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[tooies]

when a pelican bites you there's no malice in their eyes. they aren't upset at you. they are just hungry and want to see if you fit in their mouths. and if you don't then it's no problem and everything is fine. and if you do then well i guess your fate is sealed but that's ok it's a beautiful animal

[averykellyfan]

Pale Moment #3 (spoilers for the big mystery)

These letters the girls wrote to their families (and Jeremy) are badass, but now with full context it's a really good thing nothing happened to the girls, because Matthew would get screwed over here with what Lucy says in her letter. Let's say Maricica pulls some bullshit interception and gets the trio sent to the faerie courts before they meet with the sable. Matthew would probably only end up finding out his gf was part of the carmine conspiracy because the kennet trio's parents sent the police and then a witch hunter the leader of the fucking LIGHTHOUSE after both of them.

[averykellyfan]

Pale Moment #2

Do you guys remember how at the start of Pale we had zero practitioners other than the girls and arguably Charles and Matthew for like 3 or 4 arcs and then Wildbow was like, "alright gang, time to introduce 57 named practitioner students in a single extra materials chapter for this really cool summer school training arc" And like more than half of them became REALLY relevant by the end of the story?

[averykellyfan]

So since @victoriadallonfan keeps posting old moments from Ward I figured I'd post Past Pale highlights, here's a great moment from 16.8. Florin literally stops himself in the middle of his big emotional villain monologue so Avery can talk with her gf, then as soon as she finishes he immediately goes "oh by the way, I have absolutely ZERO game plan here for if you decide to fuck my shit up, I know i'm doing evil stuff here but please just don't"

[victoriadallonfan]

The End of Pale

End – Beyond the Pale

Where to even begin? Pale ended up being my longest work, which really wasn’t the plan when I started.  When I started writing Worm I wrappe

[averykellyfan]

*Charles pops into existence* Zed, I gainsay you for a million years, the readme on your github said the program would work if I did all these steps, well I did them, AND IT DIDN'T.

[half-man-half-lime]

Maricica successfully converted from Vriska to Bec Noir

[multiversal-bridge]

So there's been a big discussion lately about the pacing in the works of Wildbow (creator of bespoke internet fiction), particularly in his latest work, Pale, which has become longer than the others in just a couple of years of writing. I have thoughts about this and I can't get them out of my head so I'll just post.

I think the framing of this discussion leaves something out? Because I genuinely think Pale is Wildbow's best paced work.

Sounds super weird to say that when it's so long, right?

But I think there's a difference between length and quality of pacing, and I think the key to understanding what Wildbow's doing is this:

Pale is paced like a television show.

To explain a bit more what I mean by this:

Movies and television shows are forms of storytelling that are both valid in different ways, and allow you to do different things. The advantage of a television show is that you get to add layers of nuance to character's psychology as well as explore a number of different characters over the full runtime of the show. (Bear in mind I'm trying to imply a TV show that everyone agrees is good throughout its run, like the Sopranos or something.) There's advantages to doing this sort of thing, at least if you do it well.

Wildbow is a big fan of TV and talks a lot about shows he watches. So it's not surprising that his pacing is like TV. You bring on a character for an episode, and you may not see them again in the next season, but their mini-arc informed the larger arc that was going on with the protagonists at that point in the story. A chapter is basically written like an episode. 2-3 arcs roughly corresponds to a season of the show, with certain arcs ending in a major change in the status quo.

And Wildbow has a very good sense of those larger arcs. I was talking with a friend recently about what a contrast Pale is with the later A Song of Ice and Fire books. Where Martin is creating an ever-expanding list of characters going off in ever expanding directions, in Pale Wildbow keeps his characters from straying too far by tying new ideas back to the main plot. We have an arc where we meet a bunch of new magical creatures, but it's also about gaining allies and figuring out which of them are being used as pawns by the conspirators behind the main mystery. And yeah, recently, we got in theory like 18 new characters, but in practice we've only really focused on like three of them, and they're ultimately extensions of the final villain(s) in a plot that seems to be chugging toward the last station.

And I like this better than the pacing in Ward, or Pact, or Twig, or the latter half of Worm! In all of those works, there were moments where I thought oh, come on, this is stretched out way more than it needs to be. In contrast, despite its length, I've never really felt that with Pale. And I was initially skeptical about some of the plot developments!

It's true that Wildbow's chapters have gotten longer, but it feels to me like that's more about embracing an episode structure with multiple scenes in it, whereas in other works I often felt a bit cut off by one-scene chapters. Wildbow may also be playing to his strengths, as Pale focuses much more on psychological dialogues instead if action scenes. And character psychology has always been at the heart of what makes Wildbow works good.

Your milage may vary. I might just be weirdly into psychological dialogue scenes. And I freely confess that there may be a difference in experiencing the story chapter by chapter over the last two years, as I have, and maybe it might not read as well binged all at once. But I've seen writing that's badly paced before (including in other long-form web fiction), and this doesn't trip that trigger for me.

Obviously no one should feel obligated to read Pale. But may be more helpful to think of Pale as a good thing that's continued in its same good vein for a long time than something that's suffering from the sin of excess. At the very least, there are reasons why those of us who are reading it are having such a fun time.

[sweaterregrets]

sveta 😌😌

[averykellyfan]

absolutely amazing artwork, captures the feel of her character completely