Alfa

With the definition of fantasy as "being impossible under any circumstances given all we know about our universe" to distinct from fantastical stories as "being pretty unlikely but possible given all we know about the universe" and science fiction as "being possible, even if not very likely, given all we know about the universe, just not at this point in space and time" HP lands well on the side of fantasy. I guess it falls widely out of the usual range of "core fantasy" fantasy like LotR, WoT, Cosmere [okay, that examples are all epic fantasy, there must be also some good urban fantasy/low fantasy and other genres, I'm just not very familiar with them] etc. and more on the side of the "fantasy-fairy-tale-combination" like Narnia, even if it ends more on the side of urban fantasy. Edit: please stop me before I classify everything in a multidimensional tensor of genres and sub-genres.

Or, probably: Shallan (angry): "No on murders my family!" Pattern: "Hmmm...lies, how delicious...hmm" Shallan: "Fine. (disgusted snort) No one murders my family except for me"

First and foremost, thanks for the kind welcome. Second and almost as important, thanks for giving me reason for getting into a discussion. Third, and also important, I need to say some things in defence of JKR. While being an author of well-above-average skill, of course she's not as great as the other masters who were named there. Her accomplishment, which lead me to name her a milestone of fantasy is of another sort: she made fantasy "socially accepted" far more than it ever was before. People reading fantasy before Harry Potter were often dismissed as not reading real literature, whatever real means (JRRT still beats more than 95% of the authors of his time). After Harry Potter fantasy lost a lot of it's reputation of being a thing strictly reserved for people to dreamy for the real world. That is a real accomplishment, something none of the other great minds of fantasy had manaed to accomplish. And this accomplishment I admire.

Hello, I'm Alfa. Alfa is short for Alexander Fabel, I'm 21, half-german and half-russian and as far as I know I have ancestors all over Eurаsia between France and Mongolia. [Curiously, my grandmother was a von Losberg, so I am likely a distant descendat of the von Losberg who fought against Washington.] Anyway. English is my third language, and I was pretty bad at it until recently; only during University it started to improve. Reading Excuses is my first attempt to write in english on my own initiative so let's see what comes out. I am currently living in Berlin, where I also lived for the past six years. Previously I lived near Munich and before that near St. Petersburg. I study Economics and work in a company which focuses on audit, tax consulting and the like; so I am a relatively "boring" person to most of the world. "Secretly" I'm a self-proclaimed nerd. I enjoy to read fantasy (guess why I'm here) and watch science fiction; I play computer games and RPGs like Dungeons&Dragons quite often and I like swordfighting. Favorite authors include (but are not limitted to) Sanderson, Scott Lynch, Brent Weeks, Michael Scott, the early books of Ralf Isau, probably GRRM and Rothfuss (a little ambivalent about those two); I also admire Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Jordan and Rowling as great milestones of fantasy. In non-fantasy fiction I like Duma, Rainer M. Schröder, David Mitchell, Adam Fawer, Frank Schätzing and quite a good bit of others. I'll try with a somehow experimental Fantasy/SF (mostly SF) story with the working title Demiurge; I never wrote anything in that particular style in English, and not much in German.

I actually think that burning villages to the ground - while not extremely original - is something what happened often enough - far too often - in history; so I guess it isn't exactly a cliché, but more a "stage in the natural life-cycle of a village". People kill each other, villages got bunt down, tragic, but almost unavoidable. What matters is what to do with the burned-down village, to bring sense into it. Was it raided for provision and burned down because of resistance? Was it buned for vengeance? Shocked persons often realise details like "strangely, the cattle was slain, but not taken" or something alike. Probably strange elements on this part would help more than especially cruel fashions to anihilate the poor village to gain the readers' interest.

Technically there could be some odd epics, who are gifters who can't use their own powers, but that is not stated anywhere. I also do wonder if all gifters can share all of their powers, or if there are some who can do it with only specific subsets of them (and as far as we know nobody was able to gift gifting itself). Also, we don't know anything about gifting motivators; somebody needs to ask Peter if for example Megan would have been able to gift her powers to, say, Cody using a motivator from Prof's cells.

