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By the point they started interacting with the lich beyond a fight at the invasion, they were time pressed and also getting lessons from him. It makes sense not to go phylactery-hunting at that point since it would probably block getting lessons and end at least a few loops early when they got killed (Zach probably should have done it back when he thought he had infinite time though)
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Dec 10, 2018 22:31
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Delve, Chrysalis, and There is no epic loot here, only puns are all full of stat boxes and reasonably entertaining.
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Jun 19, 2020 21:20
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Lone Goat posted:I enjoyed Threadbare and didn't know about the other two. Did Small Medium finish? The author's fictions page lists it as "Hiatus". I don't want to commit to it if it's going to remain unfinished. It had a real ending. Royalroad apparently automatically does a 'ongoing' -> 'hiatus' transition and switching something to 'complete' requires interacting with their support system (which is a sign of how often web fiction ever actually finishes).
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Jun 21, 2020 08:04
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Pact vs Twig: I read all of Pact and dropped Twig partway through, but what I read of Twig I liked more. The thing I didn't like about Pact was how undefined all the magic was. Once it got past the beginning, I never had a sense of what anyone could do. There'd be a problem, then sometimes they'd easily magic their way out of it, sometimes they couldn't, and sometimes some unexpected weird thing would happen, but never with enough pattern for me to get a sense of what options a character would have in a future situation. I was reading it for a plot driven story (as opposed to like a magical realism atmosphere thing), so having stuff resolve or not at the whim of how to get the next plot beat was unsatisfying. LLSix posted:I enjoyed Beware of Chicken, except for the fighting parts. Which made me realize I'd really like a story focused on farming. Are there any stories like that? Speaking of Beware of Chicken, I liked the part in one of the recent chapters where the protagonist introduces knitting. The native is like "This is slower and worse than a loom, but doesn't need as much equipment and you can do it while traveling, so cool (but the mittens you made are still terrible)". Plus the note at the end about hand knitting only becoming widespread in real world China in the 1920s. That's the best execution of otherworld-protagonist-introduces-technology I've seen.
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Jan 30, 2021 07:29
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PoorWeather posted:To push back a little on the idea that there is no justice and terrible stories succeed while good ones fail on RR, I'll say that the majority of readers who consume the schlock-content and push up its numbers are probably very low-investment. Mine is performing like ridiculously badly on all of those metrics, but it hasn't stopped it from having slowly becoming financially successfulish, though it obviously doesn't compete with the stuff that puts massive backlogs behind a paywall. A lot of the RR things I read are fodder for killing time while climbing stairs/treadmill running. Quantity and not having to think hard about prose are positives are worth a lot for that
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Feb 17, 2021 03:40
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VictualSquid posted:I wouldn't have know that all those characters are supposed to be underage if you hadn't brought it up. They mostly read as young adults to me. I was also reading them as young adults. Broccoli is implausibly naive about relationships/innuendo for an adult, but also no one in the story is questioning her/her group traveling by themselves, carrying weapons & dungeoning, running a bookstore/shipyard, and doing politics. She seemed more 'homeschooled ultra-mormon goes off to college' than kid to me.
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Mar 19, 2021 21:11
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For Pith in particular, the weirdest thing to me is a strange but very setting-specific moral stance one character has. It's needed to make a lot of the plot go, but it's weird and other characters in the story specifically call it out as weird. Plot details: The story has people's souls being movable between bodies (either natural or factory-made). Because of  , Anabelle is in a falling apart body that's going to die from a stroke/heart attack at some point in the next few months. She's willing to kill people, including in active ways with plans like "break into this building, kill the guards, then search the place", but is unwilling to swap bodies with those same guards instead of/before killing them. Eventually it gets resolved by the plot maneuvering her into a situation where a swap more directly keeps one of her friends safe, then she's fine with it. (as opposed to before when she's just indirectly endangering them by doing stuff while semi-crippled and potentially dropping dead at any moment)
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Apr 21, 2021 22:14
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Spoiler is about romance/sexuality in MoL The story as a whole will devote approximately nothing to romance of any kind. There's very rarely an occasional bit with a girl Zorian had a crush on in the past, and you've probably already gone through most of Akoja's presence in the story (she's barely even a tertiary character).
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May 2, 2021 21:03
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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.
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Oct 21, 2021 04:23
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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.
