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Ive been reading Gamers of the Underworld which is wonderful in how incredibly stupid it is A devil starts a new dungeon. However hes incredibly poor and doesnt have money to hire goblins to do the building. The dungeon core is strange because its slightly autonomous and keeps suggesting strange ideas to Sherlock, the devil. What it ends up doing is faking an MMO and inviting people from our world over to build the dungeon. The beta testers log in to the VRMMO, get a goblin 'avatar' and start doing 'quests' like digging tunnels and hauling rocks. And Sherlocks just standing around flabbergasted that these goblins are so hype to work for free. And that they do wierd things like throwing themselves into the blacksmiths furnace just to see what happens. https://www.webnovel.com/book/13909061505200205/Gamers-of-the-Underworld
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Oct 7, 2019 04:58
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Ooh, I love outside perspectives on isekai protagonists. They're always a fun read.
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Oct 7, 2019 16:30
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I've been reading Azarinth Healer. It's a solid meat-and-potatoes litrpg where the young woman isekais and instantly stumbles into a powerful secret class, then proceeds to power level and get purpz and power level some more. It's not especially clever and the writing is a bit amateurish bordering on rough, especially at first, but I find it a very comfortable, engrossing read, like pigging out on a big ole bag of potato chips. It has some trigger warnings, but while technically the warnings are true, I found the story relatively mild in that regard. (Like, a 100-ish chapters in, at least. There might be mass rape and pedophagy later on, who knows.)
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Oct 7, 2019 17:12
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Oh you sweet summer child. I'd been skipping reading it because of how rough the early chapters used to be. I recently powered through it and you're about to hit grim dark territory real soon. Like some of the grim darkest poo poo I've read recently.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:04
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Ytlaya posted:How does Chu Song fit into this, then? Why didn't she make it into the inner sect last year? It seems like if someone like her can exist outside of the inner sect and reach third realm in the outer sect, there should be at least a few other people in the outer sect who also reached third realm in their third or fourth years or whatever. If you recall in the tournament, not everyone got as difficult fights as others. Kang Zihao in particular got a prelim where he was with Sun Liling, then a fight against a yellow that was his old subordinate during the year... and then he was punted aside with a Meizhen fight. Ling Qi, otoh, got in a prelim fight with both a green 2 opponent but also a full group of Sun Liling's faction who were armed with specific anti-Ling Qi talisman. Then she got a fight against Chu Son to get in the inner sect. Basically, being a high noble gives you the easy road, and being a vocal anti-cai gives you the harshest road. quote:edit: Unrelated, but upon re-reading the Bai Meizhen/Sun Liling fight and even the Gu Xiulan/Wen Ai fight, Ling Qi really needs to get some flashier abilities. She mostly just makes her mist and then freezes people. I feel like the other characters often have aesthetically neater and more coherent powersets because they're left up to the author, instead of the readers choosing stuff based upon game stat stuff. This is something that's often mentioned to the author, and I think it's because fights being from Ling Qi's PoV means there is more of a focus on the details and less of a focus on the aesthetics.
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Oct 7, 2019 21:06
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Cynic Jester posted:Oh you sweet summer child. I'd been skipping reading it because of how rough the early chapters used to be. I recently powered through it and you're about to hit grim dark territory real soon. Like some of the grim darkest poo poo I've read recently. Used to be? I've tried it a couple times 'cause it's always on RR toplist but it was... really bad. Also, it seemed more like the MC was getting Jedi powers than Healer powers.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:25
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Cynic Jester posted:Oh you sweet summer child. I'd been skipping reading it because of how rough the early chapters used to be. I recently powered through it and you're about to hit grim dark territory real soon. Like some of the grim darkest poo poo I've read recently.  I want to know how bad it is.
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Oct 8, 2019 01:27
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Azarinth Healer is fine if you just want to read about an unkillable masochist traveling to various exotic locations and punching various magical creatures to death. It's grimdark in the sense that whole cities get wiped out by demon invasions or cannibal elves or just humans being jerks. Sometimes terrible things happen just offscreen to remind you that the villains are bad and deserve to have their skulls punched out of their heads. After about 200 chapters the protagonist gets tired of all the human drama and bullshit and decides to explore the uninhabited wildlands that no one has ever come back from, and the story gets a bit more upbeat. Azarinth Healer is better than 95% of the dreck on RR, and if you're in this thread you've probably run out of better things to read.
