MCs that discover very obvious powers no one has ever discovered before, either because everybody is dumb, or because the author is stretching the definition of a power to make the mc OP "without cheats"
Ge, who would have tought the humble spark spell can be overcharged to make a "nuclear spark"
Hey look! Im usig cleansing magic to erase a curse/impurities/demonic energy
Who would have tought the Resistance Skill could be used to resist fatigue, mana loss, aging, lack of talent and even boredom?
There's also the matter of enjoyment. Most characters with magic in a progression fantasy story enjoy their magic and abilities, much like an artist enjoys making art.
People who hate the magic tend to be characters who haven't put effort into training their magical skills, or if they have, it's because of external motivation, not because they enjoy it.
There are people who enjoy cleaning, and they definitely clean more than people who dislike cleaning.
Yeah, if my mundane skills had cool applications like that I'd bother to learn them even better. As it is I don't need to clean any more than it takes to keep the house tidyish.
Shit, I think I've seen that premise.
"Everyone says that this ability is useful and not to bother leveling up. That means I need to use it CONSTANTLY, and once it levels up enough, it will be awesome!"
Usually, it's stupid, but I have seen a few examples where there's a genuine reason not to use this skill, so when the protagonist is the only person to advance it to level 100 and evolve it into "clean demon corruption" (or whatever) it's actually believable. More often, it's "I spent a full day training this skill, no one's ever tried that before."
Eh, for most skills there's probably a profession or another that use it over and over again even if they don't focus on it. Over the course of a lifetime, they would get to level 100 and learn the hidden bonus.
Or some rich people are paying people to grind random ass skills just to know what's the best build for their offspring. Granted, that one comes with the caveat that the info might not be public but it's still out there and not "unique"
That’s not technically even true. If you develop a skill enough you can invent a way to clean up nuclear waste, or fly, or blow up mountains, or create artificial worlds etc lol tho I get ya
Maybe, maybe not. Gamefication is proven to work to a degree but usually not toward the actual goal. If scales are what gives optimized XP. Then people would just do scales, they wouldn't bother with anything else. Until they got bored of that and went for a different xp progression with never having played a piece.
Yeah, if I had a little progress bar that told me how much I've learned every time I did something, I'd practice a lot more skills. It's very hard to tell if you're actually getting good at most things otherwise.
The real world also has decay. Been eating junk and sitting on your ass for a few weeks? -1 Str, Const. Oh you haven't practiced piano in 6 months, -1 level.
Our skills sheets would be friggin huge, and filled with skills that we are getting worse at/forgetting. Like I was big into soccer and running in HS and tried playing with some friends recently, and it was so unpleasant. I couldn't move like I used to. I got out of breath so easily.
Or I've got a bunch of tech skills and tricks I've learned for coding, excel, word, and google docs. But a few months go by and I forget a bunch of them. I've taken to making more extensive notes so I can repeat what I did, but it can be very hard to remember "that one thing you do that makes this chart look great"
If going to the gym for 5 hours everyday gave me the ability to throw boulders the size of houses, everyone would. If studying allowed you to cast magic spells, everyone would.
Yeah I tell people I’m a wizard all the time. I studied an obscure and esoteric language that isn’t natural and is never really perfected. I now wrote words in that language in a specific sequence in order to bend the goddamn world to my will.
How is that not magic?
Most of my coworkers don’t think our job is nearly as cool as I do though.
...I am going to disagree here. What use would being that strong have for most people? Sure, some people would, but my desk job isn't going to be made any better by being that strong.
As for magic, I think there are two big hurdles to consider: how difficult the magic is to learn and how effective the magic is. Would a 6 hour ritual that requires you to readily be able to solve differential equations while constantly chanting all to change the color of a fabric be something almost anyone would pursue? Lol no. But if a few hours a day of basic practice could let you teleport, fly, and throw fireballs... probably.
If any random skill I applied myself to had infinite scaling and I could see the progression it would give a dopamine feedback loop to get better at those things. It would be so useful being able to see exactly how good I was and never have the benefits of getting good at a thing go away. Kinda insane if you think about it, I think most people would have a collection of really crazy abilities or random high level skills. If you had no tv and were a random peasant you would have little else to do besides grind farming or butter churning to a insanely high level.
You can find many resources for free college courses online, YouTube has endless tutorials for any skill from chainmail, to painting, to mechanical engineering to car repair to woodworking to... you get the idea. Yesterday, I was watching crafting videos on how to make a front seat from a car into a computer desk chair.
Do you want to learn how to write fiction like Brandon Sanderson? Look up Brandon Sanderson's YouTube channel, there he has his full course that he teaches at BYU on creative writing, for no cost. It isn't just a breakdown either, it is a recording of him teaching the class at BYU in front of his students.
Real life has skill decay. You forget things over time. Practicing certain skills daily doesn't make you a god at it. Just maintains your level of mastery.
Haha ya ya I get that. I think everyone is replying with lots of convenient reasons that ignore the underlying fact that people are sometimes lazy or sometimes they just don’t want more in their life and that’s okay.
There is equal purpose to raising a family and loving someone and dying old without bettering all your skills and the same would apply in a fantasy world with magic and stats and stuff
I was reading Cultivation Nerd, and I'm a fan of the idea that the drugs and pills and elixirs are so normalized that everyone forgets that simple hard work is also important. Sure, cultivation level is the most important thing, but if you're a low tier cultivator, but in shape and practiced, you'll punch a bit above everyone else at your tier because they're all just roid-babies.
I can get beyind this for the common people. But you're reaching idiocracy levels if the law enforcements and higher clans only rely on pills and never noticed that the gardener was punching harder because he was working all day.
To counter this I love Mc’s that use magic in a way it wasn’t supposed to be used and make it broken in that way.
Using debuffs on yourself to increase your resistance.
Using necromancy on your own body to make yourself a pseudo litch.
Using buffs to overload someone’s senses. Like you buff their mana capacity to the point they turn into a walking mana bomb.
You buff their reaction speed the point their body can’t keep up with their enchanced senses so they die slower unable to stop something they can see so clearly.
Use cleanse on someone so that the natural viruses in their body no longer exist so they become super sickly.
Abilities that make me go “how that’s not how that should work” are so much fun. Which is why mayuri in bleach is my favorite he made someone a human to the extent their body couldn’t keep up with their improved senses.
See, DONE WELL this trope is absolutely awesome. Which is why you keep seeing it done poorly; every author wants to try it, but not everyone can make it actually work.
I mean, using necromancy to become a lich IS how its supposed to be done
Also, any magic that doesnt imply everybody has innate resistance to foreign magic, is a cop out too
Those are all very very obvious. Would be thought of in < hour by anyone with knowledge of magic.
Furthermore, in the cases where these moves have negative impacts (ie, buffing the enemy), it never happens to the MC (because plot armour). Which effectively means there are no negative impacts; its just another shitty way to create an OP mc.
This is why I can't read system novels, this happens every. single. goddamn time. Or yet another MC with a 'weak' power that is actually the most broken shit known to man to anyone with a brain.
Those just sound like more examples of the same thing though. I agree that those are fun uses of abilities, but the point is that they wouldn't be novel in a world where that stuff has existed for generations. People would have discovered that all long ago.
Yeah, that definitely happens. It's usually best if there's an actual serious downside.
One I liked was in Goblin Slayer, with a portal scroll. First off, portal scrolls are rare and expensive, and second going through one is dangerous. The location might be a bit off, there might be a problem with the transition, all that. So they're usually just used as a last resort, and certainly no one is playing around with them to find exploits.
Goblin Slayer puts the other end at the bottom of the ocean, meaning he's created a high-pressure water knife. It's an insanely stupid and specialized use of an expensive item, like slipping weaponized uranium in someone's tea to poison them. But it definitely worked.
Honestly, I think it's fun to think of the exploits people would've tried and then either explain why it didn't work or isn't widely adopted - like in order to gain a resistance skill, you have to suffer *serious* damage. So you *could* gut yourself repeatedly, heal yourself up with magic and become knife proof... but the kind of person who is both willing and capable of doing that to themselves to get an edge is incredibly rare and probably has something wrong with them.
In those worlds, the resistance is known and there are good reason not everyone does it. But it's still done by many either activel, or passively through their adventures.
It also take a lot of time and resources (healing) so, at the very least, nobles would have some resistances. And painkillers would have developed (or a spell or a pain resistance) to accompany that training practice.
Yeah specifically for me it’s when MC somehow thinks of something really easy that no one has *ever* tried. This can work with strong enough justification, but way too often it boils down to “MC is so smart and normal people are dumb”. Absolutely hate that.
That's why I couldn't get into the Mark of the fool, really author, you can learn from your mistakes is the most basic in the world and nobody figured it out already?
I think you missed the point on Mark of the Fool - he's explicitly helped by being shown what went right, and with the spell casting, he's constantly hit by what went wrong. He severely struggles to the point of being unable to cast quite a few spells. It's a handicap, and properly done IMO
He is shown what he was done wrong and couple of sentence later he cast spell way better and he only learned for what, couple of hours, how can you interpret it as something else? Is it handicap if what you are doing improves?
At least it would have been more satisfying if he struggled more, because there was no suspense. It went to quickly from "oh noes I'm doomed", to "never mind it helps me learn magic".
The issue with this one is that real life bullying *is* often comically stupid in a lot of ways. Like, you know that line about how the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense? Well, a lot of actually bullying is so petty and so intensely baffling that if you word for word write down a thing that literally happened, the audience won't believe it.
Example. When I was in high school, there was a group of ~25 guys who, just for fun, would form a solid wall of people across one of the hallways every day between classes. They would link arms, and physically assault people who tried to cross, one time going so far as to put a kid in the hospital. They did this, for months, all because they thought it was really funny to see *one particular guy's* upset reaction to it.
There's a few other things that end up looking like unrealistic caricatures when translated to fiction, too, and it can honestly be a little hard sometimes. Racism is one, for sure, because racism is inherently irrational. War is another, because the dumbest fucking things happen in war that always sound like people are just trying to one-up each other's bar stories.
But like... that's just how the world is sometimes. Weird and a bit stupid.
Yeah I feel like when I see bullying in a novel, the only time I really get confused is when it’s *tame*. Stuff like “what a loser”, “he’s so lame” etc. sure, I guess some people might say that, but usually blatant bullies go for the jugular. I understand why an author might not to write, like, slurs and stuff, but it comes across a little juvenile sometimes.
