This is a review of "Nailmaker: The Reaper, an Isekai LitRPG: Progression Fantasy with an OP MC" by A. Bel. It is adequate Delta wish-fulfillment.
The protagonist is a Delta named Jack. He is a typical hapless do-gooder, deluded that's he's hard. Hand him enough power to found an empire, and he won't get laid for the first book. He'll make some fine speeches about teamwork though. A harem inexplicably forms anyway, waiting for him to deign to dick them.
The spectacular errors of judgment Jack proudly commits in the name of his pedestrian moral sentiments are similar in character to those responsible for dooming the West. If White men put their clans and Y-DNA clades first, instead of foolish abstract notions, their governments would not dare oppress them so.
Since I analyzed the suboptimal character progression choices, I've included the relevant statblocks, which are quite lengthy. You don't have to read them unless you want to check my work. The important part of this review is the insights about Delta psychology from examining their escapist fantasy. For the real-world political analysis, start at the final section, titled "Y-DNA".
The document is far too long to post here, so read it as an HTML outline.
George "Rejected Runt" Martin, who is 5'6" (168 cm) tall, writes fiction from the perspective of an envious midget who wants to see the tall fall.
Lord Tyrion Lannister is the youngest child of Lord Tywin Lannister and younger brother of Cersei and Jaime Lannister. A dwarf, he uses his wit and intellect to overcome the prejudice he faces.
Peter Dinklage, born June 11, 1969, Morristown, New Jersey, U.S, American actor who was perhaps best known for his role as Tyrion Lannister, a humane and clever dwarf with a penchant for debauchery, on the HBO television show Game of Thrones (2011–19)
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a self-insert character is typically defined as the fictional version of yourself that lives out your dreams and fantasies in a novel, short story, or most commonly, fanfiction.
Samwell Tarly is another example: a fat cowardly virgin scholar who rises to the top through the power of plot armor and being a niceguy™.
Varys the fat eunuch is a third. Chinese imperial eunuchs were notoriously petty and self-centered, yet Varys is a rare selfless patriot, despite lacking any children to motivate his concern for posterity. Patriotic self-sacrifice is a masculine trait for the same reason that drunk driving is a masculine trait: testosterone. Something GRR Martin obviously lacks.
Tyrion and Varys Being an Iconic Duo | YouTube
Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. JRR Tolkein, a 5'9" Nicolas Cage lookalike, wrote to express the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Tolkein could've written enough orc rape scenes to make Martin envious (and horny). But Tolkein didn't, because rape disgusted him. Tolkein married his childhood true love, who chose him over money, family and religion.
Behold the inspiration for Tinuviel:
Searching photos of GRR Martin's romantic partners yields no comparable inspirations.
GRR Martin's first wife wouldn't follow him to Sante Fe, much less wait through years of no contact and WW1. GRR Martin wrote a dying world poisoned by his sexual perversion and status frustration. Martin's plot tears down all that is noble and fair, ruining the world until at last damaged and desperate beautiful women are within his self-inserts' feeble reach. The constant sexual assault is a symptom of his buried bitterness towards women and the tall men they chose over him. The world must learn to stop overlooking the dwarf!
- George RR Martin is a fucking weirdo | r/MenWritingWomen
- He REALLY likes rape | Vox Populi
- The grimy pessimism of George RR Martin | VP
- Mailvox: GRR Martin and the Left | VP
- George Martin baits the hook | VP
- When A GAME OF THRONES was great | VP
- Theories of collapse | VP
Martin's fiction thus belongs to the subversive category, and cannot outlive the temporary cultural milieu which it deconstructed, as so many other popular works are overlooked by future generations, to whom his nihilism will be no novelty. He will forever fail to measure up.
- Bookman list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1890s | Wikipedia
- Mailvox: illumination and shadow | Vox Populi
If you are not short, you may be unaware that height is such a big deal. Google relevant keywords such as "OKCupid height" and "heightcel" for details.
To forestall the inevitable: I am 5'11", and my wife fits under my chin. Tiptoe kisses are cute.
I wrote a spoilery analysis of "Everybody Loves Large Chests," which is a LitRPG much too aggressive for Woke tastes. Probably why its sub got banned from Reddit. I don't know whether discussion of such topics is germane to this sub, but I saw there's a book club with similarly aggressive fantasy, Monster Hunter International.
ELLC is surprisingly relevant to today's world. The author is Bulgarian, and the bad guy empire is pretty obviously the USA.
