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Found my fav Slay the Princess route recently. Dragon my beloved. Your horrifying beak mouth was an impossible-to-refuse lip syncing challenge 💖

Shoutouts to @blacktabbygames for making such a cool game!

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“Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves.”

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Arcade, in regard to the sniper duo

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Wormblr Recommended Reading Order

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: This short novel is needed to understand the power fantasies of most fanfictions of Worm. It is also important to understand the writing style of Mark Twain to understand the next work.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Not only is the Isekai genre a vital part of the Worm fanfiction community, this book also provides a surface level understanding of royalty, needed to understand Twig.

The Holy Bible: To understand most of Pact and Pale you will need to thoroughly analyze and draw allusions to this novel. They both draw from many characters and themes, providing direct allusions to the "Christianity" religion.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the understanding of the word "sequel" and its connotations is needed to fully grasp Ward, and its subtle relationship with Worm.

Claw: This is the shortest book by Wildbow, and a good starting point. The reader will start to parse his writing style, and understand how to analyze characters.

In Flanders Fields: Clicking on the Support Wildbow tab will lead the reader to his Patreon, where they may learn that he deals in a currency labelled "$CA". Learning more about the author, they may find he lives in a place called Canada. The short poem In Flanders Fields is a crucial piece of work into understanding this "Canada" place. It also helps to ground the viewer when they read Pact and Pale.

Slaughterhouse Five: This piece of work is necessary to understand one of the main antagonists in Wildbow's best work, Pact. The reader will understand this so called "German" phenomena, and fully understand the character Johannes Lillegard.

Frankenstein: It is crucial to understand the monster in Frankenstein to comprehend many parts of Twig. It also introduces the reader to a "superhero", with the character of the monster.

Twig: One of Wildbow's best works, Twig is indicative of Wildbow's peak as a whole. The interplay of the Lambs and the world as a whole is intricately crafted, and the main character Jessie Ewesmont is a very likeable character. Unfortunately the book is ruined by one of the side characters, Sylvester Lambsbridge. It is possible to skip over the sections of the book where he appears though, and it is highly recommended to do so.

Ward: The second installment in the Parahumans series, Ward is by far much better than its predecessor. Victoria and team Breakthrough are much more compelling characters than the pastiche and tropey team Undersiders.

War and Peace: The third installment in the Parahumans series, War and Peace is innovative and complex. Much smaller than Wildbow's other novels, but still sizeably good. The main character Napoleon is very compelling, and is almost as good as Victoria.

Pale: The fourth installment and final installment in the Parahumans series, Pale serves as a good ending for all the characters in the series. The Kennet Trio serve as very thrilling antagonists for the protagonist, and are arguably more interesting.

Pact: Though completely unrelated to the Parahumans series, Pact is still good in its own ways. By far not as good as War and Peace, but Blake Thorburn still serves as a good and interesting main character.

And that's the recommended reading list! After reading in this order, you should be enlightened, and be able to find the true path to Wildbow's treasure. It is said Wildbow's treasure has the secret of immortal life.

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You take a boat from north of Boston directly to the Harbor.

States you can visit in the Fallout games

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Nah, the “Far Harbor” DLC for 4 has you visit Bar Harbor.

States you can visit in the Fallout games

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Double art reveal day? Yeaaaah double art reveal day ✨️

Aka has been COOKIN' this week 👀

Hh'eily, the Color out of Space 🌈

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Happy aniversary you dumb fucks @staff

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What does a wet Fritter look like. Like if someone just sprayed them down with a hose. Do they look like a drowned rat…

lucky for you i've actually drawn this before!

they just become even more of a soggy mop end, tbh...

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If I was teaching, I would focus on the critical thinking aspect.

What is Taylor doing? What does she say she wants to do? What do you think she’ll do next? What does she think this person’s motivations are? Is there another possible motivation they could have?

Just because Taylor is about as an unreliable narrator as you can get, without just blatantly saying something like “The sky is zebra striped.”

Sure Taylor, you definitely didn’t kiss Brian to piss off Sophia. Gladly is a grade-A asshole for not stepping in, when you explicitly turned down the help he offered. Truly, you are always correct.

If Worm were literature taught in schools, what aspect of it do you think instructors would focus on?

Danged if I know. (but tl;dr? I think fiction in general is being influenced by webserials-as-made-for-survival-income and that Worm is a major example of a webserial of that sort (not the primary example; IIRC I think that might be "The Wandering Inn" for English language and who knows what it is for all languages?) and is or is a contender for earliest popular example. The needs of the author (to maintain and grow the fanbase) shaped the story to some degree, and that is probably what it would be.) Longer below the cut; I wrote the above after meandering for a while and then deciding to make a tl;dr.

I don't think I could teach anything that wasn't practical because I'd be spending 45 minutes out of the hour rambling down rabbitholes and the damned students (I've been one so I know) would ENCOURAGE me.

And, while I'm an enthusiastic consumer, I'm not a successful liberal arts student and my writing has holes I don't have the comprehension to identify.

