The Shortest Path posted:Golem is a great, interesting character with a lot of nuance whose subplot does a lot to explore the themes of the book, though? Golem is a boring, nothing character who doesn't even care when Taylor shoots his baby sister in the face. What even are the themes of Worm? Whenever someone says something like this, the answer tends to be something really truistic like 'you sometimes need to do bad things, but you must do good things.' I'd say the central theme of Worm is cooperation and communication over competition, but even then that's pretty tenuous given how the story plays out. IShallRiseAgain posted:First thing I would do if I was editing worm is cut the entire Golem subplot, what an awful waste of time that was. All of the stuff set in the prison didn't really end up mattering either. If you were seriously going to edit Worm, it'd basically be in the following order:
Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Mar 28, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 00:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 12:49 |
|
|
Flesnolk posted:Wildbow alt spotted a wildbow account would never be named "the shortest path"
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 00:42
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:Golem is a boring, nothing character who doesn't even care when Taylor shoots his baby sister in the face. What even are the themes of Worm? Whenever someone says something like this, the answer tends to be something really truistic like 'you sometimes need to do bad things, but you must do good things.' I agree with basically all of this, but I would go even further. In addition to your cuts:
Leviathan-Behemoth-Simurgh is a good narrative conceit to organize the three books, but I'm struggling to figure out what to do with the Simurgh entry. Leviathan works as "Superkids do street-level crimes," and if we cut out the weird wards section altogether Behemoth would work as "Street criminals become middle managers and recruit other vulnerable people to crime on their behalf," but I almost think that Simurgh would need to be re-written from scratch because the back half simultaneously has way too much going on, and suffers from long stretches of a whole lot of nothing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 01:12
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:Golem is a boring, nothing character who doesn't even care when Taylor shoots his baby sister in the face. What even are the themes of Worm? Whenever someone says something like this, the answer tends to be something really truistic like 'you sometimes need to do bad things, but you must do good things.' I'd say the central theme of Worm is cooperation and communication over competition, but even then that's pretty tenuous given how the story plays out. He does care, he's just an extremely stoic person who has trouble letting himself express his emotions to other people. He's like that in pretty much every scene we see him in. Given who his father is and how he likely acted when Theo was young, it's a pretty easy line to draw between that stoicism and Max being abusive, but that's a bit of a tangent. He has a lot more depth to him than is immediately on the surface, I like him a lot, but I can see why you'd not given your dislike of a lot of the rest of the work. Worm's primary themes are trauma and individuals dealing with their trauma in different ways and how that manifests throughout the rest of their lives and the choices they make, as well as the friction between cooperation and competition. Ward is certainly more explicit in its major thematic premises than Worm was but it's definitely a big thing across the work as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 01:17
|
|
|
worms primary themes are actually bullying, and the dangers of distracted driving
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 01:27
|
|
|
violent sex idiot posted:worms primary themes are actually bullying, and the dangers of distracted driving Taylor viewing everything through a lens of people with power bullying people without power is a result of her personal trauma wrt bullying, so basically yeah.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 01:31
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:I agree with basically all of this, but I would go even further. In addition to your cuts: The one about making it more obvious that Sophia is Shadow Stalker -- just change the last line of 1.1 from Emma was my best friend to Sophia was a superhero or something -- would also explain why Taylor is against the Wards. I think you could do a pretty decent novel which goes more into the double agent thing and plays up the will she or won't she join the Undersiders thing where the bank raid is the big climax (and the epilogue is the Wards interlude where she's fingered as a new villain or whatever). But otherwise, yeah, cut the half-hearted double agent stuff.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 01:35
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:The one about making it more obvious that Sophia is Shadow Stalker -- just change the last line of 1.1 from Emma was my best friend to Sophia was a superhero or something -- would also explain why Taylor is against the Wards. Yeah, revealing it from the getgo would definitely work... I always thought that the secret identity thing was kind of flimsy and inconsistently utilized, so one possibility would be to make the Wards an actual semi-elite institution, instead of a child soldier pit that takes whatever it can gets. Then we could start the story with Taylor finishing a crappy day at Bully High, getting really excited as she hops on a bus and explains to the reader that she recently got a superpower and is on her way to Wards tryouts, only to arrive and find that mean girls rule the wards and it's just high school with spandex. She walks out of the tryouts dejected, notices a mugging or something, and viciously beats/bug-assaults the dude in considerable excess of what his crime warranted, then walks away with a spring in her step not even consciously realizing handing out a violent beating just made her feel better. I obviously like it more because I came up with it, but that strikes me as a much smoother and more believable descent into Taylor Does Bad Things She Probably Shouldn't.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 01:41
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:Golem is a boring, nothing character who doesn't even care when Taylor shoots his baby sister in the face. I feel Golem could work as a foil to Taylor, in that we also see his trauma but see how he doesn't use it to excuse violent sociopathy. Granted, for that to work he'd have to both be A) A proper character in more than the last 0.001% of the story and B) Actually oppose Taylor or call out her bullshit in any way shape or form, other than just getting mildly grumpy at infanticide.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 02:24
|
|
|
violent sex idiot posted:worms primary themes are actually bullying, and the dangers of distracted driving Texting kills.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 04:15
|
|
|
or just accept that the things that made worm a good serialization also make it not a particularly good fit for typical publication and stop fantasizing about lobotomizing 80% of the story
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 04:15
|
|
sunken fleet posted:or just accept that the things that made worm a good serialization also make it not a particularly good fit for typical publication and stop fantasizing about lobotomizing 80% of the story Well, I mean, we're not the ones shopping it to publishers and hiring ghostwriters so...
