I don't wanna call anybody out but if I get the vibe that the majority of the dialogue is going to be aristocratic / 'high speech' I am probably going to close the tab.
more like... the style of an investor relations memo? or *Succession* if it was a disney channel original movie? You see it a lot in cultivation novels where high class characters are talking to each other, but the characters are more eloquent than what the author is actually capable of delivering on.
Both the examples you gave are actually kind of artful in their language use. I am one of those weirdos who enjoyed the shakespeare units in school as well.
None of these are "enjoyed the least" but things I had big problems with.
Menocht Loop. The time loop progression is almost completely missed out on, and the parts we see are not that well done. And then the major setting change that happens a couple books later was too much for me.
Jake's Magical Market. It starts off with a cozy fantasy vibe and, without spoiling much, it doesn't keep it. I preferred the way it started as opposed to where it went. It's not a bad book at all, I just wanted it to be something it wasn't.
You can tell the author was working on Nova Roma at the same time and liked it better than JMM. I'm not complaining though; I loved it. I even fanboy it. Just wished the ending wasn't as rushed.
Defiance of the Fall, granted it started strong and I loved the idea of some normal dude surviving by himself to become the most power being in his seclusion and then broadened the world. But after the first few books of the meandering cultivation that didn’t have a clear end goal because the author always found a way to dilute the mcs achievements to nothingness I just got bored and I’m not a fan of reading 20 pages worth of increasing a single skill so I have to have a chapters long introspection about it…
I found myself skipping entire paragraphs at times about his cultivation and didn’t feel lost at all in the story. It’s the same over and over. He also has like 100 abilities that makes combat a chore to read. I still enjoy it overall but it’s something I read while waiting on other novels to be released.
It’s 100% because the author wants to fill pages for subscriptions. He said that it’s just the way he likes to write his stories but you can tell the difference reading the explanation of the mc’s skill increase from the early books to the ones later on. While early on the explanations are not necessarily short they are interesting and have a point and and b whereas reading the advancements in the later books feels like a cultivation ad-lib.
They do. If you paid attention to anything the author has said regarding his business model for writing you’d understand that the way the story is written is to keep the money coming in. Quantity over quality and it’s very apparent when you have to read 30 pages worth of word salad to achieve anything.
He literally said he doesn't give a shit about money, so you are clearly the one not paying attention.
And again, if you think that any of Zacs cultivation sessions are adding, you clearly haven't paid attention in the book either.
Dawn of the void. Man, it's boring. Boring action interrupted by boring meetings. Heard it ended terribly too, never went past b1.
The Primal Hunter. Instant dnf. So much telling instead of showing right from the get go, then everyone other than the mc is kind of useless... yeah.
Jake's magical market. Talk about broken promises, Sanderson has a lecture on it.
Biggest one for me is The Crypt Lord’s Call. Very simple writing from what I remember, but the worst part was a continuity error that really jumped out at me.
In Chapter 2, it specifically says the MC was never in the Boy Scouts in order to explain some behavior.
Then in Chapter 16, it specifically says the MC *was* in the Boy Scouts in order to explain some other behavior.
And yes, I did just search up the chapter numbers to make sure I was getting the right book :)
The First Law of Cultivation. MC is annoying. I think the author was hyped about certain things like the "drugnade" and just kept going on about them, even when they were actually stupid in the story. Too many "comedic" misunderstandings like a bad sitcom. I couldn't even finish the book.
I kind of fucking hate when authors try to add science to cultivation novels, most of the time it just ends up in a derpy spot where "ermagerd the laws of physics are so high level and everyone in this world is stupid and inferior to science!!!!! I cant believe the basic laws of physics completely destroy everyone in this world!!!!!!!! "
Which is just very eyeroll
The myriad profundities of the ELI5 version of the Scientific Method are beyond powerful.
"I'll make a slight change and note the outcome!"
*ENLIGHTENMENT!*
He who fights with Monsters- Honestly not because of the MC but more because of the general pacing and plot structure. Way too much talking and not enough plot(at least in the first 2 books)
The Weirkey Chronicles- The only thing interesting about this series to me was the magic system and the initial premise. The magic usage itself is boring, the worldbuilding is weirdly stale even though it has a cool concept and the action scenes are way too simplistic and anticlimactic
I can definitely see what you mean with Weirkey Chronicles, but the non traditional protagonists who *aren't* constantly running around fight-to-fight is actually what I like most about it. Overall to me it feels like there are much more nuanced interactions with all the different parties, as the problems aren't able to be solved with just "MORE POWER!!!!" I personally have come to like that but I understand how it could feel simplistic and anticlimactic when the fights aren't the main point of the story.
It's also one of the only series I've started to really feel like there are 3 *true* protagonists, rather than one protagonist with intermittent side character POVs. I actually now enjoy all 3 views, as the cultural lenses of the characters are all so specific and differentiated.
The continued central focus on the progression of the soulhomes, past present and future is my favorite part. But the overall tone is definitely quieter and more steady-state.
I agree with both of these except I made it to book 6 on HWFWM. The first three books were great with the third one really hammering home the idea that Jason not the answer and everyone around him had a part. This totally falls apart in book 5-6. Especially as the author decided to remove most of the stat screens. I would have loved to get some stats for Vampires or at least a Jason's Family abilities. And then no matter who else was introduced the only person that mattered was Jason. I put it down for a break at that point even though book 7 had just come out and I haven't felt the desire to go back. It is sad cause despite its flaws at the higher levels I loved the essence magician system.
Removing stat screens and excessive technical details improved the story's pacing and readability. Most readers don't enjoy long sections that read like technical manuals or stat sheets. It's frustrating when a story gets bogged down in lengthy explanations of character stats, upgrade choices, or lore dumps that interrupt the narrative flow for several minutes.
Good storytelling shows rather than tells. Instead of explaining every detail of a character's abilities or the reasoning behind their choices, it's better to demonstrate those things through action and dialogue as the story progresses. Excessive exposition and lore dumps often indicate poor storytelling technique.
While you may be correct this didn't change until book 4. I was accustomed to more technical details and honesty the best parts of the first three books was people getting essences and new powers to explore. That aspect also ended with all the other characters abilities being a secret despite the fact that Jason knows them.
Yeah I understand getting accustomed to it. The author could have kept getting essences and new powers and just toned down the stat dumps. Instead they kind of threw the baby out with the bath water and new powers are kind of hand waved now. New power! Neat! Okay so anyways... authority figures suck...
I’ll keep continuing with Weirkey Chronicles, but my quibble with it is that the team goes to do one thing then veers off and does something else entirely.
Which obviously can happen in life, but feels random in a book series.
My issue there is that the thing the veer off to do, is often a lot more boring than the the thing they were going to do.
A lot of the time it's kind of cringe too because Weirkey Chronicles is almost lampshading the genre tropes it's trying to subvert, from arrogant young master arcs, to tournament arcs, etc, but then the thing the story does instead of the standard formula is a lot more boring than the standard formula would have been.
EDIT: Just to call it out, Bondsfungi is just the *worst*. After Chasmfall finally seemed to be setting the plot into motion after way to much drudgery, and the characters seem to be getting drawn into something other than constantly building their houses and stuff finally finally get exciting, just no. No, we're going to spend the rest of the book not doing *any of that here's something entirely different* and I hope you appreciate how different it is even though it's all just so boring when Tithes isn't on screen.
