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gonadic io posted:PGTS book 4 it really feels like something's got to give soon. My bet is on Thaddeus deciding that she's getting tuition from the Raven queen because she can do things that only the Raven queen can and he's seen them. The conduit stuff and if he remembers her comments about splitting Will. I personally think that Merlin is Siobhan in the past.
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Feb 21, 2024 03:17
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Plorkyeran posted:The thing that got me to finally drop Millennial Mage was the second authorial screed about how women exist to have babies complete with the tradcath meme about how a woman who is a scientist has wasted her life because she could have given birth to multiple scientists instead.  The MC is a female battle mage  Although I guess the MC modeling her powerset after traditional not-Greek heroes should have been a warning sign in retrospect. I just assumed the author wasn't aware of how rapey Greek heroes were.
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Feb 21, 2024 03:23
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Nettle Soup posted:
It was after she got kidnapped and then made it back to human civilization, so a few arcs after where you dropped it. In retrospect those arcs were kinda boring and dropping where you did would have been better. LLSix posted:
Mages live a long time so it wasn't "you need to drop anything and have some kids now" but rather "you can spend a few decades running around doing things but eventually you'll grow up and decide to squeeze out a dozen babies" ("dozen" not actually being an exaggeration).
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Feb 21, 2024 04:51
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nrook posted:(Did you know: People who don't think clearly are dumb and pathetic?)
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Feb 21, 2024 05:26
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i do not think the author actually endorses tala's thoughts in that arc. millennial mage has always had a strong undercurrent of "tala is wrong about a lot of poo poo" and at the current point in the story her advancement as a mage depends on her growing as a person and aligning her thoughts with reality instead of stupid preconceptions or biases. i realize there's always a danger in saying "the character is deliberately wrong" because an author can reveal themselves to be a lovely person at any time, but like. tala is deliberately written to be wrong and characterizing her thoughts as authorial screeds seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the story is doing. pgts also suffers from people thinking siobhan's thoughts are the authors thoughts, sometimes, but siobhan is also deliberately written to be wrong, very frequently. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 06:01
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Those aren't Tala's thoughts. It was the older wiser advisors giving Tala advice, and nothing in the story even hinted that we should think that they are wrong.
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Feb 21, 2024 06:27
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Nitrousoxide posted:I personally think that Merlin is Siobhan in the past. Oh poo poo what if the supposed dream abberation thing is just Merlin's personality locked away
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Feb 21, 2024 12:03
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gonadic io posted:Oh poo poo what if the supposed dream abberation thing is just Merlin's personality locked away That personality wouldn't exist yet. Merlin aged backwards, meaning Siobhan will become Merlin in the past
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Feb 21, 2024 12:11
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When you design a setting such that a mage's enlightened understanding of the world can be objectively measured by how cool their fireballs are, readers can assume that the inner monologues of the best fireballers will start to resemble the author's views. I read Millennial Mage for quite a while because I wanted to know what came next, but the story is bad and its themes are bad.
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Feb 21, 2024 14:07
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again Horizon Burning posted:it feels like every web serial has this awkward moment where readers are like 'is this protagonist an antisocial weirdo written by an antisocial weirdo, or is the author a secret genius doing an unreliable narrator' and it's odd to see how common it is and how often people decide it's the second option instead of just realizing that maybe people who write thousands and thousands of words every week might not be the most well-adjusted people?
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Feb 21, 2024 14:59
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It's also a weird place for your analysis to end. Even if it is an unreliable narrator and the text is working to examine their views, it doesn't mean the actual views of the author or the text are without flaw. I love Book of the New Sun. You'd be hard pressed to find a better story where the unreliable narrator has lovely views. Gene Wolf certainly isn't endorsing all of Sevarian's views, but the world view that does end up coming through is not without flaws.
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Feb 21, 2024 17:59
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Wittgen posted:It's also a weird place for your analysis to end. Even if it is an unreliable narrator and the text is working to examine their views, it doesn't mean the actual views of the author or the text are without flaw. It's great to read novels by people whose views you don't agree with, but that doesn't apply to web novels, come on. They're not literature, and supporting people with garbage views isn't worth it, just read some other crap. The author of "Millenial Mage" isn't Gene Wolf or Murakami.
