#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

because pale is like "ooOOOhh in a timeline without the other two Verona would have just been a lame-ish striver witch who overrates herself and would have died an unceremonious death ooooo this shall be an Existentially Uncomfy idea for her" and it's like. Don't threaten me with a good time I want to see the failgirl practitioner serial. i want to see the practitioner cognitive dissonance serial

#palecrit #pale web serial #wildbow #not because it would have been his best work or anything but it would have been kinda *fun*. and good as an actual bitesized serial #remember when he wanted to write anthologies

[shakertwelve]

i still haven’t read pale but i will continue to reblog palecrit with no commentary because i find the way people pop out of nowhere to argue about it entertaining

[andbrokenmemories]

So it's weird how like. The Kennet girls are good at everything, aren't they? [pale spoilers ahead]

Like that's obvious, it's textual -- it's very textual, other characters being in something like awe over it over and over and over across the story. The girls are very good at this, and they have a deep well of power. This comes up continuously.

what's weird is thaaat a lot of the fanbase seem to like, enjoy that. Enjoy having protagonists who can play around with magic in a way Blake never ever could have. I kind of get that, I won't like shit-talk it too hard. (I do like Verona, y'know?)

But it's an interesting fact. Because Wildbow's the underdog protagonist guy! At least in action scenes, that's his whole thing! Taylor and Blake have to eat shit and die to claw their way to victory, and often those scenes work for me. And it's one of the things I think WB gets the most praise for? Like, from his established base. It's a conscious choice to not do that for Pale. He like, introduced the idea that this kind of wild practitioner would be especially powerful. He made that up for this book.

I wonder what that decision looks like -- after Ward, and Ward's issues, especially, since that seemed to be the first break from this. Underdog protagonists seem to be the default, for him; the thing he has most experience with. I've seen posts from him describing his process -- put characters against the wall without having a pre-planned out for them, so WB himself has to puzzle out exactly what they can use to make it out alive -- and he seemed to derive like... An actual enjoyment, out of it?

Yeah, there are fights in Pale where they're up against the wall... even one where, with Dire Consequences for us all, Wildbow had them lose because he couldn't see a way for them to win!

But it's not the same. I'd honestly say they usually lose because of their like, lack of full maturity -- their child soldier-y emotional rawness and uncertainty -- their lack of cohesion, as the book usually plays it. Lucy cannot stop John from joining the Contest because she can't hold her nerve against him. The girls cannot stop the murder plot from coming to fruition because they lack unity, aren't working together as a team. Emotional stuff. The girls have more tools in their box than any Wildbow protagonist before them, by far, but they can't always use them properly to get the W, for emotional reasons, for character reasons.

In theory, that's an interesting direction (maybe, possibly), and I should be relieved that Wildbow is trying something fresh. In practice... I've said I don't like Pale's fight scenes. I think Wildbow is plainly worse at this than the content of his previous works.

Part of this is seen in the Contest. Or, at least, how Wildbow Posts about it. If you can't tell, a specific WoG lives in my brain: Wildbow said once that he kept the story going past Break because he genuinely did not believe the trio could beat Maricica. I can imagine him doing his typical calculus for this, and what led him to that conclusion, maybe. For example, we've heard a lot about the ability of the Fae to manipulate stuff, aaaand to have the girls come along and undo all of that with minimal information to begin with wouuld sort of. Damage our belief in Faerie significance. Still, though -- cards on the table, here -- I think this was a Dumb and Bad choice. (It's a sidenote to this post, but I think it's very strange that, in-story the straw that breaks the camel's back is shown to be the Alabaster allowing shit to go on rather than throwing in with John, effectively a betrayer revealed moment -- a thing that, even if sorta his intention from the start, he could simply say 'aw beans i never really planned this out far enough' and just drop. for the sake of wrapping up a better story. and naturally i believe this would have been better also because it means we never would have fucking gotten White Woman Animus!! i digress. i digress.)

