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The only unrealistic thing about PHO was there being only one site and not a bunch of dumb spinoffs with at least two being dedicated to speculating about capes' sex lives.
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Aug 29, 2017 19:07
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berenzen posted:The clones all died from the killswitch, but iirc we never actually saw shatterbirds body after Noelle swallowed her. if she managed to survive that and the golden morning, then it might be her. There's a line that mentions that Vista killed her.
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Oct 28, 2017 02:49
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WB said that the story proper won't assume any knowledge of the stuff being covered in this intermission, so if you don't enjoy the process of trying to puzzle out what's going on you might as well just skip them entirely. They're mostly just something to keep the hardcore fans engaged and occupied during the gap between stories.
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Oct 30, 2017 00:55
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I thought Taylor was an immensely frustrating main character, but at the same time I loved her. Every single arc had multiple times when I wanted to yell at her to stop making such terrible decisions, but my frustration was born out of that I found her sympathetic despite her flaws. I loved how the perspective that the story was told from made it so that I could understand how this character could think of herself as a good person making good decisions while actually being a bit of an rear end in a top hat. I think the story could have benefited from a few more interludes where you see Taylor from an outside perspective. She doesn't notice that she's sort of hosed up, so the story inherently can't draw attention to it; you have to just notice things like that she didn't form any meaningful connections with the Chicago wards in two years, realize that's a problem, and think about what that says about Taylor without any guidance from the story.
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Nov 1, 2017 21:43
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I've been rereading it along with the We've Got Worm podcast, which unfortunately didn't quite make it to the end in time. If only they'd started a few weeks earlier.
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Nov 11, 2017 20:58
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Early episodes there were a lot of people angry about how mean Scott was about Taylor when he was actually just trying to talk about what he thought the story itself was saying about Taylor. It was pretty hilarious, and it's just made better by how many of those same people have come to accept that every single arc (except the travelers one I guess) has in-story callouts about how lovely a person Taylor is being. I'm not at all a podcast person, but WGW consistently pulls out things I that I missed even on a reread and it's done a lot to deepen my appreciation for Worm and not mind some its flaws so much. My view on the time skip was previously that it was just a lovely way to recover from putting the end of the world too far out for the story's pacing, but they convinced me that while the time skip wasn't great, it did actually serve some purpose in the story.
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Nov 12, 2017 06:29
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Worm's first arc really ground your face into Taylor's trauma before letting it fade into the background a bit, so I'm expecting Ward to take a similar approach. This arc has to establish that Victoria has PTSD and make sure we understand what that means for her, but that doesn't mean that her dealing with PTSD will be the focus of the story as whole (even if it is what ends up driving the plot to some degree).
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Dec 1, 2017 02:02
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Che Delilas posted:I'd argue that Taylor's trauma spends far more time in the foreground than not. Every time she makes a major decision or has to deal with an adversary, violent or not, it's right there in her thoughts. We may not see her getting bullied all the time, but that trauma saturates her entire mindset (e.g. every time she characterizes a person disagreeing with her as 'bullying', which is just about every time). It's one of the things that makes being in Taylor's head so frustrating, heartbreaking and ultimately fascinating. I guess "background" is the wrong way of putting it. The first arc was really focused on telling us the readers about how awful it is to be Taylor, but for most of the story it doesn't really go out of its way to point out how many issues she has, and instead just acts as if obviously everyone goes into a murderous rage when they encounter something that could be considered bullying. Victoria is less prone to self-delusion than Taylor was so we probably won't get the same thing where the narration treats her (completely hosed up) actions as just being normal and sensible, but I do expect the explicit "HEY I'M DOING THIS BECAUSE I HAVE PTSD" to fade out once we're done establishing that.
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Dec 1, 2017 19:21
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Namarrgon posted:On authority incompetence; I think if you look back at it in retrospect (when you finish the story and know all the pieces) there really wasn't that much incompetence. Sure, people did not always make the best decisions but they often made reasonable to good decisions with the cards they had available. That in itself is a pretty strong anti-authority view. The overarching theme is sort of that authority is inherently bad, rather than being bad because the "wrong" people are in power.
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Dec 19, 2017 00:45
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Milky Moor posted:This thread just gets weirdly condescending when people say they don't enjoy Wildbow's stuff. We've had 'go back and read more slowly' (lol), 'listen to this podcast to 'get it' (lol again -- if you have to listen to a podcast to understand a work, then something's gone wrong along the way), lots of people like it (haha really?) and so on. I understand that some posters in here are pretty tied up with the Worm community, but those sorts of responses are not the best way of handling criticism. It is, as mentioned, defensive and condescending. This is something I see happen all the time with media. I think the thing that gets missed is that when someone says "I don't like this story because of X, Y and Z", they almost never actually dislike the story because of X, and even if you do convince them that X is okay it will not change their opinion on the story. X, Y, and Z are usually actually just some things which require some trust or acceptance from the reader, so a reader who is already enjoying the story will have no problem with them, but one who is looking for explanations for why they don't like it will latch onto them as the obvious problems. The seemingly similar but very different case of "I'm enjoying this story but X is bugging me" is where a justification for X may actually be helpful. If you enjoyed Worm but were frustrated with how the story bought into Taylor's biases because you missed the unreliable narrator aspect, then listening to WGW pointing out all the places where it happens will probably ease your frustration. This won't make you enjoy the story if you weren't already loving the good parts, though.
