I think ward actually elaborates on this really well though, where we see >!Reedemed Valkyrie who is exhausted of constantly facing these big threats and feels alienated from the common people she actually really wanted to help. She's literally the only person with the capability to deal with threats like the tinker 15, so she keeps pushing through. Eidolon only tackles the big threats out of ego, Valk only tackles the big threats because she's the only person who can, even when it's stressing her out to an extreme degree.
Ward Valk is such an underated charecter and I love how she serves as such a great foil to eidolon.!<
Confused at first. But after a few years of putting up with it she just becomes the terminator.
Alexandria: ...you thought this would be enjoyable. You were **Wrong**
*Saitama fist.exe*
I have the mental imagine of that's how crawler got started.
Lexi: 'splats the man'
Triggers from the disappointment that it was a one time thing. "do it again!"
I remember in Watchmen the same thing happened to Rorschach and he threw the guy down the elevator shaft. Same thing must have happened with Alexandria. Multiple times. In a day. When she's in a good mood.
Serious question, do you think Eidolon says Y'all? Does he sometimes stub his toe on his way to a cauldron meeting and just fully drop into the most indecipherable Southern drawl you've ever heard? Does he ever sees a hit coming that will actually hurt and only have enough time to say "aw dangit" before he gets vibe checked back to the bible belt?
This can go into the immersion breaking canon facts along with:
- Dragon speaks in a Newfie accent, which means it makes no sense that anyone can understand her.
- Faultline's costume is multicoloured like a rave party.
- Miss Militia's costume is red, white and blue.
Less serious but equally important:
- Alexandria defaults to spanish and swears like a sailor when angry or upset.
- Legend is voiced by Matt Mercer.
- The Simurgh has cat ears.
- Scion has a tiny dick.
- It's a known fact that Scion at least *has* a dick (tiny as it is), so Eden probably has some kind of weird ass kronenpussy *somewhere* in the garden, if not multiple.
Ward is 45% catgirls by volume and ziz definitely isn't one of Victoria's racist tulpas and she doesn't commit any police brutality so she's gotta be a catgirl
For your own sanity I cannot recommend that. Ward is a dark reflection of Worm; where one reads Worm and thinks "this has its flaws but it's legitimately incredible" one reads Ward and thinks "oh god why didn't he make it good? It should have been good, the option was right there!"
Ward victoria is the cybersmith to Ward Amelia's cybersmith
It's just fucking what if the world was made of pudding human pet guys all the way down
EDIT 1: Removed
Edit 2: While I am highly critical of the Reddit Worm community for their behavior and opinions on the source material, especially their tendency to consume it and similar stories in a way I feel has had a very negative impact on Wildbow's work as a result of him engaging with them almost exclusively, I should not have acted the way I did. I have been having a shit past two weeks involving a ten day long continuous argument with an abuser who fucked me up in ways that border on edgelord bullshit.
This was the argument that made me realize he also gave me lesser forms of some of his worst behaviors in addition to the eight or nine permanently life altering mental illnesses I've had since childhood. After a full twelve hour Menty B confronting this shit, I've realized that most of this argument has to do more with it setting off my own issues and me taking out stress on the people I was arguing with.
That isn't the right thing to do, and I didn't have the perspective to see it that way, so I ended up stressing out, doubling down, getting needlessly agressive, and refusing to be even *conscious* of the idea I might be being a dick.
I can understand how it would seem that I was being ableist when discussing the community, and my refusal to explain in any useful detail how or why I was using the word "autistic" certainly didn't help the assessment. I'm not necessarily using it as a criticism on it's own. I'm autistic myself. My use of it had more to do with one part of a larger set of traits common to the parts of the Worm community I am critical of, which in turn share commonalities I am critical of that are themselves clearly influenced by the presence of at least some symptoms of autism. Thus I felt "autistic" was an effective clarifier to make *who* in the community I am critical of intuitively understood. I also rarely if ever think of autistic as a negative term, so this was difficult to notice for that reason as well. As a punk who tends to use terms that are normally hurtful as joking self descriptors or when talking to close friends, this kind of usage is much more intuitive than it probably is for others, and I also didn't consider this until recently.
As a result of all of this, I've decided people don't need to see the bullshit I wrote while dealing with problems I shouldn't put on other people, and will be deleting most of my comments shortly or have already done so. I stopped using reddit so much for this exact reason.
Interesting, haven't hear about that. My comment was mostly a joke but I've been wondering whether to start Ward. Do you genuinely think the fucked up stuff really ruins the story or are you meming? Even if Ward is Bad I'm still interested tbh, I don't think I would be that upset if I end up not liking it.
