I’ll make sure to get back to you when I get to S3, then. Gotta admit to being disappointed that Christina just disappeared, but the fact you remember her name suggests she’ll be back. Woo! Before that, to the other points:

Leveling systems are generally terrible writing, agreed, but they can serve as excellent antagonists (something you’ll see attempted often in RoyalRoad entries). I think they’re a trend from Korea that stuck around because they appeal to gamers. I’ve never really looked into the topic, but the first I remember hearing of was called The Gamer and it released in… 2013. Hoo boy. Yeah, I’m almost 30 lol. It wasn’t that long ago, but apparently long enough for nostalgia to set in. At the time it was super popular and spawned literally tens of thousands of spinoffs.

That’s not as many as it sounds like, though. Eastern novels/writing seems to be iterative, with stories slightly mutated over and over in vast quantities until something is new enough and good enough to gain popularity and shift the genre again. There’s less focus on brevity, novelty is central but narrow, and the novelty is often entirely described within the title. Western web fiction is similar in some ways, but much less homogeneous.

I do have an ebook reader. My main suggestion would be, if you’ve got one in mind, looking for problems with it online, like “<ebook name> stopped working” or “froze” or “won’t turn on.” A lot of them break in suspiciously predictable ways and are completely unrepairable. Second suggestion is to get one that isn’t bound to a store, which you can freely upload epubs/pdfs to, preferably via USB cable. Everything else is pretty much subject to your use-case. Small size, backlighting, water/rain resistance and low weight are requirements for me personally.

My reader is a tablet style thing which I can use for work. However that leaves it too large to actually read much on while in bed or on the go, and I’ve ended up mostly using my (very small) phone to read epubs.

Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully it’s useful to you! As to web fiction: I do still suggest searching. There is no one website, it really is best to spread out. I often use TopWebFiction and RoyalRoad, but so many good stories are hidden in some weird forum or blog somewhere that I usually just look at story request threads for new stuff.

Alright I’m reading Skeleton Soldier. I like it. It is a little silly, a little shallow, but it’s fun and varied and damn if it doesn’t pull off some emotional whiplash. Like when the female knight in the tournament tripped while everybody was booing her? My stomach dropped through the floor.

Yoo, Skeleton Soldier is just time loop LitRPG in manga form. Absolutely cringe and I am absolutely here for it. That used to be one of my favorite genres/tropes to read! Yeah, those types of stories are rarely finished, and usually pretty shallow. Kinda like fast food for reading. I’ll give it the manga a shot. Thank you!

I really wonder wth happened with your school lol. I hated mandatory reading too, but it wasn’t nearly that bad, just tedious.

Sorry to heap more suggestions on to you, but if you’re into stories like skeleton soldier you could take a look at RoyalRoad or similar web novel sites. There’s literally tens of thousands of such stories uploaded for free by the authors. The vast majority of them are bad or worse, but with how many there are there’s more than enough high quality stuff, some of which is novel or experimental in a way one doesn’t find in published work. Just be ready to drop a story if it feels like it’s going nowhere or is not fun to read.

I’m not much of a manga reader, but I never say no to recommendations.

I’m amazed you’re getting into reading the way you are. Props to you.

Hello, thank you for the update!

Oh boy I didn’t even notice the pregnancy plot hole you pointed out. I read the second book once as a kid and never again.

I’m really sorry to have put you through that D=

The third and fourth books are indeed completely different, but I hesitate to suggest reading them because of your experience so far. My personal ranking is 4 > 1 > 3 > 2. I do think they go interesting places as they have more traditional fantasy scope and characters, so the world is fleshed out a lot. But it is still more of the same…

Anyway, thank you so much for the time taken to review them. I liked your analysis. Do you have a favorite book to recommend?

Reading comprehension is for people who paid attention in school. Nerds.

Through a postcolonialist lens this is pretty clever. Use of civilized as a term to excuse the racist and expansionist actions of one’s own country, expansion which happens to have coincided with railways being central to industrial power. Now the colonized are civilized, are we the barbarians?

Unironically thinking like that is the real ape-brained behavior.

This reads different if the woman is an economist.

Hey, thank you so much for the wall of text!

Yes, most of what you mentioned is what I was vaguely including with the term “YA.” I’ve read a lot of it so I’m very inured to the silly tropes and unlikely and dramatic deus ex machinas. It’s great to hear your negatives because I’m seeing my own blind spots!

I think your criticism is valid. I don’t think it’d be correct to call any impression-based criticism invalid. Doesn’t mean one can’t also learn from it. Additionally, the negatives might make sense in context of it being YA, but that doesn’t make them weightless imo.

I liked the second book the least by far, but maybe it’ll be different for you. I’m sorry the BBEG wasn’t up to snuff, I was absolutely convinced. Maybe books 3/4 will do it but it’s mostly in the same vein. I’m glad you still enjoyed it!

I’m not familiar with Hollow Knight, but if you say there’s similarity maybe I should be…

Or you could read the article and see that’s not even remotely the issue, and the title is as per usual misleading.

Germany planned 8 billion eur financial support for Ukraine this year. That’s been used up. So, no more monetary (!) aid unless they find some spare change in the budget, which they won’t.

And to preempt the next headline: Germany’s spending next year on Ukraine will be halved, yes… Because there’re plans for an international fund.

Also while “Olaf” is the one naying further spending, he’s not doing so independently of the ruling coalition. He has little agency.

Obligatory fuck Lindner and fuck the FDP.

No worries, I don’t expect anyone to remember random internet stranger number seven thousand one hundred and eight. But, just in case =D

Oh yes I’m a sucker for sprawling, disjointed worldbuilding. It’s what ended up pulling me into fan fiction. Maybe I should try dark tower again. I’ll put it back in the “maybe” pile.

Please get back to me with your impressions, especially on the “befriending bad guys” side. I’d love to know (even if you end up disliking it)!

I thought dark tower was okay, but it was a bit too surreal for me towards the end.

Might I recommend the Mortal Engines quartet? They’re kinda YA, especially the first one, but the setting is as far as I know completely unique, and beyond amazing. I really don’t want to spoil the first few moments of realization, so I’m just going to put the first two passages below.

Also, many of the BBEGs are cool af and (spoiler for the later books) as least one matches your request exactly, while others match it pretty well.

Honestly I love the characters, they work so well. Especially Tom, he’s the most normal everyday lead I’ve ever read in a fantasy/sci-fi book, and yet all his actions are totally believable.

My only complaint is that book 2 is kind of frustrating in places.

First two passages:

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

In happier times, London would never have bothered with such feeble prey. The great Traction City had once spent its days hunting far bigger towns than this, ranging north as far as the edges of the Ice Waste and south to the shores of the Mediterranean. But lately prey of any kind had started to grow scarce, and some of the larger cities had begun to look hungrily at London. For ten years now it had been hiding from them, skulking in a damp mountainous, western district which the Guild of Historians said had once been the island of Britain. For ten years it had eaten nothing but tiny farming towns and static settlements in those wet hills. Now, at last, the Lord Mayor had decided that the time was right to take his city back over the land-bridge into the Great Hunting Ground.

They phrased it as “NATO allies are prosecuting a war they would like to win, while Russia is prosecuting a war it believes that it has to win” but yeah pretty much.

It’s wild that they’re spinning this as an economic failure for the west. Anything else - humanitarian, political? I’d totally agree with. But even the article gives the impression of an adult holding a flailing child at arm’s length. How blindly anti-west does one have to be to see that as a win for the child.

Online dating in 2001? What was that like?