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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  5mo ago (ussri.substack.com)   3191 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.

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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