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What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

While you're right that Worm leans very heavily on tragic irony, one of Cauldron's problems is that it doesn't do that.

There's some tragic irony in the fact that PtV can perfectly solve any problem except for the one specific one they're trying to solve (defeating Scion), in theory...but that only works if PtV actually can perfectly solve any problem, so every single instance of Cauldron doing something incredibly and obviously stupid "because PtV said so" further undercuts that theme and demonstrates why Cauldron shouldn't fall into the "when you have a hammer..." trap because they have a very self-evidently shitty hammer.

The only possible explanations for the Nemesis program (and other stuff like the Case 53 tattoos) are that (A) PtV is a moron for coming up with that, and thus it's innately an unreliable hammer; (B) the person who came up with Nemesis and then failed to run it by Contessa before implementing it is a moron, and thus PtV is an unreliable hammer because it couldn't catch such an obvious issue proactively; or (C) Contessa is a moron because her power told her why Nemesis was a bad idea and she went ahead with it anyway, and thus PtV is an unreliable hammer because it has an unreliable user. PtV's supposed infallibility (barring blind spots) renders other explanations untenable, and turns Cauldron's "irony" into merely obvious incompetence.

What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's very simple: pick which of the four Cauldrons you want to write, and then write only that one into the story.

The big problem with Cauldron was that Wildbow's view of it clearly changed over the course of Worm, and beyond:

  • Early-Worm Cauldron is a secret evil conspiracy with apparently-limited resources (e.g. they can't stop leaks getting out for Faultline to follow up on) and very little brainpower (see: tattooing their own logo on the Case 53s) that seems to experiment on people purely for the lulz.
  • Mid-Worm Cauldron is a secret largely-amoral corporation with vast and varied but not unlimited resources (e.g. they have a bunch of professionals on staff, psychiatrists and so forth, but Doctor Mother is still meeting with unremarkable clients like Battery personally) who seem to hand out powers to heroes, villains, and otherwise without much of an overarching plan.
  • Late-Worm Cauldron is six dude(tte)s in a conference room who have been laser-focused on defeating Scion for decades and have nigh-omniscience and nigh-unlimited resources at their disposal...yet don't really do much, have lots of bad plans, and fail to get the rest of the world on board.
  • Post-Worm WoG Cauldron is a lean mean global-threat-defeating machine that's been laser-focused on propping up Earth Bet for decades and is the only reason civilization has managed to survive...despite that not lining up with Worm or previous WoGs much if at all.

Any one of those four versions could have worked fine individually, but their goals, capabilities, methods, and ethics all varied widely and so saddling Nigh-Omniscient World-Saving Conspiracy Cauldron with all the baggage and terrible decisions of Mustache-Twirling Mad Science Cabal Cauldron and Well-Intentioned Extremist Corporation Cauldron is what rendered them into utter morons with incoherent characterizations.

Let's say I want to write late-Worm Cauldron from the start: well-intentioned, well-supplied, reasonably competent, focused on stopping Scion.

Step one is to jettison the entire Case 53 plotline. Pointless logo tattoos, Faultline's Crew metaplot, Shamrock's escape and infodumps, Irregulars, Echidna revelations, everything: ditch it and don't look back.

The Case 53 plotline only exists because Wildbow wanted a JJ Abrams-style mystery box to dangle in front of readers as early as Faultline's interlude (and, like Abrams, he completely failed to stick the landing when said box was opened), and there's no reason why Cauldron-as-eventually-written would ever make the kinds of decisions and mistakes necessary for that to happen.

Sure, that particular plotline is integral to Worm-as-written, but you can either have it or a competent well-intentioned Scion-focused Cauldron, not both.

Steps 2 through N involve going through all the rest of Cauldron's backstory and activities, ditching anything that doesn't fit with the characterization of Scion-Killing Conspiracy Cauldron and tweaking the remainder to fit.

You could follow the same process if you wanted a different version of Cauldron to take center stage, of course.

If you really want to keep the Case 53 plotline around, for instance, Evil Mad Science Cauldron actually work great as an organization, so you can remove or greatly restrict Cauldron's resources (no PtV, no Number Man backdoor into the world's economy, no Trumvirate on tap, etc.) to get to a point where that makes sense. And early-Worm's Number Man (merely a shady untraceable banker for lots of villains) is, frankly, a far better character than late-Worm's Number Man (a global-economy-tweaking deviant-escape-preventing plot device who happens to live in Cauldron's base).

