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Hungry posted:I still get a stray comment now and again on Royal Road saying some variation of "there's too much romance and too many lesbians in this clearly tagged lesbian romance story." When I was keeping up I constantly had the urge to go "There's too much eldritch horror and not enough dumpster fire slice of life hijinks in this clearly tagged eldritch horror story," so I think the moral is that fans are insane and it is literally impossible to please everyone or sometimes anyone. That's why I always advise people to ignore 100% of fan feedback, including this right here, and just write the story they want to write. Which you're already doing with good results. So I guess reading this comment was literally nothing but a waste of time- oh no, it's entropy, the scariest horror antagonist of all! ...also the scariest romance antagonist, I suppose.
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Jan 11, 2022 00:18
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Larry Parrish posted:As far as people not getting a story I pretty much avoid comment sections but I remember a lot of people on Ar'kendrythist always being like 'wtf this is boring' which always made me laugh. And the occasional whining about politics. I don't know what people expect out if stories about wizards since they're traditionally massively involved in politics. They expect Xianxia, but Western, with Magic™, not offbrand cultivation.
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Jan 11, 2022 00:44
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Kalas posted:I swear Ar'Kendrithyst became a lot more entertaining to read when I started to play 'spot the hidden dragon/s'. Haha, I have not played that game. Any really good candidates? Sewermaster Al maybe?
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Jan 11, 2022 00:44
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Today’s Beware of Chicken I know I shouldn’t read the comments, but too many people seem certain that the villain survived. Like Jin punched him hundreds of miles away into a mountain while destroying five talismans that attempted to save the “young master”. Sure if this was any other bog standard cultivation story, odds are the dude would survive and be back, but this isn’t one of those stories. If this was one of those then someone from the Fa Ram would have died, but once again not in this story. So when combined with the land Jin is effectively a Sky Realm cultivator. With this arc winding down I wonder where the story goes next. Are we going to see gramps show up? Will any of the other disciples assume a human form? Will Rizu and Meiling attempt to heal Loud Boy’s cultivation?
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Jan 11, 2022 05:40
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Big D's quest has a pretty clear path forward. And Rou has a baby on the way. But yeah, I am curious about what comes next. Lots of possibilities.
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Jan 11, 2022 05:47
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Peachfart posted:I have now started 5 or 6 serials that go from interesting plot -> generic magic school story. Please writers, stop this. It is so boring. The other version of this sort of bait and switch is in the countless power fantasy WNs that begin with a protagonist who seems to be an underdog at the very beginning but is actually super strong after a brief opening arc where they experience some difficulty.
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Jan 11, 2022 06:00
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Maguoob posted:Today’s Beware of Chicken I would say I'm on the side of him surviving only because we know that he has some form of possession/body-snatching and it would be really weird to spend so much time establishing that facet only for it to not matter at all. Like there was no reason for him to be anything but a 'normal' arrogant young master for him to fill the role he has so far in the story, but based on his POVs he has a bunch of secrets that haven't mattered yet. Also makes him a dark mirror to Jin who also stole a cultivator's body, albeit unintentionally. I think the Shrouded Mountain Young Master body is toast, but he could show up in a couple different ways as an antagonist in the future. If, for instance, Fa Ram becomes its own school he could show up in a new body as a saboteur. He could try to gain influence to get some of the outside sects to crush Jin etc, etc. Zore fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 06:09
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Wittgen posted:Haha, I have not played that game. Any really good candidates? Sewermaster Al maybe? I'm keeping my thought to myself so I don't out myself as a dumb rear end when I'm utterly wrong.
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Jan 11, 2022 08:02
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Zore posted:I would say I'm on the side of him surviving only because we know that he has some form of possession/body-snatching and it would be really weird to spend so much time establishing that facet only for it to not matter at all. Like there was no reason for him to be anything but a 'normal' arrogant young master for him to fill the role he has so far in the story, but based on his POVs he has a bunch of secrets that haven't mattered yet. Also makes him a dark mirror to Jin who also stole a cultivator's body, albeit unintentionally. Basically, it's not that kind of story.
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Jan 11, 2022 09:14
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Megazver posted:Basically, it's not that kind of story. Eh, the author doesn't seem to be the type to write a whole bunch of details that would be extremely pertinent to him coming back without that actually having payoff somewhere down the line, you know? Also he's the only thing that even remotely counts as an antagonist so far.
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Jan 11, 2022 09:23
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Omi no Kami posted:When I was keeping up I constantly had the urge to go "There's too much eldritch horror and not enough dumpster fire slice of life hijinks in this clearly tagged eldritch horror story," so I think the moral is that fans are insane and it is literally impossible to please everyone or sometimes anyone. I suspect with some of the latest stuff I've finally managed to make the eldritch horror into the dumpster fire slice of life hijinks. Maybe. Perhaps.
