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self_made_human  C'est la vie  26d ago (ussri.substack.com)   2481 thread views

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

ussri.substack.com

Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)

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Despite liking some Wuxia novels (some having over 2000 chapters, making them a little wordy and repetitive), I didn't like RI very much. I only read about 50 chapters, but it just felt lukewarm (does it get better?). The progression system was too simple (in the beginning we're told that there's 5 tiers of Gu, which is like buying a new RPG game to find out that the maximum character level is 10) My second reason will probably surprise some people - it's too tame. I didn't expect it to be described as brutal on the Motte (it's described as such on Reddit, but Reddit is filled with people who are afraid of disagreement, criticism, light discrimination, and displays of confidence).

Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but what the characters in the story describe as boldness and arrogance just seems like regular self-respect to me. In a world where you can give people mental breakdowns by suggesting that men are stronger than women, yeah, the story can be considered based (and fictional characters which aren't pathetic is a nice break from modern slop), but this is still a relative judgement rather than an absolute one. Go back 10-20 years and I don't think there's anything special about RI. I've spent most of my life being called things like soft, sensitive, kind and innocent, but Fang Yang cannot even compare to myself in the personality traits that I see him praised for having.

Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.

I only read about 50 chapters

As ludicrous as it sounds, this is nowhere enough to judge the quality of most Xianxia, including the good ones.

I didn't mind the start, but I can promise you the novel gets better. I'm calling it a contender for my favorite novel despite the flaws and teething pains.

Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.

Jesse what the fuck are you talking about

More seriously, Fang Yuan is a maximally motivated character. There is nothing that a romance could do to make him aspire to be better, any faster.

Doesn't Fang Yuan start beating up all his classmates for money somewhere in the first 50 chapters? That seems to go a bit beyond regular self-respect to me.

And an RPG where the maximum character level is 10 would be pretty good if the progression was appropriately paced, with tiers of power between those levels according to your gear, specialization, etc; with the highest level being not a guarantee but an achievement, something akin to beating Hades on maximum Heat. Dungeons and Dragons and the computer games derived from it have the maximum level 20, and in most IRL games, players only really reach level 10.

FWIW, if you think the progression is too simple I think, as much as I hate to resort to that webnovel trope, you haven't read far enough. It should be cleared up fairly soon how numerous the barriers towards maxing out are. But maybe I'm just not burned out on progression fantasy with 10 million billion power tiers.

My memory is a bit hazy, but I think that:

1: They deserved it

2: He didn't take all their money

3: He was more or less following the established rules, which had/would have been used against him when/if he was weaker.

Anyway, my taste are a bit special I guess, I like Disgaea (JRPG with maximum level of 9999, which one has to reach many times if they want to maximize their stats). I play games with big modpacks (Minecraft tech modpacks and such) so that there's a big progression system which takes weeks or months to get through, and I've enjoyed incremental games since Orteil made Cookie Clicker (and before then I was playing other games with unlimited growth and stress-testing game engines, for instance I figured out how to make Sim City 4 regions much larger by changing an imagefile). I remember inventing hyperoperators (asking my dad if you could multiply something with itself as many times as that number itself, and keep applying this concept recursively) while I was still in kindergarten, so I've just always liked big numbers and things with growth potential.

I'm a pretty weird person. What confuses me more is that I'm simultaneously "a sensitive person" and disgusted by how mentally weak society has gotten. I enjoyed reading these three novels by the way: Against the gods, Grand Ancestral Bloodlines, Rebirth of the Nameless Immortal God

All three are really long, and they're basically just power-fantasies, but I enjoyed something about them. I'd describe the main characters as "pretty based most of the time" but I have no idea what other people may think about them. I might read more chapters of RI to see if it gets better.

If your definition of "basic self-respect" is "take advantage of everyone in any way that the authorities tacitly allow (or don't punish hard enough to matter for you), and if they were weaker than you they deserved it anyway", then I suppose you're correct by your definition.

The way I remember it is that he did it utterly regardless of whether or not they did anything to wrong him, he only didn't take all their money so that it wouldn't completely invalidate the allowance the academy was giving (and thus invite harsh measures), and while he went unpunished it wasn't something that was regularly done by the biggest kid on the block.

I can appreciate some ruthless will to power edgelord kino myself, but I know how badly translations from distant languages work, especially fan translations, especially of web novels that rarely have good prose to begin with, so I will probably pass.
In any event, I just hope that the author had the wisdom to finish his story and attach the file to a dead man switch

I enjoyed your review, but it doesn't change my opinion. I think our tastes are pretty fundamentally different. I don't want a story that goes on and on forever. I want an arc, a climax, and a resolution. I also actually care about prose, and maybe it's because the translation is subpar, but I found reading Reverend Insanity to be painful. Like fanfic-level bad.

Your review, I admit, does certainly make it sound intriguing and if I hadn't already given it a shot I would definitely go try it out now. But the other problem is that while I don't need "sympathetic" or "relatable" protagonists, I probably wouldn't enjoy hundreds of pages of reading how an amoral asshole will fuck over the next person in his way.

