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Twilight > The Lord of the Rings
(ani.social)
This is not an unpopular opinion.
It's rage bait.
Fucking hell, I hate having to upvote this...so much....
Twilight is everything that is wrong with modern literature. It's dumbing down your art in order to cater to a population whose reading levels have declined to the low grade school level over the years.
Good books increase your literacy. You learn new things from reading them; new words, new phrases, etc... an author is supposed to add to the collective intelligence of the world, not debase themselves to write at a fourth grade level so that their books are more popular to incurious illiterates.
Eww, gatekeeping literature.
You can just read for fun, ya know. It need not be an intellectual pursuit.
You like what you like. I prefer science fiction myself. I tried reading the first LOTR book and I couldn't get through it bcz it had like 2 straight pages describing the scenery.
Followed by two more pages describing each piece of food on the table in as much detail as possible.
Lotr was clearly written when people had more time on their hands.
Lotr's time use and verbosity is nothing to me, I've read Robert Jordan's works.
This is all based on my weak memory, but I read maybe half Robert Jordan's wheel of time and dont remember having the same issue. I can't remember why I didnt finish the series though, so maybe it was a bit too drawn out for me after all.
I recal lots of joking about being paid by the word, even he himself made jokes about the length of his novels, when he was dying while trying to finish the last of the story he said Tor would have to invent a new binding method because he was going to fit it all into the last one, no matter what. Sadly he didn't have enough time but left enough worldbuilding behind.
I think they might have been some of my favorates in part because of the length tbh, I'm a very fast reader.
It is nice to spend so much time in a well built world, I should go back and reread/finish it.
The ridiculous amount of songs and poems in the LOTR books were incredibly boring. They're certainly not page turners. Very slow pacing and often overly detailed descriptions abound.
You're not wrong. But also I don't think it would be quite the same without, and the tedious display of reverance for song and poetry contributes something very human (and often beyond human) to many of the characters.
I'm with the OP, I gave it a shot but the songs and poems were a negative for me too. I just started skipping them, and also skipping most of the giant paragraphs detailing what a broom looked like or how a piece of ham glistened or whatever.
giant paragraphs detailing what a broom looked like or how a piece of ham glistened or whatever
I genuinely don't even know where that is coming from. He is known for lengthy description of landscape and geographical features, and that critique would be valid, but... not about trivial details about random objects like this? Huh??
Well I was making an attempt at humor there, maybe not entirely fair. I do remember descriptions around feasts and stuff like that being overly long, but they might not have included descriptions of mundane objects like I was implying.
Lotr is boring as fuck but twilight is garbage pap. I cant read either
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Unpopular Opinion
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