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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Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

For me, I use web novels to comprehend the Great Dao of Web Novels. Soon I will form my nascent soul of wish fulfillment.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 03:29

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 14:17

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

SerSpook posted:

Try Ze Tian Ji, it is really good.

I wish there were more stories like Ze Tian Ji, I just love every plot that involves gross over-estimation and misunderstanding of the protagonist's abilities.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2016 23:21

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

jwang posted:

Power through the lovely translation parts and just gloss over the sentences for the gist of it. Maybe it's because of how I read, but bad translations doesn't bother me nearly as much as bad plot. Unless the translation is absolutely incoherent, or it's translation of the Chinese version, I wouldn't harp on too much about how bad it is. Best example is the machine translations done of LMS, where the translations can be absolutely terrible at times, but I still can power through it because I'm there for Weed being a penny-pinching douche and the translations aren't to the point where I'm wondering what they're trying to say. When it drops down to something on the level of Baka Dogeza's translation of Knights and Magic, I just give up and call it a day. I can get the basic gist, but reading it is so irritating that the bland plot jumps out and smothers any will to read further.

I've being doing this reading style more and more since picking up web novels and it's been bleeding over into other reading. Now I can read books at 10 times the speed with none of the pleasure!

# ¿ Oct 11, 2016 03:57

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

FriggenJ posted:

I've been enjoying the hell out of Running Away From the Hero!. It's an amusing take on a "I was reborn in a fantasy world" with a truly Korean flavor.

Basic Synopsis: Korean salaryman reincarnates into a fantasy world with absolutely no ability to use Physical Strengthening or Magic arts. How does he survive? He helps an evil organization cultivate scary students by brainwashing them and doing tons of paperwork to make himself invaluable. The catch? He doesn't really care about good or evil, he just trains troublesome students who end up all becoming monsters (whether Heroes or Villains) who still fear the hell out of him because of how harsh he was with forming them when they were young.

Along with his two mystical weapons the all-feared "Wooden Bat" and the reclusive yet terrifying "Metal Bat" watch his antics as his dream of an early retirement is ruined.

It's interesting, but after the first 4 chapters, it's behind a paywall. That's pretty much the worst thing ever. The translation isn't even that good.

edit: From the same website, though, I recommend you all immediately read this beautiful work: Invisible Dragon

Words cannot be used to properly convey the experience.

edit edit:

Apparently Invisible Dragon is considered one of the seven "Forbidden Texts" of Korean novels. I did a bit of digging and found the descriptions for the other six.

quote:

Sorry for seeing this so late.
Here are the other 6 of the 7 forbidden texts.

Blood Martial God: The legend of the forbidden wuxia novels in Korea. The novel is quite famous for having so much bs logic-- starting from the fact that the author started off the novel with pitting the main character against one million martial artists. The author's bs logic is highlighted at the end of volume 1, where the author utters these famous words: "What is the fate of the martial world after this Not even god knows But I as an author know Which means that I the author is above god uhahahahaha". The novel has been completely erased from the site it was on. Only the first volume of the book still exists.

Supreme Martial Arts: A wuxia novel written by a middle schooler who became inspired by the writing style of invisible dragon. Apparently the entire plot of the novel was created in a mere 12 minutes.

Dissecting Fantasy Plots: This isn't actually a novel. It's actually a parody of generic fantasy novels. The only reason this is considered a forbidden text is because it was written a long time ago. People couldn't understand it that well because of the language from the early 90's, and marked it as a forbidden text.

Harry and Monster: A legend among forbidden novels. It is on a different class from other forbidden texts. The text destroys any bit of logic that may have been left in the plot, which makes it completely meaningless to try to understand. It was actually published in real life, which just serves to make it even more infamous. It was dubbed the name "Korean Necronomicon", and the reason why the book even got published is a mystery in itself. If you want to read more about this novel, there is a small preview of it in the "Novel Pickup Request" section.

Otherworld Dragon: A generic fantasy novel. This was only marked as a forbidden novel because of how generic it was during the early days of Korean novels. These types of novels are everywhere in Korea now. The plot is about a dragon who transfers to earth and wrecks poo poo. The novel is criticized even more because of its plot progression.

My Boyfriend's IQ is 180: The novel that was created with the mind of an elementary schooler. The main character is a person who is 180cm tall, and weighs 40kg, who can fight and win against a group of 60 people. Reading this numbs the mind of the reader. The fact that the author ended the novel with a kiss that lasted several hours just makes everything worse.

The works of Kim Won Ho: Just the fact that it was written by this man makes the novel a forbidden text.

-----

Kim Won Ho is a Korean novelist who publishes novels at the speed and quality of a factory machinery. The author is described as the collective of all bad parts of Korean novels. All of his novels contain an OP main, a huge amount of cliches, balance destruction, etc etc. It is said that just about everything about all the characters in his novels can be seen just by looking at the author's name on the cover. because of this, a strange situation where an author became even more famous than his works has been created.

