In the case of my evaluation of Paranoid Mage, I'm fairly sure, given the clear nature of the writing, that my judgment is correct. I'd peg down the chances of me being correct to around 85%, give or take. However, since we are discussing literature, only God knows what's right or wrong.
Introduction
Paranoid Mage has had one of the most meteoritic rising in webnovelistic history. It has reached $15.000 in Patreon in less than a month. And that was just in what Patreon shows. It's likely that the actual profit broke the 20 grand ceiling.
Few Novels have reached those numbers. Fewer still, if any actually did, reached them so fast.
There's no questioning the quality of writing here and it's probably one of the few examples where I feel like pointing out certain elements that made its success is certainly easier than usual.
Chapter 1
The narration feels very cinematic and it's well described. However, I don't believe that this level of good writing is why the book made it.
There's a clear jump, cushioned by 7-8 paragraphs, from background descriptions/funeral to action. But the action does not keep up the same rhythm. Instead, we are yanked back to our seats when Callum hears the words that foreshadow that shit is going down and that the main character made a mistake.
“What are you doing?”
That sentence is the turning point of the book. Up until there, the author has built the background knowledge we needed to interpret what's happening. That's what makes it click in your head: "Callum fucked up. He didn't consider that this could have been a supernatural event." You don't need a further explanation; if the author had opted for shorter chapters that might have been a good point to end chapter 1 on. And now, we are in a 'reactive' stance; we are trapped. That realization hit Callum as much as it hit the reader - and that's where the magic happens. Now the reader's stomach is twisting. Let's explain this with a comparison; have you even found an ad on your phone where someone is playing a puzzle game and making the clear wrong moves? That's made on purpose because they want you to think 'I could do much better than this.' In this case, you are not better than Callum - and that's even stronger than the mobile ad. We could, indeed, talk about a transfer of emotions, coercing your own expertise into the character's one. When you are brought on the same level of the character, who's not an idiot, you are now his shadow. This deep level of immersion means that you need Callum to succeed after his screw-up. Because if Callum is in trouble, you are in trouble as well. If you don't go on to discover why Callum messed up and how he's going to save himself, you are going to be left in an emotional limbo yourself.
What happens after we realize that Callum messed up is mostly unconsequential. The author could have written with a foot in his mouth and it would still be catchy. The turning point, the hook, is the mess Callum has made for himself. And the previous 4-pager set-up is what has you reeling. Anyone can the scene of Callum being questioned and brought away, but only a damn good narrator could have structured the entirety of previous scene so well.
To reiterate the point, the remaining pages are just fluff, narration-wise. If you have the world-building on hand and a small outline, they would have been as easy as stealing candy from a disabled person. They provide a good lull, but they are not what an aspiring author should be looking for.
Narrative Device:
Background Info -> Problem -> Callum makes a small mistake based on Background Info -> The Reader is now in Callum's clothes because he didn't notice as well
Further thoughts:
If the scene about the gym fire had been too long, too foreshadowed or anything, this would have not worked. If the reader could have caught what was going to happen and the best solution at hand, the chapter would have fallen mostly flat. The fact that the chapter is so fast in liquidating the event, with bare bone narration for it means that our minds are too ensnared by the fact to notice that Callum could be making a mistake.
This is one of those scenes that are very well-written. Few authors consider how important it is to be exceedingly concise when narrating this stuff.
Chapter 2
'It was a tyranny he’d never even known existed reaching out to claim control over him, but there was absolutely no way he was going to let it.'
'The man is watching,' as they say. This plays a lot into our collective fear that the government might be controlling all of us, on a level. When I say collective, it might be better to point at US residents. Other countries usually give less of a damn about the government. Especially Europeans. I don't know enough Asian people to judge what's like over there.
This is pretty much the only real heavy-hitter here, narration-wise.
Would Paranoid Mage still be famous without this particular trait here? Or is it because of Chapter 1 that Paranoid Mage is so popular? Is there a synergy between the two or could we argue that there's one that overshadows the other?
If I had to say, I'd probably still point out at chapter 1 as the first 'money-maker.' This is good candy, but too many novels have some similar elements and didn't succeed. But in the end, it's impossible to give a definite answer without creating ad-hoc experiments in this regard.
The opening salvo stirs some interesting feeling that can be summed up as the prototypical 'Hero good, Politicians bad.' Nothing new there. I am frankly not sure that this is, in a reader's eye, anything more than candy. It's good, sure. And if you consider the Chinese matrix of the unsung hero, Callum is no more than your average xiake with the typical Christian traits in literature.
“Yes,” Lee agreed. “I’m sure it’s connected to how he managed to get to be thirty years old without noticing magic at all. He’s some kind of medical curiosity.” Lee’s eyes glinted with avarice. “I bet I could make my reputation if I got to properly study him.”
