Web Novel megathread: 90% fantasy settings, 90% repressed nerd fantasies

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Web Novel megathread: 90% fantasy settings, 90% repressed nerd fantasies

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Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Fallorn posted:

The fact that the MC is literally broken in the head and past elder god gibbering and not just emotionally not really present is different. He is so crazy once some gods realize they are like oh wait I do not want to gently caress with you.

that's the one thing that kinda keeps my interest yeah

i mostly just skim it though, it falls into the dumb pattern of "oh no the MC starts with a huge disadvantage this is different i swear, also they easily overcome the disadvantage 5 seconds in and it becomes generic power trip #231"

xianxia pulls that poo poo constantly

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Mar 28, 2018

# ¿ Mar 28, 2018 22:16

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 15:55

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Ytlaya posted:

Yeah, this seems common to most power fantasy web novel things, both isekai and cultivation stuff. I'm not sure why they even bother with the pretense, really. I guess it's create the illusion that the protagonist somehow "deserves" their power and isn't as privileged?

the weird thing is that before they get everything immediately handed to them there's sometimes a brief period where they are actually underpowered and things are genuinely interesting

this usually lasts maybe 4 chapters though

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 20:10

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Tunicate posted:

chat group at least has him consistently out of his league

i mean its obvious nothing too bad is gonna happen since its a comedy story

and the biggest challenges are less beating up enemies and more putting up with the insane rear end in a top hat wizards who are ostensibly on his side

tbf the wizards ARE genuinely on his side, it's just that they're both extremely enthusiastic and extremely stupid common-sense wise

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 21:54

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

i think the funniest example of that i've seen was in invincible, where the mc was reincarnated with full memory and had approximately 800 million different unique advantages over any other person who ever lived, but started his story with a bitter feud against his 5 year old cousin. all of said cousin's immediate family died, and i think the child himself was beheaded before he hit puberty. nothing less would have sufficed, because a small child was rude to another small child.

invincible is so dang bad.

i like how the more petty the MC's grudges are the more obvious it is that they're author stand-ins

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 21:56

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

-the author thinks esports are the pinnacle of human achievement
-since esports are the most exciting thing he can possibly imagine, he writes the fans of such as deranged howling cultists who latch on to the e-thletes as living gods they would die and kill for

this sounds amazing

# ¿ Mar 31, 2018 02:32

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Chronische posted:

Meng Hao was a good boy. Too bad the series lost what made it interesting after he left planet South Heaven, and honestly for a good while before that too.

ISSTH is divided into boring curbstomp fights and incredible shenanigans, and unfortunately the latter shows up less and less as the series goes on.

I think the highest point of the whole story is when some super-god is trying to kill him with a transdimensional soul-eating fishing rod from the sky that stops time and meng hao's response is to run around stealing everyone's poo poo while time is stopped and it's chasing him

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 5, 2018

# ¿ Apr 5, 2018 19:40

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Kyoujin posted:

I enjoyed him looting the tiles (shingles?) while everyone else was fighting over some treasures or something.

oh man i forgot about him strip-mining an ancient city for precious spiritual roofing

when issth was good it was insanely good

# ¿ Apr 8, 2018 08:17

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

cultivation chat group: i can't believe so many people are so eager to test venerable white's fantastic new invention

everyone is extremely kind

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 07:11

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

sunken fleet posted:

I've seen that one pop up before but I always imagined that it was just the horrible JP WN trope where the MC gets sidetracked talking about glorious Japanese food for chapters at a time

why does this happen so much anyway

# ¿ May 8, 2018 12:57

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

khy posted:

Food is an incredibly, incredibly huge part of culture. We have to eat 3 times a day, so every culture out there has spent time and effort into developing ways to make those meals as fulfilling as possible. Because of that, a lot of people get extremely proud of their cooking and their country's cuisine. Even outside of manga and novels, we glorify chefs and cooking - there's a TV channel dedicated to food preparation 24/7, countless movies about chefs and restaurants and food preparation, you name it.

