Disagree if you want. But Reverend insanity feels way too different. Even if it feels like it should take place in an anime like world. The pacing needs to be different and not anime like at all. You know what I mean?
I know he’s not top ten. As much as I want to say otherwise, as well written as he is. Even if I rank fang yuan somewhere between a 9.3-9.7 character wise. And some BN fans will say “peak! 11/10”
I know fang yuan isn’t top 10.
But could he be top 25? If not. What about his insights. This is the only character I’ve come across where not just myself, but multiple people have developed in their own life because of his insightful life advice.
I am currently writing two books.
Have been going back to “perfect everything” again and again and again and I keep seeing flaws. With this loop, I’ll never finish it. Any advice on what I should do? I thought about just posting the ideas online and letting someone else run with them. I feel like 2 are genuinely success leading ideas but idk if I’ll ever end up actually publishing anything
See I always hear the top three being “judge Holden, the Qu, AM” and then people mentioning Fang Yuan, Griffith (let’s face it, dude shouldn’t even be mentioned, the god hand should be named, not one of their subordinates), the Lich
Tbh these characters feel pretty tame. Yes their atrocities are bad, especially what AM does at the end. I am surprised nobody has come up with something truly truly more awful.
But I don’t even see people naming truly bad entities like the scarlet king, crimson king, SCP-2718, The Drukhari / Commorragh — Warhammer 40,000, SCP-3125, Zalgo, Xähÿ Shaudenfreude Çīħr
Not to mention many more that just aren’t popular but very vile concepts:
The Crossed infection — Crossed
Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
“I Am At The Center of Everything That Happens To Me”
The Shrike - Hyperion
Slake-moths from Perdido Street Station
The world of Hogg — Samuel R. Delany
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
“Lena” by qntm
BLIT / basilisk images — David Langford
The castle system — The 120 Days of Sodom (rivals Holden)
Cthaeh from Kingkiller
Yeerks from Animorphs
The Affront from Excession
Some Lovecraft entities
The two worst I found were:
The Consult / No-God / Inchoroi — The Second Apocalypse
Surface Detail - digitalized hells
I have a few ideas that I think could create one of, if not the most vile entity ever made in fiction and I’m surprised there’s nothing that levels AM in terms of singlehanded atrocity and ideas that level all of these. It comes at the unmaking of characters. But I’m curious what other people think first.
Two different streamers. Say KohlPowered and Auro
Should play a horror mod in the same world together without actually playing together or interacting in voice chat or living with each other in the game. They should go do their separate thing and every once in a while they cross paths.
I think it would be fun and not take away from the core experience of solo playing a mod for viewers.
Firstly, the only thing these two have in common is manipulating and sacrificing those close to them to gain benefits. Behind that, there isn’t much similarity at all.
Matter of fact, saying “fang yuan is slightly more evil” based on atrocities is insane. “Slightly more”
My brother in Christ, if we’re talking about scale. Griffith is the saint, lord and savior compared to fang yuan.
Griffith didn’t butcher a whole family (mild scene btw), he didn’t boil twin children for benefits. He didn’t massacre hundreds of thousands of lives. He sacrificed his closest thing to a family, a gang he recruited, for his life goal.
Fang yuan did the same thing but worse right? Chapter 199, he absorbs his entire family, and clan and generations of the clan. You can argue first gen gu yue would’ve done it if he hadn’t. But if he knew about it before first gen got there, oh he 100% would’ve still harvested their lives for this aperture powerup.
This guy literally made a post saying “any thoughts that aren’t actual shower thoughts are a bannable offense 🤓☝️”
Like what are shower thoughts to you dude? I would think “thoughts that you think of while in the shower” no?
I know a lot of you probably like this subreddit, but when you have an owner like this, who gets mad because you don’t align with his “shower thoughts” the subreddit stays the same, dies, or just never grows.
You could do the same thing 50 times in a row, succeeding every time and the one time you mess up, people will say “see, that’s why you shouldn’t have done that”
Depending on which path you take, of course. In the game fallout new Vegas. If anyone here is familiar with it, the main character seems to be phenomenal at talking his way out of and into situations, convincingly so too.
Given what things the courier is capable of, and whether you follow through or not. Arent the ideologies pretty similar? In the game, you experience the ideology instead of hearing it explained like in reverend insanity.
Does it feel right?
It’s when he was refining Human Sea right?
It’s never made sense to me. The bear scene is one of the most mild and tame scenes compared to everything else he does.
Yet, I do understand this: and I don’t understand how the author did it: but the bear scene does make you feel very uncomfortable and somehow through writing alone, you feel wrong and the whole section feels disturbing and very badly so.
But, objectively speaking, it is one of the most mild moments of all of fang yuan’s actions. Even before the bear scene, he literally slaughters a family. What, because it’s written without being as intimate and deep as this one, it just gets a slap on the wrist and passed over? Like stepping on ants, we just ignore his other brutalities until we build a connection to a character? lol.
