Yep. It takes a certain amount of skill to be able to ramp up the power and abilities of your protagonist without the story getting away from you.  That’s kind of why I described what I could recommend as series because there’s a few where the first few work well HWFWM being one of them but after that, there’s a pretty significant drop off in quality of the overall narrative.
And even one of those that I’d say that I recommend (Ready Player One/Two) works pretty well but more so for a subset of readers that I just happen to be part of (those whose main cultural media experiences were between the 70s and the 90s.) and while the series works moderately well it’s definitely written to a specific subset of readers.
As an aside because I already mentioned two of the three I recommended in the original comment, I should probably also recognize the third just for posterity. It’s the four book trilogy, This Trilogy is Broken by JP Valentine.
Magician by Raymond E Feist (later broken into Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master and the split works even better)
Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings.
Both are pretty cliché by modern views, but both are pretty well written otherwise. Good world building.
But ooo-boy, if one is the type of person that has trouble mentally separating the very problematic writer from their works (like JK Rowling or Marion Zimmerman Bradley), Eddings probably isn’t the best to read.
Wizard of Earthsea is part of the 3 books that showed me I loved Fantasy.
I’ve been tempted to give a few a go again. They were my jam in middle school.
I’m plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I’m currently on book 4. Book 1 was for bingo, the rest are just to boost my numbers for my annual reading goal :).
LitRPG can wildly fluctuate in quality, but if LitRPG interests you at all, this is one of the top 3 series I’d recommend.
Makes sense. That thing was op, they tried limiting it with only holding one shot, but it was an auto kill if you hit with it. Throwing knives was much more fun.
If you can manufacture a multi-trillion dollars advertisement strategy for single payer, go right ahead, otherwise we can wish things were different until we are blue in the face or work with the current environment as it exists.
I could be wrong, but maybe the political and media environment in the 1940s is different than today making it an inaccurate comparison.
That’s exactly it. They don’t like it but they view any alternative, especially one forced on them, as worse. If you want to fix the problem, you unfortunately have to coddle the morons and let them voluntarily change when they find out it’s better.
ALT: a BlueSky post by Ryan Marino, MD (@ryanmarino.bsky.social); it says “Did you know? Black Friday is named in honor of Rebecca Black, who invented Friday in 2011.”
“Idaho senator born in another state tells Native American congressional candidate from a tribe native to the state to “go back where you came from.”
It would have been a much wordier headline but relays a lot more pertinent information.
Description: A picture titled “Russian plants” in a 3 x 3 grid with one of the grid items being Jill Stein, the rest are flora.
Has anyone investigated the consequences of all the sunlight that’s leaked into the environment because of this disaster? What sort of clean up are we looking at and how long will it take?
It’s mostly fine… It kind of suffers similar flaws to the second Hunger Games book by being a “let’s do that again”-style rehash of the first. But the series makes a cohesive whole.
I think one of the reasons Broken works fairly well for me is it doesn’t feel the need to tie off every loose thread by the end. I still end up wanting to return to the world without the story being anti-climactic.