#john wildbow mccrae

[f1rewalk3r]

so. was claw any good? cant be asked to read it, i’m in the middle of pale.

i’m pretty excited for the sci-fi serial. like this sounds insane. will john wilbow pull it off?? who knows

[f1rewalk3r]

does him saying this really shock anyone? like seriously

we did it trans rain is popular enough to make wildbow act online about it

[doyouknowthischaracter]

DO YOU KNOW THIS CHARACTER?

[simurghed]

draw the travellers right now

[evil-jennifer-hamilton-wb]

Talking to my mom about Wildbow’s portrayal of addicts:

Me: you can tell, in-text, that the author really hates addicts- Mom: Wait he hates attics? Why would an attic even show up in the story? Is he part of Anne Frank’s family /s ? 

[f1rewalk3r]

we should all go collectively vandalize the wildbow fandom wikis i think. brians summer of the forest is real. leet “died” in brazil (began working with Lillian from Otokono Pharmaceuticals to produce DIY HRT). Blake is a trans man and Rose is a trans woman. Victoria Dallon never commited police brutality ever, actually. Rain was a cis woman until wildbow retconned it. Charles got forsworn because he miss-gendered (heh) Zed. Twig is a figment of your imagination, and was never real to begin with, have you been taking your meds?

[nonplatonicsubtext]

victoria ass song

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Terrible Visions

A scrambled timeline is a timeline that has proceeded much like ours, except that some particular facet has been mixed up all over the place. For example, in the scrambled timeline we will consider today, our world's fictional stories have been told by different people, and in different ways.

Bryan Lee O'Malley, in this alternate timeline, is best known as the cartoonist responsible for Homestuck, a popular comic series about a group of children who become embroiled in a cosmic-scale video game known as Sburb. Although Homestuck is probably most often associated with the cult classic Edgar Wright-directed film adaptation released in 2016, the comics themselves are highly-regarded, and the film brought a new audience to them. Netflix has commissioned an animated continuation, The Homestuck Epilogues, which is due to be released soon.

Andrew Hussie, on the other hand, is a figure you're likelier to know if you're overly online. His "MS Paint Adventures" series - most notably including Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, which is kind of like Homestuck but weirder and hornier - have firmly remained a fixture of obsessive Twitter fandom culture. It doesn't help that the best-known iteration, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, is infamous for stretching thousands of pages of meandering digressions out of a simple and focused narrative starting point. Scott Pilgrim fans have developed something of a toxic reputation, which is not entirely deserved - although of course Knives discourse is interminable, and back in the fandom's heyday there were reportedly incidents of fans assaulting each other "for being evil exes".

Scott Pilgrim fandom was very big back in the day, though, and consequently it was a nexus for other creative figures who would go on to surpass Hussie. Perhaps foremost among these is indie developer Toby Fox. He was literally living in Hussie's basement when he produced ROSEQUARTZ, a universally-beloved retro Goonies-like RPG about a human hybrid boy born to a race of gem-based aliens. He's now developing an episodic spiritual successor, RAZORQUEST, with more overtly dark themes. It revolves around an inheritance dispute among a demon-summoning family.

Other foundational figures in this timeline's internet culture include Alison Bechdel, who helped get the webcomic scene started. Although she's now more seriously acclaimed for her personal memoirs, her gaming webcomic Press Start To Dyke, which premiered in 1998, was once everywhere. It had a broad appeal, and at its height, it was common to see even straight guys sharing pages from it. Time has not been especially kind to it, though, and at this point its main legacy is test.png, a meme spawned by one of the comic's most ill-advised pages.

Then there's John C. McCrae, more often known by his pseudonym Wildbow. A prolific and reclusive author of doorstopping "web serials" - long-form fiction published online - McCrae's best-known serial is still his first, Wind, a noir superhero story set in an alternate history where capes are mostly just a subculture of unpowered vigilantes. Wind landed in a culture already rife with comic book deconstructions, like Alan Moore's 2002 graphic novel Worm Turns, but it nonetheless managed to stand out from the pack with its extensive cast of characters and its themes of coordination problems and the end of the world. Later McCrae web serials include Part (the first "Otherverse" serial; an urban fantasy story about a couple who die in a car accident and find that they have become ghosts), Tear (a "biopunk" story set in a collapsing underwater city), Warn (the controversial Wind sequel), and Play (the second "Otherverse" serial, set in a small Indiana town that helps hide a psychic girl from the CIA).

Last and perhaps least, we should discuss J. K. Rowling. Far and away the most famous of any of these authors, Rowling's name is inseparable from the YA series that she debuted with, the Luz Noceda books, which remain her one successful work. Although it was heavily derivative of older fantasy novels - like Jill Murphy's Academy For Little Witches, or Philip Pullman's Methods Of Rationality trilogy - Luz Noceda was still a monumental and unprecedented success in the publishing industry, and the film adaptations were consistent blockbusters. The final book, Luz Noceda and the Watcher of Rain, contained some allusions to a romantic relationship between Luz and her recently-redeemed associate Amity. Rowling confirmed that this was her intent in subsequent interviews and indicated that she had fought her publishers for it; the film would then go on to escalate matters slightly further.

