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Despite its atrocious name, Ave Xia Rem Y is definitely my favorite Western cultivation web serial. It’s exciting, it’s interesting, the protagonist is easy to root for, and the writing is good enough that I never notice it being bad, which is more than I can say for many other series I like. What’s with all the healers in web serials, though? It’s definitely a trend, at least. I know Azarinth Healer is super popular; are there just a lot of readers who went looking for similar themes and helped support other stories with protagonists who spent their time curing diseases or helping with injuries?
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Jan 25, 2022 21:01
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 08:31 |
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I was planning on waiting for Book 6 of Prac Guide to be finished before reading it, but I have a feeling if I do that I'll read spoilers for it in this thread way before I get the chance to catch up  I feel like the series varies a lot in quality just based on how interesting the antagonists of the arc happen to be. I enjoyed Book 5 a lot more than 4 just for that reason.
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Feb 7, 2022 03:18
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EE is right; Princes’ Graveyard is definitely the best arc.
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Mar 6, 2022 06:35
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I started reading Millennial Mage recently, since I saw it recommended a few times. It's pretty good! The description I saw of it by Jazerus of basically being a cultivation story with an alternate setting is accurate, but there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, part of the pleasure of progression fantasy is seeing a complex, interesting setting and looking forward to the MC participating more fully in it, and MM definitely has that. Seeing more of the setting, culture, and the way magic works is the main thing keeping me going. Plus, the student debt angle is compelling and adds an economic angle to the story that adds interest. I really only have two criticisms: First, the pacing is wonky. Every day is exciting, but that also means strange things happen to keep every day exciting, instead of just having a few boring days and skipping past them in the narrative. The second is that something about the way Tala is described has a weird vibe sometimes; she seems to get naked and be seen by dudes a lot, or her boobs start glowing and embarrassing onlookers, or other stuff like that. I might be reading too much into it.
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Mar 13, 2022 20:26
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navyjack posted:Honestly I’m getting ready to drop it. It was kinda sold as being a “working” mage trying to pay off student loans and I think there are interesting stories to be told in that space, but a fairly short time in and she’s already fell in with the Nikolai Tesla of Inscriptions, discovered immortality juice, invented anti-magic defense nobody has ever thought of, learning to fight in a style specially designed for her and her amazing physical attributes, bonded with her super-special awesome deadly pet, and bootstrapped her way into the upper echelons of mage society through plucky grit. It’s turned into not my cup of tea. This doesn't really bug me because it's progression fantasy and she still seems reasonably constrained by her financial situation. Like, she definitely still has to go on these boring trips (with a minder now), she negotiates with everybody to try to get stuff cheaper, stuff like that. I get the impression that Archon society is "the real mage society" rather than being an elite circle, too, since everyone reasonably competent we've met in the story either is an Archon or should have become one. I can see how it would be a turnoff if you were looking for a story with a main character who really was down on her luck, though.
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Mar 14, 2022 01:03
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Honestly the best use of the trope I’ve seen is in Cultivation Chat Group, where other characters complain frequently that the protagonist is “rich as gently caress” and insanely lucky. Since it’s a comedy, it doesn’t grate that the world is incredibly unfair in his favor. The only xianxia I’ve read that doesn’t do this is Forge/Threads of Destiny, where many characters introduced as Ling Qi’s peers (but who are significantly ahead of her) are still ahead of her hundreds of chapters later.
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Mar 14, 2022 05:35
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There’s Millennial Mage, just recently discussed. It features a magic system revolving around bodily inscriptions and the investment of soul-power into objects, at least from what we’ve seen so far. There’s an interesting setting and lots of neat secrets slowly being revealed, and the writing is pretty good. It’s not as good as Virtuous Sons but it might catch your interest.
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Apr 8, 2022 20:09
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Oh yeah, if you’re looking for stuff that’s different in the Beware of Chicken sense (xianxia setting, but different genre), there’s a surprising amount of Chinese romance xianxia targeting a female demographic. I enjoyed reading Ascending, Do Not Disturb in translation. There’s BL xianxia too but I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know of much Western fiction of this type, though there is When Immortal Ascension Fails Time Travel to Try Again; no romance yet from what I’ve read but a similar vibe.
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Apr 9, 2022 01:23
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To be honest I bounced off of the time travel one too, but as I’m the only person alive who didn’t find Beware of Chicken entertaining I figured it might just be me. Comedy is always hit-or-miss, after all. Most of the Western cultivation series don’t really drag in the same way the Chinese ones often do, I think because the model is different; the big Chinese webnovel sites are pay-per-chapter, and the fanbase likes seeing tons of content even if it’s stretched thin.