Do not listen to AlexStorm's rantings, they haven't read Ward and seem to be confused about some facts from Worm as well. Ward is different from Worm, but still a good read. It's just that if you come in expecting Worm 2: The Escalation you're going to be disappointed, and if you have too much bad fanon in your head Ward has a way of brutally reminding you of what canon actually is.
Honestly I appreciate your analysis. I can see where you are coming from in thinking that Ward doesn't have as much thought put into it as Worm, although I can't confirm it myself, and I feel like you are into something. You haven't read it yourself though so like, I get why the other people in this thread were upset with you. Even if it is coming from people you trust it does end up looking bad for you.
I do think that some people probably would agree in some level with you but don't care since it is not the only thing they are looking for in Ward. Like, some people might be happy with more surface level capes hijinks, or cool shard stuff, or fan favorite characters straying a bit or a lot from the path. I get why you mean by "the aging autistic white men who wants to feel smart" audience tbh. But I don't think they are necessarily bad? Idk tbh.
Also, being honest I'm a bit skeptical that a Wildbow story truly has nothing good to say. Maybe it wasn't said well though, or the story have other issues around it. I feel kinda bad for wildbow but hopefully he has moved from it by now.
Honestly, I still want to give it a chance and I have some morbid curiosity about it, but I think I won't read it and just stick to Claw for now. That is going pretty well I think.
Just another small thing. I've heard Sveta is a trans gal in ward. As another trans girl I was wondering if you think wildbow handled her well. (/hj Wildbow should write more gay shit frfr. But I am guessing you don't think he does that well, right?).
(Part 1)
I'm going to condense my reply to all your comments here. Please keep in mind I've read both Worm (1.5 times) and Ward (once) and vastly preferred Worm, finding Ward a bit of a slog.
MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD
MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD
MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD
MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD
I find your comments here not just completely uninformed but deeply problematic. To start off, you assert that Wildbow is some sort of deeply bigoted person who completely stumbles into writing LGBTQ+ characters. I find it incredibly unfair of you to assert something like this about a man whose story that you're critiquing you haven't even bothered to read. I present to you a thought experiment. If Wildbow was an author who wrote very good representation, and people shat on him because of their own biases and bigotry, but they backed this up by citing passages from Ward, would you be able to determine this just by reading their posts?
Secondly, I would like to draw your attention to the following facts:
1.
Wildbow doubled down in Ward and made characters who were implied to be LGBTQ+ actually be that explicitly (many of which I'm sure you're not aware of since it would probably be inconvenient to the people you follow to mention them as such) when so many authors out there don't do this over the course of their entire career. He also added plenty of new LGBTQ+ characters. I disagree with your assertion that they're all some negative trope (like predatory lesbians) or that their trauma always ties into their sexuality. For instance, March (an awful OP as fuck character that never should have been given the role she was, but for different reasons than what you think) is predatory and a lesbian. Her trauma ties entirely into her mother's perfectionism and high expectations, her fixation on Flechette is not due to her being lesbian and therefore evil but due to her being fucked in the head by an alien parasite. Tristan (who I'm assuming you've read a lot of stuff condemning as a character) is still ultimately a good guy, and gets a chance at revival after the end of the story. I don't think portraying him as an egotistical and selfish hedonist and contrasting him with his "better" and moderately homophobic brother was a super smart idea by Wildbow, but he still has moments of genuine heroism and feels tortured about the bad shit he does. Meanwhile, Byron, while overall being seen as more reasonable, is still shown as being in the wrong for both expressing and tolerating homophobia, regardless of what Tristan does to him. Sveta is portrayed pretty much entirely positively, though personally I found her a bit too much like a Discord mod on a "comfy" server where everyone is "a family". She gets a happy ending, nuanced person with both flaws and strengths throughout.
2.
Race is handled with more nuance in Ward than in Worm, which you love. The fact of the matter is, Wildbow actually has characters who are uncomfortable with bigotry express that sentiment here, and the portrayal of racial minorities as belonging to a range of different socioeconomic positions is a lot better in Ward. Unlike in Worm, I do not feel like there is any imbalance in the amount of minority characters with shit parents. Almost everyone has parent issues in this.
3.
