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Megazver posted:'Misery porn' is totally a thing as a specific genre with its own cluster of characteristics, though. Just google the term, there's a lot of reading available about it. It's not just goons being mean to Wildbow. Right, but what about it makes the genre deserve a negative connotation besides 'I don't like it'?
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 17:42 |
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# ? May 29, 2024 10:55 |
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Insurrectionist posted:Right, but what about it makes the genre deserve a negative connotation besides 'I don't like it'? It's very much not everyone's cup of tea.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 17:49 |
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The name is unfortunate because it implies that it’s for people who get off on characters suffering, but it’s a legit classification. It’s a genre where the protagonists always lose, even when they win, and where everything that’s good in the world is at constant risk of being taken away. Definitely not for everyone.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 17:56 |
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Insurrectionist posted:Right, but what about it makes the genre deserve a negative connotation besides 'I don't like it'? We put books that primarily focus on sex scenes in a different genre from those that fade to black or even have just a few pages of sex in them. So it makes sense to put stories that primarily focus on people being miserable and/or tortured in a different genre from tragedies where bad things happen but other things happen too.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 17:57 |
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Insurrectionist posted:Right, but what about it makes the genre deserve a negative connotation besides 'I don't like it'? If you're curious about the origins of the "Misery Porn" / "Mis Lit" subgenre, here's some articles I dug out of the wikipedia sources cited list. https://web.archive.org/web/20080804101600/http://www.thebookseller.com/in-depth/feature/34722-tugging-at-heart-strings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/dysfunction-for-dollars.html?pagewanted=2 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jun/15/childrensservices.biography https://web.archive.org/web/20080306141122/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fportal%2F2008%2F03%2F05%2Fftmag105.xml
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 18:01 |
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Insurrectionist posted:Right, but what about it makes the genre deserve a negative connotation besides 'I don't like it'? I mean the implication is in the name - the judgement is essentially that the primary appeal is prurience and voyeurism, often in conjunction with some retrograde social views (you can be simultaneously morally judgemental while being exhilarated by the scandalous goings on, an approach that has a lot of historical antecedents), and consequently its analogous to pornography or erotica (and thus suspect) avoraciopoctules posted:Ice Phisherman, for your question about Wildbow writing I usually get told that it's 1. Misery Porn and 2. the writing gets Really Weird about criminals, poor people, and ethnic minorities. I did a quick google, and the discussion I remember seeing in this thread was October of 2020. one "nice" thing I'll say about Wildbow is that all of that stuff is extremely up-front in the early parts of Worm, so its pretty easy to just dive in and see if you can get past Taylors high-school experience (which iirc takes place in a thunderdome of creatures whose behavior only vaguely resembles that of humans) and the early portrayals of Brockton Bay
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 18:06 |
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blastron posted:The name is unfortunate because it implies that it’s for people who get off on characters suffering, but it’s a legit classification. It’s a genre where the protagonists always lose, even when they win, and where everything that’s good in the world is at constant risk of being taken away. Definitely not for everyone. My impression, based on reading some stuff I'd say is in the misery porn genre, is that the 'porn' in the genre's name is there because there's often an emotional component of identifying with the poor blameless lamb who's relentlessly tortured and degraded by horrible people, yet stoically and angelically and beautifully endures (just like you, the reader). We generally call a genre something-porn, when a big part of the appeal is that it's written to deliberately push some emotional or physiological-ish buttons for the reader.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 18:15 |
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Systemic Lands is one of the darkest web serials I've read. It's just bad things happening in a system that's rigged to be unfair. The MC observes that the system has diminishing returns on leveling things up and complains about the situation frequently, between murdering the hell out of people. That being said it can be an interesting read just to see a setting where absolutely every bad thing about human nature is pointed out in the most pessimistic way.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 18:16 |
