winning feels like losing, when it's by the rules of that world

lune/they/20s fandom/meta sideblog.

[autistictaylorhebert]

The year is 1991, a villain robs your record store and on a whim you call a new hero helpline. It takes them over an hour to arrive, during which the villain waits around patiently because its a fun novel experience and it's new to everyone involved. The hero and villain almost appear to be play-fighting, and afterwards the villain immediately escapes their police holding cell because neither containment foam nor the PRT exists yet. Everyone tips you afterwards.

The year is 2002, a villain robs the restaurant you manage, and you call the local hero team, who arrive within 20 minutes. There's a brief, professional fight with a back and forth that almost seems like a therapy session, before the villain is captured. Because of circumstantial political tides they're immediately sent to the birdcage, despite it being a first offence.

The year is 2012, villains rob the grocery store that you work at, and you wearily call the PRT, the heroes arriving 50 minutes later because most of them have been killed in endbringer fights. The fight is bloody and quick, with all banter from either side taking the form of growled threats. Upon being brought back to the phq all of the villains are immediately offered plea deals to become probationary heroes.

The year is 2015, villains rob your community's new grain silo. No-one calls the heroes, but they decide to come anyway, taking over 2 hours (they live 10 miles and two portals away), to eventually catch up on a highway where 30 civilians die in the ensuing fight. After this the villains are captured and subsequently exiled to a blacksite prison world where one of them almost immediately dies of exposure and the other later becomes a titan. You don't get your grain back.

[lunar1an]

the wild thing about "Paths as realms reaching into space" is that it lines up surprisingly well with the old PD document. oh, finders explore the unformed void that lies Beyond all realms? they interact with unknown and nameless things, and Paths are very mysterious and dangerous, with a chance of random events fucking you over? the most popular introductory NA Finder Path is literally a Dark Forest?

yeah sure i can believe that's the magic equivalent of space and maybe there's some weird shit out there where you have to wonder if it even originated from Earthly realms or not.

so now the real question is how the bdsm hamster is relevant to any of that

[lunar1an]

belated note: raquel going back to the musser tar pit is of course entirely in-character for her. while i don't think she's tempted by gaining power within the family i do think she probably wants to find out more about her mother and what happened to her. like all she got was some asshole telling her that her mom died and was still being used by house musser to the end. of course she'd want to trace her history down, and the trio likely inspired her to want to try and introduce Some good into the family or save others. which ofc leaves room for that manipulation the trio's concerned about.

feeling entirely validated in my fic assessment that raquel needs to be dragged away from the musser family to have a chance of escaping their gravitational orbit.

[lunar1an]

reading Pale E.z part 1 and completely ignoring the major setting revelation about the Paths to freak out about avery and raquel what do you mean raquel is going back to the Musser tar pit to try to 'improve' things and no one is stopping her. Raquel Get Out Of There. You Will Not Break The Cycle.

what do you mean avery is trying to propose "practitioner arranged marriage but with tweaks so it's 'good' now" after 3.8 million words of pale saying "practitioner arranged marriage is bad, even the 'good' ones". Avery What Are You Doing.

[sunlit-skycat]

I have Thoughts about that arranged marriage for Sheridan/Clayton. Maybe it'll be okay on Sheridan's side, but there's a lot of pressure on Clayton to follow through with it in order to give the Garricks access to the Kelly family (perhaps even to pick which side of the Kelly family gains power over the others). Not all relationships with skewed power dynamics go badly, but that sure is a weight on one end of the scale.

[lunar1an]

it's very in-character for avery to, instead of going "we do relationships our way and you have to deal with that" (verona style), go the non-confrontational route and choose a compromise that appeases both sides. sheridan and clayton already like each other, so let's do a trial run of dating and see about marriage from there.

except she's unable to get rid of the elements of coercion and other structural problems inherent to using this system, even if she's nice about it. i think her offer to give clayton a KF apartment during the dating period is a good microcosm -- she definitely intends it as a gesture of goodwill, but like...that apartment's kind of conditional on him continuing the relationship, then. that's another kind of pressure on clayton.

and yeah, giving the garricks more access to the kelly family is a whole other can of worms.

[lunar1an]

reading Pale E.z part 1 and completely ignoring the major setting revelation about the Paths to freak out about avery and raquel what do you mean raquel is going back to the Musser tar pit to try to 'improve' things and no one is stopping her. Raquel Get Out Of There. You Will Not Break The Cycle.

what do you mean avery is trying to propose "practitioner arranged marriage but with tweaks so it's 'good' now" after 3.8 million words of pale saying "practitioner arranged marriage is bad, even the 'good' ones". Avery What Are You Doing.

[lunar1an]

Pale I think suffers from a similar problem to Ward but like, heightened immensely because of its bloated word count. It just keeps going and going, heightening stakes and introducing new threats and escalating the magic war it embroils itself in from arcs 16-24 or so...and then it has to wrap everything up.

