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Maybe i should read zombie knight but I just can’t get through the whole 1 page per page thing. It really sucks when I read on my phone.
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Jun 29, 2018 21:52
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Affi posted:Maybe i should read zombie knight but I just can’t get through the whole 1 page per page thing. It really sucks when I read on my phone. There's a "display entire chapter at once" option.
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Jun 29, 2018 23:02
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Autonomous Monster posted:There's a "display entire chapter at once" option. Can’t figure it out and have to click back and crap after every page. But I stuck with it anyway. It’s. Good actually. Interesting premise.
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Jun 30, 2018 08:19
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Ward 7.y: Why you gotta do this, Wildbow? Poor girl’s got enough on her plate already without a fledgling anti-parahuman activist group hunting her down for what she did to her parents.
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Jun 30, 2018 18:29
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I just hope this doesn't lead into another long, heavy-handed hate group story; the fallen stuff darn near made me stop reading, and I don't think I could trudge through another 6 arcs of it.
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Jun 30, 2018 21:42
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So I just finished the chapter in Practical Guide where Anaxares becomes Hierarch, and it was a great twist.
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Jun 30, 2018 22:42
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Ytlaya posted:So I just finished the chapter in Practical Guide where Anaxares becomes Hierarch, and it was a great twist. Oh god yeah it's my favorite chapter.
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Jun 30, 2018 22:49
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The Shortest Path posted:Oh god yeah it's my favorite chapter. Mine too.  All the Anaxares chapters are great but that's the best.quote:
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Jun 30, 2018 23:28
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I feel like, out of the Calamities, Captain might be the closest to a semi-decent person, if only because she seems to openly acknowledge that she's doing bad things because she chooses the handful of people she cares about over them. Like, at least she'll think "this is a shame" while murdering a bunch of people. Warlock is very straight-forward evil, and Black just seems ambivalent, even if he doesn't enjoy it. One of the biggest differences between him and Catherine is that, at least to some extent, Catherine's goals involve desiring some "Greater Good" (at least for Callow), while Black just implements helpful reforms as a purely pragmatic thing and has no desire to go beyond what's absolutely necessary to maintain stability). Then again, Catherine is also okay with being friends with people who wouldn't have a problem with killing random innocents. I doubt Masego would mind experimenting on random innocent people, or that Hakram would hesitate to butcher a bunch of children if she ordered it. I'm a bit confused about the limitations of Catherine's Take aspect. Is it mostly just that it draws from her well of energy to take stuff? Because otherwise it seems a bit overpowered to be able to just freely take even things like aspects. The limitations of Fall (at least as it's currently used/understood, which is hinted at not being the bigger picture) are pretty obvious; she's basically useless after using it, so if it doesn't do the trick she's hosed.
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Jul 1, 2018 01:10
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hey I'm like 70 pages into Zombie Knight and does the character ever stop being an autistic anime cliché because I'm getting nauseous trying..... to...... read.... this..... horrible.... stilted..... garbage...........
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Jul 1, 2018 07:35
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Ytlaya posted:I feel like, out of the Calamities, Captain might be the closest to a semi-decent person, if only because she seems to openly acknowledge that she's doing bad things because she chooses the handful of people she cares about over them. Like, at least she'll think "this is a shame" while murdering a bunch of people. Warlock is very straight-forward evil, and Black just seems ambivalent, even if he doesn't enjoy it. One of the biggest differences between him and Catherine is that, at least to some extent, Catherine's goals involve desiring some "Greater Good" (at least for Callow), while Black just implements helpful reforms as a purely pragmatic thing and has no desire to go beyond what's absolutely necessary to maintain stability). Then again, Catherine is also okay with being friends with people who wouldn't have a problem with killing random innocents. I doubt Masego would mind experimenting on random innocent people, or that Hakram would hesitate to butcher a bunch of children if she ordered it. Take is a bit of a power struggle between aspects - a lot of things if she tried to Take would probably end up killing her due to being anathema to her as a villain or as someone who is no longer entirely human or mortal, or merely just being far too powerful for her if she goes after something way above her weight class, and probably some things just aren't Takeable due to just being flat out incompatible or too thoroughly entrenched. Even then, Take is only temporary, both for her and the person she stole from, and consumes her own reserves of power to use the new ability.