I mean the author succeeded in what he wanted to do, to prove how controllable people’s emotions and feelings are. But it’s kind of comical.
Fang Yuan boils two twins in a pot, he leaves people permanently dismembered and disabled without killing them, he sends the head of a guard to his gu-master’s family house, he frames some dude for that dude’s brother’s death, he led an entire caravan of 1000+ people to their deaths, he sacrifices his entire village and community for aperture (lol Griffith), he’s destroyed countless lives, murdered millions, harvested thousands, including harvesting souls, this happens later. On top of so much much more that happens every couple of chapters lmfao.
But the one scene everyone talks about is this bear scene. Not the twins, not the slaughtering of millions of lives, each with their own individual main character story being taken away just for this power up lol. But nah, the one singular person being killed because she’s associated with innocence.
Why is it this way?
The first I think 80 chapters somewhere around there are very impressive and watching him fail and continue onwards is very rewarding. I honestly think some of the highest quality moments from reading this were the introspective insights, the life coping advice, him failing again and again, and the authors decision to not shy away from disturbing brutal scenes.
That last remark, the author’s decision to not shy away from brutal scenes, is also one of my early criticisms. Eventually gets to the point where it’s redundant and you become desensitized to it. The main character will do something brutal and you’ll be like “oh… that again wow totally didn’t see that coming… yeah so like does this dude ever use true kindness as a weapon or is it just constant conning?” And I think that this is a very crucial aspect that takes away a lot of points from Reverend insanity.
It does power scaling very well, I’ll give props to that. Bai Ning bing and fang yuan had great tension.
Another critique that I have is showing that the main character is capable of making flaws early on and then for just numerous chapters I think it goes 150+ chapters he just does not make a single flaw or mistake and everything that he does, it doesn’t feel earned, but yet the author tries to convince you that is earned. I don’t fully blame the author, because he was what? Something like 20 years old when he wrote this, being that young has a huge influence on how you write. But for someone to come in and say that it’s peak all the way in and throughout I’m glad they could have that experience from it, but it just doesn’t hit me or a few other audience members the same way the power scale can exist and this 500 year experienced individual can still be capable of making flaws even if he goes against greater opponents in the future, as it was shown very early on with the liquor worm that he is indeed capable of making flaws and mistakes and failing and keep moving forward, which I think was a great great asset for this main character.
The quality of the writing itself: it is persistently, good quality. It’s just those small mistakes take away unintentionally. Overall I’d give it a solid 8.9 on consistent writing alone. It is very rare to come across a book that is this highly consistent. There is filler or buffer whatever you want call it and this is a web novel thing so I can once again cannot blame the author. They have to meet some kind of quota from what I was told.
Even in that filler, it gives useful information so there’s no words that are completely useless and I do like that. It’s hard to do that as an author.
The self insights are I would say honestly 10 out of 10. And that’s the only 10 out of 10 thing I can give in this.
This book has incredible life advice if you take it correctly
The strategy writing is fun, but I cannot say if it’s realistic it is very convincing though: as in it feels as if it would work. So props for that.
The character building side character building feels weak as of right now not terrible. I’m just saying in contrast to everything else. It’s not that good yet. However, I have seen many spoilers and I know that that will eventually change. Right now, his brother and bai Ning bing seem to be the only two developed side characters who remain.
I like how everything concludes or ends as I said, the writing is consistently good even with its flaws.
Overall, at this point in the story. I’d give the whole thing around an 8. Somewhere between 7.6 and 8.4 in total.
This is my personal opinion and from what I’ve heard it gets better.
I do keep going back-and-forth. I think the big thing that keeps holding this back is the author overglazes the main character. He seems flawless even though it felt early on that the big focal point were to be his failures and setbacks. Yet failures and setbacks rarely happen as of right now.
Second thing holding it back is being desensitized to his “wicked ways”
I don’t feel any shock value. Just boredom from seeing him scamming when he could take a different strategic approach.
There are now times where he feels unnecessarily manipulative in the bad sense. When he could have achieved his goals without being ruthless to get there in certain scenarios and circumstances.
Third thing holding it back, is the filler. But that’s not holding it back by much tbh.