...I should actually post this at my site.

Source

Emmideer fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Oct 19, 2016

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 23:48

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

A lot of main characters I have in my head like I think the author would look, some skinny lanky dude with black hair and maybe some glasses, then whenever a picture pops up it's inevitably either a hyper-muscular spartan or a male model in a robe with a smug smile.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 14:10

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

i miss my butt avatar. it made people so incredibly mad for some reason.

I had you on ignore before it went away

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 23:02

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

that person, later on... is not by any means good even by ln standards. i just really like the premise of an inexplicably invincible dude with a glass heart, who literally runs away crying whenever he encounters even the slightest rejection. unfortunately, the fact that every woman he meets is actually madly in love with him effectively ruins that premise.

Hahaha what? I managed to get through all of 2 chapters with how bad it was, but it's that bad?

Is anime production really that cheap in comparison to the money it makes, that they can adapt below bottom barrel and have it be profitable?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 18:56

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

BlitzBlast posted:

It's more that there's a season of shows to be made, and they can't all be winners.

How do anime seasons "work"? Is there some minimum quantity they need to push out or something?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 19:00

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

BlitzBlast posted:

Well you see, there are a bunch of studios whose job is to make an anime. They can't go "lol this stuff is awful, we're not going to make anything this season" for the same reason you can't just arbitrarily decide to take a season off of work.

Hmm, I suppose I understand. And I suppose LNs are a commonly adapted format because they can be cheap to get the rights to, cheaper than adapting other media or writing an original script?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 19:13

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

BlitzBlast posted:

Oh is that what you meant?

No, 90% of LN anime are greenlit by the company that publishes the LN in the first place. They're just big old advertisements, they don't need to make a profit so long as they increase sales of the book.

Oh! Huh, that's the opposite of how I understood it, I thought LNs weren't that big of profit centers and anime would get a bigger share. That it's the opposite, that's interesting!

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 19:20

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

darkgray posted:

Never having heard of "that person, later on...", I assumed you were talking about the main character of Death March, which is being animated. So maybe that.

Ah, same.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 00:25

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

I'm glad we've taxonified our terrible WNs.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 00:31

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Mygna posted:

It's not like the Chinese authors/publishers aren't aware of these translations by this point. If they thought the donations for extra chapters thing was scummy, they would have probably shut down Wuxiaworld instead of officially licensing them as translators.

There was actually an announcement recently that Wuxiaworld would be doing official translations of 20~ titles for a very popular web novel site in China.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 18:49

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Kaja Rainbow posted:

I recently found Cultivation Chat Group. Basic premise: college student gets invited by accident to an internet chat group for cultivators. He thinks they're just deluded roleplayers at first. Some decent comedic touches in there.

It's really good in my opinion, at least in the group of translated novels that are competent and nonweird (top 10%?)

Too bad not a lot of it has been translated, yet.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2016 22:12

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

i was kinda neutral on emperor of solo play, but then the mc responded to an attempted mpk by having all his skeletons /dance instead of taking any aggro himself. that's some good poo poo.

It's pretty decent as far as MMO stories go, but it has the dual issues of spending lots of chapters on pointless happenings + slow translations, making it essentially pointless to keep up with.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2016 03:15

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

If we're recommending out comedic Harry Potter fanfiction, there's always Make a Wish. It's the same joke 100 times in a row, but it never gets old.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2017 23:55

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Shukaro posted:

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is another very readable english Harry Potter fanfic that also happens to be complete.

While good in some ways, it is also bad in some ways. For example, Harry Potter is near wuxia protagonist level of rear end in a top hat, minus the wanton killing.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 21:12

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

BlitzBlast posted:

Also I can't believe this thread has hit a new low and started discussing fanfiction.

We call ourselves the web novel thread, we're really the trashy writing for nerds thread.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 21:20

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Backing away from Harry Potter fanfiction, let me recommend a Chinese web novel that's essentially fanfiction of being the author of famous (primarily Chinese) poetry and prose, I'm Really a Superstar. The translation level is really high.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 01:29

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Kaja Rainbow posted:

A bunch of recs

Most of the recommendations are really interesting! Sadly, the same ones also appear to have only a handful of chapters translated.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 02:26

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

FriggenJ posted:

Note, if you're going to read a chapter that was originally deleted from qidan I'd recommend you don't. The MC originally gets ALL kinds of rapey with the girls in his life. Like, no actual rape but drat if it doesn't count as sexual assault in some fashion.

Yeah, forgot to mention those. Thankfully they affect the story 0% and the author himself is editing his own story to remove them. The translator is keeping them for some reason, but at least they're clearly marked and skippable.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 20:11

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Ytlaya posted:

Is a yandere otome game an otome game where the protagonist is yandere or the main love interest guy?

It's another "I was reincarnated as the villain" story and seems to imply the protagonist of the game is yandere (not the MC of the story)

# ¿ Jan 12, 2017 15:48

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

BlitzBlast posted:

Other way around, the MC was a yandere while the protagonist is normal.

