The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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@sun_the_second you've been tricked, mwahaha
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Right. Xianxia novels vary widely in terms of quality. It's not uncommon for them to be thousands of chapters long.
There are, in fact, instances where a novel can start off slow for dozens or even hundreds of chapters, and get better. That's often the case when the protagonist has to start from scratch and scrabble to establish the powers and connections required to do much of anything.
How do you know if a novel is good? The rating systems on the popular sites are fucked, and it's certainly a pain to read a ton of one before realizing it doesn't get better.
Hence communities like /r/MartialMemes, where readers ask each other for recs or reviews. They also love to RP as actual Cultivators, which is why they're addressing someone as a "junior".
The joke here is that some naive newbie has asked a more experienced reader about a novel. The latter promises that it gets better, and even if the first few hundred (!) chapters are dross, stick at it and the payoff will be worth it in the end. Unfortunately, he hasn't even read the story in question and has been making shit up.
Fortunately for @sun_the_second, I have in fact read Reverend Insanity (and am currently re-reading it again), a popular novel that has occasionally faced (unfair, IMO) accusations of having a slow start. He began reading it on my recommendation, and hopefully he's enjoying it so far. If he isn't, I promise it gets super peak at chapter 42069, can't give up on it before then.
Since I have an opportunity to ask: what is with RI's author's numeracy? Do the Chinese have no precise numbers?
I can understand why the narration says "thirty to forty of jade dragons flew forward" because an average person wouldn't count them precisely at a glance. But when there are such unnecessary hedges as "four to five", hell, they might even go as low as "two to three" although I obviously can't quote the specific page numbers... well, my eyebrows rise.
Is this a translation issue? Like how "forty days and forty nights" just means "till it's done."
I think I'm getting decent at spotting translated Chinese idioms, and I'm pretty sure most of what I'm talking about are not that.
It is, in fact, that. It's an artifact of Chinese. To some degree this can be done in Japanese (三日か四日 for 3/4 days) or (三四天 in Chinese) but it's more common in Chinese. Don't rely on me as an expert but that's my take.
There's a handful of well-known examples in western languages, too, and probably a bunch more that are too informal to really be written down.
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