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gonadic io posted:This is IMO the strongest proof we have of why artonan magic is causing chaos. What sacrifice does an artonan wizard make when they cast? None, they take their cake and eat it. I really strongly believe that this is a global warming analogy where they know their lifestyle is causing this big looming problem but also fundamentally fixing it would require upending their whole lifestyle so they just keep kicking the bucket down the road with new colonies and so on. They use their authority to cast? They can exhaust their authority just like an Avowed/Knight. It's like a person using their body to lift a weight. It's not really similar to, say, "a wordchain where you don't pay the debt side" (since there really would be no downside to that). I do think that there's probably a link between the chaos problem and something about how Artonan society functions, but I don't think "people being wizards" is a part of that, since that's just "people using their authority to do things." (not sure if this has been mentioned in non-Patreon yet)Maybe something to do with wordchains, since I imagine the Palace of Unbreaking exists for a reason; its existence kind of implies that not treating wordchains properly causes big problems (and it may have initially been created in response to such problems). Nitrousoxide posted:I could see this. The two mains also have very... focused personalities. With the female one being incredibly zeroed in on honor and debt. While the male lead is aggressively mercantile in every conversation. He's always thinking about how he needs to give something up if he ever gets something to avoid being in debt or how to squeeze anybody for the information he might want. At least as of right now 20% of the way into the story there have been very few opportunities for the two main characters just sit down and chat with folks in a setting where their lives or honor aren't on the line. I generally like the main characters (my mental image of Tristan is amusingly kind of similar to "a darker-skinned Alden"). It's just that it feels like things are constantly moving from tense situation to tense situation in a way that doesn't really let you get a better feel for the setting/characters.
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Jan 25, 2024 18:55
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Ytlaya posted:They use their authority to cast? They can exhaust their authority just like an Avowed/Knight. It's like a person using their body to lift a weight. It's not really similar to, say, "a wordchain where you don't pay the debt side" (since there really would be no downside to that). I can neither confirm nor deny anything that may or may not have been mentioned in patreon, but you're absolutely right that nothing of this has been confirmed yet in RR. It is purely my speculation on the fact that all other magic we've seen (wordchains and Gorgon's peoples') require real sacrifice to do magic, and Artonans' does not - it just fatigues the caster who then recovers and has lost nothing. Maybe all magic period does cause chaos, sure. We do also know both that Avowed have a stabilising effect against chaos by their very presence (does this work on a universe-wide scale?), and earth is used as a dumping ground for some amount of demons/chaos, presumably from the "important" Artonan planets, every year. gonadic io fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jan 25, 2024 |
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Jan 25, 2024 19:13
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Necroepilogos Patreon: I love how every time Pheiri does something that his builders absolutely would not approve of he goes "but this is really important!" followed by "but this is really important tho" and finally "Chief Uren said I can do what I want, haha nerd".
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Jan 25, 2024 19:21
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gonadic io posted:I can neither confirm nor deny anything that may or may not have been mentioned in patreon, but you're absolutely right that nothing of this has been confirmed yet in RR. It is purely my speculation on the fact that all other magic we've seen (wordchains and Gorgon's peoples') require real sacrifice to do magic, and Artonans' does not - it just fatigues the caster who then recovers and has lost nothing. Maybe all magic period does cause chaos, sure. I mean, when a person lifts a heavy object it doesn't require "real sacrifice" either, but there's still an exchange of "energy." Authority itself appears to be a natural part of the universe/life (or at least intelligent life) in SupSup, and magic is just "using it to do things." And when people use wordchains they're also fully recovered after they pay off the debt, so there's no long-term sacrifice there either. "Wordchains that people don't pay off" are the only real thing that truly goes "unpaid" (and thus the biggest source of concern IMO). It appears that magic can facilitate "avoiding the debt" (which is otherwise not possible, since the debt normally comes automatically). This would make Artonans the only/main source of such a problem.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:51
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Ytlaya posted:I mean, when a person lifts a heavy object it doesn't require "real sacrifice" either, but there's still an exchange of "energy." Authority itself appears to be a natural part of the universe/life (or at least intelligent life) in SupSup, and magic is just "using it to do things." And when people use wordchains they're also fully recovered after they pay off the debt, so there's no long-term sacrifice there either. I absolutely do not believe that wordchains going unpaid are the only (or biggest) source of chaos. They're portrayed as somewhat archaic and not all that popular in Artonan society outside the religious organisation that is the Palace. They are not mainstream at all, in the way that 1/3 or whatever of Artonan society are part of the spellcasting caste.