Do I even have to explain this? Oh wow, our protagonist presents exceptional elements! Wohoo!
Another person might argue that I'm not talking about the good balance in power that has been shown so far. Callum is no power-creep and we get just a whiff of his powers. That is enough for some readers to consider this as a 'great' novel. And they can. But they would be simply ignorant, that's all. You don't judge a novel by what it doesn't do wrong. You judge it by its exceptional traits. The fact that Paranoid Mage is mostly written decently is not what it made it stand out in the crowd.
If this article was a 'how to write a good novel,' I'd point out small details here and there about what's good in this chapter. It's well crafted, for sure. But this is not such a course.
Chapter 3
It turned out Sen did know what a bank was, but didn’t care what Callum was doing there.
Let's pull up what we saw at the end of chapter 3:
Callum pressed his lips together. He’d got along well enough with Selene to get married, so that obviously wasn’t true. It was just that Sen didn’t care about so-called mundanes. For that matter, it seemed pretty clear that the supernatural world in general wasn’t all that impressed by the mundane one, for all that they clearly were happy to copy all the nonmagical advancements.
So far, he hadn’t been impressed by what the supernatural world had to offer.
We are establishing a pattern in how InadvisablyCompelled starts chapters. This guy knows what he's doing and it shows. The chapters start with the information you need to somehow expect the foreshadowing. The info is not foreshadowing proper, but it makes sense to understand what's going to happen later. Proper foreshadowing would have been Callum already fooling Sen in some way at this point. But here, we just get to know that Sen doesn't know what a bank is. And that means that mages do not know shit about the mundane world. That sets up Callum for a plethora of shenanigans in the future. Genius.
The rest of the chapter is nothing much, really. You can mostly see examples of what I personally define as Chekhov's Sprinkler
Chapter 4
This is the first chapter where InadvisablyCompelled breaks the pattern. What we get at the beginning of this chapter is not what we need at the end.
“Hello there!” The girl at the counter chirped as he walked into the café, the small bell above the door jangling. Her nametag proclaimed she was Clara. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before!” If he had to guess, he would have said Clara wasn’t more than fifteen or sixteen, which raised the question of why she wasn’t in school, but it really wasn’t his business. “It’s my first time,” Callum admitted, walking up to the counter. He eyed the menu, surprised to find there were fewer sandwiches and more steaks than was usual for a café. Not a bad surprise, by any means, since he could always make his own sandwiches but the art of the grill had always eluded him. “I’m not sure if this is a late lunch or early dinner, so what do you recommend?”
and
“Mine and my wife’s,” Jeff said affably. “That’s my little girl in the kitchen.” He hiked his thumb in the direction Clara had gone. “I’m not little!” Clara’s voice came floating out from the back, and Jeff laughed. Callum just shook his head. They really were ordinary folk.
All of this constitutes the set-up for the end of chapter 5.
Chapter 4 is a lull of babble. There's nothing much that points to why the series is great. You need to look before and after. This chapter could veritably be defined as a failure by the standards established by the author so far.
Chapter 5
The start of chapter 5 keeps the messy line established with chapter 4 for about ten paragraphs, give or take. But after that, the magic comes back to InadvisablyCompelled. If I had been his editor, I would have ripped through chapter 4 and the first scene of chapter 5. I would also have threatened him of bodily harm if he didn't start getting his head right. That stuff did not hold up as the rest and could have potentially been a problem. However, it's still somewhat smooth, although, again, pretty useless.
“Hey, Clara.”
This is the first sentence after the useless scene with Archmage Duval. And there you go. This brings up once again the pattern that we have established by chapter 3 and broken at chapter 4. This sets the stage for the end of the chapter. And this is the chapter where InadvisablyCompelled truly shines. In fact, the author has the reader aligned with Callum since chapter 1, and now it's time to truly strike the iron while it's hot.
“She makes good steaks, doesn’t she?” Arthur Langley slid into the chair opposite Callum, holding his own version of what Callum had ordered. “I’m pretty sure she’s going to take over one day.”
Clara becomes the 'sacrificial lamb' with positive attributes more and more. If you have read the previous chapters breakdown, you might already know what's coming our way.
“They’ve taken Clara,” she blurted before he could even begin to ask. “You have to help.”
I don't think I need to elaborate much here. While chapter 1 presented a somewhat elaborate device, this one is pretty simple. But let's break it down, nonetheless.
Clara is presented like an innocent person but there's turmoil in the chapter. On a level, we could argue that even the first 'useless' part with the archmage gives the tone a little urgency - still, it could have been engineered better. Clara is set up as the 'cutest and sweetest.' And that sets us up to be riled up by her being kidnapped. Smart.
