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atelier morgan
Mar 11, 2003

super-scientific, ultra-gay

Lipstick Apathy

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

cool, i'll check it out. i've long wanted to like those 'badass lady transmigrates into some loser girl who lives in a vaguely ancient china-ish setting' webnovels, but they kept letting me down. it's always the same poo poo, too.

god yeah there are so many promising wn just, torpedoed by toxic and disgusting abusive relationships being normalized

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Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Artificer posted:


What are some good isekais/mangas/manwhas/web novels what have you where the protagonist or some friends that have spooky powers or evil powers or skills normally attached to evil characters? But are good people? I love the concept so I'm collecting a list to slowly work through.

He Who Fights With Monsters, with the caveat is that the MC is definitely kind of an rear end in a top hat with a personality disorder or two, but tries to do good things anyway. Also, both MCs in Vainqueur the Dragon, I suppose, if you count 'being a very stereotypical D&D dragon' as 'evil powers'.

Megazver fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Dec 15, 2019

atelier morgan
Mar 11, 2003

super-scientific, ultra-gay

Lipstick Apathy
Metaworld Chronicles off royal road is another one (the protag is a void mage, who eats life force for power, tries to be decent in a fundamentally awful world) if you can handle the sheer amount of extra and very awkward handling of issues

atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Dec 15, 2019

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

atelier morgan posted:

Its a xianxia style isekai rather than a palace intrigue isekai so she hasn't hooked up with anyone and instead just has a platonic harem of male admirers. The closest thing to a romantic lead is a spirit inhabiting her body and its not close at all.

She spend most of the first several hundred chapters disguised as three boys

Sounds good.
2000 chapters :stare:

Has anybody found a reasonable way to create or download an ebook from one of those crazy websites?

7c Nickel
Apr 27, 2008

Megazver posted:

Also, both MCs in Vainqueur the Dragon, I suppose, if you count 'being a very stereotypical D&D dragon' as 'evil powers'.

I was a little disappointed here, because I wanted more "How the hell am I supposed to run a kingdom when my boss thinks taxes are an abomination and no coin that enters the treasury can ever leave?" and less standard webnovel power creep fights.

7c Nickel fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Dec 15, 2019

Kalas
Jul 27, 2007

VictualSquid posted:

Sounds good.
2000 chapters :stare:

Has anybody found a reasonable way to create or download an ebook from one of those crazy websites?

I've used the WebToEpub addon for firefox. Works really well for what I've tried.

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Kalas posted:

I've used the WebToEpub addon for firefox. Works really well for what I've tried.

This is pretty cool and seems to work for lots of WNs. But it doesn't work for the one we were discussing.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

VictualSquid posted:

This is pretty cool and seems to work for lots of WNs. But it doesn't work for the one we were discussing.

try https://www.wuxiaworld.co/The-Good-for-Nothing-Seventh-Young-Lady/

Megazver fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Dec 16, 2019

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007
seventh young lady is good, though i kind of wish any other woman mattered at all. i also like that she actually steals poo poo. it contrasts nicely with stealing the heavens, where the mc almost never steals anything despite explicitly being a super thief with magical super thief powers. that wn was a huge loving mess, though.

i think i'll go into why it was so bad. a little ways into stealing the heavens, the mc started running into historical figures from a specific period of chinese history (not rot3k, surprisingly). they had apparently been hanging out in this cultivation world for thousands of years, without ever growing or changing in any way aside from power levels. what's more, they absolutely and completely conformed to the versions in the official historical record. since there was an anecdote about a guy with a big dick that means he is now a sinister cock magician, and everything he does is penis-related. since someone was a wise older teacher type in the stories that means he is still a wise old teacher type despite now being about the same age as everyone else and starting cultivation at the exact same time. it displays a fundamentally wrong understanding of how history works. what's worse, all of these historical figures had absolutely ridiculous plot armor. no matter what happened, they could never die. one guy was cut into pieces, and the pieces were then skeletonized. it didn't do poo poo! this treatment was unique to the chinese dudes, since a story where it is fantastically difficult to kill anyone would actually be kind of interesting.

i read it for far too long, mostly because it was entertainingly aggravating. however, i had to stop when the mc started doing mass human sacrifices for power. just capturing an innocuous city full of people and butchering every man, woman and child in it to make some numbers go up. this was portrayed as a perfectly sane and normal thing to do and absolutely none of the characters had a problem with it. seriously, what the gently caress?