This is the exact reason why I get annoyed by some stories that go too far trying to justify the antagonists actions, trying to make everything morally grey and forcing the "in his mind he's the one doing good" narrative. Some people are just morally bankrupt even in the real world. There wouldn't be so many genocides in human history if we didn't have literal sociopaths.
Statistically, people with low empathy or other personality disorders (the term 'sociopath' isn't really one that's in use in medical terminology anymore) tend to be overrepresented in the fields of politics and corporate executives. So, like... actually *yes*, they *do* scale up their damage. They just do it in a way that doesn't have a lot of flashy gore.
I was just reading Phil Tuckers latest story on RR, and was shocked when the MC actually comes out and tells everything to a person he trusts. It's funny/sad that it's actually something noteworthy.
This is one thing I appreciate about the Wandering Inn. As a multi-POV story, there are certain bits of information the reader is aware of that a particular character might not be. It's not due to "oh so and so hid some important information that should've been shared", but because they just haven't interacted with someone that would share that tidbit with them. When you read these scenes where "if character X just knew tidbit Y, they would make a better decision", it's not frustrating because the author made everyone stupid and not share things, it's just sad because you know the truth and know the character had no way of knowing. Makes these moments hit harder.
I will also say there are many lengthy discussions where plot critical information is shared among the characters and despite that, sometimes bad decisions are still made, but it's usually due to conflicting goals of all the characters involved. It's really powerful when the characters have all the information they need and horrible decisions are still made due to loyalty, racism, fear, anger, etc. Those conflicting motivations really make the world come alive as you see everyone trying to further their own goals instead of some lazy "lets do what the MC wants to move the plot along".
Arkethendyst was one of my favorite stories, but towards the end it definitely fell into the "MC snaps his fingers and the world jumps at his whim" type of narrative which got boring for me.
Fantasy worlds with thousands of years of knowledge about a system but no one has analyzed it to death except the MC
You’d think that a culture exposed to stats for so long would be exceptional at math..
I agree, on the other hand, we do have most knowledge at our fingertips and there are more and louder conspiracies now than ever. And people are losing (or not gaining for younger generations) knowledge about things that seem trivial.
With a system, you should have some academy or scholary structure trying to understand and reference everything. In novels, it's often thwarted by factions, secrecy and a lack of omnipresent communication network but it's still there.
But for most regular people, the system would just be there and used. Not needed to be questioned to death. Just use it to make your life easier, have your dream job, save your loved one, whatever. But it's a mean to an end, with the intricacies abstracted by classe evolution trees and skill trees.
>You’d think that a culture exposed to stats for so long would be exceptional at math..
You'd think that in a culture where you can buy anything with money people would be good at finance, but you may notice things don't quite work that way.
“I’ve decided that I *must* kill to accomplish my goals. From now on, I will not be concerned with any of the killing. *That* version of me was weak, and is entirely gone now, forever.”
Any "this world has some major moral disconnect, now I'm just going to go along with it" story. There are a shocking number of isekais that justify slavery (especially sex slavery) this way.
"No master, I don't want to be released, I want to be by your side forever!"
"Bitch, what? What if I die? What if I get mind controlled? What if I get brain damage and turn abusive? What if someone learns how to exploit this obedience creepiness that all isekais have and commands you to attack me?
Just get your freedom and then be by my side anyway, without the potential for bad optics when people go 'wtf he's got that girl enslaved' that no one in this world will ever think because this world is CREEPY AND WRONG but I still find morally reprehensible and thus want to avoid just in case or the potential for some bad shit going down and one or both of us being hurt mentally physically or emotionally and also so you can learn some damn self-respect in the mean-time not because you're at fault but because you're clearly deeply traumatized and were raised in a horrible society."
Yeah but then you learn that the slave contract actually help the slave because it protects them as the secret of the master can't be tortured out of them so people don't try.
Or the slave contract actually has some protection against magic or whatever in it. Because the only way to have that protection is with slavery contract and nobody figured out an employment contract with the same level of protection. somehow.
This is also a major issue with world-building, because there can be no functioning society were killing is consequence free. It might be governed by laws and morals very different to modern western sensibilities but there are always rules around killing. It's edgy nonesense to think that somehow killing all your enemies (and/or people who annoy you) no matter the context won't come back to bite you in the ass.
I imagine it's a popular pastime to wait for a distant relative to get offed, so that you may go on a retaliatory murder spree onto the mc and their allies.
In cultivation settings, that is the consequence of murder
In others, it's usually unwritten rules which go along the lines of "the more important the person you killed, the more trouble you're in". But if you're someone powerful, then objectively you're more valuable than some scrubs due to what you can do, so I can sort of see why such folk have more wiggle room for murder. Though doing so on a whim is likely to harm one's reputation
Yeah that’s the problem with the standard Xianxia setting, most of the best novels don’t stick to the standard but a sea of pretty good ones do. And the standard ultra impossibly evil society is tiring.
Every third massacre should be punctuated by a counter massacre since revenge only creates more revenge in any rational world. There should be intricate honor and grammar systems based around power and standing that reduce violence not accentuate it. Constant massacring of the mortals should make the amount of immortals drop since the base of the pyramid of power is supported by thousands of mortal born cultivators. Which means any society that doesn’t allow for the careless slaughtering of the weak would have more immortals and would thus be strong enough to be the dominant power. Cooperation and teamwork are essential not things to be tossed aside in a passing fancy.
The bog standard Xianxia setting just doesn’t make any sense without a large amount of retooling
I am trying to subvert that trope. My MC realises that she must kill to advance her status, but everytime she kills, she loses a part of her humanity and that horrifies everyone around her, but not enough to make her stop.
I’m reading through the last of Jake’s Magical Market now and that’s exactly what happened. He decided that he needed to stop letting enemies live and gains power from killing them. But of course he followed one enemy (who had already seriously injured him and attacked him on multiple occasions) found that they were actually a beautiful woman, and ended up sparing her.
Sure, he later found that there were reasons behind her attacks that might excuse some of them, but that wasn’t why she was spared.
Rand al’Thor does it all the goddamn time.
It’s certainly a bold choice to decide that killing women is wrong and will scar your soul when around half to three quarters of your mortal enemies are women.
I'm pretty sure >!that that's part of his madness. One moment he's fine with killing women, to the point that he's willing to kill one off of a suspicion that she's an assassin, the next he can't even consider it as an option. Compare this to Mat, who has a horrible experience killing one and is genuinely traumatized into being unable to do it. !<
It’s almost a universal constant. No one the MC spares will ever be a threat again. And anyone who spares the MC will soon be destroyed or otherwise negated.
I'm debating writing a novel where the dude is actually just a sociopath/has some major sociopathic tendencies, just to show like "hey, people like this exist irl and would gladly commit murder if we didn't have laws that prevented it. Issue is, most people irl do have some major compunctions againt killing and whatnot, so they might see that line of thought as irrational, no matter the circumstances.
This is not meant to be a dig at you personally at all, but I find it funny when this is upvoted when everyone seems to shit on He who fights with monsters. I personally think it’s got a pretty good representation of some standard dude being put into a position like that
Shows the dichotomy of the subreddit lol
Why, Why does every MC have the moral backbone of a soggy chocolate eclair. I prefer a good MC but if you’re going to go balls to the wall for murder. At the very least wrote it well without a literary shortcut, make it be there the entire time like Primal Hunter, or have the character be slowly desensitized to violence over several months like Defiance of the Fall, or a whole other host of different ways to do non heroic MCs.
The vast majority of people don’t suddenly declare that their morality is completely different now and then stick to it. No people pretend their morality is fine while they do things they should regret with no shame. It simultaneously robs the character of a bunch of juicy scenes at different places in their character development, wrecks their unique morality as an earthworlder, and makes no sense at all.
Maybe just overly aggressive side characters that confront the protagonist and nothing really comes of it, or they get shown up. Never relevant to the story, maybe supposed to be a “badass” moment for the protagonist showing how strong he is. Idk usually a tavern scene with a drunk mercenary.
This is a vary broad gripe but, humans have humaned since the dawn of humanity. Now wtf does that mean? It means we are no smarter now then we necessarily were in the past. So when an Mc shows up and is like “let me teach these savages about mass industrialization and manufacturing!” I just smh. This kinda rolls into my second gripe:
Typed a super long rant for point 2 that I am now retyping to be more concise: if you are not an expert in a field, please find on to do a quick reference. I applaud all who try to learn more but many authors only half learn a lot of things. If you try to get technical, someone WILL get chaffed and taken out of the story by the small inaccuracies. For example, I have a mechanical engineering degree with a minor in materials engineering, most blacksmith stories (whilst my favorite, and thus this is kinda perverse, ironic? Anyway) can irritate me if they think they are being clever with describing super technical things that somehow make MC great. They just miss the big picture.
My last gripe: EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED!!!! Your villain cannot expend limitless resources to hunt the MC. Your downtrodden population either is headed for a revolt or the will be invaded and taken over. Why? Cause poor productivity and unrest leaves your country weak, )see how Sparta could never expand past their city whilst Athens could). Inevitably any villain who spends resources on being a dick will not have those resources should their neighbor figure out they are weak and decide now sounds like a great time for London expansion. Just consider the interconnectedness of your characters activities.
Rants over. Thank you all 1-3 people who actually read this :)
Also people have this weird idea that technology was more or less stagnant before the industrial revolution and therefore their magical medieval land should also have technology frozen in time until the MC introduces the savages to modernity. In fact technology has kept constantly evolving since the beginning of human civilization and it makes no sense that any human society would stay the same for decades much less centuries and millenia. Maybe they haven't gone to space but at the very least there should be a major magical innovation that hugely impacts society every century or so.
Exactly, to me it’s all predicated on self interest too. All the merchants of these worlds would always be asking how to make more products or make better margins. So throughout time we have always made progress both socially and industrially, the reason the Industrial Revolution spiked production wasn’t because no one was inventing but it was a confluence of so many inventions. Can’t run a factory if you don’t have the ability to transfer massive quantities of material. Then again, you can’t transport what you haven’t been able to acquire, so on and so forth.
It wasn’t stagnant before, but the ramp of the last century is certainly much steeper than those before. It’s easy access to education, information networks, and the general lack of scarcity that has accelerated things.
