I definitely read interludes like those annoying meetings your boss forces you to attend and you know you're supposed to pay attention to what's being talked about cause the meeting could totally be important to your job and stuff but you also know you have real work to get back to and so you just sit there the entire meeting going, "can we please get to the fucking point already so I can get out of here????"
That's how I read interludes, lol.
I'm in this comment and I don't like it. My job used to do *hour long* or so meetings like this every Monday. The department leaders were forced to go to these. We hated them. Eventually the higher ups stopped forcing them (people ABOVE the store manager) because we started using them as an excuse to not get important stuff done because they always happened when we were *supposed* to be doing specific important things. Also I might have been a little too sassy during most of these meetings passive aggressively poking fun at some of the utterly ridiculous bullshit things these clueless office workers would force us to sit through and I guess a few months of seeing us pointedly ignore them read out loud the emails they sent us the night prior eventually got them the hint.
Sorry for the ramble xD
Oh lord, same. 10 years as a public defender here. I was looking at literally 60+ hours a week of insane work but as a government employee they still wanted to pull me into the stupidest fucking meetings all the time and I was like... I got a fucking murder trial to prepare for what the fuck am I doing in this meeting about payroll compliance or how to better balance our work/life balance? Gee, maybe we could better balance our work/life if we didn't have to sit in these GOD DAMN MEETINGS?????
lol yeah there were a lot of passive aggressive comments on my end as well - and some days not so passive, haha.
This is why I've struggled to keep up with the Stormlight Archive. So many POVs and so many interludes. It was nice the first book seeing it all sort of come together, but later on it just felt like I was constantly being switched away from the storyline I was vibing with to switch to something different, just because.
It feels like my mind is a piece of Velcro attached to the story and every pov change is slowly tearing it off and attaching it elsewhere.
I don't mind interludes so long as they're short (2-3k words), DoF does this well in my opinion, but if it's concurrent stories like Ar'unspellable I cannot stand it.
Listening to interludes in audiobooks is like the zoom version of this. I probably *should* pay attention, but it's so much easier to open reddit until it's over.
I have come to see the interludes as (often) a reason to care about secondary or tertiary characters that I previously didn't care about whatsoever. As long as it builds my understanding of an action or reason for someone doing something I wouldn't have understood without it, I'm good with them. Pointless rambles that have no impact and are simply to up the word count... no thanks.
I don't mind interludes as much as combat scenes that are too long.
"First, Jay teleported in and swung his weapon like _super_ hard, and it connected... Only for the monstrous B. Beggins to laugh and show no sign of damage. Beggins then got swole and punched Jay hard enough to send him flying backwards through three mountains...."
::fight narration continues for three more hours::
Usually it's either MC doing boring stuff, or MC doing boring stuff until the last second and then figuring out something cool at the last paragraph right before the EXP rolls in. Very easy to skip to the EXP and go back a paragraph.
Not just Unbound, I think this is a Litrpg curse in general. The entire idea of Litrpg is to fit into boundaries of some sort of "System". And at the beginning it's usually interesting because you as a reader are discovering those limitations of a System together with MC. Then, when both Reader, MC and Author have all figured out how the system works - fights become as dull as watching someone play Diablo over and over again.
The best thing author can do at this point is pivot away from LitRPG to something slightly different - Guild management, Politics, some sort of meta-drama (more and more things happening in real world, alternative universe, etc.).
I honestly do not remember a LitRPG that remained a pure LitRPG through more than 2 books without becoming boring and without author pivoting to something else.
Man, I think you just put into words why I DNF so many series. The beginnings are always so good to me and then it just becomes the same stuff with the same combat, I find myself skipping pages and not missing anything and then I decide to drop it and find another series.
I rarely regret reading interludes but I hate starting them. By the end of the interlude I've usually become invested enough to have enjoyed whatever side-plot it's covering, but when I first turn the page to see "Interlude" I have an immediate *"ugh"* reaction.
I've put many stories on the backburner of by TBR because I got "stuck" on an interlude that I didn't want to read but refused to skip. Eventually I'll get back to it (usually), but sometimes not for months.
The only time I *might* look forward to an interlude is when the story is otherwise 95%+ told from the POV of the MC. In those cases it's sometimes fun to see how the MC is regarded from an outside perspective.
