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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

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Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
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A Small Bird said:
Actually my presupposition was more about things like economies and ecology. Let's take monster ecology. The monster threat level is usually leagues above IRL. So if your herdsman class levels don't give you the ability to fight monsters to protect your flock, then you won't be able to raise a herd of sheep or pigs or whatever.
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So I discussed this with my partner this morning, and she pointed out that people tend to have a vote if farmers and gets as something from a peaceful environment like the UK (insert stereotypical cartoon "morning music"). But that's not necessarily the case. Herders in Tibet for example, have to deal with freaking snow leopards. There's farmers who have to deal with alligators and freaking hippopotamuses. Freaking water death monsters. So there's already room for differing abilities to deal with threats.

It occurred to me that one response for the situation would be for the herd animals to level up themselves. Primarily gaining slow experience from grazing, more from getting away with typical stupid herd animal stunts.

So higher level herd animals might match their high level herders, like Rambro. Aurochs. Or worse critters from the early Pleistocene. The most dangerous areas proven have sheep with iron wool that breath fire.

Naturally the farmers and herders will have the ability to deal with normal threats, like talking wolves and dire gophers. Adventurers would be brought in for special problems, like dragons or roving packs of isekied cultivators. Maybe you would need to get to med level in a regular profession before becoming an adventurer- say, level 50 woodcutter before becoming a ranger.

So low level professions, would be be for kids. A level five town guard would be a 12 year-old apprentice taking up the family side job.
 
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Glimmervoid said:
I think that's why I also favour 'soft' litrpg systems, with more fudge round the edges, in comparison to 'hard' litrpg systems, which try to calculate the effect of every loaf of bread baked to levels gained to kilograms dead lifted via some giant spreadsheet that can't possibly capture the full nuance of a living breathing world.
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I am so glad I throw litRPG mechanics out when I write isekai fiction. There's something so much more rewarding about a bunch of dorks running around angry that anime/manga lied to them! XD

Axslashel said:
My favourite mmo isekai is Log Horizon and I can absolutely see why the game was interesting to play before everyone logged in was transported to it but it is a good thing the story says it is a 20 year old game because no one would design an mmo like that today.
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So many legacy layers of content! XD
 
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Like, fundamentally the reason the litRPG mechanics tend towards badly-designed and baroque is that they're a narrative tool, not an actual game. In many cases they are literally not an actual game, either, simply a convenient magical system for awriter to slot in, one that exists in its own ecosystem with its own expectations. And the primary use of the narrative tool of litRPG mechanics is to make the protagonist overpowered in a concrete and obvious way, so that the 'power' part of the 'power fantasy' can come to pass.

And that's, like, fine? If you're after a power fantasy, you want one that delivers, after all; the primary problem with litRPG stuff is that people use the mechanics in place of things like 'plot' or 'characterisation'.
 
Squirtodyle said:
It's not that every Asian person is a member, but the story is very clear about it when it introduces the idea.

Lung attempts to recruit everyone Asian he can between the ages of 12 and 60 and if he doesn't try to forcibly recruit you, he expects you to pay the ABB tribute in some way, which is behavior so well known that it's been on multiple news sources and has had signs printed out for a school guidance counselor's office for young kids at school who've been targeted that way.
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Being shaken down by an organized crime ring for protection money doesn't make you part of the crime ring, any more than being killed by an axe murderer would make me an axe murderer.

Squirtodyle said:
Right but the exaggerated twist in this case is that Lung, a Chinese-Japanese man, forces Every Single Asian to pay tribute to him. Which is obviously complete nonsense based on the poor understanding Wildbow has of Asian identities and how many nationalities would be grouped under "Asian" in the way it's used in Worm.

Which was...the complaint to begin with. The ABB is a gang that attempts to recruit Literally Every Member of a seemingly specific but in reality extremely broad category, and if not recruit you're expected to pay tribute to him specifically because he leads the Asian gang and you are Asian.
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Except that the ABB is very specifically not... normal. It's dominated by a specific guy who's got a big fucking psychiatric complex and the only reason he gets away with it is that he's a particularly OP supervillain.

My impression is that the story itself is saying "normally a gang that recruits like this would be weird, and hilariously unstable, but Lung has a complex and decided to do weird stuff and it worked unusually well because when Lung gets mad, Lung turns into a fucking dragon." Plus also "because the other major gang in the city is the Literal Nazis so if a fucking dragon with a complex decides that he wants to make you pay protection money but is in exchange willing to fight the Literal Nazis who hate you and want you dead whether you pay them or not, well, you pay the fucking dragon."

skanszy said:
Street gangs in Worm feel to me more like video game factions than anything else.
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Frankly, yes. They behave so outlandishly and in such an overpowered manner that it's very difficult to explain why the feds haven't shut them down without playing the "everything else is worse" card very hard. And since Brockton Bay is supposed to be basically Hell's armpit, with a particularly severe case of economic malaise brought on by particularly broken-down infrastructure and other problems... that excuse does wear a little thin.
 