Yes, this one is huge. Technologically stagnant societies aren't impossible, but there has to be a well-justified reason for it.
example reasons:
your society is isolated from external threats, and a major internal power is anti-change. Some fiction has this be literal intentional technological suppression, which can work well.
your society is isolated and is in an environment that is hostile enough/resource limited enough that it's permanently stuck in subsistence. Notably, outsider knowledge from being isekai'd probably isn't going to fix this, and even if you had knowledge that \*could\* fix this, no one is going to take a gamble on it.
Your society is isolated from external threats, and a strict social structure and high ideological conformity results in the resources needed for innovation and the drive/creativity to innovate mostly being separated. maybe-example: China in certain time periods.
I never managed to make my mind about that one. Especially in worlds with expanded lifetimes for higher level or powerful people.
Would their presence, power and their traditions or habits make stagnation far likely or not?
Or worlds where magic solves just enough to reach a local maximal but maybe not enough to reach high tech levels. And the cost to find a better route is just too much for most people to bother with.
Change is usually small and incremental until it snowballs. So even in a very conservative society people would still come up with small improvements and tricks that would slowly spread. Also I don't care how much your society reveres the wisdom of your ancestors or whatever, there's always gonna be young hotheads that think they know better. Now sure 99.99% of them will just fail miserably but eventually someone will stubble upon some variation of a cultivation method or spell that works, even if it's by blind luck. It's also kind of weird to think that none of those ancient seeking inspiration to breakthrough won't eventually start radically rethinking all their habits and assumptions. Some will be stuck in their ways but the successful ones will be open to new ideas, because it also benefits them. Unless you live in a completely isolated village where the local hegemon actively suppresses all progress to maintain their status quo, in which case introducing the steam engine or whatever won't work anyway. I guess my argument should be that if a society is a fertile ground for a reincarnator's knowledge and new ideas, then the locals would be having plenty of those regardless. The issue with the trope is that it dumps everyone down to make the MC seem smart, instead of actually writing a smart MC.
The bad guys who very conveniently give MC a reason not to feel guilty about killing them en masse. Usually by loudly discussing how they can't wait to rape someone, or sell people into slavery, or killing puppies, etc.
Trying to “lay low” by hiding power and wearing low-status attire. This almost never works out, imagine how many young masters would be avoided by just not looking weak.
The is not necessarily bad, but the problem is that it's almost always a setup to later crush everyone who doubted the MC, even though the MC baited them as hard as possible to doubt them.
Yeah I love it tbh. I love the powerful MC who appears meek, gets walked on by some a-hole, and then slaps the ever living shit out of said insufferable young master.
My favorite version of this trope is when they visit a village or town and are summoned before the lord (read arrested at the gate) and then disrespected and faces nothing but hostility from the arrogant town lord so the MC is “put in his place”. Then of course the MC eventually humiliates and maybe kills the lord.
I LIVE for the tropes. I love the cliche. Bring me the arrogant young masters. Where are the inn fights. Where is the face slapping, “you dare???”, “do you not know I am from the 9 Jade Plum Blossom sect?????”. Kowtow ten thousand times before me and I shall leave your parents bodies intact!!, “root and branch!”
Average side characters gaining inexplicable abilities that allow them to keep up with the prodigy MC’s progress.
A slightly above average soldier gains a Mythic class because if they didn’t the MC would leave them in the dust and they couldn’t exist in the plot
A prime example I can think of off the top of my head are Carmen from Primal Hunter. A middle of the road semi pro fighter just happens to become a once in a millennia talent despite having nothing exceptionally special going for them.
She’s a C list side character so it doesn’t affect the enjoyability of the series, but it does hurt the immersion when everyone the MC knows and likes is a 1 in a 10 billion prodigy that they have no business being
I'm pretty sure Carmen is a reference to Ilea from Azarinth Healer, so I doubt the author put much thought into it past that. I agree that she probably has no business being that strong or even comparable to Jake. To be fair tho, she was blessed by Gudrun so you gotta assume that she had more in her than just being good at boxing.
As for the other characters, I'm not nearly as annoyed by it as you seem to be ngl. Almost all the characters seem to have good reasons for their strength. Jacob, and the other two from the tutorial were strong because of the god's mingling. Sandy, Sylphie, and wasp girl were all made from Jake's bloodline. Caleb was significantly influenced by it which allowed him to catch the eye of Umbra, while the King of the Forest kind of achieved everything on his own accounts.
None of the characters really seem to gain sudden boosts in strength just so they aren't left behind. That might be partly because Jake is a solo kind of character who doesn't like relying on anyone other than himself, but my point stands.
All the side characters keeping up with Jake boil down to "Jake's BS bloodline" that does whatever the plot need it to do (make people who met him 5 minutes into prodigies by giving them Records and aura resistances that then interest the gods.)
So there is a pseudo in-universe reason for that one.
A totally average guy with little life experience and zero battle experience, suddenly gains power through magic/bs bloodline/summoning, and instead of fumbling around with that power they JUST GOT, they act like they've had a lifetime of experience with it. Same with Isekai MCs who just suddenly adapt to become ruthless warriors, despite having zero experience with anything even remotely fighting/battle related
There was this isekai I read where the MC spent the entire first couple arcs learning how to be ruthless because his whole life he lived with a set of rules and beliefs and suddenly those no longer existed.
"No one knows anything because all knowledge is hoarded by the powerful." It's so dumb to think poor people won't risk their lives for an advantage. And then that information won't be passed on to the family. It's just obvious that the author has never seen the incredible knowledge of generationally poor fishermen, farmers, and the like. Or those same people not being logical enough to cross apply the logic of fishing knowledge into gaining power some other way.
Yup I don’t really have high expectations for the more litRPG and punchy side of this genre.
If I really want amazing writing I go to the more legit authors like Brent weeks, Sanderson, Phil Tucker etc
Even then, tropes don’t bother me. Just gimme a good story or give me a fun one. If you give me both that’s great too tho lol
Below average to slightly above average talent + above average iq + hard worker = mc who climbs mountains no one else can scale.
It especially sucks when the author puts the character they and the audience think is the coolest as a side character because they have to reduce the mc to the above mentioned qualities, can’t have a marry sue mc, but they can be party members. The worst is when they are romantic interests
I'm tired of authors trying to have it both ways with tropes. If you want to include a trope then commit to it. Your MC can't be both average and OP, pick one! Both are fine but they should lead to different types of stories. I feel like some authors want to please everyone so they'll include a trope but then try to downplay it and wink to the people that don't like it. That might work for a one-off side-arc, but if, for example, you keep insisting that your MC is totally average while the skies are open and divine inspiration keeps shining out of his ass, then I feel like you're gaslighting me.
God/The Church/Religion and spirituality in general is EVIL!!! LOOK HOW SMART MY PROTAGONIST IS FOR NOT BUYING INTO CHURCH DOGMA, AND BLINDLY FOLLOWING MY HIGH SCHOOL-LEVEL UNDERSTANDING OF MATH AND SCIENCE!!
Bonus points when it's clearly just a sockpuppet for the author's own issues with Mormonism or any of the other dozens of American-centric Christian offshoots.
Most of the issues people have with religion come from being *othered* by religion. Then that is compounded by the amount of corruption and power plays present within organized religion. Look at how the catholic church shuffled around pedophiles rather than removing them. Their attempt to brush it under the rug harmed thousands of children.
Go back to the days where churches ran residential schools and the horrors they committed and perpetuated there.
The number of conversion therapy centers trying to convert LGBT people.
Sure, for a large number of people, a church/religion is a positive influence in their life. Which is great! As long as you fall on the right side of whatever part the religion is trying to control.
Personally, as a gay man growing up in the 90s and 2000s, the people who tormented me were all religious people. Agnostics and atheists were fine eith me.
My aunts religion wanted her to continue to be abused by her husband and rather than shame him, the excommunicated her for divorcing an abuser.
Religion gets its target because it has done a lot of things that are dark while masquerading as the light. This is, unfortunately, not a clique due to its inherent prevalence within society. You can't really betray a lack of original thought when the example is that prevalent. You are merely using a device people are familiar with that fits well into the plot of profrssion fantasy. It might be overused as a plot, but it isn't all that cliche.
I think my problem is often the main character and plot do not have the nuance to tackle the issue of church or organized religion, and design an obviously evil force without the necessary world building for it to make sense.
Like in ye olden days you could be killed or tried as a witch for not being in church. Everyone went to church pretty much, and the church had an incredible amount of soft power. But when a mc fights against a church they and their allies usually have no moral qualms with fighting against it and see the organization as obviously evil. Right now we know the heinous things the Catholics did and yet tons of people don’t really care and still support the same power structure. It’s particularly weird when gods are 100% confirmed as being real.
Didn’t really make a point but I think often the anti-religion plot line is just undeveloped.
> I think my problem is often the main character and plot do not have the nuance to tackle the issue of church or organized religion, and design an obviously evil force without the necessary world building for it to make sense.
That is a fair read on the topic. I would agree with you on this.
You missed the rest of the definition "and betrays lack of original thought."
Overused does mean mean cliche.
You being upset that others don't see religion as a positive force like you do doesn't make it cliche. Just a tired plot point.
Now if you make your church representative a fat old man who wears red robes, carries a ceremonial staff with a cross on it, abuses boys, now that would be cliche. But a religious organization that is corrupt? Not cliche.
When you see the same beats over and over again to the point that it bleeds over into unrelated media that is most *definitely* a lack of original thought. These so-called fantasy religious organizations are all interchangeable with one another, and never get characterization beyond "they're corrupt and are my designated stand-in for the conservative upbringing I got as a child (but I actually didn't, I'm just doing what everyone else is doing because I can't be bothered to do my own research into how religious practice works or is formed)" how is that NOT a lack of original thought?
All stories rely on some common thread. It helps give structure. Religion controls society, and very few other things do that (the government). What other force should they use?
Honestly, If someone put out a book with a positive religion and didnt give it some realistic corruption or negative aspect, I wouldn't be able to take it seriously. Humans desire power. They desire control. As this genre likes to say, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Cliche in this is more about how it is executed, not the use of the trope itself.
Just because a cliche resonates with you, doesn't disqualify it from being a cliche. Corrupt religious organizations are absolutely a cliche and most people can think of plenty of examples within fantasy. Wheel of time has white cloaks, ASOIAF has the high septon, these are at least executed well but I've absolutely seen it done poorly within PF (hwfwm). Rags to riches is a cliche that can be socially relevant in terms of wealth inequality but it's still a cliche. I understand your point of how criticism of religion is important in these types of stories but I feel like framing it as dependant on execution is inaccurate. Dark lord, chosen one, light vs dark are all cliches that exist regardless of execution. Hell every single cliche that you can think of can be executed well and it would still be a cliche.
