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Gladi
Oct 23, 2008

Tom Clancy is Dead posted:

Flos and Erin importing generic ideas (theater, humanitarian aid) are the two annoying parts of TWI.

The theater is extra annoying as the excuse was that Izrils' is a too martial culture. Whereas in real life plenty of martial cultures were pretty obsessive about the arts

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mossyfisk
Nov 8, 2010

FF0000
TWI always feels like it's about to explore a theme around the leveling system discouraging things which don't give concrete results and how it hampers culture... but then it never does. Plus apparently all that stuff is super good for getting levels??

The drakes should at the very least have a gladiatorial combat tradition.

Kalas
Jul 27, 2007

mossyfisk posted:

TWI always feels like it's about to explore a theme around the leveling system discouraging things which don't give concrete results and how it hampers culture... but then it never does. Plus apparently all that stuff is super good for getting levels??

The drakes should at the very least have a gladiatorial combat tradition.

I suspect the fact that Erin causes so much random chaos around her is the system WANTS people to explore other avenues but so many people are either generic adventurer classes, peasant classes and the like.
She's a catalyst of the classes expanding/evolving. The system is helping her.

It's basically a national secret that having lots of different classes hurts gaining a high level class, and that royalty can remove unwanted class levels. The people that are in the know are not spreading that knowledge to keep themselves ahead.

Affi
Dec 18, 2005

Break bread wit the enemy

X GON GIVE IT TO YA

Kalas posted:

I suspect the fact that Erin causes so much random chaos around her is the system WANTS people to explore other avenues but so many people are either generic adventurer classes, peasant classes and the like.
She's a catalyst of the classes expanding/evolving. The system is helping her.

It's basically a national secret that having lots of different classes hurts gaining a high level class, and that royalty can remove unwanted class levels. The people that are in the know are not spreading that knowledge to keep themselves ahead.

Welll yes and no. Having many different classes can also result in getting cool classes like general of the line or druid and crap. I'm guessing there is a manual out there somewhere that all the rich people are hogging.

Gladi
Oct 23, 2008

Affi posted:

Welll yes and no. Having many different classes can also result in getting cool classes like general of the line or druid and crap. I'm guessing there is a manual out there somewhere that all the rich people are hogging.

I would not go so far. It had been explicitly stated that the Innworld has fallen a lot. Probably even the rich know lot less than was common knowledge thousands of years ago.

Kalas
Jul 27, 2007

Affi posted:

Welll yes and no. Having many different classes can also result in getting cool classes like general of the line or druid and crap. I'm guessing there is a manual out there somewhere that all the rich people are hogging.

Good point, we know what classes it takes to become a Druid now.

Also thinking about it, it's not just Erin. Many who've been summoned are going into this without preconceptions and getting 'odd' or really good classes. Doctor/Clown/Emperor/(Pop singer?).... Erin just happens to be doing it to the natives who get caught up and play along with her insanity/enthusiasm.

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

That Guy Bob posted:

You ever seen those cartoons in the 90s where the nerd is stepping up to plate at baseball or something and the nerd does the whole calculating the coefficient of the Earth's spin or some nonsense and hits a homerun?

Yeah, but that would still require "and be capable of perfectly executing the actions your power lets you decide upon" to be a part of the power. Like your power could tell you "I need to hit the ball at X angle with Y force to make it go where I want," but actually controlling your body to hit it at that precise angle/force is something else entirely.

I'm fully aware this is a pretty nitpicky gripe.

PetraCore posted:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he keeps himself in shape specifically so he can fight good. He's still way more vulnerable in a direct fight than Contessa is, but I thought he typically was a sniper?

Yeah, and his sniping makes perfect sense as a combat application of his power. But at various points you also see him (or his clones) doing crazy physical fighting that seems to imply that he can basically act perfectly unless you put him in a situation where there's literally no escape (which is a situation Contessa's precog-equivalent power would never let her get into in the first place if she "asked it the right questions").

