Th-this is my hole! It was made for me!

[rynling]

I decided to cancel class yesterday so I could finish the White Mask Varré story. I regret nothing.

Like Elden Ring itself, I think this story is very good, and I would recommend it to no one.

I will now alienate everyone I know by posting it online.


...As an aside, I learned from the Dark Souls podcast that Lady Tanith of the Volcano Manor is named after Tanith Lee, a fantasy writer who was extremely prolific during the 1980s. I managed to get a copy of her short fiction collection Dreams of Dark and Light from the Princeton library, and wow. Those monsters do be fucking.

Comments

[lassarina]

I've never read any Tanith Lee but I definitely recognize the name. It's always fun to find what the inspirations for things are. (Mass Effect has a lot of ships named for various classic sci-fi, including Anne McCaffrey.)

[rynling]

Oh man! I used to love the Dragonriders of Pern books when I was a kid. I was actually thinking of revisiting the first few novels over the summer, but I keep reading that they haven't aged well. Thinking back, I guess I can see that. Maybe it's best for Anne McCaffrey and the Dragonrider books to rest peacefully in the nostalgia zone, where they can live next door to Brian Jacques and the Redwall books and lend their names to spaceships.

[lassarina]

I haven't re-read them since college because I remember just enough to be sure that, if I read them now, I would be very upset at a lot of things I missed back then. So they live in a box in my basement and I get to remember them fondly as books (and an author) that were incredibly formative and important to tiny Rina. Some things are better with the nostalgia glasses, and I don't feel the need to punish myself for what I liked when I was younger (and, lbr, there might be Issues with her books but she was a lot better than many other writers of that era.)