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 04:23
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:Well, I mean, we're not the ones shopping it to publishers and hiring ghostwriters so... eh I'll believe wildbow actually has intentions to publish when I see it. The story has been done for literal years and most online authors publish about 5 minutes after they finish their books sooo...
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 04:56
|
|
|
In my opinion you guys never really liked worm or simply grew out of it. And that is okay. But to act like the kind of edit you posit would "improve" anything instead of being a new work, with some names in common, is completely disingenuous. sunken fleet posted:or just accept that the things that made worm a good serialization also make it not a particularly good fit for typical publication and stop fantasizing about lobotomizing 80% of the story This. Milkfred E. Moore posted:What even are the themes of Worm? Whenever someone says something like this, the answer tends to be something really truistic like 'you sometimes need to do bad things, but you must do good things.' I'd say the central theme of Worm is cooperation and communication over competition, but even then that's pretty tenuous given how the story plays out. This i agree with. I read in worm a constant struggle between wildbow's personal feelings and their aplication in a wider world, between his idea of where the plot must go and the "shared world" nature of the work, sprung from multiple different stories. Add to that the dialogue he ended up establishing with the fanbase and the pressure of the schedule he commited to and you get themes in the story as this murky, half-formed, barely coherent thing Kefahuchi_son!!! fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Mar 28, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 12:11
|
|
|
Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:In my opinion you guys never really liked worm or simply grew out of it. And that is okay. Nah, sometimes you even have to cut stuff you really like to improve the flow of the narrative. The whole "kill your darlings" thing. More is not always better. This is especially true for a serial which probably had the vaguest outlines at best. A story seriously suffers if it spends a bunch of time on side-tangents that end up going nowhere important.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 12:54
|
|
|
I like Worm, but you could replaced Theo with a cardboard cut out and get the same amount of character building.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 13:35
|
|
|
GlassElephant posted:Practical Guide So it looks like Black rejected the chance given to him by the bard? Either that or the Saint proved she could outrun a horse. I would expect some sort of trickery but I'm not sure how much he would be able to slip past the Grey Pilgrim, especially without his name. Man, it was good seeing Catherine actually outplay Pilgrim, like completely, for once.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 13:52
|
|
|
IShallRiseAgain posted:Nah, sometimes you even have to cut stuff you really like to improve the flow of the narrative. The whole "kill your darlings" thing. More is not always better. This is especially true for a serial which probably had the vaguest outlines at best. A story seriously suffers if it spends a bunch of time on side-tangents that end up going nowhere important. I don't disagree at all but personally speaking that raw, unfiltered, juggle a multitude of things at the same time aspect is what made worm a thing to me. I don't really approach it as a conventional narrative in that sense ( as i said before worm is more of a soap-operaish event) and even in those i tend to prefer sprawling messes to admittedly more streamlined and elegant frameworks. I think if worm was to lose that it would be just another among dozens of generic ya/superhero novels, that are barely a blip in my radar, instead of a flawed but compelling space that makes me look forward to reading it every week.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 15:18
|
|
|
IShallRiseAgain posted:Nah, sometimes you even have to cut stuff you really like to improve the flow of the narrative. The whole "kill your darlings" thing. More is not always better. This is especially true for a serial which probably had the vaguest outlines at best. A story seriously suffers if it spends a bunch of time on side-tangents that end up going nowhere important. Honestly I don't think anyone who read fiction for tight narratives or cohesive themes/messaging or strong prose would give Worm the time of day. And on the flip-side I'm not sure why anyone who read through and liked the entirety of Worm would be interested in a version that cuts away an entire magnitude of words and all their favorite secondary/tertiary characters and scenes, if they're even interested in re-reading it in the first place. At which point the question of why on earth you'd try to publish Worm at all seems to have no answer. Especially since WB makes fair money on Patreon and if he wanted more he could have just self-published it years ago. E: Worm's length never really registered properly to me honestly, because as a teen I was OBSESSED with reading long poo poo. It was like some mental health issue, the dumbest and most benevolent one possible, where I couldn't get invested in works if they were short. I'm talking less than 100k words, I couldn't get invested. 500k+, now we're talking. It wasn't for some bragging reason or the like, it was the fact that I loving hated finishing a work I liked so I wanted them to last forever so I could enjoy volume after volume knowing I still had plenty more to go. I grew out of that mostly, but the mentality of not giving a poo poo about a work being economical with language or pacing itself properly is still there in my brain, unlike my appreciation for and recognition of other qualities in written works like prose, characterization, themes etc that has somewhat matured and improved as an adult. Insurrectionist fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Mar 28, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 17:24
