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like everything big yuds does, he's really convinced that bayes theorem is literally all you need to understand loving anything
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Oct 9, 2020 23:49
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Yeah I hope nobody misunderstands my HP20 recommendation as me saying it's anything nearly as insufferable as HPATMOR; I just meant it's also got a lot of playing with the rules of magic. It does it in a much more goodhearted way that doesn't feel like the author is cynical about either franchise (this was written before we realized Rowling was a TERF)
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Oct 10, 2020 04:37
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I have up on actual harry potter on book 4 or 5 but holy crap was HP20 amazing. I was so pumped when it came back just to find it quickly abandoned again. Last week I marathoned arrogant master template just to find it dropped right in the middle of a critical event. Maybe I should just stick to completed serials.
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Oct 10, 2020 05:29
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Kyoujin posted:I have up on actual harry potter on book 4 or 5 but holy crap was HP20 amazing. I was so pumped when it came back just to find it quickly abandoned again. Oh yeah, Arrogant Master dropping off was disappointing
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Oct 10, 2020 18:46
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Where is the best place to read Cultivation Chat? Also what about the original Mandarin? I’m out of practice, but it might be fun to give it a try.
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Oct 10, 2020 21:11
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navyjack posted:Oh yeah, Arrogant Master dropping off was disappointing well, he turned it into what he hated.
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Oct 10, 2020 23:11
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Yeah, he got too deep into the weeds of how poo poo works. Something like Vainqueur the Dragon does a better job of keeping the satire up.
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Oct 10, 2020 23:16
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Vainqueur the Dragon has somehow survived it's own not being poo poo. That makes it like one of 5 web series so far
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Oct 10, 2020 23:24
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Mulozon Empuri posted:Vainqueur the Dragon has somehow survived it's own not being poo poo. That makes it like one of 5 web series so far And landed the ending which is awesome
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Oct 10, 2020 23:32
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I've been reading Vainqueur and its been pretty good so far, I'm dipping my toes into web serials again after burning out about 70% of the way through Worm a few years ago. The only other one I've read is Mother of Learning which was... fine. The total lack of distinctive character voice and limp ending sort of soured me on it though. Anyone have any other recommendations?
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Oct 10, 2020 23:52
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Mulozon Empuri posted:well, he turned it into what he hated. That makes sense. I thought the whole reason the latest events were happening were to kind of reboot and get it back on track but I could see author dropping it if he wasn't confident to fix it. I should finish vainqueur. Left off around 120ish and didn't know it was finished.
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Oct 11, 2020 01:01
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Zore posted:The only other one I've read is Mother of Learning which was... fine. The total lack of distinctive character voice and limp ending sort of soured me on it though. Anyone have any other recommendations? Other than that, there's all the usual web serials people discuss here, like The Wandering Inn and Practical Guide to Evil. Anything that comes up in this thread a bunch is probably great.
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Oct 11, 2020 02:07
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Zore posted:I've been reading Vainqueur and its been pretty good so far, I'm dipping my toes into web serials again after burning out about 70% of the way through Worm a few years ago. The primordial was even introduced as an actual character for a bit but then just never did anything after they left the loops. edit: Arrogant Master had like over 20 cultivation levels in story, which is even more ridiculous than actual xianxia serials that rode the power escalator for over 2k chapters. I think it did have a problem with staying in its lane when your "worldbuilding" gets to that point. Algid fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Oct 11, 2020 |
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Oct 11, 2020 02:50
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Algid posted:You have an evil god that a cult is trying to break free and enslave with mind magic. A ritual being mentioned that specifically fuses two beings. A mc that depends primarily on his (vastly superior) mind magic, and an author that wrote Natuto fanfic before. It amazes me things didn't end with them failing to contain the Primordial and Zorian being forced to control it with a combination of the shifter ritual and his mind magic. Yeah, there are just a ridiculous number of plot threads in Mother of Learning that never really end up going anywhere and a lot of the resolution is just an asspull. Also everything just working out for Zorian and Zach with uh literally no downsides really made the stakes feel completely flat. No one died because they accidentally were still thinking in time loop terms, the bad guys are utterly foiled and even the single thing that should have been a serious wrench in their plans (the fact demons and angels could enter the equation in the real world and they had no experience with it)... ultimately amounts to nothing because they get a literal 'get out of jail free' card that handles it for them. Everything ends up going way too according to plan and it really sucked most of the tension out of the story because they just came up with bullshit countermeasures to things that they explicitly should have no experience with (like hiring the dragon as a mercenary etc). Also Zorian's progression and accumulation of abilities got way too rapid at the end. He concocts and pulls off his whole plan to defeat the Mind Blank spell and trick an angelic contract like a week after learning about it? While also building a bespoke army of golems, doing novel research into other branches of magic, playing detective and doing all the bullshit they did every month in the time loop. It was way, way too much and just went way too much into the godhood end of the power fantasy pool for me.
