Elric of Melnibone Saga

I recently finished reading:

Elric of Melnibone
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate
The Weird of the White Wolf
The Vanishing Tower
The Bane of the Black Sword
The Storm Bringer
Elric at the End of Time

And to get a taste for the writer's style, I read The Blood Red Game, which deals with the concept of the Multiverse central to the Elric Saga, but in a Sci-Fi Setting.

The Good:

The series explores some archetypal High Fantasy concepts with an energy and forward momentum that carries you all the way to the series completion:

• Elric is the emperor of an amoral pre-human race in decadence, living in the capital and last bastion of their civilization.
• His race is more attuned to magic phenomena, and in the clash between Chaos and Order, they have aligned themselves with with Chaos.  They're evil, remorseless hedonists.
  
• He has an innate weakness he must compensate with special drugs, or herbs, and eventually he acquires the soul-stealing sword Stormbringer, which sets him on a path that will define the result of the universal struggle.
• The choices he makes along the way bear little satisfaction to him, as they all occur in function and by influence of the forces tugging at his fate.
• The world building is amazing at some points; here is a land that was ruled for ten thousand years by the Melniboneans, and there were dominant civilizations that predate even them.  This means that there are ruins, dungeons, people, monsters, curses, pacts, treasures, etc, to be explored aplenty.
• Michael Moorcock is only too glad to carpet bomb the reader with, even today, original and revolutionary concepts.
• There is a pervading sense of doom throughout the series, which haunts Elric and is all too apparent to the readers.  You know how it's going to end.  You just don't know when.

The Bad:

The biggest flaw that I perceived is ex-machina.  Whenever Elric is in the direst of situations, he is saved because he knows a spell, casts a summon, or gets saved by pure dumb luck without a very noticeable price to pay or harm received.  This eventually gets better, as it was probably a product of the short serial genesis of the stories.

The other flaw that I can think about is the archaic writing.  It just feels old, with a lot of exposition, exclamation points and some other things that are not necessarily bad, but a bit cumbersome nowadays.  As a non-native reader I found it distracting at times.


The Veredict: Recommended

If you're into fantasy and would like to read the saga of one of the grand daddies of the genre, by all means dive in.  You will be surprised by the sheer imagination at work in the mythology, and perhaps find the origin of quite a few conventions of the genre.

On a lighter note, Elric may well be the first Emo Barbarian and he dressed like an asshole.  Read the books and you'll see.

Oh, and The Blood Red Game sucked real bad.  It's a moralistic fable of the struggle of man to ascend to the next level of evolution and to find his place in the multiverse.  I thought it was horrible, and one of the characters sounded like wish fulfillment on the part of the author.  I think the term is "Mary Sue"?

Gary Frank in Superman? No, thanks.

As much as I'd like to be courteous to Gary Frank and his take on Superman, I can't.  In any case, nobody cares about anything I write.

Why I hate it:

Drawing inspiration from the Christopher Reeves movies is a bad move, as they were a product of their time. They are as dated as the first Shreck.

The fact that everyone he draws is strangely over-rendered and looks 60 is definitely not going to help when he draws Superboy. Just look at that face, he looks like he is pooping in his red Super Diaper.  And Saturn Girl looks like Hideous Girl.

And the proportions he uses, with those enormous heads, really break the illusion further.  Heroic proportions?  Don't make me laugh.

Actor likenesses are so passé...

 

El Juzgado de Transito de Pavas es una Mierda

Llego al lugarejo como a las 11:45 AM, leo un letrero de cartulina que parece que hicieron con los pies. Las instrucciones confusas me dirigen tomar un ficha y sentarme en unas bancas.

Espero un rato y me llaman mi numero.

En el momento en que voy a llegar, un enano gordo con pinta de conductor borracho reincidente se sienta en el espacio libre y comienza preguntar como logra que le devuelvan su basurero con ruedas.

Puesto que el tipejo que me tenia que atender se pone explicarle, les doy un chance de que terminen de hablar. En ese momento, la unica otra vieja que estaba atendiendo termina lo que estaba haciendo y me pregunta que si era lo mismo del enano. "No", dije con toda tranquilidad, "necesito una copia de un expediente."

"Tiene que volver a la 1:00", me respondio ella, "falta un minuto para las 12:00; ya vamos a cerrar."

Les dije que yo habia estado a tiempo, que no me habian atendido por atender al borracho, y el idiota que no me atendio me dijo que era mi culpa por no haber dicho que tenia la ficha.

El servicio en las entidades gubernamentales es de lo peor, yo creo que ni ante Dios se humilla uno tanto como cuando tiene uno que ir a hacer un tramite. Ni siguiendo los procesos de mierda que imponen para maquillar su ineficiencia se salva uno de tener que sufrir en manos de los inutiles y perezosos que existen en toda dependencia gubernamental. Notese que no digo que todos los empleados gubernamentales son mediocres y vagos, pero tristemente son tantos!

Lo mas simpatico del caso es que en la tarde, cuando regrese, me asignaron una oficinista que me llevo a sacar las copias a un video pirata! Esos son los proveedores estrella del gobierno; robando mientras atienden al publico.

Alvaro Matteucci W.
-Sent From My Phone

Catching up

Got an HTC Touch. This may help me blog more often.

Code Lyoko

I recently had the opportunity to watch an episode of Code Lyoko. I have to say that not only was it ugly, but it was also boring and pretty pointless.

One thing that I truly dislike is the fact that the characters are so bland and inexpressive. The CG parts are reasonably good, but all the same, they lack a lot of personality in their designs. The enemies were pretty blah as well and the story was pretty bad.

While the interaction with a virtual world is always a good topic for fiction, they really don’t make the most of it. It really surprises me that it has become so marketable, with a lot of tie-in products.

Anyways, not worth anyone's time.