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I realized something cool that Wildbow could do given how the battle with the abstract demon went. Blake was somewhat worried earlier in his dealings with Conquest that the shackles on Rose might open her up to the C-Man's influence, and that she might not be a secure person to give information on his plan. She eventually convinced Blake otherwise because he needed her help, and now we've seen Conquest wringing their plans out of her. Or so we were told. Given Blake's concerns, wouldn't it be the best opportunity to throw Conquest off if they had came up with a better plan (perhaps one tied to some object, like sheets of paper where they wrote it down,) put it in motion in a couple of different ways, and then fed some "major," but unnecessary portion of the plan (say the notebook that they took the paper from to draft the whole thing out) and fed it to the abstract demon on purpose? If so, neither Rose nor Blake could tell conquest about it, and thereby spoil the plan, if they couldn't remember planning it or setting it in motion. The abstract demon doesn't rewrite history, just removes memories of events (or removes "connections"? We're not totally sure how Ur does it yet.) So if they fed Ur some "key" piece of their planning of said alternate plot, but not the items related to the other portions they set in motion, wouldn't that prevent them from remembering the plot, but allow the other portions to carry forward? I think it would be a pretty elegant set-up... but I'm not sure if he's put enough forshadowing in for it.
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Apr 29, 2014 18:42
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So the plot of the movie Push
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Apr 29, 2014 20:01
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Victorkm posted:So the plot of the movie Push Never seen it, but I guess now I have to...?
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Apr 29, 2014 20:20
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Well that was a chapter. Seems like we're going to have the big confrontation on Saturday, maybe Tuesday?
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May 1, 2014 08:05
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That was refreshing. It was neat getting some insight into the minor characters we haven't spent much time around. Gotta say, though, that Blake probably should have brought up the whole "no lying" thing before awakening his circle of friends to magic. It would have irritated me finding out about that after the fact, when there's no going back.
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May 1, 2014 13:59
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Now taking odds on which/how many of them die 
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May 1, 2014 14:11
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They're going to live, drat it!  No one's dying and everything will be rainbows and puppies from the next update onwards, you'll see.
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May 1, 2014 14:33
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Seeing how Blake's friends specialize once they have a chance to should be interesting (assuming they don't all die in the next fight, which would be pretty dumb). Blake expects Tyler to be a jack-of-all-trades who does a little of everything. That might be a bit of misdirection, though; it seems a bit too similar to Blake (especially since Blake credits his talent with glamour to being able to bullshit like an artist). Could differentiate them as Blake being better at pulling something on the spot and Tyler being more inclined to preparations, but that's basically Rose's role. With his interpretations of the objects in this chapter, I could see him having a focus on chronomancy, maybe. Alexis is interesting. She sees a knife as creative, and associated the dreamcatcher with bonds (which could be read as connections). Her personal item represented a past of loving up, but wanting to make, help, or fix things. She might be headed for an enchantress kind of role, or some kind of healer. Tiffany is practical. Her words on the rose and knife lay that in the open, and her comment on the skull is an open appreciation of dualities - life and death, beauty and terror. In light of some of the stuff she said on the date back in 4.6 (“I’ve never been in a fight, not… not that sort of fight. But it makes me angry. Makes me want to hit them, beat them senseless for being so stupid that they’ll beat each other senseless."), I think she might gravitate towards being a goblin queen, or maybe even diabolism. Beating nasty things up, binding them, and making them beat up stronger, nastier things. Honestly, I don't know that Blake should have included Tiffany; he doesn't know her that well, and I'm not sure that she's getting into this for the right reasons. Blake is in it because he was forced, and most of his friends are in to help him, but Tiffany wants to use it to redefine herself. I don't think that's healthy in magic, between the recent talk of possession and the older rule that personal power is founded in connections to yourself and your normal life.
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May 1, 2014 14:49
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Who bets that at some point in Pact, Blake realizes that there needs to be an informed populace to enact any real social change, so he goes gently caress THE MASQUERADE and tries to awaken/inform the whole world? That seems like a very Wildbow-ish plot.
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May 1, 2014 15:04
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Nah, you gotta be a bit more subtle than that. Maybe something like a rapid growth-oriented secret soci- ahahahaha Blake being subtle yeah right.