His clones also imply that he was already super badass as a teenager, so you can't chalk up most of his fighting abilities to training.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


Ytlaya posted:

His clones also imply that he was already super badass as a teenager, so you can't chalk up most of his fighting abilities to training.

I remember his interlude in Worm mentioning that his power was extremely limited and actually not-great for combat situations, and people's perception of him was colored by the fact that he was really selective about engaging with opponents and only did so in situations where his power was extremely useful.

That having been said, like five arcs later we get armies of harbinger clones using their power to dodge bullets and do matrix-style parkour between moving cars on a freeway, so who knows.

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

I mean I could buy stupid parkour but dodging bullets is dumb, yeah. And the stupid parkour would be a pretty reckless thing to attempt, but that fits with them being, well, teenagers.

It's frustrating because I thought I had a pretty good idea of what Number Man's power applications were? But even if you're really good at anticipating where something will be if you've got an understanding of the physics involved (I wonder if powers that mess with physics like Citrine's or Foil's would frustrate that?) there's still the matter of being physically able to react in time, you know? Car jumping could work with enough traffic and the cars moving at predictable speeds, although it'd be reckless, but I don't get how the bullet thing is supposed to work.

Like... Contessa can dodge bullets because her power tells her to dodge a moment before anyone actually fires a bullet, right?

EDIT: Oh god maybe it really just does come down to the harbinger clones being teenaged idiots and doing stuff that Number Man wouldn't risk doing now that he's grown up. Still stretches my belief a bit too far in terms of actual power, but makes sense in terms of 'why are they doing that and he doesn't'. It might also have something to do with the fact that the Harbinger clones are the, well, shittiest copies, since Jack's the most biased with them.

PetraCore fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Aug 6, 2018

Fajita Queen
Jun 21, 2012

Dodging bullets would probably be extremely easy for Number Man because if you know where a gun is pointed you know exactly where not to stand. You're dodging the other person's aim, not the bullets themselves.

Argue
Sep 29, 2005

I represent the Philippines

mossyfisk posted:

TWI always feels like it's about to explore a theme around the leveling system discouraging things which don't give concrete results and how it hampers culture... but then it never does. Plus apparently all that stuff is super good for getting levels??

The drakes should at the very least have a gladiatorial combat tradition.

This is pointed out multiple times in the story; I don't think it's lacking in development. Clearly the actual physical laws of the world itself are designed to cultivate fighting and conflict; before Erin & co. arrived, all classes were either for fighting, or to do something in service of fighters (or at minimum, survival). We even have several instances of native characters wondering what the point is of this or that thing that someone tried to introduce.

I don't think we can compare the world to real life cultures that had tons of art because this is a world where the gods (presumably) themselves are incentivizing cultures into combat.

Stairmaster
Jun 8, 2012

The Shortest Path posted:

Dodging bullets would probably be extremely easy for Number Man because if you know where a gun is pointed you know exactly where not to stand. You're dodging the other person's aim, not the bullets themselves.

Counterpoint: he wouldn't have numbers on the guns outside his line of sight

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

The Shortest Path posted:

Dodging bullets would probably be extremely easy for Number Man because if you know where a gun is pointed you know exactly where not to stand. You're dodging the other person's aim, not the bullets themselves.
I guess if you've always got sight on the gun. You'd still be accounting for people moving it around but I can accept that on the same principle as predicting where a moving car will be when you need to land on it.

I guess somewhere over the years he just figured out the best way to dodge bullets is to not put yourself in a close fight with people with guns, whereas his clones were both drawing from an incomplete template of a younger, rasher him and weren't exactly intended to stick around for years. Like, the clones were intended to cause maximum chaos and murder in a relatively short period of time. Obviously the Harbingers survived, as did Ashley and her sister, but that was very much not the norm.

