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Sampatrick posted:If your prose is bad then literally nothing else matters imo. Like, if your prose is fine, then you can make up for that by having good characters or what have you, but a story is composed of words. If your prose is like actually bad, there's no coming back from that. Obviously this is all my opinion and people prioritize things differently, but I think there are some aspects of fiction where you have to be at least fine or you can't really make up for it. Thank God we’ve got you on hand to let us know what is good enough and what is “actually bad”
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Feb 19, 2019 19:16
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Man, you are getting real upset about something that I admitted comes down to personal priorities lmao. I'm not saying that you're wrong or bad for liking TWI but even people who are fans of the serial have admitted that the prose is kinda not good.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:30
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Sampatrick posted:Man, you are getting real upset about something that I admitted comes down to personal priorities lmao. I'm not saying that you're wrong or bad for liking TWI but even people who are fans of the serial have admitted that the prose is kinda not good. I don't even read TWI, but you're the one who keeps hammering out post after post about how triggered everyone else in the thread is by your calm, rational posting.
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Feb 19, 2019 20:52
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I called it "not the best." I'd hardly call it bad (except for the aforementioned action scenes). Even something like prose is pretty subjective. Like, nothing wrong with saying you can't stand how it's written. Just maybe drop the BotL esque castigation of everyone daring to enjoy Bad Art
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Feb 19, 2019 21:06
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Sampatrick posted:TWI has a ton of issues. The writing is like objectively awful, pacing is essentially nonexistent, and it's a piece of genre fiction that has no plot. It's really quite bad. I'm not saying there are no issues. I am saying that it is serviceable enough for what it sets out to be. Like two years ago I tried to reread Perry Rhodan from the beginning and found it to be much more of a chore than a number of the web serials. And Perry Rhodan is far from the worst of pulps. Just declaring the writing to be awful seems silly, when talking about pulp SFF. Where the writing serves as information delivery.
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Feb 19, 2019 21:17
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lol at the Jindrich PoV section from one of the recent PracGuide chapters.
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Feb 19, 2019 23:23
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I just got partway through the current Parahumans interlude and I have a theory. Colt is a lot closer to what the broken / structurally flawed triggers are supposed to produce. edit lol maybe not what a great last segment of the chapter Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 00:04
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I hope another dog gets powers and he basically gets the same powers as Heartbreaker and is discovered when someone comes across a dog with this giant dog harem.
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Feb 20, 2019 00:41
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Ytlaya posted:I hope another dog gets powers and he basically gets the same powers as Heartbreaker and is discovered when someone comes across a dog with this giant dog harem. Was there a super-dog before? I know that before the Chris reveal, I was secretly hoping that he was a dog with changer powers, and the reason his body was always jacked up was because he had trouble figuring out people anatomy.
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Feb 20, 2019 01:11
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there was a dog with like, a time dilation bubble or some poo poo in the Valkyrie interlude
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Feb 20, 2019 01:48
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I've been re-reading WtC due to boredom, and a few things stand out early one that I missed early on: I wonder if whats-her-face the artifact princess being a hot, mission-driven sociopath was a direct result of juniper's early behavior? He skipped several damsels in distress in a row, then suddenly ran headfirst into a super-attractive girl who was ten times more dedicated to following plot threads than he was. Boy was the early game narrative better-structured than the stuff they do later; at least up to the big, dumb bottle deer pregnancy adventure it felt like they were kinda-sorta on rails following the DM's narrative, but the second half feels a lot more like the sort of unstructured murder hobo-ing/munchkin-ing that most DMs very explicitly try to lead their players away from. I don't think there's any real evidence for this, but since we learned that the flower guy was (allegedly) a DMPC it seems like there's a non-zero chance that one of juniper's party is the same. I don't think there's a good chance, and if there was my money would be on the soulless harry potter girl (not having a soul is a great excuse not to let your player peek at the character sheet), but it would make my day if sociopath princess lady is actually the DM's puppet; middle-aged god/DM juniper using his adolescent self's dream girl to lead himself around by the nose would be freaking hilarious.
