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Notes -
Sky Pride on royal road.
The description felt very generic eastern cultivation story. But I finally gave in and read it because of its long tenure in the top stories. Even though it is generic and plays standard tropes quite often I feel many of the elements are done well.
What I feel it handles best is the ugliness of a cultivation world. Or at least having a non psychopath OP that finds the psychopathy of the setting horrifying and trauma inducing.
Been following this with a few friends since November last year - quite good, I second the recommendation.
Entertainingly, it does pretty well on the daoism front. I tested this out against a few people I know who were in the middle of reading the Zhuangzi and it took much longer than I expected for them to figure out I was pretending at knowledge by aping a webnovel
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I gave it a very fair shake and was mostly disappointed. The prose leans purple, the protagonist is... okay, but "quirky" in a manner I do not find charming. He's painfully earnest, and the feral child being resocialized deal overstays its welcome. It's been long enough that I've forgotten much of my criticism, but I'd describe it as a mid novel at best.
That's a shame, because To The Far Shore is up there in terms of novels I've read on RR. Post-post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail, with radiation magic and fallen civilizations rediscovering muskets and the ruins of hyper-advanced civilizations that came before? You bet I enjoyed it.
Both are by the same guy, which is annoying. It means Warby can write. He just can't write this.
Consider the starts. Mazelton begins media res, he arrives at TTFS ready to fire: paranoid Ma assassin with an almost pathological lack of empathy, an inventory of opinions about everyone in the room, instincts honed by a clan that treated "eat carrion if you must" as parenting advice.
Tian arrives with nothing. The opening arc is the author manually installing a soul, one trauma-recovery beat at a time, and the prose is straining for emotional registers the protagonist can't yet supply. That's where the purple comes from. Lavender adjectives are what you reach for when your POV character is still booting up.
Xianxia compounds it. The genre wants a genuinely virtuous MC so cultivation breakthroughs feel earned, which makes "sweet boy from the trash heap" the obvious play. It is also rather played-out in the genre, and once Tian commits, his available range is roughly Pure to Slightly Less Pure. The supporting cast keeps trying to drag him somewhere more interesting. They were losing, when I gave up on it.
My favorite of his is https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/83045/weeaboos-unfortunate-isekai-the-necromancers-gacha - charming and macabre.
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It's funny I was thinking of tagging you, since you are one of the only other cultivation enjoyers I know. But our tastes consistently do not align. To the point that I should be getting reverse recommendations from you, asking what you hate to find something I like.
I'm not sure I agree with the "purple prose" accusation. I do find there are stories where I will just skip over things and feel that I'm not missing anything. This isn't really one of those stories.
One thing that is described quite often is the elemental cycle. If you know the cycle already I can see how this feels like purple prose. I do not, and constantly forget it. The in text reminders are helpful not extraneous for me.
I also struggle with Eastern names. The author does seem to go out of their way to reintroduce characters or at least make it very clear who they are. If you don't struggle with names these parts would also be wasted on you.
The main character's earnestness is one of my favorite parts of the story. Psychopath MCs are incredibly hard for me to stomach, but so are whiny bitch MCs. It feels like Tian is far from either of those pitfalls.
It's been long enough that I'm not 100% sure if my memories of the prose being purple are entirely reliable. But I do remember feeling like it was overwrought, that Warby was trying too hard. I think a common thread in media I don't particularly like is being too "tropey". If I can predict pretty much exactly what's going to happen in a story arc without even having to read it, yeah, why really bother?
There's only instance in the section of the book I read where I was went "oh, that's cool". It waswhen he got sent off to whack a demonic cultivator, and decided to risk his life to save civilian prisoners. So far so basic, but then I think it turned out that his senior brothers were monitoring him all along, and if he'd done things in an utterly ruthless way, they'd have killed him for being a potential future demonic cultivator himself. Good idea.
There's the loveable senior brothers thing, where you just know what's going to happen. The tsundere female foil of privilege, where you can sleepwalk into knowing they're going to end up friends/lovers. I could go on for a while, or I could, if I remembered more of the story. C'mon. All I ask for is more originality than that. It's not an awful book, God knows there's some serious horseshit on RR, but I'd give it a 6/10 at best, below my threshold for sticking with it in the hopes of it getting better.
On a semi-related note, I think only the Chinese write good Xianxia. The Western knock-offs just don't capture the vibes, it's even worse than when the Japanese try to depict a Western school in their media. That Greco-Roman "Cultivation" story on RR, whose name escapes me? Holy fucking shit was it bad. Great concept, execution so mediocre I could cry.
They ground him, eventually adopt him. He is nearly broken when he has to watch some of them get killed in what feels like a pointless war with a heretical sect.
Turns out she is not actually privileged, or that she is basically at the bottom tier of "privilege". They do become friends. Turns out later that her mentors use his ass whooping of her as a teaching lesson for her to be less of a loud mouth. The mentors point out that you never know when someone might be a hidden dragon or have a powerful backing so you should always be polite and courteous. Which is something so blindingly stupid and obvious in a cultivation world, but it seems rare that any story actually mentions it and notices it.
The main part I think you would have liked is the depiction of war. The MC is a thirteen year old in a war zone. Once he manages to distinguish himself a little they try to get him a slot as a hospital orderly which is relatively safer. Its safe from violence but not from Trauma. He is watching his senior brothers and sisters get murdered and mutilated in horrific ways. The heretics they are fighting like to use poison, necromancy, and gu (insects/parasites). The war also seems to be very pointless from the MC's perspective. Certain practices by the sect he is in are very callous towards the lives of the lower sect members.
Its very much a "shit is getting real" moment for a xianxia. Which is very much not the typical vibe for any xianxia. Which is part of why I thought you might like it more. Xianxia vibes can get very wishy washy about human tragedy. Exterminating families, including the children. Blowing up whole cities. Horrific wars with massive casualties. etc. And these things typically don't feel like they have much weight to them.
I also hated the greco roman cultivation story. Because it seemed like it would be a lot of navel gazing and gay wrestling without much power progression.
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