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gently caress SAINT
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Nov 24, 2014 06:58
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Blasphemeral posted:Ok, if that's actually where he is. If not, talking about that spoils the end. Hence people asking him to clarify what he's talking about. I mean, thinking "gently caress this Saint guy" before then is totally a thing you could do. Very belatedly - yeah, that's where I was. Saint did the bad thing. But everything turned out okay for Colin and Dragon. :3 TOOT BOOT posted:I'm getting increasingly bored with Pact. It just hasn't been interesting in like a month or more. I want some serious plot-advancing things to happen and instead we're getting tons of filler action. We didn't really need 50,000 words about Blake killing some DuChamp redshirts or 20,000 words about a Dragon and Giant that disappeared off the stage as quickly as they entered it. This is what happened to me, unfortunately, right at the dragon and giant part. I loved Pact when it started and I still think the world is really cool, but Blake went through so many changes so quickly and it never had the, well, slick coolness that Worm had. I'd still rate Pact highly but it's more of a 3.5-4 out of 5 than Worm's 5/5, if that makes sense. Pact just had so much fighting and, honestly, doesn't have the same character moments like Worm does. Even if I really liked a lot of the characters (Green Eyes, Evan, etc) they just don't grow and develop as much. Compare virtually any of them to, say, Armsmaster. Great world though.
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Feb 21, 2015 11:21
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Neurosis posted: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. We know Dragon is a learning system. While she can't alter herself, she can still learn and adapt and it could have just been some kind of rapid shift along those lines. It might not have been a trigger event but it could have been. I prefer to think that it wasn't because, what is a shard so magical that it can just fit in anywhere? Like, we know they have a physical component - the corona whatever - in people's brains. Does it also exist on, like, one of Dragon's servers? NecroMonster posted: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. She definitely stopped using them, I'd say, given that they never come up again and people spend a lot of time in her armored ships. After all, once Armsmaster allowed her to make AIs she had no need of the weird organic computer fetus things. I'd say she didn't tell Armsmaster, just quietly scooped them all out and disposed of them.
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Sep 26, 2015 04:49
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DarkCrawler posted:Aren't the shards doing it on billions and billions and billions of different settings and realities and timelines with who knows what in where? Presumably shards work with alien races who don't have anything that physically resembles a brain. What is to say that the shard isn't just something that works on anything sentient and modifies itself accordingly, and the corona pollentia is just how it shows in humans? Because it's utterly ridiculous, particularly for a setting that tries to present itself as grounded and serious.
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Sep 28, 2015 22:51
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Yeah, the timeskip is widely acknowledged as the biggest flaw in Worm. As far as the S9 clones go, I don't think it's so bad. After all, some of those S9 guys were pretty goofy and it mentions in Bonesaw's interlude, I think, that some of the originals only lasted days as members of the Nine. Not every member of the Nine was some big shot super villain - they weren't all Siberian and Crawler types. The current batch of S9 - Jack, Bonesaw, Mannequin, Siberian, Crawler, and so on - felt like the most powerful iteration. And even then they had members like Burnscar and Cherish who weren't super-threatening. The Nine always struck me as surviving due to some combination of Jack's power, the fantastic PR and propaganda which comes with being known as psychotic supervillains, and a general skill at only fighting battles on the terms they designate. When caught out - for example, by Defiant and Dragon in Boston - they don't fare nearly as well and Dragon even manages to kill the Siberian while Defiant comes within a hair's breadth of killing Bonesaw. NecroMonster posted:If Dragon could have a shard (and I do think this would be possible if the Worms had accounted for it) than what's to stop a tinker from making something with passive access to a shard? Ultimately, I just don't think Wildbow is as good at writing this kind of cosmic-level sci-fi as he is at writing the street level cape stuff. I'd say that if you rounded up most of my criticisms with Worm, it'd mostly come down to how the Big Stuff is handled throughout the narrative. The Endbringers, Scion, the shards, and so on - I think they're all fantastic ideas but ultimately collapse somewhere along the way. That's not to say it isn't gripping - Interlude 26 is one of my favorites - but he's just not very good at, for lack of a better term, understanding that 'less is more' when it comes to the big mysteries. My other big criticism of Wildbow's writing in Worm is that he seems to describe characters exactly once in the story and leaves it at that. If you asked me to describe what many of the characters look like, I'd have a lot of trouble. Taylor is tall, lanky and has dark hair? Grue is black with a motorcycle-skull helmet? Regent has black hair and is kind of androgynous? Tattletale has blonde hair? Armsmaster has a beard and I presume he's white? Miss Militia is Middle Eastern? Foil is East Asian? Dragon is ethnically-ambiguous? Jack looks like of like Johnny Depp? I don't have a clue what Saint looks like beyond the cross on his face or what Teacher looks like beyond his namesake or anything about Lung beyond dragon tattoos and muscles. And there's characters whom I think my mental image comes purely out of nothingness, such as Golem looking like Bobby Hill, simply because I have very little idea what the text describes them as. And I think there's inconsistencies within the text when it comes to character appearances, such as the number of Defiant's cybernetic limbs. Compare this to, say, The Expanse series where I could give you a very good description of the characters - their height, build, facial features, general demeanor, quirks and habits - simply from the text. The fact that I can only get maybe half a dozen words about a lot of Worm's characters when it comes to those same features is a big issue, I think.