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Oct 22, 2021 03:41
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It mostly reminds me of Pith
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Mar 14, 2022 23:03
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That mostly seems like advice for serial fiction generally that's inherent to the format. It'd still apply to (and you can see evidence of things like it in the structure of) older serials like Treasure Island or The Count of Monte Cristo
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Apr 10, 2022 16:41
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And the autopsy will reveal that they died in 2010 
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Apr 14, 2022 03:09
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Peachfart posted:Beware of Chicken
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Apr 26, 2022 03:25
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Infinity Gaia posted:TUTBAD is sort of a sequel to Worth the Candle, right? Is it readable without going through that because drat I could not mesh with that one at all.
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Apr 30, 2022 01:44
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Larry Parrish posted:I appreciate that everyone who knows the protagonist thinks he's a loving idiot who read too many books and needs to take antidepressants. Normally an edgelord character like this is either unchallenged or proven to be right in some way by the narrative. In this case, he's objectively just mentally ill lol.
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May 14, 2022 08:00
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All of those things sound like they're about dungeons though
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May 27, 2022 09:09
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Larry Parrish posted:the difference is Shakespeare was funny although you need a mountain of context to get most of it It's always a dick joke
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Jul 27, 2022 17:43
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From the author's note at the start of flashback #2, I think he agrees it doesn't flow well, but it's a serial so can't go back and move sections around now.
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Jul 29, 2022 05:12
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TUTBAD: This Used To Be About Dungeons, But Now It's About Relationship Drama
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Aug 3, 2022 01:17
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TUTBAD: Time to summarize the characters in one line eachTUTBAD 134 posted:“No,” said Alfric. “Imagine that you’re her, and that you’re responsible for disappearing somewhere between three dozen and two hundred people, maybe even more. You’ve been doing this entirely in secret for a number of months, being careful to evade a cursory pastwatch, manipulating memories so that no one can tell on you, all that other kind of thing. If someone comes to you with questions, what do you do?”
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Sep 6, 2022 19:00
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Meta-wise, splitting up the leads and removing Lan Fen from the plot would be weird since a lot of the story so far would become semi-pointless. In-story, it'd also be weird for Lan Fen to pull the trigger on annulling the marriage since she's still trying to keep a low public profile and that'd be a big signal that she has independent resources/cultivation back
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Sep 20, 2022 23:10
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Lone Goat posted:yeah this TUTBAD arc has been dragging really bad
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Nov 9, 2022 04:25
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The law largely doesn't care what tools you used to create some art. Ultimately a copyright infringement case is going to have a judge/jury looking at the two end products and deciding if they're too similar. It doesn't matter if the copy came from someone handpainting it or from a model regurgitating an image it was fit on. Independent creation is a defense, but similar things are presumed to be copies unless you can prove otherwise, which is a high bar (e.g. songwriters do lose cases where some little bit of melody is similar to something in an old song because they can't prove they never heard the first one)
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Jan 6, 2023 05:10
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TTOU It does seem like it's setting up for extra people (which I think is kinda a cop out), but 2nd crew doesn't make sense for who. They can't chronosleep twice, so they'd have to have been hiding for over a year for no particular reason, then pop up for this specifically. For Aspen's arm, wasn't that from the deep tissue DNA samples he volunteered to get taken?
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Jul 31, 2023 22:59
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TTOU I don't mean it's a whodunnit copout; I agree it's not really that kind of mystery. Suppose the killer had immediately confessed. There's still an interesting messy N-way conflict: "[Crewmate Aspen personally likes] did the murders because they think Renn's philosophy is abhorrent and dangerous. Aspen is torn because they agree with the motive, just not the intensity of the reaction. They also don't believe in the death penalty in general, and certainly not for this killing that's semi-justified in their mind, so they're going to be in conflict with Sands, but the ship also has no practical way to punish anybody short of execution." If the actual murderer is a 3rd party that can be metaphorically/literally kicked out an airlock without anyone feeling too bad about it, it's sidestepping the whole big thorny interpersonal conflict with an easy solution
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Aug 1, 2023 04:04
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OddObserver posted:Prank by Mother?
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Aug 28, 2023 21:03
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Kyoujin posted:SS69 Public Nice we got the chapter in one big chunk. The chainer family definitely has plans for Alden. Was Hazel specifically calming him before the conversation or just evening him out and it happened to be the calming wordchain debt?
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Aug 31, 2023 21:51
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I think that is still just branding driven. They wanted a single overarching brand name to use, and did it awkwardly instead of relying on the intrinsic repeated phrases. Original titles: - Higuarshi no naku koro ni => When the cicadas cry - Umineko no naku koro ni => When the seagulls cry - Ciconia no naku koro ni => When the stork cry/cries Whoever decided the official english titles apparently didn't trust that people would figure that out as a cohesive brand and threw them all under a "When they cry" metabrand attached to a single untranslated word for the specific novel line. (And to be fair, "Casual consumers browsing a list of things to potentially buy are idiots with no generalization skills" isn't a terrible assumption)
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Oct 17, 2023 23:19
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Einander posted:Okay, this is the point where I'm starting to agree that the current SupSup arc is getting a bit long in the tooth. (SupSup 100) It just didn't really do anything for the plot over all, and I'm including establishing/deepening character relationships and the arc of Alden's superheroic development the general emotional vibe in that. Everything that happened here has been covered before, so if you cut it and summarized it with one paragraph, I feel pretty confident that the story would feel the same on both sides.
