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I keep telling people it's a slice of life with a plot and nobody ever believes me and keeps saying it's too slow.
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May 2, 2022 11:25
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Larry Parrish posted:I keep telling people it's a slice of life with a plot and nobody ever believes me and keeps saying it's too slow. It's usually slow but it's also very good. The last few chapters have just been nuts.
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May 2, 2022 11:32
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If it helps (it doesn't), my problem with it that ultimately led to me giving up was the opposite, where it felt too fast. I like a gradual ramping up of power and uh that's not Erick. He's a world class archmage by like the first half of the first volume, it's just not my kinda speed.
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May 2, 2022 20:23
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That's because he always was a wizard
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May 2, 2022 20:37
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Infinity Gaia posted:If it helps (it doesn't), my problem with it that ultimately led to me giving up was the opposite, where it felt too fast. I like a gradual ramping up of power and uh that's not Erick. He's a world class archmage by like the first half of the first volume, it's just not my kinda speed. I haven't actually read that story, but simply 'leveling' extremely fast is one way to handle a problem I'm feeling in several stories I'm reading atm. Implicit in a leveling/cultivating system is that there are people that are so much stronger then you that you can't even consider fighting them. That limits a story in a way that normal fantasy isn't limited. Lord of the Rings wouldn't have been the same if the Nazgul was 300 levels or 3 cultivation stages above Eowyn and she wasn't able to touch him at all. Sure there are more powerful people, but there's always the David vs. Goliath thing possible thats simply impossible with cultivation. You end up with ever more convoluted excuses why the really powerful people don't bother with you right now. You need a school story with what to amounts to schoolyard bullying, or a tournament arc for real challenges. You can have levels limited by areas, but that feels somewhat artifical to me. There are other ways to get around this - start everybody at the same level after an apocalypse, or in a game. I'm feeling this makes 'western' litrpg somewhat easier to write, whereas Cultivation stories are much harder to do well.
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May 3, 2022 09:00
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I mean the obvious answer there is "don't have your protagonist fight world-ending threats right off the bat." Just look at Cradle. While he gets a world-ending type of goal pretty quick, it's a long ways off, and in the meantime he has many smaller challenges ahead of him. He has to get into a magic school, then escape Sacred Valley, get an iron body while under the tutelage of a maniac, then escape slavery, then prepare for an honor duel against someone radically stronger (but nowhere close to world-ending level), etc. The reason why the superpowers aren't relevant to those challenges is that those challenges are beneath them. They don't give a poo poo about Lindon's tiny concerns. But I don't disagree that it's something the story has to carefully work around, you have to include some way for the MC's entourage to keep up or risk them becoming Krillin.
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May 3, 2022 10:14
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68300 words
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May 3, 2022 11:22
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oh gently caress me 8.83 8.84 8.85 Epilogue
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May 3, 2022 11:25
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Argue posted:68300 words couldn't squeeze out another seven hundred? c'mon aba
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May 3, 2022 13:59
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TWI: Well things happened.
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May 3, 2022 14:39
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MonikaTSarn posted:I haven't actually read that story, but simply 'leveling' extremely fast is one way to handle a problem I'm feeling in several stories I'm reading atm. Implicit in a leveling/cultivating system is that there are people that are so much stronger then you that you can't even consider fighting them. That limits a story in a way that normal fantasy isn't limited. Lord of the Rings wouldn't have been the same if the Nazgul was 300 levels or 3 cultivation stages above Eowyn and she wasn't able to touch him at all. Sure there are more powerful people, but there's always the David vs. Goliath thing possible thats simply impossible with cultivation. Even if everyone starts at the same level, the power imbalance between the MC and bystanders shades interactions in a different light. If everyone is the same and you don't help someone, well, that's fine. Not great, but fine. And hey, the MC usually has lots of their own problems. When the MC is the strongest man on the planet with more gold than god and is ignoring people who are having even an averagely bad day that he could turn around with a few moments of his attention? Now he's at best a selfish dick. If the MC is an actual nice person and helps most people she meets, this isn't a problem, but how often does that happen in stories with stats? Stories with stats have an extra problem other stories don't. Eventually, an author is going to misplace a decimal point or eyeball a comparison wrong, and introduce a plot hole. (Stories without stats have the opposite problem instead. After the plucky underdog punches up for the tenth time, and "pushes beyond their limits" or casts one more spell even though they're so exhausted they can't see straight, it drains all the tension right out of the story because even the densest reader eventually catches on that the MC isn't really in danger).