Maricica had weaknesses the story gave us to nibble on, and those weaknesses... are just kind of dangling threads, now? As of where I hopped off? like, guess she can't be that inexperienced with people if she became a goddess and started a cult and helped with all that red heron shit lol

So it's that thing I said, about fight scenes being more character driven. But then also, he's clearly thinking about this the same way as ever! As shown by his weird logic with framing the story going past Break as a thing he Had To Do, for Logical Reasons, or at least that weighing on the decision. a thing that is silly and i disagree with on it's face. right?

And then this shows in the sheer quantity of fight scenes -- if the girl's main limiter is internal emotional context and stuff........... uh... why are there so many fights? Why wouldnt the story naturally curve towards. having fewer fight scenes when theres no other way to square things away. that progress character arcs. whyyy do i care about fight scene 129 when i know how strong these girls are. whyyy are we fighting so many random others, and dedicating genuinely long segments of story to them, rather than montaging that shit? Getting it over with? If it has to be there at all? (for reference -- I just tried to think of a Random Pale Fight i fully don't think mattered. i selected the random like. angel summoner guy? with the fortnite constructor angel. that's a part of the musser invasion or whatever. this is a character with literally no substance, just a musser-side goon. From him entering the ongoing! fight to Lucy getting out of dodge is 4.6k words. Plague 12.7, the Mannequin fight, up to Mannequin leaving -- that's almost the entire chapter -- is 6.9k words. on the worm wiki, i saw there's a brief 'major events' summary of that chapter. i couldnt tell you the major events of the Pale chapter, of which that section of fight is like a third, maybe. lucy gets a bit more upset. lucy gets in a few quips against musser-side characters that actually matter but actually dont matter much to how that broader conflict is resolved. i guess.)

Wildbow writes any random fight the girls get into as being worth as many words as his fights in the past! the scrappy, pay-offy ones. bleh. My point in all this: you cannot simply set your protags up in the way I'm positing, here, and then continue to use the same vocabulary of every other serial anyway. it straight up doesn't work. it's exhausting. The Future is An Eternal Slaughterhouse 9000 Arc. Look, thats a criticism that boils down to 'web serials are too long'. And I'm not sure I care too much about web serials being too long! I have read longer web serials with longer fight scenes! I have written fiction with a longer average word count per chapter than Wildbow, at least during Worm! its a real criticism, but its not one im amazingly interested in personally. But the Kennet three could've had weaknesses to play around -- or at least, more weaknesses. We are in a Post-Pact world, and in this Post-Pact world, the magic in Pale really barely feels like it, uh, relies on discourse and presentation. like at all. And that seems like an option to give these characters obstacles! An option Wildbow gestures at during the Musser meta-arc!

but what struck me getting that word count comparison earlier, skimming that fight? The girls just aren't operating in that world. There's never a thought for presentation -- maybe sometimes, for a slight edge. But it never really matters, certainly not after the blue heron. They're using glamour as a workhorse tool, covering goblins in it for brief misdirects to get an edge in a fight; they're calling on the same shrine spirits over and over. They don't build up tools over a portion of story then cash them out for a satisfying win, they're just... strong. They have more items in their bags than Wildbow probably knows what to do with. Strong enough for just Lucy to dunk on any random set of practitioners, but not strong enough for the story to just skip that part, and not strong enough to just solve the plot until it's time to go fuck up Charles and end the story.

I know you could argue that I'm making this up, or that it's what some people prefer to what Pact was doing. But I just think it's not even what wildbow is good at! (and i always theorize that when wildbow is writing kind of bad, it's probably because he's not actually engaged or happy with what he's putting himself through. did he read a specific thing that made him personally excited to make the girls so versatile? I don't really know, but I don't get that vibe.)

