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Myriad Truths posted:I certainly don't expect Akua to betray at this point. It would be a really strange (and admittedly disappointing) turn after everything that's happened. I don't think she's fooled by what Cat wants for her, but it doesn't matter if she willingly puts herself into that role and plays it to its fullest. I feel like the most realistic mental state for Akua here is one where she genuinely likes Cat/the Woe but might still hold "outsmarting other people and rising as high as possible out of ambition" as some kind of inherent virtue. I feel like it would be boring and weird if she never formed any emotional attachments to the other characters, since we explicitly know she isn't a sociopath and has had people she personally cares about. I said "might still hold" because it's possible that Akua has actually come to understand that, at the very least, the Praesi ideal isn't the end-all be-all. That being said, I feel like there has to be something this is leading up to, since we keep getting little reminders about how the situation with Akua is risky. The fundamental logical issue of sorts with Akua is that she can't ever really be a good person (or at least generally well-intentioned in the same way Cat is), because being a good person would likely cause her to go insane with guilt from her past actions.
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Feb 1, 2020 04:29
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Ytlaya posted:The fundamental logical issue of sorts with Akua is that she can't ever really be a good person (or at least generally well-intentioned in the same way Cat is), because being a good person would likely cause her to go insane with guilt from her past actions. This is literally Cat's play, this is the promised vengeance.
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Feb 1, 2020 04:55
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Katalepsis again holding out on us hopefully means a full chapter of cop recruitment next time.
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Feb 1, 2020 20:38
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I'm honestly hoping that they keep pushing back dealing with her, and she's just kind of sitting there in the corner watching for the next several months. (Lozzie can feed and/or decorate her when she's bored.)
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Feb 2, 2020 00:16
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Edit: wrong thread
Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Feb 2, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 05:43
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oh god who let Relc Mrshasit
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Feb 2, 2020 05:50
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Omi no Kami posted:I'm honestly hoping that they keep pushing back dealing with her, and she's just kind of sitting there in the corner watching for the next several months. (Lozzie can feed and/or decorate her when she's bored.) Like an abandoned Christmas tree.
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Feb 2, 2020 13:27
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Hungry posted:Like an abandoned Christmas tree. So I don't know why my brain went in this direction, but you're making me think of the Charlie Brown christmas special where everyone wants to kill or eat that poor woman except for Heather, who's like "We don't need a shiny aluminum DCI, this detective is the one we got and we're going to decorate her and make this the best christmas ever." (Then they start hanging coats and hats on her or something.)
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Feb 2, 2020 19:45
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TWI: goddamnit bird
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Feb 2, 2020 22:25
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Ksmvr is going to get a bollocking if anyone heard the first bit. Bird is the best.
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Feb 2, 2020 22:40
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Last chapters of MoL are up, on Groundhog Day to boot.
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Feb 2, 2020 22:58
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Omi no Kami posted:Last chapters of MoL are up, on Groundhog Day to boot. Nope, there is still an epilogue.
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Feb 2, 2020 23:14
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Nope, there is still an epilogue. Oh, there is? That's awesome. Because yeah- the ending was decent enough, but it felt like a kind of unsatisfactory place to end- honestly I never cared about the primordial or angels or crap, Zorian and his dumbass slice-of-life stuff was way more interesting to me.
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Feb 2, 2020 23:42
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Bird... 
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Feb 3, 2020 09:45
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Brain Candy posted:This is literally Cat's play, this is the promised vengeance. Granted, Cat herself is kinda guilty of a similar crime, even if it's not quite as blatant as Akua's. The thing with her letting the Lone Swordsman loose actually did probably lead to massive pointless death and didn't really serve any purpose other than "helping her climb ranks in the vague hope of using that to accomplish good later" (which wasn't really a strong argument at all).