There have been many lengthy and heated online arguments as to whether the references in the book itself constitute text or mere subtext. Whatever your stance on this discourse, a new complication has been introduced recently: although she has put out no official statement on the matter as of yet, it has become quite apparent from Rowling's shrinking network of contacts and her conspicuous silences that she is certainly TERF-sympathetic, and likely an outright TERF herself. For many, this is leading to a critical reevaluation of the social values inherent in the Luz Noceda series; others, to say the least, are holding off on that kind of reappraisal.

Anyway, Scott Pilgrim just beat Luz Noceda in a Twitter poll for Most Gay Media, and people are piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed

[f1rewalk3r]

you are pretty spot on here but fwiw this is my least favorite Wildbow Thing. He seems to approach his works with these themes in mind and in my humble, yr-3-bachelor-of-arts-in-english:-creative-writing-emphasis opinion, this is dumb.

personally I find my own writing to be more compelling if I don’t try and interject themes and big ideas and just let them develop naturally. It comes off as trying too hard or forced when you try to do that in my experience.

stephen king once said about writing that your characters should feel like real people with real thoughts and feelings that you cannot control, you just tell the story. granted, he was on coke for most of the novels he wrote thru the 80s, but still.

Some wildbow protags fit this description (taylor and blake, mostly) but some of them dont (i think victoria, despite how much i love her, is one of the worst cases for how the authors hand influences her)

when Wildbow tries to write these deep emotional themes you can really tell he’s forcing it at times. I wonder if for his earlier works he was just writing to write and the themes didnt come in till the end (again, worm and pact? mostly?) Then maybe he realized people expected him to write stuff with a big cohesive theme and that influenced his creative process to be more rigid rather then fluid.

anyways

Thinking about Wildbow power systems in broad strokes. Not fully developed thoughts, just putting words to text in short form.

Some spoilers

Shards are all about change, for good and bad via powers, the setting never stays the same during and after our protagonists stories are over in the large and small scale.

Practice is all about status quo, patterns that promote stability against change, and our protagonists try to do good and heroic things within that boundary.

Academy is all about status quo usurping change, new boss same as the old boss, with society shifting leadership dramatically yet always remaining the same even under the protags.

[victoriadallonfan]

Since I seem to have a growing audience of followers from other fandom stuff:

Hello! I’m Victoriadallonfan aka Ridtom aka Tomrid aka any anagram with those letters. I have a Ko-Fi for art commissions and donations!

I also have my own supernatural fantasy story called Dead Eye!

This blog is primarily about Web Serials from the online author Wildbow aka John C McCrae, and my blog name comes from one of his characters!

These works include:

- Worm: a young bullied girl with superpowers is mistaken for a villain on her first night out and things escalate as her career grows

- Ward: (sequel to Worm) a retired and traumatized superhero is brought back to work in order to deal with a new generation of heroes and villains

- Pact: a young man who is part of a abusive family inherits a creepy house and is exposed to a darker, fantastical, side of the world

- Pale: (sequel of sorts to Pact) three young girls with difficult lives are inducted by a magical community to solve a crime

- Twig: a young experimental boy works as a spy and assassin for the corrupt and fascist 1920’s British Empire in alternate world of biopunk

- Claw (most recent): a round table pov following a cat and mouse chase between a criminal couple, a crime family, and a journalist in an alternate USA in the midst of civil war

I mainly post about Ward (my fave) but I also dabble in the other works at times.

I also have been branching out into doing analysis posts on the Alien Franchise, Predator Franchise, Alien vs Predator, and calling out right-wing grifters or TERFs

I hope you enjoy my posts and feel comfortable enough engaging in a fun and thoughtful way!

[ewingstan]

So the whole idea of Twig’s setting is that instead of writing Frankenstein, Mary Shelley figured out how to reanimate and stitch together life. I have some ideas for how this would go if he chose a different author:

Tick: Instead of writing The Time Machine, H.G. Wells creates a....you get the picture. The Lambs are agents of a British Crown who want to ensure a future goes their way. Think Ars Paradoxica if the government didn’t just use time travel to ensure things went their way, but to ensure the world looked the way they wanted it to. Also would probably have a lot of future beings/technology taken from potential futures that will now never be.

Bite: Instead of writing Dracula, Bram Stoker discovered how to use blood for longetivity and enhanced abilities. The lambs are thralls for a vampiric Crown Empire, ruling over a populace they see as cattle. Wildbow gets in weekly Reddit arguments disputing any perceived antisemitic themes.

