#pact ask

[lakesbian]

What do you think the plot of the Maggie Holt novels within Worm is? It can't really be the plot of Pact, because that doesn't gel with the YA vibe that the Maggie Holt novels would follow, and also it would be hard to make Mags the center of what is mainly Blake's story

in the maggie holt novels it's all about maggies experience with her own prophecy and blake is a tragic side character who dies badly diabolist style partway through the second novel or whatever. she does still get her name stolen though that whole part is still a thing

[lakesbian]

For me there’s only a few characters that feel like squeaky toys to me and most of them are ocs but something about Blake makes me want to latch onto him like a crocodile and run him through a death roll for a while

blake thorburn the peoples chewtoy. tonight is the night of posting strange things about blake

[lakesbian]

Re:Pact being an unintentinally transgender novel. When I got to Rose's introductuion I did a double take and had to check the url that I hadn't accidentally opened scribblehub and stumbled upon transfem Blake Thorburn fanfiction.

and the crazy part is it only gets more transgender after this. have you finished the novel or is your first read-through happening now

[lakesbian]

from my perspective on your posts, pact has like magic? i was wondering which worm characters you feel could be slided perfectly into pact. i though there are the wizard types like myrdin, but also glaistig uaine is very theatrical?

aksjdflhsdf pact has magic yes. umm i think glaistig uaine would be really good at being in pact in a johannes sort of way except i believe in her ability to make a less bad mistake. myrddin does not have a pact individual's soul to me though. i feel like krouse and noelle Do have the souls of people who could face an unfortunate doom in pact. the rest of the travelers can come too if they want. uh, nilbog could probably be in pact. helen is not from worm, but she should be in pact the most out of anyone. pretender and the satyricals could be in pact? look, i don't think about people who aren't the undersiders very often

[lakesbian]

Pact prompt: How do you think an Incarnation of Conquest residing in Toronto turned out? On one hand, it's an acknowledgement that Canada is still recently occupied territory, that everything in the Americas has been stolen & replaced by disease and massacre. On the other hand, attention is drawn to the fact that the conquest happened hundreds of years ago and the land/people is now only dealing with the fallout - and so Conquest (the incarnation) is relatively weak. The text contradicts itself, so what are your thoughts on Conquest?

TO be honest im kind of a bad person to ask about like. broader pact stuff. because im a Character Studier. i get obsessed with specific favorite characters and then pick them apart like bugs but i have deeply milquetoast opinions about broader elements of worldbuilding or what have you. that said my feelings on conquest still basically boil down to the observation that there is a little tongue-in-cheek bit where it's pointed out to blake that it makes sense for there to be an incarnation of conquest in toronto, because history of colonialism, but it's also still portrayed as a Witty Accurate Jab for blake to mock the idea of there being a powerful incarnation of conquest in toronto. conquest has some slavery imagery, but also there's everything with crone mara. and so on and so forth. the text does contradict itself a lot. it surface-level wants to be progressively aware of oppression of indigenous people, but it doesn't really see that oppression as something real or relevant, so it contradicts its own establishments of that oppression existing + includes genuinely one of wildbow's most racist moments ever. i do think conquest has some good moments so it's a shame how weak those aspects are. would be much stronger if the book could actually commit to awareness of the horror of what it was trying to touch on

[lakesbian]

Pact prompt: Would you consider rereading Pact? I know you're still yet to finish the Worm reread & watching Madoka - but if you do finish those, do you think Pact is worth rereading or did you already extract everything you needed from it？In my opinion, the most poetic lines & sections are toward the end, so rereading the whole thing from the start is daunting (for me personally).

i mean i think theres a huge amount of things that would be good to extract pact that i havent so it'd be nice if i could reread it and gain The Scholar's Understanding of it but it is also like. quite dense and heavy as far as wildbow novels go imo. even for me (someone who laughs at much of blakeys suffering). and it's also A Lot Of Words so without novelty Or intense hyperfixation it'd be hard to get the motivation to go through it all again. but mayhaps someday a reread is in the cards. many years from now. mainly i need [yelling loudly with unclear direction] SOMEONE!!!!!! to keep reading it so i can reexperience it vicariously

[lakesbian]

Do you know the game "Scarlet Hollow"? I played it because when I saw it all I could think was PACT PACT PACT. The plot is you come home to your estranged (blond) cousin for her mother's funeral. Your family is rich and bad and has some dark secrets and your mother hated them so you barely know them and after you come something bad and scary starts happening and the local witch tells you you are doomed and you can befriend your cousin despite her resisting it etc. Just wanted to tell you about it and share some screenshots that screamed pact to me as well

i like the "(blond)". i have not heard of this due to not knowing games but this does look rather pactcore. they stuck rose in blakes outfit for the protagonist there. pact enjoyers who also like games hop on this ?

[lakesbian]

hello so i just finished pact earlier today. great stuff, i enjoyed it a lot. that said, i've seen you mention in the past that there's one part of it that is Really Very Transgender and i never really saw that? besides the obvious consistent throughline of rose & blake being a male and female half of the original person, but i think i saw you say once something like "no it's not the obvious thing you think it is". so i was curious if you could say which part it was you were referring to?

the Transgender Bit is that theres not actually any sensible way for the original person (henceforth referred to as Pre-Meiosis Thorburn aka PMT) to have been cisgender. like the book presents it as correct that blake gets the conclusion "ah, PMT was a (cis) man," but the logic doesn't even remotely hold up under scrutiny. it's pretty general fandom consensus that PMT was transmasc instead. here's a post collecting as many reasons (thematic + logical) why PMT was transmasc as i could think of. it just makes the narrative go soooo much harder to patch up the awkward hole of "um, uh, it was a man named ross, yes, thats definitely a male equivalent of rose, yep" with "it was someone whose deadname was rose, and the catholic grandma obliterated them with a demon to create an ontologically unhappy cis woman sona heir and a man who has to die for her." also im glad you enjoyed it. yay pact