#a practical guide to evil

[eldritchwyrm]

please read A Practical Guide to Evil

[hyakunana]

AT LAST, EVIL IS UNLEASHED!!!!! 😈 and I'm the Character Colorist of the new WEBTOON project, A Practical Guide to Evil!

Super happy to be part of this dream team! And I hope you all enjoy it!

[st-just]

My hot Practical Guide to Evil take is that I'm perpetually annoyed when people treat 'justifications matter only to the just' as, like, profound, or deeply telling about Cat's character.

She justifies things to herself constantly! And to everyone whose opinion she actually cares about! When she thinks she fucked up she is consumed with guilt! She never fucking shuts up about 'long prices'!

[swordandscytheandpen]

Finished Guide. I have thoughts.

Mostly positive ones. I have nitpicks, sure, but it's damn near impossible to write a fully satisfying resolution to a three million word story. EE did an insanely good job considering.

Akua was one of the highlights, of course. Her arc was indeed probably the single best redemption story I've ever seen. The pivot in Praes, in particular, was amazingly compelling ("why was she not hearing the song?" hit me HARD). @kvothbloodless once responded to my tags while I was in the middle of Book 2, assuaging my skepticism that a character as remarkably hateable as Akua could have a well-executed redemption arc, and I gotta say her confidence was well-placed. It's a testament to EE's character writing skills that a character who is not only morally monstrous but immensely personally unlikeable could be turned around like this. I'll make fun of Guide's length, of course, but I don't think an arc like this could be handled so well in a work of reasonable length. It's a strength both of the writer and the medium, I suppose.

Her final fate, like most of the cast's, was a pretty solid conclusion to her character arc as well. Really followed through on the narrative's refusal to entertain redemption through death, while still being a surprise, unlike the whole Dead-King's-jailor thing. The dynamics of that particular fate on her character had already been explored through her and Cat's thoughts several times, so it's nice to see something different, instead of just watching the original plan play out with rings instead of a crown.

Same goes for a lot of the other characters. Viv and Indrani had excellent conclusions. Masego and Hakram I'm not dissatisfied with, though I do have minor points of umbrage. Hakram's arc might just have gone past me a little bit; I feel that if he has to be tied so tightly to the Clans as a whole he really needed more foreshadowing connecting him to his home. Instead, it felt a little bit like a family-conquers-all story shoved in with only justification in the moment, which ain't really my cup of tea. More specifically, it felt like the narrative required him to have deeply-held goals that he could go be independent about, but forgot to actually touch on those goals until he'd already left Catherine. Still, just a mild disappointment.

Then we've got Masego, and my take on him is similar in that it's broadly satisfying but I just feel like it doesn't fit in certain ways. In his case, it's mostly the apotheosis: the edges of that particular puzzle piece seem rough, as if EE had something else in mind but swapped it out relatively late in the process. There was some hinting that his dream of godhead would result in conflict with Cat, and then they just... didn't do that. Then in the epilogues, it really seems like his apotheosis hadn't made much impact on who he is or what he does. His part of the epilogue would have been just as suitable, to my eyes, if he hadn't achieved that. So it fell flat a little bit, which took some of the wind out of his ending. Everything else about him was great though.

Catherine's ending took the longest for me to think through. At first I was a bit ambivalent about it, 'cause it felt like nothing was really subverted. Minus a few hiccups, she got everything she wanted. Cardinal. The Liesse Accords. Even all the Woe surviving. The only thing she didn't get was Akua, and she already knew that wasn't on the table. I really just did not expect a straightforward Catherine Wins ending to the Guide. I thought she'd probably die at least; in fact, I thought the most likely outcome was Cat's death and her goals being posthumously realized! This story sure felt like a tragic ending was coming down the pipes!

And then once again, I remembered that this is a story about stories. What Cat has isn't just a happy ending, it's one last victory over the narrative. It's a middle finger to the idea that villains don't get to sail off into the sunset. And you know, it really takes some strength to put a fresh coat of paint on the very idea of a happy ending. So yeah, Cat's ending is great. Just perfect.

But of course, there's no way to wrap up three million words while satisfying every single plot point. So, keeping in mind that APGTE is probably among my top 5 written works in the English language now, I do have a point or two of order.

