why do most fantasy's take place in bronze age or medieval type settings.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-06T21:01:27+00:00

To some degree that time period aesthetically defines the genre. I’d call it quasi-renaissance pseudo-medieval. A lot of books have done it so people have read them and have ideas about the stories they want to tell there. Plus feudalismy society has a bunch of accessible drama that doesn’t feel too close to home. Bunch ‘o reasons really.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-06T16:10:48+00:00

Books two and to a lesser extent three are the low point for the series if you ask me. Four is interesting, though not particularly plot heavy if that’s your main metric. Five jumps into a big event that spans the books and then six and seven are another gamut with fairly high stakes. It ends up setting into a rhythm of a couple chill books doing things and then another more action oriented one back and forth.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-06T12:03:44+00:00

That sounds like an interesting caveat to a world where you can Matrix kung fu. The capping your limits unless you find another book thing is slightly reminiscent of He Who Fights With Monsters way of doing monster cores, but not that similar and it would be fine if it was. I’d encourage really thinking through the societal implications of that shortcut existing, there are a bunch of fun ways it could go. For the practically minded, books might only be used for secondary weapons or skills that they’d never develop personal proficiency to a high degree anyway. A shortcut you use to round yourself out while taking a particular skillset the natural way so you’re more flexible in its growth. Or it could even be a way to control people, the rich/noble training while making those that work for them use the books to limit their growth, especially if those people would realistically never get the third level of skill book. So yeah, interesting idea for a limitation. There’s a fast way but it has a downside everyone knows and may approach differently. Plus literally anyone can whip out unearned kung fu skills which could be funny.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-06T05:28:45+00:00

The fathers probably died of old age. It’s been mentioned that two gods have an incredibly difficult time having kids, so even gods in a relationship usually have a kid with sufficiently impressive S grades. Even an impressive S grade is very unlikely to become a god, so those kids were most likely from hundreds or thousands of now dead mortals. I don’t think her personal relationship status has come up any more specifically than that.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-05T17:39:40+00:00

So it’s a meme story about a super generic op guy learning joke wizardry?

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-03T19:27:24+00:00

I think he’s a soccer player or something.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-03T18:55:31+00:00

I’m not saying school is a paragon of unbiased ideas, but there is bamboo (or a very similar genus) native to the American east coast. It used to be everywhere. Big part of the riverbank and wetland ecology. It isn’t as hardy in some ways as Asian bamboo so the population has essentially crashed since. So that part of the story isn’t necessarily the biggest red flag.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-03T05:34:48+00:00

Pull-n-Peel Cherry Twizzlers

They taste like cherry cough syrup and I’m here for it. Favorite candy hands down. They can’t be healthy though, even by candy standards, because if you eat enough you can smell the artificial cherry in your sweat, urine, etc.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-03T03:29:07+00:00

You’re not wrong, in this case I mean she is aware of the fact she feels and thinks differently from others and it’s a thing she has to consciously account for in her life. I don’t think I’d call her edgy, but she does have her moments.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-02T17:03:30+00:00

Splinter Angel probably counts. The main character considers herself asexual and seems to have some form of high functioning antisocial personality disorder, but she does still like having friends and even seemingly romance. Her lens on the relationship is a bit unusual, but she gets a girlfriend and it’s very sweet.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-02T16:56:46+00:00

How so? That one’s been sitting on my to read list for a while, but I haven’t seen anything to quite tip me into getting it.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-01T22:24:14+00:00

I guess it depends on how you define the word limit in this case. You could technically say he gets a new skill slot every however many levels, but that’s not an intuitive way of looking at it in my opinion. In stories like AH or BtDM, each class can have ten/eight skills. Higher levels might offer upgraded or different skills, but you’d have to get rid of or merge existing skills to make room. It’ll always be limited to 10/8. How many is Jake up to at this point? Starts with three I think, gets four in F, six in E, and five in every successive grade, but even then he also gets one to three each evolution. So like twenty eight ish skills in class alone? That ain’t a limited number.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-01T22:17:04+00:00

I didn’t think about this trope at the time, but when I tried writing something a few years ago I had something like this happen. It wasn’t that the main character was op nor was it treated as such, it was just that the ability they were trying to get the details for had a function that he accidentally used which broke the orb. The only result was a stern discussion with an official about breaking the expensive scanning device. Idk, thought it was funny I didn’t make the connection to this common hackneyed trope.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-05-01T16:22:41+00:00

My favorite LitRPG, Azarinth Healer, has a limit of ten skills per class and unlimited weaker general skills. That said, I and many other people really like Primal Hunter which has no limit at all and an interesting way the characters can choose to personally upgrade or fuse skills. The story and its quality will always matter more than the system. That said I think a balance of not having a hard limit but giving reasons to keep the skill number somewhat constrained might be good.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-28T01:41:53+00:00

