|
Kairos is a pretty good LitRPG, the writing quality is better than average, though it's also fairly...straightforward, I guess? And practically the polar opposite of Outcast in Another World when it comes to the protagonist being inwardly-focused and doubting themselves, as Kairos is a man of action and kind of murderhobo-y. Not on the level of a Xianxia protagonist, he still tries to be at least sort of not-horrible, but he really doesn't flinch from killing people in his way if he feels at least somewhat justified.
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 20:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 08:25 |
|
|
He's a viking, and Vikings were the original murder hobos. Really, it hadn't occurred to me that someone might bounce of Kairos because of the main characters morality. Compared to the utter monster that is Never Die Twice's protagonist, warlord Kairos fighting for his people in sometimes brutal ways just feels so wholesome.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 20:16
|
|
|
Outside of Vainqueur the Dragon, my problem with their stories was never that I disliked them, it was that I didn't like them. With Kairos, I read to chapter 13 without feeling like I had a compelling reason to continue reading it. I wasn't attached to any of the characters, the worldbuilding and system didn't interest me, I didn't care about the plot, and the language wasn't worth reading for it's own sake. If I had a specific complaint, it would probably be the generic feeling from playing the greatest hits of Greek mythology at a fast rate. The whole thing felt a bit soulless, and yeah, straightforward. Maybe even formulaic?
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 20:41
|
|
|
Vainqueur didn't really do anything for me. I can see why people like it, but it just didn't make me laugh.Bremen posted:I didn't find anything in it creepy. Well, I guess there are elements of "Our souls are linked, that means we're destined to be together!" which I wasn't exactly thrilled with but it doesn't seem to do anything creepy with it at least. I thought that bit was weird mostly because it was sort of a gigantic twist out of nowhere in where the story was going, and it wasn't the fun sort of twist or a direction that sounded more interesting. It felt like the author came up with a solution to the immediate problem the characters were facing without properly considering the implications of that solution.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 20:46
|
|
|
Everything Void Herald writes is great. Characters feel distinct, chapters are obviously edited for grammar and spelling, and every story is clever and entertaining. Definitely the best author on Royal Road.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 21:16
|
|
|
I have a really hard time giving a poo poo about Kairos. I just got to the point where we get the interminable sniping and negotiations between his lover and the new wife and it was just so eyerolling and overdone. Does it get better at some point or mostly just continue in that vein.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 22:13
|
|
|
Tom Clancy is Dead posted:Outside of Vainqueur the Dragon, my problem with their stories was never that I disliked them, it was that I didn't like them. With Kairos, I read to chapter 13 without feeling like I had a compelling reason to continue reading it. I wasn't attached to any of the characters, the worldbuilding and system didn't interest me, I didn't care about the plot, and the language wasn't worth reading for it's own sake. If I had a specific complaint, it would probably be the generic feeling from playing the greatest hits of Greek mythology at a fast rate. The whole thing felt a bit soulless, and yeah, straightforward. Maybe even formulaic? Agree with this, I may have even dropped it at the same point. I tried The Perfect Run and it just didn't grab me either. I liked Vainqueur but just couldn't get into anything else.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 22:43
|
|
|
Plorkyeran posted:I thought that bit was weird mostly because it was sort of a gigantic twist out of nowhere in where the story was going, and it wasn't the fun sort of twist or a direction that sounded more interesting. It felt like the author came up with a solution to the immediate problem the characters were facing without properly considering the implications of that solution. I guess I just didn't let that bother me because it was clearly set up as "after we graduate" and I didn't expect that to be a timeframe covered by the books, at least not anytime soon. It seemed like the kind of thing that would change the dynamics at the academy a little but not really fully play out until maybe an epilogue at the end of the series. Now, the current patreon chapters, that's a sudden shift out of nowhere, and one I'm not sure I'll enjoy long term, though I plan on giving it a chance.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2021 23:44
|
|
|
In a reversal from standard webnovel, one of the things I disliked about Kairos was the lack of slavery. To me, it's distasteful/whitewashy in the same way as making a US plantation-era south (but skipping all the slavery) themed story would be.
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 04:23
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 04:41
|
|
|
Foxfire_ posted:In a reversal from standard webnovel, one of the things I disliked about Kairos was the lack of slavery. To me, it's distasteful/whitewashy in the same way as making a US plantation-era south (but skipping all the slavery) themed story would be. yeah tbh the depiction of slavery doesn't bug me as much as the protagonist just being like 'oh, neat' and being a sidenote that's never examined. at least the protagonists who are cool with it engage with the idea a little and it's not just suffering as window dressing. another corollary is not having slavery in a place that really seems like it should; it smacks of not thinking things through. i like the way ar'kendrythist does it. slavery exists as a concept but is basically impossible because a majority of the gods hate it and being forced into servitude gives you a buffed class that makes it extremely easy to escape and kill everyone on your way out.
