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porfiria posted:I don’t get how anyone likes this. Like I find it much easier to grasp liking bog standard fantasy that is just people talking and running around and stabbing each other (written poorly). But this awful purple misogynist poo poo is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I hate that I have to live in the same universe as these words. I hate that anyone the planet would think to write them. I hate that anyone published them. I hate, in absolute moral sense, anyone that likes this. I want to gather up every instance of Rothfuss’s writing, every scrap of paper and I every byte of data and hurl them into the sun. And then I want to die so I don’t have to remember. it makes the reader feel smart. no, it doesn't make sense. genre readers aren't equipped to handle something actually perceptive, so, you just say like 'women are like fires' and they go 'oh wow, how novel, that must be something smart.'
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Oct 25, 2019 23:26
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fauna posted:i know people have been saying that the art of the story is dying forever, and i don't think it's dying, but i do think it's changing. If you want to see the horrible harbinger of what might be coming next, look at web serials. Certain publishers and other platforms have been looking to hone in on this market of dumb readers where the most well-known story is like the worst mash-up of Meyer and Sanderson combined with one hell of a bullying revenge fantasy, telling what's at best 200,000 words of story over 1,600,000 words of prose. Serial Box is one of the groups trying to get ahead of the curve but even they aren't quite willing to match the sheer rambling, sprawling nature of these stories, instead treating their serials more like TV seasons with writers' rooms (and they've landed some pretty hefty IPs, like Marvel and DC.) Luckily, given that the author of that most well-known story has turned out to be a total diva convinced that his janky first-draft is a masterpiece to the extent that he can mock editors on his subreddit, and the sequel to it has been extremely poorly-received by everyone except his most devout fans, the enthusiasm may be cooling.
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Nov 22, 2019 00:17
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Xotl posted:I'm curious, but not familiar with what you're talking about : can you give some links? The story in question: Worm. And, all in all, it was an okay ride providing you were skim-reading and only really paying attention to the few characters who were well-realized. It is a very clunky story that has glaring issues because it's the first thing the author, Wildbow, ever wrote and he did so without thinking more than a chapter in advance. The average fan pitch for this leviathan involves slogging through the first 250,000 words (the first eight arcs) because that's when the story gets good. It doesn't really get good, though. The story just jettisons even the pretense of being about anything deeper than expository worldbuilding, superhero fights and one hell of a revenge fantasy. The reason why people think this is an improvement is that the first 250,000 words are filled with meaningless high school drama and the author's bizarre thoughts about how the world works, including a storyline where the protagonist teams up with a literal Neo-Nazi gang to fight press-ganged, bestial Asians who have bombs in their heads (planted by another Asian person.) That's not to say there're not some interesting ideas in Worm, but it's ultimately a <200,000 word YA trilogy, and a lot of the ideas that the fandom claims are original are just drawn from lesser-known superhero properties like Irredeemable and City of Heroes, some quite heavily. It got big because Eliezer Yudkowsky gave it a shout out when people still thought rational fiction was new and exciting, which should tell you plenty about the kind of story it is. Basically, it's a superhero story for people who think they're too smart for superheroes. The protagonist is a blank slate who gets away with doing things like cutting out eyes and killing a baby because everyone else is worse than her and some of the situations are more contrived than the usual Ticking Time Bomb hypothetical. Which takes us to the sequel no one outside the most hardcore members of the fandom likes: Ward. Even the web serial thread on this very forum, named after this guy, doesn't talk about this serial except how much it sucks. The thing about Ward is, though, that it's basically the exact same thing as Worm, right down to Nazi gangs, mountains of exposition, fight scenes that drag on for over 4000 words, awkward overly-redundant writing with no sense of pacing or emotion, villains with heavy plot armor, and all of it without even the threadbare narrative spine that Worm had. So, it's really just revealed that the author isn't very skilled and hasn't actually improved his craft despite writing constantly for years since Worm started but now he's dosed up on an extremely loud, toxic fandom. Before Ward, Wildbow wrote two other serials, Pact and Twig, which even his fans don't really like or recommend. But where Pact and Twig had actual evidence of improvement, Ward is just a full regression. Perhaps because Pact and Twig didn't get to the heights of Worm. Over the years, the fandom enthusiasm for Worm moved from it being an interesting first draft to a masterpiece that'll redefine the entire genre of superhero fiction. So, it all started to go to the author's head. As mentioned, here he is, basically mocking the reasonable suggestions of a publishing company's editor that would help turn Worm into a YA series on his subreddit. The author was apparently entertaining multiple talks with publishers prior to doing this, especially when Avengers mania was in full swing. Since then, his rhetoric has shifted from the idea that it'll be published any day now to hiring a ghostwriter at some point in the future to write a new version of his magnum opus for him.
