I'll see you again in 25 years . . .

Dragon Quest was like this for me. I was a big Final Fantasy fan, and my first exposure to the series was the demo of 8 that came with Final Fantasy 12 (another game that took me a while to appreciate). I did not like it at all. It seemed slow, old fashioned, and boring.

I didn't learn to like Dragon Quest until my thirties, thanks to XI. It was just the perfect game at the perfect time. I had become an adult with adult problems and suddenly the slow, old fashioned, boring Dragon Quest became subtle, fanciful, and refined.

I still don't think 8 is that good though.

I have done what I always do with big books and spent a year and change juggling the first half along with five other books, reading very slowly, then got my act together and spent a month finishing (the first (600-page) volume of) this thing. Iā€™ll read the rest later but will take a break for now.

Itā€™sā€¦ great, of course.

Maybe telling on myself but I like the authorā€™s ā€œopinionated assertiveness in narration,ā€ for lack of a better term. Hugo describes historical events, milieux, social institutions etc. and then explains what he, the author, thinks about them outside the fiction, which is helpful for me as an ignoramus in grappling somewhat with these things I know little-to-nothing about, and fun to engage with even if you disagree with what he claims along the way (this kind of rhetoric usually comes with pretty broad assumptions about class, culture, nations, etc). Part 2, Book 6 describes a particular convent in favorable terms, then in Book 7 Hugo-as-himself comes out and explains his conflicted, predominantly negative feelings about monasticism in general in the (then-)modern world, and about convents in particular during the time when the story takes place. Stick that in your musical, I dare youā€¦!

I also enjoy when a protagonist character disappears, we skip ahead in time, some supposedly different character appears, and it carries on like this until the author goes ā€œbut of courseā€¦ we have been discussing none other than Jean Valjean all along.ā€ Do authors still do this? Is this just a 19th century adventure book thing?

To the point of the thread, I am thinking more afterward about (1) how I was not equipped to understand the majority of it in high school, both when I tried it (unabridged) on my own and when it (abridged) was later assigned reading (despite this, I believe itā€™s good to punch above your weight when reading, especially as a kid/teen); and (2) thatā€”even if (1) were not the caseā€”that the pedagogy employed to teach literature to U.S. high school students is really not sufficient to even begin digesting a book like this. The difficulty is endemic to a book like Les MisĆ©rables, which besides clearly being for adults is explicitly moral/political, but I have to wonder if there isnā€™t at least a better way to try, to prime students to eventually understand the material. In my high school we would usually skirt around anything polemical (mention The Jungle as broadly important but donā€™t actually read it), teachers avoided expressing their opinions too strongly; donā€™t want to have a disagreement and get parents calling in about how you said something about the police, etc., or more charitably they want the kids to figure it out. Regarding this book in particular we read a version that was just the plot action, and class ā€œdiscussionā€ was entirely focused on recalling specific details of that plot, who did what at what time on what page. I feel sort of cheated, retroactively, even though the best of educations would not have been able to force a high school version of myself to understand so rich a text as this.

meanwhile


This is a quintessential Hugo thing. Currently reading Notre Dame and he does this all the time. Almost every time a character shows up during a chapter with a different POV. I kind of hate it and kind of love it at the same time.

Come to think of it, Dumas pulls the same trick a lot in Count of Monte Cristo but is a lot less giddy to make the reveal. He is happy to let the scene play out without the dramatic flourish of directly telling you who everyone is. (HINT: It's usually the guy with a billion dollars who likes to play dress-up.)

thatā€™s why I was thinking it could be a wider trend, though the two were buddies I think so it may have been specific to that particular environment

Hmmā€¦I got a few of these. I played IQ on PS1 when I was a teen and thought something was interesting about it but I chose to play Street Fighter Alpha instead. Now, I recognize it to be one of the best puzzle games Iā€™ve ever played. The ominous void in the background, the classical music, the vaguely mathematical gameplay and the voice yelling ā€œperfectā€ just blend to create an enthralling experience.

Another one was Vandal Hearts - I used to look at that game every time I was in a game store. The cover art looked so cool but the screenshots on the back made it look like a blurry mess. I kept picking it up thoughā€¦until I finally bought it 2020 and loved it. I probably wouldnā€™t have liked it as much if I played it when I was younger but it hit perfectly for me during COVID. The opening music told me I was getting into something special. The story is thoughtful and the fountain of blood is a nice firecracker reward for engineering a kill.

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