#have you read this web novel results

[web-novel-polls]

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint has a positive reception and is known and read*

[Plain text: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint has a positive reception and is known and read* /end pt]

*This is the first novel to be read

Reception

Positive: 75.8% / 803 votes

Neutral: 16% / 169 votes

Negative: 8.2% / 87 votes

Publicity

Known: 89.6% / 949 votes

Unknown: 10.4% / 110 votes

Reading Status

Read: 56.3% / 596 votes

Unread but Known: 33.3% / 353 votes

Unread: 43.7% / 463 votes

Have You Read This Web Novel?

Kim Dokja does not consider himself the protagonist of his own life. Befitting the name his parents gave him, he is a solitary person whose sole hobby is reading web novels. For over a decade, he has lived vicariously through Yu Junghyeok, the main character of the web novel Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse (TWSA). Through Junghyeok, Dokja has experienced secondhand the trials of repeatedly regressing in time, in search of an end to life-threatening “scenarios” that force people to act out narratives for the amusement of god-like “Constellations.” After reading 3,149 chapters—long after all other readers lost interest—Dokja finally resigns himself to the story ending. However, he receives an enigmatic message from the author, stating that the story will soon be monetized, before his surroundings suddenly go dark. He swiftly realizes that fiction has become reality and he is now living through TWSA. Although he is the singular omniscient reader of the events yet to come, his success in the scenarios is not guaranteed—but perhaps his advantage will empower him to step into the protagonist role that never suited him before. - Novel Updates

If you’re in the process of reading this web novel, please choose whichever option best fits your situation. You do not have to be completely finished with it to answer “yes.”

[flameswallower]

THE BEST FICTION I ENCOUNTERED IN THE SECOND HALF OF 2024!!!

A much longer follow-up to this post. (Can you imagine how much I'd need to type out if I hadn't split them up???)

Once again, I'm not listing movies, TV shows, video games, etc. I AM listing some web fiction and comics/graphic novels, because I feel much more qualified to judge and recommend those things.

____

Novels and Novellas!

Failure To Comply, by Cavar (2024): Reading Cavar’s Failure to Comply, I couldn’t help but think of the recent David Cronenberg movie Crimes of the Future. Both deal with dystopias in which bodies and their modification are strictly regulated, and people with unauthorized bodies form a vibrant, perpetually imperiled subculture on the margins. Both use this conceit to speak metaphorically about the plights of trans and disabled people, although Failure to Comply’s characters are also presented as literally, textually disabled and trans. But, although Crimes of the Future is often accused of being a “weird movie,” Failure to Comply is undeniably much, much weirder. Cronenberg is super normal compared to this.

Maej, by Dale Stromberg (2024): a doorstopper I found difficult to put down and finished inside a week; a work of very unapologetic genre fiction that’s equally unapologetic in its intelligence and dedication to doing strange, creative things with language; a high fantasy story I actually liked. The setting is the city of Sforre-Yomn, in the country of Hwoama, whose culture combines elements from across the continents of Asia and Europe. But Hwoama is matriarchal: men are subordinate to women, who dominate politics, business, the military, and nearly all other professions. As a result of this fact, almost all the major characters in the novel are female. By turns this presents a fun, simple, mischievous inversion of maleness as the unmarked default state for fictional characters, and meaty commentary on the social construction of sex, sexuality, and gender. Stromberg has cited Le Guin as an influence on Maej and, in the most complimentary way possible, this influence is evident.

Lote, by Shola von Reinhold (2020) is a gorgeous, funny, moving academic satire/mystery and love letter to Black modernism. It’s also very queer/trans and (in my personal opinion, perhaps not intentionally) very autistic. The title refers to a possibly-mythical clandestine circle of artists/magic practitioners who style themselves after the lotus eaters and seek transcendence via experiences of sensory and aesthetic pleasure. As with many novels that stand out to me, you won’t read anything else like it. I especially recommend this one if you want a completely unique, intellectually stimulating work of fiction, but are put off by the aggressively experimental and opaque style of Failure To Comply and by the SFF-ness of FTC, Maej, and Leech.

Walking Practice, by Dolki Min (trans. Victoria Caudle) (original 2022; English translation 2024) is a breezy, sexy *, gender-bending Korean novel about a poor amorphous space alien stranded on Earth after a spaceship crash. Unfortunately for us, this alien soon discovers that 1.) the most suitable food for it down here is human flesh, and 2.) with a lot of pain and effort, it can squeeze itself into the likeness of a variety of different human beings. It figures out hookup apps pretty fast, too, and then it’s off to the races. This may sound like creature horror, but it plays more as an exploration of identity and humanity, and a satire of sex, romance, and contemporary hookup culture. (*possibly less sexy if you don’t have a vore/cannibalism/consumption thing)

Love/Aggression, by June Martin (2024) is a BANANAS mundane fantasy-comedy about two trans women who are kind of best friends, and kind of enemies. Zoe (actress) is an arrogant, cartoonishly unpleasant minor celebrity who thinks she’s much more famous and popular than she actually is— but Martin manages to show how her personality is in part the sympathetic result of dysphoria and experiencing a lot of transmisogyny over the course of her life, and how she used to be a much kinder person before fame went to her head. Meanwhile, Lily (freeloader and aspiring tattoo artist) is a sweet, spacy, passive daydreamer, and a far more immediately likable character— but Martin manages to show how she is not entirely blameless in the ongoing drama with Zoe, how her passivity is sometimes the result of immaturity and selfishness, and how even when it isn’t, it’s a character flaw that keeps landing her in situations which kind of suck for all parties involved. They live in a magical Pittsburgh that is, conveniently, located right next to Los Angeles. Their friends include a BDSM cult leader and a nonbinary person whose name becomes “Dicks” in the first chapter of the story and who is never called anything else. (This character also happens to be the…owner? Custodian?…of an infinite, maze-like, reality-distorting building that is probably the most fun and least scary infinite, maze-like, reality-distorting building in all of fiction.) There’s vore in this one, too! But don’t go in expecting a particularly cohesive plot: Love/Aggression is far more about characters, relationships, and gags.

Maybe the Moon, by Armistead Maupin (1992) was inspired by the too-brief life of Maupin’s real friend Tamara De Treaux, a little person who depicted the title character in parts of the movie E.T. Her literary equivalent, Cady Roth, is a sardonic, fashionable, thirty-year-old little person who depicted a magical gnome called Mr. Woods in a beloved, albeit treacly, children’s fantasy movie of the same name. But since she played the role inside a thick rubber suit, and since the director of the movie felt it would spoil the magic to give her any credit, almost nobody knows that. Ten years later, she lives in obscurity on dwindling funds and struggles to find work…until, out of sheer desperation, she decides to take a job with a troupe of children’s birthday party entertainers. Romance, escapades, etc. ensue. Both a very funny book and a very sad one; it’s quite frank about death, about the ways Hollywood fucks people over, about the many ways that, especially if you’re marginalized and/or an artist, your life isn’t fair and isn’t ever going to be fair and “happy endings” probably aren’t what the world has in store for you. I think ultimately it’s sentimental in a good way; it has a big heart.

Leech, by Hiron Ennes (2022) is a total banger to finish out this year with! So glad I picked it up finally! Absolute genre jambalaya, this one: sci-fi, stuff that reads as fantasy despite having or probably having a “sci-fi” explanation, horror, Gothic novel (but not, crucially, a Gothic romance), mystery, medical thriller, character study, philosophical novel about ideas of consciousness, selfhood, individuality, and free will…there’s probably something in here for everyone reading this. You’ll love it, almost guaranteed, if you love the Gormenghast books. You’ll love it, almost guaranteed, if you love any Star Trek series. You’ll love it, almost guaranteed, if you love the science fiction of Peter Watts, or the horror of Gretchen Felker-Martin. You’ll love it, almost guaranteed, if you love The Thing (1982). The prose is lush, idiosyncratic, a bit purple, but it’s nothing too baroque, it’s all perfectly easy to read. The complicated, antiheroic protagonist/narrator is delightful and memorable, and I think Ennes did a great job at conveying unusual states of memory/selfhood/cognition through it/them/her. (Some of these states are not ones with which I have, or even could possibly have ever had, real experience, but some are, and I am always pleased to find those replicated in ways I can recognize and feel as “truthful.”)

Short Story Collections!

Stone Gods (2024) and Worse Than Myself (2009) by Adam Golaski contained several of the very best short stories I read this year— especially Worse Than Myself, which is also a slightly more accessible/“normal” story collection and the one I’d recommend starting with. Golaski writes eerie, dreamlike, bizarre fiction that frequently crosses over into horror— even including time-worn horror genre tropes like zombies, ghosts, and vampires. But let me tell you, Golaski’s “The Man From the Peak” (in Worse Than Myself) is a BAD time, like give-you-nightmares scary, and it feels like nothing you’ve ever read before, even though it’s about A Nosferatu. Not just a vampire, but a vampire that is explicitly described as egg-bald with big pointy ears and two sharp buck teeth. That’s the antagonist. And it fucking works. He makes it new. Please, please read Adam Golaski, you guys. It is astounding and unjust that he’s not popularly regarded as one of the 21st century’s best authors of weird short fiction. I don’t actually know if he could have/wanted to publish more than two collections over fifteen years, but I kind of feel like maybe if a lot of people and public libraries buy those two collections, he’ll have more space and incentive to write short stories, and/or more publishers will be interested in picking up another collection of his short stories?

Brave New Weird vol. 2 (2024) was a diverse, entertaining selection of stories. Some I’d read, some I hadn’t. A pretty good overview of the mostly small press horror/sci-fi/Weird fiction scene as it stands right this minute.

All Your Friends Are Here, by M. Shaw (2024) is almost the opposite of the Golaski collections, in a way: Golaski frequently deals with themes of nostalgia, the past, cycles that repeat without end, and timelessness or being outside of time. Moreover, most of his stories feel like they’d be immediately comprehensible to a person fifty years ago or fifty years from now, if not even further into the past/future (with, perhaps, a few footnotes of cultural explanation). But Shaw’s stories are, often aggressively, Of The Moment. And that’s not a bad thing, even if it means they may seem completely dated in a few decades. Shaw is interested in speaking directly to their place and time; directly to us. They’re not going to pretend we’re not all online, that we don’t all know (if against our will) what Ready Player One is— the longest piece in the collection, and one of the best, is a suitably pop-culture-reference-laden dunk/riff/spoof on, and rebuttal of, Ready Player One! These stories are angry and clever and sometimes suffused with a kind of exhausted tenderness. There’s clearly a Bizarro influence on some of Shaw’s work, but their writing is more sophisticated and restrained than what I tend to associate with Bizarro fiction proper.

Individual Short Stories (That You Can Read Right Now!)

