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ryoka is good, actually, and i liked flos well enough it was the extended wistram interlude that broke me personally although wistram was pretty cool objectively
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Mar 19, 2019 21:11
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Jade Mage posted:Occasionally I consider reading Wandering Inn but this thread always makes me hold back and find something else. Every few weeks something seems to be very bad in TWI, and it's not too often the same thing over and over. it's very good, by breaking point i definitely didn't mean i stopped reading. it's just an extended flashback that took a bit too long to resolve or which should have been interwoven with non-flashback chapters. the most recent book felt kind of overambitious to me with too many character povs but other than that i really can't recommend TWI enough
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Mar 19, 2019 22:16
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the worm universe is just another story that fell victim to the "great worldbuilding, terrible execution" syndrome. and for the same reason as most of them: the escalation problem. this is the dbz thing where, no matter what, the power levels must go up and the next enemy must be even more dangerous (or, for wildbow, even more body-horror) than the last enemy. inexperienced authors end up creating premises that work really well as small-scale settings for small-scale stories, and then they shove their dumb high-stakes poo poo into a structure that just can't contain it
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Mar 25, 2019 17:36
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sunken fleet posted:guy they're called web serials for a reason. I know wildbow generally tries to write "complete" stories but doing that is kind of anathema to the format. Meandering episodic content is what serials are. To a web serial author writing a solid final ending is slaughtering their own personal golden goose with their own hands. There's a reason all the most financially successful examples in the genre are a zillion chapters long and nowhere near any sort of final resolution. I know a lot of the thread favorites are the ones that seem to a have solid ending (or at least be building to one) but eh. this is why TWI is so successful as a serial its format is unabashedly episodic. there's a plot, and important characters do important things that influence events, and things change over time. but at the end of the day, it's really just the story of erin's life and the things going on in the world around her, without the huge narrative peaks and valleys of a novel because that's not how life actually works you can argue about whether that's personally what you want to read, but it's certainly making the most of the medium to do a story like that instead of a more traditional novel-like structure
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Mar 26, 2019 04:18
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Flesnolk posted:Wildbow alt spotted a wildbow account would never be named "the shortest path"
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Mar 28, 2019 00:42
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LLSix posted:I mostly enjoyed the first chapter of TWI, but the second chapter is just painful. yes it gets better soon, the lyonette introduction is probably one of the lower points of the book but keep in mind literally everything you brought up is important, they're not just unintentional annoying things that the author threw in. you've identified all of the conflict points in erin's life, and right now she's being dumb about basically all of them - that does change.
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Apr 9, 2019 23:48
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I have no idea which novel you're talking about but it sounds a hell of a lot like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee it's connecticut yankee with a strong dose of socialism with chinese characteristics
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Apr 10, 2019 04:42
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Omi no Kami posted:When I was reading TWI, I remember finding the fact that everyone with a crafting skill had the ability to create objects of identical quality and composition to be so weird- it seems like that would explicitly disincentivize innovation, since all you would be doing is pouring resources into a new thing that all of your competitors get for free when it's done. correct. this explicitly happens with all of erin's earth food - she gets an evening of exclusivity for hamburgers and then literally everyone with a cooking skill knows how to make them once they see them or hear of them the planet that twi takes place on has been technologically stagnant since the gods died and the only remaining but still mostly dead god created levels and skills (probably)
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Apr 22, 2019 22:30
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Omi no Kami posted:Huh, where was that covered? I stopped reading it at some point, but at least as far as I'd gotten, all I remember is the beat cop ant guy saying that religions are terrible ideas because there might actually be a god listening, and that the bug guys beat feet away from their old continent to escape their angry/insane god. I don't think I remember anything about skills/levels though, the closest I can recall to those explicitly coming up was Ryoka's fairy buddy going "Just FYI, it's probably a really, really good idea that you didn't take any levels." it's never been explicitly stated, but that's how i interpret the bits and pieces about the system that have been dropped so far. i'd have to reread the whole story to give you the exact details on why i think so tho the system is a means of control and the only spooky-bizarre-evil thing in the world, on a large enough scale to be running the system, is the god under rhir who makes eternal monster hordes. the demons that the blighted king is fighting are the latest horde, the antinium were the previous one, and apparently there were several before them too. i figure that interacting with the system is metaphysically similar enough to worship to sustain the god in its role as game master, if the entire world is doing it, which is presumably why it's not dead even though everyone is atheist
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Apr 23, 2019 00:11
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A big flaming stink posted:the demons of rhir are actually shown to basically be the same as regular people in the clown chapters. Moreover, the antinium's god is nowhere hear strong enough to be the source of Levels and Skills. If a singular agent is the cause of these things, we're talking a god on the level of YHWH. of course they're the same as regular folks, so are the antinium. we don't know enough about the power of a single god in innworld to make the judgment that it can't be the game master. i wouldn't be too surprised if the system has a different origin, but the god under rhir is the only extant divine power, it's known to be evil/insane, and the fairies are certainly of the opinion that leveling puts you under the thrall of something very nasty, so it seems like the most likely option to me with what we currently know. i doubt that the explanation for the system, when it comes, is going to rely on a bunch of stuff that we've never been introduced to before - that's not really pirateaba's style.
