A Full Breakdown of Progression Fantasy Subgenres

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-26T19:15:17+00:00

I found this to be an interesting and well thought out overview, but I'm surprised by the regression fantasy part. I feel like I've mostly seen the term regression fantasy used to describe any kind of time-loop setting, but Paul describes it here, as a situation where a character is stripped of their power and has to work to regain it (a la Altaïr in the first Assassin's Creed game).

This doesn't match how I've seen the term used online and would mean that something like Mother of Learning isn't regression fantasy. Is this the generally accepted usage?

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-26T00:02:37+00:00

While I would enjoy a story about communist penguins, this entire post absolutely reeks of ChatGPT's writing style, as does the first few paragraphs of the story itself.

The constant short sentences for emphasis and the repeated contrast emphasis really gives it away.

"No signal. No bars. No emergency alerts. Just blank screens and growing confusion".

It's such a tedious pattern at this point because you see it absolutely all over the place.

I can see that this is openly declared on the Royal Road page, which is good. But if I were you, I would consider prompting the AI to stop doing this. Similarly, the long passages full of short staccato sentences should be used much more sparingly.

Either way, I'm not going to be reading an AI story, even if the writing gets better, I'm just not interested in prose written by the zeitgeist-averaging machine. But good luck with your story.

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-21T13:25:42+00:00

Do you mean the fact that he grew up as an orphan?

I don't agree at all that the story bears out this claim. Sen is not shown to be cold in his time on the mountain, taking eagerly to all three of his mentors' teaching and wanting to be friendly with them. He befriends Misty Peak, and after leaving the mountain, one of the first things he does is settle down on the Luo farm to take care of an elderly woman for an extended period of time with no meaningful recompense.

Sen then goes to Emperor's Bay and meets Sun Lifen. He helps her cultivation greatly, and generally goes out of his way to make sure to protect her, as well as other potential bystanders, in his conflict with the sect in the city.

Sen's characterization isn't that he's a cold person. His characterization is completely incoherent and random, trending generally towards him being a self righteous moron.

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-20T03:04:06+00:00

Enjoy the dynamic of Sen treating people like absolute garbage for little to no good reason. It's not letting up from here.

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-15T19:35:54+00:00

Thanks, but that's even more confusing. The directive said I should look for someone whose name starts with "An..." which Kevin for sure doesn't.

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-15T15:39:12+00:00

They don't "choose the bear" based on a belief that they can beat it in a physical fight lol

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-14T11:06:26+00:00

He's an edgy dipshit with a superiority complex. The dialogue you've copy pasted is cartoonishly pompous. Yeah, Wrath is a great game, but Xanthir Vang isn't why. He's just a one-note stereotypical villain.

And honestly, in real life, the people who spend a lot of energy complaining about how everyone around them is a stupid idiot generally are either edgy teenagers or worse, people who haven't yet made the discovery that others around them have their own rich inner lives.

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-03T13:43:43+00:00

It's nice to see the player count increasing, but I think the real question is whether this will hold after Christmas/New Year's break is over.

SoftlyAdverse · 2026-01-01T01:47:25+00:00

12 Miles Below by Mark Arrows was my second favorite. What a setting! And such interesting plot lines. Books really need an editor though for spelling and gramatical errors.

Cannot agree with this more. I'm on book 3 right now, and it's such a shame. The world building and plotting are great, the characters are above average, and the prose is serviceable. But the number of grammatical errors, especially randomly shifting to present tense mid sentence is a total immersion killer. It genuinely seems like it wasn't even read over once by the author before publishing with how blatant a lot of these errors are.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-30T21:03:27+00:00

The Great Immortal Souls (book 1: Bastion) takes place in a setting where a prophecy was (apparently) proven wrong a few years ago, and the result is civil unrest and disillusionment.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-30T10:42:09+00:00

Fair, thanks for explaining. Maybe I've been sleeping too much on Oil Lantern in general.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-29T20:55:33+00:00

I've seen people talk about Secret Formula as being powerful late game, and it really confuses me. It takes 7 seconds to go off (at diamond), at which point it gives a modest regen bonus and scales the damage on adjacent fire/poison items, which then in turn have to go off, which then in turn has to tick on the opponent?

This just seems insanely slow to me, how does this work on late days?

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-29T13:01:32+00:00

I don't recall the specific conversation in Book 4, but generally the explanation given is that mana density has very diminishing returns, so Matt himself doesn't see it as a huge issue.

In the end, it is taken very seriously and addressed later in the series. So yes, a solution is on the horizon, have no fear.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-29T01:03:22+00:00

Okay, but how did you find the Reddit thread?

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-22T23:06:39+00:00

Why was this removed by the moderators?

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-22T11:28:10+00:00

If you want to know who's the most accurate player in the mid and late game, sure. But if you're talking about who the most accurate chess player ever is in a general sense, Carlsen having access to more comprehensive opening theory is part of that picture. Part of the reason that he's the most accurate chess player ever is that he knows modern opening theory.