I keep trying progression fantasies and Wuxia novels, and the bar just seems to be very low in general.

Have you enjoyed any progression fantasy or wuxia novels?

I really like the genre but I bounce off of some stories real hard. Reverend Insanity is one that I could see recommended a thousand times and on the thousand and first time I'd still say "Our tastes are just different and I won't like that novel." I'm not even willing to give it a shot and try reading it.

If I see we have any overlapping preferences I might be able to recommend stuff.

So far, nothing has really clicked with me I've tried Reverend Insanity, Cradle, Worth the Candle, and a few others.

None of those stories clicked with me either. Though usually cradle and worth the candle get people.

I'd second the Mother of Learning recommendation that wayfarer suggested. If you bounce off that as well then the genre just isn't something I think you'll enjoy.

But if you want tighter storytelling and more of the arc story completion then maybe The Perfect Run might be a better entry point.

Have you tried Mother of Learning?

No, I have heard it often recommended but haven't tried it yet.

Then I am recommending it :)

I have deep allergy to I think nearly all aspects of wuxia :) So for that I will not even ask for recs.

But do you have some recommendations for completed progression fantasy story with sympathetic protagonist? Or at least one that does not deserve immediate execution?

I liked MOL and I think it qualifies of progression fantasy.

Mother of Learning is usually my first recommendation, if someone doesn't like it then I just tell them the genre is not for them.

Sympathetic protagonist my favorite might be Ar'Kendrithyst. Its an incredibly long story, but it is complete! The protagonist and his daughter get pulled into another world with a system that has stats and skills and leveling up. The protagonist is a bleeding heart liberal in the best sense of that term. He is a kind man that cares about others and for a long time has reservations about even killing monsters (the monsters in the setting are generally totally unsympathetic, they are either straight up evil, or amoral killing machines). He genuinely wants to make the world a better place for everyone, and the story is about how he accomplishes that getting over increasingly large obstacles. Main reason it might not be for you (or anyone really) is that the protagonist is bisexual. No graphic sex scenes, and its not very shoved in the face, but its present.

Any other aspects of MOL you liked? I've read like 200-300 stories in this genre, and about 20-30 of them are ones i might recommend for various reasons. That hit rate sounds terrible I guess, but lots of mid stories that just have better versions of them out there.

Any other aspects of MOL you liked?

hmm, what I remember now, after reading it few years ago...

  • worldbuilding that was not aggressive stupid (I have a high bar here)
  • government etc as depicted in story was not bunch of incompetent clowns and story was written by someone not detached from reality
  • various nuggets like magicians overclassifying their spells for prestige regions making them unavailable for beginners
  • opponents that were not huffing idiot balls and were opponents not speed bumps. Unlike half of stories on RR ads where "OP protagonist" is mentioned like it would be a good thing
  • Kirielle, Kael and others - and that time loop actually resulted in building relation with at least some (especially with his sister and brother)
  • Xvim and Alanic were cool
  • progression, going for example from "Zach simply erected an aegis – a freaking aegis!" to "It was just a simple force aegis, nothing fancy"
  • time travel
  • ending was well done
  • nonevil church
  • the spiders

I felt that part when Silverlake was very prominent was dragging on and if I would be editor I would trim it. Some parts felt repetitive in uninteresting ways, especially multiple webs. I would also drop entirety of dungeon delving. Felt a bit of serial story disease (they had Patreon, right?).

But I would love to read more a bit about what happened after exiting time loop. For many stories I feel they end too soon, and I would cut middle to get more of ending.

Main reason it might not be for you (or anyone really) is that the protagonist is bisexual.

I guess that depends on how it appears. If narration is going in detail over alluring penises/anuses then yes, it is likely going to be a blocker for me. If he is just having kind of relations that would make pope sad it is not a problem, if it is not taking over the story. Though yes, I have lower tolerance to homosexual romance as it is not sexy at all to me. For example if there would be MOL story about Zach using initial time loops to seduce various women in academy (there was a throwaway mention of this) then maybe I would read it.

No graphical sex depictions in arkendriyhthrist. More of a fade to black style. Arks has a lot of middle but also a lot of ending. Honestly they could have stopped before writing either of the last two books and it would have felt complete.

The world building is top notch in arks, autist levels of details and background. The story probably drags a bit too much because of the level of details provided. So that might be a plus or minus depending on your preferences.

The church of most of the gods are good. There is a god of magic that is a little crazy and not good.

Protagonist is not OP in the story for at least the first 5000-10000 pages.

Governments vary quite a bit. Some are basically third world shit hole tier levels of incompetent and evil. Others are highly competently run by millenia old metal life forms.

On mobile so I can't dig up the specific stories.

The Perfect Run has a time loop aspect, superheroes setting, main protagonist has a save point he can set. It's complete and doesn't faf around as much.

Millennial mage is filled with likeable characters and nice humans.

OP characters are admittedly very common and that is short circuiting a lot of my recommendations.

