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Saturday's Twig was great.  For certain Wildbowy values of great.
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Sep 4, 2017 02:48
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bewilderment posted:Unsong is so goddamn dense with religion/Kabbalah/programming jokes early on, it's great. I just started it recently but it's pretty refreshing after me mostly having gone through all the gloom of wildbow's stuff. Wait till Uriel figures out knock knock jokes.
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Sep 10, 2017 01:59
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Autonomous Monster posted:
Who, dragons?  Edit: man totally missed a chance to say the bourgeoisie
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Sep 15, 2017 23:38
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Katreus posted:Prac Guide update. I read this and went "huh, sounds fun, I should catch up", and still didn't see the end of the chapter coming.  This remains a solidly entertaining YA ish novel with some interesting thoughts on narrative roles, and Thief is one of the more mostly-mindlessly entertaining bits. I've loved her since at LEAST the revelation that she could steal ships, stick them in her belt pouches, and pull them out for later abuse.
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Sep 16, 2017 00:46
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avoraciopoctules posted:I'm rather enjoying the latest villainous interlude in Practical Guide to Evil. I really should have seen that twist coming, but either way Anaxares has been one of my favorite characters. I loving love the Fantasy Democratic Communists in general and their POV character in particular. Even before this chapter. Also the Tyrant does a good job of synopsizing why the Bard may be the worst and most terrifying monster in the story.
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Sep 25, 2017 22:16
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There's really a motif in Wildbow's works in writing from the perspective of people who would absolutely be villains in other stories. Blake is a goddamn diabolist and Sy is kind of a bastard at the best of times.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:42
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Silver2195 posted:I didn't read that far into Pact, but from what I remember, Blake was a fairly conventional good guy who was a "diabolist" only by chance. I guess you could say he's morally in the wrong for not just letting his enemies kill him early on because of the potential threat he posed just by existing, but that's a very harsh standard to hold someone to. (Maggie, on the other hand, was pretty dark. Is she really supposed to be a YA novel protagonist?) Blake spirals into systematically loving everything up and causing enormous amounts of chaos for the perfectly understandable reason of "would rather not die because his ancestors were fuckers". A lot of the other players aren't particularly nice people either, and Blake's good intentions work pretty okay in the long run in a lot of cases, but if the story were written from a number of the other perspectives (see Alistair!) he'd be pretty alarming for an awful lot of it.
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Sep 27, 2017 20:44
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Nettle Soup posted:Twig is into epilogues. I gotta say, that was a good point to end the main story at and I'm looking forward to every epilogue chapter.
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Oct 8, 2017 02:26
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Silver2195 posted:I assume the main villain will be Sleeper. This is plausible. And also enables some terribly interesting scenarios.
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Oct 9, 2017 01:45
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builds character posted:It doesn’t have to be the end of all the worlds. Twig and pact both managed to scale that back a bit. Pact arguably more than Twig.
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Oct 9, 2017 02:40
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Silynt posted:Excellent point about the Legion motto, I totally forgot about that. That makes perfect sense. After pondering the Calamity chapters, I actually sort of like the way the author did it. We don't actually need to see everything, and the aspect trigger is a perfectly fun climax.
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Oct 10, 2017 01:25
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Double posting to ask, re Practice Guide when does Malicia ask Catherine to kill Black? I sort of remember reading it but not specifically when it was She doesn't.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:56
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builds character posted:Ya, totally agree that nothing this dude has written would suggest trauma and suffering of characters drive the story.  When Blake is the least explicitly traumatized major protagonist in the lineup...
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Dec 3, 2017 06:05
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NecroMonster posted:There was a bunch of poo poo technically worse in Worm. The big difference here I think, is the lack of agency, the lack of someone or something to lay the blame at the feet of. There's someone to lay the blame on. Taylor murdered Zion, therefore causing the malfunctions.  although this does remind me of my personal most "well, guess I have to be a villain" superperson in Worm there is effectively no constructive use of Breed's powers, the best he can possibly do is produce parasites in surplus corpses and use them to kill serious threats in a horrible but not particularly tactically useful way the ethical option for him would be to become an accountant or something and maybe apply to desecrate a corpse for some self-defense tools Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Dec 22, 2017 |
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Dec 22, 2017 01:48
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Cicero posted:Yeah Zorian was annoying in early Mother of Learning, but I started reading Wandering Inn (at 1.12 R right now) and wow Ryoka is a far more unlikeable jackass. I don't understand the point of writing a main character who's such an rear end in a top hat. And not, like a glorious bastard or funny rear end in a top hat or something like that, she just loving sucks. Is it some kind of Mary Sue wish fulfillment thing where she gets to be successful and surrounded by friends and praised even though she's a huge douche to everyone around her? And honestly the main character seems only marginally better for this, but at least Erin seems like she's trying to be a decent person. I hope this poo poo gets better over time. both of those things do improve substantially.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:11
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:Yo the chapter of pracguide where you find out that Blacks real motivation is just pure fuckin spitefulness and a desire to defy the narrative laws that govern reality and tell fate to huff a dick is the craziest loving thing Jesus Christ my favorite pracguide bits are the ones around the Democratic Communist Diplomat, but Black is arguably more important to the narrative*
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Feb 4, 2018 06:02
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Insurrectionist posted:Despite all the rampant speculation on secret bad guys, 'oh it looked like they were really shady but actually they're mostly just pathetic' is basically the conclusion for both Rain and Kenzie at this point (except she's still shady as gently caress too). So I'm guessing the same will be true for the rest of the team too. Replace shady with megalomaniacal in the case of Ashley and team mom in the case of Sveta. rain might actually have been less pathetic before the post-trigger stuff messed him up and, ironically, let him be a better person kenzie's great though
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Feb 14, 2018 20:59
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Okay the Fallen manage to be even creepier than I thought.  also Kenzie intentionally deep-sixed somebody? that's nice
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Feb 22, 2018 23:05
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21 Muns posted:I thought she was the only one who hadn't? oh darn, totally misread i guess
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Feb 24, 2018 04:43
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Error 404 posted:Or how loving perfect Chris' mad anxiety form is? Now we know why Tristan went "goddammit man, really?"
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Mar 6, 2018 00:49
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Autonomous Monster posted:I'm more amused by the Bard running face first into anti-protagonism and just failing to wrap her brain around it. Anaxares is hands down my favorite character and I love Bellerophon's nutso communist democracy. I also enjoy that they're nominally Evil because, well, duh, Any Law Not Created By A Vote Of The People Is An Imposition By Tyrants, including the laws of Creation.
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Mar 8, 2018 02:06
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Katreus posted:Epilogue Prac Guide. I got the impression that the last bit was about people like her in their narrative-breakery making a blip on the Magic Radar, but you might very well be right.
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Mar 8, 2018 02:13
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Looks like Mama Mathers has some concerns about this whole thing.
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Mar 22, 2018 16:02
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The Shortest Path posted:She's so desperate for positive human interaction at that point in her life that she doesn't even want to think about being found out, because that would mean losing all her friends. It's also why she keeps lying to herself about eventually turning them in but keeps finding excuses to push that out. i describe at least the first part of Worm as a really good allegory for why people join gangs
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Jun 6, 2018 00:10
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PetraCore posted:Taylor is a loving great unreliable narrator and I'm glad that Wildbow seems to like unreliable narrators as much as I do. Sy is really good for that too, although he's got literal brain damage as an excuse for at least part of Twig. Victoria is the first of his protagonists that could not super easily be the villain of another story, and if and when Team Therapy goes off the rails I expect her to join the ranks. Worm: actual supervillain, with nominally good intentions Pact: scion-of-diabolists willing to use various horrible measures (dislikes using actual diabolism, but he deployed the Imp of Beasts once and a half and had the Barber and the books in his back pocket; also, Rose is quite villainous for similarly justifiable reasons) Twig: duh
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Jun 6, 2018 05:56
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I like all of the members of Team Therapy, but it's pretty boring to post that. well, I like them as characters, i hope i'd have the sense to abruptly go somewhere else in person
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Jun 12, 2018 00:30
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SerSpook posted:PracGuide: And here's the Grey Pilgrim to gently caress up peace negotiations. anaxares is the best character and bellerophon is the best polity imo the scene where he demands his own execution for treason is even better than him telling off the Bard
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Jun 14, 2018 01:27
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navyjack posted:I think she’s the “marked card” for the Gods Above in the great game. Yeah - the Tyrant describes her pretty well in the Best Anaxares Chapter. So does Anaxares in the second best, if with more flowery language and less specifics. Her job is to make sure the cycle of (Good-skewed) stories keeps on cycling. Her CURRENT priority is to hammer down Praes in general and Black in particular, because they're the nail sticking up at the moment.
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Jun 17, 2018 09:29
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The Shortest Path posted:I had some fairly awful poo poo happen to me and ended up laid up in the hospital for several days, so I used that as an excuse to binge a bunch of Practical Guide. I'm several chapters into book 3 and I'm totally in love with it. Black and Cat's strategy of cheating with both hands and then cheating some more is wonderful. Anaxares and all the horrifying implications of his situation is also wonderful. I've really been missing out. anaxares for world overlord i also love that the populist communists are extremely solidly in the Evil basket, they insist on the Will Of The People over the divine law
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Jun 19, 2018 02:32
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Ytlaya posted:I'm not sure if it really makes sense to describe them as communists or even fully populists; it seems more like those people who control whether the stones explode you are effectively in control, even if they think they're reflecting the will of the people or whatever (and the will of people is only accepted if it involves people in government showing zero personal initiative). I guess it wouldn't really makes sense in the context of the story if an actual good/reasonable country existed (and I doubt the gods would allow such a thing anyways). Though I don't really know what sort of society the weird all-powerful sci-fi gnomes have. I really hope that comes up again, but it'd be weird to have it as just this one-off mention near the beginning of the series. I theorize that the super-gnomes are a Good polity that have devised a particularly direct mechanism of communication - if they haven't, or aren't, they've transcended the central conflict in Creation, which is... weird. Their work to maintain a certain level of stasis overwhelmingly feels like an in-universe Good proposition. For your other concerns, keep reading, I'd love to engage with you on the topic but can't. may bellerophon, queen of cities and first among the league, reign forever edit: quote:“I am a mere vessel for the will of the people,” he babbled hurriedly, “unfit to pass judgement on my own. Long Live The Republic, Peerless Jewel Of Freedom.” Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Jun 19, 2018 |
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Jun 19, 2018 02:48
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this broken hill posted:reprehensible bullshit and trash yeah, but do you have any input that isn't praise?
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Jun 20, 2018 05:29
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Uldor posted:Prac Guide black/championchat: someone noted in the comments that Praes and Black are pretty into necromancy, Captain had an Aspect involving obeying orders, and he's got a vengeance narrative going Champion might not be expecting an attack by her own trophy cloak edit also even with the "killed Captain while she was in monster form" thing, desecrating your opponent's corpse for apparel is... iffy, from a Goodness standpoint
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Jun 23, 2018 00:47
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builds character posted:Ward - kenzie could easily make a camera that sees the wretch, couldn’t she? Victoria is a huge dork and I love her new cape name.
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Jun 25, 2018 01:36
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, I can't quite get a handle on her schtick. Like, attachment disorder aside a lot of her internal monologue reads like high-functioning extroverted sociopathy to me; framing things as managing/controlling Victoria, analyzing everything she does relative to how it'll elicit the desired response, and either noticing or having very few emotional reactions during the whole thing. But she apparently still has emotions and a need to socialize beyond what's required to fulfill her material needs and wants. Either way, I know it's not in keeping with the second chances schtick but I genuinely don't think it's responsible to keep her on the team; Vicky has no way of knowing this, but based on her own internal monologue I'm guessing they're never going to do better than Kenzie doing her own thing in a direction she thinks they'll find useful, and that is potentially really dangerous in an investigative/combat setting. some flavors of sociopath have both recognizable emotions and a need to socialize that said i don't think she's a sociopath
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Jun 26, 2018 20:10
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Plorkyeran posted:There was a moment in reading Ward 7.x where I went "oh no good things are happening please make the good things stop before everything goes horribly wrong", and then I knew that Wildbow had beaten me. I know, right?
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Jun 28, 2018 01:01
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SerSpook posted:The interludes in book 4 are probably the best part of it so far. counterpoint: most (none? can't remember when bardchat happened) of them don't involve anaxares and the Glorious Republic Of Bellerophon
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Jun 28, 2018 01:05
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The Shortest Path posted:Oh god yeah it's my favorite chapter. Mine too. All the Anaxares chapters are great but that's the best.quote:
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Jun 30, 2018 23:28
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PetraCore posted:That said, that also gives me hope that Ward will be able to handle getting widespread and rowdy without ending in interdimensional worm battles or the falling of the world into hell or however Pact ended. Like, we already know there's a ton of other settlements that split off from Earth Bet. Earth Gimel isn't actually the last bastion of Earth Bet or anything. pact's world-level implications were actually pretty limited the absolute tippy-top threat was a modest chunk of Canada potentially getting wiped by the Barber (and the actual total damage was considerably smaller) the constant escalation and excessive action was a problem, but it had the lowest macro-scale stakes of any of the stories by a ridiculous margin
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Jul 2, 2018 22:13
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tithin posted:Theory: she's not necessarily anti-dead-king in the sense of being designed to wreck him, but she might be anti-dead-king in that the level of firepower Trismegistus achieved gave the Heavens the opportunity to empower a similarly mighty, ultimately considerably nastier tool of their own Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jul 2, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 22:16
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after the vague history tidbit I'm wondering if all three of Wildbow's worlds had the British Empire never fall in somewhat different ways
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Jul 4, 2018 21:14
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