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Was it ever confirmed whether or not the Endbringers were created as a side-effect of Eidolon's power or not? I'm going through the end of the story on my second re-read and that bit is still really vague to me.
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Sep 30, 2015 19:41
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Piell posted:They weren't created as part of his power, they were a standard part of Eden/Scion's strategy for causing conflict. Eidolon just activated them subconsciously. That makes a bit more sense to me. Is this one of those things Wildbow talked about on Reddit or was it subtle linereading that I completely failed to get after three reads? It also makes my reading of the Simurgh probably very inaccurate, in thinking that every event in the story was completely engineered by it to set up Taylor with the exact resources, personal ability, and mindset she would need to defeat Zion, with the other Endbringers, Echidna, the S9, etc. all being set up in such a way that she would develop properly to think in terms that would prepare her for that fight. Reading too heavily into it? Fajita Queen fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 23:23
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Right, she has asked her power to achieve an endgame where Zion's defeat is possible, and it told her what steps to take to ensure it. She doesn't need to know what each consequence of those steps looks like, and once the Simurgh is influencing things all the choice is out of her hands anyways.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:24
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Oh yeah, what's the deal with Clockblocker? He was said to have died during the Behemoth fight and then magically showed up again for the Slaughterhouse Nine clone thing, without even a mention of what happened to him.
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Oct 3, 2015 03:53
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Dragon being shut out puts more pressure on Taylor and forces her into the position where she kills Zion. Just like literally every other event that happens in the entire story.
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Dec 6, 2015 16:17
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Merry loving Christmas, everybody! Did wildbow do something crazy or is this about the most recent chapter
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Dec 24, 2015 18:31
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I think Taylor being a boring protagonist actually helped a lot of parts of the story, by being an observational window to everything else going on and all of those actually interesting characters. If she were exciting, the rest would stand out less and the story as a whole would feel more cluttered, imo.
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Jul 3, 2016 01:22
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Tattletale really quickly went from a great character to an exposition device and it sucked, yeah.
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Jul 3, 2016 01:41
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Pavlov posted:Clockblocker still holds the award for worlds best superhero name.  He was one of my favorite characters in general, up there with Yamada and Glenn.
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Jul 6, 2016 15:10
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Worm will never, ever work in a visual medium because a major part of its presentation is that you're getting things from the perspective of a single person with an enormous amount of sensory input from the bugs, and how that perspective gradually changes over the course of the story. There is no possible way to quantify that in a show/movie without sacrificing all of the reasons to want to watch something in the first place. Text can describe the effect of Taylor's power to someone incapable of themselves processing sensory information from a multitude of angles and places, audio+video would just overwhelm and confuse anyone trying to get anything meaningful out of it. Now if you wanted a show that's just a third person perspective of the events in Worm, that could potentially be something interesting, but at that point it's not Worm at all.
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Jul 30, 2016 15:33
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quote:People discovered the first few Names of God through deep understanding of Torah, through silent prayer and meditation, or even through direct revelation from angels. But American capitalism took one look at prophetic inspiration and decided it lacked a certain ability to be forced upon an army of low-paid interchangeable drones. Thus the modern method: hire people at minimum wage to chant all the words that might be Names of God, and see whether one of them starts glowing with holy light or summoning an angelic host to do their bidding. If so, copyright the Name and make a fortune. Where the gently caress has this been all my life?
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Aug 14, 2016 21:17
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Alright so after reading the first volume of UNSONG, it feels very similar to Douglas Adams' books. Not a whole lot of cohesive linear narrative, tons of fluff and seemingly meaningless sidestories that build up to a punchline, the same kind of humor. I really, really like it. Especially Uriel, what a great character.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:58
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Dikkfor posted:On the plus side, he's finally figured out Knock-Knock jokes. gently caress
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Aug 24, 2016 05:15
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I don't think he'd necessarily survive a shot to the head without his power active, depending on how exactly his power works, but once it kicks in and gives him a bit of a boost I doubt conventional arms are gonna do anything to him.
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Aug 26, 2016 18:41
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Pavlov posted:Yeah that sounds like a classic case of midi-chlorians right there. This is my (and I imagine many others') biggest issue with Worm, really.
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Aug 31, 2016 21:56
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Megazver posted:Hitherby is lovely. I think it could probably use an introduction by a third party that, like, explains in plain terms what to expect and how to enjoy it, like all those classic novels get. Perfectly Defensive Samurai is great, thanks!
