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Notes -
The Years of Apocalypse on Royal Road.
A rare example of a time loop story done right. I can hardly name another two (Mother of Learning, and Reverend Insanity). The premise is standard fare for the genre. A student at a Wizarding College dies, wakes up in the past, and realizes she has to optimize her way out of a catastrophe. But the execution is where it distinguishes itself from the endless scroll of mediocrity on Royal Road.
It's good stuff! I found it off a recommendation on /r/rational, and the person who endorsed it noted a relatively grounded approach to the mechanics of time looping (consideration for the butterfly effect, at the very least) and an exploration of the psychological toll of reliving events while surrounded by people who start fresh.
Most time loop protagonists slide inevitably into sociopathy. If you know the people around you will reset to their factory settings in twenty-four hours, they stop feeling like people and start looking like NPCs. Their suffering ceases to have moral weight because it has no permanence.There are no consequences, after all. Unlike RI, the protagonist is a young woman, who, while competent, isn't an amoral monomaniacal monster. When she's cast on a competency-porn set, said competence is earned through hard effort.
It touches on the "Groundhog Day" problem but treats it with the severity it deserves. How do you maintain sanity when you are the only entity with continuity of consciousness? How do you avoid manipulating people when you know the exact sequence of inputs required to get a desired output? The story does not shy away from the fact that this process creates a hardness in a person, a callousness that is difficult to wash off.
The author, who actually bothered to read up on engineering or physics, treats magic as a branch of mechanics. This is "hard magic" in the Sandersonian sense, but it leans closer to hard sci-fi. When the protagonist constructs a spell, it feels less like chanting in Latin and more like debugging code or wiring a circuit. It scratches a very specific itch for competence porn, satisfying the part of the brain that enjoys watching capable people solve well-defined problems with available tools. The magi-tek is closer to tech than Harry Potter.
I'd tentatively give it a 8.5/10, as of reading about 80 rather lengthy chapters. The older I get, the more specific and niche my taste in fiction gets. It's a curse, but occasionally I can find a salve for the wound. This probably counts.
Have you read The Perfect Run?
Much more humor focused, but still pretty great.
I've heard the name, and I know it's got time travel in it, but little else. The very high rating is promising, I'll take a look, thanks!
It's kind of a superhero story with the MCs power being setting a save point and reloading to it when he dies (and some other related powers). The story is about him achieving his "perfect run" after a particular save point.
Something that makes the story a bit different than other timeloop stories is that we enter it kind of in the middle or the end. The MC has had the power for a very long (subjective) time and has already been very affected by it.
The same author actually has an ongoing story that is also a time loop story (this time litrpg), called "The hundred reigns", in which the MC somehow inherits the "evil overlord" class in his sleep one night from his father and has 100 hundred reigns (lives). The issue being that he is a bastard (as in not trueborn), has no power, the court and the world at large doesn't understand how the Overlord class works and believes you get the overlord class by killing the previous overlord and are more than happy to kill the MC to get the class. Also, the empire is threatened by invasion, is on the brink of civil war and rebellion, the Overlord is hunted by a centuries old Elf oracle, and there is possibly an apocalypse on the horizon.
An interesting aspect of the worldbuilding is that people in general don't have "classes" or level at all, for that you need an item allowing you to tap into a cultural archetype as defined by a kind of collective oversoul. Activating the class puts on an armour or costume related to the archetype, like a superhero or kind of how like classes/jobs work in some JRPGs. To level up you can either kill powerful things or act in accordance with the archetype but eventually you probably need to do both, which could be a bit of an issue when you have a class modelled after a literal demon...
That loops are a limited resource leads to things being somewhat different from some other time-loop stories since the MC can't just throw away tons of loops to achieve his aims.
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