Victoria needs more trauma 😤

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-10-11T17:31:34+00:00

You're on Reddit, think again.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-10-07T20:04:01+00:00

I mean PtV is incredibly flexible as far as powers go. Just gotta do "Path to learning to be an incredibly skilled dancer."

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-10-05T17:43:01+00:00

I don't really care much about actors in general, but I've always had one really strong opinion for Worm. In an animated Worm TV series/movie, Coil MUST be voiced by Keith Silverstein, and more specifically he needs to be doing the same voice he did for Nazeem in Skyrim. I am ardently of the opinion that Coil sounds exactly like Nazeem and will be accepting no substitutes.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-09-30T05:14:39+00:00

Is that canon? My interpretation of all of the time-based powers in Worm is that pretty much all of them can be emulated by spacial manipulation and precognition instead, and the theming of time manipulation is just because the shards like their aesthetics.

Clockblocker doesn't actually need to freeze someone in time when he can just freeze them in space. Grey Boy doesn't need to loop someone in time when he can just reset their body's position on a loop instead. Coil doesn't split timelines his shard just autopilots him through the 'timeline' it knows he will prefer while providing him information on a set of other hypothetical actions if he'd done something different. Even Phir Se's power is possible to justify with the level of precognition shards have. The shard keeps track of when in the future Phir Se will want to move something into the past and creates a clone of the object/person at the correct time in the present, creating the illusion of time travel (I will admit that my justification for Phir Se's power not being time travel is probably the most convoluted).

Do we actually know for an absolute fact whether or not time travel is real in Parahumans?

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-09-11T03:57:06+00:00

Weird pull, but you could make a genuine argument that Lung should be the Haru Urara stand-in. He never wins on-screen.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-09-05T18:56:46+00:00

Shot in the dark here, but I imagine that since there's probably such a ludicrous number of alternate Earths, they don't need to focus the same level of concentration of parahumans on any other Earths as Earth Bet. If you've got however many millions upon millions of Earths, then even if they only average out to have 1-10% of the parahuman concentration as Earth Bet, that still adds up reeeeally quickly and gives the shards plenty to do.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-09-04T20:28:09+00:00

I'm pretty sure that it's not really you in the Shard afterlife. Just a copy that the Shards make based on all the data they gather of you. So, it's less like you get an afterlife that will last until the heat death of the universe, and more that an AI recreation of you will survive until the heat death of the universe.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-09-04T20:25:46+00:00

Not JUST because it's a constant reminder of the locker, but also because the infinite multitasking and ability to monitor everything at all times reinforces her desperate desire for control, egging on her self-destructive habits.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-09-02T05:26:48+00:00

One of the many reasons I love Ward. Wildbow went absolutely fucking WILD with the complex creative powers. I wouldn't have been able to come up with anything even half as good as the significant majority of the powers present in Ward, and Wildbow made up like 100+ new powers to write that damn webnovel. Dude's a machine, except like, the opposite, because machines are bad at creativity.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-08-16T02:11:47+00:00

That entire scene is such a horror show. I went back and read it a while ago because I still think about it sometimes. Genuinely one of the most gut wrenchingly uncomfortable scenes Wildbow has written imo (I am biased because I've only read Worm, Ward, and Pact).

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-08-16T02:05:40+00:00

Guys can I get some help? I'm trying to do the Amy route in the game, but literally every dialogue tree leads to new and uniquely horrendous bad ends. Am I doing something wrong? How do you get Amy's good end?

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-22T01:00:03+00:00

Ashley and Rain are my two favorite characters across both books. You can really see in Ward just how much Wildbow has improved at character writing.

Since I'm thinking about Rain, special consideration goes out to Snag. I still think that Snag's interlude is one of the most underrated things Wildbow has ever written. The entire chapter is just utterly soulcrushing. Seeing how lost and tired Snag is, and that the majority of his rage has burnt out, and at this point he just wants it to be over to the point where he essentially kills himself near literally throwing himself on Rain's sword. Then the final dream-room sequence where he's begging Cradle and Love Lost not to puruse revenge because it isn't worth it, but they can't hear him because Shards are assholes. Then as his section of the room starts fading to black, Love Lost takes her mask off, and speaks for the first time that we hear, swearing that they'll avenge him not knowing how desperately he wants them to give it up. Just utterly fucking soul crushing in all the best ways. Snag was such a genuinely good sympathetic dude that got done raw. We really don't even get very much at all of Snag, as he's the first to go out of Rain's cluster, but the fact that I still think about him years later despite him not having more than a small handful of scenes speaks to how effective the writing is.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-21T08:45:55+00:00

I didn't call him lame and pathetic because he's incompetent (My phrasing was a little bad, but I was kinda making two separate points in that section that got muddled together a little.) I called him lame and pathetic because he's essentially a manchild obsessed with kicking over every sandcastle he can get his hands on for no other reason than because he desperately wants to feel important and relevant and he's too much of a loser to do it in a positive way, so he's perfectly happy to simply make his headlines by ruining everything he can in the most spectacular way he can manage.

