#anti wildbow

[helpmeimblorboing]

Supernatural has been dethroned as the king of queerbaiting. Twig Wildbow is the new king now. All hail

Seriously at least Supernatural had the decency to not put the queerbaited characters in a straight relationship while the queerbaiting was ongoing

Wildbow, god that he is, decided to one-up that level of homophobia by having his character firmly state that he is heterosexual, and then get into an ill-fated relationship with a girl, as the actually gay character gets his mind wiped

This, after such hits as “the only lesbian character is a rapist”, “the only gay character is sex-obsessed and willing to murder his own brother for a fuck” and “bisexual character is a hedonist and also the first member of the protagonist squad to die. Also no one mourns him”

At this point, I’m expecting his next serial to have a queerbaited relationship, only to have the characters go out and beat up a gay man and have the action be justified using homophobic stereotypes

[hottakehoulihan]

Ward is a punishment

Oh my fucking gods YES.

Imagine how fucking great and not a slog Ward would be if only Victoria had died before the first page!

...

You might wanna opt out of the rest of this post, which is both negative and has spoilers for Worm and Ward (hence the tags), so here's your chance.

I'm usually capable of being pretty forgiving and generous with authors and their work, but I'm coming right off of being tortured by this story that just rubs your face in awful and then keeps rubbing and rubbing and rubbing with contrived excuses to make it uglier and uglier. And I've been getting mad about this for a bit (and unlike a book--which I can throw across the room or set down and take a breather, I'm showering or driving; the audio just keeps going (a feature and a flaw))

Long unplanned-for weekend now, so I'm gonna be quiet a bit longer, but when I'm showering or driving I'm listening to Ward.

It's my second go-through. The first was a while back, and I remember it was a bit of a slog, but I don't remember...

Hey, here's something I wrote as a rant a chapter or two back. It's mean-spirited and heartfelt:

Taylor eventually embraced bullying, because it was necessary to save the world. And then she stopped, and said she regretted the lengths she'd gone to. She worked willingly with and forgave those who wronged her even when they were not trying to be better, so long as they'd cooperate and help with the bigger picture. Victoria embraced bullying foes from day one and regularly exceeded the law in doing so. First she was rescued from consequences by her sister. Then she joined the police. Then she graduated to bullying her old enemies even after they swore off wrongdoing and tried to become better. She never forgave. She never held the moral high ground. [Edit: since writing this, I had to endure Victoria doing MORE bullying and also bullying Dot. She's also shitty to Kensie in her head] Her friends became worse people by association with and loyalty to her. She's only marginally a better person than Sophia was at her worst. (At least up through Arc 14 of Ward. Maybe this changes later, but I'm not counting on it. She's the most immoral and unlikable Wildbow protagonist and yes I've read Claw. I think I'd like Ward 10x more if Amy weren't shoehorned in there for Victoria to bully, and 20x more if Victoria weren't there to spout her hypocritical cop rhetoric about former villains.)

And seriously, I very much want to know; can I look forward to Victoria becoming less of a shitheel?

I have a friend who reads a LOT of asian romance comics and translated webnovels, and who has a huge amount of hate for the trope of someone eventually becoming lovers with someone who tortured or raped them. Full agree. Not angling for that.

But gods damn it. Amy fucking leaves the planet and Victoria follows her to shout her down and tell her "you don't GET to not talk to me and also you don't GET to talk to me you don't GET to eat butterscotch ice cream and you don't GET to decide you're not going to punch yourself in the face and you don't GET..."

Victoria isn't just a piece of shit when she's bullying Amy though. She's ALSO spending half her time yammering about how everyone who has ever done anything bad is permanently bad.

Fucking cop.

If WB was a silent recluse and all we knew about his stories was what was IN those stories, I'd wonder if this was high art and we were meant to understand that Vicky is an unreliable narrator and that we were intended to deduce that she's an awful pill of a person.

A quote from this same chapter, even:

“If you heal thousands of people and you mutilate twelve or so, you’re a healer who mutilates people.  [...] Bonesaw and Swansong will always be ex-Slaughterhouse Nine.  Precipice will always be ex-Fallen.  [...]”

