Discussion Serendipity

Many, novels begin or start off with the spell of serendipity cast upon its pages, though fortuitous encounters or special events which bring the MC out of the monochromatic world in which they reside, to be after down all challengers and take center stage as the Protagonist of the novel with all events seeming to revolve around them and only get 'challenged' to the result of gaining 'more wealth, fame and power'.

This realization made me consider alot of things, a novels life span is limited by its ability to have things go wrong, When the novel can no longer be serendipitous, the novel will lose its stakes and become boring. As such, when an MC becomes too Strong, there would be less enemies because they would know that they would die when they face the MC.

Chinese authors have shown to great effect how you can prolong this effect without having any real character growth.

1. Multiple dimensions / power tiers / echelons where the MC is the transition point between these levels of then by challenging power levels vastly superior to themselves and changing the circle of characters they interact with or promoting existing ones.

2. Ignorance is bliss logic. Where the main character remains 'low key' until there is a conflict of interest where he can savagely murder the unsuspecting rich noble young master and thier entire family/clan (lol)

3. 'Everything you see before you is yours' situation ( What? You mean the curtains?!) . This is when you make the world so vaaaast that the MC'S past exploits and achievements haven't reached the location where he currently is in.

4. Doesn't interact with the world for long periods of time. In a sort of letting the world catch up to the MC'S past exploits so he can smash them straight back down again with his current strength scenario.

5. Fortuitous enemies/enemy power ups. More conflicts appear because of an infinite number of reasons mostly involving a love interest, rivalry, valuables or tournament.

6. Downgrade the MC'S strength or position of power, only to see them come back stronger than ever to prove the people who did it wrong and 'teach' them a lesson.

7. Shifting goal posts, where one plot is revealed after another In a sort of ridiculous Russian doll situation. Where the mc always needs more strength to achieve said goal.

8. Side plots that the author never really a dresses again and characters within them remain one dimensional for all eternity mwahhaahaha

9. Slowing down the pace of the novel literally with more words, describing the same scenes over and over again from slightly different view points with alot of exposition.

Well that's all I can think of off the top of my head, so after all of what's said above, it will often end with paying off past and existing characters, resolving loose ends and conflicts and end with serenity.well there are many ways it can end aswell but that's the just of it.

 

Your post title scared the shit out of me.

 

and so the slice of life genre was born desu

 

Filler is definitely a thing that stretches novels, more often making the novel worse.

Another theme is arrogance. Either the MC is arrogant, or all his enemies are arrogant despite the MC obviously being stronger, or maybe it's not so obvious to them, but still, it's easy to fall into that habit. That's a personal pet peeve of mine.

This all leads to the problem of repetitiveness. All in all when the author's hanging on a thread, repetition's in their head. Everything you mentioned is pretty much the essence, unfortunately, it's rare we see a complete and concluding story that doesn't yield to these factors (in a way to prolong the story and milk chapters).

Bonus points if a novel contains all of these.

 

10. Always a new stunning/inaccessible/cold/kind/goddess/more-perfect-jade-skin girl to interract with...

Well, that was a great post !
It explain why I mostly read the 300-400 first chapters of some novels before dropping them.

 

That's mostly on CN. JP and KR are not always like that.

 

Dang bra.nice going......i feel you dicovered the dao of chinese novel

 

To sum it all

Everyone else aside from Mc are only stepping stones

 

Actually its an often problem observed by a lot of peope that actually finish the CN novels with MTL, they get that condensed in a short amount of time as the chapters are already ready to be read, like for example personally after reading dozens of them with mtl you kinda grow instincts for the 'life expectancy' of a novel, I already can guess how many chapters the novel will remain interesting for me depending on how the MC life difficulty is, how many side characters get attention,and other parameters.

you made a good list so far for the 'tricks' Chinese authors use, good thread.

 

okay, you convince me... I'm sticking with the japs then.

 

CN are mostly web novel ... They get paid based on no of words/chapters .. so they keep dragging a good plot as much as they can. While JP has good balance between WN and LN .. author does a web novel to know his audience and reaction. They he publishes LN based on data of WN and are 'polished' ... So either way in JP be it LN or WN .. they keep it short ... Though am not saying they are always good .. but most of time they manage to keep a decent pace

Oh FYI try reading slime tensei and overlord (ln) ..They have most elements u mentioned. . and yet are quite refreshing

 

Yeah that's pretty much how most Xianxia/Xuanhuan go.

Of course many of those things can come with character growth, but bad authors aren't going to bother.

Anyways if you're going to have a story that isn't just SoL you're going to need some sort of conflict for the MC, and if you're planning to write hundreds of chapters you probably aren't going to plan the final conflict at the start and be writing your way up to it the whole time (unless you're TJSS). So most likely there's just going to be lots of smaller conflicts the MC overcomes and becomes stronger each time. Doing anything else requires more effort than most authors can put in and release chapters at the pace they do.

 

The titled look catchy, although, generally speaking all novels are okay, any novel is readable for me.

 

Hmmmmmm... I don't think novels need to rely on serendipity to continue.

The only thing you really need to have a novel, is conflict... Any sort of conflict, emotional one, physical one, verbal one, politics... Anything, some conflict is needed. Your MC needs to go through some sort of hardship, even if it's something as simple as needing to lose weight. It's you fighting against your eating habits.

I think that relying too much on serendipity is actually a bad thing overall... You need things to be foreshadowed properly so as to make your readers see what you did without being surprised and start thinking "where did that come from!?", at the same time, you can't make things too obvious either, as it loses part of the fun...

It's a hard to achieve balance, and I think relying on serendipity is a terrible way of going through with it.