All of the gang stuff in early Worm is just complete bullshit, honestly, like it's a literal child's understanding of what gangs are. At the start of Worm you have Nazis who don't do Nazi things and just run dogfighting rings on every block, a gang made of "every asian" that kidnaps women by the truckload to send away to prostitution "farms," a gang that forcefully drugs random people for free in broad daylight to chemically addict them to the good stuff, a Lex Luthor supervillain who employs hundreds of armed spec-ops people at extortionate rates while doing absolutely nothing at all to generate a cash inflow, a gang of literal outlaw mercenaries who work for both the government and criminal organisations at the same time and publicly run a nightclub where they can be found at all hours of the day, and then the plucky, underdog, gentlemen-thieves who are the main characters.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
The original skull, which they used as inspiration, would have belonged, per your link, to a 1.3 kilometer leviathan. Which is still utterly monstrous, and is between the 750 meter juvenile and 5km adult sizes for the living ones from the popular mod.
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There is no proof, in game, that 1.3 kilometer is not in fact an fully grown adult specimen.
5 km adult size is very much headcanon.
 
Delirium said:
plucky, underdog, gentlemen-thieves who are the main characters.
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Tangent: they are way less that than sometimes made out to be.

They're more subtle than the gang warrior capes but they're also very much a team where "makes dogs-o-saurs the size of rhinos and has the social skills of an abused dog" is always a fairly okay fit. On their best days they're stealthy like a commando raid, not like a phantom thief.
 
Delirium said:
All of the gang stuff in early Worm is just complete bullshit, honestly, like it's a literal child's understanding of what gangs are. At the start of Worm you have Nazis who don't do Nazi things and just run dogfighting rings on every block,
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I may be missing details because I skimmed large parts of Worm the one time I read it, but it seems to me that this criticism kind of works at cross purposes with some of the very good criticisms you make farther down.

You'd expect the Nazi gang to spend a lot of its energy doing criminal things that make money even if they're not all that obviously connected to Nazi ideology. Though "dogfighting on every block" probably wouldn't make that much money by itself of course, as you'd be supersaturating any possible demand for that particular form of illegal entertainment.

a gang made of "every asian" that kidnaps women by the truckload to send away to prostitution "farms," a gang that forcefully drugs random people for free in broad daylight to chemically addict them to the good stuff,
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I've already said my piece about the ABB, in that they're a clear-cut example of a thing that would make no goddamn sense without a core of supervillains personally making it work. With that they're remotely plausible, in that they don't represent "what would normally happen," but rather "the passion project of this one lunatic who happens to be able to beat up a tank." At least they have some gesture in the direction of a revenue stream, unlike the example you point to later which is even sillier.

The Merchants, likewise, absurd. They have a gesture in the direction of a revenue stream again, but this is like, lurid 90s "D.A.R.E." shit. Since John McCrae is a millennial who went to school in that era (though, I gather, in Canada), this doesn't entirely surprise me.

And, as I've said, these gangs really, really should have the feds after them, because they're so blatant that tolerating their presence is basically an engraved invitation to would-be supervillains all over the rest of the country.

a Lex Luthor supervillain who employs hundreds of armed spec-ops people at extortionate rates while doing absolutely nothing at all to generate a cash inflow, a gang of literal outlaw mercenaries who work for both the government and criminal organisations at the same time and publicly run a nightclub where they can be found at all hours of the day,
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And here we do hit peak absurdity, yes!
 
Simon_Jester said:
You'd expect the Nazi gang to spend a lot of its energy doing criminal things that make money even if they're not all that obviously connected to Nazi ideology. Though "dogfighting on every block" probably wouldn't make that much money by itself of course, as you'd be supersaturating any possible demand for that particular form of illegal entertainment.
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The problem is that the Neo-Nazi gang in Worm don't actually do anything related to being Neo-Nazis, and the fact that there's an extremely powerful Neo-Nazi gang that controls part of the city's underworld doesn't come up in any meaningful way for, for example, Brian and Aisha, the two black members of the Undersiders.

It's not just that they do things that aren't Nazi stuff but are profitable, it's that they never do anything to connect themselves to the ideology so they're treated as just another gang when like, no, they're Nazis.
 
In fairness to Coil's nonsense, being a gang is basically a cover for his agenda of seizing control in his civilian identity.

Also in fairness, that cover shouldn't work considering the lack of ganging he does and his whole deal is absurd.
 
Squirtodyle said:
The problem is that the Neo-Nazi gang in Worm don't actually do anything related to being Neo-Nazis, and the fact that there's an extremely powerful Neo-Nazi gang that controls part of the city's underworld doesn't come up in any meaningful way for, for example, Brian and Aisha, the two black members of the Undersiders.