Also, in googling the topic I have seen a lot of references to how immigrants have a strong tendancy to use food to combat homesickness - to relive nostalgic and happy memories. I wonder if authors want us to think their characters are doing the same, seeking out that tiny bit of japanese familiarity despite being thrown into unfamiliar and exotic situations. If you google about why food is such a big part of culture there's a fair amount of interesting articles that go into more detail.

i know people love talking about food, it is literally impossible to post a picture of a pizza anywhere on the forums without starting a 3-page derail, but it is still astoundingly boring no matter how realistic it is

# ¿ May 8, 2018 16:28

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

khy posted:

Pizza isekai when?

see what i loving mean

you did this as a joke but it still resulted in a lot of foodposting

the universal truth of the internet is that everyone thinks their food opinions are the most important thing in the universe

# ¿ May 9, 2018 10:09

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Tunicate posted:

I can't remember the name -its one of the old super griefable games goons loved. It was wuxia themed. There was a lot of politicking in who ruled various sects and an ongoing snobs vs slobs fight with goons against the Vietnamese people who knew how them game actually worked (since the English server was a poorly translated localization of a Chinese game, and several major updates behind)

one of the best goon strategies was to chug booze like a frat bro so that you'd have a high alcohol tolerance, and if you threw up the cone of projectile vomit would be essentially pure alcohol, instantly incapacitating any of the lightweights.

Then when that other player was in a drunken stupor you could castrate them and sell them into slavery for profit.

That player would then be locked into eunuch kung fu classes until they could do a long series of quests to magically get their junk back.

i wasn't aware that the dick and/or vag was necessary for martial arts prowess

that sounds loving incredible though

# ¿ Sep 6, 2018 01:11

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Darth Walrus posted:

Incidentally, has anyone ever done a story about the people outside the cultivation death-race? Like, imagine running a bar in a xianxia setting. You deal with customers who are more interested in eating you and your staff than your light, refreshing range of snacks. You run evac drills for when a high-level cultivator comes through. You try to survive a fantasy FDA inspection checking exactly how immortality-inducing the food you serve is. You discover that your bouncer has punched out a few dozen too many rowdy drunks and is about to ascend to another plane as the Third-Class Radiant Deity of Happy Hour Enforcement, and you have to scramble madly to find a replacement who is (a) competent and (b) not too much of a sociopathic murder-hobo.

There's mileage there, I think.

"someone accidentally tripped a member of the honorable and heroic Screaming Murder Demon sect and now their patriarch is preparing to refine the entire city into a magical treasure, we need to make the most bad-rear end beer ever to distract him"

# ¿ Oct 24, 2018 21:00

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Ytlaya posted:

Yeah, if anything stories where the person starts out weak relative to their peers and become absurdly powerful through some early challenges are the most common.

they usually have to do something interesting with their disadvantage and it's legit good for maybe 2 chapters, then they immediately lose it and have everything handed to them effortlessly

# ¿ Oct 25, 2018 01:45

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

ShinsoBEAM! posted:

Honestly I consistently read Mahouka as the most accurate depiction of a dystopia I have seen, it's so blatant in some ways that I'm tempted to say even the author is aware of what he is doing.

Like in the lore the only nation that falls under remotely "good" is the USNA but that's mostly in comparison to everyone else, mostly in that they are the only nation that doesn't heavily regulate mages nor is controlled by them. Japan is literally being controlled by an open shadow government of elite family of mages that perform insane experimentation and eugenics on their kids in order to stay on top of the other families. The only reason why all the characters seem to completely ignore the extremely authoritarian parts of their government think this they are good ideas, is because they have been indoctrinated from youth, and are basically all part of the privileged class. Like remember the parts, especially early on, with non-magic people protesting and rioting and the entire cast was like very dismissive of their argument and like wow they are just dumb and ignorant.

These things don't even feel portrayed as good to me, there is just no character in the main cast voicing their opinion against it or generally aware of their own hypocrisy, which many people I think have wrongly taken into asserting the author actually supports these things fully and is like yeah these are good things and cool.

all i really remember from briefly reading mahouka is when the student council president deals with the rampant inequality by holding an assembly and giving a speech that amounts to "rich people are just better, know your place lol" and this is treated as heroic

# ¿ Nov 19, 2018 23:41

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

drilldo squirt posted:

Also how bitter is the Mahuka guy that japan lost WW2?

I know Japan Has Never Committed A War Crime is a big part of the japanese right-wing mythos , so he probably takes the standard stance of pretending WW2 never existed unless it's convenient

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 00:30

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

but really it's because the perfidious chinese are strong and dangerous and trying to destroy japan but also weak and cowardly and easily beaten. it's very standard nationalist rhetoric.