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May 1, 2014 15:11
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I just finished Worm a couple days ago. I really enjoyed it. I mean, it kept me reading voraciously for over a million and a half words. That's pretty impressive. That said, it had a lot of flaws too. I'll start with the bad things so I end positive. The pacing had problems. It's essentially a first draft and it shows. Stakes are kept too high for too long sometimes. There's no reflection time. The time skip was bad. It was funny reading comments all the way in the next arc that were like, "Wait, this is two years in the future?!" Definitely signs something is amiss. The prose was nothing to write home about. There's a lot of exposition, and it sometimes sounds expositiony even when it's not exposition. Yikes. Even with all that exposition, I felt like it was hard to follow sometimes. Felt like I was reading Russian literature or the Wheel of Time books at times. Huge cast. Everyone has civilian and (sometimes multiple) cape names, plus a power set you need to be able to recall to follow the action. The cast page was a god send, but it still wasn't enough sometimes. The strengths more than make up for this stuff, but I look forward to published Worm. These are all problems I think he can fix, and it should be amazing when he's done. I hope he has a good editor helping him with this behemoth. It has so much going for it. I loved Taylor. She is maybe the best superhero I've ever read. She reminds me of Batman in being a resourceful, driven, focused tool user, but she is better than Batman in absolutely every way. Instead of the boring and broken super power of unlimited wealth, she has the awesome and totally reasonable power of controlling bugs. Instead of being a dick who people inexplicably love, she's someone who other characters respect, like, or hate for understandable reasons. Instead of spending her time punching poor people and throwing mass murderers into easily escapable prisons, she identifies real problems and then fixes them. She is just the most badass motherfucker during fights, and she is badass in a way that makes it really fun to cheer for her. She is also an incredible paragon. She made impossible choices over and over, and I'm not sure I remember any that were really morally objectionable. Morally questionable? Maybe. Morally trying? Absolutely. But goddamn does she do a lot of good, for good reasons, with careful consideration to whether or not she's doing enough good or good in the right way. I liked how so many characters acted as a foil to Taylor. Maybe it was just a cohesiveness of theme, but pretty much everyone compared and contrasted with Taylor in a way that helped me better understand both characters and the world at large. I liked the Slaughterhouse 9. I've seen some people saying they didn't like them, but they struck me as horror movie monsters from day one, and I thought they fulfilled that role with gusto. I really liked the theme of cooperation. At the end, Tattletale makes a little speech about how Taylor always asks for cooperation when it's hard to say no or something. It was insightful but unfair. (Tattletale in a nutshell.) Taylor does ask for cooperation in ways that put pressure on the people she's asking. And she always asks from a position where she feels she can do the right thing moving forward. Over and over, though, she puts herself on the line to try and get cooperation. She does reach out and compromise. It's just that almost no one will meet her half way. Of course, a lot of the people who don't meet her half way get murdered by Taylor, but that's just how things go. (Seriously, why didn't Coil just give up Dinah? Idiot.) Sorry for the long post. Just wanted to get some thoughts out there and see if I couldn't find other opinions.
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May 1, 2014 15:33
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Wittgen posted:-snip-
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May 1, 2014 15:42
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Wittgen posted:Felt like I was reading Russian literature or the Wheel of Time books at times. Huge cast. Everyone has civilian and (sometimes multiple) cape names, plus a power set you need to be able to recall to follow the action. The cast page was a god send, but it still wasn't enough sometimes. I agree with you that the cast is huge, but I thought that Wildbow did a remarkable job keeping the cast separate and memorable. Lots of those characters have their own unique voice and motivations, far beyond the Wheel of Time trap of "[profession] with a [country of origin] accent". One of the things that helped out a lot with that were the interludes. Getting to see the world -- and especially Taylor -- through other eyes made a huge difference in understanding why characters reacted the way they did. In a superhero story, even one centered around a supervillain, it's easy to make everyone opposed to the protagonist into an antagonist. One of the story's biggest strengths is that even when characters are opposed to Taylor (or anyone else), it typically winds up having a very reasonable explanation. (In general, I agree with your points. It's definitely a first draft, because Wildbow said he started publishing this way as a means to force himself to accept "good enough". Prior to this he would wait for something to be perfect and never actually finish it.)
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May 1, 2014 16:10
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Coil would only have given up Dinah if Alexandria pried her from his dead hands. It just works so well with his power I think anyone would be tempted to keep her. The time skip is pretty bad though and the Wards-part was my least favourite bit by far.
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May 1, 2014 16:50
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I think the fact that people wouldn't go along with Taylor so often literally comes back to the reason why capes fight so much.