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Jul 1, 2018 08:56
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Lone Goat posted:hey I'm like 70 pages into Zombie Knight and does the character ever stop being an autistic anime cliché because I'm getting nauseous trying..... to...... read.... this..... horrible.... stilted..... garbage........... protip: don't read bad things in hopes of them ever getting good, when there are so many nonbad things to read instead
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Jul 1, 2018 10:06
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Megazver posted:protip: don't read bad things in hopes of them ever getting good, when there are so many nonbad things to read instead Don't listen to this guy, if you sink enough hours into reading anything the part of your brain that convinces you that you don't make bad decisions will kick in and assure you that the bad thing was, in fact, good.
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Jul 1, 2018 11:43
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Lone Goat posted:hey I'm like 70 pages into Zombie Knight and does the character ever stop being an autistic anime cliché because I'm getting nauseous trying..... to...... read.... this..... horrible.... stilted..... garbage........... The banner art is a skeleton doing the Dreamworks face.
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Jul 1, 2018 11:47
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Lone Goat posted:hey I'm like 70 pages into Zombie Knight and does the character ever stop being an autistic anime cliché because I'm getting nauseous trying..... to...... read.... this..... horrible.... stilted..... garbage........... No
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Jul 1, 2018 12:27
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Lone Goat posted:hey I'm like 70 pages into Zombie Knight and does the character ever stop being an autistic anime cliché because I'm getting nauseous trying..... to...... read.... this..... horrible.... stilted..... garbage........... Somewhat. But only in the far future. He speaks normally with his reaper and with people he's fought besides/against, and eventually just lets his reaper speak for him in the talky bits with strangers/acquaintances. Or his reaper outright tells him what to say, with a few big exceptions where he -has- to take responsibility with his own words. But this state of affairs is only after he gets comfortable with his reaper, and he still turns into a monosyllabic statue when a stranger addresses him directly.
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Jul 1, 2018 17:34
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Omi no Kami posted:I just hope this doesn't lead into another long, heavy-handed hate group story; the fallen stuff darn near made me stop reading, and I don't think I could trudge through another 6 arcs of it. Of course, it's terrible to take this reasonable anxiety out on the least connected and most vulnerable, which is what ends up happening because everyone higher up or more connected to what can be incorrectly inferred is really hard to touch. I don't think this is going to lead anywhere good. And it's wrong to treat parahumans as nonhuman or inherently bad or broken, even if I understand where the anxiety is coming from. But I think treating it as similar to racist, sexist, gaybashers would be a serious misstep, and I don't think that's where this is going. It's like how you can go into how treating bigotry against mutants as the most common and bad form of bigotry falls flat in a lot off x-men stuff because minorities can't actually summon up lighting, but I still think it's interesting to go into how the really bad villains who are mutants are going to stoke some reasonable fear (esp if they're advocating for genocide of non-mutants), but how that fear is going to be taken out on the most vulnerable and least connected members of the community. Like, it's a lot easier to attack a funny-looking teenager with the ability to turn random objects green than it is to take on Magneto or Storm or Wolverine. the main players of the x-men are never going to be the most vulnerable and it's interesting to explore stuff like that. We probably have a similar situation brewing here, except this time there's the verifiable apocalypse stoking people's fires and the fact that extremely relevant information is being held back by the people in power making everything worse. EDIT: That said I agree that I really don't want this to be What The Story Is About for the next 5 arcs, I want it to be an element of larger stuff going on. As much as I didn't hate the Fallen arc it ground everything else to a halt.
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Jul 1, 2018 21:48
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I do definitely think that Gary Nieves is a right-wing archetype, just a different, more nuanced one - a fearful Daily Mail reader as opposed to a militia compound cultist. Less aggressively creepy, more relatably terrible.
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Jul 1, 2018 23:24
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Wolpertinger posted:Even then, Take is only temporary, both for her and the person she stole from, and consumes her own reserves of power to use the new ability. Oh, was it only permanent (until she took something else, anyways) with Rise because William was dead?
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Jul 2, 2018 00:09
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Did they ever make it explicit how much adult heroes generally get paid in Worm (working for the Protectorate)? I want to say that gave the amount the Wards receive as a stipend, but I'm not sure if they made it clear how good of a living someone can make as a hero (obviously this only applies pre-Golden Morning). You'd think that someone would at least get six figures for being one of the extremely rare people capable of fighting off Endbringers and villains.
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Jul 2, 2018 01:07
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I don't think we see any of them being that rich. It always struck me as heroes get an allowance and otherwise have their needs taken care of by the PRT. I mean, you don't need to pay them six figures when, like, what're they going to do? Not fight the Endbringers? Not use the abilities when they have an alien crystal in their head telling them to use them?
