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Silynt posted:His stories are pretty fun but in dire need of an heavier editing pass, just for basic continuity errors. People’s levels jump around haphazardly between chapters (in System Apocalypse). Character’s names change between books because he seemingly forgot what he named them and couldn’t be bothered to check. It’s frustrating at times how simple but consistent the errors are. I noticed some of this too, in Thousand Li. gimme the GOD drat candy posted:well, this is the webnovel thread, not the competently written literature of any kind thread. Fallorn posted:Webnovels and Kindle unlimited have a bunch of the same issues which is they are published quick and dirty and could use an editor coming in to clean it up and help make sure continuity stays together. Iunno, I don't think I usually see continuity errors like this crop up too often in WNs. Maybe it's just more noticeable here because I'm not cutting a garbled translation slack, I don't know. Anyway, the three Thousand Li books were a fairly placid, grounded take on xianxia. I always like it when these stories tie the worlds of the sects and the sword wizards into some sort of greater social context, and that's very strong here, Tao Wong placing the story into the context of a Warring States-esque milleu. I have to say, though, I'm coming away from it feeling only an ambivalent connection to the characters. Placing it next to Cradle, Wu Ying is lacking the all-powerful obsession that makes Lindon a compelling protagonist. The dude really just wants to chill and gently caress around with plants. The author notes suggest that book 4 might be something of a change of direction, so that might change. Speaking of Cradle, Will Wight is finished with his Kings/Killers trilogy and it's... fine. The bifurcation of the narrative hurts it, I think- either series alone feels a little underweight and lacking, and reading them together... I suspect it would work better if you were swapping back and forth between chapters, rather than books. Y'know, like you would be doing in a regular book with two plot threads.
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May 22, 2020 22:16
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So hey you know those xianxia WNs where the protagonist is terribly wronged, reincarnates and sets out to get revenge~~? You know, that one specific scenario which I swear I've seen done like half a dozen times at this point? Does anyone have one where the protagonist has a female friend? Like, one? A single female friend? Not a mentor or a younger sibling or a background character who exclaims breathlessly when she does something cool? A friend. An equal. An ally. I will settle for a respected rival or frenemy. Anything. Help me out here. I'm reading the Demoness' Art of Vengeance at the moment and it's killing me. e: atelier morgan posted:Fields of Gold is a reincarnation story where the protag has a magic stone from a xianxia setting in what is otherwise an extremely normal historical setting which she uses in her constant quest as a peasant girl to not starve by growing better crops or healing ordinary wounds. Maybe this will suit, idk.
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Jun 11, 2020 15:21
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LLSix posted:Lot of females in Forge of Destiny. Argue posted:I think they're specifically looking for xianxia and/or revenge do-over ones? The one I read and posted about just now in the wholesome isekai thread is one of those, although I was kinda bored because of all the "second son/eleventyeth prince" poo poo that all of these seem to do. I don't know if this is where they're going with it but I suspect that the character they just introduced 90 chapters in might be such a friend, because while the main character is a do-overer, the new character that befriends her appears to be an actual isekai protagonist (which is funny, because everything to that point was fairly mundane and more about internal politics). She was only just introduced so I can't say for sure, but if we're going to see the time looper and the outworlder hang out, I'm hoping it will be the kind of friendship you're describing. Argue has the right of it. I really just want to see someone write a version of this particular story where they don't present women as this undifferentiated mass of back-biting serpents, constantly trying to climb over each other. It can't be that hard! I believe in you, CN authors!! Thanks anyway, LLSix. Yinlock posted:they're not so much malicious as they are ancient beings with no common sense. and the big ones are usually retaliation for someone openly seeking death by like putting up a giant glowing sign that says "THE ASTRAL KING HAS NO BALLS" in the sky I'd actually quite like to get back into CCG, but I've forgotten where I left off. I think Shuhang had just gone on some sort of adventure with the nega-Senior White? There was some sort of underground ice castle, and evil puppet dudes getting beat, and some sort of spirit insect? And the real Senior White was having a falling competition with some doofus. If someone could point me within, like, a hundred chapters of that I'd be grateful.