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Jan 25, 2024 19:53
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There's certainly a chance that wordchains are related to chaos. Gorgon said that they have some similarities to his race's form of magic, and we know his home planet was engulfed in chaos storms. Unless, of course, the Artonans are the cause behind that chaos.
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Jan 25, 2024 20:20
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Haoyu is the best in Super Supportive. In my head, he has a soft friendly voice. Like Mr. Rogers.
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Jan 25, 2024 21:00
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Alden, Lute, Stuart and Haoyu all have strong claims on being best boy, but Kibby is uncontested as the absolute best.
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Jan 25, 2024 21:40
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I have a confession. I think my favorite might be Jeffy.
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Jan 25, 2024 21:56
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Jeffy stock has been rising lately. It's a bull market. BTW, after Kibby, the second best female character is Other Alden.
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Jan 25, 2024 21:58
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Nitrousoxide posted:Jeffy stock has been rising lately. It's a bull market. When you're right, you're right. It's good that Jeffy is in the story. Every store needs a good himbo.
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Jan 25, 2024 22:00
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Jeffys initial aggro-ness soured me on him pretty hard, and his selfish thoughtlessness kinda sucks. But other times he’s an adorkable moron! Truly high school is a land of contrasts.
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Jan 25, 2024 22:26
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Every one and their dog seems to be getting books and audiobooks published, how has worm never got that treatment. It doesn't even appear to be up on Kindle for sale. Edit: poo poo even Randidley the world dumbest named series got an audiobook.
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Jan 26, 2024 16:19
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Wildbow is a misanthropic recluse with a bad business sense?
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Jan 26, 2024 16:30
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imnotinsane posted:Every one and their dog seems to be getting books and audiobooks published, how has worm never got that treatment. It doesn't even appear to be up on Kindle for sale. it never fails to make me chuckle
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Jan 26, 2024 16:35
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imnotinsane posted:Every one and their dog seems to be getting books and audiobooks published, how has worm never got that treatment. It doesn't even appear to be up on Kindle for sale. Because the heat death of the universe will happen before Wildblow finishes editing Worm.
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Jan 26, 2024 18:19
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Wildbow has been consistently opposed to any form of monetization beyond writing lots of words and hoping people give him money.
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Jan 26, 2024 19:31
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How weird, surely he is successful enough that he could pay for an editor if he really wanted to do it.
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Jan 27, 2024 01:02
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He tried that and the editor told him to delete some words so he got mad and decided editors were bad. (This may not be an entirely accurate description of the events).
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Jan 27, 2024 01:27
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I've always felt that the serial space does a great disservice to its writers. Between the patreon stuff, the weird parasocial nonsense, and the insane amount of antagonism everyone involved directs towards negative feedback, it feels like authors get trapped in a world where their first attempt at writing receives nonstop validation. I know how much of a dick I sound like saying this, but I really think that being told your best effort sucks rear end is a key formative experience for every writer. The way it's intended to work is that you write a thing, seek C&C, get told it sucks, write a slightly less sucky thing, and so on until you start to get a really solid feel for what works. I used to think that all it took to get decent at writing was to churn out 500,000-1,000,000 bad words, but I think I was underestimating how vital feedback is to that process. Because RRL's thing (and Wildbow's thing) have resulted in authors outputting millions upon millions of words, and still writing like a seventh grader trying their hand at fanfic for the first time. It's so frustrating to see writers who I think could refine their craft and make something genuinely awesome get stuck in the serial mines. But on the flip side they often make way more via crowdfunding than most published authors get from quality work product, so who am I to gripe?
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Jan 27, 2024 01:38
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For some reason I’m still reading Industrial Strength Magic despite the more or less total absence of character depth (it’s cheap, updates often, and is reasonably interesting in setting?), and the Patreon is just full of comments about exponential growth curves of character strength and why isn’t the MC even more powerful?! Ugh.