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Sep 29, 2015 14:36
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Pavlov posted:This is largely why I think Twig is his better story. I honestly haven't read it. I never finished Pact and the setting of Twig just doesn't grab me. I think though, generally, people are pretty positive about Twig, although it wouldn't surprise me if it has the least amount of readers across all three of his works. While I never finished Pact, I did like a lot of the ideas in it. Like how a lot of the spirits and such operated on a nebulous story logic.
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Sep 29, 2015 15:00
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No, that's pretty much right. I'm also fairly sure that the 'superweapons' glimpsed in that alternate timeline are smaller, weaker and more numerous than the Endbringers. So, while not wholly created by Eidolon it seems pretty clear that he called them into being, particularly given the patterns they follow and Eidolon's own terrible personality.
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Sep 30, 2015 23:49
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Taylor saving the world and being killed for it is probably one of the worst messages you could put into a novel that essentially revolves around various forms of bullying. Worm isn't a grimdark story, as much as its fans want to insist that it is.
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Oct 2, 2015 14:05
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builds character posted:I don't know what you mean by grimdark but pretty much everything is bad forever. It's certainly not 1950s superman. It's really not "everything is bad forever". Like, if Wildbow was going for a 'everything is bad forever' story then he kind of missed the mark with Worm, the story that proves that co-operation is better than competition, where only one important character dies, and the world is saved from not only a succession of powerful monsters but the violent entity is also killed. Oh, and they can resurrect a lot of the people killed, such as Clockblocker. Virtually every epilogue is a happy ending. Pavlov posted:It's called "tragedy". Worm is a really good one, if you ignore the epilogue. It's called "bad writing", actually. Where are the tragic elements in Worm?
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Oct 2, 2015 23:31
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Fellwenner posted:How is it bad writing? Aside from obvious first draft issues. Because it isn't happy, without looking at the epilogues? It is stupid from a thematic standpoint. It is ridiculous from an internal worldbuilding standpoint. Just because something isn't happy doesn't make it tragic. The ending, as is, is perfectly bittersweet. Much like anything else in Worm, going beyond the text (which is a fairly straightforward, easy to understand story) into whatever Wildbow says makes it into a weird disappointing mess of ideas that he was obviously not able to properly convey in the text or is applying as post-hoc justification. To borrow a phrase from another poster: Worm fans do not actually like Worm. They want something else, this strange 'grimdark' idea of a story that isn't actually backed up by the text in any way. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Oct 3, 2015 |
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Oct 3, 2015 01:33
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This is very quick and scattered because I'm distracted, but...builds character posted:It's quite possible I'm misremembering, but my recollection is that the following things that I would characterize as bad happen. The good thing about Worm is that the characters have nuance. 'Real good guys' don't actually exist. Worm's tone is serious and 'grey'. Some good guys are villains, some bad guys are heroes. It's not tragic. It's ambiguous Scion and the Endbringers are about as 'evil' as anything gets. Because Scion is a cosmic entity of literal conflict and the Endbringers are weapons of war dredged into action by the thoughts of a suicidal cripple. You can't truly assign morality to either of them because they're all just doing what they were made to do. Shadow Stalker - the bully - is about the worst it gets because she's needlessly petty and never acknowledges that anything she did was wrong. But Armsmaster is just a narcissistic cop who lets his badge go to his head (the fanbase always forgets that he's an esteemed hero before that all goes down). Eidolon is suicidal and redeems himself by taking on Scion. The Undersiders are said to be bad guys but, excepting Regent (who picks on Shadow Stalker, someone who is worse), what is is that they really do that is so bad beyond picking on the PRT? The ABB and E88 are far worse than them - and they all get defeated. quote:3. Do you mean co-operation vs. competition in the worm vs. humanity sense? Because otherwise I'm not sure I'm seeing it. The reason they win is because Taylor literally takes people and makes them into a bunch of slaves trapped in their bodies as superweapon. It works, so good job saving the world I guess but what makes the argument for tragedy (and for her as a hero) in my mind is that she has to make these huge sacrifices to save a society that was really awful to her. She turns into basically the most badass super villain of them all and she does it for a good cause but she's definitely still clearly in super villain territory. Taylor doing that is the classic 'I'll make you work together for the greater good'. Throughout the story, we see that if people understand each other and work together, they accomplish more than anything they could do alone. It's still not a tragedy. Taylor wins but it's unfortunate that she has to win in such a way that people are scared of her - but for that sacrifice, she gets to basically live in paradise. That's not tragedy. It's like archetypal hero's journey, with the hero unable to return to the