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Sham bam bamina! posted:I've had a look at it and other web serials myself, and it's all been pretty fuckin' bad. Reading this thread or the comments on Royal Road is like being in a cafeteria where everyone's eating bowls of sand. It's genuinely bewildering to me that anyone has the time for this. I was legitimately drinking myself to death when I read worm and even then I didnt like it. I know what you mean though. The people who actually like the bad fan fiction tier writing actually seem to love it. On royalroad or kindle unlimited I've gradually discovered that a 4.8 out of 5 is basically a 0. There's sometimes outliers, though. God forbid someone write a romance novel that isnt intended to be smut; they hate that. Character development gets in the way of edgy lovely "oh so you're approaching me?" kind of writing
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Feb 12, 2021 19:54
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pith is really good but is deeply soaked in liberal kool-aid. currently im reading traitorman's books, which start with the dreaming scepter. they're fantastic, they're that classic style of fantasy novel. not the Tolkien kind, more like conan or dune. i love them. Pretty short though; it's actually a novel posted on RR and not somebody trying to milk patreon money forever.
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Feb 12, 2021 19:59
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Larry Parrish posted:I was legitimately drinking myself to death when I read worm and even then I didnt like it. I know what you mean though. The people who actually like the bad fan fiction tier writing actually seem to love it. On royalroad or kindle unlimited I've gradually discovered that a 4.8 out of 5 is basically a 0. There's sometimes outliers, though. God forbid someone write a romance novel that isnt intended to be smut; they hate that. Character development gets in the way of edgy lovely "oh so you're approaching me?" kind of writing In general you don't want to look at review aggregate scores for things like web serials, fanfiction, or even published fantasy/scifi. The best way to approach reviews is to read the bad ones and see why people didn't like the book/serial. That's usually more revealing than anything else.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:42
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Tzarnal posted:I've been reading Pith since soon after it started but I feel that I should add the following. It is relentless, overwhelmingly, near exhaustively depressing. Yeah, this is no joke. I started reading it last night and blitzed through it all the way up until the aftermath of Honeypot's boat party. Holy poo poo did I not expect any of that. I had some bad dreams last night.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:27
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Speaking of things on Royal Road that aren't garbage, I hope The Last Science returns from hiatus. It went on indefinite hiatus 10 months ago for COVID reasons but I want to read more. I reread it recently and still thought it was really good. And there's still a huge plot twist that's been left dangling since near the start I wanted to see the resolution of.
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Feb 12, 2021 22:52
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Stuff that I've read lately: Knight and Smith - kind of a standard western fantasy novel, lone orphan ends up being a hero. Pretty enjoyable so far but I'm vaguely worried whatever main antagonist shows up will be a cartoon character. Emmy and Me - If you've read a contemporary romance novel with a hint of fantasy, be it magic or shapeshifters or whatever, you've read this already. I still liked it but I'm an absolute loving sucker for these, I think I've read more interchangeable romance novels than anything else in my life. The comments and reviews are kind of funny because you can tell a lot of people dont get the point of these. The Adventurer's Academy - I have no idea where this one is going. The protagonist is a ditz, which considering her background seems... shockingly naive, and I wonder how that could possibly happen. But whatever. It has neat ideas, and isnt offensively bad, let's see where it lands. Beware of Chicken - Standard xianxia, isekai protagonist, whatever, but get this: our hero isnt mumbling about missing the internet to themselves all day, or becoming a psychopathic murderer out of the blue! He just wants to settle down. So far you could say this basically a slice of life novel in sort-of-fantasy China. I love it. Beneath the Dragoneye Moons - Standard isekai, kind of like how Beware of Chicken is in many ways a standard xianxia. Much like that one it's a hell of a lot more captivating than I would normally find such a standard genre fiction. It has a fairly gritty and depressing setting, but with a relentless tone of youthful optimism. I like it a lot. Magic-Smithing - I kept skipping over this one because you could tell from the description the author has no clue where they're