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Having someone who can help spot unconscious biases that slip into your work is great, but I wouldn't really consider forgetting that sound is a thing to be a particularly important one. It's more of "oh, that's interesting" when you notice it.Servoret posted:I always thought Wildbow did the white person thing where characters are default white unless he introduces them with a racial signifier. In the first chapter of Worm, we meet Madison, who has “shoulder length brown hair”; Taylor, who has “dark curly hair”; Emma, who’s “red-haired”; and Sophia, who is “dark skinned” with no hair color noted, just as no skin tone is noted for the other three. Later on with the Undersiders, we get the same thing: Tattletale has “dark blond hair”, Regent has “short black curls”, Bitch is “dark haired”, and Grue has “dark chocolate skin” and cornrows of no specific color. Technically, they could all be black, but somehow I get the impression that’s not his intent. Worm's full of "default white" characters, but he does seem to have learned somewhat from that. In Ward he's shifted to just not explicitly stating anyone's race until it's plot-relevant and there actually is a "oh btw this character that's been previously described with no mention of her skin color is black" moment with Kenzie. Having a totally race-blind PoV is kinda a copout, but it's at least a step in the right direction.
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May 7, 2019 15:43
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There's also the Twig scene with the only black character in the serial which I still can't decide if it's acceptable or not.
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May 7, 2019 15:50
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There was a gang at my school called Brown Boy Gang so ABB isn't really that far a stretch.
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May 7, 2019 17:10
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Lone Goat posted:There was a gang at my school called Brown Boy Gang so ABB isn't really that far a stretch. The Asian bad boys are (Were?) a real gang, though they were west coast.
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May 7, 2019 17:20
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The Asian Boys are a real gang, but they aren't a bunch of Chinese, Japanese, and Korans, they are Southeast Asian with the majority being Cambodian.
shades of blue fucked around with this message at 18:06 on May 7, 2019 |
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May 7, 2019 18:04
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The best argument for why having a Pan-Asian gang is reasonable would be Wah Ching but even then, that's a Chinese gang that also has other ethnicities.
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May 7, 2019 18:08
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Sampatrick posted:The best argument for why having a Pan-Asian gang is reasonable would be Wah Ching but even then, that's a Chinese gang that also has other ethnicities. My understanding was that the "pan-Asian" thing only happened because lung (and then bakuda) brute forced it, not as a natural situation.
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May 7, 2019 18:32
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Has Wildbow ever explained why Lung was spelled Lung and not Long? That was extremely head scratching for me when I read Worm.
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May 7, 2019 18:42
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:The deafness is really interesting, yeah. When you examine the prose, Worm is actually a really quiet story. Things that we understand intuitively to be loud (like, say, a swarm of flying insects) are presented like they're silent. Huge explosions happen near Taylor and her ears don't start ringing.  Kaja Rainbow posted:As a deaf person working on her own story, this discussion of Wildbow's deafness and how it affects his writing is interesting. Kaja Rainbow posted:Just, it brings to mind that I might want a beta reader capable of spotting those kinds of issues. I ain't deaf and these issues never crossed my mind either. Well, I mean, they will now.
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May 7, 2019 19:00
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That Guy Bob posted:Has Wildbow ever explained why Lung was spelled Lung and not Long? That was extremely head scratching for me when I read Worm. I just did google translate and the vowel sounds like halfway between the two.
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May 7, 2019 19:16
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I think i've finally been able to figure out why the Flos chapters in TWI tend to be so below par. it's because they're the chapters that are most explicitly concerned with worldbuilding most of the time, and let's be real worldbuilding is one of the worst loving impulses of the fantasy genre in general--Tell, don't show writ large. This is a criticism of the patreon chapter to be precise, the previous chapter that just went public is fine because it's mostly focused on Nawalishifra's character development. Also Trey and Teres are just stupidly passive characters at the moment.