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May 3, 2022 16:59
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Hit my 55k for the Writathon, now to sleep for a week. How on earth does she do it in one chapter, spreading it out over a month was bad enough!
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May 3, 2022 17:05
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I get where you’re coming from, and I did roll my eyes a bit at how Erick (a social worker) remembers all this physics stuff, but it didn’t bother me all that much. The question Ar’Kendrithyst is concerned with is “what will Erick, a decent person who prefers to avoid violence, do with world-altering power?” So it’s for the best that he gets the world-altering power pretty quickly, and it doesn’t spend a long time on topics unrelated to the main theme.
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May 3, 2022 17:28
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LLSix posted:Even if everyone starts at the same level, the power imbalance between the MC and bystanders shades interactions in a different light. If everyone is the same and you don't help someone, well, that's fine. Not great, but fine. And hey, the MC usually has lots of their own problems. A lot of this is just an obvious result of serials starting from the assumption that they have to continue indefinitely. The main character getting too powerful for meaningful challenges isn't a problem when the story is allowed to hit a climax and end once that's happened, but serials often aren't allowed to do that.
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May 3, 2022 18:00
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I think I can say that we are ‘somewhere’ in the story’s arc of being one third done. Or one half of the way there. Or two thirds.
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May 3, 2022 18:01
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nrook posted:The question Ar’Kendrithyst is concerned with is “what will Erick, a decent person who prefers to avoid violence, do with world-altering power?” This is one of the main reasons I love and Patreon Ar'Kendrithyst, so few stories were as well written and had a moral protagonist when Ar'Kendrithyst started. There are more now(Beware of Chicken being the most popular), but I am invested in Erick and his struggles to make his new home a better place.
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May 3, 2022 19:08
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I think I can say that we are ‘somewhere’ in the story’s arc of being one third done. Or one half of the way there. Or two thirds. Is this a reference to something specific, or just how you're evaluating Arkendrythist? Personally I think Arkendrythist must be pretty close to being done. From where we are currently at on the Patreon chapters, dude is out as a wizard, about to do peace talks with two of the biggest assholes in the world and presumably end their threat, and his anti-apocalypse vision doesn't see any other major hurdles. I could see one last book about establishing candle point as a power and handling the dragons/kirgintharp/quiet war tangle. Hard to see an infinite road ahead though.
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May 3, 2022 19:09
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(Ar’Kendrithyst) I had assumed the Worldly Path was the second of three major arcs, but I have no evidence for this beyond just a general intuition.
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May 3, 2022 19:12
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Wittgen posted:Is this a reference to something specific, or just how you're evaluating Arkendrythist?
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May 3, 2022 19:12
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TWI v8 finale [Immunity: Crossbow Bolts] lmao Well, my prediction was close, I've been predicting the whole time that the only Innkeeper skill she'd get would be [Lesser Poison Resistance]
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May 3, 2022 19:34
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Argue posted:TWI v8 finale [Immunity: Crossbow Bolts] lmao Hahahahahahahah that fuckin owns. I love TWI so much
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May 3, 2022 19:43
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Nettle Soup posted:Hit my 55k for the Writathon, now to sleep for a week. I hope pirate manages to clamp down on the chapter word count for vol 9. The mental and physical toll of that output can't be good. Also, if anyone is interested, they is a tracker for chapter wordcounts: https://wanderinginn.neocities.org/statistics.html TWI is coming up on 10 million words and that doesn't include whatever the word counts for Gravesong, Last Tide, and all the edits being done for the book releases.
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May 3, 2022 19:46
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I really enjoyed Lost in Translation. Well written and good world building I'd say. The blurb is horrible ignore it. The first book is complete and book 2 has been waiting to happen for like 6 months. Anybody know if the author is still alive?
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May 3, 2022 19:47
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As much as I love reading giant piles of words I really do hope pirateaba manages to stick to her goals and reduce how much she writes each week because drat her authors note sounds scary and unhealthy.