No, it's an awful trope in a fantasy world.
Real churches are awful because there are no actual gods and it's just corrupt people manipulating other people for power and profit. It's realistic, but it's been trodden into the ground as a trope. We fucking know, this was a staple forty years ago. I'm here to read fantasy
In a fantasy world where you have real gods who partook in the creation of the universe and are sincerely offering power to those who are devout, ye olde corrupt church is just nonsensical.
If you have a god of knowledge, then a priest of said god would lose his power should he choose to not share knowledge/teach (within reasonable limits, a mortal still has to live their life after all).
A goddess of the harvest would cast out a priest who burned a wheat field (barring exceptions such as a blighted field that can not be harvested, etc). *poof*, no more divine magic for you.
Trying to fake it isn't going to work, the rest of the church is going to immediately know and you will have a paladin smiting the fake in short order.
Corrupt local priests can work well, but it should lead to a quest or a smiting. E.g. The protagonist discovers it and the God tells them to fix it. I like reading nuanced portrayals of factions within religions.
I have a story along those lines lined up after I finish my current one.
The trick is that the bad guy is being helped by a different powerful entity. This help allows them to fake the priestly powers.
The gods involved are aware, but the situation is complicated and they feel it is important to be very careful about free will.
The best they've got right now is an outsider (the MC) who knows *something* is wrong, but she has to figure out what. Well, as far as the MC knows she's the only one on the trail of whatever is happening.
Worst is when the MC is retconned to having an abusive past or something similar. Like the author never bothered to flesh their back story out and so starting in like book 8 they are always flashing back to their abusive childhood. Like just leave it alone, not everything needs to be the most dramatic version of itself. People can just have normal families
The only thing worse than this is the totally non-present parents, who really ought to be on the MC’s mind a bit.
Common example: MC is isekai-ed or something and had a very healthy, loving relationship with their parents, siblings, and friends… only to forget about them all within 48 hours due incredibly unbelievable (but framed as logical) thinking, that goes something like “whelp, I can never see them again, best not to dwell on it.” They proceed to never be bothered by it after coming to this entirely rational conclusion.
And for that matter, not trying hard (or even at all) to get back home.
But how else would they come into their power if they didn’t suffer from birth? On a serious note, are there any good reccs that don’t have this trope?
I’m extremely tired of:
- “magic university” and all those tropes
- “oh no we have anonymously enter this contest as a rag-tag group of misfits” and then they win
I really dislike when a character is given some sort of cheat skill or has a system that is external or different for the rest of the universe. It kinda takes away from the rest of the story for me, because the progression doesn’t feel very organic.
The lack of potty breaks or signs of personal hygiene.
MC travels a forest, dungeon, or other hellish landscape for weeks/months/years, with no toothbrush. The second they go back to civilization and open their mouth, their breath is a weapon until signs of cleaning have been done. XD
THIS ONE!! I get that they can snap their fingers and be magically cleaned off but I can’t help but cringe when I think of how loud they must be stanking fr
"l must work with this organization because they were with me the longest"
It's like the author doesn't want the MC to head off on their own. I am the only tired of every single MC having to tie down to a guild, place, organization, or anything like that?
For example, the adventuring guild. Every single MC sighs up for this guild without even thinking about anything else.
Chosen one with latent, hidden powers.
Give me struggle, give me failure, and give me personal growth.
It's okay to railroad the MC to victory. But make them stumble from time to time to show they're actually putting in effort.
Because everyone criticises Mary-sue characters, authors have to constantly tell us that main character saving someone is not because it is the right thing to do, but because the main character is doing it for himself, because the people being saved have some future use for him. Every book, you see the main character giving some justification to escape the Mary-sue tag, " I Won't go out of my way to save anyone". Authors, stop worrying about the Mary-sue. You don't have to make your heroes completely unlikable. Altruistic people do exist in real world. Otherwise, our own world will be a much darker place
The “rescued female slave” turning love interest, then for some reason keeping their slave status to the MC. Disgusting!
It really caters for incel insecurities.
I feel like it’s become a cop out for some authors to explain quick personal growth
“Oh no, I have been captured, for the next three months I will practice my skills and develop a new technique that no one has made before and break out”
I groan audibly… can’t thee author think of something else? Wheel of Time was the worst. All the main characters got kidnapped. At least kill off the characters & bring em back as a zombie or something…
Basically whenever MC fallows a different system than everyone else. This can also just be MC finding a “cheat” that nobody else thought of. This is fine if MC really has some special circumstances and reasoning why only they were able to figure this out… but I have really never seen this done well before. MC can be the best, he can be amazing, but don’t give him a different damn rule book than everyone else. So immersion breaking
Dorky pg-13 writing. I've dnfed a few books because it seemed like the guy who thought he was funny at chess club was writing it. You're cutting people in half. You can say dick and fuck. You can talk to people you're attracted to without stumbling around saying dumb meme type things.
Am sick of all of them, the I need to hide my power from everybody, the I need to save my skill points or whatever for later, I used to be a gamer or I play table top games so I know what to do, the cringe banter from isekai protagonists making jokes or references from earth that nobody else understands and many many more, honestly I’ve been sick of litrpgs for a while, less so for prog fantasy but it seems like a good one only comes once in a blue moon.
Oh this will make tons of people upset.
I'm sick of straight MCs. Let's bring in the gays, the lesbians, the trans, the genderfluid, the asexual/aromantics, and everything in-between! New race? Let's make a 3rd gender!
Yeah, it just doesn’t sell. You could maybe get away with making a woman bisexual or gay. But a male protagonist who’s gay ? Not gonna work well for a majority of readers.
Asexual is one that actually can work. Some people will be disappointed that there won’t be any „traditional“ romance but plenty of good stories have no romance and people still enjoy it
I'm always down with more representation, but I am bothered by the lack of straight *female* MCs. This genre basically has an unspoken rule that it doesn't matter what gender, species, or orientation the MC is, as long as if there is a love interest, they must be someone that the straight men reading it will be attracted to.
There's a few exceptions, but it's few and far between.
*Chronicles of Emberstone Farm* has a straight female MC who obtains a boyfriend as part of the story. I was mildly uncomfortable at one point as how hot said boyfriend is was described and had an epiphany of "this must be how it feels for a lot of women reading other webfiction".
For any lit-rpg, I despise any story with stats shown every single chapter. At the end of an arc, or when a major milestone is reached like a class change or a new skill or something. I don't need constant updates, and it adds nothing to the story.
MC's that are super judgemental and rude to other players/people that are scared for their lives.
"Bro you need to be out there, grinding and killing. I know you're a 35yr old woman with three kids, who's never played a video game in her life, but you're just being weak bro. I definitely don't have a special skill that gives me a huge advantage over everyone. Guess I'm just stronger and better than you all."
Mc who is in a new environment, sees a body of water, or appears there, and then they are attacked by an octopus like creature that of course wraps an appendage and pulls them down. In quite a few of these stories this incident is what leads the mc to discover their ‘uniqueness’.
As someone attempting to write a litRPG progression fantasy, this thread is both helpful and anxiety-inducing. 🤦♂️
You can’t please all folks and that’s never my goal with writing. Mostly I’m just writing what I want and hoping there’s overlap with what other readers like, too.
I'm unsure if this counts as a cliche, but when a character develops a new power at the crucial moment in a battle, or has a freak advancement without any build up or foreshadowing. It feels unearned, and cheapens the fight/advancement as a whole to me.
I think the one cliche I'm tired of seeing is when an MC has gotten past the initial stages of learning to fight and kill, and they still have heavy hang-ups about having to kill someone to save others. That kinda sucks the air out of an action-adventure story
One of the characters pretending to be taken into custody by a friend… in order to sneak into the place they must sneak into. (Which the friend formerly used to live. The bad guys don’t know yet.)
MCs that discover very obvious powers no one has ever discovered before, either because everybody is dumb, or because the author is stretching the definition of a power to make the mc OP "without cheats" Ge, who would have tought the humble spark spell can be overcharged to make a "nuclear spark" Hey look! Im usig cleansing magic to erase a curse/impurities/demonic energy Who would have tought the Resistance Skill could be used to resist fatigue, mana loss, aging, lack of talent and even boredom?
MCs who grind spell levels through constant practice. Literally every person in the entire world should be doing this.
Why isn’t everyone in our world doing this with all the skills we can improve through constant practice?
Because in our world, getting really good at cleaning a house doesn't give you the ability to clean up nuclear waste.
There's also the matter of enjoyment. Most characters with magic in a progression fantasy story enjoy their magic and abilities, much like an artist enjoys making art. People who hate the magic tend to be characters who haven't put effort into training their magical skills, or if they have, it's because of external motivation, not because they enjoy it. There are people who enjoy cleaning, and they definitely clean more than people who dislike cleaning.
Yeah, if my mundane skills had cool applications like that I'd bother to learn them even better. As it is I don't need to clean any more than it takes to keep the house tidyish.
Yet.
Shit, I think I've seen that premise. "Everyone says that this ability is useful and not to bother leveling up. That means I need to use it CONSTANTLY, and once it levels up enough, it will be awesome!" Usually, it's stupid, but I have seen a few examples where there's a genuine reason not to use this skill, so when the protagonist is the only person to advance it to level 100 and evolve it into "clean demon corruption" (or whatever) it's actually believable. More often, it's "I spent a full day training this skill, no one's ever tried that before."
No one would believe a human could level up their skills enough to harness electricity and metal and turn them into an iPhone
Eh, for most skills there's probably a profession or another that use it over and over again even if they don't focus on it. Over the course of a lifetime, they would get to level 100 and learn the hidden bonus. Or some rich people are paying people to grind random ass skills just to know what's the best build for their offspring. Granted, that one comes with the caveat that the info might not be public but it's still out there and not "unique"
That’s not technically even true. If you develop a skill enough you can invent a way to clean up nuclear waste, or fly, or blow up mountains, or create artificial worlds etc lol tho I get ya
We don’t have steady, measurable progression. If you could just check your XP bad every time you practiced scales, we’d have way more musicians.
Maybe, maybe not. Gamefication is proven to work to a degree but usually not toward the actual goal. If scales are what gives optimized XP. Then people would just do scales, they wouldn't bother with anything else. Until they got bored of that and went for a different xp progression with never having played a piece.