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Nov 22, 2019 05:12
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Patrat posted:I actually just checked the writer's Patreon though and they are making nearly $80,000 a year there, so regardless of quality they are making as much as a really successful genre author would through selling conventional novels. I think that is slightly more than N J Jemisin was making from her books before she moved to having a Patreon and writing full time, at the point where she published those figures she had two Hugo awards for best novel under her belt. The Wandering Inn makes double that, actually, but that author is suspected to be three people collaborating. Like I said, there's money going through here and publishers are looking at it. Wildbow's Patreon was sitting at about 2.5k before Ward went up, and the reason why Ward is going on for so long (it's already twice as long as Worm) is because the Patreon will crash once it ends, especially when the serial is not well-regarded by anyone beyond the hardcore fans (who are the ones who pay into the Patreon.)
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Nov 22, 2019 11:56
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Bitch is a female character whose power is to mutate dogs into giant dogs. She's the recalcitrant muscle of the team. As a side effect, her power has left her viewing everything through canine terms, so, smiling is like baring teeth. So, the protagonist starts treating her like a dog and her behavior improves, although the rationale is based on those disproven alpha packleader theories (Worm is filled with errors like this that the author bases entire scenes or plot arcs around). Yes, that means that one of the most prominent characters is a woman called Bitch and dehumanizing her is seen as understanding her psychological trauma (another character specifies that Bitch does not enjoy her situation and would harm herself or others if she discovered the truth.) Instead of attempting to rehabilitate or understand or heal, she is dehumanized, belittled, and often beaten. Because she's rude. Even though it's the equivalent of doing those things to someone with doggie autism. This is the closest thing Worm has to a central idea, and it's even encoded in the worldbuilding: people who go through severe psychological trauma ("Trigger Events" are what give people their powers) harm others and destabilize the world and the only thing to do is fight them/make them fight each other. It's an irony, then, given the emotional rawness that bleeds through when the author illustrates the source of his trauma: high school bullying.
Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 22:37
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Antivehicular posted:This is furthering the hypothesis I got from reading the first couple of chapters of Worm years ago: "this author has never met a woman, let alone a high-school-aged girl, and is regurgitating tedious misogynistic media tropes instead." How gross and clueless do you need to be to write this character, let alone name her Bitch? About as gross and clueless as you need to be to write a story arc where the protagonist teams up with an actual Nazi gang (who are cool, suave, and stylish) led by a millionaire man who calls himself Kaiser to fight against a (bestial, savage, insane) pan-Asian gang which is made up of poor people. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to have the black character of the team, the supposed team leader, not raise a fuss about any of this, even when another black supervillain is barred from joining the alliance based on the color of his skin. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to have your most prominent black characters be: a sociopathic, psychotic bully, an angry guy from a broken home (who beats Bitch), and his sister who has learning difficulties because her mother was using drugs while she was pregnant with her. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to say to your fans that another character, a child abuser whose ethnicity isn't specified in the text, is also black. About as gross and clueless to give an openly racist superhero who had never been mentioned before a big heroic sacrifice redemptive moment during a giant monster attack because anti-racists ruined his superhero career. Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Nov 22, 2019 |
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Nov 22, 2019 23:27
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The last thing I'm going to say is that for a story where the author gets very basic things wrong without seeming to realize it (what an aquifer is, how a flashbang works, canine psychology, how schools operate, all Asians are the same, etc) there are multiple times where the story goes into a rather in-depth accounting of Nazi iconography, tattoos, symbology, and so on (such as why the Nazi gang is called Empire Eighty Eight.) It's very, very strange.
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Nov 22, 2019 23:57
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Just like with Sanderson, if you get enough people telling others that something is good, those other people will start to believe that it's good. Maybe even be fooled into reading it in the mistaken belief that it "gets good" and "all leads somewhere," hint hint. The worst thing about this is that the Worm fandom holds Wildbow up as being a genuine master of trauma and psychology and race and all these things. Much like Sanderson, if you ask a Worm fan what makes Worm good, they'll probably say "the worldbuilding" and have very little to say about the actual story or how it's told.
