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This was a frustrating chapter to read, and it was a great chapter because of it. We got to see Blake use what little power he's gained so far to secure a legitimate, crushing victory, despite all of the preparations arrayed against him. He proved that all of his victories up until now haven't been luck, but skill, and that he can go toe-to-toe with another practitioner in a fair fight and win. And then Officer Belhaim demonstrates that it never really was a fair fight to begin with and resets everything, and now we go back to Blake the scrappy, half-dead underdog barely scraping success out of failure. This chapter sold me on the series.
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Apr 12, 2014 08:46
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Fetucine posted:I wonder what's going to be reset. The familiar ritual definitely wouldn't if it completes, but I wonder if Dunc's power loss from lying or Blake losing half the blood in his body will stick. Or Rose getting fixed and empowered. What was the lie? I didn't catch it on another read-through.
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Apr 15, 2014 17:49
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On the topic of other serial novels worth reading, Ra updated! I have to say, even though I've been enjoying the story as a whole, I haven't been feeling these last few chapters. Maybe it's because we've been stuck in backstory exposition for four chapters now, but the plot has been moving forward at an absolutely glacial pace that hasn't been helped at all by the fact that chapters come out about once a month. It reads just fine when read in one sitting, but we've gotten like one or two "real" plot developments over the course of the past three months. The protagonists have been caught in this super-interesting scheme that is finally coming to a head, but hang on let's go take a break and have a history lesson for a few hours. This has happened a few times before, both in Ra and Fine Structure Constant (Sam's previous large work): the author really wanted to show off some awesome part of his setting and devoted a big chunk of time to doing so. It works great in novels, because the readers who care can study every word while readers who don't can just skim it until they hit the next chunk of plot, but I think it's a style of storytelling that really doesn't carry that well to a web serial, especially one that updates so slowly. Luckily, it looks like poo poo is about to legitimately go down, so I'm probably going to forget about all of these complaints whenever the next chapter finally hits.
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Apr 26, 2014 23:30
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I liked how Maggie was referred to as "Maggie" from Blake's point of view up until the point where he called her "Mags", at which point that last connection to her original name got lost and she was referred to as "Mags" at every point in the text thereafter. Way to go, Blake!
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Aug 22, 2014 17:13
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The more we hear about Rose, the less I'm inclined to believe that Blake was actually originally the vestige. Isn't it awfully convenient that all of Rose's belongings were damaged in a flood and thrown out? Why haven't we seen any of her own things? When Blake was thrown into the Drains, his stuff was all still there and the landlord had to throw it all out. If Rose was real to begin with, she should have left some sort of mark on the world.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:29
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CaptainJuan posted:Why hasnt Ra updated god dammit. Worst cliffhanger ever The author apparently has the worst case of writer's block on the planet. He tweeted recently that he's writing the final chapter by brute force, trying sentence after sentence until he gets one he's happy with.
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Dec 12, 2014 09:53
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I really hope Twig doesn't have the same sort of pyrrhic ending that Worm and Pact both had. Can we please get a Wildbow protagonist that eventually winds up ahead, and stays there?
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Mar 3, 2015 19:49
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Okay, Twig has me hooked in a manner that Pact never did. Strange bio-punk mysteries, as solved by a bunch of engineered (and maybe slightly insane) super-children? Sign me the gently caress up.
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Mar 21, 2015 07:03
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Samog posted:lmao the twist in ra is so bad It's not that it's bad, it's that it's executed terribly. "Magic" being the only way to talk to an insane, wish-granting god is a cool idea. Magic being constructed by egotistical, lazy humans as a way to force their corrupted god to continue granting wishes, at the cost of weakening its prison is a cool idea. Our entire existence being a fabrication constructed as a consolation prize for the terrible few that managed to seal their god away at the cost of all of humanity is a cool idea. Elaborating on all of these cool ideas by making it future-tech from the year eleventy billion and introducing a war between real humans and virtual-reality humans is dumb, as is a lengthy expository flashback to that war. Removing all agency from the main characters except as a way to clumsily advance the machinations of beings far more powerful than they are is dumb. The ending where the virtual humans win despite us never actually seeing them at all is dumb, and having the only scraps of victory the "good guys" can get being secured not by the protagonists but by a super-powered side character is really loving dumb. It honestly felt like the author had one idea for what the big twist was through the first part of the story, then halfway through decided he had a way better idea and ran with that instead.
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Jul 20, 2015 17:15
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Every time this thread gets bumped, it's always about Worm. Are people reading Twig? It's actually really good and I'm surprised nobody's talking about it at all. It's doing the same kind of thing that Pact did where the protagonist keeps getting chunks of his support base carved away out from under him, but it's far better than Pact because he actually is competent (in his own strange way) and is able to find new ways to make up for his losses. He wins, and frequently, but not without making things worse in some other way. His world is crashing down around him and I am extremely interested in what happens next. I'm pretty drat sure the blood flowers aren't an engineered plague at all, but the tiny fragments of primordial life that were told to bloom by the last remaining primordial in Lugh. I'm hoping that the next Enemy chapter we get gives us some insight into how the Academy is handling the thought that there's a horrific bioweapon out there that they didn't create. The worldbuilding is also super interesting to me, because I am a huge fan of alternate histories. There's so many unanswered questions about the backstory that Wildbow has been slowly dripping out answers for, although the scale of the plot is currently small enough that I don't think we're going to get a complete history of the world unless a character starts awkwardly expositing.
