#wardblr

[keighthundred]

NGL it's kinda crazy that people think there's no possible way Rain could be trans when there's literally a bit in canon ward about him wearing a dysphoria hoodie and refusing to look at his own body in the mirror

[victoriadallonfan]

- Heavens 12.6

This was all a plot by Big Foil to steal Victoria’s spikes

[ewingstan]

So whereas Worm and Pact were basically sprints to the finish with their stories, with very few breaks between events outside of Worm's infamous 2-year timeskip, Twig and Ward both make frequent use of timeskips between arcs. This has its drawbacks and benefits. Putting a timeskip after a major world-shaking development allows the audience to see how the setting has settled into an interesting new status quo, whereas a more temporally continuous story can only really show the immediate reaction to those developments. But wildbow's choice to have those timeskips often occur right after those big developments means we don't get to see those immediate reactions, either from the setting's society or from the characters themselves.

Iota has criticized Twig's tendency to jump forward right after a juicy character beat happened, depriving the audience of the potentially very interesting look at how Sy and the lambs staggered back from various bombshells. We only see them months later on their next mission, visibly affected by what's happened but having moved past much of it. I have mixed feelings about how the timeskips are used in both serials, but I'll say that this problem hurts Ward much a lot more than it hurts Twig. This mostly comes down to what the story focuses on in between timeskips, and how Sy and Victoria narrate their respective teams.

We don't spend a lot of time with the lambs outside of missions, which you'd think would create a problem of never seeing their personal relationships develop. However, Sy famously cannot bring up a character without giving his complete overview of their perceived character, how they can be cracked, and how they compare to his favorite people. This means that we're constantly tracking how Sy's relationship to the Lambs and various other characters is shifting. We see the moments when he goes from comparing Lillian negatively against the other lambs, to comparing doctors negatively against Lillian. If the timeskips mean we miss seeing interesting conversations where characters relationships start to shift, we're never in any danger of missing how those relationships shift.

This also lets us get a good idea of what the time we skipped over looked like. Alongside his constant descriptions of other characters is his descriptions of their attitude towards him. When he does this to the lambs, it often involves a lot of backfilling of what their relationship has looked like in-between arcs. Lots of "I don't know why the others think I've been losing my edge. They've taken to cuddling with me every night for some reason. They say its so I don't cry myself to sleep from losing Jamie, but I think they're being silly an I'm being So Normal about everything." This is sometimes less effective than just showing us those moments, but it at least lets us fill in the gaps.*

Compare this to how Victoria narrates other characters during combat. Like with Sy, we'll get a lot of description of how she feels about enemies and people she's wary of. She tells us exactly what her problems with others are, and what about their psychology can be exploited in a fight or negotiation. But unlike Sy, she doesn't do the same for her teammates—not unless she's worried they're not going to be able to follow the plan.

This isn't a flaw in isolation; it's actually some pretty slick characterization of Victoria and Breakthrough. Whereas the lambs don't differentiate between communicating as a group of friends and communicating as a team—being on a mission never gets in the way of their shit-shooting, friendly teasing, and melodramatic accusations—Victoria noticeably changes how she talks with and about her teammates when on missions. This shows us how she ends up reproducing New Wave's problems, and how leading them as a hero team prevents her from being able to help them as friends. And it makes it all the more interesting when, say, she's actively worrying about Kenzie during missions in the way she's worrying about her in her daily life.

The problem comes from not having enough of the out-of-mission scenes to contrast it against. Because Victoria usually isn't narrating her perception of her teammates during combat, we need to rely on how she sees them and how they're interacting out of combat to see how their relationships have developed. But despite being what Ward is arguably set up for, Ward skips over a ton of opportunities for these interactions in order to get to the next big action piece.

All this leads to a situation where after 17 arcs and thousands upon thousands of words, I couldn't tell you how Victoria feels about Rain. I couldn't tell you how she feels about Tristan or Byron. I could tell you how she feels about Sveta, but I couldn't tell you how their relationship has changed over time. Hell, I know more about how she feels about Damsel than about Swansong, because in combat scenarios she's constantly thinking about whether Damsel can be trusted, while after a certain point Swansong gets trusted to the point that Victoria isn't narrating what she thinks about her.

This just....it seems like such a missed opportunity given Ward's premise. This is a book about a therapy group becoming a peacekeeping force, and the ways that goes wrong. The ways Breakthrough's opinions of each other shift and develop should be the focus. We get a great look at how Victoria feels about her relationship to Kenzie and her worries about having her be part of the team. But shouldn't we have at least some idea of her feelings about how the other members are being affected by the group? Isn't it a problem that her opinion on half the team has barely changed after she first met them?

*this is also why Twig's timeskips become more detrimental in the last third of the book. Sy is with the lambs a lot less, and we can't track how he's changed by looking at how he thinks others are considering him. This was less of a problem in the arcs where Sy and Jessie were living together, and Sy was constantly considering the ways they did and didn't work well as co-conspirators and cohabitators. But bizarrely, he all but stops thinks about how Jessie considers him after they start dating. Further, he's too befuddled by Helen to seriously consider what she thinks about him. I see this as a big reason why the last arcs weren't able to fully express how he'd matured into the state he'd apparently reached by the end.

[lemurlord]

Not to shit on a mutual's blorbo, but I feel like Lily could've gotten way more creative with Sting. Certainly the physics-deleting, god-killing alien weapon has more than two modes, and types of applicable targets?

[rebel-sqrrl]

Once again, blame @oddlyshapedsalad for this

[victoriadallonfan]

The crossover we all wanted

if i had a coin for every time i got into a story about someone involved in law enforcement who ends up fused w animal(s) bc of a fucked up incident, has to team up w their enemy and also takes care of kids w them in a story that involves themes of breaking family trauma cycles and nature vs. nurture i would have two coins, which isnt much but its weird that its happened twice

[bug4932]

ever gone flying without explosions?/ever gone flying with?

[dw-flagler]

as a fanfic writer and reader, as much as i love torturing lisa like an ant under a microscope or some shit there's literally nothing i could ever do that would be crueler than what happened canonically.

[estavionpira]

Hello, PHO user. Before you is a PHO post asking you to name a female cape. You have unlimited time to tag a female cape, NOT a male one.

Begin.

[goldenmotive]

[cpericardium]

have you drawn contessa in the jujutsu kaisen "nah, i'd win" panel

I'm sure someone has already done this

later that day

[heyitschartic]

Hello is this Victoria Dallon? Yes, your daughter Kenzie fell into the Taffy puller on her field trip today. Yes she's nine feet tall now, yes, we're so sorry. Basketball? Yes, we have a school basketball team, why do you ask?

[victoriadallonfan]

I’m taking over Wormblr and Wardblr

Handing out vials for my loyal viziers.

Giving powers symbolic of traumatic personal character arcs to the peasantry!!!

[victoriadallonfan]

Don’t forget her repaint

[Normal]: Hey

[thedubiousdallon]

In the low-stakes slice-of-life version of Worm that lives in my head we increase the degree to which Victoria is a magnet for socially awkward repressed dykes by a factor of a hundred. Her admirers start a support group. There's a private PHO thread and Ashley gets snippy when anyone comments on the latest post before her. Everyone pretends that it's not weird that Amy's there. There are ten Dean interludes where he's playing 5D chess to keep from becoming the protagonist of a harem comedy because he's convinced that they're all actually into him.

[germesthegenie]

This is definitely how cluster personality bleed works trust me