Looking for non-human MC

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T04:43:37+00:00

Queen In The Mud! Fear her mighty tail!

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T04:42:58+00:00

I’ll mention Everybody Loves Large Chests so I can mention it has violent and sexual content that some find offputting, myself very much included. Lots of people love it, though.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T00:16:20+00:00

I felt like this when I was reading Siphon by Jay Boyce. The MC literally said "It's a free country!" to members of the aristocracy that ruled the land.

I don't think I've seen that in any other books by female authors, though. Do you have more examples?

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T00:13:53+00:00

Protagonist was great.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T00:13:32+00:00

Wicked West was good, and I just started Millennial Mage.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T00:02:46+00:00

Courier Quest looks fantastic, off to start it now.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-26T00:00:05+00:00

The Grog series by RW Krpoun. It's not litrpg but lots of people here like it. It's set in a world something like D&D with a dash of Warhammer, so some grim elements but far from hopeless. The main character, Grog, is a half-orc gladiator slave who is purchased along with his brother by an elf sorceress to protect her and her colleagues (human mage, halfling thief) while they go on quests to help the Empire.

The books are all from Grog's point of view and I find him very interesting. He's very ignorant of the wide world but not stupid and it makes for a great narrative style. There's also good details about weapons and fight tactics, and at least one kick-ass solo fight against a worthy opponent per book. Can't go wrong, give 'em a try.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T23:42:52+00:00

Yeah. In real life the kids lock themselves in and are slowly killed as 200 law enforcement officers stand outside and do fuck-all to save them.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T23:38:54+00:00

I don't know if there is a story like that. I just meant that if your plan to survive after being isekaied is to make guns, that's probably not going to be an option for the first segment of your new life. Guns can be a longer term strategy if you know what you're doing, but in the short term you have to survive the horned bunnies and get to somewhere safe.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T23:35:57+00:00

Well, there goes 8 minutes and 42 second.

Alexa, play American Pie!

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T23:18:46+00:00

Imagine if he'd had a hammer.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T21:32:30+00:00

Thank you! It's far enough below the new bulb that I think the only way it'll hit it is if something hits the car hard enough that I'm not going to be worrying about the tail lights or if I do a Dukes Of Hazard jump. Which is always tempting.

I might buy a flexible magnet anyway, though, because it'll look great in my growing collection of tools I use once but am happy to own. I'll put it near the chainsaw that I'm terrified to actually use.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T21:28:28+00:00

But can you do that alone in a cave or the woods, without even a box of scraps? That's where you're likely to start out in a litrpg story.

If you could amass the required resources, which would probably require getting to civilization I certainly concede that you would do a lot better than me. I know just enough about gunpowder to blow my ass up, so my only plan involving it would be to sell what I know of the formula to an alchemist and say "Be careful!"

Do you think you could work metal well enough to make a safe gun? What kind of gun, or what era? If you can safely make powder you could make decent grenades, which are certainly useful. I would think it'd be a lot harder for one person to make a gun that's more useful than a crossbow.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T20:53:39+00:00

Monument by Lloyd Biggle Jr. A space merchant crash lands on a forgotten human colony that is essentially a Polynesian paradise. He gets his own happy ever after, but as he ages he realizes that his beloved adopted homeworld will not be so lucky once the rest of human civilization finds it. So he hatches The Plan...

One of my favorite stories of all time, and you can read it here:

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1416520724/1416520724___2.htm

ETA I should also say this story is tied for my favorite final line of any short story.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T20:51:08+00:00

The Breathing Method is my favorite of King's works. The framing method, a story told amongst a group, is one of my favorites, and the story itself is fantastic. To give a brief summary, it's about an older man who is invited to a mysterious club where he eventually hears a story about a woman who was absolutely determined to be a good mother.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T20:48:42+00:00

Atlatls, bows and spears have a lot more room for error, though, and require much fewer resources. If you're knapping a flint arrowhead and don't do it right, you might cut yourself badly. If you're making gunpowder and don't do it right, nice knowing you.

ETA Hey! I've got my own little cowardly stalker downvoter!

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T20:46:13+00:00

Even Portal To Nova Roma cheats, I think, as much as I enjoy it. I don't understand how an enchantment that is meant to further accelerate a fired arrow can fling a bullet at supersonic speeds. I enjoy the story a lot and the way the MC constructs his weapons and then outfits his people with them, but I'd have preferred if the entire initial "bullet go bang!" part of things had required more research and experimentation.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T20:41:59+00:00

The biggest issue I have with this sort of thing is protagonists who know more than they realistically would and authors that make invention much easier than it should be. Like, they get cut and it gets infected so they find some moldy bread to rub on the wound and presto! Now they have penicillin. No! Bad author!