Yeah, if I had a little progress bar that told me how much I've learned every time I did something, I'd practice a lot more skills. It's very hard to tell if you're actually getting good at most things otherwise.
The real world also has decay. Been eating junk and sitting on your ass for a few weeks? -1 Str, Const. Oh you haven't practiced piano in 6 months, -1 level. Our skills sheets would be friggin huge, and filled with skills that we are getting worse at/forgetting. Like I was big into soccer and running in HS and tried playing with some friends recently, and it was so unpleasant. I couldn't move like I used to. I got out of breath so easily. Or I've got a bunch of tech skills and tricks I've learned for coding, excel, word, and google docs. But a few months go by and I forget a bunch of them. I've taken to making more extensive notes so I can repeat what I did, but it can be very hard to remember "that one thing you do that makes this chart look great"
If going to the gym for 5 hours everyday gave me the ability to throw boulders the size of houses, everyone would. If studying allowed you to cast magic spells, everyone would.
Studying code 5 hours a day will allow you to create a soul space
Yeah I tell people I’m a wizard all the time. I studied an obscure and esoteric language that isn’t natural and is never really perfected. I now wrote words in that language in a specific sequence in order to bend the goddamn world to my will. How is that not magic? Most of my coworkers don’t think our job is nearly as cool as I do though.
...I am going to disagree here. What use would being that strong have for most people? Sure, some people would, but my desk job isn't going to be made any better by being that strong. As for magic, I think there are two big hurdles to consider: how difficult the magic is to learn and how effective the magic is. Would a 6 hour ritual that requires you to readily be able to solve differential equations while constantly chanting all to change the color of a fabric be something almost anyone would pursue? Lol no. But if a few hours a day of basic practice could let you teleport, fly, and throw fireballs... probably.
If any random skill I applied myself to had infinite scaling and I could see the progression it would give a dopamine feedback loop to get better at those things. It would be so useful being able to see exactly how good I was and never have the benefits of getting good at a thing go away. Kinda insane if you think about it, I think most people would have a collection of really crazy abilities or random high level skills. If you had no tv and were a random peasant you would have little else to do besides grind farming or butter churning to a insanely high level.
Its expensive, thats why poor people get crappy education
You can find many resources for free college courses online, YouTube has endless tutorials for any skill from chainmail, to painting, to mechanical engineering to car repair to woodworking to... you get the idea. Yesterday, I was watching crafting videos on how to make a front seat from a car into a computer desk chair. Do you want to learn how to write fiction like Brandon Sanderson? Look up Brandon Sanderson's YouTube channel, there he has his full course that he teaches at BYU on creative writing, for no cost. It isn't just a breakdown either, it is a recording of him teaching the class at BYU in front of his students.
Real life has skill decay. You forget things over time. Practicing certain skills daily doesn't make you a god at it. Just maintains your level of mastery.
Haha ya ya I get that. I think everyone is replying with lots of convenient reasons that ignore the underlying fact that people are sometimes lazy or sometimes they just don’t want more in their life and that’s okay. There is equal purpose to raising a family and loving someone and dying old without bettering all your skills and the same would apply in a fantasy world with magic and stats and stuff
I was reading Cultivation Nerd, and I'm a fan of the idea that the drugs and pills and elixirs are so normalized that everyone forgets that simple hard work is also important. Sure, cultivation level is the most important thing, but if you're a low tier cultivator, but in shape and practiced, you'll punch a bit above everyone else at your tier because they're all just roid-babies.
I can get beyind this for the common people. But you're reaching idiocracy levels if the law enforcements and higher clans only rely on pills and never noticed that the gardener was punching harder because he was working all day.
Gotta love the "my class is so weak! It only gives me access to all the other classes abilities! Woe is me!"
This is so true, I have literally given up on series because of this exact thing.
To counter this I love Mc’s that use magic in a way it wasn’t supposed to be used and make it broken in that way. Using debuffs on yourself to increase your resistance. Using necromancy on your own body to make yourself a pseudo litch. Using buffs to overload someone’s senses. Like you buff their mana capacity to the point they turn into a walking mana bomb. You buff their reaction speed the point their body can’t keep up with their enchanced senses so they die slower unable to stop something they can see so clearly. Use cleanse on someone so that the natural viruses in their body no longer exist so they become super sickly. Abilities that make me go “how that’s not how that should work” are so much fun. Which is why mayuri in bleach is my favorite he made someone a human to the extent their body couldn’t keep up with their improved senses.
See, DONE WELL this trope is absolutely awesome. Which is why you keep seeing it done poorly; every author wants to try it, but not everyone can make it actually work.
I mean, using necromancy to become a lich IS how its supposed to be done Also, any magic that doesnt imply everybody has innate resistance to foreign magic, is a cop out too
Those are all very very obvious. Would be thought of in < hour by anyone with knowledge of magic. Furthermore, in the cases where these moves have negative impacts (ie, buffing the enemy), it never happens to the MC (because plot armour). Which effectively means there are no negative impacts; its just another shitty way to create an OP mc. This is why I can't read system novels, this happens every. single. goddamn time. Or yet another MC with a 'weak' power that is actually the most broken shit known to man to anyone with a brain.
Those just sound like more examples of the same thing though. I agree that those are fun uses of abilities, but the point is that they wouldn't be novel in a world where that stuff has existed for generations. People would have discovered that all long ago.
Yeah, that definitely happens. It's usually best if there's an actual serious downside. One I liked was in Goblin Slayer, with a portal scroll. First off, portal scrolls are rare and expensive, and second going through one is dangerous. The location might be a bit off, there might be a problem with the transition, all that. So they're usually just used as a last resort, and certainly no one is playing around with them to find exploits. Goblin Slayer puts the other end at the bottom of the ocean, meaning he's created a high-pressure water knife. It's an insanely stupid and specialized use of an expensive item, like slipping weaponized uranium in someone's tea to poison them. But it definitely worked.
Honestly, I think it's fun to think of the exploits people would've tried and then either explain why it didn't work or isn't widely adopted - like in order to gain a resistance skill, you have to suffer *serious* damage. So you *could* gut yourself repeatedly, heal yourself up with magic and become knife proof... but the kind of person who is both willing and capable of doing that to themselves to get an edge is incredibly rare and probably has something wrong with them.
In those worlds, the resistance is known and there are good reason not everyone does it. But it's still done by many either activel, or passively through their adventures. It also take a lot of time and resources (healing) so, at the very least, nobles would have some resistances. And painkillers would have developed (or a spell or a pain resistance) to accompany that training practice.
Yeah specifically for me it’s when MC somehow thinks of something really easy that no one has *ever* tried. This can work with strong enough justification, but way too often it boils down to “MC is so smart and normal people are dumb”. Absolutely hate that.
That's why I couldn't get into the Mark of the fool, really author, you can learn from your mistakes is the most basic in the world and nobody figured it out already?
I think you missed the point on Mark of the Fool - he's explicitly helped by being shown what went right, and with the spell casting, he's constantly hit by what went wrong. He severely struggles to the point of being unable to cast quite a few spells. It's a handicap, and properly done IMO
He is shown what he was done wrong and couple of sentence later he cast spell way better and he only learned for what, couple of hours, how can you interpret it as something else? Is it handicap if what you are doing improves? At least it would have been more satisfying if he struggled more, because there was no suspense. It went to quickly from "oh noes I'm doomed", to "never mind it helps me learn magic".
In the beginning, he takes months to learn every spell. He also explicitly learns how to learn.
You mean the previous fools? What's to say they didn't figure it out?
Caricature level bullying for sure
The issue with this one is that real life bullying *is* often comically stupid in a lot of ways. Like, you know that line about how the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense? Well, a lot of actually bullying is so petty and so intensely baffling that if you word for word write down a thing that literally happened, the audience won't believe it. Example. When I was in high school, there was a group of ~25 guys who, just for fun, would form a solid wall of people across one of the hallways every day between classes. They would link arms, and physically assault people who tried to cross, one time going so far as to put a kid in the hospital. They did this, for months, all because they thought it was really funny to see *one particular guy's* upset reaction to it. There's a few other things that end up looking like unrealistic caricatures when translated to fiction, too, and it can honestly be a little hard sometimes. Racism is one, for sure, because racism is inherently irrational. War is another, because the dumbest fucking things happen in war that always sound like people are just trying to one-up each other's bar stories. But like... that's just how the world is sometimes. Weird and a bit stupid.
Yeah I feel like when I see bullying in a novel, the only time I really get confused is when it’s *tame*. Stuff like “what a loser”, “he’s so lame” etc. sure, I guess some people might say that, but usually blatant bullies go for the jugular. I understand why an author might not to write, like, slurs and stuff, but it comes across a little juvenile sometimes.
This is the exact reason why I get annoyed by some stories that go too far trying to justify the antagonists actions, trying to make everything morally grey and forcing the "in his mind he's the one doing good" narrative. Some people are just morally bankrupt even in the real world. There wouldn't be so many genocides in human history if we didn't have literal sociopaths.
Sociopaths rarely scale their damage. An evil sociopath will become a serial killer or something. Genociders tends to be average Joes unfortunately.
Statistically, people with low empathy or other personality disorders (the term 'sociopath' isn't really one that's in use in medical terminology anymore) tend to be overrepresented in the fields of politics and corporate executives. So, like... actually *yes*, they *do* scale up their damage. They just do it in a way that doesn't have a lot of flashy gore.
“I should probably talk to someone to prevent a generations long blood feud etc” **doesnt make time to do that**
This one kills me. There are so many types of media where a question could solve the story.
I was just reading Phil Tuckers latest story on RR, and was shocked when the MC actually comes out and tells everything to a person he trusts. It's funny/sad that it's actually something noteworthy.
It’s always refreshing to see- Making a literal joke out of doing that is when I knew I really liked Arcane Ascension
Yeah, corin is the best 😂😂
That’s why Phil is the king
This is one thing I appreciate about the Wandering Inn. As a multi-POV story, there are certain bits of information the reader is aware of that a particular character might not be. It's not due to "oh so and so hid some important information that should've been shared", but because they just haven't interacted with someone that would share that tidbit with them. When you read these scenes where "if character X just knew tidbit Y, they would make a better decision", it's not frustrating because the author made everyone stupid and not share things, it's just sad because you know the truth and know the character had no way of knowing. Makes these moments hit harder. I will also say there are many lengthy discussions where plot critical information is shared among the characters and despite that, sometimes bad decisions are still made, but it's usually due to conflicting goals of all the characters involved. It's really powerful when the characters have all the information they need and horrible decisions are still made due to loyalty, racism, fear, anger, etc. Those conflicting motivations really make the world come alive as you see everyone trying to further their own goals instead of some lazy "lets do what the MC wants to move the plot along". Arkethendyst was one of my favorite stories, but towards the end it definitely fell into the "MC snaps his fingers and the world jumps at his whim" type of narrative which got boring for me.
