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Cynic Jester posted:I Was Just an Only Child Boy, Now I Became One of a Four Quadruplet Sisters I'd read it if he became all four of the quadruplets at the same time.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:27
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Megazver posted:I enjoyed the first 500 chapters but I hear it gets worse after that and the ending (it's complete in Chinese) is a wet fart. Oh man it sucks that the ending is apparently super rushed. It sounds like the author was just making the smart move of jumping ship from Qidian though.
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Oct 13, 2018 00:24
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yeah, a poor ending is a small price to pay for escaping debt slavery by qidian.
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Oct 13, 2018 00:26
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Quidan's terms are so so so lovely.
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Oct 14, 2018 18:12
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Annointed posted:Currently reading through, wow this is giving me the same vibes as reading those pulp novels of taking old naval battles and aristocracy and putting it all in the far future. It evokes memories of intricately detailed ships inked in pen. In other words I am really digging the aesthetic and the climb towards power. It is pretty belated, but thanks! It is definitely not venturing above pulp level but I am having fun writing it. Also I am kind of amazed at just how brutal the players are being. I mean they kind of have to be, the Empire the game is set in is awful and their trump card is that they are ludicrous at winning space battles. The willingness to just attack a democratic planet and nuke infrastructure to enforce looting purely for personal gain though? That surprised me. Chuang Mu was basically Better Chinese Space America. They did turn down the opportunity to genocide the place in order to be complicit in a Space Coup though, I guess?
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Oct 19, 2018 23:44
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Patrat posted:It is pretty belated, but thanks! It is definitely not venturing above pulp level but I am having fun writing it. Also I am kind of amazed at just how brutal the players are being. I mean they kind of have to be, the Empire the game is set in is awful and their trump card is that they are ludicrous at winning space battles. The willingness to just attack a democratic planet and nuke infrastructure to enforce looting purely for personal gain though? That surprised me. Chuang Mu was basically Better Chinese Space America. They did turn down the opportunity to genocide the place in order to be complicit in a Space Coup though, I guess? Oh that thread is yours? I’d been giving it a pass as I thought it was another tired 40K thread based on the title. I’ll have to give it a look now!
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Oct 21, 2018 23:36
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Quest is good! Ranca being an insasiable murder bot is great. I like to think every time before she goes to a duel, Ranca says “Oh boy, here I go killing again!”
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Oct 22, 2018 20:17
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So I just caught up with the various Forge of Destiny updates, and I like how realistic it is that Bai Meizhen isn't magically getting over her feelings for Ling Qi, even if it might seem like things are wrapped up on that end from Ling Qi's perspective. Like, it makes sense for a teenager in that position to keep having trouble with that sort of thing, particularly when they were living together (I imagine not living in the same house will do wonders on that front when they join the Inner Sect, since I've always gotten the impression her feelings for Ling Qi are mostly just a typical crush rather than anything "deeper"). Similarly, it's also realistic/funny that she's crushing some on Cai Renxiang. Girls with more angular/less-feminine faces seem to be her thing, like swole dudes are for Ling Qi.
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Oct 24, 2018 07:04
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Incidentally, has anyone ever done a story about the people outside the cultivation death-race? Like, imagine running a bar in a xianxia setting. You deal with customers who are more interested in eating you and your staff than your light, refreshing range of snacks. You run evac drills for when a high-level cultivator comes through. You try to survive a fantasy FDA inspection checking exactly how immortality-inducing the food you serve is. You discover that your bouncer has punched out a few dozen too many rowdy drunks and is about to ascend to another plane as the Third-Class Radiant Deity of Happy Hour Enforcement, and you have to scramble madly to find a replacement who is (a) competent and (b) not too much of a sociopathic murder-hobo. There's mileage there, I think.
