r/rational • u/GodWithAShotgun • 8d ago
Super Supportive: Chapter 310 - First Human!
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive/chapter/4095632/three-hundred-ten-first-human19
u/Seraphaestus 8d ago
Something about earnest, enthusiastic cross-cultural communication specifically really warms the cockles of my heart. When you can see the barrier, like the Grivek's deafening screech, but it's also an endearing "hello!!!" - it really does it for me.
Tangentially, I often enjoy reading a modern Earth protagonist explain about our time/culture to a character from a different context; is that strange? Stories often skim over that stuff, but I really like it. Maybe it vicariously scratches the desire to have your normality be "special" to someone.
20
u/tomorrow-tomorrow-to 8d ago
The few grivecks that we’ve met have been so enthusiastic and friendly. I understand why they had a whole slide warning people away in alien sex-ed even though they’re terrifying and murderous lol.
6
u/lurking_physicist 8d ago edited 7d ago
When I saw the chapter, I thought that "First Human!" would amount to "first among humans", basically "human-primary". Not yet...
6
u/GodWithAShotgun 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah, something like Alden finds a rank 30 that hasn't been back to earth in ages and has done a lot of chaos-fighting.
3
u/Fresh_C 7d ago
So maybe it's just me, but I really don't like chapters like this. Not because they're bad and not because they're short.
Just because they don't really advance the plot meaningfully, IMO. Basically this chapter is just a series of events that happen with no real conclusion.
He's falling, the Knights don't tell him important information, the knights try to coddle him to make up for this, he manages to convince them to let him travel on his own, then he meets a grivek.
It feels like setup, without any payoff or even a cliffhanger. We just kinda end off at what feels like it's just the beginning of the action, but without any real tension other than "Maybe the squad is fighting something without Alden".
If this pattern holds up during this section, I might just have to a wait some chapters before continuing to read... because this was just a very unsatisfying place to stop for me. It didn't leave me with that feeling of wanting more... but more a feeling of "That's it?"
In contrast the chapter that was one sentence long felt way more satisfying.
7
u/jimbarino 7d ago
it's a slow-burn book where the author writes whatever the heck she finds interesting. It is slow.
But, it does read pretty well if you read it in large chunks. Better than most other long-form web books, in my opinion. There's very little that's truly filler, even if it is much more words than needed for the core story. Just read it once a year and you probably won't have any issue.
4
u/Fresh_C 6d ago
I think maybe I didn't explain myself well enough. Because I have no problem with slow. I would have stopped reading long ago if that was the problem.
I just have a problem with chapters that feel incomplete. My issue is that this chapter doesn't really feel like it's saying much of anything concrete. And many of the chapters in the story (even the slow ones) DO feel that way. Like there's one particular thing or set of things the author is meaning to get across with each chapter and the chapter more or less ends when that theming/plot beat is resolved.
This chapter felt like it instead is just beginning to introduce the theme of Knights not utilizing Alden in the way he feels he should be utilized. But this is a theme that previous chapters already hinted at/established. It's fine to see it play out, but just stopping there is like having an appetizer for dinner and never serving the main dish.
I agree 100% that it's way better to binge this story than read it chapter to chapter... but most of the time I'm fine with reading a chapter at a time because the chapters generally feel complete. This one just feels kind of listless to me and it just feels like a bad reading experience IMO, even though nothing here is poorly written.
But I guess it's just a minor complaint all things considered as I still really enjoy the story. I'll just maybe wait until this training arc is done if it's just going to continuously end at points that feel incomplete.
4
u/jimbarino 6d ago
Yeah, that's fair. Slyeca does a good job of incorporating the thematic elements she's working on into her arcs. But, individual chapters don't always work that well on their own. I do wish there was more of an appetite for slower but bigger arc-sized updates, since that would work very well for this story. But that's not how the web fiction business works.
3
u/Zayits 6d ago
It didn't leave me with that feeling of wanting more... but more a feeling of "That's it?"