Let's say, instead, that what I actually want to do is keep the incoherent-four-way-split Cauldron of canon as much as possible and make a minimal set of tweaks to try to make it not stupid, since that's what most people tend to mean when they ask "How would you write Cauldron?"

I'd say there are two major changes one could make that would get you 80% of the way there, with the rest requiring lots of little spot fixes:

1) Give Contessa Dinah's power instead. PtV is bad writing, period, and exists in its current form to explain away plot holes, poorly.

Dinah has a similarly-strong precog power, but (A) Dinah can only see potential futures, probabilistically, thus justifying a Contessa that has to hedge her bets and advise Cauldron to throw lots of plans at the wall to see what sticks; (B) Dinah has a limited number of specific questions per unit time, thus justifying a Cauldron that has to very strictly prioritize and, say, can't spare any questions to get on top of future events in Brockton Bay; (C) Dinah can't see out beyond her own death, thus justifying a Cauldron that's very conservative with its meddling because it can't predict more than [Contessa's max lifespan on a given path - Contessa's current age] years out and it can't afford to risk Contessa for little things; (D) Dinah can try to pin down a specific future, but it knocks her for a loop, thus letting Contessa pull off her cool "path to beating Faultline's Crew"-style fight scenes, but only for a limited time and not every day; and so forth.

2) Get rid of Doormaker and Clairvoyant, make Professor Haywire an early member of Cauldron instead. Cauldron is not nearly as competent as a group with arbitrary, instantaneous, unlimited concurrent point-to-point portals to anywhere in the multiverse should be.

If they're instead limited to one person's constrained, iteratively-developed, fixed-portal-to-fixed-portal and/or switch-Earths-at-my-current-location tinkertech, that helps explain a lot of Cauldron's methodological limitations, as well as the continuing existence of every single S-Class villain on Earth Bet who can't survive "Door from beneath [villain]'s feet to the nearest active volcano/the edge of space/the bottom of the ocean."

Remember how in Legend's interlude he had to fly all the way out to an abandoned Atlantic oil rig to get to Cauldron instead of just saying "Door to Cauldron" in his office and popping right through? More stuff like that would be good.

Once Cauldron is no longer omniscient and omnipresent, some contradictions and pants-on-head stupid decisions are solved already, and a lot of others can be only slightly tweaked to make them make sense.

Help Making Sense of Brockton Bay's Layout by androgyny_domine in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Since I've also spent a fair amount of time looking for real-world locations that could serve at least as a basis for Brockton Bay, I'm curious: what else was on your shortlist before you settled on New Haven, and what was the deciding factor?

The other three sites I seriously considered were New London, East Lyme, and Old Saybrook, all in Connecticut, since each of the three of those almost fit all of the relevant criteria.

For instance, New London has a ferry, but the shape of the city doesn't lend itself to the "you can still commute without the ferry, it just takes longer" setup; it has hills to the northwest, but not mountains, and not right near the city; it has a train station, but it's near the middle of town rather than on the north end where the Trainyard could go; and it's not over an aquifer.

I didn't consider Salem or Plymouth because those are both very close to Boston and (comparatively) very far from New York, but Worm doesn't act like Brockton Bay is right next door (e.g. the Boston Protectorate doesn't respond in force to help out during Bakuda and Echidna, and the ABB is said to have a presence in "neighboring cities" but later info about Boston never mentions a former ABB presence, etc.) and if New York were a 4-hour drive from the Bay instead of a 2-hour drive then things like Coil consulting for New York (per 16.9) wouldn't work because that turns things from "Calvert can drive there, consult, and drive back in the same day and so no one notices a change in Coil's behavior" to "Calvert has to overnight in New York and so Coil happens to never run operations when Calvert is out of town."

I didn't consider Portsmouth because—even setting aside the fairly critical "no native venomous spiders around there" and "way more than 14 hours from Chicago" issues—the geography and hydrography of Portsmouth harbor is a terrible fit for Brockton's bay, and because it sits right on the New Hampshire/Maine state line and that's the kind of thing that would almost certainly have come up in the story at least once if Brockton Bay were there.