old world as they've been forever changed. Was the society that awful to her? As a general rule? Armsmaster was, certainly - and he ended up apologizing and doing his best to atone. Shadow Stalker was - and she shows off her cowardice by running from the final battle. Alexandria was, but she gets killed and basically ends up disowned by the organisation she built. quote:4. Entire worlds die. It starts out with behemoth and your (my, anyway) reaction was wow that is a lot of superheros dropping like flies but it turns out LOL, that's just the warmup to a ton of different alternate earths getting totally torched by scion and even more people we've actually met dying. In between we get a solid slaughterhouse "we're not scion but we're still pretty bad" set of bad guys with a pretty dark storyline. The issue with this is that a lot of the characters who die do no matter. It's essentially the same of saying that Star Wars is a tragedy or sad or dark because nameless characters die. I'd say there are three characters of importance who die during the Behemoth fight, off the top of my head. Dragon, who gets rebooted. Accord, who dies to demonstrate the inability of people to work together in a crisis. And Regent - which just kind of happens and is something we'd see more of if the story was supposed to be what everyone says it is. And yet Regent dies to what, save Imp? quote:5. The ending is very much post apocalyptic because, you know, actual apocalypse. It had a small band trying to do good but the world was still pretty clearly hosed in a ton of different ways and people were being a bunch of bastards. For main characters, you've got taylor not dead but she got to be the super villain and now she's recovering with her not-mom on another world, grue is all sorts of messed up still, regent is dead, tattletale and imp are trying to be good and I forget what bitch is up to. Honestly, of the endings I thought dragons was the happiest. Everyone else is totally screwed in the new world which, I think it's clear, still has a ton of bad guys doing bad things in it. Grue is dead. The world isn't too screwed - towns and cities still exist and the world has Chevalier's Protectorate watching over it all. And they've got Glastig Uaine as Valkyrie. It is apparently post-apocalyptic but we don't really know what the extent of it is beyond 'there are some monsters around, maybe and Teacher and co. are off planning something nefarious'. It's not that bad an ending, not really. Again, this comes down to what Wildbow chose to show - people getting on with their lives and starting new towns without much concern - with what people then go on and ask him about, where there's apparently scary monsters and villains all over the place. quote:6. I must have missed the resurrecting bit. You mean the lady who made them come back as ghosts? Because I don't really think that counts. In Uaine's epilogue - that's Valkyrie, by the way - Clockblocker is seen putting on a new white bodysuit. So, yeah, they've got some way of bringing people back. quote:7. I do agree the epilogues tended to be a lot more upbeat than the rest of it, but the rest of it is jesus-alien and friends kill everybody while humanity is generally awful to each other so it's not like that's a particularly high bar. Although the home-making is pretty upbeat too, in the context of the whole story it felt like something that got built up just so scion and the slaughterhouse nine could knock it all down. See, this is what's interesting. Worm fans are so utterly preoccupied with Scion's endgame plot stuff which is like, what, two arcs of a twenty-something arc story that they just don't really look at how the rest of the story is presented. Things like themes, concepts, character development, the idea that Taylor is an unreliable narrator... It's just so strange. Does a tragic story end on 'upbeat' epilogues? edit: See, you say that Worm indicates that people are lovely to each other. I'd argue that it says that people are generally good - but it is the system that makes them act badly. This is personified in the 'big plot' by how the Entities lay down rules that draw people into conflict and how the Protectorate is set up by Cauldron to promote an army for the apocalypse not justice or peace. If the story was tragic, these systems would win. In Worm, however, all of those big organisations and entities are destroyed, leaving people free. In Defiant's epilogue, he even mentions that he should retire because he's not a good superhero. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Oct 3, 2015 |
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Oct 3, 2015 06:43
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Pavlov posted:I'm not sure you know what tragedy is. I also don't care to be the one to explain it. "A play dealing with tragic events and having an unhappy ending, especially one concerning the downfall of the main character." What, exactly, is Taylor's downfall? What, exactly, makes the ending as presented unhappy? Why are the events tragic or sad, given that almost every single character ends up better off then they started? What is Taylor's tragic flaw that causes her downfall? You will be penalized if you draw from anything outside the text of Worm. It's okay to admit you're wrong, no one will judge you. If you compare Worm to any of the great tragedies, or any story that is really seen as tragic in recent history, the idea that Worm is anything approaching a tragedy is laughable. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is a better executed tragedy than anything in Worm. It's a struggle to think of any part or character in Worm that one might think of as tragic. Mannequin, maybe. Panacea's attempt to fix her sister...? Weld? However, if you're intent on parroting lines to win obscure Internet literature debates in some childish attempt to make something seem more 'adult' then, sure, I guess it's a tragedy. If Wildbow wanted to write a tragedy then, honestly, it was an abject failure on his part.
