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berenzen posted:To try and get away from making the entire page a CIA document, I'll say that one of the big tics in Wildbow's writing that bugs me a bit is that he seems to love the word copacetic. It's not terrible, but it started to bug me as it got to the later chapters and I began to think 'Someone might want to show him a thesaurus.' He also really likes the term "headspace", and uses 'anyways' instead of 'anyway', which really bugs me.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:19
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I think I'll voice the dissenting opinion and say I'm glad he cut out the ward stuff. I was ready to get started on the bigger picture stuff with Endbringers and Jack.
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Sep 4, 2013 14:30
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NecroMonster posted:Try this one on for size. Leviathan's attack may have saved more people than it killed thanks to evacuations and the breaking of a LOT of the glass in town. With what we now know about the Endbringers, and specifically Simurgh "their" possible motivations have gotten really loving hard to pinpoint. Not really. S9 only targeted the city because they were reeling from Behemoth's attack.
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Sep 25, 2013 04:23
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Algid posted:And this caused a chain of events that eventually lead Jack to Scion and had him start murdering everyone years ahead of schedule, which according to Cauldron is the best case scenario for actually winning. drat. I wonder if the Simurgh just does all the planning.
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Sep 25, 2013 04:43
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Did we ever actually find out what Dragon's tinker knack is? Taylor made a lot of guesses, but I don't think she ever figured it out.
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Nov 12, 2013 20:30
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Saith posted:Semi-related to the thread, but some of my friends want me to GM a game for them set in the Worm-verse at some point. I'm kind of at a loss as to what system I could use, though. Any thoughts? My group has actually been doing the same thing. We've used FATE, and it's worked out so far. It's a good system for having wildly varying power levels between characters, while keeping everyone relevant.
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Jan 19, 2014 19:00
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Maggie mentioned books about superheroes. I choose to believe this means there's a book series in Pactverse that take place in Wormverse.
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Feb 12, 2014 15:19
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Affi posted:I'm going back in to research what the Company said and what was written about Black Lambs Blood. It would be very very fitting if Grandma Rose actually wrote that and purposely twisted words to make it seem like it was a completely different person who wrote it. Huh. I'm kinda intrigued by the idea of just having a non-practitioner tell lies for you. Telling someone to say something untrue isn't actually lying. I suppose this make it hard to trust nonpractitioner allies of other practitioners.
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Apr 5, 2014 21:57
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Elyv posted:Blake brought it up, if Duncan can't stop him from escaping then he inadvertently lied. In fact, he broke an oath, which is apparently the worst kind of lying.
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Apr 15, 2014 17:58
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Mr. Wednesday posted:The more cartoonishly evil the Crown/Academy is shown to be, the less cool I am with the protagonists doing their dirty work. I actually feel the opposite. It's so interesting to follow protagonists who work for a pretty evil organization, but are just too young and immature to care about anything beyond their own goals and problems.
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Jun 16, 2015 23:53
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Drashin posted:Does anyone have any good non Wildbow web serials to recommend? Preferably something that is less dark and less serious than Wildbow's works. Look here: http://qntm.org/fiction Fine Structure and Ra were web serials that are now finished.. The other short stories there are pretty good, too. Fine Structure is kinda hard to describe. Maybe someone else can try. Ra is about modern day with functional magic. In fact, it's so functional, you need university training to use it, and it basically a combination of physics and computer science.
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Jul 19, 2015 01:31
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Nope, I'm staying in denial. Taylor lived happily ever after.
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Jul 30, 2015 12:14
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NecroMonster posted:It's true. Taylor was the win condition Contessa was always working towards without ever being aware of it. Her actions led to Eidolon, which led to Simurgh and and Alexandria, which led to basically every single thing Taylor experienced. The irony here is of course that the larger portion of all of the time and effort that went into the entire "plan" was probably wasted because the plan emphasized "safety" and "ease" over simply working, because that's how Contessa's power works as well as being a continual theme of people's failings in the story. That and selfishness. Contessa's power doesn't work that way. She has to ask it for what she wants to achieve. She's not subconsciously compelled to do anything.