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 05:01
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:yeah tbh the depiction of slavery doesn't bug me as much as the protagonist just being like 'oh, neat' and being a sidenote that's never examined. at least the protagonists who are cool with it engage with the idea a little and it's not just suffering as window dressing. another corollary is not having slavery in a place that really seems like it should; it smacks of not thinking things through. i like the way ar'kendrythist does it. slavery exists as a concept but is basically impossible because a majority of the gods hate it and being forced into servitude gives you a buffed class that makes it extremely easy to escape and kill everyone on your way out. im burning through ar'kendrythist right now (at book 4) and I kind of loving love just how goddamn stupid erick is about everything
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 06:07
|
|
|
The Perfect Run is probably my favorite story on RR, although tastes will always vary from person to person.
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 06:18
|
|
|
A big flaming stink posted:im burning through ar'kendrythist right now (at book 4) and I kind of loving love just how goddamn stupid erick is about everything He's a world changing genius and the right man in the right place and yet also a complete dipshit moron sometimes
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 07:05
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:He's a world changing genius and the right man in the right place and yet also a complete dipshit moron sometimes let's give a newly orphaned girl and all her friends gear that is leagues better than anything money could buy! seriously half the time erick is exactly this 
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 07:16
|
|
|
Foxfire_ posted:In a reversal from standard webnovel, one of the things I disliked about Kairos was the lack of slavery. To me, it's distasteful/whitewashy in the same way as making a US plantation-era south (but skipping all the slavery) themed story would be.
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 09:31
|
|
|
Yeah, one of the major plot points is that Kairos' people are split on his marriage to Julia because she's Lycean and they practice slavery, whereas Travians are a people descended from escaped slaves. Kairos' himself is pretty outspoken on his anti-slavery views. One of the first things Kairos' did when he returns home is free the slaves he was gifted as a dowry.
Narmi fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Oct 21, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2021 18:50
|
|
|
Cicero posted:I don't understand. There's slavery in the story, it's just distasteful to Kairos' culture because their origin story is basically escaped slaves from the Roman Empire, I think? So he personally doesn't condone slavery, but other cultures in the world do have slaves.
|
|
#
?
Oct 22, 2021 03:41
|
|
|
Slaves are first mentioned in the first chapter, and the country's origin story with the founder as an escaped slave is mentioned in chapter 2. edit: just bringing it up because the story definitely isn't whitewashing the presence of slaves in Greek society or the wider Mediterranean, though it's true that the protagonist and his culture are explicitly anti-slavery. Which is probably narratively necessary, I think most readers would have a much harder time accepting a hero who embraces slavery than one who just kills his enemies. Cicero fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Oct 22, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 22, 2021 05:10
|
|
|
Tom Clancy is Dead posted:Outside of Vainqueur the Dragon, my problem with their stories was never that I disliked them, it was that I didn't like them. With Kairos, I read to chapter 13 without feeling like I had a compelling reason to continue reading it. I wasn't attached to any of the characters, the worldbuilding and system didn't interest me, I didn't care about the plot, and the language wasn't worth reading for it's own sake. If I had a specific complaint, it would probably be the generic feeling from playing the greatest hits of Greek mythology at a fast rate. The whole thing felt a bit soulless, and yeah, straightforward. Maybe even formulaic? This is how I feel. The stuff of his I've tried to read (Perfect Run and Kairos) are both probably "the best and most competent WNs that I don't like." There's something about them that doesn't appeal to me that I can't quite put my finger on, though it bugs me in a completely different way than Wandering Inn (the other really popular WN I don't really like). One thing that kind of bugged me in Perfect Run is the way the women are written. It sort of reminds me of the way women are often written in Western cape comics (not in a good way, obviously). But they still succeeded in getting me to read much more than I do with most other web serials, just due to having a basic competency that most lack. Outcast has a somewhat similar feel to the Void Herald stuff I've read, but I like it more. For some reason I find myself significantly more invested in the characters. I was actually kind of surprised/upset when a couple major supporting characters died at one point (being vague for spoiler reasons), which is something that's usually difficult for stories like that to pull off. I think part of the way it succeeded in being surprising/impactful is that it actually gave the characters in question some unrevealed background and unresolved personal issues, so there wasn't really any sense that they had "death flags" beforehand (at least any more than most of the other major supporting characters; if you made me pick out a character most likely to die during the conflict in question, I would have probably guessed Orn'tol, with Malika "taking his place" or something along those lines).
|
|
#
?
