Hey, if you've still got enough left in the tank after all these epic roasts, why not look at one of mine?
First, I got Ferdie. The forum already carpet bombed the cover, but someone still needs to do the actual content. In particular, I could use some help with the first chapter. It's pretty long, so if you don't want to bother, I get it. Still, no matter how many times I change it, I never feel satisfied with it, so some constructive criticism would be appreciated.
What would you do if the only power you had to save the world could doom it just as easily? Back on Earth, I went by Ferdie. I led a fast and hard life until my girlfriend joined the Liberation Society, pinned me down with her bots, and cut my...
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If that makes your eyes glaze over, I haven't had any feedback on my new side project whatsoever, so you might take a look at that instead. It's short, so if you hate it, you won't have to suffer for long.
What would you do if your reason for living was to help people, but no matter how much good you did, those people would always despise or reject you? Race wakes up alone in a meadow as a rat. Even though he is absolutely, positively certain he should not be...
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I read through three chapters of your “prologue,” and if regret were a currency, I’d be richer than the dystopian overlords in your story. Let’s start with the obvious: you’ve written a piece that screams
“Look, I know all the Royal Road shticks!”—but instead of weaving something fresh, you regurgitated every overused trope in the genre blender and hit “puree.” Sure, you might think that it's unique in some way, but your story doesn’t even have the decency to lean into these clichés with any sense of irony or charm. Instead, it gives me a image of a bloated, overly self-conscious mess that pretends to subvert while doing exactly what it mocks without realization.
Let’s talk about
kairos because it’s clear you’ve missed the memo. In rhetoric, kairos is about understanding the
timeliness of your work—the cultural, social, and narrative moment in which your story exists. Your writing feels stuck in a time loop circa 2017, when Royal Road had some kind of originality left, and readers still had patience for angry anti-heroes and overpowered MCs with a grudge the size of a nepotistic star RR author's ego. But now it’s 2024, and the genre demands
more. Or less, given more and more people jump ship when someone mentions LitRPG. Readers are tired of unexplained fights, edgy cults that exist as a plot point, and “cool rebel girlfriends” who exist solely to betray the protagonist in increasingly melodramatic ways. You’ve brought a stale loaf of bread to a buffet already overflowing with crusty clichés, and wonder why your first chapter sucks so much.
The problems start in your
synopsis, which promises a lot of punching, spellcasting, and morally grey heroics in some Isekailandia. Instead, I got three chapters of aimless screaming (lack of ethos), forced worldbuilding (overwhelming logos), and emotionally flat profanity (dead pathos). The premise is overbloated in the worst way—it crams every idea you’ve ever had into a prologue, desperately trying to establish an entire universe in 5,000 words or less. The result becomes that of soggy narrative soufflé that collapses under its own weight. Yes, I know you’re trying to do what all the "big" Royal Road authors do: hook the reader with edgy premises and snappy synopses. But you’ve missed the part where they also know how to
execute those ideas without drowning the audience in exposition and incoherent rage.
Chapter 1 is the literary equivalent of a Jonhny Somali streams in Korea. The protagonist screams, rants, and breaks things—fueled by anger so cartoonishly exaggerated it becomes parody. The profanity is completely wasted towards being "edgy" for edginess' sake. When every other word is some variation of “fuck” without context or emotional nuance, it stops being impactful and starts sounding like a not-Somalian-but-pretending-to-be trying to sound tough on the internet. If you’re going to make your MC angry, give the reader a reason to care. As it stands, Ferdinand’s rage is just noise—a temper tantrum without a shred of persuasive weight.
By Chapter 2, the whole narrative collapses into a slop that's only digestible when you turn off your brain. The story starts dumping every piece of worldbuilding into the reader’s lap like an overzealous tour guide who doesn’t know when to shut up. Robots, acid baths, dystopian bureaucracy? A girlfriend-turned-cultist? Sure, all of it could be interesting in theory, but you don’t give the narrative room to breathe. Instead, you shove every idea into the first few thousand words, leaving no space for intrigue, discovery, or—God forbid—pacing. Logos, the pillar of logical progression, collapses under the sheer weight of your need to explain everything
right now like some blabbering cultist who saw too much outside the void. The result? A narrative that feels more like a Fandom summary than a story.
Ethos, meanwhile, is so self-sabotaging it’s almost impressive. Your story is so self-aware of its Royal Road audience, not with overall webnovel reading base, that it forgets to actually
connect with them. The implied author—your narrative voice—doesn’t trust the readers to care about the story unless you bash them over the head with genre tropes and fourth-wall winks. But instead of creating something unique, you’ve leaned so hard into the “I’m different, I swear!” shtick that your work becomes exactly what it tries not to be: generic, tropey sludge.
Pathos, the emotional pillar, is buried alive beneath the rubble of ethos and logos. Not it was alive to begin with, but on life support, and you cut it off. How can a reader feel anything when the story fails to inspire trust or logical investment that will not explode itself by chapter 10? Ferdinand’s pain, his anger, his betrayal—they should evoke empathy, but they don’t. Instead, they feel like TEMU knockoffs of emotion, pasted into the narrative because the story thinks
this is where the audience is supposed to feel something. Kris’s betrayal, the dystopian misery, the castration scene—it’s all so exaggerated and devoid of nuance that it comes off as cheap shock value rather than genuine tragedy.
And let’s talk about trust, because that’s where you’ve truly failed. To keep readers invested, you need to establish a contract with them—a promise that their time will be rewarded with something meaningful, fresh, or at least entertaining. But your prologue screams,
“Here’s the same postmodern slop you’ve been consuming for years, but edgier and less coherent!” Why should anyone trust you to deliver when you’ve already given them every reason to tap out? You can’t expect readers to wade through 7 years’ worth of stale tropes just because you’re self-aware enough to nod at them.
To fix this mess, you need to stop writing like you’re trying to impress the ghosts of Royal Road’s past. Establish trust with your readers by cutting the bloat, focusing on one or two compelling ideas, and letting the story evolve organically. Drop the self-awareness—it’s not clever, and it’s not helping you. Stop trying to explain the entire universe in three chapters; mystery and pacing are your friends. And for the love of everything amateur, give your characters emotions that actually matter. Profanity and anger only work when the reader understands why they exist.
In the end, your story tries so hard to avoid being tropey that it becomes a walking trope itself. It’s a shallow imitation of better works, wearing the skin of originality while offering nothing of substance. If this is what the revolution looks like, I’ll gladly stay with the oppressive regime.
As for your rat story, it's too short in words per chapter to be meaningful. It can work, but it reads like a generic LitRPG. 700 word per chapter doesn't help, the first 3 chapters are essentially chapter 1, and the ch1 is generic as the rat you've shoved your "hero" into.
