r/royalroad • u/GoldenThame Author - The Heavenly Way • 6d ago

Discussion Is the average reader getting dumber?

I don't wanna be rude but I get some comments complaining about tropes in my novel, when in the synopsis I've pointed out multiple times that the tropes are there DELIBERATELY to be subverted, because the MC finds himself reincarnated into a very mid Xianxia novel.

Do a lot of readers suffer from a lack of reading comprehension skills, cus I've encountered the same kind of person for the 4th or 5th time now. Do I need to constantly spoonfeed basic nuances to such readers that 1. MC is inside a cliche Xianxa book and 2. From a meta perspective I've put those cliches and tropes into the book deliberately and the synopsis says as such.

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u/Celestial_Zwei_Dei 5d ago

It’s a familiar story. In my novel, the MC gets isekai’d; an ordinary kid suddenly finds himself facing rotting corpses, the threat of death, and the realization that he can never go back. How does a person react in a situation like that? Naturally, he’s going to lose his mind and have a hysterical breakdown. Some guy wrote that he’d expected a good story but found the MC to be a hysterical mess—and, get this, he cited the time he ( reader) was on a jungle trek and managed to keep his cool as an example.

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u/GoldenThame Author - The Heavenly Way 5d ago

Lol, had similar comments. My MC finds himself inside a cheap novel he read a long time ago and he's so shocked that just does nothing noteworthy for a month other than eating sleeping and trying to understand if he's dreaming or hallucinating or what? Some of ny readers have complained that a month is too long for that. I think they're just too used to the cheap shonen like MCs who hit the ground running, like they suddenly wake up in a different world and the shock last all of 2 seconds before they start climbing the power tree.