|
Twig is getting really intense right now. The Duke of Francis continues to be badass and is about to fight some sort of primordial-derived experiment, Helen is badly injured, and the Lambs are about to fight the Infante (who is seriously injured but still probably has some bizarre tricks up his sleeve) again, and we still don't know exactly what Fray and Hayle are up to. It will be interesting to see how it ends. My guess: Sy, Helen, the Duke, the Infante, Avis, Fray, and Hayle all die, while Lillian, Duncan, Ashton, Mary, Jessie, Mauer, the Lord King and everybody else still in Europe, and First Augustus survive. The Crown States effectively become three countries, ruled by Lillian (with help from Mary and Duncan), Mauer, and First Augustus (backed by the smartest pro-Crown Professors left in North America). The sequel comes in a few decades, where the Crown finishes conquering Asia and invades North America again.
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2017 02:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 00:26 |
|
|
charms posted:Reading through Worm, the parts that stuck out to me the most are the ones that seemed to imply that the author has never gone outside (the protagonist gathers intel on some supervillains she just met by looking them up on Wikipedia, the protagonist can tell which Asians are criminals just by looking at their "swagger"). It never came across that way to me.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2017 16:36
|
|
|
Meanwhile, in Twig... Helen is alive, but will remain incapacitated for months. That makes 5 active Lambs and 2 incapacitated ones. We still don't know what Hayle and Fray are up to. I'm thinking they may actually end up being taken to the Crown Capital, since it would allow the Lord King to get directly involved in the story instead of being saved for a hypothetical sequel. It also sets up a possible resolution: Sy reveals the truth about the Nobles to the general British population and it sends the Crown's European territories into chaos. The problem is the possibility that the Crown just wipes out Europe too and relocates to South America or India. I'm also interested in finding out what ridiculous titles the Nobles above the Infante have. His full title is given at one point as the Infante of Crown Hispana, and here's what Sy remembered about him when he first met him: 10.17 posted:Infante. That put this man around the ninth, tenth, or eleventh place from the throne, though it was always hard to tell, with new births and deaths that weren’t spoken of. My memory of these things was bad to begin with, but I thought of two possibilities for who he might be. Either the Lord King’s second grandchild or husband to the youngest child of the king. Jamie, who has a rather better memory to say the least, has this to say about First Augustus: 14.15 posted:Augustus is close to the Infante, and is in the Infante’s neighborhood when it comes to the line of succession. The way things unfold, he probably won’t ever wear the crown, barring incident. Children are born, they’ll fill up the space between Augustus and the Crown, but… it’s not entirely out of the question? Of course, we now know that the family trees are all faked anyway, but the Infante's being around tenth place should still hold. I guess the people above him would have titles like Dauphin of Crown Gaul? I'm assuming the Archduke (the Duke of Francis's uncle) was the title associated with Austria (which doesn't mean he actually hung out there), while FIrst Augustus is the title associated with part of Southern Europe (and I guess there would be a Second Augustus associated with another part of Southern Europe). The #2 noble would probably be the Prince of Wales.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2017 07:55
|
|
|
Interesting cliffhanger in Twig. The offer to become Nobles, combined with Avis thinking that Fray was going to destroy everything except humanity, reminds me of the Mass Effect 3 ending of all things: do they enslave the Nobles (the Lambs' current course of action), kill the Nobles, or become the Nobles? That's neither a praise nor a criticism, just something that amused me. I like Fray admitting that things didn't go remotely according to the original plan. She isn't Contessa, after all. Someone in the comments suggested that the original point of the fake expiration dates was to encourage them to take Fray up on her offer when Gordon's expiration date was approaching. This means that Gordon's death is partly Fray's fault, although that's far from the worst thing Fray is responsible for.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2017 23:51
|
|
|
In the latest chapter of Twig, it looks like another "god" is dead. It felt fairly shocking even though Hayle himself had explicitly acknowledged it would probably happen. I feel like Mary and Lillian will end up killing Sy. He seems pretty far gone at this point.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2017 21:14
|
|
|
GreyjoyBastard posted:There's really a motif in Wildbow's works in writing from the perspective of people who would absolutely be villains in other stories. I didn't read that far into Pact, but from what I remember, Blake was a fairly conventional good guy who was a "diabolist" only by chance. I guess you could say he's morally in the wrong for not just letting his enemies kill him early on because of the potential threat he posed just by existing, but that's a very harsh standard to hold someone to. (Maggie, on the other hand, was pretty dark. Is she really supposed to be a YA novel protagonist?)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2017 01:18