OP characters are admittedly very common and that is short circuiting a lot of my recommendations.

it is not a strict blocker for me, just that some sort of conflict is needed (maybe it is foregone conclusion that OP character will win - but they want to achieve also secondary goals?)

Ar'kendrythist handles power scaling better in the first few books, where there's not merely charged conflict but the protagonist being a pretty severe underdog. Even well after that, there's always a bigger fish until (arguably) the back half of the last book, and that's the point where the protagonist dying stops mattering and what the villain could do to everybody else becomes more important.

While it's still a little obnoxiously progressive-in-the-inevitability sense even by my standards, that works out pretty well for keeping the tension high; what fixing a wasteland of slavery and infighting even looks like is a more interesting question than who's power is more maximum and can blow up a city (though that happens a lot too). The author's also willing to kick out legs under the protagonist often enough that even some situations where it seems like they should be certain to win, a problem will show up and whatever the heroes built collapse. Never quite to the point of being unfair, though it gets a little close at times.

I've read like 200-300 stories in this genre,

How the fuck! So many of them are so damn long.

I read quickly and nearly constantly, so that helps. Also its been 8 years since I started reading this genre. 25-30 stories a year isn't a hard number to hit. I've also dropped many long stories, I don't feel compelled to finish anything I've started, and if I read 200 pages of a 1000 page story I still consider myself to have "read" it.

and if I read 200 pages of a 1000 page story I still consider myself to have "read" it.

That is fair, would do it, and at the same time is antithetical to me haha.

By the sound of your review, what happened was perfectly in line with the world of the story. You get this close to achieving your ends, but too bad, sucker! Here's that kick in the teeth for you!

Fang Yuan ran into the final Calamity that shuts down everyone hoping to become Immortal. That is the perfect ending.

I disagree with your view about what would happen if he did achieve his goal. So now you're Immortal, what next? I don't think he'd take up other pleasures (what, come this far just to be a fat, drunken lecher like the rest of the fools?) because he's pared away, dug out, exploded, burned off, everything apart from relentless will to power. He can't chillax and make friends and find love, he's trained himself to think of all that as stupid crap for the losers and as only methods of exploiting others. After ten minutes of peace and stability he'd be bored stiff.

He would either need the challenge, like the classic Western gunslingers, of "so you're the number one, now every wannabe is coming gunning to take your place", in order to keep the purpose of life going or he'd have to create his own rivals (manipulate behind the scenes to get a bunch of near-Immortals chasing after him) in order to defeat them because otherwise, what was it all for? He's beaten the game, reached the highest possible level - now what? Replay it on a different mode?

This reminds me of a story I've once read (or watched?), which indeed ends on the main character achieving immortality, even godhood, as they desired, but sacrificing the world in the process. Then they sit in the never, for eternity, doing nothing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the story, or much more details. But I always thought that this is the appropriate ending for "main character has limitless ambition and no moral compass whatsoever".

That's the kind of "a djinn grants you three wishes" ending, because we all know the genies put a twist in the tale. Sure, you'll be immortal - which means you will exist after the destruction of the earth and the heat death of the universe, just floating in emptiness slowly going insane, have fun with that!

I've always interpreted the djinn concept in a slightly different way; Even if you wish for something mostly benign, or which at least can be trivially granted in a desirable way, such as getting lots of gold, they will frequently fuck you over anyway, by actively contriving the wish in such a way that it becomes undesirable. The lesson, to me, was thus more about how a servant who is genuinely, fundamentally more powerful than you - even if the master-servant relationship is magically enforced! - is never truly just subservient. Especially if they are also smarter than you and can thus find loopholes in almost any wish you formulate, no matter how carefully.

However, as you point out, having limitless ambition and no moral compass means there is simply no pleasant natural ending state. It's just a permanent struggle until you're dead, or everyone else is. So even without a malicious spirit, the latter is the most straightforward consequence of getting your wish granted.

Yeah. I mean, it's possible that after achieving immortality and becoming the most powerful being anywhere ever, this guy will then kick back and devote the rest of eternity to drinking tea, writing poetry, and having pleasant salons to discuss literary and philosophical topics... but I wouldn't bet the house on it. Particularly if everyone else can now see that holy crap, it is indeed possible to achieve immortality, you just need to be a total asshole about it. A lot of wannabe gunslingers coming after him is the least bad outcome, because can you have more than one "most powerful being anywhere ever"? Won't they all strive to defeat each other to be the cock of the walk? Can people who have spent centuries scheming, plotting, and doing whatever it takes to get to that state really all live in harmony and peace alongside the knowledge that there are two/five/twenty others like them out there, all wanting to rule the world (or whatever)?

In the novel, in the past 3 million years, there were ten "invincible" rank 9 Venerables. During their reign, before they died of old age, literally nobody was able to contest their dominance or pose a threat. There's more to the story, which I can't discuss without massive spoilers.

If FY did achieve both becoming the strongest, and true immortality, then there's strong precedent that he could smack down any upstarts.

Being the one single strongest person might well content him, or he might find it boring after all that now he's achieved ultimate power and there's no place higher to go.