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Dec 19, 2017 01:03
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Flesnolk posted:I find that the concept of the unreliable narrator often gets treated as a crutch, as well. People at times go "unreliable narrator! unreliable narrator!" as if the concept of a narrator potentially being unreliable is some kind of shield proof against criticism as opposed to an artistic device that can succeed or fail on its own merits. Speaking more on it in general than directly about how Worm handles (or doesn't handle) it. Yeah, it's often a total non-sequitor that doesn't address the actual criticism in any way. It's similar to saying "well there's a plot device responsible" in response to a complaint about how the Undersiders always win when the person says they like to see the protagonists lose sometimes rather than it being about the victories being implausible.
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Dec 19, 2017 02:44
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Yeah, I only read the first arc before getting distracted and that seemed like the obvious direction for the story to go?
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Dec 29, 2017 23:17
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Milky Moor posted:Colin is Wildbow's best character in Worm. He has an arc that spans the whole work (Taylor's basically stumbles to a halt post-Leviathan). This is the main thing that makes the "Wildbow rolled dice to see if Taylor survived" thing plausible to me. She would have had more of a complete character arc if she had died trying to save the people in the shelter than what we actually got, which certainly suggests that was his original plan.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:26
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Either I stopped minding the strange structure or that did get a bit better over time. There's still something "off" but it's now something I only occasionally notice.
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Jun 12, 2018 04:53
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There was a moment in reading Ward 7.x where I went "oh no good things are happening please make the good things stop before everything goes horribly wrong", and then I knew that Wildbow had beaten me.
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Jun 27, 2018 02:14
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Autonomous Monster posted:Now I'm sitting here looking at this, and I'll be frank: that is one intimidating website. Somebody wants to be the queen of terrible serial fiction and they are wanting it real drat hard. Using a generic marketing site template for your web serial is an interesting choice. But not a good one.
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Jun 28, 2018 21:34
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The Martin family dinner is pretty much the only thing in Ward that's left me eager to find out what happens next. Every 2-3 weeks I catch back up on it and enjoy it, but then I'm perfectly fine with just forgetting about it for a while. It has a lot of really amazing scenes, but as a story? Eh.
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Aug 8, 2018 03:07
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I'm so glad that Akua managed to clearly and unambiguously lose, but then continue to stick around in the story.
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Aug 9, 2018 01:29
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Ytlaya posted:So, I was wondering about why Dead King views Catherine as an immortal in a way that presumably other characters in the setting aren't (his wording implies that the Immortal Club would just be him and Catherine, though that's not 100%). After all, all villains are technically immortal in the sense that they can live forever like Ranger as long as they're not killed. I wonder if it's possible that Catherine flat-out can't be killed unless her soul is directly hosed with; after all, her body itself is a construct, so there's no reason to think that any amount of it being destroyed would truly kill her. That's basically the case with fey in general - immortal unless their souls are used to fuel sorcery or something. (PGtE) Well she's lost half her body and her head and it was just a minor inconvenience. It's distinctly different from how the Fey work, though: they reform with the changing of the seasons, and seemingly don't otherwise have the ability to repair damage done to them
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Aug 12, 2018 05:05
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SerSpook posted:I'm pretty certain Bard is also part of that club. There's been a few mentions that the Squire name does sorta still exist and is attached to her; it's just nearly powerless.
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Aug 12, 2018 05:06
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builds character posted:Apparently Malicia thinks she’s still fighting a villain. (PracGuild) I do like that better as an explanation for her actions than "Malicia is actually incompetent and it was only Black that was story-savvy". She's seemingly made some significant missteps lately, and it'd be really unsatisfying if Cat beats her due to her picking up an idiot ball, but her simply misunderstanding Cat's Role would be fitting.
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Aug 20, 2018 22:10
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Ytlaya posted:I'm curious to hear more from Black. We haven't gotten much of a view into his goals ever since the events after the mess at Liesse, and it seemed like something about his perspective had fundamentally changed. I assume book 4 ends with Malicia defeated, but for that to happen from her plans to gently caress other Cat backfiring would be way too obvious for how the story's gone too far. Seems more likely that she has another plan in progress to deal with the obvious repercussions of triggering a villain death flag, and her defeat will come in some other way.