|
|
|
i like Ashton's arguments in the most recent Twig. Still no clear explanation of what the Lambs becoming Nobles is supposed to entail. Do they get implants to make themselves bulletproof and start pretending to be related to the Lord King?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2017 05:19
|
|
|
Calef posted:I remember Wildbow saying somewhere that Twig's ending was going to be not-happy but not sad either. Without a *lot* of development, the current ending feels pretty devastating. It also feels like it's intentionally dangling a whole mess of plot threads for a sequel, unless these epilogue chapters are going to tie a bunch of things off. That isn't the impression I'm getting from them though... Definitely a lot of remaining plot threads. We haven't seen the Noble-ized Lambs; we don't even know which of them, other than Sy, actually went through with it. Fray is still alive (albeit imprisoned, but she doesn't seem like the type to stay imprisoned). Mauer is still alive and probably less than thrilled with a lot of the Lambs' decisions. Most importantly, the Crown is still around and will return to invade America again eventually. We haven't even seen the Crown's European territories or met the Lord King yet. It will be very interesting to see the sequel. It will probably have to be set only a few years later, because it seems like the Twig world in more than couple decades would be too weird to tell Wildbow's style of story in.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2017 05:09
|
|
|
I would say Wildbow's biggest mistakes (which are also what he seems to consider his biggest mistakes) are things he already fixed in Twig (mostly involving pacing).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2017 01:15
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:If it's a direct sequel, where do you even go when you ended on 'stop space-Cthulu from killing All The Earths'? I assume the main villain will be Sleeper.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2017 01:41
|
|
|
The post on Pig's Pen makes some interesting points about where he thinks he dropped the ball a little in Twig. I think he's right that he waited too long to explain some things about the setting (in particular, if you don't read the About page first, it takes a long time to realize it's supposed to be the 1920s and not still the 19th century), and that a few bits dragged out too long (Sy and Jamie/Jessie visiting random towns and negotiating with two-bit gangsters).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2017 19:42
|
|
|
The ending of Twig raises more questions than answers, but we do learn a few important things. Jessie and Helen are OK, at least. It's less clear how stable Sy's brain is now, and what exactly the Lord King just agreed to. Also, does his name being Adam mean that he was Wollstone's first experiment? Does the Lord King's "true body" look like the slug thing, or is it more human-looking?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2017 21:55
|
|
|
TOOT BOOT posted:Did we ever find out anything more about Wildbow? I remember hearing he was a deaf man living in Canada but then saw a quote implying that wasn't true. I don't want to be all stalkerish or anything but when you've read a bazillion words by someone it's weird not have a basic, accurate bio. We know he's from Ontario, at least. http://forums.webfictionguide.com/topic/thinking-of-adopting-a-pen-name-thoughts Wildbow posted:I have the same problem - there's actually a fairly famous Canadian poet with my name, who was born in the same province (only 5-6 hours away from where I live). John McCrae - the author of 'In Flanders Fields'. Not sure if that has any traction in the states, but it's something you hear several times during every Remembrance Day in Canada (inspiring the poppy pin, which many will wear). Will people mistake me for him? No. But it does muddy the water some. We also now know he's male, which for a long time we didn't; I suspect more people assumed Wildbow was female than male for a while. Edit: Wildbow is "deaf but not Deaf," as explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/18yphm/what_is_a_common_problem_in_your_subculture_that/c8jfv3t/ Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Oct 21, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2017 04:30
|
|
|
Another thing I just remembered: IIRC, when somehow in the comments complained about the high school parts of early Worm and suggested that writers include such things as a lazy way to draw on personal experiences, Wildbow mentioned that he himself did not attend a traditional public high school.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2017 04:47
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:I can certainly appreciate writing under a pseudonym and trying to keep things close to your chest. It's pretty popular to determine whether something is bad or good based on the person behind it and not so much the craft of the work. I know a guy who was certain that WB was a woman because "they write the female characters so well", for example. More than that, I think the assumption that Wildbow was female came from 1) the cuteness of his avatar and 2) his not correcting people who referred to him as female.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2017 05:07
|
|
|