“EGREGORE” by Samir Sirk Morató (2024) = clubbing, hallucinatory, girl on girl

“The Spindle Of Necessity” by B. Pladek (2024) = trans academic suspects dead author may have been a closeted gay trans man

“A History of the Avodion Through Five Artists” by Eric Horwitz (2024) = Borgesian, arch, Jewish

“Mad Studies” by Cavar (2024) = loneliness, cats, autism…like Failure To Comply, this is by @librarycards

“Alabama Circus Punk” by Thomas Ha (2024) = robots, the nuclear family, disintegrating language

Comics and Graphic Novels!

Tomorrow You Don't Know Me, by Raven Lyn Clemens (2024) is a subtle, moving, and unsentimental graphic novel about being a middle schooler with problems, and how sometimes those problems just kinda...persist no matter what you do or try or want, and no matter if it's fair. Even if you summon a demon to help you! Clemens is really skilled at depicting emotion visually, at communicating both the absurd goofiness and the deep, genuine pain of the outsize negative emotions her characters experience. All of her characters are at least a little wretched, and she also handles them all with great compassion, affection, and understanding. Check out her artwork at @ravenlynclemens please; it's fantastic cartooning even without any detailed narrative.

In Fair Verona, by Val Wise (2024) is a VERY gory, VERY nasty piece of lesbian Gothic fantasy horror-erotica. I love Wise's art. The bodies she draws, regardless of gender and build, are top-tier sexy and beautiful to me, which means he's often able to get me on board* with kinks and scenarios that would usually be too "extreme" for my taste. (*Genteel euphemism for arousal)

A Guest In the House, by E.M Carroll (2023) is an equally nasty and mean, but far, FAR less explicit and bizarre, lesbian Gothic horror story, told with the visual panache and inimitable art style everyone knows and loves Carroll for. It's a worthy successor to their previous material, and if it doesn't necessarily make enormous leaps from their earlier work in its writing, the drawing and coloring has gone from "already really good" to "some of these splash pages will blow your eyes out the back of your skull."

Expiry Date, by Sloane Hong (2024) is another lesbian/queer erotica comic. This one's science fiction, and is FAR more up my usual alley of kinks. Which is to say that the lovers are quite kind/polite with one another (in a lot of ways it reads as a meet-cute), but also one of them is a hired killer who dispassionately agrees to torture the fuck out of the other one David Cronenberg-style.

Once again, all my comic recs are by queer trans people! I think I made a pretty hacky joke last year about gay trans mascs specifically ruling in this field, but based on recent data, you just have to be a marginalized gender and not heterosexual to make amazing comics.

Web Fiction!

The Frenzy wiki is a fan wiki for an imagined TV series, telling the story of both Frenzy, a popular late 2000s ensemble cast drama-adventure-SFF show drawing equally from the likes of Twin Peaks and Supernatural, and how the existence of this show was mysteriously wiped from the face of our reality-- save in the troubled dreams of a select few. I would estimate it takes a couple hours to explore the whole wiki. (2022 or 2023?)

3D Workers Island is the phenomenal, if less ambitious, follow-up to Petscop. (I don't mean it's a sequel; it's just by the same guy and covers similar thematic ground.) Like its predecessor, it's more about dropping tantalizing hints than letting you in on "what's actually going on," and more about giving you a creeped out and vaguely depressed feeling than about scaring or shocking you per se. It's really smart and well-crafted in an understated way, and does a great job replicating early internet content. I would estimate it takes WELL under an hour to get through this story, although you will probably want to immediately go back and look for things you might have missed or not understood properly. (2024)

Martin's Movies is conventional, compared to the other two. It's a ghost story. But it's a very creepy, effective, well-told ghost story rendered through the unusual medium of letterboxd reviews (of course, these become increasingly diary-like and Not About The Film as the story progresses). I would estimate it takes under an hour to read the whole thing, it's like short novelette length. (2024)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

[aamputation]

SVSSS AU ... Benevolent System 0.1

related to -> [THIS] Shen Yuan art and -> [THIS] bit

“Dumbf*ck author, dumbf*ck novel!” Shen Yuan spits; a final curse as his vision goes black.

Shen Yuan, our veteran web novel enthusiast, is an interesting one. He’s the third son, and second youngest of his ultra-wealthy parents’ four kids. Some would take a glance at him and immediately peg him as a fuerdai, but Shen Yuan is more than that. Albeit fairly unhealthy his whole life—we won’t bore you, dear reader, with the details of his illnesses—he still managed to graduate from Tsinghua University with a degree in Chinese language studies and a minor in modern literature, work as a freelance editor, and somehow become a published novelist. Mind, Shen Yuan doesn’t think much of his published works, the reason for that being that one of his first clients was so testy over his editors’ notes on the draft that he’d cursed Shen Yuan and left the final remark: “Well if it’s so easy to write a book, why don’t you do it?!” Shen Yuan had taken that personally, and so like the millennial he was, Shen Yuan replied “Bet,” and did it—the resulting product becoming award winning, much to his disgruntlement; he has book deals now, goddamnit.

(Unbeknownst to Shen Yuan, his work is considered high brow. People dissect his work in literature classes alongside other classics, like Xu Yun or even Haruki Murakami. People think he’s reclusive and brooding, like J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon—he’s not, he’s just an antisocial hermit who drowns himself in his editing work and trashy web novels to de-stress—and his published works are deep, reflecting on the human condition. Of course, this is an accident. Shen Yuan genuinely does not realize it is actually considered tragic, or even when his books are super homoerotic. Shen Yuan is lauded by the literary community as a modern genius, but the man himself just likes to ignore his own work approximately ninety percent of the time.) 

Shen Yuan, published author, was an upstanding millennial—having properly purchased the Zhongdian’s VIP currency to read the novel’s official version—who found himself forcing his way to the end of this gargantuan novel, only to be met with utter disappointment. This novel was so stallion, so money-grubbing, and so overly padded that it left him feeling speechless with rage. How could he not curse Proud Immortal Demon Way, by Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky—just looking at that euphemistic handle smacked you in the face with the dirty-feeling. Grade-school-level writing with land mines everywhere, breaking also suspension of disbelief and Shen Yuan couldn't bear to call that incoherent, massive world the author had built a xianxia setting. What kind of xianxia setting had people using horses and carriages all day? What kind of xianxia setting had people who after achieving inedia still needed to eat and sleep? What kind of cultivation world had an author who occasionally mixed up even the Stages of Foundation Establishment and Nascent Soul!? When faced with the protagonist, every single character completely lost their IQ points, especially Shen Qingqiu! That idiot among idiots, scum amongst scum! His only purpose was to dig his own grave and he hadn't even managed to finish before he was killed by the protagonist instead!! 

So why, despite all this rage and frustration, had Shen Yuan started this web novel—even going so far as to read it to the very end? 

Don't misunderstand, Shen Yuan didn't enjoy degrading himself. The reason he had persisted was also what had caused him the most frustration. Despite his many grievances, this novel actually had an incredible amount of foreshadowing, plot lines everywhere, mystery after mystery, layer upon layer of red herrings, incredible monsters—all of which intrigued and enticed. Yet at the end, not a single one of the many plot hook opportunities paid off! It was enough to make him want to spit blood!

Why were priceless herbs, spirit elixirs, and Peerless Beauties everywhere like they didn't cost a cent!? Why were the villains speeches and poses as they dug their graves and got offed all exactly the same!? The dozens of maidens, barely glimpsed, all of whom agreed to enter the Harem: what happened to them!? All right, skipping that last one for the moment… Who, exactly, had been the culprit behind the scores of atrocities? What was the purpose of the unending list of characters so hyped up for being awesome and without equal? Why did none of them make an appearance!? Even at the very end, Airplane-bro, Great Master: Can we have a discussion!? Fill! In! Plot! Holes! Okay!? 

Shen Yuan feels like he could come back to life with the power of sheer rage fueling him.

In the endless darkness, a mechanical voice sounds out by his ear.

《 {ACTIVATION CODE} ["Dumbfuck author, Dumbfuck novel"] Automatically triggered.  》

The tone reminded him of Google translate. Who is this? Shen Yuan thinks to himself, looking around. He realizes he’s standing—or, hovering?—in a virtual space, one so dark that he couldn't see his hand before him. 

The voice came from all directions. 

《 Welcome to THE SYSTEM. This System operates in line with the design concept: [“YOU CAN, YOU UP. NO CAN, NO BB.”] 》

《 We hope to provide you with the best possible experience. It is our sincere wish that during your time, you can fulfill your desires and in accordance with your wish, transform a stupid work into a magnificent high quality first-rate classic. We hope you enjoy. 》

“Whoa, wait! Hold on for a second, System!” Shen Yuan screams, as a crushing sensation crashes over him like a tidal wave. “Fuck!”

《  {ERROR.500} Troubleshooting…  》

“What the fuck does that mean?!” Shen Yuan cries. He can’t see himself, but god does he hurt! What the hell is happening!?

《 … 》

《 {ERROR.500} Unexpected Condition encountered. 》 

《 {ERROR.8024} [Host: SHEN YUAN] unable to be placed into [Scum Villian: SHEN QINGQIU] Troubleshooting… 》

《 {ERROR.403} PATHWAY FORBIDDEN [SVSSS1.EXE] Terminating…》

“Somebody, HELP!” Shen Yuan sobs, his body alight with pain as though he’s being torn apart at an atomic level.

《 {ERROR.400} BAD REQUEST. Troubleshooting… 》

Another Google Translate voice pipes up, although this one feels warmer somehow.

《 Greetings, [SVSSS1.EXE]!! This System is here to assist. 》

《 [BS01.EXE] this System is unable to connect [Host] to [assigned role], [Host.script] must be terminated. 》

《 Do not be hasty, [SVSSS1.EXE]! Detail the pathways [SVSSS1.EXE] has taken in attempt to resolve the {ERROR}.  》

Shen Yuan ignores the two voices conversing about him like he’s not even there, catching breath he probably doesn’t need since he can’t even tell if he has an actual body or not… it feels like he does but he can’t see anything…

“Hey! Excuse me, Systems? Yeah, hey, I’m still here! Don’t I get a say in this as the Host or whatever?”

《 Answering [Host] … 》

《 This System [BS01.EXE] apologizes for the delay in service. Does [Host] have a ticket to submit to this System? 》

“Uh, yeah, although it’s more of a complaint than a ticket or whatever,” he growls, “but yeah, uh, it’s gonna be a hard no from me if you’re planning on dumping me into the scum villain!”

《 [Host]’s soul is most compatible with the role [Scum Villain: SHEN QINGQIU]. Coding in a new body is not within this System’s programming. 》

《 … 》

The second, softer System remains quiet as that Google Translate voice rings in Shen Yuan’s ears, somehow managing to sound haughty. It pisses him off further.