It's not just that they do things that aren't Nazi stuff but are profitable, it's that they never do anything to connect themselves to the ideology so they're treated as just another gang when like, no, they're Nazis.
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Ah, I see, that's a bit clearer to me and you have a point.

In that case, it sounds like you're saying Wildbow's problem here with Empire 88 isn't so much that he created a gang that doesn't work as a gang, because it could, or maybe does, and it wouldn't be relevant to your point. It's that he created a gang whose Naziism is purely aesthetic, which trivializes that ideology as a threat and ignores the way that Nazi white supremacism would have consequences for those around them. Which is, admittedly, par for the course given that Worm was written in the early 2010s when laughing off neo-Naziism was still a popular sport among privileged Anglosphere-dwelling literati everywhere. Sort of a 'period piece' fault.

Although, again, I haven't read enough of Worm closely enough to be 100% confident in the accuracy of your assessment of the tone of the work. Me, maybe I've had my views colored by a lot of fanfiction in the intervening years that does write Empire 88 as a bunch of Nazis with many or all of the things that implies, to the point where that overshadows the original in my brain.

Aineko said:
In fairness to Coil's nonsense, being a gang is basically a cover for his agenda of seizing control in his civilian identity.

Also in fairness, that cover shouldn't work considering the lack of ganging he does and his whole deal is absurd.
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Yeah, "where is he getting the money from" is the big question and I genuinely don't know if there's an answer.
 
The problem is treating Worm as some indepth bible of perfect social commentary on a "realistic" superhero setting
It is not
It is
literally
A Young Adult fiction
From structure to storytelling to characters and all

So there's my hot take of the day
 
If you want to see someone try to make classes, monsters, and RPG mechanics fit into worldbuilding, you can read The Dragon, The Hero and The Courier AKA Ryuu to Yuusha to Haitatsunin. That's a story with classes, levels, and RPG mechanics with an entire in-universe guild that exists to certify people's levels. But it's also a story about swords and sorcery types butting heads against a rising state that is trying to push new-fangled ideas like "bureaucracy", "legalism", and "standardization", and the protagonist is a half-elf who went to a human city to get a job at the new post office.
 
Squirtodyle said:
Right but the exaggerated twist in this case is that Lung, a Chinese-Japanese man, forces Every Single Asian to pay tribute to him. Which is obviously complete nonsense based on the poor understanding Wildbow has of Asian identities and how many nationalities would be grouped under "Asian" in the way it's used in Worm.

Which was...the complaint to begin with. The ABB is a gang that attempts to recruit Literally Every Member of a seemingly specific but in reality extremely broad category, and if not recruit you're expected to pay tribute to him specifically because he leads the Asian gang and you are Asian.
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I'm not really interested in litigating the specific complaint - suffice to say we disagree - but it is very frustrating hearing people get a mistaken impression of the work based on flanderdized explanations of what actually happens.
 
skanszy said:
Street gangs in Worm feel to me more like video game factions than anything else.
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I wouldn't really call that an unpopular opinion. As actual gangs go, Worm's are done quite poorly, and it's largely to it's detriment because from the sounds of thing with much better writing behind them both AE88 and ABB can actually work well. Like GTA does a better job of how it writes it's gangs even if I generally hold most media is terrible about organized crime period, Worm's is pretty egregious.
 
Aineko said:
Considering his power, that would be trivial unless we think the measures to catch Thinkers in financial markets actually work.
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Good point.

Also, now that you mention it, anti-Thinker protocols in financial markets would probably break down rapidly once it became practical for major investment firms to just hire their own Thinkers.

Everyone desperately wants to keep the Number Man from playing the stock market until the Number Man offers to manage a trillion-dollar wealth fund owned jointly by the richest thousand men in America. At which point suddenly everyone forgets that any laws to the contrary ever existed...
 
Simon_Jester said:
I may be missing details because I skimmed large parts of Worm the one time I read it, but it seems to me that this criticism kind of works at cross purposes with some of the very good criticisms you make farther down.

You'd expect the Nazi gang to spend a lot of its energy doing criminal things that make money even if they're not all that obviously connected to Nazi ideology. Though "dogfighting on every block" probably wouldn't make that much money by itself of course, as you'd be supersaturating any possible demand for that particular form of illegal entertainment.
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We (not you and I but me and another poster) discussed this a few days ago but the Empire definitely is an element of Worm that you can look at and if you reframe a couple things it can become a very biting critique of the structures of white supremacy. It's just that Worm doesn't do this and mostly seems to have never set out to do it which renders its applicability a lot more suspicious as a product of unthinking cultural bias.

In a work that was actually about these things, the Empire is pretty competently constructed as a narrative element. They're a gang that outwardly presents itself as morally superior to other gangs, to the point of refusing the label of gang. They're also secretly aided and funded by the city's social elite and occupy a privileged position when it comes to law enforcement because they are more powerful than the local state authority. If all of that were intentional it would be good stuff!

