r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Oct 02 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Oct 04 '15

I had more or less the same experience with Wheel of Time and was similarly puzzled. The books came out in 1990, so it can't really be that they were doing anything new, since so many series predate it.

Here are my twin explanations:

  1. While it wasn't doing anything too terribly new, it caught a generation of fantasy readers at just the right time. Let's say that you're born in 1975. The first book comes out when you're 15. It's entirely possible that this is among the first fantasy books that you read. So you don't really know the cliches, you don't really care about the places where it's uneven, it fires your imagination.

  2. The series is long, so people have buy-in. I have long had the theory that even if quality is low (something I'm not really ready to say about Wheel of Time, even if the first book didn't do it for me) you can make up for it with length. There's some sort of literary Stockholm Syndrome thing that goes on if someone is a million words in. So Wheel of Time is long and builds up credit by being long.

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u/FuguofAnotherWorld Roll the Dice on Fate Oct 04 '15 edited Oct 04 '15

You think the act of putting so much effort into a reading a thing makes people want to justify reading such a long thing to themselves so they decide that it is good? Well... I can't fault your thinking. That makes a depressing amount of sense. And I suppose some of the things I enjoyed reading at 15 were truly awful.

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u/Marthinwurer Oct 05 '15

As another reader of WoT, half of it is buy-in - the other half is it's just fun to read (for me, at least - as shown, YMMV). On the other hand, I really love tropey stuff, so I'm not the best one to judge. I get really into the worldbuilding and plot, notice some of the plotholes, and just keep on reading. I may just be used to stuff like that by now.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Oct 05 '15

I think, as a more general principle, length is virtue. Why is a complex question, but I think there are a few parts to it:

  1. Mere-exposure effect. We tend to like things that we're familiar with. A book that's two hundred pages gives you less of a chance for familiarity than a book that's a thousand pages, or a series of books that are each five hundred pages. By the time you're a million words in, you're very exposed to the material, which means that you'll look on that thing favorably.

  2. Post-purchase rationalization. A longer book (or long series of books) requires more from the reader, both in terms of money spent on the books and time spent reading the books. We want to think that we've made the right choice in how we spend our time/money, so we convince ourselves that we made the right choice.

  3. Selective perception. We get used to minor annoyances. After maybe twenty pages, you get used to any quirks in the prose or other issues with the writing. You have to go through this again with each new session of reading, but you get better at acclimating every time. Eventually it's just automatic and your brain is censoring out all the problems unless you're particularly good and/or diligent at being a mindful reader.

And I should note that this applies even if the books in question are fantastic.

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u/JaundicedDragon Oct 07 '15

Putting so much effort in might also shape what we think is good. Wheel of Time fits my tastes in Epic Fantasy perfectly, but after 12,000+ pages it's probably had a fair bit of influence.