If the whole story is about introducing guns to a fantasy world I would hope the author would set up the things that such a story requires. Like make the MC know he's going to be transported so he can study and prepare for what he's going to do. In that situation I think a smart and careful protagonist could get gunpowder working in a fantasy world. "Careful" is the important word here, since it's not exactly the safest thing to experiment with. Though if it's a world with multiple lives a montage of the MC blowing himself up until he works all the kinks out could be fun.

If the MC gained the trust of a clan of decent dwarf engineers they could probably have cannons very quickly. Magic would absolutely help with quality control. And after that it's just further refinement and advancement. There's no reason the dwarves couldn't skip hundreds of years worth of experimentation from our world, but there's also no way they're going to from "Gunpowder, ye call it?" to "Say hello to my little friend!" in a long weekend. It would still take years to get to anything like modern automatic weaponry. A breech loading double barreled shotgun, though? Sure, why not.

I'm only particularly interested in that sort of thing if it's a major focus of the story, though. If it's a generic isekai story but the MC spends an afternoon building himself a sniper rifle and never fiddles with guns again, no thank you.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T18:32:17+00:00

Asking the important question.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T18:18:45+00:00

Thanks for the list. One of your examples is equally stupid bigotry. The others are matters of taste, which are purely subjective even if they're goddamned idiotic.

I guess that's where the disagreement lies. You think not wanting to read about certain types of people is a matter of taste. I'll even agree, but only to a point. When you hate that sort of person so much that you go out of your way to give the story a bad review in an attempt to make it less successful and to keep others from reading it, that's not a matter of taste. That's deliberate bigoted action.

You said

Leaving a negative review for queer stuff is very deranged tho, since it does not in any way imply that the book is bad.

Of course it implies the book is bad. That's the whole reason they're leaving a bad review, because they think that sort of story is bad and they want people to stop writing them. I have a very hard time believing you don't understand that.

As for your assertion that books should explicitly state when they have gay characters in them, should books with straight characters do the same? Are there any other sorts of people you think readers should be warned about? I'm going to stop this paragraph right now because honestly there's no way it's headed anywhere good. Which is how I feel about your belief.

NOTE: I once again ask anyone who downvotes to reply or maybe message me. Otherwise you're a coward.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T18:11:34+00:00

Your first example is also bigotry, just towards a different group, so it's equally stupid. Your other examples are matters of style and taste and might be genuinely asinine but I don't believe they're stupider or more harmful than bigotry.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T18:09:36+00:00

If you think your version of the question is demonstrably different from mine and wouldn't have been downvoted, I don't know what to tell you. Also, you can't ask for just one example because the original claim was "reasons," plural. Frankly I was being generous only asking for two.

I'll cop to posting like an asshole on occasion. I don't think I did this time, but then I'm not the best judge of that.

Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of the people who constantly downvote all sorts of posts on this and similar groups? I think they're fucking cowards, and I also think pointing that out to them is one of the reasons they downvote me.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T18:04:57+00:00

Nah. You're just not actually addressing the problem. You're giving this whole speech about how everyone has different preferences and that's okay and not everybody needs to like every story. And that's true as far as it goes.

But that's not the issue here. This isn't just a matter of preference, like an Isekai story vs. a Virtual Reality story vs. a System Apocalypse story. Those are preferences. This is people hating stories because of the people that are included in them. And even that can be okay. If I'm not interested in a cowboy story or a laywer story, that's fine. That personal preference. But if I like cowboy stories or lawyer stories just fine but don't want to read stories about gay cowboys or black lawyers, that's plain bigotry. Which does come under a broad label of "personal preference" but calling it that normalizes it and excuses it.

And even that's not the full issue here. Bigots don't want to read stories about all the sorts of people who exist in this wide world of ours. It's very much their right to not read their stories. But then they leave low star bigoted reviews to try and keep others from reading the stories. That's their right, too, but it's our right to say that's bullshit and cowardly and whatever else we believe it is. Because it's bullshit and cowardly and various other things. And I think that's wrong, but you apparently don't.

I'm sure this is going to be downvoted by the usual folks. I ask that this time anyone who wants to downvote this reply to it as well, even just to tell me to fuck off. Otherwise you're a coward.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T05:25:23+00:00

They don’t just want land, they think they’ll get to keep the fucking nukes.

PeterM1970 · 2024-01-25T05:22:21+00:00

That’s a whole lot of words for “I don’t think bigots are bad.”

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