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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3350 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Dewey's The Public and its Problems. Still on McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. Thoughts below.

Someone here recommend Dungeon crawler Carl a few weeks ago and I really enjoyed listening to it. I have tried other litRPGs/Progression fantasy/cultivation but nothing else I've tried has even come close and are usually very poorly written (maybe the writers are ESL?) and I'm dumbfounded as to why they're popular.

Anyone have any recommendations in this space? Goodreads and Amazon ratings don't seem to mean much.

There's some ESL (especially among cultivation fiction), but the average writer just isn't that good, and the average litRPG/progression fantasy/isekai writer tends to be a little worse than average. That said, some recommendations, with the caveat that they're almost all unfinished serial pieces, starting with the strongest characterization and working down.

  • Forge of Destiny, feminist fantasy cultivation fic. It's not the most original plot or system -- think the protagonists of Kill la Kill go to Wuxia-skinned Hogwarts -- but the characterization is very strong and the style starts decent and quickly works its way up.
  • Beware of Chicken, comedy cultivation/isekai. Main character dropped into the half-dead body of a junior sect member and promptly nopes the fuck out of the rat race, to quickly find a different sort of challenge when he's the biggest fish in a tiny pond, as accidentally uplifts spirit beasts and grows a cultivator-grade rice too valuable for anyone to buy. The original version needed an editing pass like whoa, and it was still worth it; the reworked (though Kindle Unlimited/purchase) version is much cleaner.
  • _The Humble Life of a Skill Trainer, progression fantasy, low-stakes. Main character is a skill trainer, in the sort of system where the line between 'teaching specialized skills' and 'physical and psychological torture' is blurry at best. Mostly focuses on smaller-scale politics and interpersonal stuff than how to best stab the Big Bad Evil Guy. Tone is a little too self-introspection focused, but it mostly works out rather than feeling like a bad Hannibal clone.
  • Delve isekai/progression litRPG. Crushingly realistic take on the everyman-dumped-into-an-abandoned-system-world genre. Somewhat interesting approach to avoid shonen syndrome by making the main character's combat skills very numbers-driven, explicitly. Pacing sometimes suffers, especially if you're reading it 'live', and a few characters are pretty wooden -- Amelia has a lot going on, but you're not really sold to care in the same way that Tallheart's stoicism or Rain's ADHD or even Reese's frustrated cynicism manages to grip -- but there's a lot of serious consideration for how people-as-people would treat a gamified system of this class.

Thanks for the recommendations! Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by feminist in the case of forge? I don't mind female protagonists but I'm not super keen on being preached at, regardless of ideology.

More feminist fantasy in the Mercedes Lackey or Tamora Pierce sense: a large proportion of characters and especially viewpoint characters are female, women's issues pop up in ways that are uncommon in mainstream fiction (even 'mainstream' cultivation fiction), the viewpoint characters are much more self-driven than in typical works for the genre, so on. There's some of the Girl Power! stuff going on, but it's more cultivator-on-cultivator pranking or sabotage than preachy aesop.

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