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Feb 3, 2020 20:12
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Katalepsis somehow takes the cop in a direction I wasn't expecting at all.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:38
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Holy crap, Heather went from hilariously ineffective explanations to pondering murder in nothing flat. Also I didn't notice last chapter, but is that Heather's weirdo fetish bunny onesie Lozzie's rocking? That's hilarious.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:33
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Hey so uh I feel weird posting this but Hieronymous and The Shortest Path are both chill with it so I guess I might as well. Into the Mire has been officially longlisted for my country's highest literary honour for fantasy:   This is, to put it mildly, extremely cool. I have also since been informed that at least one SFWA member has nominated Mire for a loving Nebula too, holy balls. The email goes on to say that if too many works are nominated in a category, the final ballot may be chosen by number of total nominations. With Shortest Path's blessing, I'm linking the nominations form here if anyone wanted to chuck in a vote for me. Since it's an awards committee, the nominations form is of course a slightly outdated google form. You don't need to be a member to vote and all you need to do is provide some really simple answers: title (Into the Mire), category (Best Collected Work), author pen name (Casey Lucas), publisher (Self), and contact (https://www.intothemire.com). If you felt like chucking in a nom for my short story as well, you can read it here and input the publisher as Sponge Magazine and the contact url as https://www.sponge.nz. But wait! There's more! The Sir James Vogel awards are being held at the same ceremony as the Hugo Awards this year, at WorldCon. This means the SJV awards panel will be the same judges as the Hugo awards' judges and it means that the "nominee information pack" gets sent to all those people as well. This year ol' Gamer Thrones himself George RR Martin is emceeing and there will be a whole slew of serious literary agents and authors there, and if I'm a nominee they'll literally have to read my terrible webfic. Thank you so much to all you goons who have supported Mire and read it over the last couple years. This is leaps and bounds beyond anything I ever imagined when I started it. I find out if I've made the shortlist in April and you can get your dog, your dad, your wife, and your landlord to nominate me until the end of March!
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Feb 10, 2020 03:14
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Anomalous Blowout posted:Hey so uh I feel weird posting this but Hieronymous and The Shortest Path are both chill with it so I guess I might as well. Congratulations!
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Feb 10, 2020 03:33
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Anomalous Blowout posted:Hey so uh I feel weird posting this but Hieronymous and The Shortest Path are both chill with it so I guess I might as well. This is incredible and I wish you success in winning! I'll go ahead and stick all this in the OP too if that's okay with you.
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Feb 10, 2020 04:23
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Anomalous Blowout posted:Into the Mire has been officially longlisted for my country's highest literary honour for fantasy: Way to go!! IttM has always been my go-to recommendation to people alongside Inheritors and NAH, so I'm super-psyched to see you getting exposure. (You've probably got this covered, but I'd make sure you have a really polished query ready to barf at random literary agents- IttM could be edited into a traditional novel a lot more easily than a lot of serials.)
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Feb 10, 2020 09:06
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That is incredibly cool. Congrats!
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Feb 10, 2020 11:14
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Like I’ve said before into the mire is heads and shoulders above all other web serials. It’s not really written as a web serial even. Happy to see you getting recognised! On another note! Mother of Learning is finished now! It’s a good end. It was dragging a bit but now it’s tied together and I’ll probably reread it in the future. I liked the three final chapters and yeah Zorian is one scary motherfucker. Wouldn’t mind a sequel in the same universe with maybe a focus on the brewing intercontinental war.
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Feb 10, 2020 11:49
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Affi posted:Like I’ve said before into the mire is heads and shoulders above all other web serials. It’s not really written as a web serial even. There is still the epilogue, so it's not over yet.
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Feb 10, 2020 12:00
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biracial bear for uncut posted:There is still the epilogue, so it's not over yet. Now it is! Despite all the issues me and other people have brought up around the last 25%, I thought it was pretty okay! I was disappointed at how much of the last bit was dedicated to large-scale combat, and it's a bummer that Zorian and Taiven didn't end up being a thing, but all in all it was really fun. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Feb 11, 2020 |
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Feb 11, 2020 00:32
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I want that MoL slice of life sequel
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Feb 11, 2020 02:36
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I would read a slice of life MoL so hard. The threat is gone, the world doesn't need saving, just give us hundreds of thousands of words about Zorian's grumpy rear end as he raises his sister, leads the spider civil rights movement, and is generally just a mumbling weirdo. It'd be like Friends, except at Imaya's house and with fewer sociopaths.