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Oct 24, 2018 17:23
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Darth Walrus posted:Incidentally, has anyone ever done a story about the people outside the cultivation death-race? Like, imagine running a bar in a xianxia setting. You deal with customers who are more interested in eating you and your staff than your light, refreshing range of snacks. You run evac drills for when a high-level cultivator comes through. You try to survive a fantasy FDA inspection checking exactly how immortality-inducing the food you serve is. You discover that your bouncer has punched out a few dozen too many rowdy drunks and is about to ascend to another plane as the Third-Class Radiant Deity of Happy Hour Enforcement, and you have to scramble madly to find a replacement who is (a) competent and (b) not too much of a sociopathic murder-hobo. "someone accidentally tripped a member of the honorable and heroic Screaming Murder Demon sect and now their patriarch is preparing to refine the entire city into a magical treasure, we need to make the most bad-rear end beer ever to distract him"
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Oct 24, 2018 21:00
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Darth Walrus posted:Incidentally, has anyone ever done a story about the people outside the cultivation death-race? Like, imagine running a bar in a xianxia setting. You deal with customers who are more interested in eating you and your staff than your light, refreshing range of snacks. You run evac drills for when a high-level cultivator comes through. You try to survive a fantasy FDA inspection checking exactly how immortality-inducing the food you serve is. You discover that your bouncer has punched out a few dozen too many rowdy drunks and is about to ascend to another plane as the Third-Class Radiant Deity of Happy Hour Enforcement, and you have to scramble madly to find a replacement who is (a) competent and (b) not too much of a sociopathic murder-hobo. Try https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/a-normal-mc-in-a-world-of-geniuses.50052/
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Oct 24, 2018 21:39
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Megazver posted:Try https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/a-normal-mc-in-a-world-of-geniuses.50052/ Yeah, I don't mean just the people who are starting out weak in the great cultivation contest. I mean the people who genuinely aren't in that line of work and have to deal with the people who are (until they're obliging enough to bugger off to a higher plane of existence, anyway).
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Oct 24, 2018 21:50
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, I don't mean just the people who are starting out weak in the great cultivation contest. I mean the people who genuinely aren't in that line of work and have to deal with the people who are (until they're obliging enough to bugger off to a higher plane of existence, anyway). There's a forum quest called White Collar Cultivator that has an average Joe get mistakenly kidnapped into the world of cultivators and then given a desk job. It's sadly on indefinite hiatus since April, but I can recommend giving what's there a read.
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Oct 24, 2018 22:24
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i've started when a mage revolts and it's really bad, which is no surprise. however, it is bad in a very ya-ish way, which is quite distinct from usual chinese wn's. it's an utter failure of a story, but it fails in interesting ways. on the positive side, the story acknowledges that maybe a fantasy world wouldn't be completely inundated in chinese culture. for starters, there is absolutely no hint of face thus far. i suspect the author has read a lot of english-language novels.
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Oct 25, 2018 00:25
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:it's an utter failure of a story, but it fails in interesting ways. Mods, new thread title please.
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Oct 25, 2018 01:13
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, I don't mean just the people who are starting out weak in the great cultivation contest. I mean the people who genuinely aren't in that line of work and have to deal with the people who are (until they're obliging enough to bugger off to a higher plane of existence, anyway). Yeah, if anything stories where the person starts out weak relative to their peers and become absurdly powerful through some early challenges are the most common. It's an LN instead of a WN, but Grimgar is one of the few examples* I can think of where the MC was legitimately average and stayed that way for a long time (I don't know if he ever became above average, since it was licensed, but he stayed average for at least the first 4-5 volumes). * Also Rokka no Yuusha, which is also an LN instead of a WN (I'm a really big fan of Rokka no Yuusha and find it really depressing that it seems to have stalled out or something). And both of them are better than literally every action-fantasy WN I can think of, simply by virtue of being written fairly competently. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 01:14
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, if anything stories where the person starts out weak relative to their peers and become absurdly powerful through some early challenges are the most common. they usually have to do something interesting with their disadvantage and it's legit good for maybe 2 chapters, then they immediately lose it and have everything handed to them effortlessly
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Oct 25, 2018 01:45
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:on the positive side, the story acknowledges that maybe a fantasy world wouldn't be completely inundated in chinese culture. for starters, there is absolutely no hint of face thus far. i suspect the author has read a lot of english-language novels. Face, or something rather like it, plays a role in essentially all societies. Omitting it from your setting is an odd decision. (I'm being a bit tongue in cheek here, obviously; I think your meaning is that the novel does without the trite speeches about face, and associated cliches such as auction scenes, often found in Chinese WNs.)