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Feb 21, 2024 18:16
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I did actually finish Paranoid Mage, and oh boy were the author's world views coming through loud and clear by the end.
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Feb 21, 2024 18:23
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Arkendrithyst is getting paused for a few weeks while the author writes the entire ending of the story, and I am a combination of excited and sad.
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Feb 21, 2024 18:24
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M. Night Skymall posted:It's great to read novels by people whose views you don't agree with, but that doesn't apply to web novels, come on. They're not literature, and supporting people with garbage views isn't worth it, just read some other crap. The author of "Millenial Mage" isn't Gene Wolf or Murakami. even back when everything had to go through a real publisher sci-fi and fantasy were replete with works written by maladjusted weirdos though, and while there are obviously massive gradations in writing quality (with most web serials being on the very low end) I don't think the "real literature" binary is often terribly helpful obviously if the views are truly offensive garbage or the writing turns into didactic screeds (or its just boring/uninteresting) then you should drop stuff without a moment of hesitation, but the amount of support you're giving something by merely reading it on RR is beyond minimal, and even well-adjusted people go in weird directions/authors often work through stuff in their writing I've found enough enjoyment/interesting stuff in published genre fiction that also required me to overlook things like the authors-not-even-barely-disguised-fetish that I am (and I think others should be) often willing to work past allusions to dubious politics if it seems like there's something compelling there a good example of where this approach has some value in the web-serial space specifically is probably Worm, because its a work a lot of people have enjoyed/valued and which has some stuff in the early going that seemed like pretty clear indicators that the author was neither particularly well adjusted or possessed of good and well-considered political and social views
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Feb 21, 2024 19:23
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Cicero posted:I mean I took that as more of a display of Siobhan's mentality/arrogance. That's exactly the kind of thing she thinks. I think it’s both. It is clearly true, in the text, that Siobhan is arrogant, rude, and cuts people off quickly if she thinks they aren’t worth her time. And while this is portrayed as cool and badass it’s also portrayed as a character flaw; there’s a reason she resolves to be kinder at one point. But it’s also the case, I think, that the value PGtE valorizes most is the ability to think clearly and rationally. That’s what separates someone like Thaddeus Lacer from “normal people”.
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Feb 21, 2024 20:53
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gonadic io posted:I did actually finish Paranoid Mage, and oh boy were the author's world views coming through loud and clear by the end.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:02
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Skill Thief 40 - Holy poo poo. I can't believe Aspreay actually (sorta) owned Valente. That whole "fight" was amazing.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:08
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nrook posted:I think it’s both. It is clearly true, in the text, that Siobhan is arrogant, rude, and cuts people off quickly if she thinks they aren’t worth her time. And while this is portrayed as cool and badass it’s also portrayed as a character flaw; there’s a reason she resolves to be kinder at one point. Thaddeus Lacer is, I think, the only character who is portrayed as unambiguously good within the framework of the narrative. Even when we're not seeing him through Siobhan's (biased) FOV, he's always the smartest and most correct person in the room. He's a perfect role model for the qualities that the narrative holds up as things to aspire towards. It's a good thing that Siobhan shows how those qualities can be taken too far or poorly applied. Her competence and self-sufficiency, taken to extremes, have led her to exploit and ultimately ruin a very important relationship. Her pragmatism has, among other things, led her to allow a huge web of misinformation to form around her identity as the Raven Queen. She's massively overextended herself in ways she doesn't know how to fix, like how she's been lying to Damien for months about a fake secret society, and all of this is definitely going to crash down around her.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:46
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DACK FAYDEN posted:did it end? did he murder all the (((globalists))) and marry his tradwife? his tradwife who suddenly stopped having opinions or anything to say immediately after getting married. and the protag goes back to church. and has 2 kids. and nobody ever, even the mages way better than him at portals, are able to beat him. he murdered essentially every government worker out there then was like well if the next one is poo poo I'll just murder them all too. then retires to his tradfarm. or something like that it was a while ago and I was pretty checked out by that point for obvious reasons
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Feb 21, 2024 22:01
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Bog Standard has been dragging for awhile but they finally did the big reveal. Bog 46 Not surprised it was the witch girl with hoarder parents. I didn't expect them to be her undead familiars but it was obvious something was up with them. I definitely did NOT predict the witch wearing her zombie familiar mother as a skin suit.