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Apr 9, 2022 03:11
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Larry Parrish posted:Anyway, what's other people's no click zone items. For me, if the blurb lists genres (that's what the tags are for!!) or specific influences, I'm never looking at it, on the assumption that it's going to be overly derivative and probably badly written too. In the few cases I'm interested despite, I've been right about 9 out of 10 times lol. Honestly I barely look at tags and basically only read new series due to word of mouth, from this thread and from other sources. I only barely pay attention to the blurb, too, because even though it's by the author it's still just marketing material at the end of the day. Like, I'm sure there are plenty of great Hollywood action movies where the screenwriter sold them as "Die Hard on an X", right? I don't think a piece of fiction is necessarily completely derivative just because its blurb advertises it as such. I realize that in some respects relying solely on word-of-mouth makes me the enemy of new authors, since I'm not willing to take a chance on something new that doesn't already have an established fanbase, and I do feel a little bad about that, but oh well. I've never even considered subscribing to a Patreon, but presumably that would change if I actually went and joined Discords related to the web serials I follow, since in that case I'd need to sub to participate in the conversation. But on some level I just don't enjoy following web serials serially that much. I'd much rather build up a backlog by ignoring it for six months and then catch up all at once. I do buy the ebooks for series I like, though, just so I'm supporting the author in some way. e: I don't sub to KU but I do suspect the incentives of KU (strong start, good first book, consistently enjoyable medium-length narrative experiences) push for better fiction on average than the incentives of RR/Patreon do nrook fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Apr 10, 2022 |
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Apr 10, 2022 18:12
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Fates Parallel volume 2 is dropping on Amazon tomorrow; I’m intensely curious if and how the plot will be reworked. e: I don’t know what day it is. nrook fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 02:20
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avoraciopoctules posted:Would definitely be interested if someone else gave their impressions of the reworked Fates Parallel. I got the first book on Amazon, but I bailed midway through after I was given some content warnings. Specifically, I heard the initial soul-bond brainwashing stuff I found creepy was nothing compared to what would show up later with... I think some princess lady they had just met.. There are a bunch of different criticisms of Fates Parallel. Some of them are unfair (IMO), some of them are reasonable but I don't agree with them, and some of them I totally buy. A brief description. Mild spoilers for the second volume, and extremely vague spoilers for the third:
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Apr 11, 2022 21:26
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My brain has been broken by too much xianxia: I always thought Fates Parallel was pretty fast-paced, but that’s because my point of comparison for the genre is always Forge of Destiny.
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Apr 12, 2022 15:15
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I always think of the Wizard of Rhyme books when I see the main country in Dragoneye Moons, although I think the idea of a fantasy Rome where the other guy won predates it. Loved those books as a kid. Anyway, I finished Fates Parallel book 2. The changes to the plot are mostly around pacing it better and giving up on the cute but ill-advised idea of making Jia's agreement with Hayakawa as much a surprise to the reader as it was to Eui. It's slightly better handled, but if you hated it before I doubt you'll like it now. I still really like the series, though. The prose is quite good, the dialogue is snappy, and the character relationships (which are the heart of the story) are well-written and compelling. Sometimes it's a little slow, but for the genre it's snappy enough, and it rarely falls into the "slice-of-life doldrums" where you have no idea what or when the climax is going to be. I do wish the initial premise didn't come off as a Forge of Destiny ripoff, but it finds its own identity soon enough. Among Western xianxia I'm only spending money on this and Destiny right now, although I'd buy a Virtuous Sons ebook if Ya Boy published one.
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Apr 16, 2022 05:13
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Practical Guide to Sorcery is good but for me it updates too slow to enjoy as a serial. I just treat as a fantasy series and plan buy the new book every year or so. I reread half of Ave Xia Rem Y recently and it was not quite as well-written as I remembered it being. I still enjoyed it well enough, but it’d be great if Mat Haz could use some more pronouns. e: to be clear this isn’t like, a criticism of The Luigi Of Practical Guides, I’d still recommend it to anybody who was into that sort of fiction nrook fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Apr 23, 2022 |
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Apr 23, 2022 00:40
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Whaleporn posted:I imagine pirateaba posting one of those typical question or advice theads about how sometimes you can't write anything but instead of being about writers block, it's her ask if there was a way to continue to write while asleep. iirc Stephen King was known for this; when he’d do events with other writers and talk about their processes, he didn’t understand why everybody couldn’t just sit down and write a lot every day
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Apr 27, 2022 01:14
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Ar'Kendrithyst is funny because it definitely has pacing problems but I feel like they aren't like, regular web serial pacing problems. It is definitely split into major arcs and the author doesn't forget what they are supposed to be building towards during each arc (which is the major problem with a lot of web serials.) It's just insanely slow. When it is cool it is cool though. I really liked when Erick went through the teleporter and everyone suspected he had died. The series shines when it talks about the big movers and shakers in its fantasy world and how Erick relates to them.
