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 -
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.
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.
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