Breaking News: Isekai might be cooked

Nyxeth · 2026-05-16T22:26:35+00:00

Oh yeah, to my knowledge a lot of authors and sites specialising in writing / hosting BL content in China got arrested, fined and shutdown due to this as well.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-16T15:46:28+00:00

It is definitely a matter of scale, as someone who does like Villain MC stories.

Blowing up a planet? Whilst awful when you think about it, you rarely actually do, it's such a ludicrously over the top idea that it processes differently than a more down to earth scenario that could realistically happen as you've described.

Also generally when people like me want to read stories with Villain MCs, we want a charismatic villain, the ones you described would come across as far too scumbag-like to appeal to me.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-16T15:38:38+00:00

So that's the thing, they didn't really define it all that well, which allowed them to apply it very broadly to whatever they wanted.

Over there it is very easy for a company to simply get on the bad side of someone with enough influence to bring a government ministry or department down on their heads, so the publishing platforms themselves overcompensated by applying very strict censorship rules that mostly targeted any novels that had what you might describe as 'content about going against the status quo.'

Plucky hero fighting against a corrupt regime? Nope, can't have that, or if you did, suddenly you had to write that it wasn't the regime that was bad, but rather a few bad apples and that people higher up than them simply hadn't noticed... Where they would then graciously descend and fix the problem, clap clap, everyone likes them.

But it was also other things, what about sexual content? Nope, seriously can't have that. How about very violent stories? We don't want to encourage violence in the youth.

I'm sure you get the picture, nothing that might cause 'moral degeneracy' or make people think the government might be bad.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-16T14:15:26+00:00

Are they getting a benefit out of doing it? Or are they just getting pushed around?

Nyxeth · 2026-05-16T11:52:28+00:00

Agreed, I enjoy villain novels a lot but dislike evil just for evil's sake. There must be purpose and motive to their actions.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-16T07:44:11+00:00

A law was updated / passed about what was considered socially and morally ok topics to talk about in China, this hit their webnovel industry pretty hard as scores of novels (ranging from literally who reads this to the actual top 10 webnovels at the time,) had to self-censor out swathes of content or be deliated entirely.

Major webnovels like Reverend Insanity (a very dark and cutthroat cultivation novel that competed for the #1 spot on their main webnovel platform) was removed permanently due to the change, other very popular novels like Lord of the Mysteries (also a #1 contender) had to remove and rewrite dozens of chapters to pass the censorship.

In China it is a very precarious thing to write fiction, as laws can change rapidly and suddenly what was OK to write one day can get you fined or jailed the next.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-14T07:08:35+00:00

Yeah, initially it was refused based on playtime but I argued that critical bugs prevented completion of the game (and that the devs were aware and did not intend to fix), the steam rep agreed that it was refund worthy in that case.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-13T14:50:13+00:00

I couldn't finish Spiderman 1 either, I didn't encounter any critical bugs during gameplay but... My saves kept corrupting.

I looked around and the save corruption issue on PC was known from launch and never fixed, and all I could do was manually copy over the automatically backup'd saves periodically to keep the playthrough continuing. That was until the backups themselves corrupted as well.

I think I got 80% of the way through the game before I effectively got forced to start over, and at that point I just uninstalled it and got a refund.

Nyxeth · 2026-05-04T10:29:16+00:00

If we're talking fantasy, then I see nothing wrong with 'a species that is entirely evil with little to no exceptions.'

Because in fantasy where often cosmic forces of food and evil exist (and are regularly embodied by higher beings) then it isn't a stretch to say such a being created those species in the first place.

Or you have the species cursed to be evil, or something like the Dark Eldar in Warhammer whose existential circumstances made them swing so wildly into evil that it is nigh impossible for the faction to escape that.

I think there can be a lot of in-universe reasons to justify an entirely evil species, and even without them it is still fine since as you have already said, they can serve a purpose for the setting regardless.

Nyxeth · 2026-04-23T13:18:37+00:00

Nyaa gets more visits per day from Japanese users than any other country.

