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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes. I have internally labelled vast swathes of literature as "not for me" and that is perfectly ok. The Hugo awards seems like just one more place that is 'not for me'.

I don't have much to say about the bulk of your post, but I do hope you can find a more enjoyable set of works. There are plenty of up and coming authors writing stuff that could be described as "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing". There are other places you can start looking:

https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing - Shirtaloon, Zogarth, and The First Defier are all people I have read and who would fit that description.

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/complete - Mother of learning is my favorite. Post Human has AI, sci-fi, aliens, and space battle elements. Royal road in general has lots of fresh authors trying out fun ideas. If you have a tolerance for grammar and spelling mistakes it is full of fiction I think you'd enjoy. If your tolerance is low just stick to the top recommended stories.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/ - Has progressive-ish politics but still produces good recommendations. But mostly the recommendations are the same. Some of the ones I already mentioned get recommended, but also: Cradle, Iron Prince, and Arcane Ascension.

https://old.reddit.com/r/litrpg/ - Common Recs include: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Azarinth Healer, and He Who Fights with Monsters (Shirtaloon)

Amazon - Once you buy enough of the books you like I have found Amazon has a decent algorithim for finding similar books. You need to be deliberate about it, and give star ratings to books, and also remove certain books from your recommendation list.

Unfortunately I have a huge distaste for reading anything that isn't already completed. The vast majority of prog fantasy/litrpg stuff has a long way to go before being finished, if ever. I've been burned too many times in the past to commit to that type of story.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes.

This is a good policy - I could have stood to be less critical, especially since I didn't even read half the book.

Unfortunately I have a huge distaste for reading anything that isn't already completed. The vast majority of prog fantasy/litrpg stuff has a long way to go before being finished, if ever. I've been burned too many times in the past to commit to that type of story.

I thought that might be the case. The link on royalroad I posted only shows Completed fictions. There are also quite a few request threads on progressionFantasy and litrpg subreddits for completed fictions. Mother of Learning is complete, and I'd highly recommend it. Post Human is also complete, and you might enjoy it if you want a different take on AI, empires, and space battles.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes.

This is a good policy - I could have stood to be less critical, especially since I didn't even read half the book.

I started the policy when I began writing my own story on royalroad (and yes, I left it unfinished after ~300 pages). I quickly realized how hard it was to please everyone with the story, and I couldn't even please all of my own tastes with the story I was writing. I generally think "more is better" when it comes to fiction and story telling. I want more authors, I want those authors telling more stories, and I want them getting better by just doing tons of writing. I will offer editing help and suggestions if the author asks me, but otherwise I just say what I like to try and encourage more people to write things I like. I'd extend that to you, if you feel there isn't enough "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing" one of the best solutions might be to write your own stories. You have a base level of writing talent that puts you at a better level than many authors on royalroad (you can put together an argument and enough words to make a top level post on themotte). If you have interesting ideas write them. If you don't, just write "fanfiction" and change around some of the things you didn't like in your favorite books.

I've thought about and started trying to write many times. I just don't have the mental energy to do it while juggling a full time job at a startup, partner, clean house, puppy, etc.

In order to do it I stopped moderating at themotte and slatestarcodex, and generally anytime I thought about posting on or reading reddit I spent that time writing instead. Felt good while I was doing it, but yeah I hear you on the mental energy. Its why I haven't been able to do it again.

royalroad

Mother of Learning was great. But some other that I tried were either abandoned or turned into protagonist winning effortlessly because they are protagonist.

Can you recommend anything complete?

(I can recommend https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/45534/this-used-to-be-about-dungeons/ - fantasy slice of life, with some plot. Good characterisation, nice worldbuilding. Nice world, as in "closer to ideal than reality" not some brutal dystopia where everyone is evil and/or stupid)

Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales is on Royal Road* and it's the best novel I've read in years. A 1,600,000 word rational self-insert litRPG isekai webnovel about a depressed teenager who gets transported from his English class to the magical land of Aerb to face his inner demons come to life with the help of a harem of beautiful girls† sounds like a trainwreck, but Wales's genius turns it into a masterpiece. The setting is vast, logically coherent, and enchantingly interesting, Juniper and Amaryllis are incredibly smart, knowledgeable, and driven, there is a great supporting cast, tons of action with interesting obstacles to overcome, and an amazing ending.

* Though I prefer the AO3 version, since it lets you download an EPUB/MOBI/PDF for your Kindle/Kobo/Nook and read the whole thing in one page.

† Or, as the original description put it, "It's a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, loosely based on my personal experience of falling into a portal to another world and discovering that I had a character sheet attached to my soul."

The section on the website I linked to is only for completed fictions, and the two recs were both completed stories.

Completed stories are not RoyalRoad's strong suite. Typically they have stories with very interesting beginnings and good looooong middles. My approach is to just stop reading them once I get bored with the tropes / writing in the long middles. Usually I'll play "pick my own ending" and just stop reading a story when I feel like it gets to a conclusion and I've started to get bored.

"This Used to be about dungeons" (TUTBAD) was not really for me. But if I had to think three other stories with similar things to what you listed I'd say:

  1. Beneath the dragoneye moons. Slice of life, has more plot than TUTBAD. Lots of characterization, lots of worldbuilding. Most people in the world are nice, even if the setting of the world itself isn't so nice.

  2. Millennial Mage. Slice of life for the first few books. Cool worldbuilding where humans are one of the least powerful species and thus they are all very nice to each other. The other species aren't evil, but more just amoral and don't care about human well-being.

  3. Ar'Kendrithyst. My personal favorite, and perhaps one of my longest going patreon subscriptions. MC is very nice, but thrown into a dangerous and slightly brutal world. He is changed to be more ruthless, but he also changes the world to be a little nicer. Great characterization.

I'll caveat that Ar'Kendrithyst isn't complete, and likely isn't going to be complete for another year or so (if it ends at Book 8). I think you could read Books 1-4, but even going to 1-6 might run into the "winning effortlessly" problem and Book 7 more so.

I think I often don't mind reading the "effortlessly winning" books. Especially if its after a long buildup of power from previous books. The alternate to the effortlessly winning is the perfectly scaling escalator of difficulty. Where somehow the MC only encounters appropriately leveled challenges all throughout the story.

One of my reasons for recommending it is the easiness with which the MC sometimes wins. This matches slice of stories a bit, in that there isn't a ton of tension or strife to hook the reader, and its more of an interest in the world building and characters that keeps you around.

"effortlessly winning" is not a problem by itself, I would be happy to read/watch something about character stomping all over appropriate targets but that is really hard to pull well.

There are stories where the protagonist sometimes wins easily and sometimes gets curbstomped in turn (and to an extent, that's true in Ar'Kendrithyst, cfe Moon Moon), but understood and agreed.

If you liked This Used To Be About Dungeons, you might like other stuff by Alexander Wales, who tends to be well-thought-of in rationalist circles. Probably his best known work is Worth The Candle. Wales' stuff is very well written by many metrics, but he does not write characters that I like, which is fatal as far as I'm concerned.

Royal Road has a number of other stories that I do like, but they are incomplete/in progress/on hiatus. The best thing I've read there is Beware of Chicken, though the first book has moved to Kindle Unlimited and Audible by way of Amazon. A casual knowledge of xianxia/cultivation stories would help, as it's a genre parody, but isn't essential. Very highly recommended.

Strongly anti-recommend Beware of Chicken, it becomes embarrassingly bad after the first book

Seconding Beware of Chicken. It's an innocent pleasure.

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