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Aug 29, 2018 02:30
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The Shortest Path posted:Ward 9.3 is really intense. I like how it's not quite clear that they're mind whammied until Byron pops out and starts freaking out, it's very well written. Also a Goddess-controlled Kenzie is loving terrifying. I though it was pretty explicit that they were whammied before that. The narration just doesn't make a big deal about it because Victoria is mostly just confused about it and not upset or fighting it.
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Aug 29, 2018 02:31
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We've had multiple characters outright say that Malicia isn't great at the whole narrative thing and it was all Black, so obviously it can't be true. Mostly it's that I want to see Catherine defeat Malicia at her strongest, not win out of inevitability because it turned out that Malicia wasn't very good at the thing that kept her in power for so long. Narrative doom was great for a character like Akua, but Malicia should be a very different sort of enemy.
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Aug 29, 2018 06:58
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Masego is the best.
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Aug 29, 2018 22:09
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The impression I get from reading PracGuide is that the author spends a lot of time polishing a few great beats per chapter, and the surrounding text is basically a first draft. The less interesting the thing the text is about, the more typos and overused idioms it has. It's an effective way to write a serial, but I wish he had an editor that'd make a pass over each chapter.
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Sep 7, 2018 07:05
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Omi no Kami posted:I'd mostly agree... I'd argue that PracGuide's arcs might be a bit too long (I found arc 3 simultaneously exhausting and too packed with content), but that's highly subjective. I think my only big criticism of it (besides the fact that the author doesn't edit and proofread their stuff enough) is its tendency to go on incredibly long chains of interludes that, while individually interesting, aren't where I want to be as a reader. I know they're often the most interesting part of the story, but by late arc 2 I was already hitting a point where when I read two interludes in a row I'd just pop back to the table of contents and skip past however many were left to get back to the story. I have mixed feelings about PracGuide's interludes. They're often some of the best standalone chapters, and they're nearly always positioned exactly where they need to be to work. There's only a handful where I've gotten to the end and thought "that really could have been told from Cat's perspective" or "that could have waited until the current sub-arc was done". Despite that... I'm still always initially disappointed when I open a new chapter and see an interlude, and one of the long blocks of interludes led to me dropping the story for a year or so. Ytlaya posted:Overall I'd say that PracGuide is the most competently and entertainingly plotted web serial among all the ones I've read, even if others might have stronger prose or (in some ways) characterization. It somehow manages to maintain a high pace without falling into the trap that wildbow's series do, where there's a feeling of constant escalation and/or cliffhangers (Twig still had the latter, and Ward has a sort of subdued version of both). PracGuide ends on cliffhangers all the time, but it helps that they're usually not too forced. If there's a cliff to fall off of then you can be sure that the last line of the chapter will be Cat tripping, but cliffs don't magically appear just for the sake of a bullshit cliffhanger that's resolved in the first sentence of the next chapter.
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Sep 21, 2018 20:38
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One of Wildbow's strengths as a writer is that he's actually really good at horror, and while Worm isn't a horror story per se it often evokes the genre. PracGuide has none of that; even horrible atrocities have a somewhat comedic tone rather than horror.
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Sep 22, 2018 02:14
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Just imagine a John Galt speech written by Wildbow.
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Oct 1, 2018 05:42
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Yeah I'm just assuming he isn't actually dead.
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Oct 3, 2018 19:55
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A character who died offscreen with zero ceremony turning out to actually be alive is such a cliche that it not happening would almost be a twist, and my default assumption when reading a story is that the character is alive until given a very good reason to think otherwise. PGtE hasn't done that yet. It's not that I'd be surprised if we got to the end of the story without him ever showing up again because yeah, he was dead the whole time; it's just that I also wouldn't be remotely surprised if he did show up again.
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Oct 3, 2018 23:34
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I wouldn't call it compensation so much as a thing to ensure that all villains are inevitably defeated. They have to stay forever at their prime so that when a hero does finally manage to beat them it's an actual victory and not finishing off the old bedridden cripple, or worse, the villain dying of old age before any hero does manage to beat them.
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Oct 4, 2018 16:14
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Masego interludes are such a delight.
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Oct 26, 2018 06:31
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My vague recollection of it was that I liked everything including the ending. I think it does one of those ratfic subversions of an epic fantasy ending?
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Oct 26, 2018 22:30
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blastron posted:If it weren’t for the author openly stating it is, I honestly wouldn’t have categorized Worth the Candle as “rational fiction” any more than Worm is. Both protagonists are pragmatic, careful planners, both settings are relatively well-explained and self-consistent, and when characters in either story make bad decisions, they make them for understandable reasons. Worm is itself generally considered ratfic despite it not being intended as such. When you strip away the "not a bad story in these specific ways" criteria it does basically come down to stories featuring that sort of protagonist where the world has fantastic elements that follow understandable rules.