Maze: Instead of writing House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski figures out how to use people’s own psychology to bend the geometry of 3D spaces, creating rooms larger on the inside than on the outside and able to grow in novel ways. This gets adapted into attempts to improve housing, create unlimited storage, etc., but the psychological nature of the process creates a memetic chain reaction in which people who learn about the existence of such abnormalities accidentally impose it on other rooms and buildings in less-controlled fashions. The result is a world where most inside spaces are inhospitable labyrinthine worlds unto themselves, occasionally collapsing in on themselves as their inhabitants die and leave no psychological imprint to continue growing off of. The only known way to impose some control over your living space is to create layers of meta-narrative over your own relationship to your home, which allows for more nuance and control to be wielded against the expanses. The lambs are a group of specially engineered psychologies meant to impose meta-narratives onto psychological spaces in ways that render the spaces more habitable (or at least more useful) to their handlers, but run into problems as the narrat[  ] begin to get [         ] by the spaces they’re depl[   ] against.

Meta: Instead of writing Worm, John C. “Wildbow” McCrae figures how how to use tissues from a dead space entity to give others—

[missingvalentines]

Maybe I am stupid. Probably I am stupid. Most definitely with only a little shadow of doubt I am stupid. But where do i read Parahumans or Worm by Wildbow or John McCrae please I have seen so many people talking about it but I can't find ANYTHING. Yall came through with the dungeon meshi manga I beg yall

[f1rewalk3r]

“if wildbow wasnt wildbow we could have gotten _____”- most common phrase in Parahumans/Otherverse related forums

i feel like if wb wasn't wb we could've gotten the pact wherein blake is constantly going "ill be fine all i need is a black coffee and a kick in the ass and some stimulants and"

[f1rewalk3r]

okay so i was trying to do pact book club with my roommate b4 we had a falling out (unrelated) and i have cool Pact Motorcycle Analysis from rereading chapter one. (see below)

PMT “set [their bike] on the lawn, leaning against the inside of the fence.” leaning is the key word here. why are they leaning the bike on the fence? does it not have a kickstand? most street bikes have kickstands. the only ones that don’t are for extreme motorcross, not street legal, and built solely for dirt. So it would look something like this:

worth noting that this is a KTM 300 which is really nice and PMT's bike is "...about the shittiest, smallest, cheapest bike ever, and it’s used..." so assume much smaller and shittier then this one. But also, please note: No kick stand, and especially nothing that makes it street legal (plates, headlight, taillight, signals, mirrors) Okay, so what? Well, PMT then begins "...Unlocking and lifting the seat of the motorcycle, [to] retrieve the shirt [they] had stowed away..." These hardcore enduros, and even most sport, naked, and cruisers Do Not have under seat storage, especially locking under seat storage. The only thing that does? Scooters.

Eat your heart out, taylor hebert.

Brief Side Notes here: While our protaganist is referred to as Blake in this chapter, we can assume this is world-editing fuckery, given the snip doesn't happen until 4mo later with Molly's death. Also, we do see them mention a helmet. However, they are also wearing paint covered "...jeans, the lap striped with narrow streaks in various colors." This means that either PMT doesn't wear gear (squid status confirmed) or they wear armored jeans around regularly to the point of getting paint on them from the Toronto artists/dykes.

Later on in the chapter, though, the bike has been "Tipped over in a way that had scraped it hard against the stone wall. Headlight and taillight broken." So it does have lights, and is thus street legal. In conclusion: Given the text in this chapter, we can assume the PMT/Blake's bike is either 1) a plated, street-legal converted dirtbike with no kickstand (It is mentioned as leaning against the fence twice, proving "Leaning" is a deliberate choice) and the seat thing is a continuity error. or 2) the bike is a shitty scooter with no kickstand. or 3) the kickstand AND seat are both continuity errors and blake rides an older model cruiser (my personal HC given. Everything about PMT)

See the storage saddlebags BESIDES the seat, not below. So yeah. Either the bike is a magic fiction model macguffin that doesn't exist and just does whatever it needs for narrative purposes. OR (more likely) Wildbow just doesn't know how to write bikes.

Thanks for reading. Follow for more Pact Motorcycle Analysis.

[theaudientvoid]

If I had a nickel for every time John "Wildbow" McCrae wrote a teenage girl having her life derailed by a bullying campaign orchestrated by her former best friend I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

[prokopetz]

When you say tie in rpg are you talking about john wildbow mccraes weaverdice/pactdice

(With reference to this post here.)

It's never just about one thing; SF/F authors awkwardly stapling some game mechanics to the side of their worldbuilding bible and calling it a tabletop RPG because people are more willing to pay money for it that way is a very common practice.

Authors who intended their tie-in tabletop RPG to double as a worldbuilding bible but ended up warping the worldbuilding all out of shape in order to cram it into a D&D-compatible framework is also more common than one would like; even A Song of Ice and Fire fell prey to that one at one point, if memory serves!