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Misery porn is a perjorative term, though. Even the Wikipedia article on it points this out. Pretty weird to pretend it's just a neutral descriptor. Also, is it accurate to call Worm misery porn? A lot of bad things happen and it's pretty bleak, but a huge amount of the word count is Taylor eking out wins in superpower fights. I think of Worm as being more an example of the dark and brutal superhero genre. It has a lot more in common with Watchmen or Invincible than it does with Angela's Ashes.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 18:19 |
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Wittgen posted:Misery porn is a perjorative term, though. Even the Wikipedia article on it points this out. Pretty weird to pretend it's just a neutral descriptor. yeah, it's absolutely not a neutral term (though I think it's often an accurate one) and I'm in full agreement with you, I also wouldn't describe Worm as a whole as misery porn and I don't think it would be nearly so successful if that's what it was, but it leans that way in some of the early going and then gets substantially better/more enjoyable when Wildbow reigns things in e: I should also say that despite me not characterizing Worm as misery porn, I do still think its a reasonably fair warning regarding Wildbow's work as a whole, because a consistent tendency towards (and undercurrent of) that style of melodrama is a noteworthy feature of his ouvre, and you sort of need to be down for (or tolerant of) it to enjoy what else is on offer it's not all or even most of what it is, but it is a notable component part, and to a degree beyond what may be expected for "dark fantasy" or whatever genre we'd be inclined to put it in LGD fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Aug 22, 2023 |
# ? Aug 22, 2023 18:28 |
Pact certain is, which started this conversation, even if Worm isn't. I think themes of it show up throughout Wildbow's writing. He himself has said his experience of being bullied in schooling for being partially deaf drives those aspects of his writing, although it's certainly an intentional style choice at this point.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 19:18 |
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avoraciopoctules posted:Ice Phisherman, for your question about Wildbow writing I usually get told that it's 1. Misery Porn and 2. the writing gets Really Weird about criminals, poor people, and ethnic minorities. I did a quick google, and the discussion I remember seeing in this thread was October of 2020. -a gang run by a very stupid man called the "Azn Bad Boys" that is entirely composed of Asians, and has a pan-Asian solidarity ideology (like, everyone from Asia. no racism within people from the entire continent here! that's never happened!) to the point where I saw a goon suggest once that they are all going along with it to humor him because he doesn't really know what "Asian" means and I cannot see any other rational explanation -a gang of actual, literal Nazis called something like Empire 88 that are treated as just the same as any other gang and equally valid to work with because hey we've all got superpowers here smileyface
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 19:35 |
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DACK FAYDEN posted:oh my god yes I was gonna bring up #2 but then decided not to, off the top of my head Worm has both To be fair, the Azn Bad Boys are supposed to be stupid even in universe. I always assumed the Empire was supposed to be inspired by groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, but I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable about US gang culture.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 19:48 |
Again, people can like misery porn, but no one should go into reading wildbow without being aware that much like Russian history it always gets worse. Big flashing signposts saying “turn back, you have so much to live for” can be ignored by the determined nihilist, but are courteous behavior for the merely curious. Read other stuff, imo. There is a ton of available words and not enough time to read it. Wildbow isn’t transformative or life changing reading. It’s a specific taste that isn’t even particularly great, and it very intentionally does not have either the brevity or payoff of the various influences that clearly inspired it. Metamorphosis is an interesting book about turning into a monster, but part of what makes that work is the book ends relatively quickly which is the exact antithesis of serial writing. For the folks who read other, better, writers and decide they like the specific genre of misery-lit/misery-porn then by all means feel free to roll around in the million words of wildbow as a guilty pleasure the same way I consume terrible isekai stories. *shrug* Anias fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Aug 22, 2023 |
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 19:53 |
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Anias posted:Again, people can like misery porn, but no one should go into reading wildbow without being aware that much like Russian history it always gets worse. Big flashing signposts saying “turn back, you have so much to live for” can be ignored by the determined nihilist, but are courteous behavior for the merely curious. All of this. There are just better uses of your reading time.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 20:08 |
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Anias posted:Again, people can like misery porn, but no one should go into reading wildbow without being aware that much like Russian history it always gets worse. Big flashing signposts saying “turn back, you have so much to live for” can be ignored by the determined nihilist, but are courteous behavior for the merely curious. Isn’t this holding Wildbow to a standard you’d hold no other modern serial writer? Who on Royal Road, exactly, so you think is a better writer than Kafka?
