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ShinsoBEAM! posted:I think it's better to keep them separate threads. I also don't think Bookworm is that great, and if that's getting rec'd about a dozen other things would need it too, partially because there is just vastly more of the translated web-serial stuff than native English stuff. Yeah, let's definitely keep them separate threads, but make sure that there's prominent links between OPs. If anyone has WN recommendations, post about them in the other thread and I'll update the OP when I have time. e: Actually, after looking at the WN OP, there's some English web serial recommendations there that haven't made it into the OP here: quote:Savage Divinity Most of these are very WN-esque despite being original English-language stories, which is why they're in the WN OP, but it's up to you whether or not they should go here or in the WN thread. blastron fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Aug 25, 2017 |
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Aug 25, 2017 01:24
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Is there a latest-chapter link on the site? I’m so used to just being able to scroll down on most other sites.
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Nov 2, 2017 16:37
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Charlie Bobson posted:If I partly enjoy worm for having badass super hero fights will twig still appeal to me Specifically for fights, only kind-of. None of the protagonists (save for Helen) have explicit combat-related superpowers, and the main character’s whole gimmick is that he’s a normal kid who takes drugs to make him smart and adaptable. He plans and manipulates his way through fights rather than solve them with brute force, so if you liked the “clever uses of a weak power” thing that Worm starts out with then you might like Twig.
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Dec 25, 2017 19:28
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The story starts out by presenting bug control as pretty weak and requires Taylor to come up with clever tricks to let her fight on the same field as other supers. It takes a little while for her bag of tricks to get big enough for it to be apparent how ridiculous her power actually is. She certainly doesn’t start out with a perfect positional map of everything in a 5-block radius, swarm clones, or any of her other bullshit.
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Dec 26, 2017 07:10
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My greatest regret with translating Bookworm is that I can’t put it out at anywhere close to the same insane breakneck speed at which the author originally spewed it out. It reads a lot better when you read a chapter every day or two, rather than one every week or so.
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Feb 9, 2018 05:08
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Do you mean Victoria? How’s she a serial abuser? (I might have missed something.)
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Feb 10, 2018 01:31
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Does the rest of the team know Rain’s backstory? “I killed a lot of people doing terrorist things as part of a cult that I’m still technically a member of” would be a good implosion point. Also, what’s the spoiler policy? Are we just covering up discussion about everything, since not everyone is current on every single series that gets posted about in here?
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Feb 17, 2018 21:34
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navyjack posted:Did she just change her Name? To what? I think it’s impending but hasn’t happened yet.
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Feb 23, 2018 08:45
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To be perfectly honest I thought that the criticism was perfectly valid before being reminded that Milky Moor also writes serial fiction. I still think it’s valid. If it were posted on their actual site then I’d have different feelings about it, but there’s nothing wrong with an author speaking about another author’s work in a setting that doesn’t necessarily invoke their authority.
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Feb 24, 2018 01:27
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Worth the Candle updated. I don’t know why, but I am extremely concerned for the weirdly happy pilot and his bird wife. This is the most directly involved the party has gotten with innocent bystanders, and I am actually legit uncomfortable not knowing if the pilot manages to fly his ship to safety or if he gets shot down and plummets into a bottomless pit until he starves to death. I get that this story is supposed to be grim and dark but this is a step above.
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Mar 30, 2018 23:43
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:I don't think it has been mentioned in this thread yet. It's good? Can you write a relatively spoiler free blurb of what it's about? It’s pretty good, yeah. It’s about a life-long Dungeon Master who nods off in class and suddenly finds himself shoved out of a helicopter above a world that’s made out of a pastiche of his home brew D&D settings. Between his setting knowledge and some unique superpowers, he manages to avoid getting himself killed, but despite his advantages he’s still constantly challenged and is frequently on the back foot. It gets pretty dark and and tackles some fairly hefty issues with decent competency. The decisions the protagonist makes have actual, long-term consequences that directly impact the plot both positively and negatively, which puts this miles above a lot of other serial fiction. Here is a link.
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Mar 31, 2018 03:11
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Lone Goat posted:what's wog? Word of God. Wildbow constantly posts things on various forums, subreddits, and comments sections with extra setting information and explanations not given in the actual text. These are technically canon (although you could make a Death of the Author argument that it can be ignored) and is referenced thoroughly in fan discussions and on the fan wiki. It’s kind of obnoxious that there’s an extra source of information that I don’t have access to because I don’t obsessively read Worm subreddits and SpaceBattles threads, but I’m also glad that this isn’t getting shoved into even more interlude chapters that aren’t directly germane to the plot.