PetraCore fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Aug 6, 2018

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

PetraCore posted:

I mean I could buy stupid parkour but dodging bullets is dumb, yeah. And the stupid parkour would be a pretty reckless thing to attempt, but that fits with them being, well, teenagers.

I can actually sorta buy the dodging bullets if his power let him "see" all possible bullet trajectories given where all his opponents are holding their guns and then he could just move in places where there's no chance of the bullet going*. And even avoiding cars or whatever, since I imagine his power works as a sort of pseudo-precog thing where he can predict where things will be X seconds in the future assuming they stay at their current speed (it might act as an equivalent to Foil's timing-related power).

* Though I'm not sure if it's even possible to guarantee you stay out of line of sight of someone, given they can adjust their aim towards you faster than you can move out of the way, so even though you might be much better at dodging than a normal person, it definitely wouldn't be a sure thing. Like, Number Man shouldn't be able to predict if Person A is going to randomly jerk their arm to the side and shoot (unless you interpret his power in the "virtual omniscience" way).

Stairmaster posted:

Counterpoint: he wouldn't have numbers on the guns outside his line of sight

Is it ever specified if his power words through his sight like that? His power always bugged me in how incredibly vague "understands the world through numbers" is. Taken to an extreme, such a power would basically be like being omniscient.

Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Aug 6, 2018

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

So what I'm guessing is that Wildbow was overselling it a bit with the clones, and that the Number Man has many many advantages in close combat compared to an unpowered person but that the cost benefit analysis goes way more in his favor if he's sniping from a distance or undermining them another way?

EDIT: But yeah that's what I was thinking of with the cars. It's not enhanced intuition like Tattletale since he seems to get a lot more of the behind-the-scenes math involved, but if you know or can estimate using your power the velocity, acceleration, mass, momentum etc of a given car it should be possible to crunch the numbers to figure out where it's going to be in x amount of time, and his power just lets him do that really really fast and in an innate way, like Foil's enhanced understanding of physics.

The reason I still think that's stupidly reckless is because you can't predict the human element involved, especially if they're just strangers driving the cars. One misstep based on a faulty prediction and you're roadkill. Which might seem exciting to some people but seems to be something Number Man has really, really grown out of. My impression of him as a character is that while he's certainly ambitious he tries to do things in a practical and controlled manner?

Come to think of it, some of that might be because the more controlled/stable his environment is, the better he can use his power to run predictive models. Unpredictable elements impact how useful his power is?

PetraCore fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Aug 6, 2018

Xun
Apr 25, 2010

Edit: actually this is pretty inflammatory and basically boils down to “I’m uncomfortable with some of the unintentional themes in TWI, especially around the art and culture stuff”

Xun fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Aug 6, 2018

Affi
Dec 18, 2005

Break bread wit the enemy

X GON GIVE IT TO YA

Xun posted:

Edit: actually this is pretty inflammatory and basically boils down to “I’m uncomfortable with some of the unintentional themes in TWI, especially around the art and culture stuff”

Go for it.

Fajita Queen
Jun 21, 2012

Affi posted:

Go for it.

:emptyquote:

Xun
Apr 25, 2010

Hope I don’t get probated :v:

First off I realize this is probably unintentional on the authors part but I am very uncomfortable with the fact that Erin is a painfully white Christian girl who goes to a heathen world that has killed their god and introduces them to culture and the concept of kindness and generosity. She literally saves some ant guys by preaching at them.

The argument that the inhabitants of the world are too “martial” to develop things like art and entertainment doesn’t sit well with me because that the author has not shown that at all. If the culture of the world was that different and actually revolves around combat, there would be nobody making pastries for Magnolia, making buildings that don’t look like utilitarian boxes, flower girls, carpenters making different looking furniture, tailors and a fabric industry that goes beyond whatever is the most combat focused, stonecarvers, painters, musicians, etc. So artists and creative people exist and pursue their crafts, but somehow they are also too focused on combat abilities to create entertainment, not even for profit. They need some rando to teach them how. And before you say “I bet only rich people can afford that” please remember that even serfs in the Middle Ages has entertainment. Dont the entertainers who work for nobility need to start somewhere to level up before they get hired? Or are all of them also nobility (who are strongly discouraged to take extra classes). Like holy poo poo oral performances of stories goes back thousands of years and I bet they were around when people were hunter gatherers.

