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Falstaff posted:Nah. Readers are way too kind to Miss Militia. For most of the story, She's the "good cop" who turns a blind eye to the crimes and corruption of her fellow cops because she doesn't want to make waves. Eh, I think her motivations were understandable. She had a pretty normal human desire to err on the side of viewing her peers positively, but once (for example) Armsmaster's corruption became clear she reacted appropriately. I got the impression that Miss Militia viewed heroes overly idealistically (due to her own experience with her life improving after coming to the US and joining the Protectorate), but generally had good intentions and was still willing to accept inconvenient information once it became clear and irrefutable. Being resistant towards doubting your peers is obviously its own sort of sin, but I still view her more positively than, say, Taylor and the Undersiders. And the same goes for most other heroes we get to know, particularly the ones who aren't ex-villains. Clockblocker, Vista, Weld, Gallant, and Aegis were all generally good people (at least from what we saw), even if they weren't perfect. And a lot of the flaws of the Protectorate* stem from its bureaucracy, but it's important to realize that there are also benefits to that same bureaucracy. While we usually only see the downsides to it, it's probably overall a good thing that heroes have to carefully monitor the extent to which they damage property or take violent actions, etc. * I'm ignoring the "cooperation from Cauldron" stuff here, since that's obviously a completely different matter, but it doesn't apply as much to their "on the ground" operations and individual heroes.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:24
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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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Ytlaya posted:Other than that, people always point to Taylor providing a high quality of life for her "subjects" and completely ignore the fact that she's only able to do that using the money illicitly earned by Coil. The alternative to her actions isn't "not giving those people food/shelter" but rather "using the money through actual public institutions rather than a criminal organization." Coil was funded by Cauldron as an experiment, to see if capes could assume direct control of cities. 'Heros vs Villians' is a framework thought up by Cauldron, to legitimize cultivation and training of capes for the end of the world. Cauldron run the PRT; Alexandria is the warlord of the USA. The conflict portrayed in first half of Worm isn't the Undersiders vs the state, it's nascent Cauldron vs actual Cauldron. I don’t know how people can read the same work and think the problem with Taylor is that she opposes the legitimate state. Rather, it’s that she hypocritically criticizes the state when not realizing that she practices their ideology.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:36
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sunken fleet posted:Are you saying that those are bad things? They all seem to me like pretty reasonable actions for her to take in the context of the story. Calef kind of hit it on the head, but I wanted to reinforce a point. Taylor takes the expedient route and rationalizes it in a "this was the only route" sort of way. Making no judgement what-so-ever on the morality of the actions, she acts on impulse or in very cut-throat ways, but when she thinks or talks about her actions she shifts it into a "I was backed into a corner" defense. Often times she wasn't really backed into a corner, or put herself in that corner, or just didn't want to deal with the complications (coil being the perfect example). That is where the unreliable narrator combines to make her a really interesting character, because you get drawn into the story and on-board with a lot of her rationalizations even after you try to account for them. Like tricking Sundancer into take a shot at the 9, it wasn't just that she was pretty sure there were still people alive, but with her sensory power she would know exactly how many and where they were and still made the call to sacrifice them (exactly what the PRT does when they drop a bomb on the city, actually!). Also as soon as anyone disagrees with her she puts them into a mental box called "Bully" and utterly dismisses them and anything they say/do. Which ties into a major theme of the work where Cape's traumas keep them from getting better/moving on. One of those hidden benefits to the PRT is how they are actually trying to take care of the mental health of their heroes (though much like in real life, severely understaffed). I really like Worm, and I like Taylor as a character, but she really wasn't that great of a person.
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Jun 7, 2018 18:56
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Brain Candy posted:Coil was funded by Cauldron as an experiment, to see if capes could assume direct control of cities. 'Heros vs Villians' is a framework thought up by Cauldron, to legitimize cultivation and training of capes for the end of the world. Cauldron run the PRT; Alexandria is the warlord of the USA. I remember Coil mentioning making a bunch of money using his power (which happened to be perfectly suited to making a poo poo ton of money through the stock market). Cauldron would then probably be able to keep Watchdog off his back. While the PRT/Protectorate is controlled by Cauldron, the entire government isn't, and it's still better to have those resources controlled by an organization (the government) with some accountability to the public than by some random powered teenagers. Either way, my point still stands that most of the good Taylor did was only made possible through Coil's criminal activities (mostly what I guess sorta amounts to insider trading). So it's a false dichotomy to act like the only possibilities were "Brockton Bay helped by the resources of the Undersiders" and "lawlessness with a mostly powerless government/PRT in charge." Also, while the PRT was ultimately lead by Cauldron, most of its members weren't with Cauldron and a lot of the duties performed by local Protectorates were the same things a more legitimate government would do. I mean, the Protectorate still continued to exist after Cauldron stuff was revealed and Cauldron members removed, and even before that it was still a better idea to work "through the system" than to be a random villain/vigilante.
