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Cultivation Chat Group remains amazing. Latest in cultivation hijinks: how to cook (and eat) heavenly tribulations.
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Mar 31, 2018 03:02
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holy poo poo there are over 1800 chapters of that right now on lnmtl. hmmmmm I'm gonna give it a shot
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Mar 31, 2018 05:00
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there's like 340 of them with human translations on webnovel.com
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Mar 31, 2018 05:18
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yeah i'm caught up on those bro
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Mar 31, 2018 06:11
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:i think the funniest example of that i've seen was in invincible, where the mc was reincarnated with full memory and had approximately 800 million different unique advantages over any other person who ever lived, but started his story with a bitter feud against his 5 year old cousin. all of said cousin's immediate family died, and i think the child himself was beheaded before he hit puberty. nothing less would have sufficed, because a small child was rude to another small child. I get the impression something about the Chinese education system results in immense bitterness and hatred between children. edit: Like I'm imagining some 35 year old man sitting there at his computer and suddenly standing up and walking over to the punching bag in his bedroom with the photo of a kid who was rude to him in kindergarten taped to it. The punching bag is covered in taped over cuts and puncture marks.
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Mar 31, 2018 06:42
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DisDisDis posted:This xianxia stuff sounds wild what's the wildest xianxia I once thought like you but then I tried reading one.
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Mar 31, 2018 06:57
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:-the author thinks esports are the pinnacle of human achievement I know I would do anything for Ph@tFU<k5000.
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Mar 31, 2018 08:58
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Already blazed through another volume of Kumoko. Tempted to grab the manga too. Any idea how many chapters there are in volume 1 of the manga? Also, how's Goblin Slayer? Amazon keeps recommending it to me.
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Apr 1, 2018 05:34
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Argas posted:Already blazed through another volume of Kumoko. Tempted to grab the manga too. Any idea how many chapters there are in volume 1 of the manga? Not very great. Relies on shock value, but has really bland characters.
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Apr 1, 2018 12:54
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goblin slayer is terrible and rapey, plus the premise doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
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Apr 2, 2018 00:19
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jwang posted:Cultivation Chat Group remains amazing. Latest in cultivation hijinks: how to cook (and eat) heavenly tribulations. I'm fairly excited for what I can only imagine will be wacky racers with cultivators that has been getting teased for a bit.
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Apr 2, 2018 15:33
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:goblin slayer is terrible and rapey, plus the premise doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. I like the idea behind it, the premise that while plenty of people level up and take on the big evils that someone has to actually focus on the smaller ones that get ignored by adventurers who are more in it for glory. If they'd remove the rape and torture porn and just be about a guy with an unhealthy obsession but manages to be a savior to all kinds of villages as a result, I would probably have enjoyed it.
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Apr 2, 2018 17:34
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:goblin slayer is terrible and rapey, plus the premise doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It seems like pretty much every WN related to goblins ends up really terrible and rapey.
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Apr 2, 2018 19:53
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Largepotato posted:I know I would do anything for Ph@tFU<k5000. Behold your rival god! 
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Apr 2, 2018 19:56
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khy posted:I like the idea behind it, the premise that while plenty of people level up and take on the big evils that someone has to actually focus on the smaller ones that get ignored by adventurers who are more in it for glory. If they'd remove the rape and torture porn and just be about a guy with an unhealthy obsession but manages to be a savior to all kinds of villages as a result, I would probably have enjoyed it. the only reason people are contemptuous of goblins is video games. so, a setting where goblins are not and never were trivial but everyone acts like they are for absolutely no reason doesn't make a lick of sense.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:02
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Prosperous Food Translations have some good translations going on. Granted, it's all closely tied with food like the group name suggests, but for the most part all the characters are likable and not total scumbag murder-hobos.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:37
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:goblins are not and never were trivial I'm not sure where you got this impression. Admittedly, I've been following the manga and not the LN, but the garden variety goblins are never presented as something of serious concern to anything other than novice adventurers, and even when a goblin king happens, and musters special forces and uses actual strategy and tactics, it's put down by a single town worth of mid-level adventurers. "Goblins attacked an outlying farm and carried off some livestock and killed some people, their neighbors want some adventurers to go clear them out." is pretty much classic D&D starter adventure material, and in true D&D style, sometimes a party wipes on it.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:02
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Too bad about Goblin Slayer. Sounds interesting, especially the premise of following someone who isn't some destined hero but essentially a dire rat catcher. Could still be good but I don't think I have the energy to read a story with a lot of rape and torture porn.
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Apr 2, 2018 23:02
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so its like goblins the webcomic then?
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Apr 2, 2018 23:32
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Tunicate posted:so its like goblins the webcomic then? No. Extremely no.