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Oct 28, 2018 19:21
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sunken fleet posted:Void Domain - It's a lot like Harry Potter, except instead of being a gormless capital "H" hero who gets by with the power of love and friendship Eva is instead a vicious girl with a penchant for brutal blood magic and deals with demons. It has an edge over a lot of other web fiction in that it is already complete! No waiting for updates here. The whole thing comes in at a hair over a million words. (The author has moved onto another project Vacant Throne that I know nothing about but if you like one you might like the other.) The "hidden world of magic" that exists in setting requires a bit of suspension of disbelief but if you can get past that it's all pretty well set up, the author clearly put a lot of thought into how the magic in his setting "works" and came up with some creative stuff. Plus who doesn't like reading about evil magicians, demons, and our marginally less evil protagonist all battling each other to the death? I just finished the first book of this. I've enjoyed it so far and am going to keep reading it, but it has some issues. The prose isn't great. Lots of short and stubby sentences that don't flow well and especially early on there's a lot of awkward paragraphs where a character's name is repeated in every sentence. It's gradually getting better so maybe in another 800k words it'll be good. Structurally book 1 really doesn't work as a book. To use a Harry Potter analogy, it's like the first book ended when the dragon subplot was dealt with. Yeah, a plot thread was resolved and there was sort of a climax, but it really just felt like the author went "wow I've written a bunch of chapters and here's an excuse to declare a book done so I should jump on it". The biggest issue is that the characters don't have distinct voices. None of the adults ever come off as actual adults, and in particular when Zoe and Eva are talking to each other it's like two overly mature YA protagonists are talking to each other, not a teacher and a student. Devon's not quite as YA protagonist, but it's still super weird to have him introduced as Eva's master and then have them immediately start talking to each other as peers. Maybe the author's just pretty young and didn't really have an adversarial relationship with any of the adults in their life as a teen?
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Oct 30, 2018 04:14
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blastron posted:It’s been a while since I read Void Domain, but I recall the problem with its prose being that it read like a translation of a Chinese web novel. I have a hunch that there’s a generation of amateur authors out there whose understanding of how pop fiction should be written is based heavily off of translations of popular material from East Asian countries. Prose is structured differently in Japanese than it is in English, and I’ve found that even some of the better professional TLs of light novels out there still feel weirdly stilted. In this specific case I'm not sure. The defining quirk of LN translations is a lack of paragraphs. Even if it's not actually formatted with a paragraph break between each sentence (although there is in the bad ones) most translators fail to reflow the sentences to form real paragraphs. Void Domain has a stilted flow between sentences, but the author does clearly understand the concept of a paragraph and writes using them.
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Oct 30, 2018 16:46
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Omi no Kami posted:I've only been keeping up with Ward intermittently because I found the structural and pacing issues alienating, but I'm glad to hear that it has a more upbeat tone; the ceaseless depression bordering on nihilism worked great for Worm, but at this point it feels like almost as much of a writing crutch as escalation, and I'd love to see what came out of his attempting to write a genuinely happy story. I... wouldn't describe it as having an upbeat tone. I actually find it more soul-crushing than Worm ever was, largely because Wildbow has gotten much better at using happy moments to contrast and emphasize the sad parts. It has an ebb-and-flow where he hammers you for a bit, then eases up and lulls you into a false sense of security rather than just being unrelentingly bleak to the point where you no longer even care. There's a general upward trend (all of the main characters are clearly better off than they were at some point in the past), but it's not like any of them are "fixed" and we aren't done with the flashbacks showing just how bad they used to be. It is the first Wildbow story that I think could plausibly have a happy ending and I sort of hope he pushes himself to actually write one, since I'm not sure he knows how. Unrelatedly, the PGTE posted an update down in the comments which you could easily miss: So, announcement! I’ll make an official post at some point, but here’s the gist of it. Book IV has ended up significantly larger than I’d planned for, and would be ridiculously large if I kept to my original outline. Instead the latter half is going to be Book V, which will bring the Guide series to a total of six books instead.
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Nov 26, 2018 08:06
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violent sex idiot posted:when cat gave whatshisfuck the title lord of empty graves she didnt make up or chose the title, winter did. seems reasonable to assume that when the king gave her her title winter chose it in a similar fashion And the fact that the King of Winter seemingly knew what title she'd get before hand can be easily explained by him having infinitely more experience with Winter and so being able to predict what it'll choose for someone.
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Nov 27, 2018 18:33
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Ytlaya posted:Is the issue that she just wouldn't be able to return from that state if she got into it too deep? Because that would make the most sense. That was my assumption. She talks about it like she's afraid of there being a point of no return where she'd start to think that going further was a good idea.
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Nov 28, 2018 04:00
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