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Jul 2, 2018 01:17
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PetraCore posted:Of course, it's terrible to take this reasonable anxiety out on the least connected and most vulnerable, which is what ends up happening because everyone higher up or more connected to what can be incorrectly inferred is really hard to touch. I don't think this is going to lead anywhere good. And it's wrong to treat parahumans as nonhuman or inherently bad or broken, even if I understand where the anxiety is coming from. But I think treating it as similar to racist, sexist, gaybashers would be a serious misstep, and I don't think that's where this is going. Yeah, this is a weird case where I think the core of my criticism might just be that it isn't the story I personally want to read. By all means, fear of and bigotry towards parahumans is a logical and completely understandable reaction among the general populace. In a way it's even weird that we didn't hear more of this when things were going well, and I assume that was a conscious choice to try and avoid retreading ground that X-Men has covered exhaustively. I can't fault people their reactions, and I'll admit that fearing and blaming an obvious, visible minority is a sadly common and natural reaction to severe adversity. But I really don't want to read about it for hundreds of thousands of words. WB is at his best when he's writing tight, character-driven drama, and I'm finding it really hard to care about the never-ending, constantly escalating conspiracies, societal woes, and plots within plots; I just want to read a tightly-paced drama about Vicky and her weirdass, possibly criminal superhero team. Incidentally, in the very beginning (I was about to say 'before the story's direction became obvious,' but I still have no clue what the heck Ward is supposed to be about), and before it was made clear what patrol block did and what Victoria's actual job was, I thought she'd become a parahuman social worker, and that the story was going to be about her directly working with vulnerable and at-risk adolescents with superpowers, and simultaneously navigating an apathetic bureaucracy and her own desire to help kids she physically and legally couldn't. This is getting into dumb fan-fiction territory, but I can't help but really wish that that's the story we actually got. The more it heaps on conspiracies and complications (while refusing to actually explain them), and the more it looks like things are moving towards an escalating dimension-wide threat, the less I want to read it.
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Jul 2, 2018 01:20
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, this is a weird case where I think the core of my criticism might just be that it isn't the story I personally want to read. By all means, fear of and bigotry towards parahumans is a logical and completely understandable reaction among the general populace. In a way it's even weird that we didn't hear more of this when things were going well, and I assume that was a conscious choice to try and avoid retreading ground that X-Men has covered exhaustively. I can't fault people their reactions, and I'll admit that fearing and blaming an obvious, visible minority is a sadly common and natural reaction to severe adversity. But I really don't want to read about it for hundreds of thousands of words. WB is at his best when he's writing tight, character-driven drama, and I'm finding it really hard to care about the never-ending, constantly escalating conspiracies, societal woes, and plots within plots; But that's the Wildbow Model. Three separate stories in that vein should've made it clear that any of us who were hoping for Ward to be different were being pretty illogical.
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Jul 2, 2018 01:43
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Milky Moor posted:But that's the Wildbow Model. Three separate stories in that vein should've made it clear that any of us who were hoping for Ward to be different were being pretty illogical. Oh yeah, I honestly wasn't expecting anything different, but I was kinda hoping for it. Twig did a surprisingly good job of not becoming a runaway conspiracy/stakes-raising fest, and I suppose by his own admission he wanted to specifically try writing a story that didn't rely on constant escalation, and I was really hoping Ward would be closer to Twig than Worm in that regard. I don't think that was a realistic expectation, but a genuinely street-level "Bunch of jerkish kids with issues" story that never turned into interdimensional alien worm battles would've really made my day.
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Jul 2, 2018 02:08
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Omi no Kami posted:Oh yeah, I honestly wasn't expecting anything different, but I was kinda hoping for it. Twig did a surprisingly good job of not becoming a runaway conspiracy/stakes-raising fest, and I suppose by his own admission he wanted to specifically try writing a story that didn't rely on constant escalation, and I was really hoping Ward would be closer to Twig than Worm in that regard. I don't think that was a realistic expectation, but a genuinely street-level "Bunch of jerkish kids with issues" story that never turned into interdimensional alien worm battles would've really made my day. I feel like the plot for this kind of a story would run out of steam, honestly. You've gotta raise the stakes at some point, right? It doesn't need to be crazy, but it gets repetitive to repeat street level stuff for an extended period of time. I think what Wildbow really needs to do is not write such absurdly long web serials. Shorter, more tightly focused stories would work very well with how Wildbow likes to construct his plots. Imagine if Wildbow was doing shorter stories, all set in the Parahumans universe, and each story had a new protagonist. I think that would be much more interesting than lots of escalation, forever and ever.