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Oct 3, 2015 07:56
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Pavlov posted:Milky I really don't care to get in a slapfight over it. Concession accepted.
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Oct 3, 2015 22:31
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Because she wouldn't have tried to contact Lisette (Kevin Norton's friend, and Scion's-human-buddy successor), who might have been able to shift things at the turning point (see the interlude). Also, probably because Saint could presumably aid with controlling Dragon tech without her pesky restrictions. 1. That's such a stupid reason. Unbelievably stupid. Somehow Dragon not contacting Lisette would change things when actually contacting Lisette did sweet gently caress all. 2. Saint was failing at controlling Dragon's systems and Dragon's restrictions were all broken at that point anyway.
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Dec 6, 2015 09:57
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Don't think about it too hard. Worm's got a lot of things, particularly relating to the big setting stuff like that, that need to be cleared up. Especially everything from Slaughterhouse 9000 onwards. For example, don't point out that Tinkers work differently towards the beginning of the story than they do towards the end. The whole thing with Tattletale remarking that Armsmaster's power only works on technology in his immediate vicinity, like he has some kind of reality-warping power that affects technology, as opposed to the 'alien tech knowledge' it became later.
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Dec 9, 2015 13:34
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A lot of adverbs, too.
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Dec 10, 2015 14:37
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So, WIldbow is beginning to put serious thought to editing Worm. By asking people on Reddit to rate every arc between 1 - 5 on a numerical scale. And then asking them to be prospective editors because he doesn't want to explain things to a professional editor. 
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Dec 18, 2015 13:25
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I mean, I can kind of understand why Wildbow would want to stay away from a professional editor - because they'd take a machete to a lot of Worm. There's a lot of Worm that you could safely strike out and not lose much, and that'd be generally anything that comes from pumping words into an update to make it substantial enough for his fans. A professional editor would expect things to be cut down to their major plot points. While a lot of the interludes could be made into prologues and epilogues for individual books, and some of them maybe turned into novellas or short stories, the majority would go. For example, you could probably excise the entire Travellers arc into a separate novel and lose nothing of consequence in the main body of Worm. The story would probably be distilled down into Taylor, the burgeoning supervillain and her rise to power, and Armsmaster, the hero in a position of power who falls as a consequence. Given that the average Worm fan doesn't understand ideas like 'themes', 'subtext'. 'implications' and 'deliberately unanswered questions for further speculations and sequels' their attempts to edit Worm would be absurdly terrible.
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Dec 18, 2015 13:45
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Personally, I thought Taylor was a pretty uninteresting protagonist. Worm's real strength was the world and the secondary characters, all of whom were more interesting than Taylor.
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Dec 18, 2015 14:09
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:He's actually been editing seriously for some time, and he has talked to professional editors and when talking to them, they have taken machetes to Worm. With awful, awful suggestions. That's weird because that post implies that he hasn't. What are some of these 'awful, awful suggestions' then? 
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Dec 18, 2015 22:05
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/454gb3/worm_news_editor_applications/ Can you seriously imagine adapting Worm into a TV series? I mean, honestly, because I can't. I can see a series of movies, an animated adaptation, things like that... but a TV series? Worm is far more grandiose than Heroes or any other superhero series on TV. Again, he needs professional editors who have experience with adapting for television and know what to strip out of the work while maintaining the key themes, plot beats and character arcs - not Reddit people whose circlejerking makes them opposed to actually discussing the work. Hate to say it, but a Worm adaptation would risk ending up far more like the Magicians than the Expanse, if we're going to look at recent adaptations of literature for TV.