This enters the category of 'abuse of power,' or even better 'injustice against the weak.' We could rename it a 'Hero flick,' or 'White knighting.' The formula is pretty straightforward. It's the same of the young master beating up some homeless person on the streets and the MC jumping in. Or the MC of a Xianxia suffering from an elder of a sect and suddenly popping some secret technique to defeat them in a battle to the death.
It's executed in InadvisablyCompelled established pattern and that packs a punch. But like, a very solid punch. I'd be curious to experiment with two groups. One, I'd let them read the first three chapters and then wait a week for the last two. The other group, read them all together. Then rate from 1 to 5 how sad would they be if they couldn't continue. I'd say that the 'punch' would obviously be stronger if chapter 1 and 5 are read in the same day or in the span of a few days. The shorter the interval, the greater the effect, probably.
Thoughts
Paranoid Mage is close to a masterpiece for 6 chapters. The end of volume 1 undoes a lot of good things that the author did. I'm surprised the end of the volume didn't make a good chunk of readers flip. However, the parts before are peppered by examples of excellent writing. InadvisablyCompelled has nailed the first five chapters so hard that I don't see this thing failing anytime in the future. A good look at the Patreon subscribers would give, however, a good idea of the reception. I'd predict a plateaus with a descending trend in three months, but I'd welcome a positive growth as well. As a fellow author, I mostly wish my peers to succeed. Not everyone, obviously. There are a couple of writers I wouldn't mind if they caught on fire. InadvisablyCompelled is not one of those.
Callum's archetype is close to Mike from Breaking Bad. Crafty, smart, resourceful. However, Callum doesn't have as much personality as some other heroes. I blame the lack of time. This is a book that would require more time to work on. Or an amazing editor - and not amazing in 'oh wow, this person edited a mainstream fantasy book.' Yeah, no. I mean an editor with two balls as big as a house. If an editor worked on this, I have no idea what the quality of his work was, considering I haven't read the raw.
I think this could be turned into a TV show easily. It's a positive thing, mostly. It has a lot of good stuff that would certainly enrich Netflix catalog and donate some quality to it. It would need rewriting for certain parts to make up for the nonsensical turns at the end of volume 1, for sure.
I think people reading this might imagine that I'm shitting on Paranoid Mage. So, let's be clear. This is probably one of the top 10 best written web novels I have ever read. I could say top 5 but I'm too lazy to elaborate on an actual list. So, I'll keep it conservative for now. What the author did is not easy. I mean, you can try it yourself. You need a very precise setting with even more precise narrative devices to do this. The fact that Chapter 5 was the cornerstone on RR, meaning that you had to wait something like a week for the next chapter, made it so that many Patrons, even writers I know, jumped on it.
This is definitely a Mercurial Novel
Answer
I think that the answer is mostly found in chapter 1 and chapter 5.
I'd say that the great transfer of emotions and the share of responsibility that the reader feels on him are essential to what happens in chapter 5. Chapter 1 is very elegant and well thought. There might be a chance that without chapter 1, chapter 5 would have tanked. I do not have a crystal ball, though, and I can't be certain about that. But my best guess is that chapter 1 laid down the framework on which chapter 5 really shone. When the reader is brought on Callum's level in chapter 1, he's now getting all riled up, all anxious; adrenaline is flowing and even more catecholamines are pumped through his body - he's in a perfect flight or fight state. When hitting chapter 5, there must be a spike in adrenaline, in anger. Someone who's been sweet to Callum has now been kidnapped, an innocent. And being hooked on Callum's adventure, we get as angry as you could imagine. That's the genius. Without the crucial superimposition of animus, chapter 5 would have been good, but not perfect. Instead, we are so deep into Paranoid Mage by the time we reach chapter 5 that the visceral reaction pushes you to keep reading, to go on Patreon, go on the Internet, wherever you might find new chapters!
How to make Paranoid Mage better
I don't think it takes much. InadvisablyCompelled has done an incredible job up until chapter 5. Starting from chapter 7, he breaks his own structure. To make the novel even more of a banger, he should simply apply the framework present in the past chapters to the next ones. If he did that, we would be talking about one of the candidates for best-written web novels.
There are more consideration I'll add here in the future. I'm still thinking about some of it.
A book relies much more on its narrative than the proper linework. Take Paranoid Mage, for example. If you read the individual paragraphs, there's nothing special. Nothing. The prose is simple and straightforward. There's not even something on a multiple-paragraphs level; there's no symbolism, no rhetorical devices that leave you saying 'wow, that was good.' No. It's all in the overall narrative devices that craft a special narration. The work on the scenes, and how scenes are supposed to be crafted - that's what Paranoid Mage excels at.