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gwern comments on Lawrence Watt-Evans's Fiction - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
Makes me think of this webcomic about a gamer in our world hwo gets summoned to a fantasy board-game world with wierd laws of physics, when someone in that world tries to summon the "ultimate warlord"...
Erfworld came up earlier as a worthy topic of discussion and comparison to MoR (re: exploiting fantasy rules). Now that I'm caught up, I would have to amend my favorable comments there: Erfworld was good up until the Crowning Awesome of the volcano. Since then, it has been complete crap - abandoned its metafictional pretensions, gone into incredibly boring arcs, etc.
I usually commit the sunk cost hard with fiction series (Wheel of Time comes to mind), but the past year or so of Erfworld has been dull enough that I'm close to just unsubscribing.
EDIT: you know what, now that I've explicitly labeled it a sunk cost, I've realized it really is. I'm putting a 6-month reminder on my calendar, and if the comic doesn't shape up before then, I'm unsubscribing. I probably will - past is prologue.
EDIT2: I also put in a reminder for Bad Machinery which had a similar problem. The reminder fired today (23 June 2012) and on reflection, the last selkie arc wasn't good enough to justify future subscription, so I have unsubscribed.
I agree, they have completly lost their steam lately. Fun while it lasted though!
As predicted, I unsubscribed. The mildly-Asian arc did not salvage anything for me.
It's still setting the stage for what's to follow. Might be good when it's done. I hope so.
I wouldn't say complete crap but the second arc (book 2) does have a bit of Wheel of Time syndrome. There are way too many characters and the plot slows to a crawl. By installment 80 the main character has worked out a plan to get to the big battle by jumping through a couple of portals. I thought this sounded great. Oh boy, I can't wait for this to happen. But wait I did. This bogged down in long, dull negotiations with a bunch of boring secondary characters we have no reason to care about. 67 installments later the main character comments appositely:
Perhaps the authors had realized how frustrating this was at that point - but there were still to be 13 more installments before our guy actually gets through that goddamned door.
Still. There is a lot of good character development in there and many excellent (if plot-slowing) vignettes about duty, honor, sacrifice, loyalty and so on. I like that stuff enough to read on. But if you were in it for the plot and the metafiction, I can see how it wouldn't be worth your while to read on.