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Apr 2, 2018 23:42
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Argas posted:Too bad about Goblin Slayer. Sounds interesting, especially the premise of following someone who isn't some destined hero but essentially a dire rat catcher. Could still be good but I don't think I have the energy to read a story with a lot of rape and torture porn. Probably most WNs don't involve protagonists who start out as "destined heroes." That's part of the whole trope - they usually start out disadvantaged in some way (sometimes with some other "destined hero" enemy or rival) and then later pick up a bullshit cheat and steamroll everything for the next 5000 chapters. I think the goal is to create the illusion that the protagonist isn't privileged and somehow "earned" their ridiculous power. Even stuff like Kumoko is an example of this. Yes, she starts out weak and struggles for a while, but at the end of the day she becomes absurdly powerful due to in-born and luck-based advantages. It's actually the "destined hero," Shun, who is handicapped and fundamentally limited in how powerful he can become when compared with someone like Kumoko or the vampire/oni.
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Apr 3, 2018 00:08
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Ytlaya posted:Probably most WNs don't involve protagonists who start out as "destined heroes." That's part of the whole trope - they usually start out disadvantaged in some way (sometimes with some other "destined hero" enemy or rival) and then later pick up a bullshit cheat and steamroll everything for the next 5000 chapters. I think the goal is to create the illusion that the protagonist isn't privileged and somehow "earned" their ridiculous power. Eh, Kumoko already drops a lot of hints that even if she may not be the designated hero or anything, she's still got some secret power that's giving her a lot of help early on. It's still an uphill climb though. Goblin Slayer sounds like he's just there to kill goblins and not the demon lord or whatever.
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Apr 3, 2018 00:23
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kumoko became ridiculous largely because of her disadvantaged early life. being able to act and grind from the moment she was born was the big difference between her and all her 'classmates', and then it snowballed from there. oni's experience as a non-human with human-level intelligence was very similar up to the godhood part. kumoko totally didn't earn her divinity, though. i expect that remained true in the ln version, though i'm not sure about the exact details of how it happened there.
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Apr 3, 2018 00:28
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:kumoko totally didn't earn her divinity, though. i expect that remained true in the ln version, though i'm not sure about the exact details of how it happened there.
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Apr 3, 2018 00:37
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The new chapter of Release That Witch is the first POV from one of the other races in the world. On one hand, cool. On the other, whoever's translating it (by cleaning up the machine translations) got obviously overwhelmed by the new terminology, like in chapter where he described the new witches as 'sarcomas' instead of 'blobs'. This time, among other things, he doesn't know the difference between 'pheromones' and 'genes'. Sigh. I wish RTW's translation was cleaner, so I wouldn't have to warn people about it every time I want to recommend it. Megazver fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Apr 3, 2018 |
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Apr 3, 2018 16:08
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I started reading Release That Witch and within like 2 chapters, with absolutely zero evidence, the main character decided the church was absolutely corrupt and that witches were actually really good and nice.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:15
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Piell posted:I started reading Release That Witch and within like 2 chapters, with absolutely zero evidence, the main character decided the church was absolutely corrupt and that witches were actually really good and nice. TBF, "the church is corrupt" is generally a foregone conclusion.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:22
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Piell posted:I started reading Release That Witch and within like 2 chapters, with absolutely zero evidence, the main character decided the church was absolutely corrupt and that witches were actually really good and nice. I mean, his first impression of them is them burning someone at a stake for poo poo and giggles.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:29
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Organized religion has a spotty history at best, so the assumption that organized religion in a different world would also be a gathering point for ginormous dickbags with delusions of grandeur isn't really a stretch.
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Apr 3, 2018 16:33
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Argas posted:Eh, Kumoko already drops a lot of hints that even if she may not be the designated hero or anything, she's still got some secret power that's giving her a lot of help early on. It's still an uphill climb though. It's only an uphill climb for a relatively small portion of the story. She very quickly becomes extremely strong (by part-way through the lava place she is already strong enough to only be given trouble by the sort of opponents literally no human could face); long before becoming an Arachne (or whatever that form is called) she has already developed a way to easily avoid and deal with most enemies. She still faces challenges at this point, but those challenges all consist of ridiculous enemies that are far beyond the reach of literally any human in the setting. gimme the GOD drat candy posted:kumoko became ridiculous largely because of her disadvantaged early life. being able to act and grind from the moment she was born was the big difference between her and all her 'classmates', and then it snowballed from there. oni's experience as a non-human with human-level intelligence was very similar up to the godhood part. This isn't really the case at all; her advantage was mostly that she's a monster and monsters have much higher peaks they can reach (and being sapient allows one to take advantage of a monster's ridiculous innate abilities). It's true that her experience let her grind a bunch of skills she wouldn't have been able to otherwise, but at the end of the day the biggest benefit she (and oni guy) had is that they were monsters, and no humans, including the hero, can really touch higher tier monsters. Even if Shun (or whoever) had been put through Kumoko's training, he still would have always been weaker than them. Part of why I actually like the Shun parts is that he is very unlike your average WN isekai protagonist. By the time he does any sort of fighting, he's already established as far weaker than many other characters in the setting (who generally have much stronger cheat abilities than him), and he also doesn't have the typical sort of self-insert harem; IIRC just his crazy sister and apparently-trans (but now cis) best friend are interested in him (speaking of which, I found that whole plot thread sorta interesting). Even though he's very strong by human standards, in the context of the story as a whole he is decidedly weak, which doesn't work at all as a power fantasy (which is the biggest defining characteristic of male isekai protagonists). As a result, he's more interesting to read because the battles he gets into aren't necessarily foregone conclusions. He also comes off as a genuinely decent guy, which is unfortunately unusual for isekai WNs. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 3, 2018 |
