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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:It's definitely not ironically. I bounced off it real fast when it became apparent it was self insert fantasy for Scott Alexander, and he spent the whole time making it clear how much more clever he is than anyone (both as the writer and the character) and how institutions of any kind, corporate or government, only get in the way of his cleverness. Maybe it gets better later, but I couldn't get past the start. Unless I'm misremembering, the "protagonist" of Unsong ends up achieving basically nothing by his own merits; all the real work in saving the world is done by other, vastly more capable people, and the culmination of his character arc is his realisation that he's playing a bit part in someone else's story, and is nowhere near as cool or as smart as he thought he was. I think his sole actual contribution (aside from discovering the Vital Name by pure dumb luck) is to survive just long enough that once everyone else is dead they can ride his body. So, maybe give it another chance and enjoy watching this dumb nerd getting dunked on? bewilderment posted:I don't know a whole lot about him other than reading his RationalWiki page but from what I can see, despite leaning libertarian himself fairly openly, I couldn't really draw an inherently anti-organisational view from the book itself. Possibly even the opposite. It definitely read as anti-establishment to me, but I could never pin a specific ideology to it. Some bits read socialist, some were just vaguely anarchist and then there's that one industrialist guy on the boat who seems to be presented as presenting a compelling argument for "Just stand back and let the profit motive save the world, sonny," but then sort of unceremoniously... dies, I think? Gitro posted:Ryoka's a misanthropic badass smart hot asian nerd, she's like a checklist of what awful nerds think is cool and good. Getting clowned on and learning to be less of a shitheel makes her way more tolerable, but up until that point it's kind of ugh. This is true, though I'm still finding her pretty insufferable. Actually a little moreso, now that she's made friends with a group of people who make a point of being institutionally insufferable.
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Sep 13, 2017 13:52
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Nettle Soup posted:[MoL 80] Finally. There's been a whole plot-gap there since the beginning of this poo poo of why don't they just talk to him. In all of their interactions with him, he's seemed like a pretty reasonable guy, for an ancient lich anyway. Going straight to "let's kill him!" without ever considering "Hey, what if we just ask him straight up" has seemed like a really weird missing piece. Zorian's default operating mode is extreme paranoia, especially wrt anything that could cause damage that persists across resets, and Zach thinks he's a videogame character and the lich is his endboss.
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Jan 26, 2018 20:17
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Megazver posted:Oh, also, Unsong. Just remember it's okay to fast forward through the qabbala pun sections. The numerous, extensive qabbala pun sections. On the one hand, Unsong is great and there's a lot more to it being great than kabbalistic puns, but if you don't like the puns I doubt you'd like the rest of it either. Why would you read it if you didn't like the puns, that's just dumb. Nettle Soup posted:I stopped a few months back too, around the point of "holiday to pirate city" has anyone been keeping up with it? Yeah. It's not getting better. The problem here is that the author doesn't want to cut, anywhere. He's got too many characters with too many plots and is determined to document every individual plot beat in excruciating detail, with exhaustive commentary. This is why a simple scene about doing repair work has been stretched piecemeal over like half a dozen chapters instead of knocked off in the five or so paragraphs it actually deserved. Trissiny's sections are still alright, mostly. But we're cutting from her to the group in Puna Dar to the freshmen at the university to the group attacking the freshmen at the university to Tellwyrn's own separate branch of that to Vadrieny's own private quest... Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut e: Mother of Learning is sort of doing the same poo poo, covering all the i-dotting and t-crossing that "needs" to happen before the story can get to the interesting parts, but as ratfic the bean-counting is sort of the point of the thing. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 15:35
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Cicero posted:Is it some kind of Mary Sue wish fulfillment thing where she gets to be successful and surrounded by friends and praised even though she's a huge douche to everyone around her? It is in fact the exact opposite of that.
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Feb 1, 2018 03:01
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Catching up with the Wandering Inn. I'm at 3.16- Erin is bored and thinks the highest ideal of humankind is to be a celebrity. What the gently caress. e: and now Shakespeare is some sort of magic. I want to hurt whoever wrote this.
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Feb 3, 2018 16:40
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Practical: I hope that wasn't supposed to be your killing blow, Cat. No one's ever dead if you didn't see the body.