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Jun 13, 2020 14:03
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Megazver posted:Try chapter 937 for the start of that arc. Thanks!
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Jun 13, 2020 14:38
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The primary virtue of the LitRPG stuff in Kumo is that it starts getting scaled back fairly early on, then gets chucked entirely.
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Jun 23, 2020 02:37
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a perfectly normal post
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Jun 24, 2020 23:08
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Silynt posted:Book 8 of the Cradle series is going to be coming soon, the teaser blog post is here. No date announced yet but the link to his Facebook shows a shot of a proof copy of Wintersteel that appears to be the longest in the series by a fairly wide margin. He’s apparently trialling a new writing strategy where he doesn’t preemptively cut anything before he’s written it. That does not to me sound like the wisest approach, and I’m sceptical that the quality is going to hold up, but it has apparently resulted in one chonker of a book.
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Sep 5, 2020 23:38
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IShallRiseAgain posted:I just hope this doesn't mean more Suriel stuff, especially since the last book seemed to cut back on that. He cites these as examples of stuff that never made it to first draft in previous books: quote:https://www.willwight.com/a-blog-of-dubious-intent/wintersteel-new-strategy So, fairly varied, basically side content. No Suriel in any of it, though given the way Uncrowned ends I’d have expected her to feature more prominently in Wintersteel regardless.
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Sep 6, 2020 01:50
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October 6th release for Wintersteel. 
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Sep 18, 2020 09:52
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Wintersteel is outstanding. It’s so good it makes every other book in the series look like trash in comparison.
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Oct 6, 2020 23:04
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Cynic Jester posted:"Remember Lindon! Remember to visit a barber! A barber, Lindon! Your hair lacks volume and defin--" Eithan is operating at peak Ethan throughout but the bit that slew me was right at the end: Eithan’s head slowly slid up over Lindon’s shoulder.
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Oct 7, 2020 15:15
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Y'know, I've never personally had that much trouble puzzling out what's going in these stories. So, like, there's this mystical energy suffusing the universe. Or maybe it is the universe. But it's out there, and if you know the trick you can reach out and touch it, and take it into yourself. And this makes you a punch wizard. Then, if you punch wizard hard enough, you might just achieve such a spiritual oneness with the universe that you can remake yourself utterly and become a living god. Sometimes a thundercloud picks a fight in the in between. And so far this is fine, centrality of punching aside this is basically every system of occultism ever imagined. There's a bunch of jargon for the nitty gritty of punch wizardry and enough ranks and gradations between points A and B to make a game designer blush, but a lot of it maps pretty directly to western fantasy concepts. Your spiritual arts are spells, spell formations are like magic circles, etc. But then you get to "sword intent". And I'm just like what. What the gently caress is a sword intent. No one ever explains sword intent. It's not even on this list: So if you squint at it long enough you might decide that it's kind of like killing intent- a thing you "know" about from watching too much anime- but with swords instead of killing. Only it seems to be a lot more substantial than even a telepathically active bloodlust. You can run out of it, for one thing, and you have to grow your reserve slowly, over years. A lot of the time it seems to be treated as a sort of super-Qi, powering the most potent of punch wizardries. It seems to have a mind of its own, and you can give it orders and send it on missions. It gets stuck in wounds and hangs around the place cutting people millennia after the original sword intender is dead. And so on. I think at this point I have a pretty good handle on what sword intent "is", insofar as I can list off a set of traits I expect it to have and rarely be surprised by it, but I'm still completely befuddled as to what it, y'know, is. If anyone does have a good understanding of the concept, please do not tell me. I enjoy the mystery. Anyway, xianxia is basically this K6BD page but without the old woman standing at the side, going, "Y'all are dumbasses, what really matters is noodles." 
KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 13:39
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Artificer posted:I bounced off of My Disciple Has Died Again pretty hard by chapter 14. Ehhh, I like it but I don't think there's any obvious point where it "picks up", so. If it's not grabbing you it's not grabbing you. Mr. Prokosch posted:You could read Beware of Chicken instead. It's very good. I resisted reading this for a while because I was like, "but I like the fights," but. It's good. 
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Feb 4, 2021 12:53
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I am sort of side-eyeing the way that Jin Rou's dreams of bucolic utopia have to be underwritten by such copious violence. Violence that the narrative has- until very recently- allowed him to displace the culpability for onto a bunch of naive and innocent animals. Very much putting me in mind of "We're definitely not going to find any violence in Vinland, lads  ".He isn't ignorant any longer, I suppose, and I'm guessing this girl is going to be a "virtuous" cultivator, and he'll have to actually debate his position with her instead of just feeding her to the pigs. I dunno. We'll see how that shakes out.
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Feb 4, 2021 13:30
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I am extremely here for little friend Song Shuhang to get a cute baby sister to spoil and raise into some sort of cultivation monster. On the hyper-accelerated timeline CCG is on, she'll probably be God by Friday.
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Feb 9, 2021 23:42
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Tunicate posted:Nah, that's his pet onion Lady Onion's fate is to always be one step too late, so I expect she'll only get to be God after it can no longer help her. This baby, on the other hand, I guarantee is getting spoilt rotten. There will be a lot of third parties sighing and staring at clouds. Megazver posted:If you're super curious, you can read up spoilers on her in the wiki. I will resist. The best thing about CCG is its pure chaos energy, spoilers would ruin it.
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Feb 11, 2021 15:10
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Does much traditionally published wuxia cross over to the west? Because I'd absolutely buy some if anyone was interested in selling it to me. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon got a wholeass critical darling movie adaptation and even that didn't manage to swing a translation.
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Feb 17, 2021 18:08
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LLSix posted:I'm not sure what you're looking for, so I'll just say that I enjoyed the first twoish story arcs of CCG. Shortly after White is introduced the story arcs stopped being interesting to me. The style of humor it is attempting I don't enjoy even when executed very well. Ha. White showing up is when it goes from "generic, mediocre xianxia" to "I see why people keep recommending this now" for me. It appears we have diametrically opposed tastes.
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Feb 19, 2021 10:18
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LLSix posted:I didn't realize Basil Brush was a reference. Terror of British children everywhere! And Canadian ones, I guess? e: My youngest brother loved it, actually. Drove me spare.
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Feb 24, 2021 18:15
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Reading the speculation in the Kumoko thread and wondering: does anyone remember when in the WN it's revealed that Kumoko was always a spider, and how far away from the current episode is that? (I haven't started watching it yet)
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Feb 26, 2021 18:40
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LibrarianCroaker posted:https://twitter.com/blu_online_/status/1372881738167296008 Sucks whole rear end. I Favour the Villainess is great, by the way. Everyone check that out if you haven't already.
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Mar 19, 2021 18:57
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Ling Qi is great. One of the best character traits of hers is that she actually takes time out from cultivation to socialise and not just disappear from her friends' lives for too long. Ha. It's funny you say that, given how much griping there is about characters that got lost or dropped because the thread kept voting against spending time with them. On the topic of FoD: Ice diplomat route has won the vote.
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Mar 20, 2021 00:45
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Where’s the thread? I’m just reading the Royal Road version, didn’t realise it had anything to do with the forums until after she finds her egg. It's not this forum, it's over on Sufficient Velocity: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/threads-of-destiny-eastern-fantasy-sequel-to-forge-of-destiny.51431/ (Sequel thread starts in the second year with the transition to the inner sect.)
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Mar 20, 2021 02:19
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Anias posted:As SV is currently down (data center power outage) mind summarizing (in spoilers if need be) for the class? Yu Nuan, one of the minor characters I can't remember much about, has asked to be adopted into Ling Qi's clan. There's a vote on whether to accept, refuse, or delay. I didn't check the vote myself, but it's usually pretty obvious which way the vote is going very early on. Not that you really need to see the numbers to know which way this one was going to go, tbh, nothing an SV thread likes more than new friends.