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Oct 11, 2020 03:31
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The really weird thing about Mother of Learning is that the early story has enough tie-ins to later events that I assume the author was working with a fairly complete outline of the plot, but a lot of the last quarter of the story feature decisions that are frigging baffling if you assume they were planned in advance, mainly building the entire first arc around 'Who's the mysterious masked man', and then going 'Oh, it's some guy Zach knew who was onscreen for 5 seconds in the third act' and what felt like a fairly late-story asspull to go 'Oh wait, it was angels this whole time.'. As far as the messy part, I'm pretty sure that was straight-up the author taking a look at where the story was and realizing that if he kept on pace, it'd take another seven years to finish. Because yeah- the first and second acts were pretty great, at least for me it started petering out when he and Zach teamed up, and fell apart suddenly and very comprehensively when they started hanging out with older brother man and Zorian started spamming clones. (I'm also really salty that the author didn't find a way to make Zorian/Taiven both not creepy and a thing. I thought adding the ability to keep people in the loop might've been a lead-in to aging both of them up, since late 20s Zorian and mid 20s looper Taiven is way less weird and no-good than teenager/middle-aged teenager, but that whole thing just kinda poofed.
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Oct 11, 2020 07:24
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Omi no Kami posted:The really weird thing about Mother of Learning is that the early story has enough tie-ins to later events that I assume the author was working with a fairly complete outline of the plot, but a lot of the last quarter of the story feature decisions that are frigging baffling if you assume they were planned in advance, mainly building the entire first arc around 'Who's the mysterious masked man', and then going 'Oh, it's some guy Zach knew who was onscreen for 5 seconds in the third act' and what felt like a fairly late-story asspull to go 'Oh wait, it was angels this whole time.'. I like the stuff with Daimen if that's what you mean, though I agree with the clones essentially ruining the whole "power development" aspect of the series (and at the point when he meets with Daimen a number of the negative aspects were already in play - I just liked the specific dynamic with Daimen himself). Same with Zach; how Zach is dealt with is the most disappointing thing for me, even though it sort of makes sense narratively (Zach mentally "checking out" due to how long he's been in the loop + being sure that he's going to die makes sense, but he's probably the single person Zorian is the closest to during the series so it feels bad for him to not have a big role in its finale).
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Oct 11, 2020 08:10
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Ytlaya posted:I like the stuff with Daimen if that's what you mean, though I agree with the clones essentially ruining the whole "power development" aspect of the series (and at the point when he meets with Daimen a number of the negative aspects were already in play - I just liked the specific dynamic with Daimen himself). Same with Zach; how Zach is dealt with is the most disappointing thing for me, even though it sort of makes sense narratively (Zach mentally "checking out" due to how long he's been in the loop + being sure that he's going to die makes sense, but he's probably the single person Zorian is the closest to during the series so it feels bad for him to not have a big role in its finale). I liked Daimen too and honestly wish they'd done more with him, especially the thing with Zorian spending years going "Boy my bro's an rear end in a top hat," only for Zach to meet him and go "...honestly he seems okay, I'm pretty sure you're the rear end in a top hat." But it's also around that point where I assume the author realized they needed to speed things up, because clones/Daimen is around the point where I recall stuff hitting warp speed and single chapters semi-regularly becoming "Anyway X was a problem, so we spent six months iterating on it and found a fix. Also I learned another way to explode people with my brain. Zach was there too." The finale itself was a big ol' letdown for me- I honestly think that the author fell prey to the impulse or perceived need to make a big, epic ending, and in MoL's specific case action and combat were pretty much the worst possible way to go about that. Even with how it was written I honestly never felt that Z&Z were convincingly put in peril, and I really wish that instead of a giant city-destroying brawl it was just, like, Z&Z planned their perfect month, mask guy and jerk witch planned their perfect month, and the last few chapters is just three assholes all doing clandestine plot/counterplot crap while the rest of the city is completely oblivious.