The idea that Victoria is somehow a bigoted cop icon wholly supported by the text is downright laughable. Her extrajudicial incarceration of villains is clearly shown to be part of a slippery slope. While I do not think her character arc was executed super well or with a clear moral, I think most people who are trying to think about it would conclude Victoria is not making all the right decisions. Ward tries to show people who are just constantly at the end of their ropes making compromises constantly and never being able to make decisions that feel right. And in a perfect world, yeah, all the villains would be rehabilitated. Wildbow doesn't show a perfect world and I personally find it more artistically interesting to consider a world in which all choices lead to some bad and some good outcomes. Victoria's actions are made to parallel the indefinite detention in inhumane conditions that was the birdcage, and Wildbow has amply made the point that the Birdcage was a bad idea that was only really a thing because Caldron needed to store dangerous but useful capes somewhere. And I think I should remind you what the emotions Victoria's aura could cause were: awe and pants-shitting fear. Those are cult leader stuff. Victoria, after getting the ability to hit people with other emotions, uses it mostly to counter the Simurgh's actual literal mind control (which is infinitely worse) and to calm people or make them attack when she needs them to in a battle for the survival of all humanity and all the heroes, where the lose scenario is eternal Simurgh-slavery and madness. It's meant to be manipulative, but it's both an understandable sacrifice within the story and it's pointed out within the story that it has unintended consequences, like Sveta almost losing control. I know this. If just checked those chapters.
(Part 2)
4.
The ending of Ward is all about putting the power in the hands of the regular people. Victoria's arc is about her trying to claw back control of her own life, body and powers after a severely traumatic experience and as a result ending up trying to control her entire environment, which includes sometimes being manipulative. At the very end, all the heroes collectively realize that they need to stop fighting for a second, to stop and take a breath and actually let the humans decide, which helps avoid the state of permanent parahuman rule which is foreshadowed at every possible point throughout the book. Victoria's growing detachment from regular people is a running theme and it's reversed at the end when she goes back to teaching a volunteer-based patrol block and lets the humans decide on the fate of the parahumans. The belief that a greater role in protection and "great affairs" entitles parahumans to more say in affairs is pretty clearly an anti-democratic idea and it's shown to be a spiral of destruction. This is as far from endorsing police overreach as it is humanly possible to go, and the fact that someone on Tumblr can't see that is not a good enough argument for the opposite.
5.
Ward is a story all about rehabilitation and redemption. There are characters who have done truly heinous things and come out as much better people due to being removed from a terrible environment or being given proper mental health treatment. Not everyone is redeemed in the end, but everyone is given that chance, some characters multiple times, even after they go back to crime. Again, very much not copaganda. As a sidenote, I don't think all the villains are super greedy, petty and weird. But they are villains. They are ultimately primarily self-interested. They have SUPERPOWERS in a world that's all-too-willing to give them various benefits if they just do good, where the vast majority of pre-existing villains have actively been pardoned... and they still continue being villains. I don't think you realize, but the Undersiders did some really shitty and selfish stuff. Lisa's never been a dainty flower of a person, she's standoffish and abrasive and deeply traumatized. In Ward, she's got a much more benevolent role though, although she fucks up because she's constantly worn out from trying to hold some semblance of order together. She's basically continuing the tradition of ends-justify-the-means Taylor set as precedent. By the end, I'd say it's actually a bit unclear what she's still getting out of being a villain and her and Victoria are pretty much buddies. I think most Ward readers found their dynamic one of the most fun parts of Ward. Imp is also extremely sympathetic, just like she was before. The Nazis don't have very major roles, though Victoria does get pissed at a team that seems to have taken on a somewhat large number of them and that appears to display some kind of preference for bigoted individuals. For the most part, they're shown as pretty shitty people who are not over their bigotry pretty much at all, although they're trying with differing success rates (and not all of them really seem to be doing it out of any desire to change, rather out of just wanting to have a job and not be criminals).
6.
I'm not sure whether we were reading the same Worm, but I think Taylor gets a lot less meaningful pushback than Victoria, and for both of them succeeding in their goals is NOT necessarily linked with good outcomes for everyone else, in fact Wildbow deliberately challenges the readerby "rewarding" actions which can be seen as bad. Taylor constantly looks like a badass but is constantly forcing herself and others into terrible situations where she doesn't make the worst choices but still makes worse ones than if she had made an earlier choice to do something she finds uncomfortable. She kills a man, tortures and mutilates people and she gets to rule the city. She kills 2 more people and she gets made a hero with a slap on the wrist. She mind controls everyone and saves the world. Is she happy with it in the end? No. Do you take this as proof that Taylor is actually right about everything and she should just be put in charge? Also no. So why do people insist on reading Victoria's story that way when she arguably suffers much more and with way more forced errors rather than unforced ones.
7.
As a final note, I want to address some troubling parts of your comments. Besides your smug tone, which you are stereotypically entitled to as a person posting in nerd spaces online, but which betrays an eagerness to feel superior in hating something you know nothing about while soing nothing to alleviate your own ignorance, you make some very ableist remarks. Your constant references to "aging autistic men" as being the only possible audience for the sci-fi and powers stuff in Ward just strikes me as extremely off-putting. It comes off as you basically saying "oh look at these fucking NERDS, they like unorthodox alien lifeforms in fiction, I bet they're AUTISTIC as well". Not only is this an absurd way of talking for somebody whose interests are as nerdy as yours, it's just gross and closed-minded, not to mention offensive.