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Feb 20, 2019 10:34
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violent sex idiot posted:there was a dog with like, a time dilation bubble or some poo poo in the Valkyrie interlude
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Feb 21, 2019 18:24
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Sometimes I lag behind in Ward and am left with huge chunks to catch up on and that sucks. I definitely wouldn't call it plotless tho, we've reached enough of a point (I'm currently on 11.11) that things are starting to slot into place as pieces of a bigger plot. I don't even really think the setting is unrelentingly bleak because as much as everything is getting hosed up things are generally doing really well for two years after a global apocalypse. poo poo was always going to get worse when the second post-Gold Morning winter hit, it was talked about enough even before winter that I guess I'm in the position of generally seeing this as a 'winter' of the setting even with all the crazy reality breaking stuff going on. The fact that Victoria and the rest of Breakthrough have been consistently getting better makes me feel like Wildbow isn't going to go for the type of 'everything is totally hosed' ending in Worm and Twig, so while it might be dumb optimism on my part I'm not worn down by the grimness. Like idk, for me it's a setting where several seemingly worst-case-scenarios have already happened and people are still hanging on, surviving, and building for the future. If the ending really did come down to 'you can try all you like to make things better but factors beyond your control will always gently caress you' then yeah, I don't think that's a good story.
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Feb 21, 2019 18:33
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PetraCore posted:Sometimes I lag behind in Ward and am left with huge chunks to catch up on and that sucks. I definitely wouldn't call it plotless tho, we've reached enough of a point (I'm currently on 11.11) that things are starting to slot into place as pieces of a bigger plot. I don't even really think the setting is unrelentingly bleak because as much as everything is getting hosed up things are generally doing really well for two years after a global apocalypse. poo poo was always going to get worse when the second post-Gold Morning winter hit, it was talked about enough even before winter that I guess I'm in the position of generally seeing this as a 'winter' of the setting even with all the crazy reality breaking stuff going on. The fact that Victoria and the rest of Breakthrough have been consistently getting better makes me feel like Wildbow isn't going to go for the type of 'everything is totally hosed' ending in Worm and Twig, so while it might be dumb optimism on my part I'm not worn down by the grimness. Yeah, I generally agree with this. There isn't the same feeling that things are careening towards a bad outcome, though it's hard to explain exactly why. I think it's because even though events have been getting really bad, the characters are (mostly) on upward trajectories in terms of their development. As opposed to Worm or Twig where the protagonists basically fell deeper and deeper into dire circumstances emotionally and/or morally. Much of (current) Team Breakthrough (with the possible exceptions of Kenzie and Sveta*) have made significant progress in terms of their own personal/emotional states. * This in particular feels like a ticking bomb. I can't really see any way for Weld to resolve the relationship situation, so it seems inevitable that they're going to break up, and I have no idea how Sveta is going to be able to handle that.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:03
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, I generally agree with this. There isn't the same feeling that things are careening towards a bad outcome, though it's hard to explain exactly why. I think it's because even though events have been getting really bad, the characters are (mostly) on upward trajectories in terms of their development. As opposed to Worm or Twig where the protagonists basically fell deeper and deeper into dire circumstances emotionally and/or morally. Much of (current) Team Breakthrough (with the possible exceptions of Kenzie and Sveta*) have made significant progress in terms of their own personal/emotional states. Just finished 12.z and the reveal that March doesn't give a gently caress about long-term consequences bc her brain broke and the only thing that long-term matters to her is her and Fletchette's inevitable death and afterlife as shards is, uuuh, sure a thing. Seems like part of that is going on with Love Lost, too, with her comments about Snag calling out to her from the darkness and revealing everything to her or whatever. It's interesting because I was under the impression that cluster triggers couldn't trigger again or bud off, but it seems like both of those have been disproven by now, with March and Colt. But given the circumstances of both of those, it feels like it's only something that happens when other things are going really wrong, like someone loving around with draining their cluster and trying to drag March into that, or whatever is going on with Rain's cluster that they've got the dream space, as well as the breakdown of natural safeguards bc Scion and Eden are both dead. Like, those are pretty extreme circumstances, but it's notable that both clusters have something else leaking in after the death of a member driving one or more living members to extremes based on their still-living connection to the dead. EDIT: Actually, DID March trigger again, or was it just because she was dying? The second seems more likely if I think about it, but her power level is kind of insane. The important part is her getting a glimpse of something that was in no way healthy for her mental state and that directly leads to her escalation and obsession, since she didn't have Kiss/Kill before that. PetraCore fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 19:55
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Ytlaya posted:* This in particular feels like a ticking bomb. I can't really see any way for Weld to resolve the relationship situation, so it seems inevitable that they're going to break up, and I have no idea how Sveta is going to be able to handle that. [spoiler]Don't have to break up if one or both of them are dead! 