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Oct 11, 2020 08:43
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I found the ending to Mother of Learning decent though not great. Maybe that's because I read the whole thing through in one go once it was completed and didn't have time to build up much in the way of expectations, though.
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Oct 12, 2020 06:21
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I read probably 90% of it in a couple days and then waited around for the ending, but by the time that short break hit it was obvious that the author had thrown way, way too many plates into the air to actually end it as a coherent plot cleanly, instead of continuing what was basically a slice of life about a dude using magic to learn social skills.
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Oct 13, 2020 02:41
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Thanks for the Vainquer the dragon recommendation, it was a nice finished web serial to just lose yourself in. Utterly ridiculous and a little too corny but a nice read.
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Oct 13, 2020 04:30
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lol worm spoilers: apparently wildbow edited it so fan-favourite character browbeat, who everyone definitely remembers existed, died in the leviathan fight. I know he said he rolled dice to see who died but I didn't think he'd reroll them later on.
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Oct 13, 2020 13:05
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90s Cringe Rock posted:lol worm spoilers: apparently wildbow edited it so fan-favourite character browbeat, who everyone definitely remembers existed, died in the leviathan fight. I know he said he rolled dice to see who died but I didn't think he'd reroll them later on. iirc he was never mentioned ever again post-Leviathan but he had never explicitly been named as a casualty either, so there was lots of fan speculation about what actually happened to him. Kinda like whats his face in Game of Thrones, the sword guy in the first season.
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Oct 13, 2020 17:02
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The Shortest Path posted:iirc he was never mentioned ever again post-Leviathan but he had never explicitly been named as a casualty either, so there was lots of fan speculation about what actually happened to him. Kinda like whats his face in Game of Thrones, the sword guy in the first season.
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Oct 13, 2020 17:11
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Actually, Browbeat has (had) a bunch of mentions post-Leviathan. Nothing major, but just little mentions that he was helping out with x or y issue. Wildbow has a pretty well-known dislike of memes, and during the run of Ward, Browbeat was a huge meme. So, without fanfare or announcement, Wildbow went back and edited Browbeat's appearance in the Leviathan fight from surviving to dead and removed him from all post-Leviathan mentions. It's the only edit Worm's received since being finished, and it's a really inelegant one. All he did was change 'Browbeat - down' to 'Browbeat - deceased.' /r/parahumans initially thought it was a sign of Ward's masterwork, that March was altering the timeline of Worm. What makes it even funnier is that the Browbeat chapter is also the first appearance of another topic that Wildbow hates these days - Parian's 'true' power. Spoiler: Parian's 'true' power is that she could use human flesh.
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Oct 13, 2020 22:58
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What was truly insane about the Parian thing is that Wildbow kept simultaneously jangling the secret like car keys in front of a cat and getting increasingly irritated at his fans for making guesses that weren't correct... and then the obvious usage that people were supposed to guess was that she can combine deaders into a giant flesh golem to punch behemoth or something? Worm is one of the very few stories I've encountered where my interest and enjoyment sharply decreases every time a) I think about it, or b) wildbow writes about it.
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Oct 13, 2020 23:14
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Omi no Kami posted:What was truly insane about the Parian thing is that Wildbow kept simultaneously jangling the secret like car keys in front of a cat and getting increasingly irritated at his fans for making guesses that weren't correct... and then the obvious usage that people were supposed to guess was that she can combine deaders into a giant flesh golem to punch behemoth or something? Worm is one of the very few stories I've encountered where my interest and enjoyment sharply decreases every time a) I think about it, or b) wildbow writes about it. worm has Naruto Syndrome worse than anything other than, well, naruto that is, everyone enjoys the premise, the initial worldbuilding and cast, and the narrative arc that the first third or so of the story seems to be setting up, and if you want to continue feeling nostalgia toward it you have to forget that the rest exists because it's never going to stop spiraling downward
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Oct 13, 2020 23:26
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I've always been morbidly curious if the first part of Worm was an accident. Like, if you cut away street worm and maybe johnny depp worm, what you're left with has the exact same highs and lows as the rest of his work: sporadic genuinely interesting ideas kneecapped by weird decisions, creepy sex poo poo, and severe structural problems. Early worm has pretty much all of those problems, but taylor's reverse spider-man villain origin story thing actually works really great as a framing device. So, like, what the heck? Did he just trip over an effective setup, then blunder forward without realizing why his thing worked? I can't imagine that's the case, but the last 75% makes a lot more sense if you assume that he genuinely didn't understand why the first 25% worked.