This isn't even close to the first time she's ranted along these lines. Earlier she made the same rant about Victor and Rune. ...and before that plenty of times.

For all that earlier Teacher's minions forged a diary that made her look machiavellian, if she actually KEPT a diary

V's literally trying to come up with justification to give Amy life in solitary confinement.

Gods I wish Amy would just flip V both middle fingers and then walk away from her and never look back.

I wish Vicky had died to Crawler, or to Gold Morning.

I loved meeting Kensie and Byron and the Heartbroken and even Swansong. Seeing grown-up-some Vista is great. ...or pretty good. ...I think I've stopped liking Sveta much because of her association with Vicky right now, and that's rubbing off on Vista too. ...but Imp? Lisa? Even Foil and Parian. (My ambivalence is because anything we revisit also gets a fresh rubbing of dirt.)

Vicky is of course morally pure and doesn't get judged by her own zero-historical-defects-allowed criteria. I think the people she's nearly killed but for Amy's help have all been rewritten to be racist child abductors to help justify that, but that's not how I remember it in Worm.

Oh, and it goes ON and ON and ON and Amy is NEVER allowed to ...ugh

Doctorow wrote an essay recently that addressed a sci-fi story I remember from my youth, and he points out that the story makes a point but it's an artificial and contrived point because the situations in the story are contrived by the author to make that point.

I saw a fan-cut of the Predator movie once that was a what-if Arnie had died at the very start while coming out of the helicopter.

(The movie worked, but it WAS a lot shorter)

And I'd almost like to rewrite Ward but take Vicky entirely out of it. Or Amy. There's still a fair amount of slog in the book, but dang; any scene with both Amy and Vicky in it is torture porn.

I could almost credit that notional silent recluse WB character I made up with doing a brilliant villain-protagonist with Vicky, but an equally plausible explanation is that Ward is a punishment for anyone who commits the sin of liking one of his canon lesbians.

I'm not feeling very charitable right now. I loved Worm, Pact, and Pale, and I expect I'll find much to love in Twig and Seek when I (re)read them. Hell, I liked Claw up until the start of the penultimate chapter. I'm easy mode.

But damn, I hope I stop having to deal with Vicky bullying Amy soon.

And the fantasy of a story where Vicky respected Amy's wishes and didn't hug her against her will, or where Amy respected Vicky's wishes and let her fucking die?

God damn that'd be a better story.

And a more pleasant one.

Hokay. It's bedtime and I got that out of my system and there are probably more rants I want to say (it's an ADD thing; I write long things because I am worried I didn't say everything I wanted to. This is not a good strategy. ...but writing a shorter thing takes a lot more time editing and planning and I'm not going to do that about Ward I kinda hate Ward right now. ...but I' gonna finish rereading it because I don't remember it well and I want to hope that maybe it gets better. Sincerely, a "fan cut" of the story might really rescue it. Just...can't cut out all the Vicky parts, unfortunately, but maybe I can cut all the Amy-being-forced-to-be-pathetic-by-[as-far-as-I-can-tell]-the-author parts.

Hoo. I need a palate cleanser.

At the time of this reading, I could not recommend a read of Ward to anybody. I'll finish it and maybe it'll improve. And maybe it won't, and maybe I'll do that heavily-cut version that omits all the 100% unrewarding sloggy character-bullying scenes so that fellow Worm fans can at least enjoy the [relatively] good bits and get a synopsis of the rest. (...though arguably, even the good bits are potentially character assassinations.)

Time for go to bed.

Thanks for reading? Sorry you had to read this? Take care. I'm taking a break.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Yeah, Amy raping Victoria is just bad as a concept and can be ignored in Worm with no difficulty. The whole plot works just as well with her violating her sister’s mind and body exclusively in power-related ways. There’s no reason for WB to go there, and I’m pretty sure it was just him trying to undercut some of the endless debating about Amy after the fact.

If that was the idea, it backfired miserably, because it's just made the endless debating about her even more endless.

