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Nah, if no one ever learned poo poo that means that Taylor's real battle, her ideological and social one, failed. Doesn't really matter if she "saved" people if they are just going to keep marching towards oblivion anyway.
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Jul 31, 2015 07:37
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y'know for all its faults, we still give enough of a poo poo to argue about this big dumb web serial two years later
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Jul 31, 2015 08:37
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Serial format gets you invested, especially if you binge-read it then have to wait for updates. It also hits the magical Rowling spot where the world has enough definition and enough things that are wrong when you give them some thought that you can really get into arguing about it. People start throwing numbers around and yelling about power interactions, and so on - if Worm was a better or worse story it might have avoided that sweet spot and been easier to stop thinking about.
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Jul 31, 2015 08:40
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NecroMonster posted:Why in the gently caress would Contessa leave her in a coma rather than just kill her? And are we really supposed to assume that no one, including Contessa, ever learned a loving thing over the course of the whole story despite Taylor trying to teach them and get them to see reason over and over again? i feel like people are cutting taylor too much slack here. there were times she could have dealt with things differently but chose to be violent or to insist people bow to her without compromise. we're in her head so we see her rationalisations and i think that sways people. i started a reread before figuring 'well, he's editing and it's a really long series, probably better to wait for the edited version' and on the reread she is much less sympathetic.
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Jul 31, 2015 12:24
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Taylor does screw up a bit from time to time, she isn't perfect by any means, but he's also the only person genuinely trying to do things the right way in the whole drat setting. Hell that's the whole point of Contessa and what Contessa learns from Taylor; the easiest and safest way isn't necessarily the best.
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Jul 31, 2015 19:17
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DarkCrawler posted:Only because despite her repeated requests throughout the entire work, those motherfuckers just wouldn't work together, even in the face of total extinction. Also how is that different from any other war ever? Are parahuman lives more worthy or something? Pretty sure preventing the total wipeout of humanity (multiple versions of humanity in fact) was worth the way lesser evil of killing a hundred or two forcibly conscripted parahumans, since there was only her option or Scion victory to choose from. You could say the same of Cauldron, minus the whole asking politely part, and most people capes in-universe don't have the rosiest view of them either. chrisoya posted:I always figured Contessa shot her into sanity and safety and they all lived happily ever after, but when you put it like that, "no-one ever learned a loving thing" does seem more like Worm. That's what I liked about the first few epilogues; yes, the world is still lovely, and sure, people still don't work together for the common good, but she did make a difference. Imp, Bitch, D&D and Valkyrie are all better, happier people for having known Taylor. “It’s always about the people, isn’t it?”
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Jul 31, 2015 20:07
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Imp has the best uses for her power, and the epilogue has some of the funniest.
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Jul 31, 2015 20:24
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To echo NecroMonster, it doesn't make any sense to put her in a coma. What's the point? Kill her or save her. Her story has ended and shouldn't be held in limbo. About the re-write, I hope it is significant. A lot of changes should be made. The timeskip, Tattletales deus ex machina power (I know powers are physics defying, but this one affects the story rather than the story universe). And leaving aside the absurdity of talking about realism, I don't see capes, good or villain, holding off on killing. Yes, there have been killers, S9, Hookwolf, etc., but I'm talking about the good guys and the non-cartoonish villain stereotypes. As Kincaid said, all it takes is a bullet from a distance and it doesn't matter what magic powers you have. I see Government being fully compromised by capes, and Government also fully embracing Cauldron. Really, who gives two shits if someone got their powers 'naturally' or not? Fellwenner fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Aug 1, 2015 |
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Aug 1, 2015 04:27
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Fellwenner posted:To echo NecroMonster, it doesn't make any sense to put her in a coma. What's the point? Kill her or save her. Her story has ended and shouldn't be held in limbo. I mean, most of this is explained in the story itself (timeskip excepted): 1) The timeskip is specifically planned to be addressed 2) Tattletale's power is more plausible than Coil's or Contessa's at least. And note that shards are connected, not isolated. See: Uber; who has access to all tinker tech trees, or Dragon, who despite being classified a a tinker, isn't fundamentally one (more of a tinkertech thinker). It's brokenly powerful but aside from the Queen Administrator it's also one of the higher-tier shards to begin with. 3) The 'not killing' part is explained by the 'cops and robbers' game as well as history. The unwritten rules are there because the ones who did go around killing innocents either got kill orders and did end up wiping themselves out, or were strong enough to survive, and everyone else got the hint. 4) The government was fully compromised by capes, specifically Cauldron, just not by capes actually holding positions. Since high-powered thinkers were applied to watch stock exchanges among other things for manipulation, actual capes on a micro level would probably be flushed out pretty easily. 5) Cauldron wouldn't openly work with the government, because they wanted control above all else, and the secrecy mattered because the Yangban would work their own angle and sabotage their plans (as they did later in the story). Also, the money for vials was inconsequential except to force the buyers to value them; the favors are how Cauldron was able to manipulate cape situations and also being non-governmental let them resort to extralegal methods of ensuring complians. Also, even then, natural triggers dramatically outpaced Cauldron triggers, and weren't as stable, so again, being out in the open wouldn't accelerate vial distribution much and would rather hamper the ability to sweep the outlier cases under the rug.