going or why, and that it isnt even written all that well to begin with. Mad Azarinth Healer vibes. It's basically all been one long training montage so far. I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to go Savage Divinity on me. I can't really recommend it unless you're bored, unlike everything else so far. Dungeon Crawler Carl - if you didn't like Dominion of Blades or Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon, I'm not sure you're going to like this. That said it's not such a relentless slide into depression as those two, but it's still unbelievably horrible in the broad strokes. Holy poo poo this author loves existential dread. Highly highly recommend. If you've never read anything by Matt Dinniman, I'd start here. I'm a big fan but it's my favorite so far. Only Villains Do That - By the insane genius of The Gods are Bastards, a tale of two dipshits being turned into game pieces by bored deities. Much like TGAB, people actually talk like, y'know, people. Just started, very few chapters, but if it's even half as good as TGAB it'll be an instant favorite of mine. The Many Lives of Cadence Lee - Honestly this is just In Loki's Honor but less lovely, and most of what that entails. Fairly generic settings so far, a strange but probably reasonable detachment from reality. I like it, but it's not terribly long yet. Guess I'll see where it goes. Pith, since I don't think I said what I actually think about it - fantastic, probably my favorite that isnt TWI or something that I've been reading for years now. As I mentioned it has a deep seated yearning for the liberal world order to not be a thing of brutality, which I consider naive in the extreme, but it's still very good; the only reason I keep bringing up my perceived political bias of it is because despite being a fantasy world it feels like I'm right there. Much like TGAB it does an incredible, amazing job of building a real world without having to explain it. I can really feel the poverty in the seat of insane wealth and power. I'm always on the edge of my seat for the next one. I think that's all of the ones I've read lately that I havent already posted an opinion of, or was so horrifically bad or forgettable that I didnt bother posting about.
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Feb 13, 2021 00:13
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I love The Wandering Inn but there are just SO MANY WORDS that I can't recommend it to anyone that doesn't have the literal months of time to catch up. Still my favorite and the only web serial that I subscribe to Patreon for more content.
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Feb 13, 2021 00:21
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Its one of my favorites too, but I cant recommend it to anyone who doesn't like slice of life stuff. It's fairly niche, despite being so huge and popular, I'd say.
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Feb 13, 2021 01:07
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Honestly think TWI should have some kind of fake site that only has 1 or 2 volumes of content because at this point the length is kind of an anti selling point up until you realize it's actually very enjoyable and relatively well written despite what your intuition might tell you about the quality of an author who puts out 50000 words in a week.
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Feb 13, 2021 01:08
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Myriad Truths posted:Speaking of things on Royal Road that aren't garbage, I hope The Last Science returns from hiatus. It went on indefinite hiatus 10 months ago for COVID reasons but I want to read more. I reread it recently and still thought it was really good. And there's still a huge plot twist that's been left dangling since near the start I wanted to see the resolution of. She's written a few more chapters since going on hiatus that are patreon-only so I'm still hopeful that she'll be able to get back into the rhythm of writing regularly again once things settle down (which probably won't be for at least a few more months since she's now indirectly involved in vaccine rollout...).
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Feb 13, 2021 02:00
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I love the Wandering Inn but I’m on hiatus until they resolve the whole situation from the end of the last arc. Is that looking like it’s going to be ongoing for a while?
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Feb 13, 2021 02:52
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Velius posted:I love the Wandering Inn but I’m on hiatus until they resolve the whole situation from the end of the last arc. Is that looking like it’s going to be ongoing for a while? A solution may have shown up in the last patreon chapter but if that doesn't work for whatever reason (it wont) then we're looking at Ryoka having to travel to another continent, through an active war zone, and infiltrating the treasure vault of one of the most powerful kingdoms in the world. While like 5 other major plot threads are happening. So it'll be a while!
