Wildbow - Blog Posts

Glow-Worm P.4

I really digging the epistolary format of these. A surprising amount of characterisation can be crammed into a search term or a couple of comments. Rain's desperation jumps off the page.

Also of interest is the tidbit about cluster mechanics that wasn't picked up by the fandom; I don't think I've ever seen any fic ever have clustermates with a primary and secondary power of similar strength. This might be because Ward never expands on this idea elsewhere.

Also, we have the first mention of what will likely be a recurring bugbear for me; the classification system. In Worm, power classifications are a useless bureaucratic post-hoc kludge. There is one fight where Taylor is only given ratings instead of power descriptions and it leaves her entirely unprepared. And here we have a hero referring to a cape having a "mover power with the ability to run on walls". What does "mover power" add to "the ability to run on walls"?!?! Its fine here, because its possibly a hero, like Weaver, inflected by the PRT's bureaucratic ticks, but from what I know of Ward and of Weaverdice, it seems that Wildbow forgot that the classifications aren't useful and aren't an intrinsic part of the power system.

Internal Inconsistency Counter: 6 (nc)

Inconsistency with Worm Counter: 1 (nc)

Number of times I've complained about power classifications: 1 (+1)

I think if Taylor ever got (normal, non-evil) cloned then one would kill the other within a day. Taylor would despise herself if she had to look at herself from outside her own head.

if worm happens after wildbow develops ward/weaverdice power sensibilities she never meets the undersiders. lung doesn't hear her stepping onto the gravel roof because his trigger only has like light thinker notes tbh. and he's already a brute/changer, blaster with mover notes, that's already a lot, we should trim down, we should trim this down. Really drive at the cocaine elements of his trigger

it is rlly funny that wildbow thinks so little about legend that he forgot he never gave him a name in worm so ward accidentally canonizes that his son’s name is also his name

Actually maybe Wildbow’s tendency to issue poorly thought out proclamations about his stories to win arguments with his fans is a good thing, as it forcibly introduces otherwise naive readers to the idea of the death of the author

Have a present thing throughout the rest of the comic being small panels showcasing various bug perspectives/her sense with bugs, then the water hits and it’s just her water obscured view with nothing else

Imagining a nice segment of the comic adaptation of the Leviathan fight as seen entirely through Taylor's water obscured lenses as carnage ensues

You’re right and I agree with you but I wanted to try and justify it so this is a quick and not super thought out explanation, it could be him being with Dragon and chasing the Nine are meant to be him at his peak while the Leviathan fight is his lowest point

it’s been pointed out how him being in Brockton was the worst possible option for him, stuck in a dead end position with enemies he’s not really suited to deal with, no one he’s really close to, all his shit with Dauntless and dealing with the recent ABB crisis and everything else, all just emphasizing his worst traits, the Leviathan fight is the bottom of a years long spiral with it being his seeming salvation, getting him respect and removing problems only for it to go wrong

meanwhile him hunting the S9 with Dragon is both him out of that situation but also putting his traits and abilities that got him to that point to full use, he finally has someone he’s close too, he’s making real progress using his abilities (both hunting the S9 and helping Dragon) he’s doing something that will earn him respect and glory but tempered by having Dragon there to reign him in and an actual focus on finishing the job

admittedly him and Dragon are still weirdly similar it is to his supposed trigger event but still this is all just random surface thoughts and probably wrong jut thought i’d try to justify it

i do feel like colins arc is a little weird. i don't have anything against transhumanism as a concept, past finding a lot of transhumanists as People really annoying, but I find it odd that mannequin comes to colin, goes "you and I are the same, and you should do the same thing I did and become less human", and then Colin does, and the story kind of treats it as a value neutral choice. in isolation, i would totally find replacing your body with robot parts to be value neutral, but we're not operating in isolation, we're working with a scenario where the bad guy told colin to do this thing, he does it, and it doesn't... mean anything. in fact, his identity as defiant is meant to be a better version of him, a humbler one, compared to colin as armsmaster. it's just very odd narratively -- it makes me wonder if wildbow is quietly a die-hard transhumanist and didn't want to introduce dissonance by condemning a transhumanist action even in a context where the narrative positions it as part of a corruption arc, or if he had enough transhumanist followers that he didn't want to tick off by doing that (im leaning towards the latter but i dont know when exactly yud recommended worm to his devotees within the storys publishing history)

