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There is some seriously weird, awkward phrasing. It fits because I can only imagine Brennan being the awkwardest man in the world.  "I am very Zen."  "Please stop staring at me."
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Feb 25, 2013 08:14
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Jube: Seven Good ol' walrusman Jube starts the chapter out strong by answering a knock on his apartment door in plaid Bermuda shorts and a Dodgers shirt. It's Tachyon, bringing in the MacGuffin. Actually it's a transformed Croyd, which Jube points out is an imperfect disguise because he's dressed in a white suit instead of like a Nomura character on a coke binge. Croyd talks about the illusion powers he got this time, and how he broke into the clinic to steal the MacGuffin. There's a kind of Borscht-Belt humor to it: quote:"I came in looking like a spider with a human head, and told them I had athlete's feet. Eight of them. ... When they paged [Tachyon], he went south and I went north, wearing his face. ... I even pinched a nurse and acted guilty about stuff that wasn't my fault, which I figured would cinch things for sure. ...Then the elevator hit the first floor, and as I was getting off, the real Tachyon got on. Gave me quite a start. ... I turned into Teddy Roosevelt, hoping that might throw him, and devoutly wished to be somewhere else. All of a sudden I was." It's not GRRM if you miss a chance to be creepy about 15-year-olds  quote:He sounded a little sad. "I would have stayed for the lecture, but it caused quite a commotion when Teddy Roosevelt suddenly appeared in class clutching a bowling ball. So I left, and here I am. Don't worry, I changed subways twice and bodies four times." Jube pays Croyd in jewels, and Croyd talks about spending them on one of Fortunato's ladies named Veronica. Can't fault this series for skimping on foreshadowing. She'll get her own eye-gougingly terrible plot way down the road in volume 8. There's a little more wrap-up about how one of the evil police cult guys got away without his cover broken and is in the papers expressing amazement that the force was pretty much entirely interchangeable evil cult guys. Croyd leaves, and the cult guy Red comes out of the back room. After clusterfuck.jpg, he put Kim Toy on a bus to San Francisco, where she had friends (in Chinatown, naturally). Being bright red makes it hard to blend in and the police were looking for all the cult guys, so he was hanging around Jokertown in a ski mask and a poncho and eating out of dumpsters for a while before collapsing on Jube's doorstep. Jube, being a good cult Samaritan, took him in. He felt obliged since it's hinted that his alien race has something to do with other the space MacGuffin Calgiostro got a couple hundred years ago that made him start the cult. quote:He could not abandon the Mason to the fate he deserved. Parents did not abandon children, no matter how depraved and corrupt they might grow with the passage of years. Twisted and confused and ignorant the children might be, but they remained blood of your blood, the tree grown from your seed. The teacher did not abandon the pupil. There was no one else; the responsibility was his. After this meditation on walrusponsibility, he puts the bowling ball into the communicator thingy he was making, which looks a lot like the one the cult roachman was making but bigger because flipper-fingers suck at fine electronics. It lights up, and Red is suitably impressed. Jube theorizes that The Astonomer was going to power the cult one himself with his rapemagic. They talk about the Shining Brother who came from space and gave Cagliostro the device and stuff, and Jube reveals that he must have been a space cyborg from the Network, that giant space trade company Jube works for. Oh, hey, I was unfair to give them crap for how dumb the TIAMAT name is, it's an in-world dumb that comes from the space cyborg name for the Swarm, "Thyat M'hruh, Darkness-for-the-race." As it turns out, it was all a scam to sell world domination. I think. It's not very well explained. I think they were supposed to call for protection from the Swarm. If that's the case, their timing wasn't real great, since the Swarm was already growing Gorbachevs. He mostly talks about how they were supposed to use it to call the Network to come and take over the world for them. quote:"The Master Trader would never have given you world dominion. We don't give anything away from free. But we would have sold it to you. You would have been an elite of high priests, with 'gods' who actually listened and produced miracles on demand." "You would feel the importance of this with Cagliostro's storyline, if it weren't one of around seventeen subplots and hadn't been left to the guy who just wanted to talk about him banging jailbait." But the Swarm's gone, so what use is this now? quote:"If I send the call, it will be heard on the nearest Network outpost in a matter of weeks. A few months later, the Opportunity will come." What they would pay with, also not stated. Red says he thinks he's getting it, which makes him alone there. He goes to the kitchen to get a drink, and comes back with a knife. He waves it at Jube and tells him to make the call. Jube says no and he has a laser gun. It's the one he gave to Doughboy, but he kept hitting things with it and breaking them, so Jube took it back and put all the zappy stuff back in it. quote:It was a deep translucent red-black, its lines smooth and sensual yet somehow disquieting, its barrel pencil-thin. Can't beat that raw sexuality. Jube tells Red to back down and give it up. Red says that skulking around eating out of garbage cans is no life for a married couple, and poorly explained space-Ponzi-Scheme world domination has to be better. Red won't stop talking about being Irish. He presses the issue, and has the expected result of bringing a knife to a laser fight. The book ends with Jube calling Croyd to come take care of another body. There you have it, volume 2 of Wild Cards. After the incredibly uneven but occasionally creative and promising first book, we got whatever this is. The important question to ask is, What Went Wrong? The big problem is that here they tried to do a single overarching storyline. When you've got a lot of people collaborating, all working on their own character, naturally they're all going to be bringing different approaches and writing about different things. While the first wasn't good by any means, it was better, because it told a story that that kind of format works for. It was about the effect on the world of one big central event, the wild card virus. For that, having a lot of different approaches and viewpoints is a strength, because any real global event does have drastically different meanings to everyone affected by it, so it makes the world feel more multifaceted and made up of real people. There's infinite possibilities to work with, and that's fascinating, even if the ones the writers chose to go with turn out to be about mind control rape. Everyone could have their own take and do their own thing without being hampered by trying to move along a metaplot on top of theirs. But when you're trying to do a big plot going from A to B to C, the multiwriter format becomes a liability. This leads to several fractally blossoming sub-problems. Pacing Here's your basic plot structure.  It's not an ironclad law that must be eternally obeyed, but it's what a person will naturally recognize as being how a story is supposed to go. It's one of those things that you can mess around with, but you'd better know what you're doing and have a drat good reason. That's one story. Now, if you're trying to build a story out of other stories:  Well, crap. That's gonna be messy. That's not to say it can't be done. You just have to be very focused on what you're trying to do, and how each story works on its own while fitting in the whole. I can't think of many books that try it. There's A Visit From the Goon Squad, and that handles it by mostly being interconnected characters with an overarching theme. In earlier stories it works all right, since, say, Croyd can just be doing his own thing while incidentally running into some recurring characters and setting the stage for later developments. You've got time to fit things in. Where it gets unmanageable is when they're trying to ramp up to the climax of the main storyline through stories that also need their own exposition and buildup. Every time a story ends, they have to go back to square one for the next, while still trying to maintain the momentum of the main plot. That would be a tall order even if the main plot were good. There's two stories here that serve as climaxes for the two halves of the main plot: By Lost Ways for the cult part, and Half Past Dead for the alien part. While leaving your climax to Yeoman is already in the great cosmic annals of things that will never work out well, it's still a couple entries down from the magnum terrible idea that is trying to resolve your main plot in a character's introductory story. Introductions by nature require a lot of exposition, and yet they tried to put Water Lily into the story for the very first time right as they were trying to resolve the story. No time to gracefully let anything reveal itself there, so we ended up with awkwardly justified infodumping, characterization by means of people shouting "You are young and naive!" at her, and then rapidly, disorientatingly running full tilt into clusterfuck.jpg. Trying to fit all that in doesn't leave any time to ramp down or debrief at all, so you slam facefirst into the interlude about the comet, then you start at 0 again with Yeoman's story, which has to ramp up fast to try to wrap up the other half of the plot. It doesn't help that both authors got tired of writing at the end and decided denouement could get bent. The fact that we need to have two climaxes is part of the next problem: All Of The God drat Subplots Let's try to recount the bare bones of the main plot: a monsterblob from outer space is trying to eat everything on Earth because it was summoned by a cult that includes half the people in New