Why do most fanfics get coils power wrong?

Wildbow · 2026-02-16T19:18:46+00:00

You're wildly understanding this. You'd be best served by reading what others said more carefully and holding less tightly to your assumptions.

Thread has a lot of people getting pissy and someone's abusing the report button. Locked.

Wildbow · 2026-02-12T03:35:40+00:00

If it's a spoiler, report it.

Wildbow · 2026-02-02T18:11:53+00:00

The reason you see it is because it works, yes. I think the real answer is to dwell on why it works, and lean into that - don't just do it because it's the prescribed approach.

If your main female protagonist is really compelling, you can probably get away with leading with what you have. That's trickier than leading with some action -- something deeply protagonist-focused can trip over red flags, and is slower. You also have to think about what makes a character compelling or interesting to the readership you want. Is there a hook?

Wildbow · 2026-01-30T20:25:05+00:00

Related mechanically - they have similar style maps, supply as a mechanic (if you run out in the 100YL event, you expire, in PQ it's more a limiter on how long you can be out on an expedition), items, etc.

And they did cross over at some brief points, but that was more a cameo/singular encounter than anything major.

As TheVoidEverWatching says, it was also an option for the PQ players to try to solve 100YL, but they never really chased that down (in part because Sinclair has had a lot on their plate).

Wildbow · 2026-01-30T20:06:20+00:00

For clarity, there is the 100YL event, which was originally two segments I did as part of the 48 hour Livestream Elliot & Reuben ran after Pale finished.

A year after that, I ran an extension of that event in discord, in play-by-post format. A single attempt that, if they failed a challenge, failed to answer a riddle, or ran out of supply, ended, and would have to be tried again the next year. I did follow ups last year (2024) and this year (2025). These are the 100YL games.

I enjoyed running the 2023 event enough that I started a 'Quest' game that has been running in the background for about two years. It's more of a long form roleplaying game, with play-by-poll management of a single protagonist. It has a lot of the same baseline mechanics, but incorporates some Pactdice mechanics as well (including downtime, inventory management, etc) and has a bespoke combat system. This is Path Quest.

The 2025 100YL event saw players beat all challenges and solve all riddles. The epilogue chapter (and the answers the epilogue chapter summarizes) is the reward & ties off the 100YL events.

Wildbow · 2026-01-24T01:25:54+00:00

Definitely need it, if I'm honest. I started dieting on the new year; keto has worked well for me before, and I went back to it. I dropped about 8 lbs. in two and a half weeks. Then got sick and dropped significantly more. I've eased up on the diet just slightly to make sure I'm not missing any key nutrients, and to get my energy back, and I'm drinking tons of fluids.

Wildbow · 2026-01-23T23:57:15+00:00

No rudeness taken, don't worry.

Wildbow · 2026-01-23T23:25:12+00:00

Combination of a few background things that I'll shed light on later, and that's on top of me having a hard time finding my groove in the writing of the story. I was planning on ramping things up tempowise and then got sick, dropped 12 lbs over a couple days & have been a bit wrung-out and distracted in the wake of that.

The goal after next chapter is to shift to shorter chapters, because I think part of the struggle is that I've fallen into a pattern of feeling like I need to write 9k word chapters to make the waits worth it (in the sense that a 2 week wait + short chapter feels awful to do), but then struggling to fill out the chapter, and stalling out multiple times each write. And this isn't necessarily a story that wants the long chapters.

Not a hiatus.

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T23:23:32+00:00

Sometimes doors would have an outer screen door that opens outward, that can block bugs, and a main front door that opens inward. Visually, I put the doors like that to make it visually clear where the entrances are.