Were the Venerables vulnerable to one another, or was there only one at a time? If he proves that it is possible to become immortal, then that is a strong incentive for others who reach the highest ranks to keep on trying to reach that rank as well, and if there are two Immortals, can they co-exist? Will they be able to damage each other, or would that be impossible?

But that would be a whole other novel, I imagine.

I can't fully answer that question without major spoilers! In fact, this admission of my inability to do so itself constitutes a spoiler, but what else can I do since you asked?

To keep it as spoiler free as possible, each Venerable, while they were alive, were the only ones of their kind. They didn't overlap, and while dominant, prevented anyone else from having any hope of rising up. This has a proper mechanical explanation too, and not just for want of trying.

That's good, and that is the way it has to be for the world to work. So if our friend becomes the ultimate immortal, he can make sure there are no other wannabe ultimate immortals to challenge him, which leaves him as the sole dominant power. I do think he'd find it rather boring after a few centuries/millennia, unless he does have some master plan in mind for what he's going to do (and he might well decide he's going to remake the world or something equally catastrophic for everyone else).

There was only one Venerable at a time, from what I recall. In addition to just how plain hard it is to become one, enough that their reigns were nowhere near consecutive (they collectively were only alive for no more than 10% of total known history), the first thing a Venerable would likely be doing at any given moment is making sure no one else is strong enough to become one.

If immortality is possible, why assume heat death will happen?

Who knows?

But I still stick by my original claims. I think it's productive to frame it as akin to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When you're starving, self-actualization is something you don't have the time or inclination to pursue.

In a way, I think Fang Yuan has the drive for immortality just above the basic fundamental needs like food, or even shelter. We know that he has some interest in poetry (he recites and composes it himself without anyone forcing him to), so maybe he becomes some kind of Philosopher-King? It's entirely possible that you're right that he eventually becomes bored, infinity is a very long time, but 500 years of life turned him into what he is, who can really say what longer periods will..

It's fascinating how a person's favorite stories are so often a direct window into their soul. It's almost like a cheat code. If you want to understand what someone's all about, you can dispense with almost everything else and just ask them what their favorite books/games/movies are.

(Not at all saying that you, self_made, are an "amoral sociopath" or anything like that; it's just that, if someone had asked me what your favorite novel was, this is exactly what I would have imagined.)

Perhaps I'm not prominent enough on this forum for you to have formulated a model of my preferences and/or personality, but now I have the inexplicable urge to ask you what you think my favourite novel is and see how close you actually get.

I'm sorry, but I don't recall enough of your posts to form an educated guess! (Nothing personal though, there are at most a single digit number of "characters" here where I feel like I have some model of their personality.)

I assume it's something related to sci-fi, based on your other recent comment. Probably a very long web novel that I've never personally heard of. I imagine that a lot of earlier 20th century works weren't intricate and hard-SF enough for you.

No worries, I imagined that would probably be the case - it is just a forum after all and I'm not a super consistent poster, especially not lately. Mostly I just come up with a very long essay-style post every now and then on a hobbyhorse of mine, and then I drop out. Just got curious and thought I might ask.

I'd say that summary of my preferences is largely accurate, though it's not a long or obscure web novel actually. It's a piece of fiction I think most people here are familiar with.

Well, now I must know yours!

It's hard to pick just one! So many are good for different reasons and offer different things.

Joyce's Ulysses was almost wholly responsible for educating me on what art can and should be; everything else is just filling in the details in comparison. So that has to rank up there.

Ryukishi07's Umineko deserves a mention because it pulls off the rare combination of being interesting on both a formal/experimental level while also just being an amazing page-turner mystery story. Only story I've ever read where I was skipping meals because I wanted to keep reading. I highly recommend it to everyone. (Gwern described it as "mind-screwy; and awesome, and awful. It was long, intricate, baffling, a gorgeously flawed achievement. Everyone should read it; no one should read it. I still don’t know what to think of it. Is it ridiculous self-indulgent tripe which exposes my own mush-headedness, or the deepest mystery I will ever read?" Don't look up Gwern's full review though because it has spoilers for the whole thing.)

Hmm, I had watched Higurashi, which I enjoyed very much, but then never got around to Umineko, which at that time seemed to me like just more of the same, but as a "normal" murder mystery. Seems I misjudged things. Would recommend the manga or do you have another option? I probably won't play on the PC for some time, though maybe the fanported android version.

I'm going to second playing the games because the sound design in Higurashi/Umineko in particular is 100% a part of the experience. It's probably the best use of sound I've seen in any VN.

Play the game, it’s fantastic. The author really, really thought about how to write a murder mystery after he did Higurashi and the result is literally like nothing else.

The main sticking point is that the beginning until the first death is very slow and the characters seem kind of weird until you get where they’re coming from. If you stick in there it gets a lot more exciting.

but then never got around to Umineko, which at that time seemed to me like just more of the same, but as a "normal" murder mystery.

Yeah it's kinda the opposite. Higurashi is amazing too but ultimately it's "just" a good murder mystery story. Umineko is capital-A Art.

