So back in the day i read HPMOR, right?

Meta
Title:
Creator:	eccentric-nucleus
Date(s):	Sep 11, 2022 Followup discussion posted February 2023-Present
Medium:	online, Tumblr
Fandom:	panfandom and original fiction; followup discussions focused on HPMOR, Worm, Worth the Candle, and more
Topic:	progression fantasy, LitRPG, rationalist fiction, wish-fullfilment fantasy
External Links:	Tumblr, Archived version
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so back in the day i read HPMOR, right? is an untitled essay posted to tumblr by eccentric nucleus on 11 September 2022. It sparked discussion of the litrpg genre from an outsider perspective, the merits of genres we don't like, and also recommendations.

The Essay

so back in the day i read HPMOR, right? like many people. and as it went on (& yudkowsky kept talking about his writing process on tumblr) it became more and more clear that this was fiction approached from an angle i had never really considered before.

• mention of Spacebattles and Dark Lord Potter Forums as places where writers with a similar approach tend to post. Characterizing this approach as:

just like, expressing this conceptualization that the point of fiction was to... write a character stomping through a little fake world going from victory to victory so that the reader could enjoy the vicarious glow of having a hard problem presented to them and then immediately resolved. how smart you are for following the line of thought of the main character, who did this smart thing!!

• Original saw this mindset as particular to rationalists:

so that was very weird, but it was mostly a singular kind of weirdness. another weird, out-of-touch artifact from the rationalists, like roko's basilisk but harry potter fanfiction instead.

• More recently, discovered the webnovel Mother of Learning :

anyway a while back i stumbled across "Mother of Learning", and i think my initial response to it was 'this is less a story with a plot and more a series of obstacles that are presented to the main character to be sequentially overcome'. [...] the time loop isn't an unexplained device used to inspect a character through a lens, it's a dragon ball-style training chamber. there are "plot developments" as more information is revealed, but all of that takes a back seat to extensively and exhaustively describing every ability and technique that the main character learns and how they use them to be more powerful.

• MoL lead them to RoyalRoad:

(i've always found the name very funny since my main familiarity with the term is the phrase "there is no royal road to geometry - euclid", aka there is no shortcut to learning something; you always have to put in the hard struggle of comprehension. it's actually named after... something from a light novel or something? it used to be a fan forum for a specific work before branching out into a publishing platform.)

there is a strong genre constraint: they mostly want to hear about their protagonists getting endlessly more and more powerful, and sometimes collecting a harem of sexy women. it's for that kind of fiction.

• Reading stories on RR lead to understanding of several connected geres which OP saw HPMOR as fitting within (parenthetical comparison to xianxia):

reading a few stories there was very illuminating, in that finally i could place HPMOR in a genre: that of the 'progression fantasy', a profoundly self-indulgent and formulaic genre that's mostly just an action story with a lot of the bits stripped away so they can describe how much more powerful the protagonist is getting. a subgenre of this is the 'litrpg', which are stories with a diagetic video-game-mechanics layer. people are checking their stats and getting experience from killing monsters and leveling up and all that. a lot of them read like text LPs of videogames that don't exist. where the author is, of course, executing a min-maxed run.

(there's a lot of overlap here between progression fantasies and like, xianxia stories? cultivation stories are generally all progression fantasies, and so there's a lot of overlap thematically.)

• Noting the popularity and commercial success of Progression Fantasy as a genre:

anyway so that was kind of a grim awareness of a dark corner of the literary world. this stuff is popular. royal road is pretty aggressively farmed by publishers wanting to license stuff so they can make ebooks or w/e; there are author patreons there that make like, thousands of dollars a month for writing chapter 1394 of "my character with a cool spear levels up more".

• Vs OP's personal experience engaging with the genre:

i've read a bunch of progression fantasies but i wouldn't say i really enjoyed any of them, partly because a lot of them are really bad at like... constructing a narrative with any kind of stakes. it's all gonna be jettisoned away in favor of talking more about level ups. it is actually almost exactly the experience of grinding for levels in an RPG: it's not really fun, but it can be engaging in the moment, and also you get to see a number go up, so that's like a reward.

(i started writing one of my own as a writing exercise b/c i wanted to try some short-paced serial work that wasn't porn, and it shot up to uh #40 top-rated on the entire site. it was in the top 10 for a few days. i have some complicated feelings about that.)