I mean, if he had made it far more clear in the scene, I'm not sure I'd have found it impossible or wildly out of place then - we're talking two layers of hypothetical here - because of what happened in 14.10 and all, but 15.x just... doesn't have it.

Like, I'm not sure I agree it's bad entirely as a concept in a purely abstract level, but in the context we have, yeah, it doesn't work.

Wildbow, despite what some of his critics have said, is not a hack writer. And he is obviously a smart man. But if that really was the intended takeaway, then he faceplanted badly when he tried to convey it. Like, hall of fame of 'not conveying the intended idea to the reader' level badly.

[kyliafanfiction]

"Amy was the author of her own suffering"

Leaving aside that you're taking away credit from a woman who worked hard to make Amy suffer (Carol), genuinely go fuck yourself.

This, this is the real fucking sin of Ward. It turned the fandom into overcompensating for their previous views and utterly denying any of Amy's suffering in canon.

Good victims and bad victims aren't a fucking thing. There's just victims.

[victoriadallonfan]

I don't think I have any TERF's following me in the places I associate, but if there are, kindly fuck off for good.

[kaftan]

There were prison sweats, black, with the word ‘Villain’ printed across the shoulders and down the right leg in white, with a white t-shirt with the same word in black.

Where to cop

[ahologramofcrystal]

It’s supposedly to show that Taylor has become no better than Alexandria, willing to do anything if it means “saving humanity.”

Because she’s terrified that literally anyone could be the one Jack interacts with and causes the end of the world. I mean, she would’ve thrown hands with Eidolon because she has absolutely no idea who it could be. (My money was on Taylor, for the record.)

Sparing the baby from eternal torture would be a valid justification, but Taylor thinks that the woman who was undergoing an eternity of torture should have kept her damn mouth shut. So I doubt she was thinking of sparing Aster from that.

I didn't expect the baby shooting to happen so casually. And not much explanation to why. So she wouldn't come under Gray Boy's power? Or maybe there is more I missed or that is coming.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

I would have explained my strategy.  A way to win, if we could get the pieces in motion.  I would have rallied them, tried to get them on board.  Even told them, knowing I’d be gunned down an instant later.  But I was mute, incomprehensible.

Also, like, the whole 'things would have been better if Bonesaw did it' (even though Bonesaw's various hybrids and power experiments didn't really have a great record of having like, the ability to speak) and 'Amy only stepped forward because Simurgh' theory of events is like...

How does the Simurgh benefit from this? I mean, the Simurgh is stupid and a bad plot device and absolutely the worst thing about Worm but still. After a certain point, if everything really was a Simurgh plot, then what the fuck was the point of the entire story? Why are we here, if the entire ending is all just Ziz being Ziz? (Also, how does she then somehow lose in Ward, but you know, consistency has never been WB's strong suit)

[kyliafanfiction]

One issue I have with the whole 'Wildbow said Aura Theory isn't True' is that the whole theory comes from, or at least got big, because of a comment he made in reply to a fan comment.

Now, I have read a reddit thread where he said something to the effect of 'I was tired, not paying attention and didn't give the right answer' or something to that effect. And like...

Okay, fine. He made a mistake. Took him three years to notice and correct it, or something like that, but fine.

But that calls into question literally any other Word of God statement he's ever provided, at least in answer to a question or comment. Because he could have bene tired and not paying attention and given a wrong answer then.

And since so much of the wormverse is understood through WoG because of the tight confines of much of both Worm and Ward in terms of POV, that means... a lot of what we think we know about the Wormverse could be 100% wrong.

Like, how many landmines are littered around in his WoG that he's never caught because they never caught on, never became popular fic trends or correcting them never became central to a sequel or later part of the work?

At that point, should we care about his WoG at all, when he could just reveal he was wrong?

Like, to be clear, I don't think Aura Theory is a necessary explanation for Amy's obsession with Victoria. Nor do I think, even if it was true, it would actually mean Amy didn't still actively choose (albeit while in the midst of a psychological break after the sort of shit that would break most people under the sort of stress she was under).

