#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]

i love her

[estavionpira]

pale is harry potter

pact is harry potter and the methods of rationality

[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 =__=

[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

[flipchild]

Sorry for pactposting

[dw-flagler]

he is such a dick to rose

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

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

have I mentioned yet that I'm gonna be reeeeaaaal normal about blake and roses relationship btw.

[operator-report]

there's a girl in there

pact liveblog

[torschlusspanikattack]

callan and the citizens of jacob’s bell make me so mad—i would have axe murdered them all right there

—hate when petty interferences meddle with significant plans so much

[il3x]

I think I *may* have one original pactpost in me. Has anyone posted about what if the animal hoarder guy who got Got by Pauz and shuffled off to a mental hospital by Fell got into practitioning later. Dowght, I think his name was... there's something particularly haunting to me about like. this horrible thing happened to you for a very real reason but everyone is covering up that reason or is wholly unaware of it. Fell gaslight gatekeeping in the most literal sense... and then when you Do find out The Very Real Reason, well! Well! Get doomed idiot!