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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2678 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm trying to finish Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This time around it is resonating, perhaps because the abstract desire for freedom is on my mind.

Series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches by a lady authoress. I use that term because she would probably hate it. But the stories, while having decent plots, are spoiled by the authoress not being able to keep her damn yap shut about class, race, and sex. Guess what, gentle readers: 1890 Victorian England did not share the same social attitudes as 2020s California! Yes, I know you are all aghast to learn this, but women were kept down by Da Man, the less well-off were kept down by Da Man, and non-white folx were kept down by Da Man. That was one very busy man, I gotta say.

She also falls down in basic research, e.g. referring to somebody as Mr. So-and-so, then calling him a lord. If he's a lord, then he's not a mister.

If she could cool it on the SJW preaching and do some basic "England or Scotland is not the USA, a local constable is not the equivalent of a sheriff, no gentleman would refer to a woman by her first name if she's not a family member or long-standing friend, etc." work, the stories would be much better. Oh, and stop having Watson trying to winkle out of Holmes "So, dude, you ever had a girlfriend before? Like, ever?"

It's clear these stories started off as fanfic and she also clearly has her own headcanon about the characters and their past, but the underlying plot is good enough to keep me reading even while I'm yelling at the screen about her preaching.

The Sherlock TV show fandom had almost as strong a Britpicking culture as the Harry Potter fandom - if you wanted to write fanfic you were expected to get it Britpicked, and there were lots of British fans willing to Britpick it for you. But I guess the Doyle's Sherlock Holmes doesn't have the same kind of organised fandom.

Even the Sherlock fandom had some (early) doozies, I recall one fanfic where someone made John Watson a fan of a particular baseball team (the explanation was he'd been introduced to it by Americans in Afghanistan, but I think the Doylist explanation was "I'm American, I can write about baseball but I know nothing about rugby").

I'm as British as they come and I was a New York Yankees fan for a while after a summer job at Brookhaven where most of my housemates were Yankees fans. Baseball is the perfect sport to watch on TV while multitasking housework or low-effort admin in the same way that cricket is the perfect sport to follow online while slacking off at work.

Down with three true outcomes - live balls and skilled defensive play are the best bit of baseball!

~300 pages into the unabridged Les Miserables. So far it seems oddly like a parellel inverse of Count of Monte Cristo; assumed identities, long prison stretches, changes of fortune, redemption vs revenge, guilt vs innocence, rising in society vs falling, self interest vs pro sociality, life at the top vs life at the bottom.

He Who Fights with Monsters 12. Seeing as I've read 12 of these things I am having fun but he can't help himself insert some reddit tier lib takes. They are infrequent enough that I find them manageable and he is semi-self aware. He's gotten better about not rehashing the previous chapter (I'm sure this is because of how he releases on patreon) at the start of every chapter. I think it was book 10 I could basically skip the first couple pages of each chapter.

The Pilgrims of the Damned: The Assembly Book 3 by Steve McHugh. Book 1 never did get too political, and the writing is still pretty snappy, so we're going with it. MC is looking more and more like an expy of his previous MC as time goes by, but it's been long enough since I've read the Hellequin chronicles that this isn't an issue for me.

About two-thirds of the way through A Canticle for Leibowitz. Story is starting to pick up now. Committing to reading at least 10% a day until I've finished it.

Somewhat recently I finished the series A Practical Guide to Evil. Pretty fun. I wish I had time to put it into better detail, but the world and setup is interesting. It's a sort of fantasy-with-superpowers type world? I don't know if I've really seen a book do it quite this way, however. The core concept is that "character archetypes" called "Named" periodically form in the world and with powers to match. For example, there's a Black Knight that shows up every few decades in the Evil-aligned nations, and a Paladin or whatnot who will show up in a Good-aligned nation. Roles can and do evolve if you survive long enough and are successful (e.g. you might start as a Squire and later evolve to e.g. a Mirror Knight). They have 3 limited-use (recharging) powers that are partly personal partly role-based. Fights between them tend to loosely follow some meta-narrative type rules, like starting a 'Rule of Three' set of conflicts between two rivals, or how Parties of Five tend to naturally form and are more powerful. It's a typical fantasy world (magic, nonhuman races, vaguely medieval) but with better than average worldbuilding IMO. The Evil-aligned empire on the continent exploits Orcs and Goblins to fight in their armies. You get periodic crusades against them, and periodic bouts of world-conquering too.