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Apr 3, 2018 15:12
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Gladi posted:Death of Author is about themes in literary analysis not setting building. Oh, hm, after some wiki reading, you’re right. Thanks, I learned something today. Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Entirely unrelated though, I love your translation work on Honzuki. If I could pay to get more translations sooner, I would, though it sounds like you'd burn out if you didn't pace yourself as you do. Given that you don't want money (according to your tumblr) or anything, I want to at least say thanks and ask if there's anything non-monetary (i.e. technical) I can do to help. Also, the table of contents is out of date. Thanks! I appreciate the offer, but the only thing I could possibly need is more time and energy than I’m left with after work. Just knowing that people are enjoying it is enough for me! 
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Apr 5, 2018 04:30
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The best part about the Wretch is that Victoria’s inner monologue has gone from calling it “my forcefield” to calling it “the wretch” and then now naming it “the Wretch” as she’s forced into using it (and confronting it) more and more.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:15
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Omi no Kami posted:Kenzie on the other hand, holy crap- a lot of the writing in Ward has been awkward and poorly-edited, so I can't tell if this is intentional or WB rushing to get the chapter out, but the way her dad talked is pushing me much further into the pro-Robodad faction. Like, his middle managers sentence didn't even make grammatical sense, and Kenzie quickly interjecting sounded like someone resetting a behavior tree. (I know he's probably just an awkward guy, but every single thing about Kenzie is so absurdly suspicious that I love conspiracizing about her.) Ward 7.1 The “you didn’t tell me about the first one” bit about her dad getting shot twice is absolutely readable as either her being a huge control freak and hating not knowing things about people or a deliberately scripted interaction to make it look like she didn’t know something about her robot dad.
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May 16, 2018 03:33
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Ytlaya posted:As much as I'm enjoying Practical Guide to Evil, I have noticed that the author seems to really, really love grunting and "mirthlessly smiling." And the clenching and unclenching of fists.
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Jun 8, 2018 18:03
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Man, Catherine’s going to fake being part of a heroic narrative hard enough that she actually becomes a hero, isn’t she.
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Jun 15, 2018 17:34
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Ward 7.y: Why you gotta do this, Wildbow? Poor girl’s got enough on her plate already without a fledgling anti-parahuman activist group hunting her down for what she did to her parents.
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Jun 30, 2018 18:29
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I’m actually going to be a little disappointed if Akua steals the Winter mantle from Cat. It’s almost too obvious at this point. She’s already been shown to be very good at controlling it (and very compatible with it while doing so), has been co-opting it from inside, and has now been sculpted to look like a fae. All of Cat’s big milestones have involved her powerset dramatically being altered by some big addition/removal, too, so her losing the Winter mantle as part of a big pivot would be a pretty predictable twist.
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Jul 19, 2018 00:08
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PracGuide: ”I would rather lose my hand than have you distrust me” is extremely hardcore and I love it. It’s great how alien the non-human races in this story are.
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Oct 5, 2018 21:20
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If it weren’t for the author openly stating it is, I honestly wouldn’t have categorized Worth the Candle as “rational fiction” any more than Worm is. Both protagonists are pragmatic, careful planners, both settings are relatively well-explained and self-consistent, and when characters in either story make bad decisions, they make them for understandable reasons.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:53
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It’s been a while since I read Void Domain, but I recall the problem with its prose being that it read like a translation of a Chinese web novel. I have a hunch that there’s a generation of amateur authors out there whose understanding of how pop fiction should be written is based heavily off of translations of popular material from East Asian countries. Prose is structured differently in Japanese than it is in English, and I’ve found that even some of the better professional TLs of light novels out there still feel weirdly stilted. Hell, I’m reading through the internationally acclaimed Three-Body Problem trilogy, which are Real Serious Books and not light novels, and even through the stellar translation there’s just something off about how things are structured that makes it feel, indescribably, like it was translated from Chinese. I myself am nowhere close to professional, but when I’m translating Japanese text, it takes me two or three editing passes to make it feel like English prose to me, and when I go back weeks later to reread it it still somehow feels off in a way I don’t know how to describe or, worse, fix. I don’t read a lot of Western serial fiction, honestly, so I don’t know if this is actually a trend among young authors of middling skill or if this is just wild speculation, but between novels like Void Domain and the comments I see praising mediocre translations I can’t help but wonder where a good chunk of kids are learning what writing looks like.
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Oct 30, 2018 06:00
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I'm very, very much hoping that the end of this PGtE chapter is the start of Akua's sudden, but inevitable betrayal.
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Nov 28, 2018 07:51
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Is there a chapter for today besides Peregrine I? The last Cat-based chapter I read came out on 11/30.
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Dec 3, 2018 19:23
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Huh, weird, it’s not showing up when I try clicking next or previous. Thanks!