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Jan 27, 2024 02:00
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Velius posted:For some reason I’m still reading Industrial Strength Magic despite the more or less total absence of character depth (it’s cheap, updates often, and is reasonably interesting in setting?), and the Patreon is just full of comments about exponential growth curves of character strength and why isn’t the MC even more powerful?! Ugh. because 1) possibly the best name after Randidly Ghosthound and 2) all the details other than the main city of that setting are absolutely wild and I wish they'd just do little vignettes in random places that are fending off superpowered lobster horde attacks or frantically destroying telescopes so nobody Hears A Sound from space or whatever, the world as depicted is completely insane it's like how Delve had about two paragraphs about how there was an entire isekai'd roman legion that built a fort so long ago that even the now-dead ancients found it as a relic and then just... did nothing with it
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Jan 27, 2024 02:21
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Wildbow is also insanely burnt out on Worm and doesn't really want to think about it any more.
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Jan 27, 2024 02:29
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Patrick Spens posted:Wildbow is also insanely burnt out on Worm and doesn't really want to think about it any more. Yeah, this is the big thing. He said something semi-recently about how the story involves a lot of things he doesn't agree with anymore which has made it impossible for him to edit. That, and I think the best time to edit and re-release Worm was prior to Ward existing. Few years ago, I would've said Worm could've been a huge hit had Wildbow got the lead out and put some work into editing and revising it (first eight arcs into a trilogy -- bank robbery, gala, Leviathan), but I feel like the market now has moved on from that kind of story and everything is leaning more into romantasy etc.
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Jan 27, 2024 03:55
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Yeah, this is the big thing. He said something semi-recently about how the story involves a lot of things he doesn't agree with anymore which has made it impossible for him to edit. That, and I think the best time to edit and re-release Worm was prior to Ward existing. Edit it into a litRPG because it seems like the only thing people want from web fiction these days. 
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Jan 27, 2024 04:01
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I think he made a big mistake in not monetizing Worm 5-10 years ago, but the window's definitely passed.
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Jan 27, 2024 05:51
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Velius posted:For some reason I’m still reading Industrial Strength Magic despite the more or less total absence of character depth (it’s cheap, updates often, and is reasonably interesting in setting?), and the Patreon is just full of comments about exponential growth curves of character strength and why isn’t the MC even more powerful?! Ugh. This is extra dumb because the whole point of Paradox is he’s doing his best to NOT become exponentially powerful because he’s worried about the consequences. This is funny because the author’s previous series all seem to have been dropped because the MC (all very much the same person as his current MC) keeps getting so powerful they break the story and he ends up written into a corner. Making the “my guy is trying to NOT break the story”is kind of funny in that context.
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Jan 27, 2024 06:25
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Velius posted:For some reason I’m still reading Industrial Strength Magic despite the more or less total absence of character depth (it’s cheap, updates often, and is reasonably interesting in setting?), and the Patreon is just full of comments about exponential growth curves of character strength and why isn’t the MC even more powerful?! Ugh. Sorry; are they caught up to the latest Royal Road chapters, where he is so hilariously overpowered that he’s decided to bait the wrath of a god-like entity while his toddler children were within the blast radius, because he was sure that he had at least a 3% chance of no-selling the attack? The attack that was launched because he, over the course of a handful of chapters, invaded Hell itself to steal the secret of immortality, because he was upset that both he and his nemesis survived a point-blank nuclear explosion? A plan that worked because he is numerically So Good At Magitech that he can produce arbitrary problem-solving devices out of thin air, provided we get two paragraphs of text quoted from the spellbook he is writing? …are LitRPG fans literally incapable of enjoying a story if there isn’t a ding! in every chapter?
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Jan 27, 2024 06:29
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Omi no Kami posted:I've always felt that the serial space does a great disservice to its writers. Between the patreon stuff, the weird parasocial nonsense, and the insane amount of antagonism everyone involved directs towards negative feedback, it feels like authors get trapped in a world where their first attempt at writing receives nonstop validation. See, first off, the discourse around webfiction seems much MORE negative to me than around other books - see Velius posted:the Patreon is just full of comments about exponential growth curves of character strength and why isn’t the MC even more powerful?! Ugh. Like, there's a massive contingent of people talking poo poo about every part of every webfiction. And, personally, I think constructive criticism CAN be helpful, but all too often it turns into hearing that people don't want what you actually liked about your work - there's a ton of posts in this very thread about how most webfiction kinda sucks because it's incredibly long and drawn-out, and Proper Writing Technique says to plot like you're making a movie, tight and efficient. But if somebody want to write something long and drawn-out, and somebody else wants to read it, then they are writing correctly, full stop. Plenty of webfiction I like wouldn't exist if the author was told they were writing wrong because it doesn't fit the common conception of the correct way to write.
