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TWI 6.67 patreon: god dammit not another cliffhanger 
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Dec 29, 2019 04:04
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Cliffhangers are in my opinion just a way for lazy authors to get their readers 'excited' about what comes next when the author themselves may not have a clue.quote:I'm not sure where I'm taking this scene so I'm going to do a big dramatic suspenseful moment and hopefully the readers will give me an idea of how to take it.. if a fanfic/etc uses them, I typically stop reading fairly quickly unless it's really interesting
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Dec 29, 2019 04:10
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i mean she wrote it like that because she's ill and she was already pushing 20,000 words
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Dec 29, 2019 04:12
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Katalepsis arc is over and everything is going great.
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Dec 29, 2019 06:24
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To be fair in this case it's a cliffhanger that we knew was coming. its why the Watch and Army's response time was so long, Toren caused an undead outbreak in the Dungeon which distracted everyone
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Dec 29, 2019 06:50
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The last web serials I really enjoyed were Epilogue and Into the Mire, I think because they're smaller stories that were doing something new and interesting, with a smaller cast and a single plot that the author was building up to.
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Dec 29, 2019 10:13
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TWI 6.68 patreon:       
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Jan 1, 2020 04:40
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A big flaming stink posted:TWI 6.68 patreon: Yeah, that hit right in the feels. Rest in peace, The Wandering Inn. Right up until the ants rebuild it, again, or something. Every time pirateaba wraps something up, five more things start to get rolling. With 'the world changed' bit when Ryoka decided where to bring the Earther group, I have a feeling pirateaba flipped a coin.
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Jan 1, 2020 05:05
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Kalas posted:Yeah, that hit right in the feels. Rest in peace, The Wandering Inn. Right up until the ants rebuild it, again, or something. Every time pirateaba wraps something up, five more things start to get rolling. With 'the world changed' bit when Ryoka decided where to bring the Earther group, I have a feeling pirateaba flipped a coin. lul. I can't help but question an author's motives when they do something like that. "Oh hey, I'm a bit bored with the way it's going, let's shake it up hard. ah yes, the readers' tears shall feed my writing.. blah blah blah"
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Jan 1, 2020 05:47
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Ambaire posted:lul. I can't help but question an author's motives when they do something like that. "Oh hey, I'm a bit bored with the way it's going, let's shake it up hard. ah yes, the readers' tears shall feed my writing.. blah blah blah" There has been NOTHING boring the last few chapters. This is poo poo hitting the places on the ceiling that were missed the last time around. Not actually a spoiler, but rather let people catch up before posting responses in plain text.
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Jan 1, 2020 05:59
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Ambaire posted:lul. I can't help but question an author's motives when they do something like that. "Oh hey, I'm a bit bored with the way it's going, let's shake it up hard. ah yes, the readers' tears shall feed my writing.. blah blah blah" honestly i feel that this latest chapter is closer to a return to the mean rather than any attempt at cheap drama
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Jan 1, 2020 06:25
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How long is the break gonna be for nonpatron normies?
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Jan 1, 2020 06:30
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Argue posted:How long is the break gonna be for nonpatron normies? the break is till jan 18th, so the nonpatrons will be updated on......jan 21st
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Jan 1, 2020 06:33
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A big flaming stink posted:honestly i feel that this latest chapter is closer to a return to the mean rather than any attempt at cheap drama Yeah, we had our big dramatic climax to the book, and most of the urgent plotlines have been resolved for now, and the status quo was damaged, so it was mostly just moving some story pieces around that had been passive for a while to set up some vaguely intriguing new possibilities for the next book. Don't see where the cheap drama or reader tears comment is for, it's not even really that much of a cliffhanger.
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Jan 1, 2020 10:00
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The wandering inn is a wandering inn because every time they rebuild it it moves a bit to the side.
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Jan 1, 2020 13:41
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Maybe Erin will finally get to go on that road trip that was being hinted at in the early parts of the volume. She had plenty of invites to various locales around Izril, so maybe it's finally time to put actual wandering into the Wandering Inn!
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Jan 1, 2020 16:55
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Now i'm imagining the wandering inn as some sort of like traveling event where she sets up like tents or rents buildings or something wherever she travels to. Though the obvious actual 'wandering inn' is gunna some trick involving her door.