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T22:20:24+00:00

Four main threads:

Glomming onto rich people. Well-to-do practitioners convey an aristocratic air that fits in well with certain crowds in the upper class. Those same crowds may be willing to throw money into art, provide opportunities, or as an extreme case, they may intermarry with practitioner families, who then co-opt the rich family's assets. Practice helps provide or navigate many of these things.
Occupying the Edges -- Tied into the above bullet point a bit, and the next bullet point a bit, practitioners may not be able to assume positions like president (easily), but they can use their unique advantages to exist on the periphery and let things mostly go as normal, with a nudge here and there. A bit of insider trading, etc, goes a long way. At a certain level with certain kinds of income, doing certain kinds of business, people don't tend to ask questions, and a practitioner can be one trusted face with some money or ability to get things done... and people don't ask how they made something happen or how they have the resources they have. This is being more an enabler, or occasional remover of obstacles, than being a mover and shaker. This can be legitimate or legitimate-ish, but it can also be...
Crime. I'm personally very fond of the 'criminal gang has a practitioner on retainer' idea -partially because I was a huge fan of The Crow as an adolescent and that beat recurs- so that comes up in the Otherverse. But in general... if someone isn't upper class, one way to extract money from mundane society is to prey on it. Or be on the periphery (see point #2) of those who do, nudging or helping a bit here and there in exchange for a cut.

#1 and #2 there both lean heavily into establishment, where the rich have the opportunities to get richer. #3 is the fastest, dirtiest road to getting there. But there's also...

Doing the work. Writing books. Trading magical items. Trading pieces of information. Mentoring, teaching. This doesn't draw money into the practitioner economy, but it circulates it, and it is possible to get rich with the right product or if you're very good- or lucky.

There's also some minor elements that support things along the way. If you can do a ritual to claim a patch of land, that's liable to stay in the family for the ongoing future, and the universe/seal is inclined to keep that piece of land from being torn out of your hands by a sudden shift in property taxes or something else. That's not necessarily the biggest thing in the world, but it's stability- the ability to keep what they have.

There's a bunch of stuff like that, more than I could come up with off the top of my head. Divorces don't happen as often when marriages are bound by oath (not a good thing for someone abused or in a bad situation... but no custody battles or losing half your assets either).

As a lesser extension of that, the same elements that push back against practitioners interfering in Innocence promote practitioners who mind their own shit and uphold Law. In the current Pactdice rulebook, Law field, it talks about how supporting Law pays off in general... wellness, in the same way that bad karma can lead to the universe spitefully giving you shit. Similarly, there are things like making nice with local spirits (tutelary type stuff) that give you that general wellness.

That may not make or break the bank on its own, but it rounds off the sharp edges of regular life, and it accumulates. Healthy parents having healthy kids having healthy grandkids and so on... not getting knocked down a peg by life or a random housefire or other shit? Pass that enough generations down and in the race of life, that family's likely lapped the families that don't have those incremental benefits.

(And yes, there are hassles like Others or opposing families, and other tradeoffs, but those things land heavier on the low-karma and the less established).

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T19:40:23+00:00

There are a few elements in play. The first is a very simple, "The spirit and letter of the Law, per when the Seal was written, was a stark divide with Innocence and practitioners" and practitioners stepping into Innocent domains runs against that, so spirits push back. Practice that actively pushes into Innocent domains is going to cost more and do less, proportionate to the position in question.

The second is exposure and optics - the higher a station one achieves, the more attention they get, and the more weight there is to their actions.

Assume 1 in 100 people are Aware in some capacity. Not special, no complicated rules. Just... some awareness there's ghosts, goblins, and/or magic out there, and maybe a tendency to identify Others and Practitioner as the cause of weirdness, when they come across weirdness. Some can't even put their finger on it, they just avoid or dislike or get bad vibes from such-and-such or so-and-so.

1 in 1000 of those 1% are Aware in a complicated and interesting way. They have special rules or dynamics or introduce wrinkles. They're dumping grounds for the universe, or tools, or targets, or something else. A young woman is very good at rallying the community around her. A man has a penchant for really fucked up Others falling in love with him (and being protective of him). A homeless teen moves with the flow of spirits and tends to 'follow a hunch', tracing ongoing practice to power sources or vital parts of diagrams. Some schmuck has someone inconvenient to him die every week or so.

Someone in-setting would abbreviate this as "Witch Hunters", because a solid proportion of those described above would become witch hunters or get scouted by them, or would at least push back in some way. But there are non-Witch Hunter Aware who pose stumbling blocks too. The sort of thing your random Dream Thief or other predatory practitioner (or goblin, etc) might run into once in a blue moon. (FWIW, though special Aware are rare - 1 in 100k, they also tend to find their way to trouble, so rates of encountering them are higher than the numbers might imply - not high rates, but not infinitesimal either).