And it finally remembers that it actually has to resolve the trio's personal arcs with their family and actually do something with Kennet as a town and not just a setpiece for the girls to do fancy rituals or fights in. Like the entire heart of the story was set aside for a million words or so in order to fight the Evil Red Guy. And now it has to circle back to at least try and wrap things up but there's such a sense of missed opportunity.

Like why did we have to have an arc about the Wild Hunt or Musser Round 2 when we could've had those words dedicated to Avery's family problems! Or actually addressing that the Innocent side of Kennet (the one that matters) is a dead end ski town filled with people who kind of suck and doing something substantial about it instead of a throw-away line in the epilogue?

Either way, it felt more like the initial story took a pause to go on a bender for like 10 arcs, and then it was like. Oh boy. Now that the War(tm) has ended we can actually go back to the parts of the story that matter. And resolve all of that in like 6 chapters.

[ewingstan]

I don’t hate the ending of Ward (complicated feelings, another post), but there’s a frustrating amount of problems that get solved in ways that just deflates the problems the story previously wanted you to take seriously. Take Rain getting out of his prison sentence: it largely gets solved by Rachel pointing out that Rain trying to martyr himself in prison as penance is stupid. And yeah, she’s right. But middle section of Ward really was trying to make a moral conundrum of Rain and Ashley turning themselves in. Victoria was conflicted, and the text wanted you to feel conflicted—the drama depending on you seeing the question of whether voluntarily accepting imprisonment as penance was the right thing to do as a real, serious question. And yet, the plotline is ultimately wrapped up by denying the question should ever be seriously entertained. Again, I didn't have much patience for the question, but the story did ask me to care.

It’d be one thing if Ward had spent the time after Rain went to prison interrogating his sense of necessary retribution, but it doesn’t. It just seems to change its mind. And, truth be told, Ward seems to change its mind a lot.*

The epilogues have a lot of similar cases of various problems that have been present the whole time not really get solved so much as they just stop. Should we be worried about the machine army that has been a slow existential threat this whole time? Ehh, Saint figured something out. A non-Teacher enhanced Saint figured something that all the previous tinkers didn’t? Yeah, why not.

Can Sabah and Lily ever fix the stresses in their relationship? Oh sure, they just need to leave the Undersiders and become heroes again. Wait, if it was that easy why were they still with the Undersiders? Eh.

I think this is partly related to my feeling that the Ward we get from 20.b onward feels like a different story. It's not just the change in tone, or how the Dreaming Death gets recast from a dire sacrifice to a choice on the humans part—it the story also just starts caring about very different things, and stops caring about what looked like the concerns it rested on. Amy choosing to take on the Dreaming Death, and Marquis collapsing in despair, is suddenly not about someone deciding the world's better off without her and her father being staggered by his failure to help her. Now it's about someone embracing a risky gambit to help others, a motivation that her villainous father could never understand. Byron taking on the Dreaming Death isn't a sad parallel to his brother's sacrifice/suicide hours earlier. Instead, it's the start for him and the others to engage with a new relationship to the humans. I didn't necessarily agree with all the places the story was going with what the dreaming death was before, but it was something that felt of a piece with the rest of Ward in a way the recasting of the Dreaming Death really didn't.

*I say "Ward" rather than wildbow because ultimately, I have access to the text and not to the author. People reproduce horrific ideas in their work that they'd never consciously expose, and in a real way don't believe on even an unconscious level, but that nevertheless is claim being made by their work. While the differences between Worm and Ward may reflect a change in wildbow's own opinions, a lot of it can be laid at the differing characteristic attitudes of the types of story he's telling in each.

[lunar1an]

i always kind of got the sense that ward was a story that got distracted by or interrupted by its escalating stakes and fight scenes. it wanted to explore certain themes, but then the plot almost gets in the way, forcing the epilogues to do the heavy lifting of actually resolving the character arcs or plot threads in a very short window. it's probably a consequence of the nature of serial writing, where constantly having to publish chapters and keep that schedule w/o having a lot of time to examine what's being put out can lead to that story evolving or getting away from you as a result.

[ariapmdeol]

maricica

[lunar1an]

as much as i did like post i do think it represents an unfortunate shift in the setting from presenting aspects of the world as impersonal and structural to very anthropomorphized and direct, especially when it comes to higher powers.

in pact we're presented with Conquest as this aberrant manifestation of a given concept -- something that's not usually supposed to exist, an inevitable and overwhelming Idea that just embodies what the world already thinks of Conquest in that particular region. it may represent a human experience, but the human host is just fuel for something thoroughly inhuman.

this did somewhat hold up in pale with the Ruins Incarnations and the idea that they're things that feed off of relevant echoes in that realm. and in early pale we see other "lawful" forces like Judges generally be distant, with the world running by itself and them only stepping in as last resorts when people actively came to them. even when they were revealed to have a subtle governing role, it was very much like...Others still formed without them, violence still happened without the Carmine having a say in it, and so on.