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Oct 25, 2018 01:53
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, I don't mean just the people who are starting out weak in the great cultivation contest. I mean the people who genuinely aren't in that line of work and have to deal with the people who are (until they're obliging enough to bugger off to a higher plane of existence, anyway). It's more wuxia than xianxia, but check out the Grandmaster Strategist. There are overpowered martial artists running around everywhere with magical skills. The main character is working against them, while never learning martial arts or ever being able to win a fight. He spends a significant portion of the novel too sick to get out of bed.
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Oct 25, 2018 09:13
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Its Rinaldo posted:Quest is good! Ranca being an insasiable murder bot is great. Thanks! Also the latest update has introduced somebody with murder skills as acute of those of Ranca, though he has yet to get any screen time yet. The nepotism spawn Baron Adald has, after being trained up and given his own battleship, pulled strings to get some... Really good officers assigned under him. His marine commander is frankly terrifying.
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Oct 25, 2018 22:06
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Forge of Destiny is getting rewritten and posted on Royal Road.
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Oct 27, 2018 00:18
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well, good. the voting and rolling never added much.
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Oct 27, 2018 01:13
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:well, good. the voting and rolling never added much. There will be a sequel quest on Sufficient Velocity (with less (no?) rolling), this is just the first part getting rewritten.
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Oct 27, 2018 01:31
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In this case, the traditional Cheat Item is having a few dozen guys  about her cultivation.
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Oct 27, 2018 01:37
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Is it Yrsillar rewriting it? And if so will it mean a longer wait for part 2? Not that I'll complain or anything if it does, since FoD would benefit quite a bit for even a basic rewriting that just checks for basic grammar errors (etc), though it would kind of be a bummer if it meant waiting like 6 months or a year or something. Some of the recent updates expanding on the setting have been really interesting, particularly the stuff with the fantasy-Mongols.
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Oct 27, 2018 01:49
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Ytlaya posted:Is it Yrsillar rewriting it? And if so will it mean a longer wait for part 2? Not that I'll complain or anything if it does, since FoD would benefit quite a bit for even a basic rewriting that just checks for basic grammar errors (etc), though it would kind of be a bummer if it meant waiting like 6 months or a year or something. Part 2 starts either next week or the week after that and the rewrite is by Yrsillar.
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Oct 27, 2018 01:58
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Tobermory posted:It's more wuxia than xianxia, but check out the Grandmaster Strategist. There are overpowered martial artists running around everywhere with magical skills. The main character is working against them, while never learning martial arts or ever being able to win a fight. He spends a significant portion of the novel too sick to get out of bed.
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Oct 27, 2018 02:29
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Tunicate posted:In this case, the traditional Cheat Item is having a few dozen guys I seem to remember at one point in the thread Yrsillar essentially had to banish sorcery from the thread as the weird formula being posted to calculate optimum cultivation were at that point resembling sinister warlock incantations.
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Oct 27, 2018 13:56
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Tobermory posted:It's more wuxia than xianxia, but check out the Grandmaster Strategist. There are overpowered martial artists running around everywhere with magical skills. The main character is working against them, while never learning martial arts or ever being able to win a fight. He spends a significant portion of the novel too sick to get out of bed. I'm liking this alot too, though I have to add a warning that it has moments of blatant sexism that made me double-take, and I'm already used to ignoring problematic subtext/text in my fiction (as evidenced by me being in this thread). An example, in the first volume a friendly character explains "(character) is a once-in-a-generation prodigy, but has only one weakness: she is a woman, and is therefore indecisive." If it was just once, I could chalk it up to mistranslation or slip of tongue, but I'm up to volume 3 and there have been multpile "Yikes" moments for me. To be fair, rampant sexism is historically accurate if you look at it as a period-drama instead of wuxia (which it honestly feels more like). Kind of like Game of Thrones. Actually exactly like Game of Thrones, but more power fantasy and less nihilist despair.
