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Point of correction, Ashley's power is *more* in control due to Bonesaw, not less. Original Damsel of Distress' power would fire off on its own, and poo poo like that. The comparison I was making was more in line with "Victoria beats a guy nearly to death with a dumpster and only after the moment passes regrets it", which I think lines up pretty accurately. In the heat of the moment Ashley shoots to kill, and as soon as that passes she is going to regret it because, like you think, I think that she doesn't really want to be a villain but being a villain is something she knows and can retreat to. Ashley doesn't have Amy on hand to cover up the crime though. Victoria's conflict is going to come from understanding and sympathizing with Ashley and having that directly conflict with the whole "murder is illegal even if they're a bad person". Like Victoria in this same chapter skipped out on killing Valefor, who is objectively a much worse person, at least once (maybe twice if she could have done the mental gymnastics to drop him mid-air or something).
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Mar 29, 2018 01:45
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True enough regarding the specific control over how she uses it, but I was thinking more in general terms, coming from her being a clone and all. I got the impression that clone + passenger = don't play so nice, especially after how Ashley was described at the end of the chapter. I don't agree with your dumpster comparison. In that situation, Victoria was maybe a little annoyed/mad, but fully in control of herself and fully in control of her power. She just did it thoughtlessly, to deal with a random thug, because she was used to having her family pull her rear end out of the fire if she hosed up anyway. In this case the story goes so far as to point out that Victoria can't see any sign of Ashley in her eyes at all. At the very least this indicates Ashley's emotional state wasn't remotely comparable to really anything we saw of Victoria in Worm, except I guess after Amy changed her brain where ironically she actually disengaged rather than escalate things further. And at most she might literally struggle to not commit acts of violence due to the effects of her passenger and/or being a clone.
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Mar 29, 2018 01:58
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Insurrectionist posted:I disagree with the last part. If anything, Ashley is a lot like Victoria as she is now, or at least sometime between Gold Morning and today. Both of them have serious problems with their powers due to the residual effects of a cape loving with their bodies. Both of them specifically struggle with controlling it and its lethality. Both have tougher times with control in combat situations, though for different reasons. Both of them want to do better and be better, but constantly struggle with backsliding. This part even more so if you subscribe to the theory (like I do) that Ashley doesn't really want to be a villain, she just doesn't know how to NOT be a villain and is very uncomfortable with her existence as a clone, to the point where she sees villainy as a safe retreat since it's the one part of her that she feels grounded in and really connects to. It's why I'm kinda expecting Victoria to actually take this relatively well, at least so far as standing up for her goes. Man what happened to Damsel in Distress is really upsetting and even though I'm glad we're getting more insight into her via Ashley, it's just... upsetting. And the identity issues Ashley is struggling with aren't unique to her, there's a LOT of clones. Even though I understand the ways Bonesaw was manipulated, threatened, and coerced, it's still like... hey, there's still very real, living consequences! That doesn't go away just because you're sorry, and it doesn't go away just because Jack Slash deciding to manipulate you and you being another parahuman inherently means you lose.
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Mar 29, 2018 06:36
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Insurrectionist posted:True enough regarding the specific control over how she uses it, but I was thinking more in general terms, coming from her being a clone and all. I got the impression that clone + passenger = don't play so nice, especially after how Ashley was described at the end of the chapter. More giant spoiler bits to annoy those that haven't read yet! My dumpster comparison isn't based on either of them out of control of their powers. Instead, Victoria has gone over the edge in excessive force in anger (you can't argue this, she has Amy heal him so he doesn't die on the pavement) and immediately is regretful. I clipped out some descriptive bits but nothing is out of context below. Notably with Ashley is that her damaged hand is the one on her face, her undamaged hand with better control over her power is the one she blasts BoB with so we explicitly can see that it isn't a control issue. Ashley has a lot more anger before she snaps, but this pattern of "anger->excessive force->regret" is something Victoria dealt with constantly (just because she wasn't in a blind rage before attacking doesn't change the pattern). We haven't seen if Ashley is going to hit regret or not, but we both think that Ashley wants to be a good person/hero, and instead of having Amy around to fix it Ashley instead retreats to "well I'm going to be a villain anyways" (looking at their CTF game for example). Victoria currently doesn't exhibit this at all, instead she is constantly being very, very measured with her use of force in every fight we've seen. The reason I think Victoria will have trouble with this is that she should be able to identify with Ashley having this cycle, along with being friends and someone she likes and cares for. The other side is Victoria's catechism, and following the law and what is right. Is she going to cover for Ashley, justify it, go with a group consensus, ask the wardens, or what? Worm 2.x posted:He flew a good twenty five or thirty yards down the back road before hitting the asphalt, and rolled for another ten.