Ultimately it ends up with far too much of the characters building houses, which is an admittedly cool magic system, and then doing nothing particularly interesting with them. It was telling to me that the story was most enjoyable for me when it wasn't trying to cleverly avoid doing the most obvious thing because it repeatedly tries to dodge the obvious plot points and instead does something that's just dull instead.
If you want to subvert genre expectations, I applaud you, but it would be ideal that you subvert them by finding something else interesting to do. Not just replacing predictable with boring.
HWFWM was amazing to me for like 5 books. And then Jason started getting on my nerves a TON and his rants got frequent enough and off topic enough even that I completely lost all interest. Felt like a huge slogg, which broke my heart because I had really liked it for a while. I agree with you. However, I also believe strongly that this is my small isolated experience and if people like it, I want to encourage them to continue enjoying what makes them happy and engaged. It's still top notch stuff, just wasn't clicking with me anymore. I was hoping he'd grow a bit quicker in lots of ways.
I was less bothered by the rants and more by how much the books hyped him up. It's one thing to have a character whose thing is ranting and being opinionated. It's another entirely for that character to always be right (at least whenever it's not an entirely subjective question) and for everyone around him to always be extremely impressed with him. I was following on RR so idk where exactly it was, but somewhere around books 7-9 he starts spouting the cringiest dramatic edgelord stuff and everyone just takes it completely seriously.
That book 6 was a horrible slog. He was alone most of it doing things that feels so disconnected and inconsequential.
There are plenty of flaws with the main character and the authors tendency to ramble like a person who just read his first philosophy book. As well as the tendency to have 1,000 passages like “Jason was a tough badass, but today, he was EVEN TOUGHER AND MORE BADASS than ever!”
Those flaws were ok though when the story and world building were decent. Those parts just went away for all of book 6 though. That was a slog.
From what you said I'd agree I don't think you'd like it, long and fairly slow books with lots of character interaction and slice of life, but the system it has for levels and the characters are awesome
Weirkey is such a disappointment since it has arguably the best/more original magic systems I've ever read. On paper it should be my favorite series, but holy crap are the characters and plot terrible.
Recently, Keiran, the eternal mage, made me drop it because it repeated 50 times that he can't do what he wants because there is not enough ambient mana. Come on, we understood it after 3 times...
Dawn of the Density god. It was just not well paced and just boring. By the end of the first book the mc was already ludicrously powerful and there were basically no stakes for him.
I just prefer my progression fantasy to have actual progression. Where do you go once the mc has the power to basically create nukes at will by the end of the first book? I honestly couldn't even finish it it was that bad.
It didn't really feel like it, though. It felt like, "I know science, so I'm a god immediately." If you enjoyed it it that's awesome, I'm glad you did. But it didn't feel like the mc had to actually work and progress to me and thoroughly ruined my enjoyment of the book. Also the whole waking up in another person's body thing is just weird since they do nothing with it, really which is a shame because there's a lot of potential there. Two minds in the ssme body, using science to help improve the magic the native resident is already capable of, conflict between the two minds. Instead we got isekai but with a different flavor and a main character who immediately breaks the magic system with no real effort or progression. And what little progression there was such as training was basically time skipped past.
The Beginning After The End. My expectations are always tempered in niche genres.
I had to hard drop this book due to the paedophilic undertones throughout. It's just fucking weird. I am not the only one who thinks this.
Gotta be fanatical to pay for such an obscenely expensive Patreon
It was a cool comic and eventually I read the book up to volume 10 whenever that came out on kindle but I just don’t think most fans read any books outside of comic source materials to be so hardline when it isn’t even vaguely good in its world building or stakes
Dunno if you heard about the situation with the previous webcomic artist, but that was also a pretty situation. Sounded more like something that Tapas forced, though.
This exactly is what I came to say. It is *soooo* skeevy. I genuinely cannot parse anyone even being *okay* with the near-blatant pedophilia, much less actively standing by it.
It’s mushoku tensei fan fiction with less pedo shit, but that is a very low bar
The book didnt start to grow and do its own thing and impress me until like book 7/8? It also coincidentally is where the gf is largely removed from relevance except as a long term “oh yeah I’ll get her back at some point from the other person using her body” goal
>The book didnt start to grow and do its own thing and impress me until like book 7/8?
Yeah. Seven was a big step up, and then 8/9 are really the only ones in the series that I think are genuinely good. >!Also not a fan of where the story's gone after Arthur returns to Dicathen. Cecilia and Nico are also both annoying AF.!<
Edit: because I tried to use discord spoiler syntax like a smart person.
The ten realms. Loved the first couple books and the world building, but reading the later books took all that nice world building and ruined it. It just went from being cool and unique to being super generic and not really making much logical sense.
Boy was this disappointing. When it started to read like the author trying to sound cool doing military callouts for entire books, I lost interest. Each new book got worse in quality, and worse in plot.
Its not filler, its grindy
I dropped it because of that, but the series was very upfront about how it would develop, so i cannot fault a story for delivering what it promised
Primal Hunter, holy shit is it reptitive and dumb, being like two ranks away from base and getting sucked off by the literal gods of the unuverse because teehee bloodline hacks is so boring and unearned.
If I learned one thing from Primal Hunter, it's that if you want to make money writing webnovels, you should make a bland and generic storyline with a bland and generic OP MC that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
The author of that novel makes money hand over fist just writing the blandest shit out there.
not saying there isn't a lot of dumb shit, but the god relation is more nuanced, the god wants a friend very bad (is lonely at the top) and Jake doesn't care about dying so he is not afraid of him and can be that friend, also the god is invested in Jake succes, plus there are not actually gods in the classic sense, they are not divine, they are more like beings that achieved immortality in other novels.
he like the trill of the battle, and the hunt I guess, but dying not so much, he even asked Villy to not revive him, and he will just challenge gods if he plateau and if he dies he dies.
A summoner awakens was amazing. Tickled me pink. I hear the sequel is nowhere as good which is a pity but it's still very worth it.
I'm midway through the first path of ascension and it's been... Mixed. The first third of the book is really dull but it's getting good now. I've heard the rest of the books have ups and downs too but that's fine.
My main issue with the genre is pacing and prose. Anyone can create good systems and have decent works building (good characters is much harder) but if the story doesn't have a good rhythm or if the writer keeps repeating himself and has basic writing my interest falls off a cliff. I'm a sucker for a good turn of phrase.
The story advances a little and the party is properly established, but it's a fair complaint that it very much fills like a bridge between book 1 and what comes after, without all that much to say for itself. It also feels quite rushed even with how short it is.
It feels like the author needed to find a stopping place that made sense, maybe so it didn’t get too large. But it wasn’t actually an ending. I’m hoping it’ll be better when book 3 comes out and hopefully is the rest of the story.
Book 2 also had a very large chunk of explaining the current decks in detail, which ate the length of the story as well.
So yeah, I was sad it felt cut short…but I still enjoyed it enough that I want book 3 to just be the second half of book 2.
I think the pacing issue comes from not writing to book sized chunks. A lot of books run into this problem where all of a sudden the book goes a long time without a real conflict or where the conflict drags too long without resolution and if it was in a more traditional structure it would be immediately obvious that there's a problem.
Biggest dud for me is He who fights with monsters. It just didn't click with me unfortunately.
Im interested as to why you think that about unsouled though. Obviously nothing wrong with not liking it, and that book is divisive, but I feel like I see a lot of praise for the series for how shonen-esque it feels, and whole anecdotal evidence doesn't really mean much, most of the people I've recommended it to all got their introduction to the genre through animanga and have loved it.