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Feb 13, 2021 02:54
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I'm a bit late to the "why do people read web serials even though they're bad" discourse, but I think a lot of it plays into the associations that younger people have in regard to fiction, and how that often matters more than the actual content. A huge amount of nerdy people just straight-up don't really read books anymore, because their status as a "fun thing" has been eclipsed by forms of media accessible more easily and earlier in life; movies, video games, and so on. A lot of people's first real experience reading novels, even genre fiction, is being forced to do so at school. For many people, this taints them in their mind forever unless they make an active effort to re-conceptualize the experience later in life. No matter how well-written a piece of print fiction that follows the rules may be, it will never appeal to their lizard brain again. But on the other hand, they can be reached by web fiction because it's so different in presentation and culture that it's able to piggyback off of other associations and become fun again. This is a big reason why LitRPGs became so popular. Because they go out of their way to use the language and framing of video games, reading them fires "I'm playing a video game" neurons rather than "I'm reading a book" ones, though that's only the most obvious example of what I mean. Fan fiction gets so much more popular than original fiction because people can taste the original property when they're reading it, and translated webnovels like Kumoko or Bookworm, despite being very janky to read, are popular because they make people taste anime and manga. Worm grew popular because it became a darling of Spacebattles, which is a forum largely about nerding out about the fluff of dorky properties and running CYOA's that literally center that fluff. The special powers, the key locations and minutia, you get the idea. Worm capitalized on that taste in subtle ways, and so managed to become popular enough to establish its own feel as something independently cool in the minds of its readers. Enough that many are still reading even though Wildbow's current stuff has completely departed from its original road to success. That's not to say that a lot of web fiction isn't good - honestly, I think the growing sentiment of "it's all trash" in this thread is a little pretentious. A lot of the better stuff reads like decent unedited paperback literature to me, which is often what you want rather than Stephen King when your brain is overworked and you just want to relax. But people who are bemused by some of the outright bad stuff becoming a big hit haven't been paying attention to the way the literature market has changed in the past few decades. Before RoyalRoad was even a thing, we witnessed the whole quasi-erotic novel market change completely as traditionally written stuff was murdered and replaced by Fifty Shades style content that originated on the internet and, despite reading like poo poo, is metafictionally indulgent in a way that people care far more about than technical skill. I would bet we are going to see a lot of really interesting trends as publishers become increasingly aware of this over the course of the coming years. Japan is kind of ahead of the game in that respect because the light novel market was already so established. It was incredibly easy for it to pivot from stuff that was pulpy but nevertheless had vague literary ambitions to NUMBER GO UP content that has boomed in comparison. PoorWeather fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 13, 2021 04:22
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i think it's interesting that TWI appears to be completely un-fanficable, like an anti-worm, despite superficially having a lot of the same properties that made worm a spacebattles darling; a huge cast, diverse powers, a grounding in familiar nerd stuff like superheroes/D&D. there's virtually nothing despite its de facto standing as a titan of web serials is pirateaba just the only person on the planet capable of fully satisfying the hunger of their fans?
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Feb 13, 2021 04:59
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Yea, I’m just not sure there is a hunger for more than 50,000 words a week. Edit: also, did Worm have an active fanfic community while it was ongoing?
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Feb 13, 2021 05:16
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Worm didn't really even have readers while it was ongoing. It exploded in popularity as it was wrapping up.
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Feb 13, 2021 06:25
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Velius posted:I love the Wandering Inn but I’m on hiatus until they resolve the whole situation from the end of the last arc. Is that looking like it’s going to be ongoing for a while? Yeah, I dropped it for now as well. This was worse then the goblin war as far as gut punches go.
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Feb 13, 2021 06:34
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Kalas posted:Yeah, I dropped it for now as well. This was worse then the goblin war as far as gut punches go. It's the little twist after the stab in the gut that makes it truly hurt, you know?
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Feb 13, 2021 06:37
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Jazerus posted:i think it's interesting that TWI appears to be completely un-fanficable, like an anti-worm, despite superficially having a lot of the same properties that made worm a spacebattles darling; a huge cast, diverse powers, a grounding in familiar nerd stuff like superheroes/D&D. there's virtually nothing despite its de facto standing as a titan of web serials It's weird that it doesn't come up with TWI, but it makes sense. I've read lots of Worm fanfic and it's an easy story to build on, usually giving Taylor a variety of different powers from various settings, or make another character the narrative voice. It's a setting that makes people want to change things, to fix them or make them more interesting. With TWI, that just doesn't feel.. necessary? It's not a setting that requires fixing, and it already has a TON of ongoing, major and minor plot-threads and character perspectives that would probably make it a nightmare creating anything but a small-scale, focused fanfic. Worm is, ironically, much simpler in terms of the major story elements that it goes through, which I think makes it easier to change things and see where those changes lead. It doesn't hurt that Worm is already finished also, which means we actually know where all those story beats lead normally, which isn't the case for TWI; lots of stuff is still a mystery.