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May 7, 2019 20:58
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A big flaming stink posted:Also Trey and Teres are just stupidly passive characters at the moment. Right here. Actually Teres isn't as bad a Trey, she's all in on getting levels and power from what I've seen. Trey is a wet blanket, and unfortunately he's the focus of the twins mostly. I do like Gazi and the rest of the Seven though, but half the time they are doing things with Trey which drags these parts down.
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May 7, 2019 22:06
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Really? I'd say Teres is moreso of the two; at least Trey is conflicted about how much of Flos's power is built on top of systems of oppression, while Teres is mostly concerned about being well-liked by these larger-than-life figures. Granted, the sole consequences of Trey's conflict has been being paralyzed with indecision for multiple books at this point.
A big flaming stink fucked around with this message at 22:41 on May 7, 2019 |
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May 7, 2019 22:27
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NinjaDebugger posted:My understanding was that the "pan-Asian" thing only happened because lung (and then bakuda) brute forced it, not as a natural situation. Yeah, I don't want to be overly defensive of the way Wildbow deals with race in Worm, but the ABB situation at least had an explanation (Lung, IIRC, was an ethnically Chinese person who lived in Japan, so he had this "East Asian without a clear home country/culture" thing going on, and the contemporary ABB was basically Lung's creation). IIRC the ABB existed in the setting prior to Lung taking it over and growing it, but I forget if we ever learned much about what it was like before that. I agree more with what people said re: classism. In particular, the way he talks about drug use is very "from the perspective of a middle class white liberal." Like it expresses sympathy while simultaneously clearly indicating that drug users/addicts are somehow "low class/trashy." Also, most of the rich cauldron capes we meet (the ones who bought their powers) are good people - like Gallant, Battery, Triumph, etc. I get that there's some intended "emotionally stable people with powers pretty much always got them from Cauldron, by definition" element, but it's a bit too common.
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May 7, 2019 23:09
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A big flaming stink posted:Trey's conflict has been being paralyzed with indecision for multiple books at this point. That's the problem. I'm ready to move on from K chapters and see what's going on with Ryoka and her vampire friend. Or more Niers, I'm ready for him to meet Erin at this point. FFS.
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May 7, 2019 23:46
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lung is half chinese half japanese I thought and thats why he forced the weird unsteady pan asian alliance thing but maybe im misremembering
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May 7, 2019 23:56
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A big flaming stink posted:I think i've finally been able to figure out why the Flos chapters in TWI tend to be so below par. it's because they're the chapters that are most explicitly concerned with worldbuilding most of the time, and let's be real worldbuilding is one of the worst loving impulses of the fantasy genre in general--Tell, don't show writ large. Christ this was a bad chapter. Not only was it a boring worldbuilding infodump, but it was an IRRELEVANT worldbuilding infodump. Who gives a poo poo about the geography of loving Chandrar- it’s only even remotely relevant to this side story, and even then no one would care if Flos’s enemies in the early stages of his awakening get hand waved away. If we’re gonna have to read a whole arc about this war that he fights BEFORE the war with the Empire of Sands, which will in turn be before the war with the rest of the world, then I’m gonna have to take a break for a few weeks.
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May 8, 2019 01:10
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pirateaba posted that this mini-arc only has 1 more chapter
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May 8, 2019 01:16
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Man, still not digging Ward, but BDSM Chuck E. Cheese's might be the single most disturbing concept I have ever seen in a WB story.
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May 8, 2019 01:28
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Even with an in-story explanation for the pan-asian ABB I'm pretty sure the real reason is that WB thought that AZN Pride was a much more mainstream thing among actual immigrants than it is.
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May 8, 2019 05:02
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Somewhere on the internet, I think maybe in that let's read that likened WB's approach to race as a dude smoking in a fireworks factory, someone wrote a satirical thing in which Lung starts picking up asians and putting them in his gang. As the scene goes on it becomes increasingly obvious that a) Lung doesn't know what an asian person is, and b) everyone in his gang is too terrified of him to try and correct him. That has always been my headcanon for how the ABB went down, because it's hilarious.
