I wouldn't call Zorian more social (or at least his social skill were pretty much non-existing in the first chapter, time loop did change him though) he's just more creative. He's constantly following different clues, different paths, mixing things up untill he makes a breakthrough.

 

Would it be too risky for Zorian and the Matriarch to kidnap or trap somehow that student who threw stinkbomb during first appearance of the worm or that assassin (and search how he obtained info from that language-knowledgeable teacher) and look at their minds ?

They seem like obvious choices to find out more about invasion/their pawns in student/teacher body who have best access to Zach...

 

I would say that Zorians success is mostly because he is anti-social and distrustful of others. (I mean he didn´t even notice when one his best friends kept dying) Zach tried to make other people believe him and thus the enemy knows of him and is able to stop him at every turn. Zorian on the other hand told nearly no one and because of that has not nearly as much opposition.
Add to that the psychological burden of feeling absolutely powerless that Zach has to feel every time he dies and I am impressed at how well he holds together.

 

The thing that's killing me is I don't understand why the Matriach - or why anybody in the protagonists's postion - would attack. Your enemy is out there, there is a third (or fourth, or fifth, or whatever) time traveller. You lose a lot of power the moment you're discovered, hell, you might be screwed if the evil bad guy realizes you're the element that's causing each loop to become increasingly different.

Furthermore, attacking the artillery is a pretty dumb plan. I mean, it's great for an all-in, but now the bad guy knows -- assuming the bad guy is the third time traveller anyway -- that his artillery is vulnerable to spider attacks. He's not going to allow that kind of mistake a second time. And it's not like they really stood a chance of resolving the conflict by just taking out the bombardment.

Assuming the bad guy is the time traveller (who's maybe just caught in this loop for a specific plan, reason, or maybe unwittingly), you'd want him to be and stay complacent by not mucking up his plans until the very start.

Of course, we don't know who the third traveller is, but neither does Zorian. As far as he knows, showing his hand now is incredibly risky with little to no pay off.

 

Even though it gives up the initiative, the Invaders will probably think Zach is the one causing the difference, and I have the impression that the invaders were apready moving against the spiders.

 

I'd give this 4/5. The start is a little rocky, because the main character comes off like such a whiny asshole ("Ugh, the teachers would so fail you for that answer"), but I stuck with it because of the glowing recommendations in this thread. Glad that I did, too.

I love groundhog's day (well, any kind of time travel really), so I'm a bit biased in favor of this kind of fic.

One thing I really like is how Zorian is comparatively wimpy in terms of magical power, and the restarts don't seem like they'll fix that. Zorian will always be completely outclassed by the likes of Zach and the Lich, and so he has to find his edge in other ways, mainly by being clever and studious. I think that makes him a more interesting character than Zach, so I'm glad the story follows Zorian and you just see glimpses of Zach rather than the other way around.

 

I think the appeal is that he is whiny. He's supposed to grow as a character due to the restarts, similar to groundhog day.

 

I agree with Chime. Zorian's character development is one of my favorite parts of the story. The plot device is exactly like Groundhog Day, except instead of developing as a character and getting the girl, Zorian is developing as a character and stopping an invasion using his guile and wits (and possibly also getting one or more of several girls.)

I also love how nobody102 manages to develop many of the secondary characters. At first glance, it seems impossible. How could he give any character meaningful development when their personality reverts at regular intervals? The answer here is to cleverly use the perspective of a moody teenage boy to limit our viewpoint to what Zorian thinks and feels. As he spends time with the other characters, we discover their hidden depths as he does, and this also leads to him growing as a person.

 

Yeah, nobody103 is one of the best character development writers I've seen. I can still go back and reread Scorpion's Disciple and enjoy all the ways everyone grows throughout it. One of my favorite Naruto fanfics for sure, even though it was left incomplete.

 

New chapter up.

 

Just read it. Awesome. The protagonist personal growth is amazing, seeing his development is the better part. I'm fan of this genre, but it's a first (except the movie, obviously) when I see the focus going to personal growth. An easy 5/5.

