Rise of the Runelords "audiobook"

I listened to about 90% of the Burnt Offerings audiobook, but then got a new audiobook listening app on my phone which treated them as an actual audiobook instead of just chapters or files. So, I started the whole thing over. As of this morning’s commute, I’ve finished now all but about five minutes of Burnt Offerings, which I’ll finish at lunch while sitting in the car and eating, and then it will automatically continue on to the Skinsaw Murders, or whatever exactly the next part of the audiobook is called. 

There are a couple of issues with this audiobook; one of which is structural and one of which is authorial personality. By the first, I mean that it isn’t really an audiobook, it’s a radio drama format audio, which isn’t really the same as reading a book. When there’s an action scene, for instance, there’s a bunch of sound effects and dialogue, but no actual description of what is happening. So unless the dialogue kind of clunkily describes the action, you just have to take it for granted that it’s exciting because it sounds exciting, without you actually having any idea what’s happening. There are some ways in which a radio play is superior to an audiobook, namely in the presence of various voice actors doing separate voices, as well as honest-to-goodness sound Foley effects artists adding sounds; an audiobook is just one guy (or gal) reading the text of a book, and maybe, if he’s good, doing a decent job of “acting” the dialogue for all characters. But lacking a narrator, the radio play format has weaknesses relative to audiobook, in that the dialogue has to be clunky to help propel the story in a way that real dialogue wouldn’t, and all descriptions of actions are difficult to make natural.

The second issue is regarding the author. There are two things in particular that I noticed; one of which is that they often use very stilted dialogue not just for exposition, as noted above, but also because they aren’t great at characterization. (I’m saying they; I don’t know if there was a single writer or not of the radio play script. There are multiple authors credited, but at least one of them is the author of the original module.) There’s an attempt to make breezy Friends-like banter, which doesn’t really work very well because the women come across as unfeminine and unlikeable, especially whenever Valeros is saving one of them. Also, Valeros is consistently subject to snide remarks by every other character, because the authors are gammas and their resentment of the “inferior” athletic, good-looking men who have a can-do attitude and actually do stuff rather that merely sitting around complaining is pretty evident. I don’t recall noticing that as much before, but I’m not sure if I didn’t notice it or just didn’t recall it. It’s kind of an unlikeable affectation in a writer when subconscious (or conscious) resentment against normal people colors what they write a little too much. But you can almost literally see the conflict in the writer’s head happening here; the disconnect between having to make the four iconics that they use all be heroes, but their dislike of the archetype of the fighter, associating it too closely with the same high school jocks who had better luck with the girls than he did; or if the writer is a woman, who weren’t interested in her, and she’s had to cope by telling herself that she never wanted them because they are buffoons all along. Either way, it’s not a convincing pose, and is incredibly transparent. Sigh. Gammas and women.

For various reasons, I’ve long ago decided that unless recommended by someone who’s tastes I trust pretty deeply, that I won’t read any more fiction written by women. I’ve been caught in the bait and switch too often where some cool looking fantasy or science fiction story is actually a crypto-romance where the woman character sits around talking about her emotions, her feelings, her anxieties, and most especially which of the two male love interest archetypes she’ll end up with. This isn’t to say that I don’t read books written by women. C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett are among my favorite genre writers, for instance, and I bought a Flame Tree quality copy of Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen specifically because it’s actually one of my favorite non-genre books ever. I enjoy a good rom-com as much as the next guy, and I even enjoy watching Hallmark Channel movies almost more than my wife does (not that I do that often, but when a cozy rom-com sounds kinda fun, she’s rarely in the mood to watch them, so I sometimes throw on the old DVD of Notting Hill or whatever by myself.) I will note, however, that the rom-com’s that are most successful tend to be written by men, because they are successfully able to pull off the com in rom-com, whereas those written by women often have complete cyphers for the female protagonist, and cringy betas for the male love interest, so there’s no chemistry or charisma to anyone involved, and it ends up being painful to watch. The secret to “chick flicks” being watchable and even kind of fun for a guy like me is a light breezy attitude, and charismatic characters with good chemistry with each other who are fun just to “hang around with” regardless of what they’re actually even doing.  There’s a real art to writing good characters who have good relationships and are fun to read or watch or listen to, and many authors simply don’t have it. In that case, they should just stick to focusing on plot, or something else that they’re better at. Nobody has ever read Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum because of the characters, for instance. Really good authors are, of course, fairly capable in all of the dimensions necessary to craft a good story; plot, situation, tension, suspense, and of course charismatic characters that the reader cares to spend some time with in the book, movie or whatever medium the story is told in.

In this case, I kind of feel sympathetic towards Valeros, especially as he’s mistreated and miswritten by the author(s?) He should ditch all of the bratty little princesses in his group and go hang out with someone else who appreciates and respects him more.

Of course, it’s relatively easy to identify women authors and avoid them, but gammas are harder. I’ve decided to specifically avoid some of the ones that I’ve become aware of, like Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss, etc. I’ll continue with these Pathfinder Legends “audiobooks”, which again, I don’t think really describes what they are properly, but I’ll be wary because all three of the books have the same four iconic characters as the ensemble cast. I had actually thought that it would be different for each. The modules themselves recommend an iconic party as a kind of pregen group, if I remember correctly (at least these early ones did; I don’t know how long Paizo continued to do that). Curiously, I’m struggling to find which PC pregens were included online. I guess it doesn’t much matter. I do wish that honest to goodness novelizations of the adventure paths were forthcoming. I’d read them. Sure, sure; commission someone to write them after the entire adventure path of modules is published, but then they’re coming out a year to year and a half later. But I dunno. Maybe the Pathfinder fiction line faltered because there’s not enough demand for game fiction anymore. It’s a different world than the mid 80s and 90s, or even the 00s, I guess.

Then again, I don’t find that the iconics are really great characters. Ezren the wizard is Captain Obvious, Harssk the dwarf makes Grumpy look friendly and inviting, Marisiel and Emiko are typical “stronk wamman characters” which only fail to be more obnoxious than they are because their characterization and dialogue are kind of sparse anyway, and Valeros is probably my favorite, but the writer clearly sees him as a punching bag for his Revenge of the Nerds fantasy.

Time really flies. I looked up the Wayne Reynolds iconic Valeros art, and saw two versions. The original was done seventeen years ago already! Pathfinder still seems like a relatively new development to me, but I was in my mid-30s at the time. Sigh. He was redesigned for the release of Pathfinder 2e, as were about ten of the original iconics, with all new art and all, but this wasn’t necessarily an improvement; I kind of like the first one better. Like I said, the iconics of Pathfinder actually aren’t really great characters, in my opinion. But Valeros, as a pretty vanilla fighter of Cheliax ancestry actually works better than most. Pathfinder (and 3.x before that) had the unfortunate problem of encouraging a little bit too much the edge cases in character design, and people didn’t think characters were interesting unless they were some kind of really odd and idiosyncratic class or race or both. Valeros was a regular human fighter of a race that’s kinda-sorta based on the Romans (kinda-sorta) so he’s pretty “plain”, and as such, he's actually one of the more memorable and likeable of the bunch. When he was designed, Paizo hadn’t become quite so overtly freak-oriented as they have become since.