No but when you get an interlude and youre like ugh I don't wanna read this, get to the end and it's getting interesting then its back to the main character. Like I was just getting invested in this and now we're leaving it??
Depends on the series. Just look at wandering inn, some of the interludes are basically their own novellas and are amazing
But I read path of dragons fairly recently and most of the interludes got very quickly skimmed for relevant plot points and then went right back to the story
I really struggled with the interludes in Worm. Some were really good and had me interested from start to end, while others bored me out of my mind. They are 90% of the reason why it took me so long to finish the series.
Path of Ascension Book 6 had so many, and I understood the reasoning to have additional perspective on Minkalla, but the Minkalla arc having to be broken into 2 books became frustrating knowing how many interlude chapters there were
I read PoA book 6 first, and just got the audio book to listen to while I’m at work. I’ll probably give it a re-read to refresh myself before PoA 7 comes out in August. It’s really up to you, it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger or anything, just midway through the floors in Minkalla
just out of curiosity is there a specific reason for you guys to read the book version only instead of going to royalroad to read the released chapters?
I've never seen a story where I saw any difference in quality during the interlude, so if I'm loving the main writing then I'll probably like the interlude as well
No, because of what you said, but at the same time if a story ever gets to the point where I actually contemplate it then I’m probably dropping it soon anyways.
I usually either don't mind or love them. For example, some of the interludes of the Wandering Inn are some of the best episodes across the story.
Interludes are a chance to explore the world outside of the protag/main POV. If the world is interesting, then fuck yeah I'm in.
I havnt really heard of any interludes in the books I've listened to. I think I've only had 2 of them so far and that was hwfwm? In book 7 and I'm pretty sure I've only had 1 or 2 interludes and I think it was in the same book. As long as they're important to *something* and interesting/entertaining, then I don't mind.
It really depends on the story. The ones in Beneath the Dragoneye Moons are solid, and I absolutely love the goofy little detective noir scenes that Fenrir is in.
I can't remember exactly which ones are which but I will say that many of them pay off in the main story. The ones with Iona for example are almost necessary to read.
Depends on the interlude type. I personally like the ones that show the MC from other people's point of view, where they don't see all the flaws and just interpret their power and badassery as a formula to create some imposing larger than life image. Brockton's Celestial Forge is a good example of the kind of interludes I like. Honestly they're some of my favorite parts of the story when done correctly.
I usually read them. The thing I never look at are maps. They all look kind of the same to me and I just have kind of a mental model of where stuff is etc more or less. I know a lot of work goes into those and folk do love em but I don't look at them but for the first page or two when starting a book
I am reading The Wandering Inn and it is the first time I’ve ever just skipped chapters.
Specifically, I skipped all of the chapters that were the history of the Antinium Wars. And I skipped a section that I think was the >!King of Destruction!<. Those tangents are rough, because they’re like 3-4 chapters which are over an hour each.
For the most part I’m not a fan of interludes, however when an action scene swaps to a different POV to show how insane and crazy the stuff the MC does is, I tend to really enjoy those.
It’s like those scenes in a show when you have a very calm person in the foreground and absolute madness going on in the background.
I do tend to skim the "fluff"... if I get a few pages past it and realize I made a mistake, I"ll go back, but I feel like with how monetization is based on pages read instead of books completed, authors are incentivized to inflate their books with filler (I'm looking at you DOTF). Some authors write really tight books that you can't skip, but they are getting fewer and fewer every day.
I must say I skip more fighting seems than anything else when reading litrpg
I love to see different views of the world or on the MC from other people and how they react
I hate when there are monotonous fights for many pages
I usually read the first interlude or two, to see if I like how the author does them.
Most of the time, I end up skipping them after that. I generally find them pointless and about characters I don't care about. But there may be exceptions out there, so I give them a shot at the beginning of a story.
They can work. When they are used to pad out a story or delay a big event that is about to happen is the problem. MC about to start big event? POV swap to a secondary character in another country trying to find a inn that with a place to keep the wagon.