|
|
|
You are not alone with reading things and not wanting them to end. That's pretty much the demographic for people who read serials online. Why do you think the popular JP webnovels are mostly a bunch of super long and cyclic stories (usually MC goes to place > meets girl > solves problem (either of the place or the girl or both) > picks girl up and brings her along > MC goes to new place - repeat for 20 volumes). Or why do you think CN webnovels are just super long drawn out powering up sequences that conclude with the MC moving to some new area where he's weak so he can go through powering up again? Sure the author's are trying to hit word counts but it's also what the audience wants. Even EN web serials are like this, why do you think Randiddly Ghosthound (which pulls 6k/ month on patreon) is 800 chapters of grinding to level up like a video game character and teasing romances that will never happen? The whole draw of web serializations is that they're long, unfocused, scatterbrained messes where the only constant is the specter of the author trying to hit deadlines that lurks behind every word. The fact that wildbow managed to pull something like a satisfying conclusion out of some of those serials is cool and good and a mark of their skill as an author but it's also sort of abnormal for the format.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 17:39
|
|
|
IShallRiseAgain posted:Nah, sometimes you even have to cut stuff you really like to improve the flow of the narrative. The whole "kill your darlings" thing. More is not always better. This is especially true for a serial which probably had the vaguest outlines at best. A story seriously suffers if it spends a bunch of time on side-tangents that end up going nowhere important. Perhaps consider that long serials with complex, in-depth worldbuilding for its own sake and tightly narrated, focused novels are two separate, different things that are good for different reasons and that people can enjoy different things than you?
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 17:47
|
|
|
sunken fleet posted:You are not alone with reading things and not wanting them to end. That's pretty much the demographic for people who read serials online. Why do you think the popular JP webnovels are mostly a bunch of super long and cyclic stories (usually MC goes to place > meets girl > solves problem (either of the place or the girl or both) > picks girl up and brings her along > MC goes to new place - repeat for 20 volumes). Or why do you think CN webnovels are just super long drawn out powering up sequences that conclude with the MC moving to some new area where he's weak so he can go through powering up again? Sure the author's are trying to hit word counts but it's also what the audience wants. Even EN web serials are like this, why do you think Randiddly Ghosthound (which pulls 6k/ month on patreon) is 800 chapters of grinding to level up like a video game character and teasing romances that will never happen? True enough, but I tended to get bored with the truly repetitive works like that. I mean you can certainly argue Worm is repetitive in ways, or like GRRM's stuff - the kind of books I read as a teen - can be repetitive. But those kinds of serials really take it to whole different levels of predictability. I remember trying the Sword of Truth series because it was so long and throwing it in the garbage. Somehow even teenage me couldn't be fooled by Goodkind. E: I figure young me's anticipation waiting for GRRM to publish Dance with Dragons year after year is why I am conditioned to read serials happily now even when they turn bleh because at least the words are dispensing regularly. Then when it finally did publish, I was just growing out of liking the series and blamed not liking the book that much on it being worse than the others. I mean it still wasn't very good, but in hindsight it was mostly just me moving on from ASoIaF. Insurrectionist fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Mar 28, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 18:04
|
|
|
Insurrectionist posted:True enough, but I tended to get bored with the truly repetitive works like that. I mean you can certainly argue Worm is repetitive in ways, or like GRRM's stuff - the kind of books I read as a teen - can be repetitive. But those kinds of serials really take it to whole different levels of predictability. nah i would say wildbow and a few others are exceptions to typical repetitive drek and that's why they're so popular. I was just saying being super long and unwieldy is a feature of the format
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 18:10
|
|
|