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Mar 29, 2018 08:24
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I think if she does see her old self in Ashley, she probably won't take it very well, because old Victoria was a pretty terrible person. It's worth noting that when we're talking about her regret shown in that interlude regarding what she did to the dude the text is pretty explicit about what kind of regret that is. When she panics and calls Amy and Amy berates her, the thing that comes up is the consequences for Victoria in a legal sense. She regrets doing it because it gets her in potential trouble, less so because it was the wrong thing to do murdering some random mook and the morality of that. This is then reinforced when Amy agrees to heal him and Victoria completely stops caring, even to the point of enjoying it when Amy performs some twisted mind-games on him. There's no sign that Victoria at the time actually valued his life in the slightest. That's why, in addition to the very different contexts for their lashing out (being assaulted by a powerful villain in the middle of a warzone vs beating up a fleeing non-cape on the street) and Ashley's parallels to current Victoria, I personally doubt that the story will have Victoria strongly connecting Ashley with her old self at all. It might cross her mind, but I'm not so sure it'll be something that really impacts her feelings on or handling of this situation.
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Mar 29, 2018 13:51
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My crazy Ward prediction : Victoria will end up looking at Mama Mathers at some point in this scuffle and get her all up in her head. The only way to get rid of her is to have Amy go into her brain and erase the original memory of seeing Mama and any other memories of her
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Mar 29, 2018 14:23
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Silynt posted:Wandering Inn Patreon chapter (4.22) I haven't seen the patreon chapters but I can't imagine that could be anyone other than Ryoka, since that's what she did in their encounter. Even the current free chapter has him inquiring about something that I'm pretty sure was her idea. Argue fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Mar 30, 2018 |
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Mar 29, 2018 16:13
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Is it possible that he mistook her for a man because of her voice or something? I could see that being used for a bit gag or something but it still feels really off.
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Mar 29, 2018 16:48
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Argue posted:I haven't seen the patreon chapters but I can't imagine that could be anyone other than Ryoka, since that's what she did in their encounter. Even the current free chapter has him inquiring about something that I'm pretty sure was her idea. Please use spoilers when talking about the Patreon chapters, even if you haven't seen them and are just responding to someone who has.
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Mar 29, 2018 18:49
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Chris's whole situation in Ward is really interesting. Heck, so is Tristan's/Byron's. And Ashley's. And I don't even know what the heck is going on with Kenzie. This is a good cast IMO. Regarding Chris's power, it seems sorta like Genesis's from Worm, except with some pretty awful drawbacks. I'm guessing that his limited number of forms are probably overall stronger than the custom ones Genesis could put out, in exchange for having to deal with all the bullshit limitations.
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Mar 30, 2018 04:40
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Just finished "The Gods are Bastards". Lots of amazing characters, but the plot really was all over the place. Anyone else reading it? I also really have to recommend the Android app "Offline Browser Pro"- it makes reading online serials on planes so much easier.
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Mar 30, 2018 15:05
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Ytlaya posted:Chris's whole situation in Ward is really interesting. Heck, so is Tristan's/Byron's. And Ashley's. And I don't even know what the heck is going on with Kenzie. This is a good cast IMO. This is pure conjecture until the story actually clues us in to what his deal is, but given the absurd number of forms he appears to have, and the heavy emotional effect of each form, I was thinking that the limitations might be almost entirely self-imposed: it's possible he can cycle through all of his forms in a rapidfire fashion, replacing injured body parts and otherwise responding dynamically to the situation, but every single time he shifts he gets the full impact of that particular emotion, so going through more than one or two at a time makes him super-duper unstable and uncontrollable until he's had days or weeks to let everything run its course and water his mind down with extended doses of one or two happy parts of the emotional spectrum.
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Mar 30, 2018 15:56
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On the other hand, an unexpected upside is that I'm pretty sure he's quite resistant to emotion-affecting powers, if not immune. Because his emotions don't shift dynamically and fluidly in the first place, I think even when not transformed there'd be a resistance, and when he's transformed, he's embodying one emotional and his experience of the rest of the spectrum seems to be extremely blunted, so there's not much someone can do to him. Love Lost was just making Mad Anxiety, well, mad anxious, and I'm pretty sure the same thing would have happened if she had just been screaming at him in an un-powered way. Of course, the downsides of his power outweigh that upside, but in specific situations that upside is really really nice.