but of course as pale went on and the setting shifted, the higher powers became kind of...more involved. if something bad is happening, it's because one specific individual decided to ignore the problem or make it worse. maybe they don't have the resources, but they still Chose to ignore your bad thing instead of another bad thing.

to some degree this is inevitable once you get into the question of gods or greater spirits and so on -- once you personify beings with a ton of power and agency, you wonder why they're using power a certain way. Problem Dragons Will appear (aka: some big bad thing that tangibly improves the world just by slaying it).

this is fine, when the greater powers are just kind of things that exist on their own. maybe they're adding an excess amount of bad or good in the world but the world could function without them. spirits are just representative of existing trends, gods only exist because of worship, etc.

but the way Incarnations have developed have now made them intrinsic and essential to the very balance of the world. they regulate their concept and don't want Too Much as well as not wanting Too Little. instead of mulching their hosts within a matter of moments the Incarnation is like a mantle, and humans who are appointed that mantle can pursue their Agenda until they are Calcified(tm)(tm)(tm) and therefore the Incarnation must seek out a new host because being too inhuman is actually bad and unnatural for them. they have tons of very human agents who regulate every single matter related to the Incarnation and also can personally decide if you deserve mercy or not from it by spending their own power.

it's one thing when a lot of these forces are just representative of existing societal problems. but when it's actively like. "here's Magic Government, they're the reason why you are sad" it's...i don't know.

tldr i'll probably just ignore new incarnation lore. or theorize that all of post is a fake simulation and every soul absorbed by an Incarnation is just soul sludge where a few faces in particular get to be pushed out when they're useful for understanding a situation. eldritch thousand-faced nightmare Incarnations would be fun.

[ilynpilled]

im getting p sick and tired of the tragic villain archetype of straw man revolutionary lol

[ilynpilled]

villain is kind of based and has some points so they will kick puppies and contradict themselves and be incoherent and inconsistent while acting like a delusional hypocritical tyrannical savior blinded by hatred and prejudice and trauma on top of the innocent corpses and the distorted revolutionary violence to ante up the “u r becoming the thing that u fought against…tragic” so we can in good conscience reject them and their points and methods and ideology and implicitly treat it as inevitably bound to go too far extremism that will destroy instead of create and will just tragically feed into what they were the victims of and seemingly wanted to defeat in the first place and in doing so tacitly valorize pacifism and liberal idealism

[ilynpilled]

and then it becomes this torturous conversation of “but how can u call x right or x an *insert* when xyz” and like no shit. that is what i mean by straw man revolutionary. they are a fictional character not a real person that just spawned from the ether, their actions, intentions, and their writing (the xyz that u point to) reflect the politics of the ppl who wrote the damn thing, and what they r saying with the damn thing, so the politics of the damn thing. that is the version of a revolutionary that they depict, and that is what the discussion is about here. when ppl highlight this they r not agreeing with the characters as they r (unless they do and give u a lay up for free bc we r having a #medialiteracy off and properly criticizing fiction and identifying the root issues is a hellish task) they r just highlighting how they r depicted and what the politics behind such a depiction and framing is

[ilynpilled]

love the alternative dimension that these ppl r living in lol

[ilynpilled]

this archetype is always reserved for villains and antagonists, so they have to be written like this, otherwise the protagonists themselves are just gonna appear to be villanous lol (comically even). these characters are always gonna be used as anti villains at best so there is truly no way to write them in good faith bc that really does put your heroes and ideology in a very uncomfortable spot

[psychewalker]

POST

P O S T Day 1, Part 0 Wren, procrastinating, waited for a while in line, letting some people go ahead, before finding a bit o

For the small number of Pact/Pale fans on here, Wildbow casually dropped a short story in the vein of Poke and Pate.

Except this one is ~35k words.

[ishdaj]

"You’re doing a good job of protecting your host"

A scene from Mute 3.11.B of the Seek web serial.

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Featuring bonus human!Basil sketches and portrait <3

[lunar1an]

the development of the Paths from "scary place from outside reality where you can instadie at any moment and unnamed and unknowable things can Get You" to "wonderland underpinned by storybook archetypes and a harsh dissonance between childish whimsy and unspeakable traumas" is a bit ??? until you realize it was a realm developed alongside Pale and therefore ended up paralleling Pale's narrative and themes. a bit like how the Abyss in Pact parallels the themes of blake's story.

this does not necessarily take away from being disappointed the Paths went this way but it does make it very interesting how diametrically opposed the Abyss and Paths are if you see them as reflecting the themes of their respective web serials.

[absyyynth]

there is nothing more reviled than the faerie

[halcyoncyrus]

Liking a character who sucks is silly because yeah I hate him and yeah I want people to bully him and say mean things but if you say the Wrong mean thing I'm going to get defensive

[halcyoncyrus]

everything he does is his own fault but also some of that shit wasn't entirely his fault do you understand

[awkwardee]

The deer

[lunar1an]

seek chapters taking like 10 days on average to release makes a lot more sense when you realize WB is also simulating an otherverse adventure game on the side with Pathquest