5 = It touched my heart in some way
4 = It was very good
3 = Meh, I read it and forgot about it
2 = Unreadable or suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper disappointing
1 = WTF is this shit. Any who agrees with any point in this story is not someone I want to ever associate with. (Hyperbole unless it is f*cist propaganda)
That's pretty much me, more or less, though I might use other words to describe it. Me, I'd say I rarely give 5 stars or 1 star unless I think the story really deserves it.
5 = It is professional quality, what is this doing on a webnovel site? And why doesn't this have an animated adaptation yet?
4 = It was good, but I can't see it ever moving beyond the webnovel world.
3 = Really mid, it was neither good nor bad. I might have even enjoyed it a little. But, even if it was fun, I wouldn't call it "good."
2 = It was bad. It was just trash. Forgettable trash, it doesn't actively offend me in any way, but I would actively anti-recommend it to anyone looking at it.
1 = It would have gotten a 2 rating, but it also actively offended me in some way that went beyond just being bad. If something in the story actively offends me, I rate it 1 star lower, and I keep the 1 star slot open for things that are both genuinely bad and also offensive.
Examples of each rating...
5 - Star: Mother of Learning / Deathworld Commando: Reborn
4 - Star: The Runesmith / The Reincarnation of Alysara
3 - Star: Tree of Aeons / I Shall Survive Using Potions / Death Marching to Another World books 1-9
2 - Star: Death Marching to Another World books 10+ / I Was a God Until I Reincarnated (after the re-write)
1 - Star: I Was a God Until I Reincarnated (Original version before the re-write)
Context on that last one I rated 1-star, it really was just atrocious. It reveled too much in the abusive female character with misunderstandings trope, even to the point of beating an already uncoscious MC (who, by the way, was unconscious because he'd just overtaxed himself healing her from a fatal wound,) just because she miss-interpreted something he said. What's more, this MC looks like a kid, so it's blatant child abuse. Not something that should be considered a viable love interest to be regarded as a pervert for that trope. In other words, she came off as an incredibly and insufferably child-abusing pervert, but it was written in such a way that made it obvious the author actually wanted us to see her as a love interest.
This insufferably abusive woman even dismissed the fact that the MC managed to raise his mana by 1 point when it was just established, a few sentences earlier, that it's cannon impossible to raise mana. It was not because she disbelieved him, it was because "it's only 1 point."
The re-write was done by the author's friend. The author passed it off, and the friend removed all of these actively offensive things I just outlined, but, even though the friend removed all the horribly offensive stuff, it was still fairly bad writing. If anything, removing the horribly offensive stuff just allowed the reader to see how the story was incredibly paint-by-numbers aside from that, employing all of the blandest tropes, and not even doing very well with those tropes at that.
So, the original was bad plot, bad implementation, and actively offensive characters. The re-write fixed the actively offensive characters, but not the other two issues.