First off, towards the end, Named were dying like flies. Felt like every chapter had a list of casualties all its own. And I can see the drive to do that; there were a lot of Named involved by that point and there had to be casualties. It keeps the stakes high and the villains scary. But I can't help but feel discouraged from reading once six characters I'm somewhat engaged with die in the span of two chapters. Mostly offscreen.

The biggest offender here was the Painted Knife's band. I really loved the bonus chapter about their backstories, as well as the concept of them as the first band containing both heroes and villains, and I'd wish we'd seen nore of how that relationship developed. And I thought it was a weighty enough label that they'd shot up again later. So when it was mentioned offhand that the Royal Conjurer was killed, I was blindsided a little bit. And then the rest died, one by one, offscreen (except the Knife). Poor Poisoner. She was my favorite. Felt like wasted potential, like a story that wasn't followed through to the end. The Blade of Mercy was in a similar boat. He was important in the Arsenal arc! Let him die onscreen at least!

There was Roland too, who wasn't as bad. His death wasn't really satisfying, another surprise Hawk casualty, but at least it was shown and meaningful. Still, I feel like he deserved a proper character arc outside his backstory. Poor guy.

A couple other deaths, too: Rafaella and Alexis in the fight against the Dead King. Rafaella was ambiguous enough that I really wasn't sure whether she was dead for a while, and even after... I dunno. The hero who killed Captain needed a stronger resolution than "sacrificed herself to get rid of the Dead King's last line of revenants." Then Alexis's death just wasn't meaningful; it wasn't for anything. And I know, I know, that's not how death works, but it is in stories! Didn't feel right. It was too fast.

But the Keter deaths were really my biggest gripe, and if that's the biggest problem I have with a conclusion to a story that long? I can only offer applause.

You know what death I didn't have a problem with? Hanno, in the epilogue. How the hell do you kill a character that major in just a few sentences and make it feel satisfying? The epilogues were just all-around great. The character deaths and resolutions felt natural, plot points that were touched on in the main story were shown to ultimately be left to the next generation, and the continued history and development of the world made it feel so alive. It's a common sin for characters to create a new static world that's supposed to feel like it'll last forever. And sure, the framework of the Accords are kinda like that, but the rest of the world? There are still wars, still conflicts, still upheavals. (The Republic of Orense was a nice touch in that regard.) The epilogues are nearly flawless and I will stand by that.

Last thing - of course I gotta talk about Anaxares. When Yara dropped him into the Serenity, I was pretty hyped about it. But then... I dunno. It turned out a bit flat. Felt less like the culmination of Anaxares's character and more like a plot device to cross the Serenity out of the equation. At the end of the day, with Anaxares sitting in the Serenity through the final battle and then appearing in the epilogues just to pop up years in the future, cause problems, and run off again, he felt weirdly like a sequel hook? And forgive me, but I'd eat my hat if there's a sequel. I guess it's imagination bait, which is certainly preferable to a poorly-executed conclusion. He's still my favorite non-Cat character. If there's any decent fic about him, please give it.

Speaking of, that's all I've got. Looking back up, this was mostly petty complaints, but I wanna be clear: once the first few books were past and EE broke their worst writing habits, this became one of my favorite writing pieces ever. The length and the proliferation of typos and other errors mean that I'd hesitate to fullthroatedly recommend it to anyone, but it's one of those works that has permanently altered my brain. Good fucking book.

Okay, Pale Lights time. Hopefully I'll catch up before Book 3 comes to an end, but I'm not gonna rush. Rapidly chewing through ridiculously long works is not, I have learned, conducive to getting the most enjoyment out of them.

[thetallowman]

Alright. I need to ramble out a monologue about Hanno of Arwad, and how's he actually really interesting, thematically. (To finally cross him off the list of characters I have Thoughts about, if nothing else.)

When Hanno first shows up in Guide, it seems all but assured that he's going to end up an antagonist. He's in a band with the Bard (who has something bigger going on, even if the larger details aren't yet clear), he's got Chekhov's Training Montage as a backstory superpower (similar to the what William got in Arcadia), and his unique gimmick is flipping a coin (exclusively a villain move in other media). He seems set up to be be Cat's new heroic rival, and Black theorizes his Aspects were designed to counter her. Even their mottos clash: "I do not judge," vs. "Justifications only matter to the just."

Textually, Hanno seems like a threat because he's working for a Choir of angels, the same creatures that doomed William and tried to flip Cat. And this is a fair assumption - the Choir of Judgement (not Justice, notably) are a bunch of monsters that call tails on every coin flip in the series and are explicitly willing to kill the majority of the continent. It's easy to see Hanno in the role of headsman for a corrupt authority.