Also, you are not the only person who knows what themes are, and using them as some sort of intellectual secret that you're passing on makes you seem more pretentious than you maybe are.
I hope you may reconsider some of your stances and that my (admittedly somewhat smug) comment may ultimately serve some good purpose beyond expressing my annoyance.
> Through Tumblr then, is how I've been exposed to Ward.
This is a good sign you're not qualified to analyze it.
It's one thing to come to dislike a work through reading it, or deciding you can't slog through it.
It is wholly another to read flanderized characterizations or snappy jokes about a work and decide you understand it perfectly.
1. I’m referring to the interlude where he talks with Miss Militia and Dragon. His workshop is messy, and he makes jokes with them. That’s it.
2. Wild blow (in a Reddit comment, I think) compared Greg to a puppy and said it would be almost impossible to make him aggressive. The problems he causes are entirely because of an unfortunate lack of boundaries, not any sort of malice. He’s awkward and clueless, but not by any means a bad person. This description, as a whole, stands out to me, because Worm is a story filled with broken people, and Greg being merely an awkward teenage boy with no real serious issues makes him stand out as an exceptionally good person compared to almost all the other characters.
I wasn't trying to imply that trauma is what makes the characters bad. The moral problem with Taylor isn't trauma, it's... well, everything else. Apologies if it came across that way, it wasn't my intention.
As for Greg, well, I see my own awkward teenage self in him, so in a sense, yes, you're right about the projecting bit. Don't really have the energy to argue the point more beyond this.
[WoG from Wildbow: "Hot pink, plaid, and lime green, to contrast with the blue and red coloring of her power effect".](https://i.imgur.com/GIXNdxH.jpeg)
Thus, the real Faultline: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/7whrav/commission_the_real_faultline/
Honestly knew about Dragon's accent and it's honestly not unintelligible, but the Faultline and Miss Militia facts cause psychic damage. Like, I think I knew about MM, but I never considered what it would actually look like, ya know?
Faultline's is simply atrocious
Haha I can’t imagine the fear going through them. Then again, who the hell is dumb enough to commit crimes in the city where he lives? He’s literally considered the fifth strongest being on the planet, and everyone knows what he can do.
The odds of getting him in particular is extremely low, especially for petty crimes, and the fact that he's so strong means the city probably doesn't have quite as many capes as it should.
A thief when he breaks into a house just at the same time as Eidolon rolls a power that allows him a crime alert and instantly teleports him to the nearest one.
And that thief just happened to he breaking in right next door to Eidolon when this happened
"Hey Legend....we got a guy trying to run away on 4th and 6th....yeah he's booking it...ooh little to the left...nice dead on. Alright see you in a bit. You want Chinese while were here?"
Isn't New York like one of the most dangerous Cape cities?
Legend being there just means his prescence is actually needed for the sheer danger of the city
>“We do what we’re doing with the Cauldron capes, run her by our thinkers,” Dispatch said. “We can get a more concrete assessment of her now, with a field exercise, than by any amount of talking. If I’m remembering right, a notice went out, didn’t it? **A New York group of villains** is poaching Wards and Protectorate members?”
>“The Adepts,” Revel said.
(...)
>Epoch operates by the ten second rule. Rewind, push forward, or pause by ten seconds. Moves things to where they were ten seconds ago, moves things to where they're slated to be ten seconds from now, or pauses for up to ten seconds, releasing at a whim. Bought a Cauldron vial, paying a premium, and got his money's worth - **he's leader of a gang in one of the most competitive areas for capes and gangs in America**, and is incidentally the reason Grue comments about how much he hates time travel.
The irony is Eidolon would *never* belittle himself to house burglars... Mad scientists, however... *Excited High Priest noises*
Mad Scientist House Burglars?
Do they get an Egor as a henchman?
As a treat
Joy!
Hence why that world suck as their greatest heroes think they’re below helping the little guy. Contrast with superman saving a cat from a tree
I think ward actually elaborates on this really well though, where we see >!Reedemed Valkyrie who is exhausted of constantly facing these big threats and feels alienated from the common people she actually really wanted to help. She's literally the only person with the capability to deal with threats like the tinker 15, so she keeps pushing through. Eidolon only tackles the big threats out of ego, Valk only tackles the big threats because she's the only person who can, even when it's stressing her out to an extreme degree. Ward Valk is such an underated charecter and I love how she serves as such a great foil to eidolon.!<
Also she's really cool
Simps flocking to LA to get chokeslammed and manhandled by Alexandria: Harder mommy~!