This is on top of me being kind of annoyed at the author writing Erin being casually racist as a ~quirky~ thing she does that is ~so thoughtful and nice~. When she meets Ryoka the first thing out of her mouth is loving konichiwa. She makes a ton of assumptions about Ryoka just based on her appearance and it’s gross, especially when presented as ~just being nice~. As an Asian American that really struck a nerve with me since it is poo poo people pull irl and it is never nice.

Xun fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Aug 6, 2018

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

I don't see why you'd get probated, that's pretty valid criticism! I haven't actually got around to TWI yet so I can't comment specifically, however.

Argue
Sep 29, 2005

I represent the Philippines

Xun posted:

The argument that the inhabitants of the world are too “martial” to develop things like art and entertainment doesn’t sit well with me because that the author has not shown that at all. If the culture of the world was that different and actually revolves around combat, there would be nobody making pastries for Magnolia, making buildings that don’t look like utilitarian boxes, flower girls, carpenters making different looking furniture, tailors and a fabric industry that goes beyond whatever is the most combat focused, stonecarvers, painters, musicians, etc. So artists and creative people exist and pursue their crafts, but somehow they are also too focused on combat abilities to create entertainment, not even for profit. They need some rando to teach them how. And before you say “I bet only rich people can afford that” please remember that even serfs in the Middle Ages has entertainment. Dont the entertainers who work for nobility need to start somewhere to level up before they get hired? Or are all of them also nobility (who are strongly discouraged to take extra classes). Like holy poo poo oral performances of stories goes back thousands of years and I bet they were around when people were hunter gatherers.

I didn't think about those examples you gave, which is a good point, but I do think the author has definitely shown this combat-focused aspect of the culture, several times over. It's been established that the place is at war all the time, they talk about how there's a literal bible about levels and classes, and (for instance) part of that long Flos side story that went on forever was him bemoaning how the nature of his class basically forces him to just be at war all the time. Also, I feel that given the nature of fantasy novels in general, it must be some kind of fallacy to assume a medieval-ish fantasy world should culturally correspond 1:1 with earth history. It seems reasonable to me that the arts there would be far less developed than they were here 400 years ago, especially given the way their world works. Even with analogous jobs existing, this doesn't guarantee that someone would have had the a-ha moment that seems obvious to us earthlings because someone had the a-ha moment here.

Regarding the casual racism thing, when Erin meets Ryoka, she explicitly doesn't say "konnichiwa". It's pointed out that it's an urge in her head that she had to fight off, and okay, I myself found it weird the author had to say it at all, but considering how often Erin double checks with her guests that she's not accidentally being speciesist, my take on it was that she probably grew up somewhere racist and is trying to be better, which I think tracks with her being an atheist who used to believe (explicitly mentioned during her Jesus lecture then never brought up again).

Edit: err, not to imply that Christians = automatically racist, of course, just that there's evidence she grew up conservative and only recently abandoned that way of thinking

Edit 2: okay I checked and her reason given for not saying it is she might mess up the pronunciation, so I'll admit that my reading might be overly charitable

Argue fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Aug 6, 2018

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

PetraCore posted:

So what I'm guessing is that Wildbow was overselling it a bit with the clones, and that the Number Man has many many advantages in close combat compared to an unpowered person but that the cost benefit analysis goes way more in his favor if he's sniping from a distance or undermining them another way?