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Jun 7, 2018 19:26
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idk maybe it's the crazy American in me but I got pretty fully on board with Taylor's "rationalizations" and have never really gotten off-board. She is pretty legitimately backed into a corner throughout the entire story and reacts more or less appropriately. She's not Superman, so she can't perfectly save everyone every time with zero loss of life, but she does good with the poo poo hand she's dealt. Her responses are proportional and rational and she operates with a pretty clear moral core that happens to not wholly discount lethal force as a problem solving method in extreme circumstances. I mean you guys keep bringing up Coil (which was a pretty heavy turning point in the story) but I don't understand what you imagine could have been done better when dealing with a man who dabbles in alternate realities, is the center of power of all the local villains, has the PRT so thoroughly subverted that he is the local chapters leader, and has a precog on a leash. Also he wants to kill her. Like if you rewrite the whole story starting from when she first joins the Undersiders and make it so she refuses to interact with him from the start maybe he doesn't end up as such a clear and direct antagonist but that's not the story... Taylor seems to me to be as much of a good person as it is possible to be within the context of the setting.
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Jun 7, 2018 19:35
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The first arc is really a perfect microcosm of her behavior through the whole story. Like a genuine crazy person, she decides to go out on her own and mete out vigilante justice to whoever she runs across. She happens to run across (what turns out to be) one of the most dangerous villains in the story, and dumbly backs herself into a corner by climbing up to a rooftop. Having gotten herself backed into a corner because of her series of poor decisions, she quickly escalates to lethal force against Lung. She then get her rear end saved from the dumb mess she created by (people who eventually become) her friends. Then Tattletale, the perfect enabler, decides to give her a path forward that solves the immediate issue ("Taylor is basically suicidal") by creating worse issues down the line ("Taylor is now a criminal"). This is what happens over and over again. Self-aggrandizing savior complex => gets in over her head, backs herself into a corner due to her own mistakes in judgement => escalates level of violence because it's necessary to get out of the mess she created => gets ultimately rescued from her own mess by her friends => gets roped in for another round by Lisa's manipulations. I think you're focusing on the "escalates level of violence because it's necessary to get out of the mess she created" step without realizing it's part of a pattern.
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Jun 7, 2018 19:45
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oops
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Jun 7, 2018 19:46
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Pretty much all of the main antagonists in the story are wholly external - they come to Taylor with no prompting on her part, even Lung in that first arc arguably (since he's a villain making GBS threads up the neighborhood she lives in / near). In fact if I had complaints with Worm it would probably be the non-stop slew of external threats that keep popping in, one after another, each bigger and badder than the last. Coil, bitch, the PRT heroes, Leviathan, Echidna, the nine, Accord, Scion... all of those people come at Taylor with no particular prompting on her part. Like yeah, when the huge monster is laying waste to her city, or when the worst monsters humanity ever produced roll up on her doorstep, or when the crazy golden god hellbent on the destruction of the human race drops by, she could have "not escalated the violence" but that's why she's the hero of the story and not the chump that dies in a shelter.
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Jun 7, 2018 20:16
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sunken fleet posted:idk maybe it's the crazy American in me but I got pretty fully on board with Taylor's "rationalizations" and have never really gotten off-board. She is pretty legitimately backed into a corner throughout the entire story and reacts more or less appropriately. She's not Superman, so she can't perfectly save everyone every time with zero loss of life, but she does good with the poo poo hand she's dealt. Her responses are proportional and rational and she operates with a pretty clear moral core that happens to not wholly discount lethal force as a problem solving method in extreme circumstances. They figure out pretty early on that there are limits to his power. In fact, Lisa's entire plan hinges on the fact that if you spool out your plan far enough down the line that it doesn't trip him noticing then you can get him hosed in both timelines and you win. Then instead of taking this info and contacting someone in authority that has shown them goodwill/trust (say, miss militia or dragon or bypassing local PRT entirely) and is willing to believe the info they have about working around his power and captured precog, they instead engineer a situation where Coil needs to choose between them and his infinitely more valuable pre-cog. He only wants to kill her because she forces him to make a choice that isn't a realistic choice. Then at the end of it they don't try to figure out a way to keep him check mated (sedation?) while they contact authorities, she shoots him and they hide his body so they can take all his criminal empire. There are a lot of chances before you're at the actual killing where they could have taken a different approach, but Taylor never even considers them (mostly because the people involved disagreed with her once, she has a pathological distrust of authority, and armsmaster is lovely) and Lisa is the great enabler who really prefers this outcome over anything else so she isn't exactly going to volunteer a different plan (she helps her friend AND gets a criminal empire, whats not to love). Remember at this point in time they didn't know anything concrete about cauldron, so there isn't any excuses there. A lot of the other situations are like that. There are other options that she could have made, but it was expedient to act the way she did, and the only way she sees forward is escalation or doubling down on past actions. Some situations aren't like that, like the S9 arc, but even there if they had a better relationship with the heroes a lot of random lovely-ness could be avoided. They benefited a ton from working with the travelers, now imagine that they were able to work with the PRT like they were dealing with an S class threat (ie like with endbringers, and how the S9 are designated).