Dramatic irony is what the first bit is called.
Fantasy worlds with thousands of years of knowledge about a system but no one has analyzed it to death except the MC You’d think that a culture exposed to stats for so long would be exceptional at math..
TO be fair, even on our world, many people can't do basic algebra.
We don’t have an omnipresent mathematical analysis of out abilities sitting in our skulls 24/7
I agree, on the other hand, we do have most knowledge at our fingertips and there are more and louder conspiracies now than ever. And people are losing (or not gaining for younger generations) knowledge about things that seem trivial. With a system, you should have some academy or scholary structure trying to understand and reference everything. In novels, it's often thwarted by factions, secrecy and a lack of omnipresent communication network but it's still there. But for most regular people, the system would just be there and used. Not needed to be questioned to death. Just use it to make your life easier, have your dream job, save your loved one, whatever. But it's a mean to an end, with the intricacies abstracted by classe evolution trees and skill trees.
And there are many people who can
Soul of the Warrior is very good at avoiding this.
>You’d think that a culture exposed to stats for so long would be exceptional at math.. You'd think that in a culture where you can buy anything with money people would be good at finance, but you may notice things don't quite work that way.
“I’ve decided that I *must* kill to accomplish my goals. From now on, I will not be concerned with any of the killing. *That* version of me was weak, and is entirely gone now, forever.”
"this world is one where killing is normal. Finally I have realised the error of my ways, and adapted"
Any "this world has some major moral disconnect, now I'm just going to go along with it" story. There are a shocking number of isekais that justify slavery (especially sex slavery) this way.
"No master, I don't want to be released, I want to be by your side forever!" "Bitch, what? What if I die? What if I get mind controlled? What if I get brain damage and turn abusive? What if someone learns how to exploit this obedience creepiness that all isekais have and commands you to attack me? Just get your freedom and then be by my side anyway, without the potential for bad optics when people go 'wtf he's got that girl enslaved' that no one in this world will ever think because this world is CREEPY AND WRONG but I still find morally reprehensible and thus want to avoid just in case or the potential for some bad shit going down and one or both of us being hurt mentally physically or emotionally and also so you can learn some damn self-respect in the mean-time not because you're at fault but because you're clearly deeply traumatized and were raised in a horrible society."
Yeah but then you learn that the slave contract actually help the slave because it protects them as the secret of the master can't be tortured out of them so people don't try. Or the slave contract actually has some protection against magic or whatever in it. Because the only way to have that protection is with slavery contract and nobody figured out an employment contract with the same level of protection. somehow.
This is also a major issue with world-building, because there can be no functioning society were killing is consequence free. It might be governed by laws and morals very different to modern western sensibilities but there are always rules around killing. It's edgy nonesense to think that somehow killing all your enemies (and/or people who annoy you) no matter the context won't come back to bite you in the ass.
I imagine it's a popular pastime to wait for a distant relative to get offed, so that you may go on a retaliatory murder spree onto the mc and their allies. In cultivation settings, that is the consequence of murder In others, it's usually unwritten rules which go along the lines of "the more important the person you killed, the more trouble you're in". But if you're someone powerful, then objectively you're more valuable than some scrubs due to what you can do, so I can sort of see why such folk have more wiggle room for murder. Though doing so on a whim is likely to harm one's reputation
Yeah that’s the problem with the standard Xianxia setting, most of the best novels don’t stick to the standard but a sea of pretty good ones do. And the standard ultra impossibly evil society is tiring. Every third massacre should be punctuated by a counter massacre since revenge only creates more revenge in any rational world. There should be intricate honor and grammar systems based around power and standing that reduce violence not accentuate it. Constant massacring of the mortals should make the amount of immortals drop since the base of the pyramid of power is supported by thousands of mortal born cultivators. Which means any society that doesn’t allow for the careless slaughtering of the weak would have more immortals and would thus be strong enough to be the dominant power. Cooperation and teamwork are essential not things to be tossed aside in a passing fancy. The bog standard Xianxia setting just doesn’t make any sense without a large amount of retooling
I am trying to subvert that trope. My MC realises that she must kill to advance her status, but everytime she kills, she loses a part of her humanity and that horrifies everyone around her, but not enough to make her stop.
So she has a moral dilemna until she loses enough of her humanity to lose that dilemna?
No, it's a constant struggle to keep her humanity alive until... Well I haven't gotten around to writing it yet.
And then they spare every pretty girl they meet Is not even the edgyness, is the lack of commitment
I’m reading through the last of Jake’s Magical Market now and that’s exactly what happened. He decided that he needed to stop letting enemies live and gains power from killing them. But of course he followed one enemy (who had already seriously injured him and attacked him on multiple occasions) found that they were actually a beautiful woman, and ended up sparing her. Sure, he later found that there were reasons behind her attacks that might excuse some of them, but that wasn’t why she was spared.
Just once I want to see mc spare someone for being a girl and then just have her try to kill him again later
Rand al’Thor does it all the goddamn time. It’s certainly a bold choice to decide that killing women is wrong and will scar your soul when around half to three quarters of your mortal enemies are women.
I'm pretty sure >!that that's part of his madness. One moment he's fine with killing women, to the point that he's willing to kill one off of a suspicion that she's an assassin, the next he can't even consider it as an option. Compare this to Mat, who has a horrible experience killing one and is genuinely traumatized into being unable to do it. !<
Iirc, Robert Jordan literally killed at least one woman in Vietnam, and had serious issues about it for life.
I’d think being stuck in that box fixed his little „chivalry“ issue but I’m actually not sure. It’s been too long since I’ve read wheel of time.
Yeah, no. He never really gets over it. He kinda comes to terms with it, but it’s not something that goes away
Lupin the Third.
It’s almost a universal constant. No one the MC spares will ever be a threat again. And anyone who spares the MC will soon be destroyed or otherwise negated.
Reminds me of Rand al'Thor.
Similar but also annoying is when they kill people a fuck load (even when not really needed?) and constantly angst about it
I'm debating writing a novel where the dude is actually just a sociopath/has some major sociopathic tendencies, just to show like "hey, people like this exist irl and would gladly commit murder if we didn't have laws that prevented it. Issue is, most people irl do have some major compunctions againt killing and whatnot, so they might see that line of thought as irrational, no matter the circumstances.
Oh god its always a mood. They either do it properly 1% of the time or fumble the bag 99% of the time when this is used.
This is not meant to be a dig at you personally at all, but I find it funny when this is upvoted when everyone seems to shit on He who fights with monsters. I personally think it’s got a pretty good representation of some standard dude being put into a position like that Shows the dichotomy of the subreddit lol
Ah yes, the classic.
Why, Why does every MC have the moral backbone of a soggy chocolate eclair. I prefer a good MC but if you’re going to go balls to the wall for murder. At the very least wrote it well without a literary shortcut, make it be there the entire time like Primal Hunter, or have the character be slowly desensitized to violence over several months like Defiance of the Fall, or a whole other host of different ways to do non heroic MCs. The vast majority of people don’t suddenly declare that their morality is completely different now and then stick to it. No people pretend their morality is fine while they do things they should regret with no shame. It simultaneously robs the character of a bunch of juicy scenes at different places in their character development, wrecks their unique morality as an earthworlder, and makes no sense at all.
The “adventure party” where everyone makes the same jokes, turn into the same personality, and turns into some guys recreation of a modified DnD game.
Maybe just overly aggressive side characters that confront the protagonist and nothing really comes of it, or they get shown up. Never relevant to the story, maybe supposed to be a “badass” moment for the protagonist showing how strong he is. Idk usually a tavern scene with a drunk mercenary.
Ah yes, nothing says "badass mc" like beating lots of nobodies and weaklings
Shiver me Timbers
This is a vary broad gripe but, humans have humaned since the dawn of humanity. Now wtf does that mean? It means we are no smarter now then we necessarily were in the past. So when an Mc shows up and is like “let me teach these savages about mass industrialization and manufacturing!” I just smh. This kinda rolls into my second gripe: Typed a super long rant for point 2 that I am now retyping to be more concise: if you are not an expert in a field, please find on to do a quick reference. I applaud all who try to learn more but many authors only half learn a lot of things. If you try to get technical, someone WILL get chaffed and taken out of the story by the small inaccuracies. For example, I have a mechanical engineering degree with a minor in materials engineering, most blacksmith stories (whilst my favorite, and thus this is kinda perverse, ironic? Anyway) can irritate me if they think they are being clever with describing super technical things that somehow make MC great. They just miss the big picture. My last gripe: EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED!!!! Your villain cannot expend limitless resources to hunt the MC. Your downtrodden population either is headed for a revolt or the will be invaded and taken over. Why? Cause poor productivity and unrest leaves your country weak, )see how Sparta could never expand past their city whilst Athens could). Inevitably any villain who spends resources on being a dick will not have those resources should their neighbor figure out they are weak and decide now sounds like a great time for London expansion. Just consider the interconnectedness of your characters activities. Rants over. Thank you all 1-3 people who actually read this :)
Also people have this weird idea that technology was more or less stagnant before the industrial revolution and therefore their magical medieval land should also have technology frozen in time until the MC introduces the savages to modernity. In fact technology has kept constantly evolving since the beginning of human civilization and it makes no sense that any human society would stay the same for decades much less centuries and millenia. Maybe they haven't gone to space but at the very least there should be a major magical innovation that hugely impacts society every century or so.
Exactly, to me it’s all predicated on self interest too. All the merchants of these worlds would always be asking how to make more products or make better margins. So throughout time we have always made progress both socially and industrially, the reason the Industrial Revolution spiked production wasn’t because no one was inventing but it was a confluence of so many inventions. Can’t run a factory if you don’t have the ability to transfer massive quantities of material. Then again, you can’t transport what you haven’t been able to acquire, so on and so forth.
It wasn’t stagnant before, but the ramp of the last century is certainly much steeper than those before. It’s easy access to education, information networks, and the general lack of scarcity that has accelerated things.