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 20:17 |
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Bremen posted:I always assumed the Empire was supposed to be inspired by groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, but I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable about US gang culture. no, that's definitely the obvious allusion (and the argument could be made that Wildbow also isn't/wasn't very knowledge about US gang culture ), the issue is more tonal in terms of how it treats Empire 88s ideological commitments, which sometimes are full bore ideological national socialist white supremacy and other times essentially treated as the window-dressing of a Warriors-esque themed gang (both in terms of plot and moral implication) plenty of real world white supremacist gangs (including the AB) have of course made ostensibly unlikely alliances/business deals with other groups, but it's just not well considered or portrayed in terms of the tensions/rationales/implied history/necessary motivations
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 20:20 |
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nrook posted:Isn’t this holding Wildbow to a standard you’d hold no other modern serial writer? Who on Royal Road, exactly, so you think is a better writer than Kafka? I took the original post as more a single example of many better alternatives. In the turning into a monster genre there are lots of serials I'd suggest before Worm. Chrysalis, I'm a Spider..., Slumrat Rising, Practical Guide to Evil. I don't even like the genre; so those are just off the top of my head. In case all this talk of Worm makes someone want to read a good superhero story, I'd recommend: Super Minion Super Supportive Any other good superhero serials or webcomics? (Not All Heroes is too dark for me). LLSix fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 22, 2023 |
# ? Aug 22, 2023 20:51 |
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Comparing to Kafka is silly because I'm not reading that, I'm reading stuff on Royal Road so by definition it's better [for me].
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 21:01 |
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Megazver posted:My impression, based on reading some stuff I'd say is in the misery porn genre, is that the 'porn' in the genre's name is there because there's often an emotional component of identifying with the poor blameless lamb who's relentlessly tortured and degraded by horrible people, yet stoically and angelically and beautifully endures (just like you, the reader). Wait is this what people think Wildbow's stories are? Because lol.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 21:34 |
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LLSix posted:I took the original post as more a single example of many better alternatives. There's The Perfect Run, Industrial Strength Magic, Mage Among Superheroes, quite a lot actually. I think Super Supportive is the only one I'd cleanly rank above Worm if you weren't trying to avoid dark stuff, though.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 21:44 |
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Super Supportive definitely has some dark stuff going on... but it does a very good job of presenting compelling, likeable characters and a plausible world. When bad stuff happens, people react to it in ways that make sense for what they know and believe. I am quite enthusiastic about seeing how the author continues to develop their setting.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 21:50 |
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Bremen posted:There's The Perfect Run, Industrial Strength Magic, Mage Among Superheroes, quite a lot actually. I think Super Supportive is the only one I'd cleanly rank above Worm if you weren't trying to avoid dark stuff, though. Superpowereds by Drew Hayes is at the very top of that list with Super Supportive/Worm, even though I think its currently only available in collected/published e-book format (and of course if you like the genre then you should definitely read Forging Hephaestus and the subsequent Villains Code books)
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 21:55 |
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Sleyca is so good at blending various levels of secret together in a way that is satisfying. There is stuff we feel confident on, open questions we are trying to answer, and then really opaque stuff that we might not even be thinking to question. Makes speculation fun but reveals still pack a lot of punch. There is a similar thing with plot as well. There is stuff we know is coming up, but there are a lot of big blanks as well. Thinking about it as of chapter 78: It is October. Alden is two months into his 8 month vacation from summoning. We know the following is coming up. Party at Kons house. Alden will get in but what about Kon and Lexi? Depending on who does and doesn't make it, there could be different kinds of tension. Rabbit only ball in December. I don't think Alden will want to go, but story wise surely he will. Maybe with Natalie? As the only rabbit on Celena Norths hero track, he will gather a lot of attention. As a big rabbit gathering, meeting Manon again is on the table. Politics are juicy. Visiting Stuart after Stuart affixes. This should be in a couple months, I think. Could be before or after Rabbit party. Boe calls back. Could happen anytime but probably soonish. Jeremy said Boe was contacting him every six weeks or so, and it's been seven since Alden got back to Earth. Alden's second summons. Presumably will happen same week if not same day he comes off of leave. That means six months from now on story time, on April. Alden's next affixation. I assume this will happen a year from now in story. Could take longer or shorter depending. Will result in Alden being massively stronger and probably make the tension of his wizard secrets a lot more pronounced. And of course there is just a ton of getting into the rhythm of schoolwork stuff. The next 10-20 chapters will probably be setting up the classes and social dynamics that will get complicated later on.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 22:08 |