York and is run by a guy who gets magic by raping and dismembering people, and was founded by a guy in the past based on technology given to him by a space cyborg as a business venture that is now being reconstructed by a cockroach man, and now the modern facet of the cartel was shot down with a warp device that everybody is fighting over so they can use it to power their alien communication device or just warp places. (A second for credit where it's due: I do like that they put in the effort to make the MacGuffin something that has uses and functions all throughout the plot, instead of just being an inert thing with Everybody Wants This written on the side.) It would be possible for nine authors to write a book about that and keep it coherent, if they were scrupulous about keeping a tight focus. But in the book they actually wrote, well... that synopsis covers about 10% of it. What everybody did was try to cram this in on the margins of what they actually wanted to write about. GRRM wanted to talk about the girl who wouldn't date him in high school, Lewis Shiner wanted to write dubiously consensual sex, Walter Jon Williams wanted to write about a robot flying in circles a lot and getting a girlfriend, Melinda Snodgrass wanted to write "What if Dallas was Dune and everybody wore pimp hats?" By the time Cagliostro's brought in to wrap things up at the end in the last story, I'd forgotten about him being in the first. It's as if the writers all looked at the concept of streamlining, nodded to each other, and said, "Yeah, let's do the opposite of that." Why have the android just find the MacGuffin when you can have him fly around in circles looking for it, find the lady who has it, get black hole'd away and lose her, then go flying around for a while and find her again? Why have one police cult guy when you can have...poo poo, I couldn't even keep track, but it was at least three, all with the same personality of general rear end in a top hat. The whole station must be like a reverse of the anarchist cell in The Man Who Was Thursday. The one guy who's normal and not cult affiliated must just think no one likes him. The more you think about it, the more it looks like the writers were trying to weld things onto the decrepit ferris wheel that is the main plot to make it less stupid, until it became something unwieldy and stupid that fell down and crushed some fairgoers. Then there's the couple writers who do their own thing and ditch the metaplot because it's lame. GRRM practically says so: quote:After that first unforgettable moment, the war of the worlds had turned into just another chore. It was more extermination than combat, like killing especially large and ugly roaches. ... He found himself trying to think of new, imaginative ways of killing the things to relieve the boredom. ... Over and over again, day after day, endlessly, until they stopped coming. When the narrative straight-out states that your central antagonist is boring, you have the biggest problem: The Bad Guys  The Swarm Honestly, I believe the Swarm Mother could have been a decent driving force if they'd been willing to come to a consistent conclusion about what it is, and if they'd committed. You'd have to actively work to not get mileage out of a high-unstoppable, hideous horde of alien beings devouring all you hold dear, and yet they manage, by shoving it off to the side and having what should be the most emotional and viscerally horrifying parts given to us through the lens of a robot and the World's Least Interesting Man. There's a lot of missed potential here (I recommend this as a title for the next book in the series when they run out of card puns). The back cover promises aces and jokers teaming up to fight this thing. That could have been interesting, and it would have worked to ease the transition from the history and worldbuilding of the first volume to the tabletop campaign here. It's an opportunity to play with how jokers are perceived and how they interact with people. How does it change how you deal with people who are weird and alien if a real alien comes to town? When there's a bunch of furry space blobs eating New Jersey, suddenly Ol' Joe Foot-For-A-Face looks a lot more homo sapien. But we don't hear anything about that. The only joker who figures much in the plot is Jube, and he isn't one. As I've said before, one problem is that no two writers can agree whether the Swarm is an arcane, eldritch, unknowable existence or a mindless yeastblob. Mostly it tends toward the latter, with some of the language and trappings of the former when they feel like getting dramatic. But the problem with a mindless enemy is that it's mindless. There's not much of a face to put onto it, no human hook to grab onto. It's understandable to want to throw in a person to give a human identity and personality to the threat. So they did it in in a way that doesn't do that.  The Astronomer This guy's greatest crime is being boring. The thing that makes villains potentially fascinating is the reasons; it's easy to say why somebody'd do the right thing, but to get them to do the wrong thing, you have to work harder. With The Astronomer, they don't bother. He's just an evil guy. Yep. Maybe he gets more fleshed out in the third volume - all I remember about him in that one is more murderrape - but since he's carrying the bulk of the plot in this one, I think it's fair to judge him on it standing alone. I'd say it stands about as well as he does, being that he's in a wheelchair, but he can walk sometimes when he feels like it. Okay, evil for it's own sake, that's pretty flat, but poo poo, not everybody needs to be Shylock. Bad guys who are evil just because can be fine, if you go over the top and have some fun with it. Crazy cackling supervillains can be great! But that requires flair, personality, and not taking it real seriously. A guy in a green cape who has a bunch of doppelganger robots and is a sorcerer and yells about himself in the third person is awesome! A guy with nothing especially distinguishing about him besides "rapes people" is not. Trying to be ultra-gritty and push the envelope raises a reaction, sure, but that reaction is, "Why would I want to read about this?" He's actually less of a credible human threat than the Swarm. Take the Joker, for contrast: what makes him scary and fascinating is how his monstrousness comes directly from something very human. Anybody can recognize that id-level urge to say gently caress the world and do whatever you want because you think it's funny. You'd never do it, but you understand. The Astronomer doesn't have anything like that. Characterization is barely wrinkly-skin-deep. There's nothing to see as a person, let alone an interesting one. Tying him into the Swarm story not only complicates it needlessly, it makes what could be a frightening alien threat into something subordinate. You can't put All-Devouring Creature From Beyond the Stars on the same level as A Guy. What's supposed to make it more immediate actually waters it down and defangs it. The alien's not alien enough and the human's not human, so neither of them works. Great guy to hang the next book on, right? Don't worry, there's somebody else to liven things up! Brennan's Vietnamese Mafia guy gets his diary and stamp collection stolen.  Up Next: This could get complicated. In a few days, I'm leaving the country to start a new job. I'm determined to continue this, but it's going to be on the back burner. Things will likely be very slow and sporadic, as opposed to the bastion of speed and consistency I've been so far.
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Mar 18, 2013 22:58
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The only reason this isn't the most awesome post in the history of ever is that it doesn't have diagrams of rapist cockroach dudes and computerwives getting disintegrated while pimps, screaming dudes, and levitating evil wheelchair guys wander around in the background. Seriously, great analysis.Thinky Whale posted:
Take them all on an e-reader. I recall book three being a significant improvement over book two, not that that would be difficult. It's definitely better-paced and better-structured. For a while there I had a theory that odd-numbered Wild Card books were at least somewhat good while even numbered ones sucked. This worked okay until volume nine, which was the one where Dr. Tachyon is involuntarily switched into a woman's body so he can be raped and impregnated by his psychotic nephew.
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Mar 19, 2013 07:05
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Thanks! I'm fascinated with why these are so bad. These aren't teenagers writing Harry Potter fanfiction and doing dumb things because they don't know any better: these are professional, established writers. These are craftsmen creating something terrible and not noticing. The cockroach-man wasn't a rapist, though! Cockroach dude was pretty chill. The pheromone-induced-rape-attempt guy was one of the cult cops. Cherry Dare posted:Take them all on an e-reader. That's what I plan to do. I definitely don't want to be hauling anything heavy and full of vagina murder over national lines. Cherry Dare posted:I recall book three being a significant improvement over book two, not that that would be difficult. It's definitely better-paced and better-structured. I'm curious to get to it, because I really don't remember much besides the girl in her underwear who can phase through walls running around a lot. I think the pacing made more sense, since all the stories are intercut to make one big one, so the momentum has a chance to build more naturally. Cherry Dare posted:For a while there I had a theory that odd-numbered Wild Card books were at least somewhat good while even numbered ones sucked. This worked okay until volume nine, which was the one where Dr. Tachyon is involuntarily switched into a woman's body so he can be raped and impregnated by his psychotic nephew. That kind of works, since 4 is terrible, five I don't remember, but 6 is as close to good as they get. Oh, and the mind-swapping rape impregnation kid is his grandson. God drat it, Wild Cards.
