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Sindai posted:Is Warlock the one where the main character has a magic computer brain chip that just does everything for him? I dropped that one super fast. one? there are a cubic shitton of those. the thing that really gets me about charm of soul pets is that it doesn't actually describe practically any of these grimdark pokemon. some pokemon will show up, be named, and then it is considered as a vague monster-shaped entity with no further details. much like the author, i'm still not entirely sure how many legs a mo ye has.
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Jun 19, 2020 08:35
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What are some good LitRpgs? I'm looking for the ones with stat boxes, character sheets and explicit skill levels. I am not looking for cultivation stories. I've read a lot of them and am looking for something a little bit different. The best I've ever read is probably Threadbare. The Gamer is a classic example. Homicidal aliens... is a fun, fast paced read. Not great, but enjoyable for what it is. The Wandering Inn exists. Some people like it, it was not for me. StrixNebulosa posted:Martial World: I never knew how difficult deboning an animal was before, and I'm impressed. I wish this were cooking xianxia instead, but alas he's getting into fights already and has a magic cheat cube. I'm seven chapters in and this is...good. Not great, not bad. Gave this a try and got to the point where he does his deboning trick. Having deboned chickens and rabbits, I think he's about right on the difficulty. I'm a novice and it takes me about an hour to part out a chicken. Writing seems about average so far. Author's attitude towards women is so far demeaning, dismissive, and possessive, but not yet outright rapey. About middle of the road for the genre I'd guess? I'm not a fan but it hasn't gotten bad enough to make me stop. LLSix fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jun 19, 2020 |
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Jun 19, 2020 14:02
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LLSix posted:What are some good LitRpgs? I'm looking for the ones with stat boxes, character sheets and explicit skill levels. I am not looking for cultivation stories. I've read a lot of them and am looking for something a little bit different. Azarinth Healer, He Who Fights With Monsters, Delve and Beach Bum are all reasonably fun ones on royal road and even the most edgy of them is far less awful than most xianxia There is no epic loot here, only puns is kinda sorta litrpg and also good humor with emotion If you want just absolute garbage Metaworld Chronicles has dnd wizards, misogyny and colonialism while Defiance of the Fall has a murderhobo protag in the 'finest' xianxia tradition
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Jun 19, 2020 14:17
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LLSix posted:What are some good LitRpgs? I'm looking for the ones with stat boxes, character sheets and explicit skill levels. I am not looking for cultivation stories. I've read a lot of them and am looking for something a little bit different. To be clear I haven't found any web novel that isn't at least lowkey sexist. This is frustrating. I recommend balancing reading your garbage with books written by ladies - Melissa Scott, CJ Cherryh, Barbara Hambly, etc.
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Jun 19, 2020 15:04
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Delve is decent, yeah.
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Jun 19, 2020 15:40
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LLSix posted:What are some good LitRpgs? I'm looking for the ones with stat boxes, character sheets and explicit skill levels. I am not looking for cultivation stories. I've read a lot of them and am looking for something a little bit different. I asked a friend this question and she recced http://moodylit.com/bitter-table-of-contents https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37542138-bitter "Bitter by V Moody is very good Tho a bit light on the character stat sheets (Finished too, if that helps to sell it)"
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Jun 19, 2020 16:06
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All warlock know how to do is use AI chip and lie
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Jun 19, 2020 18:40
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Jon Joe posted:All warlock know how to do is use AI chip and lie
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Jun 19, 2020 18:58
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LLSix posted:What are some good LitRpgs? I'm looking for the ones with stat boxes, character sheets and explicit skill levels. I am not looking for cultivation stories. I've read a lot of them and am looking for something a little bit different. I'll go ahead and throw out a few korean LitRPGs (all VRMMO based because of course), Ranker's Return and Dungeon Predator and Everyone is Young Except for Me. Also Overgeared, where the MC gets actually good character development, one of the few novels I've actually teared up at certain points. They don't overuse RPG elements (which let's be real, numbers/titles changing doesn't add much story wise) but they are still a part of the story. Jon Joe posted:All warlock know how to do is use AI chip and lie Evil Kit fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jun 19, 2020 |
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Jun 19, 2020 19:00
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SaffronKit posted:I'll go ahead and throw out a few korean LitRPGs (all VRMMO based because of course), Ranker's Return and Dungeon Predator and Everyone is Young Except for Me. Also Overgeared, where the MC gets actually good character development, one of the few novels I've actually teared up at certain points. They don't overuse RPG elements (which let's be real, numbers/titles changing doesn't add much story wise) but they are still a part of the story. Thank you. Are any of these not misogynist? I can tolerate harems, but talking about women as if they're property or inherently inferior or creepy rape poo poo is a big nope for me.
