Webnovel Feedback Roasts For the Fearless

[Tempokai]

I have 3 systems: Divine Beast, Divine Sect, Divine Search | Scribble Hub
Use your powerful Dao of review to evaluate my scripture. Help me refine it and make it sacred.

Welcome to Xianxia Done Quick!
Ladies and gentlemen, today we witness a new challenger in the great speedrunning tournament of web novels—our contestant, the esteemed "ThousandDaos"! Look in awe, confusion, and existential dread as he attempts to pull off a 100% Completion Any% Speedrun of an entire xianxia story in the time it takes most authors to introduce their main character’s personality!

Oh? What’s this? He’s cutting out world-building with precision with info dumps! He’s skipping tension by using [Triple System] trick! He’s removing struggle just by skipping over it! Oh wow, he just glitched through character development entirely by relying on zero subtext! He’s going for the dreaded [System Route Skip] where all problems are magically solved before they can even begin! I would clap, really, I would—if you hadn’t made the entire speedrun meaningless.

See, I read your first two chapters, and I sat there, baffled. Not just confused—no, no. Confusion is too gentle a word. I was stupefied by the sheer speed of your PACING. You flew through what should have been an entire arc’s worth of content in the time it takes most writers to finish their prologue. Why are you running? Who is chasing you? What literary debt collector is threatening to break your kneecaps if you don’t hit a word count quota before dawn?

I get it—you want to tease the reader with planet-shattering fights, godlike warriors flinging galaxies at each other while the protagonist somehow gets caught in the crossfire. Cool. Standard late-game Xianxia fare, but speedrunning to that point while sacrificing everything that makes a story engaging? Now that’s not a good idea.

THE PROBLEM? YOUR OPENING CHAPTERS ARE DEVASTATINGLY MEANINGLESS.

You sacrificed pacing. You sacrificed buildup. You sacrificed tension. You sacrificed anything that would make me care about this protagonist or his journey. You gave him three cheat systems in Chapter 1. You had him randomly dig up a hidden fortune in a house he picked out through a literal GPS hack. You let him power up faster than a hacked mobile game account.

Do you know what this tells me? It tells me that you don’t actually care about storytelling. You just want to hit the "cool fights" quota as fast as possible. I can hear a false idol of a CN market whispering to you, "Do it. Do it fast, or else they'll run away. JUST DO IT BECAUSE YOU CAN DO IT. DO IT", and you obliged, falling into a heart demon, forgetting about the Dao Of Storytelling, and just writing this webnovel for mindless gu-filled consumers that don't ask for much.

You know, if you can hear me behind that gu, storytelling is all about persuasion. It’s about immersion. It’s about making the reader believe, for even a second, that what’s happening matters. You just failed at that.

If your end goal is just to get to the “big dudes fighting” part, then skip the pretense. Just start with the MC already being a god. You clearly don’t care about his journey, so why pretend? Why waste words on a “progression” that’s about as difficult as typing a cheat code? This is where you lose readers who have critical thinking skills. This is why any veteran reader, tired of the same sounding template of the genre rolls their eyes and closes the tab, because we’ve seen this before. The classic CN Xianxia formula.

Oh yes, you know this method well.

Step 1: Give MC a tragic backstory (optional).
Step 2: Give MC a cheat system to instantly bypass all struggle.
Step 3: Drop MC into a world where everything revolves around him.
Step 4: Introduce an OP enemy but don’t worry, MC gets stronger just by existing.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit (if your platform pays per word).

This factory-made method almost never works, and when it does, it’s because the author actually tries to write characters that feel alive. What you’ve done here? It’s nothing but slop. The kind of hollow, mass-produced nonsense that clogs up CN novel rankings.

That’s the saddest part. I don’t even think you’re trying to be bad. You’re just going with the flow, wu wei. Just another cog in the content farm, churning out yet another overpowered MC who faces zero actual adversity. This isn’t storytelling. This isn’t the Dao of Storytelling you're chasing after.

This is just meaningless gu-filled "wish-fulfillment" with an XP bar attached, and you know it.

May the Dao of Storytelling have mercy on your next draft.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

If your end goal is just to get to the “big dudes fighting” part, then skip the pretense. Just start with the MC already being a god. You clearly don’t care about his journey, so why pretend? Why waste words on a “progression” that’s about as difficult as typing a cheat code? This is where you lose readers who have critical thinking skills. This is why any veteran reader, tired of the same sounding template of the genre rolls their eyes and closes the tab, because we’ve seen this before. The classic CN Xianxia formula.

Oh yes, you know this method well.

Step 1: Give MC a tragic backstory (optional).
Step 2: Give MC a cheat system to instantly bypass all struggle.
Step 3: Drop MC into a world where everything revolves around him.
Step 4: Introduce an OP enemy but don’t worry, MC gets stronger just by existing.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit (if your platform pays per word).

My wife was listening to a webnovel that made this work, at least through step 3 (as far as I listened to it) - God Among Men. But it is very tricky (it opened with the guy doing impossible stuff in a car that was rigged to kill him - then had a short flashback showing PART of what got him there, and kept flashing back during "slow moments" to reveal the backstory).

 

[MrMeowMeow]

Congratulations! You’ve created a world, some grand, intricate, deeply philosophical, and emotionally stirring world—at least, that’s what you think you’ve done. But in reality? You’ve slapped together a pile of familiar sci-fi tropes, dipped them in amnesia sauce, cooked them until they were mushy enough, and shoved them at the reader like an overenthusiastic street vendor hawking goods at one of those unsanitary Chinese stalls, where you already know it’ll be bad for you in the long run. From the outside, sure, it looks decent—polished, structured, coherent even, but then, the moment someone actually thinks about it, the illusion shatters, showing the hollow, meaningless husk of a story that it truly is.

I made it to Chapter 2. Do you know what that means? It means I tried. It means I gave you the benefit of the doubt, trudged through the vague, passionless prose, and held onto the microscopic hope that, maybe, you had something to say beyond “look, my protagonist is sad and confused, now be intrigued”. But what did I find? A meaninglessness disguised as a narrative, an empty shell masquerading as a deep, psychological sci-fi webnovel.