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Feb 13, 2021 07:07
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its because its not hard to write something better than worm, but it would actually be pretty hard to write something better than TWI on a technical level, anyway. if you change the format almost at all it's no longer a fantasy slice of life novel and the appeal is gone, which isnt the case with a much more straightforward 'discount watchmen' kind of vibe
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Feb 13, 2021 08:08
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It was entertaining for a while thread, but when it's getting to the point that I have to defend Wildbow, well...Plorkyeran posted:Worm didn't really even have readers while it was ongoing. It exploded in popularity as it was wrapping up. This is incorrect. The numbers Worm was pulling in its first year were more than some serials get over their entire run. It exploded in popularity as it was wrapping up in 2013, yes, but his numbers in 2012 were already quite beyond numbers most Wordpress-based serials ever really pull in today.
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Feb 13, 2021 08:42
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There was a whole meta-community thing in the comments of the chapters throughout most of the story while it was being written. A lot of the usernames in the parahumans online snippets were allusions to the names of people who frequently commented.
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Feb 13, 2021 08:46
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Plorkyeran posted:She's written a few more chapters since going on hiatus that are patreon-only so I'm still hopeful that she'll be able to get back into the rhythm of writing regularly again once things settle down (which probably won't be for at least a few more months since she's now indirectly involved in vaccine rollout...). Good to know at least.
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Feb 13, 2021 14:52
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Larry Parrish posted:pith is really good but is deeply soaked in liberal kool-aid. Would you mind elaborating?
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Feb 13, 2021 19:31
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Flesnolk posted:Would you mind elaborating? i dunno. it really reminds me of how i felt about the world growing up as a poor teenager; i deeply mistrusted power structures and authority figures, since they'd been horrible to me my whole life, but i thought the root of the problem was that jerks were running things; i didn't understand that those people are there because society encourages it. most of the characters in pith who aren't deeply nihilistic are similar. ana, despite having tons of direct evidence that the principality is a fascist war machine run by a cabal of shadow wizards, despite them literally one generation ago being an actual wizard dictatorship, thinks that all evidence of corruption is basically coincidence, or one bad egg. where the story is now, it seems like that thinking has mostly dropped off, but i dunno. for a while ana and to a lesser degree the rest of queen sulphur just seemed... hopelessly loving naive. maybe that was on purpose, but the author had a big blog post about dropping off to every other week to spend time to volunteer for (presumably) joe biden to defend against fascism. was one of the funniest things ive ever read in my life
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Feb 13, 2021 22:11
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Larry Parrish posted:i dunno. it really reminds me of how i felt about the world growing up as a poor teenager; i deeply mistrusted power structures and authority figures, since they'd been horrible to me my whole life, but i thought the root of the problem was that jerks were running things; i didn't understand that those people are there because society encourages it. most of the characters in pith who aren't deeply nihilistic are similar. ana, despite having tons of direct evidence that the principality is a fascist war machine run by a cabal of shadow wizards, despite them literally one generation ago being an actual wizard dictatorship, thinks that all evidence of corruption is basically coincidence, or one bad egg. where the story is now, it seems like that thinking has mostly dropped off, but i dunno. for a while ana and to a lesser degree the rest of queen sulphur just seemed... hopelessly loving naive. maybe that was on purpose, but the author had a big blog post about dropping off to every other week to spend time to volunteer for (presumably) joe biden to defend against fascism. was one of the funniest things ive ever read in my life My read is that the readers are supposed to think Ana is naive.
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Feb 15, 2021 04:40
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dogsekai
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Feb 15, 2021 13:51
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Larry Parrish posted:i dunno. it really reminds me of how i felt about the world growing up as a poor teenager; i deeply mistrusted power structures and authority figures, since they'd been horrible to me my whole life, but i thought the root of the problem was that jerks were running things; i didn't understand that those people are there because society encourages it. most of the characters in pith who aren't deeply nihilistic are similar. ana, despite having tons of direct evidence that the principality is a fascist war machine run by a cabal of shadow wizards, despite them literally one generation ago being an actual wizard dictatorship, thinks that all evidence of corruption is basically coincidence, or one bad egg. where the story is now, it seems like that thinking has mostly dropped off, but i dunno. for a while ana and to a lesser degree the rest of queen sulphur just seemed... hopelessly loving naive. maybe that was on purpose, but the author had a big blog post about dropping off to every other week to spend time to volunteer for (presumably) joe biden to defend against fascism. was one of the funniest things ive ever read in my life Ana was brought up with a ton of propaganda shoved down her throat, was largely uneducated and extremely desperate, and found herself with no support network while she her body was falling apart. It's not really hard to see that she latched onto her childhood dream and the first people to give her a place to belong, first to have a sliver of hope for a better life, then to justify her actions. Also that "big blog post" was part of an after-chapter note that wasn't even 100 words. Hardly a manifesto.
