#Worth the candle

[businesstiramisu]

what you see: standard Webtoons action girl love interest

what you get: the character worldoptimization called "my greatest inspiration and primary role model"

Nightpool sent me a link to the worth the candle webtoon since the first few chapters are out... I am extremely excited for a worth the candle webtoon not because I plan on keeping up with it because I just can't wait to see what this particular media property will do to the general webtoon reading public

[unbeknownsttomen]

the DID NOTHING WRONG club

a quick little shitpost i did to blow off some steam from working on jennyffer, another girl who did nothing wrong.

amy dallon from parahumans, Bethel from worth the candle, Ianthe tridentarius from the locked tomb trilogy and Vriska from homestuck. i am extremely compelled by these kinds of characters and frankly i can never get enough of them.

here is a clean version

[weaselandfriends]

Worth the Candle, a webfic I've recommended on this blog a few times, is getting a Webtoon adaptation. To me, this is super cool. Not just the adaptation itself, which so far I feel like has made a lot of shrewd adaptational changes, but the idea of prominent webfic breaking into more and more mainstream outlets via adaptation. In Japan, there has been a long-running webfic -> light novel -> anime/manga pipeline (basically any isekai you've heard of took this route), which has never really had a comparable pipeline in the west.

I suppose the closest equivalent is fanfic porn that gets its serial numbers filed off for an original novel publication, like 50 Shades of Gray. There has actually been a lot of fiction like this, with 50 Shades being the most notable, and that perhaps points to the fact that the western literary industry is heavily dominated by female readership in general. (Men, increasingly, just do not read traditionally published fiction!)

In the bigger picture, this feels like yet another major blundering on account of the English-language publishing industry's inability to adapt to the internet. Though I also wonder how much different the landscape might have been if Wildbow accepted any of the apparently numerous adaptations he was approached with.

[fipindustries]

is funny just how many times juniper states that he is not attracted or interested in grak romantically and yet he would have still had sex with him if he was really horny or if he deemed it necessary. like its a thing that gets brought up a little too many times

[businesstiramisu]

WEBTOON made @animebw cover the butt in this panel

there's NO WAY they're keeping much of the romantic or sexual content the starting from... Barren Jewel, at the very least? (Even if or maybe *because* it's mostly talk and interior monologue -- exactly the stuff getting cut and streamlined the most.) But we'll see, maybe they'll bowdlerize it in an interesting or entertaining way

My web serial, Worth the Candle, has been adapted into a webcomic. This was thanks to my agent, who I have a great fondness for, since without him I would have to spend time trying to make connections and call people and do a bunch of work that I don't know how to do and am not good at.

I was offered the chance to write the webcomic, but declined, mostly because writing Worth the Candle had taken four years and was pretty draining, and was a story that I feel like I'm done with, minus some editorial stuff, answering fan questions, and the odd bit of promotion. So my level of involvement is that I get the pages as they come in, make some comments on them, and generally just give feedback which they are free to ignore.

So let's talk about some of the adaptational changes! You can read the first three issues on Webtoon here, or the first eight issues if you're willing to pay, and the books start here, but I'll assume that you haven't read either, and there won't be substantial spoilers because I'm talking about stuff from the very beginning. Actually, I guess there will be some spoilers, but later on, and I'll mark them, mostly having to do with some foreshadowing that the webcomic does which I didn't do.

(I licensed the rights to make the webcomic to WebToon and took my money upfront, they didn't ask me to write this post, I have not actually asked the artist/writer why they made these changes, it's just me guessing and commenting, for fun.)

Character Design

Here's how Juniper Smith is described in the books, ch 2:

I won’t belabor my physical description. My friend Greg had once said that I looked like someone had chosen ‘default’ for every option in the character creator, which I’d tried to laugh at but cut kind of deep. I wasn’t handsome, I wasn’t ugly, none of my features were very prominent, my eyes were blue, my hair was brown, average build, average height … After Greg had made his comment at one of our D&D games, my nickname had been ‘default’ for a while, at least until I stopped pretending to find it funny, and even after that my friends would use similar lines to trash talk me, saying that I was “the most generic man alive”, “a white bread with skim milk motherfucker”, or “the human equivalent of vanilla ice cream”. Not that I was any less of an asshole to them.

