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Oops. I meant altering people to be immune to diseases. And I doubt that growing back limbs would fall under the category of "legal" Shaping.

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This is an operating room, where wounded humans and serviles are brought to be cured. A trained Shaper can use magic and raw essence to alter a damaged person or even rebuild damaged body parts.

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I'm going to burn in some sort of underworld for starting a topic like this on Facebook. In my defense, I did not, at the time, realize just how often these surface.

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But see my point is that a great work actually tilts the standards of quality in its favor, so that features that would be flaws in any lesser work cease to be flaws in its case.

It's a bit like genre. It's not a flaw in a western for an important new character to ride into town, out of nowhere, in the last third of the book, because that's how things are in frontier towns, and it's accepted as part of the genre. But that would be a terrible flaw in a country house whodunit, where the closed set of suspects is a basic requirement.

A great book in effect defines itself as a genre all its own, and this is what makes the quality gap: above a certain threshold, books leap directly to flawlessness.

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"The drakons are a new race, young and without tradition. When Ghaldring took control and began to weave the rebellion, he realized that they would need structure and rules. So he made them. And he dealt with any who disagreed...[The laws] are complicated, with much about honor and respect. And much about settling disputes through battle. I will not go into who can challenge who in what way under what circumstances. It is very complicated, and I think only Ghaldring truly understands."

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PS Diki, that's exactly what I said: "saying that you don't believe in astrology gives a more liberal result".

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There are also a lot of completely irrelevant questions like the one about astrology. For some reason saying that you don't believe in astrology gives a more liberal result, despite the fact that it has no relation to social and political views, and neo-pagan rebellious teenagers are more likely to believe in astrology than fundamentalist christians.

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Well, in principle. And maybe even in practice. But I still wonder if it's really possible for any work of art to be almost great.

There seems to me to be a sort of great divide in artistic merit. If a work doesn't reach threshold, even its best elements suffer from their lousy context, and don't really work. Past a certain point, though, even features that would otherwise be flaws become interesting and effective quirks.

So I postulate a quality gap, within which no art is possible. Or at least, it must be very difficult to remain poised within this range. As a rule you're automatically either better than that level, or worse.

So I seem to be denything the possibility of the 'flawed masterpiece'. Maybe it's just sour grapes: if it's flawed, I want to say it was never a masterpiece anyway. Hmmm.

Anyway, I propose that taking a book from below the quality gap and turning it into a movie that rises above it isn't really making the book into a movie, but just making a movie that draws some inspiration from the book. You can draw some inspiration from anything at all if you like.

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But one might ask how likely the first scenario really is. Isn't it actually quite a bit harder to come up with an effective plot, a cool setting, interesting characters, and a lot of arresting scenes, than to craft those good elements into a good novel? Isn't anyone who can come up with those ingredients pretty much guaranteed to have the skill to whip them together?

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Well I'm not very familiar with this(I'm from Europe)but wasn't thankgiving census like days ago?

So what's the point of this going on still?

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