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Dec 3, 2018 19:34
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tithin posted:e: sorry, 3 bi women, including malicia - though this is only really mentioned in passing. I vaguely recall a conversation with Akua in the previous volume where she said that Wastelanders will hook up with anyone regardless of gender because sex, like everything else in their hosed up society, is just another tool of manipulation and power. I don’t remember it being presented as “every Wastelander is bi”, but it’s been a while.
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Jun 28, 2019 17:58
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I’m giving up on Metaworld Chronicles. The plot is competent, I guess; the protagonist is powerful but in over her head and the action beats generally serve to actually advance the plot or reveal setting details instead of just being flashy fights. The writing, though. The author constantly uses big words that sound like the words he actually meant to use but don’t actually mean the same thing. His descriptions are vivid, but 90% of them are about how hot the female characters, many of whom are teenagers, are. The protagonist is ostensibly straight, yet handsome men are described in throwaway sentences while we are constantly reminded how long and/or toned the womens’ legs are. Any suggestions for stories that won’t make me feel like a creep? I’m already reading PracGuide, Morher of Learning, and Worth the Candle, and I’ve either finished or given up on Wildbow’s various works.
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Aug 5, 2019 07:28
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On the flip side, I’m ten chapters in on Into the Mire and am quite enjoying it. All the characters have personality and motivations, and I’m really enjoying the bouncing around between perspectives as we learn more about them and the world.
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Aug 7, 2019 21:01
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Practical Guide: I’m 99% sure the White Knight’s passionless execution of every sinner he walks past, whether they’re actually committing evil at the moment or if they’re just wicked in their own right, is setting up for Scribe’s death. If Scribe is on-site, and the White Knight happens upon her, I think the Choir of Judgement would be able to pierce Scribe’s unnoticeability. Also I do like EE’s continued quest to make very obvious bad guys out of heroes in a story about sympathetic villains. The systematic murder of wrongdoers is not a good thing, even if it is apparently a Good thing.
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Aug 30, 2019 18:17
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I think my only reservation with what Jason is doing is that it’s constantly hammered in that the simulation is indistinguishable from reality. I can absolutely buy an otherwise perfectly normal person turning into an absolute monster of a heel while playing a video game, but when you’re actually trussing someone up from a tree, slitting their throat, and taunting their teammates by desiccating their corpse in front of them and using it as a shield and it’s perfectly lifelike then there’s something wrong with your head. Oh, also, grinding someone’s face into the mud so that they choke to death while bleeding out is extremely hosed up. I’m legit hoping this gets more development, it would absolutely suck if he gets a pass on it because he was doing it on someone’s request and it was just a simulation. e: i just read the latest chapter and, welp blastron fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Sep 25, 2019 |
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Sep 25, 2019 03:37
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The entire thing in the murder simulator was hosed up. The imagery the simulation presented was as real as life, and he did some astoundingly awful stuff, such as using someone’s corpse as a shield while taunting her sister about how she couldn’t save her. It doesn’t matter that he was asked to do it, he willingly performed some serious emotional torture without showing any remorse before, during, or after the fact. Jason is not a good person, no matter how much good he does. All of his good deeds are done from a position of power and don’t require him to sacrifice anything (except for the potential payment that he refuses because it doesn’t align with his otherworldly viewpoint). In fact, when he’s doing good that he’s not forced into by circumstance, he reads as someone who gets off on doing good, who flaunts his morality to those who don’t share it and who exults in the praise of those he helps. Even clearing out all the low-level quests feels less like he wants to do good and more like he wants to murder monsters and be recognized for it. He doesn’t do a lot of explicit “evil” outside of the murder simulator, but he’s a pretty unrepentant jerk to people he doesn’t like and merely flippant and self-absorbed when talking to people he does. While he’s described as being nice to background characters, we’re almost always told about his deeds, rather than shown, which rather lessens the impact. Humphrey is literally the only person in the entire series who has called him out for being a scumbag and that’s being played off as him being unreasonable and needing to grow out of his unrealistic ideas of what a hero is. “He who fights with monsters” is the start of a Nietzsche quote that continues with “might take care lest he thereby become a monster” and I’m pretty sure Jason is 90% of the way there already. He probably didn’t start off that way, although he was probably somewhere north of zero on that scale, but at this point he’s definitely not a normal, well-adjusted human being from our Earth.
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Oct 13, 2019 16:07
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Yeah I’m glad to see some actual introspection resulting in character development. I was kind of hoping that losing the party healer due to Jason’s assholery would have immediate consequences, but this is good too.