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Mar 19, 2013 10:19
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Five is Down and Dirty. It's the longest of all the books, the major stories are intercut, and contains some pretty good stuff including contributions from GRRM, Zelazny, Walter Jon Williams and Pat Cadigan. All the rapey stuff and sex powers are restricted to Cadigan's story, as I recall, and there is no way you can interpret her as being remotely positive about them.
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Mar 19, 2013 10:33
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Thinky Whale posted:
My bad. Though I think excusable under the circumstances (lots of miscellaneous rapists running around in a small space.). Thinky Whale posted:
This, plus Hiram Worchester is a major character. His plotline primarily involves preparations to host a giant party for aces at his restaurant, and it's a lot of fun. I also liked the bikini Kitty Pryde. Negative: the villain is the Astronomer; I think some other really boring characters have POVs, but the action is more entertaining even with them than in the last book. Also, this book introduces the woman whose ace power is that she can kill you with her vagina. Thinky Whale posted:
Somehow, that's even worse.
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Mar 20, 2013 07:58
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I'm pretty sure you're going to find that book five is an even worse clusterfuck of too many antagonists and too many plotlines. Fun fact: books four and five were originally intended to be one book, until GRRM's publisher told him they weren't going to put out a 900 page Wild Cards paperback. Supposedly they had intended to alternate between the book four and book five short stories in a single volume, so it would have had like four or five metaplots and a dozen antagonists? Books six and seven were originally supposed to have been one book too, which is why Yeoman and Popinjay appear out of nowhere in the middle of book six and then wander back out of the plot again.
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Mar 20, 2013 18:21
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Thinky Whale posted:
Man, I hate to disappoint, but the books give as gigantic of a cop-out as you might expect from the series. He has no motivation or memory beyond being the Astronomer, having self-mindwiped all of his memories of his life in order to be a better magical wheelchair murder-rapist. Because having no history is supposed to make him eeeeeeevil or something. You can kinda see what they're trying for with that, but it's executed with such a degree of ham-handed idiocy that I burst out laughing when I realized that was the best they could come up with. I've got all of these things in e-Book form and still use 'em to decompress from various bits of serious literature. I'd agree that Fort Freak is a good return from some of the worse areas - it has some genuinely good parts and really hits on the highlights of the series, which are the ground-level struggles. It's a shame Father Squid isn't handled well. Really, though, I can't think of any character more annoying than Double Helix. The sections could have been compelling or interesting, but it comes off as endless whining and vague, I-must-preserve-the-British-Empire-that-never-was sort of character codes. Book 17 has a special place in my heart for its awfulness, if only because it seems like they were trying to arbitrarily wrap up a whole ton of stuff and kill off Fortunato, which makes a lot of the lazier stuff worth it.
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May 5, 2013 20:16
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Saving this from the Archive, for now... Thinky Whale, are you planning on continuing? Wild Cards is one of my guilty ridiculous pleasures, so if you're overwhelmed right now and don't mind, I'm willing to pick up where you left off. Everyone else: Are you still interested in this wonderful trainwreck of a series?
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Jun 23, 2013 23:52
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I for one have enjoyed this immensely so far and would love to see it continue. I hope this doesn't die!
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Jun 24, 2013 00:27
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Yond Cassius posted:Saving this from the Archive, for now... I'm still here. I must get round to finishing that thing I was doing on the first story in Deuces Down, too; I ran out of effort.
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Jun 24, 2013 00:29
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I'm interested! I've read nearly the entire series.
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Jun 30, 2013 04:48
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Oh, jeez, sorry, I haven't checked this in ages. I've been really busy with moving and having a new job, but I've been getting a start on Volume 3. I was thinking of doing one chapter at a time, but it's turning out really long, so I think I'll break it into smaller chunks. In that case, I'll actually have the first one up soon! Sorry again for the...Christ, month-late reply.
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Jul 13, 2013 13:19
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Thinky Whale posted:Oh, jeez, sorry, I haven't checked this in ages. I've been really busy with moving and having a new job, but I've been getting a start on Volume 3. I was thinking of doing one chapter at a time, but it's turning out really long, so I think I'll break it into smaller chunks. In that case, I'll actually have the first one up soon! Nah, just two weeks! I've been trying to find my box with all the Wild Cards things (I'm pretty sure it's under some other boxes). I should have it out today. Do you want to tag in and out, or just keep flying solo? I'm here to help if you want it.
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Jul 13, 2013 13:39
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Yond Cassius posted:Nah, just two weeks! I've been trying to find my box with all the Wild Cards things (I'm pretty sure it's under some other boxes). I should have it out today. Do you want to tag in and out, or just keep flying solo? I'm here to help if you want it. Let's see... It might get messy to try to switch back and forth in the same book. How would you feel about jumping forward and doing volume 4? It's basically a new starting point and a new story, so I don't think it would be too confusing to do while 3 is ongoing. You could go way ahead and do one of the later ones or the reboot, too.
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Jul 13, 2013 14:49
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Thinky Whale posted:Oh, jeez, sorry, I haven't checked this in ages. I've been really busy with moving and having a new job, but I've been getting a start on Volume 3. I was thinking of doing one chapter at a time, but it's turning out really long, so I think I'll break it into smaller chunks. In that case, I'll actually have the first one up soon! Thinky! We all thought you had taken your own life in despair, but obviously this is not the case - what's wrong?
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Jul 13, 2013 16:36
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Jedit posted:Thinky! We all thought you had taken your own life in despair, but obviously this is not the case - what's wrong? Nah, just went to Japan and got employed, both things that make it harder to find time to talk about cajun werealligators. But for the important things, you make time.
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Jul 14, 2013 02:38
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Wild Cards 3: Jokers Wild Hey there! It's been a while! I've been dealing with a lot of moving and new job and life stuff, so it's been hard to find the time to get around to the world of aliens and sorceror-pimps. Let's jump right back in with volume 3, the culmination of all the setup in the first two. Mostly the parts about the Vietnamese mob boss and the rape wizard. It's not very good.  There's a few different covers. I'll show a couple more as we go along, but for the time being I think this one is the most informative. The format for this one is a bit different from the interconnected short stories we've had before. Here it's laid out like a standard novel, but written colloboratively by 7 authors. Each chapter starts out with a timestamp, then bounces around to what everybody's doing then. Who's writing what isn't marked, but you can usually judge by the viewpoint character. Here's what Wikipedia says, for reference:  Bagabond – Leanne C. Harper Fortunato – Lewis Shiner Jennifer Maloy aka Wraith – John J. Miller (also writes Brennan, who isn't a viewpoint character but appears in other characters' chapters pretty often) Sewer Jack Robichaux – Edward Bryant Roulette – Melinda M. Snodgrass Spector aka Demise – Walton Simons Hiram Worchester – George R. R. MartinWe start with a brief intro: quote:There is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio, Fiestas and Festivals and Founders' Days by the hundreds. The Irish have St. Patrick's Day, the Italians Columbus Day, the nation its Fourth of July. History is full of mummers' parades and masques and orgies and religious pageants and patriotic extravaganzas.  