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Jan 27, 2024 06:36
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Look I might be impressed by the size of the turd I just dropped, you might even be shocked as well, but at the end of the day it's still a turd
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Jan 27, 2024 06:45
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Omi no Kami posted:I've always felt that the serial space does a great disservice to its writers. Between the patreon stuff, the weird parasocial nonsense, and the insane amount of antagonism everyone involved directs towards negative feedback, it feels like authors get trapped in a world where their first attempt at writing receives nonstop validation. Uhhhh having written a vaguely popular thing, the sheer amount of hate and critism I get is... yeah. People are NOT positive
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Jan 27, 2024 12:46
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There's a reason Wildbow pretty much stopped interacting with anyone online outside of a few specific discord servers and it's not because people were too positive towards him.
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Jan 27, 2024 13:11
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I think it depends really strongly on the story type. Re: Trailer Trash seems to be almost entirely positive comments (god if THAT author had to deal with lots of awful comments I’d lose even more faith in humanity). Or maybe posting authors notes where you express human feelings and limitations makes a difference? Wandering inn generally has a positive tone too, despite having numbers, probably because they’re largely irrelevant. Most of the power fantasy ones seem to be read by the worst offenders, not surprisingly.
Velius fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Jan 27, 2024 |
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Jan 27, 2024 14:33
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John Lee posted:See, first off, the discourse around webfiction seems much MORE negative to me than around other books - see That's a bad argument. A lot of really lovely reality tv is popular. It doesn't mean its good, just that some people have really poo poo taste. There is also the whole continuing to consume a work just due to momentum even if it no longer has much appeal. Can you really claim a work that has a bunch of subplots that go nowhere as good writing? You might enjoy it moment to moment, but ultimately its a disposable work that will be forgotten as soon as its usually awkwardly finished or straight up abandoned. A lot of the time criticism comes from frustration that there is a barrier to enjoyment. Sometimes its wrong, but criticism is absolutely essential for an author to grow. There are many instances of extremely popular writers using that popularity to get complete creative control, and their works turns to poo poo because of it.
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Jan 27, 2024 16:50
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IShallRiseAgain posted:That's a bad argument. A lot of really lovely reality tv is popular. It doesn't mean its good, just that some people have really poo poo taste. There is also the whole continuing to consume a work just due to momentum even if it no longer has much appeal. "Sure, maybe the AUTHOR likes it, and the READERS like it, but popular things aren't necessarily good  "Like, sorry if I'm being overly obvious, but: There are plenty of works in every media sphere that simply do nothing for me, and I really see them as worthless... to me. But the exact opposite thing has happened, where a work is meaningful to me and other people say that it's obviously garbage for idiots, because people are different and find different things valuable. It's a mistake to say that things you see as poorly crafted and/or having no meaningful message are Bad and shouldn't exist - at the very least, the reading audience could simply have not encountered the ideas present before, because they're not big readers/thinkers or they're just kids. You say that it happens all the time that writers get creative control and then their writing is RUINED because they get to write what and how they want (many such cases!  ), but, uh, I bet they don't feel that way. "Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good!" is exactly what you said up there, but when it's about a writer writing whatever they actually want, but (implicitly) losing some audience because of it, suddenly the popular opinion IS the mark of quality? Either making your work more popular by hewing closer to the median popularity of pacing, plotting, story type, etc. is bad or it's good or it's neither, but TBH it sounds like you're saying "It's bad when it's stuff that, in those changes, got farther from my personal tastes, but good when it produces stuff I like."
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Jan 27, 2024 19:26
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uh yeah its unequivocally true that something being popular doesnt inherently mean its good. like, it can be good but its not a given. or at least more generously that theres not room for improvement. if your argument is that the only indicator of quality is popularity that quickly takes you to some insane places.