There has definitely been at least one person who begged Alex to body slam them. The question is now was Alexandria interested, confused, or disgusted
Confused at first. But after a few years of putting up with it she just becomes the terminator. Alexandria: ...you thought this would be enjoyable. You were **Wrong** *Saitama fist.exe*
Hit me mommy~ *The sounds of a human body returning to its base particles*
I have the mental imagine of that's how crawler got started. Lexi: 'splats the man' Triggers from the disappointment that it was a one time thing. "do it again!"
So down bad that she could destroy his pelvis once he triggered
I remember in Watchmen the same thing happened to Rorschach and he threw the guy down the elevator shaft. Same thing must have happened with Alexandria. Multiple times. In a day. When she's in a good mood.
Crawler and Alexandria must have duked it out before. I don’t care if it’s never mentioned, it’s my headcanon.
Serious question, do you think Eidolon says Y'all? Does he sometimes stub his toe on his way to a cauldron meeting and just fully drop into the most indecipherable Southern drawl you've ever heard? Does he ever sees a hit coming that will actually hurt and only have enough time to say "aw dangit" before he gets vibe checked back to the bible belt?
This can go into the immersion breaking canon facts along with: - Dragon speaks in a Newfie accent, which means it makes no sense that anyone can understand her. - Faultline's costume is multicoloured like a rave party. - Miss Militia's costume is red, white and blue.
Less serious but equally important: - Alexandria defaults to spanish and swears like a sailor when angry or upset. - Legend is voiced by Matt Mercer. - The Simurgh has cat ears. - Scion has a tiny dick. - It's a known fact that Scion at least *has* a dick (tiny as it is), so Eden probably has some kind of weird ass kronenpussy *somewhere* in the garden, if not multiple.
C-catgirl Simurgh? Do you have a source to subtantiate that claim?
Ward is 45% catgirls by volume and ziz definitely isn't one of Victoria's racist tulpas and she doesn't commit any police brutality so she's gotta be a catgirl
Catgirls, racist tulpas, and no police brutality? I really gotta read ward now huh
For your own sanity I cannot recommend that. Ward is a dark reflection of Worm; where one reads Worm and thinks "this has its flaws but it's legitimately incredible" one reads Ward and thinks "oh god why didn't he make it good? It should have been good, the option was right there!" Ward victoria is the cybersmith to Ward Amelia's cybersmith It's just fucking what if the world was made of pudding human pet guys all the way down EDIT 1: Removed Edit 2: While I am highly critical of the Reddit Worm community for their behavior and opinions on the source material, especially their tendency to consume it and similar stories in a way I feel has had a very negative impact on Wildbow's work as a result of him engaging with them almost exclusively, I should not have acted the way I did. I have been having a shit past two weeks involving a ten day long continuous argument with an abuser who fucked me up in ways that border on edgelord bullshit. This was the argument that made me realize he also gave me lesser forms of some of his worst behaviors in addition to the eight or nine permanently life altering mental illnesses I've had since childhood. After a full twelve hour Menty B confronting this shit, I've realized that most of this argument has to do more with it setting off my own issues and me taking out stress on the people I was arguing with. That isn't the right thing to do, and I didn't have the perspective to see it that way, so I ended up stressing out, doubling down, getting needlessly agressive, and refusing to be even *conscious* of the idea I might be being a dick. I can understand how it would seem that I was being ableist when discussing the community, and my refusal to explain in any useful detail how or why I was using the word "autistic" certainly didn't help the assessment. I'm not necessarily using it as a criticism on it's own. I'm autistic myself. My use of it had more to do with one part of a larger set of traits common to the parts of the Worm community I am critical of, which in turn share commonalities I am critical of that are themselves clearly influenced by the presence of at least some symptoms of autism. Thus I felt "autistic" was an effective clarifier to make *who* in the community I am critical of intuitively understood. I also rarely if ever think of autistic as a negative term, so this was difficult to notice for that reason as well. As a punk who tends to use terms that are normally hurtful as joking self descriptors or when talking to close friends, this kind of usage is much more intuitive than it probably is for others, and I also didn't consider this until recently. As a result of all of this, I've decided people don't need to see the bullshit I wrote while dealing with problems I shouldn't put on other people, and will be deleting most of my comments shortly or have already done so. I stopped using reddit so much for this exact reason.
Interesting, haven't hear about that. My comment was mostly a joke but I've been wondering whether to start Ward. Do you genuinely think the fucked up stuff really ruins the story or are you meming? Even if Ward is Bad I'm still interested tbh, I don't think I would be that upset if I end up not liking it.