The worst part? On the surface, it’s not even terrible. The words are in the right order, the sentences make sense, and the structure is technically there. It works, at least linguistically. But a storytelling isn’t just words strung together—it’s a carefully woven language game of context, character, and action, a trinity of storytelling you butchered before the reader even had a chance to care. You failed the sequential “context, character, action” opening so hard that I’m genuinely impressed. It’s like watching someone try to bake a cake by throwing raw eggs, sugar, and flour against a wall and expecting a Michelin star.

Your synopsis? It’s fine, maybe even promising for sci-fi lovers. But then the sheer passivity and vagueness of your actual writing kills the mystery before it even starts. Do you know how impressive that is? Mystery is supposed to pull a reader in, make them need to know more, but instead of dangling a breadcrumb trail of intrigue, all I see is you just kind of wave your hands vaguely in the reader’s direction and mutter, “Trust me, it’s mysterious.” That’s not how mystery works. That’s how people pretend they know what they’re talking about in college philosophy discussions.

And then, because you really wanted to put the final nail in your story’s coffin, you went and spoiled the plot yourself. Yes, you, the unreliable narrator of your own premise. You wrote a synopsis that promises one thing, then immediately delivered something so generic and uninspired that it made your own premise look like false advertising. You want the reader to care about your protagonist’s amnesia and suffering? Then maybe—just maybe—give them a reason to care about him beyond “muh family”.

Ah, "muh family"—the time-honored tradition of lazy emotional investment. You really thought this was your ace in the hole, didn’t you? “If I just tell the reader my protagonist lost his wife and child without even bothering to show them as compelling characters, they’ll instantly feel something!” No, they won’t. You know why? Because you didn’t develop MC as a person first. His grief, his pain, his entire emotional existence is just a pre-packaged sob story, plucked from the endless void of overused sci-fi clichés and dumped onto the page as if tragedy alone is enough to create depth.

This brings to the amnesia, because hoo boy, if you’re going to saddle yourself with one of the hardest storytelling crutches to use effectively, you better know what you’re doing. You don’t, period. An amnesiac protagonist is already a gamble because you’re cutting the reader off from a character’s internal history, which means you have to compensate with an incredibly strong world and present-moment stakes, but what did you do? You left the logos of your world—its internal logic, its weight, its reason to exist—as an afterthought. Because of that, your ethos (credibility) and pathos (emotional impact) both died in a tragic double suicide, hands clasped like lovers in a bad Shakespearean tragedy, suffocated beneath the crushing weight of your reader’s indifference.

That means the only thing that could have saved this story was the world itself. But guess what? That was already dead too, alone in its sterile little room, before those two lovers even had the chance to perish. Because you didn’t establish the context first.

And this is where your biggest, most glaring flaw becomes impossible to ignore. Your world is built entirely out of clichés, but you structured your story as if the reader should already care about them. You threw in cryosleep resurrection from Cowboy Bebop, cybernetic existentialism from Ghost in the Shell, the evil corporate overlord from every dystopian novel ever, the forced obedience pain chip from Metal Gear, and the tragic lost family motivation from Fallout 4. So, instead of making the world feel lived-in, you just paraded these elements around with no weight, no contrast, no meaning.

And that’s the problem. Contrast. That one thing that separates a hollow, trope-riddled sci-fi disaster from a genuinely compelling narrative. The mind is a terrifying thing, even when it forgets. It leaves echoes. Flashes of what was, glimpses of how the world used to be, instinctive reactions that betray what has changed. And yet, your protagonist feels nothing. His thoughts don’t wander back to a past he can’t fully remember. His instincts don’t betray the kind of world he once lived in. He doesn’t notice the absence of something he should subconsciously expect.

Without contrast, your world isn’t a world—it’s just a setting. Therefore, your logos was never alive to begin with.

So here’s the truth, laid bare for you to see: You know how to write, but you don’t know how to write well. You have technical competence, sure—you can string words into sentences, paragraphs into chapters, and plot points into something that resembles a story. Storytelling isn’t just words and structure. It’s knowing how to make the reader care, how to pull them into a world that feels real, how to create a protagonist who isn’t just a passive observer in his own damn story.

Go back. Learn actual storytelling techniques. Understand what makes a mystery intriguing instead of just “vague.” Figure out how to write a protagonist who drives the story forward instead of just reacting to everything like a confused NPC in a bad RPG. And for the love of all things literary, stop relying on sci-fi clichés like they’re a substitute for worldbuilding.

Because right now you’re not writing a story. You’re just writing words.

Thank you.

 

[AdOtherwise]

I read three chapters of your webnovel. Just three. Not a herculean effort, not some pilgrimage to enlightenment—just three chapters, and what I found was something so profoundly, immaculately fine that I nearly fell asleep clutching the word. Fine. So refined. So honed to the cutting edge of total averageness that I could peel back the surface like one of those cheap price stickers and find the manufacturing label underneath: "Certified Template #4829."

And here's the thing—there’s nothing wrong with that. Truly. Templates exist for a reason. Comfort food sells. People love to munch on the same predictable slop day after day, like livestock lined up at the algorithm’s trough. But when the template devours the story, when your work is just a flesh suit for a checklist, that’s when the whole illusion collapses. That's when the wheels squeak, the scaffolding rattles, and the whole thing reads less like a passion project and more like the outcome of an industrial accident at the Isekai Novel Factory.

Sure, you’ve written a story. Congrats. Gold star. Participation trophy. Clap, clap. But the tragedy is that you’ve written the kind of story where if I tossed the pages in the air and they scattered across a room full of other webnovels, I wouldn’t be able to tell where yours ended and the others began. There is no fingerprint here. No lingering taste. No signature. Just processed narrative mulch.

Webnovels are about persuasion, you know. Not just stringing together words, but making people believe in something. You’re not just telling a story—you’re selling it. Selling the idea that this world matters, these characters breathe, that turning the next chapter will feel like opening a door to somewhere alive. And sure, you're persuading the general audience—the readers who come for comfort, for the warm bath of familiarity, for the dopamine drip of “Ah, yes. I know this beat. I know this arc. I know this twist.” But for anyone who's been around the block twice and isn't just spooning gruel into their mouth with wide, trusting eyes, your webnovel is the beige book on the beige shelf in the beige room. It’s there. That’s all anyone can say about it. It exists. Look, Ma, words.