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Feb 21, 2019 20:12
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Despite all the hate in here, I kinda love TWI. She needs to start editing her chapters to be 75% shorter though, I don't have time for this!
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Feb 21, 2019 23:44
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PetraCore posted:Yeah, but at least Sveta's in a position where she has a support system beyond just Weld. It's not going to be pretty but it's not quite the sort of crushing spiral into despair I feel it would have been in Worm, cough Amy and Victoria and the Very Bad Day, cough. As for her power, March is conveniently working with a power booster, who is effectively able to give her almost-Contessa-level bullshit powers. I believe this is basically the entire reason she's as good as she is. Her powers were already damned good (as she says herself), and they become pretty broken when boosted. Her powerset itself is also pretty ludicrous; Foil's timing/aiming powers are pretty great when you're willing to kill/maim people. Her powers are still a little too vaguely defined for my taste; I don't understand how perfect timing would make her capable of dealing with a lot of the powers in this setting. It might make her virtually invincible against any sort of normal fighting-type parahuman (since she can basically perfectly dodge things), but there are many powers that perfect timing wouldn't help against (like that one Heartbroken who can freeze your body). The biggest reveal, IMO, from that chapter is the confirmation of Rain's hypothesis about personality traits being passed between members of a cluster. That's a big deal, and it's going to be really shocking to people like Rain or Foil. It's heavily implied that a lot of March's personality comes from Foil, in the same way as she picked up a drug addiction from Homer. Same goes for Rain.
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Feb 22, 2019 00:13
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I tried to like TWI, I really did, there's definitely potential there, but not under this author at all.
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Feb 22, 2019 01:28
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Ytlaya posted:As for her power, March is conveniently working with a power booster, who is effectively able to give her almost-Contessa-level bullshit powers. I believe this is basically the entire reason she's as good as she is. Her powers were already damned good (as she says herself), and they become pretty broken when boosted. Her powerset itself is also pretty ludicrous; Foil's timing/aiming powers are pretty great when you're willing to kill/maim people. Her powers are still a little too vaguely defined for my taste; I don't understand how perfect timing would make her capable of dealing with a lot of the powers in this setting. It might make her virtually invincible against any sort of normal fighting-type parahuman (since she can basically perfectly dodge things), but there are many powers that perfect timing wouldn't help against (like that one Heartbroken who can freeze your body). Rain's cluster works differently that way, though, and Love Lost even notes it - Rain is the one with the LEAST bleedthrough (maybe none, maybe just an equal splash every five days from everybody) because everybody else hates him and isn't handing him their chips.
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Feb 22, 2019 02:11
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Nettle Soup posted:Despite all the hate in here, I kinda love TWI. if you're looking for works that exemplify brevity being the soul of wit, I fear web serials might not be the best genre to consult.
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Feb 22, 2019 02:56
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Well, there are some. But a big Web Serial Audience meme is that number of words directly correlates to the quality of those words.