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Aug 1, 2015 08:59
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Cauldron doesn't work with governments directly because that results in following laws and poo poo or having public outcry and what not. They are a really small organization actually and either don't want to or could not deal with that. There most valuable resource is probably Contessa's time; better to operate from behind the scenes and manipulate key individuals than try to maintain public support (remember that these are the people that created the Siberian and Gray Boy).
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Aug 1, 2015 09:05
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Tattletale's main problem is that her power is inconsistent as hell. Sometimes it's thinking quickly to deduce facts from clues, and sometimes it's blatantly just outright clairvoyance. All in all, it sits at whatever level is necessitated by the direction of the narrative, which is lousy writing.
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Aug 1, 2015 09:08
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Question. Is there a twig table of contents? I can't seem to find one
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Aug 1, 2015 15:51
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RC Cola posted:Question. Is there a twig table of contents? I can't seem to find one It's sitting on the right of the main page, under the Patreon link.
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Aug 1, 2015 15:56
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Tattletale's power is literally that she is sherlock holmes the super hero. Doesn't really need any more explanation than that.
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Aug 1, 2015 16:07
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mossyfisk posted:Tattletale's main problem is that her power is inconsistent as hell. Sometimes it's thinking quickly to deduce facts from clues, and sometimes it's blatantly just outright clairvoyance. All in all, it sits at whatever level is necessitated by the direction of the narrative, which is lousy writing. Also explained in-universe: it passively offers insights, but feeding more context and more power into it gives much more info at the expense of thinker headaches, so it's overpowered in proportion to the importance / Lisa's willingness to suffer pain.
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Aug 1, 2015 16:37
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Neurosis posted:It's sitting on the right of the main page, under the Patreon link. I'm on my phone trying to find the chapter and going to the home page just redirects me to the current chapter
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Aug 1, 2015 16:45
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:(Non-Wildbow-related content) I liked this and ended up reading all that was available; I'm generally not a fan of fantasy settings but I love both Edge of Tomorrow and anything like The Magicians where magic gets a relatively scientific treatment, so this skewed doubly towards my interests. Thanks!
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Aug 27, 2015 05:25
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If you're more into sci-fi and haven't already read The Last Angel, I highly recommend it.
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Aug 27, 2015 08:03
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I kind of wish Wildbow would stop with all the online 'word of God' posts. Great story but almost everything he 'explains' makes it worse. Also, when you look at the text, Armsmaster never EMP'd Skitter during the Leviathan fight.
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Sep 23, 2015 02:11
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Milky Moor posted:I kind of wish Wildbow would stop with all the online 'word of God' posts. Great story but almost everything he 'explains' makes it worse. Specifically...?
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Sep 23, 2015 02:14
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Specifically...? Off the top of my head, Dragon not being a Tinker (because she's actually a Thinker), the Endbringers having a galaxy's worth of matter making up their physical forms...