This is how he looks in the comic:

I would more or less give this full marks.

In terms of other aspects of character design, Juniper is here given a black shirt with a red symbol on it rather than the stock white t-shirt he's wearing in the opening chapters of the first book, probably in the interests of adding in some visual variety. On the page, it's perfectly fine that every person in the first 50k words is wearing basically the same stock outfit. In a visual medium, I do think that you need that pop. I do think it's interesting that Juniper is wearing the same clothes in the classroom as he is on the plane, implying that when he transmigrated his clothes ... came with him? I don't know.

The other major character of the first section is Amaryllis, who is a major character in the entire work. Here's her description in the book:

Standing by a workbench, among various car parts, tools, and cans of unidentified fluids, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

I’m not really sure what protocol is here, in terms of prose. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a creep, so maybe I should stay as generic as possible and tell you about her dark red hair pulled back in a braid, the glacial blue of her eyes, how starkly alert she looked as she peered over the parts in front of her, or her grease-smeared clothes. Save for her eyes, I wasn’t really focused on any of that. My mind was consumed by tracing her curves, the shape of her chest in her blood-stained t-shirt, the fullness of her lips and the delicate way she had them parted -- and yeah, it was pretty fucked up that the splatter of blood on her shirt wasn’t worth rating much of a mention. I was consumed with staring at her and thinking how gorgeous she was, until I noticed that she was having a powerful effect on me, at which point different parts of my mind were given over to marveling at the sensation of being so attracted to a girl, and others were still focused on her.

Imagine that someone spent a few years studying your likes and dislikes, running through video of your every private moment, somehow surreptitiously hooking up EKGs to measure your physiological responses without you knowing. Then imagine that they sat down with that data and the best photo manipulation artists in the world and made the absolute perfect picture to cause your heart rate to spike, a jolt to run up your spine, butterflies in your stomach, and a cold sweat on your palms. Then imagine that they did this again, over and over in slight variations, until they had a full 4K 60fps 3D movie to show you. That was what it was like watching her.

And here she is (as she's introduced) in the comic:

Aside from the change in clothes, which in the book are the same white t-shirt and blue jeans that everyone else is wearing, Amaryllis has a scar on her face, of unknown provenance. This was probably added for visual variety, but I do find scars to be very fetching, and in one of the early versions of Worth the Candle she did have one (patterned off a woman with an extremely attractive facial scar I had met, the kind of facial scar that looked like it was applied by a Hollywood makeup artist specifically to give a touch of the exotic and mysterious, except she was a just a Midwestern mom).

And of course Amaryllis was always going to be an adaptational challenge, because the books are told through Juniper's eyes, and she's The Most Beautiful Girl in the World to him, and conventionally attractive to everyone else. Juniper tries to be normal about this. But if you're in the visual medium, you have to show both how Juniper feels and how she actually looks, and attractiveness is just so incredibly personal. My wife and I get in these kinds of discussions a lot, where she'll think someone is good-looking and I'll say "him?" or vice versa.

I think the above panel in particular is a good middle ground, a glamour shot that snaps back to the reality of their first meeting:

(The void gun she's holding there is much different from the one described in the book, not something cobbled together from spare parts and void equipment, but this is another very minor change that I would assume is meant for communicating immediately that this is a lethal weapon, and there's probably not a place for explaining how and from what it was cobbled together, which is also under-explained in the book for reasons of pacing.)

Story

I've read the first nine episodes, and overall, it's hewing very closely. There are a few bits in particular that stand out to me in how they're handled.

Spoilers for later in the series follow, I guess.

These are the opening lines of the webcomic. This is much stronger foreshadowing than I used, and I like it. Part of Juniper's backstory is that he's been deeply depressed and self-destructive, and he's slow to open up about this with other characters or the reader. The "it" that he couldn't go through with is, then, suicide. In the books? This comes very very late. Juniper being depressed after Arthur's death is brought up after the first major arc, halfway through what's now Book 1, and gets more explicit as the books go on, eventually getting to Juniper talking about his attempted suicide with people and grappling with it like ... almost halfway through?