• Contrast with OP's experience with engaging with fanfic (particularly PWP):

recently, i've been reading a lot of, uh, gay incest teenage mutant ninja turtles fanfiction. a lot of it is incredibly overwrought. 200k words of characters pining guiltily over each other! soap opera antics with miscommunications and secrets! genre cliches piled up in a big heap and remixed! and like, fanfic as a genre can be real formulaic too, right? a lot of people who read&write fanfic don't read much else, and there's absolutely a 'house style' for most fanfic. but when i read fanfic i get the sense that the authors are, you know, aware of some literary conventions, of the various aspects that make up a story, and they're struggling to convey concepts and themes.

personally i think that porn fanfic has a million times the literary and artistic merit as chapter 1400 of randitly fucking ghosthound, because porn, overwrought incest soap opera dramas, is at least saying something about the nature of human desire, whereas most progression fantasy stuff is an utterly self-absorbed thesis on "writing somebody cool and powerful is escapism so i can feel cool & powerful", stretched out to a million words.

• OP's feeling that that this sort of power fantasy is a worse expression of human desire:

like i guess 'i want to feel powerful' is an expression of human desire but it's a particularly flat one. i think a lot about that bit in dead zones of the imagination:, ^{Archived version}

[Quote from "David Graeber: Dead zones of the imagination: on violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture.]

a fantasy of having power is, i think, fundamentally a fantasy of never having to know anything you don't want to, of never having to deal with the consequences of your actions. i feel it's a particularly grim thing to enshrine into a millon-word epic.

Lilietsblog's Response

On January 2, 2024, lilietsblog wrote a six-part response which garnered particular interest; being reblogged widely.

1. The comment sections display the worst of the genre:

Nowhere are the literary shortcomings of the genre more pronounced than in the comments section. The poor writers might actually have some sort of character ideas but they are accompanied by a background chorus of "why did the protagonist give up the gains (tm) for that random side character? the protagonist should only care about getting stronger!"

2. Low bar to entry means more amateur writers trying (and perhaps not succeeding) in experessing "character-based ideas":

I actually do think that the WRITERS of this genre really do frequently try to express character-based ideas. LitRPG has a very low entry bar because it's formulaic enough you don't have to be good at stories to put a few chapters together, and then you can just keep going using the progression as a plot crutch. It's a genre that attracts novices, because it's easy. I don't even mean in the sense that "novices who want to wirte anything will choose to write LitRPGs" I mean in the sense of "more people who have once thought they would like to write a LitRPG actually end up publishing a LitRPG proportionally than other genres".

3. "ALL LitRPGs deal with transhumanism." -- for lilietsblog, this is a draw of the genre:

Also, regardless of the writers' intent and consciousness of this fact, ALL LitRPGs deal with transhumanism. Their characters are changed as they level up, and each writer chooses HOW, how it feels to them, which aspects change and which don't, whether there are stats for "intelligence" and "charisma" and what it looks like when they go up. They are not particularly nuanced or well-thought-through takes by and large, but that's their very charm. It's not what the author wanted to say, it's just what they think, how they see the concept. And I find it wicked interesting even when I abandon the work on chapter 10 bc my curiousity has been satisfied and I'm interested in literally nothing else about the story.

4.Defense of competent protagonists, theorized interaction with YA genre trends:

Quite frankly, there's nothing wrong with writing competent protagonists. They can still encounter meaningful challenges and be changed by the experience! Not everyone needs to be a YA dystopia ingenue who didn't realize their world kinda sucks before plot hits and has 0 relevant skills to anything that happens to them afterwards. The progression fantasy surge might be a blowback against that, actually? And writers frequently overfocus on this and overthink this, throwing their characters between entirely avoidable errors and inexplicable hypercompetence, because it's the topic of the day.

5. There are well-written progression fantasy works:

No, for real, there's plenty of progression fantasy that actually has good character work, worldbuilding work and plot work. And then there's progression fantasy that's just really good at being fun to read, action-filled and well-paced (Azarinth Healer has a LOT of weaknesses but it's so so so enjoyable). Sure, lots of it is very clumsy, but the same is true of any genre.

6. Defense of the literary value of Progression Fantasy stories and humanity of their writers:

And it's always a tempting trap to find meaningful literary value in even the least professional and most awkward works in the genre that speaks to you, while dismissing all works in genres that don't that can't convince you and draw you in regardless. But remember: if shlocky porn riddled with grammatic errors and misuse of synonyms has literary value, so do "numbers go up" protagonist-beats-up-everyone LitRPGs. Because on the other side of the text there's always a writer, trying to paint a picture with words and make other people imagine what's being on their mind.

7. Don’t like, don’t read.

Other Responses

• interesting look at LitRPGs
  • "dark corners" -- particularly weaselandfriends' reblog but others picked up the term and shared examples e.g. the tags here
• people agreeing or disagreeing or disagreeing with OP's harsh assessments of the genre