I'll Kill You,

i'll kill you,

reading pact (2.5) n its funny seeing blake call out rose for it being a hatchet and than he calls it an axe when hes stressing, funny.

Worm is probably in the top 3 works of fiction I've read in terms of "number of hours spent thinking about it", and easily takes first place if we add in the time I've spent thinking about Wildbow's other works.

One of the topics I've found myself turning over and over in my head endlessly is why Worm works so much better than any of the other things he's written. I think a lot of it is control of tension and downtime.

What stands out about Worm compared to the others is how much slower and lighter it starts. Up until arc 8, it's really just a story about teenagers having a very wish-fulfillment-y, very wattpad-y kind of fun. Sure, they're criminals, sure, they're going up against dangerous, racist gangsters, but so much more time is devoted to their growing friendships, to stuff like going shopping, having secret hideouts, having a crush on a guy, etc. Worm even continues to have a high ratio of downtime to action well into the S9 arcs. Both of those types of things aren't just fun, they're essential to why we care about the characters in the first place, and continue to care when they go off the rails. And I know this probably seems so self-evident it isn't worth pointing out, "ofc we like characters because we see them be characters", but this just isn't as true of any later Wildbow works. Wildbow, depending how you want to analyze them, either by and large writes tragedies, or high octane action series. In the case of a tragedy, the audience needs to see what they have in order to care when they lose it. In the case of action series', there isn't a lot of narrative wiggle room for cramming in character beats.

Worm's start, specifically, does something that definitely isn't unique in fiction, but nonetheless is unique in Wildbow stories, and is especially potent when pulled off. Our main character starts the story in a bad situation, and because of that we're all the more happy when she rises out of it, and because of *that* we're all the more invested when that tentatively good situation hangs in the balance. The amount of downtime decreases steadily as the book goes on, but that's expected and fine, because 1, there's simply less room as the plot gets going, 2, putting it in anyway would ruin tension, 3, the further into the book you get the more invested you already are, and so the less you need to be convinced to care, and 4, the end of the story is getting nearer, so there's less need to stall the audience's burnout, because odds are increasing page by page that you'll be done before that happens.

Pact, of course, is a very different story, and that's mostly by design, and that design mostly works in it's favour. The start is rather abrupt and loses basically any sense of normalcy and ownership we the readers might feel over Blake's everyday life. We initially don't care about the story for Blake's sake; instead we care about Blake for the story's sake. We don't see what he had, and so, even though for Blake this is as dire a situation as the worst it gets in the first 7 arcs of Worm, initially we're pulled along more by intrigue than investment in the character. This comes back to bite Wildbow in other ways when characters from Blake's past are introduced; there is a huge disconnect in how much Blake cares about them, how big a tool of the plot Wildbow wants them to be, and how little the audience knows or personally cares about them. The pacing is also very fast without much downtime, but that works in the favour of the novel. It makes it a harrowing read, but that's by design, and it's the shortest of his novels, so it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Twig largely carries on the minimal downtime pacing of Pact, to mixed effect. As the arcs are "assignments" rather than fully causally, character driven events, it logically makes sense for this to be the case, but the slightly stilted vibe this imparts on the story, and the fact that both the characters, and by extension you the reader, aren't overly invested in the cases for their own sake, makes the fact that almost all of the downtime, and most of the relaxed, fun character moments that sell the main cast as (imo) the best set of main characters Wildbow has written to date, is confined to rougly the first and last chapters of a given arc rather frustrating, as those characters *are* undeniably the throughline, and are absolutely carrying the plot rather than the other way around. At about the halfway point, the plot takes over and downtime takes even more of a backseat, which doesn't work in this case, because not only is the audience probably more invested in the characters than they are the plot, it's actually unclear given prior characterization why the characters care about the plot as much as the story wants you to believe they do. But that's a different conversation. Twig, favourite, least favourite Wildbow story, I promise I'll talk about you at length like you deserve some day.

With Ward, I honestly can't even pretend to have an objective and unbiased opinion of it. I finished binging all of Worm just around the time Glo-Worm dropped, and I immediately moved on to Pact, burned out once on that, then Twig, and burned out threeish times on that. By the time I'd gotten to Ward, I was very burnt out on some aspects of Wildbow's writing that have only increased over time. I think I'm probably on the extreme low end of people who've read more than one web novel by Wildbow in terms of how much interest I have in reading long, drawn out fight scenes, for instance. Reading Ward, I don't think there was a single time I caught up to what had been written before I burned out again.

But nonetheless, I do think my criticisms of how downtime is handled (or more accurately, not handled) in Ward are justified. In Worm, the amount of downtime roughly decreases every arc, but that's to be expected, because the story is picking up pace. In Pact, there's very little downtime because that's what kind of book it is; it's short and blisteringly fast paced, likely under the assumption that it can move on to a new plot point and then end before the audience burns out. In Twig, the downtime stays almost as low as in Pact, and that's almost justified by the "mission" based story structure. In Ward, I really can't think of a storytelling reason there's as little downtime as it is. It feels like what was the result of specific story needs in earlier novels has just . . . Settled in, and become the new normal by the time we hit Ward, regardless of whether it suits the story it's attached to. Ward is a slog for me. It's certainly got more downtime than Pact, but where Pact is short, Ward was the longest thing Wildbow had written at the time, and the pace moves at a crawl rather than Pact's blisteringly fast pace. There's a lot more I could say about Ward, I love it, but personally I don't know that it works for me on any level, really. But that's a topic for another post, maybe.

I'm still not caught up on it, so my commentary here is more tentative, but Pale, in stark contrast to Ward, which I felt was perhaps the least good thing Wildbow had written overall, is perhaps the best webnovel he's written overall. Certainly the best since Worm. I'm not sure it's as easy a sell as Worm, and the problem of ludicrously bloated fights remains, but in a big way it's a return to form, being the first time since Worm Wildbow's had a teenager as a main character (Twig is several kinds of complicated in that regard), and the first time since then that our main character has really had to juggle a double life. It's also breaking new ground for Wildbow, featuring three main characters. Wildbow hasn't really fixed the downtime and pacing problems of his previous works per se, and I still feel like the story starts abruptly and obnoxiously late into the timeline, but the whole "double life" deal forces the story to focus on the human element that's been mostly ignored since early Worm, and the "three main characters" schtick equally forces a focus on the relationship between those three even in the more tense and "plot driven" sections of the book in ways unlike anything else he's written.

Do not blame me for who I am. The doctor prescribed me 20 mL of #lol. twice a day.

literally every time he turns on cam on stream these days he's got a new fucked up hairstyle i can't handle it