Or, if you're a joker,  It's the anniversary of when the virus dropped, which began as an observance and became, as most things do, an excuse to get drunk and for the first paragraph of the book to mention orgies. It's an interesting idea, since naturally a world-changing event like that is something people would commemorate. The thing that gave Joe superstrength and made Jane a pile of eyeballs could make for some tense and conflicted parade floats. quote:September 15 became Wild Card Day. A time for celebrations and lamentations, for grief and joy, for remembering the dead and cherishing the living. A day for fireworks and street fairs and parades, for masked balls and political rallies and memorial banquets, for drinking and making love and fighting in the alleys. With each passing year, the festivities became larger and more fevered. The story proper starts out at 6 am on the fortieth Wild Card Day, 1986, mostly important because you can imagine everyone involved having magnificent 80s hair. Here's our first viewpoint character, a woman in an alleyway behind a dumpster: WRAITH Wild Cards challenge time! How far can we get before a description is creepy? quote:No matter how many times she'd done this, she thought, it was still exciting. Her pulse speeded up and she breathed faster in anticipation as she put on a hoodlike mask that obscured her finely sculpted features and hid the mass of blond hair tied in a knot at the back of her head. She took off her trench coat, folded it neatly, and set it down next to the dumpster. Under the coat she wore only a brief black string bikini and running shoes. Her body was lean and gracefully muscular, with small breasts, slim hips, and long legs. She bent down, unlaced and removed her sneakers and put them next to the trench coat. Page 1? Yeah, page 1. I like to imagine these things said in Murderous Moppet voices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9dF5eIMZ4 Her power is phasing through stuff, and she uses it to walk through the wall into the building. It will only work on a small amount of other matter, so she can only wear a bikini and no shoes. SEWER JACK Perspective shift! These come fast and frequently. We tend to only stay with one character for a few pages at a time. It's all organized by time of day, instead of anything connecting the section to the previous one, so there's a lot of jumping all over the place. They're not marked by character, either, I'm putting that in to make it clearer. This one helps the disorientation by starting out with a dream sequence. quote:It was the sound of a power saw biting into sodden hardwood. The whine of steel teeth made Jack's own teeth ache as the all-too-familiar boy struggled to hide deeper within the tangle. The boy is Jack and all the rest is more clearly from his point of view, so I think “all-too-familiar” means he's all too familiar with that sound. I'm not sure, though. It's really weirdly phrased and not immediately obvious how many people we're talking about here. quote:“He in dere somewhere!” It was is uncle Jacques. The folk around Atelier Parish called him Snake Jake. Behind his back. Hey, what's wrong with being Jake the Snake?  quote:The boy bit his lip to keep from crying out. He bit deeper, tasting blood, to keep from changing. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes. quote:“Tol' you! Dat little gator-bait right dere. Get 'im.” Other voices joined in. Before Jacques le Serpent can pull him out to yell at him for having basically the same name, Jack is woken up by a ringing phone. It's his sister Elouette calling to say that her 16-year-old daughter Cordelia ran away. Apparently Jack did the same thing. This is not a family very good at child retention. She tells him that she's tried calling the police. quote:The sheriff had shaken his head sadly. “Gal looks like that,” he'd said, “well, we got cause to worry.” He'd done what he could, but it had all taken precious time. It had finally been Cordelia's father who'd come up with something. A girl with the same face (“Purtiest little thing I seen in a month,” the ticket clerk had said) and long, luxuriant, black hair (“Black as a new-moon bayou sky,” said a porter) had boarded a bus in Baton Rouge. They found out the bus was bound for New York, presumably from a security guard mentioning lips the color of a crawdad fresh out of the jambalaya pot, and now Jack needs to go catch it and try to find her. It gets in soon, so he has to hurry. (”Merde.”) Bagabond, the animal-psychic bag lady, is in his living room hanging out with her giant cats and a raccoon, who are pretty rad friends. She offers to come along, Jack says nah, he's got this, and she has an appointment to go see Rosemary the mafia princess social worker anyway. He gives her a kiss on the forehead and she tries to kiss him back but nope, too slow. quote:”drat it,” she said. The cats looked up at her, confused but sympathetic. The raccoon hugged her ankle. Come on, how can you be frustrated about anything while getting a hug from a psychic-linked raccoon? Some people are so demanding. WRAITH Jennifer's heading up the apartment building. quote:What she wanted was on the uppermost of the three floors that were owned by a rich businessman with the unfortunate name of Kien Phuc. That would be Yeoman's Vietnamese Mafia bad guy. I don't think we've been told his last name before, since we've mostly heard about him from Yeoman and mildly amusing is kept away from that guy by an invisible force, like a maglev train floating above the tracks. Wraith knows about his place because of a show called New York Style on PBS, a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous type deal where rich people show their houses off and that she uses to second-hand case the joint. Kien has servants, mirrors over the bed, and “a two-thousand-year-old bronze Buddha gazing benignly from a place of honor next to a fabulous electronic entertainment center complete with a wide-screen television, VCR, and compact disc player,” in case you've forgotten he's Asian or that it's the 80s. He also has jade figurines and one of the quote:2200-year-old terra-cotta grve figures of the emperor Ying Zheng, first emperor of the Qin dynasty and unifier of China …. It was a fantastically valuable piece, but, Jennifer knew, too large for her to remove and probably too unique for her to fence.  “Yeah, I can give you 50 bucks.” Wikipedia says they have the emperor's name wrong, but there's a lot of different ones and a lot of different ways to romanize Chinese, and I don't know a drat thing about it, so I can't rag on them with confidence. Wraith doesn't know about Kien's real career in General Villain Stuff, but she's starting to think this is a weird amount of money to have from owning restaurants and drycleaners. She unghosts, since she's starting to get dizzy. quote:The thick pile of the luxurious carpet feeling quite sensuous on the soles of her bare feet, quote:she glided around the teakwood desk almost as quietly as if she wre insubstantial, and stood before the Hokusai print hanging on the wall behind it. Let's be fair, a show entirely about rich guys taunting people with superpowers into stealing from them would be pretty great. However, the city's smartest and most dangerous crime lord installed sophisticated invincible electronic locks and forgot that some people here are magic, so Wraith sticks her hand right in and goes to town. ROULETTE This is a lady coming home with the Howler, the guy who was yelling the cult headquarters down back in clusterfuck.jpg in the last book. He can do killer screams and has a swollen neck that makes his head look like “a baseball perched on a pedestal.” They do some flirting. quote:”Roulette, I haven't stayed out all night since my high school prom.”  ? quote:He moved in, wrapped brawny arms about her waist. “I'm not quite so 'good' anymore.” He talks about being all blue-collar and about how his dad used to talk about not getting above themselves, and how that's funny because now he's a superhero. Roulette cries a little and says she finds that sad. He says let's have sex, showing the emotional intelligence you'd expect from somebody with a bad case of Gears of War Neck. She goes with him but isn't very happy about it and wishes she could put it off. WRAITH Rooting around in the safe, she feels some coins and figures that they're gold when they're tough to ghost. Dense stuff is a harder for her powers to work on, so she leaves them for now and grabs some books she feels. quote:She drew three small notebooks through the wall, and, unable to see details in the darkness, switched on the small tensor lamp that sat on top of the teakwood desk. Two of the books, she could now see, had plain black covers. The third had a blue cloth cover with a bamboo pattern. Diary of Kien Phuc Day 1 I hope nobody forgets I'm Asian. She hears a noise and moves the lamp so she can see the rest of the desk. There's a thing in a jar. quote:It was little more than a foot high, with green, glabrous, somewhat-warty skin. It floated with its head clear of the water, its web-fingered hands pressed against the glass, its human eyes staring at Jennifer out of a pinched face. They looked at one another for a long moment and then it opened its mouth and cried out in a high-pitched, wailing voice, “Kiennnnnn! Thieffff! Thieffff!” That's pretty boss, if you can hear it over the sound of the thesaurus being flicked through. I can't help but wonder about little burglar alarm frogman. Does he get paid well? Does he eat fish flakes? How do you even get into this line of work? It must be boring as all hell, but there can't be many options for you, so mob boss night watchman isn't such a bad one, all told. But this is one of those stories where jokers are only there to be henchmen. Hey, here's another one. quote:There was motion at the door and someone flicked on the study's overhead light. Jennifer saw a tall, slim, reptilian-looking joker. He hissed at her, his long, forked tongue lolling out an impossible length. He raised a pistol and fired. I believe this is the same lizardguy who bit Brennan last book. I like that “bite somebody and inject them with your mutant death venom” and “shoot them with a gun” are both options. It doesn't work on Wraith, though. The bullet goes right through her while she's peacing out through the floor. NEXT TIME: Black candles, magic mirrors, panties.
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Jul 14, 2013 03:13
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Thinky - your plan for Yond to do Book 4 at the same time as you do 3 has a small flaw in that Book 4 does follow up a couple of things in Book 3: the Peregrine/Fortunato arc and Fortunato leaving New York at the end. Also, please do not dis Brian Bolland or I will be forced to go Renaissance on yo rear end. This is similar to going mediaeval, but with gunpowder. 