The synopsis? Technically fine. Oh yes, it’s all presentable. The commas behave. The adjectives show up on time. There’s atmosphere—a dark one, even. But it’s so puffed up with forced drama and overinflated vagueness that the entire thing feels like it might float away into the night sky. I finished reading and thought, “Ah. So… nobody does stuff to become someone.” What a revelation. A whole journey from Empty Boy to Important Boy pipeline and I haven’t even turned a page. There’s no personality radiating off that blurb. There’s no pulse. I felt nothing. This is where your pathos flatlines. No emotional buy-in. Just the mechanical hum of story parts clicking together, automated, polished, soulless.

But hey, maybe the chapters save it, right? Surely. Let’s stroll into those. And what do we find? More tropes wearing trench coats pretending to be scenes. Each beat falls exactly where the template tells it to. Each line of dialogue bows politely to the invisible framework. Add worldbuilding here. Insert existential dread there. Deploy colorful side character now. Engage bully encounter. It’s like watching a rehearsal where no one dares stray from the script, lest they upset the almighty Three-Act Structure.

It’s exhausting. Tiring in that special way only total predictability can be. You’re not telling me a story. You’re delivering a product. One meticulously designed to simulate the idea of fantasy adventure while never actually becoming one. This is where your ethos chips away, bit by bit. You lose authority over your own work. I stop trusting you to surprise me, move me, or even try. Because why would you? You’re not writing for passion. You’re writing for metrics. You’re programming a content feed. You’re stacking blocks.

And sure—sure!—it’s completely, absolutely fine. Nobody’s going to arrest you for it. You’ll even get readers. A decent few, at first. They’ll click through, recognizing the beats like an old song on the radio. They'll hum along for a while. But the further it goes, the more obvious the sameness becomes. The more people drop off, like leaves in autumn, until all that’s left is four dedicated stragglers grinding through to the end 365 chapters later, purely out of spite or sunk cost.

Because your prose? Your prose is so competently bland that it could be anyone’s. I couldn’t pick your sentences out of a lineup if my life depended on it. Not a turn of phrase. Not a moment of stylistic audacity. Not even a clumsy, ambitious failure that at least tries to do something weird. There’s no spark of joy. No hint of obsession. No evidence you ever once wrote a scene and thought, "Hell yeah, I’m onto something."

All I see is the well-oiled machine of Commercialized Webnovel™. A product with the crusts cut off. An algorithm-pleaser in a cute little uniform, waiting in line behind a thousand others exactly like it. Polite. Predictable. Pleasantly forgettable.

And you know what? Maybe that's what you wanted. Maybe you aimed directly for fine, and you hit the bullseye dead center.

But me? I'm just sitting here, staring at it, wondering why you even bothered.

This feedback is a work of art. But yeah, I've gone through so many revisions that anything unique or interesting got swept under the rug in favor of fitting the standards of writing since that was my weak point back then. Bullseye, indeed.

Thank you for the feedback, truly. I forgot I even signed up for this, but it made my night!

 

[GonzoGuilty]

I lack the mental fortitude to withstand even the slightest critique of my writing. I do know how helpful it is to receive the type of feedback that I've seen here so whenever you get a chance have at it. If my book stops being updated it's either my object permanence made me forget to update it, or the review shattered all hope I had if my book being well written. ?
The Nexus Chronicles

 

[Justhetip...]

You flew through what should have been an entire arc’s worth of content in the time it takes most writers to finish their prologue. Why are you running? Who is chasing you? What literary debt collector is threatening to break your kneecaps if you don’t hit a word count quota before dawn?

Sorry, just felt like I had to add this.

 

[Tempokai]

Honestly you scare me @Tempokai but at the same time this whole roast session is eerily insightful so.

MHA: LAW OF MOTION

A drifter who found his anchor, only to meet an untimely demise, and the one man who would change superhuman society forever. Discrimination against mutant quirk holders, systemic suppression of quirks, and a rebellion that had been simmering for decades. At the heart of all this, 15-year-old...

www.scribblehub.com

I read three meandering, cliché ridden chapters. Honestly, it's Ultrameh of Ultrakill proportions. You thought you were writing something profound, didn’t you? You sat there, fingers hunched over the keyboard, thinking this is it. This is my magnum opus. Then, somehow, this came out, a tragic waste of potential, a... certainly a piece of text, that happens when you throw storytelling into a blender set to Random AI-Generated Slop Mode and forget to add the one ingredient that actually matters: consistency.

You see, the worst kind of story isn’t just bad—no, bad stories can be funny, entertaining even, in their catastrophic failure. The real plague on fiction is sloppiness, and what you’ve given me is the worst kind of mess: one that doesn’t even have the decency to be consistently bad. Instead, it flexes back and forth between ChatGPT’s overly polished, soulless nonsense and your own self-indulgent, cringeworthy self-insert power fantasy, like a Frankenstein monster assembled from spare parts of every MHA fanfic that should’ve never been written.

Oh, what’s that? You thought using ChatGPT was a good idea? That it would somehow “assist” you in your creative vision? Let me tell you something: ChatGPT doesn’t assist you. It replaces you. It erases you from your own story, turns you into a ghost lurking behind AI-generated filler. I would’ve respected the attempt if the story was at least good—if it had the guts to do something new, something interesting, but no, as always. You didn’t even have the decency to fail spectacularly, instead, you regurgitated yet another MHA reincarnation slop, so formulaic I could predict every major event before even pressing "next" on the prologue.

Reincarnation, insert god that certainly is not an authorial self insert. Muh parents die because plot said so. Becomes vigilante because prologue said so. Wow. What a shocker. Truly, you are a visionary among fanfiction writers. I’ve never seen such a groundbreaking take—except in every single other MHA fanfic that does the exact same thing. And here’s where your credibility, your ethos, completely dies.

The job of a real storyteller isn’t just to use clichés—it’s to deform them (as I written in my Dao Of Worldmaking), twist them into something fresh. You think you’ve got a unique take here? No. You’ve done nothing but copy-paste from the Most Overused Fanfic Tropes™ list and applied it with all the grace of a teenager slapping Hello Kitty stickers on a textbook because everyone around them had at least one, not realizing that it was just a freebie from the latest promotion the principal had made for money, disregarding everything.