I don't know what the plans for the webcomic are, but my guess is that they're setting up for much, much later on in a way that I didn't. This was always a background element, something that informed Juniper's character, not so much the suicide attempt as the feeling that came after, this understanding that yes, he did want to live, a heady, energizing kind of "I guess I don't have the way out that I thought I did" sort of thing.

So I take it as a good sign that this is the opening line. It points toward them understanding where they're going.

One of the other major adaptational changes is that they signpost Arthur's death with a memorial on his desk:

When I was getting pages, this was one of the first moments where I was like "yes, this is a good change, visual storytelling to replace my walls of text, flows and offers indirect information". I am very happy with the adaptation thus far, and stuff like this is what I love about adaptation in general, the need to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of the medium.

Content Rating

Worth the Candle gets grim and dark in places. It at least attempts to grapple with serious things. The webcomic is rated Young Adult, and I'm not sure how they're going to handle the later stuff, but I can talk about how they're handling the stuff now, and what I think it means overall.

First, there's a lot less swearing. Worth the Candle in its entirety uses the word "fuck" ~1200 times. Granted, this is over the course of 1.6 million words, so a fuck density of one every 1.3k words, and some of those are in the verb "soulfuck" rather used descriptively, as exclamations, etc. My personal feeling is that this doesn't matter basically at all. I don't think I notice when someone isn't swearing unless they're using corny substitutions or trying to get cute with it.

Second, the violence is toned down in that YA way, where they're still showing much of the same things, just not with the same level of visceral detail. When a Marvel comic has someone thrown into a wall, they're no blood or snapping of bones or mangling of bodies, at least if it's a comic at a certain rating (I have definitely read some edgy 90s comics that do go hard on the violence). I think, overall, that this isn't my preference, which might be obvious from the way that I try to write fight scenes and such. But I'm also sort of inured to this toning down of violence, since it's omnipresent.

Third, there's the sex stuff, and ... well, it hasn't come up in the webcomic yet. I think I laid out my reasoning for why I think sex scenes should be written/included in Why to Write a Sex Scene, but the brief version is that sometimes you're showing how characters relate to each other, what they think of each other, and the sex scene shouldn't always just be something that's skipped over and left to the reader's imagination, because things happen, there are moments of communication, it can and does develop a relationship in the moment rather than after the fact. Plus a little titillation is, in my opinion, usually good.

The great thing about writing webfic is that no one can stop you from just including three solid chapters of hardcore pornography in the middle of your story. I have never done that, but I could is the point, and I would only get complaints from people who have no power over me. That same freedom doesn't exist here, and ... yeah, it makes my heart sink a little bit.

Fourth, there's some of the more mature content stuff, the topics that might not be broached. I don't know how they're handling that, so I reserve judgment, but I think my opinion is probably going to be "well, you do what you have to do", and if my version of the story is superior because there are no brakes, then I can be smugly superior about that.

Conclusion

This is already a fairly long post, and there are a few other things that I could have remarked on, but I think this is all the most interesting stuff.

Alright, just one real quick: Arthur is adaptationally more attractive, though this is also how Juniper sees Arthur and I think by the standards of webcomics, this is actually sort of necessary. Most of the flashback cast is not described until much later on, and by then you kind of know and understand them from the things they've said, if you can keep track of them. Many of the flashbacks are nearly disembodied. But if you're showing Arthur early, then the first impression he's going to make is in his appearance, and that really anchors people.

So overall, I am happy with the adaptation. There are challenges ahead, and I'm thankful that I'm not the one who needs to tackle those challenges.

