Hi! It's so generous of you to spend your time helping others, and I would love it if I had the same scorching feedback! I won't take any offenses to your critiques, and I hope the flames of your feedback will forge my story into something sharper and stronger.
Unarmed and Unbroken
I read three chapters of your webnovel, and I’m here to tell you it’s not terrible. It’s just…
meh. Spectacularly, tragically, facepalmingly meh. The kind of meh that makes you sit back in your chair and wonder if a story can technically exist and still fail to
live for 107th time again. Your story is like a treadmill in a blackout—clearly designed for forward motion, but it goes nowhere fast and in complete darkness.
The most maddening part is that the ideas are there, I know you have
something. There's an MMA fighter. He gets Isekai’d into a game world. He can’t use weapons and has to fight with his fists. That
should be a compelling hook, the kind of thing that gets RR readers foaming at the mouth. But instead, it lands with the narrative grace of a wet grappler grappling a seal in the rain.
You clearly read a lot of LitRPG. That’s not up for debate. You’ve studied the form, the tropes, the skill trees, the genre’s entire evolutionary tree like an overcaffeinated literary paleontologist. You've got the storytelling mechanics memorized, and you know what a player HUD should look like down to the table. But here’s the problem:
reading genre is not the same as telling a story in it. You’re not writing from the inside out—you’re assembling genre furniture from IKEA and forgetting to include the screws.
How do I know this?
Wayne Booth would’ve spotted your implied author in five seconds and lit a cigarette out of pity. He’d tilt his head, squint at the prose, and say, “Ah, I see—this author
knows the tropes but has no idea how to use them narratively.” Your story
screams “experienced reader, first-time storyteller.” It's all scaffolding and no structure, a house that exists in the blueprint, with only concrete foundation being poured.
Your synopsis reads like you copied a few plot summary sentences from your mental Notepad.exe and slapped it on the page without bothering to ask if anyone actually wants to read past it. It doesn’t seduce. It certainly doesn’t provoke. It doesn’t even say a sweet narrative promise that it's worth following. It just sits there like a lump, politely informing us that a guy named Marcus will try to reach level 80 without weapons. Oh. How riveting. That totally sets you apart from the 125,631 other LitRPGs on the digital shelves.
You know what’s missing?
Exigence. As Lloyd Bitzer would say, your story lacks the compelling reason why it needs to be told
right now. Why
this story? Why
you? Why
Marcus? What makes this narrative a necessary voice in the sea of sword-swinging stat-boosting power-fantasy clones? Because let me tell you, having a unique class or MMA background doesn’t make a story unique. You don’t get narrative credit for gluing “MMA Fighter” onto the same rehashed “guy wakes up in a game” skeleton everyone picky enough have seen since 2016.
What makes a story unique is the
execution. The delivery. The voice. The damn
fire. And what you’ve delivered is a tepid, undercooked premise left to wobble around on the page without distinct flavor, rhetorical heat, or at least conviction that it will make sense by chapter 10. You’ve got the frame, but the canvas is blank. You’re painting a mural of grayscale when the genre demands neon-soaked madness and emotion.
Your rhetorical purpose is supposed to be “MMA Fighter Doing MMA in a Magical World,” right? Then why does it read like “Mildly Disinterested Man Describes Punching Things While Plot Happens Somewhere Offscreen”? Your
function is misaligned with your
form. You want to sell this world, sell this concept, sell Marcus—but instead, you’re narrating it like you’re taking attendance at a PTA meeting. There’s no good drama to follow, no weight of "WTF is happening", and certainly no push to read further even to know if he stumbles and dies next chapter. You're writing a story about a guy who punches monsters in the throat, and somehow,
somehow, it’s not exciting.
And don’t even get me started on how you broke the basic sequence of
context, character, content. You jump into a ring fight scene without giving us
why we should care. You parade Marcus around without making him feel like a
person, let alone a fighter. He’s got cauliflower ears and a tattoo—cool, so does every third guy in a dive bar. That’s not character, that’s costume your implied author wore. You never become that character just by wearing the skin of that character. You never sold
who Marcus is beyond “man who punches.”