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Jan 11, 2022 09:23
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The Shortest Path posted:Eh, the author doesn't seem to be the type to write a whole bunch of details that would be extremely pertinent to him coming back without that actually having payoff somewhere down the line, you know? Also he's the only thing that even remotely counts as an antagonist so far.
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Jan 11, 2022 10:30
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Rob Filter posted:Out of curiosity (question open to anyone) what elements make up a generic magical school story? Only wizard school story I can remember is the pots, but haven't really run across many wizard school plotlines outside of that. It's pretty much all harry potter derivative for western fiction, the focus is on wizards and magic. In isekai derived stories the setting is skewed to a boarding school that happens to also have mages but is more a vehicle for class conflict as they are first and foremost a high school story (think bakarina) or a fighting high school story that happens to have magic so the main character can be really good at it (Any number of forgettable anime). The big ones for web novel magical schools are mostly drafted from HP: -It's a boarding school so people live in dorms, which means you have characters who might not meet run into each other more often with no contrivance by the author. This means both love interests and enemies can show up at any time. It also means there's also pressure for the characters to stay in the setting. -It has people from different social classes so you have friction between rich students and poor ones. Fantasy race discrimination comes up too. -The school acts as a microcosm or proxy for a political conflict. Ie, 'this student is the prince of so and so country, who's at war with this student who's the dutchess of this and this country'. You can add an element of possibly lethal conflict without the stakes going out of control for the writer as there's an authority in the school to prevent an all out war. Also you can add flavor by mentioning places that don't need to be fleshed out besides what characters tell us about not-here-land. -The school has extremely talented instructors who act as mentors or antagonists. That they are instructors at a magic school and usually have a specific class is short hand for high proficiency in that field. Making your main antagonist an adult who teaches a class gives them inherent power to both interact with and frustrate the protagonist, without having to resort to a sword fight. It also means that there's a lot of power that's held by when an arbitrary character feels the protagonist is ready to power up. You have built in characters to show off the top of the power curve in a reasonable way. -The school has rules that exist to be broken. Curfew is the big one, but also rules that ban students from using the MC's main magic (usually in necromancer stories). You can have characters follow the rules and ignore them at different times to brute force characters in and out of situations. -The school and it's grounds are large. As in, there's lots of places to go and see in the school. The character can always go somewhere they have never been to before if the needs of the story decide it. -The school has a bunch of modern or modern-like amenities. This is to make the setting inviting, or remove inconvenience to streamline a story. -It's in a castle. It's almost always a castle because castles have towers and dungeons and secret passages. Heights add danger to any situation, and towers emphasize authority, so towers are good. Dungeons evoke the underworld and danger, be it imprisonment or the D+D dungeon with monsters. Secret passages let you go crazy with moving people around in a story without worrying as much about the logistics of 'how does he get back to his reading chair without breaking a sweat after killing so-and-so?' Castles also tend to be built on cliffs, with walls, or have a moat. They form closed environments to contain characters and force conflict because people can't just walk down the road and out of the story. -The school has a secret. By one, I mean a lot. The implication of hundreds of secrets in a place makes it more desirable. It is part of the theme: magic study means there's power in knowledge and so that's built into the setting. Learning the secret rewards someone with power or treasure. The bad secrets (demons! an instructor is a lich! The big bad guy is a teacher here!) are there to keep the character and reader both guessing about what the powers arrayed on each side of a conflict really are. -The students have both classes and special field trips, sporting events, or class activities or extra curricular activities that in their very nature expose them to danger. Whenever there's a little to much plotting the writer can use these to add a mid-book mini climax and then throw a breather in. It also can provide a simple challenge to cold open a section. When the Mc Mage and their friends go griffon hunting, you have maybe one instructor and a griffon, and you can establish how year 15 finds them before you get into chasing down the magic candelabra that untaps lands. -The library has forbidden sections. Again, arbitrary power gating. When does the character decide to try to get at those level 9 spellbooks? -Grades 8 through 18. The protagonists are generally 13 to 25 so you can have a bunch of life milestones add drama to the mix.... wait a minute.... Middle age man at magic school. Bam! original idea do not steal. -Robes only*. Many settings have a robe only dress code. This is because robes = wizards, and also the robes reduce the need to describe what people are wearing. Anything that's unusual about a uniform dress is an easy flag for character traits. *In isekai there's a uniform dress code because they love high school settings. Those are the big ones. I can't recall a lot of older traditional fantasy novels with active magic schools. When something like it did crop up it was usually more an organization (think the white tower from WoT) that happened to train new wizards rather then being a school, per say. Most older books I think lean on the hero cycle idea of a wise old mentor as it's a great stand in for a father figure as well as a likeable old guy to kill off to add some pathos and force a crisis that kicks off the rest of the book. Whaleporn fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 11:35
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Having literal teachers deliver lessons to the protagonists about the world and the magic system is also the easiest possible way to avoid the exposition dumps that plague fantasy. As an aside I always feel a bit sad for writers like Jill Murphy when people attribute these tropes to Harry Potter. I don't know how popular her books were internationally but in the UK at least I think everyone over a certain age knew that Rowling was copying huge chunks of The Worst Witch series for her setting and characters.