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May 3, 2022 19:53
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Yeah, the author's notes section goes extensively into pirate experiencing burnout; I think they plan to make v9 chapters shorter (if they don't backpedal) for the sake of their own health, and are hoping to change their work-life balance a bit. Yeah, I'll take shorter chapters over deader author any day.
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May 3, 2022 19:54
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Cicero posted:I mean the obvious answer there is "don't have your protagonist fight world-ending threats right off the bat." Just look at Cradle. While he gets a world-ending type of goal pretty quick, it's a long ways off, and in the meantime he has many smaller challenges ahead of him. He has to get into a magic school, then escape Sacred Valley, get an iron body while under the tutelage of a maniac, then escape slavery, then prepare for an honor duel against someone radically stronger (but nowhere close to world-ending level), etc. The reason why the superpowers aren't relevant to those challenges is that those challenges are beneath them. They don't give a poo poo about Lindon's tiny concerns. The Cradle protagonist is also being guided by a hyper-cultivated person throughout most of the story, probably steering him clear of genuinely unbeatable encounters. Eithan basically has an incomparable understanding of the sacred arts among Cradle residents. Risk is still inherent to growing stronger in that setting (at least beyond Truegold), but Eithan ensures that Lindon's success at least remains possible (with a few exceptions). More broadly, Cradle also tries to explain why higher cultivated people avoid fighting lower ones. The explanation is a little questionable, but more or less amounts to "No one benefits from Archlords killing thousands of Lowgolds, and other factions crack down on such behavior, leading to certain rules for war. And individually, killing a lower cultivated person makes you look bad to all your peers." So as long as you don't directly insult a really strong person (or give them any other excuse), you don't usually need to worry about them swatting you.
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May 6, 2022 02:07
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Okay, now that I have had a couple of days... I didn't really like the last several chapters of the recent TWI book ending. They felt rushed. They were a mess of characters and stories and were exhausting to read. It wasn't terrible, but I just didn't enjoy reading them. About the only super cool thing that happened imo was When the afterlife was hacked . Maybe it would be better on a reread but I'm glad Pirateaba is taking a break.
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May 6, 2022 04:52
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Yeah, it was okay, but this was the first time I felt a book finale didn't top the previous book's finale. My main beef was in the end, there was no real need for Fetohep and the whole Chandrar gang to rush to the gnollmeet; Erin was there independently of them and the ritual he did could have been done from anywhere, and consequently, their presence at the end felt a bit forced. Plus, the Horns have a lot of loose ends left on Chandrar, but I'm assuming we're getting a door there soon. That said, I appreciated how despite being more geographically scattered and POV-jumpy than ever before, book 8 was the most focused the story's ever been due to everything being driven by a singular mission, and that all those threads joined together (albeit with some of those threads being forced into place). It did introduce a lot of interesting things to look forward to in book 9; I just hope it can be as focused as this one was (for some vague measure of "focused").
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May 6, 2022 05:33
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Everyone keeps singing TWI's praises but I see things like it having ten million words or a single chapter being almost 70k words long and can only see it as too daunting to read. It also implies to me that most of those words are filler, and the actual meat of the story must be much smaller.
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May 6, 2022 14:11
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Eopia posted:Everyone keeps singing TWI's praises but I see things like it having ten million words or a single chapter being almost 70k words long and can only see it as too daunting to read. It also implies to me that most of those words are filler, and the actual meat of the story must be much smaller. Very much how I feel. The fact that the main conversation I see about TWI is that it's very long and often releases these mega chapters makes it very unappealing. I say this as someone who read and enjoyed the first book.
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May 6, 2022 14:23
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A good editor could probably cut half the words in any given chapter. Maintaining the pace would be hell. The bigger chapters are daunting and I know I'm going to be reading for like an hour or two, on and off, but I read a few minutes at a time on my phone so everything gets chopped up like that. Even when I read a whole chapter at once, though, the word bloat doesn't get in the way too much.
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May 6, 2022 14:38
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TWI has so much filler. Like, cutting away from the action to spend time on uninvolved characters watching the current plot on television is a thing that happens often. It would be significantly better if it was about 1/4 as long.