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Jul 14, 2013 09:52
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Hey cool, my favorite thread is back. I'd thought your adventures in glorious Nippon had made you completely forget about this thread. Now I have to go and quickly read the updates for the first two books to remember what the hell is going on. All I recall is Brennan's aggressive blandness, rape wizard, and spunk powered psychic man (also a rape wizard?). Oh, and clusterfuck.jpg, I remember that also.
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Jul 14, 2013 18:34
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Jedit posted:Thinky - your plan for Yond to do Book 4 at the same time as you do 3 has a small flaw in that Book 4 does follow up a couple of things in Book 3: the Peregrine/Fortunato arc and Fortunato leaving New York at the end. I think Thinky will get to the main event before I get to the aftermath, but we'll see.
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Jul 14, 2013 22:42
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Jedit posted:Thinky - your plan for Yond to do Book 4 at the same time as you do 3 has a small flaw in that Book 4 does follow up a couple of things in Book 3: the Peregrine/Fortunato arc and Fortunato leaving New York at the end. I'm not too worried about spoilers. A lot of people reading the thread have read the books already. Jedit posted:Also, please do not dis Brian Bolland or I will be forced to go Renaissance on yo rear end. This is similar to going mediaeval, but with gunpowder. It's a nicely drawn lady in a bikini and gimp mask, I won't argue that. Antlerhill posted:Hey cool, my favorite thread is back. I'd thought your adventures in glorious Nippon had made you completely forget about this thread. I could never forget about Wild Cards! It has a way of burning itself into the memory. As we go along I'll be giving quick recaps whenever something that relates to past books comes up, just as a refresher. But the rape wizard and the slightly-more-consensual-sex wizard are the important parts. Yond Cassius posted:I think Thinky will get to the main event before I get to the aftermath, but we'll see. It's up to whichever you feel like doing. The books are interconnected enough that there's not really a way to avoid overlap 100%, but I think it's workable.
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Jul 15, 2013 01:23
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BAGABOND One thing about checking in with what every character is doing at a particular time of day is pacing gets janky fast. Just keeping everything chronological is enough of a logistical nightmare that there's no feasible way to keep the action at a consistent pace. Which is to say, we go straight from Wraith's daring escape from gun-wielding lizardman to Bagabond sitting around in a bathrobe. She's thinking about how she's gotten closer to Jack and Rosemary and is annoyed at getting more human. She psychically checks in with all the animals around and mentions how she doesn't let all their dying bug her, since it'd drive her nuts if she did. She promises the zoo animals to help them get out someday. Bagabond Says to Hell With the Plot and Leads a Zoo Animal Stampede would actually be pretty awesome. The writer's flat bluntness makes things hilarious in places, though, like when expressing her disasstisfaction and loneliness in the complicated, delicate arena of human relationships: quote:She wondered why Jack refused to sleep with her. He keeps turning her down and she is bummed. She also wants babies, I guess? quote:Her frustration and lack of understanding were beginning to turn to anger. It had begun only the last year. Each time she played with the kittens, she felt a lack in her own life. Don't worry, it's not gross that she's into Jack; she's one of those hot, young, petite bag ladies. quote:Without the laters of dirt and ancient clothing that protected her in the world outside, she knew she was not unattractive. Today she has to go see Rosemary. The section ends with her musing over which coat to wear. FORTUNATO Hello, old friend. Words 3-5: thirteen black candles Word 59: panties Word 68: breasts Or, in context, up until the moment I remember I hate him: quote:There were thirteen black candles in the room. When they burned, the wax turned the color of fresh blood and ran down the sides. Now the room was turning gray and their narrow circles of light were starting to fade. Stupid hot women go around expressing concern for you and inviting you to bed, and then they get all mad when you say they look fat. quote:“Yes, o sensei.” The sarcasm was muted, childish. A few seconds later he heard the bathroom door lock. If she wasn't Miranda's daughter, he thought, he would have put her back on the street weeks ago. gently caress you, Fortunato. Whatever, he has magic to do. quote:He'd covered the five-pointed star on his floor with tatami, and on them he'd laid the Mirror of Hathor. .. It was made of brass, the front reflective for clairvoyance, the back abraded to rebound an enemy's attacks. This is one of those special mirrors with a reflective side. He mentions getting it from “an aging hippie in the East Village,” a nice shoutout to Captain Trips. He's been trying to find The Astronomer but has had no luck. quote:The Bornless Ritual, the Acrostics of Abramelin, the Spheres of the Qabalah, all of Western Magick had let him down. The middle one looks like something that could be used for scrying out a guy, but the first is something you're supposed to do before messing around with demons and the last is a model of reality to meditate on, so it's not entirely surprising they didn't help him get anybody's address. All the mysticky-sounding things off the top of Lewis Shiner's head were to no avail, so now he's trying Egyptian Magick like the Astronomer uses, except with cats instead of raping people. quote:The trick to Egyptian Magick – the real thing, not the Astronomer's warped and bloody version – was to go at it from their reverence for animals. Fortunato had spent his entire life in Manhattan, Harlem at first, then downtown once he could afford it. To him animals were poodles that left their poo poo on the sidewalk or listless, foul-smelling caricatures that slept their lives away at the zoo. Vote 2 for changing the plot to Zoo Rescue!  quote:It was an attitude he could no longer afford. He'd let Veronica bring her cat to the apartment, a vain, overweight gray tabby named Liz, in honor of the movie star. Note that she's lending him her cat for his black magic, and he still manages to phrase it as though he's doing her a favor. It's the little ways of being a douchebag that mean the most. quote:The cat's primitive value system was a doorway into the Egyptian universe. Also suggesting there's a more primitive value system than Fortunato's.  quote:He picked up the mirror. He just about had the mind-set. He watched his reflection: lean face, brown skin a little blotchy from lack of sleep, forehead swollen with rasa, the Tantric power of retained sperm. I just want to draw your attention to the fact that the Tantric power of retained sperm are words that someone wrote, looked over while revising, and passed on to an editor, who saw them and said, “Yep, let's publish this." He's just getting into a groove when his concentration gets broken: quote:He heard a sound from the bathroom, a muffled sigh, and his concentration broke. And then, instead of the Astronomer, he was looking into the mirror and seeing Veronica. She sat on the toilet, her panties around her ankles. In her left hand was a pocket mirror, in her right a short piece of red-striped soda straw. … At first I thought this meant that the door was open behind him and he'd seen what the mirror was atually non-magically reflecting, but on second reading, he did in fact accidentally use a magic mirror to view a hooker doing blow. quote:”Pack your poo poo and get out,” Fortunato said. Well, you did once send a lady into a hostile death cult armed with your sperm. quote:”Do you think I don't know smack when I see it?” Do you do heroin with a mirror and a straw? All I know about it is that some guy in TCC slept on his arm until it fell off! quote:”How long you been on this poo poo?” Aside from the black magic and corpsefucking, Fortunato has a strict moral code. quote:She shrugged, dropped the mirror and straw into her open purse. She stood up, nearly tripped, then saw her feet tangled in her panties. Whore Slapstick was one of Laurel and Hardy's less celebrated shorts. quote:She balanced herself on the towel rack while she pulled them up and snapped the purse closed. “Couple months,” she said. “But I'm not on anything. I jus' do it sometimes. 'Scuse me.” “I could try to make you go to rehab but I'll say ABRAHADABRA HEAR THOU ME FOR I AM THE ANGEL OF APOPHRASZ OSORRONOPHRIS” quote:“Care? I'm a loving hooker, why should I care?” Every once in a while something like a human intelligence kicks in and it occurs to the writer that hey, from a certain point of view what Fortunato does looks pretty terrible. He never quite commits to understanding that this is because it is terrible, but it's a tantalizing moment when a ray of light breaks through the clouds of Axe body spray. Now he'll have to stop hiding behind the justification that they're special hookers and so it's okay. This is where he'll have to face that what he's doing is using these people without any regard for how they feel about it. He's going to have to actually examine himself, make a decision, and face some real growth and character development. I'm actually interested to see how he deals with this. quote:Before Fortunato could said anything somebody started hammering at the front door. Bullet dodged! He can tell it's something important because “lines of tension and urgency radiated from the hallway,” as one of his powers is apparently making the whole world a mood ring, but wait, he can ignore that for a second and deal with the difficult situation by- quote:”I don't put up with junkies,” he said. Ignoring the difficult part. Veronica tells him that a bunch of the girls are on heroin or coke and he's a clueless moron. Point for Veronica. quote:There was a scraping sound in the front room and the door came open. A man named Brennan stood in the doorway, a strip of plastic in one hand. The strip of plastic is never explained, so I think it's saying that where Fortunato uses magic to open locks, Brennan jimmies them with credit cards. But you'd think anybody know knows Fortunato would know better than to go in when the door's locked. quote:“Fortunato,” he said. “Sorry, but I--” In case that is happening. Brennan is actually great here, because you have to keep in mind that all of this is being done in front of the avatar of quote:“Hi,” she said. “Wanna gently caress me? All it takes is money.” She teased her nipples with her thumbs and licked her lips. “How much you got? Two dollars? Buck and a half?” Tears ran out of her eyes and a line of mucus leaked out of one nostril. This is how women act, right? It's interestingly telling how these details have a way of slipping in there, like when she was tripping on her underpants before. The writer's almost trying to write her like a person having a crisis, but can't quite bring himself to do it without a healthy layer of insulating contempt. Look, somebody's falling into despair over how empty her life is and how she's been treated as having no non-sexual value as a human being until she believes it herself! Haha, she has a runny nose. quote:“Shut up,” Fortunato said. “Shut the gently caress up.” Our hero. quote:“Why don't you slap me around?” she said. “That's what a pimp's supposed to do, isn't it?” Somewhere, an 80s laugh track kicks in. quote:“I don't know if it can wait,” Brennan said. “It's the Astronomer.” Dramatic chord! NEXT TIME: “Jack was instantly suspicious of any helpful stranger wearing a purple pinstripe suit.”
