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Sindai posted:Assuming you have an account you can go to Release Filtering and exclude stuff in a bunch of different ways, including groups. Oh I didn't even see that option, makes it so much more bearable. I literally removed two groups and 90% of the frontpage disappeared.
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Apr 22, 2018 04:53
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 13:31 |
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Translation has started on the new Overlord novel if anyone is still following that. Also there's this hilarious misunderstand comedy called To be a power in the shadows that I found the other day. It's really funny, with the same sort of humor as Tiliea's Worries if you're familiar with that one - and it's been updating daily recently. It's the story of a boy who dreams of becoming more powerful than a Taepodong (which is a North Korean ICBM) and I highly recommend it, been checking it daily for a week now.
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Apr 26, 2018 14:25
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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 somehow blown up into a full length novel so I didn't bother reading it. ...do you feel that's an inaccurate summation? Because if so I'd check it out.
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May 7, 2018 03:26
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is that even an official source? or just "translators" charging for other people's work?
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May 17, 2018 05:37
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there's tons of "kingdom-builder" type fantasy stories where MC personally isn't very strong but makes up for it with his amazing knowledge of soy sauce or whatever (for example I Won 4 Billion in a Lottery But I Went to Another World, Risou no Himo Seikatsu, Cooking with Wild Game, Realist Kingdom Reform) all of which are pretty ok if you like the genre. But for more straight "fantasy hero on an adventure" nothing really springs to my mind. I was a sword when I reincarnated maybe? I've heard it's good and that the MC duo become much less overwhelmingly powerful relative to their opponents a little later into the story. Dungeon Defense? The MC is pretty bullshit with his "social engineering" you might call it, but he's personally one of the weakest characters in the setting. Akuyaku Tensei Dakedo Doushite Kou Natta? This one fits bet I think, it' very "low fantasy" and the MC isn't super strong except for her (relatively) high social standing.
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May 17, 2018 09:41
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khy posted:Is this like, a parody or something? No the world is just full of perverts. Some of which apparently feel compelled to translate and share text based erotica for reasons that are unknowable to the likes of me.
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May 19, 2018 10:22
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The official translation scene has taken off a bit since the OP of the thread was made too. Yen Press and the other various publishers all have pretty high quality translations (relative to typical web novel TLs) if what you're looking for has been picked up by one of them.
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Jul 9, 2018 08:52
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spirit stones, my mortal foe  why did I start reading something on the pay site 
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Jul 13, 2018 05:45
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lurksion posted:It is interesting that they've managed to tap into a market of people willing to pony up more $ than books for poo poo. The only redeeming feature of this stuff is that it is (was) free. Yeah I got kind of into Release that Witch and looked at quidian's payment model and noped the gently caress out. It boggles my mind that people are actually willing to pay many many times what you would pay for a book for... I don't want to say garbage but the stuff isn't good. Everything on their site is all really obviously padded to hell and serialized forever to milk idiots. Serializations with thousands of chapters and a payment model that comes out to like a dollar for five chapters? It doesn't take a math genius to see that that get real expensive, real quick. And all for, um, "not great" translations. You would think that there would be no way translated web novels would be worth that much money to anyone but I guess if the prices are set that way there must be some people willing to pay.
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Aug 21, 2018 12:20
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Are there any Chinese novels with female leads that are good and aren't "romance"? I read like 200 chapter of Venomous Consort because the premise tickled me and the first 50~ chapters grabbed my interest. The lead character is some sort of poison master who reincarnates. She assassinates someone in the first couple chapters and then she slowly claws her way back into her families good graces with her skills - it's all pretty cool so I sort of figured that would be what the story was about. But then it just sort of downslides from there because she never kills or fights anyone again and the main male lead gets introduced - he this weird omnipotent stalker guy who follows her around and sometimes randomly strips her of her powers some she can be a damsel in distress for him to rescue... some of it is probably different cultural norms or whatever that made the guy come off as hugely unlikeable to me but yeah. He was really unlikeable. I'd would much rather read a story about the witty female lead wowing everyone with her skills and whatnot rather than the "romance".
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Sep 29, 2018 18:43
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Thanks, I'll check out My disciple died yet again, it sounds funny. Might peek at forge of destiny too since you guys recommend it but I dunno how I feel about english original trying to ape xianxia
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Sep 29, 2018 20:47
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Megazver posted:That and in a similar vein I am still rather enjoying the Library of Heaven's Path. Agreed. The plot gets a bit ( a lot) repetitive but I have fun reading it every time. Slapping faces everywhere!
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Oct 3, 2018 20:30
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quote:in his heart, he was greeting all past eighteen generations of Luo Xi ancestors an entire round
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Oct 9, 2018 22:56
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Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. I'm having fun learning all the weird language ticks of translated Chinese (coughing up blood, slapping faces, and whatnot) but that one wasn't immediately clear.