sunken fleet posted:nah i would say wildbow and a few others are exceptions to typical repetitive drek and that's why they're so popular. I was just saying being super long and unwieldy is a feature of the format True enough. I really do find myself consuming web-serials and books completely differently, not just in the bite-sized portions and how I read serial updates while bored at work and books on cozy evenings either. When I read a book I want to get through the whole thing and think about it after, I want to be challenged by the author in some way, or learn/see something new. I'm pretty happy when they're shorter these days. I remember my 'gateway' to decent literature was Hemingway, and The Old Man and the Sea was my favorite of his even though it was quite short. Whereas when I read a serial, I've realized I'm mostly just there for a character or characters. I never really read them for prose, or story, or even really world-building/setting though I can enjoy those. Certainly not for themes, pacing or because I'm feeling challenged in any way. But character-arcs, journeys and the like gets me interested. Even if it's just in a fanservice way - a character-type or trait that I can't find in other stories, on TV or in books, where I can outright tell I'm lowering my standards and reading tripe just to see a story featuring them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 18:19
|
|
|
The Shortest Path posted:Perhaps consider that long serials with complex, in-depth worldbuilding for its own sake and tightly narrated, focused novels are two separate, different things that are good for different reasons and that people can enjoy different things than you? Worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding is fine. I'm a person that wants TV shows to have 26 episode seasons again, so that everything isn't one tight narrative. That doesn't mean that stories should be spending a bunch of time building up subplots with side characters that don't end up going anywhere. I wouldn't even cut most of the side stories, but the useless subplots need to go.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 18:39
|
|
|
The Shortest Path posted:Perhaps consider that long serials with complex, in-depth worldbuilding for its own sake lol (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 18:57
|
|
|
To tie it back to what the original.discussion was, the point is that the editor made a good faith try based on what wildbow apparently said he wanted, i.e. publish through an established publishing house, rather than self-publication. And the editor probably didn't deserve the mockery wildbow and his subreddit or whatever made of him when as far as we can tell, his suggestions is similar to what most people agree should be done if indeed you actually do want to do the purported.goal. Obviously, that is a different issue from whether such goal is necessary or even desirable.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 22:16
|
|
|
I think Wildbow wanted to be the next GoT, WoT, or Malazan, and the editor gave him advice for a trilogy. Epic Fantasy is a genre that is published, though it's a lot harder to get a publishing deal for than Wildbow was probably expecting/hoping.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2019 22:33
|
|
|
quote:I couldn’t prove that Rumena had worked on its mastery of Chantant purely to be able to slag its opponents verbally, but I had very deep suspicions. Hahah, Rumena owns Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Mar 29, 2019 |
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2019 20:42
|
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:
...I thought Tats did work it out, almost immediately? I could be misremembering, it's been years. Regardless, for me Worm was always about... the impossibility of urban fantasy, I guess. This idea that you cannot simply inject fantastical elements into "our world" and have it remain "our world"- that the simple existence of superpowered individuals would be massively corrosive to our existing societies. The bullying is more a motif than a theme, in my mind. So if I was going to slim Worm down I'd probably choose to emphasise Cradle and the PRT (and their impotence), the Endbringers, and the drawn out collapse of civilisation.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2019 22:06
|
|
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:...I thought Tats did work it out, almost immediately? I could be misremembering, it's been years. She actually knew even before she met Taylor. In one of Coil’s prediction branches, Taylor tries to stop the Undersiders, which Coil told Tattletale about before their rooftop meeting. Tattletale’s entire MO was to try and “save” Taylor (because she wasn’t there for her brother), which was further predicated on knowing Taylor wanted to be a hero, but had a screwed up enough life situation that she was at credible risk of burning out catastrophically.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2019 23:07
|
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:...I thought Tats did work it out, almost immediately? I could be misremembering, it's been years. But is it? The thing about Worm, and a big reason why people like it, is because it's basically our world but with superheroes without the baggage of Marvel and DC's history. Despite twenty or so years of these parahumans being around, the world is virtually identical. It has this tension of, like, having parahumans being a thing you can study and know everything about through classes, but Taylor also has no idea what trigger events are and they have to be repeatedly explained to her (like three times in about six chapters at one point). The PRT has a whole catalog and ranking system with the ludicrously usable containment foam, yet someone using their bugs as Taylor does is basically unstoppable... except we know that other insect controllers exist because Taylor directly mentions at least