 

Updated

It looks like the author is speeding up the pacing. He summarized a bunch of things that happened in restarts mentioned, but not shown.

I like that he's going to be learning a bunch of stuff from his new mentor, but I think that whatever Xvim is trying to teach him will wind up being the most important thing he learns.

 

I'm always dubious when people time-skip, and in this case time-skipping restarts. I find that there is little reason to have them except to power-up, and it gives the impression that the author is running out of steam. I can't recall, I'm sure it has happened before in this story, but just starting a sentence off with "The next five restarts were both hectic and boring" makes me sad.

On the other hand, ending with "Accordingly, the matriarch laid out her plan for the next restart, one that would definitely be impossible to ignore…" makes me happy.

I'm sure we could have gotten there with more showing and less telling.

 

It seems like the latest restarts were to allow the non-PoV character (the Matriarch) some room for experimentation that didn't directly affect Zorian. It would be much less believable if the very next restart after bringing the spiders in they managed to throw off the invasion.

 

To be fair "boring" restarts are an unavoidable consequence of the genre. You would need some plot device to penalize "taking too long" otherwise. The author could have used the existence of multiple loopers to do this somehow, which I am guessing is where the story is going now, which is promising though.

 

Yeah I disagree. I crave detail. If you're just going to gloss over the restarts don't even mention them. If you need plot development that's logical think of a creative way to accomplish it. It'd be bad writing to say, "And so Harry read books for the next six months and that's how he learned how to speak Chinese." "And so Harry took karate classes, did push ups, studied the Bible, and charmed snakes for three months." To explain how Harry can now suddenly do such and such-- as a reader, I want to see Harry charm snakes and go through that experience. If you don't need snake-charming to kill Voldemort, you don't need to mention he learned it. It's not a part of the story.

 

This was on the author's bio. If I had to guess I'd say that the first arc ends after what follows a successful throwing off of the invasion. (Like the reveal of the third time traveler)

 

I hope that after the first arc ends, the time loops stop. Every time loop fic I've read had the issue of continuing them for way too long (Time Braid or Chuunin Exam Day as a Naruto example).

My highlight of this fic has been the way in which Zorian learns more about the various other characters who has been around him. Aspects of the training are interesting, but in my opinion not nearly as much so as the character interaction. And not really liking the scenes with the Matriarch at all. Having someone wiser and with more resources them him feels like it diminishes his role a bit, and makes her the one running the show.

 

Man, the pacing is already slow enough as it is. It's been years since the story, and it's not a third of the way through, in spite of already hanging in at 150,000 words.

Besides, if you hadn't noticed, that's kind of the way nobody's been doing things so far. Zorian gets his introduction to how a particular kind of magic works - when he learns a new thing, the principles behind how it works, some history behind it, and the like. It just so happens that a lot of things take months to actually learn well.

Just look at the lessons with Xvim. The first time around we got a pretty detailed description of what goes down. Then every other lesson with Xvim is pretty much like that - so they get glossed over, because they're essentially the same as the first, up until the point where they start with the mana-charged marbles, at which point we get details again, but then the next few lessons get glossed over.

Magic, in this universe, is clearly a complex thing. You don't learn a new spell over the course of a single lesson. Sure, you might learn the basics, and you might even be able to cast it at the end of the hour if it's a really basic spell, but it'll still be a shitty version of the spell. But it takes weeks, months, or even years to get really good at it, and that's the part that gets glossed over in the story, and rightfully so. As long as all the important stuff is covered and Zorian's progression exposited during the little timeskips, everything's fine. It's not like "oh and Zorian studied this for six loops and learned this new thing," rather, we get a chapter that focuses on "this new things" and then him going through the training and study to actually get good at "the new things" is what gets covered.

The whole thing with the spell formulas is a perfect example of this. When they're introduced and Zorian's starting to study them seriously for the first time, we get an extensive introduction to them, how they work, what they can do, how they're made, some of their history, etc., and then we, as the audience, knows basically all there is to know about it.

