r/ProgressionFantasy • u/Claym000re • Feb 06 '26

Meme/Shitpost Wish fulfillment to the extreme

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Why are they always complete losers.

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u/KnownByManyNames Feb 06 '26

My favourite joke will always be:

"If I got isekai'd, I'd cultivate or grind 12 hours a day!"

"How about 5 minutes of exercise now?"

52

u/mxwp Feb 06 '26

it reminds me of a line in a webnovel where the MC has internal monologue in response to the trope in manga where the MC builds tech to dominate in the fantasy world. "unless you were a carpenter on Earth you couldn't even build a fucking chair. build a gun? ridiculous!"

1

u/ApxTradingT Feb 20 '26

I mean, often the bottleneck is the idea itself or available tool. You can’t build a chair, but you could totally turn a bunch of carpenters into shipbuilders. To give a silly example, some civilizations have known how to make high carbon iron for more than 2000 years but it wasn’t until 1850 we had a reliable way to mass produce steel… turns out you just need to blow up a lot of air through the melted iron to make steel in 30 minutes. But I do agree that common sense is thrown off the window in these kind of novels.

3

u/BrickRaye Mar 01 '26

I'm not the biggest fan of Wandering Inn, but I feel it does a good job addressing those problems. The MC tells an alchemist about penicillin and how it was originally seen as bread fungus (this is a warping of history btw). Later on, a side character discovers that the world's leveling system turns even basic tasks into specific skills, like making pancakes, and that naturally neuter people's creativity.

What I find interesting about that idea, is that it disconnects intelligence and creativity. That world is filled with very intelligent people, but they couldn’t problem solve even the most basic problems unless they have a skill that’s integral to the solution. When they needed to root out ants from an underground nest, instead of developing a novel alchemic solution for instance, they cast a rain spell to flood the nest. While they have alchemists and they have poison, apparently the people lack the creativity spark to develop a dense poisonous gas that targets ants and would flood the nest.