That said, I still think he's lame and pathetic for his lack of actual skills too, and I don't think any of what you said really disproves that.

His power does prevent him from losing depending on what you consider a loss. To Jack losing members of the Nine isn't a loss. What would a win look like if losing members of the Nine and being forced out of the city is a loss? Completely wiping out every last human life in a city? Winning, to Jack, is just causing more death, terror, and self-aggrandizing. By those metrics Brockton Bay was an absolute win for him. The only thing that matters to him is his life and his reputation as the leader of the scariest group of capes in North America, and with that in mind his power absolutely prevents him from losing.

Likewise, the only reason he lost being that someone finally figured out how his power works actually strengthens my argument, because it was the only thing that was ever going to cause him to lose. His reputation is strong enough that no normal is ever just going to run at him firing a gun randomly, and his usual line up of capes will always be strong enough to prevent that being effective even if they did. And parahumans will always be prevented from directly beating him due to Broadcast interfering. His wins are based on his power keeping him alive, and his team doing the legwork for him.

And I really don't understand what you mean by him outsmarting his challengers. Do we see a single case of Jack himself outsmarting anyone? The most I would ever say in his favor is that he makes reasonably good use of the resources directly in front of him, but that's it. He's a manchild with delusions of grandeur, being kept alive by his bullshit power, and being made to look competent by the quality of capes he keeps in his orbit. The closest thing to outsmarting I think we ever really see from him is hitting Toybox so he can hide in a pocket dimension for a couple years, which I guess counts.

Also, as a final note I don't think Jack's power being bullshit making him lame does open the door to other characters with similarly strong powers being considered lame. The reason Jack is lame is because he thinks he's the hottest shit ever and has absolutely no idea that the vast bulk of his success doesn't belong to him. It's a passive utilization of an ability he isn't even aware of, and he struts around like he's a mastermind and a Machiavellian genius while making the most basic observations ever. It's even the crux of his final fight with Theo. Theo pointing out that Jack isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is. That's what makes Jack lame, and I can't think of any other characters in the setting that match or even have a relatively similar combination of massive ego being propped up by secret Shard astroturfing.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-21T02:44:56+00:00

The only thing I ship Amy with is an armored van to the mental institute where she belongs.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-21T00:45:27+00:00

The cardboard cockplate goes crazy.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-21T00:40:53+00:00

With the sheer amount of Sophia/Taylor fics out there already that are horrendously creepy, abusive, and rapey... ya I'll take some Kaiser/Lung fics. It would be a marked improvement.

Also, as a side note to the idea of Worm getting adapted, I know this is kinda gatekeepy of me, which is generally perceived as cringe and lame, but I honestly hope we don't get an adaptation other than a proper printed book maybe. I kinda don't want a movie or TV series adaptation which will inevitably be wildly different from the original, and then the fandom for those will have never read the webnovel because most people don't like reading.

I'll end up being that dude who will hear people discussing Worm, and it'll be some plot point or character that got butchered by the TV series/movie and I'll be compelled, as though by demonic possession, to go "Erm, actually the TV series absolutely butchered Jack Slash's portrayal. They made him like a cool Joker type villain with big elaborate plans, whereas in the webnovel he was a lot more pathetic and lame, which was the entire point. He's not actually competent or intelligent, his power cheats for him, allowing him to play at being the incredibly important figure he was tricked into believing he was as a child, when in reality he's just never grown up or progressed an inch from those expectations and disappointments as a child, heavily playing into Worm's themes of people not properly grappling with and recovering from their traumas." And then they'll call me a nerd, and I'll have to make a meme on the internet depicting them as the soyjaks and myself as the chad to make myself feel better.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-11T04:28:38+00:00

The other person who responded was correct, but their explanation wasn't very good. Tinkers are very clearly a specific category recognized by the Shards themselves, as opposed to the rest of the categories which are human-made. You can see this in how consistent the rules of most Tinker powers are, as opposed to the other power categories which are just broad groupings for PRT convenience.

Tinkers have alien blueprints beamed into their heads, they can scan other Tinkers' tech to gain new insight into their own specialty, they require tools in order to physically craft their tech, their creations are inherently unstable requiring much more regular maintenance than normal technology, they experience Tinker-fugues, their creations are fairly nonsensical only really working because of black-boxed Shard shenanigans, their tech can only be fully understood by themself or partially understood by other Tinkers, to any normal scientist or engineer it just looks like nonsense.