The context for the books however is that the main character is born and orphan in a middle, traditionally Good-aligned kingdom that usually gets the worst end of the stick when the Good nation of city-states to their West and the Empire to their East rampage all over their land. She is recruited as an Evil Squire, at first, to the Black Knight. However, said Black Knight and the Empress have conspired to "break" the typical cycle of Good vs Evil. They carefully try to avoid narrative traps in their fighting, stamp out Good heroes before they can get enough experience to start winning, treat the conquered middle Good nation abnormally well with expanded autonomy and economic prosperity, and develop the Empire's army into a more egalitarian and deadly fighting force, with expanded rights for nonhumans. This means that the MC's home nation is slowly turning... Evil! Mostly. But "Evil" in a, well, "practical" way as the title suggests. The idea is to be juuuust not-Evil and competent enough to prevent Fate spawning too many Good heroes from ruining everything. In their eyes, Good are jerks who are overly rigid in their thinking, while Evil has the potential to be pragmatic and level-headed about the greater good, paired with a resentment that narrative usually blindly favors the Good. Throughout the series the main character slowly adopts more and more of this attitude, but also tries to look out for her home nation and eventually grows quite powerful both personally and politically.

There is some character stuff of course, starting a bit tropey but gaining depth as you go on, some inventive fights (the main character often has to resort to tricks and cunning to win against the often narratively stronger Good heroes), and a surprising amount of politics and political maneuvering. And yes, the meta-narrative impact on fights is pretty interesting to see, especially among the more-experienced Named. You might get a hero who deliberately sets up a noble sacrifice as a giant fake-out, or deliberately as part of their fight strategy sending someone to wander around and thus rely on divine providence to guide them to the exact right spot, or a villain who tries to avoid their monologuing tendencies which inevitable backfire, but sometimes leaning into As the series expands you do eventually visit most parts of the continent, other nations' politics and alliances often become highly relevant. You've got a surprisingly deep and fleshed-out history of the nations involved. Which I've always really appreciated in series, like for example Wheel of Time was great in part because you ended up actually using the map over the course of the series with a nice sense of scale. A fair amount of the series is mostly war-stuff, though, which you either love or hate.

And you've got some comedy too. There's a city-state to the south that is an exaggerated democracy, where everything is put to a vote and the bureaucracy is intense and they almost never agree to do anything, but also has secret police who are constantly trying to guard against Tyranny. We get periodic epigraphs from some of the Named former Emperors, from Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful (the best unexpected quotes), Emperor Traitorous (infamous for several quadruple-crosses and such), etc. that occasionally give Hitchhiker's Guide vibes. Anyways, it's originally a web serial and that shows at times but nonetheless was a very fun read if pulp fantasy is your jam.

As an aside, in the original serialization, this world does apparently have a reason that the world is stuck at a certain technological level. Apparently there is a race of "gnomes" which are implied to be super-advanced, flying or space-faring or something, that will deliver a warning if an invention happens or line of research is pursued they don't want. If the warning is ignored they basically nuke the city from orbit. Is this elaborated on anywhere else in the novel aside from a few random mentions? No. They in no way affect the plot. I guess that's one way to set up a fantasy world's tech level... (IIRC in the published, edited novelization which is in progress, the second of ~6 currently about to come out, which I do recommend as an improvement over the original, this idea was dropped in favor of some kind of Fate hand-wavy thing, but IMO the gnomes are more funny)

So, basically, the set-up is: Evil Empire becoming Less Evil, more Good? Then hurrah, Good wins! Maybe in a sneakier way, having the Evil guys be less Evil in order to win over the middle kingdom, not provoke Fate into creating more Good heroes to fight them, and so forth, but definitely sounds like if they are moving pragmatically towards "yes, we are working more for the common good and not cackling fiendishly while throwing babies into furnaces", then how Evil can they really be?