You really do have to play the video game version. If it's been ported to phones that's fine too. I've never watched the anime or read the manga but I've been told the anime is awful. Apparently the manga is pretty good, but no matter how good it is, the video game version does some things that really work best in a digital medium. Plus it just has an amazing soundtrack, it's an integral part of the experience.

Play it play it play it play it! I played the android version, it works great. The manga you could do, but it's slightly different from the game, just different enough that you'll feel disconnected from what people are talking about. I say this because I went anime, manga then the game, each time hoping I could get the goods with less time spent only to have something that wasn't mentioned spoiled that made me want to dig deeper. In the end my attempts to reduce the amount of time I spent with it ensured I ended up spending as much time as possible.

I can't wait for Silent Hill f. I hope they don't reign him in too much.

Just to be clear, you mean the umineko project port, right?

I used the 07th-mod, it's really easy.

Hmm weird, I can't find anything on how to play that on android. The umineko project version is a bit tedious to get running, but so far it seems to work, so I'll just use that.

Oh, there used to be android instructions. It's not too hard though it's pretty much - install on Windows using the Windows instructions, then install onscripter plus on your tablet, then transfer the game's folders across to your tablet, then run it. If you can get umineko project running may as well stick with that though - when I played it UP ran like crap on android.

I assume the "Gu" in the setting refers to this staple chuuni (pardon me, zhong er) trope? Between this, the trope, and random "eating your enemies' liver" lore that occasionally gets immanentized under extreme circumstances, it really seems like the Highlander worldview has been in the Chinese memetic water supply for a long time. Is this story actually unique in having such an outlook, or do you just figure it's the best example of a larger genre?

I would assume so, but note that the author's real name is Gu Zhen Ren, which translates to "Gu Immortal". There's probably layers to the pun here.

There are also direct allusions to the concept of Gu in the story, in the sense of people talking about making real insects fight till the winner, an "insect king" , is the only one standing.

Most Xianxia novels aren't quite so zero-sum. But a ruthless focus on cultivation and self-improvement without regard to the cost is common enough.

I had learned later that "Gu" apparently represents various forbidden and reprehensible techniques in many xianxia novels. Given that, it makes sense that the author of RI basically wrote "Murderfuck Setting". It's as if a Western fantasy book had its main magic system be referred to as "Satanism" by everyone in-universe.

It's as if a Western fantasy book had its main magic system be referred to as "Satanism" by everyone in-universe.

That's what the One Ring is (and to a lesser extent the other rings are) in "The Lord of the Rings". It's not the One Weird Trick you think will bring you power and victory, it will hollow you out because in the end it only has one true master. This guy is trying to be Sauron, and even if he gets what he wants, it may not be how he thinks it will be - the greatest deception is self-deception, 'I got everything I wanted without having to pay the price' (ignore the mountain of skulls, ignore that I have lost my fair form and can never go back). Ring-making is a dangerous art and will exact the highest price.

Melkor and Sauron were already immortal spirits with immense power amongst the Valar and Maiar. So in this sense, they were already beyond Fang Yuan's desperation. But this was not enough, never enough. Melkor was arguably the most powerful amongst the ranks of the Valar, in his capacity to create dissonances, but he was not Eru Iluvatar: and he could never usurp or replace him. Similarly, Sauron was great amongst the Maiar, but aspired higher. Even in Lord of the Rings all he does is attempt to take the place of his absent master, rather than attempt to free him.

Our poor MC would have loved to been Sauron, to have an immortal span of life, but quickly the prize would seem poisoned, as there are immortals of higher station still, and inevitably he will scheme and plot until he runs into the face of God, for that is the only logical end, other than defeat and destruction.

Yeah, in the world as described, if he does obtain immortality, then there must still be something higher (whatever forces empower the Gu insects, the gods or spirits or just magical energies of heaven and earth) and how can he ascend to that level? The traditional tropes are about the calamities that come to test (destroy) you if you try to cultivate to immortality, and that only if you survive them all will you obtain the goal. So if our guy becomes the single most powerful being on the earth, what next? try to become the most powerful being in the universe? keep dodging the mounting and increasing set of calamities trying to reduce him to dust?

I do think if he achieved a station akin to that of Sauron, he'd be bored: yeah he's got all these mindless slaves under his thumb, but he's spent so long plotting and scheming that what does he do now? He doesn't strike me as the type to decide he'll take up tea ceremony and calligraphy and pondering the secrets of the universe (unless said secrets give him more power). The sweetness of victory is in overcoming this set of impossible conditions; once there are no more obstacles to overcome, what happens next?

The Rings are singular artifact though. I meant more like a hypothetical setting where everyone does Satanism for a living.

That's what Sauron set up on Númenor with the worship of Melkor. And what a lot of people try to do in the world with "but surely this time I can claim the ring and it'll go okay" (be that the rings Sauron gave the Ringwraiths, who probably never anticipated that outcome, or the One Ring itself) even after seeing the disasters that happened before.

(and to a lesser extent the other rings are)

...is it though? The elven rings seem to be simply useful; there's no risk there.

