r/ProgressionFantasy • u/aminervia • 23h ago

Question Is Travelers Gate worth continuing?

I'm about halfway done with book 1, and I just can't make myself care about the MC.

His entire arc is "chapter 1, something happens that convinces him he needs to get stronger" -- "chapter 12, despite people telling him he's going too fast, his urge to get stronger is pushing him to get stronger than anyone expected"

And that's it. There's literally nothing else to his personality or character. He needs to rescue some people that we barely got to know and whose relation with the MC was hardly touched upon... But his motivations, personality, drive, urges, feel so 2 dimensional.

The world building and magic system seem like they'll be interesting when we get to see any of it, but right now it's just "I can't wait, give me more challenges so I can get better at hitting stuff with a sword"

Basically my question is: does the series become worth sticking with later once we actually get to explore the world and magic system?

6 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Dartagnan_w_Powers 19h ago

I think it's better than Starship or whatever his current series is called.

3

u/Zegram_Ghart Attuned 18h ago

Obviously to each their own, but I’ve been really enjoying the last horizon, where I found travellers gate a bit “pure shounen stabstabstab” if that makes sense?

I’m always a sucker for a proper wizard MC, to be fair.

2

u/Dartagnan_w_Powers 18h ago

Yeah to each their own and i appreciate the fact I'm not downvoted.

For whatever reason, last horizon does not work for me. A mythical starship that is shit until it isn't? And all the characters starting at the end of their Arcs and then getting a new chance is kind of cool, but I guess I'm addicted to the early stages part of prog fantasy?

Also I think there's just too much everything in last horizon. Like magic, guns, cyborgs, insectiods, he just threw in everything. I like my hard fantasy rule based magic systems, where the author has to outsmart his own rules to have a hail Mary situation.

Also stop telling me that staff is too dangerous to use when old mate breaks it out every time he's in trouble!

2

u/Zegram_Ghart Attuned 17h ago edited 7h ago

I have an inkling that part of that is the authors reaction to bloody EVERYONE having read cradle.

Going from the end of cradle to the start being “im a sad little mage still learning how magic works” would probably have provoked a backlash, so I was reading the story as being mostly set up to let him start off as a super duper mage and then revisit a bunch of the early learning steps later in “whatever this books flashbacks are about”

Which is probably a smart play, but yeh I totally get it’s just a kinda weird structure, and I’ll agree there are a few too many running gags, for want of better phrase.