Let’s say, for a moment, that I ignore the LLM issue. Let’s pretend, for argument’s sake, that this entire mess was purely your own work. Guess what? It’s still the same copy-paste drivel, following the template to the letter like a lifeless, uninspired assembly line of bad writing decisions. Why should I care about this protagonist? Why should I care about his “genius” when all you do is tell me he’s smart without ever proving it? Why should I be invested in his tragic backstory when it was so blatantly telegraphed three chapters ahead that I could’ve written it myself just by filling in the blanks?

The moment you spoon-fed your audience every emotional beat before they had a chance to feel anything, your pathos—your ability to make reader care—was already dead in the water. I didn’t grieve for Rio’s father. I didn’t fear for Rio’s future. I didn’t feel anything except a growing sense of secondhand embarrassment as I realized this was just a speedrun of every “traumatized genius vigilante” arc that has ever been written.

The last one, logic? Oh, you never even had that. Your logos was already rotting in its grave the moment you took My Hero Academia’s world and decided to slap graffiti all over it without understanding why the original story even worked.

You think you’re writing something compelling just because you put words on a screen? You think people will respect this mess just because it has the illusion of structure? Cringe Alert: just because ChatGPT sprinkled in some poetic-sounding nonsense doesn’t mean your audience will stick around. Just because you technically wrote a story doesn’t mean you actually created something worth reading.

This is the real tragedy here. You didn’t just fail—you didn’t even try to be anything more than the sum of a thousand other bad fanfictions before you. And that's unforgivable.

 

[Deleted member 195328]

Waiting for feedback.
https://www.scribblehub.com/series/1454440/the-adventures-of-aldric/

 

[AncestorDuck]

I would like to get roasted too. Unfortunately, I'm one step behind every esteemed fellow author, as I'm even unable to write past Chapter 2. Do you think you could roast my very being instead? It would mean a lot to me.

 

[N3fari0n]

It would be an honor to be roasted by you. There is no need to hold back. I can take it (I think?).

Ascension of the Dark Prince

While raiding a dungeon, a group of adventurers unleashes a horror that should have been kept sealed. Now, that demonic entity is trying to break free and send the world into a dark age.

www.scribblehub.com

 

[So_Indecisive]

I read three meandering, cliché ridden chapters. Honestly, it's Ultrameh of Ultrakill proportions. You thought you were writing something profound, didn’t you? You sat there, fingers hunched over the keyboard, thinking this is it. This is my magnum opus. Then, somehow, this came out, a tragic waste of potential, a... certainly a piece of text, that happens when you throw storytelling into a blender set to Random AI-Generated Slop Mode and forget to add the one ingredient that actually matters: consistency.

You see, the worst kind of story isn’t just bad—no, bad stories can be funny, entertaining even, in their catastrophic failure. The real plague on fiction is sloppiness, and what you’ve given me is the worst kind of mess: one that doesn’t even have the decency to be consistently bad. Instead, it flexes back and forth between ChatGPT’s overly polished, soulless nonsense and your own self-indulgent, cringeworthy self-insert power fantasy, like a Frankenstein monster assembled from spare parts of every MHA fanfic that should’ve never been written.

Oh, what’s that? You thought using ChatGPT was a good idea? That it would somehow “assist” you in your creative vision? Let me tell you something: ChatGPT doesn’t assist you. It replaces you. It erases you from your own story, turns you into a ghost lurking behind AI-generated filler. I would’ve respected the attempt if the story was at least good—if it had the guts to do something new, something interesting, but no, as always. You didn’t even have the decency to fail spectacularly, instead, you regurgitated yet another MHA reincarnation slop, so formulaic I could predict every major event before even pressing "next" on the prologue.

Reincarnation, insert god that certainly is not an authorial self insert. Muh parents die because plot said so. Becomes vigilante because prologue said so. Wow. What a shocker. Truly, you are a visionary among fanfiction writers. I’ve never seen such a groundbreaking take—except in every single other MHA fanfic that does the exact same thing. And here’s where your credibility, your ethos, completely dies.

The job of a real storyteller isn’t just to use clichés—it’s to deform them (as I written in my Dao Of Worldmaking), twist them into something fresh. You think you’ve got a unique take here? No. You’ve done nothing but copy-paste from the Most Overused Fanfic Tropes™ list and applied it with all the grace of a teenager slapping Hello Kitty stickers on a textbook because everyone around them had at least one, not realizing that it was just a freebie from the latest promotion the principal had made for money, disregarding everything.

Let’s say, for a moment, that I ignore the LLM issue. Let’s pretend, for argument’s sake, that this entire mess was purely your own work. Guess what? It’s still the same copy-paste drivel, following the template to the letter like a lifeless, uninspired assembly line of bad writing decisions. Why should I care about this protagonist? Why should I care about his “genius” when all you do is tell me he’s smart without ever proving it? Why should I be invested in his tragic backstory when it was so blatantly telegraphed three chapters ahead that I could’ve written it myself just by filling in the blanks?

The moment you spoon-fed your audience every emotional beat before they had a chance to feel anything, your pathos—your ability to make reader care—was already dead in the water. I didn’t grieve for Rio’s father. I didn’t fear for Rio’s future. I didn’t feel anything except a growing sense of secondhand embarrassment as I realized this was just a speedrun of every “traumatized genius vigilante” arc that has ever been written.

The last one, logic? Oh, you never even had that. Your logos was already rotting in its grave the moment you took My Hero Academia’s world and decided to slap graffiti all over it without understanding why the original story even worked.

You think you’re writing something compelling just because you put words on a screen? You think people will respect this mess just because it has the illusion of structure? Cringe Alert: just because ChatGPT sprinkled in some poetic-sounding nonsense doesn’t mean your audience will stick around. Just because you technically wrote a story doesn’t mean you actually created something worth reading.

This is the real tragedy here. You didn’t just fail—you didn’t even try to be anything more than the sum of a thousand other bad fanfictions before you. And that's unforgivable.