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Oct 8, 2019 01:40
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LLSix posted:Used to be? I've tried it a couple times 'cause it's always on RR toplist but it was... really bad. Also, it seemed more like the MC was getting Jedi powers than Healer powers. Some time in I want to say June or July the earliest chapters got an editing run, fixing the most egregious poo poo. It's still worse than the newer chapters, but way more readable than it used to be.
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Oct 8, 2019 07:09
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Oh my god it was only while watching today's Honzuki episode that I realized why Maine's dad is so irrationally jealous of Otto... "Otto-san, daisuki!" I'm not entirely sure that tracks at all given that they're not actually speaking Japanese in that world, but the anime definitely seemed to be playing up the homonym.
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Oct 9, 2019 18:28
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So what's a newish (<100 chapters so far) web novel I can get into? Translated or original English, I don't care. I like xianxia but any genre is fine.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:05
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https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/26294/he-who-fights-with-monsters Probably my favorite Webnovel right now. Sort of a mix between light LitRPG and Xianxia, with excellent characters and a pretty sweet setting.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:15
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He Who Fights With Monsters is real good, it's like two notches above everything else that comes from royalroad. It has it's own set of issues that come alongside being a webnovel that gets updated every weekday, but it's one of the best litrpg/xianxia stories I've read.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:26
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I'll give it a whirl, thanks!
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Oct 10, 2019 18:03
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Cynic Jester posted:Oh you sweet summer child. I'd been skipping reading it because of how rough the early chapters used to be. I recently powered through it and you're about to hit grim dark territory real soon. Like some of the grim darkest poo poo I've read recently. I've been accused of being a patronizing twat once because I called someone a sweet summer child and, having now ended up on the other end of it, I can kinda see why, heh. Well, I'd say that you're making the common mistake of confusing the trappings and scenery with the psychological effect. Violence and carnage aren't what defines grimdark, grimdark is, basically, about loving hard with everything the reader invests in. It can actually be done with zero death. Like, for example, cozy mysteries are psychologically comfortable as heck despite having murder, because the story is carefully engineered so that the murder or any other complications have zero negative effect on the protagonist and the reader, but you could take the exact same setup - setting, characters, relationships - but without the murder and spin it into something that'll give the weaker readers PTSD. And Azarinth Healer (like most successful web serials, really) is comfortable as hell, even after the demonpocalypse. Nothing the reader proxy protagonist cared about was threatened. Cozy house? Still safe. All the side-characters she cared about? Doing fine. All the characters THEY cared about? Lol, there p.much aren't any, it's all good. The apocalypse isn't even an inconvenience to her, it's just a fun new playground for her to power level.
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Oct 10, 2019 19:21
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Grim dark as in 40k grim dark, where everything is poo poo but everyone you care about is awesome.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:35
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Cynic Jester posted:Grim dark as in 40k grim dark, where everything is poo poo but everyone you care about is awesome. Well, 'like 40k' should be the default usage for 'grimdark', but when discussing fantasy it's not. Like, not at all.
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Oct 10, 2019 22:57
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Megazver posted:Well, 'like 40k' should be the default usage for 'grimdark', but when discussing fantasy it's not. Like, not at all. The term originated from the tagline for 40k. If people are using it to describe something else, they can have fun with that. But far more importantly, He who fights with monsters keeps being the best thing I'm reading. quote:“You seem to be taking it calmly,” she said. Best MC 
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Oct 16, 2019 00:28
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Cynic Jester posted:
For me the overly clever dialogue is kind of hit or miss. I gave it a shot seeing it in this thread and dropped it a couple dozen chapters in. Is The Wandering Inn any good? It's on RR too, and boy that's a lot of content.
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Oct 16, 2019 10:25
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The Wandering Inn regularly adds in new characters you probably hate and forces you to read them until you start liking them. You will probably never not find some of them annoying to infuriating. It also drops interesting plots for hundreds of thousands of words before going back to them. It bloats like crazy after the first couple of volumes. It's good.
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Oct 16, 2019 11:00
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It's great. There are a few boring arcs, yeah, but the hits far outweigh the misses. I like a lot of the characters, and I'm fairly sure that each reader has characters they'll love or hate based on their tastes. I wouldn't say the story drops interesting plots; it's just that it's primarily a slice of life story, so the details of day-to-day living take precedence over the very slow burn major plot points.