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Oct 2, 2015 02:24
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I don't know if he has writer's block or what, but it seems like only half the updates are actually story. The other half are random back story tid bits. At this point, though, the story is dragging on and I'm generally more interested in the backstory updates. Basically, the world building is really interesting, but the actual story isn't very interesting. It's not really living up to the start of the story which seemed to promise a lot more than what's happening now.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:22
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DarkCrawler posted:Unsong is great. The dialogue can be insanely cringey at times but the worldbuilding is excellent and it's about 85% worldbuilding which is good. That's the weird thing. 85% worldbuilding certainly means the world is well developed and very interesting, but it means the plot progresses at a snail's pace, and no individual character gets that much development. It kinda feels more like a collection of microstories; some of which feed into a vague central plot.
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Feb 28, 2017 02:48
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Affi posted:Having a hard time enjoying Ra. Is the convulted technomagicbabble part of why People like it? Possibly? I liked it . If you know some of the engineering roots it hints a lot at how magic works, which is fun and intriguing. It also does a good job of selling the idea that magic is an extremely well understood field of engineering, quite apart from more standard stories would portray. Not gonna blame you if it puts you off, though.
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Apr 5, 2017 22:45
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Speaking of practical magic, does anyone have any more good examples of it? I'm craving more of it.
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Apr 6, 2017 22:59
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Nettle Soup posted:8: A Practical Guide to Evil - It's ok, I don't like what it's doing with chapter 16, which is turning suddenly into an enders game type "you're controlling troops now!" scenario, but without any build up, training or emotional investment to actually make that work. I'll probably give it another go, later. So, that kinda bothered me too at first (it feels like it's really coming out of nowhere and could have probably been better executed), but (spoilers for stuff after this point up to the end of book 1 or so) It turns out this is basically where her legion comes from when she gets one, and by the time they're our of the wargames, the characters and relationships are better developed and it works well.
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Apr 17, 2017 02:58
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Ytlaya posted:I'm finally catching up on Twig after having last stopped around Arc 10, and it is very uncomfortable to read because everything just keeps going to poo poo in various ways. Is he still doing that? That's what made me stop reading Pact. It's just exhausting to read about things going wrong over and over again. You need a victory sometimes and some room to breath. I don't know how bad it is in Twig, but in Pact I remember the level of intensity just staying high for basically the second half of the story. As for constant escalation... I don't actually consider that a flaw. It's certainly something the I know some people don't like, but I actually like how Worm turned out. I find escalation to be fun, and I think it works fine as long as you know where you're ending up. (The story needs to end sometime if you're escalating, because you really can't go back down.,) But, yeah, I think it's a preference thing.
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May 15, 2017 01:59
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The Shortest Path posted:That's primarily why I think The Gods are Bastards is overall a much better work than Worm, even if I think Wildbow is a slightly better writer than Webb. The "everything is bad, poo poo all over the protagonists, happy endings don't exist" trend that's been going for a while in fiction needs to die an awful death; Optimism is much more enjoyable to read. Yup. This is exactly why I just can't get into Game of Thrones.
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May 15, 2017 22:46
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Sampatrick posted:Worm had plenty of happy moments in it, though. The victory over the Slaughterhouse, her getting together with Brian, the actual ending to it, taking out the ABB, killing Coil, etc. The idea that Worm is some grimdark work where everything was always miserable doesn't really reflect the actual text. There was a cost attached to most of her victories but that doesn't invalidate that they were victories. Personally, I wasn't talking about Worm. Worm mostly worked. Pact was the problem. Also, I don't really mean "happy" moments as much as "peaceful moments". Things don't need to be optimistic, you just need time to breath. On a basic level, you get tense while reading a story. You can't just keep up that intensity for 20 chapters. It's emotionally exhausting. You need a break where the threat relents a bit, and things are going better at least relatively speaking. Otherwise the emotional shocks start to dull.
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May 17, 2017 01:54
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Sampatrick posted:The most recent update to Practical Guide to Evil is really bad Why? It seemed on par to me.
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May 22, 2017 01:43
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Plorkyeran posted:Worm has a few of those words ("copacetic" is the other really noticeable one) where initially one character uses it and then the other people they talk to start using it too. It's sort of a neat idea as that's something that happens all the time but generally doesn't show up in fiction, but I think Worm also ended up showing why it doesn't happen in fiction (it got annoying to read). None of those words bothered me nearly as much as "anyways".
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May 31, 2017 22:58
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blastron posted: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. I'll be the dissenting opinion here. I really like the sci fi explanation behind it. I guess it's a just a personal preference because I tend to really enjoy very explained magic.
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Jul 5, 2017 02:48
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If you don't enjoy puns, I don't even know why you're reading UNSONG.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:50
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