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Jul 20, 2013 09:18
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Cats have a value system?
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Jul 22, 2013 06:33
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Cherry Dare posted:Cats have a value system? By Fortunato's standards! I like to imagine the cat during the whole scene just ignoring all this bullshit and taking a nap.
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Jul 22, 2013 07:00
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JACK He's at the bus terminal looking for his niece, the one with eyes that shine like the lid of Uncle Francoise's gumbo pot. quote:What [Jack] wanted to do more than anything else was to get all his clothes laundered, read a few chapters of the new Stephen King novel, The Cannibals, and maybe wander up to Central Park to have some cheap vended hot dogs with Bagabond and the cats. I'm not gonna lie, that's fantastic weekend plans. It's a little clunkily dropped, but it's cool when they play around with the alternate universe setting with the little things. The Cannibals is an unfinished Stephen King novel that he eventually reworked into Under The Dome.  It's a special day, so the streets are crowded, and it's nice to see that people in the world will take an alien body horror virus as an opportunity to sell stupid hats. quote:Jack stepped off the curb to avoid having to confront a swaggering trio of teenaged boys – normals by the look of them – who wore outrageous styrogoam headgear. The hats featured tentacles, drooping lips, segmented legs, horns, melting eyes, and other, more unappetizing appendages that jiggled and bobbed with the wearer's movements. Jack sees the guy selling the hats and contemplates ripping his throat out, but he'd be late for the bus. He works through the crowd for a few pages, repeatedly mentioning that he's in a hurry and this is a waste of time. The most interesting thing that happens is somebody touches his butt. quote:Somebody in the crush patted him on the rear. “Watch it, jerk,” he said without rancor, not looking. Finally he spots Cordelia. The narrative mentions she's good-looking again, but manages not to slaver. Doing good! quote:Elouette had sent pictures the Christmas previous, but the photographs didn't do the young woman justice. Looking at Cordelia, Jack thought, was like looking at his sister when she'd been three decades younger. His niece was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was a faded crimson with screaming yellow letters spelling out FERRIC JAGGER. Jack recognized the name even though he wasn't terribly interested in heavy metal groups. He could also make out some sort of pattern made up of lightning bolts, a sword, and what looked like a swastika. The writer also threw in a band named after the dude from The Iron Dream. Alternate universe books were the theme of the day. This is neat! However, the clichés are out in full forces. quote:A tall, slender, expensively dressed Hispanic man was trying to help her with the suitcase. Jack was instantly suspicious of any helpful stranger wearing a purple pinstripe suit, slouch hat, and a fur-trimmed coat. It looked like baby harpseal pelts. Jack calls for Cordelia, but she doesn't hear him and is, sadly, dumb as a sack of Bayou hammers. She follows the  guy. Then we get a bunch of Jack trying to get through the crowd to them, none of which is very interesting, but at least it gets us a giant joker using the phrase “I can dig it.” He loses her completely and resolves to keep looking. This promises to zzzzzzzz SPECTOR Spector wakes up. Being technically dead still hurts. quote:The pain was always there, like the smell of stale smoke in a seedy bar. The ringing of the phone breaks into the sound of the writer trying to be noir. quote:”Mr Spector?” The voice had the refined edge of a Bostonian. That is the first time I have ever heard “refined” to describe a Boston accent, but okay. quote:”Yeah. Who are you?” It's one of those phone calls. Reading off the Noir Phone Guy script, the voice says a client of his wants to hire Spector for his “certain unique abilities.” He says he's from the Shadow Fist Society, one of the many mafias that uses the city as a battleground to fight tooth and claw for the title of dumbest name. They want a demonstration of him killing somebody. Spector says okay, sure, whatever, that's pretty much the only thing he does. He asks who they want him to kill. Boston Phone Voice hasn't thought things through that far, so he says, you know, whoever. How about Gruber, the pawn shop guy who told us about you? He's kind of a dick. Spector's happy about the idea because Gruber rips people off a lot, so killing him's fine. I am now worried for that Pawn Stars guy.  Spector asks about money, Phone Guy says they'll talk about it later, he's busy, and hangs up. This bodes well for a business contact. This is how they get you into timeshares, Spector! He goes to look at himself in the mirror, that old friend of writers looking for ways to fit in a description. quote:He walked naked to the bathroom and stared in the mirror. His stringy brown hair needed washing and his mustache was overgrowing his thin upper lip. Other than that he looked the same as the day he'd died. Segueing into an origin story recap! A short one: he died, Tachyon figured out something that brought him back, and it was a bad idea all around. He wonders if that means he's immortal now. quote:At this point, he didn't really care.  “My character's a nihilist!” “What's his motivation?” “Uhh...” quote:He stuck out his tongue. His reflection didn't. It smiled at him. You know what would be interesting? If instead of this being a part of the Psychic+Whatever Suite, there was an ace whose only power was that they could control what people see in a mirror. You could do the obvious one of making people think they're crazy by having weird poo poo show up, or more subtly by making things just slightly off and messing with their memory. You could make them think they're talking to somebody they know who's right behind them. It could be benign or malicious, and either useless or extremely powerful, depending on how clever you are, and how well you know your target. But that's off the topic from this, which is a momentary way for the Astronomer to be spooky. quote:”Now, now, Demise. I only want to have a little chat.” ... “Hi. I got dressed this morning by checking off items on my Big List of Evil Stuff, but everything with skulls on it was in the wash.” quote:“What do you want?” Spector was afraid. The Astronomer was one of the few people his power didn't work on. This doesn't add up with the thing immdiately before where he said he doesn't care if he lives or dies. In some nice symmetry, it also doesn't add up with the thing immediately after. quote:”Do you know what today is?” He is now going to psychically call Spector over and over to ask this while he's trying to disarm bombs and not get stabbed by a vampire. It'll turn out that it's the anniversary of the day they first saw the giant monkey climbing up the Empire State Building fight with the robot. quote:”Wild Card Day. Everybody and his dog knows that.” Spector picked a pair of brown corduroy pants off the floor. I imagine him really wanting a dramatic crash of thunder and getting a sad tuba noise. quote:”Judgment Day?” He pulled his pants on. “What are you talking about?” You can either talk about people intervening with your true destiny or you can call them fuckers. Doing both makes you sound less threatening than indecisive. quote:”Turtle. Tachyon. Fortunato. You're going after those guys?” Spector clapped his hands softly. “Good for you.”  quote:”By the end of the day they'll all be dead. And you, my dear Demise, are going to help me.” Remember, this is a guy he's scared of that he is talking smack to and honest to god  ing at. quote:”No? Then I'm afraid I'll have to make a corpse of you. Along with all the rest.” The Astronomer thinks that one of his powers is the ability to do badass one-liners. Nobody has the heart to tell him it isn't. quote:The Astronomer shifter into a jackal's head. It opened its mouth; dark blood flowed steaming onto the carpeted floor. It howled. The building shook with sound. Spector covered his ears and fell to the floor. The section ends on this momnt of tension as you wonder whether he'll just kill him now and finish it for good or vanish while being spooky and leave Spector to a book's worth of dicking around. YOU PAID FOR THE WHOLE SEAT, BUT YOU'LL ONLY NEED THE EDGE. NEXT TIME: He'd never mastered her, and maybe for that reason she could still give him more pleasure in bed than any of the others. (It'll be short, because right after that is something that deserves an update all to itself.)