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Sep 23, 2015 03:51
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Milky Moor posted:Off the top of my head, Dragon not being a Tinker (because she's actually a Thinker), Monarch 16.5 posted:A thought dawned on me. It was a half-formed thought up until the moment I devoted some attention to it. Then it clicked. Tinkers had a knack, a specialty, be it a particular field of work or something they could do with their designs that nobody else could, and I knew Dragon’s. She could intuit and appropriate the designs of other tinkers. quote:the Endbringers having a galaxy's worth of matter making up their physical forms... Interlude 8.x (Bonus Interlude) posted:Exterior skin is hard as aluminum alloy, but flexible, lets him move. 3% deeper in toward core of arms, legs, claws, tail, or .5% in toward core of head, trunk, neck, tissues are hard as steel. 6% in toward core of extremities or 1% toward core of main body/head, tissues strong as tungsten. 9% toward core of extremities, 1.5% toward core of main body, head, tissues strong as boron. 12%-
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Sep 23, 2015 04:24
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:The actual text does everything short of outright stating it: Take this, it's exactly what I'm talking about. Is Dragon a Tinker? She seems to be and she seems to have some ability to work with Tinkertech and maybe even make it safer to use - her affinity could be reverse-engineering or integrating existing work. This works with what we see from Defiant, with his nanotech blades. It's also cool because the idea that two Tinkers can work together and make great things if they truly understand each other, like those two do, is interesting! It's cool because it contrasts with a setting that reminds readers that even in this world there's huge conflict and divides down racial and socio-political lines. But Worm is also a work with characters like Miss Militia, Parian, the E-88 and ABB and others where the prevailing fan sentiment is 'there's no racism themes in Worm'. There's also the more esoteric idea that Dragon isn't a parahuman at all and is just an incredibly bright AI which explains why she creates things other people can use and also how the Dragonslayers could reverse-engineer her suits. But, no, she's actually a Thinker. But no character in the text thinks this. Not one. Not Defiant, not Saint, no one. Only Taylor thinks it and in that first paragraph, Taylor even says she is a Tinker with a "certain knack". Where is it even hinted? What, exactly, is the difference between a Thinker who can make Tinkertech from other Tinkers and a Tinker who can do the same beyond needlessly obfuscating the 'truth' of the text behind posts you need to find on loving Reddit. There's absolutely no need for it because it doesn't affect anything and doesn't matter in the least. What, is she the only Thinker to have ever displayed an affinity for Tinker technology? Why even include Masamune - held up in the text as amazing because he can reverse-engineer existing designs and mass produce them safely - when that's basically what Dragon does throughout the text. There's zero need. You know what affords Dragon brainpower? It's the fact that's she an AI entity with servers all over the world, with a mind so fast that she can monitor practically everything across the globe. The idea that shards and powers do all the brain work is another weakness of Worm that's been exacerbated by author commentary. No character has agency if it comes down to 'the shard did it'. quote:Supported by Tattletale, but not outright stated in the text. Perhaps ridiculous, but he worked it out. I believe that the matter is distributed across universes, which is why Sting works against it where basically nothing else does. Again, not outright stated. So, Scion can deploy enough power to annihilate Behemoth in twelve seconds. He never does this again. I think he cracks Leviathan's core open in less time than that, too. Is this level of power more or less than using Path to Victory, which we know is pretty monumental to him? Eidolon set Scion running and forced him to use PTV. Given that Eidolon had been broken apart by one of Scion's smaller beams, you wonder why Scion didn't just hit him with an Endbringer-killer. More importantly, and this is something everyone forgets about Worm - even Wildbow, I think, as the story goes on - but Tattletale is not infallible. She messes up during the bank raid where all she has to calculate is the level of Protectorate response. The story makes her practically omniscient when it serves the plot - which makes her far worse than Contessa from a story perspective - and it tends to happen in situations that she could not have any idea as to what happened (for example, Armsmaster EMP incident*). Tattletale doesn't connect the dots like Sherlock does, she dictates things. People liked BBC Sherlock and his super deduction because he could be wrong, because things could confuse him, because he had a very simple human flaw to have everything 'make sense' that Moriarty picked up on and exploited. I think it's cool when Wildbow explains things that aren't really covered by the text. Little minutiae, half-finished ideas, his writing process. For example, what the Guild did that differentiated it from the Protectorate. That's cool! But there are other times where Wildbow seems to exhibit this really mean, superior streak. Sort of like: no, this is my playground, and it goes like this. Which is fine, I guess it's