why are so many MCs in this genre unlikeable or handicapped by stupidity?

I'll let you know when I get there! I've been lucky so far in my choices as I've really enjoyed the series I completed. I have dropped a few fairly early, though. Great thing about xianxia is there are a lot more choice available than LitRPG, since it's been established so long as a genre. The main handicap is finding a series with a decent translator...

 

If you're gonna stay reading that genre, do yourself a favor and learn to like machine translations. It's not for everyone, I know. But some of those series go 7k chapters long... it will take years before someone finishes one properly. The "short" ones are 700+ chapters haha

 

I'd say that it's a wider brush. Because it's not a straight power fantasy, you have a higher chance of readers ignoring your work and crashing into a #100,000 debut rank on Amazon. At the same time, it's also much more relatable for people and capable of drawing higher genuinely 5 star reviews from outsiders. In a manner, for those more into the literary aspect of it, a story with a dynamic protagonist is a better start than a flat OP main character and I'd sooner recommend a book with a dynamic MC to a potential fan ignorant of LitRPG than one with the latter, so the higher end of the genre is capable of reaching the heights of the likes of Awaken Online or Way of the Shaman or even Ready Player One, whereas the power fantasy characters have a high floor and ceiling but it's not nearly as high. It's really like an elevated house and a 50 story building, whereas the dynamic characters may have a lower floor since you're following an actual arc, but the higher end of it is the top of the Burj Khalifa.
Power fantasies make people feel good, but people tend to want to root for a character at the same time so that's why the dynamic MC's stories will have greater longevity and potential.

I'm probably piss-ass wrong, though.

 

On the topic of character flaws and negative character traits, I realized that most flaws can really be boiled down to the 7 deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. 7 aspects of the human condition that, when exploited, leads to moral failings, aka "sin". Or, in our case, conflict. Just about everything can be traced back to these things, though you could argue that despair or melancholy (the 8th sin, which was omitted to keep with the "7" theme going on in Judeo-Christianity) should go with it. And you know what, because I want to give Jesus Christ a big ol' right hook across the chin, I will.

Pride: belief of one's superior quality
Envy: want of what others have
Wrath: willingness to offend others
Sloth: unwillingness to carry out action
Greed: wanting more than you need
Gluttony: taking more than you need
Lust: desire for sexual gratification
Melancholy: negativity even when unwarranted

A character can have more than one sin, or even the same sin multiple times. There's also misinterpretations of these sins— gluttony and greed, for example, don't necessarily correlate to "food" and "money". Just as "pride" can mean everything from pride in your bloodline to pride in your race to pride in your handwriting. Melancholy and sloth can mean cowardice but in different ways— one is being cowardly because you doubt your own abilities, while the other is being cowardly because you don't want to get hurt or expend effort trying.
A dynamic character in a mainstream work will want something, but one of these sins will prevent them from getting it for whatever reason.

The secret to making it work is also giving consequences to these sins as well as showing them as being capable of good. Another misconception about the sins is that they're only evil and that a good person will be without these sins— except sometimes pride in yourself is what gives you the confidence to accomplish a task; greed is what motivates you to pursue a goal; sloth is what allows you to rest when you overexert yourself or risk bringing envy upon yourself from others; hell, without lust, humans would have gone extinct well before civilization began.
That's something I didn't mention in the earlier post: overcoming a flaw doesn't give you the excuse to have a Mary Sue, even though it's true that a person can't completely change who they are multiple times a year and not suffer mental damage. Even the most interesting and capable people have flaws, and these flaws tend to change over time. Moderation of these flaws can help make a character feel human, and readers will tolerate a dynamic character becoming flat (for a period of time) if they feel they deserve it through something like great character growth and control over their flaws. It's just that, eventually, new flaws appear as new experiences happen and new lessons are learned by new people. So let's imagine the protagonist of Nightmare Online succeeds in the end and overcomes his greed and neuroticism, tempering them both. Five books later, he's wound up becoming such an institution that he may even offer to teach what he learned to a new upstart, becoming a wannabe mentor figure. Except he's been around so long that he discovers he's become too stubborn and set in his ways and is outright disdainful for the manners of new players, something that threatens to end his entire career if he doesn't learn to temper himself.
Woot, a new character flaw that I didn't even know my character could've had five minutes ago.
He learned his lessons, overcame his flaws, and became a dynamic round character— so where did this new flaw come from? Consequences. Consequences of other characters and his own actions, as well as how he learned from his trials.