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Jan 11, 2022 12:05
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It's all a real trope in old British fiction, and actual boarding schools. Just look up the uniform for Eton or pictures of Cambridge university. Pretty much all schools in the UK have a set uniform. Enid Blyton, Michelle Magorian, Angela Brazil, all of the Chalet School books, and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. Magic is a new element, but it mostly replaces Latin or Greek as "Esoteric thing the protagonist has to learn to get to the fun bits". In my little set of short stories for nanowrimo I ended up writing a few chapters that were "magic school" because it was an easy thing to fall back on when I wasn't feeling very creative, but I actually didn't think of harry potter at all, weirdly. I was mostly thinking of Jane Austin's Emma, Michelle Magorian's Back Home, and the Naughtiest Girl in the School series by Enid Blyton (and how much it pissed me off as a kid).
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Jan 11, 2022 12:41
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i mostly associate literally a school for wizards with being terminally British, because as you said it seems to be a default setting for writers from the UK. normally when I say 'magic academy' it's a little less literal than all that. i wonder who's responsible for the weird number of 'its a fantasy school, but for aristocrats and also it's actually an officer's academy'
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Jan 11, 2022 12:43
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Possibly Anne McCaffrey or Elizabeth Moon? Maybe combined with the Aubrey Maturin stuff? I guess they all get mushed together.
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Jan 11, 2022 12:57
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Plorkyeran posted:I'm going to blame My Hero Academia for popularizing superhero school. youre gonna blame mha and not, like, x-men?
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Jan 11, 2022 13:36
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Hungry posted:I suspect with some of the latest stuff I've finally managed to make the eldritch horror into the dumpster fire slice of life hijinks. Maybe. Perhaps. The real horrors were the relationship problems we created along the way? Either way, thanks for writing a fun story.  (My initial take wasn't criticism, by the way, I just wanted to illustrate that fans are dumb, and fan reactions are constant moving targets. For my money your thing dodges most common web serial problems. ^^)
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Jan 11, 2022 14:13
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Omi no Kami posted:The real horrors were the relationship problems we created along the way? Either way, thanks for writing a fun story. You're very welcome indeed! Always glad to hear when readers are enjoying it. And that's absolutely fine. Even if it was criticism, I try to treat critique as sacrosanct, it's actually extremely valuable. But yeah, fan reactions are always a moving target, I've certainly learnt that by now, especially blending together the genres I have. I know there's some people who really love the horror parts, others who enjoy the slice of life romance more, or the other way around, and interest waxes or wanes depending on what the story is currently doing.
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Jan 11, 2022 14:20
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I gave my story the "School Life" label on RR even though the characters spend exactly 1 chapter actually in the school, and I hope I've managed to trick at least one person into reading it on this basis.