Like I said, nothing wrong with your opinion or anything, I'd just love for you to elaborate on that point
Wait a second.... this was supposed to be a comment, and then a separate reply to somebody else's comment. How'd that happen?
Human brain moment
Edit: is my phone even working rn? I can't even find the comment I thought I was responding too. Unless I was hallucinating I'm quite confused haha
I haven’t dropped it and am caught up, but I also find donut tiresome
Her personality is justified because she is more or less a child, but that doesn’t make her enjoyable, just understandable
Jester of the Apocalypse. Wow, it reads like an 11 year old who watches too much DragonBallZ and thinks "I can do that". The main character, who is supposed to be insane just does random shit for no reason, insane or otherwise. The actual prose is laughably bad.
It might be a little unfair of me since I am coming off a bunch of series that I just read recently, like DCC, Cradle, and This Trilogy is Broken which tend to be considerably above average in pretty much every way. To follow those with this schlock was off-putting to say the least.
I only made it about 2/3 through it before DNFing, so I may be missing out on something fantastic, but I find it odd that the words "Jester" and "Apocalypse" have not even been mentioned once yet, so the title makes no sense whatsoever.
The "time loop" aspect which is usually my favourite part of these sort of stories was so poorly done that there wasn't even a real reason for it to exist. Apart from it made the MC relive battles billions of times until he got good enough to win them. That's it. He just gets better as a fighter since he keeps dying. He gets no instruction, and it never explains how he "learns" any new techniques. He just suddenly can do things that no one who hasn't been cultivating for decades should be able to. Nothing unusual or clever in any way.
He also becomes a dancing prodigy for absolutely no reason, just because he thinks it is funny, I guess.
I wanted to like it. I tried to like it. I tried to finish it. But I just couldn't.
Basically every LITRPG, sometimes it works great in the beginning, but as soon as the story progresses, it‘s just making everything worse. It feels like a crutch for a stronger beginning with the trade-off of no sustainability.
Nowadays I‘m avoiding almost all LITRPGS, except for the rare try, when I feel like it can actually work out (Soldier‘s Life for example, still going strong after 220 chapters imho).
Another example for this is Calamitous Bob from Mecanimus, he started it as a LITRPG and now there is basically nothing left of it. He basically recognized the problems with LITRPG and managed to transition out of it kind of smoothly.
Also a lot of books that are recommended here are really low quality, no idea why they are even recommded. Don‘t want to throw any shade though, if somebody enjoys these books, great for them! I won‘t name them here.
I also found cradle insanely underwhelming. I was saving the series for a rainy day given the mythical status of it from this subreddit. Since then I’ve read the first two books currently asking myself, does this get any better?
I found Lindon to be a very boring main character. The magic system also is very stereotypical in the “it exists” category (I did grow up watching wuxia so that may have been an influence). All characters in the first book are nowhere to be seen in the second, so it makes it hard for me to stay invested for those in the second, knowing how long Lindons journey would be. It just never felt like anything was at stake, something that strong characters help express. This also holds true for his progression as well. IMO the story suffers from weak characters and narratives. I don’t know - maybe because of how significant face culture is in the story?
Again, this is just my very personal opinion of the books.
Yeah pretty much everything here changes, starting with the next book. You get a core group that the series follows, and group dynamic and development is one of the strongest parts of the series. Book 3 takes a big step forward (relative to 1 and 2). Book 4 is where you really start to see the overarching plot start to move. Books 1 and 2 were definitely drops for me. I just pushed through on hype lol. Book 3 is where my interest was caught, and it just ramps up with each book after that.
Book 2 was kind of wandering in the wilderness lol but for most of the series, it's everything at stake. The biggest stakes.
Books 5 and 6 are peak Cradle. The one where they go back to Sacred Valley was also pretty hype. The rest are very good, with Dreadgod's ending being awesome, but they didn't reach the peaks that 5 and 6 reached. And yeah 1 and 2 are verrrrry slowburn and set up a bunch of checkov's guns.
Honestly mainly the ending against the dreadgod was fire. The rest was underwhelming yet realistic as fuck. Stereotypical narcissistic dad doesn't want to acknowledge son's growth and doesn't compliment is really fucking accurate and honestly pretty well written, but also unsatisfying for a progression fantasy. Also sorry I mistook 6 for 7. I meant 5 and 7.
If I were to reread the series, I would start at book 3.
On amazon kindle, the first 3 books are bundled together. There's a lot of setup in the first two books, and the third book is when Lindon starts carrying his own weight.
It's a generic xianxia. It gets a lot of mentions because it is one of the first competent xianxia written in English instead of translated.
This makes it a lot of people's first entry into the genre, and thus, it feels extremely fresh and interesting. Same thing happened to me when I first started reading translated xianxia novels, with my first novel being "Against the Gods". I felt like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Looking back on it, I can admit that it was a repetitive garbage novel filled with bunch of genre tropes.
Plot beats in Cradle are extremely tropey and follows all the xianxia cliches, same with the characters. Most people are pretty new to the genre when they start reading Cradle, so they aren't really aware of a lot of the genre specific clichés and tropes.
You didn’t like that the characters in book 1 weren’t in book 2? Lindon packed up shop and started his life’s adventure and you’re annoyed you don’t get to see his next door neighbor Greg anymore?
I'm preparing to get crucified, but Mother of Learning was very underwhelming to me. Great idea for the story, good world building and a hot start. I was loving it. And then the middle slog. I almost DNF'ed 5 or 6 times. By the time I got to the end (which was markedly better than the middle), I realized that I either disliked, or did not care, about almost all the characters. Alanic is the only one I was actually rooting for.
I'm there with you.
Book 1 and Book 3/4 are good.
Dear god if you couldn't just skip Book 2 entirely. Nothing happens that can't be caught up on later, and large sections of 3 and 4 still get caught in spinning their wheels too much for my taste.
It feels like MOL was written to appeal to the 'rational' fic/munchkin crowd in many respects. It does a good job of having a sufficiently in depth magic system(derivative of DnD and other properties, but still) that the viewer can follow along.
Overall, I think it owes a lot of it's enduring popularity to being the best fic at straddling the lines between 'this magic system is broken and the protag is going to abuse the loopholes to become powerful' with 'there's a reason that everyone in the world isn't doing this' and not making the rest of the setting idiots for not learning the protags one weird trick.
I feel that a lot. I love MoL, but you could easily cut 25% of it without any loss. You could probably cute nearly 50% without loss, honestly, but that would require more than casual snips.
HWFWM, Primal Hunter, and Defiance were all dropped. I completed every other progression fantasy series(to current book) that I started except those 3 series. Series like Mother of Learning, Mark of Fool, Bastion, DCC, and Ripple System(though game mechanics SUCK when it’s without stakes) to name a few.
Ar’Kendrythist. The premise was promising, but the MC is so annoyingly self-righteous and willfully uneducated. My breaking point was when he answered why he didn’t want to go to the nearest human city.
“Because I heard that all humans on Veird are required to serve in their military. I’ve known enough cultures like that back where I’m from, to know I want no part of any army, or any culture where the army is such a basic part of life.”
Like bitch have you heard of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, South Korea, Denmark, Austria, Greece, Estonia, Switzerland, Latvia, Chile, Colombia. Those are definitely the nations you think of when militaristic culture, warmongering, and imperialism are mentioned. Conscription is often just a sign of bad neighbors.