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Jul 2, 2018 02:37
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Sampatrick posted:I feel like the plot for this kind of a story would run out of steam, honestly. You've gotta raise the stakes at some point, right? It doesn't need to be crazy, but it gets repetitive to repeat street level stuff for an extended period of time. I think what Wildbow really needs to do is not write such absurdly long web serials. Shorter, more tightly focused stories would work very well with how Wildbow likes to construct his plots. Imagine if Wildbow was doing shorter stories, all set in the Parahumans universe, and each story had a new protagonist. I think that would be much more interesting than lots of escalation, forever and ever. Not really. But I think for the sort of writer Wildbow is, a smaller story with a tighter focus is more difficult (and Worm demonstrates on a few occasions that he's not the most knowledgeable when it comes to how real-world institutions like schools operate, which'd hurt a street-level story). I also think the serial audience is biased against smaller/shorter stories because part of the serial appeal is the rampant speculation for everyone. Now, if any author has the capital to take some risks in order to demonstrate their ability, it's Wildbow -- but he also has particularly devout fans and a reputation for writing certain stories about certain things.
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Jul 2, 2018 03:01
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Ytlaya posted:Oh, was it only permanent (until she took something else, anyways) with Rise because William was dead? I thought she could keep them forever but she could only use them 3x with diminishing returns
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Jul 2, 2018 03:15
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Omi no Kami posted:Oh yeah, I honestly wasn't expecting anything different, but I was kinda hoping for it. Twig did a surprisingly good job of not becoming a runaway conspiracy/stakes-raising fest, and I suppose by his own admission he wanted to specifically try writing a story that didn't rely on constant escalation, and I was really hoping Ward would be closer to Twig than Worm in that regard. I don't think that was a realistic expectation, but a genuinely street-level "Bunch of jerkish kids with issues" story that never turned into interdimensional alien worm battles would've really made my day. It's hilarious.
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Jul 2, 2018 03:44
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That said, that also gives me hope that Ward will be able to handle getting widespread and rowdy without ending in interdimensional worm battles or the falling of the world into hell or however Pact ended. Like, we already know there's a ton of other settlements that split off from Earth Bet. Earth Gimel isn't actually the last bastion of Earth Bet or anything.
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Jul 2, 2018 03:50
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PetraCore posted:It says something about Wildbow's preferences that I 100% agree with this statement about the web serial that escalated into multiple covert factions erupting into all-out war, a massive conspiracy to fake royalty and nobility via child experimentation in order to better control society and develop biological war machines, and the eventual overtaking of the continental United States (and, to be honest, probably spreading to more of the Americas) by an extremely fatal plague. I unabashedly love Twig (it's easily my favorite WB story of the four), I found that some of the later chapters weren't as much fun to read on account of how hard-to-follow the narration became when Sylvester was having one of his psychotic breaks, but all-in-all I have surprisingly few petty, pointless nitpicks compared to his other works. On the topic of escalation though, I remember in his retrospective he mentioned that the entire last 2-3 arcs were going to be completely different, as he apparently intended to resolve the whole story with diplomatic/political intrigue instead of a big combat climax, but he ultimately caved in to what he felt the fanbase expected and wrote the big assault on the university. I'm really curious as to what the original planned ending was, because for me the political maneuvering and actual espionage (instead of small children running around stabbing people) were always my favorite parts of Twig.
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Jul 2, 2018 04:10
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Omi no Kami posted:I unabashedly love Twig (it's easily my favorite WB story of the four), I found that some of the later chapters weren't as much fun to read on account of how hard-to-follow the narration became when Sylvester was having one of his psychotic breaks, but all-in-all I have surprisingly few petty, pointless nitpicks compared to his other works. On the topic of escalation though, I remember in his retrospective he mentioned that the entire last 2-3 arcs were going to be completely different, as he apparently intended to resolve the whole story with diplomatic/political intrigue instead of a big combat climax, but he ultimately caved in to what he felt the fanbase expected and wrote the big assault on the university. I'm really curious as to what the original planned ending was, because for me the political maneuvering and actual espionage (instead of small children running around stabbing people) were always my favorite parts of Twig. Twig is my favorite WB story by far, and Ward is my second-favorite although that's tentative since it's in progress. I just didn't click with Pact at all and while I love Worm, it's definitely his roughest in writing style because it's the first.