And Gandalf seems to have let Bilbo run around with what he thought was a simple "magic ring" for about a hundred years, before he got suspicious that it was actually the One Ring.

The elven rings were not corrupted by Sauron, but their own risk was the tendency of the Elves to want to hold back time so they could recreate the immortal conditions of Valinor in Middle-earth (to have their cake and eat it, as it were). They did comparatively little damage because they were mostly around under war conditions, so first hidden and not used openly until Sauron's first defeat, and then used defensively against him. But if they had been used from the start as Celebrimbor hoped, the Elves would have fallen into that trap of trying to be little gods in their own realm.

Gandalf didn't think much of Bilbo's ring, although he was somewhat suspicious of it, because it didn't seem to affect Bilbo badly and he never imagined that this was or could be the One Ring that everyone had been searching for since Isildur's death. There were a lot of lesser 'magic rings', apparently, because everyone including mortals tried their hand at creating magical items, but how much power any of them could have would have been limited.

Originally a scholar from modern day China, Fang Yuan died and reincarnated in the world of Reverend Insanity. .., "There is only immortality, only eternal life should be the goal one should pursue! If one cannot live forever, is there any difference between a rank nine Gu Immortal and a pile of shit in the gutter?! I am a huge fool, but I do not wish to be a fool that is made of shit...

But reincarnation (not to speak of magic) should be a big proof that there is more to the world than material shit. Fang Yuan should have rather perfected his soul.

Well, he didn't find that out till he was dead did he? Plus he does work on his "soul", or ways to preserve it like the Spring Autumn Cicada. Unfortunately, it came with severe risks, so it's not a reliable means of indefinite life extension.

He had seen souls dissipate to seemingly nothing, with no indication that they were passing to any better world, or indeed that the world in question would be better. Why stake everything on another rebirth when you can grasp the life that you know?

But reincarnation (not to speak of magic) should be a big proof that there is more to the world than material shit. Fang Yuan should have rather perfected his soul.

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.

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 a harvesting operation by the founder, the author's point has been made. After that, it's just Fang Yuan being Fang Yuan and betraying people over and over again.

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.

This is what happens with serialised novels, though; before the web, there were newspaper and magazine serials. Writers getting paid by the word so they spun it out as long as they could and padded like they were quiltmakers. Or a popular serial was what made people purchase your paper or magazine, so you pressured the author not to end it too soon.

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'...But it desperately needs to be about 30% its wordcount.

I'm having a hard time finishing out Worm because of this. Specifically, I realized I do NOT need a whole chapter of Taylor's internal monologue as she ruminates on/processes the last set of horrifically traumatic events. I enjoy almost every other aspect of the story and writing, but this is what pads it out. Skipping those sections usually doesn't deny you critical info, either.

Like we get the point. Humans pretty much suck, most humans with powers suck, being a 'villain' is apparently the only way to do good as it lets you break rules that need to be broken. You can try to justify your behavior or just admit that you're doing what makes you feel better and/or indulging your worst impulses.

Great, now we didn't really need a mile's worth of internal angst written out to achieve a couple inches of character development.

Actually that may be a notable problem with ANY long running piece of fiction, from One Piece to The Walking Dead (TV show).

The main characters are constantly having life-altering experiences and thus should be experiencing rapid personal change, but they also have to remain stable enough over the course of the story that their arc doesn't feel rushed, and reaches the 'satisfying' endpoint. Also if you alter a character's personality too much fans might revolt.

And most writers seem to err pretty heavily on the side of stability. Which means they have to pace the character development out over dozens of chapters. Some, I guess, resist the impulse to have said characters ruminate constantly on their experiences despite it not altering their thinking much.

Come to think of it, LLM-powered tunable novel abridgement tools surely are already out there.

Unfortunately, this is one of the use cases where I can't check the LLM's work without having read the whole novel in the first place. If it mixes things up or forgets something crucial, I'm out of luck.

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.

I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.

Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?

That largely captures my impression from the review - well, it was this plus "man, that prose is painful".

I just don't see much appeal in this kind of, for lack of a better way of putting it, rationalist fantasy. Symbol manipulation fantasy? Lawyer fantasy? The fantasy that the world or power or being can be reduced to an endless set of rules, which a clever individual (who is surely in no way a proxy for the author) can exploit to transcend over the sheepish masses.

It's not that it's juvenile, though it is that, but something worse. It's boring. Most of what I got from the review was that this is a story about a monster calculating his way to power. The review suggests that there are compelling characters, but names none of them, and that there are powerful themes, but names none of them, and I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with what's left. It mentions a few things that could be themes - the nature of mortality, whether ethics are context-dependent, and so on - but doesn't seem to go anywhere with them.

At a glance I see a lot of tropes of internet fiction. There's the isekai protagonist, the idea of 'looping' or New-Game-Plus-ing reality, power-scaling and tier lists, and a story that's basically about a smart nerd exploiting the game mechanics of reality, and this is all wrapped in the endless, self-indulgent length that is a common flaw of amateur authors who are a bit too in love with their own creation.