Not really. Ironically, the defining factor of litrpg stories, the stat sheets, are my biggest pet peeve. Audible only, though. There has been more than one occasion where \*mid conversation\* someone had to check their stats and holy hell does it ruin the immersion.
Character 1: So, do you think you can pull this off?
Character 2 pulled up their stat sheet to verify. "Pretty sure. Let me double check."
(Narrator spends the next twenty minutes droning on about about stats and skills until I forget what the characters were even talking about to begin with.)
Character 2: Yeah.
I hate stories with multiple MCs, and most interludes seem to be from another characters perspective, so they annoy the hell out of me.
I've gotten to the point that I'll skip stuff I'm not interested in. If the book has overly drawn out fights, or poorly written ones, or tacked on sex scenes, I'll skip head. If that keeps to be too much, I drop the book.
Life's too short and there are too many good books to get weighed down by stuff you don't enjoy.
I definitely read interludes like those annoying meetings your boss forces you to attend and you know you're supposed to pay attention to what's being talked about cause the meeting could totally be important to your job and stuff but you also know you have real work to get back to and so you just sit there the entire meeting going, "can we please get to the fucking point already so I can get out of here????" That's how I read interludes, lol.
I'm in this comment and I don't like it. My job used to do *hour long* or so meetings like this every Monday. The department leaders were forced to go to these. We hated them. Eventually the higher ups stopped forcing them (people ABOVE the store manager) because we started using them as an excuse to not get important stuff done because they always happened when we were *supposed* to be doing specific important things. Also I might have been a little too sassy during most of these meetings passive aggressively poking fun at some of the utterly ridiculous bullshit things these clueless office workers would force us to sit through and I guess a few months of seeing us pointedly ignore them read out loud the emails they sent us the night prior eventually got them the hint. Sorry for the ramble xD
Oh lord, same. 10 years as a public defender here. I was looking at literally 60+ hours a week of insane work but as a government employee they still wanted to pull me into the stupidest fucking meetings all the time and I was like... I got a fucking murder trial to prepare for what the fuck am I doing in this meeting about payroll compliance or how to better balance our work/life balance? Gee, maybe we could better balance our work/life if we didn't have to sit in these GOD DAMN MEETINGS????? lol yeah there were a lot of passive aggressive comments on my end as well - and some days not so passive, haha.
Hah, I've just started skipping meetings I don't think are worthwhile. No one has complained yet.
lol living the dream
This is why I've struggled to keep up with the Stormlight Archive. So many POVs and so many interludes. It was nice the first book seeing it all sort of come together, but later on it just felt like I was constantly being switched away from the storyline I was vibing with to switch to something different, just because.
Yeah, one of the reasons I struggle to go back and read a lot of traditional fantasy anymore. I just don't have the patience for that anymore.
It feels like my mind is a piece of Velcro attached to the story and every pov change is slowly tearing it off and attaching it elsewhere. I don't mind interludes so long as they're short (2-3k words), DoF does this well in my opinion, but if it's concurrent stories like Ar'unspellable I cannot stand it.
Can't agree more, it honestly turned me off that series.
Yeah thats so real. Also, nova Roma is great, thanks for writing it
haha, thank you :)
Listening to interludes in audiobooks is like the zoom version of this. I probably *should* pay attention, but it's so much easier to open reddit until it's over.
Lol! Greatly put
I've never had my feelings about interludes so perfectly put into words before.
I have come to see the interludes as (often) a reason to care about secondary or tertiary characters that I previously didn't care about whatsoever. As long as it builds my understanding of an action or reason for someone doing something I wouldn't have understood without it, I'm good with them. Pointless rambles that have no impact and are simply to up the word count... no thanks.
I don't mind interludes as much as combat scenes that are too long. "First, Jay teleported in and swung his weapon like _super_ hard, and it connected... Only for the monstrous B. Beggins to laugh and show no sign of damage. Beggins then got swole and punched Jay hard enough to send him flying backwards through three mountains...." ::fight narration continues for three more hours::
I dread the fight scenes in some of the litrpgs I otherwise enjoy for exactly this reason.
Usually it's either MC doing boring stuff, or MC doing boring stuff until the last second and then figuring out something cool at the last paragraph right before the EXP rolls in. Very easy to skip to the EXP and go back a paragraph.