in addition and separately to that, its super fucking weird that the PRT says that they can't account for colin because he escaped and there's this sense that he's gonna Do something and/or possibly leave the city without knowing about the s9s condition that no candidates can leave the city, only for him to.... literally never at any given point show up during the s9 arcs after his arc 11 interlude

I FEEL LIKE THE INLY REAL LIMITATION IS WHETHER OR NOT IT COUNTD AS AN ARACHNID DUE TI BEING FROM ANOTHER PLANET

COULD TAYLOR CONTROL THE SAND WORMS FROM DUNE?

THEY SEEM TOO LARGE TO HAVE THE INCREDIBLY SIMPLE NERVOUS SYSTEM THAT HER POWER EXPLOITS EVEN IF IT'S SIMPLE RELATIVE TO THEIR SCALE SO I FEEL LIKE NO BUT I WOULD BE OPEN TO ARGUMENTS OTHERWISE

that one witch hunter in Pale

i might be doing really terrible on the emotional regulation front but in my defense ive had a gaping hole in my chest since i was 12

post was probably by @lakesbian they do like all the Alec character analysis’

I'm fricken stupid as hell having these kinds of revelations days after the fact, but I read a character analysis on Alec that tapped into the reason his power is the way it is; that it takes 15 min to an hour to act, can only control a max of 4 at a time and that his nerve map memory imprint thing or whatever that lets him resume control instantly is basically permanent, and how all of that was because he's the kind of Master who only needs a small group to stand up for him and protect him (the other members of his family/HB's cult) vs someone like Taylor's Master power where she needed minions that could be found everywhere, which could watch everything and attack from every direction. Alec needing members of his family to physically act in his defense (rather than feel emotions for him or have his mind take over theirs) but getting an ability to force them to do so. <- All of this covered by the post, just bringing it up to give context to my thought;

DOESN'T THIS RECONTEXTUALIZE AISHA WILLINGLY GIVING HERSELF OVER TO HIM?!

All his minions during his warlord arc are probably paid for, or weren't aware that being around him 24/7 meant he could hijack their nerves.

But here comes Aisha and she's like "I want you to take over my body." and I was initially thinking ooh it's just a parahuman version of sexual experimentation, teenagers do that, I get it, I won't pretend it doesn't happen but DOESNT THIS MEAN SHE BASICALLY ASKED HIM TO GIVE HER HIS TRUST? Like, all he needed to not trigger was probably someone in his family or the tight knit cult standing up to Heartbreaker (not going to happen) but still? And Aisha is coming along and saying "I'm that someone. I trust you. You can trust me. You're not your father, you won't abuse this, I'm giving you consent under the jokey teenager, not serious guise of fooling around with you wearing my skin."

Maybe that plays into why Aisha goes after Heartbreaker, why she adopts the Heartbroken and why she makes that her mission. To continue his legacy after his death, to be the kind of person the Heartbroken needed the way Alec needed someone. She does kinda do that with Taylor too, fucking up Nero later on, though beyond those two examples I kinda struggle to nail down where she's continued a loved one's legacy. Oh, except maybe where she helps Taylor in Brian's place during GM. That could work too.

I'm still figuring out how to Tumblr but if I find that post again I'll link it here in the replies.

the fuckin Treasurer’s old teacher

jessie: sylvester, there's a new trend in the crown states where people are identifying as "sapiosexual"

sy:

i think it could be interesting to have Taylor interact with a Mark who’s early in their career and only just starting to learn Taylorisms to see her as what he might end up as.

