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Honestly, I felt that the first 20 chapters were pretty weak. It gets better after that, and volume 2 is where it feels like the author has managed to settle into their writing chops. Volume 1 definitely shows as the author's first written work.
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Aug 29, 2017 03:40
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builds character posted:shes not going to be the black knight though, is she? She’s clearly meant for something more. Prac Guide The Squire always becomes either the White Knight or the Black Knight. It's entirely possible that Catherine breaks this somehow or somehow manages to inherit both, but the Story of the Squire is that they become a Knight Dunno if this discussion really needs to be in spoilers though.
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Oct 3, 2017 03:22
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The clones all died from the killswitch, but iirc we never actually saw shatterbirds body after Noelle swallowed her. if she managed to survive that and the golden morning, then it might be her.
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Oct 28, 2017 00:45
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My guess? Vista. Young, at the end of the world, part of the wards, powerful powers.
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Nov 2, 2017 07:57
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Double posting to ask, re Practice Guide when does Malicia ask Catherine to kill Black? I sort of remember reading it but not specifically when it was If you're talking about the quote Where she says that she's betraying her best friend, she's talking about letting Nauk die
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Nov 22, 2017 01:58
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Trickster was also a serial manipulator and emotional abuser towards noelle. He's a gigantic rear end in a top hat, a likeable rear end in a top hat, but an rear end in a top hat nonetheless.
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Feb 11, 2018 19:43
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Omi no Kami posted:Speaking of PracGuide, has Black ever gotten clearer on exactly what his play with Cat was? I remember him mentioning to the empress that he was trying to basically short-circuit the system to permanently stop heroes from spawning in Callow without actually weakening their control, but that's the last I can recall from his camp. Book 4 spoilers My guess is that he wanted to etch a new Role into creation, and destroying the superweapon has basically done that. All Villainous Names are bound to lose eventually, it's part of the Role of being a Villain, and Names are simply Roles wielded by mortals. I think the initial play was to get a strong Black Knight set up with little conflict facing her, have her raise a Squire, but force that Squire to not be able to become a White or Black Knight. That way the Squire would have to transition to a brand new Name that a Squire could become, hopefully etching a new Villainous Name that could win, and win for good. I think part of him destroying the superweapon was realizing that Cat was about to transition into a new Name, thereby foiling his plans. So he accelerated the schedule, and prevented her from taking a Name. Now she's nameless and doesn't even have power that draws from the Gods Below but is still a Villain. Meaning that she's now etching a brand new mark onto Creation, telling a story that has not yet been told, and as such does not have a Name, but has all the power thereof of one
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Jun 19, 2018 09:04
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I think he was Named. The issue is that he was intruding on the Narrative being written, and its been established later that intruding on a narrative- or stepping outside of your own- removes narrative protections that Named have. It's the reason why heroes can die easier during a Crusade, because they've diverted from their written narrative to fight a villain that they're not supposed to. The Exiled Prince probably had a narrative to fight Black or Malicia, but that got sidestepped when he deliberately went up against Catherine, effectively sealing his own death warrant.
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Oct 5, 2018 05:33
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Omi no Kami posted:Something about the start of this week's Katalepsis makes me want to see a mini-arc that's just the entire house (and Twil, and Natalie) crammed into a station wagon and forced to go on a big, silly road trip for no reason. 
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Jul 5, 2020 21:56
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Yeah, it generally only tries to focus on 2-3 storylines over the course of a book now. That being said tGoB is on hiatus while the author tries to recover from burnout after treating himself incredibly unhealthily this year.
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Jan 11, 2021 03:32
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Just caught up with Dragoneye, and I think the story really suffered from trying to jam 4 years of character development into ~70 chapters. It really makes the instant promotion to Sentinel feel a lot more unearned and ends up feeling that Elaine is just constantly succeeding without any external tensions of sexism, despite the attempted justifications made in the story. There's a lot of plot points that the author felt that they wanted to resolve, but it's just ends up a bit messy resolving them entirely in a chapter so you can go to the next sequence in the time skip. Additionally, there hasn't been enough narrative tension surrounding her oath, which makes the supposed restrictions around it feel a lot lighter than they should be. I hope now that the story pacing is slowing down a lot in terms of time skipping, the author might be able to explore those tensions a lot more. I think there's still a lot of potential for the story to succeed, but the quality of the story dropped significantly after she left the plague town.