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May 1, 2014 16:56
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Kalas posted:I think the fact that people wouldn't go along with Taylor so often literally comes back to the reason why capes fight so much. It's really difficult to un-entangle shard influence from ptsd and other mental illnesses where character motivations are concerned here, so rather than point towards one influence or the other its probably best to just assume its a combination of the two that cause the capes to act the way they do. This also has the benefit of this anti-social behavior being something that can be overcome, where as wholly shard influenced behavior would paint every cape (and thus humanity) as just totally god damned hosed.
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May 2, 2014 06:45
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I haven't read Worm yet, and he's only just started on this, but I'm seeing the same 'reasonable antagonists' thing you've been talking about in Pact too. He's done a really good job with the interludes he's done so far, making characters that come off as just terrible people/dicks from Blake's point of view and making them seem pretty sympathetic from their own point of view. Being raised with an awareness of magic seems to make you grow into a rather ruthless person considering how high the stakes are when it comes to magic, and the admittedly dangerous oath to have her children be ignorant of magic that Grandma Rose made is probably what allowed him to actually grow into the more reasonable person he is today, especially considering that people being raised by a diabolist, even the most good intentioned diabolist you could find, would inevitably be considerably more ruthless than any other practictioner by default, simply because it would be necessary to survive when the universe itself is aligned against you and your family. Consider that she set up the family against itself simply to cultivate this ruthlessness she percieved as necessary for a diabolist, even despite the oath of ignorance, and Blake could have ended up just as much of an rear end in a top hat as any of the people he met if things had worked as she had planned.
Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 07:16 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 07:10
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Just spent ten days binge reading Pact; I really like that Blake was able to reach out to his friends. I know there's good reasons for Taylor always being so isolated and unable to fit in, but it could make Worm really depressing to read. Plot , setting, and five arcs of evidence to the contrary aside, it looks like Pact is going to be a lot more fun.
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May 2, 2014 14:22
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Ghetto Prince posted:Just spent ten days binge reading Pact; No, you see, he has to have all these friends so they all can die horrible deaths, and so he can quadruple his bad karma for being the ones who initiated them.
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May 2, 2014 16:16
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Blake needs all his friends so they can do the other genre where weirdly-costumed teams fight bad guys! In the name of Ornias, I will punish you! Then they'll die horrible deaths and karma will make everything worse via the power of friendship with demons.
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May 2, 2014 17:22
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I think it would have totally fit Coil's new persona as Calvert to have let Dinah go. You forego her power for a week or so, but in the end you still get to use it (at the PRT's expense), just not as ruthlessly I suppose.
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May 3, 2014 01:28
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Saturday chapter out.  . Damnable cliffhangers!
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May 3, 2014 10:21
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Yeah. It's getting to the point to where I'm actually looking forward to Monday's because of a new update.
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May 3, 2014 13:04
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I wonder if Pact is meant to be a lot shorter than Worm. Did Wildbow give any indication of the length for these next stories? Obviously there is tons of room left in the world but potentially taking down Conquest and the Behaims in one blow feels like it wraps up all of Blake's major antagonists. From here he would really just have to work on his negative karma by sealing demons and trying to set the world right.
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May 3, 2014 17:49
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None, as far as I know. But then, I don't think the Behaims are really the big antagonists; they're the act 1 hurdle. The Duchamps are still out there, and Johannes the sorcerer certainly seems much worse than both. And, let's be honest, we've still not seen much of what the world is like, what the lawyers are like... probably the ultimate big bad IS the lawyers, in the end.
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May 3, 2014 17:56
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What I was thinking the other day is in worm near the end it turns out the big thing in the series are the giant space worms so in pact what I want to know is what the pact will be
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May 3, 2014 18:42
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Lyon posted:I wonder if Pact is meant to be a lot shorter than Worm. Did Wildbow give any indication of length... IIRC, Pact is supposed to be about a year and a half long.
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May 4, 2014 02:41
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Grundulum, I agree that the cast is fleshed out very well. I'm just bad with names, and the fight scenes were sometimes really hard to follow as I struggled to remember exactly what some guy's power was and how it was related to the the action just described. I don't think the lack of cooperation is because shards are conflict driven. I think the super powers and the conflict loving shards are just there to enhance the theme. In real life, humanity could pretty easily end absolute poverty, dismantle our nuclear stockpiles, stop global climate change, etc. But we don't because humans are both great and awful at cooperating. This is why I really like Worm's themes of cooperation and leadership. Pavlov, that is a very interesting theory. If that is the case, Coil is significantly less dumb than I thought. I'm on the second arc of Pact. It's kind of dragging for me. Does it get better? It just feels like an exploration of how this world was custom designed to be unreasonably awful for the protagonist.