I liked when it was revealed that every single person in chinatown was a criminal terrorist

also magic power is determined solely by how japanese you are

I haven't even read/seen mahouka beyond the first few manga chapters and I know these things, it really doesn't waste time going into turbo racism

# ¿ Nov 25, 2018 03:12

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

I stumbled upon the manga of If It�s for My Daughter, I�d Even Defeat a Demon Lord, and it was cute, I liked it. Then I found the raw web novel and ran it through google translate. After skimming the very poorly translated ending, did Dale really marry Latina or can I blame google for that?

this is what we in the know call getting usagi drop'd

it's the worst

# ¿ Nov 26, 2018 04:30

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

cultivation chat group is still really good

this is my webnovel update ty for reading

# ¿ May 11, 2019 05:21

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Tunicate posted:

I like the recent chapter where Shuhang is finishing up a phone call with a senior and is like 'oh wait, I forgot to ask you something, did you hang up yet?' and he's like 'I've already lived for several thousand years, I'm in no hurry, I'll never hang up first'.

i liked when some kind of insane blood feud started because a small dog interrupted a senior's posting combo

i just finished binge-reading a couple hundred chapters myself after remembering it exists

shuhang may be starting to get op but his entire life is still 100% shenanigans and he has to work for every inch of it so i'm fine with that

e: like i don't think he goes through a single day without some insanely powerful lunatic appearing out of nowhere and howling for his blood who must be stopped in the dumbest way possible

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 06:59 on May 11, 2019

# ¿ May 11, 2019 06:55

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

tbf he died 57 times a few days ago, it's a brand new day and a majora's mask moon isn't plummeting directly towards his face, it's quite suspicious

# ¿ May 11, 2019 07:26

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

7c Nickel posted:

I think I dropped it when the intelligent monster Pekinese kills a German Shepherd while the MC and the racist Gweilo caricature just stand around while their dogs fight to the death. Just too much weird cultural dissonance for me.

he doesn't kill it, just scares the poo poo out of it

and that's the teacher that keeps getting owned because shuhang's seniors want to get him out of class for Adventures

# ¿ May 12, 2019 00:00

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Log082 posted:

CCG is so loving good. It's not one of the funnier parts, but I like how Shuhang is dead serious about making sure his parents live as long as possible and stay safe. I feel like that's not something that happens in any cultivation novel, usually because the parents are dead before the novel starts, but also because most protagonists are so self centered. Shuhang, meanwhile, makes time to hang out with his friends still between all the cultivation nonsense.

there's also a lot of fun worldbuilding and making GBS threads on standard murder-hobos, like there's buddhist sects that cultivate "virtue" and being obnoxiously evil will have a thousand bald glowing men descend upon you to lead you back to the right path and exorcise all your ghosts

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 06:37 on May 12, 2019

# ¿ May 12, 2019 06:34

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

blastron posted:

A modern knowledge isekai that�s both good AND complete, you say?

i look forward to you picking it up followed by it's immediate publication

# ¿ May 13, 2019 07:39

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

it'd be nice if this was a crackdown on rapist murderhobo novels but instead it'll probably be shutting down good stories for being too nice to gays

# ¿ Jun 5, 2019 19:12

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Darth Walrus posted:

If you're OK with Bleach fanfic (and let's be honest here, this is the webnovel thread, it's not a place to get fussy about high art)

actually the line has been drawn at bleach fanfic multiple times in this forum

we do not cross that line

# ¿ Jun 6, 2019 01:22

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Konstantin posted:

Why would the Chinese government care about this poo poo? I understand they are cracking down now due to a certain anniversary, but webnovels seem like they should be pretty far down the priority list.

china always has time for getting mad about gays, friend

# ¿ Jun 6, 2019 12:09

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

sunken fleet posted:

Government censorship is such a strange thing, as someone from the states, it's real hard to wrap my head around it. I wonder if the Chinese stuff I follow is all going to disappear now? "Violence" seems like such an all-encompassing topic that I can't image what censoring it would look like if not just scrubbing like 90% of webnovels on the market out of existence.

the usa also censors the hell out of inconvenient things, they just do so via media blackouts

# ¿ Jun 6, 2019 20:24

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

sunken fleet posted:

lol

please give me one example of a time when the US government moved against webfiction

interesting how insanely specific you had to narrow things to

# ¿ Jun 7, 2019 02:10

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

sunken fleet posted:

welcome to the web novel thread where web novels are discussed friend, if you want to discuss the pressure the US government puts on the news media or hollywood or whatever I welcome you to do that... elsewhere

edit: so this is less of a Zing! type of post, that insanely narrow niche being censored is what sort of boggled my mind in the first place. Like the idea that the US government might start pressuring weedlord69.blogspot.com to be less "subversive" and to tone down its bong and bong adjacent content is just so ludicrous to me on its face that it's astonishing to think of and yet that seems to be exactly what's happening over there in China - tiny internet only operations being targetted for censorship I mean. It's a real eye-opener.

tbf bonermaster26 has had free reign for way too long

# ¿ Jun 7, 2019 03:04

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

china's fun police are very thorough

e: though tbf like 90% of wns are garbage trash and deserve it, but I'm sad about the few good ones that'll get axed