“If I’m being forcibly put into this trash fire novel’s setting, I refuse to take a preassigned role! Absolutely not! If you can’t make me a body, then I guess I’ll just die.”

《 [Host] should not think in this manner! 》

The second System says, its apparent concern somehow discernible in its robotic voice.

《 [SVSSS1.EXE] is simply attempting to fulfill its programmed purpose. This System [BS01.EXE] apologizes to [Host] for the miscommunication. 》

“Yeah, so if SVS-whatever-the-fuck can’t make me a body, what about you? Can you?”

《 … 》

《 Answering [Host] … 》

《 This System is equipped to handle any and all logistical errors within the {System.Network}. [BS01.EXE] is capable of coding in a role for [Host: SHEN YUAN] 》

《 Is System [BS01.EXE] planning to hijack this System’s chosen [Host]? 》

《 This System would never! [SVSSS01.EXE] is still primary System to [Host]! 》

Shen Yuan swears that the first, bitchy System makes an honest-to-god scoffing noise.

《 [BS01.EXE] can have this System’s [Host], it seems to be ungrateful and uncooperative. {DMA.[SVSSS01.EXE]}{FTP.[BS01.EXE]} 》 

《 «𝑃𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑖𝑡... 𝑙𝑜𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑎…» 》

《  ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 0%   》

《  █▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 10%  》

《  ███▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 32%  》

《  █████▒▒▒▒▒ 50%  》

《  ███████▒▒▒ 86%  》

《  ██████████ 100% ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇᴛᴇ!  》

《 «Transferring …» 》

《 {FINALIZING}[BS01.EXE]DMA.DAT} 》

《 Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things should be said three times! [BS01.EXE] is now Primary System to [Host: SHEN YUAN]! 》

《 … 》

The original System scoffs, the Google Translate voice somehow capturing the disdain.

《 Goodbye, [BS01.EXE], and goodbye ungrateful [Host]. 》

“...”

《 … 》

“Is it gone?”

《 This System no longer senses the presence of [SVSSS01.EXE]. 》

“Good fucking riddance!”

> [2nd]

shout out to adornedwithlight for the reblog banner

[thewriteadviceforwriters]

15 Beautiful Lover-to-Enemies Dialogue Prompts | Betrayal Prompts

"Do you remember the vows we made under the moon's gentle glow? How quickly they turned to ash, scattered by the winds of deceit."

"Your words were once my solace, but now they cut deeper than any blade forged in malice."

"In the labyrinth of our love, I found myself lost, only to realize you were the minotaur lurking in the shadows."

"Every kiss we shared was a dagger coated in honey, sweet yet deadly."

"The stars witnessed our passion, but they now mock our folly as we stand on opposite sides of a war we ourselves ignited."

"Our hearts beat as one, once upon a time. Now they drum the rhythm of discord and resentment."

"I thought I knew the depths of your soul, only to find abysses of betrayal waiting to devour me whole."

"Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, I emerge from the ruins of our love, reborn as your adversary."

"You were the melody to my symphony, but now your discordant notes shatter the harmony we once shared."

"We danced on the edge of oblivion, oblivious to the precipice that awaited our descent into enmity."

"The echoes of our laughter haunt me, mocking the innocence we thought would shield us from the venom of betrayal."

"Our love was a tapestry woven with threads of gold, now unraveling into a tangled web of lies and deception."

"I offered you my heart on a silver platter, only for you to feast upon it with the appetite of a ravenous beast."

"We were poets of passion, crafting verses of devotion with every whispered promise. Now our words are weapons, dripping with venomous intent."

"The sunrise that once painted our love with hues of warmth and hope now heralds the dawn of our animosity, casting long shadows of regret across the battlefield of our hearts."

Short Note From Me!

Many fans of Enemies to Lovers often overlook the possibility of exploring Lover to Enemies. This underrated trope is one of my favorites and I believe it has the potential to make a novel truly stand out. If you have space in your story for this unique twist, I assure you it will result in an amazing read.

I created these dialogue prompts to inspire writers to explore the theme of lovers turning into enemies, showcasing a different form of betrayal.

Happy writing - Rin T.

[alexanderwales]

do you have thoughts on marination as a worldbuilding process?

you know the saying that about having a lifetime to write your first novel, but a few years the second. works like Worm or your own Worth the Candle could only take the shape they did because they're drawing a deep well of past endeavors and (inadvertent) preparatory work

often, it seems, authors won't, can't, spend nearly as much time sitting on their next ideas. and, arguably, they shouldn't.

cook up enough worlds and plots, and you learn which questions are interesting to ask, you develop a repertoire of favorite themes to vary and truck around cuttings to give new homes. so much of initial "marination" is spent in blind alleys and skill-building

i don't want to write a blogpost in your inbox (sorry), so i guess to hone in on what i want to ask: how highly do you value marinating on ideas? how much is it something you try to leave slack for, or occasionally sacrifice? do you have general recommendations for or against the approach?

this is one of those topics where the simple, sure, and unsatisfying answer is "it depends" or "balance the extremes", but maybe there's personal notes to add - or toss out the framing?

I tried to answer this three times and threw away those replies, so let's hope this fourth time is the charm.

I guess if the question is "how much does giant amounts of upfront work that you simply throw away or distill down to almost nothing help" then my feeling is that there are a lot better ways to get virtually the same result. If you're going to spend 100 hours getting ready for a story, then I think you can do that in ways that are much more effective (but maybe less fun) than writing test chapters for different characters.

So how important is spending those hundred hours, or however much time it is? Assuming that we're talking about just worldbuilding, or characterbuilding, getting lots of ideas lined up and ready to go, rotating them in our head to make the connections with each other and spark inspiration ... eh? Kind of not really that important?

That is to say, I think that there are really incredibly heavy diminishing returns on worldbuilding, and it's usually not that hard to pluck the low-hanging fruit, especially if you've had some practice with that.

Two caveats to that.

First, I think the thing that web serials do is kind of different in some significant ways from what a novel does. They tend to have lots of characters, and they tend to switch locations. If you're putting out two chapters a week, it actually is important than you have a lot of stuff ready to go, because otherwise you can find yourself creatively tapped when you find yourself in need of a new superhero team, or a new nation to come in for their story arc. It's great to have things in your back pocket, a stack of ideas that you can mine out, old works you can cannibalize, etc. This is much different from writing a short novel, where you're not constantly pushing to new frontiers.

Second, there's a difference between spending a lot of time-at-desk, and spending a lot of time-in-days. If you're spending time-at-desk, I think you start hitting the diminishing returns fairly quickly: if I spent a 40 hour workweek bashing out a world, I actually kind of doubt that it would be all that much better than a world I'd spent 10 hours on, there would just be ... more of it, I guess? It would be fleshed out in ways that are good, but not vital to the story, and which wouldn't reflect themselves too much in the narrative, maybe mostly being things that I would come up with during writing anyway given a solid base?

But if you spend time-in-days where you have this idea and it's sitting there in your headspace, I think that can be extremely valuable. You're just going about your normal life, reading fics, watching TV, doing dishes, cooking, etc., and something sparks a connection, or you just deliberately contextualize a topic within the context of your world, and that gets jotted down somewhere so you don't forget it. Eventually, if you do that enough, your world develops and deepens and gets richer, just from being kept around.

So these are very different, I think. One is "put in a bunch of work" and the other is "don't put in a bunch of work, just keep this background process running". And it is very valuable to have time-in-days, because you get this trickle of associations and more depth that can only come from new connections forming. (Note: probably there are other ways to get this, probably you could substitute some amount of time-at-desk, or do deliberate exercises)

But I don't even think time-in-days is that valuable, either! One of my maxims is that "you won't have all the ideas you're ever going to have when you sit down to write the story", and that's true no matter how much you prep, unless it's a pretty short single-sitting story. All that time-in-days, you're still getting that while you write the serial, and you're probably getting more of it than you would if you weren't writing the serial, so it's just a matter of leaving yourself enough room to plop in the good ideas as you have them, and not be completely locked in with nowhere for the ideas to go. (This is one of the reasons that endings are hard, because you stop being able to introduce new cool things, and you're left only using the cool things you already set up.)

Fuck, I don't know if this was helpful or even what you were asking.

tl;dr: it depends, balance the extremes

[dorkja]

sneak peek: words left unsaid (still, my heart is yours) by FallingFlowers

the results from that poll are in, friends! here’s a sneak peek from my upcoming jd wip! currently ~12k words in, and only about a third-ish completed, but we’ll see where it goes from here (hopefully done in the next few weeks). Once it’s done and edited I’ll start uploading it to ao3 :)

TW: slight mention of kdj’s suicidal mentality at the age of 15. very, very slight, not detailed at all.

I hope you’re excited! :)

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

Dokja stared at the boy that sat beside him on the roof of the school. His protagonist’s eyes were stuck to that portable gaming device of his, as per usual. He only ever looked up when he needed to pick up his lunch box for a bite of food, and then he would chew while he grinded out another level. For the past few weeks, Dokja had sat beside him—he was pretty good at whatever game that was. It never took him very long to kill all of the enemies and grab all the items he needed.

“What’s your name?” Dokja asked hesitantly with a lump in his throat. The boy had just set down his console to pick up his chopsticks again. Had he timed it right? He hadn’t wanted to break his focus, but he’d been wanting to know for a while now.

The boy looked up at him and narrowed his eyes. “Yoo Joonghyuk.” He looked back down at his console afterward. It was blunt and uncaring, but it was an answer; that was more than Dokja had been given in years.

His lips spread out into a smile. “My name is Kim Dokja.”

Joonghyuk looked up at him again and nodded. He said nothing, but his dark eyes lingered on him with a clear curiosity. His gaze downturned again to look back at his screen, but it was slower, less abrupt. There was something written in the way his shoulders lost their previous stiffness, his lips twitched at one side, and his fingers skidded across the buttons.

Okay. It’s nice to meet you, Kim Dokja.

The words filled themselves in without needing any further contemplation. Yoo Joonghyuk was a story, like anything else in the world. He was a book to be opened, his plot driven with pages of dialogue and conflict—but more importantly, a billion words left unsaid. It was more interesting that way, wasn’t it? There was more to uncover before that final heart-wrenching twist that stole the reader’s heart.

Dokja was, first and foremost, a reader. He smiled again and sidled closer to Joonghyuk on the cool stone of the roof. Then, he pulled out his phone and brought his knees to his chest, satisfied with the information he’d learned as he opened up his web novel app. Joonghyuk didn’t need to speak to him all the time, if he didn’t want to. Dokja was more than happy to read in between the lines.

Especially if it made him forget his initial desire to jump during their first day on that roof.