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Feb 11, 2020 04:22
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Omi no Kami posted:I would read a slice of life MoL so hard. The threat is gone, the world doesn't need saving, just give us hundreds of thousands of words about Zorian's grumpy rear end as he raises his sister, leads the spider civil rights movement, and is generally just a mumbling weirdo. It'd be like Friends, except at Imaya's house and with fewer sociopaths. So, so much this.
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Feb 11, 2020 05:04
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I'm game for Community except with wizards. Wish the time loop had more people survive with their memories intact, but I liked the epilogue despite that.
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Feb 11, 2020 05:19
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Sequel is obviously about one of the baby Greygoo Hunters as she attempts to eat her siblings and become the one to finally crack open that Primordial Prison to get to all that sweet sweet magic inside. She'll need to use her Primordial flesh-crafting powers to infiltrate the world above (in her assumed identities as a girl-spider and a spider-girl) but end up discovering that real magic was the friends we
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Feb 11, 2020 05:22
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The only thing that really bugged me much in MoL is that I felt like Zorian's mental enhancements were kinda ridiculously overpowered, especially combined with simulacrums.
Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Feb 11, 2020 |
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Feb 11, 2020 06:47
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spending many subjective years doing tedious mana shaping exercises also paid off.
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Feb 11, 2020 07:03
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Yeah, there's this really odd shift in pacing around the 50% mark (I wanna say around the time he first gets the simulacrums) where it feels like the author realized that his plot as originally planned would take years and years (and years, and years) to finish, so he just kinda hit the gas and had them start sprinting from plot beat to plot beat, picking up random powers as they went. It still took something like 2 years from the point where I felt it accelerated and Zorian became unstoppable to the finale, so it was probably the right decision, but it also feels like the story just barely touched on stuff I wouldn't have minded hearing more about. Koth was neat, Zorian, Kiri, and Damian versus the entire rest of their family was fun, Neolu and her weirdass merchant dad, and so forth. Heck, apparently the vampire princess lady in the first arc was intended to be a launching point for an entire chunk of the story where Zorian would infiltrate the nobility of Ulqaan Ibasa and learn all about zombietown. Weirdly enough, despite racing to hand Zorian upgrades in the back half, I also think that led to some of the ending's biggest problems: Zorian is a sneaky-rear end motherfucker who loves intelligence, investigations, and puzzles. Combat is very explicitly last on the list of things he enjoys, and the first half of the story seemed to very deliberately and regularly lampshade the fact that even with all of his improvements in other areas, Zorian was still a shockingly subpar combat mage at best. I think that making the finale a big action setpiece was a mistake, and a lot of the story events which had to happen in order for things to come down to a last-ditch confrontation were jarring and unsatisfying. The thing is, Zorian had become such a badass that even with the finale shifting to emphasize whole armies banging together, it felt like the author was really struggling to justify Z&Z not absolutely steamrolling the finale with their absurd nonsense. This might just be my personal taste, but I think a far more satisfying finale would've been Z&Z and QI working from the shadows- they both know that the other faction won't tip their hand and come into the limelight, so it's all down to moving chess pieces around and demonstrating who has superior intelligence-gathering, people skills, and connections. Also, I am astonished that Red Robe wasn't Zorian's jackass middle brother. He was the only person in Zorian's life who essentially received no time in the limelight, to the extent that it was kind of jarring. I guess the story would've had to contort itself too hard to make it work, but on the flip side making him turn out to be some rando lawyer bro that we hadn't heard about until the 75% mark wasn't too great either. Honestly, given how limp the reveal felt I kinda wish that we'd either learned his identity much earlier in the story, or had it not be a big deal. It was a great early hook, but I think it had a mediocre payoff for the amount of early narrative weight the mystery carried. Rambling mini-essays aside, boy I liked that story... quality-wise it doesn't come close to topping stuff like ItM, but it's probably my very favorite serial in terms of pure enjoyment. (I do wish it had much more slice of life, though- every time Zorian had to interact with a human and turned into an awkward weirdo was way, way more interesting to me than the magic battles and archeological expeditions.)