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Jul 2, 2018 04:18
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PetraCore posted:Huh, yeah. And honestly the ending is fairly espionage-y given the Lambs' long term plans. Hmm yeah, I'm trying to hold off on mentally rating Ward until it's finished and can be judged on the exact same terms as the others, but for me it's Twig by a mile, then Worm, Ward, Pact. It feels weird to place Ward so low, because the writing is easily his best, and it has some individual scenes like the wretch's reveal and the Martin family dinner that are unbelievable, but the pacing problems and often really janky transitions between chapters/scenes are throwing me. I'm super-duper hoping that will all tighten up as it goes, though, because all it really needs to jump ahead of Worm for me is a good 5-6 arc stretch of tight, well-edited, decently-paced prose.
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Jul 2, 2018 04:50
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PetraCore posted:It says something about Wildbow's preferences that I 100% agree with this statement about the web serial that escalated into multiple covert factions erupting into all-out war, a massive conspiracy to fake royalty and nobility via child experimentation in order to better control society and develop biological war machines, and the eventual overtaking of the continental United States (and, to be honest, probably spreading to more of the Americas) by an extremely fatal plague. Yeah, it’s extra weird considering Pact is the one that, in the end, really only seriously affects one tiny little town in bumfuck, Canada, and yet no one (including me) thinks it kept the escalation to a minimum compared to the story you described.
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Jul 2, 2018 05:30
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Two new Prac Guide out, one interlude one main chapter. main chapter's shorter than I'd like but something struck me about it after the recent development I reckon that at some point Akua and Cat are going to merge into a single person back into being a human - both have woven their souls into the winter mantle, but Akua's fantastic with Demons, and Cat's fantastic with Necromancy. It should be pretty clear that both are trying to break free of the restraints of their stories, and Cat's already shown that rebirth is one way to do that. Combine that with the redemption Arc the Grey Pilgrim's trying to run and I think that Cat's got a game on the go to counter him.
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Jul 2, 2018 05:37
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navyjack posted:I thought she could keep them forever but she could only use them 3x with diminishing returns Nope; this is what I thought initially, but the limit is just 3 time a day. She uses it like at least 7-8 times total, and the first time each day she used it, it would work fast (with the next two being progressively slower). Basically, it was extremely good, and she was reasonably not happy when she was forced into losing it by taking the big wind ball thing from that one Summer Duchess.
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Jul 2, 2018 05:40
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tithin posted:Two new Prac Guide out, one interlude one main chapter. main chapter's shorter than I'd like but something struck me about it after the recent development Frankly, I love that Catherine's grand plan is to just backstab everyone as often as possible, including the Dead King.
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Jul 2, 2018 07:08
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Ytlaya posted:Nope; this is what I thought initially, but the limit is just 3 time a day. She uses it like at least 7-8 times total, and the first time each day she used it, it would work fast (with the next two being progressively slower). The stolen stuff has a limited pool of unreplenishable power, IIRC she mentions it when she originally takes the power. Eventually she would have ran out of healing juice. Current Prac Guide: Is the Dead King refusing to step out of his hell a sign of wariness about heavenly backed kill team guided by the Bard? If Black and Scribe's musing were correct and the Bard is meant as a counterforce to the Dead King, then him refusing to set foot in creation seems like him refusing to take any risk unless he has a convenient foil that acts as a heroic lightning rod. And Akua's info suggests that he isn't as limited while fighting outside Creation.
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Jul 2, 2018 08:22
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SITB posted:The stolen stuff has a limited pool of unreplenishable power, IIRC she mentions it when she originally takes the power. Eventually she would have ran out of healing juice. Theory: I don't know where the theory about the bard being an anti-dead king power came from, but it makes sense if you consider that she stepped in to save Akua from the Fae, probably with foreknowledge of what would be needed to end the king. Cat's playing into the Bards long time game without realising it.
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Jul 2, 2018 08:32
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Ytlaya posted:Oh, was it only permanent (until she took something else, anyways) with Rise because William was dead? Even without that, I'm pretty sure that every use of Rise was weaker and less effective than the last - even beyond the weaker each use in a single day, when refreshed it wasn't quite as strong as it was before. Him being dead did probably contribute to it's longevity, though. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Jul 2, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 08:55
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tithin posted:Theory: Origin: It was during a Calamity interlude in book 3, Cadenza I think. They mentioned either the Dead King or Triumphant being responsible for the Bard, but OOC we know that the Bard predates the Elves who predate Triumphant, so the Dead King is far more likely.
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Jul 2, 2018 09:27
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