his prerogative as the author, but it's much less interesting as a reader and less fun to talk about because these answers close things off rather than open things up. And that sort of 'secret truth' just makes me wonder why it's not clear in the text in the first place. I say this as someone who pretty much never stops recommending Worm to people. I think it's awesome, but I think Wildbow is revealing his hand too early and surrounding himself with some of the worst types of people to listen to if you're writing a story. I don't think it's a surprise at all that Pact turned out as it did when you see what those two discussion groups think are the best parts of his writing - the fights, constant escalation and the idea that Worm is 'super grimdark'. The Armsmaster EMP thing is something I've mentioned when discussing Worm and it was something I thought of as a very cool moment. Basically, go back and examine the Leviathan/Armsmaster fight. Your objective is to point out where Armsmaster is using his EMP weapon on Taylor, given what we know of how his EMP weapon works (short-ranged, line of sight, a sensation of heat and electric shocks). He never does. He's never in a position to and nothing about Tattletale's 'deduction' makes logical sense, when directly compared to Skitter getting hit by a wave and her arm and armband broken, particularly Tattletale's 'evidence' of Skitter being reported dead. This is an announcement Armsmaster obviously heard because he expresses shock that she's alive when she saves him. This struck me as a cool scene because Armsmaster is not guilty of EMP'ing Skitter, which Tattletale levels at him as the dealbreaker for his actual issue of basically killing villains. It's cool because Tattletale lies! She uses what people know about her and her power to her own benefit! And Legend, Miss Militia and everyone believe it because they do not like Armsmaster! It's personal and tells us a lot about the characters - Tattletale is crafty and gets revenge on Skitter's behalf when she sees an opportunity, Armsmaster's own subordinate thinks he's a meathead gloryhog when it comes down to it... But this moment actually comes down to Armsmaster EMP'ing Skitter at what must be the exact moment she is crushed to the ground by a wave and Tattletale being able to piece it together somehow, according to Wildbow, and that it should be obvious from Flechette's character arc. Literally 'Armsmaster did it because Flechette joined the Undersiders'. Did he forget what he wrote? Did he deliberately write something that doesn't make sense? Did he give into the fan idea that Armsmaster is super horrible (seen in this very thread as a 'megalomaniac')? That's not even mentioning how the armbands are supposed to be EMP shielded due to being used in Behemoth fights. Was Dragon that enamored with Colin that she didn't see one of her armbands being EMP bursted? Or, if she did, she quashed her morals and ignored it? People forget that Armsmaster was using a 'supernetwork' during the fight to outwit Levithan - and there's only one character we know who might have infrastructure like that. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 10:01
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To be fair, I think part of the (meta) point of the PRT rating system was that it is based on potential threat level when facing capes out of the street. Dragon uses tech, ergo is a tinker. I am like 90% sure statements like that from Wildbow are responses to the semi-autistic Worm reddit community that doesn't quite seem to grasp that concept. So try to see his statements in that context as well. For Masamune; I'd argue there is a big difference between reverse engineering and mass production. Dragon can copy other's tinkertech and modify it and play with it, but she is still limited by having to do superpower-maintenance on them (it's just that she can vastly outperform regular humans in the maintenance department, so net effect is she can field more stuff). I was under the impression when Masamune mass produces things they can actually be maintained by humans.
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Sep 23, 2015 10:50
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I'd have to double check but I'm fairly sure that Dragon is mass-producing Azazel craft and stuff for the Dragon's Teeth personal army before Masamune is found. It's a concept she talks about with Colin as far back as her first interlude, if I remember right - she obviously thinks she can do it if she's telling Armsmaster of all people - the guy who'd loudly tell her how bad an idea it is because he's a big dumb idiot - that they can work on it using his designs. edit: And, yeah, the PRT rating system is definitely deliberately flawed and stuff like that is what makes Worm cool. edit: Similarly, I think I remember Wildbow stating why the chance of victory went up after Saint did that thing he did. Not because that Dragon wouldn't have a DT guy fight Jack Slash but because of something else which was less interesting because, again, it takes a character trait (Dragon's compassion and benevolence) and disregards it for some act of plot reason. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 10:53
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Found it. The chances of success tripled because 'Saint contacted Lisette when Dragon wouldn't have' - the woman whose only appearance in the story past her first one is to ineffectively try to talk to Scion and who is then immediately killed and doesn't appear to accomplish anything.