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Feb 19, 2018 17:05
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Silynt posted:In Practical Guide, I was surprised that Catherine sided with Malicia over Black regarding disposal of the weapon. On the one hand, I know that she cares about Callow above all else, so she's grasping at straws to protect it from war. On the other hand, she seems to have bought into Black's preaching about the inevitability of defeat for people who own things like that weapon, so why would she toss aside that core belief right at this moment? It seems really weird for her ethically, too- not just because it's made out of the hundred thousand dead countrymen she was just mourning- I can see her talking herself into eating an omelette if the eggs are already cracked- but because if you keep this thing around, it will be used by someone, at some point. It's a lodestone for heroes every bit as much as villains. And that's lethally dangerous not just to whoever gets hit with it, but the entire world and everyone in it. And she just had a talk with Thief about red lines, too. I'm going to blame the mantle. lurksion posted:And he probably isn't even wrong. This isn't a rational enough world that MAD would work. Neither is ours, frankly.
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Feb 26, 2018 17:56
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The Shortest Path posted:It's very, very good, the current arc has been dragging a LOT though. Not just the current arc. The rot set in a while ago. I've always been a little leery of tGAB. Some of that's bias on my part- it's in a genre I'm just not very fond of- but I think there are legitimate, objective problems with its storytelling. The pacing I've covered before, and the eleventh hour sci-fi elements I'm not actually all that bothered by. No, I want to talk about the characters. See, they talk to each other. They talk to each other a lot. Every time a character develops, they get together with their friends and they talk the change to death. Every possible implication and ramification is dissected in exhausting detail. Nothing is allowed to remain implicit. So why is that bad? Sounds pretty healthy, right? Well, aside from the fact that it is repetitive and choking and bloated as all gently caress, the problem is that all of these characters are slowing becoming the exact same character. Soon, everyone will be Sweet. They all adopt the same way of thinking about the world, of interpreting events. You get a lot of scenes where someone's thinking a thing, and then a little further down the line we have a different character, thinking the same thing in the same way for the same reason. Now, I could live with the convergence of philosophies- Webb is clearly pushing A Thesis, and the convergence is a working to that purpose- but the repetition is slowly driving me mad. It's not interesting repetition- it's not done to expand on previous points, or examine them from a different perspective- it just happens because we haven't seen these guys have that epiphany yet. It's also slowly chasing out all the incompatible goods- there is less and less scope for the good guys to pursue differing goals or clash over means. Everybody wants the same things in the same ways. That's loving dull. TGAB is still in the top percentile of web fiction. Webb is not an incompetent- they clearly know where they want to go with the story, every arc has a purpose in the overall narrative. Hell, the fact that they write full grammatical sentences puts them well ahead of the pack. But even so, I have found myself consistently less enthused by Gods than any other web serial of a similar grade. Practical Guide, Wandering Inn, Taint, Last Angel, Bookworm, ZTJ, Unsong, Ra- hell, even Void Domain.
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Feb 28, 2018 00:53
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I'm more amused by the Bard running face first into anti-protagonism and just failing to wrap her brain around it. God, Practical's cosmology is such incredibly vile bullshit. Why is she so invested in keeping it running? e: I wish Anaxares was the main character, frankly. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Mar 7, 2018 |
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Mar 7, 2018 13:13
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tGAB's going on hiatus because the author thinks they're burning out. I agree, frankly, so this sounds like a good idea. They claim it's only going to be until April, but they're also talking about a second project and a publication kickstarter. The way these things usually go, the hiatus will be indefinite by Friday. 
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Mar 19, 2018 00:43
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boxen posted:Is Practical Guide done now? No updates after the chapter called "epilogue", and I can't find anywhere that the author talks about plans for it. Practical is divided into books, each of which has its own prologue and epilogue. That epilogue was for book 3. About a month elapsed between the epilogue for book 2 and the prologue for book 3, for reference, though there were a couple of side-stories inbetween. I don't think it's over, but you never know when something is going to just stop updating.
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Mar 19, 2018 18:35
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21 Muns posted:The author doesn't even really need to explain it; if it can be explained, it's not a plot hole. It being the author just means that when you say "no that's bullshit gently caress you" it's even less credible than if you dismissed anyone else who'd come up with the same explanation. Plot-hole-seekers are just bored miserable cynics who have no joy in their life and probably use Something Awful dot com. You're misreading Moor here. When they say "there is a need", they don't mean "this material requires further supplementary material to 'make sense', it is insufficient in itself", they mean "people have a need" for lore, background etc.- they want the author to explain their work to them. The important part of that sentence is "as if from an oracle". The criticism isn't about the content of the work- "there are plot holes in this story"- it's about the manner in which people relate to the media they consume.