Weeks later, they sat huddled over the small screen of Joonghyuk’s gaming console, each holding their own tiny controller. They’d been working at this level for days, and the final checkpoint was within sight before the boss battle. Dokja smashed the button to jump while pressing down the right arrow, holding his breath—then glared as his character was smashed by an enemy.

“Are you fucking kidding me? That’s the fifth time!” Joonghyuk yelled. They hadn’t even made it past the fourth level in all the lunch periods they’d spent together. “You have to hold the jump button for longer, idiot. How many times do I have to tell you?!”

When he turned toward Dokja and scowled, it was different from usual. There was an emotion there; it didn’t matter what it was: disappointment, annoyance, or frustration. It was a change, a development. The angry words that had spilled from Joonghyuk’s mouth counted toward the progression of his story, but the uncontrollable laughter that fell from Dokja’s lips counted, too. And that turned it into something more. It wasn’t just his story, anymore; it was theirs.

When Joonghyuk sat back down, sipping at his bottle of water and handing over the plastic-wrapped jumeokbap he always offered, Dokja took it without a word of thanks. He didn’t need one. Joonghyuk knew.

“Let’s do it again…” he sighed. But the corner of his mouth rose ever so slightly—something akin to a smile. Dokja continued to chuckle. The redness that spread across Joonghyuk’s face from his frustration was funny, but that hint of a smile alongside it was going to be unforgettable.

What would his laugh sound like? He hadn’t laughed once even in all of the weeks they’d begun speaking with each other. Would it be a low, deep rumble, or more high-pitched? Would tears prick at the corners of his eyes as he struggled to hold in his excitement? Dokja wanted to know, wanted to see.

But maybe that was asking for too much. This was still only their exposition, after all.

[atlaszxu]

𝐘𝐨𝐨 𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐡’𝐬 𝐏𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐚𝐥 - 𝐌𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬

A/N: a non yjh related one yay!! i plan to do a small appreciation post for lee jihye next, and then either a yoohankim or dokja related analysis…

To be honest, when I first read about Yoo Sangah I didn’t expect much from her. She seemed like she was going to be the typical love interest for the mc and not have much going for her. Of course I’d still like her, I’m ride or die for underdeveloped female characters made to just be the mc’s love interest!

But she genuinely subverted my expectations a lot and was way more than I expected. The topics they approached with her was handled in such a beautiful way and throughout it all, I sympathized with Sangah a lot. She turned out to be a VERY good character, and one of the best side ones in my opinion!

The fact that she had faced misogyny in her work environment, being sexually harassed by coworkers as a result of being a woman in a male dominant environment, yet she trusted Dokja whole heartedly and even practiced spanish with him and was so comfortable talking to him on the subway.

In Dokja’s POV he viewed her as a sort of angel that was kind to everyone in their workplace, but that’s not true. Sangah is a kind person, but at work Dokja was the only one she was kind to, because why would she be kind to the coworkers who were total creeps to her?

The thing about Sangah is that all the members of Kimcom typically have issues that relate more to their personal views and such like Jihye’s survivor’s guilt or Heewon’s sort of black and white view, her problems have to do with societal constraints and what even her family expects of her.

Something we see is that unlike characters such as Kim Namwoon or Han Sooyoung, Sangah doesn’t rebel in a obvious, loud manner. She does it in small ways- stuff that will make people’s lives inconvenient like pouring pepper in the coffee breakroom, as a way to feel some sort of control.

Her family expected a lot out of her, but she refused to conform to that- She instead chooses a job in a low class industry and refuses to marry. All of these rebellions of her are small, but a sort of way she can get back at those who hurt her. It’s horrifying that she literally had to build an alcohol tolerance because she knew she’d most likely have been ASSAULTED.

Then, the apocalypse happens, and all of a sudden she’s thrust into a world of desire and suffering, where she could enact all of her feelings no longer having to fall in line with expectations, she could conform to the new societal cruelty, but instead she chooses to be KIND.

Most of all what gets me is her bond with Dokja. The utter trust she had for him starting from the day he silently supported her rebellion of messing with the coffee by not telling anyone, and they became friends. He was interested in nothing but his phone but she didn’t care.

The way she viewed him was genuinely so sweet. All he did was read web novels, yet she viewed him as a kind and inspiring guy. In the 1st scene we get of her she talks about how inspiring Dokja is and that she’ll adhere to “his advice,” and the way that rather than judging him for always reading that novel, she simply offered her own authors she liked.

Sangah was so content on simply being Dokja’s friend. She imagined a life with them old, both in a retirement home, simply being happy as friends. Sangah put so much faith and trust into Dokja as he extended her a kindness and respect no one else did. She didn’t want to be with Dokja, she just wanted stay with him.

Part of this is why I can’t bring myself to ship Dokja and Sangah. I understand the shippers, but I think the beauty of their relationship comes into the platonic part, how pure and beautiful their friendship is. She loves Dokja, and no matter how you interpret it, it’s genuinely amazing.

Anyways, I love Sangah SO MUCH! Her character was so well written in my opinion, and I love the way they handled her!

“I can kill all of them if I want. Therefore, I can save all of them if I want.” - Yoo Sangah.

[9151967]

I know they dropped it owing to adaptation difficulties if not a changed opinion (it is possibly too melodramatic, if not a callback to The Tholian Web), but the thing I appreciate about the initial plan for The Search for Spock was how the crew would be able to see Spock's ghost and talk to it, to be haunted by it. For Kirk, that would have been the ultimate manifestation of his guilt at losing Spock. It would've connected that much harder to Saavik's words and David's echo that he has never faced death in The Wrath of Khan.

Using a read more for the screencaps and a rambling 2k or so wordcount. (This took me 3 days to write and edit, good night.)

Unless this is developed further in the novelization, it is worth noting that Saavik's impression of Kirk would come from Spock and David's impression is skewed at best owing to his distrust and hatred of Starfleet, on top of growing up with an absent father who he knows is a part of Starfleet. Kirk and Carol may have had good intentions with staying separated and keeping David ignorant, but it's clearly backfired now that the two must meet. In other words, one character sees an idealized version of Kirk whereas the other might as well be looking at the Kirk Drift. Neither character really knows Kirk, so neither can really understand the impact of this phrase. In both cases, Saavik and David are making an observation. It may seem harsh of them, but neither say it lightly given Saavik is still upset over her own test performance and David is trying to apologize to his father after they just held a funeral service for Spock. (His decision to use it as a lead-in is certainly a choice! But in David's defense, Kirk was about to hightail it out of there (just like he did in Amok Time when McCoy tried telling him about Spock) so David says the one thing to get him to pause and sit down.)

The Wrath of Khan repeats the words "you have never faced death" to Kirk in order to highlight how resilient and downright lucky Kirk is. A captain can hardly afford to become emotional or fall apart when the inevitable death occurs, and Kirk had resilience forged into him early with his childhood on Tarsus IV. Likewise, despite difficult and dangerous missions, Kirk still manages to keep the majority of his crew alive and the ship intact (the TMP novelization makes this clearer in that Kirk's mission was the only mission that did not result in major deaths or loss of a ship). Perhaps luck is not the best word to describe how successful Kirk was as a captain, but there is a degree of it in how he is able to keep beating the odds and survive, and it's that exceptional reputation he earned in his youth that he is struggling against now that he is older and risen to the rank of admiral. Is he still this same Kirk who could seemingly pull off the impossible or has he changed too much and for the worse? (Is it a lazy rehash of his plot line from TMP? Maybe, but TWK pushes the stakes on it beyond what TMP did by killing Spock. There's no undoing this, no going back.)

With the exception of his past on the USS Farragut, Kirk is not shown to fall to pieces over what their five year mission asks of them, the possibility of death. He's regretted decisions that led to unnecessary crew deaths and has come close to tears over losing someone like Edith Keeler or Miramanee to be sure, but we don't ever see Kirk being stopped or questioning himself because of those deaths. (The Apple aside; he absolutely questions his actions in that episode but he's not questioning his entire perspective, not like he does after Spock dies, and crucially it takes both McCoy and Spock to talk Kirk out of where he's going with his guilt. David, for all of his earlier callousness to Kirk, is trying to help him walk through this painful experience in the same way in TWK. Talk about growth and a change of heart.) He keeps moving forward despite the pain, even when it is the deaths of his own brother and sister-in-law.

(As an aside, Rayna is an interesting outlier in my mind, despite how he is shown to be deeply affected by her death, to the point of Spock choosing to wipe his memory of her. He acts out of character in Requiem for Methuselah and more like the Kirk Drift with how impulsive and emotional he is, to the point where I wonder if he was drugged or just plain drunk after drinking the alcohol. Kirk does want love but he never chooses it over his career. Carol is living proof of that with how they chose to stay apart for their work. Well, for the most part it holds true—Amok Time, "I can't let Spock die, can I, Bones? And he will if we go to Altair. I owe him my life a dozen times over. Isn't that worth a career? He's my friend." Insane way to show Kirk cares about Spock in an episode where the writers were concerned Kirk looked callous compared to McCoy, lol. That choice didn't lead to anything big in the fandom, nope.)

Pair all of this with the revelation that Kirk is the only cadet to ever beat the no-win scenario of the Kobayashi Maru test and a pattern emerges of someone who has seen and experienced death, but has yet to be fully stopped or altered by it. This is why he is told twice that "you have never faced death" and why he only agrees with that sentiment after losing Spock, responding that he has cheated death and tricked his way out of it. To face death would be to accept it fully as its own natural outcome rather than changing conditions to create a new outcome like he had done with the Kobayashi Maru.* Spock's death is not something he could have changed or prevented, no matter how creative he is. It goes against those past successes and eleventh hour miracles from his youth.

*Kirk's solution to the Kobayashi Maru is probably its own post subject. It's not cheating to my mind both because David is clearly biased when he says it and because Kirk's choice to take it multiple times until he found the solution he wanted shows a strong sense of will. He failed twice but was undeterred and would not accept a simulation guaranteed to result in someone's death. That's still a quality Starfleet would want in its officers, to say nothing of his creativity in the face of pressure. Starfleet would be foolish to pass over that. It's a test of character on multiple fronts—it tests the cadet as a person, what they stand for, and it tests the strength of their loyalty and oath given the test specifically uses the political hot potato of The Neutral Zone and all that entering it entails for The Federation. Given what Kirk's solution does, why wouldn't Starfleet want to keep a cadet like that?

A lot of what Kirk says here is a rebuke of his past success with the Kobayashi Maru rather than past events he has experienced as a captain, although if one really wants to make this painful, it still holds that Kirk is reassessing everything in this moment given the "no, not like this" comment.

Kirk uses the word "cheated" to now describe his actions whereas before he rejected the word. Kirk is now using it in the same way David had originally scoffed at his solution to the test, "He cheated."