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Jul 3, 2016 07:12
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You're assuming that Catherine still even has a Name. This author is almost as unkind as Wildbow when it comes to making things worse for protagonists.
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Nov 24, 2016 18:53
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boxen posted:I just read through this in the last day, and it is fun, once you get used to the style. I've caught up with everything translated so far, and started looking at other translations to see if they're any good. They are, as you said, hot garbage. Glad to hear you're enjoying it! You might want to check out Ascendance of a Bookworm, the other series I'm translating; it's a resurrected-in-another-world story that has likable characters, a believable plot, and plenty of real challenges for the main character. A Practical Guide to Evil: I take back what I said about how things keep constantly getting worse for Catherine. A power-level reset and the defeat of the last remaining Claimant are both unequivocally positive things. The un-defining of her Aspects is really interesting, though, I wonder if those are going to be redefined in some sort of convention-defying way, or if she's going to end up with variations on Struggle and Seek again.
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Dec 1, 2016 05:39
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Finished blitzing my way through The Gods Are Bastards. Very solid overall, with good character writing and believable plots. It has the same issues that a lot of serial fiction has; namely, it is in bad need of a good editor to trim down some of the more pointless arcs and diversions to new groups of entirely new characters. I definitely recommend it, though. Be warned, though: it's a very long read, since the author has been releasing three times a week for years. It took me a literal month of reading about two hours a day to get through it. I'm the tiniest bit upset about the secret sci-fi setting. It's usually one of the worst possible ways to take a fantasy story, but so far it's far enough in the background that it isn't mattering all that much.
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Dec 25, 2016 08:01
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Three chapters of that length a week is insane. Is the author employed elsewhere or do they fund themselves through their writing like Wildbow does?
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Dec 27, 2016 07:21
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Yeah, Ra is, though I wish it had ended very differently. I dislike the ending so much that I can now only recommend it begrudgingly, with a big "the ending is weird and I don't like it but the first 3/4s is good" disclaimer in front of it. Transhuman futuretech powering a fictional recreation of real Earth was a cool twist. The author should have kept the Wheel Group as outright villains and not introduced the Real/Virtual divide because that made him write himself into the worst corner, with the only logical option being the incredibly unsatisfying destruction of Earth and the defeat of literally everyone in the story.
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Mar 28, 2017 02:50
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Mad Hamish posted:Oh, I don't know, I thought it was kind of cool that there isn't a happy ending for anyone. It's very unusual to see any kind of media where the villain wins or where the heroes fail, I kind of liked it. To be honest, I really like stories where the heroes fail a lot too, but only if that failure is satisfying. The way the story ended was very unsatisfying to me because it essentially retroactively invalidated the agency of the main characters. Their entire existence was ultimately meaningless; they were the scrubs that happened to get caught up in a war between two powers unimaginably greater than them and had no deliberate influence on the outcome. Laura stopped being the protagonist when she started blindly following not-Tanako's plan. Her part in the final chapters could have just as easily been played by any of the potentially countless possessed mages. Natalie didn't do very much besides advance the plot via exposition. Even the actual heroes-escaping-with-humanity bit was stolen from them by Rachel, so the final few chapters were basically the entire world falling apart around the heroes due to the grand plans of people above them while they struggle ineffectively, only for a deus ex machina to come in and provide the ultimate solution. It was a deeply unsatisfying ending.
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Mar 29, 2017 15:27
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Magic as an engineering discipline appealed to me as a programmer and engineer. The concept of speaking words of power into the ether while holding the entire picture of the spell in your head is very much like very old-school punch card computing, where you had to precisely convert the program in your head into a series of inscrutable holes in some pieces of paper. Describing the actual effects of magic as the results of magnificently fiddly equations is wonderful, the entire concept of "phonic algebra" is an amazing touch, and the stark disconnect between the precise magic coming out of academia and the just-get-it-done approach of the Hatt Group engineers is insightful. I love the fact that actual wizardry is the result of literally cheating, either through (mid-story spoilers) exploiting flaws in how magic is constructed or (late-story spoilers) using bits of leftover supertech, and that real, practical magic is extremely specific and purpose-built. Scientific magic is very much my poo poo, and I will eat up any story that treats magic as a thing to be studied, analyzed, and unwound instead of mystical hand-wavy garbage.
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Apr 6, 2017 05:59
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I just made a FictionPress account and subscribed to it so I can get email notifications.
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Apr 18, 2017 02:41
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jon joe posted:I enjoyed Worm and Pact, but have yet to be able to make it past the first post of Twig. Someone give me some arbitrary cutoff line to read towards, tia. You've hit it. e: wait, I misread. I thought you were talking about not being able to get into Pact. Oops, um, Read until after they go to investigate the prep school, which is like 3-ish arcs in, I think. The group dynamic really changes for the better. blastron fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 03:05
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Elyv posted:I don't if anyone else is reading the Gods are Bastards but I'm so happy to be done with all this computer/sysadmin poo poo for now It's really the worst possible direction they could have taken the story in. "This Fantasy Setting Was Really Science Fiction All Along!!" is a trope that requires a ton of careful, careful writing to sell and TGAB doesn't pass that bar. I'm glad it's over... for now, at least.
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Jul 3, 2017 20:09
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