OK, yuck, that definitely sounds like something I’ll avoid.
I may need to re-read the passage, but I not certain that is an accurate description of the encounter in question? I do not remember anything about a “Mexican welfare queen”… I think this is the bit:
A huge Versus splattered into the air.
The Hoarder!
Level 7 Neighborhood Boss!
Trapped in her pile of rubbish, abandoned by society, the war inside her head has seeped out of her mind and infected both her body and her surroundings. Now nothing more than a garbage troll, the Hoarder is a horrific reminder of what can happen to those who fall out of the light! Protected by her minions, she’ll do anything to keep her precious stockpile safe!
The woman’s title—The Hoarder—appeared in a stylized, metallic font with blood splattered around it. It was straight out of a fighting videogame. The moment the description ended, we could all move again. The giantess finished her scream and took a few steps toward us, garbage cascading around her with each step. Half of the woman’s face was burned to hell. She had a health bar over her head, and it was already 3/4’s gone. I’d cheated the boss fight, killing her minions and hurting her before it even began.
“Ayúdame por favor,” the woman cried, reaching for us. Her voice was deep, beefy. Scared. The giant woman sounded terrified. “No se que esta pasando. Me duele el estómago. No se donde estoy. Por favor, tengo miedo.”
It is supposed to be the point that the dungeon crawlers and NPCs are slaves abducted/mutated/re-programmed by the reality TV people and forced to kill each other and play out crude scenarios for the audience’s amusement, and moreover this is quite popular entertainment.
That does not sound like they are being racist towards that woman. Maybe it gets worse later.
I do not recall anything especially racist; the creatures are mostly diverse aliens and monsters and fantasy creatures (put together, in-universe, by incompetent, not-particularly-creative but definitely cruel, producers on a shoestring budget)
No, not really.
You’re supposed to be horrified and feel sorry for The Hoarder.
Also not getting any “welfare queen” out of that, she is literally a hoarder and trash is falling off of her. I do not want to judge based on one single paragraph though.
Right, but the whole series is not Politically correct, not at all. So, I dont see racist, but still, clearly PG13 +.
That was the impression I got as well. She was a tragic figure. There was no hint of judgement about her; she was a sad person turned into a monster by bigger monsters.
I may be misremembering, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression, so I retract my description of her in that scene. I do remember my takeaway being that the author was leaning heavily on some racist stereotypes, even while satirizing them, and that that was a motif through the book in a way that I found pretty offputting.
My group is reading it so I started. Sadly, I’m reading it, although everyone else listened to it. I don’t do well with audiobooks.
I can’t believe how long the books are to read, much less listen. I’m a reasonably fast reader and it takes a full day to read the new books.
I think it does get grimdark, again, after book 1. Books two to four or five have the elements of it but they are pushed to the background, IIRC. I finished a later book, not sure which one, and had to pause and think about it and step away from how grimdark it was to me. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but after being somewhat light hearted-ish, that book hit hard.
I can get behind this description. I am glad that I have read it but I don’t see me reading it again.
I agree. I would be surprised if the OP liked the series.
I disagree. Influential for certain in ancestries (elven age in early editions for sure) but not in game play by the creators. I’m also not a fan of Tolkien.
I do enjoy Viva La Dirt League but haven’t watched them since they left YouTube.
I think some of the later books have gotten philosophical. Maybe even satirical on our current society.
Thanks for the discussion!
I’m a lot like the OP. Primarily read hard SF. Big fan of LOTR, but rarely read any fantasy and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything in the LitRPG genre. I’ve never played D&D or MMORPGs, but I’ve picked up enough through nerd osmosis to have some understanding of the tropes.
Been hearing how great this series is from some friends, so I’m about halfway through the first book. I resisted for a while because I thought it sounded really stupid as well. I’m definitely enjoying it though. It’s obviously not great literature, but it is a lot of fun so far. Seems well written and moderately funny.
I’m not currently seeing how this can be stretched out into a half dozen or however many books are out now, but clearly people are rating them highly so I trust that the story gets deeper as it goes along.
Anyway, I would vote to give it a shot. I reserve the right to change my mind once I finish it. If nothing else, it’s a pretty quick read.
Dinniman maintains the freshness of the books by changing its genre based on the level in the dungeon. General book themes hidden in the Spoiler.
- Book two is classic rpg - get species/class, visit towns, do quests.
- Book three is probably the weirdest - giant maze with looping logic. No one understands this one.
- Book four is a split puzzle room
- Book five is Fortnite. Don’t let that turn you off. This is probably the best book so far.
- Book six is Pokemon
- Book seven is your giant war and army battles. RTS with initial resource and base building. Then zones opening to allow other armies in.
The throughline continuing throughout the books is learning the backgrounds of the humans, the development of the AI, and the politics of the aliens. While maintaining the humor, craziness, grossness, and quirkiness. For example, one of the newer characters that goes from revolting to fan favorite is a love goddess is currently incorporated as the head of a sex doll.
It seems like the humor is really juvenile, extraordinarily nerdy, and pretty cringey. I mean, I’d heard of the sex doll character, but it wasn’t described to me as ironic, or in any clever way, just sort of a “and this other character is a love goddess… in a SEX DOLL! hahahah!”