Eh, partially but not entirely. For one, these Named technically have allegiance to the “Gods Above or Below”. So there’s a bit of divine pressure. In that sense Good is more “do what you are told” and Evil is more “spit in the eye of the heavens” (also tolerate dirty tricks and blackmail and stuff in combat for example) and so there’s technically a hard divide there and in terms of the Roles that arise (narratively self reinforcing too which is part of the point/problem). So evil and capital-E Evil in this setting are overlapping but distinct.

Also the Dread Empire still will do stuff like assassinations, collateral damage, even massacres, that kind of stuff, and to some extent the main character participates in that too; part of the broader setting, kind of cleverly, is that the Empire doesn’t have good farmland or rather, much of their land is ruined, so they turn to massive blood and sacrifice rituals to magically sustain crop output and avoid starvation (and invasions of course for food plunder). There’s some plot threads that try to connect the macroeconomics to the political conflicts IIRC. The predominant human ethnic group in the Empire (there are several) have a culture of backstabbing and poisoning and such. Did I also mention that despite having many more mages, they deal in necromancy and diabolism as very prominent magical disciplines?

With that said yes, the whole overall arc of the series is an attempt towards pragmatism on the side of Evil but also seeing if Good can work together with them sometimes or even come to a kind of accord rather than be a constant kill on sight cycle of violence. And a central tension is in order to get that, you have to gain raw power first, but not so much that a better future becomes impossible. But it’s a series with several books so we see some variety and detail come out over time.

I’m curious to know if I’m truly the only person on TM who finds reading fiction to be extremely difficult…

I've been on a huge fiction candy binge. I don't know how many books a year I was reading per year for the last 10 years but it's been pretty intermittent. Start with the birth of my second kid I gave up all mobile gaming, and have read what I feel is an unhealthy amount. 7 Dungeon Crawler Carl books and on book 12 of He Who Fights with monsters in 5 months. Wife even says I've been doing more than my fair share around the house and taking care of the kids. Still feels like wasting a lot of time.

I was always a "smart kid" growing up but I hated reading. Of course I discovered blogs 10 years ago and I enjoy reading Discourse about news and current events (and i don't do it to learn about the issues or the events).

I realized a couple years ago that I just don't like fiction and narratives that much. There are dozens of us maybe!

Very interesting. Good to know I’m not alone.

I was always very much an autodidact. I never really “took off” in terms of any burning desire to read until I was maybe 16 and when it happened I raided my father’s library and tried reading everything I got my hands on. Don’t know what it was but one day something just clicked and I dove right into it.

I’m not as smart as people think I am. I feel like I’m deceiving people at times when they say that. Yes, I’ve read a lot of books, but genius is unmistakable when you see it. When you see what the kids at MIT can you, you’ll quickly understand why these people are in a different galaxy.

One thing I always do when I read non-fiction is pay very close attention to the book’s bibliography. These are a gold mine that often go completely ignored by the reader. It often links directly to other books, articles and other authors. I’d always go and look up those books and the background of these authors to see what their expertise is in.

What that meant was I always kept my ear close to the ground such that even if I didn’t know the answer to a question (usually because I was more interested in reading something else), I knew ‘exactly’ where to look and who to ask and could “point” people directly to the answer and give it to them that way.

I think I’m maybe more rational or educated than I am “intelligent” in the sense of just raw mental horsepower. I have a very good memory and rarely forget things (although it’s a problem because usually when I don’t want to engage a point with someone I just tell them “I forgot” or “I don’t remember,” and those who know me very well, never believe it), but very few of the ideas I’ve come up with were invented by me. A lot of the time I’m quoting or paraphrasing or extending the logical arguments of others I’m persuaded by it really feels like plagiarism when others attribute it to me.

That's fascinating. Can you elaborate on how and why that's the case?

It doesn’t mean I’ve never read it, I’ve read a lot of fiction that I like, including most of the classics of old science fiction, but a lot of it is also a drag.

My father was a voracious reader all his life and loved his science fiction. But back when he was in high school he tried reading all the Dune books in sequence and said he just couldn’t do it because he abhorred Herbert’s literary style. He said Herbert is overly descriptive, he felt suffocated by reading him and didn’t let you as a reader use your imagination. And then one day he picked it up again and read every Dune book back to back in the same day and felt pumped up afterward; somehow he was able to just do it.