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Feb 22, 2019 03:05
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(Ward) The Love Lost interlude explicitly stating that everyone but Rain has been getting personality bleed, and that none of it had been from him like LL and Snag had thought, was an interesting twist of irony. I really, really liked that chapter.
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Feb 22, 2019 03:44
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The Shortest Path posted:(Ward) The Love Lost interlude explicitly stating that everyone but Rain has been getting personality bleed, and that none of it had been from him like LL and Snag had thought, was an interesting twist of irony. I really, really liked that chapter.
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Feb 22, 2019 05:45
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I forgot about the person March was working with, lmao. As forYtlaya posted:The biggest reveal, IMO, from that chapter is the confirmation of Rain's hypothesis about personality traits being passed between members of a cluster. That's a big deal, and it's going to be really shocking to people like Rain or Foil. It's heavily implied that a lot of March's personality comes from Foil, in the same way as she picked up a drug addiction from Homer. Same goes for Rain. I still haven't started Arc 12 yet though so maybe this is completely skewered, I'd just like it if there were some ambiguous edges to personality bleed because I think that makes it even more unsettling.
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Feb 22, 2019 05:52
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If you want a web serial with concise chapters, I recommend Into the Mire. I love TWI sometimes and am annoyed by it sometimes. But then I don't read web serials for the prose - they're almost universally bad. Though it's not like sci-fi and fantasy novels are that much better generally.
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Feb 22, 2019 06:44
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:If you want a web serial with concise chapters, I recommend Into the Mire. mentioned that one back in october as being a good one to keep an eye on but we'll see if it takes this time Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 07:10
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PetraCore posted:I think I'm going to quibble with this a bit, in that May on the day they all triggered was making a lot of assumptions about who Lily was as a person based on the fact that she had friends and was able to dress like she wanted and goof off. Basically, I don't think it's quite as simple as 'Lily got May's serious dedication and May got Lily's careless attitude' because of the additional factor of a super traumatic event shoved on both of them, even though I'm sure there was serious personality bleed between Lily and May and with May and Homer essentially swapping music and drugs. Like, someone pushed to be a child prodigy burning out spectacularly and spiraling away from that sort of seriousness isn't unheard of, and unfortunately for everyone around her March is extremely dedicated. Oh, yeah, we don't know exactly what came from what (stuff like the music and drug addiction were just very obvious things for March and Homer to notice), but it's still going to be disturbing to find out that certain aspects of your personality ended up as part of this murderous lunatic, and vice versa. As for Rain, when I made that post I hadn't read the Love Lost interlude yet, so I didn't know that it was basically confirmed that he wasn't getting bleedover. Which is good for him, since it would have sucked for him to have that piled on his plate after everything else.
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Feb 22, 2019 07:10
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Prac Guide: Vale Nauk. You were never the same after the Summer fae, but you went down with red teeth. I can definitely feel that the pace of the book is picking up hard now - especially in comparison to the end of the last book which was so loving slow.
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Feb 22, 2019 12:43
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PetraCore posted:It's a good twist because turns out getting angry and hosed up and turning to dysfunctional coping mechanisms isn't an uncommon response to trauma! Like, do powers make things worse? Yes. Is the personality bleed affecting Rain's cluster? Yes. Do you need personality bleed from a teenaged piece of poo poo to get angry and dysfunctional, and does that teenager need to have stolen chunks of your personality to gain empathy for people around him? Nope. Well no, they were actually getting it from Cradle, not Rain
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Feb 22, 2019 13:28
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tithin posted:Prac Guide: More importantly, maybe it's just me, but Catherine is back to being entertaining and likable again.
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Feb 22, 2019 15:53
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The Shortest Path posted:Well no, they were actually getting it from Cradle, not Rain
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Feb 22, 2019 16:24
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Trasson posted:More importantly, maybe it's just me, but Catherine is back to being entertaining and likable again. yeah, i didnt really notice before how much she started to suck until she stopped
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Feb 22, 2019 18:38
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violent sex idiot posted:yeah, i didnt really notice before how much she started to suck until she stopped I like that it was a story point that neither did she. I think that's why the reader doesn't necessarily notice how far she slipped, because the story is told from her point of view and SHE didn't notice, but I'm not a knows-books-and-words-good-person.
