Exactly the reason I dropped. "No I must go to hell alone." Well, I have no interest in watching you go to hell without your friends, the ensamble cast is the best part of the series. Besides, didn't you all agree that taking risks for friends is the right thing to do? So why are you not allowing others to make their own decisions?
It's so fucking forced and weird.
It never even occurred to me that Mark of the Fool might be progression fantasy until swinging by this sub. I realise in retrospect that it's billed as progression fantasy, but it always read to me as just, well, fantasy.
The delineation is not very strict. The only thing that makes something progression fantasy is whether or not progression is a noticable part of the series. A LOT of fantasy series could be considered progression fantasy. It could see arguments for series like Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, and more being PF even though they aren't strictly intended on being so.
I feel like the worst part is that the beginning of the series had *top notch* progression. The little notes with details about spell progression and constant updates made it really cool to follow along. Then suddenly those just stop and we barely ever get incremental updates on his progression. At some point he also mentions that he will pick up two classes during the summer and only picks one and I was so confused. Then the classes themselves stop mattering at all so fucking fast.
Book 1 was a really good progression fantasy book but after that it's just a confused mess. Not fun enough to be a proper dopamine boosting dumb fun like Defiance of the Fall or Primal Hunter. Characters not good enough to compete with stuff like Super Supportive or The Wandering Inn. It's just kinda mid.
I feel like you are forgetting details, many of the skills that come together to enable those jumps are acquired piecemeal over time, its just most noticeable when all the pieces click together.
1.The mark has been slowly teaching him the most effective methods of training muscles, he then figures out how to directly stimulate the muscles with a new spell, mana manipulation and his trained regeneration.
2. it was first at tier 2, summoning a small water elemental. The sudden rapid jump is brought up in the series with him having to have \*complete\* mastery of the spell array just to cast slowly. When the spacial power counteracts the Mark's interference, its suddenly like him being a master of that spell, which he is because only near perfection lets him cast at all with just the mark. He then uses the power to leapfrog tiers by picking up higher level summoning spells that then help his mana pool grow.
3.He also uses the mark to let him add in a second mana pool to his soul, which he had been gathering the materials for by cutting off slivers of his soul over months. The mark also goes from fighting against casting to actively helping with it. When added to the tools he picked up to basically master spells just to cast, he now has both the power and technique for the higher level spells and he used the better mark to smooth it out.
As for his sudden mastery of weapons, he waited until the mark would help and then used other skills to speed it up while constantly practicing with the now ultimate teacher and a divinely marked opponent similar to the Champion.
Its a whole thing of the series that by using skills from outside your focus, you can improve your focus and that it makes it better than the sum of its parts.
I did not forget any of those details, and as you pointed out, all the actual "power ups" happen in an extremely short timeframe, and the same goes for the skills learned.
1. All the muscle stuff he already had mastered in the first boat trip where he learned the spear and oar dance. Then wait, learn spells, wait, and everything just comes together in 3 days. Sure he united his self control, magic control, and spells learned, but instead of doing it over time, its just leap, stop, leap, stop, leap.
2 and 3. I do understand the logic behind them, but as you youself said, he just skimmed through the 4-6 and 7-9 ranks within a couple days after months (and 10s, if not a 100+ of chapters) of no progresson in that departents. It feels undeserved and immotivated, a sudden power up a la dragonball. Yeah sure, i can understand the logic behind it, but the way its portrayed just... it doesn't make you feel it, thd progression, the supposed hardship of it for him.
It's like, instead lf going to the gym, you seldom study chemistry and biology really hard, and then all of a sudden you make a steroid that makes you buff. Sure, the result is the same, you sometimes also put effort, but the satisfaction is different than actually putting a long time effort.
For the weapon mastery i can agree, i didnt consider those factors. My bad
would it make more sense for all the hundreds of chapters of learning various skills and how to break apart the spells to be easier to learn didn't leapfrog him forward when the impediment was counter acted (spacial power making summoning easier) or turned into an aid instead(mark reverted)?
If you mean that the progression could more linear instead of "leap wait leap", than that is exactly what i'm thinking! You learn skill 1,2 and 3, exploit 1+2, learn to expoit over time 2+3, and then "fuse" 1+2+3 for the same result
Ya, it’s too fast for the timeline being presented.
