/lit/ - Literature

>>15586254
Fanfiction edition:

Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality
http://hpmor.com/chapter/1
A complete rewrite of the Sorcerer's Stone. Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.

Luminosity
http://luminous.elcenia.com/story.shtml
A complete rewrite of all of the Twilight novels featuring a protagonist who takes action in her own self interest and is not weak-willed.


4chan Original Work Edition:

Trapped in a Fantasy World
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=008
Written in a journaling format, writefag 008 tells the story of a group of modern-day humans who are called through a mysterious portal into a fantasy world. An isekai novel written before it had become an established genre.

OP i dont read webfiction but i appreciate the work you did into making this thread

>>15586254
>Worm
Absolutely unreadable cringe. Maybe not being bullied into mental trauma as a kid makes me unable to relate to the protagonist, but Jesus Christ I could not force myself to keep reading that shitheap until it 'got good'.

>HP and the methods of rationality
Yikes from me. Bayesian propaganda disguised as fanfiction and poorly told by any standard.

I'd love to write some serialized fiction but is it better to host it yourself or put it onto a platform like a royalroad?

>>15586254
>>15586265
>This much masturbatory rationalfic, but no Alexander Wales
Thank you for reminding me to put Luminosity on the list, I liked The Northern Caves as well, but it doesn't really fit in.

God Tier:

Mother of Learning
A Practical Guide to Evil
Worth The Candle
Pact

Good tier:

Brennus
Unsong
Worm
The Gilded Hero (provisional)
The Menocht Loop (provisional)
Delve

You should check these out tier (mostly rationalfic, fanfic, and similar garbage that can be entertaining):
(Upper level)
The Metropolitan Man
Luminosity
A bluer shade of white
Twisted cogs
The Games We play
Jayke Cypher (provisional)
Harry Potter and the Methods of rationality

------
(Lower tier)
The Gam3
Release That Witch
Purple Days
The Good Student
The Waves Arisen
A Hero's War
Twig
The Humble Life of a Skill Trainer (provisional)

Stay away tier:

Ward
Lord of the Mysteries
Metaworld Chronicles
The Wandering Inn
Star Child
Re: trailer thrash
Savage Divinity
The Zombie Knight Saga
How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis
Super Powereds
The Simulacrum
Everybody Loves Large Chests

Best chinkshit has to offer tier:
All chinkshit is shit, especially Reverend Insanity
Just read the four classics and, if you really have to, I Shall Seal the Heaven.

>>15586254
I think that might be the most disgusting and repulsive pic I have ever seen, /gif/ rekt threads have nothing on it.

>>15586976
Depends how hard you're going to shill it. I made a blog site at first, but with the average visitor rate of 3 per month, I turned to RR. At least you are guaranteed to get some readers there.

BUT if you have a lot of friends and can get the word going, it's better to make your own website, where there aren't a billion other stories to drown out yours.

>>15587178
there's a video :)

>>15587332
every couple years or so, one of those rekt threads will get me curious and I will watch a bunch of horrific things, some of the worst things you can imagine and they often leave me hollowed out. Despite all that, I still get curious and go to one of those threads every couple years. I can say with certainty, I will never watch that video, it is pure prfanity, despite how terrible it is, torturing someone to death at least has reason, even if that reason is just as terrible as the torture itself.

>>15587372
It's a dude eating a big candy for laughs, I don't get how that turns worse than literal gore in your head. Are you quite sane?

>>15587423
>Are you quite sane?
Very much so. The people doing horrible things are not doing it just for laughs, they have reasons how every terrible. Eating 10 pounds of gelotinous sugar for laughs has more in common with the average rekt thread patron than the rekt threads content, it is just vulgar and profane.

>>15587167
Everything in your God Tier is good to middling at best. Pact is wildbow's weakest work, APGTE and Worth the Candle are both cringey, with Worth the Candle being a literal harem isekai/litrpg. Mother of Learning is the only good work of fiction there.

Anyone else find Worth the Candle extremely frustrating to read because it goes over the main character's sexual attraction to literally every female character introduced but never, absolutely never, even pauses to consider whether he might find another guy attractive? He's a teenager in a world that's purposefully turning up his sex drive. It bothered me more and more with every chapter I read.

>>15587640
Some people just don't do dick, it is nothing to get upset about.

