Well Veeky Forums the longest piece of literature in human history is now Ambience: A Fleet Symphony...

Well Veeky Forums the longest piece of literature in human history is now Ambience: A Fleet Symphony, a shitty kancolle fanfic.

How does it feel?

fanfiction.net/s/10333897/389/Ambience-A-Fleet-Symphony

>Words: 4061k+
>Over four million words

Why

autism

Is it erotica??

Wasn't Henry Darger's book longer ?

Finnigans Wake is autism. This is just sad.

Why the hate?

Are you sure about that?

There are those crazy Chinese web novel authors that have works which go on for more than a 1000 chapters, but the wordcount on those has probably never been checked.

I'm not familiar at all with Chinese, but don't their words condense ideas better than English? Like certain thoughts that require 20-30 English words may only take like ten Chinese characters?

I hate it because it's fan fic. If you're going to dedicate four millions words to a piece of literature it should make the Bible look like a child's fairytale.

>inb4

t. Joshu

>I hate it because it's fan fic

that's kinda pretentious

Yeah, Darger's book was 15 something thousand pages long. Seeing as War And Peace was just under 600 000, it probably goes way beyond the four million mark.

that was also full of illustrations

When I look at the translations of the web novels, each chapter is probably about half the size of an Ambience chapter.

A random Xianxia novel like I Shall Seal the Heavens already has more than 1000 chapters. Although, it might be considered as a multi-volume series.

hundreds of them, but they were not in the book proper, seeing as some of them were murals.

It even specifies in the link that there are probably multi-volume pieces which are larger, but that it is the largest single-volume ever written. He even says it's as far as he knows, and implies it's not an absolutely certain evaluation.

Is it though? I written fan fiction and it's never been longer than a post box. I'm not saying its a fruitless passion. But it's certainly not something worth the amount of effort he put into it. It's a monumental dedication to an already very small fanbase (in the grand scheme of things) when something even half that size could've been built for all of man to appreciate.

Not even Proust could sustain his book for a million words. There's so much clutter and excess in the whole thing.

>As Miller explained it, The Realms of the Unreal is a war story, an epic tale influenced by the adventure stories and serials and comic books of its time.

Yeah it was longer, but it's not self described fan-fic so it doesn't really qualify here as far as the official title of Longest Fan Fiction goes.

>for all of man to appreciate

I don't think that was his intention. Why should he have to do that?

I suppose he doesn't. To the point you've pulled me down to, it seems it's just my moral ethics protruding from my opinion. In my eyes it's just pointless. I'm sure he has a massive sense of completion and achievement, but I believe it a waste to put so much time and effort into what *may* only be remembered as a novelty. And I say may with emphasis because there's a good chance it will become completely forgotten. Which of course the world will soon die and all will be forgotten. But to dedicate that much effort, in my eyes, into something, why not make it influential and memorable? Something to help people or that makes people think? Maybe that is pretentious on my end, but I really I just think it as masturbatory.

It's not inherently bad because it's fanfiction. It's just pretty much impossible to write such a long piece in such a short amount of time (given that Kancolle has only been around for a short while). People who write that much are usually very driven, probably to the point of insanity in some cases, they're not gonna go over everything a dozen times to make it perfect, they can't, they don't have the time. That's the reason why these ridiculously long works are always bad.
That aside, I've read fanfiction that was 300k+ words that would've made for great standalone novels if you just changed the names to original characters. Fanfiction takes the exact same amount of dedication and skill as original work does. And in a piece that is more than four million words long, there's bound to be a shitload of redundancy; with or without shipgirls, it's bound to be bad because it's long, period.

I completely disagree. I think we all have a short precious time on this earth and not everybody needs to strive to leave something behind. The majority of people are forgotten to time. If you want to write a massive anime fanfic that only a small portion of mankind will enjoy, and that brings you satisfaction and happiness, I think that is perfectly fine. There will always be other people with higher aspirations but that doesn't negate the happiness someone should feel for writing something that may be objectively "less important".

>Fanfiction takes the exact same amount of dedication and skill as original work does

Bait?

The title is "longest piece of literature in human history", and Darger very certainly takes the cake there.

He even had other books he wrote, like his biography that's like 96% about a fictional living tornado and a 10 000 page sequel to Realms Of The Unreal. He also autistically described the weather every day for decades.

Admittedly I've always struggled to comprehend that sort of fulfillment. Meaning, I of course understand it, but my beliefs bleed through and I can't help but feel that while they're satisfied in the moment, when death clouds over their mind the shadow of self-fulfillment will dissipate under the covered, selfless illumination that is existence. It's a narcissistic shade that will leave him alone in the end.

It seems we are just of two different mentalities. No right or wrong at this point.

Well he fudged the title because in his description he clearly states "longest single-volume fan fiction".

God damn that dude needs to find people to talk to besides the anonymous brain.

You sound like a really dramatic person. You should be concerned with enjoying your life as it happens, not the concept of enjoying what it was after it no longer matters either way.

Yeah, Darger suffered pretty badly from loneliness and only had a single friend.

His life in general is borderline Dickens' levels of sad, it's hard that he led that life, made some of the most influential outsider art of all time (all the while neither his writings and paintings were available to the public) without wanting to publish anything of it, and that the only reason we even know of him is because the landlord happened to care enough instead of just seeing Darger has a senile old man and throwing is art to the trash.

Honestly, no, I mean it.

What interests me is on the forefront of humankind. Not to try and sound super deep or anything, just that I'm interested in the just out of reach. The plausible yet still unattained: I enjoy spending the majority of my free time studying the planet, where it's been and where it's going; thinking about the functional robot I wish to build using self-propelled, perpetual motion generators I attempt to theorize and hopefully prototype once I have the funds, along with in depth pattern recognition software to give it believable A.I.; I enjoy thinking about and reading about the human condition and trying to pinpoint where us modern humans have lost touch with ourselves.
Then on weekends I drink some beers with family and friends and smoke a little weed to experiment with tangible thought as much like space-time. I don't have many friends since I regrettably gave up on acedamia before realizing this is just how I am. So I'm very much pseud.

Sorry, I'm kinda ranting about my life. Don't get to talk about it much. Not your problem though, I know. You're right though, I just don't know how to. I feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm not doing such things, and I get stress related tension headaches daily. I feel like an egg bound under a rubber band ball.

I can understand that. I'm much the same way in that I have very few people to talk to. So art is my way of basically 'talking it out', and I care little if it's ever exposed or accepted. But I'm nowhere near that level. It's almost bittersweet that his landlord did that. How many will appreciate his work compared to how many will think he was crazy?

this is fuckin' hilarious

>So art is my way of basically 'talking it out'
That's what it was to Darger too, it was literally his happy spot for when things got particular rough. He goes as far as to self insert (and his only friend, no less) in Realms Of The Unreal. In fact, IIRC, Darger is several characters in Realms Of The Unreal.

>It's almost bittersweet that his landlord did that. How many will appreciate his work compared to how many will think he was crazy?
A lot of people do both. What i think is truly bittersweet is how many people like Darger may be out there, and their work is simply thrown to the trash and never given a chance regardless of it's quality.

Nowadays, if you can't sell happiness or entertainment in an hour or less, it's not worth the effort. A thought that still never fails to depress me a little.

you and me both, user
i'm still fucking mad no one has published an abridged version of Realms Of The Unreal with all the art