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Oct 27, 2018 19:34
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thanks for mentioning it, i'd rather put it aside because im not in the mood ahead of time than get surprised by that and drop it entirely
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Oct 27, 2018 23:28
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going back to a mage revolts, i am amazed at the incredible mistakes the author makes at every step. if he spends a chapter on fleshing out a newly introduced character, he kills them off the following chapter. if he introduces an important recurring character, he doesn't bother giving them a name or describing them at all. he gave his mc a pack of followers, but he refused to say exactly how many of them there were for like 50 chapters. even better, there were 23 of them, which is a very awkward number. that's too many people to easily flesh out, so the author simply didn't bother. 300 chapters in, most of them don't have names and even fewer have personalities. so naturally, the next step is to recruit yet more unnamed lackeys. an empire split into 3 due to feuding royals, which was described as having happened "less than 50 years ago". in fact, it happened long enough ago that each of the 3 newly formed countries have developed their own completely distinct culture involving mages. oh but actually "less than 50 years ago" really means 10 years ago. the mc seizes a border checkpoint, which despite being completely mundane in a setting with magic can be made completely impregnable to multiple fully equipped armies simply by locking the doors. it wasn't on top of a cliff or anything, it was just a very sturdy building. what's more, this single checkpoint somehow controlled all passage in and out of a fairly large country which was also accessible by sea. the scene which introduced the mc's family specifically included his siblings, plural, one of whom was quite important. the author immediately forgot they were there, neither did or said anything in this scene, and the sister was never mentioned again. this is a setting where firearms exist including revolvers, but otherwise technology more advanced than wagons essentially doesn't exist. i love terrible fiction to the extent that i can barely appreciate stories that aren't completely godawful any more.
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Oct 28, 2018 04:00
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why
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Oct 28, 2018 04:29
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Terrible fiction lets you move past all the boring stuff like character development or worthwhile plots and lets you get straight to the heart of why we're all here:
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Oct 28, 2018 05:05
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DarciisFyer posted:I'm liking this alot too, though I have to add a warning that it has moments of blatant sexism that made me double-take, and I'm already used to ignoring problematic subtext/text in my fiction (as evidenced by me being in this thread). Pretty much all web novels with the "ancient China" tag are ludicrously sexist, even the ones with magical pills and inner power and whatnot. Like 80% of the ones I've read with female protagonists have the lead character disguise their gender 99% of the time so they can interact with the world at all. It's depressing but also representative of actual cultural norms in ancient China I guess? I dunno. The sexism in the genre is so overt and extreme that my eyes just kind of glaze past it at this point. gimme the GOD drat candy posted:going back to a mage revolts... huh, I was thinking of picking this up too. The other "western" Chinese web novel I've read (release that witch) was pretty good but reading your post it sounds like this... isn't more of that.
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Oct 28, 2018 05:23
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blastron posted:why It's a window into someone's head and the dudes who wrote these are just terrible in a really fascinating way sometimes.
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Oct 28, 2018 05:24
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Yet another way in which Forge of Destiny is ludicrously superior to pretty much everything else out there.
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Oct 28, 2018 05:25
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oh, and the ai in his head (which is a sadly common plot device in these stories) is just his laptop brought to life, so it is 90% useless aside from constantly babbling godawful chinese internet jokes. mostly, it just remembers things on behalf of the somewhat dim mc, meaning it is more or less a fancy notebook. it later gains a body, but that body is an emoji.
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Oct 28, 2018 06:55
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Am I the only one who kinda sees a link between these and the Fountainhead ? In that both web novels authors and Ayn Rand had to make a fantasy world with tenuous connections to reality in order to justify the things they want to do?
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Oct 28, 2018 07:14
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Web novels take it to an insane extreme, but to me, it seems like the writing styles are really similar.
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Oct 28, 2018 07:15
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that's just how fantasies are. rand dreamed of perfect beautiful industrialist demi-gods (lmao), so she wrote about a world where such people would always be necessary and correct. aside from the few pros who have multiple extended completed works, webnovels are rife with self-inserts. the originals wrote about all-powerful vicious sociopaths because that's what they would do with power. however, what muddies the water is that the popular webnovels spawn many, many derivative works. then some of these derivative works also attain a measure of popularity, and as such spawn even more. the scene is quite a few layers down now, so it is difficult to tell what is authors screaming about what terrible people they are into the void and what is insincere imitations or even imitations of imitations. what's more, there's nothing to say that the umpteenth webnovel about a guy stealing their younger self's body to play a mmo isn't written because an author thinks it is somehow, against all knowledge and reason, an interesting idea they'd like to explore. poo poo's complicated. of course, regular fiction progresses through a combination of imitation and originality too. however, that has always taken place over a much longer time frame than webnovels, which are all serial fiction and mostly on lightning-fast release schedules. the whole scene is new and still progressing, though sadly that progress has mostly gone down dank and unimpressive avenues.
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Oct 28, 2018 08:43
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