Apocalypse Live
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Try reading Planetary Human if you haven't already, it might help you getting used to being played by the author like a fiddle.
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Started off as a good horror story, flushed down to super-puper-human fighting boring crap by chapter 30.
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… Did you read Planetary Human? I mean, you're entitled to your taste, but things might make sense if you do.
Well I caught back up to what's been released (chapter 37) and I have to say... I don't think I like the way things developed.
Specifically with the sudden flood of Planetary Human content.
The recent reveals of the Planetary Humans and the backstory of the Main Character may have been exciting for some people, but I would absolutely expect that that reaction would be from someone who has already read all of Planetary Human.
And while the user Kendama, the uploader and translator of the story onto this site, has pointed out that reading Planetary Human could certainly make things make more sense, I had not, and it's very likely that this story is the first exposure to the author that others are having as well.
The way the Planetary Human stuff was brought up in-story had a very different tone to the other mysterious events of the story. Unlike events such as the initial appearances of the eggs and the transformation of humans into the smilers, the Planetary Human content felt more like something the readers were expected to have some level of knowledge of the characters and power system mechanics involved, which a new reader would be completely unequipped for.
Furthermore, the sudden introduction of two new characters who are both being heavily implied to have long and important backstories, as well as the very dramatic shift in the original Main Character's personality (the revelations he made about his actions actually make things more confusing and contradictory, not less), made the following events feel like they were from a completely different genre and completely eliminated the relatively low-level feeling of the story.
No longer are we following the struggles of normal humans in a world gone mad, but instead we're watching as superhuman beings throw lightning and fireballs at each other.
I think that one of the things that really made things awkward was when the Dog-Man talked about how he was actually a Planetary Human the whole time and that there are lots of them around and that all of this originated from Planetary Humans and Planetary Humans are heading towards the city and basically the entire Apocalypse Live setting has been overthrown by the Planetary Human one.
It just felt like a massive shift in tone and direction, as if the author decided that he was done playing with these new toys and wanted to go back to his old reliable ones, so tossed this story aside.
And I get that maybe this was the original plan from the start, it totally could be, but if so it was a very unsatisfying thing to experience for myself.
An equivalent would be something like...
It'd be like if you were watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, but then the final episode revealed that secretly the entire plot was actually caused by the ripples in space and time from the final battle in Naruto, and then the story starts constantly dropping references to Chakra and how everything from the robots to aliens were all caused by Chakra this and Chakra that. Everything was actually Chakra this whole time.
It's completely out of left field and just leaves you sitting there awkwardly, twiddling your thumbs as you hope that the robots come back, and wondering if the show actually just committed to turning Shinji Ikari into a raving psychopath who can now blow fireballs before then killing him off.
Now apparently there are like 3 chapters left, and I hope that they'll really help clear things up... But that'd be 3 chapters to help me understand exactly what happened which I'd need without using lots of Planetary Human background lore to understand.
---
tl;dr, If you've read Planetary Humans you may enjoy the twists near the end, but if you didn't then you'll just end up confused.
Specifically with the sudden flood of Planetary Human content.
The recent reveals of the Planetary Humans and the backstory of the Main Character may have been exciting for some people, but I would absolutely expect that that reaction would be from someone who has already read all of Planetary Human.
And while the user Kendama, the uploader and translator of the story onto this site, has pointed out that reading Planetary Human could certainly make things make more sense, I had not, and it's very likely that this story is the first exposure to the author that others are having as well.
The way the Planetary Human stuff was brought up in-story had a very different tone to the other mysterious events of the story. Unlike events such as the initial appearances of the eggs and the transformation of humans into the smilers, the Planetary Human content felt more like something the readers were expected to have some level of knowledge of the characters and power system mechanics involved, which a new reader would be completely unequipped for.
Furthermore, the sudden introduction of two new characters who are both being heavily implied to have long and important backstories, as well as the very dramatic shift in the original Main Character's personality (the revelations he made about his actions actually make things more confusing and contradictory, not less), made the following events feel like they were from a completely different genre and completely eliminated the relatively low-level feeling of the story.
No longer are we following the struggles of normal humans in a world gone mad, but instead we're watching as superhuman beings throw lightning and fireballs at each other.
I think that one of the things that really made things awkward was when the Dog-Man talked about how he was actually a Planetary Human the whole time and that there are lots of them around and that all of this originated from Planetary Humans and Planetary Humans are heading towards the city and basically the entire Apocalypse Live setting has been overthrown by the Planetary Human one.
It just felt like a massive shift in tone and direction, as if the author decided that he was done playing with these new toys and wanted to go back to his old reliable ones, so tossed this story aside.
And I get that maybe this was the original plan from the start, it totally could be, but if so it was a very unsatisfying thing to experience for myself.
An equivalent would be something like...
It'd be like if you were watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, but then the final episode revealed that secretly the entire plot was actually caused by the ripples in space and time from the final battle in Naruto, and then the story starts constantly dropping references to Chakra and how everything from the robots to aliens were all caused by Chakra this and Chakra that. Everything was actually Chakra this whole time.
It's completely out of left field and just leaves you sitting there awkwardly, twiddling your thumbs as you hope that the robots come back, and wondering if the show actually just committed to turning Shinji Ikari into a raving psychopath who can now blow fireballs before then killing him off.
Now apparently there are like 3 chapters left, and I hope that they'll really help clear things up... But that'd be 3 chapters to help me understand exactly what happened which I'd need without using lots of Planetary Human background lore to understand.
---
tl;dr, If you've read Planetary Humans you may enjoy the twists near the end, but if you didn't then you'll just end up confused.
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@scranity Well, all I can say is that you're right. That was the author's plan from the beginning, the series is a sequel that started immediately after PH was over. At the beginning, the translators and I (I'm an editor, not a translator) weren't sure how much the two series would cross-pollinate, but by chapter 30 it was obvious, and that's why we left that warning at the beginning of chapter 31. Unfortunately, this is not a standalone series, and shouldn't be treated as such.
I know some people who comment in Mangakakalot did follow the advice, stopped reading this and went to read PH before coming back, and they seemed satisfied. You can also see from the handful of people commenting on this here that they've also read PH and they're thrilled to be understanding more of the events in that series is well.
PH and IotA belong to the Tidal Universe with Moon You and Tidal Territory. Of the five series in it, only these two can be read separately because they're at the temporal extremes: MY is the first, TT the last in the timeline.
If it serves as solace, the normies that only read officials are even more befuddled, because Webtoons did not license PH and just dropped IotA on them without rhyme or reason.
I know some people who comment in Mangakakalot did follow the advice, stopped reading this and went to read PH before coming back, and they seemed satisfied. You can also see from the handful of people commenting on this here that they've also read PH and they're thrilled to be understanding more of the events in that series is well.
PH and IotA belong to the Tidal Universe with Moon You and Tidal Territory. Of the five series in it, only these two can be read separately because they're at the temporal extremes: MY is the first, TT the last in the timeline.
If it serves as solace, the normies that only read officials are even more befuddled, because Webtoons did not license PH and just dropped IotA on them without rhyme or reason.
I'm sorry did you just say they licenced the sequel but not the original work that the sequel is dependent on???
Jeez, what the heck were Webtoons thinking when they did that?
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They weren't thinking, obviously. They seldom do. They also licensed Moon You and did it to completion years ago, but MY has only a faint connection to the others, it just explains a bit of the events in PH. The latter is the most important one, and they never touched it.
Crazy, right? A friend who goes there just for the comments (they're about six chapters behind us in this series) says the readers there are completely lost.