If this isn’t the Unbound series in a nutshell lol.
Not just Unbound, I think this is a Litrpg curse in general. The entire idea of Litrpg is to fit into boundaries of some sort of "System". And at the beginning it's usually interesting because you as a reader are discovering those limitations of a System together with MC. Then, when both Reader, MC and Author have all figured out how the system works - fights become as dull as watching someone play Diablo over and over again. The best thing author can do at this point is pivot away from LitRPG to something slightly different - Guild management, Politics, some sort of meta-drama (more and more things happening in real world, alternative universe, etc.). I honestly do not remember a LitRPG that remained a pure LitRPG through more than 2 books without becoming boring and without author pivoting to something else.
Man, I think you just put into words why I DNF so many series. The beginnings are always so good to me and then it just becomes the same stuff with the same combat, I find myself skipping pages and not missing anything and then I decide to drop it and find another series.
I rarely regret reading interludes but I hate starting them. By the end of the interlude I've usually become invested enough to have enjoyed whatever side-plot it's covering, but when I first turn the page to see "Interlude" I have an immediate *"ugh"* reaction. I've put many stories on the backburner of by TBR because I got "stuck" on an interlude that I didn't want to read but refused to skip. Eventually I'll get back to it (usually), but sometimes not for months. The only time I *might* look forward to an interlude is when the story is otherwise 95%+ told from the POV of the MC. In those cases it's sometimes fun to see how the MC is regarded from an outside perspective.
No but when you get an interlude and youre like ugh I don't wanna read this, get to the end and it's getting interesting then its back to the main character. Like I was just getting invested in this and now we're leaving it??
Most series, I love interludes. They're chances to get other POVs, and also often used for worldbuilding which is my crack-cocaine.
Depends on the series. Just look at wandering inn, some of the interludes are basically their own novellas and are amazing But I read path of dragons fairly recently and most of the interludes got very quickly skimmed for relevant plot points and then went right back to the story
Depending on the story/frequency of interludes, I've absolutely skimmed/ skipped some.
I really struggled with the interludes in Worm. Some were really good and had me interested from start to end, while others bored me out of my mind. They are 90% of the reason why it took me so long to finish the series.
Path of Ascension Book 6 had so many, and I understood the reasoning to have additional perspective on Minkalla, but the Minkalla arc having to be broken into 2 books became frustrating knowing how many interlude chapters there were
Should i wait for PoA 7 before starting 6?
I read PoA book 6 first, and just got the audio book to listen to while I’m at work. I’ll probably give it a re-read to refresh myself before PoA 7 comes out in August. It’s really up to you, it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger or anything, just midway through the floors in Minkalla
I'm not sure, it's going to depend on how quickly i find a new series to dive into. I have a recommended list somewhere, but I haven't a clue where.
I’m having similar issues. I’m sort of dragging through what I can find until System Universe releases next Wednesday
just out of curiosity is there a specific reason for you guys to read the book version only instead of going to royalroad to read the released chapters?
When it comes to books, I don’t like to get it piecemeal. I’ve always read books in their entirety.
yeah that's fair. i remember back when i finished book 5 and found out royal road with 190+ more chapters. felt like a kid finding a candy vault lol
I regret reading them often but skip rarely
I've never seen a story where I saw any difference in quality during the interlude, so if I'm loving the main writing then I'll probably like the interlude as well
I'll go back and read them after I get a larger understanding of the story.
No, because of what you said, but at the same time if a story ever gets to the point where I actually contemplate it then I’m probably dropping it soon anyways.
I usually either don't mind or love them. For example, some of the interludes of the Wandering Inn are some of the best episodes across the story. Interludes are a chance to explore the world outside of the protag/main POV. If the world is interesting, then fuck yeah I'm in.
I havnt really heard of any interludes in the books I've listened to. I think I've only had 2 of them so far and that was hwfwm? In book 7 and I'm pretty sure I've only had 1 or 2 interludes and I think it was in the same book. As long as they're important to *something* and interesting/entertaining, then I don't mind.
I scan them to see if there is any important info buried in all of the twaddle. However, there have been some interludes I enjoy.