Like Cecil has Taylor working for him cause Contessa saw the only way for her to stay put was if she had a job and so she gets put on babysitting duty when Mark first starts to work for Cecil and Mark see this woman with some sort of mysterious past who’s sorta a vague mentor figure who says things he’s been thinking in the back of his mind which scares him and makes him wonder about the role he’s going down

Hey so, thought exercise, how do you think Taylor would fare if she got dropped into the invincible universe? For the sake of mechanics let's say she literally gets dropped in via doorman portal or something.

So one thing about Invincible is that I think it's setting is protagonist-centric in a way that Worm's isn't. To the extent that Invincible's setting has worldbuilding- worldbuilding that isn't, like, ported in from the books's early association with the confederated Image Comics shared universe- it's worldbuilding that exists to convey the impression of a big-two-flavor universe. Here's our spin on the undersea kingdom, here's the riff on the Martians, here are our riffs on SHIELD, on Gotham, on Themyscira, on 70s blaxploitation-adjacent heroes, and so on. This is the entire ethos underpinning the Guardians of the Globe in particular- piggybacking on pre-existing audience affection for the Justice League to convey that it's a Big Fucking Deal when the guardians get blendered in issue 7.

You have flashbacks demonstrating that there was capital-S Superhero Stuff going on in the seventies and eighties, or as far back as the thirties with Immortal, you create the impression of a status quo, a big pond in which Mark is a little fish. And to Kirkman's credit, some effort clearly went into making sure that the non-Mark capes are sufficiently fleshed out that you can believe that they've got other stuff going on in their lives. But at the end of the day, it's the Invincible universe. You don't see a lot of people talking about the Guarding the Globe spinoff. Many of the most interesting characters- Cecil being a big example here- are interesting because of the ways in which they bounce off Mark specifically, the ways in which he chooses to deal with them. The universe is less of a character in the story the way that Earth Bet is- it's just the place where Mark's story, specifically, is happening. If there's a codified setting bible, I'll eat my hat.

Now of course the world of Worm is, in many ways, equally Taylor-centric, because that's what it means to be the protagonist. But owing in part to the themes of the story, and in part to the sheer number of false-start protagonists Wildbow played around with before settling on Taylor, it's very good at conveying the idea that there are many stories happening in this setting and Taylor's is just the one this particular work happened to focus on. There's an actual point to doing OC worldbuilding for what the superhero scene looks like in Wormverse Denver or Seattle or whatever- whereas you can come up with superhero teams for Invincible-verse Denver, but what actually ties them to that universe? What are you getting out of putting them in Invincible specifically, that you wouldn't get from whipping up a barebones MASKS setting to support your OCs? Anyway. This is a really long way of getting to my real point, which is that I think the question is less "how does Taylor bounce off the Invincible setting" and more "How does Taylor bounce off Invincible the character, around whom the setting orbits even when it pretends not to."

This I'm unsure of, because where do you stick her in his life where you get an interesting dynamic? One thing that's interesting here is that Mark's overall character arc already involves learning a lot of taylorisms- the strategic ruthlessness, the shift from a good-evil dichotomy to a helping-not-helping dichotomy-so what about his arc is going to change if they spend time together? Why would they spend time together? Given the different power levels on display, what would differentiate her, in his experience, from the dozens of filler capes that exist for him at the level of "vague acquaintance?" This is assuming she's active as a cape at all, which she might not be if this is Post-GM. Mutual association through Cecil and the Global Defense Agency might be a hook- maybe they're paying for her new arm or something- but would she latch her cart to Cecil's wagon in the first place, barring some obvious crisis situation? Hard to say. If she's depowered, and present in his life somehow in a civilian context, well, that's a fast-track to not being part of the story anymore either, given how Mark's civilian connections slowly fading away was kind of a quiet plot point.