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Jun 7, 2018 20:40
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Ytlaya posted:Eh, I think her motivations were understandable. She had a pretty normal human desire to err on the side of viewing her peers positively, but once (for example) Armsmaster's corruption became clear she reacted appropriately. lol, no. She acts appropriately when Colin's corruption becomes apparent, with the caveat that she's still going with the flow there (she's not the only one to turn against Armsmaster), the whole confrontation is too public to really do anything else without risking the truce, and that Colin gets what is effectively a slap on the wrist for crimes that would send anyone else on a face track to the Birdcage - and everything's hushed up. But that says nothing about Piggot's crimes. Or Tagg's. Or Rebecca Costa-Brown's whole "Yes, I said I'd resign, but I didn't say anything about being ~*~interim leader~*~ tee hee." All this stuff makes her uncomfortable, but she does nothing to push back against it. Which, as I said, makes her the so-called "good cop" who turns a blind eye to the crimes and corruption of her fellow cops because she doesn't want to make waves. She eventually ends up in a better place, but not through any of her own efforts. The Wards are a different matter, in that they're both minors and given a lot less authority within the PRT. They also have a lot less information than higher-up figures like Miss Militia. They still don't do what they could - Flechette has a very good idea that Shadow Stalker is violating the conditions of her parole agreement, for example, and does nothing with that despite nobody actually liking Shadow Stalker - but I'm inclined to be more forgiving with them because, again, they're bureaucratically powerless minors who are being kept in the dark by their superiors. Weld, when he discovers how deep the rot goes, does do something by turning his back on the PRT, more or less... Though it's also because he discovers he's been directly harmed by that rot, so I dunno how much that should count. Ytlaya posted:While the PRT/Protectorate is controlled by Cauldron, the entire government isn't, and it's still better to have those resources controlled by an organization (the government) with some accountability to the public than by some random powered teenagers. The government of the Wormverse is completely corrupt, top to bottom. Even besides the fact that you've got, as Brain Candy put it, Alexandria acting as Warlord of the USA, you also have blatantly unjust measures like the Birdcage and the three strikes rule. The system that exists has been battered by decades of fear, political expediency, and bad compromises that leads to things like Canary being sentenced to eternal hellprison for a mistake after a trial in which she's never given a chance to defend herself. So, that's corruption at the top. At the bottom? There's a passage in 3.2 that a lot of people just sort of read and then forget about, regarding the high-end shops on the Boardwalk. This is a world where if you're a panhandler or shoplifter in the wrong area - where you inconvenience the wealthy - you're not subjected to any kind of actual jurisprudence. You're just dragged off by private security and beaten bloody. And this isn't some big secret, it's common knowledge even among 15-year-old high school students. The same passage makes it clear that if you're wealthy, you've also got a direct line to call in the PRT for any trouble too big for your rent-a-cops. If you're not fortunate enough to live in one of those wealthy areas? Sorry, the ABB/E88 is just too much of a bother to deal with right now, have fun with your stomach bombs. I'll grant, it's arguable that Brockton Bay was especially bad in terms of the PRT's corruption. Certainly, the last batch of interludes in Ward suggest that other cities were less bad, or at least had local bureaucrats who genuinely wanted to help (and do so in a careful manner so as not to make things worse.) But we also know that Brockton Bay wasn't the worst, either... We're only given the vaguest hints of the poo poo that went down with the Vegas PRT, but I'm sure it was pretty bad.
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Jun 7, 2018 20:40
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ZypherIM posted:There are a lot of chances before you're at the actual killing where they could have taken a different approach, but Taylor never even considers them (mostly because the people involved disagreed with her once, she has a pathological distrust of authority, and armsmaster is lovely) and Lisa is the great enabler who really prefers this outcome over anything else so she isn't exactly going to volunteer a different plan (she helps her friend AND gets a criminal empire, whats not to love). This is essentially true. ZypherIM posted:Then at the end of it they don't try to figure out a way to keep him check mated (sedation?) while they contact authorities, she shoots him and they hide his body so they can take all his criminal empire. This is ridiculous. At this time, 'Coil' is dead. Thomas Calvert is the head of the local PRT. A gang of known criminals is supposed to turn in the local head of the PRT to whom exactly?
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Jun 7, 2018 21:13
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Brain Candy posted:
Eh. Out of literally all parahumans, I think Coil would be the easiest to keep locked in a cage.
