Review Detail of John_Kula in I Reincarnated As A Stick

Let me start this review by saying that I read until chapter 380 before getting so frustrated that I rage quit. So don't think that I hate this webnovel or anything. It has a lot of good things going for it. I wouldn't have read for so long If it had nothing going for it. And PancakesWitch wouldn't have been able to make her amazing webnovel Epic of Caterpillar without being inspired by this one. That inspiration is why I checked this out in the first place. But the longer I read this, the more I realized where she took inspiration from your novel, and where she decided to trim the fat. So let my rant commence. The biggest problem this novel has is that the pacing is far too slow. This is not just a problem in the beginning, this is a problem throughout the entire series. It never feels like Aurus is going anywhere. Even after all this time he's still in the forest he started in. The thing that makes this problem worse is the side characters. They're a ball and chain on the ankles of the story that's trying to move forward at a reasonable pace. Most egregiously of all, a side character chapter always comes right after the main character does anything interesting that would make you want to continue reading. Not to mention the side characters (ESPECIALLY Vanadir and company) are simply not very interesting. They also take up far more time than they realistically need to. You could probably cut out around 70 of these character chapters with no consequences to the story. I get that the side characters are meant to help with world building and making the world feel bigger. But the problem with that is that since Aurus is still in the forest he started in, there's no point in expanding the size of the world when Aurus is not ready to go to or very involved with that expanded world yet. By introducing all these side characters and locations that Aurus is not ready to interact with, you're making it so we have to talk about the whole world all the time. This slows things down even more. Argentum slows things down even more by his very existence as a second main character. I don't hate him or anything, but that's what he does. But the thing that made me rage quit was when Aurus fell into the trap of the goddess. This whole story was built on the promise that he would figure out what she was really after and screw over her plans. So seeing him do exactly what she wanted after all this waiting, that was the last straw. And maybe he does eventually do what we all want him to do, but how long am I going to have to wait for that to happen? How long am I gonna have to wait for this story to feel like it's going somewhere? I don't know, but I'm done waiting to find out. I'm making this review just to get this off my chest. Maybe this GIF is a good representation of how slow the story feels like it's moving.