Reverend insanity itself is not bad. I even close it’s a very well written web novel, and I am impressed that it maintains very high-quality writing, but the realism in psychology is a little bit off for one. You cannot truly predict how a human being will react in the future, even if he has 500 years of experience, he will make plenty more mistakes than he has shown making in here in this book. Another thing is that when he succeeds, the logic seems very persuasive. It feels like that should make sense, and this is very good writing in my opinion, but it is still flawed for example in volume two when he betrays the merchant girl or when he is using her, her brain associates him to safety psychologically because he protected her that is the authors assumption that that is how the brain would feel if you were to protect someone during traumatic events, the reality is quite different if someone were to go through traumatic events such as this merchant Girl went through they would not deem anybody even their savior as someone that they want to be around if they were around the same time that those events were occurring, however even this logic is flawed because it is not persistent in every individual so it is possible through trauma bonding that this can be the case but it is not 100% clean cut she falls in love with him and now has a major crush on him and wants to be with him. It is a lot deeper and more hurtful than this. Her brain would be swinging back-and-forth. It wouldn’t be as clean, cut and dry as the author makes it out. She would have constant moments of PTSD and would not be able to handle his presence in a clean and loving way as if they had a good healthy beginning towards any kind of relationship, which is the behavior that she is Showing in the book itself. This is one flaw, and there are many other flaws that are also persistent in the book most of these flaws do seem to be only around strategic moves that are made in either a lust avoidant way or anything romantic it seems for the most part, but there are still flaws in the strategy as well, but of course that’s to be expected. The author was pretty young when he wrote these books. I’m pretty sure in his early 20s correct?
Either way, I am not saying that Reverend insanity is a low quality web novel. No.
In fact, I would rate it somewhere between 8.9 to 9.2 possibly even higher of only gotten into the second volume of this book so far.
But as convincing and persuasive as it’s realism is as far as Psychology and strategy is concerned, I do think people give it a little more credit than it’s deserved and I think that the author clearly he’s done something right for this book has a massive fan base and the main characters one of the best written main characters out there, but I think if we saw him fail a little bit more, it would have added on even more to his character. You can use power scaling as a way to defend against this claim that I’m making. For this character eventually goes against some very intelligence strategic characters in the future, so it needs to be easy for him early on, and I understand that, but even then I feel that having a little less predictability would favor the audience a lot deeper than the author realize when he initially wrote this.
I could be wrong 100% I could be wrong. This is my opinion and I’m just curious how anybody who was able to read this very long analysis feels about my opinion on this.
For me, I’d have to say the movie obsession takes the cake on this one
Not going to spoil what the plot is about, obviously. But what are some other movies you can think of that are really good, when on paper, it sounds like it shouldn’t be as good as it turns out to be
I hope the internet hype isn’t exaggerating.
So I’m up to chapter 258.
And up to this point, mostly about 90% of the scheming has been genuinely impressive and has kept me reeled in and hooked into wanting to read more. But it feels around this part and the last few chapters, the momentum has started to drift off. The scheming doesn’t feel clever anymore and the “evil deeds” is redundant. To the point where I don’t feel repulsed, I don’t feel impresssed. I have an expressionless face, a gaze of a monolith and uncaring blank stare as I read how “horrible” fang yuan is.
It’s like yeah I already know bro. It feels like the author was trying to at this point shove it down my face “hey he’s a bad person. Hey did you know he’s a bad person yet?? Hey look look look how bad a person he is”
This feels like the edgy part of Reverend insanity and even though I thoroughly enjoyed most of its early parts. This section is getting a bit redundant.
Would’ve been better if fang yuan didn’t plan the attack. Even though, I get it. Yenno. You need power scaling considering who this guy goes against in the near future. But still. I feel like real events could knock him off course if he’s tired and drained enough.
This whole section was half entertaining, still decent but it’s just too much unnecessary “bad protagonist” energy. It feels like the author wants me to see him as evil only to tell me later why he’s amoral, not evil. Some time away from the unaliving of others would’ve been perfect here, to build up for later.
At this point it’s the same desensitization as killing NPCs in a video game.
Sure, some people will disagree. But I think the author himself would agree if done perfectly, a rewrite of Reverend insanity where it cuts all the excess filler out of the writing would enhance it by miles and bring its audience to a much wider range of people.
The book is phenomenal, and the writing itself is 9.2/10 imo, there’s only one flaw and that is excess filler that is left in every single web novel. Useless words meant to fill a quota that has no real relevance to the story whatsoever and even shies away some people from reading the whole thing because of this excess.
Remove that. And you have a much bigger audience who will actually stay to read the novel instead of extracting its good moments and skipping over most of the plot
Why
Alright. A long long time ago I talked about how reverend insanity was banned for reasons beyond just what it exposes in the Chinese government because if it truly exposed them like people claim it does, it wouldn’t only be banned. It would be annexed and impossible to find.
I argued a bit about it being banned for having a logical approach on pragmatism and that pragmatism being very dark and a liability in danger to those who are not intelligent enough to understand reverend insanity and that it could influence people in a dangerous way.
I believe politics had part to do with the ban as well but not as heavily as some/most people were pushing.
Well the ban is lifted. What is your current reason? (Mostly asking the people who disagreed with me before on the ban in the first place) for this prestigious government to unban a book 1 year later after another popularity surge hit it.