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Jun 7, 2018 21:27
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Brain Candy posted:This is ridiculous. At this time, 'Coil' is dead. Thomas Calvert is the head of the local PRT. A gang of known criminals is supposed to turn in the local head of the PRT to whom exactly? Actually, I went back and skimmed through the scene. They spend quite a bit of time talking, and he even expects them to send him to the birdcage. He wouldn't think that is where this is going if he didn't know and agree that they would be able to contact someone with the proper evidence to send him there. Lisa thinks he'll have some sort of plans that might let him get away, so they kill him instead. The thing that keeps Coil from shooting them all immediately is Taylor saying they have a dead man's switch setup so info linking his two identities goes out. The mastermind of the entire story up to this point expects to go to the no-escape supervillain jail, or at least be en-route to there before being sprung. If that doesn't counter your argument of "who would they contact" then nothing will. If they don't trust the PRT and *all* of the heroes (even though they've got a fairly good relationship with Miss Militia and Dragon at this point), Lisa is able to get into the PRT servers and go over Brockton's PRT to the people over them. Or like, all the news networks in the country. Also this is a great spot where Taylor works herself up to shooting Coil by thinking about all these people she has harmed in some way on her quest. Worm 16.13 posted:“You’re not a killer,” Calvert said. Then she *still* blames Coil for making her kill him. He literally was just defeated and they have him subdued and have the evidence/knowledge to get him sent away to the bird cage, but the easy course is to kill him. Not killing him leads to him maybe escaping, having to deal with the law and all that entails, facing her father, maybe losing her friends, and more. It is messy and difficult, so she makes the expedient choice and executes him while absolving herself mentally of blame.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:21
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I never understood the argument that Taylor is an unreliable narrator. Throughout the story everything bad/immoral/villainous she does happens in her own first person chapters, while the justifications for her actions are all confirmed in interludes. The reader is supposed to think it's hosed up what she does to Triumph, but also that the heroes are unable to protect people, the PRT are malevolent hypocrites, and the city is much better off under the control of the Undersiders. Even the goofiest stuff like how everyone in Skitter's territory supports her (love being ordered around by a teenage gang leader and constantly monitored by insects) is confirmed apart from her narration. Then even when the story acknowledges her attitude is "medieval" (it could just as easily have said "fascist") it's basically lampshading, since aside from that everything that happens implies she's correct. With that said, Worm still succeeds on a basic storytelling level and for that reason it's 100x better than Ward. Worm is Sort of Fascist and That's Okay.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:25
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Despotism and fascism are two distinct things. There's some overlap between them, but they're not synonyms.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:44
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Metalogical posted:I never understood the argument that Taylor is an unreliable narrator. Throughout the story everything bad/immoral/villainous she does happens in her own first person chapters, while the justifications for her actions are all confirmed in interludes. The reader is supposed to think it's hosed up what she does to Triumph, but also that the heroes are unable to protect people, the PRT are malevolent hypocrites, and the city is much better off under the control of the Undersiders. Even the goofiest stuff like how everyone in Skitter's territory supports her (love being ordered around by a teenage gang leader and constantly monitored by insects) is confirmed apart from her narration. Then even when the story acknowledges her attitude is "medieval" (it could just as easily have said "fascist") it's basically lampshading, since aside from that everything that happens implies she's correct. This person is correct (on both counts). Taylor has some serious issues, but she is not unreliable. The unreliable narrator reading depends on an extremely charitable view of Taylor and the wider text, up to and including some variant of 'all the prose is a lie'. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 22:50
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Some would say any post-democratic authoritarian government is fascist, but I realize there's more to historical fascism than that. I didn't mean to start an argument about the definition.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:53
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How's the prose in it?
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Jun 7, 2018 22:54
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:How's the prose in it? Bad? 
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Jun 7, 2018 23:26
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Is there a web serial worth reading that updates on Thursdays regularly?
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Jun 7, 2018 23:31
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Metalogical posted:I never understood the argument that Taylor is an unreliable narrator. Throughout the story everything bad/immoral/villainous she does happens in her own first person chapters, while the justifications for her actions are all confirmed in interludes. The reader is supposed to think it's hosed up what she does to Triumph, but also that the heroes are unable to protect people, the PRT are malevolent hypocrites, and the city is much better off under the control of the Undersiders. Even the goofiest stuff like how everyone in Skitter's territory supports her (love being ordered around by a teenage gang leader and constantly monitored by insects) is confirmed apart from her narration. Then even when the story acknowledges her attitude is "medieval" (it could just as easily have said "fascist") it's basically lampshading, since aside from that everything that happens implies she's correct. This is a .. view on the work I guess. I find you bringing up the interludes interesting, because very often they take someone that Taylor has a very stark view of and shows them in a different light that when you look at their actions with that new knowledge in mind paints a different story from what Taylor has stated as fact. She puts out views of the situation that amount to "my way is the best and if you'd all just do what I want instead of having your own thoughts/opinions/drives this would all work out". That even gets turned up to 11 in the climax, and who ends up cracking Scion? Oh it was Tattletale realizing that the way you kill a god is to make him want to die, and getting that first hit in with a mutated dog. I never got the feeling that Worm was implying that a fascist/medieval approach was best (along with uh, the rest of your points). It does point out that in a time of crisis having 1 person able to make all decisions is better, providing they make good decisions. This is something that people who study government poo poo can agree on, but you also need to note the other side of the coin, such as areas that weren't controlled by skitter's bug pan-opticon weren't doing that great (people in the merchant's district sure would have liked some law and order, or how Rachel's version of running a territory is "have her dogs savage anyone who she finds in it"). So the city isn't really better off with warlords on a whole, just one part of it (and even then when I first read it I wondered: if the prt wasn't having to deal with them would poo poo have been fixed as fast or faster). We also get a mention that villains in other cities have been trying the same thing, with the example of 3 deaths from an attempt in Anchorage. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't mean that the narrator is lying, that is just one type of unreliable narrator. I'll use a small bit with Taylor (that repeats often) for an example. When she turns herself in, and they treat her like a criminal (which she is, murder and the whole over-throwing the rule of law among stuff like grand theft and kidnapping), she labels them as bullies. In text: "They were bullies. Tagg and Alexandria both." She presents them as pressuring her for reasons that we associate negatively, and it involves maliciousness or using their strength to force someone weaker to do what they want. In reality you have a criminal mastermind turn herself in, then threaten that everything the Undersiders have done up till now (which includes stuff with the S9 and Valefor) will be small potatoes if they don't agree to her demands for her surrender. Then those demands include poo poo like "leniency for past crimes for Undersiders", "allow the Undersiders to control the crime side of the city without PRT interference", "special allowances for future crimes for the Undersiders", "head of the PRT in Brockton retire", "change the functioning of the entire PRT structure to put a cape in charge instead of a non-cape", and "give me the Defiant package (no prison/etc, just go out and hunt baddies)". Then she won't even budge on any of that, like they suggest putting a figure-head in charge of the PRT and giving the actual power to the person she wants in order to appease the public, but thats a hard no. Also amusingly right before this is a scene with her lawyer going through a list of her crimes and she gets to the point that she can't remember what incident they're about. She has stupid demands that any lawful organization clearly can't capitulate to, so they pressure her (and gently caress it up because they don't know she is off-loading stress to her swarm so they keep ratcheting up the tension). But she thinks of them as "bullies", not as people dealing with a dangerous person who has threatened the safety of the city with people who have demonstrated the ability and willingness to perform those threats while demanding that they give in to her every demand (including changing the structure of something akin to the military - sort of like saying that congress/the president shouldn't have any authority over the military). Taylor's point of view uses word choices and emphasis to tailor our view of the situation to make Tagg and Alexandria seem unreasonable and abusing their power. The reality of the situation is far from bullying, they're applying pressure to a competent criminal that doesn't really have any good intentions for them and is clearly making a ploy. That disconnect of the situation and how because of her framing it that way influences how the reader interprets the situation is what makes her an unreliable narrator. Also featured in that scene is classic Taylor justification: they forced me to kill them because they were bullies. After she finds out what really happened she doesn't think about it again (the majority of that chapter), she just stops thinking about it and focuses on the fallout.
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Jun 8, 2018 01:14
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Calef posted:I was actually pointing out that "Taylor rarely kills people" is not true if you expand your scope to include collateral damage. One of the interesting things about Taylor is how convinced she gets that the actions she takes are the only things she could do, when in pretty much every case I can think of alternate actions she could take that probably have about as much a chance of working, and the thing holding her back from those paths is that she absolutely does not trust anyone but herself to do what she feels is necessary.
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Jun 8, 2018 01:53
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Wait, why do you hate Ward, Metalogical? Also, Coil has the precognative power to push through multiple courses of action, see what works, and then do that one, but that only succeeds if there's a course of action he can take that leads to success. The only reason he's so dangerous is because he's got a lot of resources on top of that. If you take away those resources and take away the amount he's in control of stuff, the effectiveness of his power shrinks proportionately. That said, it's still pretty drat hard to deal with him when he's at the peak of his game. EDIT: Also you've misunderstood my use of the term unreliable narrator, Metalogical. Taylor doesn't lie about what happens, she never lies in the narration. What is unreliable is her perceptions, most typically her reads of people's motivations. As someone who has been severely bullied and then failed on every level by the adults whose jobs were literally to protect her, she just doesn't trust other people, and while there is a ton of corruption in Worm, Taylor's social issues absolutely have significant impacts on the decisions she makes and thus how the plot unfolds. It's also notable how she bonded so closely with the Undersiders and then failed to bond almost at all with the Wards on her team, even though she spent significantly more time with the Wards. Wildbow's described Taylor as someone who craves social interaction a lot less than Sylvester, in that she falls in super easily with the Undersiders but once she has that she's basically good even if that's unhealthy for her, whereas Sylvester spends any time away from the Lambs in Twig forming close social nets with other people. PetraCore fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 8, 2018 01:58
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I'm just over here trying to figure out how Tagg -- the man who ordered Defiant and Dragon to confront a known villain in a high school, something which even Defiant knew was a bad idea -- and Alexandria -- the woman who concocted a weirdly elaborate plan to try and intimidate Taylor into surrendering via fake murdering her friends -- aren't bullies. edit: Similar to the muddled usage of 'unreliable narrator', I'm really trying to piece together what definition of bully is being used. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 8, 2018 02:42
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Milky Moor posted:I'm just over here trying to figure out how Tagg -- the man who ordered Defiant and Dragon to confront a known villain in a high school, something which even Defiant knew was a bad idea -- and Alexandria -- the woman who concocted a weirdly elaborate plan to try and intimidate Taylor into surrendering via fake murdering her friends -- aren't bullies. The usage of bully throughout the story is definitely in more a popular media style than a more traditional usage. It is used as a title or descriptor than a verb, and that has a lot of weight to it. You don't say a police detective bullies the criminal to get a confession do you? Also, you're rather off about what happened, even after I talked about that scene. They weren't trying to intimidate her into surrendering, she *already did*. Then she threatened them and the city, made ridiculous demands, and refused to back off of them even a tiny bit (you know, how a negotiation actually works). So they played hardball right back.