>>15587640
>Everything in your God Tier is good to middling at best
I mean it's webnovels, what do you expect? They are read for entertainment, not because they say anything deep about the human condition, or the world. WtC is the only one which approaches something close to conceptual depth with the explicit expressionism, and the bible parallels used to explore archetypal events and characters. And it is still 90% (quality) popcorn, and 7% shallow meanderings of a pop-culture loving redditeur. Of course Unsong may also qualify, but I should reread it first I suppose, it may reach God Tier as well. AW's shorter work definitely qualifies as well, but it is too insubstantial, too minimal.

>Pact is wildbow's weakest work
Opinion ignored. You must genuinely be mentally disabled to believe it is worse than Ward.

>consider whether he might find another guy attractive?
Retarded complaint. Read a book, or at least a survey paper on the subject.

>>15587167
Awful taste. Chinkshit is much better than western garbage. Mother of Learning is good too though.

>>15588261
>Chinkshit is much better than western garbage
>proceeds to read 5000 pages of meditation and slapping young masters

>>15587711
Nta, just asking, where does the hate for ward stem from? I personally read only worm and ward and am currently reading pact. Im in arc 5 and so far the system/world is absolutely astounding, but i dont enjoy blake, especially compared to victoria

>>15588384
I can't find my earlier rant about this, so I am just gonna post something by another person, whose thoughts are closely aligned to mine:

(1)
This is an upsetting post to write; I've been procrastinating starting it for a couple of hours. For a couple of years of my life, it would have horrified me to learn that I would wind up writing this post. I intend this post as a public service, not as an act of spite. This is a strong disrecommendation of a work by an author I greatly admire.

Ward, the long-awaited sequel to the classic web serial Worm, finally ended early on Sunday morning. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone read Ward. Spoilers abound for both Worm and Ward.

The most positive thing I can say about Ward, in the context of a recommendation, is that if you're a Worm superfan with lots of time on your hands and you're desperate for more canonical source material to draw off of, well, okay, it makes sense to read Ward the same way it makes sense to read Weaverdice sourcebooks. You'll probably want to pick and choose which aspects you take from it, though, because Ward isn't a good story. It's awful, in the sense that it inspires awe how badly it fails as a story. It has many good little snippets of ideas, but it has no idea how to put them together into a functioning, coherent whole.

It's baffling coming from an author whose breakout work, Worm, left me under the impression that he's among the greatest storytellers of our time. People have various complaints about Worm, and some are legitimate criticism that would ideally be fixed in a future draft. But these problems are all small, petty, easy to work past to appreciate a well-told epic. They're nothing in comparison to the problems that define and pervade Ward. Ward's problems aren't subjective quibbles with how clearly some scene was written. They're basic errors in the writing process, problems that create other problems everywhere, problems that touch everything else in the story, problems that have metastasized to the story's outline and style. The story is fundamentally and fractally half-baked.

>>15588384
>>15588412
Because I had so much faith in the author, thanks to Worm, I was not one of the many people who left early on. Although there are strange and unwise choices made even in Ward's introductory pitch, I don't think the people who left early on were right to do so, at least not for the most part. Early conversations on Ward were dominated by misguided and flatly wrong complaints. For example, there are problems with Ward's choice of protagonist, but her specific identity isn't one of them - she's a finely-sketched character, and the hatred certain sectors of the fandom had for her from the start was ridiculous and frankly pathological. So I stuck with the story, all the way through. I gave the author credit. I enjoyed the good parts, and I gave the bad parts the benefit of the doubt. But by the last quarter of the story, it became obvious that, as a whole, it wasn't going to come together quite right, and in the last few weeks I realized that it was actually going to be capital-B Bad, not just substantially suboptimal.

The real glaring problem with Ward's choice of protagonist, incidentally, is that she's a returning character from Worm at all. That sets a tone. Of course a Worm sequel would feature some returning characters, but Ward doesn't just feature some returning characters. It features mostly returning characters. Any arbitrary character who appears in an important role is likely to be a returning Worm character. There are brilliant new characters and ideas all over the place - but they're subservient to the nostalgic fan service. It may sound strange to make this complaint about a sequel, but Ward isn't the kind of sequel that follows the same protagonist and concerns itself primarily with continuing the same character arcs. It's another epic written in the same setting, a sequel for the world. But Ward doesn't have a serious interest in that world; it has a serious interest in throwing things we know at us.

