Discussion CN novels absurd scaling

Have you ever read CN novels where there is always a heaven above the 'current' heaven?

Most of the time, the scaling doesn't really bother me.

For example if the current heaven is a mortal realm then going to the next heaven would be for gods.

The problem with that is, it almost always ends up with an imitation of the lower/mortal realm.

That is a given for authors are just mortal men/women so how would they know how gods live. So they base things on how 'we' live.

So now we have a situation where for example, if you ascended into the higher realm and there's a restaurant there. You suddenly have gods as guards/waiters/waitresses.

Gods as street peddlers. Heck you could even have gods as beggars.

I don't know about you guys but to me there's just something fundamentally wrong with that.

On the other hand, i've read some novels where the scaling are decent. Where although the higher realms has some extraordinary beings, there are still some mortal beings there just that the lower realms can't support the existence of those 'extraordinary' beings(could be gods or immortals, whatever).

It's akin to a container where if you outgrow a size you have to upgrade, from small to medium to large to extra large and so on and so forth.

I think the first situation is lazy writing, where an existence at that level in the first realm are rare to find but once you are at the higher realm suddenly theyre like sands on the beach and everyone is suddenly at that base level.

If i were to compare it to real life, it's like living from a third world country then migrating to a first world country but the poor there have mansions and lamborghinis, even beggars have iphones(latest model at that).

just a thought i had while reading lord xue ying(i'm at the arc where he reincarnated to a 'higher' realm per se. I've read other novels from IET but i never noticed this, maybe because i was inattentive then or maybe because he had to play it up in this novel that he had to make guards/waitresses/waiters as gods. Then again it may also have to do with the sheer scale of it.

Like how vatican city as a country only has 451 in total population compared to china and india with almost having a total of 3 billion combined.

Writing this whole post was necessary to organize my thoughts, i'm at the point where i wrote too much and it would be a waste to just not post it. Does this make me a spammer?

 

@dweenator
I guess that's the reason why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magi:_The_Labyrinth_of_Magic was cancelled and ended before the communication and transversal of higher tiers of existence became a reality.

And then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception where you need to go deeper until you finally reach and lose yourself in limbo.

Ok, now back to reality. Do you want to know why there's "always a heaven above the 'current' heaven"?

• It's all because of $$$.
• So that CN authors can recursively turn the novel into a repetitive, cyclical easy to operate cash cow to milk the minimum daily word limit using the least effort.
• Also these allows them turn their novel into a marketable Pay-To-Win Mobile Game in which each tier of "always a heaven above the 'current' heaven" becomes a new "Expansion Pack Content" or "DLC Content", not to mention about the $$$ that publishers will earn from the compulsory amount of "Gacha" treasure boxes that needs to purchased with each tier of the "current heaven content".

 

whats wrong with gods being beggars? I mean just look at Yato from Noragami.

 

But Yato is the MC and beggar by choice. Also there is only one Yato.

Where as in CN novels you couldn't count how many beggar gods there are.

Simply put, they're unaccounted for and thus 'cheapening' the value of gods.

Like what was the point of the struggle in the first place to become god when all it amounts to is a glorified version of your mortal self. If you're a beggar in the mortal plane, becoming a god, you will still be a beggar but a god. So i guess they have that going for themselves.

 

I've had dreams where the dream was taking place on a reality based on a previous dream.

For example, last night i had a dream about my school but the school was changed to how when i first dreamed it in a previous dream and in that dream i had a vague premonition that it was based on a dream while i was dreaming.

To be honest, i've had so many nightmares that it trained me to kill myself in them to escape them(wake myself up) that now i can remember myself actually knowing im just dreaming in my dream after waking up and in my dream(thats how i know to wake up when i don't like where my dream is going).

So you know how i would kill myself in my dream, i usually end up jumping from a high place. Especially when i dream of zombies, it's all fun and games but you know how dreams are, one moment you are in control the next moment things get out of hand so i just kill myself in them and most of the time i usually climb higher and higher so its easy to kill myself in them by jumping to my death. seriously.

 

Well probably some beggars in better off countries are living like kings in comparison to some places where there is barely any water. Hey, some beggars near where I live probably earn more than minimum wages. And they don’t need to pay taxes or rent... (sleep in hostel type places)....

 

Seems fine to me. I don't believe in gods so it's just another form of fiction.

 

But logically, the place should also scale.

For example, you could argue that a beggar in the states could collect up to $10 or $50 per day and if you converted that to a third world currency it would probably be x50 or more. But it's a matter of scaling, since you are a beggar in the US therefore all the stuff around you scales to the US level. Thus a bottle of water may only cost you 1 dollar in a third world country but would be around 5 dollars in the us.

 

Thats the whole point though, you're reading a fantasy story because its not real but even then you atleast have to base the story on logic or else the story would be out of whack.

It's kind of ironic when i put it that way.

 

Yato is indeed interesting but he is not a beggar as he works to earn his money
and the term "God" is quite vague as in japanese anything that is even just a little bit extraordinary and have a shrine (be it big or extremely small) and worshipped could be considered as "God", often time God are no different than a human but have some special power like being able to heat up water to make an onsen (open air bath) etc while (idk about this Lord Xue Ying novel in particular as I haven't read it) in chinese novel, generally God is a higher being or a human that transcend into immortality, they can split ocean and mountain and other crazy stuff, if that is the case then God being a beggar, or do trivial chore such as washing dishes would make no sense, they could just use magic and solve most trouble easily, why beg for money when you can just magically grow a whole forest of food? and force a lower being like human or other race to do a job for them, or dunno make a golem etc?