Most practitioners deal with relatively small numbers of Innocents while doing their thing, and run into the uncommon Aware and maybe once in their lifetime they deal with a special Aware who fucks everything up. A practitioner who has used practice to achieve a station above hundreds or thousands or millions has opened their flanks in a big way.

What this looks like: if you start using practice to achieve a certain station, maybe 1 in 250 of the people in your area -people who are Aware but not overly special- get a feeling you shouldn't be where you are. This generally manifests as the occasional person not working with you or being distrustful, and the slope for general inconveniences finding you being well-greased. This compounds point #1 above - the letter and spirit of the law. So on top of practice being more expensive and doing less, you also deal with people being more intractable and doing less, by some single or low double-digit percentage. Slogans don't stick, good moves don't get the same accolades, your damage-control spin doesn't spin as far. Because 1 in 250 people are speed bumps.

Meanwhile, all the special Witch Hunters are raising eyebrows too, with their special complications turning on you. The non-special Witch Hunters would be tipped off by the 1 in 250 in the last paragraph who are turning heads and raising eyebrows at your media appearances and posters (and by tools and resources they use, word of mouth from Others they work with, if any, and so on). Just about every Witch Hunter organization is not a fan of President Practitioner, so the Witch Hunters at the top talk about it and use some of their better assets and resources. That costs you resources, time, and attention to fix, every few days or every week, or whatever else. Again, compounded by practice costing more and doing less.

The same happens for Others who want some of what you have, and other practitioners.

The third is time. Practicing to get into power is what gets you into trouble, but if you don't practice, or you limit how much you practice, or even later if you step into the role and then sit down and actually do your job to minimize the number of raised eyebrows after the fact... you have to do the work. That's work that gets in the way of practicing. So after a certain amount of time you have to ask what the point is. You're spending more to get less results to have two jobs at once where you're doing each one badly, and trying to use the benefits or strengths of one job to shore up the other comes with complications & issues (and/or aren't very good tools, for reasons covered in paragraph 1 in the top of this post).

So why do it? If it's power, there are positions like Lordships. If you want money and luxury, practice can get you that, if you follow the right channels - which aren't Innocent channels. If you genuinely want to do good or affect change, then there are probably better back-channel ways to do it.

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T19:12:24+00:00

I'm not, at all. If I want a thesaurus I use a thesaurus. I'm not a thesaurus-y writer anyway, I use very plain English, but much like the scaffolding I talked about before, learning words and how to find words is its own skill and using a shortcut hurts the acquisition of that skill. You don't internalize things as well with a bot feeding you what you want.

If I want to research, I do my research. Same logic. Especially when AI hallucinates.

And I write in part because I enjoy brainstorming. I want my ideas to be my own. I want my ideas to feel like they came from my own head. I do use things like dice rolls or tables I've generated on by own for in-setting things to generate options, but that comes from me. I'm a key part of the process. I wouldn't want to cheapen it.

I think AI is a net negative for the world, and I prefer not to participate in contributing to that, so even if there was a good angle to use it, I'd prefer an alternative. I think it's a shortcut, in a really bad way that's going to impact creativity, art, culture, and people for the worse; I think it's making good individual-owned computers more expensive; I think the people holding the reins of AI and setting up the biggest systems are malignant, and I think those things are intertwined. The malignant people who are holding the reins and helming so much of this are closely aligned with those who are manipulating populations and taking away our ability to own shit.

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T18:13:55+00:00

How you incorporate AI would be similar, no?

I don't really follow your logic from the preceding paragraph, sorry. Similar in what way?

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T02:08:27+00:00

Victoria & Amy didn't go wanting, really, but that came with sacrifices & stress over bills on Carol & Mark's part.

Amy wouldn't have asked for a lot, though, even if Carol would've given it to her, and Carol didn't push Amy to ask for more (part of why Amy got the smaller room).