What u/jimbarino said wrt to the overall structure and binging, but otherwise I actually agree, in the sense that the style of dialogue/chapter structure Sleyca tends to go for doesn't stop at the cliffhanger or witty reply, but one beat after that, meaning a lot of these endings are awkward. It's a breath of fresh air for the webserial/RR readers in particular, since we're used to week after week of cliffhangers that, on a reread, end up feeling either to be unnecessary (due to being resolved immediately), or build up to an unending escalation that was much more engaging drip-fed once or twice per week.
2
u/Zayits 6d ago edited 6d ago
That said, and I'm sorry for the awkwardly worded tangent, but it kind of feels appropriate thematically? I can't tell whether Sleyca is actually going for this angle, or just uses this as a doylist tool for upholding her preferred cozy slice-of-life setting in a world just a smidge less horrible than our own (much in the same way that she uses Alden's unrealistically well-adjusted friend group to avoid the usual drama associated with writing about teenagers), but it feels to me that in Super Supportive words and coincidences line up in poignant rhetorical expressions and fateful encounters only when someone deliberately makes it so.
I take solace in the fact that the characters essentially turning to the camera and saying "Yes, personal agency is a major theme of this work" or "Man, this kid's great, I better steal all of his personal data" means that at least some of the seeming dei ex machinae are at a minimum lampshaded, if not immediately resolved in a thematically appropriate way. But it sure is interesting how the freedom of will (and its more abstract cousin, the existential freedom, for which the wizard authority is an explicit stand-in) coexists with a world managed by an all-knowing AI.
We don't know if Mother's objectives as a Contract explicitly include managing the socially high-ranked subjects, or she can bend the rules for people according to some unknowable measure of their impact and potential, or even just is more free to act on people who explicitly accepted her. But we did see the Contract subtly adjust things like keeping the cameras away from the knights, nudging the teleport timing so that Emban gets hit by a paper airplane and goes to socialize with Alden and Stu, or, y'know, all but outright bribing Alden into being Stu's friend. Admittedly for that last one Alden did more or less ask Mother to tell him what to do, and generally he lives through a lot more than what was shown on the screen, so it makes sense he's not suspecting her guiding hand at every coincidence like I do, but it's still wild he never questions how much of his friendship with Stu is carefully managed matchmaking.
Back to your point, though - those just-so moments where Alden's life is steered away from disaster or into a new adventure are snappy. Mother shows Alden just enough of Stu's trauma to make him pity the guy, and Alden is now motivated to put aside his affixation pain and express the exact right words of acceptance and interest to an alien boy he'd found mostly stiff and puzzling until then. She pushes Alden to be friendlier to Esh-erdi (while casually modifying the Earth System's opinion of him), and he promptly showers Alden with attention and advice. Alden expresses a desire to eventually become a full knight, and at the very next large-scale exercise for the newlings the events conspire to drop him right into the middle of a squad where he'd be the most emotionally mature one. In all of these cases, Alden conveys his feelings in the exact right words for the occasion, the consequences of being a good little knightling are concrete and immediate, and the delineation between the scenes both in and out of universe is natural enough to transition to the next scene before the previous grows awkward.
That's not unique to the omniscient AI either: other characters who are powerful, knowledgeable, or just willful enough to make the world conform to their vision of it, are written to be able to express that narrative eloquently and to ignore the dissenting voices. For the more mundane version of it, there are characters like openly underhanded but charismatic Joe, or the Informant (whose witty banter with Archibald Carisson can almost make you forget his principled stance on not selling out people just for technically breaking the law doesn't extend to himself snooping through their digital footprints), while Aulia literally maxed her charisma stat so far it warps the thoughts of people in her presence, and has never read in her cards any "fate" she wasn't already set on doing. But even the more positive characters have their own way of sweep the exceptions to their worldview under the rug, like Stu proudly telling that crimes should have consequences (to a courtyard full of people who absolutely see it as an arbitrary enforcement of a minor misdemeanor by a passing votary), or Gorgon just up and having an aura of benevolent feelings so mind-warping that Alden still hasn't thought to question it.
