As per usual, I’m several days ahead of a daily update schedule using the “chapter-by-chapter review of a book” technique, which has a spectacular easy-to-produce*actually-good-content product, so I’ll probably be doing more of that in between working on longer term projects. I’ve decided to put the next book I’d like to read to poll, and in the interests of having the results of that poll in before I run out of Threadbare content, I’m sticking it here. The poll is here, and details about the options are below the break.
Dungeon Born is the most popular example of the dungeon core genre I could find on short notice. The idea here is that instead of being an adventurer clearing dungeons, a dungeon core story stars a dungeon lord (or some kind of Dungeon Keeper style disembodied dungeon intelligence) protecting their dungeon. I don’t really have any idea what it’s like beyond that.
Tamer: King of Dinosaurs is one of the highest rated LitRPG books I could find, and as far as I can tell it is basically Ark: Survival Evolved married to a harem plot. I saw that and thought “huh, this might be fun for a lark” and then saw that it was seven fucking hundred pages long. By comparison, Threadbare lasted about ten or eleven posts total (I have the end in queue already) and was 240 pages long, which means Tamer could plausibly take up a full 30 posts which, counting the twice-weekly non book review posts, would be six weeks of content. The novelty of the harem premise will have well and truly worn off by then, and I have no idea if its actual plot and characters will pick up the slack. I can always break off midway through or start relying more on summary and using fewer quotations to prove my criticisms are valid like I did towards the end of Awaken Online, but 700 pages is still rather a lot, which brings me to options 3…
Succubus is another “blatantly pandering to male sexuality” book, although it features a single succubus sidekick rather than a harem. It’s significantly less popular than Tamer, but also a far more manageable 424 pages. That’s actually slightly shorter than Awaken Online: Catharsis which only wound up being ten posts, so this is the one to vote for if you want to see a review of a “protagonist is followed by sexy ladies” kind of book but don’t want to still be seeing that review through to August.
Life Reset is about a powerful player who gets turned into a level 1 goblin and must scheme for revenge as a fodder monster. Sounds like a cross between Threadbare’s underdog stylings and the world domination plot of Awaken Online. I like this premise and it’s pretty well reviewed (although so was Awaken Online, so, eh), but it’s also over 700 pages long.
Notably absent from this list is the Awaken Online sequels, which I’m not reviewing because I expect them to be mediocre in exactly the same way that Catharsis was and thus hard to review in an interesting way (plus not very fun to read), the Threadbare sequels which I don’t want to review immediately after the first one, and the first book of Everyone Loves Large Chests which sounds like a “pandering to male sexuality” kind of book, but actually has more in common with Threadbare, not so much as to be any kind of clone or knock-off, but enough that I don’t want to review one right on top of the other. Everyone Loves Large Chests and probably also Threadbare sequels will be on the table after I finish the next book, because I’m not excluding them for being bad review material, just because I’m worried about reviewing two similar-ish books on top of each other. For similar reasons, if either Tamer or Succubus wins this poll, the other will be excluded from the next.
Also, I have a Patreon, and seeing as these books do in fact cost me money, if you enjoy my reviewing them it would be decent of you to throw a few dollars my way every month to pay for the reading material.
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