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Oct 14, 2020 05:41
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I'm kinda curious about Worm, but not enough to try and ignore the fact that I usually can't get through depressing or overly questionable stories and I've heard enough that I'm pretty sure Worm isn't going to be one of the exceptions. The only reason I'm curious is one of the things I really enjoy seeing an update to is a fan fiction set in Worm where things are getting to be very different from the source time line, and I occasionally wonder just how far things have changed.
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Oct 14, 2020 07:06
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For every good thing I see about Worm its usually followed up with "yeah but also Wildbow did X" and a lot of words about weird poo poo he's done outside of the story that kind of takes all the shine off anything arguably good about his work.
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Oct 14, 2020 07:13
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Omi no Kami posted:I've always been morbidly curious if the first part of Worm was an accident. Like, if you cut away street worm and maybe johnny depp worm, what you're left with has the exact same highs and lows as the rest of his work: sporadic genuinely interesting ideas kneecapped by weird decisions, creepy sex poo poo, and severe structural problems. Early worm has pretty much all of those problems, but taylor's reverse spider-man villain origin story thing actually works really great as a framing device. So, like, what the heck? Did he just trip over an effective setup, then blunder forward without realizing why his thing worked? I can't imagine that's the case, but the last 75% makes a lot more sense if you assume that he genuinely didn't understand why the first 25% worked. A simple explanation is that by the time he wrote Worm he'd written the beginning to a whole bunch of parahumans stories, but had never written anything past the beginning.
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Oct 14, 2020 07:17
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Onean posted:I'm kinda curious about Worm, but not enough to try and ignore the fact that I usually can't get through depressing or overly questionable stories and I've heard enough that I'm pretty sure Worm isn't going to be one of the exceptions. The only reason I'm curious is one of the things I really enjoy seeing an update to is a fan fiction set in Worm where things are getting to be very different from the source time line, and I occasionally wonder just how far things have changed. Most Worm fanfiction has very little to do with the actual story. There's actually a lot of Worm fanfiction written by people who've never actually read the original and come to it via fandom osmosis. Similarly, there're a lot of fans of Worm who only read the fanfiction and have never read the original. Because Worm has a lot of interesting ideas and a fairly good initial hook combined with storytelling that is, at best, flawed, it's a remarkable playground for writers to 'fix' through fanfiction. In that way, you could consider Worm the 'default campaign setting' of the Parahumans RPG. I've never understood the idea that Worm is depressing, though. It's kind of too childish to be depressing. Oh, someone abducted every single Asian person in Brockton Bay and put bombs in their heads and no one noticed and now they're being made to fight to the death? Okay, sure. It's a fun story, but when a considerable number of fans haven't actually read the story, you tend to hear more about the fandom simulacra than the actual story. Which is a rough first draft of a fairly standard YA story that occasionally veers into, as Omi pointed out, weird decisions, creepy sex poo poo, detailed asides about Nazi iconography, and body horror. With all that said, Wildbow could make a great YA trilogy from everything up to the end of Leviathan. Unfortunately, he's tied himself to /r/parahumans who consider the fact that Wildbow got a shout out from Tor - yes, that Tor - a bad sign.
