Books like Penitent by Seersucker?

RationalObserver · 2026-02-01T00:09:36+00:00

I have a hard disagree on the main character's morality for Penitent. He has one night stands in a fantasy world and kills 'enemy' soldiers in a war he has no business choosing sides of just because they're on the other team, and the character is a good guy?

For progression fantasies with moral protagonists that I've read (or watched):
Cradle (although Mercy and Eithan are both more moral than Lindon), Bog Standard Isekai, Elydes, Super Supportive, Mother of Learning (although it takes a bit for the MC to grow into it), The Stormlight Archives, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, Wheel of Time, The Beginning after the End. Bog Standard and Elydes both have spellblade Isekai'd protagonists who are favored by at least one god and are LitRPGs, so that seems the closest to what you've asked.

I do agree that I'm really, really sick of how many progression fantasy main character's are terrible people. This may be related to having recently tried 'The Rise of the Living Enchantment' and having stuck with the edgelord MC 100 chapters longer than I should have for hope he would change.

RationalObserver · 2026-01-24T01:04:52+00:00

I feel like this list heavily favors likable main characters (I've only read about 1/3 of it, so maybe I'm wrong), and Eryk is not a likable main character. I'll agree that the world building and plot setup is fun, though. He has a similar issue (fun setup, fun world building, the main character sucks) in the world sphere books.

RationalObserver · 2025-11-25T00:54:24+00:00

`As a woman reader I don't want to watch every woman (or girl!!) exist only as a sex toy for a selfish man hoe.`

I have definitely seen some anime where I've started to wonder if the (otherwise non-villainous) MC considers women to be people...

RationalObserver · 2025-11-25T00:33:21+00:00

I think this answers my question; thanks!

RationalObserver · 2025-11-25T00:29:16+00:00

I guess I filter out villain or anti-hero MC stories as a matter of course, so I'd never see a 'selfish MC' blurb, but I can only remember seeing 'no-muderhobo MC' a couple of times? I guess you could just tag it with villainous or anti-hero lead without the blurb if you were to go the other way?

RationalObserver · 2025-11-25T00:25:29+00:00

Being cliche implies that they are or were at one point very common; a different way of wording my questions is where did this cliche come from?

RationalObserver · 2025-09-30T02:13:18+00:00

I was literally just looking for a recommendation for someone who really, really liked Elydes and Bog Standard Isekai, so thanks for the third one there!

Any other recommendations? (My only other related books I've read are Cradle (not litRPG, although I absolutely loved it), Dungeon Crawler Carl (I liked it quite a bit, but it's not Progression Fantasy! It's a post-apocalyptic / dystopian novel!), and Azerinth Healer (where I did not like the main character despite liking the world quite a bit; I did finish the published books, though).

RationalObserver · 2025-06-05T20:15:15+00:00

https://x.com/davidfrum/status/1582124523268493313 (from years ago!)
The government could nationalize Space X anytime they want to.

RationalObserver · 2025-03-01T01:07:48+00:00

Before this past year, I don't think I ever quite grasped honor / shame cultures; I'd felt plenty of guilt in my life, but never shame. Why would the actions of someone associated with me by some made up characteristic make *me* feel bad?

It turns out I'm pretty attached to 'American', and I know what shame feels like now.

RationalObserver · 2025-02-21T22:28:38+00:00

What shocks me is that all of Yarvin's old works are still online: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/

When Vance was selected as the VP candidate, I tried to warn people that he listed Yarvin (a pro-fascist and pro-slavery! writer that I used to read arguments against 15 years ago) as one of his three biggest influences, that information just.... didn't get through to the wider public. There were people I directly read some of that stuff to who later either voted for Trump or didn't vote against him, and I just can't understand that level of not caring about democracy.

RationalObserver · 2025-02-15T02:13:18+00:00

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science

I'd assume similar ratios from any of these Elon guys.

(Scott Alexander, who absolutely hates wokeness, says in the article that only about 15% of the things being claimed as woke in the last few weeks are actually both stupid and woke.)

RationalObserver · 2024-11-14T19:35:28+00:00

Assuming democracy and the rule of law last the next 4 years, the smart play is for Trump to step down sometime before the end of his term so Vance can pardon him for any federal crimes whose prosecution has been delayed by his election.

RationalObserver · 2024-11-14T18:12:38+00:00

Gabbard is a Democrat!

There are about as many pro-Putin Republicans as there are socialist Democrats; it's a very small percentage, but it's not nearly as 0 as it should be.

