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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 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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Of all the web serials I've read, I don't think even one approached War and Peace in terms of production value per chapter, for what it's worth. Then again, I didn't like War and Peace and liked most of the web serials. Maybe I'm giving Tolstoy too much credit, the joke goes he was paid by the word.

I didn't finish PGtE either, felt too sloggy. Mother of Learning I liked, even though the prose is obviously second-language English (thankfully not as bad as Reverend Insanity).

Web serials are, I suppose, for the same people who like TV shows over movies. They like the setting, might as well watch the events unfold for 60 hours (12 books) instead of 2 hours (1 book) where all the scenes and character interplay would be necessarily compressed.

(Funny enough I dislike TV shows, primarily because they consume my time at a fixed rate. A web serial I can just readingspeedmaxx.)

I think a TV show that goes for just one, or a couple of seasons is the perfect size. Long enough to avoid shortcuts necessary to fit the plot into a couple of hours, but not too long to start accruing unnecessary padding.

Limited series like Shogun and North and South are almost always better than regular TV shows which have 22 episodes per season and an explicit goal of staying on the air as long as possible.

Something interesting happened to anime. In the 1990s, most animes were double cours, 24-26 episodes. These days the standard is a single cour, 12-13 episodes, then maybe a second cour a few years later if your are lucky. On the one hand, this means a lot of stories are never fully adapted and the anime ends up being an advertisement for the manga or light novels. On the other hand, when an anime does manage to adapt a whole story into a single cour, the results are great; all the filler is stripped away and the story consists of only the essentials.

Haven't you enjoyed any sit com, procedural, or other long form fiction where it mostly consists of "monster of the week" with the meta progression mostly being getting to know the characters a bit better?

I have, but I haven't enjoyed one for maybe a decade. Since my kid was born, I'd guess.

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