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PaperclipPerfector  6hr ago (text post)   221 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 29, 2026

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I think he's painted himself into a bit of a corner, from a storytelling perspective. He's fallen into a pattern that's common in sci-fi and fantasy authors, where in the stakes must rise in each book. They see that readers like a thing, then try to do more of it. I get it on some level - as a writer you want to give the audience what they want. On the other hand, it's not sustainable. Imagine a version of the Odyssey where Odysseus had to personally kick Poseidon in the balls before he made it home.

This book feels like a conscious attempt by Dinniman to scale things back before the escalation reaches the point where he can't manage it anymore. I don't know if I enjoyed it much as a reader, but I think I see the reasoning.

Yep. Specifically, the tension between Carl trying to save everyone in a dungeon where each level is supposed to get progressively more difficult and kill many more crawlers was always going to come to a head, and Dinniman did manage to get the majority of the crawlers out of the picture moving forward, but largely at the expense of the novel itself. The underlying problem as a reader is that we never met most of those crawlers in the first place, and so we have zero investment in them as individual characters, and regardless of how much we don't want the generic crawlers to suffer and die, it's not enough of a hook to hang the meat of a novel on, so we're left to vaguely hope that the last two novels can get back to the good stuff while slogging through the necessary resolution of that particular longstanding point of tension in the overall meta.

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