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Feb 15, 2021 14:56
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Narmi posted:Ana was brought up with a ton of propaganda shoved down her throat, was largely uneducated and extremely desperate, and found herself with no support network while she her body was falling apart. It's not really hard to see that she latched onto her childhood dream and the first people to give her a place to belong, first to have a sliver of hope for a better life, then to justify her actions. Yeah, this is my interpretation of Ana. Also, while I can't speak to the author's politics, it's not exactly uncommon for people who otherwise have left-wing political views to end up with a distorted perception the US political situation.
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Feb 15, 2021 22:31
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To be clear I don't think it's a mark against Pith so much as something I can't ignore. Painting Joe Biden, who just based off his last time in office supported massive expansion of drone killings and continued an ethnic removal campaign, as some kind of anti-fascist option was just too much. So its stuck in my mind even though it only got mentioned the one time. It's a really good story, I just sometimes wonder how much naivety is there on purpose and how much is internalized liberalism.
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Feb 16, 2021 00:11
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why is it that every web serial this thread talks about seems to follow this pattern of readers going 'surely the author's politics aren't this bad, surely it's intentional' only to slam into the brick wall of reality that is the kind of person who would write thousands and thousands of words while uploading them to a blog that maybe a hundred people read
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Feb 16, 2021 00:46
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Horizon Burning posted:only to slam into the brick wall of reality that is the kind of person who would write thousands and thousands of words while uploading them to a blog that maybe a hundred people read on the other hand, I could just as easily say "...ecofascists?" so I mean, but you know what I mean. DACK FAYDEN fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 16, 2021 00:54
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can you support anprim thought under a system? in this immense wall of words, I shall
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Feb 16, 2021 00:55
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bwuh? i ended up in a fantasy world of luxury gay space communism?! a litrpg saga
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Feb 16, 2021 01:25
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I have the copyright on gay space communism litrpgs
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Feb 16, 2021 01:42
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I've reached a stage of my life where I feel like starting to read the wandering inn. So thanks for the link, hope i can catch up in 20 or so years.
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Feb 16, 2021 01:53
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Sibling of TB posted:I've reached a stage of my life where I feel like starting to read the wandering inn. So thanks for the link, hope i can catch up in 20 or so years. You are in for a ride. It starts off a little generic but has amazing world and character building.
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Feb 16, 2021 02:59
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Also plot holes galore, when you read from the start to the end that you wouldn't notice over months but is apparent when binging. Don't worry about I think the first 3 volumes canon since some things start to conflict in later volumes.
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Feb 16, 2021 04:00
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Larry Parrish posted:To be clear I don't think it's a mark against Pith so much as something I can't ignore. Painting Joe Biden, who just based off his last time in office supported massive expansion of drone killings and continued an ethnic removal campaign, as some kind of anti-fascist option was just too much. So its stuck in my mind even though it only got mentioned the one time. It's a really good story, I just sometimes wonder how much naivety is there on purpose and how much is internalized liberalism. Are you seriously calling Biden a fascist?
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Feb 16, 2021 05:06
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It's well known that anything but Instant Full Communism Forever is fascism. Biden isn't exactly what I'd personally consider an ideal candidate, but the notion that he and Donald Trump are at all equivalent, or him being the Democratic candidate suddenly makes trying to defeat Trump a worthless effort, is pretty laughable, and if one off-hand mention in a note that the author was volunteering for the candidate opposing Trump is enough to make Larry go "lol the author is a worthless lib, gently caress this story," then I think CSPAM has poisoned his brain a bit too much. Especially off the back of us discussing Wild "possibly an actual KKK member" Bow.
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Feb 16, 2021 05:29
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