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Apr 23, 2019 12:46
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:TWI has a lot of issues, but I enjoy it a lot most of the time. It has good slice of life chapters, is good at evoking emotions not a cheap way, and the world and most of the characters are interesting. It gets better after Ryoka stops being a major character, and skip all the Flos chapters besides 6.15.K. i feel like niers maybe meeting the doctor and definitely meeting erin is going to get some of the overarching plot wheels spinning again. maybe niers ends up buying an enormous mana source for erin's door so that she can reach baleros, linking her up with the UN guys and forming a core team of earthlings finally ready to investigate poo poo like "why are we here, and what's up with levels and poo poo anyway?", probably with ryoka too? i think a big part of TWI's theme is that the people from earth are making the world more interconnected, with the wizard TV, erin's door, etc. anyway TWI is definitely my favorite web serial and it's worth a read for sure. i don't really agree with the common opinion that it's very flawed - it's not perfect, and there are certain points where it gets pretty bogged down in a particular bit of worldbuilding, but on the whole it's very very good
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Jun 15, 2019 05:27
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one of the central themes of TWI is that information-age humans transported to another world will survive and thrive through their unique perspective on how to use instantaneous communication to allow for open exchange of ideas , and i've never felt more certain saying that than after this party chapter
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Jul 25, 2019 08:16
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A big flaming stink posted:guess who got into a fight with the patreon TWI discord about queer representation in stories and the necessity thereof? fantasy attracts a lot of people who can't, or don't want to, see political implications in their stories pirateaba's practically waving a giant rainbow communist flag with a long trailing "overcoming prejudice and bringing the world together is extremely good!" banner tied to it but good luck getting someone who's read the whole thing and hasn't figured that out by themselves to see it
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Aug 17, 2019 00:38
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the problem is when one character is queer, and their queerness is their character, or a majority of it. it comes off as "welll, i don't really know any gay people but i don't want to write a 100% straight story, so i'll just say john is gay and occasionally he leaves the group to hit on dudes. but nobody else who's a named character is gay, except maybe there's a lesbian princess because that's hot" there's a big difference between queer representation being an integrated part of the work, with their orientation treated like hermione's frizzy hair - i.e. a detail in a description of a whole person - and the kind i described above, which channels the 90s ultranerd exoticization of queerness
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Aug 17, 2019 15:04
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Sampatrick posted:The Wandering Inn is of the exact same quality as any of the 1000+ chapter Xianxia web novels except it's written in English not sure that you "get" twi
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Aug 28, 2019 20:12
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BadMedic posted:Maybe I should pick up TWI again. I stopped on a Lanken chapter where His army restarts the siege of rags in the city she conquered. you stopped just before all of that resolved
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Aug 30, 2019 00:48
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i like erin chapters too but it's okay to leave liscor sometimes
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Sep 11, 2019 22:57
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pirateaba figured out how to do a flos chapter without it being boring! just add erin
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Oct 29, 2019 23:17
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Larry Parrish posted:I don't remember if it was said outright, but when he stole that old archmages' bones it animated a bunch of undead as a defence mechanism, so probably some people died. The archmages wanted to execute them for it, but the golem badass that really runs the show stepped in for them. Which begs the question, why does Wistram care now? Isnt the golem just going to gently caress up their plans again anyway?. Also it's been a few years since Ceria and Picses left Wistram, so again, makes you wonder why they didnt do this earlier. they did do this earlier. pisces eluded several teams from wistram during his time wandering the wilds and scaring people for cash. that's why he was reluctant to settle down in liscor to begin with, way back in book 1
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Nov 20, 2019 04:12
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twi doesn't even feel anime to me, so much as it's intensely d&d. it feels like a modern take on faerun that's far less human/elf-centric. just try to convince me that pisces isn't literally edwin in the sense that anime is sometimes based on the author's d&d campaigns i guess it is anime tho