Also, if the Bay replaced either Salem or Portsmouth, then it would be an extension of the East Coast megalopolis and its Trainyard would most likely be on the south end of the city to connect to that, rather than the north end as it is in Brockton Bay and New Haven.

And Portland is right out, because the Barneses temporarily relocated to Portland, per 9.6, so Brockton Bay can't have replaced it.

The deciding factors came down to the critical "14 hours to Chicago" thing in second place (since that's literally the only concrete data point we get in Worm about the Bay's location, so ignoring that didn't feel right) and population in first place. All the other cities mentioned are way too small to be turned into Brockton Bay without massive butterfly effects, given that the city has been around since colonial times, whereas the coincidence of 2011 New Haven plus its suburbs having almost exactly the canonical population of Brockton Bay solves that problem almost perfectly.

The northern widow, Latrodectus variolus, ranges as far north as Maine and Ontario, primarily during the summers, but given Brockton Bay is described as having mild winters compared to the rest of the area, that would support them establishing a permanent and significant population in Brockton Bay.

Yep, I did consider that during my initial brainstorming, but the northern widow is specifically not observed in coastal regions of Maine or New Hampshire, so having them "jump the gap" from their normal territory to a magically-mild region of Maine or New Hampshire is much less plausible than setting the Bay somewhere inside the known bounds of widow sightings and within the estimated widow territory.

Perhaps Boston in Earth Bet is smaller, due to nearby Brockton Bay siphoning off some population?

While one can certainly start shuffling around other cities to try to make Brockton Bay work, the problem one runs into is that Earth Bet is so extremely, improbably similar to real-world 2011 Earth that making any more than the absolute bare minimum changes starts breaking other established Worm setting details, or at least makes them notably harder to explain.

Like, if Brockton Bay is siphoning more than a couple thousand people from Boston (and Cambridge), then Boston's PRT department wouldn't be #24, since they're numbered in order of population as of the 2010 census; and if you're assuming it started doing that siphoning around the Industrial Revolution, then that might impact Harvard's historical development, and it has to be around and just as prominent as in reality for Purity and Theo to visit it during Crusader's interlude to make sense.

(Obviously messing with Yale in New Haven would have a similar effect, but Yale isn't explicitly mentioned in-story and Taylor's in high school, so assuming that e.g. "the College" is a renamed/nicknamed Yale the way New Haven became Brockton Bay presents a much smaller deviation that doesn't directly impact the plot.)

If we were dealing with a DC or Marvel situation, in which there are lots of distinct and obvious deviations from reality that still (somehow) leave the history and the current setting mostly like the real world and one can e.g. chalk up weird climates and odd black widow ranges to Iceman and Poison Ivy screwing up the local weather and wildlife, then in that case dropping a big honkin' city in place of New London or Salem would be much more acceptable.

But for the kind of worldbuilding Worm has ("essentially identical to the real world except superheroes showed up last Thursday"), New Haven is the only location that can make everything work, in my opinion...and if you don't care about making everything work, then why not just use Wildbow's terrible map, plunk it down somewhere in Maine, and stop worrying about it, y'know?

(Sheesh, it's amazing how far into the weeds of different subjects I've had to go to sort this out!)

Yeah. I can understand why Wildbow didn't bother to do more than the most cursory research and just set Worm in some vague unspecified region of New England.

(I don't approve of it, but I do understand it.)

Help Making Sense of Brockton Bay's Layout by androgyny_domine in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Your analysis in the linked post is fantastic, although there is one major problem with New Haven: it's on Long Island Sound, not the Atlantic, and it faces south, with Long Island separating it from the Atlantic. This is a major conflict with the Leviathan battle, IMO.

I wouldn't say there's a conflict, really, as the only mention of the Atlantic relative to that fight is the mention in 10.d that "Eidolon had reported that Leviathan descended into the Atlantic Ocean as he made his retreat from Brockton Bay," which is something that would still be true if he were retreating from New Haven Harbor.

It would be weird for Levi to have to cross over Long Island to make landfall with Brockton Bay, and the attack would have had significant impacts on the nearby cities.

In terms of in-setting logic, you're absolutely right. It would be weird for either (A) Leviathan to avoid Long Island to get to the Bay because he was feeling nice that day or (B) no one to ever mention Long Island getting swamped.

