There are some terms that was used by novels wrongly, but people just accept that as the norm. When you mention those terms in correct way, people think of the wrong things. It's especially annoying when you try to ask for Recommendation. The one I see people misuse the most while Looking For Novels is Time Travel, Nowadays whenever you ask for Time Travel novels, most people will give you Second Chance novels that only has Time Travel in the first chapter with MC going back in time to the beginning. Sometime it's more acceptable with Time Loop genre. But that's barely scratch the surface of how amazing Time Travel fiction could be, with Bootstrap Paradox, Alternate Timeline, etc... Although to be fair, it's really hard to write a good true Time Travel fiction without making things confusing. Edit: I just tried to search for Time Loop, Time Paradox and Time Manipulation on NU and still got Second Chance. The second term I want to talk about is Dimension. 99% of novels I saw (not just read) so far use the term in place of "World". When people talk about another Dimension, it's just another world. Higher Dimension is just a world with stronger things that you can ascend to, and vice versa. And then there are some novels use the term 2D or 4D wrongly. They call a painting of mountain and river with living being in it as 2D, or some powerful being from another world as 4D. Down to a more simpler term, Smart MC. The characters in a novel can't be smarter than the author that write them. So some authors just have the MC make up one simple plan, then everything just happens to go according to said plan. Or the MC just build / invent something that has no explanation / basic whatsoever to solve the current problem. Smartness is not just "knowing things", it's the ability to deduce information from incomplete information. Gene. It's so wrongly used I don't know where to start. Hybrid is illogical. Power coming from Bloodline makes no sense. Having X% of Y gene won't give you anything. Etc... Anyway, that was my ranting. Do you have any terms that was ruined you want to talk about?
I guess I never really realized the actual definition of the terms you mentioned? I don't recall any tag being super bad for me
None of those are really used incorrectly, aside from "Smart" MC. They're just narrow parts of the full definition, is all. It's very difficult to deal with dimensions and time travel on a regular basis in a web/serialized novel, considering the author needs to plan ahead to do either of them well. "Smart" MC is relative. Relative to other characters in the story, and relative to the intelligence of the reader. If the reader is mensa or a genius tactician, he'll find any MC to be fairly mundane at best, right? Just accept that you're personally smarter than the author, but many readers won't be. The tag is correctly used if the MC mostly uses his brains to solve problems, even if the solutions don't strike you as particularly creative. As an aside, not looking down on the other readers. It just seems like you're fairly smart/creative/well-read, so you have high expectations.
Bear in mind that if you're reading books on NU then they're all in a different language. The terms you're talking about are the ones given by the translator rather than the writer. In the original the term used may be different or have different connotations in the original language. For example, it's common nowadays to see “快穿” rendered as "quick wear" when it means "quick transmigration". So yeah, you'll see terms that look wrong, but when you do, the onus is on the translator rather than the book.
Wrong or Bad doesn't mean unenjoyable. Some OP MC or Wish-fulfillment are really bad as a piece of literature, but people enjoy them nonetheless, because they hit the readers' G-point. Also using the term wrong doesn't mean it's a bad novel either, just that it's really hard to find recommendation for it. And that comes to the main problem here is people recommend Second Chance novel when asking for Time Travel; or like recently, people recommended me Multiple Worlds when I asked for 4 Dimensional. And when I search for it myself on NU, all Time Travel tagged novels are actually Second Chance. Yes I don't mind that. I don't mind if the MC's plan has flaw from my point of view. I just need the author to at least "try" to make the MC seems smart and not just handle everything to him on a silver platter then tell us directly that "he's smart". Although I don't mind the latter, sometime the readers still believe and praise the MC for being "smart". People are gullible.
Posters on NUF suck at reading; especially in threads asking for recommendations. They'll happily ignore what you state that you're looking for and just recommend any old book. Just try asking for a historical novel; about 80% of the recommendations you'd receive are obviously any but. It's the same thing with genre labels and tags - you can't rely on these because they're assigned by random people who don't the accuracy. It's still not something that you can blame on the books themselves though.
I still remember that in dark blood age some readers commented that MC is stupid because he is having PTSD. Or he is stupid because can't control his emotions.
And then there are all those people who say that a protagonist is stupid if he doesn't always do the most optimal and selfish thing. It's like some readers out there don't understand concepts like characterization, personality, or themes.
"Control emotion" is among the most stupid phrase I've ever heard of. You can control your action, like not throwing a fit when you're angry, but you can't just "not be angry".
Series Finder: Include: Time Travel Exclude: Second Chance There, you got what you want. Second Chance is a subgenre of Time Travel. It's not wrong to use it. Earth is a World, Mars is a World. Ascending to a different plane of existence with stronger beings and ascending to a different Dimension can mean the same thing. It's absolutely different than traveling to a different world. There are more definitions to Dimension than just 2D, 3D, 4D and such. A different dimension can also mean a parallel universe, or simply something on a completely different scale than something else. I have no idea what you mean here. What are you talking about with hybrids? o.0 And power can totally come from bloodlines, that's just like... Basic fantasy staple? You can't seriously assume that magic should never be allowed to have any form of relationship with someone's bloodline... Like... Geez, different authors do magic in different ways, they have freedom to do it in whatever way they want. If they wanna say that you have strong magic because your dad had strong magic, they can. That's what happen when you deal with fictional powers, you have flexibility.