I do think Aura theory is interesting, and it's worth exploring in a fanfic (because fanfics can be 'hey, what if X that isn't true in canon was'), and I wish there wasn't a contingent of fans quite so rabid about constantly screeching 'it's not canon' anytime it comes up in discussion, but...

Really. Either Wildbow just up and retconned the Aura or he doesn't police his WoG properly and it calls everything else he's ever said into doubt, unless it's specifically backed up by material in the text that can be taken as 100% unbiased/reliable.

Or we can just not care about WoG at all, which is really the best way to do things in almost every fandom, because ultimately:

If It's Necessary To Understand The Work, A Character In Said Work Or To Understand the Intent Of A Scene, It Should Be In The Work Itself.

[ewingstan]

I Need to think more about how Ward treats the trope of reformed/defanged villains.

Parahumans have always played in the space of "nominally villainous character who the heroes can have a non-threatening relationship with," previously exploring it with the joint hero/villain efforts against the ABB or the Endbringers, then with Miss Militia accepting to accept Skitter's dominion in her territory. It was largely political non-aggression. Ward has plenty of that, but the interactions between the Undersiders and Breakthrough have both a more personal element to them and less of a "same side now, different side tomorrow" element. They were co-sponsoring a junior league of capes, for crying out loud.

The Undersiders haven't really filled the old "villain" niche since Rachel's epilogue in Worm, when she helped take care of a rampaging broken trigger with the heroes. Even so, its notable how the Undersiders have done remarkably little in the way of old-fashioned crime in Ward. Hell, the most "anti-social" thing Tattletale's done is sell info on Rain to his cluster, along with selling info to villains more generally. While playing all sides was something that got you slotted as a de-facto villain in Worm, it seems like it actually does get treated more like neutrality-if-not-heroism within the new state of things.

That's mostly notable because a neutral cape in comics tends to default to being a hero with a punk coat of paint. Your Harley Quinns and Deadpools show up on hero ensemble teams nowadays way more often than they're robbing banks. The Undersiders almost feel like they're falling victim to the same sort of heroism drift much of the time, though wildbow seems to want to point out that such a position needs hero buy-in. Vista can tell Victoria about how Aisha and Rachel are basically just ersatz co-workers, and that could accurately describe her relationship with them. But Taylor tried doing something similar, and she didn't actually have that "friendly anti-hero" position until she forced the PRT into a position where she had to be inducted. Before that, even if she was being more proactively heroic than Rachel and Aisha are nowadays*, she was still treated fully as a villain. Friendly anti-hero status requires buy-in from the in-group, and Vicky has always been more hesitant to grant that status—especially to people like Rachel who barely fit into her idea of "cape." At least Lisa plays the game.

*This is, of course, ignoring that Taylor was actively seeking to usurp Protectorate control of the city, whereas the heroes have never really had a similar monopoly in The City, and most of the efforts to form such a monopoly that Victoria has spearheaded have included the Undersiders in some form.

[chirishman]

Yeah, and the local gangs are

DARE PSA But Make It Real

Nazis (unfortunately prophetic)

And then you get

All Asians Are The Same And They’re Raping And Enslaving White Women. Also Something About Honor.

It’s some straight up 1880s Yellow Peril shit

It’s even lowkey an anti-refugee narrative, Lung and a large part of the local Japanese community are explicitly part of diaspora caused by a giant disaster that destroyed their homes and livelihoods.

The only part that was missing was for him to write them scabbing on jobs picketed by the dockworkers union and spread a plague or something.

Those transliterated phrases there in the second image? They’re traditional Chinese gambling/lottery things, which maps to Wildbow’s Ruby Dreams Casino thing.

As an asian person I have to tell you this kind of unself-examined asian stereotype BS is way more pervasive than you think.

At the same time Worm was being written the news media was being so noticeably (and seemingly obliviously) racist about a basketball player being asian that SNL made a sketch skewering it.