>>15588421
(3)
The world ended in the last act of Worm. Ward is a post-apocalyptic story. But Ward doesn't want to be a post-apocalyptic story. It wants to be reheated Worm leftovers, and it doesn't particularly care that Worm's setting was already torn down and replaced by something entirely new; it has no interest in developing or exploring the world in which it's set. Its story beats are exactly the same kind of story beats that Worm had, likely because many of them are literally unused notes from Worm. It reuses them all the same, drawing no meaningful distinction between before and after the fucking apocalypse, as an event in characters' lives. We hear it said explicitly that the apocalypse killed something like 90% of humans and something like 99% of parahumans. But the actual story certainly doesn't act like it; the fucking apocalypse never stands in the way of bringing a character back from Worm. Even among those characters that Ward newly introduces, almost all of them are primarily defined by trauma they underwent before the fucking apocalypse. It's unusual and noteworthy for characters to have dead loved ones, in a setting that, even before the fucking apocalypse, had Endbringers and similar threats that were introduced as routinely killing large fractions of the superheroes (stakes that, in retrospect, seem essentially arbitrary and made of cardboard).

In the first few arcs of Ward, it set up numerous conflicts, threads, and questions that made good use of the setting it inherited from Worm. But somewhere early on, Ward got into its head that worldbuilding is masturbatory nonsense for rationalist nerds (which is a shame, because Wildbow excels at it when he's trying, which he usually is), so it dropped all of these threads; nothing was honestly examined or went anywhere. Instead, Ward concerns itself first and foremost with characterization. That's the defense that Ward's proponents generally give, that the issues with every aspect of the actual story are immaterial, because it's such a good character piece and that's what it was trying to be. But I'm going to say something that I think would surprise a lot of people: Ward's characterization is not any better than Worm's. (In fact, it's meaningfully worse.) It spends more time doing it, and that's not the same thing. An addict's house may be full of syringes, but that doesn't mean she's better at using them than a nurse. Ward spends much of its nearly two-million word (!) duration on highly introspective internal monologues and inane navel-contemplating small-talk between characters; after a point, it's just polishing something it's already completely worn away. The excess time spent on characterization directly takes time and thought away from worldbuilding, which in turn directly undermines that same characterization - any person exists in a world, and Ward effectively doesn't have a setting at all, instead operating on vague context-free feelings, moon logic, and authorial fiat.

>>15588428
(4)
This is an aside, but I blame a large part of Ward's disdain for worldbuilding (also known as "being set in a world that attempts to make sense") on Doof! Media. In the months running up to the start of Ward, a popular liveblog-type podcast called "We've Got Worm" sprung up and became extremely influential in the parts of the fandom closest to Wildbow; he even became a frequent listener and participant in the post-podcast discussions. It was well-produced and well-done all around, and in a very difficult-to-replicate way, it brought a fresh perspective and fascinating analysis to Worm. But the host responsible for much of this, Scott Daly, was very much of the mindset "well, I don't care about worldbuilding, because I'm not some fucking nerd, I'm here for all that other good stuff in writing, like character arcs". That's a valid lens for an individual reader to take in a project like that, but Wildbow wound up hearing a lot of Scott. I mean, the guys make a long professional podcast devoted entirely to relentlessly praising a particular artist; it's not a surprise that the artist would wind up hearing a lot of it. And then, when Ward started, the We've Got Worm guys moved onto Ward, and the podcast became something very different - much less meritorious, but still very popular, effectively a glorified recap podcast endlessly pumping out content each week just describing what happened last week. And it became a literal feedback loop - Wildbow hearing a constant drone of "you're great, you're perfect, I love this unconditionally, you're so good at characters, your shit is golden, but we don't care about worldbuilding, Wildbow, I love this, we don't care about worldbuilding at all, we're not fucking nerds, Wildbow, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter at all..."

I don't think it was ever quite fair to label Worm "rational fiction", because that's not a label the author selected, but in contrast to Worm, Ward is as far from the virtues of rational fiction as a story can possibly get. Characters' motivations exist only in isolation; characters can't have interesting plans to achieve their goals because there's no real framework in which such plans could exist or make sense. Effectively every important antagonist is a strawman, not a real person, and when they have a point, the story sees that as a mistake and corrects it as soon as possible by adding complications to make them unlikable and obviously wrong.

I think it's really unfair to say that Ward being a more heavily character-driven piece was just because Wildbow was blindly following a flattering podcast. Twig was entirely character driven and was written with the explicit goal of helping him improve at that style of writing, so it seems clear to me that he always intended to write something else that placed a much stronger focus on character relationships and growth.

