The Eye of Argon

My first beloved coypasta, with extremely minor changes.

Come hither ye, and read the tale of everyman-as-warrior Grignr in his quest to find love, true happiness, and an extra vowel for his name. The titular Eye of Argon is a mystical McGuffin that clearly symbolizes man's pursuit of self-worth in the form of fame and material wealth, one of many thought-provoking symbols in this subtle indictment of free market capitalism.

The prose never fails to titillate the reader even after multiple readings. One can only marvel at Jim Theis's expansive vocabulary and dense sentence structures, as evident in his very first fight scene:

Quote :

A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers vital organs. The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid.

Quote :

Grignr's emerald green orbs glared lustfully at the wallowing soldier struggling before his chestnut swirled mount.

Theis knows better than to state outright whether "orbs" refers to the protagonist's eyes or some other part of his anatomy that could possess the same color as emeralds; indeed, for all we know, the "escaping life fluid" could very well be food coloring rather than blood. As a true master of subtlety, he trusts that astute readers will read between the lines and fill in the blanks for the obvious details that he dares not write himself.

Some less dedicated readers may find Theis' lush prose overwhelming, perhaps ridiculously so. Fortunately for these plebian audiences, an annotated edition is available with some of the most pleasurable commentary to date.

Discuss.

That's one of my all-time favorite MSTings. Reading it is an almost sure-fire way to cheer me up when I'm down.

The Eye of Argon is probably my favourite piece of bad fiction ever committed to paper - or screen. There is just something so comforting about knowing that no matter how bad I write - or how brain-damaged I may become - no matter what parallell universe you find or how many Shakespeare-hacking monkeys you replace me with, I will never, ever be write something this bad.

Quote :

Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting
sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth.

Second sentence, and already we're racking up the utter stupidity that is the trademark of this atrocity. Does Theis mean "shifting" rather than sifting? How does something shine if it's dull? And if the goddamn hoof prints are smothered by the sand, how the hell can we see them in the first place, especially if they were made in dust to begin with?

Nobody knows, nobody cares - that's the brilliance of this. Jim Theis ought to get some sort of award - you have to work hard to be this bad.

Since we didn't read this for the badfic reading last week, would we be doing it this Saturday? ...please?