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Jun 19, 2020 21:33
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the mc of overgeared absolutely does not get good character development. he remains a gross creep, but after the first hundred chapters or so every other character decides that his normal behavior is instead quite charming.
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Jun 19, 2020 21:37
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LLSix posted:Thank you. Are any of these not misogynist? I can tolerate harems, but talking about women as if they're property or inherently inferior or creepy rape poo poo is a big nope for me. You are in the wrong genre, pal. (  )
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Jun 19, 2020 21:46
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StrixNebulosa posted:You are in the wrong genre, pal. ( Counterpoint: Cultivation Chat Group (mostly) Cradle
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Jun 19, 2020 21:55
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LLSix posted:Counterpoint: I feel that they're the exception that proves the rule, sadly. (Cradle owns, I haven't read the Chat Group one yet. Soon.)
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Jun 19, 2020 22:03
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I don’t read many litrpgs but how about the spider isekai LN? It even has a female protagonist.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:05
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the ant one was alright, most character are ants which makes them technically women but as eusocial insects it doesn't exactly matter
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Jun 19, 2020 22:10
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Big Dao Energy’s understanding of the Dao was such that he was on top of the world! No one’s Dao was larger than his! “I have the bigger Dao,” claimed the arrogant young master. Big Dao Energy did not respond, as he was very self confident in the size of his Dao. Instead, he unleashed his full power in a single gaze, which pierced through the arrogant young master. “Guh!” The arrogant young master spat out a mouthful of blood. “Wait until I tell my daddy about you! He has a much bigger Dao, and then it is you who will feel inadequate!” Big Dao Energy gave a booming laugh. He would test the size of this daddy’s Dao, but first he would teach this arrogant young master a lesson. He opened his mouth as spoke, “Qi is stored in the Eternal Balls of Yin and Yang.” The arrogant young master’s Dao was shattered into a million pieces!
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Jun 19, 2020 22:11
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Which is just a very long winded way of saying I think the xianxia genre (and to a comparable extent many web novels) rest themselves on a type of toxic masculinity to the exclusion of using the elements to tell a greater variety of or more nuanced stories, which in turns causes the symptoms of less than savory story elements.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:23
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I've read a couple of chapters of Genius Detective. It's more or less the Chinese version of Mentalist - there's an eccentric genius investigator who's not part of the police but is helping them for reasons, there is an overarching plot about an incredibly over-complicated serial killer conspiracy (I think?) and the genius is partnered with a rookie lady cop who's the Watson-style POV for most of the story. The relationship with and portrayal of the lady cop are decent, by Chinese webnovel standards. It's an alright read, if you're into the genre.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:52
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There Is No Loot Here, Only Puns has a female protagonist and a bunch of other women characters and is also just fun
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Jun 20, 2020 01:54
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LLSix posted:Thank you. Are any of these not misogynist? I can tolerate harems, but talking about women as if they're property or inherently inferior or creepy rape poo poo is a big nope for me. I have bad news. After a lot of reading of much Chinese, Korean and Japanese based LitNovels, pretty much everything from the east has super heavy misogynistic tones. It's pretty ingrained in their culture and ESPECIALLY Chinese culture as far as I can tell and don't even bother thinking about how disgustingly homo/trans-phobic these novels can be. The Korean lit novels are probably the best of the bunch, but even then you can clearly see the slant towards chauvinistic tendencies. You either take it in stride while rolling your eyes or drop the genre all together. To actually answer your question: Dungeon Predator's MC is kind of an rear end in a top hat and selfish while taking care of his own in a somewhat backhanded fashion. His reasons for being an rear end in a top hat (mostly to NPCS because let's face it, they're just programs in a game) are because of a massive pile of debt he has to pay off. Good news: He treats everyone like an rear end in a top hat equally, regardless of gender or race. Only recently has he found a love interest and start dating her and so far I'm impressed with how relatively realistic it is? The relationship starts off based on a business relationship and after working together closely for a while, they start dating. That's it, he doesn't treat her in a particular power fantasy way and there is even some healthy back and forth when he does something that makes her feel like he was ignoring her ability to help. Ranker's Return: So far there is zero actual love interests or dating so far. Similar to Dungeon Predator's plot in that the MC is trying to pay off a massive family debt, and the MC is dorky enough as well as too focused on gaming to have developed any love interests in some of the female characters that have shown up. Everyone is Young Except for Me The MC is a grandpa whose wife has already past on. He treats the younger female characters like he would his grand daughter. Hell, one of them this IS his grand daughter and he clearly dotes on her a lot. I don't forsee any actual love interests ever happening in this novel outside of side characters, so I'd say you're pretty safe here! As for Overgeared... gimme the GOD drat candy posted:the mc of overgeared absolutely does not get good character development. he remains a gross creep, but after the first hundred chapters or so every other character decides that his normal behavior is instead quite charming. This is blatantly untrue and undercuts some of the trauma the author sets up early on. The MC is 100% a gross, selfish creep at the beginning who is also lured in by a crush from college and then humiliated in front of his entire class. Unsurprisingly, this traumatizes him and he starts to massively distrust women. The character development occurs slowly over like 500-700 chapters, and is not rushed. The MC does [i]slowly/i] improve as a person and thanks to the VRmmo and various NPCs actually starts to deal with his personal trauma and issues till finally he does get in a (admittedly amusing and eyerolling) three way relationship IRL. Both of the women trying to date him are strong individuals who stand on their own and don't rely totally on the MC. Kinda of spoilers but who gives a poo poo, this novel is good and does deserve a read.