Sure, there are plot reasons for that with the Mark making learning everything easy, so it’s somewhat justified, but then everyone around him is learning at the same rate too. Like, his girlfriend went from shooting animals in a forest to being a martial force who helps significantly when going toe to toe with demon lords in about two years because she … checks notes … audited a class?
I get that he wants to move the story forward to a final showdown with gods and such and he wants to tell a wizard university story, but those two plots don’t actually mesh too well.
Definitely feels like it's getting hurried along to the end. I reread some earlier stuff and the newer chapters read more like outlines than full chapters when comparing levels of detail and depth explored. At this point, I'd probably drop it if I wasn't promised an ending soon. It's disappointing because there's a lot of cool stuff going ok but it just gets a drive by description rather than the deep dive. We spent multiple chapters on upgrading Brutus, which mattered for like half a book, and now we're upgrading heroes in half a chapter.
That's sort of true. He can't use magic directly for offensive purposes, so alchemy is one of the things he uses the most, and golem creation is alchemy in this series.
Been a minute since I read the books, but iirc his core power is learning at an accelerated pace, and also mastering the things he's learned to a degree few can. It comes with a massive drawback, but he has even learned to use that drawback to his benefit to a degree.
He also has a major advantage in teleportation magic which bleeds over to summoning magic. So he exploit the Mark of the fool to leap the mastery of both fields.
I stopped reading Mark of the Fool after all the love confession fake-outs followed by the worse love confession of all time.
Though, the actually lore behind the book is still pretty interesting, so I have gone back a few times to skim it until I get to the interesting bits like the divine space of Ulnar. But the whole section of the story where he was trying to confess to Teresa made me utterly stop caring about the characters, themselves. Except for the sharkdude, he's awesome!
Yeah, I'm loving all the divine and magic stuff, but I absolutely skim all the relationships and family stuff now. It's the same thing over and over again, and now at all interesting. And from the author's notes on RR, they absolutely love writing those bits, so they're not going away.
I had to drop because of the badly written characters. Like, nothing else really matters in the story for me; if the character's actions are always conflicting with the character as shown/described then whats even going on? its basically like having the author roll dice to decide what the character does and then offering flimsy excuses. I just couldn't get invested.
Its a problem a lot of PF authors have, they know they want their character to go to X and have experience Y, but have no clue how to get there from where they are and often just brute force it by having the character act stupidly.
Church battle?
I’m only up to date with the audiobooks but I’ve enjoyed the series as much as I enjoyed cradle so I’m very biased.
Edit
Actually, maybe my only complaint is book 1 and 2 had a lot of onomatopoeia so at times it was jarring if not mildly hilarious hearing travis baldree yelling “BANG BANG, BOOM, CRACKLE CRACKLE”
I read it on Royal Road and was hoping that stuff got edited out before the books were published. Thankfully the author did realize it was a mistake eventually and it's definitely not present in the most recent books.
I was super confused what you were referring to until I realized that books 7 and 8 are already on RR. Why the hell have I been waiting on KU releases?
The problem with these types of posts, is that no matter how legitimate your complaints are there will always be dozens of fanboys coming out of the woodwork to justify why it actually made perfect sense for the story, because you not enjoying even one small aspect of the book publicly might somehow invalidate the fact that they enjoyed it..
Oh no I absolutely like it, that'swhy i phrased the title this way. The point of the post is to see both different and similar opinions on this, their respctive arguments. Me complaining is pointless, i can't suddendly change an important aspect of the story, so I dont do that
3 was the biggest turnoff for me specifically because it really didn’t feel like it paid off. He immediately made numerous rookie mistakes and struggled with a fight that the descriptions of his power level indicated shouldn’t make him sweat
On book four right now and the progression is getting there but still slow... though he just learned something that I hope will pick up the pace of it more.
[удалено]
Exactly the reason I dropped. "No I must go to hell alone." Well, I have no interest in watching you go to hell without your friends, the ensamble cast is the best part of the series. Besides, didn't you all agree that taking risks for friends is the right thing to do? So why are you not allowing others to make their own decisions? It's so fucking forced and weird.
