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[RT] Forty Millenniums of Cultivation 196-203 = HPMOR 33

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• u/storybookknight:

  I dunno, the multiple hidden hoverboards in various rocks trick seemed a little bit narratively convenient to me. The odds of someone being able to predict someone else's reactions so well that they had hidden back-up chips inside of a board carrying the chip, etc etc, and the way that all of those came in handy stretched credibility. If the author had walked us through a bit of Li Yao's plans ahead of time & made us wonder 'how is he going to use all of these seemingly useless items' it would have had a better effect, I think - instead I felt like the author was making it up as he went along (not unlikely, since it's a serial, but a little disappointing.)
  

  • u/MultipartiteMind:

    (Throwing out a tangential(?) thought; I may be abnormally genre-savvy, but it stood out to me how I immediately thought at the relevant moment [](#s "'Ahh, that's surely a device faking those unrecoverable symptoms'"), and rolled my eyes at this possibility not occurring to any of the other characters.  Then again, I could be particularly affected by having recently read through the Spirit Sword Mountain chapters, which had a similar ploy.)
    
    For the 'actions-prediction', keep in mind that everything would have gone even easier for Li Yao if they hadn't predicted that far.  He could have gone straight to the final plan by dropping the chip on the ground (sort of?  See below), but had a hidden robot just in case they were okay with going after him and overlooked it, and had a decoy chip in case they only took it and didn't break it open, and had a decoy robot in case they only found it and stopped searching.  --Further come-to-think-of-it, since the true chip was found by the weight comparison, he might have done better to only have the one robot.  Or a 'hidden true chip' inside both robots, the same weight.
    
    Come to think of it, there's one forced point.  His final gambit rested on being able to warn the swordspeople about the ambush (and it's notable that he could predict it so easily while the swordpeople couldn't...), but there was no reason for them not to start with (go straight to) the final chip that they correctly predicted was the real chip, in which case they would never have seen his message and he would have lost.  Especially you'd think that they would do all they could not to let any more messages of his play if avoidable, after the chaos he started with the messenger cranes!
    
    Ah, I just remembered a happy moment (in contrast with the above thoughts):  I was very glad that one of the characters reacted only a bit slower than I did to the 'face unrecognisable, sent to the back' situation!  (Of course, not reacting before giving the order to go the back is still much slower, if counting in action-time rather than reading-time.)
    

• u/EliezerYudkowsky:

  FMC 196-203 is pretty much straight-up the xianxia version of HPMOR's underwater Christmas battle between the three armies.  There's a surprising and amusing degree of parallel evolution between the two mini-stories (since we were solving similar authorial problems, I expect).
  

  • u/kozinc:

    I feel like it's hardly similar. HPMOR's got three armies with betrayals and chaos galore, FMC has two armies and a crazy guy who plays them against each other. While they have similarities, they're still very different. Especially since you know Li Yao is very likely to win, since it's still the xianxia genre, while you never knew what was going to happen in HPMOR
    

    • u/abcd_z:

      "You give me no face!"  
      -Eliezer Yudkowsky
      

  • u/ZedOud:

    I had gotten a similar vibe from those chapters. Especially in those aspects where plots relied on plots there was a similar tempo. But then, the battle in HPMOR had a more amazing/stupendous escalation, whereas 40K's reveals had a moderately upbeat march leading through the MC's plans.
    

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