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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
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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Often things are intentionally left unexplained just so that writer doesn't have to explain "how exactly does this cheat work" and "how did nobody else figure this out".

It's same as with numbers many LitRPGs do. You get all these fancy numbers, but what do they mean? Nothing really, a sword doing 500 or 50 damage means nothing because in effect enemies will always have exact number of HP to actually withstand attacks and make it just a normal fight.

Only series that I know that has done "RPG style stats" well is I Am A Spider, So What and that is because in that series system itself is a plot point.
 
Mandemon said:
Often things are intentionally left unexplained just so that writer doesn't have to explain "how exactly does this cheat work" and "how did nobody else figure this out".

It's same as with numbers many LitRPGs do. You get all these fancy numbers, but what do they mean? Nothing really, a sword doing 500 or 50 damage means nothing because in effect enemies will always have exact number of HP to actually withstand attacks and make it just a normal fight.

Only series that I know that has done "RPG style stats" well is I Am A Spider, So What and that is because in that series system itself is a plot point.
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Spider Isekai is basically the only one that gets a pass for it as I've seen. And that's because of what the system actually is (and why)

It still commits a lot of other annoying sins, and I think from a reader's perspective the system is still annoying to me, but how it subverts the RPG system gives it a little bit of breathing room.

Also just the sheer wackiness of Spider Isekai in general kept me interested for at least to volume 11.

On the other hand, Spider Isekai's system is still bad from both an in-universe and out-of-universe perspective. It's just that it addresses the system directly and its poor design is a point of focus.
 
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Not a huge fan of Worm, especially a lot of the Brockton Bay Gang War thing, but in my experience, a sort of pan-East-Asian identity, for people raised in North America, is actually a thing.
 
Astrid Fornhoff said:
Now now, some of us do. I can't work so I have nothing but time in between managing the chronic illnesses that keep me from "being a productive member of society".
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I'm speaking as unemployed person and a father of 3 year old
But I do have some income at least so I do have free time
I'm almost certainly the exception because I don't work 2-3 jobs and still live in poverty, which many does.
 
Mandemon said:
Only series that I know that has done "RPG style stats" well is I Am A Spider, So What and that is because in that series system itself is a plot point.
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Also helps that the protagonist has to struggle for several volumes of grinding and almost dying until she finally gets to be truly OP (and then it not longer matters anyway).

Also the Appraise skill.
 
So, what I'm hearing is that people want

1) Stats having more of an effect on the story other than just "Numbers go brrrrr."
2) Everyone using system knowledge instead of restricting it to some super special cheat of the protagonist.
3) Avoid bloating things with massive number of skills that are only used once and then forgotten about (if even used once.)
 
Queshire said:
So, what I'm hearing is that people want

1) Stats having more of an effect on the story other than just "Numbers go brrrrr."
2) Everyone using system knowledge instead of restricting it to some super special cheat of the protagonist.
3) Avoid bloating things with massive number of skills that are only used once and then forgotten about (if even used once.)
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More or less, at least from my point of view.
 
Pidl said:
Ah yes, the 'struggle' of having to drive to school in a beat-up second-hand car.
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FWIW, I knew a number of poor people who drove to school in old cars because they had to. Because they loved in a transportation desert, and they needed a car to get from their house to school to their jobs.

Likewise my housemate before she lived with us was homeless, but she had a car because that's how she got to jobs.

It's a higher expense item, but like a smart phone its a necessity.
 
Okay, something that has been grinding my gears for a while now.

I get it. Steamboat Willie became public domain. Woohoo, you can now use that specific design of Mickey Mouse.

But do I really need to have my YouTube feed spammed with "copyright me if you dare" videos? Like, FFS, Disney is not going to copyright you. They don't care about you. They care about the trademark. This "LOL look I uploaded entire 7 minute cartoon" does not make you a rebel. It makes you a coward, because if you truly cared you would have uploaded it when it was still under copyright.

Also, we really don't need a badly done horror flick of Mickey Mouse.
 
Meanwhile the only Steamboat Willie video I've been recommended is one explaining what's up with Mickey from a legal standpoint because the almighty algorithm knows that I won't click a video that doesn't fall in my narrow range of interests.
 
Mandemon said:
Okay, something that has been grinding my gears for a while now.

I get it. Steamboat Willie became public domain. Woohoo, you can now use that specific design of Mickey Mouse.

But do I really need to have my YouTube feed spammed with "copyright me if you dare" videos? Like, FFS, Disney is not going to copyright you. They don't care about you. They care about the trademark. This "LOL look I uploaded entire 7 minute cartoon" does not make you a rebel. It makes you a coward, because if you truly cared you would have uploaded it when it was still under copyright.

Also, we really don't need a badly done horror flick of Mickey Mouse.
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Don't have watching habits that make YT send you that sort of thing I guess ? I dunno, I sure don't get them.

It might improve your general media consumption menu as well.
 
hghwolf said:
Don't have watching habits that make YT send you that sort of thing I guess ? I dunno, I sure don't get them.

It might improve your general media consumption menu as well.
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I watch only Hololive and FFXIV stuff on Youtube, and it still sends me "you won't believe this AMAZING SHOT in this basketball game" and "news anchor cracks up on live TV" videos. Many of which are five years old or more.

I really do not blame anyone for having weird Youtube algorithm contamination.
 
hghwolf said:
Don't have watching habits that make YT send you that sort of thing I guess ? I dunno, I sure don't get them.