darkgray
Dec 20, 2005

My best pose facing the morning sun!
I've been reading a pretty amusing new web novel, that's quite different from anything else I've seen so far on Narou: ホラー女優が天才子役に転生しました ~今度こそハリウッドを目指します!~

It's about a 30-year-old horror movie actress who dies in a car crash and is reborn in Japan again ~15 years later, this time as a blue-eyed blonde half-Japanese daughter to super wealthy parents, where she reawakens to her old identity after a nasty fall in the staircase or whatever. So now she's a 5-year-old child actress, and dazzles everyone with her skillz. Like, she's going to TV drama auditions and doing ads, etc.

Then it also has chapters that dive deeper into older characters who were involved with her past self, and whatnot. Kind of reminds me of Glass Mask a bit. I think this is a title that could be a lot of fun animated.

Fallorn
Apr 14, 2005
I wish most novel sites were not such a train wreck to read on mobile.

Kalas
Jul 27, 2007

Fallorn posted:

I wish most novel sites were not such a train wreck to read on mobile.

I just flip into reader mode in iOS, very nice to read that way. Click to next chapter, then re-enter reader mode, yeah it's an extra button press but it removes all the web formatting and ads.

Yinlock
Oct 22, 2008

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

seventh young lady is good, though i kind of wish any other woman mattered at all. i also like that she actually steals poo poo. it contrasts nicely with stealing the heavens, where the mc almost never steals anything despite explicitly being a super thief with magical super thief powers. that wn was a huge loving mess, though.

i think i'll go into why it was so bad. a little ways into stealing the heavens, the mc started running into historical figures from a specific period of chinese history (not rot3k, surprisingly). they had apparently been hanging out in this cultivation world for thousands of years, without ever growing or changing in any way aside from power levels. what's more, they absolutely and completely conformed to the versions in the official historical record. since there was an anecdote about a guy with a big dick that means he is now a sinister cock magician, and everything he does is penis-related. since someone was a wise older teacher type in the stories that means he is still a wise old teacher type despite now being about the same age as everyone else and starting cultivation at the exact same time. it displays a fundamentally wrong understanding of how history works. what's worse, all of these historical figures had absolutely ridiculous plot armor. no matter what happened, they could never die. one guy was cut into pieces, and the pieces were then skeletonized. it didn't do poo poo! this treatment was unique to the chinese dudes, since a story where it is fantastically difficult to kill anyone would actually be kind of interesting.

i read it for far too long, mostly because it was entertainingly aggravating. however, i had to stop when the mc started doing mass human sacrifices for power. just capturing an innocuous city full of people and butchering every man, woman and child in it to make some numbers go up. this was portrayed as a perfectly sane and normal thing to do and absolutely none of the characters had a problem with it. seriously, what the gently caress?

how would you rate it on the Talisman Emperor Scale Of Ignoring It's Premise

Mulva
Sep 13, 2011
It's about time for my once per decade ban for being a consistently terrible poster.
Here's a challenge for you: Name some series that have ended, and ended....well.

LibrarianCroaker
Mar 30, 2010
I Favor the Villainess

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Mulva posted:

Here's a challenge for you: Name some series that have ended, and ended....well.

I thought Release that Witch's ending was alright.

Artificer
Apr 8, 2010

You're going to try ponies and you're. Going. To. LOVE. ME!!

Megazver posted:

I thought Release that Witch's ending was alright.

Whats that? Is it any good?

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Artificer posted:

Whats that? Is it any good?

It's about a Chinese engineering intern who gets transmigrated into the body of the good-for-nothing fourth prince of a kingdom. The prominent features of the world are as follows: a) said princes are currently in conflict over who gets to be the next crown heir b) there are witches, who are born with some kind of power and who are persecuted by c) the cartoonishly evil Church and d) the human kingdoms are under constant assault by strange demons. Our prince starts off his first day in his new body sparing a witch out of bull-headed Earthling "witch hunts were loving bad, mmmm'kay?" instinct and quickly realizes that they are indeed wrongly accused of being evil and that their powers could be creatively used to rapidly industrialize the society in the face of the ever escalating threats.

I think it's pretty good with the caveat that the translation is loving dogshit.