So if you need a laugh about WW3 starting over a nuclear false flag caused by a Ukrainian gay midget clown, the story is free on Royal Road. (The Amazon version has 1.5k reviews and 4.5 stars, compared to MHI's 3.5k and same score.)
Here's my spoilery geo-strategic analysis. Do not read it until after Book 3 or across the Lodrak border!
Awaken | Season 2019 Cinematic - League of Legends (ft. Valerie Broussard) | YT
This cinematic is unremarkable except for the confrontation between Camille and Jhin. In their search for mythic resonance, the animators have stumbled upon truth.
According to League of Legends the game, Camille is bipedal. However, one cannot balance on two blades, so the animators gave her four legs, for a total of six limbs. What animal has six limbs? Insects.
Camille imperiously leads a squad of male cyborg soldiers, her honor guard. Her regal stride and extended abdomen make her an anthropoid ant queen.
She storms the theater, where Jhin plays piano onstage. The soldiers don't open fire. Why? This is courtship, not war. She is testing the male drone for worthiness. Her soldiers are sterile, not potential mates.
Jhin proves crafty, eliminating her guards, the spawn of her previous mate. The queen Camille is too powerful to be harmed, the traps designed only to catch feet, not her blades. She leaps, deigning to display her abilities, closing to challenge the male directly.
Jhin bows as she descends on him, a suicidal move if this were not courtship. The gesture reveals that his limbs are also seamed, like her face. The seamed limbs of Jhin and Camille are an ambiguous combination of chitin and chrome.
The animators make one error that detracts from the courtship theme, having Jhin fire twice at Camille, forcing her to dodge with her grapnels. This is included only because Camille has the ability in-game. In the logic of cyber-insectoid courtship, the drone would not attack her directly. He has already achieved his goal of isolating her for mating, which is why he bows. He has given the performance of his life, and will lose his autonomy when she closes to within arm's reach.
The plotlines of other heroes in the cinematic are uninteresting because they generally lack male-female polarity and mythic resonance. The Camille-Jhin scene works because in ant society, female queens are dominant, which fits today's feminist zeitgeist.
I always wondered how the queens of Earth's Ant People might have looked, before they finally converged on the gray form. Camille is close in spirit, conveying visually what the Ant People might feel telepathically, beholding their queen.
I noticed because this video juxtaposes Camille with other monster queens:
NB: My critique seems too right wing for Reddit, and this sub is the closest to a manga discussion site on Communities.win that I know of.
Mild spoiler warning
This is a critique of the isekai Overlord's introductory sequence. I am vaguely familiar with the anime through season 2, and with the manga through chapter 15. I struggle to continue with either.
The manga version of Overlord is best, but I still find the incongruence of a sappy skeleton too offputting to enjoy for more than a few pages when tired and bored.
Canonical nature of a lich
Definitions
The general lich canon is adequately described by Wikipedia and TVTropes:
Liches are defined by the enduring art that referenced in the above descriptions, of which Overlord is not a part.
Depictions
There is a reason this is the #1 search result on YouTube for lich:
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic Trailer | YT
Blizzard erred in giving the lich king unrotted flesh, but the helm hides this, making his smirk barely-visible, wraithlike, matching his thin white hair.
Best & Favorite Lord of the Rings Quotes - "Shire! Baggins!" (Nazgûl) | YT
Relativism rebuked
It is not your world. It is not your character. It is not your prerogative in any way whatsoever to believe their world works to your beliefs.
Your argument amounts to an assertion that no one can criticize another's worldbuilding. This is obviously false in the current context, which is reviewing LitRPG.
Enduring art eschews aesthetic relativism for reasons that escape the masses. "Shire, Baggins" hurts the ears, and always will.
Essentialism and evolution
Zombies are rabies, vampires are syphilis, werewolves are skinwalkers, and liches are negative energy mage skeletons, which is an impractical combination of three real things.
Necroliches have less empathy than insectoids. Unlike golems, they hate life. Proximity and psychic contact should drain and kill.
Heroes II | Epic Action Cinematic | YT
Being alive has benefits, such as a living brain capable of adapting to the constant change of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The dead prefer the stillness of tombs, where they can insulate themselves against the hostile higher plane with slowly-accumulated layers of negative energy. They prefer to emerge only to feed or fight. Sun and fungus threaten banishment and disintegration; cold and dark are friends.
Eyeless undead lower property values. Their lifesense is an irritation of the naked negative aura, driving them to extinguish all life. Vampires are least affected, having a circulatory system. (The biomagnetic field generated by iron-rich circulating blood anchors the soul to the heart.)
