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self_made_human  Grippy socks, grippy box  1mo ago (ussri.substack.com)   2628 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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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.

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