>>15588433
(5)
You're also attributing a great many things to him trying to please the audience when there's no real evidence that's the case for most of them. For example, the specific character death fakeout you cite looks to me like something planned rather than a hasty retcon, especially considering he does talk about how the audience influenced him in his retrospective and he never mentions that incident, nor does he mention doing anything as drastic as a straight up retcon. Not to say the audience didn't influence him, as he very clearly states it did, but my impression was that the audience reaction changed what elements got focus and what fell by the wayside, not that he was rewriting whole plots and characters due to feedback.

You've written... a lot, so I can't really give each of your points the attention they deserve, but I will say that your overall review comes across as hyperbolic, to the point of straying towards personal attacks on both the author and the segments of the fandom you don't like. I understand if Ward wasn't your thing, you're clearly not alone in your view, but there's a difference between something not being to your taste and something being objectively flawed. I feel like you're ascribing a lot of the latter to the story in places and ways where it's very much a stretch (such as your reading of the antagonists, of plot or character inconsistencies, of the protagonists capabilities etc.) merely because the story as a whole turned out not to be to your tastes. I hesitate to say that you're manufacturing flaws, but there are definitely cases (such as the fact that you don't think anything bad ever comes from how Kenzie is handled) where you have to take a VERY warped view of things to make the claims you're making.

And regarding the negative tone of Wildbow's retrospective, I suggest you take a look at his other retrospectives. He tends to be very highly critically of every one of his stories as soon as they're finished, only warming up to them much later on. The tone he strikes here is frankly pretty in line with how he viewed Pact and Twig immediately after finishing them, something that he himself notes. It's really not indicative of the quality of the story at all, it's just the sort of relationship he tends to have with his work.

>>15588433
Fucked up: the last paragraph wasn't meant to be here.
Anyway, from a more personal perspective my problem with Ward is that Wildbow abandoned everything that makes him unique and everything he is good at. Large-scale sociological thought-experiments mixed with the effect of the incomprehensibly on man, and communities is a whole is the main reason I liked Worm, but it outside the focus of Ward.
Instead, Wildbow decided to emulate psychological literature, perhaps getting into his head that he could be placed in the same category as the great Literature writers of realism and modernism. He utterly fails at it. His explorations of the human condition are simplistic, cliche, and reactionary. Given how he drained everything that made parahumans fun Popcorn out of Ward, I see no reason to read Ward, while you could instead be reading Proust, Mann, or Tolstoy.

>>15586254
Have you looked at the relevant charts?
Do you read Slate Star Codex?

>>15588384
Im just mad because wildbow did the same exact thing as worm where the only people that get actual bad endings are the gay/queer guys. Straight characters and gay girls make it out just fine, but queer male main cast members in paraverse works have a 0% survival rate.

>>15588428
There's two billion people in the megacity, isn't there? That'd be quite a substantial portion of first world country's populations, since im assuming much of the third world was forgotten about during the evacuation.

>>15590196
Gee anon, we get it, you are a faggot. No need to make it such a major part of your identity that you have to complaint about Poof things (hah, get it?) twice in the same thread.

>>15590217
I would have to do the math (which gets complicated by the differences in parallel earths, etc, etc.) but possibly yes. Doesn't really change much, though.

>>15589611
What charts?

>>15586254
>despite the description, this is pretty high concept
the description you gave was high concept tho

SCP Foundation was good before the trannies took over

>>15591285
I just got into this story and so far I'm very impressed.

>>15588433
Well put, and for the most part I agree, although I'd push back on the idea that Ward's main stumbling block was the lack of "worldbuilding." Although I'd say Worm is easily the best thing Wildbow's ever written, I found it did not benefit from the myopic obsession with making its sci-fi/fantasy elements "rational" or "realistic," a lesson he learned (for better or worse) by the time Ward came around. And I'd argue the character-driven storytelling was well-intentioned, not to mention a welcome change of pace from the original, at least at first.

But I think what it comes down to is that he's just not very good at that kind of writing. Or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he can't do it within the timeframe he's given himself.

For one thing, the prose in Ward is bad. Very bad. Especially considering how much practice the author has had. Which it was in Worm as well, but its fast-paced, plot-intensive style made it easier to forget. But with a slower brand of story, interesting language becomes infinitely more important. The inane, filler-ish stuff becomes unbearable in Ward because the sentences are like chalk in your mouth. And it just goes on and on and on and on.