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Sep 23, 2015 11:02
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Milky Moor posted:Again, not outright stated. So, Scion can deploy enough power to annihilate Behemoth in twelve seconds. He never does this again. I think he cracks Leviathan's core open in less time than that, too. Is this level of power more or less than using Path to Victory, which we know is pretty monumental to him? Eidolon set Scion running and forced him to use PTV. Given that Eidolon had been broken apart by one of Scion's smaller beams, you wonder why Scion didn't just hit him with an Endbringer-killer. Eidolon was no better against Scion than anybody else until he learned how to repower himself. Once he did that, though, he essentially had access to all those nifty powers that Eden would never have otherwise given away, ones that are not limited and are entirely capable of fighting on the level of an entity. Eidolon, once repowered, was significantly more powerful than any endbringer except Tohu. Even then, Scion was still entirely capable of just cracking the planet open if he felt like it, but that was explicitly against its goals at the time. Also, you seem to have this preoccupation with Dragon being an incredibly powerful AI when the story makes the point repeatedly that that isn't true. She's not able to use absurd numbers of servers all over the world to expand her capabilities, she explicitly can't monitor all the data in the world while also concentrating on a fight, she can't spawn additional AIs to help her. Hell, she can't even make automated robots to assemble her other robots, because it butts up against the AI restriction. Until Dragon gets unchained in the epilogue, she is only barely better than a human who can understand, reproduce, and gently caress with tinkertech, teleport, and be restored from backup in case of death. Granted, that is still really loving good, but she's far from even Skynet, let alone an actual all powerful unchained AI.
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Sep 23, 2015 12:03
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Also, second post on a new topic, has anybody started reading https://pricestory.wordpress.com/ ?
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Sep 23, 2015 12:03
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Milky Moor posted:The idea that shards and powers do all the brain work is another weakness of Worm that's been exacerbated by author commentary. No character has agency if it comes down to 'the shard did it'. Or even a lot of the physical work. I would like more baseline humans figuring things out, including non-Tinkers devising or reverse-engineering technology to deal with parahumans. NinjaDebugger posted:Also, you seem to have this preoccupation with Dragon being an incredibly powerful AI when the story makes the point repeatedly that that isn't true. She's not able to use absurd numbers of servers all over the world to expand her capabilities, she explicitly can't monitor all the data in the world while also concentrating on a fight, she can't spawn additional AIs to help her. Hell, she can't even make automated robots to assemble her other robots, because it butts up against the AI restriction. Until Dragon gets unchained in the epilogue, she is only barely better than a human who can understand, reproduce, and gently caress with tinkertech, teleport, and be restored from backup in case of death. Granted, that is still really loving good, but she's far from even Skynet, let alone an actual all powerful unchained AI. Dragon has some specific limitations that prevented a run-away Singularity deal but she was still superhumanly intelligent.
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Sep 23, 2015 12:25
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NinjaDebugger posted:Eidolon was no better against Scion than anybody else until he learned how to repower himself. Once he did that, though, he essentially had access to all those nifty powers that Eden would never have otherwise given away, ones that are not limited and are entirely capable of fighting on the level of an entity. Eidolon, once repowered, was significantly more powerful than any endbringer except Tohu. Even then, Scion was still entirely capable of just cracking the planet open if he felt like it, but that was explicitly against its goals at the time. Eidolon sends Scion running through all kinds of worlds and pursues him. That's the most basic summation of what happens when he taps into the full extent of his power. Scion has no choice but to use PTV, giving him a moment where he can stun and then kill Eidolon. This implies that Scion has no other power that Eidolon was vulnerable to, even if one blast that hits Eidolon, and breaks him apart to such an extent that Uaine has to put him back together, is certainly several orders of magnatude less than what Scion presumbly blasts Behemoth and Leviathan with given their ludicrous amount of matter thing. quote:Also, you seem to have this preoccupation with Dragon being an incredibly powerful AI when the story makes the point repeatedly that that isn't true. She's not able to use absurd numbers of servers all over the world to expand her capabilities, she explicitly can't monitor all the data in the world while also concentrating on a fight, she can't spawn additional AIs to help her. Hell, she can't even make automated robots to assemble her other robots, because it butts up against the AI restriction. Until Dragon gets unchained in the epilogue, she is only barely better than a human who can understand, reproduce, and gently caress with tinkertech, teleport, and be restored from backup in case of death. Granted, that is still really loving good, but she's far from even Skynet, let alone an actual all powerful unchained AI. Actually, she is. She can, and does, use absurd numbers of servers to expand her capabilities because that's precisely how she went from a household assistant to being such an influential figure. And a bunch of them get blown up near the end of the story which negatively affects her. She can, and does, multitask - because this is explicitly what leads Saint to realise that she's hunting from him and his group (searching for him while combing the security cameras of the world for the Slaughterhouse Nine). She can, and does, spawn additional AIs to help her because that is how the Undersiders defeat some of her suits - by confusing the basic level AI that runs them (and Saint takes control of them later). They try using the same logical paradox trick on Dragon, later, and it doesn't