I’ve read all the Dune books too except for a couple from the prelude series that Brian wrote. I had the exact ‘opposite’ reaction my father had. I absolutely loved Herbert’s writing style because you didn’t have to do any work. Everything is given to you. I found myself not having to do any intellectual heavy lifting and everything simply fell into place.

I’m sure it’s related to other odd quirks I have. I also can’t stand Quentin Tarantino films for instance. God, I hate his movies. And it comes down to his non-linear storytelling. I intensely hate that. Watching that stuff leaves me feeling schizophrenic and nauseated and confused as hell.

Mentally I tend to be a holistic thinker. I naturally operate in the mode of “seeing the big picture.” I struggle mightily proceeding with a story in piecemeal (it’s probably why I was also bad at cardboard puzzles as a kid). I lose my sense of reference when things tend to go “off script” from the plot and much of the time don’t even recognize when it’s happening. I remember once, my dad and I went back and watched old black and white episodes of the Twilight Zone and he got frustrated at me for failing to pickup the moral of the story and he was guiding me through each episode as we were watching it.

There’s a lot of fiction I love and even more I dislike, but it varies widely depending on who the author is. I’m sure it’s all fundamentally related to the same thing. I tend not to pickup and context very well. Maybe my friends were right and I am a high functioning autistic. Who knows.

I've never read Dune but this makes me think I might like it. Is it like reading a textbook? Do you like reading textbooks?

Both of the fiction books I've ever binge-read were hard scifi. I only read them because I had heard second-hand what the themes were, and they sounded interesting. Both of them had "that one chapter" where the author dropped the thin veneer of story to dictate the book's theme like a textbook. This is not a criticism exactly, but just something odd I noticed.

I wouldn’t say it reads like a textbook in a non-fiction sense, but I found reading it to be easier than other people have. And yes, I do like reading textbooks. Broad surveys of things, hard science primers, encyclopedias, handbooks, material that tends to have a direct focus on a given topic, etc.

Fiction books written in textbook style:

Adding A Disturbance of Fate. Warning: heavy doses of Kennedy idolatry and boomer leftist althist wank to be expected.

edit: Also A Short History of the Future and the classic After Man and the somewhat lackluster follow-up Man After Man.

Very interesting. Thank you.

Is there a specific term for this type of literary style?

I think there unfortunately is not. The closest tropes seem to be Scrapbook Story (the story is composed of in-universe documents, which may or may not be textbooks) and Encyclopedia Exposita (the story uses excerpts from an in-universe textbook as chapter epigraphs, but is not itself an in-universe textbook).

I inhaled Uketsu's latest story, Strange Maps, yesterday, and found it pretty fun. For those who don't know, it's a Japanese mystery/vibes youtuber who made the break as an author with stories that can essentially be compared to golden-age murder mystery fiction (contrived "figure the perp, motive and mode" puzzle tales that try to be fair, optimized for puzzle design and vibes rather than for realism and literary value).

His stories are refreshingly free from the last 60 years' worth of epicycles of ironic self-awareness, and while the premise in this installment (protag investigates an uncanny handdrawn map found on his grandmother's body when she committed suicide) feels less fresh than the ones that gave him his break (real estate listings for houses with weird floor plans, which turn out to be key to unravelling sprawling conspiracies involving murder, scams, mental illness and cults), he got much better at staying grounded and inviting suspension of disbelief until the end. It's also great weeaboo bait for the sheer Japaneseness of the set pieces (Corrupt WWII military-industrial dynasties! Isolated fishing villages with creepy idiosyncratic cults! Women on lifelong quests of revenge! Salarymen who get black-out drunk with their scumbag boss!).

Trash

A Conneticut Yankee in king arthur's court: This trashy isekai light novel was written by mark twain in the 1880s but it follows most modern Trashy Isekai light novel tropes to a T.

MC is sent to a magical world via Isekaitis? Hammer kun is truck kun

MC is sent to a world where his modern knowledge makes him into a god? Check

World is effectively built around MC's ability? Check

MC gets a harem? Check (kinda)

and the big one you already knew it. The Title is also the premise.