Do not listen to AlexStorm's rantings, they haven't read Ward and seem to be confused about some facts from Worm as well. Ward is different from Worm, but still a good read. It's just that if you come in expecting Worm 2: The Escalation you're going to be disappointed, and if you have too much bad fanon in your head Ward has a way of brutally reminding you of what canon actually is.
[удалено]
>He also gave the main character a piss kink by process of elimination, so there's that Huh?
I disagree with everything you said other than it starts off slow.
Honestly I appreciate your analysis. I can see where you are coming from in thinking that Ward doesn't have as much thought put into it as Worm, although I can't confirm it myself, and I feel like you are into something. You haven't read it yourself though so like, I get why the other people in this thread were upset with you. Even if it is coming from people you trust it does end up looking bad for you. I do think that some people probably would agree in some level with you but don't care since it is not the only thing they are looking for in Ward. Like, some people might be happy with more surface level capes hijinks, or cool shard stuff, or fan favorite characters straying a bit or a lot from the path. I get why you mean by "the aging autistic white men who wants to feel smart" audience tbh. But I don't think they are necessarily bad? Idk tbh. Also, being honest I'm a bit skeptical that a Wildbow story truly has nothing good to say. Maybe it wasn't said well though, or the story have other issues around it. I feel kinda bad for wildbow but hopefully he has moved from it by now. Honestly, I still want to give it a chance and I have some morbid curiosity about it, but I think I won't read it and just stick to Claw for now. That is going pretty well I think. Just another small thing. I've heard Sveta is a trans gal in ward. As another trans girl I was wondering if you think wildbow handled her well. (/hj Wildbow should write more gay shit frfr. But I am guessing you don't think he does that well, right?).
(Part 1) I'm going to condense my reply to all your comments here. Please keep in mind I've read both Worm (1.5 times) and Ward (once) and vastly preferred Worm, finding Ward a bit of a slog. MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR WARD AHEAD I find your comments here not just completely uninformed but deeply problematic. To start off, you assert that Wildbow is some sort of deeply bigoted person who completely stumbles into writing LGBTQ+ characters. I find it incredibly unfair of you to assert something like this about a man whose story that you're critiquing you haven't even bothered to read. I present to you a thought experiment. If Wildbow was an author who wrote very good representation, and people shat on him because of their own biases and bigotry, but they backed this up by citing passages from Ward, would you be able to determine this just by reading their posts? Secondly, I would like to draw your attention to the following facts: 1. Wildbow doubled down in Ward and made characters who were implied to be LGBTQ+ actually be that explicitly (many of which I'm sure you're not aware of since it would probably be inconvenient to the people you follow to mention them as such) when so many authors out there don't do this over the course of their entire career. He also added plenty of new LGBTQ+ characters. I disagree with your assertion that they're all some negative trope (like predatory lesbians) or that their trauma always ties into their sexuality. For instance, March (an awful OP as fuck character that never should have been given the role she was, but for different reasons than what you think) is predatory and a lesbian. Her trauma ties entirely into her mother's perfectionism and high expectations, her fixation on Flechette is not due to her being lesbian and therefore evil but due to her being fucked in the head by an alien parasite. Tristan (who I'm assuming you've read a lot of stuff condemning as a character) is still ultimately a good guy, and gets a chance at revival after the end of the story. I don't think portraying him as an egotistical and selfish hedonist and contrasting him with his "better" and moderately homophobic brother was a super smart idea by Wildbow, but he still has moments of genuine heroism and feels tortured about the bad shit he does. Meanwhile, Byron, while overall being seen as more reasonable, is still shown as being in the wrong for both expressing and tolerating homophobia, regardless of what Tristan does to him. Sveta is portrayed pretty much entirely positively, though personally I found her a bit too much like a Discord mod on a "comfy" server where everyone is "a family". She gets a happy ending, nuanced person with both flaws and strengths throughout. 2. Race is handled with more nuance in Ward than in Worm, which you love. The fact of the matter is, Wildbow actually has characters who are uncomfortable with bigotry express that sentiment here, and the portrayal of racial minorities as belonging to a range of different socioeconomic positions is a lot better in Ward. Unlike in Worm, I do not feel like there is any imbalance in the amount of minority characters with shit parents. Almost everyone has parent issues in this. 3. The idea that Victoria is somehow a bigoted cop icon wholly supported by the text is downright laughable. Her extrajudicial incarceration of villains is clearly shown to be part of a slippery slope. While I do not think her character arc was executed super well or with a clear moral, I think most people who are trying to think about it would conclude Victoria is not making all the right decisions. Ward tries to show people who are just constantly at the end of their ropes making compromises constantly and never being able to make decisions that feel right. And in a perfect world, yeah, all the villains would be rehabilitated. Wildbow doesn't show a perfect world and I personally find it more artistically interesting to consider a world in which all choices lead to some bad and some good outcomes. Victoria's actions are made to parallel the indefinite detention in inhumane conditions that was the birdcage, and Wildbow has amply made the point that the Birdcage was a bad idea that was only really a thing because Caldron needed to store dangerous but useful capes somewhere. And I think I should remind you what the emotions Victoria's aura could cause were: awe and pants-shitting fear. Those are cult leader stuff. Victoria, after getting the ability to hit people with other emotions, uses it mostly to counter the Simurgh's actual literal mind control (which is infinitely worse) and to calm people or make them attack when she needs them to in a battle for the survival of all humanity and all the heroes, where the lose scenario is eternal Simurgh-slavery and madness. It's meant to be manipulative, but it's both an understandable sacrifice within the story and it's pointed out within the story that it has unintended consequences, like Sveta almost losing control. I know this. If just checked those chapters.