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Jun 8, 2018 03:07
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ZypherIM posted:The usage of bully throughout the story is definitely in more a popular media style than a more traditional usage. It is used as a title or descriptor than a verb, and that has a lot of weight to it. You don't say a police detective bullies the criminal to get a confession do you? I, uh. You sure you want to go down that road, Chief?
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Jun 8, 2018 03:10
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PetraCore posted:Wait, why do you hate Ward, Metalogical? I'm not Metalogical and I don't hate Ward, but I'll try to provide some of my own insight on it. I'm tentatively positive on Ward, but I think this is largely because it's ongoing and I'm disinclined to seriously criticize it as long as I don't actually know where it's going. I have a lot of problems with Ward so far that I've been suppressing out of some hope that they'll eventually be resolved. I think Ward has the same problem that people keep ascribing to The Last Jedi - it's fixated on subverting audience expectations, at the expense of telling a satisfying story. The pace has felt very slow for a long time, but it's not because nothing's happening - it's because what's happening has generally been a cycle of "really bad problem is set up" and "setup is subverted by having the problem not turn out so bad", which cancels out into being very little happening. The habit in Worm was to escalate - just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, they do! The habit in Ward is to resolve - you thought things were really bad, but they actually turned out pretty okay in the end. Sure, sometimes things go badly in Ward, but sometimes things turned out okay in Worm - the tendency of Worm was for things to get worse, and the tendency of Ward is for conflicts to just kind of fizzle out. I'm pretty sure this is intended to be interesting because it's the opposite of what you would expect given Worm, but in practice it just makes everything seem kind of pointless - okay, why did we build up all of these people's psychological problems if the punchline is "they manage to keep them entirely under control and no one gets hurt"? Why did we build up all these big looming threats only to have them be easily defused? Surely we could have just skipped over the conflicts that didn't actually turn out to be conflicts after all? In Worm, every victory felt like an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" situation, but in Ward, it's quite the opposite; every defeat feels temporary and livable.
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Jun 8, 2018 03:22
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ZypherIM posted:Being an unreliable narrator doesn't mean that the narrator is lying, that is just one type of unreliable narrator. And Taylor's demands are actually illustrative of my other point, which is that the story itself takes her side. If Wildbow wanted to show that Taylor was unreasonable for demanding the heroes protect the Undersiders, he could have shown some negative consequences for them being forced to agree. Maybe the Undersiders-ruled Brockton Bay actually sucks, like the real-world areas controlled by organized crime. Instead, nope! It's a paradise, Brockton Bay is so safe the wards have nothing to do. Turns out Taylor was right again. PetraCore posted:EDIT: Also you've misunderstood my use of the term unreliable narrator, Metalogical. Taylor doesn't lie about what happens, she never lies in the narration. What is unreliable is her perceptions, most typically her reads of people's motivations. As someone who has been severely bullied and then failed on every level by the adults whose jobs were literally to protect her, she just doesn't trust other people, and while there is a ton of corruption in Worm, Taylor's social issues absolutely have significant impacts on the decisions she makes and thus how the plot unfolds. It's also notable how she bonded so closely with the Undersiders and then failed to bond almost at all with the Wards on her team, even though she spent significantly more time with the Wards. see above Metalogical fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 8, 2018 03:25
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Metalogical posted:Yet disagreeing with a narrator's opinion or sympathizing with a character they dislike doesn't mean the narrator is unreliable. Otherwise almost any first person narrator is unreliable. When Taylor calls Tagg a "bully" we've already seen perfectly well what Tagg is like and how he behaves towards Taylor, and her opinion that he's a bully is just that. Unlike your view of, say, Holden Caulfield's classmates, your opinion of Tagg doesn't have to depend on whether you think Taylor is "reliable" as a narrator. The same is true of any other character in the story, in that you can understand and sympathize them just based on what they do in Taylor's first person chapters. Wait what? The story doesn't take her side at all. After she is no longer dealing with "bullies" and she finds out that she basically killed 2 people because they were pressuring her (and didn't kill one of her friends) the only part of her original demands that are met are having Miss Militia instated as the working head of Brockton's PRT. Her unreasonable demands and refusal to budge lead to her killing one of the strongest capes on the planet that had made the difference in multiple end bringer attacks as is mentioned many times in the following chapter. In fact, she gets on board with helping the PRT rebuild their image with a story that is a fat stack of lies, which is the sort of thing that drove her to decry them in the first place. Tagg is the absolute weakest example I could choose because he is an authoritarian rear end in a top hat, but the big deal here is really that Taylor isn't actually in a position of weakness. Even if she can't beat Alexandria in a fist fight, she has an effective dead man's switch that sets off the Undersiders, and they also have a ton of really secret info that can cause a lot of harm. There is a reason they are having a negotiation at all. Also it turns out she was able to kill Alexandria, Tagg, and force them to clear everyone from her range even while unconscious. The follow-up scene after the kills with Dragon+Defiant ends with her realizing that she was wrong about what was going on, and we're here having an argument about it. Many other times in the story she doesn't have that realization, and that leads to people talking her about being an unreliable narrator. Not just disagreeing with her opinion. @milky: is threatening violence to coerce someone to do what you want bullying? If so, wouldn't Taylor be the bully in this scene? If both sides are bullying the other, it doesn't really fit with common usage of the world and you'd be better off using something else. Unless you were using that word to frame the conflict a certain way to invoke how the reader feels about it and to represent the narrator's frame of mind. It is almost like.. not being an entirely honest representation of the situation, as if you couldn't completely trust that what was going on was what the narrator felt was going on. If only there was a phrase for that...