Character-driven stories work because they let readers inside. We get the why, the fear, the fire, the obsession. Instead, you gave us a guy who suplexes centaurs and waters cornfields like he's grinding through his Sunday chores. He doesn't have a voice. He doesn't have an arc, and if he has it's poorly made one. He just exists as a muscular doll for you to awkwardly insert the reader inside of him. You forgot to put the man in the martial arts by making the proper context before he inadvertently wakes up in the game world.
You ever wonder why LitRPG stories with 350 chapters keep people hooked? It’s not the game mechanics. It’s not the grind. It’s not even the boss fights. It’s the
character voice. It's the snarky, broken, desperate, obsessive, brilliant little bastard at the center of it all. The one readers would follow off a cliff. When that voice is weak? The story dies, gets flatlined, getting forgotten. All because the plot doesn’t carry the voice—the
voice carries the plot.
That’s where your story dies. Right there. There’s no persuasion to read further, no hook, and no narrative gravity. You could have
the best fight scenes in the world, but if we don’t care about the guy doing the punching? It’s just noise. Action without consequence is a cinematic screensaver.
Do you want this story really to work? Then stop writing like an observer. Stop being the detached MMO tour guide and start being the
fucking narrator. Give Marcus a personality besides "I'm no herp". Give him a flaw worthy of greek tragedies. A voice. An opinion on the madness he's thrown into. Make us love him or hate him, but for God’s sake, make us
feel something.
You’ve got the pieces. You’ve got the training data. Now grow a spine and
tell the story. Right now, you’ve written a skeleton of a saga, and no matter how many times you suplex a wurm or spinebuster a bandit, it won’t mean a damn thing until there’s
someone behind those fists worth following.
Find your own voice. Make your story to have urgency. Develop a protagonist that bleeds not just in the plot, but into the prose. And only then come back swinging. Know that by writing a webnovel, you're communicating ideas. By writing, you show off yourself as someone worth following. If you don't have charisma with the skill, you'll lose everyone, even outside of writing.
Get better.
Already roasted by you once, so looking forward to my next story! (Maybe give me a bit of time—I’ll add 2-3 more chapters first.)
Nyasi Academy of Magic:
https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1551954/nyasi-academy-of-magic/
I don’t even need to roast you hard this time. You’ve done the work for me by standing on the same unstable foundation you built three months ago and shouting, “Look! I added blue curtains!” The
previous roast still applies line for line—copy-paste accurate—because instead of evolving, you chose to marinate in mediocrity. You’ve made a sequel to your own narrative stagnation, complete with returning characters like “Exposition Dump,” “Flat Dialogue,” and the fan-favorite, “Generic Protagonist Who Could Be Replaced by a Broom With Blood Powers.”
I just need to repeat your repeat offences. Vague protagonist? Still there, now upgraded from “determined man” to “boy with rare magic who stares at his blood like it owes him rent.” Worldbuilding? Still just names and labels duct-taped to bland geography. Crimson power? Underwhelming as ever—less “dangerous forbidden art,” more “look, Ma, I made a blood raisin'.” Dialogue? Everyone talks like they’re cosplaying friendship at a high school anime club. Tone? It bounces between edgy fantasy and afterschool special with the grace of a cat on roller skates.
You’ve learned nothing.
Zero internal growth. No new risks. It’s like watching someone buy a gym membership and then spend six months doing stretches at the water fountain. You’re not failing in this webnovel because you’re bad, you’re failing because you refuse to get better, learn from the pointed out mistakes. You wrote a reboot of your own mistakes and had the audacity to think new names and a magic academy would trick me for that matter.
So no, I won’t roast you again. That would imply you’ve moved forward, but you clearly haven’t. You’ve parked yourself in the same safe sandbox, built the same castle, and pretended it was new. You didn’t just roast yourself, no. Worse, you slow-roasted your dignity by trying to get a roast from me again.
(I'm mortified oops)