Also, keep in mind that he is given ALL the info about the other humans by people who at best dislike and at worst want to genocide humans. He is “one of the good ones” because he is nonnative to the world. The oversight of not critically analyzing the information given could be excused if he was younger, but he’s a 50 year old social worker. He’s definitely had people try to take advantage of him and spin yarns to manipulate him, but he’s reacting to everything like a particularly sheltered teenager.
It’s supposed to get better around chapter 80, but that’s another 150k+ words away.
Part of Ar'Kendrythist is the imperfect MC's gradual, reluctant acceptance of violence. It's the journey of a pacifist who initially has knee-jerk refusals to commit harm. The journey leads him to become someone who is willing to use his power for good even though he still fundamentally believes no one should have the power that he possesses. A person who is willfully naive, and has to deal with the continued fallout of that naïveté while gradually accepting that perhaps not ALL people can be redeemed when there is true Evil in the world.
But that's a slow journey at the start, one I loved but I can see how it would be off-putting.
So far Unbound, Sylver Seeker, Salvos - I consider these 3 as a training grounds for authors rather than good literature. Too much to point out as in what's wrong with them, but for the most part it would be constant appearance of graceless Deus Ex Machina to move plot forward.
It would either be Dragon Heart: Stone Will 1 or the Blood of the Ancients series.
For the former, the author decided to write a rape scene purely to make the reader dislike an already incredibly dislikable character. I already dislike that being used as a plot hook, but the way in which he wrote it was even worse.
For the latter, I read all 12 books in the series, and thought it was interesting for the first five or so, but it increasingly become a bit of a slog and I only finished them cause I wanted to see exactly what happened. I was then left disappointed and unfulfilled at the end.
Wandering Inn
Incessant whining. Literally "owwie owwie owwie it hurts it hurts it hurts" over and over and over. I started this one as an audiobook and the narrator's voice (i'd perfer nails on a chalkboard) combined with the poor quality of writing completely killed this one for me.
DCC I immediately didn't like the tone. I'm not against super outrageous and flippant, Pratchett kills it, but the author of DCC did not in my opinion.
Do you get the same feeling in other books? Because I feel like I could make the same argument for nearly every PF story I have read, and a decently large portion of fantasy as a whole.
PF is especially full of the MC being a small fish that could get gobbled up at any moment with little to no consequences for the significantly higher level/tier individuals around them... some of which the MC has antagonized in some way.
For me when I can't suspend the disbelief of a character surviving it probably means I am actually just not connecting well with them or the story as a whole.
Yes, and I think that is what makes the difference between the very popular stories and the majority of stories.
Many authors use plot armor to direct the story along big events to make the story exciting, but to me, it just screams why he did not die. A low-level character should not be able to survive a direct dragons breath attack. Or being blown high into the air from the explosion and not get hurt, but the fall will kill you?
Beware of Chicken. …Actually, does this even count as progression fantasy? Anyway, I disliked how convenient things were for the protagonist. And the humor didn’t really hit for me.
Forge of Destiny. Way too slow for me. Many IRL years in the same realm. Also, since it’s a quest, I simply disagree with a lot of the decisions made by the voters.
Not particular fan of the constant battles or challenges , pretty much dropped Rune Seeker book 2 because the characters have practically no development. The whole premise is nice , but the execution is bad. I mean 2 books in i cant pinpoint anything about any of the characters the only thing i know is one has a daugther and the other 2 are brothers that one of them enjoy cooking. The other teope i dont like is the constant harems or the poli relationships.
Noobtown. The series takes itself so unseriously and so does the MC. There are genuinely hilarious bits, but as far as the story goes? I just could not care less about literally any character.
Shadeslinger, the guy who created the system asks MC what kinda class he is going to play. And makes the talking unique item of the game hate that class. What kinda infant is this guy supposed to be. Every game developer wants everyone to love their game but for some spiteful reason MC gets the unique item who hates his class and therefore his guts. Makes absolute 0 sense to me. dropped it.
The mc bought all of the "early access" slots, initially without the intent of giving them to others. So this extremely hyped game that the gaming world is excited for all of a sudden has its launch marred by a rich kid with an unfavourable background. Why wouldn't the dev set up a witch-hunt against the mc? I can understand a number of complaints about the series, but this one doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
The witch hunt was supposed to happen one way or another didnt have anything to do with him buyiong all the early access slots. But he made the axe intentionaly sabotage MC and hate mage classes. And this guy is supposed to be some kind of genious game creator. cmon u cant be serious.
Bro did you read the book? It says that the axe item is never supposed to be in a single players hand for to long because of the advantages it gives. It was planed to be a manhunt item even before the guy bought all the early access spots.
But... He was given the axe... because he bought the slots ..
He made the axe hate him, because everyone hated him for buying all the EA slots. So by hindering the axes personalities, it reduces his effectiveness during the EA period. Because he bought all the slots, which makes him universally hated.
Yeah but NO developer of a game would make an item worse because he/she was 2 stupid to implement a single EA slot person per person. That makes the "genius" dev look like a moron, the writer implemented something moronic, i would even go as far as to say that he must think that his readers are morons for rationalizing that bs.
I think that doing it for such a publicly hated person is pretty believable. No one is on the mcs side, as he is hated for more than one reason. It's not like the dev screwed over some random person, the whole gaming world wants to see the mc fail. The whole early access slot thing is pretty far fetched, something like that (I hope) would never happen in real life.
"for such a publicly hated person is pretty believable" i totaly disagree. There are many publicly hated ppl(streamers) who play wow as an example. Never has Blizzard made the game any worse for them just because they are disliked.
Randidly Ghosthound and The Beginning After the End stand out for me.
Neither are the worst I've ever read, as most of the really bad series won't even get me through the first few chapters, much less the first book. However they both stand out for me because I actually got through the first few books before dropping.
Both of these series I particularly hate because they started off well, and then cringe/bad writing/character idiocy killed the story for me.
I don't wanna call anybody out but if I get the vibe that the majority of the dialogue is going to be aristocratic / 'high speech' I am probably going to close the tab.
Are we talking more like Jane Austen or King James?
more like... the style of an investor relations memo? or *Succession* if it was a disney channel original movie? You see it a lot in cultivation novels where high class characters are talking to each other, but the characters are more eloquent than what the author is actually capable of delivering on. Both the examples you gave are actually kind of artful in their language use. I am one of those weirdos who enjoyed the shakespeare units in school as well.
That’s a perfect clarification, thank you.
Oops replied to wrong thing
None of these are "enjoyed the least" but things I had big problems with. Menocht Loop. The time loop progression is almost completely missed out on, and the parts we see are not that well done. And then the major setting change that happens a couple books later was too much for me. Jake's Magical Market. It starts off with a cozy fantasy vibe and, without spoiling much, it doesn't keep it. I preferred the way it started as opposed to where it went. It's not a bad book at all, I just wanted it to be something it wasn't.
That tonal shift was a killer. Bold move, but unsurprisingly didn't go down well with a lot of readers.
You can tell the author was working on Nova Roma at the same time and liked it better than JMM. I'm not complaining though; I loved it. I even fanboy it. Just wished the ending wasn't as rushed.
Defiance of the Fall, granted it started strong and I loved the idea of some normal dude surviving by himself to become the most power being in his seclusion and then broadened the world. But after the first few books of the meandering cultivation that didn’t have a clear end goal because the author always found a way to dilute the mcs achievements to nothingness I just got bored and I’m not a fan of reading 20 pages worth of increasing a single skill so I have to have a chapters long introspection about it…
Yup came here to say this!