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Oct 10, 2018 01:09
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DarciisFyer posted:I'm liking this alot too, though I have to add a warning that it has moments of blatant sexism that made me double-take, and I'm already used to ignoring problematic subtext/text in my fiction (as evidenced by me being in this thread). Pretty much all web novels with the "ancient China" tag are ludicrously sexist, even the ones with magical pills and inner power and whatnot. Like 80% of the ones I've read with female protagonists have the lead character disguise their gender 99% of the time so they can interact with the world at all. It's depressing but also representative of actual cultural norms in ancient China I guess? I dunno. The sexism in the genre is so overt and extreme that my eyes just kind of glaze past it at this point. gimme the GOD drat candy posted:going back to a mage revolts... huh, I was thinking of picking this up too. The other "western" Chinese web novel I've read (release that witch) was pretty good but reading your post it sounds like this... isn't more of that.
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Oct 28, 2018 05:23
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meh, that's just web serial format in general. The author has no desire or obligation to wrap things up quickly. The pacing definitely suffers for it but a lot of these types of stories are designed from the ground up to be open-ended enough to let the plot drag out forever (or at least until the readers jump ship).
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Oct 29, 2018 21:41
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So here's a random plug. Recently I found and have been reading through Lightning Empress Maid. I can guarantee it's about a million times less horrible than you might assume due to the title. The whole thing is written in a quasi-first person perspective (no use of "I" but everything clearly is filtered through the lens of the main characters thoughts) and it's an interesting stylistic thing that the translator manages to bring across pretty well. Plus it doesn't slot into any of the currently popular web novel tropes (no isekai, no otome game, no dungeons or cooking or harem) it's probably the most interesting entirely new idea™ story that I've come across in a while - and I stumbled into it while randomly searching keywords on NU. So I thought I'd share. The premise is basically that there's this super powerful person who gets chased out of her position and goes on to become a maid. There's a fairly dramatic overarching plot (involving the people who chased her out and the state of the world at large) that mostly takes a backseat to daily life hijinks and comedy for the parts of the story that I've read. When it gets serious it gets fairly serious and the rest of the time it's just pretty funny and light-hearted. In fact, even when it's serious it still feels light-hearted thanks to the unreliable narrator MC. As an example, here's a moment when Nanaki (the MC) offhandly thinks about the time she became king in mother nature. quote:“I will go catch rats.” Hints of a tragic backstory wrapped in a joke~
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Nov 2, 2018 08:06
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im about 90% sure its a purposeful stylistic choice
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Nov 2, 2018 11:26
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Yeah the only novels with queer characters I can think of that aren't smut are the two or three with a capital "M" Message about the LBQT experience. Not a lot of JP/CN/KR web novels that are just incidentally inclusive that I can think of off the top of my head.
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Nov 9, 2018 12:12
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Having a full sentence or two of text as the "title" looks absurd in English but maybe it doesn't read so badly in Japanese? I dunno. It's a strange trend.
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Dec 3, 2018 07:14
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The whole "plagiarism" genre is a bit baffling to me. I'm pretty sure that timing is at least as important, maybe more important than, quality when it comes to popular art. Like if you lived in a world where all the popular movies and songs and stuff were completely different from Earth's - I don't think faithfully recreating Ironman or Inception is going to lead to instant fame and fortune. It's not like there's ever a shortage of "good" things being made - but it takes a special kind of lightning in a bottle to turn something "good" into something "popular".
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Dec 30, 2018 13:21
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isekai with a unique twist and/or isekai i personally consider "good": Dungeon Defense - Some guy reincarnates as a really weak demon lord; struggles to survive. The plot sounds really cliche because it is. That said, the author does manage to make it interesting to read. Warning: kind of grimdark To Be a Power in the Shadows - Misunderstanding comedy about a boy who wants to be a power in the shadows (as in, the cool edgelord character with a black trench coat that shows up in every movie / book / game ever) and accidentally stumbles into ultimate power while practicing his chuuni moves. It's funny Kono Sekai ga Game da to, Ore dake ga Shitte Iru - Pretty bog standard "I am the strongest in this new world" - the twist is the new world is a buggy game the MC is super familiar with so his power is all directly related to exploiting bugs in the game. It's pretty funny The Lazy King - salaryman reincarnates and slowly becomes a melancholic super powerful demon lord who spends all of his time sleeping (only 2 volumes, both translated) Overlord - i mean, everyone knows what this one is right? Youjo Senko - salaryman reincarnates into an alternate world as a girl with magical powers. set in NotGermany right before NotWorldWarOne, our protagonist joins the army for lack of other options and the story goes from there. As a story it's kind of dry and tends to use a lot of its wordcount waxing philosophical about political and economic theory so it can be kind of boring. But the premise is definitely unique and the parts of it that are well written tend to shine. Instant Death - a guy is pulled into a fantasy world with his classmates, his only power is instantly killing anything he sees. Risou no Himo Seikatsu - some guy gets summoned to a fantasy world to marry a queen. Specifically, the queen wants him to be a prince consort and outside party that won't threaten her throne or have designs on becoming king. It's pretty slow burn and the drama more or less all centers around him trying to help his new wife stay in power in a male-dominated feudal society. sunken fleet fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jan 11, 2019 |
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Jan 11, 2019 01:37