Well that's much less interesting!

# ¿ Jan 12, 2017 16:50

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Any new blood web novels out there? Preferably of some higher than average quality?

# ¿ Jan 24, 2017 17:07

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

if i reported on every wn that i tried and dropped after a chapter or two this thread would be 50 pages longer

Sounds like a good thread, imo.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2017 04:59

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Imo send a troper to a fantasy world where they try to apply tropes and surprise surprise it's not that simple and they repeatedly get their poo poo hosed up until they learn to stop being such a know-it-all brat and actually apply hard work to fix their situation.

See: Re: Zero

# ¿ Feb 1, 2017 23:50

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Law Cheetah posted:

just google the title + read online. the next book is titled 1633

That's really funny, because it just makes sense.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 21:58

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Yeah, I think stories where the protagonist strives to a better world, not just a better self, tend to be the best. Some of the Japanese web novels promise that, but then it turns out a "better world" really means "show off how awesome I am by improving technology" and possibly "create a cult of personality around myself".

# ¿ Feb 22, 2017 22:10

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

The Sandman posted:

What xianxia needs is its own version of One-Punch Man: a story about somebody who reached the top of the cultivation pyramid, and now they're bored as poo poo.

Well, okay, it needs more than that. But that would be a good start.

Only if we also get the cultivating equivalent of King, as well.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 16:02

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Kaja Rainbow posted:

There's already at least one story featuring a guy who people think is stronger than he actually is.

Cultivation Chat Group, yeah, and it's pretty good!

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 16:18

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Ytlaya posted:

Someone should write a scholarly paper on how Chinese, Korean, and Japanese web novels are reflective of each country's respective cultural ids. I feel like, before the web, publishing companies mandated some level of respectability, but the internet has allowed people to read the things they really want to read - power fantasies about being showered with riches, women, and praise.

I'm imagining there being some sort of textual analysis to find how often different types of rewards (money vs. praise vs. women, for example) are received by the protagonists of each country's respective web novels.

China: Money & Praise
Japan: Women & Praise
Korea: The highest level in a video game

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 22:50

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

this is the thread for garbage people who enjoy garbage fiction, friend.

Web Novel megathread: Garbage People Reading Garbage Fiction

# ¿ Mar 1, 2017 22:22

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

see, i just don't understand the urge to become famous so i don't get the wn's where that is the only goal. it seems so petty and banal to me, somehow even more so than naked power fantasies.

I think the "replicated my world's works" fame ones are more an opportunity to the writer to sperg about their favorite works.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 07:48

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

I doubt harem growth is for tension reasons in most of these LNs. Authors just have bigger fetish checklists, I imagine.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 17:37

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Absolute choice is absolutely stupid, but I'm reading it anyway. It does have a few moments that are quite fun. I just got to a part where the MC's secret identity is rumored to be in a gay relationship with his real identity.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 21:50

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Meme Emulator posted:

The bloodline legacy of Spiderman!

All this for just 2000 points.

I know we've had this conversation before, about why nerds are so obsessed with formalized systems, but I think the part that annoys me the most is they never go all-in on the system. It exists yet has no actual impact on the story. The closest they ever come is if the author wants something to happen a particular way, it can just be waved away as something that happened as part of the system.

It reminds me of of Brandon Sanderson's explanation on two types of magic in writing. Either you can make the magic unexplained and magical - in which case it can't be used to resolve problems, only cause them - or you can make it formalized and specific with clear rules laid out of the reader - in which case it can be used to solve problems. These fancy systems pretend to be the second type, and are used to solve protagonist problems, but are actually the first type without being properly utilized to cause problems.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2017 17:46

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

owl milk posted:

apparently the tv show's coming out in may and it has 55 episodes. hopefully it's good and gets a translation

55 episodes? Wow.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2017 03:35

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Ytlaya posted:

at least stick to the premise

You're asking too much of our poor authors.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2017 17:36

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Are there any stories where:

1) The protagonist doesn't have any special powers compared to others (or if they do, it's not what makes them successful)
2) The protagonist is legitimately a good person

The closest I've seen was early Ze Tian Ji, but even that was stretching the first requirement

# ¿ May 15, 2017 16:23

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 14:17

Emmideer: Oct 20, 2011; Lovely night, no?; Grimey Drawer

Ytlaya posted:

The first requirement is tough to meet. The protagonist of Re:Zero has a unique power of sorts but generally solves his problems in ways that don't involve him fighting (I really like how they've maintained his status as a weakling and required him to solve problems through communication with others), but he isn't really a good person (though that seems to be a plot element that the author is aware of).

Are you specifically looking for isekai action stuff, or are other genres okay? I'm assuming the former, since it isn't too hard to find stuff in other genres without overpowered protagonists or whatever.

Other genres are okay, I'm just not too familiar with them.

# ¿ May 15, 2017 17:36

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