Even though this was what I signed up for it actually stung when I got hit with this.

And from reading your review I found out that I'm not actually properly conveying what I'm trying to write and the characters backstory properly. It's so bad that you even missed where this was going (is that actually a bad thing though or is it good because it would make for a good twist?).

Yeah the first chapter was ass. I had already written chapter 1 when I remembered that I had an idea for an epilogue that I hadn't put into use so you got this complete AI generated slop. It looked amazing when the prompt dropped it but everyone I've asked for feedback almost unanimously expressed their disgust.

There's so much that you've explained that could have been solved if I had worded better in hindsight or at least made clear but I guess I subconsciously expected the readers to magically understand what I was expressing (which by the way is pretty stupid I read @Tempokai thread on rhetoric for webnovel writers and i wanted to find a hole to bury myself in. Talk about being a walking bad example).

Also I didn't want to add this because it definitely looks like I'm trying to redeem myself or trying to justify what could have been resolved easily if I wasn't so lazy but when did I ever make him out to be a vigilante. The tag was MHA: VIGILANTES. There's literally a whole manga on it by Betten Court.

If I add anything more it'll be because I'm a sore loser which is frankly embarrassing. You're insight was very helpful although it would have been nice if you worded it more kindly ya know.

 

[sbdrag]

You're insight was very helpful although it would have been nice if you worded it more kindly ya know.

It's a "roast." Roasts aren't supposed to be kind, the whole point is being mean in an entertaining way. You already said you signed up for this, and you can literally read the past roasts to see what the style of review is.

It's okay to be hurt, they're designed to hurt. Tempokai's entire stated bit is being an ego-killer - that's the point. But if you want kind feedback, don't come to a roast thread lol

Also - "why would you assume my character is a vigilante just because I used a tag for a comic where the characters are all vigilantes and that's the main point" - do you... see how that sounds when I say it like that?

 

[So_Indecisive]

It's a "roast." Roasts aren't supposed to be kind, the whole point is being mean in an entertaining way. You already said you signed up for this, and you can literally read the past roasts to see what the style of review is.

It's okay to be hurt, they're designed to hurt. Tempokai's entire stated bit is being an ego-killer - that's the point. But if you want kind feedback, don't come to a roast thread lol

Also - "why would you assume my character is a vigilante just because I used a tag for a comic where the characters are all vigilantes and that's the main point" - do you... see how that sounds when I say it like that?

Sigh ? I was just being butt hurt I know I sound stupid ??

 

[Zinless]

It looked amazing when the prompt dropped it but everyone I've asked for feedback almost unanimously expressed their disgust.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here, but you should know that mostly AI-generated stories can be reported. From what I've read, it seems like ChatGPT wrote the entire first chapter.

Content Guidelines | Scribble Hub

www.scribblehub.com

 

[Tempokai]

Yeah why not

[REWRITE] How Do I Survive In This World?
Give me your worst!

I had a sliver of hope. A tiny, fleeting ember of optimism, the kind that makes a man after the gruesome day at work believe that maybe—just maybe—there was something worth reading here. After all, [REWRITE] was slapped onto the title like a mark of some great, evolved Yu-Gi-Oh card. A promise. A declaration that this was the improved version—the one where the mistakes of the past had been burned away, grammar being fixed, leaving behind a sharper, better story.

It’s not.

What you have done here is take a rotting corpse, spray a bit of air freshener on it, and prop it up like it’s supposed to impress anyone. Five chapters in, my smile dropped. My patience wore thin, and then I saw it for what it truly was—a husk of a story, a hollow shell with a loud, obnoxious voice that mistakes noise for substance. My disappointment is immeasurable and my night is ruined.

You have committed the cardinal sin of fiction—not just making an unlikable protagonist, not just constructing a world so devoid of interest that even your own characters seem indifferent to it, not just botching a deconstruction attempt so badly that the very concept of deconstruction itself recoiled in horror. No, you went a step further. You wrote a story so utterly self-infatuated with its own wit that it forgot to be engaging, let alone good. Derrida would be proud.

Your MC is the literary equivalent of a drunk idiot at a party who thinks he’s the funniest guy in the room while everyone else desperately looks for an excuse to leave. Profanity is fine—hell, it can be great—when used with precision. But what did you do? You turned "fuck" into your crutch, your catchphrase, your identity. You wield it like a blunt instrument, bludgeoning the reader with it again and again until they’re numb to it. Swearing loses all meaning when it’s as common as a comma. Congratulations, your MC now has the linguistic depth of a 13-year-old who just learned he can swear online.

But wait, that’s not all! Why stop at shallow dialogue when you can also drown the reader in bad repetition? Poop joke? Hilarious—for half a second. Too bad you stretched that joke so thin that it snapped in half and left me wondering if you’ve ever actually heard a joke before. Stab joke? Oh, how edgy. Too bad it also got run into the ground before it had the chance to be clever.

This is where your ethos dies.

Your protagonist is meant to be the lens through which readers experience your world, yet all I see through that lens is a relentless stream of whining, self-awareness, and detached sarcasm. Readers don’t see a character worth following, worth rooting for, worth anything. They see a guy who talks like he’s above everything happening around him, like the world itself is just a bad joke that he refuses to take seriously.

And you know what happens when the MC is a fucking piece of trash with zero personality, but infinite self-awareness? It doesn’t make him compelling. It doesn’t make him funny. It makes him an insufferable, postmodernist symbol of destruction—a literary black hole that devours everything meaningful and spits out nothing but detached quips and soulless cynicism.

This is where your pathos dies.

Tell me, who is your reader? Do you even know? Do you even care? Because right now, the only audience I can imagine enjoying this is someone who thinks storytelling is a joke, that nothing really matters, and that character development is for losers. If that’s your demographic, congratulations, you have written the perfect book for people who will never finish a book once something small goes not the way they wanted.

Why did you think this specific voice was a good idea for a protagonist? Why did you decide that the best way to guide us through your world was with a character who actively makes it impossible to care about anything happening in it? Because here’s the thing: when the protagonist fails, when the emotional core is missing, your last chance is to at least be an effective deconstructionist.

Did you succeed? Yes. Not in the way you think.