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Apr 5, 2021 13:56
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Nemo2342 posted:I started reading this a bit ago (thanks thread) and while I am really enjoying it, I also really really hate webnovel.com A lot of people do! Google Qidian Underground.
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Apr 5, 2021 14:40
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StrixNebulosa posted:Thread, arise! I've been hankering for a good cultivation novel again and while I'm still reading all of my old ones (they're so LONG), well - Hey Strix. I've picked up a few on Royal Road that range somewhere between really cool and middle of the road. The Last Ship in Suzhou - A tight, focused character piece about two Chinese-American teens who get themselves isekai'd by a thunderstorm. Written with a very tender, careful style (the opening chapters are a little rough, I think, but it picks up with the first interlude) that rewards a patient and careful reader. As much about the psychological realities of being a Chinese teen from New York and trying to cram the esotericism back into the Chinese esotericism as it is anything else. Virtuous Sons - Transplants the typical xianxia plot elements to the milieu of classical Greece- chi is pneuma, cultivators are philosophers, sects are cults, one of the leads has pankration intent (it's great- I love it). Another introspective character piece, this one driven by a young Greek aristocrat's incurable dissatisfaction with the effortlessness of his existence and his best friend's brooding guilt. And, possibly, their intense gay love. Like, honestly, I have no idea if these two are hot for each other or if this is just the greatest bromance of all time. It could go either way. Ave Xia Rem Y - A third tightly focused character piece? I'm getting bored of writing "character piece", frankly. The idea here is to take all the old, worn-out cliches of the genre and... just write them really well. Like that's the premise. And while that doesn't sound like it'd lead anywhere great, it's kind of my favourite thing on this list?? The previous two are objectively better, but I have a soft spot for this one a mile wide. Our protagonist here is a principled young doctor, whose only real desire in life is to be a good son, a good disciple, a good husband, and a good person. And, well, life is planning to make that kind of hard. Memories of the Fall - Not a tightly focused character piece, this is a sprawling epic which has more in common with Malazan Book of the Fallen than anything else. With a cast of hundreds, this one wants you to care about the trials of the least Qi Condensation scrub and the schemes of decamillennia-old god-wizards all at the same time. This is about the only piece of web fiction I've seen where it felt like the author was writing twenty thousand word chapters not because they had a terminal case of logorrhoea (lookin' at you, pirateaba), but because there was genuinely that much story to get through. I'm on record as saying that the prose in the first book is kinda awful, but it's recently undergone a rewrite (maybe hold off a week or two- we're still waiting for the final chapter of The New Prologue). Universal Knowledge of the Dao - This is... honestly just a very standard xianxia. The author is French, which lends the prose an odd patois, and that's probably the most remarkable thing about it. There's a girl, she starts off weak, she gets strong, things happen to her along the way. I still like it, because, like, I am the hog working the trash fiction trough, just pour that slop all over me sister, but if being completely inoffensive wasn't an achievement for stories on Royal Road I'd not have mentioned it. This Young Master is not Cannon Fodder - Like Universal Knowledge, this one is really just textbook xianxia. There's an odd fillip in that a huge proportion of the side characters eventually turn out to be some species of isekai nonsense person, but mostly the story just wants to chill out and watch its protagonist be wildly overpowered. Definitely take a look at the first four, check out the latter two if you're really bored or something. In terms of good, complete, short xianxia (though really this one is only short in relative terms; I think it's regular novel length)- there's Ascending, Do Not Disturb. This one's a romance, and has some typical shoujo problems in that regard- the protagonist is a precocious sixteen year old, while her love interest is... three hundred... but it's about the most wholesome and endearing story you could possibly hope to make from that. Just a really nice story about people who love and support each other. I do not think any of the long running series I know about have wrapped up since I last saw you in here.