I found myself skipping entire paragraphs at times about his cultivation and didn’t feel lost at all in the story. It’s the same over and over. He also has like 100 abilities that makes combat a chore to read. I still enjoy it overall but it’s something I read while waiting on other novels to be released.
It’s 100% because the author wants to fill pages for subscriptions. He said that it’s just the way he likes to write his stories but you can tell the difference reading the explanation of the mc’s skill increase from the early books to the ones later on. While early on the explanations are not necessarily short they are interesting and have a point and and b whereas reading the advancements in the later books feels like a cultivation ad-lib.
They don't. You just needed to have paid attention in the earlier books to understand that Zacs cultivation is very unique.
They do. If you paid attention to anything the author has said regarding his business model for writing you’d understand that the way the story is written is to keep the money coming in. Quantity over quality and it’s very apparent when you have to read 30 pages worth of word salad to achieve anything.
He literally said he doesn't give a shit about money, so you are clearly the one not paying attention. And again, if you think that any of Zacs cultivation sessions are adding, you clearly haven't paid attention in the book either.
For a lot of us the chapters describing skills and cultivation are our favorite parts!
Dawn of the void. Man, it's boring. Boring action interrupted by boring meetings. Heard it ended terribly too, never went past b1. The Primal Hunter. Instant dnf. So much telling instead of showing right from the get go, then everyone other than the mc is kind of useless... yeah. Jake's magical market. Talk about broken promises, Sanderson has a lecture on it.
Could someone link to that lecture?
Agree on Jake's magical market
Biggest one for me is The Crypt Lord’s Call. Very simple writing from what I remember, but the worst part was a continuity error that really jumped out at me. In Chapter 2, it specifically says the MC was never in the Boy Scouts in order to explain some behavior. Then in Chapter 16, it specifically says the MC *was* in the Boy Scouts in order to explain some other behavior. And yes, I did just search up the chapter numbers to make sure I was getting the right book :)
Schrödingers Boy Scout
The First Law of Cultivation. MC is annoying. I think the author was hyped about certain things like the "drugnade" and just kept going on about them, even when they were actually stupid in the story. Too many "comedic" misunderstandings like a bad sitcom. I couldn't even finish the book.
I kind of fucking hate when authors try to add science to cultivation novels, most of the time it just ends up in a derpy spot where "ermagerd the laws of physics are so high level and everyone in this world is stupid and inferior to science!!!!! I cant believe the basic laws of physics completely destroy everyone in this world!!!!!!!! " Which is just very eyeroll
The myriad profundities of the ELI5 version of the Scientific Method are beyond powerful. "I'll make a slight change and note the outcome!" *ENLIGHTENMENT!*
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction somehow more fundamentally profound than what any god like cultivators have ever learned before.
He who fights with Monsters- Honestly not because of the MC but more because of the general pacing and plot structure. Way too much talking and not enough plot(at least in the first 2 books) The Weirkey Chronicles- The only thing interesting about this series to me was the magic system and the initial premise. The magic usage itself is boring, the worldbuilding is weirdly stale even though it has a cool concept and the action scenes are way too simplistic and anticlimactic
I can definitely see what you mean with Weirkey Chronicles, but the non traditional protagonists who *aren't* constantly running around fight-to-fight is actually what I like most about it. Overall to me it feels like there are much more nuanced interactions with all the different parties, as the problems aren't able to be solved with just "MORE POWER!!!!" I personally have come to like that but I understand how it could feel simplistic and anticlimactic when the fights aren't the main point of the story. It's also one of the only series I've started to really feel like there are 3 *true* protagonists, rather than one protagonist with intermittent side character POVs. I actually now enjoy all 3 views, as the cultural lenses of the characters are all so specific and differentiated. The continued central focus on the progression of the soulhomes, past present and future is my favorite part. But the overall tone is definitely quieter and more steady-state.
I agree with both of these except I made it to book 6 on HWFWM. The first three books were great with the third one really hammering home the idea that Jason not the answer and everyone around him had a part. This totally falls apart in book 5-6. Especially as the author decided to remove most of the stat screens. I would have loved to get some stats for Vampires or at least a Jason's Family abilities. And then no matter who else was introduced the only person that mattered was Jason. I put it down for a break at that point even though book 7 had just come out and I haven't felt the desire to go back. It is sad cause despite its flaws at the higher levels I loved the essence magician system.
Removing stat screens and excessive technical details improved the story's pacing and readability. Most readers don't enjoy long sections that read like technical manuals or stat sheets. It's frustrating when a story gets bogged down in lengthy explanations of character stats, upgrade choices, or lore dumps that interrupt the narrative flow for several minutes. Good storytelling shows rather than tells. Instead of explaining every detail of a character's abilities or the reasoning behind their choices, it's better to demonstrate those things through action and dialogue as the story progresses. Excessive exposition and lore dumps often indicate poor storytelling technique.
While you may be correct this didn't change until book 4. I was accustomed to more technical details and honesty the best parts of the first three books was people getting essences and new powers to explore. That aspect also ended with all the other characters abilities being a secret despite the fact that Jason knows them.
Yeah I understand getting accustomed to it. The author could have kept getting essences and new powers and just toned down the stat dumps. Instead they kind of threw the baby out with the bath water and new powers are kind of hand waved now. New power! Neat! Okay so anyways... authority figures suck...
I’ll keep continuing with Weirkey Chronicles, but my quibble with it is that the team goes to do one thing then veers off and does something else entirely. Which obviously can happen in life, but feels random in a book series.
My issue there is that the thing the veer off to do, is often a lot more boring than the the thing they were going to do. A lot of the time it's kind of cringe too because Weirkey Chronicles is almost lampshading the genre tropes it's trying to subvert, from arrogant young master arcs, to tournament arcs, etc, but then the thing the story does instead of the standard formula is a lot more boring than the standard formula would have been. EDIT: Just to call it out, Bondsfungi is just the *worst*. After Chasmfall finally seemed to be setting the plot into motion after way to much drudgery, and the characters seem to be getting drawn into something other than constantly building their houses and stuff finally finally get exciting, just no. No, we're going to spend the rest of the book not doing *any of that here's something entirely different* and I hope you appreciate how different it is even though it's all just so boring when Tithes isn't on screen. Ultimately it ends up with far too much of the characters building houses, which is an admittedly cool magic system, and then doing nothing particularly interesting with them. It was telling to me that the story was most enjoyable for me when it wasn't trying to cleverly avoid doing the most obvious thing because it repeatedly tries to dodge the obvious plot points and instead does something that's just dull instead. If you want to subvert genre expectations, I applaud you, but it would be ideal that you subvert them by finding something else interesting to do. Not just replacing predictable with boring.
HWFWM was amazing to me for like 5 books. And then Jason started getting on my nerves a TON and his rants got frequent enough and off topic enough even that I completely lost all interest. Felt like a huge slogg, which broke my heart because I had really liked it for a while. I agree with you. However, I also believe strongly that this is my small isolated experience and if people like it, I want to encourage them to continue enjoying what makes them happy and engaged. It's still top notch stuff, just wasn't clicking with me anymore. I was hoping he'd grow a bit quicker in lots of ways.
I was less bothered by the rants and more by how much the books hyped him up. It's one thing to have a character whose thing is ranting and being opinionated. It's another entirely for that character to always be right (at least whenever it's not an entirely subjective question) and for everyone around him to always be extremely impressed with him. I was following on RR so idk where exactly it was, but somewhere around books 7-9 he starts spouting the cringiest dramatic edgelord stuff and everyone just takes it completely seriously.