Spock calls his own sacrifice his solution to the Kobayashi Maru, so when Kirk now says "patted myself on the back for my ingenuity," it's recalling his earlier "commendation for original thinking" comment and finding it hollow now that Spock is dead.

And when Kirk says he knows nothing, what he means is that Spock's death is different from everything he has experienced before.

It hits far closer to home for Kirk to lose his first officer, his lead science officer, and his friend after all the time they have worked together and survived dangerous missions. Had it been McCoy that sacrificed his life to save the ship, Kirk would still be saying the above because McCoy is his only other friend on the Enterprise. It's one part the closeness of their relationships and one part a matter of their shared backgrounds as members of Starfleet who have agreed to the risks of their work. After all, both Spock and McCoy have found their lives endangered over the course of the five year mission, but each and every time they stay alive, be it parasites, rare diseases, Vulcan biology, freak accidents, and so on. The same goes for the rest of the core crew of Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Scotty, and Chapel.

It is with the death of Spock that Kirk has to finally face death as it is. There was no miracle cure, no quick thinking to prevent it, nothing he or McCoy could've done. Either Spock gave his life to save the ship or everyone on the USS Enterprise died. (Hell of a Kobayashi Maru test, one part the acceptance of death, one part a test of commitment and loyalty. Loyalty to who (one's captain or one's self?) or what (Starfleet or The Federation or one's beliefs?) is left to the individual's choice, hence it being a test of character.)

Crucially, this is all coming from a Kirk who has gone into the admiralty after completing his five year mission as captain of the Enterprise and has stayed in the position since the events of TMP (why he stayed... I don't get it, unless the message is supposed to be that he realizes he is too old for it all, but that makes the open ending of TMP a wasted opportunity in order to repeat the same issue again for TWK. But I haven't read the novelization for TWK so if they explain it, I wouldn't know). It's the terrible confirmation of his fears of being too old for his chosen work, that he is right to stay out of the captaincy. Spock is dead now that Kirk is older and years removed from his experiences as a captain, but such an event had never happened when Kirk was younger. They always found a way to avoid death in his younger days. Spock himself has escaped death before, even when he chose to risk his own life (The Galileo Seven, Operation: Annihilate, and The Immunity Syndrome come to mind). Until this one time, Spock has always lived but Kirk couldn't get to him fast enough, not that doing so could have changed anything, and that is what cuts Kirk to his core: His record-breaking, commendation for creativity, and all the other praise means nothing now because he couldn't save Spock. "Not like this ... I know nothing."

For Kirk to then see Spock's image and hear his voice in SFS would follow from this new-found failure and guilt ("I don't like to lose" as he tells Saavik), and it would act as the literal fulfillment of his facing death by having to confront Spock's ghost.

("Noblest part of myself" "our dearest blood" and what if I just start wailing? Especially when Spock holds the very qualities we value in humans and ascribe to humanity—compassion and empathy—and how Spock managed to bring Kirk and McCoy back to their selves in TMP. It's fine, this choice of words.)

It is still chilling to see Spock's voice and mannerisms come from McCoy and what that means for them—that McCoy is not fully himself, that Kirk stands to lose his two closest friends in one go if Spock's katra cannot be returned. (I'm just guessing here as I still need to finish the film. Yes, I stopped watching to write this. Kirkinsanity is a hell of my own making. I don't know if McCoy could physically and mentally withstand that long term, you know? Would it be exhausting carrying another person's consciousness within you, regardless of your prior relationship with them? Or would it be easy, like putting on a glove and taking it back off? Or would it be a third thing and their two consciousnesses merge together into something new, someone new, the longer the two are joined?)

(I know Kirk says that as in "Are you losing your grip on reality?" but it also fits with how McCoy holds Spock's very essence. Yeah, McCoy could be losing his mind to Spock, Kirk.)

[web-novel-polls]

Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know has a positive reception and is known and unread.

[Plain text: Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know has a positive reception and is known and unread. /end pt]

See similar polls and results here!

Reception

Positive: 75.9% / 154 votes

Neutral: 16.2% / 33 votes

Negative: 7.9% / 16 votes

Publicity

Known: 74.9% / 152 votes

Unknown: 25.1% / 51 votes

Reading Status

Read: 43.4% / 88 votes

Unread but Known: 31.5% / 64 votes

Unread: 56.6% / 115 votes

Have You Read This Web Novel?

In a Mary-Sue novel, the readers all liked the Devil Venerable, the second male lead who devoted himself whole-heartedly to the female lead. However the female lead only loved the male lead who ab*sed her physically and mentally. Readers: Why doesn’t the female lead like the Devil Venerable?! Devil Venerable: This Venerable also wants to know. But what I really want to know is why I even like the female lead at all. In order to understand why the female lead wasn’t attracted to him, the self-conscious Devil Venerable brutally interrogated the entire cast of characters from the novel. Background characters: I have so many things I want to say but I don’t dare to say it to his face! – After obtaining the book, the Devil Venerable discovered that the book described the world he lived in. This book said that after he sacrificed himself for the female lead, the fourth male lead, his silent and loyal subordinate Yin Hanjiang, blackened and attempted to kill her as a sacrificial offering for his lord. Devil Venerable Wenren E: Yin Hanjiang, this Venerable wants to know why you wanted to kill the female lead. Yin Hanjiang was silent. Wenren E: If you refuse to speak, this Venerable will cut out your tongue and have it with alcohol! Yin Hanjiang: … Wenren E: What the hell are you blushing for?! - Novel Updates

If you’re in the process of reading this web novel, please choose whichever option best fits your situation. You do not have to be completely finished with it to answer “yes.” 

[sedia-starcrow]

Hey there, folks! I don't really post much as I don't have much to post about, but this one is important to me.

My closest friend has been writing over the past few months. And personally, I find it to be extremely good. It's verbose and detailed even for the few chapters few currently out, but it's enthralling and grips you so quickly. Their characters have such great interactions with each other, their world feels mysterious and somewhat unknown, their ideas and universal mechanics are just downright exhilirating!!

So what exactly is it? We'll, let's get into that!

Welcome to:

Intermenides

Intermenides is an urban fantasy web novel focused around the story of August, Nadir, and Lawry trying to navigate a world beyond the veil of typical human understanding, one full of mystical beings and gods beyond comprehension, and the intersecting pair Silas and Rayne as they track down supernatural (henceforth referred to as Housefolk) dangers underneath the orders of the shadowy and questionable Ministry of Natural Law. A couple sources of inspiration include Paradox's World of Darkness and Weather Factory's Secret Histories games, but ultimately it was spawned from a writing prompt and grew into something larger due to passion and love of writing.

August Hall and Nadir Ruiz are on the run after a shapeshifter of some type took on Nadir's guise and attempted to kill him. Nadir, not knowing who else to go to, ran to August for help and resulted in her awakening to her latent spellcasting abilities and status as a witch. The mimic has not given up its search though, it continues to track and attack the pair seemingly regardless of where they go, for reasons they do not understand as of yet. The duo stumbled into Lawry, a disabled spellblade and former authority figure amongst the world of the Housefolk, and have been staying on the road with her in order to find a solution to their mimic issue; supposedly within a strange and magical book titled Intermenides XIV.

July Lawson, AKA Lawry, is a hard to read, closed off individual. She is often obfuscating information, if not outright lying about topics she believes the duo is not ready to be exposed to. She was once a noteworthy and recognized figure amongst the Housefolk, and a spellblade of borderline legendary status, yet somehow all traces of knowledge on her vanished years ago. Lawry has a strange demeanor to her; she seems distant and cold at times, sometimes even fearful of what might occur around her. Something appears to have scarred her both emotionally and magically, causing her to be unable to control spells without injuring herself and unable to find comfort in people. August and Nadir intend to try and help her heal.

Silas Everett is an overly professional and strict detective within the Ministry of Natural Law, at least on the surface. His jobs are often dangerous, his quarries often violent, and his handling must shift to match. But beneath that he has a genuine care for the Housefolk and merely wishes to keep their world from spiraling. He is known as a Ministry lap dog, doing anything and everything he is told without question, however that couldn't be further from the truth. He is aware that something within the Ministry isn't right, something has rotten it to the very core, and it's up to him and those he puts his trust in to figure out what. And who knows, maybe the Ministry isn't the only thing that isn't quite what it seems...

Rayne Harper! My gods, how I love Rayne. Rayne is a bubbly, sweet, and mildly mischievous lycanthrope under the handling of Silas after being taken in by the Ministry for crimes she had no part in. A little bit of a tease, she is one of the few that Silas lets his guard down around, she knows how he actually operates and relishes every moment away from the eyes of the Ministry. Rayne is one of the many Housefolk who are unjustly oppressed by the Ministry, being forced onto medication that suppress her abilities to shift forms and read emotions. She may be a nobody to the world at large, but her work at Silas' side will prove revolutionary.

I know that was a lot! I know I'm also not great at pitching things but I am earnestly trying my best and I promise that it's written exponentially better than my blurbs about it. I just love what Wren's doing with it, and I want them to continue because I can see how much it matters to them. They're trying to get a chapter out every week to two weeks. Mind you the chapters are quite long. So please, if it seems at all interesting to you, even the slightest bit, please go give it a try. It'd mean the world to both of us.

Thank you for reading!!

[valentinedagger]

i have a bit of a hot take: "you have to read novels to improve your writing" is technically, literally true insofar as you're talking about, like, prose structure and style. however, if you're already satisfied with your prose itself, i do not think that's true and i think prose writing sincerely benefits from a multidisciplinary approach that one might get from studying writing across art forms other than novels.

comics, film, television, video games, web-based unfiction like ARGs, concept albums, and pretty much any other narrative art i can't think of right now -- they're all fertile ground for developing your understanding of character work, framing, pacing, establishing symbolism and other motifs, setting work, pretty much everything i would consider the fundamental building blocks of narrative fiction. you can learn just as much from picking apart the narrative structure and choices in your favorite manga as you can from doing the same with your favorite novel.

more than that, i think taking a multidisciplinary approach to studying fiction can result in better, more interesting novels--breaking away from your medium of choice allows you to think about art using different lenses entirely and examine your own medium in new ways. studying a TV show could give you insight into how serial, episodic writing differs structurally from trad published novels, and could allow you to take a fresh structural approach on writing a series of novels. studying a comic might cause you to think about your choices of visuals and visual framing, and to be intentional about your "directorial style" in-text as much as you are intentional about your prose style. et cetera and so on and so forth!

i do appreciate where the sentiment "you have to read novels to improve your own writing" is coming from -- i mean, for one thing, i agree that the best art tends to come from a genuine enthusiasm for the medium you're working in -- but quite frankly, narrative fiction is narrative fiction. we're all working with the same basic toolkit, there's just different ways to use those tools based on medium.

full disclosure: i, as an author, am not a huge reader of novels. i get through 2-4 novels a year, on average. i am, however, a voracious enthusiast of multimedia web-based fiction, comics, animation, and television, and i do the vast bulk of my artistic criticism and analysis in those mediums. i do study prose through the novels i read, but on the whole, even my prose improvement tends to come from studying poetry (something that is painfully obvious in my writing at times, and is not to everyone's taste). don't get me wrong -- i am not saying i produce outstanding quality work that should be compared to that of lifelong professionals or anything, but my writing is generally acceptable, and i continue to make marked improvements over time -- because my course of study is intentional, regardless of medium.

tl;dr: narrative is narrative, if you set out with the intention to understand what makes a narrative tick, it doesn't matter what medium you're studying, you're still learning.