one. I think Worm is very much about making that sort of urban fantasy possible. It's very explanatory -- why do superheroes go out and fight? Because they're traumatized (and, later, there's the Cauldron conspiracy controlling everything.) Why don't they kill each other? The Endbringers and the truce. Why aren't cities descending into urban hellholes of insane violence? The unspoken rules and things like superhero insurance that Tattletale mentions. Like, it's a very complicated set of cards that stack up to make the fantasy possible and as harmless as can be. There's a reason why a lot of the fandom conversation around Worm has swapped from 'it's a deconstruction' to 'it's a reconstruction'... whatever that means. If you rewrite Worm to emphasize Cauldron's machinations (one of the weaker parts of the whole story), the impotence of the PRT (changing them entirely, because the PRT is only impotent when it concerns Taylor), and the Endbringers bringing down civilization (changing the whole tone of the story). Well, for one, you're turning Worm into a different story just as much as any of the other suggested edits so far in the thread. And two, you might as well just read Not All Heroes which is all about that corrosion of society in the face of the impossibility of the heroic fantasy. Inheritors, too, is also a web serial that engages with ideas like that more directly than Worm does. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Mar 30, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 00:28
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:But is it? Yep! Or, that is the overriding impression I have of it in my memory, half a decade old as it is. Japan, Bengal and Newfoundland are underwater. The Global South is (apparently) a bloody mess ruled by super-powered warlords. The interludes from the perspectives of characters in positions of authority make it clear that they think the US is on the same trajectory, only a little behind the curve. The overall effect is of a world that is slowly falling apart, and can at best only stave off the decay for a moment or two. This plays out in miniature in Brockton Bay- massive loss of life and infrastructural collapse, leading to a breakdown of the pre-existing social order and the emergence of super-powered strongmen. And it... never really recovers. Something always interferes- the Slaughterhouse Nine, Echidna, the Undersiders themselves- and there just isn't enough energy available to put things right. This isn't always foregrounded, but for me it was always there in the background, to the point where the "normal world" stuff began to feel unreal and illusory. Milkfred E. Moore posted:you're turning Worm into a different story just as much as any of the other suggested edits so far in the thread. Sure? I mean, I thought that was the conversation we were having? Any attempt to carve Worm down into something tight and strongly themed is going to end up radically altering it, because Worm is not that. And, yeah, your serial's on my to-read list. I haven't been reading much of anything, lately, on account of having just started a new job. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 02:04
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:Hahah, Rumena owns Rumena holding saint by the neck while Cat continues negotiations was so satisfying.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 02:45
|
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Yep! That's true, but I think this is where Worm's worldbuilding doesn't really work. I think there's a Worm which is told to us, which is the 'grimdark dystopia' but there's the Worm that is shown to us, which is basically 2011-2012 or whenever it was initially set but with superheroes. The Japan thing is interesting because I thought Japan was completely gone, too, but someone corrected me that it's only the island of Kyushu. For example, we are told that Brockton Bay is overrun with gangs and it's failing and that the police are powerless in the face of Lung and Kaiser, and yet it doesn't feel like it. Taylor's day to day life feels pretty normal. Even her school, which we're told is pretty bad and underfunded, is actually pretty decent as far as facilities and classes and such go. It feels like it should be more like Ireland during the revolutionary era where there were soldiers everywhere and this sense of tension and worry that things might explode at any moment. Some of this can be attributed to Worm as a first draft, but I think a big flaw in Worm's worldbuilding is that Wildbow doesn't seem to have much knowledge of what the issues he's telling us would look like. It's like the passing mention that Bakuda has wired up every single person of South East Asian descent with explosives? Like, what? Or the fact that Lung has a gang composed of every Asian nationality, even though that's not really how gangs work -- even with an allowance for Lung being a big scary tough guy who commands respect, it's a bit off. For example, I've had someone tell me that Brockton Bay is equivalent to Somalia, but that's so patently untrue that I think it demonstrates the gap between what Worm tells us and what Worm shows us. But that's kind of my core criticism of Worm's stuff up to Leviathan. It tells us a lot of cool things, but then flounders when it comes to depicting it. Sort of like the bit where they're planning the bank raid, and there should be this drama of Taylor trying to double agent the thing without arousing suspicion, but it's basically handwaved with 'They planned it and I did my best to minimise risk to civilians.' So, like Omi pointed