It might improve your general media consumption menu as well.
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Adloquium said:
I watch only Hololive and FFXIV stuff on Youtube, and it still sends me "you won't believe this AMAZING SHOT in this basketball game" and "news anchor cracks up on live TV" videos. Many of which are five years old or more.

I really do not blame anyone for having weird Youtube algorithm contamination.
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You always make a habit of "Don't recommend this video" and "don't recommend this channel"
My algo is clean and crisp this way
 
ZeroXSEED said:
You always make a habit of "Don't recommend this video" and "don't recommend this channel"
My algo is clean and crisp this way
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I do both, and I still get those types of "completely not my interest" videos. I suspect this is because there are too many channels posting those videos, so it's a futile attempt at stemming a flood.

EDIT: If it matters, getting weird Youtube recommendations almost never happens on desktop, but happens all the time on mobile, so maybe that's a factor.
 
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Queshire said:
So, what I'm hearing is that people want

1) Stats having more of an effect on the story other than just "Numbers go brrrrr."
2) Everyone using system knowledge instead of restricting it to some super special cheat of the protagonist.
3) Avoid bloating things with massive number of skills that are only used once and then forgotten about (if even used once.)
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I would say it depends on execution rather than those being inherently bad.

Numbers go brrr is an inherently aspect of litRPGs. It is only an issue because of their tendency to make their protagonists overpowered.

To use Spider Isekai again, it does have "numbers go brrr", the thing is that she is usually on the wrong side of the numbers and thus has to get creative.

Similar with system knowledge. Monsters usually don't have the intelligence to effectively take advantage of the system, but humans and other intelligent beings should at least to some degree make use of such knowledge, even if they don't go as hard or extreme as the protagonist.

And a system that simulates all kinds of magic is going to have a large number of skills and not all of them will get narrative focus. Just avoid having absurdly broken ones that are latter forgotten.
 
Tyran said:
Similar with system knowledge. Monsters usually don't have the intelligence to effectively take advantage of the system, but humans and other intelligent beings should at least to some degree make use of such knowledge, even if they don't go as hard or extreme as the protagonist.
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To draw an example from Spider Isekai (once again), Earth Dragon Alibaba pulls "use skills points mid-fight to gain resistance to opponents attacks" on our protagonist. Our protagonist had been pulling "evolve mid-battle to regain health and/or gain resistance", and so far it had been their trump card.

And then they meet a new boss that pulls exact same move on them, further cementing how powerful this creature is.
 
Honestly, Spider Isekai and Bofuri are the best uses I've seen for the game system stuff. Spider plays it first comedically but then deadly serious, while Bofuri it's purely comedic, with the broken or utterly silly skills the airheaded protagonist winds up with and the inventive uses they are put to
 
Tyran said:
Numbers go brrr is an inherently aspect of litRPGs.
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I don't think they are.

Using a game system to give framework to a story isn't new, but numbers go brrr is. I can easily bring up examples; older BattleTech books where the combats were gamed out (and even still newer ones), older DragonLance novels. The numbers aren't shown, or even described. People don't obviously level up. You would have to get deeply down into the weeds of the scenes to try and approximate character stats, building your own spreadsheets to try and determine them.

Numbers go brrr is a shortcut that comes from the explicit acknowledgement of being inside a game, which is not a thing the LitRPG has always done. It comes with failure modes as such; once you have explicitly acknowledged the setting runs on game mechanics then there's a temptation to engage with the mechanics or to engage with other aspects of the work through the mechanics. You show characters are smart or skillful by their manipulation of the mechanics. You show characters are strong through the mechanics. You make things mechanical interactions even if they don't have to be. You show level-ups rather than characters developing or learning. Numbers go brrr because you decide to show them rather than trying not to.
 
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Dragonlance books are not litrpg's though.
They are novelization, kinda, of an rpg game, but they try to get rid of the mechanics as much as they can while remaining true to the setting.
 
Tyran said:
Also the Appraise skill.
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This reminds me of the light novel series D-Genesis, where the premise is "suddenly RPG dungeons start appearing in the real world". Through blind luck, the protagonist gets the Appraise skill (or some equivalent; I forget the exact terminology), and that gives him a tremendous advantage, even though the Appraise skill is not even supposed to be that rare by the in-universe rules.

The Appraise skill works on people, but not necessarily monsters. The advantage is that now the protagonist can see the miniscule improvements to his stats whenever he defeats a slime or some such, and thus plan out the optimal level-grinding strategy.

So he, and anyone who gets to be Appraised, can continue to have motivation to kill like 200 slimes in a row, rather than giving up after ten and looking for other monsters.
 
Night said:
I don't think they are.
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I believe it is. Yes there are older works set in game settings, but those are novelizations, not litRPG.

A litRPG is build around the protagonist being aware they are actually in a game and can directly interact with gameplay stats and mechanics.

Adloquium said:
This reminds me of the light novel series D-Genesis, where the premise is "suddenly RPG dungeons start appearing in the real world". Through blind luck, the protagonist gets the Appraise skill (or some equivalent; I forget the exact terminology), and that gives him a tremendous advantage, even though the Appraise skill is not even supposed to be that rare by the in-universe rules.

The Appraise skill works on people, but not necessarily monsters. The advantage is that now the protagonist can see the miniscule improvements to his stats whenever he defeats a slime or some such, and thus plan out the optimal level-grinding strategy.

So he, and anyone who gets to be Appraised, can continue to have motivation to kill like 200 slimes in a row, rather than giving up after ten and looking for other monsters.
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The joke in Spider Isekai is the opposite. Lvl 1 Apprisal is worthless and it isn't up to Lv4+ that it starts getting useful. But leveling Appraisal is a pain.
 
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