But it's not really intentional, or at least doesn't feel that way. And that lack of intentionality is revealing, because then you have to ask: if it wasn't intentional to portray the Empire like this as part of critiquing the social mythology of white supremacy, that it acts as a morally pure, socially acceptable force, then was it just... the unthinking replication of the social mythology of white supremacy? Because it does kind of seem like that. The Empire Eighty-Eight don't just view themselves as morally superior, the narrative kind of capes for them incidentally as well; about the only thing you can pin on them for the first hundred thousand words of Worm is that they run dogfighting rings and are personally racist.

Being racist is bad, but again it's a child's understanding of racism on a larger level. Racism is when you say bad words to people and are prejudiced. Racism isn't when you run a white supremacist gang that terrorises minority populations. Racism isn't when the law treats you differently. Racism isn't when you use your international network of fellow racists to enforce social hierarchy at the point of a gun. Those bits aren't racism, says Worm, that's just gang stuff.

Racism also isn't when you run a pharmaceutical company and deny healthcare to minorities. It isn't when you only hire whites or redline minorities to specific neighbourhoods or cut social funding to their schools. It isn't when you foster an environment of white supremacist conservativism that segregates the population. That kind of stuff doesn't happen at all, says Worm.

The kind of structural racism that the Empire should represent the tip of the spear of is largely absent from the narrative of Worm.

The gangs aren't all immature representations of organised crime in the same way, I guess is my thesis here. The way that the Merchants are an immature depiction is different from the way that Coil is an immature depiction is different from the way that Faultline's Mercenaries are an immature depiction is different from the way that the Empire is an immature depiction is different from the way that the Asian Bad Boyz are an immature depiction.
 
Possibly controversial opinion , but tons of authors seem to have been raised in such environments that they write poverty or characters who have supposedly struggled with poverty in the past terribly .

More often then not it usually comes across as " we missed a few meals" or the "broke college kid" trope rather then delving deep into how being poor actually can and does affect someone and their characterization / actions and history .

Obviously there's different types of poverty and experiences but yeahhh that's my prob hot take. Authors don't write poverty well in fiction. And most mcs I've seen who "struggled" are still middle class American suburban kids at the end of the day even when they aren't .
 
Kadmus said:
And that's, like, fine? If you're after a power fantasy, you want one that delivers, after all; the primary problem with litRPG stuff is that people use the mechanics in place of things like 'plot' or 'characterisation'.
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Honestly that, and the fact that most litRPGs devolve into being nothing more than some gimmick about that specific litRPG's 'system'.
 
Mr.rodent said:
Obviously there's different types of poverty and experiences but yeahhh that's my prob hot take. Authors don't write poverty well in fiction. And most mcs I've seen who "struggled" are still middle class American suburban kids at the end of the day even when they aren't .
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Ah yes, the 'struggle' of having to drive to school in a beat-up second-hand car.
 
Mr.rodent said:
Possibly controversial opinion , but tons of authors seem to have been raised in such environments that they write poverty or characters who have supposedly struggled with poverty in the past terribly .

More often then not it usually comes across as " we missed a few meals" or the "broke college kid" trope rather then delving deep into how being poor actually can and does affect someone and their characterization / actions and history .

Obviously there's different types of poverty and experiences but yeahhh that's my prob hot take. Authors don't write poverty well in fiction. And most mcs I've seen who "struggled" are still middle class American suburban kids at the end of the day even when they aren't .
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Most authors are middle class. As one who isn't, I agree and it's irritating. I get why they don't do it, though. Being the working class poor in America isn't glamorous, it's just depressing.
 
Kadmus said:
Like, fundamentally the reason the litRPG mechanics tend towards badly-designed and baroque is that they're a narrative tool, not an actual game.
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They're almost always bad narrative tools too, in my opinion. Either poorly used or poorly set up, and usually large chunks of the system are relegated to set dressing.

Even some of the series I liked had an annoyingly large number of skills that were left unused and unexplained, and given how many of these series center around 'clever rulebreakers or system-breaking combinations' one almost wonders why anyone bothers.

Might just be the culmination of my frustration with isekai and litRPG though.
 
A Small Bird said:
They're almost always bad narrative tools too, in my opinion. Either poorly used or poorly set up, and usually large chunks of the system are relegated to set dressing.

Even some of the series I liked had an annoyingly large number of skills that were left unused and unexplained, and given how many of these series center around 'clever rulebreakers or system-breaking combinations' one almost wonders why anyone bothers.

Might just be the culmination of my frustration with isekai and litRPG though.
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Bad model of cleverness? Instead of actual mechanical exploration it's a personal cheat with a different excuse than the ever-popular ROB?
 
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