Argue
Sep 29, 2005

I represent the Philippines
I liked stuff from that at the start but it got too obsessed with weaponry. At one point he was recruiting witches with powers thought to be too useless, then made a big deal of telling everyone "no, even a witch with non-combat powers can be effective at fighting" and I thought he was gonna deliver some science lessons to explain how they could use their powers cleverly... but no, his answer was actually to just give them a gun.

Artificer
Apr 8, 2010

You're going to try ponies and you're. Going. To. LOVE. ME!!
Well, that plan is elegant in its simplicity.

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007

Yinlock posted:

how would you rate it on the Talisman Emperor Scale Of Ignoring It's Premise

dunno, i mostly just wanted to use the phrase sinister cock magician while also explaining why it is a bad story.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Argue posted:

I liked stuff from that at the start but it got too obsessed with weaponry. At one point he was recruiting witches with powers thought to be too useless, then made a big deal of telling everyone "no, even a witch with non-combat powers can be effective at fighting" and I thought he was gonna deliver some science lessons to explain how they could use their powers cleverly... but no, his answer was actually to just give them a gun.

I mean, he gave everyone guns, just in case. But I don't really recall any cases where non-combat witches were just sent off to shoot at people instead of, like, printing money or setting up VR propaganda cinemas.

Yinlock
Oct 22, 2008

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

dunno, i mostly just wanted to use the phrase sinister cock magician while also explaining why it is a bad story.

i like your trash novel trip reports

my fav is the talisman emperor one about how the talisman emperor really hates talismans

blastron
Dec 11, 2007

Don't doodle on it!

I gave up on Seventh Young Lady after the tournament arc when she just started pulling unforeshadowed powerups out of nowhere to beat fights she shouldn’t have been able to before, to the amazement of her teacher! There hadn’t really been any challenges in her way for a long while, but that’s when it became blatantly obvious the author had just stopped giving a poo poo about even pretending to have adversity.

It’s funny, sure, but the character dynamics are wrapped up in the rest of the story and it just doesn’t engage me at all.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

blastron posted:

I gave up on Seventh Young Lady after the tournament arc when she just started pulling unforeshadowed powerups out of nowhere to beat fights she shouldn’t have been able to before, to the amazement of her teacher! There hadn’t really been any challenges in her way for a long while, but that’s when it became blatantly obvious the author had just stopped giving a poo poo about even pretending to have adversity.

It’s funny, sure, but the character dynamics are wrapped up in the rest of the story and it just doesn’t engage me at all.

That was bad, but I managed to tough it out as far as the "build a city in the wasteland" arc, where the MC decides to... just loving murder a dude, for dissing her. And everybody claps.

It's not even, like, a particularly harsh diss, in the prevailing social context.

Mulva posted:

Here's a challenge for you: Name some series that have ended, and ended....well.

As the resident "I like Ze Tian Ji and I'm going to let you know it" guy, I have to say- Ze Tian Ji :colbert:

It definitely gets weaker after Tianhai dies, but it still stuck the landing.

LLSix
Jan 20, 2010

The real power behind countless overlords

Mulva posted:

Here's a challenge for you: Name some series that have ended, and ended....well.

Threadbare.

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007
well, toika specializes in incredibly unsubtle power fantasies with game mechanics and harems. what makes him different from most of his peers is that he writes stories of reasonable lengths with actual endings. but again, power fantasies with game mechanics and harems. they end well enough but it's still trashy trash that goes straight from the dumpster and into my mouth.

IShallRiseAgain
Sep 12, 2008

Well ain't that precious?

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

As the resident "I like Ze Tian Ji and I'm going to let you know it" guy, I have to say- Ze Tian Ji :colbert:

It definitely gets weaker after Tianhai dies, but it still stuck the landing.

It was way too into genocide for the latter half even if it ultimately didn't happen. Also, there was some really poor planning on the author's part because it briefly timeskips into the distance future, but then the author realizes he wants the events of the story to wrap up on a much shorter timeline. First half is good though.

Foxfire_
Nov 8, 2010

Mulva posted:

Here's a challenge for you: Name some series that have ended, and ended....well.

Petals of Titanium?

ZeeToo
Feb 20, 2008

I'm a kitty!

Foxfire_ posted:

Petals of Titanium?

It has a sequel, so does that count?