Well, the issue is that (I think) we know that he very frequently engaged in direct combat with people with a wide variety of powers, because (IIRC) he spent a lot of time as the "deal with the Case 53s who escape confinement" person (like the interlude where he fights that guy who can leverage all the versions of his limbs across dimensions). So it seems like he can virtually guarantee a win against most parahumans in close range fighting like that.

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

Ytlaya posted:

Well, the issue is that (I think) we know that he very frequently engaged in direct combat with people with a wide variety of powers, because (IIRC) he spent a lot of time as the "deal with the Case 53s who escape confinement" person (like the interlude where he fights that guy who can leverage all the versions of his limbs across dimensions). So it seems like he can virtually guarantee a win against most parahumans in close range fighting like that.
Hmm. Yeah, that's weird.

Definitely chalking this up as a case where Wildbow failed either in power design or explaining the power to readers, which is unfortunate because he's usually really good at it.

Xun
Apr 25, 2010

Argue posted:

A culture having no entertainment isn’t even culturally equivalent to us 400 years ago, it’s not even equivalent to us 4000 years. Being at war all the time doesn’t mean no culture is going to exist ever, they don’t even have any holidays celebrating military victories. Maybe I just don’t think “it’s a fantasy” is a good enough justification for this major of a cultural difference and to me it reeks of the same indifference that causes people to believe that city planning didn’t exist until the Americans invented cars :v:

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

All cultures are going to have entertainment and art, it's just how that's expressed that's going to vary based on a culture's values. It's a pretty big worldbuilding flaw, and if you wanted to seriously make it a thing (maybe to highlight if things are unnatural? idk) you need to really think about how that'd express in every other facet of life.

EDIT: I'm not an ethnologist or anything but even in despotic regimes you have art and entertainment, it's just usually tightly controlled by the government. Art has been a thing since our hunter gatherer early hominid ancestors starting wearing things just because it looked nice or painting on cave walls.

navyjack
Jul 15, 2006



PetraCore posted:

All cultures are going to have entertainment and art, it's just how that's expressed that's going to vary based on a culture's values. It's a pretty big worldbuilding flaw, and if you wanted to seriously make it a thing (maybe to highlight if things are unnatural? idk) you need to really think about how that'd express in every other facet of life.

EDIT: I'm not an ethnologist or anything but even in despotic regimes you have art and entertainment, it's just usually tightly controlled by the government. Art has been a thing since our hunter gatherer early hominid ancestors starting wearing things just because it looked nice or painting on cave walls.

Now that we’re talking about it, it’s weird how often portal fantasy/self-insert fiction has the protagonist invent “THEATRE” like it’s not one of our most ancient art forms.

About the only time I ever saw it done at all well was in a very otherwise bad Gordon Dickson book.

Kalas
Jul 27, 2007

navyjack posted:

Now that we’re talking about it, it’s weird how often portal fantasy/self-insert fiction has the protagonist invent “THEATRE” like it’s not one of our most ancient art forms.

About the only time I ever saw it done at all well was in a very otherwise bad Gordon Dickson book.

There was probably a tech/culture die off, probably just after the 'gods' were killed and the system was put in to replace them.

I bet if you went through Teriarch's lair there's tons of art objects.

If the world is being held in a specific artificial cultural period, the arts can also be locked. Remember how much disdain the Faeries had for the system, and looked at Ryoka's refusal of levels as a smart move. Probably taking levels in the basic classes, be it Farmer, Baker, Soldier or Mage may allow some form of mental nudging to keep things in stasis. This is why I keep looking at Erin (and others) as a catalyst for change, since she's basically giving out classes that don't exist or are rare.

She's probably the only Magical Innkeeper in the world.

It could be that there's people controlling the system and there's a split in ideology, someone may be using the summons to create a paradigm shift.

Or Pirateaba could just be winging everything.

Fajita Queen
Jun 21, 2012

Your criticism is really drat good, Xun. I would suggest posting critique of it to a place where she would be able to read and understand it to maybe nudge her into realizing it's an issue, but that would probably invite a lot of nonsense from diehard commenters.