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Oct 14, 2020 07:26
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I like that Grey Pilgrim is still around and doing stuff; I was worried that he'd get sort of side-lined after the events of the previous Book. It's interesting to see how he's been trying to adapt to things and change his own perspective (I imagine that confirming the Bard was an enemy was likely a big turning point that forced him to reconsider many things). I think that he was likely correct when he said that the coming "Age of Order" is likely to end up with Evil having an advantage relative to the preceding "Age of Wonders." I'm curious to find out what ends up happening with Hanno. I don't necessarily think this is likely, but one possibility is that this ends up with Hanno becoming an antagonist. The main reasons to doubt this are 1. the alternative to Hanno fully committing to his role as White Knight is that he loses his Name power and probably doesn't transition into something else (White Knight isn't exactly a transitional Name), and 2. I really doubt Hanno would ever be willing to directly turn against the Grand Alliance when the war against the Dead King is still going on. That being said, it's also hard to imagine that things go exactly how Pilgrim thinks they will; Pilgrim's logic was solid, but the fact that he's mentioned it seems like it basically guarantees that things won't go that well. It was also nice to see that Indrani didn't have any huge issue with what Catherine did before. It makes sense, and Hakram was right to mention that that Catherine doesn't give her enough credit. I wasn't sure what Hakram meant when he mentioned leaving if Catherine "talks about debts." Does he just mean that he doesn't want Catherine to act like she's in debt due to indirectly causing his maiming (and Catherine was mainly disturbed because it was the first time Hakram has ever even mentioned the possibility of leaving)? It kinda seems like the rest of Woe are all maturing more than Catherine, who is essentially forced to always prioritize the war (or whatever her duty is at any given point). It seems like Catherine views them as a sort of "anchor" amidst everything that's going on, so it's unsettling for her to see them changing.
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Oct 14, 2020 08:15
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Plorkyeran posted:A simple explanation is that by the time he wrote Worm he'd written the beginning to a whole bunch of parahumans stories, but had never written anything past the beginning. The thing that really makes me scratch my head and wonder if the beginning came together by accident is that the back half to two-thirds of the story don't just seem less focus or more exploratory, but completely unaware of what made early worm work. Kinda like how if you ask a lot of fans to synopsize the story you'll get (spoilered since I knew a few people are considering reading it) something like "Taylor becomes a supervillain and joins a team named the Undersiders. Together they try to make a name for themselves and keep their heads above water when things heat up." And yeah, I think that's Worm in a lot of people's head- Taylor and her fellow villain buddies pal around doing crime hijinks and saving the world. Except that's not really what the story is about- Taylor stops being a villain early on, the Undersiders are essentially nonentities after the first few arcs, and pretty much everything post-Leviathan is "A problem was there, Taylor solved or watched people solve it. Bullies were there, too." So yeah, I honestly wish I had a more constructive take, but I just dunno- if it was bad all the way through I wouldn't think twice about it, and if it started good and got lost along the way I could understand that, but the back half seems so utterly oblivious to what worked about the front half that I just kinda scratch my head in confusion every time I try to make sense of how that project happened.
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Oct 14, 2020 08:17
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Poor Broccoli Bunch. Out of the tournament arc pan, into the dragon dating lessons fire. (Cinnamon Bun is still good, people)
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Oct 14, 2020 14:40
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Cinnamon Bun is what I read when I need to feel some joy in this cold, grey, increasingly dead world. It even has literal cliff-hangers! The kind with airships inside them!
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Oct 14, 2020 15:09
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Omi no Kami posted:The thing that really makes me scratch my head and wonder if the beginning came together by accident is that the back half to two-thirds of the story don't just seem less focus or more exploratory, but completely unaware of what made early worm work. Kinda like how if you ask a lot of fans to synopsize the story you'll get (spoilered since I knew a few people are considering reading it) something like "Taylor becomes a supervillain and joins a team named the Undersiders. Together they try to make a name for themselves and keep their heads above water when things heat up." And yeah, I think that's Worm in a lot of people's head- Taylor and her fellow villain buddies pal around doing crime hijinks and saving the world. Except that's not really what the story is about- Taylor stops being a villain early on, the Undersiders are essentially nonentities after the first few arcs, and pretty much everything post-Leviathan is "A problem was there, Taylor solved or watched people solve it. Bullies were there, too." What do you mean by Taylor stopping being a villain early on; I don't think that happens until maybe ~2/3 through the story? I also feel like this is looking at early Worm through a rose-tinted lens; it had most of the same characteristics early on, where it sort of bounced from one tense conflict where Taylor/Undersiders barely escape/succeed (generally due to something Taylor did) to the next, which is basically the same thing that happens later.