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Oct 26, 2023 03:56
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Kibby booped Alden's face enough that he realized he could see his nose. This gave him access to nose-based magic, at the terrible cost of always being aware that he can see his nose.
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Dec 5, 2023 07:57
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Bremen posted:Yeah. From the sounds of it (SupSup 114) no one ever intended to make Lute think they'd let his mother die, that was just Hazel being utterly horrible. Then Jessica found out he was afraid of it and decided to use it to motivate him. I can give her a little credit that yeah, she was worried about her son dying, and also part of the whole family brainwashing that Chainer is by definition the best thing ever, but still, that was a big betrayal. "Trick your kid into taking the safe thing and maybe they start hating you" vs "They take the dangerous job and have a 10% or whatever chance that they die young" isn't a straightforward choice. Plus, Lute is supposed to be a 14 year old middle schooler at this point, which is well in the realm of being an idiot child who shouldn't be making massive life-altering decisions
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Dec 14, 2023 05:48
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Supsup Author error from being bad at big number worldbuilding seems like the most likely explanation to me. It isn't plausible that there have been enough grandkids for the chances to be known, but enough characters that ought to know better haven't brought that upYtlaya posted:Also, as I mentioned above, two "whiffs" marrying each other isn't that strange. If anything, they'd be far more likely to gravitate towards one another, due to the social pressures we've seen Lute experience. I wouldn't be surprised if there are at least like 50 children like that. IIRC the rate of "whiffs" is something in the single-digit percentage (maybe as low as 0.5%, but maybe that's the "rate of Avowed among globies," can't remember), and that still works out to a significant number of people. Foxfire_ fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 03:52
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Ytlaya posted:One thing that confuses me a little though is that, IIRC, (non-patreon, only really spoiling this to be on the safe side)Joe gave similar advice.
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Jan 5, 2024 22:55
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Haystack posted:Ahahaha, just sunk in that in Super Suportive, the Artonans gave humans hereditary superpowers and super-expensive immortality. They might as well have just stuck humanity in a big jar and shook it up if they were gonna be that committed to seeing humanity tear itself to bits. - Kids worldwide are getting scary/dangerous/valuable magic powers. There is international agreement that the best way to handle this is to formally revoke their citizenship and obligations to their birth countries and consolidate them in a new nation state that will have a de facto monopoly on magic powers. And it's hereditary, so soon all the superpowered people will also have no cultural ties or loyalty to anywhere else. - Early Contract negotiations apparently prioritized making those kids as destructive as possible, even though nobody actually wants that. Brute is the most common power, mid ranks are almost never summoned, and no off island nations want them. Stuff like Rabbit or Healer are in high demand both on and off planet, but are rarely given out.
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Jan 25, 2024 00:40
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Ytlaya posted:SupSup 127: Someone mentioned in the comments that Maricel may have received a message from Jacob about something related to his escape attempt(s). Like maybe he ran into trouble or something. I think that sounds pretty plausible. The main alternative theory is "she was summoned." I speculated about it maybe her sibling being selected, but that's pretty far-fetched so I doubt it's the case. Ytlaya posted:If an authority sense was something Avowed could just stumble into, it would have happened already.
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Feb 1, 2024 23:05
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Sup128 There's been a bunch of page count for it and the kids care a lot, but from the school's point of view, all the obstacle course stuff is just two random gym classes they slapped together at the last minute when Big Snake was unexpectedly absent. The results or teams aren't particularly important or permanent.
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Feb 3, 2024 20:20
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Nitrousoxide posted:SupSup 133
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Feb 24, 2024 20:40
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Ytlaya posted:I'm not sure that it's the result of an "authority scream," though. It might be (and I won't be surprised if it is), but it's also just possible that the knights were sent to help now that the chaos issue has been dealt with (and/or now that Alden is in actual mortal danger).
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Mar 28, 2024 20:36
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SupSup 148: Another simple possible answer to "Why don't chainers superhero/superheroes chain?" would be "Lute is about to spend the next month knocked on his rear end and too weak to even get out of bed while he pays these off".
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Apr 19, 2024 00:09
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