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May 8, 2019 05:34
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It feels like a bit of a cop out to just say "it's a story" but... yeah. The world of worm is a lot different from our real world reality. If you told me the entire Asian gang population was willing to work under Lung just for the sole reason that he was Lung - the mega powerful cape - I would totally buy it without a second thought. To be honest, that seems like the easiest and most likely explanation - since it's so in keeping with all the underlying themes of the superhero genre (you know, the mighty individual and all that jazz). But there could also just as easily be some esoteric in-universe explanation as to why southeast Asian racial divisions aren't as pronounced in the world of worm and I would easily buy that too. That alternate history stuff is decades old by the time the story begins so there could really be any number of rational reasons or explanations that could be tossed out to explain away why the racial divisions aren't 1:1 with real world 2011 America.
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May 8, 2019 05:40
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The actual reason is that Wildbow is just kinda blind/ignorant of those things, but to his credit he is fully aware that's a pretty big flaw of his.
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May 8, 2019 06:12
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Omi no Kami posted:Man, still not digging Ward This is a real question: why do you still read Ward? I remember you were not digging Ward back when I was into it, and I've long since stopped reading it.
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May 8, 2019 07:11
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:This is a real question: why do you still read Ward? I stuck with the first half or so because there were mysteries I wanted to see resolved (Kenzie's thing, Chris's thing, how Victoria got de-squidded and how her incest wondertwin powers were gonna shake out), by this point it's mainly sunk cost fallacy and I'm curious to see where it ends up going. I'm at the point where I basically just mass-skim the site once or twice a month out of curiosity and vain hope that it'll turn into something I can get hype about. (This is probably 100% personal bias, but I can't help but wonder if the parahuman setting is one of the problems: even with all the weirdness in Worm, the terrible pacing in Pact, and the weird crazy Sylvester/incomprehensible narration stuff in Twig, I have never come close to bouncing off one of WB's stories as hard as I did this one.)
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May 8, 2019 07:52
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Fair enough.
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May 8, 2019 08:06
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Just close the tab. I've bailed out on all sorts of serials I didn't like and my life is better for it. When the story ends just read the wiki. Speaking of story ending, Daily Grind just finished its first book, and the author isn't starting the next one right away.
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May 8, 2019 13:27
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Lone Goat posted:Just close the tab. I've bailed out on all sorts of serials I didn't like and my life is better for it. When the story ends just read the wiki. I would stop reading in an instant if it were unentertainingly bad, but I find the sheer confluence of self-indulgent misery, torture porn, weird nonsense, and author fiat to be viscerally fascinating- it's like a train wreck in slow motion. Case in point, lest it ever be forgotten, we just spent nearly ten thousand words in freaking BDSM Chuck E Cheese's. Like, I'm not going to say it was completely pointless, for all we know in 200 chapters it'll turn out that one of the fetish mascots was the Simurgh in disguise, and that was the most critical scene in the entire story. But it was so weird, came out of nowhere, did nothing, and vanished just as mysteriously as it appeared that I can't help but simultaneously be incredibly entertained, and completely stumped as to where the heck the author is going.
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May 9, 2019 04:46
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my advice is if your deaf, try not to bring attention to it with stuff like characters being temporarily deafened by explosions but nothing else. hearing is a lot like vision, it's a sense that can be overwhelmed. like I've got some minor tinnitus and its hard to sometimes understand people over this constant buzz. It's like if your vision was covered in TV static. But that doesnt mean I cant hear quiet stuff or loud stuff doesnt bother me, it just takes more focus to tune out the ringing
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May 9, 2019 23:16
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Omi no Kami posted:I would stop reading in an instant if it were unentertainingly bad, but I find the sheer confluence of self-indulgent misery, torture porn, weird nonsense, and author fiat to be viscerally fascinating- it's like a train wreck in slow motion. I'm fairly certain that the point of it being a bdsm place was to both give a bit more detail to the case 53 media representation thread brought up earlier with Semiramis, as well as to note that Parian is a regular there which says some interesting things about her and Foil's relationship. It's background detail that fleshes out some of the side characters, it doesn't need to be super important. It's not really any different than any of the other times that sort of thing is done in wb stories.