Re:Zero: I have no clue why but I read 20 volumes of a time loop mystery. The thing that this story does is make our main character go through many different time loops in succession each "arc" is basically one time loop where our main character must both figure out the mystery and defeat the opponent. But our main character suffers a lot. Even though we have plot armor as an integral part of the story he suffers much more in interesting ways than most fantasy characters. This story is very well done with deep lore.

Stuff I read that is a waste of time but I can pretend to justify it better

The Chemical Formulary: A book of chemical recipies made in the 1930s has a lot of interesting ideas and also some of the worst ideas humanity has ever had.

One line you're reading an idea on how to prevent fog on your car then a little later you're reading about putting thallium in the ground to kill ants

The Geneva convention : I swear reading the Geneva convention has changed my opinion of fictional wars. Mainly I start to think the "good guys" are actually just fucking war criminals a lot.

The federalist papers: Some very interesting old papers where you get a great insight into the opinions of the founding fathers both how much foresight they had and how much they lacked. Really a great series of documents showing that these guys were absolutely insane. (in both a good and bad way)

I hear Isekai and its tropes trashed constantly. Why is that? Compared to other genres (kung-fu fighting shonen, school slice of life), is it more predictable, more numerous, not as enjoyable, or something else?

Because it's derivative, formulaic, and its gimmick has been done to death. Most of it is blatant wish-fulfillment fantasy. And most of it just plain isn't good, at all.

I say "most of it" as a hedge because I only sampled very little of it and it's entirely possible that there might be exceptions, but across what I've seen, the rules hold. It is in fact uniformly trash. Slop, if you will.

I agree with @gattsuru wholeheartedly on the (absence of) merits, but the reason why the genre gets uniquely trashed is imo the insane output and popularity both in Anime and in fanfic/royalroad-style amateur writing, coupled with a certain level of pretentiousness. Shounen is literally defined by its target group being boys, you don't expect it to be deep and if it is, that's a positive. Slice of Life also is defined by being light and fun. Isekai on the other hand has a very bad case of "this is not like other Isekai I swear" followed very quickly by checking absolutely every trope in the worst way possible. Spoiler: If you try to write seriously in a genre trashy enough that you need to put in a disclaimer that it's not like the rest, choose a different genre. Or just own up to the fact, you probably are just as trashy as everyone else.

For this reason, imo KonoSuba is a decent contender since it's comedy and doesn't pretend to be something it's not. Likewise, Overlord is funny in its complete over-the-top ridiculousness, but it's hard to tell whether the author intended it that way, so probably more a case of so-bad-it's-good.

And secondly, Shounen and Slice of Life are arguably troperific in a mostly-wholesome way; For example, boys loving exciting adventures and people usually becoming friends after fights, that's just fun & nice. Isekai, on the other hand, is frequently quite degenerate, for lack of a better word. Especially the tendency towards harems puts it quite close to erotic dramas just with an inverted target audience.

There are well-received “normal(ish) person transported to alternate world” works, like Gravity Falls, Narnia, Idiocracy, Harry Potter.

My guesses:

Isekai doesn’t even try to justify why the normal person is in the alternate world. Presumably writers who choose Isekai instead of Isekai-like prefer not justifying major plot points.

More likely, because most Isekai are trash, people who like Isekai tend to prefer trash, and people who dislike trash tend to have prejudice against Isekai. So either a) the author makes an Isekai-like to avoid the prejudice, b) they make a trash Isekai, or c) they have a small audience.

Thanks for your response, although I'll admit it didn't help me very much. For one, I didn't list "trash" as a reason, and the closest analog was "not enjoyable." I don't understand art criticism, so if art critics (or other taste gatekeepers) give vague criticism, I just phrase it descriptively as "they did not enjoy it." Should I just note that as your position?

"Not justifying major plot points" is interesting. Is a premise the same as a major plot point? In lots of fantasy there are magic systems that do not have any justification. I'm assuming that this is not a case where there are repetitive, periodic deus ex machina or a systemic problem with bad writing? If the premise is this unrealistic thing, like who cares? Is It's A Wonderful Life trash? Is the issue that Isekai tries to steal valor by having a dumb premise and doesn't even bother to do something interesting (="enjoyable") with it?