Pussy Quipped posted:Regarding Glow.Worm Part 3 : People in the comments have suggested a lot of possibilities, although most of them don't quite fit. Lung comes close (arrogant persona, has wings in full dragon form), but the Mangled_Wings's friends refer to her as female, and the writing style doesn't seem like him; Mangled_Wings seems like a native English speaker. Most of the other suggestions are obviously wrong, like Taylor (would surely consider herself a civilian rather than a villain now, and understands computers just fine), the Simurgh (wouldn't need help figuring out computers, among many other problems), Panacea (probably not the type for smug villain rants, although I'll allow that she may have changed after hanging out with her father for a while), Canary (definitely not the type for smug villain rants), Shadow Stalker (surely not computer-illiterate), Teacher (would just ask a Thinker or Tinker minion for help if he had a computer problem), Imp (would probably be more...colorful but less angry), and Glaistig Uaine (not a villain anymore). Rachel makes a bit more sense, but it would be strange for other characters to refer to her as A. Maybe a Damsel of Distress clone (also among the suggestions in the comments), or your suggestion of a Shatterbird clone? Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Oct 28, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2017 02:43
|
|
|
Plorkyeran posted:There's a line that mentions that Vista killed her. The "lost" interlude has Vista killing her on-screen. I assume that's more or less how it went down, just without the Tattletale clone stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2017 02:54
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:I'm very curious about what sort of ability the protagonist is going to have in Worm 2. Taylor's ability worked fairly well in terms of giving her a lot of flexibility and potential for growth. It would be difficult to write interesting fights for someone with, say, Glory Girl's power-set. Something with a Thinker angle to it could be interesting; probably my favorite thing about Worm's particular interpretation of super powers is the way so many of them fundamentally change a person's perception of reality in order to be capable of naturally using them (for example Taylor's improved multitasking). I liked Taylor, but I liked Sy even better. Having said that, one problem with Sy as an action-adventure protagonist is that he needs to rely a fair amount on a particular form of plot armor, where his enemies hear him out instead of just trying to kill him first. (At least Tattletale's enemies eventually realized that you should just attack her instead of letting her spin half-truths.) Someone with a pure Thinker power would just set up the same problem again. Blasphemeral posted:There's a danger in making an exceptionally "entertaining" character. A PoV character needs to be someone the readership at large can usually associate with themselves in some way. If they're too off-the-wall, you'll have trouble hooking your readers. True. There's a reason people like Rachel, Accord, Contessa, Helen, Ashton, and the Duke of Francis are saved for occasional interlude chapters instead of being the main PoV.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2017 20:15
|
|
|
Doctor Spaceman posted:Yeah I don't get it either. It only sounds underpowered when you downplay it as much as possible, like saying Magneto can bend spoons. It's underpowered in the sense that characters who control animals (e.g., Kouda in My Hero Academia) are usually weak. Though to be fair, a lot of Taylor's power comes from the multitasking and sense-sharing abilities. (Plus Kouda is afraid of bugs, lol.)
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2017 01:53
|
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:WE KNOW THE TITLE AND IT IS PERFECT I assumed it would be Glow.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2017 06:18
|
|
|
sunken fleet posted:Can someone summarize what happens in the Ward arc zero 10 chapters of chatlogs? Every time I try to read them my eyes just glaze over... I take it you're not a Homestuck fan...
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2017 08:16
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:I think it helps that I have no interest in participating in the choice-making and am content to just read the updates in bulk every few weeks or so. The only downside is that I occasionally find myself frustrated with the choices people make about who to spend time with (it's a crime that Ling Qi has never spent time with Han Fang or Gan Guangli), but otherwise I don't really care much about the choices people make with arts, weapons, etc (though I did find myself amused at how they randomly trained Polearms for a while). Honestly, all the pill stuff seems really tedious and I'm happy to completely ignore it. I'm only up to page 6 or 7 in Reader mode, but I'm enjoying it too. I don't particular care about Han Fang, and I find Gan Guangli actively annoying, but I am a bit baffled by how much time they insist on spending with Gu Xiulan. The character I'm most interested in is Cai Renxiang, who seems to actually be trying to make the world a better place. I guess it would be a bit out of character for Ling Qi to hang out more with an authority figure like Cai, though it does seem that aspects of Ling Qi's characterization (e.g., her attitude toward gender roles) have been retconned a bit to make her the kind of person who would hang out with Gu so much.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2017 03:09
|
|
|
NecroMonster posted:They both hosed each other up really bad (and Carol and the s9 dindn't loving help things) Tattletale didn't help either...