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Jun 20, 2020 02:30
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SaffronKit posted:I have bad news. After a lot of reading of much Chinese, Korean and Japanese based LitNovels, pretty much everything from the east has super heavy misogynistic tones. It's pretty ingrained in their culture and ESPECIALLY Chinese culture as far as I can tell and don't even bother thinking about how disgustingly homo/trans-phobic these novels can be.
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Jun 20, 2020 06:03
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Elephant Parade posted:I think this is more of an amateur webfiction thing than an You're probably right, but even some of the better authors tend towards the men in the power role while the women pine and shyly smile as their man protects them in the cultivation genre at least. Even if the lass has some 'tude you still get some very, shall we say, unprogressive views.
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Jun 20, 2020 06:39
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i know there's a cultivation BL novel that's the current fujo sensation on twitter and i assume there's a million more of those that are more obscure over here e; this sounds really cute actually https://www.novelupdates.com/series/waiting-for-you-online/ DisDisDis fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 06:59
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haven't read wn's before, is formatting like this typical for translations? Synopsis sounded really fun for a vrmmo thing but the formatting is really distracting. https://www.novelupdates.com/series/the-warmhearted-you/?pg=2 this seems pretty well tled and is actually completed though
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Jun 20, 2020 07:51
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Yeah that's pretty common if you're talking about all the single lines, I'm not sure how much of it comes from the source material or from the translation. If you're talking about the use of the chinese/japanese quote marks that's also pretty common. It's hard to tell what is distracting for you because to me that just looks like a regular web novel translation
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Jun 20, 2020 10:20
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DisDisDis posted:haven't read wn's before, is formatting like this typical for translations? Synopsis sounded really fun for a vrmmo thing but the formatting is really distracting. Echoing gwrth - this type of formatting is super common, at the very least among japanese web novels. It also tends to be more common with machine translations that semi-professional ones, presumably because that's precisely how the source material is. I think this is part of the reason I tend to enjoy chinese web novels more, as they are far less likely to be formatted in ways that make it difficult to read. Perhaps because there's been way more money thrown behind their translation?
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Jun 20, 2020 17:05
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That looks pretty standard format to me.
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Jun 20, 2020 17:06
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One idiosyncracy of English is that it relies incredibly heavily on quotative verbs when writing dialogue, eg:quote:"What’s the matter?" said Nanako. quote:"My father said that he didn't like you". quote:"My father said that he didn't like you", said Rin. To further complicate things, there are a huge variety of quotative verbs that English authors use to avoid constantly repeating the verb "said". But adding those verbs to a translation is in some sense a new creative work, rather than an interpretation of the original work. Consider the words "asked", "entreated", "demanded", "begged", and "requested": they all have basically similar meanings, but the connotations for using each one are entirely different. In extreme forms, this leads to Tom Swiftys or other equally weird linguistic flukes that are highly specific to English. Basically, translating dialogue into English is much harder than one would think, and it requires a level of skill and effort that most translators of Japanese VRMMO light novels don't tend to use.
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Jun 20, 2020 18:25
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  Here are two random random pages from Kino's Travels. Like Tobermory said, there isn't a single instance of "X said" on the first one because it isn't necessary to understand who's saying what, while the other one has some. But every time the speaker changes (or when it changes from narration to dialogue), you get a new column. If you directly translate that kind of formatting to english text, you end up with the messy way most of those translations are written.
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Jun 20, 2020 19:31
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Today I learned! That's pretty neat, thanks for the info on that.