There's some configuration of these pieces that could be interesting, but I'm not quite sure what they are. Soliciting input here.

ashton moment

HE REALLY DOES CONSTANTLY CALL HIMSELF CUTE. his perspective is so funny. i know he literally just means cute in the sense of. they are all at the age where attractive boys are called 'cute' specifically instead of 'hot.' but the sheer amount he repeats it makes it so funny. hello my name is marco and it is very important you know that i am the most handsome and smart boy and everyone agrees

or read Twig

every post attempting to find 'plural' subtext in ward is just another grim reminder of how few wildbow fans have read pact

ok wait what movie is that cause i keep trying to remember it

Sy you know you can just be a girl right you live in twig world it wouldn't even be that difficult

i’ve never seen it but supposedly the show Static Shock has something similar to this with one character having super intelligence and making machines but then one episode has him lose his powers and his equipment stops working despite the fact that in most pieces of media this wouldn’t happen

“Even my most loyal. Bitch of a thing to do. Not the actual procedure of sticking the things inside their heads. After the first twenty, I could do the surgeries with my eyes closed. Literally. I actually did a few that way.”

i'm sure there's at least some of it out there that i'm not aware of, but worm is genuinely the only superpowered media i can think of off the top of my head where technology-based superpowers feel this meaningful. tinkers in worm aren't just people toting around sci-fi weapons that feel ubiquitous in the setting, they're the only people who have those weapons, and they have them because they're breaking the rules for how technology should work on a very fundamental and unnerving level. i would like to hear someone with more complete knowledge of the genre at large talk about this (@artbyblastweave ?) because something about how tinkers are written in worm feels special to me. like, from my not-very-into-cape-media PoV it feels like in most other works people w/ the tech-based powers aren't explicitly doing anything special--it's typically presented as if what they're doing is fully plausible within the normal bounds of the universe in question, and their reliance on it might even make them less interesting or more vulnerable than people with "real" superpowers. batman, iron man, etc. and worm sidesteps this entirely by not only giving tinkers extremely inventive, iconic, and powerful toolkits, but by constantly casually reinforcing that what they're able to do is just as unnatural as someone shapeshifting or shooting lasers. bakuda doing brain surgery with her eyes closed! riley making functioning blood replacement out of shit she scrounged up in her kitchen! it doesn't matter if you take the tech away, because their schtick as a cape isn't having the money to put together a purportedly-regular power suit or bag of gadgets, it's having the ability to build a bomb with a couple of nails and the lint in their pocket in the 5 minutes someones back was turned. i simply cannot go back to media where people with gadget-based cape identities don't textually have inhuman capabilities with technology after reading worm, because worm just Does It Better

that’s not ominous at all

hey guys why are you building a gi

so called "free thinkers" when khepri

he tries to fuck a hole in his hand so Blake “most fuckable rib cage” now has competition

so are the cum wizards also in pact or only in pale

how the hell does Blake have more votes than Avery or Verona, he’d probably trip and lose like seriously i get the those two aren’t direct combatants but neither are push overs and both are good in chaos like a huge 7 way brawl, Avery does her flanking taking out anyone at the edges not paying attention and Verona just runs around throwing potions and being a nuisance

No one reads Pale which makes me so sad cause there’s so much cool shit in there and this latest chapter has so much smart people could examine to the point that even i can but no one would listen or understand any of it

@glowspider has stuff

i think in terms of agony, finishing pact and then finding out that no one is extensively redrawing or animaticing fun horror bits will be fairly bad

Rose is piteous she’s just confident enough and an asshole enough so you don’t realize

one thing wildbow wont tell you about blake and rose is theyre the same height shes not even shorter than him. she is also six feet and rectangular and could punch someone hard enough to severely disorientate them. and both of their hair is like 16 inches long. the only difference is rose doesn't put it in a french braid and also she has tits and also she's not as piteous.