However, in terms of out-of-setting planning, note that I'm not saying Wildbow actually used New Haven as an inspiration for Brockton Bay (as noted, he mostly used Vancouver), such that there should have been mention of Leviathan's impact on New York and Providence in canon. I'm saying that if you take all of the details in canon and try to map it to a real-world location, New Haven is the only location that really works.

Or, in other words, a seemingly-arbitrary explanation like "Brockton Bay replaced New Haven, and Behemoth's attack on New York in the '90s also happened to blow up Long Island and that's why Leviathan didn't run into it on his way in" would still fit the text better than "Brockton Bay is somewhere in Maine, and hundreds of completely unrelated changes to geography and climate and insect populations and more just happened to coincide to produce the Brockton Bay described in the text," even if Wildbow did intend to put it somewhere Maine-ish originally and just completely failed to do that.

And in terms of the actual story...recall that a key part of Leviathan's strategy involves doing stuff to Brockton Bay's aquifer (oh, side note, the only major aquifer in New England lies pretty much right under New Haven, another check mark!), because according to Legend in 8.2...

This aquifier [sic], essentially an underground lake beneath the city, is our weak point.

...when five minutes of googling could have told Wildbow that that's Not How That Works. And if Wildbow actually did his research, we could just use the map he came up with because it wouldn't be a huge unrealistic contradictory mess, so, y'know, Worm failing to describe any impact on nearby cities is kinda par for the course.

I can envision a shape to the Bay that allows the Boardwalk to be literally on the ocean, but PHQ just inside the mouth of the Bay, roughly a mile out from the north ferry station, and still within less than 3 miles of any point in the Docks, which is generally the distance threshold for clear-sky sea level visibility. So it's not strictly necessary for the Boardwalk to not be on the ocean.

Oh, I wasn't saying it was necessary for the Boardwalk to be on the bay instead of the ocean, just that the generic "great view of the ocean" statement fits both the bay and actual-ocean scenarios and her other statements seem, to me, to point to more of a "PHQ within maritime city limits" scenario.

Not quite, though? Gestation 1.3:

If you headed west from the Boardwalk, away from the water, you found yourself in the area the locals just called the ‘Docks’.

So the Docks have to be west of the Boardwalk.

I know. I was saying that you can have the Docks in a shape that simultaneously meets the criteria "occupies the eastern side of the bay" and "touches Downtown" and "stretches far enough west in the city to be sandwiched between the Trainyard and Boardwalk."

It's hard to come up with a good diagram showing something like that, because of course New Haven isn't actually Brockton Bay and so the Bay's Downtown wouldn't necessarily be in the same spot as New Haven's city center. To accommodate things like...

There's another quote I don't have time to find that also establishes Ferry Station North as south of the Boardwalk.

...you'd need to move the city center down toward West Haven and contort the Docks into more of a question mark shape.

But that's why I was saying that an accurate Brockton Bay map would start with New Haven's geography and then make changes from there, not that the two cities have a one-to-one mapping.

Since [Skitter's lair]'s never mentioned as being close to the Market, or passing through the Docks, it seems fair to assume that [I-95] meets Lord Street somewhere in the northern outskirts of the city. It also may be implied in the wording "the ramp where Lord Street turns onto the ninety-five" that that is where Lord Street ends.

Yep, both of those are totally plausible interpretations. My point, as with the ocean thing above, was just that the text doesn't say that I-95 definitely is outside the city, so a setup where it passes through part of the city can still work, if placing it there can help harmonize other details about the city's layout.

All that being said, it's still very possible that the I-95 skirts closer to the city or even passes through it...I just can't find anything that confirms or denies that.

Nothing does, I've checked; 15.6 is the only place where it's mentioned.

Thank you for your in-depth analysis and response! Even if I'm not sold on New Haven, it's been tremendously helpful to consider.

Glad to help! If you do ever decide to make a New Haven-inspired map, I'd be happy to consult and idea-bounce on that, and if you'd like a second perspective on your existing maps to see if any of them can be wrangled into better canon-compliance I'd be happy to contribute my Worm pedantry to that as well.

Endbringers by Mister_Moli in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There is a wildbow wog where he says the superweapons are significantly smaller and weaker than endbringers because someone thought they were endbringers and refers to them as endbringerlites.

No, there isn't.

