#twig wildbow

[phthalosblues]

made a lil comic

Full without text

Original screenshot

Really happy with all of their designs

[glassknee]

My semi unpopular opinion is that I think Wildbow is a really good writer and ppl r missing out when they don’t actually like. Read his work. Like yea the presence and attitude in fandom spaces can be overbearing but he is like. A good writer.

Also has anyone done in depth analysis on twig focusing on the Lambs’ signs and Wildbow as a deaf writer bc I have a lot of thoughts on it but also I am not deaf so I am curious if anyone has posted like an essay somewhere or something

[phagogenetic]

final twig reveal: wyvern is placebo. sy and fray are just Like That

[cyclical-polyp]

This is a post about Sylvester Lambsbridge from Web Serial Twig by Wildbow. He's Plural Btw.

(Warning: Major Spoilers for LITERALLY ALL of Twig. I can't talk about this without covering the entire story and talking very explicitly about the ending.) This is really a take I haven't seen anyone make about him ever before I don't think (not that many people are out here making takes about Sy, but) so here I am to loudly shout to twigblr that Sylvester Lambsbridge is plural and he makes factives of all the people important to him and he's a fucked up little freak about it. Now obviously Wildbow didn't write him to be plural. I think if he'd *tried* to write Sy that way he would've done a dogshit bad awful job, because he's Wildbow. That said, Sy's hallucinations of the Lambs (and later a number of other notable figures) that he conjures, who act with varying degrees of independence (especially later on in the story as he gets more unstable), match pretty closely with a lot of my experiences with being plural. The ways that each of his alters are interconnected and how they're tied into deep-rooted concepts (Duncan is Politics and Social Engineering, the Infante representing Power, etc) matches a lot with how things are structured with us. Also a lot of him is tied up in his fucked up relationships! Sylvester cultivates the people around him into the shapes that best please him. He does this because he is a very very traumatized, scared individual who was sold to or seized by the government and made into a child assassin when he was a toddler. They inject his brain full of neuroplasticity drugs which cause excruciating agony on the regular. This has, naturally, leads to him having an somewhat skewed worldview from someone from a more reasonable world. He views people as either Threats or Allies, and neither can be trusted fully, ever. Both can be manipulated, though for different purposes. For the Lambs of course he'd say that he was trying to help them thrive, help them get everything they want (and genuinely he does). But he still manipulates them actively, willingly, consciously, and deliberately. This means that fundamentally, no one can ever trust him (except Jessie but this post is long enough without getting into their relationship) and so he can't get the kind of human connection that he craves. This is where his alters supplement that human need for connection. All of Sy's alters are factives of real people (and monsters), both allies and enemies. The most powerful and concrete of them are the Lambs of course, as they're the closest thing he has to people he can trust and be vulnerable with. His alters serve to help him understand and predict them, since they will never trust him and open up to him in the way he craves (because A) he's Sy and B) they're all also sooooooooooooooo fucked up in their own ways :3). Sy's deteriorating memory also fits really really well through this lens because, well, dissociative amnesia! During the time that he was on his own and his mental state got worse and worse, more and more alters started forming. He starts losing more and more memories. This is just kinda stuff that can happen when you go through a big period of trauma and you're plural. It really just Fits. And the ending of Twig, well. The alter that was Sylvester is gone. Now the host is Lord Simon. Lord Simon is a somewhat more integrated person; a lot of the crowds and voices that built up alongside Sylvester got woven in. Fusion of alters is also a thing that happens, especially during big crises. A major headspace restructuring is also not particularly weird! This man is literally just part of a system. I think I've kind of finished what I was trying to say. No clue if this is coherent or if the people will care to read it, but here it is! Maybe I'll post more Twig thoughts in the future, who knows :3

[fallowhearth]

My Wildbow fail moment was that I went into reading his other non-Parahumans serials having seen some fanart here and there etc. So, the entire time I was reading Twig, I was wondering when Sy was going to turn into a twig man.

[senviva]

revolutionary

[swamp-hag-uwu]

I will never be normal about twig

[horatiovonbecker]

Question for Twig fans (of which it looks like there are now more than three?):

Who all still ships Sy/Mary?