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Jun 8, 2018 04:02
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ZypherIM posted:@milky: is threatening violence to coerce someone to do what you want bullying? If so, wouldn't Taylor be the bully in this scene? If both sides are bullying the other, it doesn't really fit with common usage of the world and you'd be better off using something else. Unless you were using that word to frame the conflict a certain way to invoke how the reader feels about it and to represent the narrator's frame of mind. It is almost like.. not being an entirely honest representation of the situation, as if you couldn't completely trust that what was going on was what the narrator felt was going on. If only there was a phrase for that... Yes. And your answer shows a strange lack of understanding the relation between institutional power and individuals (which is fine, Worm isn't concerned with it at all and thinks it's vaguely comparable: hence this argument). I'm assuming you are aware that it is possible for forced confessions to exist. That, therefore, there is a limit to the amount of intimidation that a lawful institution can, in the course of their duties, bring to bear. Even on a criminal. This is just a really weird argument to make. The thrust of it is that cops can't bully suspects because Both Sides Are Wrong. Okay, perhaps you're right: it'd be better to say 'gross abuse of power'. But it's some dire pedantry to say it's not bullying. If your evidence for 'unreliable narrator' is 'she uses the word bully to describe a bad cop instead of being more accurate' then, hah, well! That actually isn't being unreliable at all! I actually wrote up a bit about what Metalogical is saying, about how there's the unreliable narrator (as the term is used in the sense of literary device that forces you to recontextualize an entire story upon realizing that the viewpoint character's perspective and credibility is in question) and in the sense of how this thread is set on using it, which just kind of means 'a character has a point of view that I disagree with or isn't entirely accurate or uses certain words and phrases'. An unreliable narrator has a serious credibility problem, with credibility being the keyword. To say that Taylor is an unreliable narrator but she doesn't lie is kind of strange. She's really no different to any other protagonist. Worm lacks the moment where you, the reader, truly see that Taylor lacks credibility. Yes, you can argue that things surely can't be as bad as they appear, that Mr Gladly was actually a good teacher, that Armsmaster was a decent guy when he wasn't dealing with Taylor (he isn't, everyone hates him), and so on but this goes back to what I said towards the start of this discussion: that this means you have imagine Taylor as having what'd basically constitute a severe break from reality. That's just headcanon. I mean, didn't someone just a few posts earlier say the entire government is woefully corrupt and the whole world sucks? How does that mesh with it? Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jun 8, 2018 |
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Jun 8, 2018 04:18
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I mean I think Taylor is pretty subtle in how she's unreliable and yes, she's unreliable in ways that most well-written first person narrators would be. It's used well and effectively, I just don't know what the term for that would be if it's not 'unreliable'. I also don't think the narrative ends up validating her quite as much as you're saying, since while ultimately her administrative abilities are key to stopping Scion, she also makes a lot of decisions that make things objectively worse over time. I agree that there's an institutional power imbalance between her and Tagg and especially Alexandria, and I don't actually think her killing them was unreasonable for her given what we know about her character, but that's also one of the decisions that was, well, objectively pretty bad, even if it was the only decision the character in question was going to make. I suppose Sy from Twig would be an example of a 'true' unreliable narrator, then, given that as the story progresses and his condition worses he's increasingly prone to exceptionally vivid hallucinations that are included in the narrative? Also, I wouldn't write off Ward as being too much about de-escalation yet. It's where the main characters are, and that's fine, because it makes sense with the main characters we're presented with and the context of a therapy group, but all that slowly escalated into the situation we're at now where major chunks of the city are outright missing along with key people, buildings are starting to sway in the unnaturally strong winds produced by multiple portals open at once, radiation is presumably seeping in from Earth Bet, Goddess is looking to regain power, Teacher is off doing god-knows-what god-knows-where, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. It took a while to get to this point but Worm seemed way lower key until Leviathan hit, too. I think this portal mess is the Ward story beat of 'Leviathan hits'.