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Apr 3, 2018 23:59
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Whatever it is I hope it hurries the gently caress up because this transition has been drawn out far too long
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May 5, 2018 22:04
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Ytlaya posted:One example that comes to mind is the part early on when Kilian is casting some lightning spell and says some lines that I think were supposed to sound really badass* and Catherine is like "oh god that's so hot" and I just felt so vicariously embarrassed for Kilian. Like if she lives to become an adult she will think back upon her badass mage incantations and feel nothing but shame. We're talking about a world here where there is an entire nation dedicated to building flying death palaces and shouting "Your doom is upon you, fools!" and "Who dares?!" from the tallest tower.
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Jun 9, 2018 13:57
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On the subject of looking for stuff to pick up... I went back to take another look at Heretical Edge, which I'd tried before and passed on. In short: it never gets good. Now I'm sitting here looking at this, and I'll be frank: that is one intimidating website. Somebody wants to be the queen of terrible serial fiction and they are wanting it real drat hard. Also checked out Cradle, and... I do not regret spending money on it! High praise! Apart from Skysworn maybe, that was a nothing book. I also read a bunch of stuff off of TWF but it was so bad I can't even remember the titles. 
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Jun 28, 2018 17:29
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Silynt posted:I totally agree about Skysworn, easily the weak link. Ghostwater was a solid return to form I thought. Ghostwater had me rolling my eyes a lot, just because of how transparently it was about not having anything interesting to do with Lindon at Gold and trying to get him to the next realm as quickly as possible. It had a lot of stuff happening, though, so I enjoyed it well enough. I guess I'd rank the books Soulsmith = Blackflame > Ghostwater > Unsouled > Skysworn?
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Jun 28, 2018 18:25
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Affi posted:Maybe i should read zombie knight but I just can’t get through the whole 1 page per page thing. It really sucks when I read on my phone. There's a "display entire chapter at once" option.
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Jun 29, 2018 23:02
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Lone Goat posted:hey I'm like 70 pages into Zombie Knight and does the character ever stop being an autistic anime cliché because I'm getting nauseous trying..... to...... read.... this..... horrible.... stilted..... garbage........... No
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Jul 1, 2018 12:27
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Sampatrick posted:What's the best xianxia web novel that's been translated/is written in English? I'm assuming there's some good stuff out there somewhere even if I have no idea where it would be. Ze Tian Ji Not even a contest 
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Jul 9, 2018 01:39
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He's Levantine, I think? Also: one thing I've never been entirely clear on is whether the Titanomachy is inhabited by actual giants or not.
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Jul 16, 2018 20:58
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navyjack posted:Are there 7 little principalities that make up Procer? Considerably more
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Jul 23, 2018 12:11
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The way Prac Guide's metaphysics work this plan is guaranteed to succeed. Like the world is going to tie itself in knots making sure this turns out right
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Aug 2, 2018 00:04
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quote:Masego patted Thief’s shoulder. You just know Hierophant is patting himself on the back, thinking, "I am killing this social poo poo today."
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Aug 8, 2018 13:02
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MoL: I have to be honest, if I was Zorian 1.0 I'd much rather be absorbed into a vastly superior version of myself than have that version suddenly appear and relegate me to being the poo poo Zorian for the rest of my life.
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Sep 4, 2018 15:13
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quote:She’d attempted correspondence with the Hierarch to probe intentions and six months past the man had finally deigned to reply. Cordelia almost wished he hadn’t. The missive had been three pages long, most of which castigating the notion of inherited rule as Wicked Tyranny, Procer itself as A Rapacious Pack Of Foreign Oligarchs and her suggestion of formal truce talks as Treason Against The Will Of The People. Which people in particular, she’d noted, he had not specified. He’d at least recognized her title of First Prince, as it was the result of an election. Anaxares 
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Sep 28, 2018 14:29
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Should I be reading these tGaB interludes? The one where Tellwyrn turns out to be a time lord was bad enough I just gave up on them, but there's been like a billion of them since Trissiny had her last bollocking.