[4denthusiast]

Lots of fantasy tropes get interpreted very differently in different settings, but I feel like this happens particularly much with the trope of dungeons, because there is no standard explanation for how they work that actually makes sense, so other authors are inspired to come up with their own takes. Some examples from media I've seen (possibly misremembered or misinterpreted):

This Used To Be About Dungeons: dungeons are a distinct magical phenomenon introduced into the world by the Editors (a group of somewhat incompetent litRPG-themed gods), possibly as a way to provide mortals with resources, or dissapate stray magic. If a party of up to 5 people enters one of the entrances spaced in a semi-regular grid throughout the world, a new mini-world (normally a series of rooms) is created until they leave. The monsters do not form a stable ecosystem because they are created ex nihilo along with the rest of the dungeon, and are only aggressive because the Editors made a mistake.

Mother of Learning: mana is generated deep underground, possibly by the heart of the dragon whose petrified body the entire planet is, and seeps up through a series of caves (the dragon's blood vessels). These caves have a higher mana concentration the deeper you go, supporting an ecosystem of increasingly dangerous and magical monsters, but also causing the formation of valuable crystallised mana deposits.

Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle: kind of similar to TUTBAD (and by the same author), one of the many types of magic that exist in the setting is a spell whose effect is to create a dungeon. The caster can customise it to some extent, but it inevitably ends up with some mixture of danger and treasure.

Dungeon Meshi: I'm less sure I'm interpreting this one right, but as I understand it, there are two basic sources of energy for life: sunlight and mana. Sunlight of course is only available above ground, and mana can be created by living things in a self-sustaining loop, but also tends to drift away into the air if not contained, so this self-sustaining loop only works in enclosed spaces. There are therefore two distinct classes of ecosystems, sunlight-based ecosystems above ground, and mana-based ecosystems underground, whether that's in natural caves or artificially excavated areas.

Beer and Beards: kind of similar to Mother of Learning, areas where magic is naturally generated, but with a particular elemental flavour of magic in each location, so there are distinct dungeons each with unique properties. The one nearest where the story takes place has plant magic, and is therefore good for crops.

I'd be interested to hear if you know of more interesting takes from other media.

[recordcrash]

Long ago, I started maintaining a fiction recommendation list at the Homestuck Discord, after the original comic ended in 2016. We were all desperately looking for more stories like it, because with that awful ending, it hardly felt like we had finished anything. [...]

There’s an interesting disconnect between it and this blog. I’ve reviewed some of its featured works upon reread, but the vast majority remains untouched, to the point I highly doubt many of you know it exists. This post will bridge that gap: I’m going to write at least one short review per work in every category of the list.

Read the full post here.

[jerusalemstraycat]

I'm trudging through Worth The Candle right now. I say "trudging" even though I'm actually enjoying it a lot, and I don't feel it a difficult or dreary read at all, but it's been a couple weeks at least and I'm only on chapter 37 out of 254 (!!!).

I'm still waiting for whatever incredible high-concept lore that lands WTC on every ratfic or rat-adj recommended reading list. As of now it's still a pretty generic D&D-themed isekai story with meta elements, enjoyable but not particularly groundbreaking. I have trouble imagining such a story staying interesting for another 37 chapters, let alone over 200. However, the chapter I just finished had a pretty significant development with the reveal of the personality network constraints, as well as the title drop. So I'm hopeful that things will ramp up a bit soon.

Goodness gracious this book is long.

[k25ff]

I have finished reading Worth the Candle. Maybe now I can get better sleep. It feels like my brain is hollow but also full of stuff. I need to write. I've already written more in the past week than I've written in a row for years.

One of the best things I've read, honestly.

[strikeslip]

you've also read Terra Ignota and the Commonweal books! Hello! Know anything else that you'd fit into that category?

Hello! What a delightful question.

Is the category defined by the quality of the worldbuilding, and how it supports the story while also interacting with notions of history and culture?

Is the category defined by being thrown into a complicated setting and having to figure things out from context?

Is the category defined by how different the stories are from basically anything you're going to encounter on a normal bookstore shelf?

