Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 105
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've been enjoying the webnovel Shadow Soul. TLDR - antihero MC, monster-infested wilderness survival, progression fantasy.
Pros:
There's a lot of it (over a thousand chapters). The setting is rather original and has plenty of mystery, at least once we leave Earth. The aesthetic and tone is very Dark Souls (I say despite never having played any of those games). The character arcs are not as simple as they seem to be, our MC doesn't go on a 'ruthless villain to heart-of-gold hero' arc, at least not linearly. There are swings and roundabouts on his character arc, resentments and reverberations.
Our MC quickly acquires a crippling flaw that he has to hide and helps drive the plot in interesting directions. He can't lie or avoid questions. This causes all kinds of problems which he has to deflect or proactively avoid and some he just has to live with. His Main Character syndrome is recognized in-universe, he gets a 'Fated' attribute which makes really unlikely things more probable. There's a bit of humour in how he slowly learns to stop thinking things like 'what's the worst that can happen' after experiencing countless disasters.
The worldbuilding grows and grows organically. The System everyone gets doesn't seem like a cheat and doesn't drown people in numbers like in some litrpgs. It's definitely cultivation-inspired but only loosely so. The characters are pretty smart too.
Cons:
Editing is poor by literary standards, middling by webnovel standards. Mildly juvenile humour at times. Perhaps the MC has an excessive level of embarrassment about being a horny teenager, which is at least reasonable. Niggling issue IMO. The categorization of monsters is somewhat opaque - over 200 chapters in I'm still not sure how it works, or what the exact order is, or if there's more than one system of classification for monsters. Great Ones, Unholy Ones, Cursed Ones, Fallen Ones... wat mean? Admittedly I did drop it at chapter 50 for 3 months, so I probably forgot how it works. Anyway, it's not that intuitive but this is only a niggling problem. The prose isn't that spectacular, as is common in webnovels. It's not obviously ESL though.
By far the biggest problem is that the sites it's on tend to be the cancerously ad-infested ones. If your dao of adblock is high (Brave does it for me), then you can read away on this link. Otherwise you suffer a cursed existence, languishing and suffering because the author didn't put it on Royal Road: https://www.lightnovelworld.com/novel/shadow-slave-30071448
If people interact with other people in ways that doesn't involve being slowly driven insane and killing each other, it's not DS.
Well, there is a fair bit of slowly going insane and killing eachother, though that's not everything.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link