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May 10, 2019 04:10
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The Shortest Path posted:I'm fairly certain that the point of it being a bdsm place was to both give a bit more detail to the case 53 media representation thread brought up earlier with Semiramis, as well as to note that Parian is a regular there which says some interesting things about her and Foil's relationship. Yeah, I think I just need to agree to disagree with most WB fans on this- there are definitely interesting worldbuilding details to be had, but when your story is knocking on a million words and still hasn't established what its core narrative spine is you need to seriously look at what is essential, and what can be left on the cutting room floor.
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May 10, 2019 04:14
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, I think I just need to agree to disagree with most WB fans on this- there are definitely interesting worldbuilding details to be had, but when your story is knocking on a million words and still hasn't established what its core narrative spine is you need to seriously look at what is essential, and what can be left on the cutting room floor. Okay, go read a novel then. It sounds like you'd enjoy that a lot more than web serials.
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May 10, 2019 04:18
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Parian and Foil being into BDSM is literally weird comment fanon, so, hearing that it actually turns up in Ward is super weird. Especially given what happened recently with Browbeat.The Shortest Path posted:Okay, go read a novel then. It sounds like you'd enjoy that a lot more than web serials. 
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May 10, 2019 04:38
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Actually, I think you'll find that the best web serials are the ones where nothing ever happens and the story endlessly loops and furthermore
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May 10, 2019 04:50
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Sampatrick posted:Actually, I think you'll find that the best web serials are the ones where nothing ever happens and the story endlessly loops and furthermore Mother of Learning is indeed pretty good.
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May 10, 2019 05:10
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The Shortest Path posted:Okay, go read a novel then. It sounds like you'd enjoy that a lot more than web serials. I don't want to jump into a whole rabbit hole of debate, because I don't think there's much to be said that hasn't already been said better by other people, but I have a lot of trouble with the notion that being a web serial relieves a story from the need to be well-structured, well-paced, and well-edited. Case in point, most of the serials I enjoy are very likely made up as they go- I'm fairly convinced that the only large-scale planning WtC has is the main character's backstory and a few major pillars throughout the narrative. I'd believe that PracGuide was written with nothing more than a 1-2 page summary of the whole plot, and a rough map of the next few upcoming setpieces. In fact, I'm semi-convinced that the only serial I've ever read that actually had anything close to a cohesive end-end outline before the guy started writing was MoL, and tons of that story is still obviously written in an exploratory fashion. That having been said, all of those stories still flow just fine: every narrative step clearly supports a simple, understandable through-line charted by the protagonists' consistent-but-deepening goals. Protagonists can refine their goals, change their understanding of the world, and update their goals to reflect that change in understanding, but there is always a simple, consistent focus that the story can be draped on. My gripe with serials like Ward is that there is not a throughline- the narrative spine is essentially a jagged line that randomly connects dots until an imaginary wordcount has been satisfied and the author is ready to tell the audience what the point was. I don't think it's asking too much for a story to be rigorously-structured and effectively told, regardless of the format it's composed and delivered in.
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May 10, 2019 05:12
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Omi no Kami posted:I don't think it's asking too much for a story to be rigorously-structured and effectively told, regardless of the format it's composed and delivered in. This is too much to ask in any format. There are counterexamples all over the place.
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May 10, 2019 06:19
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I don't think that it's unreasonable to say that even the most meandering unstructured story should have clearly introduced an overarching metaarc by the time it hits a million words.
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May 10, 2019 06:37
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ward is about how you absolutely should not ever give anyone a second chance
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May 10, 2019 07:01
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Plorkyeran posted:I don't think that it's unreasonable to say that even the most meandering unstructured story should have clearly introduced an overarching metaarc by the time it hits a million words. There's the whole genre of Chinese/Japanese web and light novels that stands in clear defiance of this principle though. People like long meandering and largely open-ended serials that only wrap up when the author dies or gets axed by their publisher.
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May 10, 2019 07:15
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