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May 2, 2022 03:13
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I get where you’re coming from, and I did roll my eyes a bit at how Erick (a social worker) remembers all this physics stuff, but it didn’t bother me all that much. The question Ar’Kendrithyst is concerned with is “what will Erick, a decent person who prefers to avoid violence, do with world-altering power?” So it’s for the best that he gets the world-altering power pretty quickly, and it doesn’t spend a long time on topics unrelated to the main theme.
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May 3, 2022 17:28
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(Ar’Kendrithyst) I had assumed the Worldly Path was the second of three major arcs, but I have no evidence for this beyond just a general intuition.
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May 3, 2022 19:12
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I tried TWI, but I bounced off the writing style really hard. It was just so wordy, and there were so many sentences that didn’t add anything. I can deal with a slow pace, a meandering plot, or even mediocre prose, but when every chapter could be half as long without losing anything, it’s exhausting. I dropped it after a dozen chapters, though, so maybe this improves later.
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May 7, 2022 09:05
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I've been reading Memories of the Fall (starting from the in-progress rewritten book 1) and while it's quite well-written and well-realized, it also has been ten chapters of various viewpoint characters being hosed over politically in one way or another; I'm not sure anybody has gotten a real, whole-hearted win yet. I'm not saying my fiction needs to always be a power fantasy but I really hope somebody gets some catharsis at some point.
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May 11, 2022 05:03
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Unfortunately Book 2 of Memories of the Fall is quite bad in comparison. I’m hopeful Book 3 will be better, since of course it was written by an author closer in time to the author of the Book 1 rewrite, but if it keeps being ”grimdark Azarinth Healer” I’ll probably drop the series. (Spoiler tags for people who really don’t want to know about the general direction of a story before reading it; I suspect most people would be fine clicking the spoiler, since it’s just a general criticism of the story.)
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May 14, 2022 14:32
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honestly it’s still well written, but it goes into an incredibly boring bottle universe and completely ignores the actual strengths of the series, which as you said are the well-realized depiction of a xianxia society that makes sense and has lots of different characters in it with their own perspectives and motivations I think one of my favorite moments in Part 1 is when you start seeing Ha Yun viewpoint chapters and find out he resents and is jealous of the more independent Hunters because he can’t get promoted for political reasons, just as they all resent him for picking and choosing the easiest missions using his influence. Everybody has their own perspective!
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May 14, 2022 14:49
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Good news: Memories of the Fall Book 3 is much better than Book 2. There’s a ton to say about this serial; I’ll try to write a review after I’ve finished Book 3.
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May 16, 2022 03:39
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it's definitely more stuff and I think there are a bunch of rewrite chapters that don't correspond to anything in the original book but I started at ch12 and it was ok. especially since it's memories of the fall so it loves referring to information that you don't have like you already know it anyway
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May 17, 2022 04:44
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What's actually happening on the cultivation front in Forge of Destiny in the Threads? I'm caught up on Royal Road (Ling Qi is watching the sect tournament). Lots of stuff has happened in the story, of course, but I kind of lost track of the power progression. She's at, uh, level 3 cultivation and level 3 body physique, or whatever they're called, right? "Green" and "bronze", I think? But I think this was true even at the end of Forge. How much progress has she made in both categories? Is there even a fourth level of body strength? To be honest, I don't really care that much about the answer, but it's weird reading a story with these kinds of power levels and not really knowing how the protagonist matches up with other major characters.
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May 19, 2022 00:07
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OK, thanks, good to know. It's funny that Yrsillar doesn't mention this at all in the RR/published versions. I can see why they don't; it's really not that interesting, and of course on the quest presumably when someone cares they just go look at the big stat block. But I do think it should come up a little more often than it does. Speaking of xianxia, I'm almost caught up with Memories of the Fall, and there's a big caveat on the story, one that is not at all obvious from the description. One of the major themes of the story--- maybe the major theme--- is people being oppressed and wronged by an unfair world and an unfair fate, and "justice" existing only so far as the powerful can use it to get what they want. And one of the main ways that manifests is rape culture: the MCs are predominantly (though not exclusively) female, and their actions are in many situations constrained by the fear of being sexually assaulted or humiliated by powerful men. What I'm getting at here is that rape and other forms of sexual abuse is basically everywhere in the story, and probably around half the time a female MC is physically threatened it's with an explicit or implicit threat of rape attached. These are pretty heavy themes for a xianxia progression fantasy story, and they're way more baked into it than for something like A Journey of Black and Red (where the MC is a rape survivor but spends most of her time being a badass vampire or trying not to die, not avoiding the threat of sexual assault). And unfortunately a lot of the time Rith does not exactly treat it with the utmost care; my eyes rolled back into my head, then did a 360 and rolled vertically back the other way when they pulled a "oh, in this society, women all walk around with their tits out, and everyone loves casual sex". The theme does have a resonance for xianxia, which usually has a subtheme of "the powerful do what they want, which is why the MC wants to not be weak", and the heavens themselves screwing you over is certainly a good analogy for the power of societal forces like patriarchy or rape culture, so I don't mean to say that it's always treated poorly. But it's something to be aware of going in.
