Intro
- Location
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Earth
- Pronouns
- She/They
Hello SV! It's been a while! This is (a slightly toned down version of) the worst idea I've ever had, and I don't know why I'm doing this!
This "project", as I suppose I'll call it, has been inspired by a lot of those "In Which I Watch/Read" threads I've seen. In particular, what inspired this is SV user Shockz's In Which I Watch: Sword Art Online (which was 5 years ago now, fucking hell), the Naruto Reread thread on SB, and all the times people roasted shit like Chunin Exam Day or Methods of Rationality over an open fire. The Naruto one in particular is relevant, because you see, this shit was my childhood.
I was raised on a diet of (probably?) mediocre fantasy and scifi with either the TSR/Wizards of the Coast logo on the spine, or Star Wars written on the cover. I read many other books, many of them of a similar nature, but my parents, realizing that I liked SW and D&D, gave me a library card and told me to hunt for my food, and hunt I did. While there was notable absences in the platters of novels that I feasted upon due to libraries having either no copies or limited copies of certain books (also I never read any comics), I read every single novel licensed to the properties I loved that I could find, ordering them to the library in the largest amount I could order in one go (15 at a time, iirc). I would read other things of course, priding myself on reading every new book that arrived in the kids or YA sections of my local library (even, secretly the novels for girls) but the only things I would use the rather archaic computer system for were shit like X Wing Rogue Squadron: the Kytos Trap or Eventually, however, my passion for books faded. Getting fat stacks of money from odd jobs and my parent's odd implementation of an allowance meant I would move away from the library and towards more expensive hobbies like video games and Magic the Gathering. More access to the internet at home lead me into fanfiction (thanks, fellows) and we all know where that leads. Over the years I would read less and less physical novels, as my tastes got more exacting. Nowadays I hardly ever read physical books, and when I do its generally non-fiction, and I haven't touched a licensed SF/F paperback in years.
Now, as I mentioned, this idiotic endeavor is inspired a lot by the people on SB who reread all of Naruto, from start to finish. I didn't get a chance to actively reread with them, but I went over it a bit after, and it was a pretty fascinating experience, seeing what held up, what didn't, what I used to like and now hated, and things I used to hate but now loved (less relevant to D&D novels, but wiping out years of shitty fanon was also nice). I've been thinking ever since I finished reading through that thread about what it would be like to do a similar thing with another series. My first thought was actually Harry Potter, but I saw someone else was doing one already, and I've never liked the series that much to begin with, it was just more popular than the shit I really liked as a kid. My second thought was the Star Wars EU, but, while I really do want to go through the whole thing, I figured it would be better to try something a bit tamer first.
I picked Dragonlance to start with because both the core trilogy, and each of the individual novels, are fairly self contained. Don't get me wrong, there's still a hell of a lot of other novels that come after (and even some in-between, more on that later), but if I find that I don't really like doing this whole review thing, or if I just can;t stand the setting, there's some nice points to end it.
So, lets begin! I'll start off with just introducing the first book, because it's 1:34 AM and I've got a meeting with college official types at 9.
This "project", as I suppose I'll call it, has been inspired by a lot of those "In Which I Watch/Read" threads I've seen. In particular, what inspired this is SV user Shockz's In Which I Watch: Sword Art Online (which was 5 years ago now, fucking hell), the Naruto Reread thread on SB, and all the times people roasted shit like Chunin Exam Day or Methods of Rationality over an open fire. The Naruto one in particular is relevant, because you see, this shit was my childhood.
I was raised on a diet of (probably?) mediocre fantasy and scifi with either the TSR/Wizards of the Coast logo on the spine, or Star Wars written on the cover. I read many other books, many of them of a similar nature, but my parents, realizing that I liked SW and D&D, gave me a library card and told me to hunt for my food, and hunt I did. While there was notable absences in the platters of novels that I feasted upon due to libraries having either no copies or limited copies of certain books (also I never read any comics), I read every single novel licensed to the properties I loved that I could find, ordering them to the library in the largest amount I could order in one go (15 at a time, iirc). I would read other things of course, priding myself on reading every new book that arrived in the kids or YA sections of my local library (even, secretly the novels for girls) but the only things I would use the rather archaic computer system for were shit like X Wing Rogue Squadron: the Kytos Trap or Eventually, however, my passion for books faded. Getting fat stacks of money from odd jobs and my parent's odd implementation of an allowance meant I would move away from the library and towards more expensive hobbies like video games and Magic the Gathering. More access to the internet at home lead me into fanfiction (thanks, fellows) and we all know where that leads. Over the years I would read less and less physical novels, as my tastes got more exacting. Nowadays I hardly ever read physical books, and when I do its generally non-fiction, and I haven't touched a licensed SF/F paperback in years.
Now, as I mentioned, this idiotic endeavor is inspired a lot by the people on SB who reread all of Naruto, from start to finish. I didn't get a chance to actively reread with them, but I went over it a bit after, and it was a pretty fascinating experience, seeing what held up, what didn't, what I used to like and now hated, and things I used to hate but now loved (less relevant to D&D novels, but wiping out years of shitty fanon was also nice). I've been thinking ever since I finished reading through that thread about what it would be like to do a similar thing with another series. My first thought was actually Harry Potter, but I saw someone else was doing one already, and I've never liked the series that much to begin with, it was just more popular than the shit I really liked as a kid. My second thought was the Star Wars EU, but, while I really do want to go through the whole thing, I figured it would be better to try something a bit tamer first.
I picked Dragonlance to start with because both the core trilogy, and each of the individual novels, are fairly self contained. Don't get me wrong, there's still a hell of a lot of other novels that come after (and even some in-between, more on that later), but if I find that I don't really like doing this whole review thing, or if I just can;t stand the setting, there's some nice points to end it.
So, lets begin! I'll start off with just introducing the first book, because it's 1:34 AM and I've got a meeting with college official types at 9.