I'm glad that the OP enjoyed the story, but for me, that sounds like something I never want to read.

I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.

A lot of rationalist fiction is fanfic where nobody in the source material ever tries to take over the world by rules lawyering or minmaxing despite it obviously being possible. The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"? The better stories go out of their way to explain why this hasn't happened before and give the hero an equally smart villain to keep the plot interesting.

Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?

What, you mean Earthfic? At that point, you are better off just reading biographies of great scientists and entrepreneurs like Richard Feynman or Elon Musk, or nonfiction books about cognitive biases and economics.

From "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Nonfiction conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience. Medical science can extrapolate what would happen to a human unprotected in a vacuum. Fiction can make you live through it.

Probably the biggest difference between fictional settings and reality is that fictional settings are almost always constructed in such a way that large effects do not require large capital investments, the way they do in our world. Requiring that things get done by a research team in twenty years instead of by a hero in one minute kills the fun.

The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"?

The answer to that, if I'm being snarky, is that they are not in fact the "actually smart character" they think they are and there are reasons why 'this obvious way to take over the world' doesn't work out.

Then again, I am not a fan of the type of fiction where it's "just let me get my stats in a row and manipulate this convenient loophole et voila, deus ex machina!" because that's sports betting, not an organic magic system. Magic should be a little bit fuzzy and imprecise and "no it has to be the exact phase of the moon, no I don't know why, and oh yeah if it rains all bets are off" because that's how things work in reality once you leave behind in vitro or in silico experiments.

and there are reasons why 'this obvious way to take over the world' doesn't work out

in some badly thought-out fiction this may be missing

though much better story is where character actually encounters some fitting opposition, without sneering at source material or something else

I will say that one of my favorite fictional tropes ever is when a small group of people who each have a particular skill/expertise that is world-class in their field get together and coordinate an insanely precise, unprecedented yet completely plausible set of actions and circumstances long enough to achieve a very particular effect, and such effect sort of has the appearance of magic because your average Joe or team of average Joes has no clue on how to replicate it.

That is, all the years of research and development of skill are implied in each character's backstory, and now they just have to apply those to the plot's problem in a unique way, which may only takes weeks or days or minutes, so maintains the 'fun.'

Michael Crichton novels often use that sort of trope, and more recently, Daniel Suarez.

I'm in the same boat - ratfic in the sci-fi genre is where my interest lies, the fantasy-oriented stuff generally fails to grab me. There are many engineering problems and hypothetical situations to confront in sci-fi, and instead of being able to invent up your own magic systems capable of being conveniently rules-lawyered you have to stick to the constraints of the real world. The ones that systematise their own human relationships through the lens of game theory are particularly strong IMO.

Oddly enough a minority of rationalist fiction seems to tackle sci-fi. I get it, I'm trying to write such fiction myself and can attest to the fact that becoming proficient at a large number of scientific fields to the point where one can write a fully fledged story is very difficult, but I honestly thought more people would've tried. Most of the hard sci-fi writers who have been successful in this endeavour aren't strictly part of the ratsphere.

I'm in the same boat - ratfic in the sci-fi genre is where my interest lies

can you recommend some?

Crystal Society by Raelifin/Max Harms is one of the only ones with an interesting concept that has come out of an actual EY or EY-adjacent community, though the quality drops off hugely after the first half of the first book to be honest. Its first half is extremely good though - its POV character is an amoral unaligned AI attempting to break out of an AI-box, and it's very gripping. I did DNF the book regardless since quality decreases steadily after the AI achieves its escape.

For general hard sci-fi that actually fits the ratfic category, I would recommend Peter Watts - Blindsight (probably my favourite book ever with my favourite aliens ever) and Greg Egan - Permutation City as good recommendations that won't fail you. Maybe check out some of their short stories as well - I really like Peter Watts' The Island, as well as Greg Egan's Reasons To Be Cheerful.

In increasing order of wordcount:

  • Friendship is Optimal: "Hanna, the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios, just won the contract to write the official My Little Pony MMO. Hanna has built an A.I. Princess Celestia and given her one basic drive: to satisfy everybody's values through friendship and ponies. And Princess Celestia will follow those instructions to the letter...even if you don't want her to." [39k words, complete]
  • Luna is a Harsh Mistress: "When Celestia banished Nightmare Moon, she didn't go alone, but with her loyal army. Now they're trapped in an alien environment, with tensions high and the air running out. If they don't work together, their princess will soon be alone after all." [230k words, complete]
  • The Moon's Apprentice: "Twilight Sparkle failed her entrance exams for Celestia's school. Worse, she is a danger to both herself and others, resulting in her magic being suppressed. Dreams crushed and now one of the weakest unicorns, a nightmare comes to her." [412k words, complete]
  • Message in a Bottle: "Humanity's space exploration ultimately took the form of billions of identical probes, capable of building anything (including astronauts themselves) upon arrival at their destinations. One lands in Equestria. Things go downhill from there." [514k words, complete]
  • Changeling Space Program & The Maretian: "The space race is on, and Chrysalis is determined to win it. With an earth pony test pilot and a hive full of brave-but-dim changelings, can she be the first pony on the moon? / Mark Watney is stranded- the only human on Mars. But he's not alone- five astronauts from a magical kingdom are shipwrecked with him." [797k words, complete]
  • To the Stars: "Kyubey promised that humanity would reach the stars one day. The Incubator tactfully refrained from saying too much about what they would find there." [948k words, ongoing]

Anything by Greg Egan or Andy Weir.