It is correct to call most Second Chance stories Time Travel though, you don't need more than one instance of time travel in a story for it to be time travel fiction, as long as it is central to the plot. The only reason the time travel tag isn't meant to be used for second chance on NU is because we have enough second chance stories for it to have it's own tag, not because second chance isn't time travel. If anything it is the Second Chance term that I feel is misused here and not Time Travel, since I can't help but feel the term should apply to any story that involves a second chance at life, not just time travel stories. As for Smart MC, I agree that there are loads of supposed smart characters that are badly written. My only nitpick here however is I absolutely disagree about authors being unable to write characters smarter than themselves, it is just that it it can take a lot of work to do so, often more than it is worth doing.
dood gene or bloodlines do have senses similarly hybrid stuff~ have you ever hear champion bloodlines from horse race? do you know some plants come from hybrid? its not x or y but cross breed to seek potential good trait for better generation, selective breeding which not new thing on agriculture~ that well known biology duh~ fantasy just exaggerate it~ add magic, curse, special power or whatever you call it~ do you really wanna see true example novel ruin terms? cultivation, cultivator~ thanks to xuanhuan and xianxia it mostly associate with dragonball err flying sword~ wuxia~ wuxia originally mix of genre usually martial art, history, military, drama then thanks to wuxiaworld the term misused associated with xuanhuan and xianxia
NU forcefully make Time Travel and Second Chance tags mutually exclusive. Time Travel: This tag is to be used when the Main protagonist moves from one era to another. How it is used depends on the story. It can also include jumping to the near future or near past but that all depends on the story putting emphasis. It should not be confused with Second Chance. Second Chance: This tag is used when the protagonist has failed to do something in their first life. The protagonist is given a 'Second Chance' to turn things around by going back to his or her younger self. This can happen once or many times. Do not confuse it with Age Regression or Time Travel for they are used differently from this tag. The problem is when one is looking for Time Travel novel, they look for all the cool mind-bending stuffs that it offers. Calling Second Chance novel as Time Travel is the same as all those "Start with X" novels that NEVER mention X again. "Of course the novel has X, just in the first chapter." Lemme repeat this, "There are some terms that was used by novels wrongly, but people just accept that as the norm.". You just accepted the wrong definition that fictions used as the norm. And lastly, I don't need the author to be knowledgeable about "Gene" and do everything Scientifically, but when the author mention "Gene", they never meant the real Genetics, DNA and such, but rather "something inside you that gives you properties", and thus they can mix and match "gene" all they want. They want their own defined power system? Cool. But they use a term wrongly just to make their power system sounds cool? It irks me. It's the same as when Radiation was discovered, all the company just added "Radiation" to make their products sound cool to the uninformed.
A term having more than one definition is different than people accepting the wrong one. You're the one focusing on a single definition of a term that has more than one meaning. That's on you, not on the author.
"I have eyes, but can't see Mt Tai" It's not Mt Tai. It refers to a guy named "Taishan" (a disciple of Lu Ban). And actually, you might not see Mt Tai anymore since the radiation burns would blind you anyway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That's a joke. They are just phonetically similar names, but are 2000 km apart. Just another example of how translated novels ruined terms.
And that leads us to the origin of that meaning. "Dimension" has been existing in Math since forever, then later adopted into Physics with the same meaning. But around the time Sci-fi becomes popular last century, one guy who didn't understand the term but wanted to sound cool and used the word in the place of World/Universe. People liked it, and eventually they just accepted it as the norm. Basically people accepting the wrong definition, then it become the norm, then a prestige Dictionary adds it to the definition. As for Dimension, it's still in the second phase. You can only find the wrong definition of it in fiction site. See more here.
I think the term has quite a few more definitions than you're trying to give to it. Sure, there is none in the dictionary specifically referring to a new universe, but there is one saying: "a level of existence or consciousness … a secular as well as spiritual dimension …— Catherine Bates", which can easily apply to the xianxia scenario you mentioned. There are better sources to reference than TVtropes, yanno? Lastly, language evolves with time. If a specific usage of a word is already the norm, you can't really call it a wrong usage. Sure, it might not be on dictionaries yet, but there is hardly any point in saying that it is wrong just because it wasn't officially recognized yet.
I've seen this argument before, and while there's an element of truth to it, I've still never liked it. Yes, if lots of people use a term incorrectly, this term may get a new definition eventually. However, that "eventually" part is still key, so it'd be better to use it in that sense when it's more widely adopted. Here's the thing, words are meant as a way to aid communication so if terms are used willy nilly it then becomes an impediment. It also leads to stupid things like how the word "literally" means both literally and figuratively.
It feels like I'm just nitpicking your post here, but here I am: I didn't give any definition, only mentioning the one that you're defending. One unpopular definition from someone amiss a dozen others. That feels like a stretch. Just leave that as my opinion and not arguing about it. TVTropes is one of the fiction sites I referred. It's the only place that do it justice for both sides of the argument here. The argument went off the rail more than it should. What I'm trying to talk about is it's impossible to talk about the term in its correct original meaning now, like everyone just recommended me the wrong things when I asked for it. Terms ruined by novels, maybe "ruined" is a bit excessive in your book; but it has caused me and other people like me trouble.
I don't get your point? Like... Sure, if you see a slang that you don't know being used, you'll obviously get confused about its meaning, but that's that. But often times when you see terms whose usage is already widespread being used in the new way, they tend to have a pretty obvious meaning to them. I'm sure nobody ever thought they were talking about becoming a 4D entity when someone reached a new dimension. Can't say I ever saw someone use the word literally to mean figuratively though. I'll concede in the point that if a popular usage of a word makes it mean the exact opposite of its actual definition, then that popular usage is just plain wrong and can't really be accepted.