#pactposting

[dw-flagler]

at this point we have to be open to the possibility that every time wildbow finishes a novel he is killed and replaced by a completely different wildbow

[operator-report]

pact liveblog

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

HI <3 GOODMORNING <33 pact in ur inbox time...

i think. the best, like, overall real pact propaganda i can give is that i had to stop reading it, like, a third through. like i had to sit down and go okay, i genuinely Cannot do this it will fuck my head up Too Bad. pact is about a little guy being stuck underneath a car and getting dragged along the asphalt until there's just a pulpy mess of bone and flesh and then that mess gets dragged along until there's nothing left at all. it does NOT let up. worm if taylor lost violently and horrifically and got fucked over in deeply personal ways every time instead of winning and never won Once. i still haven't gotten back to it it fucked me UP. <- in the most immensely positive way possible. it's just. radioactive to me personally lmao. i still come back to it for specifically referencing how he writes body horror & his demon world shit. he has the MOST delightful supernatural horror worldbuilding imo what if demons was like making lawyerly contracts with loose hydrogen bombs who want to leave you alive while they eat your face & the only way to prevent that was communicating as clearly and specifically as possible because the whole time they're just waiting for u to slip up... & also. fucked up monsters. u can tell he's having the time of his LIFE describing the most freaks ever.

the best pact propaganda i can give YOU SPECIFICALLY i think is that it is fundamentally about having a fucked up identical mirror twin & about identity and blurring between the two of you and which one's the real one and which one's the good one and is there a good one and who's you and who's them and what's the difference between you and you-in-the-mirror and why are you here and they're there. like i cannot express enough how much the entire almost million word serial hinges on the fact that there are Two Of You when there Wasn't Supposed to be Two Of You. AND ALSO equally as much it is about becoming the horror movie monster lurking in the dark!!!!! the slasher villain!!!!! taking a nice normal guy and then systematically stripping him of his humanity and turning him into a fucked up thing!! and also it gets really transgender about it. anyway. -> propaganda snippets for u i hope u r having a good dayyy <3333

oh fuck yes this sounds SO GOOD. i think I mentioned this in one of my worm posts but wilbow has such a specific way of writing Gross Things that scratches such a nice itch in my mind I can't even IMAGINE what an entire fucking novel of that would do to me. imagine the way i am about worm but × 12 million. holy shit.

ALSO I LOVE THAT I GET SPECIFIC MECORE PROPAGANDA AND THIS SPECIFIC MECORE PROPAGANDA is one of the MOST heart wrenching knife in the gut tropes that I love so dearly . looks at my longest surviving oc from when I was like 13. you've described her. anyway. holy shit dude that's EXACTLY the type of shit I love . I love when there's two of a guy!!!!!!!!!!!! and when it's transgender!!!!!!! fuck dude you can't keep giving me long ass wildbow stories to read I have so many books on my shelf I have not touched yet. my storygraph thinks ive spent the last 2 months not reading bc I've been so deeply entrenched in worm. omg. you've won me over with the propaganda

[estavionpira]

pale is harry potter

pact is harry potter and the methods of rationality

[hottakehoulihan]

Denny's, in the USA, is

a "family diner" chain that is open 24/7 and so is well known for being a place where you can get pancakes or fried chicken or something at 11pm or 3am.

Incidentally, since I'm about to hit on trivia, once upon a time Denny's purchased defunct buildings of a similar chain named "Sambo's", but they're vehement that they never actually operated any of those restaurants under that name, and so they're innocent of that.

Instead, well, they're named "Denny's". The place you show up at very late at night, very drunk, and with a need for comfort food, conversation, and maybe a bit of noise. Maybe you just finished midnight closing at some shithole fast-food restaurant and are out with the other moppers-of-floors and flippers-of-burgers. Or maybe you've been swallowing vodka+fruit juice or cheap beers or wine/cider coolers with school/college friends and someone says "we need pancakes!"

Right. Denny's. Short for Dennis, usually, and derived from Dionysius or, I prefer, Dionysus. Also called Bacchus,

Anyway, as I reread Pact and enjoy loving and hating Jeremy Meath's existence during his interference in Blake's life, and as my body metabolizes a bit of Salignac cognac (the best value, IMHO, for cognac you'll get at any inexpensive price) and also other food, I am celebrating Dionysus and Bacchus.

And Blake more, but there's nowhere to eat this early in the morning that is named after Blake and Green Eyes. Alas.