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Oct 16, 2019 12:54
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A lot of people dislike the 2nd major PoV introduced, because they're a bit of a Mary Sue and keep making unfounded assumptions that nigh always turn out to be the correct in hindsight, but it's one character out of many and it doesn't detract form the overall story in my eyes. Then again, I read a lot of web fiction so my threshold for how much Mary and Gary is too much is probably higher than most.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:25
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The wandering inn has goblins and all the usual problems with goblins are turned up to 11 in a failed attempt by the author to shine a light on the problems with goblins. It also has slave skeleton rebellions. Depending on your willingness to read about hard topics explored badly, it may or may not be your cup of tea. The structure (ahahaha) is essentially whatever falls out of the pen on any given day, so if you are turned off by rambling do not enter here. Personally I enjoyed the intro, and then got increasingly less interested. I bounced off it before the worst of the atrocity happened, and haven't missed it.
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Oct 16, 2019 15:56
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I have the opposite opinion; the goblins are treated as more human than... other works that may just treat goblins as something to be exterminated. There is a lot of goblin tragedy, yeah, but I don't think it's handled badly at all. And as far as hard topics being explored badly, if anything, TWI has the most on point politics of any web serial... which I guess is a low bar, but I think it mostly works. It's definitely got that issue of chapters being largely whatever the author wanted to write that day, but I view that as a plus. It's not as though it's a stream of consciousness description of what the grass looked like that day; most of the words consist of things happening and dialogue, even if said things happening are just "check out this new flavor of ice cream I made"--which there is a lot of.
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Oct 16, 2019 17:00
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The goblins are cool and good eventually, after a little bit of pain. The skeleton owns, and is back in the story briefly woo. Erin and Ryoka are best when they're forced to acknowledge that other people are in fact other people, which may take a few hundred thousand words. I try to have faith that the King will be worth the time spent reading his chapters one day. Like, he'll grow on me, and one day I'll see a chapter numbered from his perspective and be happy and realise that I love him. I hope so. There have been a lot of words spent on him. 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 17:00
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I read the first volume or two of the wandering inn and while I felt it was well written I just wasn’t really enjoying reading it and wound up bouncing.
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Oct 16, 2019 17:04
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Anias posted:The wandering inn has goblins and all the usual problems with goblins are turned up to 11 in a failed attempt by the author to shine a light on the problems with goblins. 
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Oct 16, 2019 18:23
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Speaking of goblins, I just learned that the Iron Teeth author has a xianxia thing, gonna check that out
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Oct 16, 2019 19:01
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Bakanogami posted:I read the first volume or two of the wandering inn and while I felt it was well written I just wasn’t really enjoying reading it and wound up bouncing. That's pretty much how it goes. It gets interesting but it takes several eons to get there.
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Oct 16, 2019 19:24
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Wandering Inn hits some truly, genuinely emotional beats, but it definitely does drag at points, and when it bounces from a great PoV to a dull one that's pretty rough reading.
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Oct 16, 2019 19:41
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bonus hole boy posted:For me the overly clever dialogue is kind of hit or miss. I gave it a shot seeing it in this thread and dropped it a couple dozen chapters in. Yeah, the dialogue Cynic Jester is quoting there just kinda made me roll my eyes. That's not even "overly clever" so much as just kinda cliche to be honest. Argue posted:It's great. There are a few boring arcs, yeah, but the hits far outweigh the misses. I like a lot of the characters, and I'm fairly sure that each reader has characters they'll love or hate based on their tastes. I wouldn't say the story drops interesting plots; it's just that it's primarily a slice of life story, so the details of day-to-day living take precedence over the very slow burn major plot points. I think I talked about this some in the web serial thread, but there's something about Wandering Inn that fundamentally prevents me from truly "buying into" its story and setting. Like something about the characters, events, and writing makes it impossible for me to forget "this is written by a nerdy person on the internet" (which obviously isn't an inherently bad thing since it's true for literally all of the stuff in this thread, but it can be a problem when it directly influences the writing in a negative way). The best way I can think of articulating it is that I can distinctly derive a sense of "these dialogue and events are being written to appeal to a specific type of person who is familiar with nerd culture in 2019." Ward is a reasonable web serial to use in comparison, because it's also distinctly flawed but doesn't have that same attribute that bugs me about Wandering Inn (I don't use something like PracGuide for comparison because PracGuide is frankly dramatically better than both Ward and Wandering Inn). For all its flaws with both pacing and prose (though it's probably not worse than Wandering Inn with either), I don't feel like characters and events in Ward are written in a clear attempt to appeal to the audience. By "appeal to the audience" I'm not just referring to power fantasies or Mary Sue type stuff, but also to a particular sort of drama and "emotional scene" that feels distinctly intended to evoke an emotional reaction from people familiar with nerd pop culture. While this sort of thing is usually present to some extent in most "YA fiction" writing, including stuff like the Cradle series, I think that something like Cradle benefits from still having much better writing/plotting in a broader sense. So even if there's some cheesy stuff that comes with the YA trappings, you still have a solid plot and fun, fairly well-written fight scenes/etc to keep you engaged.