It's also stated short before the Prof/Megan battle; when David sees the sun rise and calamity set. BTW: I still don't understand why Megan is reborn on Sunrise/Calamityset rather than Calamityrise/Sunset.

I'd like to get one slot if possible; either for this monday or for the next.

Well, in my honest opinion, it was written well and easy to read - but there was more than a little bit of cliché in it. Not that I exactly dislike like clichés, they're part of what keeps fantasy up, but what you wrote seems to fall a bit in the line of "old war hero, whose beloved family was murdered", which seems to be more or less standard heroic fantasy. The Barebloods seem to be like typical Orks (big, brutal, ride strange beasts, can't keep treaties), which also seems to go in the direction of typical sword-fantasy clichés. I don't say it is impossible to make something original with it; but if I would stand in the library and read this prologue, I would likely think that it's something I read about a hundred times, which would be a pity if the whole book would be really good. Even the cliffhanger in the end does not feel like a real pageturner-cliffhanger (I also don't really like clifhangers as a whole, so please ignore this sentence). What I liked was the short, precise description of the warring campaign; I oftend dislike extensive battle descriptions if they neither bring the plot forward nor have any other important impact on the story. My personal advice would be to include something in this prologue, which makes the reader say "Hey, that sounds unorthodox/intriguing/interesting. There must be something about it, and probably this men/Bareblood war is less useless (optionally: even more useless) than it seems//this guy must be something special//etc. etc... I want to read this book" I'm sorry if my critical review sounds harsher than it is intended.

Yes, but without water? From own exprerience I say it's quite annoying to be thirsty even for a couple of hours on any kind of trip; don't know how it is in a desert (yeah, Kenton will disagree), but I doubt it will be more pleasant.

Quite right, but IIRC the knight in question got a red armor; meening it likely being a Dustbringer.

To answer i quote myself some posts ago. Note that the model-like looks aren't a problem on their own; quite contrary, I like that appearance; it's more like the entrance does not feel consistent with the situation as a whole:

It's not the look of a model, it's the strange unappropriateness of the scene that makes me raise an eyebrow.

HoA, when Marsh gets the spike to spike Penrod. He sees a picture on the wall in a house of a minor smoker noble.

But the sins...the sins are mine.

Do we know if Feruchemical tin enhances metal-sight? If so, probably with tin compounding and steelsight/ironsight there would be possibilities.

I assume, that the part with the age could be solved if we just assume that a year in this particular world lasts, say, 1.5 years on Earth... if it is Wayne Ligon's INTENT, of course.

I really, really liked it. I like it very much how you handled the in-world perspective: you explained what was going on without beeing too descriptive (a short story never, ever should contain an essay on magic theory if it's not the main point of it); and I fealt like I was part of that culture. As for critics: For my taste, the wizard fealt a bit weak; his intent was unclear, for me it wasn't even clear he had one or was randomly passing by. I like his personality, the hidden dry humor,

Technically, there are 8 metals, 8 alloys which aren't strictly metals; 3 godmetalls; 48 alloys of metals/alloys with pure godmetals and some obscure godmetall-godmetall and godmetall-godmetall-alommantic metal alloys.

I guess that spren on Earth also would have a gender, likely based on linguistics. For example "Earth" is female in most Indoeuropean languages (not in English, but English's gender neutrality for non-human entities is a special case), I don't know how it's about other families, so the Spren of Earth, let's call her Gaia, would be most likely female. Wind, on the other hand, seems to be male in the languages I know (russian, german, latin), so the spren of the wind as a whole would be male.

...at least we know now, that it's a book.

Also, Kenton says after the Kertzian warrior-priest dies, that Kertzians never fight without armor. As far as I can tell, they seem pretty close to unarmored everywhere.

The story of Little Muck? or probably something from 1001 night, there are quite some stories exactly about that.

I highly doubt an "honorable" beeing like the stormfather would steal anything. Bavadin... well, he's probably autonmomous enough to say "ah, plagiarism... to Ruin with it, im fabulous".

Don't look like sidekicks, more like shadows, honestly-