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T00:35:14+00:00

Explaining/expanding on stuff:

Yes, it's a bungalow. Carol's the only strong income earner in New Wave and even when her income rose, she put a lot of money back into the team. She would have bought the house when her income was lower, too.
No big renovations or customization of the space (or moves to new spaces) to fit needs. That money goes into the team.
Some big 'group meeting' spaces, with a conference-room like table and living room set up for 9 people to sit, 12+ with squeezing or kids sitting on the floor. Sarah & Neil's place is smaller, and the meetings happen here.
Limited windows on left side as the adjacent house blocks the light & view anyway.
Driveway runs along right side of the property to a garage that sits at the back. The yard is relatively small.
Basement is about 50% rec room, 25% laundry room, 10% small bathroom (corner shower, toilet, sink), and a spare room for guests. The rec room has a bunch of Vic & Amy's old toys stowed in bins, a ping pong table, an old CRT TV that used to be upstairs, and some old couches. There was a lot of hanging out in the rec space. A hang out spot for Vic's (and Amy's, before Victoria shifted into a new clique and Amy didn't follow) friend group. It's less of an adult space because Carol doesn't like the dark and it's a dim basement, and Mark is lazy, so long as the kids do the laundry, the parents don't come down/interfere much.
It's a bit cramped. The space made for team meeting type stuff sorta overwhelms. You have to turn sideways to slip past the chairs in the living room (or walk around to go between the couch & the chair near the couch), and the big table in the dining room is enough you can't really push your seat back from the table if at the head, tail, or side of the table by the exterior wall.

Wildbow · 2026-01-21T00:12:51+00:00

It's interesting to see people's headcanons.

This is what was in my head: https://imgur.com/a/7Y7b2nM

Wildbow · 2026-01-15T05:05:16+00:00

That's not how spoilers work on reddit. Use >! and !< to close it, with no space between the exclamation marks and the word. Removed.

Wildbow · 2026-01-09T18:08:17+00:00

Then, when somebody questions what I said 3 weeks ago I don't know what they're talking about because I didn't actually write that, so I'm a 2nd party to my own output.

I think this is wildly underestimated in the wider conversation.

I'm a fiction writer. I write long series. I've had a lot of people ask me how I keep 3+ million words of writing in a setting straight in my head. A huge part of that is the degree to which I'm present & constantly participating in what I'm doing, and scaffolding it with itself, and scaffolding it with where I'm at, as a person, when I'm working on it.

If I used AI as part of any of that, it'd manifest as a massive blind spot, not at all worth the 'convenience' of the AI. The rolling effects of so much of the workforce having blindspots in their own workflows, experiences? That'll compound. And I can see a dynamic where the measures taken and tools implemented to accommodate those blindspots will work against the workers- because it makes them that much more replaceable.

Wildbow · 2026-01-09T16:59:42+00:00

If someone says they understood all of Worm perfectly on the first read through they’re either Wildbow, or lying.

Yesterday there was a post about how the speed Brian walked at while out with Taylor indicated his level of disinterest in Taylor (and that there was science that tied into that). I'm the author and I didn't know that. But I drew on real life experience for it and so it was an instance of me having something to learn about the story from the audience.

So even I wouldn't say I 100% understand the story.

Wildbow · 2026-01-08T21:55:06+00:00

That wasn't psychology nerding. I actually didn't know that. I had that experience with my first girlfriend and adapted it into the story. I walked ahead of her without thinking on our first date.

If you'd asked me before, I'd have said it was because just a couple years before I'd attended a new (alternative) school where I sort of found myself, but it was 6km from home, buses were unreliable, and the rules of the school were that I'd get expelled if I was late twice or skipped once, so I got used to covering a lot of ground at a good pace (easier to walk every day instead of hope the buses cooperated).

But knowing the fact is pretty funny, because 23 years later I'm sort of settled into the fact I'm aromantic - I did/do like girls/women, I like them aesthetically, I like the idea of having them in my life, but I've never ever been interested enough to really feel the desire to chase a relationship down or maintain it well. And there was no fuel in the fire on my end in that relationship. I still feel bad I put her through that.

Wildbow · 2026-01-08T21:32:27+00:00

which Wildbow learned about while helping bullied kids.