I don’t know where I’m going with this except that I am very very tired. Media and the people who make it are imperfect.

i love (hate) how worm has really interesting and personalized and thought-out and clever cape designs and then it gets to the asian capes and its like. their motives: theyre asian. their personalities: asian. their cape design: theyre asian oni lee is a ninja and has a japanese style demon mask (hes asian). And of course who could forget the insinuation that taylor can do phrenology to decide what ethnicity an asian person is just based on their face. like

I couldn’t pinpoint her ethnicity with the mask and goggles, and her age wasn’t any easier to figure out.

Hello. Okay.

[bodegadulac]

So, people liked my review of phase 1 of the WCU, so let's review phase 2:

This movie is baffling to me. You bring the CUI, set up Shen yu as the main fucking villain...

AND THEN THE MAIN VILLAIN IS FUCKING VICTOR?!?!?!?!?

What the fuck man.

But at the same one you have Colin becoming Defiant, showing character developement.

But also fuck you, Gwinneth Paltrow was a vague interpretation of fucking Ash Phoenix.

The dragon's teeth are fucking awesome.

But most of the movie is Dragon who crashed bonding with a little girl.

??????

I like that Dragon finally gets a gynoid body, it shows that she is now sure that she is human, even if she is a machine.

But thats the thing with this fucking movie. There are a lot of great fucking ideas weighted down by horrible studio decisions.

Also the new dragon suit is fuckinv over-designed lol.

6/10

I fucking love this movie.

I love Hannah's arc trying to find Mel, and how she discovers she has become murder rat.

I love the plot of Gesselchaft infiltrating the PRT.

This really sold me on Scarlet Johanson as Piggot tbh. Even if i'm iffy on her ship-bait with Hannah.

I liked how Miss Millitia recruits Vista from the Brockton Wards. I think they are great foils of each other.

Just, overall a great movie with great coreography.

But really? Nobody suspected Juntin Nazheer was just a nazi?

9/10

Underrated and Overhated in my opinion.

Yeah, it's kind of a mess with too many plotpoints. Like Jack is there and that goes nowhere, Theo has to balance his new membership to the chicago wards, dealing with his dad and the folk.

Topsy was a forgetable villain but i have high hopes for mockshow.

I liked raymancer, tecton and annex. Hope we see more of them.

Natalie portman as cuff was... a choice.

6/10

Give it a chance man.

Just give James Gunn a group of unknowns and he will give you gold.

What a good fun fucking movie, man.

The crew has such a good dynamic.

I like the implications of a larger thing with the C tattoos.

The whole asylum breakout sequence was very entretaining.

This movie was really really fun. But with a heart. And thats the best a movie can be.

I heard most people tought that Gavel was a forgetable villain (or anti hero) and that him joining forces with Burnscar made no sense. It doesn't make sense but it gives us some great sequences.

I loved the silly cameos of some of the weirder Wildbow characters like the Snail, Chubster and Trainwreck.

ALSO THE MUSIC! I boight the soundtrack as soon as it came out.

Please watch it. It's very fun.

10/10

It starts strong with the raid to the heartbroken, also helps set up Regent and Cherish. Damn those twins are creepy.

I really liked the earlier slice of life esque scenes in the rig.

The whole scene of the three blasphemies emerging and taking over the dragon's teeth to make a machine army was very very well animated.

Why is Colin Armsmaster again? I feel like we get robbed of his character developement... but the Lungbuster armor fucks so much.

Also, Flechette has a secret girlfriend she told nobody about. Lol. But i really like her new purple costume :}

I wonder what all the visions of the future mean. Will the slaughterhouse 9 kill everybody? I mean they have been teasing the shit out of them for years now.

Also we need to talk about how the studio bounces Piggot as a love interest for any other team member, like it feels so out of place man.

The final battle was neat, the fact that they finally reveal Scion as he kills the blasphemy's "BEHEMOTH" was surprising, cool, but it kind of killed al the tension lol.

How can i take anything seriously if thid golden man can appear and end the threat?

Also Regent dies i guess. We hardly knew ya.

Let's see what they will do with Cherish tho.

It's an okay movie.

6/10

And to round this phase up we have a funny heist movie, Assault.

Velocity as an older mentor figure works.