There is nothing wrong with undead having leftover emotions, even mammalian ones such as affection for family. An example of such pathos in art:
Dark Souls 3 Ashes of Ariandel: Sister Friede and Father Ariandel Boss Fight (4K 60fps) | YT
Andries Louws' Histaff is a good example of magical undead diverging from canon, but since the worldbuilding is internally consistent, this is brilliant rather than offputting. Thus the canon expands.
A desert called peace
Intro
Guess what actually happens when a lvl 100 lich's tomb teleports into human lands?
If you guessed, "Crisis of the Late Middle Ages," you are correct! Have a boil.
Medieval pandemics spawned fears of the undead, burials reveal
Raiders and rapers
It all starts with a bit of the old ultraviolence:
a raiding method of medieval warfare for weakening the enemy, primarily by burning and pillaging enemy territory in order to reduce the productivity of a region, as opposed to siege warfare or wars of conquest. The use of the chevauchée declined at the end of the 14th century as the focus of warfare turned to sieges. It is conceptually similar to the scorched earth strategies used in modern warfare.
The more suffering, the better, from a necrolich's point of view. More negative energy to work with.
A real necrolich would've welcomed the slaughter of surrounding villages by the Slane Theocracy, using the chaos to sacrifice additional villages by night, creating a haunted no-man's land around his tomb.
Nobody's counting exactly how many villages get butchered, so after the human raiders ride off into the sunset, nocturnal Nazarick can emerge to eliminate the survivors — and neighboring hamlets. The greater the torment, the stronger the revenant.
Let's you and him fight
Then the lich would ensure the Theocracy's false-flag ruse was discovered, to precipitate war between the two human kingdoms. This would conveniently attrit the lich's bane: holy clerics and paladins.
No reason to get greedy while the humans kill each other. Just keep stoking tempers with false-flag atrocities. The resulting chaos and death should disguise the magical signature of his tomb's arrival and explain the disappearance of any investigators.
Nazarick wants the weak Re-Estize kingdom to conquer the holy-aligned Slane Theocracy, so Nazarick should content itself with a modest exclusion zone. Nazarick's non-undead personnel can undermine the Slane Theocracy without revealing their origin. Pandora's Actor can infiltrate while Demiurge oversees.
Nazarick probably can't be relocated, so this is the best option. Nazarick wants to prevent Baharuth Empire from invading Re-Estize, since this places Nazarick in the invasion corridor, making discovery and besiegement likely.
Ideally Re-Estize and Baharuth conquer Slane Theocracy together, out of mutual outrage over Slane's alleged use of necromantic atrocities.
Sneaky skeleton
Even using the dnd paradigm a lich isn't dumb and would understand that a all-out evil empire attack would be a bad idea.
That would be stupid, yes, which is why I advised something else. Namely, false-flag attacks disguised as human action to create the sort of depopulated desolation commonly caused by medieval warfare. With poisoned wells and ruined crops, armies would avoid the tomb's surroundings. Especially if there is an alternative route that offers drinking water and safe roads.
Obviously a wise necrolich would also cast an illusion to hide Nazarick, and would avoid sending detectable undead raiding parties directly from the exclusion zone surrounding his castle. Preferably, there would be no detectable undead raids on living human lands whatsoever, just a blight that moves in once land is ruined by human raiders.
The purpose of creating a blighted wasteland buffer zone is to blur the magical signature of Nazarick's negative energy. It should look like the kind of thing that can be cleaned up after the war: Undead fighting wild beasts for worthless territory.
Momonga's false lichdom
Intro
The herbivore salaryman Momonga is transformed into a necrolich, then rules like a humanitarian, introducing liberal reforms, rescuing damsels in distress and so forth. Historical Japanese warlords were far more impressive.
Necrolich
Liches generally begin as living humans, so Momonga's case is not special in that regard.
It is clear from his anatomy and description exactly what kind of lich is meant.
He is the lichiest lich who ever liched, according to the negative energy orb artifact he captured from the necromancer. He is the ultimate necromancer skeleton lich, not merely an undead wizard with dry rot.
The other liches behave according to canon.
Notalich
Niceguy
Losing all his internal organs should have more effect on Momonga's behavior than some emotional modulation and distancing from humanity.
He is behaving more nicely than human sociopaths, let alone undead creatures without even insectoid capacity for affection.
You're also forgetting the guy isn't from "Earth," he's from a dystopian future where there are corpses littering the streets.
My complaint is that he acts too nicely. This point merely underlines that.
The author should have either put him in a less evil body, or showed him struggling internally more with his evil impulses and lack of mammalian emotional equipment.