Human society work the way it is because the society consists of human with their limited ability and resources, higher being or god would not have such limitations (or have different limitation and value) and therefore would have a completely different societal form. It could only make sense if God would have a bunch of lackeys like Angel that could be considered as a higher being than human but still in the end way lower than God, but why would a God be a servant of other God? doing chore like being a waitress? Unless "God" in this case is just some kind of race, where they are actually not much different from human but have some special ability or characteristic (like an elf have long ears but generally similar to human), so their civilization structure would be similar as in the weak and poor in the bottom while the powerful few on top then it would make sense

Again, I haven't read the book so idk about the detail but Chinese webnovel often suffer from this kind of illogical and inconsistent problem from the lack time and or research put into minor or even major details so I often read them to waste time until I can't stand it anymore and find something else to read instead, it happens with ATG, Strongest System etc

 

@dweenator
It doesn't matter, most CN authors are ignorant of "scales of economy", "micro/macroeconomics", "simple accounting" or hell even the "Chinese Language"(looking at countless typo errors in the raw CN Text chapter) itself.

And even TV shows like StarGate which features higher planes of existence have "beings of higher existence" performing mundane roles and doesn't bother to explain about the circulation of currency in the higher planes.
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Astral_Diner

 

That's the thing with fiction, you have to make it somewhat realistic or else if it strays too far from reality it will be a nonsensical story that break immersion and nobody could relate to, a fictional story need to play by its own rule even if the rule is made up

And this is why the saying "Reality is stranger than fiction" is so real, in reality if anything happens it happen, no matter how strange it might be if it is true it is true, while fiction have to be believable or it won't work

 

Just like in other culture's pantheons, there are different levels to godhood. Like a minor god or a major god but still, the gap isn't that big where one is a servant to the other.

Then again in CN novels where you ascend to a higher realm means you are restricted to that higher realms rules. Like we have different gravity levels for different planets. So if you are a god in the mortal realm ascending to a higher realm, suddenly the suppression will make it so that you are just a strong mortal in relation to that realm.

If we have stone gravel here, then their stone gravel there would be diamonds.

Typing this organized some of my thoughts making it so that it seems to make more sense.

Let's say bacteria is a mortal level. Then being an animal is godhood but there are also levels to being an animal.

Let's say being a human animal is the apex level of godhood to that. We enslave other animals for various reasons(slaughterhouse, transportation, manual labor etc.)

would you say it makes sense?

 

This reminds me of how often readers complains of cliche plots in CN novels.

But in real life we also have cliche events happen to us multiple times and that's just us, as a single person and there are billions of us, humans. So if we were to write a story for each person, readers would probably go insane of the amount of cliche plotlines.

 

True that most CN webnovel authors are ignorant of such thing because they lack the educational background or too lazy to research or does not have the time to put in the effort etc, as well as the audience usually looking for drama and story as their priority and does not really care or notice about other detail but that does not mean it doesn't matter
It only does not matter because they don't care, if we care about it, then it starts to matter. You enjoy what you enjoy, and you can't enjoy what you can't. I won't suddenly start complaining and demanding that all Chinese author need to have a degree in some kind of field that aligns with the story they write, I don't think that is right nor realistic but that does not mean I won't discuss these things in some forum with people with similar opinion while maybe looking for some story that actually more suited to our taste, because that's the thing, there are countless story out there that suit different people with their different taste

also despite these stories have a sloppy setting there might be some part that is enjoyable and therefore made the crap side tolerable

 

Fetishes, who knows. Maybe punished by the king of gods/ government structure of gods/ etc etc? Maybe the gods are bounded to do a bit of what they stand for as in if God A is a god of farming then he needs to do a bit of farming too. That makes the goddess of love/lust/pleasure a rather interesting job.

Again I agree with you but then again you get what you read.

 

Yea I read CN novel enough to know this but it doesn't really change the fact that it is a lazy setting and barely tolerable, it is like if you play game having reach level 90 and then you beat a lvl 80 dragon but next area you find a goblin with the same level as you and suddenly it is even tougher than the dragon, it works but it is lazy and forceful. They could have put more effort to make it more original and interesting btu I completely understand that with the limited time and resources they have the author have to put in the effort into things that they care about such as the protagonist relationship, or characters etc, if they have to make an original and complicated world it might affect the quality of the main story that they try to tell, I completely understand

It doesn't change how I feel about them though as I appreciate it if the author put in effort into the settings and make it fresh and original, Lord of the Mysteries is a fantastic example, a chinese webnovel that feel completely different from the traditional chinese webnovel, original setting with its own world-building and lore, completely new and well thought out power system and economy etc, just absolutely brilliant

 

• Won't there be a possibility that the "higher realm of existence" is in a fact a "police state", think like "v is for vendetta"?
• The beggars, the maids and the commoners won't know that they are in fact "godly inhabitants" living in a "higher realm of existence".
• In fact, there will be the "secret police" who enforces strict curfews, highly restricted immigration laws and control of information, such that no one of lowly-birth will know that higher/lower planes exist?

 

That would make an interesting story imo, but yea, making an excuse and setting is not that hard if you just want to make the reasoning behind anything somewhat logical but you can easily tell if something is well thought out or just copy-paste because it is easy to do, in fact I wish they would bother to explain it like you do and maybe in more interesting way but they rarely bother to do that and just move along with the basic scaling system, new world old same rule

 

that is interesting and might make into a good story, if there is not one already

as I have said, making random setting and excuse for anything isn't difficult, how they did it and if they bother to do it at all is what important, at least for me