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Mar 11, 2021 21:23
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Onean posted:I do think there's a world where the promotion to Sentinel might have been better after one more round, but I believe the author has said that it would have mostly just been filler and they figured moving on was the better choice. In-universe we also find out that most Sentinels aren't actually that much of a leap above a Ranger team. They're a step up, but the majority of their supposed power comes from, as one of them puts it, smoke and mirrors due to the massive support network they have access to and purposefully being assigned to handle their specialties that let them hit above their weight class. Without those, most of the Sentinels could be handled by one Ranger team. With those, it makes as much sense having a healing specialist (the likes of which the world has literally never seen before due to her otherworldly knowledge) with okay combat abilities and a proven loyalty to the Rangers as it does having a thieving specialist with likely even less combat potential. I don't mind the in-story justifications for it, my issues with it come from a narrative aspect. Both plague town and ranger academy had a similar narrative length, but I felt that plague town ended up having a lot more narrative depth in terms of Elaine's character development. The ranger academy arc felt like the author was just trying to check off boxes, because there wasn't enough time in the chapters that were written themselves for them to explore Elaine's time there in any depth. I think that the Ranger academy arc needed at least twice the number of chapters written to allow for character development and growth, not only for Elaine, but for side characters that were developed in the story. When the story talks about Glacia, Markus or the Plague Mage, I can actually care about them because there actually a narrative relationship between them and Elaine. I literally read through the Ranger academy arc last night, and I can barely remember the names of the people that she went to the academy with aside from Wolfy- because he was the only classmate that was narratively developed as a character. If any of the others ever show up in the story, I won't be able to actually care about them, even if the story wants us to. The nature of poorly written timeskips (which I feel post-Plague town and Ranger Academy were), is that it doesn't allow for narrative development of any characters or any sort of narrative tensions. I don't necessarily mind the plots points as they have happened, my issue with the story is that it's been too rushed, and has suffered from a lack of narrative tension as a result. Now that we're out of the time skip, we're starting to see more thematic and narrative tensions begin to occur again, so I'm hoping that the story will improve as a result. berenzen fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Mar 11, 2021 |
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Mar 11, 2021 23:08
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Laken and Flos both commit the cardinal sin of not tying well into the themes of the story being told. If I had to put the themes of TWI into neat little boxes, I'd say the the big themes of the work are Growth/Change/Self-Actualization, Family/Friendship, and Memory. Laken still doesn't fit into these themes at all- or at best as a exceptionally low-budget Erin-, but the recent Flos chapters have Flos acting as an antagonistic force that is causing the exploration of these themes in others, which makes the recent Chandrar chapters- notably the Jecaina and the Fehotep chapters- shine.
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Mar 12, 2021 03:56
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Katalepsis has a lovely werewolf and the story would be lesser without her 
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Mar 20, 2021 00:45
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Quote from pirate "I have accidentally written enough for two chapters." Ended up being split into the next 2 chapters for patreon readers.
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Apr 4, 2021 05:53
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Chillyrabbit posted:Rag's goblins are raiding Drake Hectval caravans, which is hampering the war effort against Liscor shown as a plus. The Woven Bladegrass Gnoll tribe sacked a Drake city trying to provoke a war and assumedly increase Gnoll's power/land shown as a negative It turns out that the reasoning why you commit violence happens to be perceived differently, yes. There is a difference between (Patreon spoiler) contributing to an ongoing war and committing unprovoked violence and how that is perceived by people.
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Apr 14, 2021 23:04
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Pretty sure Tulm is more metal than fehotep. In fact, I would argue most dullahan are
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Jun 2, 2021 22:38
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Sure, but you don't want to throw out too many Terms in the preamble. That's just a good way to get peoples eyes to glaze over and skip the story. Hook them in with the preamble and introduce other elements of the story later. You also have 3 temporal references in the blurb, and no mention of the main character's name. It makes the new blurb sound like a setting reference rather than a story. Cut 2 of the temporal references and add the character name to provide some reference to the story. quote:The end of the Last War bathed the world in nuclear fire. In 2151, <Character name> seeks to join the Outcasts, intrepid explorers that search through the ruins of the Old World in search of lost technology. This cuts down on terminology that might be unfamiliar to the reader, introduces the reader to main character and gives them a basic motivation and provides context to the one unfamiliar term that cannot be gleaned from context.
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Nov 17, 2021 17:27
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I'd recommend keeping a story bible or a local wiki if you want to keep stuff straight. That way you can keep stuff straight and have spoilers riddled throughout your work without spoiling it for the outside world.
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Nov 24, 2021 19:59
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Not a webserial, but if you want to read books that has that stuff as a subtheme and talks about and deals with those themes I highly recommend A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkades Martine.
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Apr 12, 2022 02:11
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That's not a chapter, that's a book
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Mar 1, 2023 04:37
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It's a thing with a lot of authors, especially in the publishing space, especially when they learn a new word that they like, or have a certain pet word. Bemused is one of the big ones that gets used a lot, because there arent a ton of synonyms for it that are often appropriate. Confused and bewildered are often considered to be too strong of an emotional carrier, and a lot of the other synonyms like puzzled or perplexed aren't quite the right fit.
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Mar 23, 2023 00:03
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Someone apparently locked lungs in a basement and forced him to write 2 chapters of Last Ship in Suzhou and release them in back-to-back days.
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Nov 13, 2023 08:42
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Jazerus posted:i think you have to separate criticisms like "spelling words correctly" from criticisms like "tight plotting". the former is obviously a requirement for a story to be any good if the reader's standards are reasonable, but tight plotting isn't what everyone wants. a fast paced story isn't inherently better than a slower one, a story where every plot point is directly connected to the main thrust of the story isn't inherently better than one where sometimes things happen and not all of those things circle back around to being relevant to the main plot. if you conflate the two then of course you're going to be frustrated by a discussion like this. nobody is clamoring for stories with persistent spelling errors, not even the people who read them anyway Good writing isn't just necessarily tight plotting and proper grammar and spelling. You can have a work that is well-written, while the plotting is meandering and slice-of-life. Word intentionality, over and under-use of words, and structuring your sentences to better evoke emotion all are elements of good writing. Grammar and spelling are a baseline of competency, and shouldn't be indicative of the relative skill of the writer. This is true whether you're writing an essay, blog or novel. It is universal across the craft of writing. Plotting is a skill of storytelling, which is intermixed and is supported by an author's skill with writing, but they are two separate skills and it is important to distinguish that when criticizing literature.
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Jan 27, 2024 23:11
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To me Saleh gives hints the way she does because she knows that's how Alden will respond. I suspect that she'd have a different way of guiding Jeffy. Saleh and many of the other instructors, to me, comes across as relatively capable teachers.
berenzen fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Mar 23, 2024 |
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Mar 23, 2024 18:48
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There are 14 chapters in this arc, not including the epilogue chapters that are currently being published on patreon right now
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Apr 8, 2024 19:54
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