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Jan 2, 2020 02:45
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I just had fun binging through the oddly named Arrogant Young Master Template A Variation 4 on Royal Road. It suffers a bit from being written by somebody who is English second language and so the grammar is off, it sometimes reads a bit as if it has been machine translated. Apart from that it is decently written for web fiction and has given me some at least smirk out loud moments. What it does offer is an amusing Xianxia take where the main character tries to survive after reincarnating into the role of a stepping stone villain with access to immense resources. Also he largely finds cultivation super boring and almost completely quits at it upon finding it will take him like, ten years of extreme tedious work to advance to the next level.
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Jan 3, 2020 09:35
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Patrat posted:Arrogant Young Master Template A Variation 4 Patrat posted:it sometimes reads a bit as if it has been machine translated With a name like that, that might be 
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Jan 3, 2020 11:37
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So I wonder if it says terrible things about me that in the midst of all of the scary and awful things happening to our protagonists in Magical Garbage Person Adventure, my main reaction to today's chapter was Oh good, I'm glad the adorable demon mannequin with the maid fetish is probably okay. Edit: ...also, I just realized, is Praem straight-up the most unambiguously positive and upbeat character in this entire story? That's awesome and hilarious. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 14:16
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Omi no Kami posted:Edit: ...also, I just realized, is Praem straight-up the most unambiguously positive and upbeat character in this entire story? That's awesome and hilarious. You know what? (Not an actual spoiler) Yes. Yes she is! She's delightful and I never expected her to be so positive.
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Jan 4, 2020 18:56
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Hungry posted:You know what? (Not an actual spoiler) Yes. Yes she is! She's delightful and I never expected her to be so positive. That's really great. When she appeared I was fully braced for her creation to be a terrible idea on Evelyn's part, or for her to be a creepily fetishized (by Eevie) loneliness abatement tool. I'm surprised how nice she turned out! (And please don't take that as a suggestion to have her turn evil or get splatted, our hearts can't take it  )
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Jan 4, 2020 23:49
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What serial are you guys talking about?
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Jan 4, 2020 23:58
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Thunderfinger posted:What serial are you guys talking about? The awesome https://katalepsis.net/
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Jan 5, 2020 00:01
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Practical Guide is back, now updating Tuesdays and Fridays. (Todays update is early since this was the originally promised return)
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Jan 6, 2020 06:40
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New Practical guide is so good. I cannot wait for this last chapter. I feel like I know where the story is going now. Catherine seems to be breaking the whole 'Heroes are good, Villains are Evil' into more of a 'Paragon vs Renegade' where heroes and villains can be good or evil,and the distinction is more one of means and methods rather than morality. I wonder if this is all set up for a sequel set in the magical academy Catherine is setting up in callow. I hope so as I want zany school adventures with villains and heroes.
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Jan 6, 2020 20:34
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should have known i'd be beaten but still, pracguide 
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Jan 6, 2020 20:53
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I'm catching up on Ward, I like to read it in chunks. Someone in here mentioned the reason Dragon couldn't just fabricate fishing boats as the Shards rewarding their hosts more when taking conflict-geared action, but I don't think that's quite it - Dragon is actually one of the people in the best places to contribute to a lot of infrastructure building and mundane solutions because when you strip her of the benefits her Thinker power gives her, she's still a hyper-intelligent AI able to oversee a lot of administrative functions. I always assumed that behind the scenes in Ward she was doing a lot of stuff that contributed to the City being built up as fast as it was, but there are limits to what she can do and the tinker-tech she has access to is much more likely to be geared towards spitting out weapons fast than making mundane stuff. Honestly the unbelievable thing to me has always been how fast infrastructure got built up from scratch in Ward, rather than how fast the City struggled when getting cut off from supplies. Even when they had lots of support from Cheit and Shin there were still massive tent cities of still-unhomed refugees while some places apparently focused on building community centers and coffee shops, and as the story progresses supplies and parts of the City just get massively more hosed up so of course the glossed over issues are harder to ignore. Everything is happening on an absolutely massive scale, so you can't just solve food shortages with manufacturing more fishing boats because you not only have to catch enough fish to feed tens of millions of people, but you need to get that food to them while it's still fresh when huge chunks of the City are now uninhabitable broken holes in reality and the transportaton infrastructure you spent 2 years building up got hosed up with portal terrorism even before that. This is not to say that Wildbow is a super great writer of geopolitics and city infrastructure. He's not. I'm sure he set up the rules of this setting to steer any POV characters towards violent conflict specifically because that gives him situations he's better at writing than round 12 of trying to develop a government in a post-apocalyptic dimensional refugee megacity. I just also think Dragon specifically is a character where if there's things she can help by producing more mundane things with the more mundane tech she operates she's going to be doing that on top of giving people guns, but that there are more problems than just can be solved with that, especially since Dragon's tech definitely still needs materials fed into it to craft into things and one of the problems the City has been facing is that they have limited access to refined ores and synthetic materials.
