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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15629 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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.

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