[occasionalgh0st]

Poverty got me acting like Blake Thorburn, nothing but rice and beans and oatmeal the last three days. No wonder he was so pissy and anxious all the time

[torschlusspanikattack]

damn, rose is so out of pocket with her slavery comparison

[il3x]

pact web cereal

[lakesbian]

it's the moment like 4 of you have been waiting for:

i finally rotated pact creature design in my brain enough to post about it. to all the people who sent me asks wanting to hear my thoughts explaining Why Pact Creatures Are So Good this ones for you.

the core of pact's monster design boils down to one very good fact about pact's worldbuilding: in the world of pact, the universe canonically loves a good story. magic literally runs on themes and ideas. subsequently, strong themes aren't the end result of pact's monster design so much as they are the most fundamental aspect of it--meaningful themes and narratives are such a textually important part of how pact monsters work that one bogeyman outright tries to start a conversation with blake by, upon noticing the birdhouse in his soul (tm), asking if birds are important to him.

what really seals the deal on this being fascinating is that pact monsters aren't invented wholesale--a lot of the book hinges on offering its own explanations for preexisting folklore or urban legend. pact takes a variety of common threads in the way cultural myths & monsters are presented, picks out the conceptions with compelling implications, and distills them into one design so thematically coherent and clarifying that it makes you go "ohhh, why aren't All ghosts/dragons/fae like this? this is Exactly What They're Supposed To Be."

like, we all know that ghosts are dead people, and oftentimes the appearance and/or behavior they're written as having is either implicitly or explicitly based on reenactments of their past life/how they died, and sometimes they're depicted as lucid but more often than not they're depicted more like broken or warped remnants of a person, and sometimes they make things colder/give off Bad Emotional Vibes/etc. those are generally true assertions about how ghosts are often culturally presented.

pact takes that and explicitly declares that ghosts are what happens when something so bad happens that an imprint of the resultant misery is left on the fabric of the universe. some ghosts appear horrifying because their appearance is warped and exaggerated beyond what's realistically possible to match how awful whatever happened to them felt. some ghosts are more lucid because their imprint is more recent, or has been strengthened and fed by human attention instead of left to decay. some ghosts are less lucid because they were forgotten. when ghosts make the atmosphere feel awful to be in, that's because the ghost isn't just the imprint of the person, it's an imprint of the awful thing itself. incredibly interesting! it feels so very much like the absolute heart of what ghost stories are about--about the grief and horror of being impacted by the ever-present echo of something terrible, about something so viscerally wretched happening that reality itself cannot forget it, about the emotionally powerful interactions between someone still-living and the memory of someone already long gone.

(pact also gives an aside that, in very rare scenarios, neutral or arguably even positive occasions which leave a sufficiently strong enough impression can also become ghosts. genuinely fascinating expansion.)

& the thing here is that pact does this for creatures like ghosts that are already richly thematic and iconic, but it Also does it for creatures with less obvious theming. how do dragons work? what's pact's underlying explanation for their position as immortal, powerful, regal, fire-breathing* fantasy monsters?

*&, depending on the media, sometimes ice-breathing or poisonous or whatever else

well, you see, dragons are recursive loops. "dragons are recursive loops" is perhaps one of the Top All Time sentences in the entire book, and the delightful thing is that, in addition to sounding excellent, it makes sense.

that's how they generate and spit out so much of whatever their element is. they're snarls. they're ouroboroses. they're something feeding into itself, self-sustaining for thousands of years, drowning anything which threatens it in torrents of whatever the self-feeding element is--fire, sometimes, but it could be poison, or ice, or whatever else, and that's why you've probably heard of ice dragons in addition to classic fire dragons. Dragons Are Recursive Loops. recursiveness is, after all, a form of immortality.

or, like, fae? we all know that faeries are incomprehensibly old/outright immortal Tricky Little Bitches who like to manipulate people while posing in an inhumanly/horrifically beautiful fashion and going "teehee." pact takes that to a fantastically surreal level of extreme artifice, one that's almost grotesque in its dreamlike nature--they have all lived for so very long that, to them, boredom is worse than death, and so they have complicated social games spanning centuries, and speak in the most practiced of misleading wordplay, and perfectly curate their forests so that even the smallest pebble is an intentionally-chosen setpiece for their play. they graduated from handjobs a couple dozens of millennia ago--now they're more into erotic-poetic descriptions of full-body degloving. you will not notice when a faerie steals and replaces your child, because you are very young and stupid compared to them, and playing-pretend at being your child is only the briefest of trifles in their unfathomably long lifespan.

the other good bit is that pact explicitly acknowledges that faeries run on what is colloquially deemed Bullshit--the universe likes a good story, and faeries have gotten very good at telling it a moving story. if a faerie tells a good enough story about having a sword that breaks the laws of physics, then that is what their sword will do. and so the way to combat faeries is not to out-bullshit them--because no one is out-bullshitting a being with thousands of years of bullshitting practice--but to say "no, that's fucking stupid and made up" until their implausibly long sword acts like a sword of that size actually should and shatters on the spot.