there’s something else that’s really interesting about Scion that’s revealed in this chapter though

and that is that Scions an asshole

now that feels obvious with him blowing up Britain but specifically because of how Jack convinces Scion to start killing he tells him to do what his ancestors did which for Entities is the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do

the whole point of Entities is to stop entropy since they realized the old way of just fighting an consuming was going to cause them to die out and yet Scion decides to revert to the old ways and kill everything and there by ruining the Simulation and stopping any progress on the entropy problem which is the exact opposite of what Entities want to do

this means to other Entities specifically Scions a huge self important asshole

Very confused by sting interlude 3; don’t really get what happened

to be fair a lot of it is new user who just finished Worm wanting to express their thoughts or having just made a realization and wanting to say it which I’d say is actually nice if a bit stupid

I love r/parahumans so much. "let's get something straight jack slash is NOT that clever" WE KNOW. let's get something straight the sky IS blue circles ARE round. are we going to learn our ABCs next

I mean in some of fan fictions due to both their parents being rich lawyers they’re already friends or in contact which i think is a fair interpretation so i could totally see it making them closer friends or bridging the gap to make them become friends or something along those lines

I could see it going two ways depending on how earlier it is in Victorias career if it’s earlier she might really care and get really close in which case Emma could be a good support and someone who actually will argue back and might help keep Victoria from doing the same violence she did in the original timeline

or two if it happens it’s not very special for Vic and she moves on and Emma stays terrified before maybe binding and becoming even closer with Taylor

also in either case Sophia might be punished a bit more without the really good lawyer of Emma’s dad and probably would be a bit more of a loner

In another universe, Emma is saved by Glory Girl instead of Shadow Stalker…

Discuss.

honestly this whole idea of home not home sounds like descriptions of veterans returning from World War 1

people who were way to young to reasonably do everything they were forced to shoved into a strange alien hellscape before just going home having to act like nothing happened

Didn’t want to derail on a post about Sundancer, but this quote:

is also pretty notable from a Tattletale perspective. Despite the fact Sundancer hasn’t exactly gone out of her way to be empathetic to the Undersiders and that she stood by even when she found out about Dinah and might very well have stood by if the same thing happened to Tattletale herself, Tattletale is choosing to be kind and reassure her. It’s not entirely selfless— things are easier in Brockton Bay if all the Travelers leave — but there are crueler ways to get her to go.

There’s some parallels there, Sundancer going so far to save someone who’s already dead. A best friend she loves past the point of sense.

Also interesting to me— Sundancer is incredibly hypocritical about Taylor, being disgusted by her brutality in carving out eyes when Sundancer has definitely already killed people by that point and has stood by while worse things have happened. Sundancer ~doesn’t~ turn against Coil (from what I remember, though it’s been a while), even though she feels bad about Dinah. She’s willing to use Dinah and Tattletale’s knowledge if it means fixing Noelle. I almost want to draw comparisons to how Taylor is disgusted by Alec despite/because of their similarities. The biggest difference being that Alec is more upfront about being a bit of a bastard than Taylor is, and Taylor is more upfront about it than Marissa is.

I need to reread some more Traveler-Undersider scenes, but Coil is in most of them. Ugh.

No he made two other important things, Green Eyes animal sidekick Evan and her boytoy Blake the Branch boy

John charles "wildbow" mccrae, know as the creator of the character Green eyes, and absolutely nothing Else of note

Are we sure he doesn’t have mommy issues

Fell

i’ve been in love with this man from the second he crashed blake’s party and literally everything he does reinforces that love. he’s so funny and such a piece of shit and every time he shows up my depression goes away. i fucking adore his dynamic with blake and i hope to god he gets to kick conquest in the dick

(reminder: spoilers get you fed to the hyena)

This is just Sharon and witch hunters that’s all this is just an otherverse skeptic

ghost hunting team that keep a nonbeliever named steve around as an emergency supernatural suppressant