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Nov 23, 2019 07:45
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Worm has a black character named Skidmark.quote:Another group arrived, and it was like you could see a wave of distaste wash over the faces in the room. I had seen references on the web and news articles about these guys, but they weren’t the sort you took pictures of. Skidmark, Moist, Squealer. Two guys and a girl, the lot of them proving that capes weren’t necessarily attractive, successful or immune to the influences of substance abuse. Hardcore addicts and dealers who happened to have superpowers. The thing about Worm fans is that they understand that it is bad and they know that the text itself is bad. So, they come up with complex theories that it's intentionally bad because the text itself can't support anything other than what I've pointed out. For example, the most popular of these is that Taylor is an unreliable narrator to the extent that she's suffered a severe psychotic break and nothing about her narration is to be trusted. This take has become less prominent after one of Taylor's nemeses, and the protagonist of Ward, went on a weird screed that Taylor was right and correct in all things. quote:She killed people. She hurt people. She may have played a part in a war over the city. She threatened innocents with bugs and choked more than one person to death or nearly to death by shoving spiders and centipedes down their throats. She killed Alexandria at a time when we needed Alexandria most. She consorted with rapists, terrorists, and monsters. [...] But listen to me. Because you made the choices and you carried on when you could’ve stopped and you spat on her and I’m not ignoring that. I’ve been holding back so I can get to it now. [...] She was all of those things and she might have still been a better person than you. I didn't even mention that our first introduction to the Asian gang boss is ordering his subordinates to kill children whereas the two leaders of Empire Eighty Eight get this whole introductory chapter devoted to their sad family life and how tough things are being a single mother with two kids. The difference by the lengths to which Wildbow goes to humanize his Nazi characters versus his POC characters is pretty damning by the author's own words: quote:Nazis sort of have this habit of being de-facto bad guys, because nazis are easy to view/create as ‘just plain evil’ with their rationales and perspectives pre-established. Beating up/killing a nazi is pretty much guiltless (I think zombies are popular bad guys for much the same reason). With Empire Eighty Eight being a collection of racist supervillains, I knew it would be very easy for them to fall into the traps of being two dimensional throwaways, and I wanted to take the time, before they were introduced in-story, to establish them as people with backgrounds, families, maybe other motivations, etc. The PoC villains never get anything like that.
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Nov 25, 2019 00:15
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Actually, come to think of it, the biggest indicator that Wildbow's just clueless about things, and doesn't think to check or research, is the protagonist's own superpower. So, the whole appeal of Worm is that it's this story about how a bullied teenage girl with insect control can style on heroes with much more impressive-sounding powers. Ignoring the fact that Taylor's power isn't so much insect control as bug magic, the text establishes very early and without fanfare what her power actually is: arthropod control. This happens in a scene where she takes control of a crab and makes it dance. Crabs are arthropods, bugs are arthropods. Okay, makes sense. The Worm wiki explicitly says that this, arthropod control, is her superpower. But there's a chapter where Taylor can sense and control heartworms, tapeworms, and so on - and none of these are members of the arthropod family. It's possible that Wildbow thought they were like insect larvae and therefore something she could control. This is backed up by the fact that Taylor isn't surprised that she can do this. I believe there's also mention made that she can control snails and slugs but, again, those aren't arthropods. So, what's going on here? If this guy can't even keep the basic superpower of his most important character straight, why should anyone believe that he's operating on some masterful understanding about race and gang violence and trauma? If he has this great understanding, did he happen to do all those things ironically? Did he knowingly paint the poor Asians as bestial, insane and savage and the rich Nazis as stylish, calm and civilized? Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Nov 25, 2019 |
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Nov 25, 2019 00:43
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fauna posted:if you don't like it, don't read it The irony here is that a fair number of Worm fans haven't actually read Worm. A lot of people come to the Worm fandom through the fanfiction (most of which is, essentially, 'fixfic' of the original) or the extensive wiki or the Who Would Win? debates on Reddit and therefore consume second-hand accounts of the story itself. Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Nov 25, 2019 |
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Nov 25, 2019 01:30
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"call a precious cinnamon roll that must be protected at all costs" im so loving sick of seeing this poo poo show up loving everywhere.
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Dec 6, 2019 11:27
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One thing that has bugged me ever since reading some YA books is the sheer number of them that have K-names for their protagonists. Here's a list based on memory and some of the books I've pulled off my shelf: Kvothe, Katniss, Kaden, Kaz, Kell, Kylee, Katsa. Is there something about the letter K that's particularly exotic? Does it test better with the YA audience? For comparison, there are only three other YA books on my shelf that don't have protagonists with names beginning with K.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:15
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lmfao this will be a deep vein, i can feel it.
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Dec 23, 2019 07:16
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SimonChris posted:http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/ this reads like someone trying really hard to imitate watts
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Jan 2, 2020 13:22
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I feel like any genre fantasy dreck that features an Actually Evil race (Dragon Age's Darkspawn, Goblin Slayer's goblins, whatever else) does more to make people these days think fascism is a-okay than Mein Kampf. Like, where do people think God-Emperor Trump came from?
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Feb 10, 2020 04:13
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The funny thing about him ranting about there not being any love scenes is that he's writing for KU where, like, half the loving books in the sci-fi category on that platform open with an explicit sex scene.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:18
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people get so loving defensive over YA, I don't get it
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Oct 24, 2020 00:48
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x meets y is endemic to the KU self-publishing crowd but there it's just a cheap way of trying to drive keyword searchers to your books. it's also a way of getting around negative thoughts about 'plagiarism' or being 'openly derivative of' by winking at the audience.
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Oct 30, 2020 01:44
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my brain got distracted by "The cards themselves were often worth their weight in gold" because cards don't weigh much at all and it made me think it was a sarcastic comment along the lines of 'the cards were worthless'
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Jul 18, 2021 08:27
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