I mean, that sort of thing can be clever; in the Dresden Files, Jim Butcher’s introduction of Lara Raith as a porn star was clever, and set the stage for the White Court in a lot of ways, and it wasn’t played for titillation or juvenile stuff. Even if there were a few lurid descriptions in there, they served the purpose of describing what a WC vampire was, and how they interacted with people.
This didn’t seem to be either; it seemed to be less Mel Brooks, and more someone trying to ape Mel Brooks without getting the jokes under the jokes.
I think people on this board have argued the exact opposite, saying Blood Rites was for titillation and juvenile reasons, with no real merit. They don’t like Butcher and find all of his books dealing with sex and sexuality to be cringe. Some have said he’s as bad as DCC for that type of humor. I didn’t see it as bad, or rather I saw it as in character, so it was fine to me. That goes for both series.
Thanks for the discussion!
That’s generally a description of LitRPG as a genre.
I finished the book (the first book, the one I received as a gift). Overall it’s a fairly typical example of a LitRPG book. A bit more juvenile (borrowing the term others have used here) than usual, but it’s also definitely not an outlier; it’s not uncommon to find that kind of humor in a lot of those kinds of stories, though I’d say most that I’ve read aren’t like that. Definitely not the best book in the genre I’ve read, but not the worst either. (I think my favorite overall LitRPG series is “He Who Fights With Monsters” by Travis Deverell, aka Shirtaloon.) It has enough of the tropes that aside from the campiness, it’s a pretty typical example of the genre, and better than a lot that I’ve read.
I will say that Kindle Unlimited is amazing for books like this. I’ve read dozens of these kinds of books. If fine literature is a fancy meal, these books are like a bag of potato chips. Easy, quick, satisfying, but it shouldn’t be your steady diet.
The end of the first book does a really good job of making you want to read the next one. Especially if you are a gamer, because some changes are about to be made that will probably define the protagonists for the rest of the series. Not enough for me to go out and buy the next book, but still. Well-done on the author’s part.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, Harry’s whole view of gender roles, etc… are kind of out of place, and I’m not sure if it’s Butcher’s views coming through, or if he’s writing Harry as being kind of out of step with the modern world like someone in his shoes would certainly be.
I just didn’t really read the whole thing as all that tittilating; he certainly describes them in flattering ways, but they’re not overly sexual, nor were they overly descriptive. (just re-read the initial description of Lara in fact).
I think part of my problem is that the more I read on this thread, maybe LitRPG isn’t my thing after all; I’m usually not into stuff like that which is sort of wink-and-nod/break the fourth wall kind of stuff. It just sounds too much like D&D nerd fan-service than something more substantial than that.
Part of it may be that I’m still something of a closeted nerd; while some nerd culture is great, a lot is impossibly cringey and not something I’m necessarily proud of being part of or associated with. But a lot of people I know proudly flaunt that stuff. For example, the people who are recommending Dungeon Crawler Carl have minor artwork (like the little picture in the bathroom, for example) in their house that’s Firefly, D&D, Star Wars and other similar stuff related. There’s NO way on earth I’d decorate my house with that stuff. I liked Firefly a lot, but there’s just no way I’d put a Firefly quote painting in my bathroom. Or weird AT-AT/dog crossover paintings on the walls.
So stuff that appeals to people who would, typically doesn’t appeal to me so much.
I haven’t read that book in years, but the main thing I remember was that Harry was less turned on by Lara (though he was), and more terrified of her.
They aren’t all as blatant as this book. Some LitRPG books (many in fact) can be read as a pretty typical fantasy and/or sci-fi book, but just with tropes added that you’d find in tabletop or video games. Like being able to summon a menu, or choosing skills (or magically learning them from finding an artifact that gives it to you, for example). Or the world is run by some omnipotent “System” that just happens to exert its rules and show its presence in the way a video game user interface would. And those books might never acknowledge that RPGs even exist; it’s just part of the reality of the world.
But as I said before, the whole genre is a fun, popcorn literature, and none of it is going to change your life. It might not be worth your while to bother with it.
How much of it is “wall breaking” depends on the setting, I’ve noticed. I recall one story where magic presented itself in the way most easily interpreted by the user, so the protagonist got an RPG style HUD because that’s what they were familiar with. Meanwhile locals both things like books only they could see, and one illiterate man got the image of a disembodied talking head.
More recently I’ve been reading Dungeon Life, (which is a bit light on the Lit part of LitRPG), where it turns out that the whole visible-numbers-and-statistics aspect of the System is an interface created by the god Order so that people could actually have some idea of what they are doing. The System itself is a black box, he had to figure out by observation and trial-and-error what action caused what response; before his interface things just happened and nobody really knew why.
I do like it when the author tries to actually explain why “the System” exists.
I do like
Was that “He Who Fights With Monsters”? Everything you wrote is familiar, including the talking head part, but I know later in the series (I will put this in as a spoiler just in case):
Jason’s version of a video game interface ends up becoming a universal thing later on.
But that whole “depends on the person” might have been another series. (I have read so many of these series that it gets hard to remember what happened in which one after a while.)
Never read that one, so no. I think the title was Newly Summon Demoness, but might be wrong. Protagonist was definitely female, though.