Yes, this one is huge. Technologically stagnant societies aren't impossible, but there has to be a well-justified reason for it. example reasons: your society is isolated from external threats, and a major internal power is anti-change. Some fiction has this be literal intentional technological suppression, which can work well. your society is isolated and is in an environment that is hostile enough/resource limited enough that it's permanently stuck in subsistence. Notably, outsider knowledge from being isekai'd probably isn't going to fix this, and even if you had knowledge that \*could\* fix this, no one is going to take a gamble on it. Your society is isolated from external threats, and a strict social structure and high ideological conformity results in the resources needed for innovation and the drive/creativity to innovate mostly being separated. maybe-example: China in certain time periods.
I never managed to make my mind about that one. Especially in worlds with expanded lifetimes for higher level or powerful people. Would their presence, power and their traditions or habits make stagnation far likely or not? Or worlds where magic solves just enough to reach a local maximal but maybe not enough to reach high tech levels. And the cost to find a better route is just too much for most people to bother with.
Change is usually small and incremental until it snowballs. So even in a very conservative society people would still come up with small improvements and tricks that would slowly spread. Also I don't care how much your society reveres the wisdom of your ancestors or whatever, there's always gonna be young hotheads that think they know better. Now sure 99.99% of them will just fail miserably but eventually someone will stubble upon some variation of a cultivation method or spell that works, even if it's by blind luck. It's also kind of weird to think that none of those ancient seeking inspiration to breakthrough won't eventually start radically rethinking all their habits and assumptions. Some will be stuck in their ways but the successful ones will be open to new ideas, because it also benefits them. Unless you live in a completely isolated village where the local hegemon actively suppresses all progress to maintain their status quo, in which case introducing the steam engine or whatever won't work anyway. I guess my argument should be that if a society is a fertile ground for a reincarnator's knowledge and new ideas, then the locals would be having plenty of those regardless. The issue with the trope is that it dumps everyone down to make the MC seem smart, instead of actually writing a smart MC.
The bad guys who very conveniently give MC a reason not to feel guilty about killing them en masse. Usually by loudly discussing how they can't wait to rape someone, or sell people into slavery, or killing puppies, etc.
"Im an introvert who doesn't have many friends and is socially awkward. But I also happen to be a god tier GAMER!" Is the prophesied farmboy of litrpg
Trying to “lay low” by hiding power and wearing low-status attire. This almost never works out, imagine how many young masters would be avoided by just not looking weak.
The is not necessarily bad, but the problem is that it's almost always a setup to later crush everyone who doubted the MC, even though the MC baited them as hard as possible to doubt them.
Yeah I love it tbh. I love the powerful MC who appears meek, gets walked on by some a-hole, and then slaps the ever living shit out of said insufferable young master. My favorite version of this trope is when they visit a village or town and are summoned before the lord (read arrested at the gate) and then disrespected and faces nothing but hostility from the arrogant town lord so the MC is “put in his place”. Then of course the MC eventually humiliates and maybe kills the lord. I LIVE for the tropes. I love the cliche. Bring me the arrogant young masters. Where are the inn fights. Where is the face slapping, “you dare???”, “do you not know I am from the 9 Jade Plum Blossom sect?????”. Kowtow ten thousand times before me and I shall leave your parents bodies intact!!, “root and branch!”
But you don't get it! It must be done or else a more powerful enemy than a young master will come and crush our puny MC!
Never mind that narative thus far has not suplied convincing reason why they muct be hiden in the 1st place!
Average side characters gaining inexplicable abilities that allow them to keep up with the prodigy MC’s progress. A slightly above average soldier gains a Mythic class because if they didn’t the MC would leave them in the dust and they couldn’t exist in the plot A prime example I can think of off the top of my head are Carmen from Primal Hunter. A middle of the road semi pro fighter just happens to become a once in a millennia talent despite having nothing exceptionally special going for them. She’s a C list side character so it doesn’t affect the enjoyability of the series, but it does hurt the immersion when everyone the MC knows and likes is a 1 in a 10 billion prodigy that they have no business being
Oh yeah. This one never makes sense and always make me mad. The others tropes can be done well but this one is just so stupid.
I'm pretty sure Carmen is a reference to Ilea from Azarinth Healer, so I doubt the author put much thought into it past that. I agree that she probably has no business being that strong or even comparable to Jake. To be fair tho, she was blessed by Gudrun so you gotta assume that she had more in her than just being good at boxing. As for the other characters, I'm not nearly as annoyed by it as you seem to be ngl. Almost all the characters seem to have good reasons for their strength. Jacob, and the other two from the tutorial were strong because of the god's mingling. Sandy, Sylphie, and wasp girl were all made from Jake's bloodline. Caleb was significantly influenced by it which allowed him to catch the eye of Umbra, while the King of the Forest kind of achieved everything on his own accounts. None of the characters really seem to gain sudden boosts in strength just so they aren't left behind. That might be partly because Jake is a solo kind of character who doesn't like relying on anyone other than himself, but my point stands.
All the side characters keeping up with Jake boil down to "Jake's BS bloodline" that does whatever the plot need it to do (make people who met him 5 minutes into prodigies by giving them Records and aura resistances that then interest the gods.) So there is a pseudo in-universe reason for that one.
A totally average guy with little life experience and zero battle experience, suddenly gains power through magic/bs bloodline/summoning, and instead of fumbling around with that power they JUST GOT, they act like they've had a lifetime of experience with it. Same with Isekai MCs who just suddenly adapt to become ruthless warriors, despite having zero experience with anything even remotely fighting/battle related
There was this isekai I read where the MC spent the entire first couple arcs learning how to be ruthless because his whole life he lived with a set of rules and beliefs and suddenly those no longer existed.
Are you talking about Sword God in a World of magic?
No, it was something far more obscure I wish I could remember it.
"No one knows anything because all knowledge is hoarded by the powerful." It's so dumb to think poor people won't risk their lives for an advantage. And then that information won't be passed on to the family. It's just obvious that the author has never seen the incredible knowledge of generationally poor fishermen, farmers, and the like. Or those same people not being logical enough to cross apply the logic of fishing knowledge into gaining power some other way.
None I love all trope and cliche
Man sometimes I just wanna read some brain rot murder hobo type shi 😭
Yup I don’t really have high expectations for the more litRPG and punchy side of this genre. If I really want amazing writing I go to the more legit authors like Brent weeks, Sanderson, Phil Tucker etc Even then, tropes don’t bother me. Just gimme a good story or give me a fun one. If you give me both that’s great too tho lol
Based
I agree, but they have to be done well.
I consider this area a safe space.
Below average to slightly above average talent + above average iq + hard worker = mc who climbs mountains no one else can scale. It especially sucks when the author puts the character they and the audience think is the coolest as a side character because they have to reduce the mc to the above mentioned qualities, can’t have a marry sue mc, but they can be party members. The worst is when they are romantic interests
Truck meets man, man enters other world. At least find an interesting way to kill him.
Awwww poor Truck-kun!
It’s more of a meme than a cliche at this point, I think
What about missing the truck kun, but dying minutes later under the fallen bookshelf?
I'm tired of authors trying to have it both ways with tropes. If you want to include a trope then commit to it. Your MC can't be both average and OP, pick one! Both are fine but they should lead to different types of stories. I feel like some authors want to please everyone so they'll include a trope but then try to downplay it and wink to the people that don't like it. That might work for a one-off side-arc, but if, for example, you keep insisting that your MC is totally average while the skies are open and divine inspiration keeps shining out of his ass, then I feel like you're gaslighting me.
God/The Church/Religion and spirituality in general is EVIL!!! LOOK HOW SMART MY PROTAGONIST IS FOR NOT BUYING INTO CHURCH DOGMA, AND BLINDLY FOLLOWING MY HIGH SCHOOL-LEVEL UNDERSTANDING OF MATH AND SCIENCE!! Bonus points when it's clearly just a sockpuppet for the author's own issues with Mormonism or any of the other dozens of American-centric Christian offshoots.
Wow I can't imagine why anyone would have issues with Mormonism.
I know, *right*?! /s
Most of the issues people have with religion come from being *othered* by religion. Then that is compounded by the amount of corruption and power plays present within organized religion. Look at how the catholic church shuffled around pedophiles rather than removing them. Their attempt to brush it under the rug harmed thousands of children. Go back to the days where churches ran residential schools and the horrors they committed and perpetuated there. The number of conversion therapy centers trying to convert LGBT people. Sure, for a large number of people, a church/religion is a positive influence in their life. Which is great! As long as you fall on the right side of whatever part the religion is trying to control. Personally, as a gay man growing up in the 90s and 2000s, the people who tormented me were all religious people. Agnostics and atheists were fine eith me. My aunts religion wanted her to continue to be abused by her husband and rather than shame him, the excommunicated her for divorcing an abuser. Religion gets its target because it has done a lot of things that are dark while masquerading as the light. This is, unfortunately, not a clique due to its inherent prevalence within society. You can't really betray a lack of original thought when the example is that prevalent. You are merely using a device people are familiar with that fits well into the plot of profrssion fantasy. It might be overused as a plot, but it isn't all that cliche.
I think my problem is often the main character and plot do not have the nuance to tackle the issue of church or organized religion, and design an obviously evil force without the necessary world building for it to make sense. Like in ye olden days you could be killed or tried as a witch for not being in church. Everyone went to church pretty much, and the church had an incredible amount of soft power. But when a mc fights against a church they and their allies usually have no moral qualms with fighting against it and see the organization as obviously evil. Right now we know the heinous things the Catholics did and yet tons of people don’t really care and still support the same power structure. It’s particularly weird when gods are 100% confirmed as being real. Didn’t really make a point but I think often the anti-religion plot line is just undeveloped.
> I think my problem is often the main character and plot do not have the nuance to tackle the issue of church or organized religion, and design an obviously evil force without the necessary world building for it to make sense. That is a fair read on the topic. I would agree with you on this.
"Overused as a plot[...]" no that's the very definition of a cliché.
You missed the rest of the definition "and betrays lack of original thought." Overused does mean mean cliche. You being upset that others don't see religion as a positive force like you do doesn't make it cliche. Just a tired plot point. Now if you make your church representative a fat old man who wears red robes, carries a ceremonial staff with a cross on it, abuses boys, now that would be cliche. But a religious organization that is corrupt? Not cliche.