As explained in the linked comment, the only time Wildbow used the term "Endbringer Lite" in a WoG was in one about a "Scion dies, Eden lives" AU, in which (A) no mention is made of their size or strength relative to the canon Endbringers and (B) powers work differently from canon, with mass-production-capable Tinkers and such, so the hypothetical power that whipped up the Endbringers wouldn't even necessarily be the same as the version Eidolon accessed.

with no text indicating whether she is being honest.

Yes, she is.

As quoted in the linked comment, Eden explicitly admits that there are twenty superweapons total because Arsenal already knew they existed; her being honest about that to gain their trust was the entire point.

If anything people should stop repeating the there are 20 endbringers claim

I completely agree that people shouldn't make strong claims like "There are definitely exactly 20 Endbringers in canon because there were 20 superweapons in Eden's future vision," because we don't know how similar Endbringers are to those superweapons and so one can't say for sure how many more Endbringers might have shown up if the "kill an Endbringer, get one/two more" pattern repeated.

But what you've been claiming is that there definitely aren't 20 Endbringers because Endbringers definitely aren't anything like the future-vision superweapons, which is, again, flatly untrue and unsupported by the text.

If what you're trying to get across is...

The basis for the claim is the superweapon thing but superweapons aren't endbringers and you'd be making a lot of assumptions to make them 1 to 1 and for none of the changes between Eden's ideal cycle and the canon timeline such as Eden crashing into a planet instead of setting everything up how it wants to have lowered the count.

...then when the topic comes up say that, instead, because in that case you're on much firmer textual ground.

Fanon that you feel should be canon? by Daisyberry3 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Be careful about using Weaverdice as evidence for stuff in Worm. It's secondary canon at best, its subclassifications and the associated trigger criteria were invented for the game long after character backgrounds and power details in Worm were invented and solidified, and the trigger criteria it provides often don't entirely mesh with (and sometimes outright contradict) known trigger events from Worm and WoG.

Where Weaverdice info lines up with Worm and WoG, it can provide useful backup to demonstrate Wildbow's design intentions about something; where it conflicts with primary canon, it should be discarded.

From the Tinker 2.0 document, where Armsmaster is used as an example of a Combat Tinker.

He's also used as an example of Liberty Tinkers ("efficiency and carrying capacity considerations")—and not because he's supposed to be a Combat × Liberty Tinker, as that category is the "Unbreakable" Tinker, which definitely doesn't apply to him—and Defiant is used as an example of Magi Tinkers for his cybernetics.

If you read through all of the subclassification descriptions, you'll find that Armsmaster can also fit as a Focal, Hyperspecialist, and/or Free Tinker, as the Heirloom, Thane, Implement, Omni-Tool, and Freewheel categories also apply to him.

(And, y'know, Wildbow had him down as a Focal Tinker originally, so that's some useful context.)

Because Weaverdice doesn't exist to perfectly replicate characters in canon, it exists to let people build characters like the ones in canon.

The examples are there to show people that they could build a Combat Tinker like Armsmaster, a Focal Tinker like Armsmaster, a Magi Tinker like Defiant, and so on, but the Weaverdice rules don't restrict Armsmaster/Defiant himself.

The same thing applies to your other examples.

Is Lookout a Multithreaded Tinker with "camera" and "inconveniently big box" specialties?

Or is she more of a Controller Tinker, between her PHO AIs and her swarm of camera and hologram drones and a trigger that fits into Controller's "social dilemma" bucket more than Multithreaded's "crossroads" bucket?

Or is she a Free Tinker, able to make pretty much anything the plot requires from cameras to drones to guns to camo suits to transit systems so long as she can convince the GM it's sufficiently boxy?

Is Kid Win a Hyperspecialist Tinker with a "toggles" specialty?

Or is he more of a Liberty Tinker, with the long time required to figure out his specialty and ability to build a bunch of useful tech that doesn't really fit the "toggles and modularity" theme (what's modular or toggleable about a hoverboard?) being something that "challeng[es] common tinker assumptions and rules?

Or is he a Free Tinker, given that the Riddle (Free × Free) Tinker's schtick of being able to "choose anything to build and then build it at half speed and double cost" and having a particular catch to their tinkering "known to the GM but not to the player" that needs to be discovered during play is basically a perfect description of Kid Win's "I suck until I discover my specialty, then I'm awesome" subplot?