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Wittgen posted:Thinking about it as of chapter 78: Hum. (SupSup 78) You know, if Alexi doesn't get in, he could definitely be unhappy the school took a B rank rabbit but not him. That could add a lot of drama to the party. Also I'm not sure Alden is planning on going, but I hope he does. Maybe something will push him to. As for visiting Stuart, I imagine that will be an interesting arc as he learns more about the knights and the rapport, and I'm curious if Alden will end up confiding in Stuart. He seems to be the most likely Artonan ally he could make, and Mother did say he would need allies who knew his secrets. I think Alden's next summons might come a bit earlier. IIRC he was told he could defer vacation time and build up a bank that would be useful for heroing, and assuming he gets over his rather justified burnout before the six months are up this could be a good opportunity to start. Probably not until after visiting Stuart, though. I am curious to see how quickly he gets summoned - sure, he got summoned within minutes the first time, but the job he got summoned to was actually pretty specific, so maybe that was a coincidence. Or maybe we'll get a few chapters of him delivering Artonan pizzas (Fresh from the oven!). And as a lover of school setting stories, I'm honestly really looking forward to just the CNH stuff, settling in and attending classes and hopefully making friends.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 22:22 |
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SupSup 78 theorizing: Alden’s first affixation happened 6 months after he became avowed and nearly killed him. I would be very surprised if he didn’t get another in 6 months at the latest. It’s already been two months so it might be in only 4 more months if his authority grew at a normal rate during his 2 months of recovery time. Or less since he has a much more developed authority sense now and that helps grow your authority. Plus you’d expect the system to want to maintain some safety margin. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the system starts pestering him with “upgrade” offers soon. Might not if his upgrades are being managed by Mother now, but since she’s in another dimension I expect she’d have difficulty doing much more than providing guidelines for the local system. Thanks for the superhero suggestions.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 22:38 |
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re: SupSup 77-78 there's also whatever is going on with the chanter family (who have reached out/initiated potentially hostile contact), and potential involvement in Anesidoran/hero politics despite Alden's attempts to keep a low profile - we don't know how the local Artonan wizards will react to the star (and what impact that has, if any, on resources provided) because all the Artonans Alden has been talking to know him and his story personally and are basically the people in their society least inclined to make a big deal out of things like personal attention from the Quaternary, something that may not apply to people doing work on a colonial backwater
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 22:40 |
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LLSix posted:SupSup 78 theorizing: Alden’s first affixation happened 6 months after he became avowed and nearly killed him. I would be very surprised if he didn’t get another in 6 months at the latest. It’s already been two months so it might be in only 4 more months if his authority grew at a normal rate during his 2 months of recovery time. Or less since he has a much more developed authority sense now and that helps grow your authority. Plus you’d expect the system to want to maintain some safety margin. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the system starts pestering him with “upgrade” offers soon. Might not if his upgrades are being managed by Mother now, but since she’s in another dimension I expect she’d have difficulty doing much more than providing guidelines for the local system. SupSup 78: Ah, but this doesn't take into account that his bound authority is twice as big as before. His free authority will have to grow twice as much to blow his affixation. Plus he's not in a chaos zone, so he isn't constantly flexing his authority and building it up. But Mother did say knights snowball. I assume it won't take twice as long to get twice as much growth, even if he isn't in a chaos zone. I still think it will still take longer than the six months it took him to his first affixation, but I don't have strong evidence for it. just a gut feeling about how the different factors balance out.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 22:49 |
Bremen posted:Hum. (SupSup 78) I absolutely expect that Stuart will be a confidant of Alden. He's already borne his heart to him in many ways and revealed really compromising stuff about himself (having hallucinations as a kid) and didn't demand a secrecy contract. In fact he helped Alden evade his family's normal requirement for such a contract. While he alerted the Primary about Alden's unusual authority after his first meeting with the avowed, he's grown to trust him a ton since then. I can think of no other Artonan other than Kibby who Alden could confide in, and she is not proficient enough as a wizard to act as an instructor for Alden's free Authority going forward.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 22:50 |
LLSix posted:Any other good superhero serials or webcomics? (Not All Heroes is too dark for me). Just out of curiosity, could you expand on this? I don't know if the revised version is any more or less dark than the first, but I'd be interested in hearing a little more. Is it content, tone? I suppose I'd say I was shooting for more gritty and bittersweet than dark.
