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TLDR: Request for fantasy / scifi stories.
I am looking for a certain type of fantasy stories, but it's a bit difficult to describe exactly what too concisely, so please bear with me.
I keep noticing two kinds of problems in Western fantasy stories of the last decade that breaks immersion for me and makes them all feel very similar to each other (and thus more boring).
The first is that the main characters will go out of their way to virtue-signal some stance or action to appeal to the modern Western audience. It may be in the form of immediately going out to fight slavery / chauvinism / racism in a medieval society, even if such a course of action would've realistically carried great risks for the gang and little practical changes.
The second is that their thoughts and actions will be sanitised to not include anything that any large percent of the audience would be likely to find "icky" and cause them to leave a negative review or stop reading the story. This includes inner monologue of sexual nature (if it's in 1st POV); very rarely using intimidation against "non-combatants" / non-enemies; rarely using the character's advantageous position (or e.g. some resource monopoly) to strong-arm concessions from allies, neutral parties, or civilians; almost never deciding to procure slaves of their own (unless there's some convenient excuse to "force" such a scenario upon the MC); and so on.
So I am looking for stories that will not have these two types of writing tropes, and will in addition:
* be well-written in general; preferably be completed and have a large word-count
* the main character(s) should also
** not be edgelords (unless it leads to a really well-executed character development later on)
** not be sadists who tend to cause suffering / harm just for its own sake
** not be hypocrites, not apply double standards when judging others' actions v.s. judging their own
* not be the Prince of Nothing series. (edit:) Or aSoIaF, or Chronicles of Amber.
Does anyone know any such stories? Any format is fine, be it printed literature, web originals, or fanfiction.
And to clarify, I am not advocating for any real-life applications of what I've listed earlier. I just want my fictional stories to have more variety to them, and am trying to find works of western origin that would offer such variety.
edit: stories recommended so far:
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Thanks for all these recs! If you know any others, please post them too, though.
Reverend Insanity fulfils your criteria almost perfectly. It's a Chinese xianxia webnovel, extremely, extremely long (albeit sadly unfinished due to a murky legal situation), translated into English.
We have a brutal but not sadistic main character who routinely intimidates non-combatants, 'strong-arming' could be his middle name, closely followed by extorting, betraying and deceiving. He starts the novel beating up fellow students for money. Later on he does some industrial-scale slave-raising of non-humans.
There's basically no sex, rape is alluded to occasionally (notoriously in chapter 1 but this is never followed up on), we never actually see it. That's the only sanitization in the story. Generally it's incredibly un-PC, there's casual homophobia and misogyny that's not even intended to raise any questions, it's just atmospheric. There's a race war going on in the background, a zero-sum struggle for dominance over the world is assumed. There are some nice people in this world, some even highly successful but this is a brutal world with dynamics that incentivize harshness and repression. There can be no political or social equality when personal combat power in their world is more unequal than wealth is in ours.
There's no hypocrisy, our MC doesn't think he's in the right or make justifications at any point, he mostly just clowns on people who are forced to betray themselves by the social constraints they're in. Occasionally he recognizes and salutes fellow people who are true to their own selves, whether they're evil like him or good or just crazy obsessed with something.
Reverend Insanity is also super thoughtful in the construction of the setting, in the conflicts of the characters and the social games they play. The slave-raising chapter I mentioned is interesting, it goes into detail about how he manipulates the rockmen leadership structure, how he toys with them, making it seem like they're defiantly resisting him as he works them to death. Nothing about the story is generic, he made up his own power system with its own dynamics, a rich and strange world with its own power structure, international relations, economy, culture and so on. It all feels like it fits in its world,
However the prose is weird, it's super straightforward, almost childish to a certain level. That may be due to the translation, I don't know. So if you go in and think 'this is insanely low-level, what kind of shit taste does this guy have', sure... it is basic in prose. The author gives up on flowery descriptions quite quickly. But there is a lot more than you'd think in this story. The power of love, fate, revenge, duty, sacrifice... Possibly this is also due to it maturing over the years. While I'd say it's not an edgelord story at any point, (even the infamous bear scene has a thematic level beyond shock value) it definitely becomes less edgy over time. There's a whole meta-level with the in-universe allegories, Reverend Insanity has a claim to literary merit.
Reverend Insanity does have plenty of flowering descriptions, the issue I find with it is that the narration is about 99% tell, 1% show. It will explain at every moment what a side character's inner thoughts and motivation were and why they acted like they did, as well as every intricacy in the magical system that facilitated a difference in power between two characters.
To a certain extent sure but there's a lot of mystery in what happens. WTF was Thieving Heaven up to, what was his whole deal? It was deliberately written so that commenters who tried to work out what would happen would be deceived, he'd change the plot to surprise them.
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