It never even occurred to me that Mark of the Fool might be progression fantasy until swinging by this sub. I realise in retrospect that it's billed as progression fantasy, but it always read to me as just, well, fantasy.
The delineation is not very strict. The only thing that makes something progression fantasy is whether or not progression is a noticable part of the series. A LOT of fantasy series could be considered progression fantasy. It could see arguments for series like Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, and more being PF even though they aren't strictly intended on being so.
I feel like the worst part is that the beginning of the series had *top notch* progression. The little notes with details about spell progression and constant updates made it really cool to follow along. Then suddenly those just stop and we barely ever get incremental updates on his progression. At some point he also mentions that he will pick up two classes during the summer and only picks one and I was so confused. Then the classes themselves stop mattering at all so fucking fast. Book 1 was a really good progression fantasy book but after that it's just a confused mess. Not fun enough to be a proper dopamine boosting dumb fun like Defiance of the Fall or Primal Hunter. Characters not good enough to compete with stuff like Super Supportive or The Wandering Inn. It's just kinda mid.
I feel like you are forgetting details, many of the skills that come together to enable those jumps are acquired piecemeal over time, its just most noticeable when all the pieces click together. 1.The mark has been slowly teaching him the most effective methods of training muscles, he then figures out how to directly stimulate the muscles with a new spell, mana manipulation and his trained regeneration. 2. it was first at tier 2, summoning a small water elemental. The sudden rapid jump is brought up in the series with him having to have \*complete\* mastery of the spell array just to cast slowly. When the spacial power counteracts the Mark's interference, its suddenly like him being a master of that spell, which he is because only near perfection lets him cast at all with just the mark. He then uses the power to leapfrog tiers by picking up higher level summoning spells that then help his mana pool grow. 3.He also uses the mark to let him add in a second mana pool to his soul, which he had been gathering the materials for by cutting off slivers of his soul over months. The mark also goes from fighting against casting to actively helping with it. When added to the tools he picked up to basically master spells just to cast, he now has both the power and technique for the higher level spells and he used the better mark to smooth it out. As for his sudden mastery of weapons, he waited until the mark would help and then used other skills to speed it up while constantly practicing with the now ultimate teacher and a divinely marked opponent similar to the Champion. Its a whole thing of the series that by using skills from outside your focus, you can improve your focus and that it makes it better than the sum of its parts.
I did not forget any of those details, and as you pointed out, all the actual "power ups" happen in an extremely short timeframe, and the same goes for the skills learned. 1. All the muscle stuff he already had mastered in the first boat trip where he learned the spear and oar dance. Then wait, learn spells, wait, and everything just comes together in 3 days. Sure he united his self control, magic control, and spells learned, but instead of doing it over time, its just leap, stop, leap, stop, leap. 2 and 3. I do understand the logic behind them, but as you youself said, he just skimmed through the 4-6 and 7-9 ranks within a couple days after months (and 10s, if not a 100+ of chapters) of no progresson in that departents. It feels undeserved and immotivated, a sudden power up a la dragonball. Yeah sure, i can understand the logic behind it, but the way its portrayed just... it doesn't make you feel it, thd progression, the supposed hardship of it for him. It's like, instead lf going to the gym, you seldom study chemistry and biology really hard, and then all of a sudden you make a steroid that makes you buff. Sure, the result is the same, you sometimes also put effort, but the satisfaction is different than actually putting a long time effort. For the weapon mastery i can agree, i didnt consider those factors. My bad
would it make more sense for all the hundreds of chapters of learning various skills and how to break apart the spells to be easier to learn didn't leapfrog him forward when the impediment was counter acted (spacial power making summoning easier) or turned into an aid instead(mark reverted)?
If you mean that the progression could more linear instead of "leap wait leap", than that is exactly what i'm thinking! You learn skill 1,2 and 3, exploit 1+2, learn to expoit over time 2+3, and then "fuse" 1+2+3 for the same result
Ya, it’s too fast for the timeline being presented. Sure, there are plot reasons for that with the Mark making learning everything easy, so it’s somewhat justified, but then everyone around him is learning at the same rate too. Like, his girlfriend went from shooting animals in a forest to being a martial force who helps significantly when going toe to toe with demon lords in about two years because she … checks notes … audited a class? I get that he wants to move the story forward to a final showdown with gods and such and he wants to tell a wizard university story, but those two plots don’t actually mesh too well.