Theoretically, you could keep any character arc going on indefinitely as long as you understand this. But there aren't many "alternate life" series out there besides some long-running comics and soap operas— most follow a common arc or general theme.

If you're not the main protagonist of the story, then you don't need a big character flaw— negative character traits will do, but you still should make sure there's something preventing them from taking the MacGuffin for themselves a tenth of the way through the story.

Though that would actually make for an interesting plot— you set up the Hero's Journey with a flawed Chosen One, but a minor character you meet early on winds up defeating the Big Bad and getting the princess and kingdom because he doesn't have visible flaws and could do what was asked of the hero with ease, leading to another conflict with the Chosen One.

 

People like to think this, because we all want to believe we live in a world where competence and craft will be rewarded, the LitRPG genre will continue growing, and the genre's success is not founded on juvenile narcissism. I don't see any reason to believe that's any more likely than the alternative, though, which is that LitRPG is a passing fad mainly propped up by its appeal to people who want to fantasize about the world handing them fantastic success for no better reason than because they have suddenly fallen into an alternate dimension that revolves around them completely.

The biggest successes in the genre don't exactly do a whole lot to inspire confidence in the former possibility. Ready Player One is about successfully entering the gate kept by the world's most fanatical gatekeepr and so becoming a billionaire, and Sword Art Online provides the template for the overpowered MC that most shitty LitRPG are aping. Even Awaken Online, usually held up as bucking the trend, grants its protagonist a power set that makes him drastically more powerful than the vast majority of the game's players with only a minimum of thought and effort, and only avoids the overpowered Mary Sue MC problem by granting its antagonist equally overwhelming power (even then, Jason is absolutely Sue as f**k before he comes into direct conflict with Alex in game). All other players are cannon fodder because they failed the Controller's chargen personality quiz. It's not awful, but it's not even close to what I'd expect from something held up as a high point of the genre - especially not something specifically cited for not doing this kind of thing.

I want there to be an audience for it. I really dislike blatant wish fulfillment because it comes across to me as condescending. Like, f**k you, Michael Bay, I am not a dipshit loser and I do not need your pity narrative to feel good about myself. And that loathing for this kind of condescending pandering also makes me really bad at writing wish fulfillment, which means if I want a piece of the sweet, sweet LitRPG money pie (and I do) then I have to bet on there being a big chunk of the target audience for whom "it's LitRPG but the protagonists are actually clever and have real character arcs" is a selling point, that the people who are reading blatant power fantasy LitRPG are reading it because they really like LitRPG, not because they really like blatant power fantasies.

Generally speaking, though, cynicism has been much more accurate for me than idealism.

 

My thoughts :-

In general the MC tends to be unlikable if the story is an Alice in wonderland or plot driven type of tale. Examples from outside litrpg include Harry Potter. Harry is easily the least likable character in any of the books! The reason is usually because the MC is left blank for self insertion and more focus is given to the world around them. They are there just so the reader can see the world through their eyes.


Now when you have a character driven tale YET want to keep the MC a bit blank for self insertion you end up with a dumbass as he NEEDS to make mistakes or the story won't progress. This is usually the case when you have a story about a group of people in place of the one true american hero. The interactions feel forced and you wonder why they're even hanging out with such a person.

Then you have reason number three. The MC is a Mary Sue that's trying to mask that. Because most Litrpg books are written by gamers not authors it tends to be a self insert power trip and since this is not -insert author handle here- but a perfect version of him that's handsome, strong, smart, witty and a babe magnate he ends up a Mary Sue that's trying to disguise that fact by making really stupid mistakes or giving himself a handicap to overcome.

Nobody likes a Mary Sue. It's pure instinct to hate them. As such you end up with someone very unlikable regardless of hard the author is trying to make them relatable -oh he likes burgers just like me! -.