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Sep 27, 2016 14:24
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Jackard posted:I dropped Worm after the time skip where the expanding scope had the author spamming kaiju and cloned villains and other dumb poo poo Yeah there's a massive drop in quality around then, it kinda sucks for a while. Pretty much everything after the behemoth fight is just increasing levels of "why is this happening"
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Oct 5, 2016 02:15
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The Gods are Bastards is really, really good so far, I'm mostly done with the first book. Tellwyrn had me at "catapult". The worldbuilding is better than pretty much anything I've read since my first go at Worm. Thanks for the recommendation!
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Nov 18, 2016 16:29
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Just finished volume one. What a loving ride. A few moments have had me close to tears, including several of the scenes with Sweet and the sisters (my favorite characters) and most of the v1 epilogues. Quite a few more have had me out of my seat laughing or silently screaming at things. I'm in deep, and apparently this isn't even a quarter of the way through, so I'm pretty drat happy to have found it.
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Nov 22, 2016 06:55
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I do. Better than Pact for sure. It manages to handle the fundamental schlock of a very obvious D&D setting quite well. Yeah this is a lot of what does it for me. I played a lot of D&D in my nerd formative years, so it hits many many buttons. Tellwyrn and Sweet and Prin being such forces of personality and general mayhem add so much to that, too. I think I'm finally gonna replace this lovely D&D redtext av with some TGaB fanart if I can find any.
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Nov 24, 2016 15:45
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Autonomous Monster posted:I'd like to state for the record that The Gods are Bastards' latest round of technobabble is wearing on my last nerve. Yeah it's really disappointing. The story has been great for so long but it's been veering off into "what the gently caress are you even doing author" territory for a bit now. The absolute worst thing in any sci-fi or pseudo-sci-fi is when the writer(s) try to come up with plausible sounding explanations for future (magi)technology that isn't grounded in any current science and it just comes off as bullshit. Plus this story has been like 95% about the characters and character development and their interactions with each other, I don't give a rats rear end about this stuff.
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Jan 27, 2017 18:11
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Lamquin posted:I recently binged through on TGaB and caught up just in time for the current arc to start. I liked the Trissiny arc before it and the series was at its best when it had the whole Western + Magic frontier feel to it. Yeah... Everything up until the point where it started going crazy is great. One of my favorite things I've read in a very long time, and I too liked the Trissiny / Prin arc before this one. Those two and Tellwyrn are my favorite characters, though the others are all also great.
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Feb 4, 2017 14:06
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Unsong is an alternate history about the universe breaking when NASA tries to go to the moon. Lots and lots of interesting extrapolations of Jewish mythology, trolling by Satan, the Archangel Uriel having no idea how to interact with humans and failing at it in hilarious fashion, and Richard goddamn Nixon. The names of God gain power when spoken and capitalism does its best to discover them all in as financially efficient a method as possible. A little girl teaches an archangel how to tell knock knock jokes. It's a good time. It's very strange, but parts of it are goddamn brilliant and the out-of-nowhere punchlines that you realize the entire chapter has been building up to are loving hilarious. It has a similar structure and feel to Douglas Adams' books, if you've read Hitchhiker's Guide or any of the rest. Fajita Queen fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Feb 20, 2017 |
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Feb 20, 2017 07:04
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Milky Moor posted:John Dies at the End is one of the few works I can remember going from Net to print and achieving some degree of success in the process 
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Mar 8, 2017 16:09
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It's not exactly efficient, but you can copy the text of a chapter into a text editor, save it as a .doc file, and use a free epub converter like https://epub-maker.en.softonic.com/ To save on time you can ctrl+A to select all text on the page, shift+click immediately after the end of the chapter to cut off all the comments and such, then paste it and select all the top links to delete. I'm trying it out now and it takes 10-15 seconds per chapter, probably less as you'd get faster at it. It's probably even faster if you just dump it all into one file instead of making a separate one for each chapter like I'm trying.
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Mar 22, 2017 15:16
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In 12-42 of TGaB, the lightsaber massacre was goddamn gut-wrenching. For all that I'm not liking the Sci-Fi twist to the story, the author is really effective at writing it.
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Apr 16, 2017 16:04
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Unsong alternates between being really loving funny (anything with Nixon, Uriel, etc.) and being balls deep in scripture references. The author does a pretty good job of explaining the latter in a way that makes sense even if you don't know what he's talking about, but it's still really offputting sometimes. Definitely worth reading for the funny parts though, it's had me in tears more than once.
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Apr 17, 2017 03:01
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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.
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May 15, 2017 04:49
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To be fair to ASoIaF, it was what pretty much started that phase and can't be blamed for other works also doing it. I guess.
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May 16, 2017 00:06
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I liked the Travelers, but their side book dragged on way too long. The whole thing could have been condensed into a single chapter, we didn't need the full narration.
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May 23, 2017 14:00
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The whole arc feels rushed, is the biggest problem imo.
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May 24, 2017 12:11
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I'm pretty sure the actual answer to that was "Coil is really really smart and used his power to trick Tattletale's" despite nobody having any clue whatsoever how that would be possible, including Wildbow. It's one of those things where it becomes obvious the author is trying to write someone significantly more intelligent than themselves and having to handwave some bits of their knowledge/actions because they can't come up with something sufficiently plausible.
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May 25, 2017 04:43
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I've been binging The Wandering Inn for the past ~week, it's really good. It mostly follows a girl who gets sucked into a fantasy world and becomes an innkeeper, with some side character perspectives to add more depth to the world. Lots and lots of adorable, heartwarming moments mixed with the occasional bit of bleak despair and tragedy. It's really good, and it updates pretty frequently too.
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Jun 8, 2017 05:13
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Plorkyeran posted:Worm is a story of Taylor making terrible decisions and loving up at every turn. Her victory at the end wasn't the culmination of everything she'd done up to that point, and in fact was sort of the opposite. The army she amassed as Khepri was useless, and nothing she did before that was important for defeating Scion other than by coincidence. It's worse than that though, because many of her terrible decisions were directly or indirectly influenced by Contessa and the Simurgh and to some extent Dinah, because they contributed to the only possible series of events where humanity defeated Scion. So looking at the big picture, they weren't bad decisions and were in fact the only possible good decisions that could be made. Which is really, really lovely.
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Jun 9, 2017 22:22
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That was the entire point of Contessa as a character. Which Wildbow has admitted was really dumb and intends to change some of it on the eventual rewrite/edit, to be fair, but still.
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Jun 9, 2017 23:04
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Plorkyeran posted:Contessa explicitly cannot accurately model Scion. Even if her path was "how do I defeat Scion while minimizing the damage to humanity" (and it wasn't), that still wouldn't be proof that how things happened was the best that things could have gone or that there weren't alternatives that were almost as good. Right but Simurgh could, and the two of them together were responsible for pretty much everything that happened in the entire story, even a lot of the smaller details. If anything changed, the end result would not have occurred.
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Jun 10, 2017 00:35
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Plorkyeran posted:"The Simurgh directed every little detail of the entire story with the goal of killing Scion" is definitely not a thing conclusively stated in the story, and even if it was it still wouldn't be not evidence that Scion could not have been defeated in any other way. The ending absolutely is a culmination of the events leading up to it. Taylor being the exact person she is with her power developed to the state it's at and also having developed an understanding of what's necessary to stop Scion from fighting, and all of the resources necessary to kill Scion being present and in the condition to destroy him, in addition to a whole bunch of other influences on the situation... yeah. Most of the events of the story led to that. Cauldron's plan to save the world was the total opposite of a failure - it worked. They just had a bunch of incorrect assumptions about why it would work, because Contessa's power doesn't tell them that. The fact that this is not presented well through the text is a pretty huge problem, but it is what it is. It's a big contributor to why I hate the last ~third of the story so much. Fajita Queen fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Jun 10, 2017 |
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Jun 10, 2017 02:15
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Milky Moor posted:Then he has no conception of numbers, of what it means to say there's a galaxy's worth of matter compressed into a giant monster. Sure but like, The Flash and probably also Superman can unmake reality by going fast enough to break time and other such nonsense, if they decided not to hold back. A couple of Marvel heroes are similarly bullshit. Comic books are really dumb sometimes.
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Jun 10, 2017 16:15
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Milky Moor posted:Which Wordpress theme is this? Isn't it the same one Worm used? I believe so, yes. Megazver posted:I like this. The author is on the cusp of being able to quit her job with the Patreon money, which is cool. I wish I had the disposable income to pay these web serial authors more. There's like a dozen Patreons I want to be able to throw my wallet at. I'll have to check out MoL too, I've heard good things.
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Jun 19, 2017 17:07
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Velius posted:It's kind of striking how enormous the quality variance is in Top Web Fiction. You have readable and enjoyable stuff like Unsong and Wandering Inn, along with the usual Wildbow projects. Then you have stuff about Mimics gaining D&D levels with random sex scenes. It doesn't seem like there would be overlap between readers. Oh god I started reading that. Everybody Loves Large Chests, right? It seemed like an interesting premise with the mimic being the main character until suddenly graphic vore and lots of awful sexism.
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Jun 23, 2017 19:59
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