Maybe some of this fixable -- Ward's length could be cut in half, for starters -- if only he had a chance to edit it, but he's been in this 10k words a week work-schedule for so long (to maintain his readership, he says) I think he's forgotten how. And he's way more concerned with keeping up his mild internet celebrity than with actually writing something worthwhile.

I agree, too, with your observations w/r/t "We've Got Worm/Ward." Those guys are fucking morons, frankly. They act like Worm and Ward are on the same level of literary greatness as Ulysses or something. And they talk about it like they've never read another book in their lives. In no world are they qualified to have any sort of authority on any piece of literature, not even garbage literature.

I'm not super hopeful Wildbow will learn from any of this, either. Judging by his newest project, Pale, which he claims will be shorter than Ward but which in my estimation is so far just as unreadable, he took the wrong lessons from the failure of his last project. He would be much better suited, in my opinion, trying to polish Worm and go the traditional publishing route. That way, at least, there'd be some real, worthwhile criticism of his work. The kind that doesn't exist at all in the online echo-chamber he's set up for himself.

>>15586265
Why would anybody ever bother to shill the tripe that is HPMOR?

>>15591257
The webfiction and self-published recommendation chart and lists

>>15593699
Can you post them?

>>15593690
It's a fun read, even if it's cringe :)

>>15593933
Yeah, I thought it was fun when I too was underage.

>>15588384
Ignoring anon's blog. Ward is shit because it did two things:
1) Wrecked suspension of disbelief because the worldbuilding no longer made sense
2) Made is clear that Taylor Hebert of all people was a completely reasonable person and in no way wrong in her expectations.

>>15590217
I didn't read that wall of text, but did it talk about how the post-apoc humans built a megacity in 4 years (somehow) without any parahuman assistance (somehow), but forgot to get any sort of local food/farms set up?

>>15592666
In Scifi/Fan things can carry a story, the worldbuilding and the character writing. Wildbow does pretty well with the first when he tries, but his character writing generally isn't anything amazing. People say the worldbuilding was an issue because Wildbow basically tossed away his greater strength then spent 2 million words painfully showing off his weakness.

Also
>Ulysses
>Literary Greatness

wew

>>15594303
The first arc takes place in the community center of a farming community. Wdym?

>>15593922
Ignore the webnovel chart. I made it without thinking much and the list I posted here is much better and bigger.

>>15592666
In maybe 20 years Wildbow could have possibly reached something similar to "literary greatness" if he focused on the world in the grandest scope: the birth, the life, and the possible death of a society which implicitly stumbles over "insight" and "literary value" by the nature of it's sheer complexity (pic related but fat and dealing with an individual's instinctual drive to understand the world around him). The so called characters you mention become interesting only in the context of other characters, Wildbow fails to give them depth in isolation of major events or other people. Certainly, he could have at least approached Alan Moore's project of showing that capeshit can be an actual genre of value.
But he never will: he decided to keep assembling gangs of children and sending them on generic adventures to deal with generic bad guys, while dumping millions of words of filler about mundane life. Now he is a lot like China Mieville but worse because of how stupidly long for no reason his work is (cool world with a lot of potential, dumb narrative, uninteresting characters).
The Golden Morning arc of Worm is the best thing Wildbow ever wrote, but the middle parts (Weaver) of Worm is just bad at times. The quality of this "filling" is exactly why I consider Pact to be the best of his work. He actually made it interesting, regardless of the climax and such. The suggestive worldbuilding combined with Blake's personal experience of living in such a peculiar world, unlike Worm, made it interesting all the way through.

>>15593980
I just like autists and autistic projects, anon. Nothing to get mad about.

>>15594283
Taylor legitimately did nothing wrong.

Feeling like starting my own blog and writing short horror stories, best place to do this? Blogspot?

>>15595852
No, the best places are those where you'd get the most views.

Posting an endless well of laughs:
https://projectfmw.wordpress.com

>>15588433
What kind of manchild prefers worldbuilding to character arcs? Is this the kind of audience that reads webnovels?

>>15588475
>His explorations of the human condition are simplistic, cliche, and reactionary.
Out of the whole rant, this is the only part that acknowledges what the writer was trying to do and criticises it. Of course, it offers no argument or substantiation.