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May 4, 2014 03:26
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It gets better, but don't expect the protagonist to be getting any definite victories any time soon. Or even a breather really. If you think about it though, Blake is doing incredibly well with the hand he's been dealt. The guy has some serious talent.
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May 4, 2014 03:43
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From Pact 1.1:quote:I opened my eyes, and I didn’t see my bedroom. I could feel my body in one place, sheets still hooked over one foot, my chest heaving, and I could see in another place. So we got the Duchamps, the big thing that happened I assume involves Rose? quote:I realized I’d been holding my breath, trying not to be heard. When I did breathe, it was a small gasp, not enough to bring air into my lungs. quote:I turned my head, and gripped the mattress. Like someone trying to come up for air, I pushed myself to an upright position. Still, I couldn’t see. When my vision started to clarify, it was a third location, outdoors this time. quote:There was no relief before I saw a fourth picture. quote:Another, quickly after the last. They were starting easier and finishing easier. quote:And now a man, sitting on a throne, a tall, long-nosed, long-haired dog at his side. The room at the top of the tower was subject to strong winds, and his long hair blew as the dog’s did.
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May 4, 2014 17:13
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Oh, and in case anyone wants to do a reread on their Kindle, I updated thorf's python script from earlier. Changes: Updated URL, updated regex to handle <strong> in different location, allow for their being no ending link: code:
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May 4, 2014 17:42
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quote:Not sure who this is - something involving Rose maybe, given the girl getting shackled? It's probably Mara. Damages 2.1 posted:A middle-aged aboriginal woman sat alone, and nobody sat near her. Mara Angnakak. She straddled the line between practitioner and Other. When Jacob’s Bell was first settled by colonists, she was already here. The notes had marked that she was very reserved, but she harbored a horrendous amount of hatred for the rest of us. She never really did much, I think her only appearance was during the town meeting early in Damages. Oddly enough, she's not one of the two (the Briar Girl and a Behaim boy) who voted to execute Maggie. Maybe she has a soft spot?
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May 4, 2014 18:21
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Mara might hate everybody else but she's on of the smaller fish too. She can't afford to give the Behaims and Duchamps any more of an advantage than they already have. It's clear enough that they're trying to weed out any possible competition. She'd be, if not next, still rather close behind.
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May 4, 2014 23:55
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Mara appears to be a Canadian Native (aboriginal? Not sure about the terminology) lets not forget Conquests favored appearance involving a pair of shackled natives. Plus she is really really loving old and all of Jacobs bell is more than a bit scared of her. I dont think she's a small fish, just less involved in thae day to day stuff. Saros fucked around with this message at 03:04 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 02:55
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I don't think she's as big as the Behaims or the Duchamps or Johannes though. I was going to say "even Johannes" but I'm not so sure Johannes is actually weaker than the two families. Certainly has a more limited scope just insofar as being one person, but weaker? That's an open question.
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May 5, 2014 03:40
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I am pretty sure Johannes is actually stronger than the two families but they don't want to really acknowledge it. Laird, in the beginning, at least implied that he thought Johannes was going to burn himself out and that he had no real plans involving him. The Thorburns are the threat he seems to think. I personally have him pegged as the next major villain, maybe even the major villain. He's linked to the whole vestige idea, he was the last one seen in the vision at the beginning, the only one to directly address Blake during it, and he seems to be quite brilliant. Lots of power really fast, finding a way to break or work around the restrictions that make new practitioners so weak.
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May 5, 2014 10:58
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I don't think Johannes will be a villian, at least not for long. Something tells me he'll be Pact's Armsmaster. On that note, I just remembered how awesome Armsmaster is.