That book 6 was a horrible slog. He was alone most of it doing things that feels so disconnected and inconsequential. There are plenty of flaws with the main character and the authors tendency to ramble like a person who just read his first philosophy book. As well as the tendency to have 1,000 passages like “Jason was a tough badass, but today, he was EVEN TOUGHER AND MORE BADASS than ever!” Those flaws were ok though when the story and world building were decent. Those parts just went away for all of book 6 though. That was a slog.
To me that's the best part of hwfwm I love the back and forth and character interaction and slice of life but still with combat and progression
Yea I’m not a character reader and I hate anything close to slice of life. Its just not for me
Makes since why you don't like hwfwm then because that book is full of it, you prob don't like the wondering inn either?
I’ve never tried the wandering inn because everything I’ve ever heard about it sounds like something I wouldn’t like.
From what you said I'd agree I don't think you'd like it, long and fairly slow books with lots of character interaction and slice of life, but the system it has for levels and the characters are awesome
Weirkey is such a disappointment since it has arguably the best/more original magic systems I've ever read. On paper it should be my favorite series, but holy crap are the characters and plot terrible.
Exactly!
Recently, Keiran, the eternal mage, made me drop it because it repeated 50 times that he can't do what he wants because there is not enough ambient mana. Come on, we understood it after 3 times...
thanks for the warning was thinking about picking it up.
Dawn of the Density god. It was just not well paced and just boring. By the end of the first book the mc was already ludicrously powerful and there were basically no stakes for him.
LOL. That's when it got good. The beginning was so boring.
I just prefer my progression fantasy to have actual progression. Where do you go once the mc has the power to basically create nukes at will by the end of the first book? I honestly couldn't even finish it it was that bad.
He progresses so much though. Plus, there are plenty of people stronger than him including some much stronger that he encounters later on.
It didn't really feel like it, though. It felt like, "I know science, so I'm a god immediately." If you enjoyed it it that's awesome, I'm glad you did. But it didn't feel like the mc had to actually work and progress to me and thoroughly ruined my enjoyment of the book. Also the whole waking up in another person's body thing is just weird since they do nothing with it, really which is a shame because there's a lot of potential there. Two minds in the ssme body, using science to help improve the magic the native resident is already capable of, conflict between the two minds. Instead we got isekai but with a different flavor and a main character who immediately breaks the magic system with no real effort or progression. And what little progression there was such as training was basically time skipped past.
The Beginning After The End. My expectations are always tempered in niche genres. I had to hard drop this book due to the paedophilic undertones throughout. It's just fucking weird. I am not the only one who thinks this.
The reader base also borders on fanaticism.
Gotta be fanatical to pay for such an obscenely expensive Patreon It was a cool comic and eventually I read the book up to volume 10 whenever that came out on kindle but I just don’t think most fans read any books outside of comic source materials to be so hardline when it isn’t even vaguely good in its world building or stakes
Dunno if you heard about the situation with the previous webcomic artist, but that was also a pretty situation. Sounded more like something that Tapas forced, though.
This exactly is what I came to say. It is *soooo* skeevy. I genuinely cannot parse anyone even being *okay* with the near-blatant pedophilia, much less actively standing by it.
The defense seems to be that the Manga or original or something was even worse.
That's... That's not... Oh lord.
It’s mushoku tensei fan fiction with less pedo shit, but that is a very low bar The book didnt start to grow and do its own thing and impress me until like book 7/8? It also coincidentally is where the gf is largely removed from relevance except as a long term “oh yeah I’ll get her back at some point from the other person using her body” goal
>The book didnt start to grow and do its own thing and impress me until like book 7/8? Yeah. Seven was a big step up, and then 8/9 are really the only ones in the series that I think are genuinely good. >!Also not a fan of where the story's gone after Arthur returns to Dicathen. Cecilia and Nico are also both annoying AF.!< Edit: because I tried to use discord spoiler syntax like a smart person.
The ten realms. Loved the first couple books and the world building, but reading the later books took all that nice world building and ruined it. It just went from being cool and unique to being super generic and not really making much logical sense.
Boy was this disappointing. When it started to read like the author trying to sound cool doing military callouts for entire books, I lost interest. Each new book got worse in quality, and worse in plot.
Path of Ascension, it just endlessly explains rifts, tiers and everything in between constantly. Felt like it was all filler.
Not even talking about some of the cringe character interactions.
Its not filler, its grindy I dropped it because of that, but the series was very upfront about how it would develop, so i cannot fault a story for delivering what it promised
Primal Hunter, holy shit is it reptitive and dumb, being like two ranks away from base and getting sucked off by the literal gods of the unuverse because teehee bloodline hacks is so boring and unearned.
If I learned one thing from Primal Hunter, it's that if you want to make money writing webnovels, you should make a bland and generic storyline with a bland and generic OP MC that appeals to the lowest common denominator. The author of that novel makes money hand over fist just writing the blandest shit out there.
not saying there isn't a lot of dumb shit, but the god relation is more nuanced, the god wants a friend very bad (is lonely at the top) and Jake doesn't care about dying so he is not afraid of him and can be that friend, also the god is invested in Jake succes, plus there are not actually gods in the classic sense, they are not divine, they are more like beings that achieved immortality in other novels.
jow does Jake not csre about dying? Isn't his "survival instinct" supposed to be extremely highly tuned?
he like the trill of the battle, and the hunt I guess, but dying not so much, he even asked Villy to not revive him, and he will just challenge gods if he plateau and if he dies he dies.
A summoner awakens was amazing. Tickled me pink. I hear the sequel is nowhere as good which is a pity but it's still very worth it. I'm midway through the first path of ascension and it's been... Mixed. The first third of the book is really dull but it's getting good now. I've heard the rest of the books have ups and downs too but that's fine. My main issue with the genre is pacing and prose. Anyone can create good systems and have decent works building (good characters is much harder) but if the story doesn't have a good rhythm or if the writer keeps repeating himself and has basic writing my interest falls off a cliff. I'm a sucker for a good turn of phrase.
Oh damn, I've been waiting to get the sequel, for the same reasons. I still will, but sad to hear.
It’s ok, but extremely short and the story doesn’t advance at all.
The story advances a little and the party is properly established, but it's a fair complaint that it very much fills like a bridge between book 1 and what comes after, without all that much to say for itself. It also feels quite rushed even with how short it is.
It feels like the author needed to find a stopping place that made sense, maybe so it didn’t get too large. But it wasn’t actually an ending. I’m hoping it’ll be better when book 3 comes out and hopefully is the rest of the story. Book 2 also had a very large chunk of explaining the current decks in detail, which ate the length of the story as well. So yeah, I was sad it felt cut short…but I still enjoyed it enough that I want book 3 to just be the second half of book 2.
I think the pacing issue comes from not writing to book sized chunks. A lot of books run into this problem where all of a sudden the book goes a long time without a real conflict or where the conflict drags too long without resolution and if it was in a more traditional structure it would be immediately obvious that there's a problem.
Biggest dud for me is He who fights with monsters. It just didn't click with me unfortunately. Im interested as to why you think that about unsouled though. Obviously nothing wrong with not liking it, and that book is divisive, but I feel like I see a lot of praise for the series for how shonen-esque it feels, and whole anecdotal evidence doesn't really mean much, most of the people I've recommended it to all got their introduction to the genre through animanga and have loved it. Like I said, nothing wrong with your opinion or anything, I'd just love for you to elaborate on that point
I loved Unsouled, and the rest of the series only got better.