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Jan 8, 2020 21:21
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Like one of the things anti-parahuman groups are upset about, I think, is that materials get diverted to tinkers doing tinker stuff instead of just building houses, even though most of it has to go towards construction given the scale of everything.
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Jan 8, 2020 21:24
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I believe it was implied if not outright stated that using powers to mundane, non-conflict-related ends has a tendency to backfire. Like the situation with power-created materials tending to cause problems. Or Mannequin for that matter - he tried to put his Tinker abilities to use with a large endeavor completely unrelated to combat and look at how that ended up. One other aspect to the city's creation that I don't think anyone mentioned is that, IIRC, Citrine is using Accord's plan in some capacity. So that would go a long way towards explaining how they were able to build up so much (as well as also possibly partially explaining why everything went to poo poo in the end).
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Jan 8, 2020 22:28
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Ytlaya posted:I believe it was implied if not outright stated that using powers to mundane, non-conflict-related ends has a tendency to backfire. Like the situation with power-created materials tending to cause problems. Or Mannequin for that matter - he tried to put his Tinker abilities to use with a large endeavor completely unrelated to combat and look at how that ended up. My impression is Shards instinctively sabatogue projects they deem counter to the cycle, which is why powers don't work when you get too far from Earth and why Mannequin was never going to be able to develop viable tech for colonies on the moon or mars. That wasn't just the non combat stuff, but he was trying to figure out how to get humans off earth, which is a huge no sell to the entities. Plus if you're too out of synch with your Shard, it forcibly expresses in bad ways, which is probably one of the problems Amy has. She can force her Shard to heal people with her, but she also needs to be doing some Weird poo poo or it's going to buck away in the middle of delicate procedures. Victoria is still super punchy but her balance seems to work pretty well, so it's not just straight thuggery they want, but maybe it wouldn't if she was just doing search and rescue or whatever.
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Jan 8, 2020 22:42
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PetraCore posted:Fair! And yeah, that's why I think Dragon would need to primarily use non-tinker tech to build long-term civilian structures, although she herself is tinkertech so idk how many degrees you need to remove that. It's a tricky balance to strike. Dragon is a bit weird because in addition to being a para'human' herself, her existence is also the product of powers. So it's unclear if dragon using her "natural" AI powers to make non-tinker tech would qualify as "using powers." To be honest I mostly just ignore that sort of stuff, though. IMO there are bigger problems than the rate of the megacity's development (like the aforementioned thing about "humans with normal military weapons" being more effective than 90% of capes for these conflicts). Fights against other parahumans or Endbringers are generally pretty good about having some element to them that makes it impossible or impractical to address them with normal human capabilities, but the current opponents are big targets that are susceptible to regular weapons.
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Jan 8, 2020 23:57
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Ytlaya posted:Dragon is a bit weird because in addition to being a para'human' herself, her existence is also the product of powers. So it's unclear if dragon using her "natural" AI powers to make non-tinker tech would qualify as "using powers." Mind, I'm of the opinion Victoria was supposed to be a rules-flouting dick in that scene and the dressing-down afterwards was completely deserved, but it fell sort of flat because it highlighted some real bullshit in the narrative treatment of baseline humans. Anyway yeah back on topic while I can see why it's necessary to have some very durable or very damaging parahumans in the fight against the Titans, it also feels like it would work a lot better if you also had squads doing ranged conventional fire. It's a battle of attrition, anyway, so every little bit helps, and it's likely military squads wouldn't register as the 'biggest threat' and thus get completely creamed. PS. Torso tripping his way across the battlefield to headbutt Eve into the ground is the best part of this entire huge action scene and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.