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Feb 21, 2024 23:26
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blastron posted:Thaddeus Lacer is, I think, the only character who is portrayed as unambiguously good within the framework of the narrative. Even when we're not seeing him through Siobhan's (biased) FOV, he's always the smartest and most correct person in the room. He's a perfect role model for the qualities that the narrative holds up as things to aspire towards. Hmm. I don't know that I agree? Well, I certainly do not agree that Lacer is "portrayed as unambiguously good", unless you want argue that when he says that mind control is good for public order we're supposed to agree with him. Actually, I just went to reread that passage and I think I should post it, because the authorial voice seems even more starkly against Lacer than I remembered: quote:“Do you remember the night that Newton Moore broke? All of it?” I do think that Lacer is consistently portrayed as the best parental figure in Siobhan's orbit, though I feel a lot of that is down to him knowing how to speak her language, and being sufficiently in possession of the things that she values that she takes him more seriously than she does other people and respects his opinions. nrook posted:But it’s also the case, I think, that the value PGtE valorizes most is the ability to think clearly and rationally. That’s what separates someone like Thaddeus Lacer from “normal people”. This is also an interesting one to poke at because, well, what does being "the smartest and most correct person in the room" actually get Lacer? And exactly how separate is he from the "normal people"? We get a lot of scenes of him rolling his eyes and scoffing at other people's bad deductions, and then confidently drawing conclusions that are also incorrect. Being the steely-eyed rationalist ubermensch has not allowed Lacer to solve the mystery of the Raven Queen. His conception of her might be more plausible than the lesser deity imagined by the commoners and the Crown's cackling supervillain, but I don't think it's any less of a fantasy. And, conversely, while Siobhan might not be a god, petitioning her gets results- so if the commoners are wrong they're wrong in a technical sense that doesn't matter all that much on the practical level. Lacer isn't wrong just because he's working from incomplete information, either: when he decides that the Raven Queen put the anti-divination ward on Sebastien because she was trying to communicate with him, that's pure narcissism talking. He very quickly comes to consider a peer or a foil for himself, and allows that to colour his every interpretation of her- he consistently overestimates both her capabilities and the intentionality of her actions. aPGtS reminds me a lot of Wheel of Time in this- it seems to present a worldview in which the quality of the answers isn't dependent on your being "smart" or "stupid", but on the strength of the information available to you and the flexibility of the framework you use to interpret it. You can be as clever as you want and it's not going to help you if you're building on bad priors.
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Feb 22, 2024 02:19
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Yeah, my opinion of Lacer was always that he was ruthlessly pragmatic at best, and functioned not just as a mentor but also a way of Siobhan learning just how messed up that world is - because even someone who she deeply respects, and honestly is nicer than most in the setting, thinks nothing of things she considers horrible. I haven't read the latest book yet, though, so I figured maybe there was more I didn't know.
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Feb 22, 2024 04:10
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Yeah, I don't think PGtS always depicts his moral compass as flawless. I don't really think the authorial voice shows anything there (the voice is pretty much always very sympathetic to the viewpoint character) but Lacer's coldness comes through in other contexts as well. The series pretty much always depicts him as cool and charismatic--- it wants you, the reader, to like him--- but that's a different thing. (Book IV) It's not just Lacer, though. Every character with true agency gets it by their ability to think clearly and rationally, to make decisions based on logic rather than falling to their lesser instincts. Oliver Dryden is a good example here because of course his ethics are opposite Lacer's; he genuinely goes out there, works all the time and risks his life to help ordinary people, many of whom he doesn't know. And while some characters think him ridiculous for wanting this, it's pretty clear that he's a hero and a saint for doing so. But the reason he is able to make a difference and get closer to his goals is because he's careful and never overwhelmed by events. There's always the blank mask of Lord Stag turning the gears behind his charming face. And I could go on and on like this. Indeed even the Will itself is a metaphor here, and not a particularly subtle one; "clarity of Will" is just a magic form of "clarity of thought". And like, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Clarity of thought and the ability to work hard and make decisions that make sense are actually virtues in real life, even if "rationalists" make annoying blog posts and suspiciously often seem sympathetic to eugenics. (There's actually eugenics in PGtS but I don't really hold it against it... weird magic bloodlines are older than scientific racism. It's fine.) And it's not like this is the Fountainhead or something; there's a chapter called "the Alliance Against Curiosity" but it's not like there's an alliance for curiosity and all the more rational characters become friends and work things out. But it's definitely a theme of the work.
