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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on Coornhert's Synod on the Freedom of Conscience. So far "Gamaliel" has been winning the fictional debate with genuinely inspired words. Though it turns out that he's just Coornhert's stand-in. These words have reminded me of the value of reasonable expectations:
Reverend Insanity, a very popular and widely recommended Xianxia novel with a villain protagonist.
I was very vexed at how slow the first 30 chapters were, but even as a noob to Cultivation novels, I know that's considered a lightning fast start. But what annoyed me was the fact that everyone had hyped up the protagonist as being fucking evil, and the worst thing he did for those 30 chapters was beat up his classmates for their lunch money.
Of course, I stuck with it, and the part where he boiled a kid alive as a handy magical ingredient certainly dispelled my doubts!
Alright, so RI is pretty much Grimdark Pokémon. You've got "Gu Masters", going around with the equivalent of a pokeball inside their body that they keep trying to make bigger and stronger. They try and catch Pokémon and use them to kill their opponents, with the low level stuff being akin to the shitty grass and poison types you find in the early level tall grass, and then progressing till you've got God (Arceus) in a tiny chinesium ball.
I mean, they mind rape the Pokémon into compliance instead of training them the old fashioned way, but let's split the difference. Everything else revolves around leveling and evolving them, and fighting other trainers for resources, with an added side of just outright killing them when convenient.
The protagonist is a reincarnator, who had lived for 500 years and struggled to a relatively high position in society until his newfound OP pokémon prompted jealous rivals to gang up and whoop his ass (he may or may not have murdered millions of people).
However, the Pokémon they were after was Time Travel-mon, so he went !YOLO and traveled back to his childhood, and did everything over again with the benefit of foreknowledge. Further atrocities ensue.
Anyway, the book is well written and the translation isn't even all that janky, but the main draw is the tight and intelligent writing, you can really tell that the author thought through the ramifications of his worldbuilding, and knew how to write intelligent and relatable characters yet intentionally made his MC a flaming asshole.
He's a likeable asshole though, highly competent, and monomaniacally driven to achieve true immortality no matter the cost. Cooking children isn't the least of the shit he gets up to, but he doesn't have an easy time.
I'd recommend it, the Cultivation system is certainly a nonstandard one, but nobody reads these things for that do they?
Grit through the first 50 chapters, or ask me for a TLDR, and then it gets really good. If you're worried, his ability to time travel isn't used as a crutch, it's an unreliable ability, and the protagonist is competent enough to get by.
I have to say that complaining that Fang Yuan wasn't evil enough is new, never heard that before! He absolutely is evil, as you say, yet it's really more of a sigma male kind of complete shamelessness rather than edge. Ally with your enemies for situational reasons? Of course! Undermine and betray them? Yes! Kill enormous numbers of people? Absolutely! Do another backflip and claim to be the paragon of righteousness and benevolence? Yes!
I also like how it messes with the tropes of the xianxia/shonen. Later on, we're introduced to the power of love (which causes our ruthless MC some problems). The power of love is very great, but it's not enough to win decisively. There's an element of tragedy to its use. The power of friendship is not a get out of jail free card, it has its limits and can be overpowered.
The story also tries very hard to navigate between the need to have a main character be exceptional and advance quickly without unfair advantages, while retaining agency and a world full of intelligent, selfish actors. There's an inherent contradiction there. Why aren't the first-rate elites, nurtured by the richest sects, capable of beating some orphan from a hick town? Are they all holding the idiot ball? Later on, you can sense that the author's been wracked with pains over the plausibility of the whole thing, trying to make it more reasonable.
I was only complaining during the first 30 chapters or so, and only half-heartedly. I've been in this rodeo long enough to know most Cultivation novels only really start 50+ chapters in!
I found Fang Yuan to be quite believable, he was significantly less sociopathic for most of his previous life, it was only after ages of suffering and suppression that he really ended up an amoral motherfucker. In the very beginning of his new life, he had a massive headstart in terms of knowledge, experience, and where to find hidden loot crates with rare Poke drops. At the point I am now, he's certainly fighting fiercer opponents, and I think that as the story progressed, the difficulty and intelligence of his enemies rose too. He has to work for it, and few things he does seem like complete ass-pulls, at least to the extent those aren't mandatory in Xianxia.
I'd also expect having access to 500 years of technological advances to be a big help, as it is in the story, though obviously not as much as in a more grounded and realistic setting.
Yeah, he does make good use of his time-travel advantage, even later on when it depletes a lot.
I personally think the author does a great job of making it seem plausible, yet a few people were unhappy about the balance between character agency and plausibility. Of those who aren't filtered by the bear scene, that's the only thing I've ever heard complaints about.
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