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Jul 28, 2013 09:15
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quote:She's thinking about how she's gotten closer to Jack and Rosemary and is annoyed at getting more human. She psychically checks in with all the animals around and mentions how she doesn't let all their dying bug her, since it'd drive her nuts if she did. She promises the zoo animals to help them get out someday. Bagabond Says to Hell With the Plot and Leads a Zoo Animal Stampede would actually be pretty awesome. Is this a reference to the Bob Dylan song 'Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts'?
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Jul 28, 2013 09:46
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To defend the Astronomer and Fortunato's various tastes in clothes and home decor: it was established in the first Fortunato story that he could in theory use his powers without the tantric sex rituals, but he requires them as a psychosomatic crutch. The Astronomer likewise uses death the same way. So the closer they stick to their respective roles of sorcerer and priest, the more powerful they become.
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Jul 28, 2013 11:59
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Jedit posted:To defend the Astronomer and Fortunato's various tastes in clothes and home decor: it was established in the first Fortunato story that he could in theory use his powers without the tantric sex rituals, but he requires them as a psychosomatic crutch. The Astronomer likewise uses death the same way. So the closer they stick to their respective roles of sorcerer and priest, the more powerful they become.
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Jul 28, 2013 12:04
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Runcible Cat posted:Those are choices made by the writers, why are you still trying to defend this crap? Because it's not a one-upmanship contest to see who can get the worst crap into print. However  the base premise of Fortunato's sex magic may be, it's kept logically consistent. When exactly the same thing happens in the Jumper storyline I don't defend it because there, it's not necessary and it is just being done for warped reasons.
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Jul 28, 2013 12:27
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Count Chocula posted:Is this a reference to the Bob Dylan song 'Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts'? Not intentionally on my part, since I don't know the song, but it could be on the writers'. Jedit posted:it was established in the first Fortunato story that he could in theory use his powers without the tantric sex rituals, but he requires them as a psychosomatic crutch. Was it? I don't remember that, but I could've missed it. There's the notion that a lot of ace powers are psychic and just use whatever form the user goes for, like the ones who use supermachines with nothing inside, but as far as I know it's never suggested that Fortunato could use his powers without banging. Jedit posted:Because it's not a one-upmanship contest to see who can get the worst crap into print. Are you sure? Are you, in your heart of hearts, sure? Thinky Whale fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 15:19
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Thinky Whale posted:Was it? I don't remember that, but I could've missed it. There's the notion that a lot of ace powers are psychic and just use whatever form the user goes for, like the ones who use supermachines with nothing inside, but as far as I know it's never suggested that Fortunato could use his powers without banging. There's a whole heap of related material in the first book, including machines that work just from a diagram of the circuit because it's really the maker doing it, not the machine - but the maker can't do it without the machine. Fortunato himself is told that he has all these powers but that it seems he needs the tantric stuff to use them. When nobody else gets his powers from tantric sex, it's pretty obvious that the sex is just another kind of crutch. When Fortunato visits Dogen, the Japanese monk with the ability to block ace powers, he says that he has no power (because he never recharged after the end of book 3) but Dogen says that he's full of power. It's made explicit in Death Draws Five, when Fortunato finally achieves self-realisation and finds that he can use the powers without the ritual. Jedit fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 17:26
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Jedit posted:Because it's not a one-upmanship contest to see who can get the worst crap into print. However You're like some horrible ur-Troper; "Yes I know this anime is about a cock-hungry 7-year-old but you see she's actually a succubus who needs human sperm to survive! It's not like it's gratuitous! That shows it's not being done for warped reasons!" Logical consistency has gently caress all to do with why people are finding these aspects of Wild Cards grotesque and it's genuinely bizarre that you seem to think it does.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:19
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Jedit posted:When Fortunato visits Dogen, the Japanese monk with the ability to block ace powers, he says that he has no power (because he never recharged after the end of book 3) but Dogen says that he's full of power. It's made explicit in Death Draws Five, when Fortunato finally achieves self-realisation and finds that he can use the powers without the ritual. Oh yeah, gotcha. I'd forgotten about that part with the monk, and I never got as far as Death Draws Five. Let's not fight, guys. It's never great to hear something you like called crap, and as much as I disagree with him about basically everything, Jedit's been decent about it and hasn't gone in for any personal insults. This is a thread for good old laid-back making fun of deathwizards in wheelchairs with jackal heads.
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Jul 29, 2013 08:23
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You da boss!
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Jul 29, 2013 13:00
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FORTUNATO Fortunato calls Caroline, his favorite hookerm to come take care of Veronica the drug hooker. Brennan is engaged in his usual activity of still being there. quote:Brennan said, “Is she going to be all right?” Brennan may not be able to carry a narrative for crap, but he has some genuinely great moments when he is there to at Fortunato. Fortunato trusts Brennan because he doesn't have any powers and because they've gone through the bonding process of digging through a yeast alien's guts together, an experience he describes as “some serious poo poo.” Fortunato remembers that, human resources problems or not, there's a plot to get to. He asks Brennan about the Astronomer. Brennan says Jube the newswalrus saw him in Jokertown that morning. Fortunato thinks this is dubious information, and would rather take the more reliable path of asking the magic voodoo mirror, but it'd take all day to clean off the hooker cooties and try again, so he agrees to go check things out. Wait, were we making reasonable progress towards getting things done? quote:By the time Fortunato had his street clothes on, Caroline had arrived. Even with her hair in short blond tangles, wearing an old sweatshirt and jeans, she made Fortunato want her.  quote:She didn't look any older than she had seven years ago, when he's first taken her on. She had a child's face [ Hold on. Back up. quote:Fortunato loved all his women Five Minutes Ago quote:“Is she going to be all right?” One Section Ago quote:If she wasn't Miranda's daughter, he thought, he would have put her back on the street weeks ago. quote:”Pack your poo poo and get out,” Fortunato said. quote:“Shut up,” Fortunato said. “Shut the gently caress up.” In every section with Veronica, the narrative is full of a very personal, barely restrained contempt that it doesn't actually seem aware of. That bugs me already because creating characters as pathetic people solely so you can go, “Hah, look how pathetic!” at them is classic bad writing. Wait, I think I get it. quote:Fortunato loved all Point is, he likes banging Caroline a lot. quote:She'd learned everything he could teach her – etiquette, foreign languages, cooking, massage – but her spirit had never cracked. I'm entertained by the suggestion that cooking and language lessons usually break people's wills. quote:He'd never mastered her, and maybe for that reason she could still give him more pleasure in bed than any of the others. quote:He kissed her quickly when he let her in. He wished he could take her back into the bedroom and let her give him a shot of Tantric power as the kids are calling it these days - quote:But there wasn't time. Aren't you supposed to be the one keeping track of this? Pay attention to your pimp schedule! She does because Wild Card Day is a big night for the hooker business. Fortunato says let Veronica go out if she “seems all right,” but make her not do drugs. He has evil wizards to fight, he'll be back later. They remember Yeoman is still there and make out some more anyway. Then Fortunato and Yeoman head out. HIRAM Hiram is looking at fish sold by a joker named Gills. quote:The joker had mottled greenish skin, and gill slits in his cheeks that pulled open when he smiled, showing the moist red flesh within. The gills didn't work, of course; if they had, the elderly fishmonger would have been an ace instead of a joker. I like him because that means there's no actual reason for him to sell fish, he just shrugged and went with it. Like people who the last name Bloom who become gardeners, or my favorite historical neurologist, this guy. It also brings up an interesting point about how subjective the line between jokers and aces is. Functionality would make sense as a way to divide it, but Yeoman's lizardguy has a perfectly useful venom bite but is still considered a joker. Ugly's not a dependable measure either, since the Howler is an ace despite looking like a fire hydrant with a softball on top. It's either a subtle case for how arbitrary the distinction is or evidence for the writers not comparing notes very much. This part's by GRRM, so it's competent, though pretty clearly written with an eye wandering off and one hand in the crab dip. There's a few lazy things like quote:the smell of fish hung in the air like a perfume but nothing real exciting. Hiram's there to get some food for the big ace party at his restaurant tonight. Then, a couple gang dude stereotypes walk in, including a guy with one eye and a monocle. quote:The cyclops took a length of chain out of the pocket of his jacket and began to wind it around his fist.  “Nice lobsters you have there. It'd be a shame if somebody considered them.”They try to get money from Gills and start to wreck up the place, and there's a fight where Hiram uses his gravity powers to beat them up. One is named Cheech and tries to do a flying karate kick, but Hiram makes him really light so he faceplants into a wall. He breaks the one-eyed guy's monocle, too. Now he's an angry deformed gang member but less classy. Punk Kids are lying groaning under very heavy ice and fish, and Hiram tells Gills to call the police to come get them. Gills is scared and says he doesn't want the police involved in a way that also says The gang subplot begins now. NEXT TIME: All I can say is it's a doozy. Oh, and that the subject of the first sentence is His hoarse grunts and the beat of his groin against hers.