out, what's the point of it? Really, my biggest issue with it is that, when it comes to these problems, Worm points the finger at individuals and not institutions or intractable cultural problems. I'm thankful because it gives me my own conceptual space to play in, sure, but it always felt like a lot of Worm's really interesting scenes get undercut by it. Take for example the initial bank raid, where it's not made possible by the PRT being slow or ineffective or undermanned, but because every member of the Protectorate has left the city for some kind of publicity event, not some kind of vital crisis. It feels incongruous with the idea that Brockton Bay is collapsing - why would you send you A-Team away for so much time? Or perhaps the scene where Defiant demonstrates how far Colin has come by refusing to cover for the abuses of the PRT and Alexandria basically goes well, okay Colin, but we'll hand over Dragon's infrastructure to Saint. Instead of it coming across as hey, Colin, the world sucks, we can't risk your morals right now, it comes across more as Alexandria just kind of being a mean person, which is exacerbated by her whole scene with Taylor later on. It's also something we see with Piggot in the first Wards interlude. It's this focus on individuals/bad actors is a side effect of the bully/bullied theme running throughout Worm, but it just feels a bit shallow. KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Sure? I mean, I thought that was the conversation we were having? Any attempt to carve Worm down into something tight and strongly themed is going to end up radically altering it, because Worm is not that. Part of why I'd want to see the edited version is to see what Wildbow builds up, like maybe he does go hard on the dystopian aspect, or maybe he goes to more what I thought was the most intriguing aspect of Worm's world, and seems to be forgotten by a lot of interpretations, which is the mention that the world isn't a horrible place, it's just exaggerated. I think the line is: the valleys are darker but the peaks are higher. I think that's really neat. I feel like the tenuous average that those extremes would enable is the Worm world as shown and more interesting than the grimdarkness that people tend to read into it. But I also struggle to think of what moments of striking lightness we see, if any. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Mar 30, 2019 |
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 02:54
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:Part of why I'd want to see the edited version is to see what Wildbow builds up, like maybe he does go hard on the dystopian aspect, or maybe he goes to more what I thought was the most intriguing aspect of Worm's world, and seems to be forgotten by a lot of interpretations, which is the mention that the world isn't a horrible place, it's just exaggerated. I think the line is: the valleys are darker but the peaks are higher. I think that's really neat. I feel like the tenuous average that those extremes would enable is the Worm world as shown and more interesting than the grimdarkness that people tend to read into it. But I also struggle to think of what moments of striking lightness we see, if any. When I first read Worm, one of the things I really enjoyed was that occasionally something would come out of left field and be really weird, and the characters would ignore it and treat it as normal. I'm having trouble thinking of any early examples, but the best one I can recall is from Ward, where Vicky recalls a fond childhood memory where their parents took them for burgers, and little kid Amy got freaked out by the fast food mascot, which was apparently a really detailed cartoon drawing of a cow being vivisected and butchered. If it was intentional, that's a great bit of worldbuilding spice- it simultaneously helps to explain the crapsack world by establishing that Earth Bet was a screwed-up and viscerally uncomfortable place even before powers appeared, and showing your reader a horrible dystopian thing that throws them for a loop, then showing the characters breezing past it without a second glance is a really effective tone setter. The more I've seen of WB's bad habits the less I'm willing to believe those touches are intentional, but they work really well regardless.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 03:38
|
|
|
My favorite bit of weird background minutiae in Worm is Nicholas Cage being in the earth bet version of The Breakfast Club.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 04:56
|
|
|
The Shortest Path posted:My favorite bit of weird background minutiae in Worm is Nicholas Cage being in the earth bet version of The Breakfast Club. Yeah, that's one I was never clear on- was the intent to highlight that Erin was upset and not thinking clearly, or to point out strange alternate universe quirks? Because I cannot possibly think of a context in which "You're really hot, just like Nicholas Cage" works as a sentence.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 05:05
|
|
|
Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, that's one I was never clear on- was the intent to highlight that Erin was upset and not thinking clearly, or to point out strange alternate universe quirks? Because I cannot possibly think of a context in which "You're really hot, just like Nicholas Cage" works as a sentence. No Cage-shaming please
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 12:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 12:49 |
|
|
nic cage is hot
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2019 14:35
|
|