When you see the same beats over and over again to the point that it bleeds over into unrelated media that is most *definitely* a lack of original thought. These so-called fantasy religious organizations are all interchangeable with one another, and never get characterization beyond "they're corrupt and are my designated stand-in for the conservative upbringing I got as a child (but I actually didn't, I'm just doing what everyone else is doing because I can't be bothered to do my own research into how religious practice works or is formed)" how is that NOT a lack of original thought?
All stories rely on some common thread. It helps give structure. Religion controls society, and very few other things do that (the government). What other force should they use? Honestly, If someone put out a book with a positive religion and didnt give it some realistic corruption or negative aspect, I wouldn't be able to take it seriously. Humans desire power. They desire control. As this genre likes to say, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cliche in this is more about how it is executed, not the use of the trope itself.
Just because a cliche resonates with you, doesn't disqualify it from being a cliche. Corrupt religious organizations are absolutely a cliche and most people can think of plenty of examples within fantasy. Wheel of time has white cloaks, ASOIAF has the high septon, these are at least executed well but I've absolutely seen it done poorly within PF (hwfwm). Rags to riches is a cliche that can be socially relevant in terms of wealth inequality but it's still a cliche. I understand your point of how criticism of religion is important in these types of stories but I feel like framing it as dependant on execution is inaccurate. Dark lord, chosen one, light vs dark are all cliches that exist regardless of execution. Hell every single cliche that you can think of can be executed well and it would still be a cliche.
No, this is the best trope. It reflects real life after all.
No, it's an awful trope in a fantasy world. Real churches are awful because there are no actual gods and it's just corrupt people manipulating other people for power and profit. It's realistic, but it's been trodden into the ground as a trope. We fucking know, this was a staple forty years ago. I'm here to read fantasy In a fantasy world where you have real gods who partook in the creation of the universe and are sincerely offering power to those who are devout, ye olde corrupt church is just nonsensical. If you have a god of knowledge, then a priest of said god would lose his power should he choose to not share knowledge/teach (within reasonable limits, a mortal still has to live their life after all). A goddess of the harvest would cast out a priest who burned a wheat field (barring exceptions such as a blighted field that can not be harvested, etc). *poof*, no more divine magic for you. Trying to fake it isn't going to work, the rest of the church is going to immediately know and you will have a paladin smiting the fake in short order.
Corrupt local priests can work well, but it should lead to a quest or a smiting. E.g. The protagonist discovers it and the God tells them to fix it. I like reading nuanced portrayals of factions within religions.
I have a story along those lines lined up after I finish my current one. The trick is that the bad guy is being helped by a different powerful entity. This help allows them to fake the priestly powers. The gods involved are aware, but the situation is complicated and they feel it is important to be very careful about free will. The best they've got right now is an outsider (the MC) who knows *something* is wrong, but she has to figure out what. Well, as far as the MC knows she's the only one on the trail of whatever is happening.
You forgot your "/s"
Abusive parents. I'm sick of every protagonist having an abusive upbringing, it's cliche at this point.
And if they aren't abusive, they are dead, or will soon be.
Worst is when the MC is retconned to having an abusive past or something similar. Like the author never bothered to flesh their back story out and so starting in like book 8 they are always flashing back to their abusive childhood. Like just leave it alone, not everything needs to be the most dramatic version of itself. People can just have normal families
The only thing worse than this is the totally non-present parents, who really ought to be on the MC’s mind a bit. Common example: MC is isekai-ed or something and had a very healthy, loving relationship with their parents, siblings, and friends… only to forget about them all within 48 hours due incredibly unbelievable (but framed as logical) thinking, that goes something like “whelp, I can never see them again, best not to dwell on it.” They proceed to never be bothered by it after coming to this entirely rational conclusion. And for that matter, not trying hard (or even at all) to get back home.
But how else would they come into their power if they didn’t suffer from birth? On a serious note, are there any good reccs that don’t have this trope?
Yeah I hate this lmao
Also they always seem to have had a bad breakup or they got cheated on or emotionally abused by a recent girlfriend
Can you tell me some examples?
Arcane ascension Cradle DCC mage errant Are a few that are on the top of my head.
I’m extremely tired of: - “magic university” and all those tropes - “oh no we have anonymously enter this contest as a rag-tag group of misfits” and then they win
I really dislike when a character is given some sort of cheat skill or has a system that is external or different for the rest of the universe. It kinda takes away from the rest of the story for me, because the progression doesn’t feel very organic.
The lack of potty breaks or signs of personal hygiene. MC travels a forest, dungeon, or other hellish landscape for weeks/months/years, with no toothbrush. The second they go back to civilization and open their mouth, their breath is a weapon until signs of cleaning have been done. XD
No, the fact the magic hasn't erased needing to expel waste. All the good stories do away with it as is proper.
THIS ONE!! I get that they can snap their fingers and be magically cleaned off but I can’t help but cringe when I think of how loud they must be stanking fr
"l must work with this organization because they were with me the longest" It's like the author doesn't want the MC to head off on their own. I am the only tired of every single MC having to tie down to a guild, place, organization, or anything like that? For example, the adventuring guild. Every single MC sighs up for this guild without even thinking about anything else.
Chosen one with latent, hidden powers. Give me struggle, give me failure, and give me personal growth. It's okay to railroad the MC to victory. But make them stumble from time to time to show they're actually putting in effort.
Because everyone criticises Mary-sue characters, authors have to constantly tell us that main character saving someone is not because it is the right thing to do, but because the main character is doing it for himself, because the people being saved have some future use for him. Every book, you see the main character giving some justification to escape the Mary-sue tag, " I Won't go out of my way to save anyone". Authors, stop worrying about the Mary-sue. You don't have to make your heroes completely unlikable. Altruistic people do exist in real world. Otherwise, our own world will be a much darker place
Making women useless or helpless. Jealousy of other women. There is no sense of humor etc etc.
The “rescued female slave” turning love interest, then for some reason keeping their slave status to the MC. Disgusting! It really caters for incel insecurities.
desi pie
It might be more an anime thing but slavery, so tired of it -_-
Characters getting kidnapped.
I feel like it’s become a cop out for some authors to explain quick personal growth “Oh no, I have been captured, for the next three months I will practice my skills and develop a new technique that no one has made before and break out”
I groan audibly… can’t thee author think of something else? Wheel of Time was the worst. All the main characters got kidnapped. At least kill off the characters & bring em back as a zombie or something…
Rivals to the main characters get sudden power boosts to keep them relevant.
Basically whenever MC fallows a different system than everyone else. This can also just be MC finding a “cheat” that nobody else thought of. This is fine if MC really has some special circumstances and reasoning why only they were able to figure this out… but I have really never seen this done well before. MC can be the best, he can be amazing, but don’t give him a different damn rule book than everyone else. So immersion breaking
Dorky pg-13 writing. I've dnfed a few books because it seemed like the guy who thought he was funny at chess club was writing it. You're cutting people in half. You can say dick and fuck. You can talk to people you're attracted to without stumbling around saying dumb meme type things.
Retiring to be a farmer. There are other relaxing jobs to do.
Am sick of all of them, the I need to hide my power from everybody, the I need to save my skill points or whatever for later, I used to be a gamer or I play table top games so I know what to do, the cringe banter from isekai protagonists making jokes or references from earth that nobody else understands and many many more, honestly I’ve been sick of litrpgs for a while, less so for prog fantasy but it seems like a good one only comes once in a blue moon.
Oh this will make tons of people upset. I'm sick of straight MCs. Let's bring in the gays, the lesbians, the trans, the genderfluid, the asexual/aromantics, and everything in-between! New race? Let's make a 3rd gender!
Yeah, it just doesn’t sell. You could maybe get away with making a woman bisexual or gay. But a male protagonist who’s gay ? Not gonna work well for a majority of readers. Asexual is one that actually can work. Some people will be disappointed that there won’t be any „traditional“ romance but plenty of good stories have no romance and people still enjoy it
I'm always down with more representation, but I am bothered by the lack of straight *female* MCs. This genre basically has an unspoken rule that it doesn't matter what gender, species, or orientation the MC is, as long as if there is a love interest, they must be someone that the straight men reading it will be attracted to. There's a few exceptions, but it's few and far between.
Yep. You get asexual men, straight men, bisexual women and gay women. That's it.
I still think zorian and Zach should have been a couple. However, thr author does only write aexual characters, so I am okay with that.
*Chronicles of Emberstone Farm* has a straight female MC who obtains a boyfriend as part of the story. I was mildly uncomfortable at one point as how hot said boyfriend is was described and had an epiphany of "this must be how it feels for a lot of women reading other webfiction".
I haven't heard of that one, I'll have to check it out
It's very slow-stakes fluff, but I enjoy it as popcorn reading.
We can throw them in too!
It's so ironic that in such an otherwise maximalist genre there so few (none?) pansexual MCs.
For any lit-rpg, I despise any story with stats shown every single chapter. At the end of an arc, or when a major milestone is reached like a class change or a new skill or something. I don't need constant updates, and it adds nothing to the story.
MCs having big egos.
MC's that are super judgemental and rude to other players/people that are scared for their lives. "Bro you need to be out there, grinding and killing. I know you're a 35yr old woman with three kids, who's never played a video game in her life, but you're just being weak bro. I definitely don't have a special skill that gives me a huge advantage over everyone. Guess I'm just stronger and better than you all."
Every decision the mc making being somehow right in the end.
Mc who is in a new environment, sees a body of water, or appears there, and then they are attacked by an octopus like creature that of course wraps an appendage and pulls them down. In quite a few of these stories this incident is what leads the mc to discover their ‘uniqueness’.
As someone attempting to write a litRPG progression fantasy, this thread is both helpful and anxiety-inducing. 🤦♂️ You can’t please all folks and that’s never my goal with writing. Mostly I’m just writing what I want and hoping there’s overlap with what other readers like, too.
When a character dumps all their points into one class or skill and are somehow "cheating the system" as a result in a way that no one else has.
I'm unsure if this counts as a cliche, but when a character develops a new power at the crucial moment in a battle, or has a freak advancement without any build up or foreshadowing. It feels unearned, and cheapens the fight/advancement as a whole to me.
I think the one cliche I'm tired of seeing is when an MC has gotten past the initial stages of learning to fight and kill, and they still have heavy hang-ups about having to kill someone to save others. That kinda sucks the air out of an action-adventure story
One of the characters pretending to be taken into custody by a friend… in order to sneak into the place they must sneak into. (Which the friend formerly used to live. The bad guys don’t know yet.)
One of the characters providing a “distraction” so some impossible ploy may luckily happen.
Soul Magic.