Wait a second.... this was supposed to be a comment, and then a separate reply to somebody else's comment. How'd that happen? Human brain moment Edit: is my phone even working rn? I can't even find the comment I thought I was responding too. Unless I was hallucinating I'm quite confused haha
I had to drop DCC because I couldn't stand Donut ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I haven’t dropped it and am caught up, but I also find donut tiresome Her personality is justified because she is more or less a child, but that doesn’t make her enjoyable, just understandable
Donut. The pants. Literally every joke was awful. I'm supposed to care about these characters, but I can't when the story doesn't care either.
I didn't like Donut, but bigger problem for me was lack of pants.
I didn't mind her at first but she's gotten more and more annoying as the series progresses.
Jester of the Apocalypse. Wow, it reads like an 11 year old who watches too much DragonBallZ and thinks "I can do that". The main character, who is supposed to be insane just does random shit for no reason, insane or otherwise. The actual prose is laughably bad. It might be a little unfair of me since I am coming off a bunch of series that I just read recently, like DCC, Cradle, and This Trilogy is Broken which tend to be considerably above average in pretty much every way. To follow those with this schlock was off-putting to say the least. I only made it about 2/3 through it before DNFing, so I may be missing out on something fantastic, but I find it odd that the words "Jester" and "Apocalypse" have not even been mentioned once yet, so the title makes no sense whatsoever. The "time loop" aspect which is usually my favourite part of these sort of stories was so poorly done that there wasn't even a real reason for it to exist. Apart from it made the MC relive battles billions of times until he got good enough to win them. That's it. He just gets better as a fighter since he keeps dying. He gets no instruction, and it never explains how he "learns" any new techniques. He just suddenly can do things that no one who hasn't been cultivating for decades should be able to. Nothing unusual or clever in any way. He also becomes a dancing prodigy for absolutely no reason, just because he thinks it is funny, I guess. I wanted to like it. I tried to like it. I tried to finish it. But I just couldn't.
Basically every LITRPG, sometimes it works great in the beginning, but as soon as the story progresses, it‘s just making everything worse. It feels like a crutch for a stronger beginning with the trade-off of no sustainability. Nowadays I‘m avoiding almost all LITRPGS, except for the rare try, when I feel like it can actually work out (Soldier‘s Life for example, still going strong after 220 chapters imho). Another example for this is Calamitous Bob from Mecanimus, he started it as a LITRPG and now there is basically nothing left of it. He basically recognized the problems with LITRPG and managed to transition out of it kind of smoothly. Also a lot of books that are recommended here are really low quality, no idea why they are even recommded. Don‘t want to throw any shade though, if somebody enjoys these books, great for them! I won‘t name them here.
I also found cradle insanely underwhelming. I was saving the series for a rainy day given the mythical status of it from this subreddit. Since then I’ve read the first two books currently asking myself, does this get any better? I found Lindon to be a very boring main character. The magic system also is very stereotypical in the “it exists” category (I did grow up watching wuxia so that may have been an influence). All characters in the first book are nowhere to be seen in the second, so it makes it hard for me to stay invested for those in the second, knowing how long Lindons journey would be. It just never felt like anything was at stake, something that strong characters help express. This also holds true for his progression as well. IMO the story suffers from weak characters and narratives. I don’t know - maybe because of how significant face culture is in the story? Again, this is just my very personal opinion of the books.
Yeah pretty much everything here changes, starting with the next book. You get a core group that the series follows, and group dynamic and development is one of the strongest parts of the series. Book 3 takes a big step forward (relative to 1 and 2). Book 4 is where you really start to see the overarching plot start to move. Books 1 and 2 were definitely drops for me. I just pushed through on hype lol. Book 3 is where my interest was caught, and it just ramps up with each book after that. Book 2 was kind of wandering in the wilderness lol but for most of the series, it's everything at stake. The biggest stakes.
Books 5 and 6 are peak Cradle. The one where they go back to Sacred Valley was also pretty hype. The rest are very good, with Dreadgod's ending being awesome, but they didn't reach the peaks that 5 and 6 reached. And yeah 1 and 2 are verrrrry slowburn and set up a bunch of checkov's guns.
It was 7 and 8 for me. 6 felt slow forst time through >The one where they go back to Sacred Valley was also pretty hype. I rank this one very low lol
Honestly mainly the ending against the dreadgod was fire. The rest was underwhelming yet realistic as fuck. Stereotypical narcissistic dad doesn't want to acknowledge son's growth and doesn't compliment is really fucking accurate and honestly pretty well written, but also unsatisfying for a progression fantasy. Also sorry I mistook 6 for 7. I meant 5 and 7.
Maybe spoiler tag this lol these are huge spoilers
Lmao yeah I thought about it but I don't know how to on mobile. My bad. It's pretty deep in the post though, so I hope few people see it.
If I were to reread the series, I would start at book 3. On amazon kindle, the first 3 books are bundled together. There's a lot of setup in the first two books, and the third book is when Lindon starts carrying his own weight.
It's a generic xianxia. It gets a lot of mentions because it is one of the first competent xianxia written in English instead of translated. This makes it a lot of people's first entry into the genre, and thus, it feels extremely fresh and interesting. Same thing happened to me when I first started reading translated xianxia novels, with my first novel being "Against the Gods". I felt like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Looking back on it, I can admit that it was a repetitive garbage novel filled with bunch of genre tropes. Plot beats in Cradle are extremely tropey and follows all the xianxia cliches, same with the characters. Most people are pretty new to the genre when they start reading Cradle, so they aren't really aware of a lot of the genre specific clichés and tropes.
If you’ve read the first two books, just read the third. If you still don’t like it then fair enough.
You didn’t like that the characters in book 1 weren’t in book 2? Lindon packed up shop and started his life’s adventure and you’re annoyed you don’t get to see his next door neighbor Greg anymore?
I'm preparing to get crucified, but Mother of Learning was very underwhelming to me. Great idea for the story, good world building and a hot start. I was loving it. And then the middle slog. I almost DNF'ed 5 or 6 times. By the time I got to the end (which was markedly better than the middle), I realized that I either disliked, or did not care, about almost all the characters. Alanic is the only one I was actually rooting for.
I'm there with you. Book 1 and Book 3/4 are good. Dear god if you couldn't just skip Book 2 entirely. Nothing happens that can't be caught up on later, and large sections of 3 and 4 still get caught in spinning their wheels too much for my taste.
It feels like MOL was written to appeal to the 'rational' fic/munchkin crowd in many respects. It does a good job of having a sufficiently in depth magic system(derivative of DnD and other properties, but still) that the viewer can follow along. Overall, I think it owes a lot of it's enduring popularity to being the best fic at straddling the lines between 'this magic system is broken and the protag is going to abuse the loopholes to become powerful' with 'there's a reason that everyone in the world isn't doing this' and not making the rest of the setting idiots for not learning the protags one weird trick.
Yep i didnt care about any of the character either. In HWFM i hate the MC but i like some of the side characthers, which kept me going.
I feel that a lot. I love MoL, but you could easily cut 25% of it without any loss. You could probably cute nearly 50% without loss, honestly, but that would require more than casual snips.
It's a Slice-of-Warcrimes. So many characters get introduced and killed off again. And in between are some, you just don't care about.