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Feb 11, 2020 07:11
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The Shortest Path posted:This is incredible and I wish you success in winning! I'll go ahead and stick all this in the OP too if that's okay with you. Dude yeah that's absolutely fine! Thank you so much to everybody who posted to say congrats, I am phone posting or else I'd reply to all of you individually but it's giving me an extreme case of the warm fuzzies to read your posts in this extremely humid airport lounge while I sweat my organs out through my pores.
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Feb 11, 2020 07:38
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, there's this really odd shift in pacing around the 50% mark (I wanna say around the time he first gets the simulacrums) where it feels like the author realized that his plot as originally planned would take years and years (and years, and years) to finish, so he just kinda hit the gas and had them start sprinting from plot beat to plot beat, picking up random powers as they went. It still took something like 2 years from the point where I felt it accelerated and Zorian became unstoppable to the finale, so it was probably the right decision, but it also feels like the story just barely touched on stuff I wouldn't have minded hearing more about. Koth was neat, Zorian, Kiri, and Damian versus the entire rest of their family was fun, Neolu and her weirdass merchant dad, and so forth. Heck, apparently the vampire princess lady in the first arc was intended to be a launching point for an entire chunk of the story where Zorian would infiltrate the nobility of Ulqaan Ibasa and learn all about zombietown. I was honestly hoping that when Zorian shot Red Robe in the chest 3 times before self-destructing that would be the end of Red Robe. But that would have flown in the face of the time loop.
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Feb 11, 2020 11:54
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biracial bear for uncut posted:I was honestly hoping that when Zorian shot Red Robe in the chest 3 times before self-destructing that would be the end of Red Robe. But that would have flown in the face of the time loop. I had a weird cycle of theories as far as that was concerned. I thought it was going to be a continuing part of the story for a fair bit, but didn't really miss that plot when Zorian left the city and started hanging out in the wilderness hunting magical wolves and chilling with pyromaniac priest dad and stuff. From the weirdly awkward and sudden way that Jornak was introduced to us, and based on how late in the story he appeared, I almost immediately wrote him off as a red herring. By the time they were getting ready to leave the loop I'd stopped caring about his identity for quite a while, and when the primordial met with everyone at the gate and helped Silverlake out, I assumed that RR had stepped through the gate without a deal and gotten vaporized. It actually felt like a decent way to tie up an open thread that needed to be resolved but wasn't story-critical anymore, and I thought actually taking the time to spin back the mystery after the story had long since left it behind was kinda disappointing. Of course, my favorite theory for ages was that it was Zach or Zorian's simulacrum, but even when that was first proposed it had a lot of problems relative to the story's description of how the spell functioned. Also in retrospect, it's interesting how little of the story RR is relevant to. In my head he was part of the entire first half, but he leaves the story in chapter 26 and basically never comes up again beyond Zorian occasionally wondering what he's up to.