And I have a couple of specific things I want to point out to try and prove this is like. a thing at all, to wrap up on: First, Glamour is used as this very, uh, soft magic thing, this very basic narrative tool. A pure mechanic of, like, mental states. If you're shaken, if you're uncertain, your glamour gives out on you -- if you shake your opponents, make them skittish, your glamour is better at misdirecting them. This is fiiine? But too vague for what Glamour is. Wildbow simply failed to properly present tradeoffs to one of his character's main action verbs, one that literally had those tradeoffs in Pact. And one last example to try and prove this: they dont even wear the hats and cloaks anymore duuude. Like, in my eyes: there was a very simple to read gambit being made, with the hats and masks and cloaks? You are awakening early, you will always have awoken early: You accepted an early shield against what that meant. A constructed image in place of the image of a fully-fledged adult, masking that youth; Whimsical and inherently magical, inherently wild. It's a very basic tradeoff, and one the story promises you it knows: even if they really would rather not have to go through the whole song and dance of suiting up, if it's tactically suboptimal or else they mature out of it and realise it's not for them, they will never be able to escape it -- not without giving up power. A mark accepted that cannot be given up. A mechanical restriction on their powersets to make up for some of their advantages, that also has some character relevancy. The Good Stuff.

except yeah it can. be taken off. it doesn't super matter. not really. they do plenty of magic without all the stuff on or even any of the stuff on -- it's rarely presented as an obstacle. it doesnt really matter. Because then, you see, they couldnt mature out of it and do cool stuff! it'd be. annoying. frustrating. they'd have to like. deal with changing past the natures they made for themselves. they'd have to. be characters. with character issues. that present themselves in fight scenes. you know?? what are we doing.

#ramble analysis #look. this is long but im not super confident i have the deets to back it up #analysis of my memory of pale ass post #but! the books long. frankly #so this is what you get #pale #wildbow #pale web serial #palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

unabashed compliment for pale: verona might have been alright as a solo protago- mm. guh. unabashed compliment for pale: the forest ribbon trail would have been cool if it was the only path. shhit

unabashed comkpliment for pale: i mean i was invested in john honestly. at the end of the day i am aware of what im about. objectively silly (in a negative way) concept for one of the major characters and also now im just thinking about pre-break pale. remember early pale. remember when it was okayish. that probably doesnt count either huh

unabashed compliment for pale: i dont hate what it does with faeries excepting all the things it does with faeries

unabashed complihent for pale. they sure did go to the trouble

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

HER FUCVKING ALABASTER GROVE OR WHATEVER WAS A UCKIG *PLEASANT CITYSCAPE PARK* UAUYGUUGHAG H CANT STOP ADDICTED TO THE SHINDIG

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

hangon im trying to synthesize a Kelly family post to get in on the White Family posting here but now im just thinking about how i barely. ever see anyone talking about. avery. the kelly family torment nexus. like theres something there you can dig your teeth into but nobody seems to want to. and I'm wondering why that is. anyway I think that's the end of the post everyone I didn't really come up with anything

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

scrolled back throguh my drafts on here and wow some of these are bad huh. I mean I tihnk i posted edited versions of some of these is the thing. uhhh oh I still agree with it being kinda weird that WB fe;t like he had to write a Black girl in an ontario ski town to gget at things about his deaf experience. like i get it but also thhen it turned out like that and like. why did it turn out like that

#does anyone want to pay me real money to finish pale. like it could be fun but i'd need real money. to do that #palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

okay I think i've made like this exact post before but i still think one of the most telling things he's ever done is the "We'd Be Fools To Leave Out The First Practitioners on the Continent! smile" into White Woman Animus true combo. that was going to be the post but, no, hang-on, i have to articulate one of my pillars right now. the thing is however bad it always ends up wildbow loves writing rep, he loves the concept of rep he loves the idea that he can put a scene alluding to a group in real life and a group's problems in real life, and just having that scene constitutes Good Writing Points to satiate his reddit brain which cares about such things. And I could frame it as "because then that gives him Permission to do the horrific racism" but i think it's mostly that he's like, alright detour over, minigame over, back to putting my Art back into the World, and its just that his art always ends up revealing the horrific. racism. you know?????