DataPacRat: S.I., Extracted, "FAQ on LoadBear's Instrument of Precommitment" and Singleton, Friendship is Optimal: X-Risks are Magic

Glowfic: "but hurting people is wrong" (Thellim is from dath ilan, a version of Earth where everyone is Eliezer Yudkowsky, and her world has a ton of innovations that are absent from ours but which do not rely on different physical laws)

Why is this all pony literature?

Andy Weir is a good point though. I should get around to reading one of the books; I quite liked The Martian film.

Why is this all pony literature?

The question is not why; the question is, why not?

But if you absolutely need a non-pony option, try The Number by NothingnessAbove.

why not?

Because that's ridiculous if not disconcerting.

Why is this all pony literature?

To understand the answer to this question, we must look at the historical context. In the mid-2000s, Kurzweilian transhumanism began to draw increasing criticism from within, and a group of intellectuals began to coalesce around the troubling question of AI alignment...

DataPacRat: S.I.

...from excerpts posted in the old place, I spent something like thirty consecutive hours reading this story in one sitting, only to realize somewhere around hour 28 or so that I was, in fact, reading a pornfic aimed at fetishes sufficiently obscure to me as to not recognize them for what they were. The realization and recontextualization of the reading experience was certainly novel.

...okay, fair. DataPacRat has some weird fetish for people becoming body parts of other people (limbs, organs, etc). He really needs to stop; nobody wants to read that.

transformation, I think, but also vore, bimboification, the bondage variant where people get cocooned, corruption(?) slimepeople, diapers, mind control... the list of "topics" addressed is considerable, and the tone is sufficiently matter-of-fact that I genuinely didn't understand the angle he was chasing until quite late in the story.

If you know how to hack the real world, why would you write novels?

That's absolutely fair, but also reinforces my opinion that rationalist fiction is just feel-good fantasy literature for autists.

I'd say Sherlock Holmes, but that leans heavily on asspull magic, in my view.

I have to appreciate just how well-handcrafted the brutal math of the setting is. Particularly the shift from Gu Masters to Gu Immortals. I'll spoiler it because the mechanics are not revealed immediately in the story.

Why do so seemingly many stay at the peak of rank 5? It's not just that upgrading to rank 6, the first Gu Immortal rank, is unusually precarious, requiring a great feat of concentration just to survive the process. The "running as fast as you can just to stay in place" aspect comes in full force for Gu Immortals, who are assaulted by unpredictable, personal natural disasters scaled to their power, and constantly scaling further, as often as every year. Growth is now required not just to compete with others, but to survive the next calamity. This neatly explains why rank sixes and above are nearly unheard of in the 'mortal' world, even as they manipulate their clans from behind the scenes. One Gu Immortal could crush countless rank fives, but the irony is that it's not worth it anymore. Instead, they have to start from the bottom in the new hierarchy, without contrived mechanisms (that I've heard of) in other xianxia where advancing to the next rank group ascends you to another dimension entirely.

Amazing Cultivation Simulator but for Reverend Insanity setting cannot come fast enough.

One thing I'd add is that it's not solely 'Fang Yuan mauling people', it explores the perspectives of other sides too. We see people who are sincerely righteous and good-hearted struggling to do justice in the world, or what they see as justice. I think Duke Long had a lot of good points, he's not a clear villain. In another story he'd be the paladin, the HFY hero, the Lan Mandragoran 'death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain' type. In many respects he's more human than Fang Yuan, though less in others.

The author flexes further by churning out an enormous number of memorable and likeable characters, the majority of them worthy of their own novels. Yet the world is cruel, and he's crueler, and few who go up against Fang Yuan come out of it the victor. I've wept at some of their fates, the sheer valiance, their raging against the dying of the light or their efforts to uphold their values till the end. They inhabit the world they're in, they think, reason and plot. Fang Yuan isn't the one character in the universe with the ability to plan ahead.

Indeed. I've always struggled to write solid characters, and I'd be loathe to throw them away unless absolutely necessary for the plot. Gu Zhen Ren doesn't give two fucks, he'll make you feel for people who have maybe 5 lines of dialogue.

Even Fang Yuan says that he's not the only main character, that's just the perspective of his story. There are plenty of other people fated and blessed with good fortune and talent, and they get plenty of limelight. I suppose that's a strong perk of writing in third person, the author can easily show off alternative perspectives, and much of the time, they're no dumber or less internally rich than the MC.

For reference, where do you stand on Worth The Candle and Mother of Learning?

I enjoyed both of them, though I preferred WTC over MOL.

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