I hope his daughter becomes Battery in the sequel lol.

Assault's crew is funny.

Madcap is a boring villain but the "let's free everyone in the birdcage" was an interesting premise.

Go see it if you have the time.

7/10

[felonytaxevasion]

No offense to any existing Genevieve Fray artists out there but I think that if you aren't drawing her like a 1920s anti feminist propaganda poster come to life you're doing it wrong

Like I don't care how Wildbow describes her this is the real and true Genevieve Fray and I know this in my heart

[artbyblastweave]

I'm partway through Ward right now, and I'm wondering how you think the story handles the anti-parahuman arc with Gary Nieves? For all that Wildbow presents a nuanced view of what good/harm superheroes can do in Worm, I feel like this one kind of falls flat, basically relying on an unsympathetic character ranting that capes are bad because they're scary in the face of characters the reader is by that point invested in.

But I'm also not done, so maybe there's a layer I haven't gotten to yet. I'd be really interested to hear your take on it.

The official stance of this blog is that Gary Nieves and the anti-parahuman arc was something that had the necessary bones to turn into something compelling- Nieve's interlude in a vacuum being a great microcosm of the horror of being an unpowered civilian in this setting, and many of their structural complaints about parahumans just being straightforwardly true- but it wound up fighting for space with everything else going on in the book due to the insane breakneck pacing, and as a consequence comes out the other side as feeling fairly thematically confused and underdeveloped. The other official stance of this blog is that I haven't read Ward in like five years so if anyone wants to go to bat for how Nieves and company were handled consider the floor ceded.

[kyliafanfiction]

I mean, caring more about shipping and memes and characters is usually a bigger thing in fandoms over the themes anyway, so Worm's hardly unique in that regard.

I've written before about how I subscribe to a specific form of the Death of the Author theory that I call the Primacy of the Text; that is, when evaluating a work of fiction, the most important things to consider is the text of the work itself. All else, including the pronouncements of the author, are of at best secondary importance.

So, this is why I don't really pay much mind when authors try to use "word of god" to establish facts about their stories. If it was really important, it should have been in story. Wildbow, for example can say all he likes that Taylor is 100% straight, but that's not the text he wrote. He wrote her acting like an in denial bisexual, and it's the text that should carry the most weight.

I don't get particularly annoyed when he does this, though. I don't really pay much import to it at all. Everyone has a right to their headcanons, after all. But that's not how most of the fandom seems to view it. Most of the fandom seems downright offended when Wildbow says stuff about the stories that he wrote.

I've also written before about how the bulk of the Wildbow fandom doesn't seem to have much interest in engaging in the text of the work. This is true of many fandoms, but seems especially true of of the Parahumans fandom, where a sizable minority hasn't even read the text, and even those who have seem more interested in shipping and memes than in seriously engaging with the themes of the story.

And I suspect this is why the fandom gets so mad whenever Wildbow ties to use Word of God on them. Since they don't engage with the text directly, headcanons are the only thing they have left, and so of course they'll be outraged when Wildbow tries to act like his headcanons are more valid then theirs.

[glassknee]

Do you really believe Wildbow is Deaf? You don't have to be all that perceptive to realize that he made it up to distract from the racism, homophobia, misogyny, lesbophobia, ableism, classism, Sinophobia, anti-Semitism, fatphobia, genocidal rhetoric, neoliberal faux-centrist bullshit, Americentrism, Gamergate-style geek anti-feminism, bog standard MAGA tough-on-crime right-wing sentiment and general incel shittiness. Before repeating something, think critically about the source. You don't need to do the man's work for him. He's not Deaf, just a typical lazy and entitled overgrown little boy who won't even put a trigger warning on his own garbage.

Uh. Do u think they will just like. Put a cochlear implant in someone’s head with no tests? Or like do u think he is that committed to the bit. This is honestly just kind of a batshit thing to say. Also do u think Deaf people,,, can’t be racist and homophobic and all that stuff ?? Also kind of insane ngl. Also the no trigger warning is just. Factually untrue. You can go to the first page of any of his web serials and see the trigger warning Right There. What.