I’ve started reading Unjust Depths which is a webnovel people have recommended. The early chapters seem a little stiff and too exposition-heavy, but the premise is interesting enough and folks have said the writing gets better, so I think I’ll see where it goes.
Chapter 2 is already a considerable improvement over chapter 1 imo, I think the author is better at writing military scifi than the opening loredump and out-of-place sex scene would lead you to believe.
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Alright there’s catgirls, I’m in.
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Unjust Depths is feeling increasingly like an excuse to cram in as many tropey gay ship dynamics as possible but it also just introduced a puppygirl in addition to the existing catgirls so who could say if it’s bad or not
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No it is just bad honestly. I’m sure it gets better but god they just keep introducing more fucking characters at a breakneck pace and they don’t give any of them time or space and all the dialogue is like. If the only reference you had for human behavior was fanfic. There’s so many fascinating ideas and interesting characters that just don’t have the chance to shine. I was just starting to get attached to one seemingly-protagonist group of people and then suddenly it shifts perspective and there’s a whole other dozen characters (who I feel much less sympathy with because they’re all awful people except maybe the puppygirl) who I’m suddenly supposed to care about.
Also they keep acting like homophobia is a thing in this world, like it’s clearly present in shaping people’s decisions and backstories but like. It isn’t actually present because literally everyone is gay. Being gay is so normal in the text and yet we’re led to believe it’s somehow also scandalous.
I feel like I need to write a better story just because of how upset I am with this one.
I will probably keep reading it anyway.
E: like when I say everyone is gay I seriously mean everyone. The fucking leader of the Nazi faction is gay. His sister is gay. Her maid is gay. Everyone’s gay. Where is this scandalous.
E2 cause I’m still mad: every fucking character has so much potential to be interesting and then they all get flattened down into a trope. The girl working for the Nazis even though she’s got a physical deformity that makes them see her as subhuman? That’s fascinating! Please explore her character and show what led her to this! But instead it’s just "she and the captain have a Forbidden Love, the Same Fucking Forbidden Love You’ve Seen 3 Times Already In Different Characters except now she’s a lil tsundere about it. Everyone’s end motivation is always just that they’re gay. Nobody seems to have other ideological priorities.
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@barquq can you move stuff into an unjust depths thread so I can keep ranting about this series without clogging this thread. I’ve entered my hater era
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done
grabs a bottle of hatorade
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Alright so the author’s legitimately pretty good at writing the mech combat. They’re still a little too explainey but generally when it’s big robots hitting each other, they manage to make it engaging.
So if I had just written a great robot duel between two “friends” turned enemies, and I was at the climactic point of that scene, and one of them happened to be a catgirl…
… I wouldn’t do this. I would close the word document and maybe go outside and take a walk and come back in a few days and delete that last bit. It completely ruins the tension. They did such a good job setting up this character as powerful, competent, fearsome, enraged, and then they just completely ruin it because they wanted to be cute I guess?? I would not put this on the internet. If I did I would quietly come back later and edit that part out and hope people forgot.
Like writing is hard I know but please. Show it to someone else before you post.
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GODDD WHAT
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That’s an amazing excerpt LMAO
Thank you for sharing this journey with us I semi-lurk a community where people are hype about Unjust Depths and I’d been feeling a little bit self-conscious about how I can’t read texts longer than 200 words so I can’t be a smart Unjust Depths reader but I’m happy to find out that Unjust Depths isn’t this daunting flawless epic but just something some person wrote. Excited to see where this goes and godspeed.
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maybe i’m off base but this just feels so irony-poisoned? like the person who wrote it is afraid to take anything seriously or feel a feeling
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I think that’s more the tone of the character than the writer, the writing feels pretty genuine most of the time. I get the sense they just don’t really know how to write dialog that isn’t like… Dreamworks/Marvel-esque trying-to-be-witty stuff.
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aaaaaah yea that definitely tracks. big “so that just happened” energy lmfao
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It has to get better, right? That many people can’t be that wrong about it, right?
It has so much potential and it’s been running for 4 years now, there’s no way it’s still bad, right?
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Yeah like there has to be SOMETHING here right? I see it described as this smart politically interesting thing by people over the age of 30 who aren’t “fandom” types of people. They can’t all be imagining it right it has to be doing more than this right? There’s only one way for the posters of Auldnoir to find out… 
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this is what’s wilding me out! cause I have seen Good Things said about this by people that I normally respect the opinions of! revie investigative journalism saving the day. 
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I think what it has to be is that at some point she’ll hire an editor or just have someone read over her stuff before she publishes it. I feel like having just one other person in the room could take this from a 5/10 to an 8/10 easily
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“Somehow the simple inertia of organic needs kept life moving on with surreal normalcy” is a phenomenal sentence honestly.
She’s got the politics, she’s got the military action, it’s just any time it zooms in on a personal level it becomes so detached from what people are actually like. It just becomes cartoonish.
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Ok nvm it’s good now.
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Had some growing pains and finally hit its stride?
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