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Sep 8, 2021 13:24
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Syritta posted:Sometimes I read these webnovels, like this, or like Mother of Learning off the top of my head, where clearly the author has been building up a world design for some years, possibly decades, and the plot is kind of secondary. Not even bad necessarily, just clearly in service to explaining this massive detailed culture and history and geography and so on. Characters exposit some interesting tidbit every few paragraphs. The record of a real civilization spans thousands of artifacts of many kinds spread across centuries; the author tries to shove all of that into their one book. It's so dense. It's literary horror vacui. Every change of scene includes a small touch of a new 700-page nonfiction tome. lmao, yes, that's the perfect way to describe it. Especially book one, which is the most scattered and confused. I'm glad to have finally tricked someone else into reading it. I am no longer alone. My own personal strategy is, if there's something going on or the characters are talking about something I don't know, to just blithely ignore it and move on, with the assumption that if it ever becomes relevant whatever it is is going to be reintroduced and explained in a more sensible fashion further down the road. And this has worked out for me every time, so far. It's the M. John Harrison quote I'm always drawn back to, when confronted with blunt-force world-building: quote:Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
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Sep 11, 2021 15:59
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:well, there's rising of tanaka. unfortunately, the nicest way i can think of to describe that is 'like eminence in shadow, but despite obviously trying to be funny it absolutely is not'. Thank you for reminding me of eminence, and by extension this incredible sight gag the manga added   I'm giggling all over again.
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Oct 26, 2021 14:23
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DACK FAYDEN posted:...commanded? Translators have a weak grasp of the English language for the most part. Let's just be happy it's a speech verb. Sort of.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:34
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Tunicate posted:Isn't this too exaggerated? aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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Nov 3, 2021 20:39
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LLSix posted:The new Cradle book is out. Yeah. Chat about it has gravitated to the KU thread in TBB. It's good
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Nov 4, 2021 17:17
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shirunei posted:Just wrapped up Way of Choices and is there anything else out there of that quality? I tried a few other WN that I can't recall the names of, other than pivot of the sky, but everything was terribly translated or too sociopathic for me. I wanted to enjoy pivot but the god awful translation kept sucking me out of the story. You could check out the author's other stuff: https://www.novelupdates.com/nauthor/mao-ni/ I've not yet, it keeps getting pushed further down the backlog. No idea if they received translations as good as ZTJ's
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Dec 2, 2021 12:11
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https://twitter.com/coolguyyibo/status/1474063944046321667 Almost want to read a story translated like this
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Dec 25, 2021 21:14
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avoraciopoctules posted:How bad? Half the cast dead? Main character crippled? Placed into a coma, wake up decades later to find their kung fu school reduced to ashes? There may be a mild injury and some characters might be sad for a while. Possibly a lifeline got burnt. I really don’t feel like it’s going to be that bad.
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Feb 16, 2022 00:54
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It's useful for letting me make a big list of poo poo I'm reading and then giving me one single rss feed for updates on them. I'd never manage to keep track of all this poo poo otherwise. Actual discovery, I mean if you go fishing in that sea you deserve what you get lmao
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Feb 22, 2022 14:40
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Will Wight has a kickstarter to create an animated Cradle TV series https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/author-will-wight/animating-cradle-bestselling-fantasy-novels-come-to-life I mean, I'll put down money, but I don't think this is going anywhere.
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Jan 29, 2024 16:18
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Supremezero posted:I mean, I assume this wouldn't be talking about having Jay Oliva if it wasn't going to go anywhere. All sorts of projects enter production, have big names attached to them and end up going nowhere. I don't know whether this one was shopped around to investors for funding, but if it did then it looks like they didn't bite all that hard, because they've needed to go to the Kickstarter well for more. Like, the fact that there's a Kickstarter at all is already a bad sign to me. And that Kickstarter is looking like it might just hit its minimum target, to produce... an animatic of Unsouled, which they will then presumably try to use to drum up more interest. But Unsouled is imo by far the weakest material in the series, so I don't have a lot of faith in it. In fairness this would be a good opportunity for Wight to punch it up some. Checking Wight's blog, he does say Olivia approached them, which is a good sign, but it doesn't really matter if the money doesn't come together. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 17:03
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