BUT

the emergence of people who make a living (or a significant chunk of their income) writing online serials for online patrons is an interesting subset of the people who make online content for online patrons.

And Worm is probably not the first of these serials, or the biggest, but it certainly had a huge impact and the author evolved a strategy for staying sufficiently popular and relevant.

This isn't about a class in being solvent as a writer, though, this is about literature.

And now that we're not all watching the same TV channels, and now that there are hundreds of people making their living (to various degrees) off of things like Patreon and Kofi and such?

It's *shaping literature*.

And I can't say how. I'm not there yet. I'd need to read a lot more not-Wildbow webserials and compare-and-contrast them with each other and with the pre-internet serials like those DIckens wrote.

But if you let your audience get bored and wander off and you suddenly can't afford dentist appointments or rent or eggs with your ramen that's bad.

So you, and the people making a living publishing Webtoons, and several other types of online art creators?

You come up with something.

You pander a little with some stories (WildBow is too proud and serious about the craft to do obvious pandering, but there have been some allowances and some tweaks).

You maybe have cliffhangers.

You introduce surprise twists.

And maybe you don't have the confidence to let your audience breathe because unlike with an actual novel (where they've already bought the damned thing so even if chapter 32 in your time-travel epic is a lengthy discussion of how actually Dinosaurs were a type of mollusk, or a fantasy pirate epic where you spend 40% of the pages on meticulous descriptions of the clouds, seabirds, and floating vegetables, well, they've paid for the book so they can skim it or skip it but they're missing out chapter 32 is fucking great it's an example of someone being enthusiastically infodumpy about a thing even while they're wrong (dinosaurs are not mollusks. We thought that once, but we know better now. They're a sort of lichen.)

And sure, some of what you're doing is because you're new to the craft and you don't know HOW to take a damn break,

but also, you don't need to.

Disclaimer: I have not read ANY non-WB webserials...except for, um, whatzitcalled...A Practical Guide to Evil. ...which major events caused me to drop so long ago I don't remember much and maybe it's great but I started it after I finished reading Twig and...I'm much more interested in returning to Twig so...I don't feel like PGTE can have been very to my taste.

--- (Time for me to write a TLDR above the cut)

There are oodles of great things about Worm or things that could be analyzed. The irony of powers, the way it's both a reflection of and a criticism of superpowered media (and maybe it was informed in some way by The Watchmen but damned if I can see it), the way it possibly sprouts from the ostensible YA boom of the aughts (Hunger Games was about five years prior). The themes of bullying and latent suicidal ideation that stretch from the very first chapter all the way to, well, the very end of the story AND to the end of the epilogue.

Worm does it great. I love this story for many reasons and many of them are unexamined or unrecognized.

But yeah; I think the biggest reason for it to be in a literature class is because the idea that you could make a living by writing lengthy serious stories online is now a reality, Worm was a big part of that, and Worm both shapes and was shaped by the real and imagined necessities of that.

IMHO.

(I found an old post once, back from around 2008, where someone listed allllll the webcomics where the people writing them had the webcomic as their only job. It wasn't actually very many. XKCD, SomethingPositive, PennyArcade, and fewer than a dozen more. Now? Webcomics that are a primary source of income are very likely so numerous there are dozens nobody reading this has heard of.) I ran out of time to write this and it's just going on and I'm meandering. That's what I've got for now.

Well, it's my hot take anyway. I might change my mind after I've slept on it but if I actually tried to post cold takes I'd only get one post out every three months.

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I made a joke a while ago about how my favourite part about Warframe is math because you can stab a guy and watch numbers explodes into the entire room.

Anyway I now have a knife where I stab someone and the entire room get electrocuted.

Warframe is stupid in the best way.

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Winter Schnee, The Winter Death Knight

Jaune: …

Ren: …

Jaune: …

Ren: Jaune?

Jaune: …

Ren: Jaune, don't…

Jaune: …

Ren: Jaune, don't.

Jaune: …

Ren: Jaune, don't!

Jaune: …

Ren: JAUNE, DON'T!!!

Jaune: …

Jaune: Smash.

Ren: GODS DAMMIT?!

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This is what Darling sounds like to normal people

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Been heinously sick this week. It’s getting desperate… I’m coping with Amy.

This half assed comic came to me in a feverish haze:

The Dubious Dallon strikes again

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You cannot describe me into submission.

Slay the Princess

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Fun fact: Even though Siffrin is sick, they can still try and leave the house after their friends save them from the king.

Unfortunately for them, Odile exists.

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To be fair, they didn’t have a “pet” endbringer during Gold Morning. They sent the Simurgh out for a mission saying “Don’t kill anyone” and the Simurgh specifically killed a single person just to remind them they had no real control over it. That they were allies, not master and slave.

Makes me wonder what that person was going to do later, that the precognitive city-killer singled them out for inhuming.

But yeah, great catch. At this rate, I’ll have to go over the story with a fine-toothed comb to find all the little details like this.

Hehe