Oct 22, 2021 07:30
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:This is how I feel. The stuff of his I've tried to read (Perfect Run and Kairos) are both probably "the best and most competent WNs that I don't like." There's something about them that doesn't appeal to me that I can't quite put my finger on, though it bugs me in a completely different way than Wandering Inn (the other really popular WN I don't really like). One thing that kind of bugged me in Perfect Run is the way the women are written. It sort of reminds me of the way women are often written in Western cape comics (not in a good way, obviously). But they still succeeded in getting me to read much more than I do with most other web serials, just due to having a basic competency that most lack. For what its worth, he's working on how he writes female characters, with the deuteragonist a woman this time (and honestly now interesting than the protagonist)
|
|
#
?
Oct 22, 2021 09:09
|
|
|
Up to date on Katalepsis. Time to catch up on... Everything else I've been neglecting for the past week.  Here are some thoughts: The thing I read before this was The Daily Grind, and it was a strange relief to read something actually British, and not just something with faux-british "what ho old chap let's have some tea and chips u wankers I'm from LONDON!" characters. When she meets the lawyers in the beer garden, her first impression is his strong London accent and she hates him immediately, that made me laugh. I loved the descriptions of things. The two I have saved because I sent them to my bf are: "She affectionately patted the statue’s abdomen, which looked like it had been chiselled from the unrealised sexual yearnings of the terminally repressed." and "Lozzie beamed even wider, and placed the skull in my hands with all the delicacy of trying to dress a cat." It felt like it was very much ramping up to something in the last book or so when before that it had been pretty slow. Also Heather is terminally, hillariously horny, but it really took her like 12 books to realise "wait, there's types of love other than romantic???  " and even now I'm not 100% sure that she understands.I liked the way you handled the mental-health stuff, not just "oh well, she wasn't skitzophrenic now she's fine yay!" which a lot of stories end up doing. I wrote a whole thing about the attic in my friends house which was permanently decorated for halloween, and writing it out was like excising a ghost from my brain.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2021 01:09
|
|
|
Man, I just sat here and thought about the implications of the story that I'm plugging together and I'm gonna have to toe the line carefully. It's centered around a Necromancer who for other goals, is raising a bunch of undead to basically create an undying, untiring work force for an industrial revolution and the trials and tribulations involved in that. I have to be veeeery careful about what's basically unthinking slave labor for her and how the other characters react.
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2021 01:36
|
|
|
Galick posted:Man, I just sat here and thought about the implications of the story that I'm plugging together and I'm gonna have to toe the line carefully. So long as they're not sentient, it's really more of a robot workforce than a slave one. Which has a whole bunch of different issues in the inevitable uprising... Also might lead to discussions on the Necroputer. What looks from afar like infantry in formation, approaching to see the skeletons doing nothing but raising and lowering their arms in response to the one in front of them, until the end of the line raises black and white panels, forming the answer to an equation. The first message on the Necronet was not 'Hello World' but 'Greetings Mortals'
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2021 04:11
|
|
|
TUTBAD 34: “I guess finding him will be the first step,” said Mizuki. “And then getting away with it will be the hard part. I don’t know what kind of entads the Greater Plenarch province has for doing detective work, but we’d want to figure that out. If we made it look like an accident, they wouldn’t do a full investigation, but we’d really want to know what we were going up against.” “I don’t think that’s what I want,” said Isra. She was hesitant. “When you talked about drowning someone, my mind went to him. I want what was stolen returned to me. I want justice.” “Oh, good, I was getting worried, I have no idea how to kill a person,” said Mizuki. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2021 17:55
|
|
|
Nettle Soup posted:Up to date on Katalepsis. Time to catch up on... Everything else I've been neglecting for the past week. I have a personal dislike for the fake-British "pip pip cheerio" stereotypes, as well as how a lot of popular urban fantasy or whatnot is always set in London, maybe because it's the one place international audiences are certain to have heard of. Which is part of why I set Katalepsis firmly in the North and anytime they've been elsewhere it's not London. I put a lot of effort into my descriptions! I have a lot of fun with them sometimes, and sometimes they give me terrible headaches, but it's always nice to know when readers are enjoying them. I try to keep the story varied between slow parts and ramps up toward action and change, but yeah this current arc has been a long rocket up toward ... something! You'll see, soon enough. And thank you for mentioning the mental-health stuff; I'm glad it comes across that way. I made a very important decision early on that it was going to be central aspect of the story, not simply dropped when Heather "got better." Real trauma lasts, requires life-long adjustment or changes or healing, and a lot of characters in the story are going through various processes like that. Glad you're enjoying it!
|
|
#
?