Every trope you tried to break was already broken before you even got here. Every joke, every “subversion,” every snarky dismissal of isekai clichés—it’s all been done before, and done better, and yet, despite having a roadmap of successful deconstructions before you, you still managed to fail. You didn’t build anything new. You didn’t create a fresh take. You just stood there, pointing and laughing at the wreckage of better stories, thinking that was enough.

This is where your logos dies.

Because when a story lacks meaning, when it lacks stakes, when it lacks even the barest attempt at making us care about the world or the people in it, it is dead on arrival. Yours is DOA. If you truly want to deconstruct isekai, then do the work. Learn the basics of storytelling first. Understand what makes these tropes function in the first place before you try to break them. You don’t get to subvert something you don’t understand. Because when deconstruction is shallow, the story is shallow. And when a story is shallow, it is not a story at all.

What you’ve created is not a novel. It’s not even a coherent parody. It’s an extended shitpost with delusions of grandeur.

And just like any internet shitpost, it’ll be forgotten the moment someone finds something actually worth reading.

 

[TheIcMan]

I live for the signature Tempokai “this is where your _____ dies” classic.

 

[Wlel]

I had a sliver of hope. A tiny, fleeting ember of optimism, the kind that makes a man after the gruesome day at work believe that maybe—just maybe—there was something worth reading here. After all, [REWRITE] was slapped onto the title like a mark of some great, evolved Yu-Gi-Oh card. A promise. A declaration that this was the improved version—the one where the mistakes of the past had been burned away, grammar being fixed, leaving behind a sharper, better story.

It’s not.

What you have done here is take a rotting corpse, spray a bit of air freshener on it, and prop it up like it’s supposed to impress anyone. Five chapters in, my smile dropped. My patience wore thin, and then I saw it for what it truly was—a husk of a story, a hollow shell with a loud, obnoxious voice that mistakes noise for substance. My disappointment is immeasurable and my night is ruined.

You have committed the cardinal sin of fiction—not just making an unlikable protagonist, not just constructing a world so devoid of interest that even your own characters seem indifferent to it, not just botching a deconstruction attempt so badly that the very concept of deconstruction itself recoiled in horror. No, you went a step further. You wrote a story so utterly self-infatuated with its own wit that it forgot to be engaging, let alone good. Derrida would be proud.

Your MC is the literary equivalent of a drunk idiot at a party who thinks he’s the funniest guy in the room while everyone else desperately looks for an excuse to leave. Profanity is fine—hell, it can be great—when used with precision. But what did you do? You turned "fuck" into your crutch, your catchphrase, your identity. You wield it like a blunt instrument, bludgeoning the reader with it again and again until they’re numb to it. Swearing loses all meaning when it’s as common as a comma. Congratulations, your MC now has the linguistic depth of a 13-year-old who just learned he can swear online.

But wait, that’s not all! Why stop at shallow dialogue when you can also drown the reader in bad repetition? Poop joke? Hilarious—for half a second. Too bad you stretched that joke so thin that it snapped in half and left me wondering if you’ve ever actually heard a joke before. Stab joke? Oh, how edgy. Too bad it also got run into the ground before it had the chance to be clever.

This is where your ethos dies.

Your protagonist is meant to be the lens through which readers experience your world, yet all I see through that lens is a relentless stream of whining, self-awareness, and detached sarcasm. Readers don’t see a character worth following, worth rooting for, worth anything. They see a guy who talks like he’s above everything happening around him, like the world itself is just a bad joke that he refuses to take seriously.

And you know what happens when the MC is a fucking piece of trash with zero personality, but infinite self-awareness? It doesn’t make him compelling. It doesn’t make him funny. It makes him an insufferable, postmodernist symbol of destruction—a literary black hole that devours everything meaningful and spits out nothing but detached quips and soulless cynicism.

This is where your pathos dies.

Tell me, who is your reader? Do you even know? Do you even care? Because right now, the only audience I can imagine enjoying this is someone who thinks storytelling is a joke, that nothing really matters, and that character development is for losers. If that’s your demographic, congratulations, you have written the perfect book for people who will never finish a book once something small goes not the way they wanted.

Why did you think this specific voice was a good idea for a protagonist? Why did you decide that the best way to guide us through your world was with a character who actively makes it impossible to care about anything happening in it? Because here’s the thing: when the protagonist fails, when the emotional core is missing, your last chance is to at least be an effective deconstructionist.

Did you succeed? Yes. Not in the way you think.

Every trope you tried to break was already broken before you even got here. Every joke, every “subversion,” every snarky dismissal of isekai clichés—it’s all been done before, and done better, and yet, despite having a roadmap of successful deconstructions before you, you still managed to fail. You didn’t build anything new. You didn’t create a fresh take. You just stood there, pointing and laughing at the wreckage of better stories, thinking that was enough.

This is where your logos dies.

Because when a story lacks meaning, when it lacks stakes, when it lacks even the barest attempt at making us care about the world or the people in it, it is dead on arrival. Yours is DOA. If you truly want to deconstruct isekai, then do the work. Learn the basics of storytelling first. Understand what makes these tropes function in the first place before you try to break them. You don’t get to subvert something you don’t understand. Because when deconstruction is shallow, the story is shallow. And when a story is shallow, it is not a story at all.

What you’ve created is not a novel. It’s not even a coherent parody. It’s an extended shitpost with delusions of grandeur.

And just like any internet shitpost, it’ll be forgotten the moment someone finds something actually worth reading.

Yeah, this is what I need—passive aggressive roast. Just like this I know you're not sugarcoting shit. Sincerity at its finest. At least you pointed out things that I need to fix. And yeah, this makes me aware that my MC is lacking personality, like a headless chicken. Guess I need to work more on it, how to develop the main character and understand my audience better.

 

[J_Win]

This guy so funny I wouldn't mind being roasted by him, and prolly the others feel the same

Might come back to this post soon

 

[Tempokai]

Gone back and forth about posting here - mostly because I'm not likely to make major revisions after 2+ years on multiple platforms and tend to feel that's unfair to people giving feedback - but I do find the roasts entertaining and insightful, and my curiosity is piqued. Especially since I rarely get to see rhetoric brought up so explicitly in feedback. So, yeah - have at it, lol.