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Feb 22, 2024 04:11
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Ah, I forgot about the mind control apologia bit. To qualify what I meant by “good”, I meant within the ratficcy framework that the story seems to present. Specifically, he’s very knowledgable and makes measured, informed decisions, and those decisions result in the furthering of his personal goals. His morals are oriented towards the greater good, and even his questionable decisions like supporting mind-wiping Aberrant victims follow clear lines of thinking. He’s also portrayed as just being flat-out right about a lot of things, to the point where we can largely assume that if he gives the readers information or conclusions, it’s almost assuredly correct. His big surface-level flaw is that he has no patience for idiots, but this doesn’t really cause him problems. He’s powerful and respected enough to get away with being aloof and dismissive to those he considers beneath him, and is smart enough to keep his mouth shut when it would be actively detrimental not to. He has a big ego, but not an overinflated one; he acts like one of the best thaumaturges in the world because he is one. He does, however, have a big blind spot about the Raven Queen, which falls rather neatly out of the intersection between his curiosity and his ego. He is jumping to conclusions about her having some special interest in him, and he’s been acting selfishly (and, gasp, irrationally) in order to satisfy his curiosity. Even so, he is significantly less wrong about her than everyone else is, having correctly identified her as being a thaumaturge instead of a weird spirit/god and correctly figuring out how a lot of her tricks work. Most of the places where he’s wrong, such as about her being a free-caster, are due to incomplete information, such as how witnesses did not notice her novel technique of gluing a sheet of glass to her hand to draw Circles on. I do think that there will be a turning point where he’s proven to be less than perfect, probably as a lesson to Siobhan about arrogance or single-mindedness, but I think it will be a humbling, as opposed to a repudiation of his whole character. I could be wrong, though; I did not expect Siobhan and Oliver’s strong relationship to blow up the way that it did, even though in hindsight it makes perfect sense.
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Feb 22, 2024 04:44
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Kyoujin posted:Bog Standard has been dragging for awhile but they finally did the big reveal. Bog 46 Not surprised it was the witch girl with hoarder parents. I didn't expect them to be her undead familiars but it was obvious something was up with them. I definitely did NOT predict the witch wearing her zombie familiar mother as a skin suit. That was legit cool, honestly.
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Feb 22, 2024 05:05
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2x Public chapters of Insanity Some big lore drops - not entirely surprising - but good lord if I was ever tempted to drop money on that story I'd do it now because that's a helluva cliffhanger to make us wait two weeks on
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Feb 22, 2024 08:06
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Super supportive 121 Bye Manon lol. You reap what you sow, I guess.
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Feb 22, 2024 08:17
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Kyoujin posted:Super supportive 121 Bye Manon lol. You reap what you sow, I guess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0DKieA4sk
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Feb 22, 2024 08:54
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Supsup 121 well Manon aced her skill check to give Aulia a really bad day, that's for sure
gonadic io fucked around with this message at 09:41 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 09:37
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Kyoujin posted:Super supportive 121 Bye Manon lol. You reap what you sow, I guess. SS121 Yeeesch. I felt Hazel was potentially redeemable as an incredibly spoiled child that had no chance from the get-go being raised in the kind of enviroment she did, but I didn't expect her to clock Manon in the face with a literal hourglass. . And now for a week hiatus on RR. Nooooo.
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Feb 22, 2024 13:22
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SupSup 121: “I’ve said, I’ve always said, that girl is going to snap and kill someone one day,”
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Feb 22, 2024 13:34
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SupSup 121: Hero Hazel is the first and only avowed from Alden age cohort to defeat a villain! I do think that Manon's Tailor Environment skill pushed Hazel to kill her too. She was constantly pressuring her to remove whatever was causing Hazel to feel uncomfortable and want to leave. What was making Hazel uncomfortable but Manon herself! It's clear Hazel was heavily under Tailor Environment's sway since she had lots of missing time and didn't even realize she was stacking up tons of chains.