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Feb 11, 2020 12:13
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, there's this really odd shift in pacing around the 50% mark (I wanna say around the time he first gets the simulacrums) where it feels like the author realized that his plot as originally planned would take years and years (and years, and years) to finish, so he just kinda hit the gas and had them start sprinting from plot beat to plot beat, picking up random powers as they went. It still took something like 2 years from the point where I felt it accelerated and Zorian became unstoppable to the finale, so it was probably the right decision, but it also feels like the story just barely touched on stuff I wouldn't have minded hearing more about. Koth was neat, Zorian, Kiri, and Damian versus the entire rest of their family was fun, Neolu and her weirdass merchant dad, and so forth. Heck, apparently the vampire princess lady in the first arc was intended to be a launching point for an entire chunk of the story where Zorian would infiltrate the nobility of Ulqaan Ibasa and learn all about zombietown. The reason the mental enhancements specifically bugged me is that they kinda felt like bullshit. I get the logic behind Zorian becoming a powerful mind-mage - he's an empath and the loops let him form a relationship with the aranea who wouldn't otherwise be willing to teach humans. But Zorian drastically surpassing their abilities to the extent of being able to make his mind instantly calculate things and stuff was going a bit too far. I also feel that simulucrums were probably a mistake and shouldn't have been inserted into the story. They allow for too much ridiculous stuff.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:35
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Ytlaya posted:The reason the mental enhancements specifically bugged me is that they kinda felt like bullshit. I get the logic behind Zorian becoming a powerful mind-mage - he's an empath and the loops let him form a relationship with the aranea who wouldn't otherwise be willing to teach humans. But Zorian drastically surpassing their abilities to the extent of being able to make his mind instantly calculate things and stuff was going a bit too far. Yeah- I suspect the simulacrums were specifically introduced to free Zorian up from having to do the grunt work to support the logistics pipeline for all of his projects, which is a problem in and of itself because it essentially let the scale of his projects expand to the point of his being a one-man army. It was still fun to read, but I always felt the story was at its best when he was a single isolated weirdo solving problems that were way above his paygrade. I honestly don't even know why they bothered with the mental enhancements- I think in theory it was as an aid in his dimensionalism stuff? The fact that I'm struggling to remember where it was relevant is decent enough evidence that they probably could've toned it down a bit.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:29
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah- I suspect the simulacrums were specifically introduced to free Zorian up from having to do the grunt work to support the logistics pipeline for all of his projects, which is a problem in and of itself because it essentially let the scale of his projects expand to the point of his being a one-man army. It was still fun to read, but I always felt the story was at its best when he was a single isolated weirdo solving problems that were way above his paygrade. I honestly don't even know why they bothered with the mental enhancements- I think in theory it was as an aid in his dimensionalism stuff? The fact that I'm struggling to remember where it was relevant is decent enough evidence that they probably could've toned it down a bit. The thing about Zorian is that even with the loops, it simply isn't plausible that he would be able to make all these ridiculously complex projects without genuinely being a genius. People say as much, commenting on how he can casually create things that are basically engineering marvels that would normally require a whole team of experts (and his time in the loop still just gives him the mental age of a fairly young adult). The explanation for how he can do this is basically the "mental enhancements." But even then he still needs to be smart enough to understand and apply the material, even if the enhancements speed up the process. A lot of the stuff Zorian/Zach can do is explained by acquiring spell instructions that would normally be too expensive or rare, but Zorian is basically doing these extremely complex custom engineering projects. The whole thing basically runs directly counter to Zorian's earlier presentation of being a relatively average mage who is maybe just a bit above average in terms of academic ability.
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Feb 12, 2020 04:32
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Yeah and that's a shame, because driven but average jerkwad is a much more interesting platform than Wizard Tony Stark to see the world from. This is one of the few things that I think would actually be pretty easy to fix. The loop could've lasted much longer (so Zorian did in 50 years what a prodigy could've done in 15), although that would probably screw him up pretty badly like it did Zach. It could've also more explicitly made Zorian intellectually gifted but magically mediocre, since engineering and artisan stuff is basically the one field where he could make that combo work for him. I think part of the in-story explanation was supposed to be that a lot of magic was easier than people realized, but the extreme levels of secrecy meant that no one person saw more than a small percentage of the whole before their burgeoning talent caused other mages to shut them out. But there's really no explanation for Zorian's growth beyond "He was an awesome mage all along," which goes directly against a ton of canonical statements about his competence. Weirdly enough, this kinda connects back to RR: it would be a completely different story, but if RR died trying to get out of the loop and left Z&Z as the only loopers to make it back to the real world, it would be way more reasonable for a driven-but-average guy to be capable of stopping the invasion without resorting to city-flattening DBZ wizard fights.
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Feb 12, 2020 05:01
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