You’re right that plenty of good works rely on unexplained premises/plot (e.g. any involving magic, Bojack Horseman why animals are antropomorphized). So I take back my first theory.

Second theory: “trash” can be substituted for anything and the general point holds: when the work is clearly Isekai, people have predefined expectations, people who like / dislike the genre like / dislike those expectations respectively.

Why this applies to Isekai more than other genres…because Isekai tends to be predictable, so the expectations are stronger.

You can "not justify" something in the sense that we don't know a justification for why gravity exists and works the way it does, and you can "not justify" something in the sense that despite everything we've been told about gravity, an apple falls up instead of down.

Shouldn’t it be enough to be able to suspend your disbelief when it comes to literature? It’s not at all like hard sciences.

Once you’ve come the postulate of necessity in philosophical terms, you’ve reached the end of the explaining that you can do. At some point these are just bottom level features of reality. Reality only has one level of organization, and that’s the lowest level; despite the separate cognitive elements that keep track of the different levels of organization.

Naturally, I suspend disbelief when reading most literature. However, suspending disbelief for increasingly formulaic and lazy disbelief-inducers gets boring.

If apples are constantly falling up even though we're always told they fall down, it would seem to be a systemic, periodic problem and not just a silly premise.

So it sounds like: the initial Isekai premise is just the first instance of the inevitable general tendency to Make Shit Up (commonly called 'bad writing'?)

If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened (and it was never explained), I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.

If there are apples falling up periodically yet it's never recognized or addressed in-universe even though it drives the entire plot, again, bad writing.

If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened, I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.

This seems obviously correct to me, except that empirically it's just wrong. Off the top of my head I can't actually think of any other examples in which it's wrong, though; is there some meta-irony here about how there's this one unexplained anomaly in the category of narrative quality of anomalies?

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I really wish there were some good isekai works out there, but as a genre it's near-uniquely prone to promising really good central ideas, and then immediately dropping them for glorified wish fulfillment antics. It's not that the stories are predictable, but that where they're going is just not very interesting, and the conflict with the potential makes it really obvious. And that seems to have only gotten worse as the genre has matured.

So you have a fascinating world with deep questions... that's not going to get answered or explored. You have a character that's badly out of depth in a world where that's a punishing problem... and is going to be overpowered godmode in ten chapters. You have a relationships that have to cross massive cultural boundaries and make serious compromises... and it's not going to matter, because the main character's going to have between three and ten waifus dangling from his arm regardless of where they can even speak his language. You have an opportunity to seriously think about the portability of knowledge or critical thinking skills when entering a world where even the laws of physics are different... and it's almost always going to go full It's Magic I Don't Gotta Explain Shit.

They can be fun reads - trash can be fun, and I'm not above reading or writing power fantasy or fixit fics or harem comedy - but they're seldom deep books, and almost never good and deep. So they're trash.

Connecticut Yankee at least tries to be bitter (albeit as much to keep with the time travel stable loop thing than out of real conviction), but it's still very central an example of the genre's problems: Hank's dropped into a complicated society he deeply disagrees with, and the answer is Invent Gun and Get Lucky (both figuratively, and separately with a literal eclipse). The only real depth is using the as a metaphor for then-current problems (the aftermath of slavery, papists, the gullibility of the populace, so on), but Twain's heavy-handed enough that they're equivalent to a modern-day writer putting Ronald Grump as a isekai villain.

To be fair, Twain was also writing in the 1880s, so he was literally inventing a lot of the tools of modern literature, so it's hard to blame him too much for not reinforcing his themes with his events. But modern-day writers don't have that excuse.

Spellsinger is my personal nemesis: it opens up with an everyman protagonist who genuinely gets squicked out by the realistic conventions of a fantasy (furry-adjacent, my kryptonite!) world, along with a 'magic' that borrows from science and that the protagonist doesn't have any unique strengths with... and then there's a two-page transition that turns into the protagonist solving every problem with the power of badly-mangled rock song. It's one of the few books I've literally thrown across the room. I've read some stinkers, but this is a book that could have been a lot more.