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Oct 15, 2019 08:32
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90s Cringe Rock posted:non-patreon, though: jesus christ jason what the gently caress Yeah, isn’t “only mean to people who deserve it” one of his big defining character traits? That wasn’t being a comically evil heel in a simulation to get in people’s heads, that was straight up intimidating a records clerk into silence by giving her a lengthy description of how he would painfully erase her from existence. There is something crucially wrong with Jason, and I hope the author is aware of it.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:51
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M. Night Skymall posted:Also people should consider reading Apocalypse Born. It's a system apocalypse story with the gimmick that the MC is in the first generation born after the system takes over earth. So the apocalypse is over now, just the system and occasional monsters. It's really slice of life/chill so far, but I'm only about half-way through the first book. I’m enjoying it too, but I’m hoping it picks up soon. I’m on chapter 10 at the moment and there hasn’t really been any real challenge to the main character. The couple of times he’s been in danger so far he handled easily, and all the adversity he’s been through has been as part of his training, to show that he’s bad at something now so that he can be good at it later. There’s been quite a few moments of introspection, though, so perhaps it’s less about struggling against adversity and more about a contemplative exploration of finding one’s place in a magical post-apocalyptic world? The writing’s solid, moreso than I was expecting from a random web serial, and I really like the character interactions. I especially like how the act of thinking about things is being handled. Quick reactions to things are done inline as italicized words interjected into sentences. Longer thoughts are done in descriptive paragraphs, but the author is careful to do reasonable amounts of thinking between beats. (Unlike, say, PGtE, where Catherine plays an entire game of 5D chess in her head between sentences.) It’s definitely leaving a strong impression so far, probably my favorite series I’ve started reading in the last few months.
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Oct 31, 2019 03:48
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A big flaming stink posted:wait is prac guide actually over and you guys are spoiling the ending or is this just some silly poo poo? No, there was a major plot beat that resulted in the actual, true protagonist winning, and now there’s another book about Catherine loving around for some reason.
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Nov 1, 2019 06:27
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Avulsion posted:Harry Potter and the Natural 20 A young genre-savvy DnD Player Character (not a Player, but the Character) gets accidentally summoned into the Potterverse by some very confused Death Eaters and ends up having to hide out in Hogwarts and pretend to be a Wizard despite having no knowledge of the local magic, history, or common sense. It is downright cruel to recommend a story that stopped getting updates within a few chapters of it going from “good” to “really good”.
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Mar 13, 2020 07:02
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Random rear end in a top hat posted:I really feel like Wildbow shouldn't have written a story about trauma and recovery if he thinks that "Just kill yourself, everyone will be better off without you." is a good note to end on. Holy poo poo. Could you summarize what happened? I’m sure as hell not going to read through it if that’s how it ends. (I got through about half of it before I dropped it, so I’m familiar enough with the core conceit.)
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Mar 30, 2020 03:52
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Random rear end in a top hat posted:I've been skimming/reading summaries for two or three arcs now, but to sum it up: Without Scion to maintain things, particularly-traumatized capes (and/or those who've been exposed to transdimensional bullshit) are having broken second triggers, being devoured by their shard and becoming Titans, basically mini-Endbringers. They've separated into two camps: those led by Titanified Contessa, who wants to blow up all possible Earths, and the Simurgh, who wants to torture humanity for billions of years. I don't 100% understand the heroes' plan (I assumed it was a red herring and they'd come up with something else), but it involves a massive suicide pact between all the heroes... which is admittedly a step up from the previous iteration of the plan, which was a total genocide of all capes everywhere. Needless to say, the entire cast I've come to know and mostly-love going full Jonestown is pretty loving sour note to end on in a story that at least tried to be about the healing power of therapy and mutual support. Thanks, I appreciate it! Also, Milkfred E. Moore posted:Ward is so absolutely cooked that if I summed up what was going on in it this thread would say I'm making it up and trolling. But, yes, that poster is right. gently caress
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Mar 30, 2020 08:24
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PracGuide does less hiding information from its readers and more hiding conclusions drawn from it. Catherine’s a mastermind villain. She needs her just-as-planned moments, and we can’t get that if she explains to the reader exactly what’s going to happen three chapters in advance. (Smart villains do not monologue, after all.) The way to write characters that are smart is to set up questions that need answering, give the readers all the relevant information that the character has, give them a moment to speculate, and then have the character reveal the answer. So far PracGuide has generally done this well enough. In the current book, there’s a lot of new setting details currently hinted at but not explored, but that’s okay because we didn’t really need to know what the Arsenal was until we actually went there. Now that there’s stakes, we’re given all the information we need about what it is (including details Catherine wouldn’t know, via interludes), and we’re never blindsided by anything that Catherine isn’t also blindsided by. It’s hard to make a mastermind work in first-person, but PracGuide pulls it off alright.
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Apr 12, 2020 21:29
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Lone Goat posted:new Daily Grind just mentioned "Lone old Goat" and playing magic the gathering, did you any of you also get highly personalised messages or was it just me? I saw the same thing you did. Congratulations on having the universe line up in just the right way to make you question reality for a moment.
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May 1, 2020 23:44
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