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

they painted lordships over the map of the lands they colonized. in order to derive power from extraction and then the patterns of settled society. and we have to stop Charles because doing the closest thing he can to unpainting the lordships disrupts the lives of the normal settled canadian Innocents. who live in cities. on the lands they painted. what are we doing

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

god the john/matthew queerbaiting was so fucked up. remember that?

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

theory: everything wildbow has ever said about amy and all the discourse and all the gays yelling at him was actually only half true. yes its the reason hes like that now but it also gave him such a hit every time. that shit felt good. edith is his attempt to get that high back without people noticing what he's doing, but ebecause he made it straight it didnt hit nearly as hard and he just got kind of bored with her and you can tell. and you can tell

#palecrit #fun game: find the words in this that are jokes/lies and the ones that are true and real

[andbrokenmemories]

The thing with Pale is that there's just So Much, so many characters with so many relationships, that it's really tempting to reread. like i want to go find some weird character or two that i havent seen anyone at all talking about to go deep into. Or at least finish it, so I feel like I have Credentials. this is the devil's instinct and you must never listen to it. and you have Got to post anyway. you have got to post anyway. literally who is going to correct you, even pale fans don't remember their own book

#palecrit #at least that's what i tell myself

[andbrokenmemories]

like actually nonexaggeratedly 80% of the fight scenes in Pale don't fucking matter on aaany particularly deep thematic level or really plot level or really character level. like. I need you to understand that for worm that number is fully flipped. You *remember* Worm fights, you remember different specific ones and what they *meant* at that point of the story.

20% for worm isn't perfect, there are a few misses imo. but for a superhero story Seeking to have Action Scenes, that's pretty good, i feel. Like, maybe this works to explain it: If I made a roulette wheel of the distinct fight scenes in Worm, mayyyybe cutting interludes, we could have a conversation about whatever one I landed on. we could have a nicey back and forth that's place-able in the broader context of the work.

dare you to say the same for pale. 50% of the fights, at least past break -- but I think earlier than that -- could be folded into one another and it would do nothing but make the book (marginally) tighter.

but it's deeper than that. cause fundamentally that doesn't even change the problems with the fights themselves! wildbow loves putting his ideas in the book. the one skill he's been cultivating above all else is rapid generation of ideas thru putting together weaverdice, pactdice: systematizing his mental space via those. He's specced into quantity of ideas. So, yeah, some of them are aesthetically cool! but that's simply not the most pressing skill for any writer, I feel, and. uh. aesthetics are cheap -- remember that wb post that went like, oh, in a written superhero setting you're giving up a lot of the striking visuals superhero comics are designed around, so you have to compensate by focusing on different strengths??

mechanical, artificial levels of consistency are cheap. none of the Pactdice Obstacles the trio faces are amazingly relevant to them, in the same a Pact fight can be, in the way a Worm fight almost always was. it's so dire.

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

see this is the thing that's hard with pale, where it's like: do I even feel like John wasn't handled great because of anything in the story he was in? or just because of where the Dogs went afterwards. like is it even his fault is my memory just warped. Oh Well it's not like im going to reread ever

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

i xould just say anything about pale and you'd believe it even though I don't remember 70% of it because you don't reamember it either. Fucked up how [spins wheel] Matthew brought up Edith not being able to have sex as a negative of their relationship he endured for her like at one point. why did wildbow go back to taht well

#palecrit

[andbrokenmemories]

honestly pale might be the most important wb work to me, emotionally, as a person, as a writer. in a good way? no not really but like. also yes yeah a little. i did just catch myself thinking 'i wish i could go back to just telling myself pale is good past all the dissonance that caused', but after thinking on it for a second. no not really actually. What was beyond the threshold was more valuable. and i can always say, hey. some of it was okay. some of it was okay

#palecrit