>>15591316
>SCP Foundation was good
Back to /v/.

>>15587167
>The Zombie Knight Saga
This and Mother of Learning are the only good ones on your list.
How can you have such horrible taste?

>>15597066
>What kind of manchild prefers worldbuilding to character arcs
I prefer character-driven novels, you stupid faggot. My favorite writers are Bernhard, Proust, and Lermontov. That's the whole point. Wildbow is beyond terrible in creating characters that isn't the bog-standard normalfaggot infused with contemporary burgercuck tropes. Grand scale societal forces interacting with individuals of great power was the one redeeming quality he had.
But I suppose /lit/ has brainwashed you into repeating surface level retardations that completely lack substance and are largely linguistic misunderstandings. You are probably one of those ">muh reading for plot" NPC's. Congratulations. You are completely unable to form abstract thoughts, and just exercise your rhetoric reflexes instead.

>>15597074
>Of course, it offers no argument or substantiation.
Neither does your post, friendo

>>15597483
>The Zombie Knight Saga
>Good
Opinion discarded, filtered, and I won't be pursuing a further discussion with you: dilate, sneed, have sex, suicide, and abort yourself.

>>15597512
The man who actually thought Worth The Candle, Worm, and HPMOR were worth recommending has no right to act superior to anyone.

Go back to reading your literal rubbish.

>>15597609
>A reader of Dan Brown-tier garbage gets mad at a reader of Stephen King-tier garbage
kek

>>15597626
I'm not denying that it's not literature. Just don't act so superior about it.

>>15597512
>Neither does your post, friendo
What? How would I offer a counter argument to no argument at all? I was merely pointing out he (you, probably) wrote five posts' worth of critique with only ten words of actual critique.

>>15597633
>act superior
>someone else acts exactly the same way
>omg, you are so pretentious, anon

>>15597652
I can't provide the evidence for absence. I made a statement which is literally impossible to prove unless I analyze every single word of Ward.
It is called burden of proof, and even youtube atheists understand what it is. You should feel bad, anon. Read an introductory logic textbook.

I dropped everything I ever tried to read, most of them already within the opening paragraph. I've been so spoiled by classic literature. How do I lower my standards to digest web fiction?

>>15598221
You don't. If you want "fun" fiction just read pulp novels from the latter half of the 20th century. The only people that read webnovels are people that are swept up in the metafranchise intersection of the game, movie and comic book industries. If you've grown out of one of them, you've grown out of all of them.

>>15598256
Shame. I've been trying so hard to understand the immense enjoyment other people seem to get from these stories, but I'm just not seeing it. But yeah, at least there are still actually fun books out there.

>>15598125
>I can't provide the evidence for absence
That's what I said. Why are you repeating it for me? You failed to make an argument, simply stating adjectives (simplistic, cliche, and reactionary) with no evidence. That doesn't require you to analyse "every single word" of Ward, just name concrete examples. Asking me to give a counter argument to your nothingness is literally asking me to provide the evidence for absence.

>>15598256
>The only people that read webnovels are people that are swept up in the metafranchise intersection of the game, movie and comic book industries
Objectively wrong. Proof: me.

>>15598221
Read Unsong

>>15598284
Nice b8, m8, no one is this stupid

>>15598307
>Nice b8, m8, no one is this stupid
What the fuck are you talking about?

>>15598318

>>15598324
What? Can you use words? Arguments?

>>15598333
>Arguments?
Evidently not. You seem completely immune to the concept of "I can't prove Wildbow doesn't achieve anything with his characterization because you can't prove a negative"

>>15598348
You CAN prove his "explorations of the human condition ARE simplistic, cliche, and reactionary" with examples. Instead, you prefer to write five posts of fat.

>>15598363
>Instead, you prefer to write five posts of fat.
Ah, you are dyslexic as well. Filtered.

>>15598363
One last thing. Pic related would roll in his grave after reading your posts.

>>15598366
>>15598385
Posturing successful. Do you plan on following it with any actual arguments with evidence from Ward?

>>15598393
See >>15598324
My hearth aches seeing that there are people retarded enough as to think that a writer's explorations of the human condition are reducible to "concrete examples" and "examples"

>>15598411
I mean, it's pretty easy to lay out how Raskolnikov's character arc is successful and rewarding while other might have failed. Writing is a craft. I mean, you usually can back it up when you share an opinion.