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Jan 27, 2024 19:34
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IShallRiseAgain posted:That's a bad argument. A lot of really lovely reality tv is popular. It doesn't mean its good, just that some people have really poo poo taste. There is also the whole continuing to consume a work just due to momentum even if it no longer has much appeal. So while I feel like web serial authors could definitely improve in some ways, I don't think it's any more of a problem than in any other genre. IMO people comparing them to published stuff kind of miss the point. I don't think published works are immune to any of the problems webserials have. At best you have people who can't spell or can't plot too good filtered out/polished up so their work is readable but that's it.
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Jan 27, 2024 19:56
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I think it's worth pointing out that I was specifically talking about writing, and not story. Obviously story judgements are subjective- you're free to enjoy whatever you want, and more power to you. I personally love tons of garbage. But writing isn't just creativity, it's also craft. And there are a lot of fairly basic technical principals of crafting prose that I find most serialists miss. I'm not saying that Big Grammar is coming for your waifu litRPG, I'm just saying that the vast, vast majority of online writers seem allergic to even minimal study of their craft. Most top-grossing RRL projects wouldn't pass a freshman composition course, and that's crazy. Learning the rudiments of creative writing isn't fun, but it's very doable, and very systematic- in my experience most writers make enormous leaps and bounds over their first 100-300k words of feedback and iteration, and start growing quickly from there. And this isn't tough stuff! I've always felt that Stephen King's On Writing is an excellent primer on creative writing, as well as Strunk & White's Elements of Style. The sort of things they cover aren't abstract or complex, it's basic loving poo poo like "Use the correct tense," "Spell your words correctly," "Don't use adverbs unless you need to." Even that is too much for a lot of web authors, and I just don't get it. On the criticism side, I do think it's worth separating fans and fan communities from C&C. Fans of every piece of media are insane shitheads that you shouldn't engage with, that's always been the rule. So I'm not saying that serialists should listen to their fans- that's insane, counterproductive, and wouldn't help. But I'm saying that writing without feedback means writing without improvement, and I think a lot of web authors don't realize how much their writing could improve with some very basic feedback. To give you a ballpark, there's a really funny process that a lot of commercial writers go through- the first few things they work on feel very personal to them, they come in to the developmental process with a lot of emotion invested in the work, and when editors give them feedback the writer doesn't hear "These things are problems," they hear "This editor hates me." As a developmental editor you need to be patient with new writers and work collaboratively to help them grow a thicker skin. But that doesn't last long- as writers improve their technical chops and start getting a handle on the whole process they tend to improve really rapidly. Nearly everyone I've worked with has flipped from "gently caress you, I'm gonna write what I want" to "You're not giving me enough criticism, what else sucks in this draft?" within a single manuscript. And whenever I see a serial author defend their writing, it sounds exactly like new authors when they take technical criticism personally. Except a lot of serialists have been doing this for 3-5 years, and are still writing and acting like brand-new writers. I just don't understand how someone could put that much effort into their creativity without also working to develop their craft. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jan 27, 2024 |
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Jan 27, 2024 20:12
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I wrote a lot of words on this but the app crashed and took them with it, so here’s the short version: There is a big difference between criticism and critique. Readers posting negative things in the comments section is a signal that people don’t like the thing, not necessarily that it is bad, and positive comments likewise signal that people like it, not that it is good. Critique is a specific and deliberate analysis of the work that finds its strengths and weaknesses in order to promote the growth of the author. I think the whole “write a hundred thousand words to get the bad ones out” idea is predicated on the author writing terrible novels with the specific intent to improve. This is good advice for any creative work; a carpenter will make wobbly tables forever if they don’t sit down and figure out why their tables are all wobbly. The issue with serial authors who never improve is not a problem inherent to web serials as a medium, but rather the environment they’re posted in being harmful to a growth mindset. Pleasing your comments section is not how you become a more technically proficient author, but it is how you get to feel good about the work that you’re pouring hours of your life into every week. If people like it, why would you need to improve?
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Jan 27, 2024 20:33
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Most people aren't aware that the concept of writing craft you speak of even exists or what benefits it might have, and that ignorance as a result applies to many authors in fields with low barriers to entry such as fanfic and webserials. Heck, you've said yourself that many beginner authors don't know the benefits of having a good editor until they have experienced it.
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