Here at Fantasy-Faction we love Patrick Rothfuss and his Kingkiller Chronicles. I feel Pat is an incredibly intelligent, well spoken man who has done a lot of good in terms of promoting the fantasy genre. However, I wouldn’t recommend you make him angry, because you won’t like him when he’s angry…

Here’s the explanation of how this video came about from student, Ariella Jem:

I’m a student in the UW-Madison Creative Writing program and each workshop requires us to attend two readings and write a short paper about them. When I asked if this Pat Rothfuss reading at UW-Milwaukee would count I was told that it would not because he writes fantasy.

And here is Patrick’s version of events:

When I was in Milwaukee, doing my reading and signing, someone told me that their creative writing teacher required them to go to a reading as part of their class, but that my reading didn’t count, because I wrote fantasy. I had her record a video where I voice my opinion on the matter. Here’s the video. It isn’t entirely safe for work, as I remember saying the word “Bullshit” about seven or eight times.

Highlights for me include: ‘We should not be judged by our lowest common denominator’, ‘Literary Fiction is a genre’, ‘Fantasy existed before Lit Fic’, ‘there is some truly excellent fantasy out there’, the list of classics that cross into realms of fantasy: ‘Hamlet, Macbeth, The Odyssey‘.