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Oct 14, 2020 19:37
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Ytlaya posted:What do you mean by Taylor stopping being a villain early on; I don't think that happens until maybe ~2/3 through the story? I was curious about this, so I checked. By the numbers: Worm contains, including interludes and excluding the sequel teasers, 304 chapters divided into 30 arcs plus one epilogue arc. Taylor turns herself in at the end of arc 21 ("Imago"), chapter 7, which is the 227th chapter overall. Alexandria dies in chapter 4 of the following arc ("Cell"), which is the 233rd. Taylor is then released into probation with the Wards in the first chapter of the 23rd arc ("Drone"), which is the 238th. So, purely by chapter count, Taylor's transition to hero status occurs closer to the three-quarters or even four-fifths mark (!) But of course not all the chapters are of equal length. They get longer as it goes and the pre-Leviathan ones are especially short (that's the first 8 arcs and 87 chapters). By word count I suspect it is closer to the halfway point. It definitely feels like it; everything after Behemoth drags and drags and drags. Personally, I felt like pre-Leviathan Worm was pretty thin, and it wasn't really until that particular climax and the foregrounding of the broader setting elements like the Endbringers it didn't really gel with me. Taylor's surrender, the interrogation and Behemoth were I felt the last high points before it began to drop off. The entire Taylor-as-hero arc is a vacant stretch of nothingness and the ending was... functional but exhausting. I'm kind of tempted to reread it now with a more critical eye.
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Oct 14, 2020 20:15
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I'm kind of tempted to reread it now with a more critical eye. There's a thread over on Spacebattles called Lockers All The Way Down that does the first eight arcs with a critical lens. It was by another web serial writer and I got asked to help out.
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Oct 14, 2020 22:42
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Ytlaya posted:What do you mean by Taylor stopping being a villain early on; I don't think that happens until maybe ~2/3 through the story? Yeah, you could totally make a fair point by arc, but I was thinking by wordcount where the beginning through the leviathan arc is around 250k words, and leviathan through the Alexandria chapter is around another 250k. I definitely agree that early worm had the exact same problems as later worm- for my money, what I specifically think works about street worm is the villain origin story: "here's Taylor, she's basically Canadian genderswapped Peter Parker with the bully dial turned up to eleven. She's sad and feels alone, but there's something special about her that nobody else knows: she has superpowers!" That whole setup is a big ol' YA cliche for a reason- it's a very effective way to jumpstart a story and onboard the reader. While the subsequent story gets heavy-handed whenever authority figures are involved, I think the idea of using the structure of a traditional origin story to establish how a young, vulnerable person becomes disenfranchised and slips through the cracks into a place where being weirdo violence scumbag makes sense to her is great. I also liked the early Undersiders building a brand thing, where they were pulling off capers to make money, solve their immediate personal problems, and find an equilibrium in the city's superpower ecosystem. I think that all goes away really quickly, though- people continue to refer to Taylor as a villain after Leviathan, but everything that characterized her early trajectory is gone- she's not building a brand, or finding her balance, she's just fronting a large-scale urban redevelopment project while a background character shovels money into her and everyone else yells at her. The slaughterhouse 9 stuff is an extended hero team-up where her team might as well be another franchise of Wards, the subsequent Noelle stuff is basically just one big City of Heroes raid boss, then it immediately pivots to her joining the wards. So yeah- maybe I'm being too generous or restrictive with my definitions, but my main point is that what really worked about the story was the villain origin story thing, which went away so quickly and so decisively after the first arc that I'm pretty sure the author didn't realize what he'd done and why it worked.
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Oct 14, 2020 23:57
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:There's actually a lot of Worm fanfiction written by people who've never actually read the original and come to it via fandom osmosis. Similarly, there're a lot of fans of Worm who only read the fanfiction and have never read the original. Because Worm has a lot of interesting ideas and a fairly good initial hook combined with storytelling that is, at best, flawed, it's a remarkable playground for writers to 'fix' through fanfiction. In that way, you could consider Worm the 'default campaign setting' of the Parahumans RPG. I've always been interested in this subject since they started doing academic studies/papers on the nature of fandoms and how it develops a community that can be devoted fans of the work while simultaneously disliking major core components of the work, aggressively embracing shipping, reading characters as gay/bi/trans, and developed wildly popular 'alternate' readings of the source material. I think for Harry Potter fandom there's tons of widely accepted fanon that has no reading from the books or JK Rowling's wine drunk ranting but became so ubiquitous in fanworks that if you google the topic you'll find multiple reddit posts with people going "was any of this ever in the books or confirmed as canon?"
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Oct 15, 2020 07:54
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