popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
28d ago
Good writeup. While I enjoyed reading 600-ish chapters of RI, it suffers the webnovel problem of just being too long. The thematic juice has been mostly squeezed by the end of the first arc. With the revelation that the "righteous" "family" Gu Yue clan was actually
I put RI in the same category as Worm or Wheel of Time: I admire it, I'm glad to have read it, and while 'low status', it's a rare modern novel that speak to the reader, eternal themes, and the times at different levels. But it desperately needs to be about 30% its wordcount.
popocatepetl
28d ago
The other problem is that the wordcount of these stories doesn't only come from bloated prose; it comes from the design of the story itself. In Wheel of Time, for example, Robert Jordan should have simply axed the Faile Shaido arc and the Andoran Succession arc, which would take a hundred pages to tell even were he writing efficiently.
Even putting aside the limitations of LLMs, re-writing this kind of flaw in a novel is like adjusting the amount of flour and yeast in a cake that's already been baked.
Yes. I do wonder whether there's hidden message here under the Daoist-flavored nihilism.
By analogy: there's throwaway worldbuilding in another cultivation webnovel, Zenith of Sorcery, that there are six afterlife planes you can be sent to after death. The character of the plane correspond to the choices you made in life: you can be send to a noblebright valhalla-type world of heroism and adventure, or a wireheaded-type plane of hedonistic pleasure, etc. Interestingly, the dead souls of each world think they've been sent to heaven. The "worst" is Red Prison, which is a constant state of warfare and struggle for power. My headcanon is that Fang Yuan got send to Red Prison.
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