There's absolutely no point in describing to us, the audience, every time Zorian sits and studies something or practices at it. It'd be like if the Rocky movies were all turned into individual television series where we get shown every training session and Rocky's rather gradual progression and advancement. It's just not interesting. The difference between individual sequences is miniuscule. After we've been introduced to the subject Zorian's studied, we've generally found out all we really need to know about it for now. Since we are not actually students of magic ourselves, we don't really need more details than that or see Zorian's PoV on any generic lessons.

It's the literary equivalent of a montage, and montages exist for a reason. Going back to the Rocky analogue, we know how boxing works. So when Rocky is getting better at boxing, we don't need to see every training session - we just need to get the rough picture of what Rocky's training is like so we can see how he progresses and grows, and exit the timeskip when new things start happening. The only difference between Zorian's studies and Rocky's training is that the system that Zorian studies is fictional and mostly unfamiliar to the audience, and as such, exposition is needed for the audience to understand what's going on before we go into "montage/exposition/timeskip" mode. Even for someone who craves details (such as myself, and, apparently, you) - that's generally enough detail.

The studies that Zorian goes through serves a dual purpose in the narrative - for one, it lets him grow in power in a logical fashion, and it seems that yes, he'll need every ounce of the skill and power he's gaining and more besides to eke out a victory or happy ending in this scenario, and two, it serves as a medium through which the author can present exposition and worldbuilding to us in a natural fashion which doesn't strain disbelief or involve massive infodumps.

Bah, I really should figure out this "brevity" thing so I can get my points across more clearly. Right. I'll try;

tl;dr:

We can't just "ignore" a bunch of loops because nothing "interesting" happens in them. The short passages that describe the passing time is the literary equivalent of a movie's training montage. It's nonsensical if the protagonist becomes strong out of nowhere, especially if that strength is plot-relevant. Seeing Harry charm snakes is interesting. Seeing him try and get it right daily for thirty days in a row because charming snakes is actually hard as fuck is not.

If we're going with the Harry Potter analogue, suggesting that the timeskips be left out completely would be like if all lessons in the HP books were left out completely. For a particularly pertinent example, think of what the scene with the troll would've been like if we hadn't seen the lesson on Wingardium Leviosa, which both served to introduce that particular spell and simultaneously show off that Hermione is isolated, picked on, disliked, bullied, and why this is the case. We, as an audience, would have absolutely no idea what's going on.

The skipped time loops may not contain much that advances the main plot, but they are necessary to establish the conditions of the scenes that do advance it.

 

I don't want to make it a big deal, but I think there's a clear difference between a "plot" and a "story". A plot follows a story, but it doesn't necessarily adhere to every detail. It's fine if a plot skips around. But if you're going to skip over large chunks of time, it can be handled much more elegantly, and with compact detail - not a simple handwaving of, "Oh yeah, he trained and did more timeloops and stuff."

This story is obviously very character-driven. What our protagonist goes through is important. If nothing important happens in a long timeframe, does that time frame even need to be mentioned? If it's not a part of the plot, cut it out.

The fact this story is old has no bearing on its actual pacing. We're not at 1 million words here.

We read stories for the detail. If the detail can't be provided because of time constraints on the author, it just feels very cheap to treat time this way. If you're going to do a flashforward, just ask yourself if it's even necessary. If nothing happened in those loops, then don't even mention them? The skills and knowledge obtained in those loops can't possibly be that important if they were skipped through. If our protagonist needs that knowledge/skill in some conflict coming up ahead, just have him obtain that knowledge/skill within the context of the plot, otherwise what's the point? That's my point - it's about pacing, for sure, and if the pacing can't afford to go into detail then there's a problem with the plot that needs to be addressed. It's inelegant to handle it like the author did. It suffices, I guess, but it's not the best story it can be, by having the writing behave this way.

Am I making any sense? Or is my point here inscrutible?