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Dec 2, 2019 01:25
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The Shortest Path posted:Yeah it was great. For the first big chunk of the chapter I was like "PA why the gently caress are you writing fanfic of this suck-rear end lovely racist anime trash" and then suddenly it was loving perfect. i mean he might share a name with the bad anime but i got much stronger doomguy/"doom slayer" vibes from the first half than anything else
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Dec 4, 2019 23:07
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my favorite thing about the TWI leveling system is that there's an actual explanation for why it exists (if you put all the hints together) and the oldest beings in the setting are aware that it's weird and artificial
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Dec 26, 2019 17:24
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Nettle Soup posted:It wasn't a criticism, it was just an observation. One of the things with fanfic is that bad things happen and everything is gritty and grimdark, but then PEOPLE ARE COOL and everyone gets through it and shows off their awesome abilities in the coolest way! i feel like it's just a very common tendency in fantasy & YA fiction. it's especially natural in a setting that could survive a direct transplantation into a d&d campaign, because d&d also caters to that tendency to push the player characters to the razor's edge before they triumph by using their shiniest spells and skills. speculative spoilers below: and, of course, a never-ending d&d campaign is exactly what the "sleeping" god under rhir wants from the people of innworld, because it gains strength and influence from their faith in levels and skills. that's my theory based on the hints so far anyway
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Dec 27, 2019 20:02
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Bhodi posted:Does TWI ever stop introducing new characters? I'm in the 4th arc, absolutely did not care for the flos chapters and last night I saw there's yet another perspective and I just put it down like OK there are enough people now and the story hasn't really gone very far for the amount of words I've read, is this ever going to pick up or just meander forever? it definitely stops introducing new major perspectives and pares down the prominence of some of them as things go along. it does genuinely get a little bloated for a while, but then it slims back down. after that there are a lot of interlude type chapters where a minor character you already know shows you the world from their perspective, but only a few major perspectives, and chapters start sometimes containing more than one perspective at a time (which makes the flos chapters especially more tolerable). but honestly, TWI is a very slow burn story where the "overall plot", to the extent that there is one, is not going to be resolved any time soon. just enjoy each chapter as a short story instead of zooming through them waiting for the part where it picks up, because it does not have a traditional introduction-action-resolution structure as a whole story, though individual chapters or books might.
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Jan 28, 2020 00:30
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Omi no Kami posted:I'm so sorry. XP (Seriously- it's amazing that manga gets made at all, because holy poo poo what a brutal career. You know it's trouble when even the 1% of the 1% who actually make a consistent, decent living at it still turn into sleep-deprived zombies to get their weekly 24 pages of pirate hijinks out the door.) i always wondered where DC's improbable fascination with gorillas came from
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Feb 23, 2020 03:24
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Oo Koo posted:"But doctor, I am Pagliacci" is dc fanfic about Joker recovering from insanity to discover that Batman has somehow been removed from the timeline and deciding to do something about it. can confirm that this one is a lot of fun. sane joker feels like an idea that should have been explored a million times over by now but somehow it hasn't
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Feb 25, 2020 21:59
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i'm starting to not mind trey chapters quite so much just because he meets much more interesting people than flos give me a fetohep pov arc where he somehow ends up in contact with erin
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Feb 29, 2020 01:03
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mossyfisk posted:Is "the city gets attacked" the only plot twist in TWI or what? lol those aren't plot twists that's just how life is
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Apr 1, 2020 02:54
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Cicero posted:None of it's nonsense or obvious repetition, but they definitely have a very very word-heavy style of writing. Chapter for chapter, about the same amount of plot-important 'stuff' happens as in a regular book or web serial, only the chapter is like 4-5x as long as a normal one. Some of that is anime-esque extensive monologuing/narration, some of it is just spending a lot of time on little slice of life details/worldbuilding for an absolutely enormous cast of named characters. TWI doesn't actually have a "plot" in the traditional sense, though. the characters and their lives are the plot.