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2017 23:18
|
|
|
Flesnolk posted:Yeah, it's not so much me "not getting it" as growing bored of Taylor and Friends' invincible plot armour and how useless the people standing against her are. That and stylistic quibbles I'm sure have been discussed to death. There are some things I know happen that I'm curious to see how they play out, and I'm curious about if the sequel is any good/improved over Worm, but otherwise I'm kind of wavering on it. Personally, I thought the "plot armor" was generally kept as reasonable levels in Worm (aside from the Alexandria fight). Taylor usually wins and obviously doesn't get randomly killed, but she occasionally loses and there's generally reasons for her victories. Plus she's usually wearing bulletproof armor and often fighting against people who are trying to keep things non-lethal. I have much more issues with the plot armor in Twig, where the main character's enemies always make the mistake of hearing him out before shooting him. At least in Worm, people eventually realize that you should just attack Tattletale instead of letting her spout half-truths.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2017 00:38
|
|
|
Flesnolk posted:it can't be a coincidence that every person with authority in Worm is malicious, incompetent to the point of utter uselessness, or both. The anti-authority thing is pretty consistent in Wildbow's writing, yeah. Though PRT Quest is clearly intended to show that the average PRT director, at least, isn't malicious or incompetent, just someone with an essentially impossible job.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2017 19:49
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:edit: It's like the big reveal that there are alien shards in people's brains that compel them towards conflict. It's the sort of thing that severely undercuts its own story and doesn't seem to be anything other than justification for the criticism that 'things just keep escalating'. Depending on your perspective on storytelling, it's a piece of worldbuilding that might actively harm the story of Taylor while not really reinforcing it. At the risk of going too deep into WELL ACTUALLY territory, I don't think shards take away people's agency to the extent that the fandom interprets it. I can't remember how much of this is stated outright in Worm itself, but as I understand it, shards' influence on parahumans' brains is usually pretty subtle, with the exception of Thinkers and a few outliers like Echidna and Burnscar. (And even those those cases, it tends to be more a side effect of the power itself than the shard.) Rather than outright mind controlling people, they choose hosts who have a degree of disposition towards conflict in the first place, and then nudge them by making the powers more powerful when used in conflict. Wildbow has even stated that shards' personalities are affected more by their hosts' than vice versa; in particular, the Broadcast shard is more malevolent than it would otherwise be due to Jack Slash's influence. Having said all that, there are an awful lot of plot devices that can serve as convenient explanations for actions that don't quite make sense otherwise. This first occurred to me when I was annoyed by the way Alexandria went down, and realized that this could be explained away by her being set up to fail by Dinah, her own shard, Contessa, or the Simurgh. I'm leaning towards the Simurgh, because it would amusing if the cover story the PRT came up with turned out to actually be true. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Dec 19, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2017 06:31
|
|
|
NecroMonster posted:I finished Twig last night and aside from just wanting to talk about it in general I have to say I'm really surprised I never realized what Ibott's real deal was in regards to Helen until like the very last page of the story. I wasn't sure what you were talking about, so I looked over the last chapter again and found something I hadn't noticed before. e.04 posted:She was and always had been fairly Noble in appearance. She’d only ever needed to grow to her full proportions to fit the mold. So he intended her to become a Noble from the beginning? That...makes a weird kind of sense, especially in light of the strong implication that the Lord King was Wollstone's original creation rather than a human.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2017 01:58
|
|
|
NecroMonster posted:ok so, spoilers Ibott built a noble from the ground up, he built a noble that would be an attractive female, and he built her to detest him, to hate him and punish him, but still need him. So Ibbott got what he wanted in the end?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2017 03:46
|
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:Teenage Frankensteins rage against the machine in 1920s America That's a bit of a spoiler. At the start of the story, the are the machine.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2017 17:06
|
|
|
Mycroft Holmes posted:i tried to read worm, but if i wanted a story where nothing good ever happens and every victory is Pyrrhic i'd just start paying more attention to politics. Heh. Honestly, I find Worm less depressing than Marvel/DC comics, because the characters and world can meaningfully change in the long term.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2018 22:00
|
|
|
Random rear end in a top hat posted:Welp, Snag & company sure aren't loving around. It might be that the dream thing is a form of the Kiss/Kill phenomenon; shards generally nudge people rather than mind control them, after all. I'm not a big fan of the male members of the therapy group team so far. They seem sort of interchangeably shady, and their powersets are overly complicated.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2018 12:14
|
|
|
21 Muns posted:Eh, not really. Rain is mega shady, Tristan has been accused of being shady but seems like he's just stuck in a bad situation, and Chris is only slightly shady. Kenzie is shadier than Tristan or Chris and also has a more complicated power. More complicated than Tristan, I guess, but less so than Chris, if only because it feels like we're not supposed to think too hard about the details of Kenzie's power (which is true for most Tinker powers, I guess), while it feels like we're supposed to keep track of Chris's various forms and their associated emotional states and aftereffects. Though I acknowledge that's a subjective impression.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2018 22:55
|
|
|
Jazerus posted:the greatest sin of naruto is that it didn't lean into the special ops hijinks and instead went full dragonball, so i think it's okay for people to take that idea and run with it It didn't lean into it as heavily as a story in a different genre would, but by shonen battle manga standards I'd say Naruto characters tend to be especially underhanded in their tactics.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2021 22:43
|
|
|
I finished the first volume of Pith and liked it a lot. Thanks, madwhitesnake! I enjoyed the magical battles and the mysteries being set up, but I think what I liked the most is the way the viewpoint characters are allowed to be wrong about things. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jun 1, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2021 03:53
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 00:26 |
|
|
Jazerus posted:grabbed these while they were free. i'm enjoying them but they really put into perspective exactly why genre-typical xianxia protagonists are so loathsome with passages like this I think this is somewhat unfair. There are people he cares about (including his family/clan, even though they mostly don't deserve it). Unless you mean that he doesn't have, like, hobbies that don't contribute to his becoming stronger, which I guess is true.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2021 05:44
|
|