Meta-textually, Hanno resembles a certain other type of character often found in other media - the asshole paladin. It's a common archetype in villain-oriented stories, serving as an easy reversal of the normal dynamic while still allowing the protagonists to be reactive, since paladins are known for going out and finding evil to stab, rather than waiting it to come to them. (Notably, in these stories the shiny exterior usually hides a core of hate or stupidity; a holier-than-thou enemy is significantly less satisfying to defeat if they actually are holier than thou.) William seems to fit into this role - and the Exiled Prince definitely does, with his pomp and sanctimony and enchanted armor - but Hanno doesn't, and I think that's why he ends up being such an interesting character. Partially it's a matter of humility - Hanno's whole origin story revolves around the fallibility of mortal judgement, particularly his own - but there's a smaller-scale thing as well.

Specifically, I think Hanno's Two Face imitation is in direct conversation with DnD's Detect Evil and similar abilities. It's basically the same thing - point to somebody and ask your god if you should kill them - and it has basically the same problems. It's simultaneously an arbitrary excuse for murder, the ultimate appeal to (divine, unaccountable) authority, and an easy metaphor for any number of injustices. There are significant problems with a system where you can chop someone's head off on the grounds of "Voices said so, just trust me." (Note that the two characters Hanno clashes most with, Anaxares and Cordelia, both uphold the sanctity of mortal law.)

What makes Hanno different isn't when or how he flips the coin - but when he doesn't. He never flips the coin for anyone he isn't already intending to kill. His bandmates, inconvenient rulers, even an ex-villain like the Repentant Magister - none of them are put to the test. He uses it not as a means of discovering and slaying the guilty, but as a safeguard against accidentally slaying the innocent. He's ultimately still choosing what actions need to be stopped, and who to refer on for Judgement. And it's this baseline, when the Choir goes silent and the finale draws near, that allows him to come full circle and choose to do his best, even if his best is imperfect.

And I think that's really cool.

[cat-foundling]

I love that all the characters so far have gotten these amazing introductory title cards:

Even Kojo has one in episode 3! (And the one for the Calamities is GORGEOUS). And then we have Catherine's:

An icon. Absolutely phenomal. What an introduction

[project-catgirlpillar]

Belerophons probably have the weirdest kinks Like living in a country where you can have your head blown Up by the Secret Police for even fantasizing about doing bondage is probably really fertile breeding grounds for developing a Kink for having your head blown Up by the Secret police

[resplendent-chungus]

I've seen these going around and I don't think anyone's done one for A Practical Guide To Evil, so;

Spin the wheel to get a PGTE character, then vote below.

Feel free to say who you got in the tags and why you made the choice you did :3

[triglyceride]

book 4 prologue

[captorations]

please read a practical guide to evil

[zincmoth]

A thing i like about A Practical Guide To Evil is how it plays with the backgrounds for the standard fantasy races.

The Dwarves? They're a continent spanning power who no one wants to mess with, instead of digging too deep they enslaved the balrog equivalents and are at the height of their power.

The Orcs were once the strongest nation on the surface, with their capital being the largest city on the continent before they got conquered by fantasy Rome and had their entire culture systematically destroyed.

The elves in the story are actually their version of the KKK who ran away after losing a war over whether interbreeding with other races should be allowed.

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️

[burnt-to-cynders]

It’s really funny to me how my one niche fandom post about A Practical Guide to Evil gets, like, one note a week. There are dozens of us! Dozens!!!

[st-just]

Reverse unpopular opinion: a practical guide to evil

Missed this, sorry!

Do you know how hard it is to write in-universe songs and poetry that are supposed to be well-loved classics, and have them actually be good? Like even more than the banter that's the skill that really stands out.

Also Karios and Anaxares, villains (antagonists, I mean) of all time. Love them both dearly.

[adishpan]

catherine foundling remains absolutely iconic

incredible banter doesn’t make or break a story, but it really feels like the cherry on top

[booksandchainmail]

so I've made a community for Practical Guide to Evil and Pale Lights, the webserials by ErraticErrata, it's public but I think you still need an invite, so reply to this post or DM/ask me if you want one

I'll try to also send an invite if you like or reblog this post, but there's a chance I'll miss it so replies are better