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Feb 22, 2019 19:14
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:If you want a web serial with concise chapters, I recommend Into the Mire. I like twi when it’s erin and the inn and things like the tension with slave skellibro, and my interest in the rest varies a lot as we get further away. I mostly tuned out of it when it was clear we’d be reading about rags forever because TWI goblins are different  but that trope was done in less words with more style elsewhere (even Rowling) and the segments drag on interminably for no obvious reason.As a story about a girl with plot armor becoming an innkeeper in Adventureland it is interesting.
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Feb 22, 2019 19:16
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boxen posted:I like that it was a story point that neither did she. I think that's why the reader doesn't necessarily notice how far she slipped, because the story is told from her point of view and SHE didn't notice, but I'm not a knows-books-and-words-good-person. It's a neat idea, but intentionally making your PoV character kinda boring for interesting plot reasons still means that you have a boring PoV character. There was still enough fun things going on to keep me happy with the story, but Winter-Cat probably stuck around too long.
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Feb 22, 2019 20:00
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The Shortest Path posted:Well no, they were actually getting it from Cradle, not Rain PetraCore posted:See, this is why I shouldn't speculate until I'm fully caught up. I think this is probably an oversimplification - Snag was relatively blameless, since the main thing he brought to the personality bleed was depression, but I think that the anger towards Rain, the quest for revenge, was mostly Love Lost. Cradle was a major source of the moral slide downhill, doing things like numbing Love Lost to her moral constraints and making it harder for her to see things from Rain's point of view, but there wasn't really one single problem person in the cluster - Cradle was just the worst problem, and was intentionally causing a problem. It was very much an allegory for different people's unhealthy coping mechanisms contributing to and compounding each other.
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Feb 22, 2019 21:58
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Question regarding the most recent Ward chapter - why is Love Lost/Colt's section shrinking (and killing them in the process, maybe?)? I get that Cradle has been making the others less empathetic by giving them his coins, but how does this translate to Love Lost being killed? Also, are we supposed to understand why Colt ended up with similar powers and showed up in Love Lost's section? Not really related to the above, but March's powers have definitely crossed a line into becoming kind of unbelievably ludicrous. I have no idea how enhanced timing would enable you to literally predict the future and give people written instructions that all (seemingly) work out perfectly. It's one thing to be able to predict how long it will take the "pieces" you're controlling to go places and do things, but she shouldn't have any way of magically predicting the actions of people she isn't observing. edit: The issue with March's power is kind of similar to the issue with Number Man's, where their abilities don't really seem to logically follow from their power-set. Like, the weirdest thing about Number Man is that his power seems to come with a Contessa-esque ability to perfectly execute actions that take advantage of his knowledge. Heck, Number Man's powers seem almost the exact same as March's in practice, only with him having the additional ability to manipulate the stock market or whatever. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 22:09
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March is as bullshit as she is because of Megan's power, which is to amplify other powers. With half of Megan's cluster dead (Goddess, Bill, the unknown 6th member) and the other two there helping her, it's pretty potent. It's why March was able to escalate so rapidly from her fairly low-level stuff before.
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Feb 22, 2019 22:16
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Ytlaya posted:Question regarding the most recent Ward chapter - why is Love Lost/Colt's section shrinking (and killing them in the process, maybe?)? I get that Cradle has been making the others less empathetic by giving them his coins, but how does this translate to Love Lost being killed? LL and Colt are fading because Cradle presumably arranged to have them killed in the real world. Also Colt’s probably got her powers through budding, when a piece from a mature shard splits off and triggers with a new person connected to their old host. This is why Victoria’s family all have related powers, for example.
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Feb 22, 2019 22:41
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