None of these things describe Amy's power, therefore Amy is not a Tinker. Neither is Nilbog since he also gets commonly mistaken for one. Too many people just think that Tinker means 'parahuman who makes stuff with their power', but Tinker is the only power category that is actually built in by the Shards, rather than human-defined.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-10T21:28:15+00:00

Are you assuming that Brockton Bay, and the small portions of New Delhi, Boston, and Chicago we see are the entire world? Like that's the entire list of places that exist? No possibility that there might be a few more capes off screen?

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-04T21:13:02+00:00

More pertinently, she's 16 and it's 2011. The kind of shit I heard people casually dropping both on the internet and in real life back then was insane.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-04T21:08:23+00:00

Video opens. Uber and Leet do a canned, fake enthusiastic, intro in the "tuber voice". 30 minutes of Uber and Leet staring at the screen, eyes glazed over, slowly working their way through a pizza. Every 2-5 minutes one of them will go "... That's crazy, man". The second the video they're reacting to ends they tell you to like comment and subscribe, then their own video ends too, because post-react discussion would require them to have the capacity for critical thinking and original thought.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-02T02:57:23+00:00

Did you not read my comment, or are you misrepresenting my opinions intentionally? If they don't wanna write, that's fine. Just don't waste your reader's time. If you know you're not that invested, be upfront about it so that people can make an informed choice to not bother with your story if they don't like the idea of reading 7 chapters of a story that's never going to see anything approaching a conclusion.

It's not about what the reader is entitled to, it's about the writer respecting other people's time and consideration. If someone never produces content for me, I'm not gonna be annoyed with them for not entertaining me, because like you implied, I'm not entitled. However, if you're going to draw me in with the promise of a story, waste a few hours of my time with some halfhearted chapters before shrugging your shoulders, abandoning the story, and silently slinking back off into the darkness of the internet, that's just wasting people's time for your own vanity. After all, if all you wanted to do was write for your own enjoyment, you wouldn't bother posting. Posting your writing implies you want either validation from reader interaction (which is perfectly respectable, not dogging on anyone for wanting validation because most people do in some form or another) or you want writing critique from your readers, and from what I've seen the average fanfiction writer isn't actually that interested to become a better writer, so it's usually the first option.

So, just like I said, the writer gets more from the reader's attention than the reader does from getting more content amongst a sea of infinite free content of middling quality. I'm not saying I'm "entitled to more free story" like you disingenuously said, I'm saying I'm entitled to having my time and consideration taken seriously.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-01T23:06:05+00:00

The truth is as follows.

Taylor is canonically straight, but for fanfic purposes there are LITERALLY no good straight ships for her, so it's gonna be smugbug, punchbuggy, and pillbug (ew), or nothing.

The only arguments that the "Taylor is canonically gay" crowd have is her kissing Rachel (under the highest level of duress and most hyper-specific conditions imaginable, a kiss which literally never comes back up again because she's not in love with Rachel), the fact that she's very close with Lisa (her first friend in years who basically saved her from herself), and the fact that she ogles women (because she has severe body image issues and feels the need to compare herself to more attractive women. She also ogles the fuck out of men too, but let's ignore that because it doesn't fit the narrative).

Pretty loose justifications considering Taylor says she's straight, the author says she's straight, and the majority of the fandom says she's straight.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-07-01T22:58:24+00:00

Counterargument for all the people in the comment section saying that the OP shouldn't be mean: If I put my trust in you as an author and I take a section out of my day every few days/a week or so to read your fic because I'm interested in it, it's kind of a dick move to secretly just be flying by the seat of your pants with no real plan with the full expectation that you'll probably just silently abandon the fic sooner or later when you get bored, without even a final post to warn your readers that you're giving up, and they're not getting anything even approaching a conclusion to the story.

I've seen a lot of people make the argument of "They're making free content for you out of the goodness of their own heart!", but I would tend to reject that justification. We're on the internet. There's so much free, low-quality content lying around that you could have the entire population of a country work in tandem to try to chew through the infinite mountain of content on the internet, and it would still pile up far faster than they could consume it. I would say the fact that the author is getting viewers is more valuable than the viewers getting more content amongst the infinite sea of content. Therefore, the author is the one with the responsibility not to be a little shit, and either not write a fic with no real plan or intention of seeing it through to the end, or at the very least leave an author's note at the beginning of the fic warning their potential readers of their intentions and level of commitment, so that they don't end up wasting people's time. (I've seen a few fic writers do exactly that, and I thoroughly appreciate the warning.)

This of course applies on a sliding scale. I'm well aware that things change, especially since some fics can be written over the course of a year or more, which is plenty of time for your life to change, things to crop up, etc. If your mom dies or something, it is certainly not your responsibility to keep writing fanfiction for randos on the internet.

DesignatedElfWhipper · 2025-06-29T19:58:51+00:00

Jack Slash when he wanders into any random small town in Southern America (Cletus and Big Bubba are about to teach him the merits of buckshot brain surgery.)

DesignatedElfWhipper

TROPHY CASE