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Telsa Cola posted:Is there ever one about someone just completely taking the piss out of the new world/game whatever. The bug one might be close but I imagine something like someone playing as a hick crossbowman and shooting down spaceships or whatever because poorly thought out game mechanics. To be a power in the shadows is written all the way through like a huge joke, if that's what you mean edit: as proof: the title of chapter 1 quote:Chapter 1: Remaining Within the Limits of Being Human Means You Would Be Vaporized By a Nuke sunken fleet fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Jan 11, 2019 |
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Jan 11, 2019 09:33
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Avulsion posted:Yeah, she's an absurdly lucky protagonist with bullshit magic powers, but I like the way the story handles it and how it fits into the world building. She knows her powers are bullshit, and the people around her know her powers are bullshit. She spends a lot of time in the latter half of the story being poked and prodded by magic-scientists trying to figure out how her bullshit powers work. Many of her friends and allies are just people who recognized that her bullshit powers will turn her into a god when she grows up, and they want to use her or get on her good side. Others worry she'll go insane and have to be put down. The people around her have their own motives and personalities, they aren't simply driven by blind adoration or irrational hatred. I agree the setting of Metaworld Chronicles is really cool. I would almost give the series a recommendation just based on that alone. It's clear the author has put a lot of time into dreaming it up and making it tick, it's pretty cool. I think calling her "absurdly lucky" is overstating it a bit though. There's a grim bit in the first few chapters where she's super weak and seems destined to never be able to be more than a magical office/factory worker - but it's followed up by a lengthy "training montage" for lack of a better term that springs her into being "relatively powerful for her age" - I never felt like the process of her getting stronger was a weak point of the story. It felt earned enough. Plus, it would be boring if she was just fastening magical rivets to magical plates in a factory somewhere or whatever it is that the lowly dregs of magical society do, right? Plus in the later bits her soul eating power is a drug addiction/crushing moral dilemma/necessary evil/attractor of friends and foes all rolled up into one. It makes for interesting reading and introduces an interesting arc to her character that I, at least, am looking forward to seeing the end of.
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Jan 12, 2019 14:04
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i'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed and/or was annoyed by the constant long digressions into fashion that happen every third chapter or so.
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Jan 13, 2019 07:13
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Jan 30, 2019 12:42
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Well, xianxia is probably more or less aimed at men, so it sort of goes without saying that it's popcorn reading for men. There are other genres of Chinese fiction that are aimed at women that have a whole different slew of problematic tropes.
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Feb 11, 2019 18:02
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Library of Heaven's Path was the first cultivation novel I read, if you read it you'll quickly be familiarized with a lot of the typical tropes and I think it's pretty funny (if repetitive eventually). It's harder to read now that qidian underground is dead though
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Feb 13, 2019 03:11
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oh sweet, thanks for that link
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Feb 13, 2019 15:42
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it's funny because mushoku tensei would be about 100x better if you weren't subjected to the babies internal monologue about how much he LOVES TIDDAYS all throughout the early arcs. So in a way it's really perfect for an anime adaptation because all that poo poo would be cut out by necessity.
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Mar 16, 2019 16:31
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Jackard posted:What's good about this one? it's sort of the granddaddy of the whole current jp isekai genre craze I think. It was released way back in like 2012 and translated pretty soon after, pretty sure it's been super popular in most of the intervening years too
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Mar 18, 2019 10:49
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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.
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Jun 6, 2019 15:01
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Yinlock posted:the usa also censors the hell out of inconvenient things, they just do so via media blackouts lol please give me one example of a time when the US government moved against webfiction
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Jun 6, 2019 21:52
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Yinlock posted:interesting how insanely specific you had to narrow things to 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. sunken fleet fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jun 7, 2019 |
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Jun 7, 2019 02:23
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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.
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Jun 18, 2019 08:21
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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. There's Grimgar? And pretty much every cultivation novel at least pays lip service to the idea of the main character constantly going against powers much stronger than themselves, forcing them to secretly build their power for a few chapters before the face slapping can commence.
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Jun 19, 2019 05:31
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if you ever look at the patreons of some of the independent China novel translators the prices are pretty similar. There is apparently a market of people willing to pay 150$ a month for a handful of advance chapters or to get past QI's ridiculous paywall. Lord only knows who it is though lol. Any time I feel even mildly tempted to spend money on this hobby I just remember that there are literal libraries worth of free stuff online, more than I could read if I had all the free time in the world
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Jul 6, 2019 14:30
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 13:31 |
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Sindai posted:Yeah the dream world stuff just completely lost me and I stopped reading. I was on board with the dream world stuff as a plot mechanic to give him access to his old textbooks and sort of on board with it being a weird quasi-vacation spot for the witches but when a significant part of the plot became "earning money in the dream world" and "leveling up his cultivator rank in the dream world" it sort of lost me too. It's such a weird thing to throw into a story about industrialization and fantasy politics
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Jul 26, 2019 02:01
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