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May 5, 2020 12:59
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:Pirateaba writes an immense amount of stylistic fluff that says absolutely nothing, including an immense amount of repetition of stuff we already know. Sometimes it's from many chapters back, but as often as not it's from the previous chapter or the same chapter. It reads somewhat similar to a translated Chinese web novel. Rather than set the scene, it often gets in the way of the emotions the story wants you to feel, either by making the tone too casual or by drawing them out too long. it reads nothing like a translated web novel, honestly. i genuinely don't understand most of the criticisms of TWI that this thread brings up any time someone talks about it, but at this point i've accepted that i never will
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May 5, 2020 23:47
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twi is really starting to come together now - everything up to the last public update was a prelude. the thing is that twi is about how communication changes the world. so much of what has been written was to establish every corner of the world as somewhere the audience cares about so that when things kick off the audience actually gives a poo poo about what's going on
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Jun 4, 2020 16:29
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honestly you are probably going to have to read fanfiction to get what you want. the pre-existing setting lets authors focus on the statbox type stuff while still having a plot - i feel like original fiction almost always (and understandably so) gets more interested in the plot than the stats, which fade into the background, or it gets too interested in the stats and the protagonist just wins. the meta-fiction aspect of fanfiction is particularly well-matched with the weird meta-reality of litrpg since the consequences of stats & skills existing, and what those numbers actually mean, is directly illustrated by deviations from the source plot and the known abilities of the source characters. probably not the answer you wanted to hear but good litrpg that isn't similar to the wandering inn in its approach to being litrpg is very very rare Jazerus fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jun 19, 2020 |
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Jun 19, 2020 17:55
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Argue posted:Is there LitRPG fanfic of works that aren't actually LitRPG? And yes, I know and love Harry Potter and the Natural 20 and have mentioned it here a number of times and am still sore that it hasn't updated after the author promised he'd be updating more regularly two years ago. Still waiting on the promised August 2018 update!!! yeah. the big fandoms have several works each - naruto is probably the highest density followed by worm.
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Jun 19, 2020 18:41
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shirunei posted:These recent Wandering Inn chapters kinda bum me out with the allusions to ongoing events. It's enjoyable to read nonetheless but it's a bummer to get drawn back into reality when you were trying to escape. Also did the author always cut back into the inn during alphabet chapters for a significant portion of the chapter? I don't remember her doing that so much and devoting it mainly to those other regions or viewpoints. TWI has always been about these things; the setup for the seemingly too-on-the-nose topical events was written months and/or years ago. at this point if something big happens in innworld that could happen in real life you should probably prepare for it to actually happen.
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Jul 8, 2020 06:02
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Affi posted:Six chapters in and it’s just pretty boring classes with cardboard characters? Does it improve soon or is it just not for me? they're getting fleshed out but i think this is definitely a "magic mechanics" story primarily, so if that's not your thing the currently posted chapters aren't going to do it for you. that may change in the future when the plot actually gets going in earnest
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Aug 14, 2020 21:16
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i think that was understood, folks they're making fun of a reviewer who believes that hysteria is real
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Sep 15, 2020 23:08
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Velius posted:Not more Flos, boo! What have we done to deserve this? flos chapters are good now because they're also fetohep chapters
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Sep 17, 2020 02:58
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asur posted:He was only in it for two seconds. doesn't matter all i want from TWI now is an arc where fetohep and teriarch buddy up for ridiculous adventures
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Sep 17, 2020 04:57
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Omi no Kami posted:What was truly insane about the Parian thing is that Wildbow kept simultaneously jangling the secret like car keys in front of a cat and getting increasingly irritated at his fans for making guesses that weren't correct... and then the obvious usage that people were supposed to guess was that she can combine deaders into a giant flesh golem to punch behemoth or something? Worm is one of the very few stories I've encountered where my interest and enjoyment sharply decreases every time a) I think about it, or b) wildbow writes about it. worm has Naruto Syndrome worse than anything other than, well, naruto that is, everyone enjoys the premise, the initial worldbuilding and cast, and the narrative arc that the first third or so of the story seems to be setting up, and if you want to continue feeling nostalgia toward it you have to forget that the rest exists because it's never going to stop spiraling downward
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Oct 13, 2020 23:26
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Infinity Gaia posted:Said chapter is now public and I concur, that was some good loving poo poo. TWI has its flaws but chapters like this one really make all the slow worldbuilding and ten billion character arcs worth it. this kind of chapter is happening more and more, and we're finally getting to the real payoff for the way the story has been structured. it just turns out you have to write the longest english language work in history to get to this point
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Nov 22, 2020 06:51
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