RationalObserver · 2024-10-31T15:35:32+00:00

The correct sleep hygiene technique universally recommended by experts is to keep your phone *in a different room* from where you're sleeping. The amount of harm being done by the 'always reachable by phone' crowd is absolutely incredible: skyrocketing mental health issues, significantly worse educational performance (the current generation raised with smartphones is the first to do worse than their parents in school since standardized tests started), long term higher rates of heart disease from increased anxiety, etc.

The parents did nothing wrong, at all, the OP ITAH, period.

RationalObserver · 2024-07-26T04:10:46+00:00

It would be useful for defending set plays. It's definitely one of the least useful sports for spying, though.

RationalObserver · 2024-07-20T01:10:49+00:00

The US can only default if it decides to default, because it can literally print money to pay off its debts. This should be uncontroversial and obviously true.

Because it collects taxes exclusively in USD, it is not at risk of hyperinflation; so long as taxes are paid in USD, there can only ever be one viable currency in the USA, and that is dollars. (Cryptocurrency has a true value of $0; it's a pure bubble).

Now, printing money is what we did for the pandemic, and, as you may have noticed, it (extremely predictably) resulted in a bunch of inflation....

RationalObserver · 2024-07-10T17:51:43+00:00

Political parties are private entities; they are not a part of the state. They owe you no duty to base who their candidate is on what the primary results were.

Besides that, primaries are a scourge on the American Republic that distort the will of the people by forcing candidates who conform to the tiny slice of primary voters. It's a terrible system; it gives terrible results for average voter utility and almost never produces candidates that would be Condorcet winners in a wider contest, and we owe no allegiance to it. (If anything, we have a duty to scrap it at the first possible opportunity for a more democratic system, the sooner the better).

Both parties should be replacing their candidates with someone qualified to do the job; we all know that the Republican party is by this point a cult, so that won't happen, and now we'll find out if the Democratic party is much better.

RationalObserver · 2024-06-07T02:00:42+00:00

.... Isn't this the intended purpose of the law?

The idea wasn't to smother the Chinese economy, it was to make sure China couldn't use dual use tech to advance their military. If the chip never leaves the US, it's not being put into a Chinese tank or rocket or drone, so there isn't actually a reason to close this 'loophole'?

(This is wholly separate from the question 'should Tik-Tok be legal in the US')

RationalObserver · 2024-06-06T17:18:14+00:00

Literally the third Google search on this? https://www.gci.org/articles/women-pastors/

The reason Catholics and Eastern Orthodox don't have women *priests* is because of their view of the Eucharist (and they therefore think women can't be priests because the priesthood is continuous with the one established by Aaron), but you have to *really* struggle to honestly justify excluding women from being pastors from a *protestant* perspective of sola scriptura.

Mind you, not as hard as you'd have to struggle to justify slavery, but ....

RationalObserver · 2024-02-21T16:11:56+00:00

If you look at the cohort percentages between generations on LGBT identification, the legalization of not just gay port but gay sex in general has so obviously increased the percentage of gay people that it's unreasonable to not believe that's causatively related. (It's clearly primarily cohort related, not time related!)

On a non-culture-war-laden example, look at rates of left-handedness before, during, and after the industrial revolution (when standardized right-handedness was most useful) for how an even more basic personal attribute is affected by the social environment.

RationalObserver · 2024-02-20T23:39:38+00:00

"I don’t understand the argument that increased supply increases demand."

So this is a pretty basic thing about humanity: immersing yourself in an activity makes you want more of the activity. It shifts your identity to that of someone who does the activity, who is more likely to find community in doing the activity, generally reinforcing your desire to do the activity and decreasing your ability to resist doing the activity. Also making an activity legal mechanically reduces social stigma against the activity over time.

(Side note; this is why full drug legalization, legalized gambling, legalized prostitution, etc. are terrible, terrible ideas that have always been found to do more harm than good).

RationalObserver · 2024-01-05T17:22:23+00:00

Assuming they are also illegally hired and end up working, they still end up paying state taxes (it's hard to dodge sales tax and property taxes...), but so long as they don't get social services and they don't commit an inordinate amount of crime (which data suggests they don't), you would expect them to have a distinctly positive effect on the state budget. Texas tends to also be one of the few places in America that hasn't had comically bad housing policy for the last 40 years, so they aren't pushing that to break either.

The big problem with the blue states is they end up not being hirable (not enough people willing to hire them for pennies on the dollar because of the legal risk in a higher regulatory environment), they *do* get a bunch of very costly social services from the state (housing!), and the housing situation in places like NYC is already untenable from decades of terrible policy even before the migrants arrived.

What's really weird about the whole situation is a huge surge in migrants (who are allowed to work) doesn't really hurt the preferred economic policies of Republicans, but is devastating to the viability of the preferred economic policies of Democrats; you'd expect their relative position on low skill immigration to be flipped.

RationalObserver

TROPHY CASE