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Mar 30, 2018 16:03
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One other comment I have that may have already been covered since I'm still behind the current chapters/arc is that I'm pretty sure something weird is going on with Kenzie's dad, though it appears her teammates know what's going on so I guess it's not some "she's literally controlling him somehow or he's a solid projection or some poo poo" situation like I was suspecting (from the fact he pretty much never says anything on his own without Kenzie nearby or prompting him).Omi no Kami posted:This is pure conjecture until the story actually clues us in to what his deal is, but given the absurd number of forms he appears to have, and the heavy emotional effect of each form, I was thinking that the limitations might be almost entirely self-imposed: it's possible he can cycle through all of his forms in a rapidfire fashion, replacing injured body parts and otherwise responding dynamically to the situation, but every single time he shifts he gets the full impact of that particular emotion, so going through more than one or two at a time makes him super-duper unstable and uncontrollable until he's had days or weeks to let everything run its course and water his mind down with extended doses of one or two happy parts of the emotional spectrum. That's a good point I didn't consider, particularly the "he can likely change during combat to some degree, even if it requires going to his "original" form between shifts." While Genesis could sorta do that, it took a while unless her real body was located right next to the combat area for whatever reason (which is generally a bad idea). PetraCore posted:On the other hand, an unexpected upside is that I'm pretty sure he's quite resistant to emotion-affecting powers, if not immune. Because his emotions don't shift dynamically and fluidly in the first place, I think even when not transformed there'd be a resistance, and when he's transformed, he's embodying one emotional and his experience of the rest of the spectrum seems to be extremely blunted, so there's not much someone can do to him. Love Lost was just making Mad Anxiety, well, mad anxious, and I'm pretty sure the same thing would have happened if she had just been screaming at him in an un-powered way. Wasn't he staggered by Victoria's aura during capture the flag? I could be confusing him with someone else, but I'm pretty sure he's one of the people she's done that to. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Mar 30, 2018 |
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Mar 30, 2018 18:41
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My opinion on Kenzie's dad is that he is just worn down from constant surveillance. Just imagine if you knew someone close to you always knew everything you said, and how you'd want to watch what you're saying and stuff like that to avoid hurting them or causing misunderstandings. After a while I'd imagine that could grind you down so you just .. don't really say anything.
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Mar 30, 2018 22:48
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Worth the Candle updated. I don’t know why, but I am extremely concerned for the weirdly happy pilot and his bird wife. This is the most directly involved the party has gotten with innocent bystanders, and I am actually legit uncomfortable not knowing if the pilot manages to fly his ship to safety or if he gets shot down and plummets into a bottomless pit until he starves to death. I get that this story is supposed to be grim and dark but this is a step above.
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Mar 30, 2018 23:43
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ZypherIM posted:My opinion on Kenzie's dad is that he is just worn down from constant surveillance. Just imagine if you knew someone close to you always knew everything you said, and how you'd want to watch what you're saying and stuff like that to avoid hurting them or causing misunderstandings. After a while I'd imagine that could grind you down so you just .. don't really say anything. I'm reminded of Kenzie saying that her mom never invites other people over. I'd suspect that's more because of Kenzie than because her mom just hates socializing with people in the home. Team Therapy seems to know what's up with them and they don't seem unduly worried so I doubt anything sinister is going on.
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Mar 31, 2018 00:51
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blastron posted:Worth the Candle I don't think it has been mentioned in this thread yet. It's good? Can you write a relatively spoiler free blurb of what it's about?
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Mar 31, 2018 01:06
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PetraCore posted:Yeah... it's also implied that whatever happened with Kenzie's bio-parents was pretty horrific. Raising a survivor of horrific abuse is draining and difficult anyway in a way that's no fault of the kid, and Kenzie's issues are enhanced by her power to the point that multiple foster parents apparently just gave up on her. It sounds like Kenzie's recovered a lot over the past two years but I'm not surprised that there's something weird about her parents. My going theory is that Victoria was correct in her assessment of Kenzie's mom, meaning that she is her biological mom and had Kenzie when she was a teenager. The description of her just fits really well with her being Kenzie's biological mom, and [teenager not raising kid well] -> [trigger] -> [ward foster system] -> [gold morning] or [mom old enough and foster system had enough of that poo poo] just seems like it fits really well with what we know.
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Mar 31, 2018 01:16
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ZypherIM posted:My going theory is that Victoria was correct in her assessment of Kenzie's mom, meaning that she is her biological mom and had Kenzie when she was a teenager. The description of her just fits really well with her being Kenzie's biological mom, and [teenager not raising kid well] -> [trigger] -> [ward foster system] -> [gold morning] or [mom old enough and foster system had enough of that poo poo] just seems like it fits really well with what we know.