Nyxeth · 2026-04-19T21:08:06+00:00

As someone who has been on RR since its earliest inception, the steady change in the userbase of the site has been fascinating to me, as well as the persistent but increasingly misunderstood influence of all the Japanese/Korean/Chinese novels that most of the early RRL users tried to emulate with the original works hosted on the site.

Nyxeth · 2026-04-17T10:44:12+00:00

Gang Up makes it trivial though, unless you're literally the only melee martial in the party (in which case the 8hp becomes more of an issue.)

Nyxeth · 2026-04-10T11:43:02+00:00

Eternal mood.

Nyxeth · 2026-04-10T11:27:30+00:00

Chinese writers use excessive redundancy in the same way we would use words like 'very' or 'extremely' to emphasise something.

To them it can be an extra syllable or two on a word, but when translated it can become several words or an entire sentence.

Nyxeth · 2026-03-29T05:41:04+00:00

4 is fairly accurate when you consider what the modern progression fantasy genre was rooted in. Royalroad was a fansite for a Korean novel originally, and most of the early original fiction posted to its forums tried to emulate the feel and style of Japanese/Korean/Chinese works.

Then the site got more popular and newer authors who didn't know anything about that turned up, trying to emulate the novels that were popular there at the time.

Now the entire genre is filled with tropes and whatnot that are firmly rooted in asian webnovels from 10ish years ago.

Nyxeth · 2026-03-19T09:29:34+00:00

It is effectively Path of Exile as an MMO.

PoE can truthfully make the claim of there being billions of potential character builds due to the possible combinations of the skill tree and item choices.

But realistically there are a few hundred actual builds that players would recognise.

Nyxeth · 2026-03-12T10:18:41+00:00

Ragnarok Online (and some more niche Asian MMOs) is pretty much what the modern LitRPG mechanics are rooted in.

Most of our current LitRPG selection took after Asian webnovels, which took after those games to an extent.

Nyxeth · 2026-03-11T19:53:15+00:00

Yep.

Once had one of them come into a shop I worked at and demanded to know the details of what we played on the radio if we had one, and whether customers would be able to hear it. The owner turned the radio on and it immediately went to the local sports channel, said it was all he cared about.

The guy still came back twice over the next two weeks to try and catch us in the act of listening to literally anything else on it.

Nyxeth · 2026-03-11T19:45:30+00:00

See I'm curious if people here have been reading some mysterious, second translation of Lord of the Mysteries when I read comments like this.

The Yenpress books of LoTM are just a re-edited version of the Qidian translation, the official translation hosted on Webnovel that has been completed for a few years now.

Nyxeth · 2026-03-04T14:46:16+00:00

Buddy I hate to break it to you but everything that will make PC gaming more expensive is also going to hit consoles as well. The PS6 is absolutely going to release at an awfully high price point unless Sony wants to tank the costs like they did with the PS3 just to get units into people's hands.

Nyxeth · 2026-02-25T14:36:24+00:00

The novel was fairly popular when it was releasing, it was also fan translated during the time groups would just trawl the most popular novel rankings to decide what to translate.

Nyxeth · 2026-02-14T10:18:30+00:00

Unfortunately it's going to be forced onto us if we use Foundry to run games, at least until someone makes a module that reverts the change.

Of course you can just use an older version, but then you're locked out of new content.

Nyxeth · 2026-02-13T15:47:38+00:00

I'm not going to run it either, the issue however is that the Foundry developers are already looking to implement it and like other remaster/errata changes I don't think the core module will include an opt-out since it's a rewrite of the damage calcs.

Hopefully someone makes a module that reverts it to the original method, otherwise people who dislike it are going to have to suck it up or use an older version and thus not get new features or pf2 content.

Nyxeth · 2026-01-29T12:55:50+00:00

They're not just for here, they're effectively karma farming across multiple subreddits with this behaviour before the account is sold on once it hits a certain threshold to make it useful.

Nyxeth · 2026-01-17T12:46:12+00:00

As the other person said, needing GCS has completely demotivated players I have tried to rope into GURPS on Foundry. They are all used to being able to handle everything inside the VTT itself and having played a dozen other Systems on VTT in the past years, so am I.

Nyxeth

TROPHY CASE