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Oct 1, 2018 21:32
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Same. I've less attachment to Juniper than Ratface, frankly.
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Oct 3, 2018 15:56
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Gladi posted:Also, anyone following Heretical Edge? I tried. Lost track around the point they came back from space. Has something interesting happened?
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Oct 19, 2018 14:26
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While it is fairly well-written, mind it is ratfic, in a big way, and the ridiculous hyperoptimised tacticool munchkinry the characters apply to every situation does begin to drag after a point. It's a much better story whenever some big emotional upset comes along to knock them out of that mindset.
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Oct 26, 2018 09:46
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Omi no Kami posted:Is the story itself going anywhere? One of the big things that's turned me off of a lot of otherwise-serviceable serials is when it becomes painful obvious that the author either doesn't know where the overarching narrative is going, or struggles to maintain a coherent narrative structure despite having a planned outcome, so you end up with hundreds of thousands of words where the protagonists just kinda wander around doing stuff that doesn't actually do anything for their character arcs or the overarching plot, and which could've been left on the editing floor without harming the story. Plot-wise, the characters have a clear and explicit goal they're working towards, but no one knows how to get there or even where to start looking, so it's hard to say whether all the titting about is secretly plot critical or actually just titting about. There's a fairly aggressive tempo to the character arcs, at least? I guess I'd peg its narrative velocity as being somewhere close to MoL's? It's no Unsong. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Oct 26, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 11:20
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Ytlaya posted:It's already been established that the whole Winter/Moonless Nights thing is basically the same sort of thing as a Name, and getting a Name wouldn't even represent any sort of meaningful "power-up" given she's already playing in the Big Leagues (like she mentioned, any of these drow sigil leaders could basically wreck almost any Named on the surface) and the other big apotheosis folks (Dead King and Sve Noc) don't have Names in the traditional sense. Disagree. Cat's been struggling this whole book to use the mantle without falling prey to principle alienation- if a Name gives her more usable power that's an upgrade, even if she doesn't have the vast pool of potential power lurking at the back there. There's also the problem that, supernatural psychological influences aside, Winter is just a bad fit for Cat. The whole core of her character is this desire to defend and strengthen her homeland. That love underpins everything she does, even her most brutal acts- Winter's cold bleak cruelty conflicts with that. I think Moonless Nights is a trap for her- if she does achieve godhood via that route she'll be the God of Moonless Nights, not the God Catherine Foundling. I think the conversation about godhood and domains from a few chapters back backs me up here- if she does apotheosise, it'll be rooted in Callow, in her relationship to Callow and Callow's relationship to her. That said, I do think a new Name is probably a red herring at this point. The two possibilities I see here are either this merging of Winter and Night ends up denaturing the power somehow and she can repurpose it (not sure how that tracks, though- seems like we're on course for the mantle to have all the worst properties of Winter and Night), or she parleys this into something so ridiculous and audacious that it slingshots her into divinity on some other path. NinjaDebugger posted:Something else I've been thinking of is the revelation that you don't get to choose what fey title you give. That means there's even more symbolism in "Moonless Nights" Thought: Cat somehow fast talks Sve Noc into giving her the same title-for-oaths deal she gave the Mighty. The mantle gives her Queen of Moonless Nights, because that's her fey title. It's that or Winter makes Sve Noc vulnerable to oath/rules lawyering shenanigans, I think,
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Nov 26, 2018 20:22
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Plorkyeran posted:Akua is going to decide that the Power of Friendship is supreme and aggressively befriend everyone in existence regardless of the cost. This is the sequel serial and it's just that one chapter where she's trying to pretend to be Cat only five hundred thousand words long
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Nov 30, 2018 03:59
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I've always found this line of argument bizarre. Ling Qi is now bound to the Cai sure, and sure, this means there are now constraints on her behaviour that there weren't before. But she also has much greater power and access to resources than before, increasing her agency commensurably. Like, Ling Qi was never going to be able to escape the power structures of the society she lives in. The more her personal power increases, the more the hegemony will attempt to enmesh her in its power structures and place limits on her actions. At best, she could leave the empire- and become subject to whatever social structures exist out there- or attempt to overthrow it- which is probably best attempt from a position next to the throne anyway, and is less likely to transform the system than Ling Qi's relationship with it. There's no disappearing into the jianghu here.