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Mar 31, 2018 01:39
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i still want to know whats up with the dad
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Mar 31, 2018 02:36
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:I don't think it has been mentioned in this thread yet. It's good? Can you write a relatively spoiler free blurb of what it's about? It’s pretty good, yeah. It’s about a life-long Dungeon Master who nods off in class and suddenly finds himself shoved out of a helicopter above a world that’s made out of a pastiche of his home brew D&D settings. Between his setting knowledge and some unique superpowers, he manages to avoid getting himself killed, but despite his advantages he’s still constantly challenged and is frequently on the back foot. It gets pretty dark and and tackles some fairly hefty issues with decent competency. The decisions the protagonist makes have actual, long-term consequences that directly impact the plot both positively and negatively, which puts this miles above a lot of other serial fiction. Here is a link.
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Mar 31, 2018 03:11
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:I don't think it has been mentioned in this thread yet. It's good? Can you write a relatively spoiler free blurb of what it's about? It's self-insert rat-fic. It's also... not bad?
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Mar 31, 2018 08:43
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Worth the Candle is also pretty self-congratulatory, but well that seems to be a function of most "rat" fictions.
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Mar 31, 2018 11:14
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Ward: maybe I'm being too critical, but tonight's chapter really underlines something that's been bugging me for a while- does Victoria just not have feelings when action is happening? She just saw one of her new friends straight-up murder a guy and very possibly ruin her life, and then (as far as she/we know) watched mama mathers effectively execute a ton of hostages, but she comes off like an emotionless robot in her descriptions. Taylor, Sy, even freaking Blake felt like a human being when they were the viewpoint character, but Vicky just feels like a camera to me, and I'm genuinely not sure if it's a problem with the writing or an intentional side effect of her pathology.
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Mar 31, 2018 11:53
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It's a criticism of Wildbow's writing (and a lot of web fiction) in general. It happens a lot in Worm too, but people explain it away as a function/side effect of the Queen Administrator shard.
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Mar 31, 2018 11:57
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Sidepiece is the loving best goddamn. 
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Mar 31, 2018 14:49
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Milky Moor posted:It's a criticism of Wildbow's writing (and a lot of web fiction) in general. It happens a lot in Worm too, but people explain it away as a function/side effect of the Queen Administrator shard. not so much 'people' as 'the story', it's explicitly pointed out in story as a thing Taylor does. Whether that's a handy excuse for Wildbow writing a bit robotic at times is another matter, but 'Taylor shunts her emotions and the tells that go with them off into her bugs' is explicitly there in text.
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Mar 31, 2018 15:04
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NinjaDebugger posted:but 'Taylor shunts her emotions and the tells that go with them off into her bugs' is explicitly there in text. Well, yes, that's related and all but also not completely the issue of character-as-camera that you get in a lot of Wildbow's stuff.
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Mar 31, 2018 23:19
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Omi no Kami posted:Ward: maybe I'm being too critical, but tonight's chapter really underlines something that's been bugging me for a while- does Victoria just not have feelings when action is happening? She just saw one of her new friends straight-up murder a guy and very possibly ruin her life, and then (as far as she/we know) watched mama mathers effectively execute a ton of hostages, but she comes off like an emotionless robot in her descriptions. Taylor, Sy, even freaking Blake felt like a human being when they were the viewpoint character, but Vicky just feels like a camera to me, and I'm genuinely not sure if it's a problem with the writing or an intentional side effect of her pathology. I don't really get the emotionless robot vibe as much, but Victoria has spent a good amount of time focusing on control: emotions, powers, situations, etc. She's sort of spent years working on that control (think Sveta not murdering people with her tentacles but for emotions). I think that you're feeling a difference from other works from Wildbow indicates that this is probably intentional to some degree. I think a lot of the emotion in the work gets delivered through dialog/actions than through mental monologue, which is a stylistic thing Wildbow does. She pretty clearly cares a lot (she stays way longer than Sveta or Capricorn and takes steps to help remove Ashley from the villains) but the situation also doesn't exactly lend itself to overt emotional stuff. I haven't had a situation exactly like this, but have with situations where just sort of shoving that poo poo into a box for later and you just focus down on the mission happens, and this reaction felt close enough to that that I didn't feel it was weird. The hostages aren't being executed though they're in extreme mental pain. Victoria was prepared for this, she knew they could do it (breaker girl) and knew they had hostages and knew that at some point the Fallen would play this card. The situation probably also isn't something entirely new: villains holding hostages has to have come up more than once with Victoria's past. I kind of want a comedic relief interlude featuring Sidepiece, Disjoint, and Moose.