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Aug 5, 2013 09:33
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] and a compact, energetic body whose every muscle seemed to be under her voluntary control. Fortunato loved all his women, but Caroline was special.
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Ed: ^^ Dear God in Heaven. ^^ I just noticed that Tor's got a couple of new Wild Cards shorts on their website: The Elephant in the Room by Paul Cornell The Button Man and the Murder Tree by Cherie Priest
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Aug 6, 2013 11:16
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Runcible Cat posted:Ed: ^^ Dear God in Heaven. ^^ The Elephant in the Room expands on a story in Fort Freak. It also features no rape or weird sex, and has Croyd in it. Haven't read the other one yet. Thinky, you're putting the cart before the horse on Gills. He didn't become a fishmonger because he looks like a fish, he looks like a fish because he's a fishmonger and he identified with his job. It's the same as with Shiner in Book 2, the shoeshine man whose skin looks like it's been polished. Jedit fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Aug 6, 2013 |
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Aug 6, 2013 11:43
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Runcible Cat posted:Ed: ^^ Dear God in Heaven. ^^ Oh, it gets better, and by better I mean worse. Runcible Cat posted:I just noticed that Tor's got a couple of new Wild Cards shorts on their website: Awesome, thanks! The art for the first one is great. Jedit posted:Thinky, you're putting the cart before the horse on Gills. He didn't become a fishmonger because he looks like a fish, he looks like a fish because he's a fishmonger and he identified with his job. It's the same as with Shiner in Book 2, the shoeshine man whose skin looks like it's been polished. Darn, I liked the idea of a guy waking up with fishparts, looking out toward the docks, and going, "Eh, might as well."
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Aug 6, 2013 13:56
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 22:11 |
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ROULETTE Just about everything here is  quote:His hoarse grunts and the beat of his groin against hers set a counterpoint to the ticking of the bright yellow dimestore “Baby Ben” alarm clock on the bedside table. Roulette pulled her topaz eyes from Stan's brown ones, watched the second hand sweeping smoothly across the face of the clock. Time. The ticking of a clock, the wash of blood through her veins driven by the inexorable beating of her heart. Fragments of time. Fragments marking the passage of a life. Perfume commercials get weirder and weirder. quote:Ultimately it came down to this. It respected neither wealth, nor power, not saintliness. Sooner or later it came, and silenced that steady pulse. And she had her orders. The prominence of the word “came” here is not a coincidence. In Roulette's sections, the writer tries very, very hard to be lyrical. It...doesn't really work with the subject matter. I'm just going to let this speak for itself. There's not much I can add besides  . quote:She drew breath - a gathering of will and power - but there was no release. It required hate, and all she felt was uncertainty. She lay back, and summoned an image of horror. The agony of labor, knowing it would soon end, and she would hold her child, and all pain would be forgotten. The doctor’s eyes widening in terror. Struggling up to gaze at the thing between her legs. So there's that. Hey, you know that thing back in the Turtle's story about how sometimes people carrying the virus have horrible dead monster babies? I think we should do some more with that, maybe have somebody it happened to. That's actually a pretty good idea! What were you thinking? We could use it to show how the Wild Card virus is a continuing crisis that can wreck havoc on people's lives. Human tragedy and pathos, okay, not bad. But it's missing something batshit insane. And then the experience gives the mother trauma-induced cooch venom. There we go. I will never stop being flabbergasted that multiple people thought these things were a good idea. Multiple meaning any. Now she's mad at the Astronomer because he'd implied it was the Turtle who smashed the place in clusterfuck.jpg, not this guy, and he claimed she'd be safe while doing this, though she's never vaginamurdered an ace before. She feels betrayed and also confused, because the Astronomer needs her to be a serial vaginamurderer and get Tachyon next, so setting her up to get killed just to be a jerk would be pointlessly stupid (as turns out to be the case). Sirens pull her out of her thoughts, and if you think that's a clumsy segue wait ten seconds, then she realizes that Howler dying was very loud and very obvious. She needs to haul rear end or she's going to be caught in a very special terrible CSI episode. She runs down the fire escape to an alley. quote:[Glass] crunched underfoot as she reached the ground, and one splinter drove deep into her heel. 5...4..3... quote:I haven't had one since that month Josiah and I spent in Peru. 2...1... quote:The thought of her ex-husband set memory in motion. quote:Jerking forward like a train gaining momentum. Images jostling and shattering like the frames of a nightmare film running at double speed...until no coherent pictures remained, just an undifferentiated blur of pain and grief and gut-burning fury culminating in a spewing sense of relief when she had released the tide, and Howler had died. Spewing. Her power is she thinks about her monster baby miscarriage and how much she hates her ex-husband, and then poison comes out of her vagina. I'm not even trying to be funny or exaggerate. That's the facts. She goes past all the glass the Howler's scream broke, described as an “insurance company's nightmare and glazier's delight,” and tries to not get noticed by the crowd of staring people. A police car comes by and they look at her real close. quote:It was a predominantly white neighborhood, and though she was dressed with understated elegance her dress was clearly for evening. That is the attempt to make it better that is so flimsy and perfunctory that thinking it'll fool anybody makes it a whole lot worse. Look, you can be Dr. Vaginamurder PhD, that's still not what you're here for. Putting a top hat on a meticulously sculpted statue of somebody's rear end doesn't make it classy, and it's not the reason you carved it. The cops move on, and so does Roulette. quote:The fear was back. Fueled not by the presence of the tangible pursuers who gathered behind her, but by the baying of the soul hounds who loped easily at her flanks. She makes the reasonable conclusion that the only explanation for this kind of narration is that she's losing her goddamn mind, but quote:she had to [kill again]. And to have Tachyon dead would make even madness bearable. No matter how much angst is in the narrative, the people I feel for are still going to be the cops trying to figure out that crime scene. NEXT TIME: Wraith is a sexy librarian, Spector gets a drink, and Roulette keeps on existing.
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Aug 16, 2013 13:24
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