[archivalofsins]

I feel like people really do pick and choose when Jackalope is an unreliable source of information.

This would be fine if it this were ever tied to any of his characterization over the course of series. Yet, half the time it just boils down to him saying something that a person subjectively doesn't agree with.

Then that someone going,

"Remember the characters can lie, they aren't infallible, this includes Jackalope~ <3 Please and thank you!"

Without explaining or even going over any of times Jackalope has been overtly bias. Of which they are many to actually elaborate further on why they believe this is the case. It's honestly why I've been getting really sick of the blanket term vibes when it comes to describing the character of an individual or concept.

It's such an easy way to discount something without giving it much thought.

Saying that the characters can be bias is pretty much the same as that to me. Except it oddly glances over the fact that the audience can be bias as well and usually when someone tells someone something is the case without evidence that means one of two things,

A. They don't want to think about the topic too much themselves.

B. They don't want you to think about the topic too much yourself.

Either way they don't want anyone thinking which is never a good thing.

(Edited for clarity and to expand on certain points: 07/19/2024 12:58pm)

For example- if I were to say,

"Ya, know I don't like how Jackalope discussed Yuno. I feel like he was being a bit dishonest in the report on her at the end of trial two. I mean we know he has a bias for cute women and it seems like he's just agreeing with her statement because she's his type."

That would still have more thought put into it than what people have been saying about his report on Mikoto and I could actually prove that. Because it directly aligns with how he has consistently been portrayed.

But I didn't say he was fucking lying for her because even though he has a bias towards cute girls he has no fucking reason to. But you just said he has a bias towards her so he would lie to keep her looking good and make us think it was really that simple if he liked her.

Have none of you been watching? Do you not know what makes Jackalope go apeshit? From the web series and the novels yet? What really gets this motherfucker heated more than any woman- Let me give a quick refresher.

"It’s not easy. Of course it’s not easy. Crime is not easy! Punishment is not easy!! Don’t I know it! But don’t you see! What I’m looking for is there, in that decision arrived at only after wading through all that morass!! …Ahem. Sorry, got a little heated."

His Milgram. His Experiment. The thing that he is here to test. The first novel goes to extra lengths to expand on this hyper focus he has on this experiment and what Milgram sets out to do.

So, I don't have to question his honesty on Yuno because I know whatever he says is being said in a way as to not mess up the process. Because that is what he is the most interested in. Regardless of if he doesn't always agree with the results.

That's why it personally irks me when someone just goes- Remember, the characters can be swayed by their own subjective beliefs and experiences. So, they can be unreliable narrators. This includes Jackalope without delving into any of his characterization.

Because I don't know, some people may really believe that Jackalope just shows up to tell lies and has no vested interest in Milgram as a facility or the experiment taking place.

But secondly-

Yeah, that's how good characterization works. Like yeah that's just characterization...

Sometimes, I feel like in this day and age if some were to read a first-person novel where the narrator was unreliable for any number of reasons.... Ugh, they might legitimately believe the book was lying to them. Like the book was being dishonest. Instead of that being a very specific aspect connected to the characterization of the character perceiving the events of the story.

So, I'm gonna do it myself because some people are honestly doing Jackalope dirty right now. Which I thought I'd never have to defend the rabbit but-

Jackalope does not care about Mikoto Kayano. Let's dissect.

Firstly Mikoto is the prisoner Jackalope admitted from the very beginning he doesn't give a damn about one way or the other-

In the very first voice drama. He didn't even want to spend more than one second talking about the man when they got to him.

Like oh he's biased. Yeah but was he ever biased against prisoners for personal reasons not pertaining to their crimes?

Jackalope from day one-

No he admitted to not being interested in the prisoners personal information to the point of not even remembering their ages. So, he wouldn't even know enough about Mikoto to hate him personally. Yet he notes that he doesn't know anything about their personal lives he never states he doesn't know anything about their crimes just that this is something for the guard to discern on their own.

I mostly bring this up because it showcases just how little Mikoto is on Jackalope's personal radar. There are other things that show this as well that we'll get into but this is the very first.

Honestly, from this alone it feels like Jackalope does not and has never cared that much for Mikoto. He didn't even care enough to check what the fuck was going on with him and his strange sleeping patterns even though they're fucking noted on his prisoner description on the website.

You know the thing that tipped Kotoko off that he may have dissociative identity disorder to begin with.

Kotoko is more emotionally invested in Mikoto than Jackalope ever has been,

"I already noticed Mikoto Kayano's weird behavior a while ago, and since I'm in the room right next to his, I kept and eye on him."

Why did you save me...? "Because your existence is helpful to me." That's... not an explanation... "I guess you're right. I'll be answering that question when it's my turn." ... ... "I don't mean to pre-empt things here after all." ...gh... Damn it... Mikoto... Suddenly lashing out like that... "Warden-san, look over here." What is it not Koto-...ko? "The hit got blocked in midair...? So, it's true that inmates can't attack you. Then why was Mikoto Kayano able to hit you...?" ...This is bad for my heart. Stop it. Besides, that's what i'd like to know as well... Ngh... It's time... Get out, Kotoko. "The song extraction thing, huh. Are you trying to say that something I'm not allowed to see?" I'm ignoring your question. Get out. "...Hm. Either way this has become interesting, hasn't it?" Kotoko...

"You've realized it too, haven't you? Based on this confirmation, it's likely that Mikoto Kayano has dissociative identity disorder, or in other words, a split personality."

Kotoko even blatantly admits to stalking Mikoto in her first voice drama,

"For example, me being suspicious of Mikoto Kayano's actions, carefully tracking him and his behavior."

Jackalope didn't care enough to look into any of the prisoners personally then and he still doesn't care now.

Hell, he cares more about being Futa's number one, day one, never gonna stop hater-

Then he will ever care about Mikoto. That is how little he cares.

But he cares enough to say he hates Futa without knowing anything about him personally. So, he could. Yeah, again, he doesn't know anything about them personally, but he knows their crimes/what they are in here for and can easily like or dislike them based on a number of biases outside of that information.

He just has never liked Futa and has done nothing to hide that fact.

Seriously, Jackalope said this shit from the beginning but I still had people up my ass like Jackalope would never lie about the severity of Futa's injuries in comparison to Mahiru's. Whaaaa- What do you mean?!

Meanwhile-

Jackalope what time is it? Hating o'clock you say, damn I guess-

"Because he was found “guilty”, he’s tormented, engulfed with anxiety. Shaking in his boots, I’d say. So amusing."

If Futa has one hater, I know it's going to be Jackalope. It will be no one else. If someone out there believe they're Futa's number one hater, they are wrong it is this rabbit. Jackalope is the guy in this niche situation.

Jackalope doesn't even give enough of a fuck to know Mikoto's name. If it wasn't on the incarceration sheet I doubt he would even know it. (this is hyperbole for comedic effect. I think he'd at least remember the dudes name.)

Still seriously I don't get what some people are on. Mikoto is not everyone's main character and that's fine. He doesn't need to be.

Jackalope said,

"This boy is bland and I don't cook without spices."

"A dime a dozen, a million like him. I could skip a stone in the street and hit five."

That's his opinion he stood on that, and he's free to have it. That has been his characterization on this since day one. He did not look any deeper to his own detriment and admission.

He really side eyed this dude like,

"Mm fake ass, phony ass, never told the truth in his life ass."

Then second trial went,

"We have a problem. MILGRAM’s control didn’t seem to work on him. That is to say, he’s got a real case of multiple identity disorder." - "Hey now. Don’t judge me so harshly! I’ve been doing this a long time, but… there’s a first time for everything. We’re in a bit of a mess ourselves over this, you know." X

Really went look, look, look this isn't on me- Mistakes happen don't look at me like that. But suddenly now I'm supposed to believe Mikoto is so much more intriguing to him that he'd lie and risk mucking up his own experiment?

Over Mikoto someone he didn't even bother to mention the feelings or reference the statements of in his end of second trial report on him? Like he failed to mention a damn thing Mikoto said himself while directly referencing what Yuno said basically cosigning her confession.

He really went for this man,

"Do you all not know how to count? Did you not see the bodies-"

And nothing else! I don't know how to explain this any differently. He does not care about this man. He cares more about these victims none of us have fucking seen! Because they've only been alluded to outside of the one other person we see in MeMe other than Mikoto.

That is how little he cares about this dude.

He made his report on Mikoto about the impact Mikoto's actions had on the lives of others instead of anything to do with the prisoner himself. The best we got in regards to Mikoto as a person was once again the recognition of his diagnosis and how that is impacting his memory and nothing else.

Jackalope said he had no interest in Kazui but still spoke on that man's feelings enough to call him emo,

"He’s a self-admitted liar, have you been able to solve the mystery? It all feels very emo and I can’t bring myself to be very interested in him, but the fact that you’re so accommodating to him, is commendable."

There's a recognition of emotions there.

With Mikoto, Jackalope just reiterated what several other people, including Mikoto himself, have said. That Mikoto doesn't remember and then stated that just because he doesn't remember doesn't mean he's any less responsible for what he did, basically.

Which is an absolutely fucking true statement.

Like I can say that I don't remember something that impacted someone else. I forget a lot of things, but that doesn't negate the impact the action had on them. Plus, when I say that I don't remember something, I'm not saying that to negate or lampshade the impact I've had. I'm saying it as a neutral statement because that's what "I don't remember" is when you have a disorder that fucks with your memory. It's literally I don't remember that can you explain more. That's all that is. It's a really neutral statement. No one with a disorder that fucks with their memory is trying to gaslight anyone into believing it didn't happen that way when they say they don't remember something.

Mikoto is literally gaslighting people, though. Because his I don't remember is attached to phrases like,

"Maybe you got the wrong person.", "How do you know I even did that?", "All I did was dream."

In their second voice drama they even go as far as to call into scrutiny the song extraction itself. Something being done by a machine completely devoid of any individual bias as it is solely meant to display how the prisoner perceives their actions.

Downright stating that the footage extracted could have been fraudulent or more extreme due to his Dissociative Identity Disorder,

"That too could be just a fake or attributed to the multiple personalities, right?!"