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Jan 31, 2019 22:10
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I wasn't too hot on CCG until Venerable White turns up, which is where it starts to get really funny. The early section with Shuhang cultivating mostly in isolation just didn't do it for me. I'm not sure if I want to tell anyone who's not enjoying it to stick it out that long, because that is more than a few chapters in. On that subject, I recently got caught up on CCG. Shuhang spinning a cocoon is comedy gold. Serial hasn't been that funny since the tractor race. If someone's interested in looking at these Chinese serials but wants something more serious, I highly recommend taking a look at Ze Tian Ji. It's one of those rare xianxia novels that grounds its characters in a political context.
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Feb 6, 2019 00:33
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Omi no Kami posted:
...I thought Tats did work it out, almost immediately? I could be misremembering, it's been years. Regardless, for me Worm was always about... the impossibility of urban fantasy, I guess. This idea that you cannot simply inject fantastical elements into "our world" and have it remain "our world"- that the simple existence of superpowered individuals would be massively corrosive to our existing societies. The bullying is more a motif than a theme, in my mind. So if I was going to slim Worm down I'd probably choose to emphasise Cradle and the PRT (and their impotence), the Endbringers, and the drawn out collapse of civilisation.
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Mar 29, 2019 22:06
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:But is it? Yep! Or, that is the overriding impression I have of it in my memory, half a decade old as it is. Japan, Bengal and Newfoundland are underwater. The Global South is (apparently) a bloody mess ruled by super-powered warlords. The interludes from the perspectives of characters in positions of authority make it clear that they think the US is on the same trajectory, only a little behind the curve. The overall effect is of a world that is slowly falling apart, and can at best only stave off the decay for a moment or two. This plays out in miniature in Brockton Bay- massive loss of life and infrastructural collapse, leading to a breakdown of the pre-existing social order and the emergence of super-powered strongmen. And it... never really recovers. Something always interferes- the Slaughterhouse Nine, Echidna, the Undersiders themselves- and there just isn't enough energy available to put things right. This isn't always foregrounded, but for me it was always there in the background, to the point where the "normal world" stuff began to feel unreal and illusory. Milkfred E. Moore posted:you're turning Worm into a different story just as much as any of the other suggested edits so far in the thread. Sure? I mean, I thought that was the conversation we were having? Any attempt to carve Worm down into something tight and strongly themed is going to end up radically altering it, because Worm is not that. And, yeah, your serial's on my to-read list. I haven't been reading much of anything, lately, on account of having just started a new job. 
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Mar 30, 2019 02:04
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navyjack posted:Wait till you get to Burma Hahaha oh man. Love that the triumphant conclusion to that arc included "and Britain gets its colony back!". And how the gently caress did Britain get an empire anyway in that universe, when the entire planet is a monster-infested nightmare realm outside a few carefully-managed cities? Not that Metaworld's politics have ever been particularly great. The whole thing just oozes class and privilege.
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Jul 3, 2019 19:56
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Omi no Kami posted:I couldn't survive more than a few chapters of Metaworld Chronicles, but among the many things that baffled and weirded me out, I thought that making it an Isekai thing was a feckin' weird narrative choice. Like, maybe it becomes a critical plot point later on, but as far as I could tell she adapts to wizard-world so quickly and so thoroughly that her being from an entirely different dimension never actually did anything in or for the story. That seems like an awfully core element of your main character to just kinda forget about 3,000 words in. She eventually uses her past life's memories to introduce capitalism to Magical Communist China.
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Jul 3, 2019 22:07
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LibrarianCroaker posted:I knew Taint hadn't updated since like, January, but I didn't realize the author hadn't posted anything at all since March. Oof. Yeah. Some chance that one'll come back but a slim one. Pity, the sense of weight and momentum in those fight scenes was unreal Though as impromptu endings go, that last arc's not half bad. 
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Jul 27, 2019 00:36
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shirunei posted:Picked up the thread on The Eagle's Flight. Really surprised that this one isn't in the OP as it's a pretty well written take on a GoT style serial. I'm not far into it but so far it has that low magic, intrigue abounds feel to it. Oh, cool. I read that a while back, posted about it I think either here or in the other thread but nobody seemed interested. Haven't been keeping up because of real life stuff but it seemed super solid mediaeval intrigue stuff.
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Dec 9, 2019 14:53
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