A Society Where "our Family Is Better Than The Family We Took Them From" Is A Defense Against Kidnapping.

A society where "our family is better than the family we took them from" is a defense against kidnapping. Moreover, being kidnapped a few times is seen as healthy for children to help them develop a well rounded view of the world. Some parents see child raising as a competitive sport where the one who can keep the most children as a sign of high status and that you are clearly winning at parenting.

me: Do you like Wildbow?

worm fandom: He’s OK

me: His early work was a little too big on SpaceBattles for my tastes, but when Twig came out in 2014, I think he really came into his own, commercially and artistically. The whole novel has a bleak, emotionally raw tone, and a new sheen of character development and focus on dynamics that really gives the stakes a big boost. He’s been compared to Brandon Sanderson, but I think Wildbow has a far more bitter, cynical, sense of humour.

worm fandom: Hey tumblr user txttletale?

me: Yes, worm fandom?

worm fandom: Why are there copies of the Pale extra materials all over the place, d-do you have a dog? A little chow or something?

me: No, worm fandom.

worm fandom: Is that a rain coat?

me: Yes it is! In 2015, Wildbow released this, Ward, his longest novel. I think his undisputed masterpiece is Amy Dallon, a character so homophobic, most people probably don’t internalize the themes of her arc. But they should, because it’s not just about how lesbians are dangerous sex freaks, it’s also a genuinely impactful narrative statement about the limitations of concepts like redemption and forgiveness when it comes to trauma and healing.

[raises axe above head]

me: Hey r/parahumans!

[i bash the collective worm fandom in the head with the axe. blood splatters over me]

me: TRY STARTING DISCOURSE ABOUT VICTORIA NOW, YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARDS!

sometimes you forget to not feed the trolls…

anyways, hey gang. it’s ya girl, skittersdrippygirlcock, back from the dead. minor intro post, still worm fanning, legally admitting i am 16.

Not to paint Fandom(tm) with a broad brush here but I feel like if you've convinced yourself that everything good about a work was an accident the retrograde idiot creators put in by mistake you're just, probably not a fan of it any more?

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

I think I love the Phir Se chapters the most out of anything in Worm. "Oh yeah real actual time travel is real, yeah the super busted kind of time travel. Also here's a non Manton limited teleporter that can just instantly kill you. Anyways they're kinda mid honestly. You're never going to see them ever again."