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May 19, 2022 00:46
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Yeah, sometimes it does really hit. This is the only xianxia story I've ever read where I gave a gently caress about the tribulations, for example, because "the heavens" are conflated with all the societal bullshit the main characters have to deal with.
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May 19, 2022 04:29
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I'm outing myself as a huge weeb by saying this, but I'm still kind of in disbelief that casualfarmer named the main character's wife Hong Meiling
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Jun 27, 2022 23:35
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Megazver posted:Mandarin Chinese, quite frankly, doesn't have that many syllables and, therefore, names made up of said syllables. Whatever you name a character, there's probably a character somewhere already called that - at least if you're looking at it written down in English with no tones. This is definitely true, but I would be surprised if it were a coincidence just because of how many pun and reference names are already in Beware of Chicken. There's an explicit nod to an obscure manga early in the first book (A Tale of Small Town Hardship in the Sengoku Era), so they're at least aware of that general milieu.
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Jun 28, 2022 00:26
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the core of the story is the beauty of friendship between young men, especially if one of the young men is secretly a woman and also an infamous criminal
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Jun 30, 2022 03:06
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If you’re looking for wuxia that’s easy to digest, I would just reject web serials entirely (oh no! nrook had abandoned the whole premise of the thread!) and read Legend of the Condor Heroes. It’s a formative work, a fast and fun read, and the English translation (of the first part) is good.
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Jul 11, 2022 17:34
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Ah, I'm glad to see we've rotated from the classic "Pirateaba's work is bad and people who read her are bad" back to the even more classic "Wildbow's work is bad and people who read him are bad".
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Jul 22, 2022 17:21
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day-gas posted:tbh wandering into this thread a little while ago, it was nice knowing that I wasn't crazy for finding Ward incredibly boring. Going slowly through the backlog was additional fun because every ten pages wildbow happened again which really gives you strength to keep moving. I mean there’s nothing wrong with thinking wildbow is a bad writer and posting about it, Anias’s post just wandered past that directly into a “and people who read him are dumb idiots” zone that rubbed me the wrong way e: I actually read book 1 of prophecy approved companion awhile ago and it mixes a fun premise and a good dynamic between the protagonist and the player with very mediocre prose; this was enough for me to enjoy it, but others’ mileage may vary. nrook fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 00:18
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I’ve heard bad things about RoyalRoad’s ownership itself from various chatter, too, especially around its treatment of stories with queer characters in them. There was a big write-up on the HobbyDrama subreddit a few months back. I haven’t ever heard this from a really obviously trustworthy source (you’ll notice the Reddit link is to, well, Reddit), but I’ve seen enough smoke that I personally believe it. Hopefully somebody with more knowledge can correct me if I’m mistaken.
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Aug 12, 2022 21:26
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clearly it’s that the authors who post in this cool and good thread are just amazing and superior people, and thus attract a higher class of patron
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Aug 18, 2022 19:50
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Larry Parrish posted:i don't understand. the Kindle app helpfully shows me upcoming books from authors I like. And it's smart enough to know that just means ones I've read more than one book from, because I don't rate anything ever. Who the gently caress has a personal time limit for the next book before they never read that author again? This all sounds like... A very niche problem for a very niche audience I actually hate this feature of the Kindle app so much, because it is constantly baiting me by thinking new books in series I like are out when they aren’t. Pure evil!
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Aug 18, 2022 22:34
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Tori Transmigrated is decent and very concerned with project management, if that’s what you’re looking for.
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Aug 24, 2022 06:22
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I’m coincidentally rereading Ar’Kendrithyst too, and it was funny and surprising to me how many “books” it is actually divided into. I had always thought of it as basically being two books so far: one called Kendrithyst, or City of Shades or something like that, and the second called The Worldly Path.
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Sep 28, 2022 16:13
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 08:31 |
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Ar’Kendrithyst has reminded me: I love disguise arcs. I love seeing the main character go incognito, and seeing them interact with people and form relationships that they couldn’t with the reputation they have otherwise. I love seeing other folks try to puzzle out who they are, or make false assumptions. It’s just fun every time. What are folks’ favorite disguise stories in web serials? I remember really enjoying every time in the Guide that Catherine talks to someone who doesn’t know who she is; her first meeting with Hanno of Arwad comes to mind, as does an earlier chapter where she chats with a random citizen in Callow (in… Marchford, I want to say?) And of course there’s the Practical Guide to Sorcery, where this is basically the premise.
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Oct 2, 2022 03:58
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