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Feb 22, 2024 13:47
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Lamquin posted:SS121 Yeeesch. I felt Hazel was potentially redeemable as an incredibly spoiled child that had no chance from the get-go being raised in the kind of enviroment she did, but I didn't expect her to clock Manon in the face with a literal hourglass. . I mean, that is the single most defensible thing Hazel has done this story.
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Feb 22, 2024 13:48
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Supsup 121 It's pretty funny that if Hazel had immediately gone to the cops she probably would have been fine. They would lie detect her to establish that she really did, correctly, believe that her mind was compromised and she was in immediate danger. Instead she went to Aulia who instead of prioritising Hazel's well-being, swept the whole thing under the rug (didn't want to embarrass the family or have people know that she was using unlicensed mind controllers) to blow up at some future point, and by that point it's way too late for Hazel to claim she did nothing wrong. It's something for Lute's investigation into Aulia's misdeeds to find, and it's also I believe a ticking timebomb where the Palace are eventually going to find out what Hazel did (to Alden), kick her out, and then at any time and location an angry Hazel with a vengeful (and pretty devastating in the right circumstances) skill use might appear. gonadic io fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 14:03
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Soupsoup121 Why does the bigger villain not simply eat the smaller villain? Oh wait, she did? I'm just curious how long it will take for Hazel's skill to undergo perception stretching and mess with contracts (the thing the Artonan empire is made from) and debts other than word chains. On an entirely unrelated note, would you say that demonic / chaos occurrences are a delayed cost of using magic, you know, like something that's owed coming due, a claim to be settled, an obligation to take care of? A debt meeting the debtor? What I'm saying is Demon Summoner Hazel seems surprisingly likely at this point if that's remotely how things work. The Artonans are probably using something like that already, to make the Slaughterhouse (and institutions like it on other planets) run like clockwork and make all their sub second timing combo attacks line up at just the right place and time.
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Feb 22, 2024 18:45
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Chaos being tied to the use of magic seems a reasonable possibility. Joe did say that the chaos problem was a fundamentally unsolvable problem, which if it was essentially "pollution" from magic use, would fit for the wizard Artonans. It could mean that Matadero is essentially a "trash dump" of chaos for the Artonans and would also explain why Earth had no known chaos issues before the Artonans showed up.
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Feb 22, 2024 19:18
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I definitely believe that chaos is essentially global warming arising from the way that Artonan wizardry works. More specifically we've seen two other types of magic, wordchains and Gorgon's stuff, and both require some pretty large sacrifices to get their effects. So large in fact that the majority of people who could have used either don't really bother because the costs are too high for casual use. (How many things that currently use electricity from the grid would you still do if all energy had to be hand cranked by yourself?) Artonan magic, however, just mildly fatigues the caster and costs them nothing major and nothing permanent. In a story with large themes of deals and equivalent exchange, I think this is pretty stark. But as the analogy suggests, for the Artonans and especially the Artonan wizard ruling class to fundamentally destroy their entire way of life to give up such magic use, well, we could stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow if we really wanted to. e: and furthermore, the Artonans have already set up a system with wordchains where the rich important people get the benefits and the chainers transfer the costs to the poor (at least this is how I believe the Palace works). If this isn't a metaphor for climate change/pollution and the global south/proletariat in general I don't know what is. gonadic io fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 19:45
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What I don't get is how affixing the Avowed seemingly helping is supposed to work?
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Feb 22, 2024 19:55
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gonadic io posted:Supsup 121 It's pretty funny that if Hazel had immediately gone to the cops she probably would have been fine. They would lie detect her to establish that she really did, correctly, believe that her mind was compromised and she was in immediate danger. Instead she went to Aulia who instead of prioritising Hazel's well-being, swept the whole thing under the rug (didn't want to embarrass the family or have people know that she was using unlicensed mind controllers) to blow up at some future point, and by that point it's way too late for Hazel to claim she did nothing wrong. Manon was rather famous and almost no one is aware that her skill can be used for mind control. And it wouldn't surprise me if Hazel's contract tattoo would prevent her from telling the police that Manon was a sway, since she only knew due to Aulia including her in the family business. So I'm not sure it would have been that easy, and it likely would have gotten very messy for both Hazel and Aulia. But yeah, it's ironic that Hazel has a much better justification for the actual murder than all the other poo poo she's done.
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Feb 22, 2024 20:00
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