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May 6, 2022 15:11
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The impressive part is how little of it is filler given how many words it is--but that does depend on your definition of filler--I enjoy seeing all those little cutaways and discussion from third parties about current events; plus by some definitions, some of the best chapters of the series are filler chapters (the one where they play baseball, for instance). My idea of meaningless padding would be if it frequently spent like twenty paragraphs describing a plate of food or something like that, which TWI doesn't do. But yeah, I do always avoid mentioning the word count when trying to pitch it to new readers for exactly the reasons above. Even if they ask me for something long, I'll just say "it spans several volumes" because even someone hunting for a long read will automatically assume ten million words equates to nothing but word salad. I certainly would have thought the same if I'd only discovered it now, but the prose is actually... competent, which I realize sounds like faint praise, but that's why I tend to compare it to the MCU--the cinematography is bland, but it functions perfectly well as a vehicle for delivering fun characters and showing how they react to the situations they're in, which TWI is great at. (Of course, this is another criticism of TWI--that it has a tendency to mostly write towards cheer-worthy character moments, but hey, I enjoy that too) edit: yeah now that the post below brings it up, one of the things that I find really interesting with all those cutaways is how it slowly shows us the worldwide effects of the rapid introduction of new technology (and rediscovery of old magic) and how it's changing lives. The concept of the television, for example, was slowly eased in over the course of several volumes and it was cool to see it slowly become a part of daily life, and is one of the many things helping to facilitate an increasingly globalized world. Argue fucked around with this message at 16:54 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 15:40
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yeah i agree, very little of TWI is "filler". it's just a slow-paced slice of life story, the character interactions and small moments are like, the point. a "main plot cut" that sheared off 75% of the word count would not be any good, because the "main plot" isn't really the central focus of the story. i have a hard time putting into words exactly what TWI is trying to do, because its length has allowed it to be a different sort of story from basically anything else ever written. something like "global slice of life"? it aims to show how this stagnant fantasy world, when introduced to things like mass communication, is changing and evolving and people from different places are drawn into events elsewhere, creating a big web of connections between people, which is changing everything. this extremely broad scope has interesting effects on the narrative - like, when two countries go to war, you as the reader already know people on both sides of the war, and this helps a lot to ground the war as just a war, instead of some kind of struggle between good and evil as most fantasy wars end up being. all of the narrative complexity serves a purpose, it isn't just words for the sake of words. if you cut things down to just the main events, there would be a lot of inexplicable moments where characters suddenly show up and do things that are dependent on their knowledge, character traits, beliefs, etc. but all of that would have been cut and so it would come across as just an endless series of deus ex machina i would definitely say it's not for everyone, if you're into tightly-plotted small self-contained stories then it's not going to be your thing. but it isn't the kind of long story where the author does nothing with the length, just spinning out endless pages of description and stretching a small plot out over way too many pages that way. pirateaba's style is actually very unadorned and direct; there's always something happening in the story. if you haven't read it, or only read the first volume or whatever, give it a(nother) shot.
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May 6, 2022 16:46
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The global scope of TWI while still retaining a decent prose and level of detail is what keeps me interested in the first place. There's so many perspectives, so much going on at any given time, and I get to read in detail about all of it. The world feels constantly alive and changing.
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May 6, 2022 17:38
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I'll admit TWI probably doesn't need quite so many words, but it would also be a much different story without them. I like the fact that pirateaba has developed a world with like 20 or 30 characters who are all important enough to be "main" character level, and dozens more that are still compelling in their own right. Just an absolute excess of points of view, levels of power, perspectives... It's almost decadent in how much the story zooms in and out of parts of the world. Pretty much every novel focuses on a small compact cast of protagonists that gradually explores the setting and meets temporary characters at each location, to be forgotten soon after. Pirateaba just sort of... Keeps every character she ever introduces around for later unless they actually die, which goes a huge way towards making the world feel extremely alive and reactive. It can lead to excess (I'm also not super hot on the Volume 8 ending) but it's worth the cost, at least in my opinion.
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May 6, 2022 19:03
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stop killing goblings, please.
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May 6, 2022 19:07
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The ending is just going to be Gamemaster Anthony's birthday.
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May 6, 2022 19:31
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Web serials are one part story and two parts performance art
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May 6, 2022 22:17
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Eopia posted:Everyone keeps singing TWI's praises but I see things like it having ten million words or a single chapter being almost 70k words long and can only see it as too daunting to read. It also implies to me that most of those words are filler, and the actual meat of the story must be much smaller.
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May 6, 2022 23:43
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