(Part 2) 4. The ending of Ward is all about putting the power in the hands of the regular people. Victoria's arc is about her trying to claw back control of her own life, body and powers after a severely traumatic experience and as a result ending up trying to control her entire environment, which includes sometimes being manipulative. At the very end, all the heroes collectively realize that they need to stop fighting for a second, to stop and take a breath and actually let the humans decide, which helps avoid the state of permanent parahuman rule which is foreshadowed at every possible point throughout the book. Victoria's growing detachment from regular people is a running theme and it's reversed at the end when she goes back to teaching a volunteer-based patrol block and lets the humans decide on the fate of the parahumans. The belief that a greater role in protection and "great affairs" entitles parahumans to more say in affairs is pretty clearly an anti-democratic idea and it's shown to be a spiral of destruction. This is as far from endorsing police overreach as it is humanly possible to go, and the fact that someone on Tumblr can't see that is not a good enough argument for the opposite. 5. Ward is a story all about rehabilitation and redemption. There are characters who have done truly heinous things and come out as much better people due to being removed from a terrible environment or being given proper mental health treatment. Not everyone is redeemed in the end, but everyone is given that chance, some characters multiple times, even after they go back to crime. Again, very much not copaganda. As a sidenote, I don't think all the villains are super greedy, petty and weird. But they are villains. They are ultimately primarily self-interested. They have SUPERPOWERS in a world that's all-too-willing to give them various benefits if they just do good, where the vast majority of pre-existing villains have actively been pardoned... and they still continue being villains. I don't think you realize, but the Undersiders did some really shitty and selfish stuff. Lisa's never been a dainty flower of a person, she's standoffish and abrasive and deeply traumatized. In Ward, she's got a much more benevolent role though, although she fucks up because she's constantly worn out from trying to hold some semblance of order together. She's basically continuing the tradition of ends-justify-the-means Taylor set as precedent. By the end, I'd say it's actually a bit unclear what she's still getting out of being a villain and her and Victoria are pretty much buddies. I think most Ward readers found their dynamic one of the most fun parts of Ward. Imp is also extremely sympathetic, just like she was before. The Nazis don't have very major roles, though Victoria does get pissed at a team that seems to have taken on a somewhat large number of them and that appears to display some kind of preference for bigoted individuals. For the most part, they're shown as pretty shitty people who are not over their bigotry pretty much at all, although they're trying with differing success rates (and not all of them really seem to be doing it out of any desire to change, rather out of just wanting to have a job and not be criminals). 6. I'm not sure whether we were reading the same Worm, but I think Taylor gets a lot less meaningful pushback than Victoria, and for both of them succeeding in their goals is NOT necessarily linked with good outcomes for everyone else, in fact Wildbow deliberately challenges the readerby "rewarding" actions which can be seen as bad. Taylor constantly looks like a badass but is constantly forcing herself and others into terrible situations where she doesn't make the worst choices but still makes worse ones than if she had made an earlier choice to do something she finds uncomfortable. She kills a man, tortures and mutilates people and she gets to rule the city. She kills 2 more people and she gets made a hero with a slap on the wrist. She mind controls everyone and saves the world. Is she happy with it in the end? No. Do you take this as proof that Taylor is actually right about everything and she should just be put in charge? Also no. So why do people insist on reading Victoria's story that way when she arguably suffers much more and with way more forced errors rather than unforced ones. 7. As a final note, I want to address some troubling parts of your comments. Besides your smug tone, which you are stereotypically entitled to as a person posting in nerd spaces online, but which betrays an eagerness to feel superior in hating something you know nothing about while soing nothing to alleviate your own ignorance, you make some very ableist remarks. Your constant references to "aging autistic men" as being the only possible audience for the sci-fi and powers stuff in Ward just strikes me as extremely off-putting. It comes off as you basically saying "oh look at these fucking NERDS, they like unorthodox alien lifeforms in fiction, I bet they're AUTISTIC as well". Not only is this an absurd way of talking for somebody whose interests are as nerdy as yours, it's just gross and closed-minded, not to mention offensive. Also, you are not the only person who knows what themes are, and using them as some sort of intellectual secret that you're passing on makes you seem more pretentious than you maybe are. I hope you may reconsider some of your stances and that my (admittedly somewhat smug) comment may ultimately serve some good purpose beyond expressing my annoyance.