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

I have to say I like that Way of The Devil has turned into Crossfit Sliders

The magic system has been set up so that this is the most effective method of getting stronger:

1) Send his soul into a random alternate universe where his parallel self just died
2) Take over their body
3) Work out until he can bench press tanks
4) Fulfill his alternate self's dying wish through sheer brute force
5) Leave

Which means, for instance, that he ends going full Night of the Lepus on Bambi's forest, because his alternate self was a rabbit and wanted the whole forest to be peaceful, and hey, if you make a desert you can call it peace.


It's a great way to repeatedly toss him into dumb new situations where he can't turn into his T-Flex form and resolve them instantly.

Fallorn
Apr 14, 2005

Tunicate posted:

I have to say I like that Way of The Devil has turned into Crossfit Sliders

The magic system has been set up so that this is the most effective method of getting stronger:

1) Send his soul into a random alternate universe where his parallel self just died
2) Take over their body
3) Work out until he can bench press tanks
4) Fulfill his alternate self's dying wish through sheer brute force
5) Leave

Which means, for instance, that he ends going full Night of the Lepus on Bambi's forest, because his alternate self was a rabbit and wanted the whole forest to be peaceful, and hey, if you make a desert you can call it peace.


It's a great way to repeatedly toss him into dumb new situations where he can't turn into his T-Flex form and resolve them instantly.

While also trying to learn the planar laws and cultivation rules of the world so he can make gains on his time spent on the world.

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007
even better, that method isn't unique to him. after a certain point, that's just how everyone gets stronger. his advantage is that since he cheats he can do each world incredibly quickly.

i have absolutely no understanding of what he can even do any more. there's so much and it is so confusing. however, when he actually starts flexing it's always hilariously grotesque and bizarre.

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007
i've been more or less enjoying demoness' art of vengeance, but then i noticed it wasn't showing up on the main nu page any more. it turns out that some clever soul added the 'sexual cultivation technique' tag, which is something i have filtered out for obvious reasons. except, it's the villain and only the villain who does that in this wn. that's some real misleading bullshit. it's far from the only tag like that, either.

Artificer
Apr 8, 2010

You're going to try ponies and you're. Going. To. LOVE. ME!!

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

i've been more or less enjoying demoness' art of vengeance, but then i noticed it wasn't showing up on the main nu page any more. it turns out that some clever soul added the 'sexual cultivation technique' tag, which is something i have filtered out for obvious reasons. except, it's the villain and only the villain who does that in this wn. that's some real misleading bullshit. it's far from the only tag like that, either.

What are you enjoying about it?

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007

Artificer posted:

What are you enjoying about it?

mostly that it's a vaguely decent cultivation wn with a female lead. it's a time leap, but the first time around the mc was mostly just jerked around by life even though she eventually reached a high cultivation. the second time, she's more focused on taking care of the people she lost. there's also how as a side effect, she actually lost cultivation and is far weaker than she was at the same point in her first life. it's still very much a power fantasy, but the power is purely social thus far. in other words, when the mc flexes it is in the form of being a catty bitch to assholes she hates.

Arkeus
Jul 21, 2013

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

mostly that it's a vaguely decent cultivation wn with a female lead. it's a time leap, but the first time around the mc was mostly just jerked around by life even though she eventually reached a high cultivation. the second time, she's more focused on taking care of the people she lost. there's also how as a side effect, she actually lost cultivation and is far weaker than she was at the same point in her first life. it's still very much a power fantasy, but the power is purely social thus far. in other words, when the mc flexes it is in the form of being a catty bitch to assholes she hates.

Mmmh, I am hoping that changes somewhat though, because so far this kind of thing is what is sort of traditional for transmigration/time travel of women in cultivation story. Mostly social put down and not much actual cultivation at all.

I'm also having a hard time thinking the original girl was really really dumb, given all we learn about her past self.

gimme the GOD DAMN candy
Jul 1, 2007
yeah, it's not a masterpiece or anything but it's avoiding the usual pitfalls of wuxia wn's. i'm not reading much wuxia right now, so that's good enough.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
Oh, Cultivation Chat Group actually ended Feb 2 at a terse 3167 chapters. Looking for reactions while trying to dodge spoilers, it seems that people are mostly happy with how it was wrapped up. Good, good. I look forward to reading the ending in five years or so.

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The Skeep
Sep 15, 2007

That Chicken sure loves to drum...sticks
Can't wait for song to bumblefoot into becoming the will of the heavens and finally put a stop to the great evil of his senior cultivators messing with his FarmVille crops.

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