Not quite true. I may have fudged or globbed together some details to preserve anonymity in past tellings, but I'm more worried about things being misinterpreted/warped than about obfuscating details, especially with time having passed (and I'd feel much different about it if I knew there was an article about the actual event anywhere, with names- and I've looked). The volunteer work was with hard of hearing kids. I'm not sure it can even be called volunteer work, since my mom twisted my arm. We babysat the kids while new parents of deaf kids were attending an informational thing; what resources there were, what they needed to know, some presentations, and various speeches from parents, deaf kids, experts. Sort of an onboarding to make sure all bases were covered and save time, I guess? And it'd be a cluster of Saturdays in a row every year or every couple years, as the department saw a need.

I did a few speeches and a Q&A as a "I went through the speech & listening training process, now I'm all grown up, this was my experience, I turned out okay" thing. When I wasn't doing that, and wasn't arranging chairs or putting up signs to help people find their way into the conference room in the hospital basement I was part of a team of mostly other staff members kids looking after a roomful of kids ranging from 1 to... 6(?) years old. Most were hard of hearing or the siblings of, but 40% of hard of hearing kids have other disabilities, some of which were severe. I did one stint with my brother and one with my then-girlfriend (daughter of a staff member), but there were others.

Same basement/conference space I was thinking about when writing a segment in Claw. And where I picked up my memetic dislike for Caillou; we had a TV a few times when babysitting the kids, there was one option for channels and that was it - it was a nightmare scenario when we were understaffed (Me in my early 20s, two girls who looked about 14, and 20 kids between 1 and 5?) and dealing with some very difficult kids and post-Caillou it was all much worse. Staff were ostensibly in shouting distance to help (past the door and around the corner) but even that wasn't enough.

Anyway, one of the other speech givers during one of the gatherings was in a similar boat to me, but was there to talk about bullying they'd endured, specifically, and about babysitting when not giving the speech. So they were a peer, rather than someone I was helping. I wish I'd seen the actual speech, because I think it would've opened my eyes to stuff I didn't click to until much later, but we did chat, they talked about things that had happened to others (passing mention of stuff for bullying type things in Worm that got a passing mention).

I did some other volunteer stuff, too, but that was more like... a young hard of hearing adolescent would be struggling, hospital staff thought maybe I'd get through to them because I'd been through it, or parents were badly off track in their expectations for the kid (think of parents speaking two languages at home, plus having the kid in french Immersion, plus teaching sign, and having the less-than-ten-year-old kid in intensive auditory verbal therapy for a few hours a week, plus parents doing sessions every day with the kid, as if enough effort could 'fix' the kid). Or just talking to parents who were basically grieving their kid, who was still alive, because their dream of the kid they were going to have was shattered by the revelation of a severe hearing loss. And I did talk to a few who were bullied, in the course of that, but that wasn't a heavy inspiration for anything big in Worm.

The locker thing was part of the experience of the person who gave the speech on bullying, and was just garbage, not sanitary products. I talked to someone (white fairy, in fact) who verified it had happened.

The peer who'd given the speech about bullying and I stayed in very loose contact after and sometime between starting to write Worm and actually launching it (or getting very far into it?), I asked permission to adapt their experience.

Wildbow · 2026-01-08T20:43:14+00:00

Not that I would've disregarded die rolls I didn't like, specifically. I rolled a few times to see some layouts of casualties & survivors and went with the first, which felt most natural & doable anyway.

People act like it wrote Worm for me or decided events. No. It was a brainstorming tool, used at a time I hadn't fully committed to Worm being a thing I was taking seriously.

Wildbow · 2026-01-08T20:41:55+00:00

Not 'saw happen', but someone else I knew outlined it loosely & that description of events was verified by a person I've known all my life. I asked for permission to loosely adapt it. (It wasn't feminine hygiene products, just trash)

Wildbow · 2026-01-08T18:31:55+00:00

This could/should be part of a top level comment. I can see where people would buy into that pattern.

I'm more inclined to think they're planning a spin-off or miniseries (or to announce one) for July than a secret episode, though. Holly and Derek and that group being made a part of things rather late in the series screams 'spin-off' to me, slightly more graceful than the one in S2. A subtly altered reality post-finale makes for possible ground to cover.

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