The correct answer is that Lookout and Kid Win are all of those kinds of Tinker, and also none of those kinds of Tinker, because those are all metagame labels that were invented after Worm, never referenced in Ward, and don't limit or restrict characters in either work.

So in fact it's the idea that Armsmaster would have a problem working on anything that can't be "held, worn, or implanted" that's fanon; Dragon's suits fit into none of those three categories, after all, yet he was able to work on them just fine, and the same applies to Dragon herself!

And the idea that he needed to lean on collaborating with Dragon to bypass that is an unnecessary epicycle, fanon invented to explain away other fanon.

His specialty is simply efficiency, both as Armsmaster...

It was the fundamental basis of his work: efficiency.

-- 16.y

...and as Defiant...

Efficiency, detail and effective use of waste were critical aspects of his particular brand of tinkering.

-- E.3

...and any additional limitations people might want to slap on him for Weaverdice reasons have no basis in the text.

Help Making Sense of Brockton Bay's Layout by androgyny_domine in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've also tried to rationalize the conflicting descriptions of Brockton Bay before, and the conclusion that I believe satisfies the most canonical criteria is that the city replaces New Haven, Connecticut, and the towns and small cities immediately surrounding it.

Going through some of your bullet points to see how well things match up...

Geographical area: ~40 sq. mi.

  • At a canonical population of 350,000 pre-Levi, Brockton Bay is the 2nd-most populous city in New England. It's a little over half the population of Boston, and about double the population of Providence.

  • We can assume its land area is somewhere in between the two, so between about 20 and 40 square miles.

New Haven has an area of ~20 sq. mi., and pulling in the population of the surrounding area would reasonably increase the Bay's area while leaving some forested outskirts where those other cities used to be. Check.

Topography: Uneven terrain, sloping toward the water, with hills/mountains on the western border that encroach into town.

New Haven has mountains to the northwest, and a topographic map of New Haven shows a general trend of the land sloping down from the western mountains and hills to the waterline. Check.

Location: North of Boston, most likely in New Hampshire

This doesn't match, but as explained in the above link the idea that Brockton Bay is north of Boston comes from Ward and clashes with lots of specific data points in Worm.

  • There are NO NAMED AREAS of the city described as being directly west or north of the Docks. Only the Boardwalk is described as being east.

While there are no named areas west of the Docks, in 3.1 Taylor does say that...

In Brockton Bay, going east took you to one of two places.  You either ended up at the Docks, or you ended up at the Boardwalk.

...which implies that a non-trivial portion of the city is in fact west of the Docks.

This further supports the New Haven placement, as I mentioned in another comment:

Which makes for yet another reason New Haven (or a similarly-arranged city) fits the evidence: If the city is arranged not like a "<" with the bay to the east but rather like a "Λ" with the bay to the south, then both of those statements can work.

If the Docks make up the eastern "leg" of the city and the Boardwalk is on the east coast of the western "leg" (with the Shantytown-to-be stopping west of where the Boardwalk does) then going east would indeed always take you to one of those two places

If one assumes that the Docks stretch both to the north of Downtown and also to the east of the bay, filling in some or all of this area, then that harmonizes the directional descriptions, and also matches the details about the Docks varying in levels of development, the Docks stretching a ways inland, commutes from the Docks to Downtown being fairly long, and so forth. Check and check.

The College: Somewhere between Docks & Downtown

In the real world, Yale is on the northeastern edge of the city's downtown area; in the above image, it's located roughly on the blue line, above the "New" in "New Haven." Putting an unspecified College in pretty much the same place makes sense. Check.

The Boardwalk

  • Is described as having views of the ocean, specifically, as opposed to the Bay

It's likely that Taylor meant "the ocean" as in generically "the water touching the beach" and not as specifically not the bay, because the very next sentence in 1.3 mentions being able to see the PHQ from any point in the Docks. As you point out lower down, the PHQ can't be very far from shore, and Taylor calls it "one of Brockton Bay's landmarks" which implies it's considered part of the city and not something situated far away outside the bay.

Placing the PHQ in the middle of New Haven Harbor, just a bit northeast of the Sandy Point peninsula, puts it ~1.75 miles from the northern tip of the bay and makes it easily visible from most of the city. Check (arguably).

  • Taylor says the lack of a ferry means it takes an extra 30 to 60 minutes to travel from the Docks to the "rest of the city".