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 7, 2019

# ¿ Jun 7, 2019 15:15

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Tamba posted:

Yeah, relatively early there was a cooking chapter...so many words I'd never seen before

you can usually skip isekai cooking chapters since it's just people going apeshit over soy sauce

# ¿ Jun 9, 2019 15:38

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Argue posted:

that's the best part of isekais

But also her cooking tribulations involve her moaning that she doesn't have soy sauce and not having enough knowledge to recreate it herself so she just makes other dishes that just don't hold a candle to food with soy sauce

that sounds like the most awful chapter imaginable, because it means there will be more soy sauce whining to come

# ¿ Jun 11, 2019 04:03

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

CCG has finally reached the Duel at the Forbidden City, and also the invention of the Song Shuhang Speedometer

you can tell how fast a flying sword is moving by the color of his face, very useful

# ¿ Jun 16, 2019 18:17

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Argas posted:

I think what makes CCG so great is the Song Shuhang is the eternal plaything of the universe. Yes he's a completely OP protagonist with broken powers and plot protection, but the world doesn't care and life can still be suffering even when you're OP.

It also makes his lucky moments feel less bullshit, like after the universe takes a huge dump on him it's funny to watch villainous passerbys just get utterly hosed by the blowback

there's a good balance between owning and getting owned

# ¿ Jun 16, 2019 20:43

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Avulsion posted:

What he doesn't realize is that every time Copper Trigram tries to avoid the consequences of his own actions by impersonating Shuhang, he ends up catching whatever misfortune was scheduled to hit Shuhang that day.

while shuhang is the universe's punching bag, people who plot against shuhang tend to get dicked over by said universe

# ¿ Jun 17, 2019 04:32

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

blastron posted:

Can we please just have a series that starts with a weak protagonist who has to be clever to get through their problems and stays that way through the entire story? I want to read about harrowing near-death adventures where every advantage has to be fought for and nothing is guaranteed, not thirty chapters of �oh no I�m going to die� and then immediate ascension to godhood.

thirty is pretty generous

cultivation chat group might count, the protagonist does get super strong but always faces stuff like 20x above him and needs to cheat like a motherfucker to win

he wins his first couple fights by lying his rear end off with a couple high-level single-use items and using them to pretend he's a Big Deal when a slight breeze would murder him

e: konosuba also does underdog fights pretty well

comedy stories seem a lot better at it for some reason

sunken fleet posted:

iirc in maou-sama retry the main character occasionally busts out his alternate characters in a sort of "transformation sequence" so he can do cool poo poo incognito. Kind of lame but it's something I guess.

I've always felt like there was unexplored potential in the "MMO alt" concept. Nowadays there are so many "transported into another world as a video game character" type deals that it really surprises me that there doesn't seem to be any that have taken a crack at expanding on that thought to include alts. Because alts are super ubiquitous, right? Anyone who ever seriously played an MMO and isn't that specific type of personality that is fine with sinking thousands of hours into one character has alts, so it seems like a natural thing to write about... but nobody does. Bit of a pity.

my dream MMO LN scenario is "npc gains sentience"

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jun 19, 2019

# ¿ Jun 19, 2019 04:47

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Katreus posted:

Re npc gaining sentience - not a ln but you might want to try out Small Medium (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21597/small-medium) which had an interesting take on an npc world trying to cope with game system and players.

Summary from the page re small medium -

eh the writing style's not really my bag but ty for the recommendation anyway

Nalin posted:

Not a LN but I can help ruin your dream either way:

https://tapas.io/series/NPC

i should have specified "and the story is also not poo poo"

Yinlock fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jun 19, 2019

# ¿ Jun 19, 2019 06:16

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Darth Walrus posted:

Grimgar was mentioned, and I've heard that Re:Zero is basically that. If you want a more traditionally structured martial arts epic, Cradle probably counts, if only because the protagonist is in such a mad rush to reach godhood that he's pretty much always running into people and creatures vastly more powerful than him without adequate prep-time.

re:zero is more torture porn than underdog

# ¿ Jun 19, 2019 09:20

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 15:55

Yinlock: Oct 22, 2008

Elephant Parade posted:

re:zero isn't torture porn, imo, since it actually goes somewhere. maybe a little, and it's certainly dark, but I wouldn't file it with Goblin Slayer or anything

Maybe that changes after the adapted content, though

like half of each arc is dedicated to the protagonist dying horribly and having mental breakdowns

# ¿ Jun 22, 2019 03:09

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Web Novel megathread: 90% fantasy settings, 90% repressed nerd fantasies

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