There’s many stories that try to use schemes and other word trickery inside their character interactions make the stories seem more intellectual or make people think that the story is very deep. However, when this complicated wording or schemes is used too much, it makes the story feel like a mockery of English rather than a story in a high class setting.
In many webcomics I read now days with nobility and such, authors decide to use hidden meanings in multiple character reactions and end up needing to use internal dialogue to explain what both sides are meaning to say. I feel like this trajectory for nobility communication is a really bad one as nobility didn’t use such language for much of their social interactions and often spoke with fairly normal language for the great majority of their life.
We can see many of these stories using this kind of language just to make the character feel more high class without many of the other aspects that indicate the social status of specific people. We can see from classic literature like Pride and Prejudice or the works of Shakespeare how higher class language and actions mix together to compliment each other in such a way that saying one thing could also mean another thing. However, this collection of works all used this kind of language to punch up at the upper class in a work of satire with Shakespeare making multiple cleverly disguised dick jokes that gives me a chuckle even when reviewing their works.
We can see with many webcomics that many Korean or Chinese authors seem to have a somewhat poor understanding of Western culture which kind of makes sense. Much of the nobility in many of these stories use fancy language without any of the actual substance of nobility that set the higher class apart from the lower or middle class in Western culture. Anyway, my complains about the lack of cultural knowledge is just a small point to help reinforce how many of the webcomics I read don’t actually know how to make someone scheme properly or at least the presentation of the scheme is not really done in a sensible manner.
One of my favorite webcomics is I Am The Fated Villain translated by Asura. I like it because the main character uses many schemes and trickery to steal the fortune of various protagonists for his own gains. Initially the story feels great until you notice the pattern.
- Character realizes there is a special person with fortune to steal
- Some random event in the world is suddenly going to happen
- The character lures the special person to participate
- Character tricks the random nobodies to go against the special person
- Yippeee everyone somehow believed our villain
I think that this kind of works since the author puts a twist at the end or middle of every arc to make it distinct from all the previous arcs and has enough character grown and overall story development to distract away from just the scheme but how the scheme plays a role in the overall story. Too often, I see mid level slop that just has the scheme happen for the main character to obtain some item or opportunity and then the story just moves on like everyone forgot about what happened. The stakes for the scheme failing aren’t ever really established other than “Main character won’t get super OP item that they probably don’t need anyway because they are the main character.”
One of the biggest motivators for a reader to continue reading an arc is the building tension and stakes as the conflict develops to the climax. Many of the schemes I’ve been reading recently really don’t feel like the stakes are real and the ones that do establish some kind of stakes really feel like they are fabricated stakes.
I probably could write a whole entire book about character building but to sum up everything, I wish some of the webcomics I read to spend more time tying things together instead of just trying to achieve last chapter’s promises and make another cliff for the next chapter. After all, I’m pretty sure the story is supposed to be the whole webcomic not individual chapters.
Potato is yum 