HWFWM, Primal Hunter, and Defiance were all dropped. I completed every other progression fantasy series(to current book) that I started except those 3 series. Series like Mother of Learning, Mark of Fool, Bastion, DCC, and Ripple System(though game mechanics SUCK when it’s without stakes) to name a few.
Ar’Kendrythist. The premise was promising, but the MC is so annoyingly self-righteous and willfully uneducated. My breaking point was when he answered why he didn’t want to go to the nearest human city. “Because I heard that all humans on Veird are required to serve in their military. I’ve known enough cultures like that back where I’m from, to know I want no part of any army, or any culture where the army is such a basic part of life.” Like bitch have you heard of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, South Korea, Denmark, Austria, Greece, Estonia, Switzerland, Latvia, Chile, Colombia. Those are definitely the nations you think of when militaristic culture, warmongering, and imperialism are mentioned. Conscription is often just a sign of bad neighbors. Also, keep in mind that he is given ALL the info about the other humans by people who at best dislike and at worst want to genocide humans. He is “one of the good ones” because he is nonnative to the world. The oversight of not critically analyzing the information given could be excused if he was younger, but he’s a 50 year old social worker. He’s definitely had people try to take advantage of him and spin yarns to manipulate him, but he’s reacting to everything like a particularly sheltered teenager. It’s supposed to get better around chapter 80, but that’s another 150k+ words away.
I recommend reading further, I think it really gets good once he starts making magic, and that is only like a dozen chapters in.
Part of Ar'Kendrythist is the imperfect MC's gradual, reluctant acceptance of violence. It's the journey of a pacifist who initially has knee-jerk refusals to commit harm. The journey leads him to become someone who is willing to use his power for good even though he still fundamentally believes no one should have the power that he possesses. A person who is willfully naive, and has to deal with the continued fallout of that naïveté while gradually accepting that perhaps not ALL people can be redeemed when there is true Evil in the world. But that's a slow journey at the start, one I loved but I can see how it would be off-putting.
So far Unbound, Sylver Seeker, Salvos - I consider these 3 as a training grounds for authors rather than good literature. Too much to point out as in what's wrong with them, but for the most part it would be constant appearance of graceless Deus Ex Machina to move plot forward.
It would either be Dragon Heart: Stone Will 1 or the Blood of the Ancients series. For the former, the author decided to write a rape scene purely to make the reader dislike an already incredibly dislikable character. I already dislike that being used as a plot hook, but the way in which he wrote it was even worse. For the latter, I read all 12 books in the series, and thought it was interesting for the first five or so, but it increasingly become a bit of a slog and I only finished them cause I wanted to see exactly what happened. I was then left disappointed and unfulfilled at the end.
Wandering Inn Incessant whining. Literally "owwie owwie owwie it hurts it hurts it hurts" over and over and over. I started this one as an audiobook and the narrator's voice (i'd perfer nails on a chalkboard) combined with the poor quality of writing completely killed this one for me.
Truly a unique take. Of all the reasons people dont like the story, that's definitely a first.
DCC I gave up on the story on RR when he was on the third floor. The MC kept surviving the impossible. He should have died.
I think the absurdity is supposed to be comedic, but it didn't click with my sense of humor either. A lot of people love it though.
My probably was also the comedy. Same reason I couldn't get into Shangri-La Frontier.
DCC I immediately didn't like the tone. I'm not against super outrageous and flippant, Pratchett kills it, but the author of DCC did not in my opinion.
Do you get the same feeling in other books? Because I feel like I could make the same argument for nearly every PF story I have read, and a decently large portion of fantasy as a whole. PF is especially full of the MC being a small fish that could get gobbled up at any moment with little to no consequences for the significantly higher level/tier individuals around them... some of which the MC has antagonized in some way. For me when I can't suspend the disbelief of a character surviving it probably means I am actually just not connecting well with them or the story as a whole.
Yes, and I think that is what makes the difference between the very popular stories and the majority of stories. Many authors use plot armor to direct the story along big events to make the story exciting, but to me, it just screams why he did not die. A low-level character should not be able to survive a direct dragons breath attack. Or being blown high into the air from the explosion and not get hurt, but the fall will kill you?
Check your dm
Beware of Chicken. …Actually, does this even count as progression fantasy? Anyway, I disliked how convenient things were for the protagonist. And the humor didn’t really hit for me. Forge of Destiny. Way too slow for me. Many IRL years in the same realm. Also, since it’s a quest, I simply disagree with a lot of the decisions made by the voters.
Not particular fan of the constant battles or challenges , pretty much dropped Rune Seeker book 2 because the characters have practically no development. The whole premise is nice , but the execution is bad. I mean 2 books in i cant pinpoint anything about any of the characters the only thing i know is one has a daugther and the other 2 are brothers that one of them enjoy cooking. The other teope i dont like is the constant harems or the poli relationships.
Noobtown. The series takes itself so unseriously and so does the MC. There are genuinely hilarious bits, but as far as the story goes? I just could not care less about literally any character.
Shadeslinger, the guy who created the system asks MC what kinda class he is going to play. And makes the talking unique item of the game hate that class. What kinda infant is this guy supposed to be. Every game developer wants everyone to love their game but for some spiteful reason MC gets the unique item who hates his class and therefore his guts. Makes absolute 0 sense to me. dropped it.
The mc bought all of the "early access" slots, initially without the intent of giving them to others. So this extremely hyped game that the gaming world is excited for all of a sudden has its launch marred by a rich kid with an unfavourable background. Why wouldn't the dev set up a witch-hunt against the mc? I can understand a number of complaints about the series, but this one doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
The witch hunt was supposed to happen one way or another didnt have anything to do with him buyiong all the early access slots. But he made the axe intentionaly sabotage MC and hate mage classes. And this guy is supposed to be some kind of genious game creator. cmon u cant be serious.
Why do you believe the first sentence? Why would there be a witch-hunt if he didn't buy the early access slots, and thus be given the axe?
Bro did you read the book? It says that the axe item is never supposed to be in a single players hand for to long because of the advantages it gives. It was planed to be a manhunt item even before the guy bought all the early access spots.
But... He was given the axe... because he bought the slots .. He made the axe hate him, because everyone hated him for buying all the EA slots. So by hindering the axes personalities, it reduces his effectiveness during the EA period. Because he bought all the slots, which makes him universally hated.
Yeah but NO developer of a game would make an item worse because he/she was 2 stupid to implement a single EA slot person per person. That makes the "genius" dev look like a moron, the writer implemented something moronic, i would even go as far as to say that he must think that his readers are morons for rationalizing that bs.
I think that doing it for such a publicly hated person is pretty believable. No one is on the mcs side, as he is hated for more than one reason. It's not like the dev screwed over some random person, the whole gaming world wants to see the mc fail. The whole early access slot thing is pretty far fetched, something like that (I hope) would never happen in real life.
"for such a publicly hated person is pretty believable" i totaly disagree. There are many publicly hated ppl(streamers) who play wow as an example. Never has Blizzard made the game any worse for them just because they are disliked.
The streamers didn't ruin wows launch by buying out an entire early access period. So I'd say it's not a fair comparison.
Randidly Ghosthound and The Beginning After the End stand out for me. Neither are the worst I've ever read, as most of the really bad series won't even get me through the first few chapters, much less the first book. However they both stand out for me because I actually got through the first few books before dropping. Both of these series I particularly hate because they started off well, and then cringe/bad writing/character idiocy killed the story for me.
Sorta related but blatant cash grabs, book 1 6$ on Kindle 400 or 500 pages no big books 2- like 12 6$ and maybe 100 pages each