Maybe a little of all three? Anyway, I'd recommend Carla Speed McNeil's FINDER, Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur Trilogy (Starts with The Quantum Thief), and Jeff Noon's Vurt in that order. That's one post-post-apocalyptic science fiction graphic novel series, a set of high concept science fiction heists with some really interesting future cultures (I think the Zoku and the Utopians have a lot in common), and the weirdest cyberpunk novel you may ever encounter. All of these are more like Terra Ignota than they're like the Commonweal books -- honestly, the closest thing to the Commonweal might be Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, but also, that sort of depends what you're getting out of the Commonweal. If you're enjoying the social organization aspects, then Le Guin. If, alternatively, you're looking for something where a sorcerer will consider grabbing a bucket of Fluorite and casting Spell Of Dioxygen Difluoride, I recommend Worth The Candle.

[drethelin]

a big downside to updating a written work to visual medium is a picture is worth 1000 words which means 1000 more chances to fuck up

I never once imagined juniper having such derpy eyes

[businesstiramisu]

Also I really want webtoons readers to know the actual name of Juniper's hometown

The first time it appeared in the book, I assumed it was derisive shorthand for "town in the middle of nowhere that no one cares about".

Which it is, but it's also literally the town name.

I kept expecting Juniper to address this, because I'm sorry that is NOT a normal town name for Kansas, you're just telling me you have no Opinions on it??? (This guy has Opinions on everything and will happily go on a tangent about all of them.) But nope!

I'm forced conclude that Juniper is actually from a slightly different version of Earth where that is, in fact, and unremarkable town name for Kansas

[alexanderwales]

"Alright, tell me about this guy we're going to war against," said Juniper.

"He's the most fearsome strategist in the world. You've heard the word 'tactic'?" asked Amaryllis.

Juniper nodded.

"Tacticus is the man it's named after," said Amaryllis. "That's the level of strategic genius we're dealing with."

"Wait," said Juniper. "The word 'tactic' is literally derived from his name?"

"Yes," said Amaryllis with a this-is-not-important frown.

"But he's human, he's only been alive for what, fifty years, which means that until, say, thirty years ago the term 'tactic' and 'tactical' just ... didn't exist?"

"Yes," said Amaryllis. "That's correct."

"Well then I would assume that he's not actually all that good, if they didn't have a word for tactics before he came along," said Juniper.

"They called them other things," said Amaryllis with a sigh that was just short of aggrieved. "Stratagems, maneuvers, things like that."

"Well then it's good we're not going against Oliver Stratago or Elias Maneuver then," said Juniper.

Amaryllis suddenly got very serious. "If we ever come across Elias Maneuver, we're better off throwing in the towel."

[theothin]

the same strategy as in blood knight! it's a useful tactic, but it shouldn't be overpowered, it's really just a roundabout way of using feather fall

[weaselandfriends]

Web Fiction, Recently Read

Hello! I'm still early into writing the Pokémon story I discussed in a previous post. I've been writing and rewriting certain parts to better grasp some of the characters, so while I do have some completed chapters, I still consider the story in the planning phase. At the same time, I've recently read a few webfics, and thought I'd share some thoughts here.

1. Floornight by Nostalgebraist

Floornight is short but dense, and in terms of its plot, themes, and focus shares many similarities with Almost Nowhere, a later work by the same author that I read and discussed in a previous post.

This work is the Problem Sleuth to Almost Nowhere's Homestuck. At least, reading the two works back-to-back, that was the impression I struggled to shake. I would often encounter an idea in Floornight that I remembered being expanded on in much more detail in Almost Nowhere, and as such it became difficult for me to appreciate Floornight in its own right.

It's a comparison that reminds me of a quote from Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

An unfair comparison? Certainly. Especially since longer works are not always commensurately ambitious, but instead simply bloated.

Almost Nowhere is ambitious, however, and pushes ideas touched on in Floornight to their limits, which makes reading Floornight afterward a less impressive experience than it otherwise might be. (Nostalgebraist's other work, The Northern Caves, is fundamentally dissimilar from both and thus not victim to the same comparisons.)

That's not to say I disliked Floornight. I was especially fond of the character Hermes Cept, who might be my favorite character in Nostalgebraist's canon. I love characters to whom the reader is introduced from the perspective of another character, giving the reader a certain first impression that is completely decimated when the character is given their own perspective later on. (A lot of Modern Cannibals hinges on this technique.) In Cept's case, what first appears to be an egotistical and incompetent celebrity scientist turns out to have significantly more depth and nuance than the first impression provides. Love it!