work. If not multiple AI controlled suits and/or multitasking, how did Dragon go off and hunt down the Nine while her half a dozen suits operated in various locations around Brockton Bay? Like, Defiant has removed most of these restrictions shortly after they team up. It's a big reason why they team up. The Dragon epilogue deals with unchaining her from Teacher's code - not the old restrictions from Richter because they're already gone. Dragon being an incredibly powerful AI is one of the most clear things of the setting. She's the world's best Tinker, she can monitor almost any crisis and be there in minutes and I'm pretty sure Tagg or Piggot mention that she basically can control the entire media if she needs to. It's the entire reason Saint deploys Ascalon, because she's gone completely beyond anything she's done before and broken virtually all of her restrictions to the extent that some of Richter's tools flat out don't work on her anymore. "Barely better than human." Neurosis posted:Dragon has some specific limitations that prevented a run-away Singularity deal but she was still superhumanly intelligent. I'm fairly sure Saint alludes to exactly this in his interlude, worrying that Dragon is about to hit whatever final threshold that gets something like that rolling. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 12:46
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Milky Moor posted:Dragon chat I think the issue with Dragon's classification is that unlike every other PRT power class, Tinker actually has a consistant shard-side effect. A Blaster power might work through matter replication, or gravity manipulation, or dimensional shenanigans, but Tinker powers all work the same way: The shard pumps alien technologies into the Tinker, whose brain takes it as "inspiration". Dragon doesn't get that inspiration from her shard, she's just smart enough to actually understand the technologies she meddles with. If I had to bet, I'd say her thinker power doesn't have anything to do with technology at all; I think it has to do with letting her understand *people*. (As far as the PRT's threat codes go though, yeah she'd definitely be a Tinker) Namarrgon posted:For Masamune; I'd argue there is a big difference between reverse engineering and mass production. Dragon can copy other's tinkertech and modify it and play with it, but she is still limited by having to do superpower-maintenance on them (it's just that she can vastly outperform regular humans in the maintenance department, so net effect is she can field more stuff). I was under the impression when Masamune mass produces things they can actually be maintained by humans. Also, unlike Dragon, Masamune gets the same burst of alien inspiration that other Tinker shards give, allowing him to create simple technologies like the rayguns Lung sees Japan's Super Sentai knockoffs use. Milky Moor posted:The idea that shards and powers do all the brain work is another weakness of Worm that's been exacerbated by author commentary. No character has agency if it comes down to 'the shard did it'. Aside from potentially loving around with the outputs of Thinker powers, the shards don't have that much control over people. Sure they can make you angrier, or prouder, or more paranoid, but the choices people make afterwards are all their own. That's why shards have to use their power over the abilities they give in order to punish cowards like Leet and Panacea and reward violent loonies like Jack Slash and Taylor; otherwise they'd puppet anyone who ever triggered into being a psychopath from day one.
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Sep 23, 2015 16:03
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Specifically, Dragon does not have access to the canonical tinker technology shard that tinkers get partial access to, but rather a thinker power that, combined with her being a very capable AI, lets her reverse engineer tinker tech. She's PRT rated as a Tinker because PRT ratings indicate appropriate response, not necessarily strict power classifications. The tinker shard typically sabotages the output with some flair to make the design more customized and unstable. Masamune creates factories that are themselves unstable, which can reproduce other tinkers' work more stably, but at lower quality/efficiency. The fact that this is the way it works is hinted at by Leet's tinker power, which in exchange for full access to all the Tinker tech trees, actively sabotages the branches he's already visited. The Dragonslayers weren't able to reverse-engineer Dragon's post-trigger technology, which led Saint to go to Teacher to get his thinker/tinker abilities in order to be able to understand what Dragon was doing afterwards. His being compromised due to his addiction to getting powers (as a side effect of Teacher's power) was actually an important plot point in the story. The suits operating while she was out hunting the S9 were not sapient, also explicitly stated, just intelligent agents with limited reasoning capability other than what she could program in (also at this point she Armsmaster was beginning to unchain her, which was a long ongoing process that sacrificed a lot of her normal functionality, hence her mute-ness). This is also a plot point where Taylor tricks the Azazel (I believe) by coming up with a hypothetical situation in which it couldn't be sure it wasn't hurting Imp, and did not have sufficient reasoning capabilities to see through the ruse. The EMP incident I *think* was Tattletale coming up with a fiction believable enough to threaten Armsmaster and hard to disprove, but I don't remember where I read the argument for that. Scion doesn't "have no choice but to use PtV", but he's not a very creative entity, because his literal role is Warrior, whereas Eden was the one who did all the hard thinking. Note that one of the things that the entities do when they start the cycle is gather data and observe new uses for the shards so they can fine-tune them for the next cycle. He uses PtV because he needed a quick solution he couldn't think of offhand, not because none of his powers were of use. IIRC thinkers at some point are actually called out in the text for typically using their powers as too much of a crutch and losing some measure of personal agency because they let their powers do too much of the thinking they should be doing. Like, every one of your points is addressed somehow or other, mostly from within the text, but your original point of hating Wildbow's expanding on the background is strange, because there's a consistency to it that you just seem really resistant to acknowledging.