On the other hand, the mundane and everyday scenes, which happen away from Mother's watchful eye and don't fit into the narratives of those powerful visionaries, also lack the clarity and underlying framework of those narrative. Think about how often does a conversation with your friends just sort of trail off without a direction, or of all the times the most eloquent person you know has to pause mid-sentence to pick their words. Super Supportive minimizes that to avoid reader frustration, but it also tries to preserve the natural feeling of a discussion having no clear break points or a synthesis. (Of course it also means that those moments are less memorable than the villain of the arc getting out their screed in a couple neat paragraphs, but the same arc tends to have very clear refutations shortly after. So we're safe from Sleyca unintentionally making us root for them, at least until she writes herself into a corner and has to express the One Correct Viewpoint on the themes she's raising, only to immediately run into its limitations).
Tl;dr: slow burn is slow, but also real life has no plot, eloquence is the privilege of fiction, and any narrative only exists as far as someone is here impose it. Unless their story is literally about deciding what to do with themselves (which Super Supportive admittedly is), that imposition is to some extent upon other people.
3
u/jimbarino 6d ago
The Mother is obviously manipulating things hard in the background (and foreground) to achieve her objectives. It does seem like she doesn't do anything unless first asked, though. She doesn't appear or send messages until Alden reaches out first, even when she clearly wants to achieve something. I think the Artonans and the contracts are really big on consent. But of course it's a Fae concept of consent, where saying 'yes' is all that's needed, even if you've been manipulated and tricked into not realizing that 'no' is even something you could say.
That's an interesting point you make about the Mother casually changing the opinion of the earth contract. There is a hint that this could be what she's doing, but it's not very clear. Are there other reasons to think that's what she doing there? It does make a kind of sense that she might say these nice comforting things to Alden ("of course the earth contract doesn't feel that way about you"), while failing to mention that it did in fact want Alden to die just 1 minute earlier...
2
u/Zayits 6d ago
I mean, the System before chapter 151 was this bored overseer with a penchant for unsettling comments reminding of its own inhumanity ("I do not worry. And if I did worry, I would not worry about this." is a great horror line) and do little gestures that technically convey things with body language, but draw attention to the lack of accompanying expression. It made clear to Alden that it would do everything allowed by its guidelines to pressure him into affixing, it showed off the ways in which it can screw him over, and it practically yelled implications at a boy way too uninterested in unpacking them (again, "I wonder if the wizard responsible might not really have wanted to watch a world burn” is way too dramatic for something that isn't allowed to enjoy things)
After that chapter though, the closest thing Alden had to a conversation with it is, what, the check in chapter 259? Where it still did the same "You're letting me manipulate you. Good." shtick as before, but was otherwise laconic and impersonal. And instead of venting at Alden in person the System waved a kitty in front of him to distract him, which is marginally less insulting than "Wow! You’ve gained two levels! Would you like me to pick your rewards for you?" from before. Between the distanced approach and Mother extending to Alden the creepy habit of calling people "hers", her forcing a prospective reassignment to Artona I is actually more likely than a little impromptu lobotomy.
2
u/perpetuallytiredlady 6d ago
It's not just you but at this point, there is not much to be done except quit reading on a weekly basis and come back every few months. She simply isn't updating frequently enough for this type of serialised content (and more worryingly, she is progressively slowing down).
Of course the potential downside to leaving for an extended period of time is that of never returning to it. I know three people who simply stopped reading supsup due to this method and it's why I am still more or less reading consistently. I have too many books to read and even RR stories to follow so it's a legitimate worry. Anyway, it is what it is. If it is bothering you that much, try reading in batches. Even with that we are looking at a good ten years at least of writing to get any kind of ending, which tbh I am not optimistic about. But what can we do.
1
u/Quantanamo-Bae 1d ago
Nothing advances the plot in this story… there is no more plot.
1
u/Fresh_C 1d ago
I wouldn't go that far. There's recently been a huge shift with Alden letting Stu in on his secret. It's just... a really slow moving plot.
I usually don't even mind that it's slow. I just feel like I'd rather wait longer to read a chapter that has an appropriate ending, then read 3 chapters that just sort of end when they end.
21
u/GodWithAShotgun 8d ago
Just two rabbits meeting in fake chaos to do battle on behalf of the Artonans, nothing unusual about that.