Being a lich doesn't auto-regulate one's emotions when they become elevated; that's a video-game feature. Being a lich eliminates all physical emotions, like being on strong psychiatric drugs, but nightmarish homicidal ones.
Imagine a bad drug trip that lasts forever. Imagine losing all your physical senses, and never feeling pleasure or happiness again except by draining lifeforce. Would you change?
Lipless
Vampires blend into societies; liches end them. If it lacks lips, it won't negotiate.
Negotiation is typically conducted via speech, which requires lips to pronounce. Without lips, a lich must resort to psychic communication, which tends to be painful to the living, if not fatal. More importantly, absence of lips is an artistic symbol indicating absence of desire to communicate.
Or he can do what Ainz sometimes does, and use a lip worm. Or do what most undead do, and use some sort of illusion magic or something to talk.
Yes, and that would be fine, if he first tried psychic communication and drove someone insane with terror. The bigger problem is that an undead would want to hurt the living with its voice, and the spiritual consequences of being made of negative energy are never addressed.
Wish-fulfillment
I'm not forgetting Momonga's motivations. However, those motivations are primarily emotional and nostalgic, not philosophical, and he should now feel nothing when he considers them.
I've read good fiction from an undead perspective. Overlord fails miserably.
In Overlord's case, the lich race merely serves as rationalization for herbivore self-insert wish-fulfillment, which I am unable to respect or enjoy.
Avian
If he'd been transformed into a reptile or bird, perhaps his mild level of dehumanization would've been believable.
Really, Momonga behaves like an avian, concerned with honor and glory, but not sex or sentimentality.
Birds are tough, man.
To be specific, he's acting like a Tengu necromancer.
Brainless
Instead of doing false-flag attacks, Momonga builds earthen ramps over his walls to "disguise" them and then demonstrates his immense wealth and holy vulnerability to both countries' armies, because he left his brain in Japan.
It's bad enough he's out in sunlight taking holy magic alpha strikes in front of military observers. I strongly prefer intelligent protagonists with a believable character.
If you're referring to the big red orb that he keeps in his skeleton, that's a world item, one of the 200 most powerful items in the VRMMO he was playing. The only idea we have of its effect is that it's highly effective against dragons
Your explanation of the orb sounds even worse than my assumption. He is gratuitously displaying a dragonball in his pelvis to ensure that every high-level on the continent decides to raid his tomb, especially the dragons?
Liches don't necessarily require a phylactery, although my first priority on arriving in a new world with different magical rules would be to see whether I can build one.
Heroic lich?
I mean, if I want to write a world where a lich is the best guy in the world, that would be wrong?
Depends on what world. It sounds highly implausible. There are many potential workarounds, but a regular human inhabiting a standard lich body should show severe and progressive psychological changes.
For example, the loss of a physical brain should alter him into a more dreamy, spirit-like state — the very opposite of what is required for adventuring, but ideal for brooding on a throne. If you have ever disembodied in a dream, that is a first step, although of course a necrolich is much darker. Ideally you would torture and murder enough people first to turn your soul black as death.
A necrolich dedicated to keeping all the undead contained in Antarctica, or suppressing some xeno-invasion portal, could very well be a world-savior. He should need to struggle to remember his purpose, and grow darker with time. Yet the genius loci aspect of lichdom could still bind him to his task.
Light novel
I think your problem is that you're reading a Japanese light novel meant to be read for fun, and analyzing it as if it was Moby Dick.
I read lots of good litRPG fiction. Just finished some delightful Maxime Durand, then Neven Iliev. It's not my fault I have good taste.
Most heavy fiction is forgotten, while some light tales endure. Quality and density are not synonyms.
Feedback
"Retain" is relative
From the D&D lich desription:
“Unlike most other forms of undead creatures, the Lich retains all of the memories, personality, and abilities that it possessed in life — but it has a virtual eternity to hone its skills and inevitably becomes very powerful.”
“Depending on the method of becoming a lich, a lich can be of any alignment, retaining whatever alignment it had in life.”
please try to explain how that doesn’t contradict your argument?
The answer is that "retaining your personality" is relative.
Relative to a glass of water, modafinil changes your personality.
Relative to a home workout, Marine boot camp changes your personality.
Relative to zombification, lichdom retains your personality.
A wizard who binds his soul to his bones doesn't necessarily become a supreme necrolich like Momonga. He loses a lot, but probably doesn't change alignment immediately.
Suddenly going from a living herbivore to an undead being composed of negative energy is a massive personality change, immediately and progressively.
CHARACTER LIMIT REACHED. Continue here.
