Blog Post #7 Now with a Title again

Again I’m sorry for these posts taking more time to complete, I will place a higher priority on them and try to put out one at least every month for now. I haven’t actually been reading that much the past few months but I recently have picked it back up again and I’m trying to avoid my habit of letting it completely consume me. I tend to just want to read all day the thing I want to read but I’m keeping that in control for now so things are going well.

I’m terms of interesting ideas that I came across, there certainly were some and I planned to write about one a few weeks ago but I never got around to it and now I forgot what it is. If only I had somewhere to write it down and fully articulate the idea to make sure I completely transfer what I was thinking at that exact time but unfortunately I don’t think a place like that exists. Anyways let’s move on to the new idea I want to talk about which I will try my best to fully articulate to you guys, and that is talking about pacing.

Now I don’t recall talking about pacing in previous blogs but since I’m getting pretty deep into the manga collection I’m picking up more manga that have obvious issues but the pacing will often determine whether I continue reading the story. When I talk about pacing I generally am talking about a specific technique that seems to get used constantly that really bothers me. To put it simply is difficult as it isn’t as simple as saying they are moving too slowly rather a specific choice made by the author to splice an arc during a different arc.

If you don’t follow maybe I should talk a bit about how most of these stories are structured, the way I like to think about it is like seasons in a tv show. The first season is like the introduction/training arc, and every subsequent season has some culminating end goal that is the main obstacle for the heroes to overcome throughout the season, with the final season being the end goal boss. Now I don’t have any problems with that formula, but what does annoy me is when part way through a season they abruptly change to a different season and finish that one before going back to the previous season. Now I don’t mean this in regards to the main antagonist, it makes sense to have your main/final antagonist show up and be annoying multiple times throughout the whole series run but for just a seemingly random arc what is the point in splitting it in two?

The current story I’m reading is called Hardcore Levelling Warrior and while it is not a perfect representation of that happening the essence of it remains. Spoiler warning, there is a tournament that is held and initially it seemed like it would be a relatively innocuous arc in the Grand scheme of things. However the reality of the situation is that this seemingly random arc has gotten extremely long and extremely important to the world politics with multiple day breaks between rounds, rule changes, added stakes, multiple chapter sub plots between each round and I was very interested in how this tournament was going to play out but now it feels like it’s taking forever.

Now is this fair criticism? I don’t know and I don’t really care but I was really enjoying the story of it until it seemingly randomly slowed to a standstill. The characters themselves are getting a lot of good backstory and learning shit and getting stronger so it’s not complete dead time but to me it’s just a strange design choice by the author to put all of that stuff here. Why not put it before/after the tournament? Why is it better to extend the time this tournament takes? I just want to know the fucking reward but now there are like so many other things that I’m supposed to care about at the same time and I really just don’t give a shit about a lot of them.

It’s hard for me to exactly keep track of the timeline but either before the tournament started or during the beginning portion there was also an incredibly interesting concept which is that the main character is forced to betray one of his comrades. Now this is really cool so I really want to know how this is going to play out but it’s taking so long that every chapter I’m just hoping that things move fast so I can see what happens with the betrayal. There is all sorts of ramifications that happen in the game world and real world as well in this tournament but with so many stakes being added I feel they almost lose their prestige. What is the point of the reward of the tournament being better than usual if the winner of the tournament will also have the new ultimate god or something backing them? Is anything this god going to give going to be worth more than just having the ability to communicate and learn from literally a god?

Now I haven’t finished the arc cuz like I said it’s fucking long but I hope it ends strong because it was very long and hard for me to read through it. Anyways this was sort of rambly but these blog posts aren’t going to be the most quality posts anyways so I’m fine with that.

Let’s see if I can keep the 1 medium a month schedule, MAY completed.