If you want recs, RE:Zero is good if you don't mind the gore, Magic Kingdom for Sale Sold is a pretty central example of the genre and its flaws done reasonably, Vision of Escaflowne is better-known for its visuals but does a good job for its time. Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure is decent if very much worse than Tenchi Muyo for 'stupid harem hijinks'. Dark Lord of Derkholm is kinda a deconstruction, enough that I don't really count it as isekai, but it does a good job of pointing out the problems.

Ar'Kendrytheist is one of very few works to actually take its setting assumptions seriously (and finish), but it's very long and extremely progressive-coded (if only rarely so woke as to be actively detrimental rather than merely smarmy), so I'm a little cautious to put it into the clear recommend list. Arguably Beware of Chicken as a 'shorter' (aka several novella) comedy, though it's not as good about avoiding the pitfalls. I have high hopes for the Contention series, but it's just at the crux of both 'what's the answer to our grabbing mystery' and 'does the main character naturally learn from his mistakes, or does he just get overpowered' at the end of Book 2 and that's kinda the turning point between good-for-isekai and awful.

Isekai is usually a thin excuse to put a protagonist most palatable to the modern audience - a modern person - into a wholly alien setting (making the setting "modern world but changed" would require extra work on integrating the changes while keeping the MC relatable). This is seen as immature reading.

It also intersects with tropes such as power fantasy (protagonist has some power that puts them ahead of natives, usually not gained through effort).

What I'm actually reading.

Finishing up the last book in The Warlord Chronicles, Excalibur, which I'm really enjoying. It's a gritty (although maybe not that historically accurate) Arthur retelling that I think thematically captures a lot of what the Arthur mythos is going for. Also reading After Virtue, which I am starting to enjoy more.

Warlord Chronicles is great. Always makes me crave playing a welsh ruler in crusader kings 2, 867 start, and forming prydain. Culture converting all vassals and provinces is mandatory, get bored afterwards.

Theres actually a CK2 mod for Warlord Chronicles, but it's not that good.

Makes me want to learn Welsh, especially since my ancestry is almost 100% British and Irish (with some Scandinavian blood). Would be practically useless but is very beautiful.

Do you know about the Winter King mod for CK2? You can just directly play as the book characters in the 480 start (edit: I see that you talked about this, guess the mod isn't that good)

Oh yes, I did. The mod is just not quite done and feels empty, but it's been 2 years+ since I last tried it so it may be better now.

I have 0% Welsh, Irish, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry but when I reread Warlord Chronicles I feel an insatiable urge to drive the Angles and Saxons back into the sea, just as Arthur would have wanted.

I hated that book. Review below

First the plot. I think I could live with an unbelievable speculative world, and even with arrogant writing, if interesting stuff happens to interesting people. Very little happens in this book, and very little of what happens is due to the agency of the main character. I get that that's part of the point: women in this literary universe (and in the world in general) are so often oppressed and powerless, and its difficult to them to feel like they have any agency. But it doesn't make the main character very interesting, or even very feminist. Offered is kind of sniveling coward who goes along with pretty much every thing that's done to her, only taking matters into her own hands when she wants to have sex with the chauffeur (which I suppose could be read as empowering, but did not come off to me that way).

Secondly, the world building. Margaret Atwood markets herself as an author of "Speculative Fiction" rather than "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy" because she prefers to think of herself as someone who writes about things that could happen. The thing is, The Handmaid's Tale could never happen in this country, especially not on the timescale suggested. Polyamory is not something acceptable for the Christian right (although not so on the left), and the reduction of Women to sex objects is not something that Christianity preaches (the most revered women in the faith is A VIRGIN). Even if some kind of twisted version of the faith was to appear, there's no way it would be able to seize power in the country, and have such widespread support on the timescale suggested. And that's not to mention the whole issue of political conflict in a society with a declining birth rate. Atwood does this kind of okay in some aspects: most everyone in the Handmaid's tale just seems tired: no one actually believes in all the crap that the regime puts on, which I think fits with the general narrative of declining population. That, however, does not fit with the brainwashing or the force of belief required for Gilead to overthrow the US government. Again, I think this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of Atwood's about fundamentalists. A lot of fundamentalists actually really deeply believe what they say they do. What Atwood presents here is yet another caricature of religious extremism: hypocrites who don't actually practice what they preach.