Kalas posted:

Or Pirateaba could just be winging everything.

It's this, but I still love it a lot.

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

New MoL

Affi
Dec 18, 2005

Break bread wit the enemy

X GON GIVE IT TO YA

You can tell the story is winding down . There isn’t much new content being introduced in these last few chapters.

I’m very much looking forward to them fighting a dragon. I mean Zach spent loads of restarts attempting to kill one. I foresee a very difficult fight!

sunken fleet
Apr 25, 2010

dreams of an unchanging future,
a today like yesterday,
a tomorrow like today.
Fallen Rib
Wooow that one's a doozy innit? Seems like the "angels" had a hand in setting up the time loop, not that that really clarifies anything since it's literally impossible to communicate with them. Also it just signs off with "...and then five months passed." so next chapter is the end of the line for the temporary markers, I wonder how the characters will take that? Seems like it's impossible that the "escape the loop in the next six months plan" can come to fruition unless a lot of stuff happens in that last month. If all the people end up resetting to template that would be a blow to Z&Z and it would probably impossible to get them back while still in the loop wouldn't it? Since we must be getting really close to the hard deadline right? There was less than 2 years left at one point and we've had a few timeskips since then so it has to be getting close. I wish the author would put a tally of "x resets remaining" at the end of the chapters, since it's information the characters know.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


sunken fleet posted:

Wooow that one's a doozy innit? Seems like the "angels" had a hand in setting up the time loop, not that that really clarifies anything since it's literally impossible to communicate with them. Also it just signs off with "...and then five months passed." so next chapter is the end of the line for the temporary markers, I wonder how the characters will take that? Seems like it's impossible that the "escape the loop in the next six months plan" can come to fruition unless a lot of stuff happens in that last month. If all the people end up resetting to template that would be a blow to Z&Z and it would probably impossible to get them back while still in the loop wouldn't it? Since we must be getting really close to the hard deadline right? There was less than 2 years left at one point and we've had a few timeskips since then so it has to be getting close. I wish the author would put a tally of "x resets remaining" at the end of the chapters, since it's information the characters know.

I reread it recently, and I think there were either 19 or 25 resets remaining when they activated the temporary markers, I'm pretty sure 19. There's a mandatory 18-reset wait after a marker expires, before you can use it again, so I'm guessing that unless Zorian's destructive study of the divine artifacts or Lichdad let them figure out how to get non-Zachs out of the loop everyone they markered is pretty much screwed.

In a way I think that's actually for the best- I'm already somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of Zorian having to murder his original soul to get a body, and the idea of them replacing what at this point must be several dozen people, including close friends of his, seems kinda sketchy.

21 Muns
Dec 10, 2016

by FactsAreUseless
So, this new Ward is pretty :stonk:. Really captures the feeling of a Trump interview/debate.

PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

Well then I'm not looking forward to reading it.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


I didn't really like today's Ward. Big ol' dose of 'that's not how produced shows/conversations/people work', the whole thing is a terrible idea on Breakthrough's part, and it feels like the only reason the openly adversarial panel jumped from 'this is a child that kidnapped her parents' to 'gold morning sure sucked' was because the writer wanted to hit that beat. I did like that Taylor has apparently become an eldritch god in people's minds, and that they worry that saying her name might get her attention and bring her back. :)

Insurrectionist
May 21, 2007
Yeah I really felt like that pivot towards Gold Morning was incredibly inelegant. I guess you could justify it by arguing the showrunners really wanted dibs on the juicy info and didn't care about how it played but it still felt silly. Honestly I was huge on Ward throughout the Fallen operation even despite being vocally bored by Rain and not a big fan of combat scenes. But the last two arcs since the Damsel interlude it's been a few splashes of great stuff like Martin family dinner with a lot of really boring set-up in between. I'm kinda surprised since Ward had a lot of what could be called boring set-up fluff before but I still enjoyed reading it. Lately, not so much.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