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Jan 9, 2020 00:31
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Like obviously parahumans get drawn into conflict in general because of Shard influence and some level of that is honestly actually necessary to avoid some really unhinged stuff that comes from an unsatisfied Shard, but I wish normal humans were an element too in more stuff than like, whoops, we could have taken down Jack Slash the entire time with normal humans and containment foam.
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Jan 9, 2020 00:33
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Ytlaya posted:One other aspect to the city's creation that I don't think anyone mentioned is that, IIRC, Citrine is using Accord's plan in some capacity. So that would go a long way towards explaining how they were able to build up so much (as well as also possibly partially explaining why everything went to poo poo in the end). This is the thing I find so amazing- in Worm Accord's plans were described as being brilliant and effective, but too complicated for most governments to seriously consider. Then we get to Ward and, like, Accord's brilliant plan to feed the world was "Buy all of our food from religious extremists whose society is built around hating capes, and who keep reneging on their deals"? So I like the notion that the real reason Accord's plans were never used before now is because they were really silly. Either way though, at this point I refuse to try and use logic in WB stories, because Ward has convinced me that it's an exercise in futility. As a guy parodying WB once said, "There are no plot holes, only WOGs I haven't written yet."
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Jan 9, 2020 03:31
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Omi no Kami posted:This is the thing I find so amazing- in Worm Accord's plans were described as being brilliant and effective, but too complicated for most governments to seriously consider. Then we get to Ward and, like, Accord's brilliant plan to feed the world was "Buy all of our food from religious extremists whose society is built around hating capes, and who keep reneging on their deals"? So I like the notion that the real reason Accord's plans were never used before now is because they were really silly. It's not that surprising that desperate people with literally no ability to get self-sufficient before the first winter came on when building infrastructure from scratch would take any help they could get, because a poisoned chalice is still preferable when you're dying of thirst. EDIT: Like gently caress of course Accord's plan to end world hunger in Earth Bet was significantly different than what could be managed in the City because Earth Bet had developed land and resources already. Now, his plan to end world hunger in Earth Bet was almost certainly ridiculously complicated and probably involved culling rebels or something because he's insane, but the things you're nitpicking aren't even textual at this point. I feel like we can make more fun of Cauldron's big plan to handle Goddess being dumping her in a defenseless Earth because maybe she'll be useful later or whatever rather than poking at stuff that didn't happen. PetraCore fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 03:59
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PetraCore posted:You're mixing up two different Earths and also it's pretty clear the food and supplies were only supposed to be a stopgap until the City could get self-sufficient. Accord dying before the world even ended and the amount of info he didn't have access to about the conditions at the time stuff was actually needed also means his plans aren't going to be flawless. My core issue is that Ward's government has consistently failed to solve basic problems with bafflingly odd and nonsensical solutions, like letting their diplomats get thrown into torture rape prison because they're buying 90% of their food, then acting surprised when that exact same faction betrays them like three more times in ten minutes. It's obvious that WB has neither the knowledge or interest in research to set up a marginally believable post-apocalyptic thingie, but what's weird is that he doesn't have to: Ward doesn't need to be post-apocalyptic, the survivors could've found an earth that was straight-up just the modern world except no capes. The core trauma/recovery/whatever crap is a story that could've been told anywhere, and the fact that he chose to set it in a bizarre pastiche where humanity can go from nothing to skyscrapers and mobile phones within 24 months, but can't figure out how to feed 50 million people. Honestly, a lot of this crap makes me feel like the story punishes me for trying to think about it- like, for heck's sake: plant a crapload of sweet potatoes and boom, within 300 days you're no longer entirely reliant on commerce with a hostile nation.