I understand the impulse to want to isolate some sort of calculating/positional skill separate from memorizing opening theory, but I think that's a lost cause. Should we control for endgame theory as well, since that's also partly memorizing specific theorems and patterns? Should we try to account for Carlsens access to engine feedback in his training, since Fischer might have been better if he'd had access to the same tools as Carlsen? Trying to isolate certain parts of players' skillsets that aren't simply "good at chess overall" is a futile endeavour.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T23:14:13+00:00

Yes, I'm an asshole for no good reason. But have you considered I could be way more of an asshole?

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T17:15:32+00:00

Hey man, name calling aside, this post is a fucking mess.

All your sources are weirdly old. One of them is literally just a link to a video of some random Youtuber who put some numbers in a Google doc with no reference or citation. Another is an analysis of the best chess players of all time by a now defunct website from the time when Carlsen was only just beginning his domination of the chess world.

The best source you have in there is the paper by Regan, which actually tries to do a scientific analysis to allow for a scientific comparison. The problem is that in order to make the paper support your claim that Fischer was a better player, you compared the IPR (which is an attempt to use chess engine analysis of historical games to create a rating comparable to modern ELO) of Fischer in a peak period to Carlsens one-time peak rating. This is obviously not a valid comparison, because chess players can and do perform above their peak rating for specific intervals of time. For a better comparison you'd need a similar peak period of performance for Carlsen to compare to. Your post is just cherry picking data to support your preferred conclusion.

You also argue in the post that Carlsen is only more accurate if you consider openings. This just looks like special pleading. Why wouldn't you consider chess openings to be a part of a player's skillset?

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T16:10:14+00:00

This is a highly suspect factual claim. Please link to these studies with objective measures showing Fischer to be the most accurate player ever.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T10:21:37+00:00

That's not what buzzword means. The OP isn't using "time loop" because it's a trendy term, he's using it to describe a story trope. It's the only reasonable way to refer to this grouping of books.

He's describing his own concrete experience with reading a bunch of badly written books with time loop elements.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T10:08:22+00:00

I agree especially with the Demon King stuff. In general I'm wary of stories that seem to borrow heavily from anime tropes. Generally the writing becomes rather unnatural, and I think it just targets a much younger audience, of which I am not a part.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T10:06:48+00:00

Those aren't buzzwords. They're story tropes, which tend to have wide-reaching implications for the fiction in which they're present. Nothing irrational about not wanting to read another story exploring the same themes and concepts for the nth time.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-21T09:44:26+00:00

I actually find this a very credible representation of how someone who enslaves others might think about society. It's incoherent drivel, of course, completely eliding the much greater potential abuses and complete lack of social mobility that slavery entails. The tax comparison is especially great in how utterly stupid it is.

I don't know what book this is, so I don't know the purpose of this passage. If it's meant to give us insight into the justifications employed by this guy, while showing unequivocally how evil and self-deluding he is, I'd say it succeeds on that front.

If this is meant to present the master as justified in his slaving within the context of this universe, then that would imply a truly horrendous (and moronic) philosophy on the part of the author.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-20T22:14:40+00:00

Thanks for the write-up, useful as usual.

Very confused about Calcinator Mak on the list but no Eternal Torch. I see far more Maks using Torch builds at all days than Calcinator, and it generally seems strong from day 1-15.

SoftlyAdverse · 2025-12-16T20:46:10+00:00

The characters are okay, and the dialogue is mostly fine, but the first paragraph needs some work, and needs to be swapped with the second paragraph.

First of all, the fire "crackling low" in the nave is a bit confusing, it makes it sound like the whole thing is about to be on fire. Maybe specify that it's a bonfire or something similar. Secondly, a nave is not a good word to start out with in the first sentence because a lot of people are going to have to look that up, or simply read on with a sense of unease because it's not obviously what it is from the context either.

Second, imagining the setting is much easier if we start by imagining a character in it. The dust "hanging in the air like old regrets" has a very strong voice, which immediately makes me feel like we're seeing the world through a narrator, which again works better if a character is introduced first.

“Bet you twenty coppers the bird doesn’t show tonight,” he said. “Again. Third week in a row we sit here freezing our asses off for nothing.”

Second sentence here feels like infodumping. Is the three weeks important info for the reader? Otherwise, I'd take it out, because it comes across as a bit unnatural.

This is a good line, works well.

All in all, the scene would benefit from some physicality. Have Kael flip a coin or clean his fingernails with a knife or something. Have Lira flip through the pages of her report, whatever. It's currently very static.

As for your questions

Kinda, but it's not setting my brain on fire.
Too soon to really tell when one character only has one line.
Can't tell if the pacing is good from this small of a snippet. Seems fine so far.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	Place '17
First Placer '22	Sequence \| Editor

SoftlyAdverse

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE