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Fine Structure is also dope and if you think otherwise you're a dope
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Aug 24, 2017 16:32
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Newest Ward was great, newest Practical Guide to Evil has had the same problem that has plagued all the recent chapters; it's full of terrible spelling and grammar errors and needed to be very thoroughly edited.
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Jan 29, 2018 23:49
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Milky Moor posted:Well, not to go back to the old argument but... Every time you make a comment that's criticizing Worm it reads like you're trying to make your own web serial look better in comparison and makes me have less of a desire to read Not All Heroes. There's a reason why artists generally do not publicly criticize other artists works.
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Feb 23, 2018 23:42
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Milky Moor posted:Weird thoughts, my friend. It's perfectly reasonable to offer critique on other works. If you think my criticisms of Worm have only started up as some kind of way to boost myself down while tearing down Wildbow, then you're projecting hard (and ignorant of my posting history). My criticisms of Worm have existed long before NAH was even a single thought. Worm is a first draft, NAH is a first draft, just about every web serial is a first draft -- if you think they can't be criticised, then that's just bizarre. Criticizing in the abstract or in the past tense is fine. You are writing a competing work of fiction now; when you critique Worm in the present tense, it reads as you trying to make your competition look like less rather than trying to make your own work look like more. It has little to do with your actual intentions - your past history of recommending Worm or engaging with the fandom are pretty much irrelevant. The text, as written, read in the present day, reads as though it has an ulterior motive even when that motive isn't really there. Let me be clear; I don't think that you actually have that kind of ulterior motive. I just think it's kinda lovely for one author to criticize another author when those two authors are competing in the same market.
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Feb 24, 2018 00:47
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Milky Moor posted:There's where we disagree on a fundamental point. I don't believe web serials compete in the cutthroat manner you seem to believe they do, and I don't see NAH as a competitor to Worm any more than Wandering Inn, ELLC, or any of the dozens of other serials as they are practically different genres with wildly different tonal schemes, thematics and so on. NAH isn't, say, Specimens, where I think that direct competition argument could be made somewhat coherently (oh, God, first Worm and now Specimens, I'm some kind of monster...) You're mischaracterizing my entire statement. I'm not saying you compete with Worm specifically, I'm saying you literally compete in the web serial market by having a patreon and a paypal link prominently displayed on your page. I'm also not saying you can only read one or the other; just like you can buy both Game of Thrones and Midnight Tides, you can also support both Worm/Ward and Not All Heroes. It would be absurd, however, to suggest that Game of Thrones and Midnight Tides don't compete. I'm sorry, but it is my opinion that it's kinda lovely for a competitor in a market to criticize another work in that market publicly.
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Feb 24, 2018 02:20
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How good is The Gods Are Bastards? Is it worth getting into or nah?
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Feb 27, 2018 22:52
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Omi no Kami posted:I think en media res might be a bit too aggressive, especially since flashbacks and back-and-forth can be really tough to manage well, but I definitely wouldn't have minded a little more streamlining early on. Like, Victoria's weird gig as a guidance counselor slash paramilitary murder squid was a decent introduction to the city, but we spent a fairly big chunk of the opening with that plot and then just kinda abandoned it once she got fired. It seems like that's something that could've been accomplished in 2-3 chapters (establish Vicky, establish job that she likes, show her doing job that she likes, show her getting fired and feeling bad) instead of an entire arc. I mean, are there any easy cuts from that arc? It introduced Rain's trigger buddies, established the tone, and showed off some bits about the city. It seemed like pretty clear setup for issues down the line with regards to normal people and parahumans having really lovely relationships. I think that shaving off chapters from the opening would have ended up with a much more rushed introduction which seems like it would contradict with the whole taking things slow thing that we've got going on right now.
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Feb 28, 2018 03:58
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Probably the worst thing about Ward is that we're on Arc 5 and it feels like literally nothing has happened. It's all lampshades for future stuff but so far there has been essentially no payoff. Wildbow is maybe not at his best when he's writing these contemplative story arcs where his characters are, for the most part, not doing anything.
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Feb 28, 2018 05:19
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It does in fact update on Fridays and we will probably see another dip in quality given that's exactly what happened when he switched to double updates.
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Mar 3, 2018 18:42
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Omi no Kami posted:Oh yeah, I honestly wasn't expecting anything different, but I was kinda hoping for it. Twig did a surprisingly good job of not becoming a runaway conspiracy/stakes-raising fest, and I suppose by his own admission he wanted to specifically try writing a story that didn't rely on constant escalation, and I was really hoping Ward would be closer to Twig than Worm in that regard. I don't think that was a realistic expectation, but a genuinely street-level "Bunch of jerkish kids with issues" story that never turned into interdimensional alien worm battles would've really made my day. I feel like the plot for this kind of a story would run out of steam, honestly. You've gotta raise the stakes at some point, right? It doesn't need to be crazy, but it gets repetitive to repeat street level stuff for an extended period of time. I think what Wildbow really needs to do is not write such absurdly long web serials. Shorter, more tightly focused stories would work very well with how Wildbow likes to construct his plots. Imagine if Wildbow was doing shorter stories, all set in the Parahumans universe, and each story had a new protagonist. I think that would be much more interesting than lots of escalation, forever and ever.
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Jul 2, 2018 02:37
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What's the best xianxia web novel that's been translated/is written in English? I'm assuming there's some good stuff out there somewhere even if I have no idea where it would be.
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Jul 9, 2018 01:07
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I dunno, there's something to be said for having freedom. In terms of meeting your basic needs, I'm sure Keter is great. There's just much more to life than just having food and shelter.
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Jul 21, 2018 17:34
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Is there an actual plot to the Wandering Inn or does it just meander like I got the impression that it does?
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Aug 11, 2018 19:39
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Jon Joe posted:I would prefer TWI a lot more if it had stuck to its initial premise of running a growing inn in a video game fantasy world. Is that not the premise? What is it about?
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Aug 11, 2018 20:23
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I assume TGaB is like TWI in that the side stories are vastly more interesting than the actual story?
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Sep 18, 2018 21:25
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blastron posted:If it weren’t for the author openly stating it is, I honestly wouldn’t have categorized Worth the Candle as “rational fiction” any more than Worm is. Both protagonists are pragmatic, careful planners, both settings are relatively well-explained and self-consistent, and when characters in either story make bad decisions, they make them for understandable reasons. I think this is the more accurate description of rational fiction. It's really just defined by self consistency which is lol as a way to describe a genre.
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Oct 28, 2018 18:57
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Silynt posted:I admit, I posted that rant after I read the chapter at 1AM because I hadn’t been able to fall asleep for the past hour and a half, so my vitriol was mostly misdirected. I WAS interested to see the Bard show up as an envoy of Below. Have we seen her explicitly act on behalf of the Bad Guys before? I know that it has been hypothesized that her Role is to keep the whole Good vs Evil train on track, but mostly - or entirely, to my memory- we’ve seen her act on the side of Above. I guess her dealings with Neshamah don’t really imply “I’m one of the Good Guys”. The implication, I believe, is that the bad guys are generally more capable than the good guys. The good guys are on the side of stability and staleness while the bad guys tend to be more revolutionary.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:08
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Twig was in every way superior to everything else Wildbow has written. The fact that Ward has been such a step back in quality is incredibly disappointing.
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Jan 20, 2019 20:39
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Ytlaya posted:I actually like some aspects of Ward more in ways that are hard to articulate...it's like the basic structure is a bit more interesting than Twig's was, even if Twig was more "polished" feeling. Twig gave me a sort of fatigue when reading it similar to Worm, even if it was overall much better than Worm, while Ward doesn't give me that same fatigue. The fatigue you're talking about is emotional impact, a thing Ward somehow lacks.
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Jan 20, 2019 22:59
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The Shortest Path posted:I don't think you're reading the same story everyone else is. I'm honestly just poo poo talking but I actually think that in spite of the emotional peaks from Ward, it on balance lacks punchiness. You get one crazy reveal every couple months or w/e but the rest of the arc is lacking imo.
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Jan 20, 2019 23:35
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Prac Guide is a step above the literal unreadables but ehhhhh it has some pretty glaring issues with pacing, characterization, and prose.
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Jan 24, 2019 19:48
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Tom Clancy is Dead posted:Which web serial doesn't? Sad but true. Serialization is not great for writing stories. I still don't get why web serials are all so bad at pacing though. Everything else yknow whatever. But the pacing is consistently so dang bad in every single one.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:23
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NinjaDebugger posted:Good and Evil in pracguide are very much Shin Megami Tensei good and evil, which is to say, not good and evil at all, just law and chaos. "good" is about giving up your will to the higher power and doing exactly what they want, even if what they want is patently evil, and "evil" is all about the strong ruling and gently caress anything else. No, Good and Evil are more or less lined up with our conception of good and evil, erratic errata has said this.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:39
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NinjaDebugger posted:That's pretty much bullshit, and if ee wants me to believe it, it needs to go on the loving page. Until then it's JK Rowling saying that wizards shat in the streets and vanished it. No, it's an explicit setting fact. The Good Guys really do care about the seven virtues, it's just that independence of thought is not an inherently virtuous thing. They don't want everyone to be a hivemind, but they have no issue with violating independence in service of virtue. You're just conflating your own view of virtue on something that is explicitly based on medieval Christianity.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:06
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It's really only the Choirs who are insane blue and orange morality things. Most of the Good guys are genuinely good guys and most of the Evil guys are genuinely bad guys. Even Cat does some pretty lovely things. I honestly can't think of any Evil characters who aren't evil.
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Jan 26, 2019 09:17
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Also Cat's plan for dealing with the Saint of Swords is so incredibly stupid Edit: Actually nevermind it might not be
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Jan 26, 2019 09:23
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That's not really how that has played out tbh.
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Jan 31, 2019 17:56
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Cat is playing AutoChess while Tyrant is playing normal chess
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Feb 1, 2019 16:18
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Part of me thinks it's implying something like that and part of me think it's implying that Bard wants to reset the continent because people are too aware of the storybook nature of reality but idk. Another part of me thinks that Bard figured out that something like the Accords was going to be made that would create peace between nations and that seems antithetical to her purpose, so maybe that's what is causing her to be so active.
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Feb 1, 2019 19:19
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If Anaxares is Robespierre, then who is Napoleon?
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Feb 2, 2019 23:27
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How can you possibly say that Twig, the setting that features a literal biological apocalypse, has a less bleak setting than Ward? My opinion on Ward is probably skewed because I can't really handle how we're getting so deep into the story and I just don't see the point of it all. Like, what's the story? I'm also like an arc behind so take that with a grain of salt.
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Feb 4, 2019 07:15
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What does slice of life even mean? As far as I can tell, it's just a story without a plot which is just bad writing.
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Feb 4, 2019 07:45
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That's not true and you know it's not true. Worm had more of a plot than Ward. Twig had a plot. Pact had a plot. PGtE has a plot. UNSONG had a plot. Having a plot and being a web serial are not mutually exclusive. My criticism isn't that the plot is meandering; I like plenty of meandering things. My criticism is that there's no point to it all. Ward has a couple good chapters but most of it is just incredibly boring. I get that Wildbow is trying to show that Victoria is depressed or how she disassociates in some situations or what have you but that doesn't make it good. I'm 10 arcs in and nothing has changed for Victoria.
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Feb 4, 2019 15:58
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Nothing had actually changed. Can you tell me even one facet of her character that has changed in the last ten arcs? The situation has changed but Victoria hasn't.
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Feb 4, 2019 16:04
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She had panic attacks at using flight for like the first two chapters of the first arc and you think that's Victoria's character changing? That's not how character development works lmao.
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Feb 4, 2019 16:05
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The Shortest Path posted:Her entire character arc has been that of someone slowly recovering from depression and horrible trauma. She feels more alive, happier, less fatalistic, has a purpose driving her. This is all pretty heavy subtext that's shown by how her inner monologue is written rather than by it being explicitly pointed out so it's understandable that you'd miss it if you're not paying attention, but to claim she hasn't changed at all is an extraordinarily dumb take tbh. Victoria's character since the start of the story has been that of a person trying to deal with their trauma unsuccessfully through drowning it in work. You're reading far more subtext than is actually present in the text. The changes that you're presenting as evidence that Victoria's character has changed are things that happened in arc 1 of the story. Like, the shift in character you're talking about is the thing that happened in Daybreak/Flare.
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Feb 4, 2019 16:54
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Ytlaya posted:Couldn't you say the same thing about Twig during most of its run, though? There wasn't much of an overarching plot to that outside of the individual arcs for a really long time, with the arcs just sort of revealing things about the setting or leading to the growth of the characters. The rebellion against the crown in Twig started like a couple arcs in and was the primary framing device for the entire serial. The very first interlude was Cynthia saving Percy and recruiting him into the rebellion. I'm probably being too harsh on Wildbow because Ward really isn't so much worse than Twig but Twig had both an overarching plot introduced much earlier than Ward has, each individual arc was more focused, and the characters were much better written. I should clarify that I think Twig is pretty much the best structured serial that I've read so I'm probably a little biased but man does Ward feel like two steps down compared to it.
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Feb 4, 2019 19:08
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Also, Mother of Learning and PGtE both have had much stronger and clearer story arcs than Ward so far. I've never read Wandering Inn and have no real desire to based on how people describe it so I can't really comment on it.
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Feb 4, 2019 19:09
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I have no clue how she intends to do it but my hope is that she's after the dwarves or some poo poo like that. Going after a person just feels too small for her.
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Feb 4, 2019 19:38
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GreyjoyBastard posted:there are multiple meanings in all three Nah, it's called Pact because it's packed full of action
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Feb 5, 2019 06:10
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