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Jun 20, 2020 19:59
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SaffronKit posted:Today I learned! That's pretty neat, thanks for the info on that.
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Jun 20, 2020 20:05
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Jon Joe posted:Echoing gwrth - this type of formatting is super common, at the very least among japanese web novels. It also tends to be more common with machine translations that semi-professional ones, presumably because that's precisely how the source material is. Another factor is that for all that it is alien, Chinese (Mandarin etc) shares a decent amount of structure and conventions with the English language. This means if you throw a random chinese sentence into a basic machine translator it can probably spit out something that isn't too difficult to understand. So translations are just straight up easier whether it be fully human based or editing machine translations. Getting it to read and flow like an actual English text is a bit of work but it already somewhat does. Japanese on the other hand likes to be super unique and special and does everything it can be awkward to translate into English. Machine translators hate it and a person doing it has to do comparitively huge amount of work to have it sound like English - which is why you often end up with translations that are perfectly understandable but they read in a distinctly foreign way. The above notes about conventions on speech are an excellent example. EDIT: I will also add that it's not uncommon for these kinds of conversations to have the names inserted before (or sometimes after) the speech as if a playscript. [John] Is that a new car? [Ben] It sure is, just got it today! Shanakin fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 21:55
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Holy poo poo do NOT read the comments for Monarch of Evernight chapter 3, I have never seen so many people angry that a little kid wouldn't murder a little girl in cold blood. Lots of "kill the bitch" being thrown around. 
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Jun 20, 2020 22:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:Holy poo poo do NOT read the comments for Monarch of Evernight chapter 3, I have never seen so many people angry that a little kid wouldn't murder a little girl in cold blood. Lots of "kill the bitch" being thrown around. haha yeah a lot of wn comments love complaining the protagonist isnt being the perfect self-optimizing sociopath
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Jun 20, 2020 22:32
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it's the same as any other comment sections. the only thing worse than reading them is posting there yourself. in an early chapter of one wn, a psychotic mc brutally punished a group of betrayers. except, you know, the author forgot to have them actually betray him. once i pointed this out, the commenters naturally leapt to the defense and tied themselves in knots explaining how this obvious error was intentional and somehow made perfect sense. the very next chapter the mc enslaved a woman for no particular reason and that was the end of my interest in this particular wn. i don't think i was dumb enough to try to explain this to a comment section, but it was a while ago so i might be wrong.
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Jun 20, 2020 22:46
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SaffronKit posted:You're probably right, but even some of the better authors tend towards the men in the power role while the women pine and shyly smile as their man protects them in the cultivation genre at least. Even if the lass has some 'tude you still get some very, shall we say, unprogressive views.
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Jun 21, 2020 01:44
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Forge of Destiny is pretty good vis a vis not being misogynist?
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Jun 21, 2020 02:41
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Artificer posted:Forge of Destiny is pretty good vis a vis not being misogynist? Yes. MC is female.
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Jun 21, 2020 03:01
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Elephant Parade posted:Judging a society's treatment of women by how women are treated in the amateur webfiction it produces--or rather, the subset of that webfiction that is translated, also by amateurs, into English--is not going to give you accurate results. Unless I am sorely mistaken, you do not have the cultural context needed to take trends in a very small facet of any one of these societies and relate it to the general values of that society, let alone all three at once. This is true and in terms of actual real life culture I take it with a massive grain of salt, although I have some misgivings vis a vis other sources. I will always admit meeting someone from an eastern culture I will have preconceptions based on what I have read and learned but know I at least would take people's actions into account more heavily than I would previous bias. That said within xuanxia cultivation novels themselves I'm fairly forgiving of what modern views would consider misogynistic as it's typically set in a time period in which that particular culture occurred and was accepted. Mind you, that doesn't mean you should be on board with the attitude just that within the context of the story it makes sense why people act like that regularly. Especially since a lot of these books can be power fantasies of various sorts with more than likely self-insert MCs though, they certainly aren't good examples by any length. Overall I think we agree for the most part, even if I'm not expressing it well. StrixNebulosa posted:Holy poo poo do NOT read the comments for Monarch of Evernight chapter 3, I have never seen so many people angry that a little kid wouldn't murder a little girl in cold blood. Lots of "kill the bitch" being thrown around. Others have already said it but I'm going to echo it with heavy emphasis: Never read the comments section on any web novel translation. Your brain will melt at the sheer insanity that exists there. Except for Grand Master of Demonic Cultivation, it's pretty much just a bunch of readers squealing about various yaoi terms and how they just want MC and love interest to make out already.
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Jun 21, 2020 03:03
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