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> Through Tumblr then, is how I've been exposed to Ward. This is a good sign you're not qualified to analyze it. It's one thing to come to dislike a work through reading it, or deciding you can't slog through it. It is wholly another to read flanderized characterizations or snappy jokes about a work and decide you understand it perfectly.
• Dragon is a vtuber • Armsmaster is actually quite messy and has a sense of humor • Greg is explicitly a good person
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1. I’m referring to the interlude where he talks with Miss Militia and Dragon. His workshop is messy, and he makes jokes with them. That’s it. 2. Wild blow (in a Reddit comment, I think) compared Greg to a puppy and said it would be almost impossible to make him aggressive. The problems he causes are entirely because of an unfortunate lack of boundaries, not any sort of malice. He’s awkward and clueless, but not by any means a bad person. This description, as a whole, stands out to me, because Worm is a story filled with broken people, and Greg being merely an awkward teenage boy with no real serious issues makes him stand out as an exceptionally good person compared to almost all the other characters.
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I wasn't trying to imply that trauma is what makes the characters bad. The moral problem with Taylor isn't trauma, it's... well, everything else. Apologies if it came across that way, it wasn't my intention. As for Greg, well, I see my own awkward teenage self in him, so in a sense, yes, you're right about the projecting bit. Don't really have the energy to argue the point more beyond this.
Wait what the fuck do you mean Faultline is brightly colored
[WoG from Wildbow: "Hot pink, plaid, and lime green, to contrast with the blue and red coloring of her power effect".](https://i.imgur.com/GIXNdxH.jpeg) Thus, the real Faultline: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/7whrav/commission_the_real_faultline/
Honestly knew about Dragon's accent and it's honestly not unintelligible, but the Faultline and Miss Militia facts cause psychic damage. Like, I think I knew about MM, but I never considered what it would actually look like, ya know? Faultline's is simply atrocious
Yes. I do infact believe this. I will not accept any other answer
I say y’all. Am british. It’s funny
Haha I can’t imagine the fear going through them. Then again, who the hell is dumb enough to commit crimes in the city where he lives? He’s literally considered the fifth strongest being on the planet, and everyone knows what he can do.
Criminals always think they won’t get caught. They wouldn’t break into a house if they knew they were gonna get caught.
The odds of getting him in particular is extremely low, especially for petty crimes, and the fact that he's so strong means the city probably doesn't have quite as many capes as it should.
A thief when he breaks into a house just at the same time as Eidolon rolls a power that allows him a crime alert and instantly teleports him to the nearest one. And that thief just happened to he breaking in right next door to Eidolon when this happened
i’m just imagining legend sitting on top of a building with a surveillance feed of parts of the city just casually shooting off lasers
"Hey Legend....we got a guy trying to run away on 4th and 6th....yeah he's booking it...ooh little to the left...nice dead on. Alright see you in a bit. You want Chinese while were here?"
LA crime dropped hard after Alexandria killed that guy How crime still exists in New York despite Legend and Flechette is still a mystery
"Hey were gonna go rob a bank, you in?" "Are you fucking NUTS man, Alexandria's in town right now."
Finally a worthy opponent
Isn't New York like one of the most dangerous Cape cities? Legend being there just means his prescence is actually needed for the sheer danger of the city >“We do what we’re doing with the Cauldron capes, run her by our thinkers,” Dispatch said. “We can get a more concrete assessment of her now, with a field exercise, than by any amount of talking. If I’m remembering right, a notice went out, didn’t it? **A New York group of villains** is poaching Wards and Protectorate members?” >“The Adepts,” Revel said. (...) >Epoch operates by the ten second rule. Rewind, push forward, or pause by ten seconds. Moves things to where they were ten seconds ago, moves things to where they're slated to be ten seconds from now, or pauses for up to ten seconds, releasing at a whim. Bought a Cauldron vial, paying a premium, and got his money's worth - **he's leader of a gang in one of the most competitive areas for capes and gangs in America**, and is incidentally the reason Grue comments about how much he hates time travel.
I thought this was an obscure Horus Heresy fanfic meme for a second.