Insurrectionist posted:

Yeah I really felt like that pivot towards Gold Morning was incredibly inelegant. I guess you could justify it by arguing the showrunners really wanted dibs on the juicy info and didn't care about how it played but it still felt silly. Honestly I was huge on Ward throughout the Fallen operation even despite being vocally bored by Rain and not a big fan of combat scenes. But the last two arcs since the Damsel interlude it's been a few splashes of great stuff like Martin family dinner with a lot of really boring set-up in between. I'm kinda surprised since Ward had a lot of what could be called boring set-up fluff before but I still enjoyed reading it. Lately, not so much.

Not to jump into a whole thing on Ward, but in a nutshell I think it's been tripped up by severe structural and planning issues at every turn. It has tons of individual scenes that constitute some of my favorite WB stuff, but I find the plot simultaneously over-complicated and non-existent (I stopped keeping track of all the conspiracies and what people are up to ages ago), and there's a big imbalance betwen setup and payoff.

I genuinely cannot remember most of the plot threads at this point, we have, what- Goddess, March/clusters, parahuman terrorism and portals, the machine army, literal nazis, figurative nazis who are only racist against superpowers, the upcoming Bet/Gimel war, Cauldron 2.0, the PRTCJ hanging on by their fingernails, society trying to recover from gold morning post-apocalyptic stuff, whatever the gently caress Tattletale is doing, Vicky's family stuff, and the yet-to-be-clarified-in-any-way character arcs for Tristan, Chris, and Sveta. Any one of those things could be the main arc of a book, but it feels like we got the first 10% of each thread, then moved on. There's too much to keep track of, and almost none of it touches on the mental illness/superhero social workers/recovery stuff, which for my money is hands-down the most interesting part.

So I dunno; I really want to like Ward, but I'm getting really sick of feeling like I have to fight with a story to figure out what's happening and what it's about.

Insurrectionist
May 21, 2007
I could say a lot of my thoughts about the plot and story and how I'm kinda disappointed in where it's gone since Arc 6. But I dunno, another part of me just isn't sure why I'm not enjoying this fluff as much as I did the earlier stuff. I didn't give a poo poo that Wildbow introduced eleventy-one threats to Gimmel while showing us none of it in favor of Victoria's therapy adventures before poo poo went south in Fallentown. And I even like most of team therapy more than I did pre-arc 6 and none really less, and have greatly enjoyed many scenes of them since. So why do I enjoy the chapters less now?

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


This is just spitballing, but I wonder if a lot of that doesn't come down to narrative structure? At its core, Worm had a really simple structure with clearly-defined goals: we understood who Taylor and the Undersiders were and what they wanted, and it was easy to get invested in their narrative. With Ward, it feels like Breakthrough is a lot more nebulous. At first they just wanted to be a hero team, then they needed an easy way to make money and keep the lights on, then they wanted to be intelligence brokers, then they wanted to fight nazis, then they wanted to... do whatever it is they're up to now, I honestly forget and don't care.

The point is, there doesn't seem to be a core thread leading the narrative forward. The characters are mostly interesting, and the world is fascinating, but it feels like Breakthrough's one and only goal is to be where the author needs them to be at any given moment in order to have a plot beat. As a result, I have a lot more trouble getting invested. I want Vicky/Sveta/Ashley to be happy, and to get a good ending, but the story hasn't given me the tools to get invested in the team or whatever the heck the overarching Thing is.

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PetraCore
Jul 20, 2017

👁️🔥👁️👁️👁️BE NOT👄AFRAID👁️👁️👁️🔥👁️

Lately I've been reading Ward in mini-binges about once a week and that seems to help rather than running to every update. I'm worried to let it sit much longer than that because then it gets tedious to read through. That's not a Ward problem, in Twig I got several months behind and it was horrible trying to catch up even though I love Twig.

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