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May 5, 2014 15:50
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Read through Worm over the past few weeks, finished Saturday night. I've digested the book a bit, and have some thoughts: Wildbow is great at a lot of things. The way he wrote powers, varied them, and made just about every power unique and useful was great. Skitter's power alone is a great example of this -- it went from sounding like the lamest possible power to something truly useful and wonderful. I also liked pretty much all of the characters - none of them felt repetitive, and very few bored me. I got a fairly decent sense of voice from all of the characters too. The world was also an interesting one, and he was good at keeping me guessing about things with hints. The world was awesome. I loved the way we got introduced to it. The Endbringers and Slaughterhouse Nine were great at giving a feeling of being able to end the world. I loved both of them. The Web serial format was interesting. I read it all at once (instead of waiting week to week) so it was roughly a giant book. There were great, clearly defined arcs throughout them that could be split into large novels. But the format also let him begin to merge the stories a bit -- for example, you had the Slaughterhouse Nine beginning to come into the picture during the first arc. All of that said, I feel like there was a MASSIVE downturn right around the time Taylor joined the Wards. Just about every bit of it felt like a disappointment, from the massive devaluation of the Slaughterhouse Nine to mere canon fodder all the way to Taylor's powers changing and the epilogue. I don't think there was a single aspect of that done well. I especially hated the Endbringers at that point -- we went from the Endbringers being a mysterious, unknowable threat to "Eidolon's powers created them so he could have something to fight, and they joined the good guys because reasons." That said, I am looking forward to reading Pact, and hopefully the ending ends up being a bit more managable.
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May 5, 2014 16:05
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EVGA Longoria posted:
My problem was the time skip. I hate time skips unless there's a genuine lull in things, which never happens in the Worm universe. As far as S9 getting downgraded to cannon fodder though, you have to remember the lynchpin that kept S9 running so well (and surviving) was the leader. Cannon fodder was exactly what he wanted the excess members to be. Also, they weren't real S9. Remember the recruiting process that S9 used when they had the time to do it right. The core members were always badass. The Endbringers were rudderless without Eidolon. They literally needed 'reasons' at that point. Taylor's evolution was the result of them being so desperate they were grabbing at any straws they had. I liked seeing what happens when someone gets a 'too scary to live' power and the end result of it.
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May 5, 2014 16:52
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| # ? May 11, 2024 18:40 |
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The time skip is spectacularly bad. It covers a period of time that's literally four times as long as she spent with the Undersiders, and... pretty much nothing changes. I really can't think of anything that actually required a year and a half jump, instead of maybe just skipping a month or so. So it's not just bad, it's also weirdly unnecessary. I don't think anyone's brought up my biggest criticism of Worm, though, and that's that a lot (most of, really) the major conflicts are ended via deus ex machina, or at least some factor outside of Taylor's control. The first Lung fight? Ends when Armsmaster and the Undersiders show up to bail Taylor's rear end out. The Endbringer fights? What is almost literally God drops out of the sky to win instantly and easily, both times. Glory Girl? Is brought down by Tattletale pulling her weakness completely out of her rear end. Tattletale is actually the biggest offender here, because her power pretty much ends up being that she has whatever information the author wants her to have, which seems to pretty much be used as a magic wand to resolve conflicts. Wildbow is almost unarguably good at writing really tense conflicts that feel chaotic and messy and hopeless, but then he seems to actually have no idea how to pull his characters out of those conflicts. Like, take the aftermath of the Leviathan fight. Skitter is being held by two of the biggest superheroes in the world, they're putting pressure on her, and there's not a clear way out. So how is it resolved? Well, Lisa skips up, use information she acquired via authorial fiat, and the conflict instantly ends. Armsmaster gets his and Taylor goes free. She's outed as a traitor, but it doesn't really change the story that much, because she is immediately allowed to rejoin the Undersiders. It's super-frustrating, beyond the usual problems with that sort of thing, because Worm tries to present Taylor as some sort of self-made badass, who rises to the top despite the entire universe being aligned against her, but when you actually look at what she does, it seems like she mostly just manages to survive and win because of dumb luck. EVGA Longoria posted:Wildbow is great at a lot of things. The way he wrote powers, varied them, and made just about every power unique and useful was great. Skitter's power alone is a great example of this -- it went from sounding like the lamest possible power to something truly useful and wonderful. Well, towards the start. Skitter's power pretty much turns into "bug magic" as time rolls on. She eventually gains the ability to pull arbitrary amounts of spider silk out of a hat and becomes pretty much omniscient within her radius, which sort of makes the story less enjoyable for me. Also while Wildbow is good at coming up with interesting powers and ways to use them, it sometimes hits the Sandersonian problem of making it read like an RPG manual. There are points where the story pretty much just halts to explain someone's power to the reader, and it's always really drat awkward.
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May 5, 2014 19:04
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