[glitterblossom]

The Taylor Hebert: The narrator’s convictions are so fiercely held, and their rationalizations so constant, that the reader gets swept up in their worldview.

The Sylvester: The narrator is actively gaslighting you, despite not knowing you exist.

I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently

[bug4932]

literally impossible to have a normal conversation with radhams best and brightest aspiring doctor

[phthalosblues]

sad sopping wet Sylvester Sunday

[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.

[horatiovonbecker]

I really want to see Mary meet the girl she replaced, whose memories got suppressed (headcanon: Twigverse solution to mindwiping is that sufficient trauma causes anterograde amnesia, so they invented a drug that makes you incredibly traumatized), and is now stronger and faster than her clone.

Mary from Twig

First Impression: "Oh, so the first major villain-of-the-week characters is a little girl? I guess that's appropriate given the main cast, but I wouldn't think they'd face off against something that thematically mirrors them like that for a few arcs. Cool idea, a shame that she's probably gonna be killed by the end of this." So yeah, I was not expecting Mary to be a reoccurring character. And once it became clear that she was joining the Lambs, I thought for sure she wouldn't stay for more than a few arcs before finding out how Sy manipulated her against Percy and turning against everyone. That was partially driven by me thinking she'd become a love interest for Sy and then we'd get to milk the drama of that relationship falling apart for a while. Was pleasantly surprised when that didn't happen, especially because it lead 1) to us seeing how Sy tries to contend with his nature as an incredibly manipulative person and trying to limit how much he hurts people close to him, and 2) led to the much more interesting "I'm fond of you but also I'd push you off a cliff if everyone else in the friendgroup didn't love you so much" relationship she has with Sy.

Impression Now: More interested in her for her relationship with other characters than I am in her as an individual personality. I kind of wish more had been done with her self-perception as a puppet/her desire to fulfill a perfect servitor role for whoever she's closest to. Don't get me wrong, it led to some interesting (in a fucked-up way) stuff with Lillian. But I kinda wish we got more from her interludes addressing how self-conscious she was of it, whether she tries to push against it or leans into it, how other people close to her react to it, etc. And I really wish I got more of a sense of how it meshed with her becoming a Noble. Besides the obvious change in power dynamics between her and Lillian, it feels like even accepting the change would have required some pretty intense changes in her self-conception, changes we never get to see. And yeah, it would probably weaken Twig as a whole to have a more extended ending exploring how all the Lambs felt about becoming Nobles. But still.

Favorite Moment: I really love the mock-fight she holds with Sy in front of the soldiers at Hackthorn. The skill of making it look like Sy is holding his own while also constantly signalling to him privately how many times she could have ended him....it feels like a pretty good encapsulation of their whole relationship. More than any other Lamb, I think Sy was thinking of Mary when he was setting up the looney toons-esque "you'll chase me from town to town and I'll stay just out of reach while casually checking in and giving you things to take credit for" plan in Corinth. With her more than anyone else, the idea of "lets play at fighting to the death while wearing the points we could have scored against each other as personal badges of honor" seems like an actually feasible way to spend a lifetime.

Idea for a Story: Like I said, I'd love more exploration of Lady Margaret, especially focusing on how she and Lillian handled it going forwards. Aside from that, I would probably want to see someone actually try to map out how her ill-fated mission with Duncan went.

Unpopular Opinion: I don't know if Twig has enough of a fandom for there to be enough big fandom opinions on Mary for me to disagree with.... her offscreen relationship with Gordon doesn't interest me? Was anyone invested in that?

Favorite Relationship: Her and Lillian. Its the most unhealthy mess I've ever seen. I love it. A super unsure-of-herself doctor and her best friend/patient/kissing buddy who acts incredibly confident and self-assured while having no idea who she is or what she wants. Stellar stuff. Could have been so much more.

Favorite Headcanon: I like the idea of her eventually meeting and hanging out with the rouge Ghost who Dog and Catcher partnered up with in Tynewear. Feel like they'd have a lot to talk about. Actually scratch what I said above, this is the story idea I'd be most interested in.

[victoriadallonfan]

Been awhile since I’ve done this:

AMA on Worm, Ward, Twig, Pact, Pale, Claw, and Seek