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Oct 17, 2019 02:10
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Thanks for the responses, I've been enjoying wandering inn so far. We'll see if it holds the appeal.Ytlaya posted:Yeah, the dialogue Cynic Jester is quoting there just kinda made me roll my eyes. That's not even "overly clever" so much as just kinda cliche to be honest. I think 'overly quippy' would be more accurate to what bothers me about it.
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Oct 17, 2019 10:17
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Ytlaya posted:I think I talked about this some in the web serial thread, but there's something about Wandering Inn that fundamentally prevents me from truly "buying into" its story and setting. Like something about the characters, events, and writing makes it impossible for me to forget "this is written by a nerdy person on the internet" (which obviously isn't an inherently bad thing since it's true for literally all of the stuff in this thread, but it can be a problem when it directly influences the writing in a negative way). The best way I can think of articulating it is that I can distinctly derive a sense of "these dialogue and events are being written to appeal to a specific type of person who is familiar with nerd culture in 2019." I think a lot of this is tastes and colours? I know I stopped Pracguides specifically because I felt everything about it was intended to be fanservice for a specific fanbase, for example. I stopped Worm for many reasons, but that was also one of the reasons (never took up Ward, so I can't tell about this one). Basically, I think that if you are the intended audience for the fanservice then the fanservice feels more organic than if you are not the intended audience.
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Oct 17, 2019 13:33
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Tried reading the English translations of Ascendance of Bookworm, but holy crap things took a nosedive in quality after chapter 103. Good news though: there's a Chinese version out, and we know how much my people care about things like IP and copyright. According to the titles, looks like they already have it translated up to the third arc, volume 5. Not bad, considering that's 12/21 volumes translated. The only issue is that it's all in traditional Chinese, which makes it tougher for me to read.
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Oct 28, 2019 05:30
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A whole bunch of people started translating it after blastron so you'll find translations that are all over the place in quality. Like, I found one that translated what was obviously meant to be "Sylvester" as "Sylphstar" and referred to priests and priestesses as Templars and Witches. I actually did find one that seemed to have decent English and is still going, but I can't pull up the link from my phone and I didn't read it thoroughly enough to be sure of the quality. I think it was hosted on a site that hosts a lot of translated Chinese web novels.
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Oct 28, 2019 06:29
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What happened to the licensed English translation? I think they promised a breakneck initial pace, like one or two months per volume.
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Oct 28, 2019 10:16
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nielsm posted:What happened to the licensed English translation? I think they promised a breakneck initial pace, like one or two months per volume. Part 2 Volume 1 is coming out in November.
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Oct 28, 2019 10:45
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It's been coming out bimonthly since May, and I believe the November 10 volume will have caught up to blastron. It's so fast that I'm kind of demotivated to keep reading the raws now...
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Oct 28, 2019 10:46
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If I had to point out a single point in wandering inn that made me think 'this probably isn't for me', it'd have to be the sudden inclusion of all the fairy nonsense.
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Oct 28, 2019 16:49
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I just spent the past few days devouring 百万回転生した俺は、平和な世界でも油断しない, and it's probably possible to describe as if Kenkyo Kenjitsu and Mushoku Tensei had a beautiful baby. Please translate it, somebody. Few Narou titles have managed to go against my expectations quite like this, and the second half is particularly remarkable.
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Oct 28, 2019 17:53
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