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Feb 11, 2016 11:27
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Anything post-timeskip in Worm is shaky and the timeskip itself should be excised. Worm begins really, really well. The conflict between Taylor and her school life, Taylor and her dad, Taylor and Armsmaster, and so on, are all very cool. They're also things that a lot of superhero fiction tends to ignore. Shortly afterwards, though, it becomes a bit boring because Taylor never really loses. There's also a heap of things in the text that don't make sense, either because WB neglected things or forgot things, which he then clarifies as 'intentional' with increasingly convoluted Word of God posts on Spacebattles or Reddit. Or there's things like how shards control people and their powers which are narrative cyanide. Or there's the problem of numbers (Endbringers have a galaxy's worth of mass... really, WB?) quote:I agree with this. None of the Undersiders were very interesting/entertaining except for Tattletale and potentially Regent (though his subplot never ended up going anywhere). I actually liked more of the heroes a lot more and wish I could have seen more from people like Clockblocker, Vista, or some of the well-established Cauldron heroes like Legend. Tattletale was interesting before she became a walking Deus Ex Machina device. The whole idea that you can feed her bogus information - like at the bank - and get her predicting things wrong is dropped entirely and she starts pulling plot threads from thin air. It's maddening.
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Jul 3, 2016 01:30
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Oh, and Armsmaster's whole 'You can't touch me Tattletale, I have psychic shielding' in the museum sticks out like a sore thumb when, later, Worm states that there are no psychic powers (with the exception of the the Simurgh). It's small things like that and there's heaps of them.
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Jul 3, 2016 01:45
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Oh, and Tinkers in general. I want to say TT directly states that Tinker tech stops working once it is taken out of the general proximity of a Tinker (during the museum fight, too).
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Jul 3, 2016 01:45
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:It's worth noting that the Queen Administrator shard/power /is/ literally psychic. "Psychic powers don't exist in this setting, except for the Simurgh... and Taylor because it's not good enough that she is cunning enough to use her bugs well, but she has The One Shard To Rule Them All."
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Jul 3, 2016 06:14
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I want to say that Clockblocker or some other Wards basically say they they were asked to identify the red smear that was Aegis post-Leviathan. I don't buy the story that WB would have killed Skitter during the Leviathan fight, but it's a nice thing to say for Internet cred.
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Jul 6, 2016 00:15
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George Lucas claims that the story of Star Wars was conceived as it turned out with Revenge of the Sith. J Michael Straczynski claims that Babylon 5 is the five-year story as conceived in the original design documents. Wildbow claims that he was going to kill the only true protagonist his web serial had based on nothing more than a dice roll. These are nice sound bytes. They're nice things to believe. But they're all exaggerations at best.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:19
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Ytlaya posted:I'm currently in chapter 2.4 of Twig and have some bizarrely specific questions about the appearance of the main characters (because I'm bad at using my imagination to create a mental picture otherwise). Correct me if I'm wrong about any of the following: One of the things I really think WB should try and improve on is nailing down character appearances. They're either mentioned exactly once and in passing, or in an incredibly vague manner, or simply not described.
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Jul 7, 2016 03:15
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TeenageArchipelago posted:irt Worm Leviathan talk: I always thought that Aegis was caught in a Bakuda time bomb. Am I thinking of someone else? Dauntless was, IIRC.
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Jul 9, 2016 05:53
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Namarrgon posted:Yeah I know it is weak criticism. Hanging out too much on the worm reddit makes me irrationally angry I guess. The Worm Reddit is a festering hole.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:06
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For casual fans of comics and such, insect control does seem like a pretty underwhelming superpower, particularly in a setting where you have characters who scale in response to their threat (Lung), Do-Anything the Techno-Knight (Armsmaster), Rainbow Bending Lasers (Legend), and so on. So, it's cool to have a setting that demonstrates how powerful and scary such an ability would be.
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Jul 13, 2016 00:22
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Neurosis posted:i can't remember legend's lasers ever doing anything useful. Maybe he killed a couple of echidna clones... He's absolutely the most underwhelming member of the Triumvirate. But if you were to tell someone that your powers were lasers that can turn corners, flight and a damage-prevention power, they'd probably think you're awesome. If you say you control bugs, they won't think you're awesome until you cover them in centipedes.
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Jul 13, 2016 03:49
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Isn't Foil's power literally make any object basically 'Kill Anything Regardless Of Defenses Or Protection'? Parian's power is apparently super powerful and able to solo Behemoth if she only used it right. :eyeroll:
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Jul 13, 2016 06:00
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