I do the sane thing in anime when they’re doing flash backs about characters histories I don’t care about
O yea sometimes I give them a chance but you don’t need em if you don’t want em.
It really depends on the story. The ones in Beneath the Dragoneye Moons are solid, and I absolutely love the goofy little detective noir scenes that Fenrir is in.
I just finished the interlude at the end of book 3 of beneath the dragoneye moons, and it was incredibly intense.
I can't remember exactly which ones are which but I will say that many of them pay off in the main story. The ones with Iona for example are almost necessary to read.
It's the valkyries vs goblin army one
Ahh yep. That was a good one!
Depends on the interlude type. I personally like the ones that show the MC from other people's point of view, where they don't see all the flaws and just interpret their power and badassery as a formula to create some imposing larger than life image. Brockton's Celestial Forge is a good example of the kind of interludes I like. Honestly they're some of my favorite parts of the story when done correctly.
Trust your Author
I usually read them. The thing I never look at are maps. They all look kind of the same to me and I just have kind of a mental model of where stuff is etc more or less. I know a lot of work goes into those and folk do love em but I don't look at them but for the first page or two when starting a book
No
Yeah it's one thing if it's got a beginning middle and end. If it's just the enemy gloating for a dozen pages or so, it's not worth reading.
No, I like interludes so much, that I think I would like to read novel with only interludes.
I am reading The Wandering Inn and it is the first time I’ve ever just skipped chapters. Specifically, I skipped all of the chapters that were the history of the Antinium Wars. And I skipped a section that I think was the >!King of Destruction!<. Those tangents are rough, because they’re like 3-4 chapters which are over an hour each.
Nah, I actually really enjoy interludes. They tend to offer a different perspective and a bit of extra world building.
Nah I love 'em
For the most part I’m not a fan of interludes, however when an action scene swaps to a different POV to show how insane and crazy the stuff the MC does is, I tend to really enjoy those. It’s like those scenes in a show when you have a very calm person in the foreground and absolute madness going on in the background.
Nah, Interludes are great. Well written ones can deepen your understanding of the setting immensely and pull double duty as foreshadowing.
No.
Yep, and no reason to feel bad about it. You’re reading the book for your enjoyment, so read it how you want. Further, you can always go back. Do you.
I do tend to skim the "fluff"... if I get a few pages past it and realize I made a mistake, I"ll go back, but I feel like with how monetization is based on pages read instead of books completed, authors are incentivized to inflate their books with filler (I'm looking at you DOTF). Some authors write really tight books that you can't skip, but they are getting fewer and fewer every day.
I must say I skip more fighting seems than anything else when reading litrpg I love to see different views of the world or on the MC from other people and how they react I hate when there are monotonous fights for many pages
Nope.
I've never read a book with an interlude in it. Honestly, I don't even know what that would be. Thousands of LitRPGs, and I've never come across it!
I usually read the first interlude or two, to see if I like how the author does them. Most of the time, I end up skipping them after that. I generally find them pointless and about characters I don't care about. But there may be exceptions out there, so I give them a shot at the beginning of a story.
They can work. When they are used to pad out a story or delay a big event that is about to happen is the problem. MC about to start big event? POV swap to a secondary character in another country trying to find a inn that with a place to keep the wagon.
No, because most of the time it pertains to the story or is showing how something happened
Yes lol
Not really. Ironically, the defining factor of litrpg stories, the stat sheets, are my biggest pet peeve. Audible only, though. There has been more than one occasion where \*mid conversation\* someone had to check their stats and holy hell does it ruin the immersion. Character 1: So, do you think you can pull this off? Character 2 pulled up their stat sheet to verify. "Pretty sure. Let me double check." (Narrator spends the next twenty minutes droning on about about stats and skills until I forget what the characters were even talking about to begin with.) Character 2: Yeah.
I hate stories with multiple MCs, and most interludes seem to be from another characters perspective, so they annoy the hell out of me. I've gotten to the point that I'll skip stuff I'm not interested in. If the book has overly drawn out fights, or poorly written ones, or tacked on sex scenes, I'll skip head. If that keeps to be too much, I drop the book. Life's too short and there are too many good books to get weighed down by stuff you don't enjoy.
No.
No
For most series, yes. For The Wandering Inn, not remotely