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Jun 8, 2018 04:41
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Milky Moor posted:Yes. And your answer shows a strange lack of understanding the relation between institutional power and individuals (which is fine, Worm isn't concerned with it at all and thinks it's vaguely comparable: hence this argument). I'm assuming you are aware that it is possible for forced confessions to exist. That, therefore, there is a limit to the amount of intimidation that a lawful institution can, in the course of their duties, bring to bear. Even on a criminal. This is just a really weird argument to make. The thrust of it is that cops can't bully suspects because Both Sides Are Wrong. I don't actually have a lack of understanding about institutional power versus personal, but that gets evened pretty quickly when you're throwing around super powers and like you said that isn't something the story worries about much. My point is it is much more pedantry to say it is bullying instead of something else like abuse of power. I don't even agree with the abuse of power statement, refer to the source material and recheck the situation. Tagg is an aggressive dick, but Taylor starts out the encounter by threatening him, the prt, and the city (coming from someone would is described as a kingpin and has the means to carry out the threat). Unreliable narrators don't have to lie to have a credibility problem. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't mean that everything that is presented is wrong (that is a type of unreliable narrator though). Taylor's youth, mistrust of authority, and unwillingness to step back repeatedly leads to situations that are presented as "I had no choice" or "You forced me to do this", but when you look at the story that isn't true. Alexandria didn't force Taylor to kill her and Tagg, Coil didn't force Taylor to kill him, etc. We're not saying that Armsmaster was a decent guy or that Mr Gladly wasn't a lovely teacher, but there are a lot of places where Taylor is just off of what/why something is happening and it is presented in her thoughts as raw truth, but when you look at the facts she is clearly wrong.
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Jun 8, 2018 04:43
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PetraCore posted:I mean I think Taylor is pretty subtle in how she's unreliable and yes, she's unreliable in ways that most well-written first person narrators would be. It's used well and effectively, I just don't know what the term for that would be if it's not 'unreliable'. Well-characterized. Yes, I just said that.
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Jun 8, 2018 04:45
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Milky Moor posted:Well-characterized.
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Jun 8, 2018 04:47
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I mean iirc the explicit problem with Tagg is that he's too similar to Taylor, which really should tell you a few things about Taylor.
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Jun 8, 2018 04:48
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ZypherIM posted:Wait what? The story doesn't take her side at all. After she is no longer dealing with "bullies" and she finds out that she basically killed 2 people because they were pressuring her (and didn't kill one of her friends) the only part of her original demands that are met are having Miss Militia instated as the working head of Brockton's PRT. Her unreasonable demands and refusal to budge lead to her killing one of the strongest capes on the planet that had made the difference in multiple end bringer attacks as is mentioned many times in the following chapter. In fact, she gets on board with helping the PRT rebuild their image with a story that is a fat stack of lies, which is the sort of thing that drove her to decry them in the first place. I feel like a lot of this is just quibbling. Taylor tries to join the heroes while still protecting her friends, Tagg and Alexandria try to stop her, she beats them, gets what she wants, score one for the good guys. If that interpretation is completely wrong, why do Dragon and Chevalier sympathize with her after she kills Alexandria? When she sees Defiant afterwards he could have been like "we actually had a costume for you until you made insane demands and murdered people, you absolute lunatic". Doesn't happen. There's never any solid clue that Taylor's interpretation is wrong and the reader is supposed to be against her. Milky Moor posted:I actually wrote up a bit about what Metalogical is saying, about how there's the unreliable narrator (as the term is used in the sense of literary device that forces you to recontextualize an entire story upon realizing that the viewpoint character's perspective and credibility is in question) and in the sense of how this thread is set on using it, which just kind of means 'a character has a point of view that I disagree with or isn't entirely accurate or uses certain words and phrases'. Thanks, this is probably more articulate than my explanation.
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Jun 8, 2018 04:55
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Metalogical posted:I feel like a lot of this is just quibbling. Taylor tries to join the heroes while still protecting her friends, Tagg and Alexandria try to stop her, she beats them, gets what she wants, score one for the good guys. If that interpretation is completely wrong, why do Dragon and Chevalier sympathize with her after she kills Alexandria? When she sees Defiant afterwards he could have been like "we actually had a costume for you until you made insane demands and murdered people, you absolute lunatic". Doesn't happen. There's never any solid clue that Taylor's interpretation is wrong and the reader is supposed to be against her. I guess I'd recommend re-reading the chapter. She wasn't trying to join the heroes, and wanted her friends off the hook for past and future crimes and untouched by the PRT (along with other things I detailed in my earlier post). She also threatened that what they did to Butcher and Valefor was them holding back and the Undersiders were going to go "thermonuclear". She gets almost nothing that she wanted, killed someone actually really important to fighting off the end bringers, and also ends up compromising her stance about the PRT by basing the whole thing on a giant lie to appease the public/heroes. This isn't written as a win for her at all, its a poo poo-show that goes sideways and at best we're left with the hope that she learns something from all this. We also get a bunch of references to how much Alexandria has been vital to fighting off the end bringers, for some extra doom on top of the pending end of the world via Jack Slash.
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Jun 8, 2018 06:03
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Given what the story illustrates about the Endbringers, is anyone actually vital to fighting them? Except Scion, of course.
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Jun 8, 2018 06:35
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| # ? May 31, 2024 12:33 |
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Milky Moor posted:Given what the story illustrates about the Endbringers, is anyone actually vital to fighting them? Except Scion, of course. Foil. Someone who can network the tinkers. And someone who can force the tinkers to network.
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Jun 8, 2018 08:51
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