Oct 23, 2021 20:47
|
|
|
I love katalepsis’s model of each arc being goofy slice of life and romance drama gradually escalating into intense action and horror, but arcs do tend to have a chapter or two too much of building.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2021 06:28
|
|
|
I dropped Fates Parallel when it started veering into SOULBOUND ROMANCE territory with the roommate that I didn't care about, somewhere around chapter 21. Maybe I misread the vibes but I kept getting whiplash about what genre the book was even supposed to be in, the tone is all over the place.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2021 06:45
|
|
|
TWI Patreon: Finally some resolution to the "class" that Ksmvr's been hinted at for entirely too long. Bit of a silver theme going on with out friends the horns I've noticed.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2021 07:54
|
|
|
Plorkyeran posted:I love katalepsis’s model of each arc being goofy slice of life and romance drama gradually escalating into intense action and horror, but arcs do tend to have a chapter or two too much of building. Different strokes for different folks. Personally I love the slow pace.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2021 09:28
|
|
|
Scaevolus posted:I dropped Fates Parallel when it started veering into SOULBOUND ROMANCE territory with the roommate that I didn't care about, somewhere around chapter 21. different strokes for different folks but that's also the only reason to read it lol.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2021 11:34
|
|
|
tithin posted:TWI Patreon: I’m really disappointed in this apparent outcome. Bait and switch with Hero, AND he gives the sword away? Lame as loving hell.
|
|
#
?
Oct 24, 2021 18:15
|
|
|
I just started re-reading Katalepsis and I'm blown away by how good the first chapter is. It was almost too bleak the first time I read it, but knowing what's coming smooths some of the jagged edges off and I'm loving it right from the start this time. I'm also remembering that night time is perhaps not the ideal time to be reading it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 25, 2021 05:01
|
|
|
Reading Ar'kendrithyst because it seems to get a lot of love here, and I'm currently at chapter 39. Does it get... Better?
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 14:54
|
|
|
Nettle Soup posted:Reading Ar'kendrithyst because it seems to get a lot of love here, and I'm currently at chapter 39. Does it get... Better? Eh. I think of it like a worse version of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. There's definitely bits and pieces to like, but I don't care about the overarching question that drives the protag even a little bit, and would prefer other characters as protag.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 15:02
|
|
|
Nettle Soup posted:Reading Ar'kendrithyst because it seems to get a lot of love here, and I'm currently at chapter 39. Does it get... Better? depends on what you want out of it, I guess. the first book set in Spur is both the worst written and the least interesting if you aren't a slice of life man such as myself. the climax of it where he goes into the titular dead city is ftw though. the story is in general about an old social worker who has absolutely never given up trying to do his small part to help people first and foremost.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 15:04
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:the story is in general about an old social worker who has absolutely never given up trying to do his small part to help people first and foremost. I wouldn't mind that, but the focus on "No you must put aside principles for VIOLENCE! Not fighting is WEAKNESS and everyone will abandon you to the wilds!" is getting to me a bit.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 15:09
|
|
|
Nettle Soup posted:I wouldn't mind that, but the focus on "No you must put aside principles for VIOLENCE! Not fighting is WEAKNESS and everyone will abandon you to the wilds!" is getting to me a bit. its important to remember despite all the cool magic that veird is like, the equivalent of a brutal perpetual civil war. on top of an old uranium mine. the whole point is that the veirdish are right to think that way but still wrong in the long run. the entire point of the story is how ideology and emotions and access to power can twist people's rationalizations to the point that society as we know it is no longer possible.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 15:28
|
|
|
Nettle Soup posted:Reading Ar'kendrithyst because it seems to get a lot of love here, and I'm currently at chapter 39. Does it get... Better? I haven’t read it, but I genuinely think this thread has 1 person who likes it and then every so often someone else reads it and is like “……..this?”
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 15:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 08:25 |
|
|
i have a very narrow type of preferred novel that nobody else likes, so, well. the goblin emperor was one of my favorite books ever and it's an incredibly slow paced book that basically has zero plot.
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2021 15:43
|
|