Nostalgebraist also shows off some serious writing chops during a certain battle scene near the story's climax. Another reader's longform review of Almost Nowhere comments that the story lets all its major events occur off screen, only to be known to the reader via the reactions of the characters, and to an extent Floornight is similar: Despite a Neon Genesis Evangelion-esque premise of soldiers fighting aliens, there are essentially zero scenes where soldiers fight aliens on screen. The climax changes that, though, and really makes me wonder why Nostalgebraist is so content to let things happen off screen, since he's so good at writing action when it happens.

I've now read all three of Nost's major published works, and there isn't a more exciting web fiction author today, at least that I know of. Can't wait to see where he goes next.

2. Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales

Floornight is a lean 70,000 words. Worth the Candle, an isekai LitRPG, is 1.6 million words.

I started reading this one years ago, but only made it to the second arc before giving up under the sheer immensity of it. The start was slow, and while it was improving steadily, I couldn't see myself wading through something of its size. Compared to Nostalgebraist, Wales' prose is more "serviceable" than exciting, so the value in reading is almost entirely from the plot, characters, and themes rather than the actual line-by-line reading experience. After finishing my own isekai story, Cleveland Quixotic, I decided to take a second stab at it.

Upon the reread, I was more amenable to a story that is simply a fun fantasy romp, and WtC has a strong sense of forward progression despite its length, which avoids the trap most long stories fall into of spinning their wheels without accomplishing anything.

As I got further into it, however, a strong metafictional element increasingly came into play. The conceit of the story is that the protagonist, a tabletop RPG fanatic in his previous life on Earth, has been put into a world eerily similar to the ones he created as a dungeon master. His actions seem to be guided or obstructed by a mysterious, unseen dungeon master with godlike powers, and the story often becomes more about trying to understand and play to the narrative that the dungeon master wants rather than simply brute forcing through challenges one after another.

At the same time, the protagonist's dead friend from Earth seems to have been transported to the world much earlier. Their narrative was Campbellian in nature, Hero's Journey incarnate, while the protagonist's is much more postmodern and subversive. This leads to some fascinating meditations on the develop of narrative over history; one of my favorite scenes is when a story-obsessed villain believes they can kill the protagonist despite his Chosen One status because it's a postmodern story and the protagonist dying unceremoniously wouldn't be out of place.

My absolute favorite part, however, is the climax. Without spoiling too much, it involves a long delve into a seemingly endless dungeon, where characters and abilities fall away one-by-one until what is left is only a bare, emotional finale. I love climaxes that involve some kind of literal and emotional ascent; I did something similar in Modern Cannibals and Cleveland Quixotic.

In general, it's difficult to finish something so long in such a satisfactory way, which only makes the ending more impressive. I was worried this story would Muv-Luv me. A year ago, I read the famous visual novel Muv-Luv, a sprawling work that begins as a comedy slice of life and ends as a futuristic science fiction war epic. My problem with Muv-Luv wasn't that it was bad; it even had many elements I adored. But its ending, while not terrible, was merely okay, and I ultimately felt like what I got wasn't worth the time investment I put into it. Worth the Candle's ending avoided that entirely, so I can wholeheartedly recommend it despite its length.

3. Cowboy Grak 5: Yet Another Fistful of Obols by Remy (gazemaize)

Lastly, this one is a fanfic of Worth the Candle, posted coincidentally one day after I finished reading. It's by Remy, the author of Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation, one of the funniest stories I've ever read. With this fanfic of a webfic, Remy cements themselves as the comedy master of the webfic sphere. I can only hope they start posting stories with more regularity...

I can't say too much about this story without spoiling almost all of Worth the Candle, so I'll keep this brief. If you've already read WtC, then you should read this 100%.

Web fiction is exciting. People are able to write all kinds of insane stuff that would never survive the streamlined mainstream publishing industry of today. I hope to read some more unique webfics and see people continually push the boundaries of what can be done with a story. (Hopefully they're not all 1.6 million words though...)