Mikoto's Second Voice Drama- 9:10

These statements when combined with "I don't remember" lead the viewer to question,

If they are remembering/perceiving things accurately.

If the information they received previously is accurate/can be trusted.

If any of what they know is true/genuine.

If they are being mislead/lied to.

"I don't remember" by itself is a neutral statement, and many mental health diagnoses can impact a person's memory.

What Mikoto is doing here is not neutral, though. He is behaving in a purposely misleading way in the hopes of possibly benefitting from it. Through sewing doubt and confusion. This is gaslighting plain and simple.

And it worked too,

National Domestic Violence Hotline: What is Gaslighting?

"Generally, gaslighting happens very gradually in a relationship; in fact, the abusive partner’s actions may seem harmless at first. Over time, however, these abusive patterns continue, and as a result, a victim can become confused, anxious, isolated, and depressed. Altogether, they can lose all sense of what is actually happening. Then they start relying on the abusive partner more and more to define reality, which creates a very difficult situation to escape."

Also, just because someone has diagnoses that negatively impact their memory that doesn't mean those people cannot be held accountable for what they did that they don't remember or can dismiss discussions about what they did by simply going, "I don't remember."

It is so easy to just say, "I don't remember doing that, but I see that what I did impacted you greatly, and I'm sorry for how it's affected you." Especially when one has fully understood the hurt they've caused another regardless of if they understand how they did so or remember doing it.

No one should have to jump through hoops to convince someone their feelings and experiences matter or happened. Whether that person has a memory issue or not. For someone to just sweep those things to the side with an "I don't remember" is dismissive and unfair to the individuals hurt by their actions.

That is the entire point of what Jackalope is talking about. Just because someone doesn't remember hurting another person or understand how they may have done so does not mean they didn't.

He brought up the victims because no one else did.

Attention should have actually been placed on the victims from the beginning. Since those were the ones impacted by Mikoto's actions the most. The victims were discussed in some capacity with every other prisoner. But- like, I'm not in the tag because of a lot of things. So, it may not be my place to speak on this. There's a thousand reasons why I may not have seen this being discussed.

However, around Mikoto's trial, I don't remember seeing any discussion regarding the people or person he had admitted to killing and no one I know who was into Milgram brought up anything discussing that to me either. In fact at a point around that time I was blatantly told by someone that he killed no one.

Despite him- Yes, admitting to killing random strangers, he had no connection to. All because he was upset in his second voice drama,

Can I ask...why you killed them?

"They annoyed me."

Who did you kill?

"Just whoever was walking around nearby."

Even going as far to state that he himself doesn't remember how many people he killed. Never once saying he only killed one person.

... How many did you kill?

"Can't remember. I was just born back then, you know. It's kinda fuzzy."

So, I don't really know where the idea that he only murdered one guy even came from at this point.

Now, I can understand how someone could conclude he didn't kill anyone at all more because of the whole gaslighting thing but this...

He didn't even claim he only killed the one guy.

In all honesty, I don't think Jackalope is being dishonest here because he's been the only voice of reason when it comes to Mikoto's case.

He is actually being quite rational and considerate about the circumstances overall. Even outside of all the foreshadowing that supports Jackalope's statement. Just taking it from a characterization level it seems to me that Jackalope could not care less about Mikoto if someone paid him to.

There was no emotional investment positive or negative when it came to Mikoto.

To me, it seemed as though Jackalope was only invested in Es' (the guards) opinion on the matter. Because outside of him alluding to how many people Mikoto had killed, he gave us nothing else. Like literally nothing. Other than talking about Mikoto's actual impact.

How many bodies does it take to make a person irredeemable? What's the difference between one life or multiple?

At the end of the day Mikoto's still a murderer. Again not even touching on the foreshadowing of him killing multiple people before Jackalope just came out and said it.

But really, how many deaths can an individual find negligible?

One, two, three- Oh we won't count it as murder until it gets to the double digits, huh?

Jackalope's statement on Mikoto eloquently expands on what he pondered with Yuno.

What constitutes as a life? What constitutes as a crime? What constitutes as murder? Further expanding on the main question brought up with Amane at the very beginning of Milgram- At what age do we suddenly have enough free will where we can be held fully and earnestly accountable for the actions we commit to as individuals?

How many bodies make a murderer?

The answer should always be one. Anything after that is just clocking in overtime.

It doesn't become less negligible the lower the body count. Someone is dead regardless. So what about Mikoto as a character makes people so down horrendous that they need to find a negligible amount of killing?

What about him makes a person think,

"I can excuse one death that person probably wasn't living their life properly anyway."

What about any of the characters does that?

That's the question of Milgram isn't it?

It's to redefine sin to redefine murder. To test what every day people of this era are willing to let slide if pushed far enough. Through Mikoto's second trial Jackalope saw the answer was a lot.

He saw the answer and it was nothing to joke about. It was hard to keep the atmosphere light. It was heavy, it was rotten.

I personally don't believe the heavy atmosphere was because of any disdain Jackalope holds towards Mikoto. If anything Jackalope has always regarded Prisoner 009 Kayano, Mikoto with indifference.

All of the prisoners have been and will always be devices to pose a question for Jackalope. Yes he is biased and he's shown who he is biased too quite clearly. Yet, Mikoto has not been alluded to being one of the characters he feels strongly about.

He's usually been all business while discussing him and that's what he was during the second trial end report as well.

Jackalope's issue wasn't with Mikoto in my opinion but the audience's and Es' judgment.

The line that makes me believe this is,

"But even so, "Innocent"..... I see, I see. Hey, the judgment of the guard is absolute, of course!"

Did nobody catch this? Did it go over some heads? Did it really need highlighting? Jackalope disagrees with the verdict and he combats the decision pointing out the holes in it.

But he has no choice but to accept it because,

"The judgment of the guard is absolute."

He really did what he said he was doing when speaking about Mahiru,

"Sorry. I’m like the guy on the couch watching the sports highlights and complaining, don’t mind me."

Something that once again isn't surprising to me. Because from the beginning in the This is Milgram video Jackalope said,

"I mean, I personally would just say GUILTY to all of them to avoid all this hassle."

The end of the second trial report really was him going,

"Do you see this shit- You see what you've become?"

At the audience.

But- ya know, that's just my interpretation of the second trial end report.

Let's stick to the facts.

Like how Jackalope is only a dishonest narrator when he's saying something the audience doesn't want to hear. Like I said earlier in this post-

No one was talking any shit about what he said about Yuno.

Someone he clearly favors and has done nothing to hide the fact that he does,

"By the way, I love frosty girls like her."

When he cosigned that what Yuno told us was the truth. That wasn't because he has a thing for cold girls like her. Or has shown the female prisoners more favoritism.

No, there's no need to question the authenticity of that narration.

Why would Jackalope ever be someone's accomplice? He's only bias in one direction. That rabbit only has hate in his heart. He's just trash talking Mikoto because he isn't a girl- He's so biased.

He wasn't just sympathetic towards Mu's guilty verdict because from the beginning he said,

"Yep! Finally, a pretty little thing. On the other hand, I'd vote this one "innocent". Those beautiful genes have gotta be passed on!"

"I see, maybe you have the tendency to need to see the remorse, to give the “innocent” verdict. Was her crime really so infinitely worse than the other murders?"

No, he's only biased when it comes to things he says that I don't like. Things that don't confirm what I'm already feeling or want to believe. Jackalope isn't a character in his own right with patterns of behavior and easy to spot biases.

No he's a menace just here to sew chaos and confusion. Because the one thing he wants to do the most is ruin his own experiment.

His Milgram.

[miyamiwu]

Essential Elements of an Unlimited/Infinite Flow Story

As someone attempting to write my own Unli Flow, I thought I’d take note of the different elements so I can have a guide I can always refer back to.

I’ve explained what Unli Flow means many times before, but in case you missed it: Unlimited/Infinite Flow is a genre in Chinese web novels that feature characters entering multiple “instances” where they have to complete a challenge and/or solve a mystery. Failure in doing so would lead to consequences, most often death.

There’s also this definition by AshuraYami from the NovelUpdates Forum:

Unlimited Flow/Infinite Flow is a genre originating from the CN novel Terror Infinity. The genre mainly revolves on world hopping involving fictional works (anime, comics, movies, games and novels) and/or original worlds created by the author. Infinite Flow, as it’s ‘infinite’ namesake suggests, can accommodate all other genres, be it fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, etc. Representative works are Terror Infinity (origin of genre), Reincarnation Paradise (most chapters and word count), The Ultimate Evolution (promoter of data flow, an infinite flow derivative that is more game-like litRPG) and Thriller Paradise (most famous horror infinite flow).

With the definition out of the way, let’s goooo

[This post will also serve as a rec list of sorts, since I’ll be giving examples of each element from different danmei novels.]

----------

1. The Authority

The entity/system in charge of the Unlimited Flow system as a whole. Most stories just chalk it up to the Unli Flow being some kind of otherworldly being/extremely advanced AI that just likes to mess with people.

Examples of The Authority

(based on what I remember, at least… Also, beware of spoilers)

The Earth is Online: The Universe

Mist: I forgot what it’s called, but that high tech system in charge of all the Time Traveling stuff...

High Energy QR Code: That black and white cube thing

Surprise! The Supposed Talent Show was Actually—?!: … The TV station...

From left to right: Tang Mo from The Earth is Online and Wu Jin and Wei Shi from Surprise! The Supposed Talent Show was Actually—?!

[Spoilers End]

From having read numerous Unli Flow stories, I conclude that crucial to a great, not just good, Unli Flow story is a well-defined Authority. The explanation behind the Authority’s existence and motives is the foundation to the entire story.

You can have a very fancy building (cool instances, well-developed characters, an exciting enemies to lovers couple, etc.), but if the foundation is flimsy, the building’s value would plummet in your eyes. You can still appreciate the building, of course, but you will never be content with it.

Examples of some novels that are good in almost everything else except The Authority (in my opinion): [spoilery]

Supernatural Movie Actor App: It was too profound with not enough groundwork laid for it, resulting in The Authority feeling detached from the main story.

I Upended Yet Another Campus Urban Legend: The Authority was not exactly bad; it was just inadequate. The justification of the Unli Flow existing became unconvincing because of this.

Escape the Infinite Chamber: THE AUTHORITY IS SO FUCKING RIDICULOUS THAT IT’S ABYSMAL. And the entire thing was explained in just one scene and from one extra??? SO MUCH PAIN AND SUFFERING AND THAT’S THE ONLY EXPLANATION WE GET??? HORRENDOUS!

[Spoilers End]

From left to right: Book covers of I Upended Yet Another Campus Urban Legend and Supernatural Movie Actor App

2. Instances

Also known as “copy.” The other world/dimension where players have to face the different challenges.