Demon King’s Gardener

After discovering a human has been secretly tending the castle gardens for the past decade, the Demon King makes him the official Royal Gardener - to the annoyance of his court. Newly appointed Demon King Jurao is surprised to see the affection the sentient plants of the castle gardens have...

www.scribblehub.com

If you merged a Tolkien knockoff, a fujoshi from NovelUpdates, and a theater script producer with an addiction to dialogue tags, you’d get this webnovel. It’s a strange, mutated thing—not bad, not good, just aggressively mediocre, the literary equivalent of an overcooked duck breast. I read three chapters. I analyzed through three chapters. I endured three chapters. My verdict? Meh. Passable. Readable. Functional.

It’s like reading George R.R. Martin when he’s at his least deranged (which is rare). You know, those moments between the incest and the five-page descriptions of what everyone is eating? That’s your novel—except instead of a meticulously crafted world, it’s a fantasy realm that feels like an HR department’s break room.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Your synopsis is fine. It does its job. It tells me what’s going to happen, introduces the characters, and sprinkles in some intrigue. But right out the gate, you made your first critical error: your webnovel cover. That thing isn’t a cover—it’s a spoiler. It’s a giant neon sign that screams “Two males will eventually kiss, fujoshis welcome, everyone else get out.” And trust me, they get out.

This cover is a mistake not just because it’s BL, but because it limits your audience before they even read a single word. The implication alone is enough to repel the majority. Not because they hate BL, but because it’s presented so unsubtly that it might as well come with a flashing sign: “This is not for you.” There's a reason some BL stories in this website don't include two males violently kissing each other. They have either MC or ML awkwardly standing, or just MC himself. But fine, let’s say you’re okay with that—you only want the BL audience. You’ve still divided that audience into two: those who like your brand of slow-burn domestic demon to human romance and those who will drop it because even among BL lovers, not everyone has the patience for three chapters of plot convenience and pointless court politics.

Now, let’s get into the real problem: your writing doesn’t justify the narrow audience you’re catering to. This is where your ethos becomes nonexistent. Poof! Gone.

You’ve set the highest possible bar for yourself—a niche premise, a niche genre, and a niche audience—so you need to deliver an ultra-quality piece of fiction. Not “high quality.” Not “competent.” Ultra quality. It needs to be so insanely gripping that readers ignore the exclusivity of its appeal and get hooked anyway.

And yet… it’s just fine.

Chapter 1 is okay. It’s slice-of-life. The setup is there. The intrigue of a human secretly tending the Demon King’s murder-garden is actually a solid premise. You trick me into thinking, Oh? Maybe this is going somewhere interesting. Chapter 2 happens.

Six characters. SIX. You dump six characters on me like a clumsiest waiter in the world who just upended a tray of drinks onto my lap.

No visual media. No easy cues. Just name after name after name, all introduced within minutes. I don’t know them. I don’t care about them. I don’t even know which ones matter. And the worst part? It was completely avoidable. There’s an unspoken rule in storytelling—you don’t introduce a flood of characters at once unless you want the reader to immediately forget half of them. Why? Because readers need time to attach. They need a reason to care before you start handing out entire noble court rosters like a fantasy phonebook.

You didn’t introduce characters—you offloaded a giant EULA that readers will certainly will disengage from. This is where your pathos disappears off-screen, because it got too overcrowded on the scene.

And, AND as if that weren’t enough, you built your entire plot on convenience. Let me get this straight:

• The garden is alive but nobody noticed a random human tending it for ten years.
• Demons are chill about it.
• Jurao, the Demon King, finds a human in his deadly plant kingdom and just shrugs.
• The nobility raises some minor questions before also shrugging.

Where is the tension? Where is the sense of consequence? Why does your Demon Realm feel less like a brutal fantasy world and more like “Somewhere, California” where everyone is mildly inconvenienced at best? Sure, Cali is the demonic hellhole I'll never wish my enemy to travel to, but why it feels that way?

Not to mention about dialogue tags. Your dialogue is bloated like a corpse in a space vacuum. Every single character says something, then does something, then says something again, then does something else. You don’t trust your reader to infer who is speaking, so you keep spoon-feeding them like a toddler. The result? A pacing disaster. The story drags like it’s being written by someone who’s afraid of that reader will not infer who's speaking. So, it reads like a script for a sitcom, not a novel. This is where your logos goes to California and never is seen again.

That brings me to my final point—your writing isn’t written like a webnovel.

It’s written like visual media. A script. A visual novel. A piece of fiction designed to be consumed alongside something else. You structure conversations like the reader can see the characters on screen, catching their quirks and personalities through animation, voice acting, and facial expressions, but this isn’t a visual medium. It’s a webnovel. And in webnovels, you don’t just create a world—you have to persuade the reader to enter it. You have to convince them to care.

You didn’t invite me into your world. You just built it and assumed people would show up, and that’s why, despite 100+ chapters, your novel has 5.5k views.

Because creation isn’t enough; persuasion is survival.

 

[sbdrag]

If you merged a Tolkien knockoff, a fujoshi from NovelUpdates, and a theater script producer with an addiction to dialogue tags, you’d get this webnovel. It’s a strange, mutated thing—not bad, not good, just aggressively mediocre, the literary equivalent of an overcooked duck breast. I read three chapters. I analyzed through three chapters. I endured three chapters. My verdict? Meh. Passable. Readable. Functional.

It’s like reading George R.R. Martin when he’s at his least deranged (which is rare). You know, those moments between the incest and the five-page descriptions of what everyone is eating? That’s your novel—except instead of a meticulously crafted world, it’s a fantasy realm that feels like an HR department’s break room.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Your synopsis is fine. It does its job. It tells me what’s going to happen, introduces the characters, and sprinkles in some intrigue. But right out the gate, you made your first critical error: your webnovel cover. That thing isn’t a cover—it’s a spoiler. It’s a giant neon sign that screams “Two males will eventually kiss, fujoshis welcome, everyone else get out.” And trust me, they get out.