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Apr 1, 2018 00:08
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ZypherIM posted:I kind of want a comedic relief interlude featuring Sidepiece, Disjoint, and Moose. After the battle, taking ashley for a post-battle drink. That would own.
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Apr 1, 2018 01:37
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ZypherIM posted:My going theory is that Victoria was correct in her assessment of Kenzie's mom, meaning that she is her biological mom and had Kenzie when she was a teenager. The description of her just fits really well with her being Kenzie's biological mom, and [teenager not raising kid well] -> [trigger] -> [ward foster system] -> [gold morning] or [mom old enough and foster system had enough of that poo poo] just seems like it fits really well with what we know. I feel like Kenzie's power is one of the ones that could most clearly imply the likely cause of her trigger (in this case probably being something related to wanting to see/monitor something that she was either intentionally or unintentionally kept out of the loop about). edit: Heck, this has even come up explicitly, with her being upset about being "kept out of the loop" when it comes to group activities, etc.
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Apr 1, 2018 04:16
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Silynt posted:Wandering Inn Patreon chapter (4.22) He didn't spend that much time with Ryoka, but he did spend some time with the butler... Reynold? Maybe that's who he's referring to
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Apr 1, 2018 12:30
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Nettle Soup posted:He didn't spend that much time with Ryoka, but he did spend some time with the butler... Reynold? Maybe that's who he's referring to This was my take on it (Wandering Inn 4.22)
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Apr 2, 2018 02:32
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Just marathoned Worth the Candle; it's a pretty fun read and updates pretty fast. LitRPG but avoids being boring on account of the MC's abilities.
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Apr 2, 2018 04:10
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The Gods are Bastards is back off hiatus with a bonus chapter.
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Apr 2, 2018 17:28
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We're getting a two chapter Arjen backstory and it's pretty great so far. Also the author seems waaaaaaay more mentally healthy than he was a month ago so it looks like the break did him a lot of good.
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Apr 2, 2018 17:36
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I'm curious about how things are going to go with Tristan. I'm doubting he's actually an outright sociopath (since Byron seems to doubt it's the case*, and there isn't really anywhere to go with his character if that were true), but it's obvious that the situation mentioned by Moonsong is going to happen to some degree later, and she probably isn't wrong that he's going to try to use Rain or Sveta or something at some point. Also, after reading the Dot interlude, I'm a little confused by what the gently caress is going on with Riley/Bonesaw. In general I've always found her post-S9 character kind of confusing. Like, I understand that she did all this horrific stuff while under the heavy influence of her shard/Jack, but I don't really understand how a remotely sane human being could continue to exist with the memories of having done the sort of stuff Bonesaw has done. I also don't really understand why it seems we're supposed to perceive Nilbog as really wise? Like, the guy was a pretty bad person who just used his ridiculously powerful ability to take over a city and kill anyone who tried to take it back (or were rude to him or whatever). I don't know how "ruling over a bunch of life forms that seemingly worship you by default" gives a person great wisdom. * Though he didn't rule out the possibility
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Apr 2, 2018 20:22
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Because she's not remotely sane. My interpretation of her is that she knows what she did out of fear of Jack was wrong to an extent, but she is also really interested in using her power to make hosed up weird poo poo, and the compromise met was for her to do so in a positive direction with Warden guidance so that she isn't horribly deforming people but can instead help them. She is in no way a good person.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:48
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And I don't think Nilbog was supposed to actually be wise, just come across that way. Some of that is probably because we're seeing things from Dot's perspective in that Interlude. Riley does seem to agree with him, but I think that's because they both seem to buy into their connection to their shard to a crazy extent. That's pretty much what he's getting at (in his own crazy way) when he tells Amy that she's supposed to act like the Red Queen. He's telling her to indulge her shard and you can almost see how that could be reasonable because Amy does tend to make herself miserable by keeping the lid on her powers. Of course we've also seen what happens when she does let loose, so this whole scene felt very much like establishing that Amy is hanging out with these people who think going hog-wild with their bio-bullshit powers is awesome and see it as art or kind of a mythological philosophy. I think framing Nilbog as being seen as this Great King from Dot's point of view serves to make us nervous about Amy talking to him and 'adopting' Dot at the end. Basically by seeing things from the perspective of someone who is hard-wired to listen to Nilbog and putting Amy into that context it primes the reader to think about the possibility of Amy listening to him like he's some wise old king, which would be tremendously bad and I can't wait for that payoff.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:02
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