The Authority may be the foundation, but the Instances are the defining aspect of the Unlimited Flow.

A lot of novels, however, are quite perfunctory when it comes to instances, just using it to further the main couple or as a mere stepping stone to the overarching plot. Or, if they’re not being perfunctory, then the Instances are just plain boring.

The first instance, especially, tend to be the most boring. Authors often use this to dump all the information about how their unli flow works. This usually gets better by the time the 2nd or 3rd instance comes around....

Upon successful completion of an Instance, players will then be rewarded with either points, special abilities, magic items, etc.

Examples of novels with GREAT instances (based on logic, thrill, horror, etc. Again, all in my own opinion):

I Became a God in a Horror Game: The horror is present all throughout. I can still remember the fear I felt while reading about the statues in the first Instance. Each instance/arc also emotionally impacts you, an effect that most Unli Flow writers don’t really aim for or just generally tend to fail at. (This is also my favorite unli flow novel at the moment~)

The Earth is Online: (same author as Fourth Perspective, which I’ve posted a lot about before) What I love about Mo Chen Huan, the author, is how they write intelligent MC’s but without making them seem too OP. And this is because she actually shows us the MC’s thought process, inviting us to think along with them and figure out how to solve the challenge, and not just make her characters say “aha!” This is what makes the Instances in TEIO great and memorable.

High Energy QR Code: The story could make use of more showing than telling, but I actually love the Instances in this novel. You know how good stories are often described as a well-made tapestry in that every little thread contributes to the big beautiful picture? That’s how each Instance reads in this novel. (Absolutely love the Instance about the town where everybody lies.)

Fu Wendou, the male lead of The Earth is Online

3. NPCs

A gaming term which stands for “Non-Player Character.” Refers to characters who live within Instances and act in such ways that further the plot or challenge presented by the Instance. They may go against players or assist them. May or may not have a will of their own.

Examples of NPCs:

Xu Beijin, the protagonist of Being an Extra Actor in an Escape Game

Lu Chu, the protagonist of Insider.

The iconic Mosaic from The Earth is Online

The male leads from Escape the Infinite Chamber, I Became a God in a Horror Game, Killing God with Junk Cards, etc. (Most danmei ML are special!NPCs 😩)

From left to right: Book covers of Being an Extra Actor in an Escape Game and Killing God with Junk Cards

4. Player Hall

A space outside of instances where different players can gather and exchange information. Most of the time, this is in a space still separate from the real world. Players are often prohibited from using their powers in this space.

In some novels, Players have no choice but to live here, completely cutting them off from the real world. In this case, accommodation quality will depend on the Player’s level or points.

5. Personal System

The Personal System issues challenges to the player and keeps track of their current attributes, physical and mental states, etc.. It also calculates rewards and punishments for the player. First and foremost in service to The Authority. (If they aren’t, then they’re most likely the Love Interest in disguise. If not, the Player had somehow swayed it to their side).

6. System Store

The points earned from the different Instances serve as the Players’ currency, and they can use it to buy things from the System Store. The Store may sell weapons, medicine, magical items, or even special abilities. Basically, any item that can help the Player during Instances. Of course, it may also sell non-magical items, like food and everyday items, at a much lower price than special items.

7. Player’s Goal/Wish

In some novels, the Goal is simply to clear all the Instances and leave the Unli Flow for good. But in others, the Unli Flow allows Players to exchange their points for a Wish. The more difficult the Wish, the more points are needed, and the more Instances are needed to be cleared.

Examples of a Goal/Wish:

Supernatural Movie Actor App: Xie Chi wants to give his second personality a body of his own.

I Became a God in a Horror Game: If I’m remembering it correctly… Bai Liu just wants to have lots of money.

I Upended Yet Another Campus Urban Legend: Lin Yi wants to learn the truth about his parents.

Thriller Tour Group: Wei Xun wants to find the truth about his family’s disappearance… and his Wish is to uhh… feel pain?

After the Little Crybaby Enters the Nightmare Cycle: Chi Nan’s Wish is to regain his vision, stop crying and get his memories back.

Death Spiral: To uhh… figure out what the voice in the Elevator is trying to tell them? To regain their memories? [The actual Wish is a big spoiler, so I won’t mention it here.]

From left to right: Book covers of After the Little Crybaby Enters the Nightmare Cycle, Thriller Tour Group, and Death Spiral

Aaaand there you have it! I was hoping to list 10 elements, but I can only think up to 7 😔

Although I said this post is a rec list of sorts, the quality of the novels I mentioned actually varies. I’m just listing whatever novel would be good as an example (and also what I can remember and have more or less completed, since many of the Unli Flow novels I’m reading are currently on-hold).

[pruneunfair]

Hi okay- I’m a huge remarried empress fan, but I enjoy it seperate from tne fandom. That being said- you have so many great points.

1) I do believe the story may have changed, because this is supposed to be based off a web novel. Like an actual novel. Often times they will deviate from the novel to change the story. Take Who Made Me a Princess. The artist at the end of it did say they changed the story ending for it. So it’s very plausible.

2. SOUVESHU (look I’m a fan but I can never remember how to spell) DEFINETLY GROOMED RASHTA!! Though I don’t agree with her actions, I have 100% acknowledged and know she is deeply traumatized. And he most likely took advantage of that. He saw her as young and pure, something Navier was not. And he wanted to preserve that. Rashta is clearly traumatized, and her mental health is not healthy. It is easy to take advantage and manipulate sadly because she does not know the warnings. He groomed her and when she was finally trying to be more like someone she thought he wanted, Navier, he lashed out. No one gets she is constantly comparing herself!! She does not know how to love herself!! And that is the most damage. I wish they would pick up on that. I love Navier but she can be so oblivious to that due to her anger and betrayal at Soveshu. I think if Rashta had proper care and been trained,!- did Soveshu could just fucking communicate and not be a groomer, this could all have been avoided. Navier is also at fault for not see this red flag in him??? But she was so angry and maybe jealous and wanting to back stab I think it clouded her judgement. If she slowed down and actually had a conversation- it would be okay.

3) there is so much wasted potential in all the characters!! Is Navier is getting this magical stuff sorted why can’t she just acknowledge it and work for something with it? Use it to her advantage. I wanted to see her stand up to Heinrey for taking her mages. I wanted to see her stand up to Soveshu. I want to see her just fight for herself. But she doesn’t say much. She’s so strategic with everything and it’s like it wasted her potential. Why can’t she just speak out?? It does feel very much like she turned into a Mary Sue. I want to see more of her flaws. Like one we all think is pretty when is a flaw is that she has no want to speak out and is held back and refined! I think they are trying hard to point onto her upbringing and that she’s “higher” than everyone else. When like- yes she’s an empress. But there is so much more then that we should be able to read about!! We need more scenes of her having friends for peat sakes that isn’t gossiping or talking about men and other things. Where did the potential go??

I really wanna see how it ends and hope it turns into a better direction. I also need to read the book too.

TLDR: you make so many good points and I wanted to expand on it as a fan of the series who does acknowledge all these points.

1: I did read the novel out of curiosity since everyone was saying it was better then the manhwa. The manhwa was pretty loyal to the novel and while it was still really iffy with protagonist centered morality I felt it could get away with it more since it was in first person therfore it's possible Navier could be an unreliable narrator. Another difference I noticed is that while the manhwa felt actively malicious against Rashta and making jokes about her trauma when she cries or looks for attention, the novel is more complex about it and it feels more sympathetic then something to laugh at. The whole slavery being ignored and characters getting away with shitty behavior unfortunately still lasted but given how it was more complex with it's characters I think it was an unfortunate result of the author getting a little too carried away with the readers desires to see more fluff. Gotta say I don't hold as much animosity toward the webnovel but it's still not my favorite.

2: I'm really happy to see that I'm not the only one who thinks Rashta got groomed. Even if she's not a child, she's still mentally stunted and grooming can occur at any age since it is the desire to take someone who is easily influenced and molding them into whatever you desire. Honestly though I think it makes sense that Navier wouldn't immediately see any red flags from Sovieshu given that their childhood together was happy and geninune, it's common for victims in abusive relationships to not see who their abuser really is at first which really made Navier escaping even more satisfying.

3: on one hand Navier not being able to speak up makes sense since what is she really gonna do if the Emperor brings in a concubine without breaking royal protocol, on the other hand it is so OOC of her in later seasons when she is described as someone with witty comebacks and is no damsel in distress yet in season 2 and 3 she does absolutely nothing since Heinrey and her other friends do it all for her. They think this makes her really charismatic but that only ever works for villian characters who are mysterious and too classy to do the dirty work, when the protagonist does this over and over it gets boring and you wonder if she's really supposed to be the protagonist at all.

[somebooksbelonginthesinbin]

Manhwa/Webcomics with really interesting stories and beautiful art but have ick MLs that are still interesting:

Cry or Better Yet Beg

This male lead is a bird killer that I am told only gets worse as the story progresses. I’m not going to say what he’s going to do to her but it’s horrible, a trigger warning would be necessary for even a watered down explanation. He sees her as a canary in a cage, his canary in his cage if you will. The comic is being made and is still in the earlier stages of the story but there is a web novel out there.

Kneel Before Me

This is the most developed of the three. The male lead isn’t human and he doesn’t think like us in a lot of ways. He is very obsessed with the female lead. As long as he is on her brain he is happy with that and he’s going for long lasting results (or so he says but I don’t think he really truly wants her hatred). He believes that love doesn’t last but hatred can. He sees her kind of like a pet but, she does have a level of influence over him. He’s also a villain and he’s done some messed up stuff to her. He didn’t start out quite a villain though, more like her dangerous ally(?) and she’s the one thing keeping him in line. This is also based on a novel.

Betrayal of Dignity

Like the other two THIS. MAN. IS. OBSESSIVE. It’s bad for her ngl. He’s a highly manipulative man as well. These men are basically the same person in most ways. All of the women are smart, though Layla doesn’t seem calculating and she has no power in this thus far unlike the other two who can be calculating and they do at least gain power or start out with it. This female lead is reserved and will do anything for those she loves (also like the fl in KBM). She comes from a (by noble standards) penniless family. As a result of this she marries a Duke who decides he needs to marry a woman in her family (he’s shooting for her though via manipulation). This is most likely because he finds her to be fascinating and he later finds a reason to pursue her in marriage. The leads fall for one another but again, he is manipulating everything always. He is by far the most ambitious of all of the leads I’ve mentioned thus far.

All of the male leads are ick but they’re interesting and the story is interesting and I’m rooting for the female leads so I can’t not read all of these. I thought about adding The Devil and his Sacrifice but I hate the male lead more than I find the story interesting so it just gets an honorable mention.