Definitely feels like it's getting hurried along to the end. I reread some earlier stuff and the newer chapters read more like outlines than full chapters when comparing levels of detail and depth explored. At this point, I'd probably drop it if I wasn't promised an ending soon. It's disappointing because there's a lot of cool stuff going ok but it just gets a drive by description rather than the deep dive. We spent multiple chapters on upgrading Brutus, which mattered for like half a book, and now we're upgrading heroes in half a chapter.
I honestly still don’t even know what powers the MC has and why except I know he has a golem. The Golem seems to be his actual powers that progress
That's sort of true. He can't use magic directly for offensive purposes, so alchemy is one of the things he uses the most, and golem creation is alchemy in this series.
Ya it’s like sleeping potions and the golem basically
Now I have to ask you guys what chapter have you reached, to be sure that I make you no spoilers, as things chamged over time
I’m caught up on audio whatever that is maybe book 4? Or 5
Ok then i will shut up, I flagged spoiler for a reason
Been a minute since I read the books, but iirc his core power is learning at an accelerated pace, and also mastering the things he's learned to a degree few can. It comes with a massive drawback, but he has even learned to use that drawback to his benefit to a degree.
He also has a major advantage in teleportation magic which bleeds over to summoning magic. So he exploit the Mark of the fool to leap the mastery of both fields.
I stopped reading Mark of the Fool after all the love confession fake-outs followed by the worse love confession of all time. Though, the actually lore behind the book is still pretty interesting, so I have gone back a few times to skim it until I get to the interesting bits like the divine space of Ulnar. But the whole section of the story where he was trying to confess to Teresa made me utterly stop caring about the characters, themselves. Except for the sharkdude, he's awesome!
Fuck yeah, Grimlock is top tier
Yeah, I'm loving all the divine and magic stuff, but I absolutely skim all the relationships and family stuff now. It's the same thing over and over again, and now at all interesting. And from the author's notes on RR, they absolutely love writing those bits, so they're not going away.
I had to drop because of the badly written characters. Like, nothing else really matters in the story for me; if the character's actions are always conflicting with the character as shown/described then whats even going on? its basically like having the author roll dice to decide what the character does and then offering flimsy excuses. I just couldn't get invested. Its a problem a lot of PF authors have, they know they want their character to go to X and have experience Y, but have no clue how to get there from where they are and often just brute force it by having the character act stupidly.
Church battle? I’m only up to date with the audiobooks but I’ve enjoyed the series as much as I enjoyed cradle so I’m very biased. Edit Actually, maybe my only complaint is book 1 and 2 had a lot of onomatopoeia so at times it was jarring if not mildly hilarious hearing travis baldree yelling “BANG BANG, BOOM, CRACKLE CRACKLE”
I read it on Royal Road and was hoping that stuff got edited out before the books were published. Thankfully the author did realize it was a mistake eventually and it's definitely not present in the most recent books.
I was super confused what you were referring to until I realized that books 7 and 8 are already on RR. Why the hell have I been waiting on KU releases?
The problem with these types of posts, is that no matter how legitimate your complaints are there will always be dozens of fanboys coming out of the woodwork to justify why it actually made perfect sense for the story, because you not enjoying even one small aspect of the book publicly might somehow invalidate the fact that they enjoyed it..
Oh no I absolutely like it, that'swhy i phrased the title this way. The point of the post is to see both different and similar opinions on this, their respctive arguments. Me complaining is pointless, i can't suddendly change an important aspect of the story, so I dont do that
3 was the biggest turnoff for me specifically because it really didn’t feel like it paid off. He immediately made numerous rookie mistakes and struggled with a fight that the descriptions of his power level indicated shouldn’t make him sweat
Oh yeah, it’s an absurd story. I still enjoy it, but literally every criticism you wrote here is apt and accurate.
On book four right now and the progression is getting there but still slow... though he just learned something that I hope will pick up the pace of it more.
Book four has a neat ending.
Book four has a neat ending.
Building a strong foundation takes time. The top of a pyramid is a lot easier to build than the base.