& all of these writing decisions feel so naturally truthful to what these creatures are Supposed to be--they're really not wholly new takes, they're a presentation of preexisting ideas in a way that gets why those ideas appeal to people and goes full-throttle on all the most thematically rich or otherwise narratively interesting parts. It's Good Writing. I Like It. you could spend an entire essay breaking down the presentation of literally any single one of pact's creatures, it's that compelling in its reflection and organization of Ideas About Creatures.

[intertexts]

have spent like.literally all day reading =__=

[ishdaj]

Pactposting again.

Happy holidays to all 11 of us in the fandom 🎄🐦🧜‍♀️

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Bonus sketch of the the Right boi and Johannes. I feel like Johannes would point out various angel stuff to Faysal during Christmas to annoy him.

[dw-flagler]

he is such a dick to rose

just say "yeah two if you count you" why are you arguing about this

[lakesbian]

still head on my desk wheezing hysterically about it being canon that the siblings cherie and alec talk abt in worm like they're older than him were just like. Six. while chasing after cherie. felt like i was being pranked when i find out they're just mentioned being like. 9yos playing video games in ward or whatever it was??? anyway i'm still split between retconning it (as i have supreme authority to do when wildbow is wrong about the heartbroken) and the much funnier option of deciding that guillaume and nicholas were just for real the world's most hellish 6yos to the point of being able to successfully bully siblings up to 15 years older than them. those toddlers stole alec's lunch money. also re the inexplicable age gap. it's particularly funny bc wildbow has literally said in WoG that alec's older siblings, Plural, were responsible 4 some of the sexual grooming including a mention of big brothers. but like. Which ones. We only know of cherie and valentina if you squint. Whomst. What older brothers. if it's not nicholas and guillaume then Whom. ur got them.

i think cherie is mostly well utilized for who and what she is but it sucks that the only interactions she has with other characters are the 9 (absolutely fucking nothing to dig into there because she's the odd one out and for these purposes just extensions of jack) and alec. we dont even get any mentions of her in ward to chew on despite the heartbroken being major characters, although some of that can be blamed on them all inexplicably being a couple years younger than alec at the minimum, as though heartbreaker stopped breeding for the roughly 6 year age gap between alec and cherie and then for a couple more after alec for good measure

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

GREEN EYES!!!!!!!! CANNIBALISTIC MONSTER FISH GF FOR U!!!!!!!!!!! IM LOVE HER!!!!!

UMMMMM HELLO. HELLO MS GREEN EYES. Ms green eyes. I will come swimming with you. you can eat me if you want. you dont even have to kill me first. Who said that.

[flipchild]

Sorry for pactposting

[hottakehoulihan]

"Lancaster fire-"

Even with the high ceiling, the haze of smoke made the exit sign above the door hard to see.  The point of view blurred, blacked out for an instant as the person blinked. “Lancaster fire-”  the point of view said, more to himself.  His voice soon rose to a bellow.  “Don’t- don’t stampede!  Don’t shove!  We’ll get crammed at the exit!”

A character says these words in Ward, Chapter 4 interlude a

The leading hypothesis is that the character is referring to "Lancaster Fire Department", implying that either there's a fire department named this (possible) or that the city (which does not. have. a. name. yet.) is in a named county (or equivalent) (and probably Lancaster, PA equivalent in that case, based on the fact that I've heard of it.) Also, if it's "Lancaster Fire Dept" the F ought to be capitalized. ...but the listener might not know that and so the author needn't write it.

...but I read it as a reference to something Pact related that is on the tip of my brain. Something like we might say "Greek fire" or "backdraft" or a description of a fire-based social situation.

I'm literally in the final climax of rereading Pact right now, but I don't remember names dependably ever, and the medium it's stored on mean it's hard to search efficiently.

I'm not finding anything in the Pact wiki, or in Pact Dice anyway. So, the Occam's Razor would be to assume I'm just wrong. Maybe I'm remembering Game of Thrones/actual history/an undigested bit of beef/a blot of mustard etc.

But there are some Pact-themed stories online calling themselves "Lancaster stories" and it could be they all stem (er, originate) from this "Red Rose City" RPG. In which the story takes place in Lancaster PA, in the titular city, and in the Pact (now Pact/Pale) universe.

And there's this Spacebattles fanfic Swallowtail (I haven't read it yet) set in the Worm/Ward universe talking about the "Lancaster Powerset"

aaand I can't reproduce it now, but I believe, while I was websearching using both "Lancaster" and "Wildbow" as search terms, I found links that looked like Pact fanfiction and that called themselves something like "Lancaster stories".

Anyway, I've got “olfactory fatigue” on this one and am gonna stop tracking on it.