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# ? Aug 22, 2023 23:01 |
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Pact certain is, which started this conversation, even if Worm isn't. I think themes of it show up throughout Wildbow's writing. He himself has said his experience of being bullied in schooling for being partially deaf drives those aspects of his writing, although it's certainly an intentional style choice at this point. I really tried to like Pact because I really loved Worm, but it just got too miserable. Ward just got too weird and alien with its apocalypse end of the world scenario and I just checked out. Also I never connected with the characters as much as I did with Worm, but that might have been about when I was reading it in my life as I read Worm earlier. Worm however was refreshing and new (for the time) and I found the blurring of the lines between "hero" and "villain" and how they mostly worked together when it came fighting Godzilla monsters (which themselves were fun) to be compelling and interesting. What made it interesting to me in retrospect was not only the characters, but that Wildbow created a system of interaction between heroes and villains underpinned by the idea that failing to cooperate meant mutual annihilation by kaijus. Bremen posted:To be fair, the Azn Bad Boys are supposed to be stupid even in universe. For all of my criticisms about his deceptions of gang culture, I feel like Wildbow got gang culture right sometimes and his talk about gangs like Empire 88, the white supremacist gang, were prescient as the story was originally written in 2011 when white supremacists and white supremacy weren't a concern for the majority of the populace like they are now. Neonazis as a threat in the current century didn't even show up as a blip on my radar until 2015. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Aug 23, 2023 |
# ? Aug 23, 2023 00:06 |
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Pact is definitely misery porn, but calling Worm that is just stupid.
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 03:10 |
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Fajita Queen posted:PGTS handles difficult ethical situations very well compared to nearly every other story popularly discussed in this thread, imo. I've never at any point felt that the protagonist wasn't trying their best to do the right thing despite all the circumstances laid against her. Eh, if that’s true it is only by of the absolute paucity of the competition and shouldn’t be tallied in the story’s favor. Nitrousoxide posted:APGTS This mostly misses the point of contention. A Practical Guide to Sorcery is reformed rationalist fiction, in that it is influenced by the same nexus of ideas that produced Big Yud and his awful harry potter rewrite, but with much of the obviously odious baggage jetisoned. This genesis is clear from the excited notes the author leaves on including effective altruism in her text, and from the way that reddit brained sciencism is draped over the work. I suppose also in the way that the abrasive idiot in a trenchcoat is the cool professor. In that context it becomes hard to read things like the blood magic taboo as being anything other than the author setting a deliberate and easy win in front of the character, since a central tenant of rationalism is that an investigation by reason alone with prefunctory confirmation can reveal the nature of reality. Blood magic clearly has applications that anyone can observe, it is good for healing. But that doesn’t mean that any loving around with blood magic becomes worth doing; specifically what Siobhan is doing is not worthwhile. Siobhan can feel as conflicted as she might about it, and she can think that she is doing the best job that she can in order to keep her task humane. These things do not matter, they are the selfish rationalizations Siobhan uses in order to pursue a magical solution to the problem of her nightmares. Nightmares that she has not tried to address via the mundane means of attempting to get help with her trauma. Siobhan could kill animals by metaphysically transfering their rest into herself like some kind of sleep vampire or she could go to therapy. She finds the former more convenient. Even “sucessful” deployment on humans in this context is largely predicated on the assumption that it is a good idea to trade the time and wellbeing of a random person for the improvement of the quality of life of the special protagonist. Siobhan has found an underclass desperate enough to thank her for imposing a somewhat gentler form of exploitation. Unrelated to the rest of the post but Bog Standard Isekai gave off bad vibes when it wasn't being really generic. I am willing to bet that it won't get better since the author associates with his brother in a professional capacity and the brother is a huge chud, would not recommend.
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 07:10 |
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Just finished book 1 of Pale Lights, and man, can the author create some cool settings. Loving all the weird world-building stuff.
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 11:40 |
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How dare Eliezer Yudkowsky invent the cool, abrasive genius archetype in fiction
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 13:45 |
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Bremen posted:There's The Perfect Run, Industrial Strength Magic, Mage Among Superheroes, quite a lot actually. I think Super Supportive is the only one I'd cleanly rank above Worm if you weren't trying to avoid dark stuff, though. I read Industrial Strength Magic first then Super Minion and it's really clear that Macronomicon was inspired by the world of Super Minion, and Super Minion is just better. Shame that it will probably never be completed. Industrial Strength Magic also had a month of daily releases so if you haven't check it out in a while it's a good time to catch up and binge on it. While the series is not perfect its fairly enjoyable, although after reading a few of Macronomicon's works they do kinda end up feeling samey.
