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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Notes -
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.
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