This cover is a mistake not just because it’s BL, but because it limits your audience before they even read a single word. The implication alone is enough to repel the majority. Not because they hate BL, but because it’s presented so unsubtly that it might as well come with a flashing sign: “This is not for you.” There's a reason some BL stories in this website don't include two males violently kissing each other. They have either MC or ML awkwardly standing, or just MC himself. But fine, let’s say you’re okay with that—you only want the BL audience. You’ve still divided that audience into two: those who like your brand of slow-burn domestic demon to human romance and those who will drop it because even among BL lovers, not everyone has the patience for three chapters of plot convenience and pointless court politics.

Now, let’s get into the real problem: your writing doesn’t justify the narrow audience you’re catering to. This is where your ethos becomes nonexistent. Poof! Gone.

You’ve set the highest possible bar for yourself—a niche premise, a niche genre, and a niche audience—so you need to deliver an ultra-quality piece of fiction. Not “high quality.” Not “competent.” Ultra quality. It needs to be so insanely gripping that readers ignore the exclusivity of its appeal and get hooked anyway.

And yet… it’s just fine.

Chapter 1 is okay. It’s slice-of-life. The setup is there. The intrigue of a human secretly tending the Demon King’s murder-garden is actually a solid premise. You trick me into thinking, Oh? Maybe this is going somewhere interesting. Chapter 2 happens.

Six characters. SIX. You dump six characters on me like a clumsiest waiter in the world who just upended a tray of drinks onto my lap.

No visual media. No easy cues. Just name after name after name, all introduced within minutes. I don’t know them. I don’t care about them. I don’t even know which ones matter. And the worst part? It was completely avoidable. There’s an unspoken rule in storytelling—you don’t introduce a flood of characters at once unless you want the reader to immediately forget half of them. Why? Because readers need time to attach. They need a reason to care before you start handing out entire noble court rosters like a fantasy phonebook.

You didn’t introduce characters—you offloaded a giant EULA that readers will certainly will disengage from. This is where your pathos disappears off-screen, because it got too overcrowded on the scene.

And, AND as if that weren’t enough, you built your entire plot on convenience. Let me get this straight:

• The garden is alive but nobody noticed a random human tending it for ten years.
• Demons are chill about it.
• Jurao, the Demon King, finds a human in his deadly plant kingdom and just shrugs.
• The nobility raises some minor questions before also shrugging.

Where is the tension? Where is the sense of consequence? Why does your Demon Realm feel less like a brutal fantasy world and more like “Somewhere, California” where everyone is mildly inconvenienced at best? Sure, Cali is the demonic hellhole I'll never wish my enemy to travel to, but why it feels that way?

Not to mention about dialogue tags. Your dialogue is bloated like a corpse in a space vacuum. Every single character says something, then does something, then says something again, then does something else. You don’t trust your reader to infer who is speaking, so you keep spoon-feeding them like a toddler. The result? A pacing disaster. The story drags like it’s being written by someone who’s afraid of that reader will not infer who's speaking. So, it reads like a script for a sitcom, not a novel. This is where your logos goes to California and never is seen again.

That brings me to my final point—your writing isn’t written like a webnovel.

It’s written like visual media. A script. A visual novel. A piece of fiction designed to be consumed alongside something else. You structure conversations like the reader can see the characters on screen, catching their quirks and personalities through animation, voice acting, and facial expressions, but this isn’t a visual medium. It’s a webnovel. And in webnovels, you don’t just create a world—you have to persuade the reader to enter it. You have to convince them to care.

You didn’t invite me into your world. You just built it and assumed people would show up, and that’s why, despite 100+ chapters, your novel has 5.5k views.

Because creation isn’t enough; persuasion is survival.

Thanks for the feedback! I get what you mean by the cover, but this is the ninth cover and the only one where they kiss so far - I change them up pretty frequently, but I can only display one at a time on SH, so I'll take that hit until I change it again next week. Didn't start posting here until I was already eight covers in, so my early covers never made the rounds. I'm not really trying to target BL readers specifically - I usually avoid that, since I know I'm not writing to BL genre convention standards. If there was an LGBTQ+ tag for genre instead of BL, I would use that - it's what I do on other sites with the option. But since BL is the only fitting queer genre tag, that's what I grabbed.

On the other hand, if two men hugging while having a closed mouth kiss on the cover of a story openly advertising as a romance between two men is "violent" enough to turn people away, I really am okay with that. I didn't know "the leads in this romance will eventually kiss" is supposed to be a spoiler lol. I am queer, and my target audience is other queer people. They're usually okay with men kissing on the cover.

I also do get the character dump, which I expected the roast for - those six are the core recurring cast for most of the early series, and continue to recur through the rest of the series. I mostly describe them up front since they don't have a uniform appearance and I like to get upfront descriptions I can refer back to, but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. It's also why I use so much attribution - it's not that I don't trust the reader to infer who's speaking, it's that I have trouble following conversations in novels with too much attribution taken out too early, when I don't know the characters well enough to know who's speaking. (Sometimes I will have trouble following conversations in my own work when I read it back after a break and I didn't include enough attributions.)

If it were more logistically feasible, I probably would go back to space the descriptions out more, but it is what it is.

My Demon Realm doesn't feel like a brutal fantasy world by design. It's a slice-of-life romantic comedy - "low stakes, high fantasy". The danger of the Demon Realm, while real to the characters, is played for ocassional comedy in the story on purpose. I do everything in my power to make it clear this is not a brutal fantasy world story, so I'm honestly more concerned that you seem to think it's supposed to be than it isn't. I know I have a couple tags that lean that way, but I assumed the majority being romance-oriented would balance out the impression. But I have unironically marketed it as a sitcom before, so, spot on there.

I think very visually, so I write the same way. It's another reason I tend to frontload character descriptions - I can have trouble following conversations if I don't know what the people speaking look like. While you didn't like the visual writing, I've had plenty of comments on other sites from people who really enjoy how much it helps them see the characters, so to each their own. This is actually the first time someone has specifically critiqued the visualization aspect in my writing, so that was fun lol.

So, yeah. Most of this is stuff I did on purpose knowing it wouldn't be for everyone. I tend to world build as I write, so the world grows up along with the characters and their relationships - but if you're not having fun with the characters, I wouldn't expect you to force yourself through just to get to that. Sorry you didn't have more fun reading, and thanks again for the feedback!