u/SpectralFailure

Edit: tiny spoilers for cradle and under the dragon eye moons

Edit 2: I don't care that he does somewhat poorly in the competition. These are best of the best, that makes sense. I meant Mercy's clan and others who are supposed to be similar power just stomping the hell out of him. Needing dross to beat someone at your own level seems weird and like a cope for power creep.

I've read a few stories now that have scaling power that is so vast that the illusion of authority becomes blurry. The story starts with the MC at the lowest point, with those of authority towering over them with power that seems unobtainable. Those people carry themselves with the idea they have worked for years to obtain their power. They regard each other with respect and hear each others' opinions with the knowledge that they have a shared power.

This never extends to the MC, in the books I have read so far. The exception being azerinth healer, where people actually respect the MC for their hard work.

As an example, I'm on the eighth book of Cradle. We started with people who can barely obtain a child's power. This is not an issue, since the plot supports why that is. I'll skip that bit since it doesn't apply much to my point. The real issue is when we went through various cities. The goalpost shifting constantly is fine since it's a progression series. The issue is that authority seems to be mostly the same feeling as we progress, and the MC doesn't seem to get any of that authority themselves. We reach gold, and every other gold treats him as an obstacle to be trampled. We reach underlord, where so far we have seen underlords regarded with some of the highest respect so far, and other underlords simply spit at him with dismissal, assuming he hasn't the same power as other underlords. This is where I am so far, and I'm feeling like even if he makes it to sage, it will just be monarchs looking down their nose at him. This story is great and I enjoy it, but we never feel like we are progressing much in society. Sure, we have a lot of power and secret tricks, but the respect and regard which should come with his status doesn't appear to show up at all. On the contrary, others at his level just look at him and think instantly they can defeat him.

The weirdness where people at his level can easily overpower him made little sense to me as well. He's been training for combat with ancient techniques and somehow they can just break him like a twig just because.... Reasons. No explanation other than what clan they come from and who their monarch is. He wasn't punching up during his training for the competition, he was fighting people on his level. The implication that he had to hold back so as to not kill them was fine, but implying he didn't know how to duel without going all out seemed a tad ridiculous considering the time he spent sparring with Athen and the like should be plenty.

This is just a rant but I'm curious if anyone agrees. It's frustrating going through stories and everyone just dismissed the MC regardless of their current power. It's always "if we could just be at their level we might get respect" but it never comes.

Beneath the dragon eye moons was also guilty of this for a while, until she joined the officers. Up until that point, no matter what her power was, everyone dismissed her. I'll say some of that seemed to be the writer attempting to represent sexism but some of it was just plain ignorance from characters.

Disclaimer: I love all stories mentioned in this post

I'm writing a book about a person who died and has their consciousness preserved in an MMO survival rpg. The MC is familiar with games somewhat from day to day life, but is a computer science major with a lot of work done in robotics and LLMs.

The character doesn't fully understand what is happening because this is new technology that hadnt existed yet. As a result, it takes a few chapters (average 4-6k words each) for the MC to finally begin working on their journey. Between reacting to her current predicament and figuring out the game, she is pretty clumsy with the system and not good at leveling. The best she's able to do in the beginning is fire making levels. Eventually she finds a dungeon and has a wakeup call about the dangers of the world, and tries to beat the dungeon without using combat. The story follows this trend and she becomes more of a tinker than mage or warrior.

My question is with all that in mind, would you stop reading or get too frustrated? Her actual introduction to the system happens about a chapter or two after getting stuck in the game, and she mostly treats it like real life because this is "deep dive" style. As such she has a fear of dying in the game, worried she will stop existing if she does (Small spoiler she realizes she died IRL pretty early).

Not sure how to ask this so hoping y'all can kind of help me understand more about the community's expectations when it comes to how fast the pacing is.

How much should I explain how the system works, and how much should I just assume the reader will know a bit about progression fantasy?

This is my first book, although I have some writing experience from more professional settings outside literature

I use brave because it's open source and nonintrusive (mostly) and has toggleable features. For the love of god, do not hit me with these BS new tab ads by default. That is ridiculous. I don't mind a popup asking to enable, but enabled by default is not okay. And your link to "disable" it takes you to a huge ass policy page. I had to figure out where the toggle was myself. Continue in this direction and I'll probably just use another browser. We really don't need these weird "features". While you're at it, remove the whole crypto BS.