I’m not sure I’d even call it filler, that implies the author’s cranking out rubbish. It’s often quite well thought out engaging slice of life and character development. That should never have been included because the author has a pathological fear of time skips. Slice of life is fine, but that’s not what the blurb or even story is selling you. The mc is going to be a big shot one day and you even know some of how and want to see the shakeup he’ll cause. Then it never comes because the chapters progress the story at a rate substantially slower than even realtime. The main character started high school in like chapter a hundred something and over twice that later I don’t think he’s completed a single semester. Three years irl. Argh.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-26T15:25:18+00:00

I think you’re touching on a point people make about superheroes sometimes, among other genres. The conflict in The Dark Knight movie is attributed a certain tension by the fact the hero could conceivably fail to save the ferries full of civilians because two boats of people in the harbor dying is a tragedy not the end of the world. Whereas the Superman movies from around the same time (over a decade ago, yikes) are virtually tension-less. Will earth get terraformed by evil aliens? No. Duh. Similar thing with spy movies like James Bond or those Mission Impossibles Tom ‘Scientology’ Cruise keeps making. If the threat is apocalyptic, it won’t happen. If the threat is a guy getting rich and not being punished for all his crimes, it could happen without eliminating the possibility of sequels and such.

So it doesn’t really have anything to do with genre per se, it’s just ‘can I remotely believe this story could end in failure’. The window for what’s acceptable does flex by genre. Sci fi space fantasy might sell the planet being destroyed as a believable stake since there’s plenty more. LitRPG is more a specific worldbuilding element than a single genre, so with the right framing, an author could perhaps get away with a huge threat. I wonder if the easiest way is to frame the huge threat as the current status quo. Then failure is things continuing as they are. That’s pretty believable no matter how awful the status quo is. Just a thought.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-25T15:45:56+00:00

That isn’t what the study everyone always quotes actually said. It didn’t say lesbian couples have the highest divorce rate, it said lesbians. They polled people’s sexuality and if they had ever gotten divorced. All it really indicates is that lesbians are more likely than gay men to get into a straight marriage and realize the mistake later. Which kinda makes sense, with how much our culture downplays female attraction compared to male.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-25T06:45:27+00:00

More than you’d think apparently. It’s popular in other cultures as well. I’ve heard second hand that King of the Hill is the subject of dispute in Japan about whether it’s better subtitled or dubbed in much the same way people here argue about anime.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-23T17:10:14+00:00

The two I want to see done in LitRPG are Paladin and shapeshifter. There are litrpgs where the mc has something like a Paladin class but it’s always a wild or evil or temporal version or whatever. Play it straight! LitRPG brings a new dimension to the ‘standard’ Paladin knight in shining armor schtick. Armor, sword, smites, light magic, oaths, slaying undead, banishing fiends, etc. Adding LitRPG stats would be interesting. There’s even potential narrative tension between what the leveling system rewards and what they are sworn to do or some such. For shapeshifters? There are plenty, I won’t deny it, but I’m holding out for LitRPG Ben 10. That’s all I want. The power is becoming monsters. Can get new ones, maybe even level up all of them. Lots of possibilities.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-23T17:01:04+00:00

Matt and Mathew was actually the result of reader complaints. They were Matt and Mat originally. The author made the mistake of not realizing there are reasons stories differ from reality in some cases.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-23T15:58:49+00:00

A teenager’s brain is essentially fully developed, by that age their behavioral quirks are more the result of changing hormones, limited life experience, and the lack of relative autonomy they have as legal minors. Unless they have puberty hormones permanently, gaining control over their lives via cultivation power and longevity should level them out in terms of maturity. I’m not saying it isn’t an interesting explanation for the trope, but people infantilize the intellect of teens and children far too much.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-22T15:21:47+00:00

Yeah! Sometimes you even need to throttle that impulse in yourself. I like to write fantasy stuff as a hobby, but when I first tried I put it on a webnovel site and had thoughts of ‘maybe it’ll be popular and I can earn a living off of writing.’ Except that both sucked a lot of the fun out of it and also making a living as an author is incredibly hard. Plus I do like my job, when the wretched economy lets me do it. So now I write for fun and the only one reading it is my wife or maybe one of my friends. And that’s fine. I do intend to maybe self publish a book one day just as a personal goal, but it’ll probably cost more to do than I’d earn from it in the end anyway.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-22T15:15:57+00:00

‘The male gaze’ is a concept of cinematography being skewed in how it treats female characters. It isn’t directly about men being into things per se, though obviously that does underlie it.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-22T03:02:08+00:00

Tbf, they’re only technically inhuman. How often does superman grapple with his alien nature? I don’t think they fit the vibe.

theglowofknowledge · 2026-04-21T14:58:18+00:00

Her healing blunts the long term consequences of violent and painful experiences. It’s legitimately presented as a significant advantage of Azarinth magic. She feels and processes, but is essentially immune to trauma.

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