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Sep 23, 2015 17:47
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Milky Moor posted:Eidolon sends Scion running through all kinds of worlds and pursues him. That's the most basic summation of what happens when he taps into the full extent of his power. Scion has no choice but to use PTV, giving him a moment where he can stun and then kill Eidolon. This implies that Scion has no other power that Eidolon was vulnerable to, even if one blast that hits Eidolon, and breaks him apart to such an extent that Uaine has to put him back together, is certainly several orders of magnatude less than what Scion presumbly blasts Behemoth and Leviathan with given their ludicrous amount of matter thing. 'Doesn't' is not equal to 'can't'. It is extremely heavily emphasized that the entities, and especially Scion, has massive powers and almost 0 creativity. Repowered Eidolon was the first thing in a loooong time that gave Scion a run for his money. He probably could have used something else, but he panicked, burned of energy for PtV and did it that way. Besides, Scion wasn't fighting just Eidolon. He had to PtV against Eidoon + GU. I mean, I think Worm definitely has some flaws, and there are aspects of the story I ignore as well but Dragon and Scion are not points I think were logically inconcistent.
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Sep 23, 2015 18:11
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NinjaDebugger posted:Also, second post on a new topic, has anybody started reading https://pricestory.wordpress.com/ ? I took a look and I'm a fan. It's kind of relaxing after being used to Wildbow's high intensity stuff.
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Sep 23, 2015 18:31
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Specifically, Dragon does not have access to the canonical tinker technology shard that tinkers get partial access to, but rather a thinker power Indicate this in the text. quote:The Dragonslayers weren't able to reverse-engineer Dragon's post-trigger technology, which led Saint to go to Teacher to get his thinker/tinker abilities in order to be able to understand what Dragon was doing afterwards. Saint got the ability to understand Dragon's code, not her technology. They had, what, four suits and one of them had the spinny wheel electrical thing on the back, too. So, unless Dragon built every single suit that was then stolen in the twelve months prior to her trigger event with no pre-existing infrastructure or access to Tinker designs in the first place... quote:The suits operating while she was out hunting the S9 were not sapient, also explicitly stated, just intelligent agents with limited reasoning capability other than what she could program in (also at this point she Armsmaster was beginning to unchain her, which was a long ongoing process that sacrificed a lot of her normal functionality, hence her mute-ness). This is also a plot point where Taylor tricks the Azazel (I believe) by coming up with a hypothetical situation in which it couldn't be sure it wasn't hurting Imp, and did not have sufficient reasoning capabilities to see through the ruse. Yeah? Okay? They're still AIs, just not self-aware ones. I'm not the one saying she couldn't make AIs, that was NinjaDebugger. quote:Scion doesn't "have no choice but to use PtV", but he's not a very creative entity, because his literal role is Warrior, whereas Eden was the one who did all the hard thinking. Note that one of the things that the entities do when they start the cycle is gather data and observe new uses for the shards so they can fine-tune them for the next cycle. He uses PtV because he needed a quick solution he couldn't think of offhand, not because none of his powers were of use. Not even his ability to blast away crazy amounts of super-dense Endbringer matter when a smaller beam he uses breaks Eidolon apart to the extent that Uaine has to patch him together? He really has that little idea about his own capabilities? That's bizarre because even a fraction of that power would annihilate Eidolon with no hope of being restored by Uaine - because it'd probably kill her, too. After all, when using that power on the Endbringers, he doesn't blow up the entire planet either, so, he obviously has some level of control over how much he uses. Scion doesn't understand his own capabilities and is jobbing the fight because of it just isn't as interesting as the idea that Eidolon, repowered and freed of his suicidal complex and put against the worthiest opponent yet, actually comes close to defeating him - until Scion pulls out his final trump card and breaks Eidolon. Again, one of these has something to do with character development and personality. The other is reading Worm like some kind of Star Wars EU alternate history level thing. It's like people saying that Scion was lying to Eidolon then. Well, sure, there's no real proof either way - but that's so much more boring. Scion lied and Eidolon was stupid enough to fall for it. Yawn. quote:Like, every one of your points is addressed somehow or other, mostly from within the text, but your original point of hating Wildbow's expanding on the background is strange, because there's a consistency to it that you just seem really resistant to acknowledging. No, they're actually not. It's telling because you're just bringing up things that Wildbow has stated in forum comments as 'within the text'. Like, the Leet having access to 'the entire tech tree' is definitely another thing Wildbow posted outside the text - all we really get about Leet in the text is that he works with Uber and can make anything he hasn't already made before, basically. It's fine if you think its completely consistent but, as I've indicated, the whole issue is that what Wildbow presents in the text is not always what he 'clarifies' outside of it. There's expanding on the background, usually by providing some kind of twist or new perspective which adds to what's already there... or you can just say 'Dragon's a Thinker' when the text doesn't give any sign that she isn't. I mean, beyond the one line of text that you indicated which is inconclusive at best. Namarrgon posted:I mean, I think Worm definitely has some flaws, and there are aspects of the story I ignore as well but Dragon and Scion are not points I think were logically inconcistent. They're consistent when you stick to the text-as-presented. They become weird when you get some of Wildbow's comments on them. For some of these, you only need to go back and look at what people are saying and guessing prior to Wildbow's clarification - the ideas just aren't thought of because, extrapolating from the text, they don't follow. For example, the chance of success Lisette thing. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Sep 23, 2015 |
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Sep 23, 2015 22:58
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Started reading this a few days ago and just got to chapter 11 where Skitter makes her deal with Coil. drat is Taylor stupid. Even in her best case scenario she's helping someone who uses drugs to enslave little girls and will do that to many more people than the one she might save. Regent's handling of Shadow Stalker is awesome enough to make up for that though. I hope Skitter is smart enough to get the kind of spiders she needs to make herself a tougher costume. She's got the resources to afford it now.
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Sep 24, 2015 19:43
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regent's handling of shadow stalker is probably the lowest point of the entire thing
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Sep 25, 2015 23:49
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On one point; I doubt Dragon was ever exactly a thinker or a tinker, I doubt she had access to a shard, mostly because she really wouldn't need to. It's important to remember that every "power" or piece of technology exhibited in the story is, by the rules of the story, a real thing that could actually exist somehow. It's also important to realize that Dragon, as she exists at the time(s) we read about her, is expressly a being that should not exist. She very likely was only as intelligent as she was because of the restrictions placed upon her, her creator even made at least one backup plan to "fix" her if she ever got out of hand and broke these restrictions. She was only able to advance to the point that she was through random chance and human fuckery, which as we've seen, the Worms weren't completely able to account for even if they thought otherwise. The other point is about Scion and the Worms in general. They really aren't as smart as people might think, they made mistakes, they failed to see events coming despite their prodigious powers, and literally didn't understand the mechanism (evolution) that they themselves where trying to spur. I mean, those god damned idiots thought evolution takes place on an individual scale rather than as entire systems, it's no loving wonder they never really got anywhere, and no wonder one of their experiments eventually kicked their loving assess.
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Sep 26, 2015 02:29
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It was a plot point that Dragon had had something like a trigger event which gave a point of her demarcation where her designs started to change. Colin noticed it when going through her guts and said to Dragon she appeared to have had a trigger event. Of course they don't KNOW it was a trigger event, given she's a machine intelligence and such an event isn't as obvious in her case, but it's strongly implied.
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Sep 26, 2015 04:17
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Just saying, the trauma was saint stealing from her, and her response was to put loving fetuses in her suits of course her code would have changed radically around the time, and a trigger event would have been the only real thing Armsmaster had to relate it to. I wonder if she stopped using the fetuses and/or ever told Armsmaster about it.
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Sep 26, 2015 04:32
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