>>15598426
>talking about the impossibility of proving a negative
>but anon, you can prove a positive!
I am done. I can't believe this is anything but bait anymore.

>>15598439
"His explorations of the human condition ARE simplistic, cliche, and reactionary". This is a positive.

>>15598441
>backtracking to a previous argument after realizing you said something nonsensical
kek

>>15598448
>bactracking
I repeated the same exact words I said here >>15598363

>this is bad
>why?
>HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO PROVE HOW SOMETHING IS "NOT" GOOD?
>but why is it bad?
>GO BACK TO SCHOOL

>>15598454
See >>15598426 and explain how
>I mean, it's pretty easy to lay out how Raskolnikov's character arc is successful and rewarding
is relevant

>>15598411
Well, yeah, if you ever made it to at least high school level of education, you should be able to explain in your own words how you experienced these in writing, or didn't. That's a very basic skill.

>>15598460
Are you capable of explaining why something was bad or are you not?
"It's not good" is not an argument.

>>15598459
>>HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO PROVE HOW SOMETHING IS "NOT" GOOD?
This but unironically

>>15598466
>explaining why something was bad
Is literally impossible, expect on a technical level (prose and such)

>>15598307
>Read Unsong

I read the first chapter, but I'm afraid unadulterated autism is not among the things I find enjoyable.

>>15598527
How exactly is it autistic?

>>15598540
Excessive rambling about numbers, letters, times, meaningless words, randomly recalling unnaturally detailed memories without any significance, seeking deeper meanings and references in tiny details, repeating patterns, etc. Okay, maybe schizophrenia is the more fitting label.

>>15598720
I think you just described postmodernism - which would be fair, I hate postmodernism (unless the characters themselves are self-aware).
However, I suspect you gave up to quick: everything you say is largely true, however in the context of the novel it all gains meaning. There is a method to the obsessions, a divine purpose assigned to them. Patterns and rambling and details are in the essence of the world, and they largely serve to mirror the specificity of an individual's life in a complex society, constantly bombarded with myths, hidden truths, fiction, and abstractions. Remember that Scott Alexander is one of the rationalspehere autists. Nothing in his work is truly "meaningless", even if, at times, excessive.
Honestly, it just may not be for you though. Your critique looks like an endorsement to me. For example:
>seeking deeper meanings and references in tiny details, repeating patterns
Sounds fascinating, and, indeed, was fascinating in Unsong. Furthermore, this is exactly what makes Joyce, for example, so interesting to me. A major difference is, of course, clear: whereas in Joyce all that shit is implicit and left for the reader to unravel, Scott Alexander, and many other writers post 1960's describe the characters struggling to unravel the "secret story" as Bolano calls it. Strugatsky brothers sometimes did it. Alan Moore sometimes did it. I think it is the forefront of world literature nowadays: reconciliation of the mystery pervading the world and man's eternal will to understand.

I think you rightfully note:
>maybe schizophrenia is the more fitting label
But what else is there for the driven man in the contemporary world except for schizophrenia? Is it possible to seek to understand the incredibly interconnected world we live in, and not occasionally give in to (often meaningless) obsessions?

>>15598834
It was clearly intentional, yes, and I don't mean to fault the story for doing what it sets out to do. It just takes a very specific mindset to enjoy this sort of thing. Great if it works for you.

But it just reeked a bit too much like something written by an anon to me. A lot of works by people here have this "intelligent, nihilistic, with a wicked sense of humor" stamp on them, and I don't like that kind of posturing.

>>15595642
>Taylor legitimately did nothing wrong.

I know, it's fucking hilarious.

>>15587423
i'm grossed out by the image too, but because my brain keeps reading it as some dude pulling out his esophagus. it's a nasty, bordering on body-horror image.

>>15586254
I'm very curious about this - are these just novels published on the web or do they take advantage of the web format? It sounds like the Northern Caves is told in the form of a message board - I love that idea.

>>15586254
I write webfiction in the hopes of becoming a published author. I'm not overly popular but I've got a few fans. I'm too scared to post it here, lol.

>>15597062
>https://projectfmw.wordpress.com
thank you for sharing this

>>15598527
The Northern Caves is the best bet for high-tier litaboos

>>15598720
You're literally describing Judaism. It's Kaballah. That's the book. The Divine is real and His plan is evident in every part of the universe, in all of the deeper meaning and tiny details and repeating patterns.

>>15599555
All of them are the former. The Northern Caves is the exception.