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 14:05 |
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I should respond in earnest. I think it is an unfortunate trend coming from the YA fandom to judge fiction primarily by how closely the author's politics look like they mirror the reader's. It's a continuing theme of A Practical Guide to Sorcery that Siobhan is constrained and affected by both her difficult situation and the mode of thought enforced on her by her upbringing. She makes bad decisions regularly, including morally dubious ones. It's a mistake to read the series thinking it's endorsing everything she does. It may be true that themes like "new ideas are unfairly oppressed by a doctrinaire society" come from Azalea Ellis's love of mosquito nets, but I don't really care: Such ideas have been in fiction forever, and I've enjoyed lots of books written by people with different outlooks than my own.
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 14:11 |
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Just out of curiosity, could you expand on this? I don't know if the revised version is any more or less dark than the first, but I'd be interested in hearing a little more. Is it content, tone? I suppose I'd say I was shooting for more gritty and bittersweet than dark. I haven't read the rewrite and I don't have constructive feedback to offer. In general, I prefer stories about good people doing good things for good reasons, so I'm probably not your target audience (or the target audience of most cultivation/RR stories).
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# ? Aug 23, 2023 17:05 |
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PGtS: Frankly, I'm not willing to judge the deferred sleep spell stuff until we know how it ends. We just got out of one "Siobhan pursues a poorly-considered solution to her sleep issues, to her detriment" plot (beamshell)- it's an ongoing theme. The fact that it's Liza pushing her to go through with the experiments isn't exactly a ringing endorsement, either- Liza is consistently presented as the most selfish and amoral of Siobhan's terrible role models (with the possible exception of Ennis). Actually, quick inventory of Siobhan's role models, because I think it makes for a good joke: Raaz Kalvidasan (the grandfather): At the very least a snob and a committed blood mage. Possibly an actual member of the actual Blood Emperor's inner circle, or descended from one? May have been directly responsible for loving up Siobhan via weird magic experiments. Ennis Naught: Professional conman and compulsive liar. I think he probably genuinely loved his wife and daughter, but that love has sharp limits. Sold Siobhan to the Gervins. Thaddeus Lacer: A man I have taken to referring to as "Snape who washes". Maybe the one with the most genuine care for her? And the other students. Also utterly unbothered by the use of mind control as a means of social control. The designated rationalist character, but has managed to convince himself that the Raven Queen is a powerful sorceress with a particular interest in him. Oliver Dryden: Manipulative narcissist with anger issues and a hero complex. The most outwardly altruistic person on this list, but I'm not certain how long that would last if he's pressed. Liza: Whatever Liza has experienced in her life has clearly worn her down to a nubbin of survival instincts and little else. Insistently transactional in her every dealing with other human beings, and has yet to be presented with an ethical or moral boundary she hasn't happily stepped over. It's a... real cast of heroes here. I'm also, like, kind of boggled by the "Siobhan should go to therapy" note. Does this world have therapists? I'm serious, did I just miss when that came up? 'cause, as far as I can tell, these people are about five seconds away from inventing electroshock and declaring themselves very clever. Actually, now that I think about it, Ennis makes specific mention of spending a year exhausting all conventional medical options before they found the dreamless sleep spell. Plus there's all the evidence that Siobhan's nightmares aren't the product of regular trauma at all, but some sort of Aberrant-induced effect. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Aug 23, 2023 |
# ? Aug 23, 2023 17:10 |
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# ? May 29, 2024 10:55 |
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Yeah, a huge recurring element of PGtS is that Siobhan keeps making awful choices and digging herself in deeper instead of just telling someone the truth or trusting them. And to a large extent its managed to turn what would have been minor issues into life or death ones for her especially now that we know Oliver set her up and she never actually had the stupid book that made her a fugitive in the first place The one thing in her life she hasn't managed to gently caress up yet is her relationship with some of her peers, which is basically currently her only real lifeline to anything sane or normal. And even that is still built on the bedrock of lies that is 'Sebastian' and the secret society nonsense she's playing with Damien. Zore fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Aug 23, 2023 |
# ? Aug 23, 2023 17:20 |