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Jan 11, 2022 14:27
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Sampatrick posted:youre gonna blame mha and not, like, x-men? i don't think I've seen a single X-Men thing that actually featured the school except as a backdrop. it's like if Harry Potter was actually about the school janitors and you just see the kids marching around in the background. what im saying here is you're old
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Jan 11, 2022 14:46
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Hungry posted:You're very welcome indeed! Always glad to hear when readers are enjoying it. The genre blending is an interesting one-I think it works more in your favor than not, since marketing-wise it's kind of a weird teamup and thematically it gives you a lot of room to explore any number of psychosexual/physical/self-image/gender things. If I had to guess, I'd bet that the waxing and waning largely comes down to the pacing of both themes, and there is frustratingly little you can do about that when writing in a serial format. If you were going for a traditional novel then sure, there are probably arcs that could've been chapters and chapters that could've been expanded, but you have to write the darn thing in real time before a live studio audience and there's just not that much latitude to figure out the structure and pacing of a section before you've committed.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:03
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PoorWeather posted:I gave my story the "School Life" label on RR even though the characters spend exactly 1 chapter actually in the school, and I hope I've managed to trick at least one person into reading it on this basis.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:20
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Omi no Kami posted:The genre blending is an interesting one-I think it works more in your favor than not, since marketing-wise it's kind of a weird teamup and thematically it gives you a lot of room to explore any number of psychosexual/physical/self-image/gender things. The experience of writing it live and not being able to go back and edit has actually done wonders for my development as a writer, and been really good for the story as well. I don't know if I've mentioned this anywhere before, but in the year or so before I started Katalepsis I was trying to draft and edit a traditional novel, in a first real attempt to get something marketable into a professionally finished state. It didn't go well; I set myself a strict word-count limit of 125k and stuck very closely to a detailed outline, but I couldn't get the story itself to work. It was very stilted and never fully explored the characters because I was trying to get them to stick to the script. No matter how I changed the outline it always hit a big event I'd set up for the middle of the narrative and then fell apart. Despite a ton of prior storytelling experience, I just could not make it function. But with a serial, the format lets characters breathe and act and do things I never expected. I make detailed plans for every step of Katalepsis but they get shredded the moment the characters start doing stuff. True, it does tend to run the word count up, but it works. It works so well that I'm gearing up to commit myself to writing more than one serial at once now.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:24
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i remember seeing at least one guy in the pith comments being pissed about the 'academy arc' which barely counted, it wasn't that long and was basically a cover job for our gaggle of domestic terrorist friends. and they were mad that it wasn't longer or more involved with the school part which, lol. bro the story about painfully dying from being congenitally poor but being too much of a coward to commit suicide was never going to have a lifting yourself up by the bootstraps message.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:38
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I’ve definitely seen people say they dropped PGtE because of the military school arc that lasts for like 10 chapters in book 1.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:40
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Larry Parrish posted:i don't think I've seen a single X-Men thing that actually featured the school except as a backdrop. it's like if Harry Potter was actually about the school janitors and you just see the kids marching around in the background. The ones that do are pretty great though. The 'Spider-Man and the X-Men' mini series for example. It's also the source of the "But I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs" panel.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:43
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Silynt posted:I’ve definitely seen people say they dropped PGtE because of the military school arc that lasts for like 10 chapters in book 1. That is about where I dropped it...
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Jan 11, 2022 15:56
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Elfface posted:The ones that do are pretty great though. The 'Spider-Man and the X-Men' mini series for example. It's also the source of the "But I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs" panel. nobody's gonna watch DC stuff from the 90s or whatever, grandpa.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:58
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Sampatrick posted:youre gonna blame mha and not, like, x-men? Yes, I'm going to blame the thing that's popular now and not the thing which was popular 30 years ago.
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Jan 11, 2022 18:27
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TUTBAD surprises me again, this time with innovative public transportation solutions to the issue that everyone can teleport directly to the centre of the hex.
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Jan 11, 2022 18:36
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TUTBAD: lmao get absolutely hosed you goddamn parasite
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Jan 11, 2022 18:41
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TUTBAD lmao, Verity's parents get worse every time we learn more about them. "We need you to get us more money because your father decided to be a greedy gently caress" along with confirmation that they stole all the money she earned from performances when she was younger. I really hope they get kicked to the curb
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Jan 11, 2022 19:03
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Plorkyeran posted:Yes, I'm going to blame the thing that's popular now and not the thing which was popular 30 years ago. Agreed. In old Xmen the school was just a flimsy cover story rather then the core of the setting. You didn't need to be an alumni to be a super hero. They got in a jet and flew around the world to fight other mutants every other comic. In MHA the characters have goals or dreams that are tied to completing their schooling or passing with flying colors. The action and drama is scaled to the experience of a new class of heroes.
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Jan 11, 2022 23:35
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Pirateaba's super secret project is up for patrons, only 160k words.
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Jan 12, 2022 00:44
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Jeez now I am rethinking my Isekai-ed main character is called to be the sect leader of a cultivation school. Alright no school tropes like that. Got it.
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Jan 12, 2022 00:53
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Peachfart posted:Pirateaba's super secret project is up for patrons, only 160k words. So about a month’s worth of chapters.
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Jan 12, 2022 00:54
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Dream Weaver posted:Jeez now I am rethinking my Isekai-ed main character is called to be the sect leader of a cultivation school. Alright no school tropes like that. Got it. A school setting has a bunch of advantages! Don't second guess if you want your story to be wuxia harry potter, just make it the best one you can
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Jan 12, 2022 01:09
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Dream Weaver posted:Jeez now I am rethinking my Isekai-ed main character is called to be the sect leader of a cultivation school. Alright no school tropes like that. Got it. In general I would not let bad authors dictate your story. Just ask yourself if that particular trope is serving a purpose. Things become tropes for a reason even if a terrible writer does not use it for the correct situations.
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Jan 12, 2022 02:37
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