Given some historical context in which this was written (aftermath of Reagan's election and Iranian Revolution), the world of this book makes a little more sense. However, Atwood's concerns about the rights of women have, at least in my opinion, aged badly. Although the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022, many states, including Massachusetts, still have the right to abortion enshrined by their constitutions. The religious right is increasingly irrelevant: their champion is a hedonistic old man who fails to even make lip service to any kind of religious morals. Threats to women rights rather have come from capital, and the insidious reduction of everything, from bodies, to free time, to meaningful relationships, to the grasping hand of the market. Atwood so poignantly critiqued this system in her MaddAddam trilogy, and it was frustrating to not see that same level of analysis here.

Finally, I found the writing to be unnecessarily convoluted and confusing. Frequent, un-signalled flashbacks, and lack of quotation marks were the worst offenders. I get that this was supposed to be due to the framing device of these being audio transcripts, but it still grinds my gears. Atwood is not unique in this regard (looking at you Cormac Mccarthy). I also found that the framing device didn't really do it for me: somehow this being a university lecture ~100 years after the fall of Gilead made the whole speculative world even more unbelievable for me.

The main issue with the book is that she understands the aesthetics of certain religious groups but has no real understanding of the mechanics of it.

In real life young attractive and fertile women were treated exceptionally well. The young women pharaohs had children with lived in luxury. Young women married to princes lived in luxury. In no culture do elite level men keep the mothers of their kids in basements.

On the flip side elite level men generally have had an easy time finding women and don't have to resort to capturing women. Taking slave wives that live in poverty is something low class men who would engage in.

Atwood really fails at evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Her books confirms my belief that many of the worst ideas in modern politics comes from people literature background who don't really understand the underlying mechanisms.

In no culture do elite level men keep the mothers of their kids in basements.

Well, it wasn't a basement, it was an attic, but the Russians basically did.

The women's quarters of the tsar's palace were particularly elaborate and were equipped with a separate courtyard, dining room, and children’s apartments, as well as a large group of maidservants, wet nurses, nannies, and ladies in waiting.

The women the elite had children with effectively lived in spas with exceptional luxury. The idea that they were forced into a miserable existence doesn't match reality.

Maybe if you limit your definition of "the elite" to just the czar. Not every boyar could afford a setup like that, but not sequestering your woman is low status, so solve for the equilibrium.

A few comments

•The Sons of Jacob definitely aren’t supposed to be a mainline Christian denomination. The name “Jesus” is pointedly never mentioned by anyone in Gilead, ever, nor is anything from the New Testament. The SoJ have difficulty controlling the Deep South due to Baptist insurgents, which would imply that many hardline denominations are not on board. Additionally, book Gilead has a strong racial apartheid element, with the “Sons of Ham” being confined to South Africa style Zanzibar-stans. This would seem to imply the SoJ are a strain of Dominionist weirdos and not mainline Christians. This was changed in the tv show to make the SoJ racially egalitarian, which honestly probably tracks better with radical Christian groups today. Many of the lower level political commissars of Gilead are former rad-fems, which also doesn’t really track with any 80s right wing or religious movement (though it seems oddly prescient today).

•It seems to be implied the fertility crisis caused massive social pressure which allowed the SoJ to seize power, and that the handmaids and the rest of the social structure are more of a semi-pragmatic measure to deal with that, and not just some stupid LARP. It annoys me that in the show Canada seems to be able to just be a normal liberal brunchtopia in the face of an existential demographic crisis.

•I think post-script seemingly taking place after the fall of the regime is an homage to Orwell’s 1984 with the Newspeak dictionary at the end.

I have only read two novels by Atwood, but the thing that seems to run through both of them is that she combines the subtlety of a pulp writer with the pretentions of a literary fiction author. It's a bizarre combination.

For parallelism, perhaps it should be "the subtlety of a pulp writer with the humility of a literary fiction author".

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