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Apr 3, 2018 17:01
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NinjaDebugger posted:TBF, "the church is corrupt" is generally a foregone conclusion. Megazver posted:I mean, his first impression of them is them burning someone at a stake for poo poo and giggles. Cynic Jester posted:Organized religion has a spotty history at best, so the assumption that organized religion in a different world would also be a gathering point for ginormous dickbags with delusions of grandeur isn't really a stretch. All true, but the way this is presented presented in RTW is interesting. Our protagonist doesn't infer or deduce that the church is malign- he takes it as axiomatic that it would be. He is not at all surprised to find the church burning witches- as far as he is concerned that's just what religion is about. He reads like someone who has been raised to believe this and read the entirety of human history through that lens. Which- I mean, I am not at all familiar with what China teaches its children about religion, but I would not be surprised to discover that it was exactly that. And that's fine, really- it's entirely reasonable to have someone who thinks like that be your protagonist. Where RTW starts to lose the plot a bit is in that everyone else in the story happily goes along with him. He just turns around one day and goes "we're going to break with the church and all established doctrine in order to consort with the literal forces of Evil" and all his advisors and aides- none of whom share the benefit of his 21st century vantage point on the history of societal development, none of whom trust his ability to leave or even like him all that much- just fall in line. There is no sense that anyone in this setting has any sort of real religious faith, or that the church is a fundamental pillar of society and the psychologies of the people residing within it. It is, in a word, unreal. The author, I suspect, has a fair understand of religion as an abstract concept but no experience of the actual emotional reality of it. To be fair, that's not an uncommon problem in fantasy stories, but it's rare for them to lean quite so heavily on it.
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Apr 3, 2018 17:43
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No longer following RTW, but true faithful do exist, and there are conceivable reasons for the lack of faith - the religion/church is actively political, isn't actually all that old, and was manufactured. Though that fact does bring up other worldbuilding issues of its own that aren't addressed afaik - for one why the gently caress no one has even kept even a cursory oral history.
lurksion fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Apr 3, 2018 |
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Apr 3, 2018 18:24
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Ytlaya posted:Part of why I actually like the Shun parts is that he is very unlike your average WN isekai protagonist. By the time he does any sort of fighting, he's already established as far weaker than many other characters in the setting (who generally have much stronger cheat abilities than him), and he also doesn't have the typical sort of self-insert harem; IIRC just his crazy sister and apparently-trans (but now cis) best friend are interested in him (speaking of which, I found that whole plot thread sorta interesting). Even though he's very strong by human standards, in the context of the story as a whole he is decidedly weak, which doesn't work at all as a power fantasy (which is the biggest defining characteristic of male isekai protagonists). As a result, he's more interesting to read because the battles he gets into aren't necessarily foregone conclusions. He also comes off as a genuinely decent guy, which is unfortunately unusual for isekai WNs. 
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Apr 3, 2018 18:55
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sunken fleet posted:Which is why he's regulated to side character status. Don't forget. https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/isekai-genre-poll-1.46691/
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Apr 3, 2018 20:13
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I LIKE ALL ISEKAI WITH OP POWERS
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Apr 4, 2018 00:25
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drilldo squirt posted:I LIKE ALL ISEKAI WITH OP POWERS i dislike when they spare enemies, kill all!
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Apr 4, 2018 00:25
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That guy is cool as hell and my friend.
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Apr 4, 2018 00:27
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Gravity Tales did a similar poll recently and- well it struck me as deranged. There are lots of questions like "Do you prefer stories where the protagonist kills LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD or is occasionally acquainted with empathy?" and "Are stories better with romance elements... or not??" and for almost every question my answer was, "I'm up for almost everything... so long it's well-written and the author does something interesting with it." But apparently I've doing media wrong all this time? Apparently I'm supposed to have incredibly narrow and specific preferences about the exact nature of the stories I'm reading?
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Apr 4, 2018 00:49
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Chronische posted:i dislike when they spare enemies, kill all! kill the animals
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Apr 4, 2018 01:12
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Speaking of oddly specific likes and dislikes, in Against the Gods the protagonist has, for the third time, been trapped with an extremely beautiful and much more powerful woman who's dying and can only be saved by having sex with him.
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Apr 4, 2018 01:26
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