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Jan 9, 2020 04:13
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Omi no Kami posted:My core issue is that Ward's government has consistently failed to solve basic problems with bafflingly odd and nonsensical solutions, like letting their diplomats get thrown into torture rape prison because they're buying 90% of their food, then acting surprised when that exact same faction betrays them like three more times in ten minutes. EDIT: I think part of the problem, and this is definitely a Wildbow writing problem, is that 2 years into this they've got skyscrapers and semi-functional internet but no official legal system or true functioning government, which is ridiculous and seems entirely to set up the mayoral election plot beat. Like Breakthrough keeps a lawyer on consultation when there's no solid legal code yet and Natalie is pretty much around to go 'uuuuh this seems hosed up but I guess is... technically not illegal at this point in time', or to justify why they need to extra-judicially throw escalating supervillans into an uninhabited Earth which bites them in the rear end, because the actual prison for parahumans set up on an isolated Earth got broken and there were no... backups? I like Ward, I like the characters in Ward, I generally enjoy the plot of Ward, the actual logistics of the setting in Ward are not great. Like, to be fair, I don't think a random other Earth that was similar to Bet but no capes would actually be okay with accepting 50 million refugees short notice a significant portion of which are symbiotically/parasitically bonded with alien entities that have goals opposite to that of human survival, but it could have been done better. PetraCore fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 04:32
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I can definitely see where you're coming from, and I think if I could get over a lot of the logic and logistical issues that keep tripping me up it might be easier to get engaged with the good parts of the story. But yeah, there are some fairly extensive and bizarre worldbuilding issues that would've been solved by just not setting it in the post-apocalypse. In addition to the food situation and rule of law weirdness that allows Armsmaster to just kind of walk up to people and yell "You're now on probation all of your stuff belongs to the Wardens," , there are just so many oddities in the way we get detailed descriptions of logistical or civil things that plain wouldn't work- the descriptions never seem to aid the worldbuilding, and might as well have been cut entirely. Actually, that refugee situation you mentioned might've made for an interesting storytelling device- everyone is in a quasi-legal grey area because they're extra-dimensional, people are scared or resentful of them so you can throw in as much bias and unfair institutional problems as you want, and it'd let WB handwave away a lot of the stuff he struggles to coherently depict without even thinking about it. My guess is that Ward plain wasn't a story that WB was interested in telling- as you said there are bones of good stuff in there- he obviously enjoys writing the mental health and therapy stuff, and that's where the story shines, but at least for me whenever it goes back to world-ending disasters or cape fights my interest starts to wane. This has been brought up by a lot of people in the past, but I really think that Ward would've been best-served as a series of novellas. Do one big chunk of Rain, one of Kenzie, and so forth. That would let him polish the best parts of his thing without getting stuck in those mires where something contrived needs to happen to get Breakthrough positioned for the next plot beat, or Victoria spends an arc watching something happen on a monitor because she's the POV character, but the narrative can't get her into the action.
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Jan 9, 2020 05:20
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Yeah, there are obviously people who like Wildbow's action writing, and I imagine they make up most of the vocal parts of his fanbase from what I've heard, but I prefer the non-combat stuff. An action sequence I actually really liked was when they were in the Shardspace, because the nature of the area they were in and what they were up against made it an exercise in creative thinking and intuition rather than straight up fighting. But mostly I end up skimming combat scenes because I don't find Wildbow's fight descriptions particularly gripping when weighed against the amount of detail he's going into. This is a big part of why I read Ward in huge binges after letting it pile up for months, because keeping up with it as it releases gets to be a slog for me. EDIT: That said, the basic concept of Ward's big plot, namely that the cycle hasn't totally stopped just because Scion and Eden are dead, is super interesting to me and exactly the sort of poo poo I eat up. I'm guessing the fact that parahumans influence shards just as much as shards influence them will have major pay-off in how this resolves, because the Titans that still retained their sense of human identity and morality might still be networking, but if one of them becomes the new Hub I'm not actually buying that what follows is explosive permadeath of all Earths. So part of why I'm enjoying Ward is because I really like the weird, hosed up underpinnings of the setting and the exploration of those, and I think part of why I bounced off Pact so hard is because I just did not have that same enjoyment of the basic setting. PetraCore fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 05:33
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