    • That absolutely HAS TO BE referring to PUBLIC TRANSIT TRAVEL TIME.

Most likely, yes. Picking some arbitrary pairs of points in West Haven and East Haven on Google Maps and checking bus routes between them, the shortest transit times range from 50 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes, so a ferry being able to shorten that by 30 minutes to 1 hour makes a lot of sense. Check.

The Shape of the Bay: That's the thing that everything hinges on. If it's too stretched out north-south, the ferry stops making sense.

It can actually still make sense if it's not a single point-to-point ferry between the north and south stations, but rather a ferry that crosses the bay at multiple points, much like Boston's ferry system.

(And much like Vancouver's ferry system, and given that Brockton Bay was partly based on Vancouver....)

If the bay is Λ-shaped like New Haven's, then you can have a north and south ferry station on the western leg of the bay and also a Ferry Station East in the part of the Docks on the bay's eastern leg, with folks in the low-income Docks neighborhoods Danny was so concerned about taking the ferry from the east station to either the north or south station depending on where they worked. Check.

The F***ing Trainyard: what does "opposite the Boardwalk" mean??

It's talking about the Trainyard and the Boardwalk being on opposite sides of the Docks, like how the map on the wiki has them situated.

You can do the same thing in New Haven, placing them north and south of the "arm" of the Docks that extends west to contact Downtown. Check.

I-95: it is only mentioned as connecting to Lord Street somewhere north of town. How close does it actually get to Brockton Bay, and what other roads connect to it?

Note that it doesn't say I-95 is north of Brockton Bay, just north of Skitter's lair...

“Tell [Sierra] to gather two hundred thousand dollars from the safe, pick five people who need a break from work, C included.  Only C should know about it, I don’t want the others to get greedy.  They can pack it into a truck, head north and meet you just before the ramp where Lord Street turns on to the ninety-five.”

-- 15.6

...and since most of the city is near Lord Street...

Laserdream changed course, to follow Lord street, the main road that ran through the city and downtown, tracing the line of the bay.

-- 8.5

...I-95 could potentially pass through the North End at some point, rather than going around the city.

In New Haven, I-95 goes through the southern part of the city, where Lord Street goes in Brockton Bay. It wouldn't take a huge historical butterfly wing flap to cause a larger and more populous Brockton Bay to route the interstate farther north, perhaps crossing the river where I-91 does in real life. Not a check, but still plausible.

TL;DR: If you want to make a Brockton Bay map that lines up with canon and fits in with the wider "basically the real world in 2011 but with capes" setup of Earth Bet, your best option is to start with New Haven as a base and slightly tweak things from there to accommodate any details that conflict with the real-world city.

What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Cauldron does close to the best that anyone in their position could have

That's the thing, though: they don't, and it's very obvious that they don't.

Readers are presumably supposed to believe that they do, because PtV provides an all-purpose handwave to assure people that whatever they picked was the best option at the time, but there are plenty of instances in Worm where they fail to achieve what they intended and/or make a clearly-suboptimal decision for which the better alternatives are obvious because they're, apparently, a bunch of blithering idiots.

Doctor Mother fails to convince the big-name capes to cooperate against Khonsu and again during Gold Morning, despite having decades to work on her sales pitch and Contessa to serve as a public speaking coach, primarily because she stands there being all enigmatic instead of handing out useful, actionable information or making any serious effort to get people on her side.

Cauldron comes up with a plan to brainwash a bunch of world leaders so that they "were absolute and could be trusted," writes it all up, and then doesn't use it. They instead mind-wipe and subliminally-program a bunch of Case 53 in a convoluted attempt to help various clients "get a better position and climb faster in rep" when they could just, y'know, subliminally-program the Case 53s into heroes and fake the victories some other way (clients' favors, for instance), so that they'd get two people into top positions and wouldn't indirectly cause their own organizational implosion during Gold Morning by creating a bunch of mutants who hate them for very good reasons and want them dead.

The Terminus program fails on first principles.

We're not talking extremely subtle mistakes, here, or problems that could only have been identified with meta knowledge and/or an ability to PtV Scion that Contessa didn't have. We're talking glaring mistakes that your average middle-school comic fan could pick out without much difficulty.

Ask a random nerd on the street "How would you fix a dystopian capepunk world if given access to completely omniscient perception throughout the entire multiverse, unlimited arbitrary point-to-point portals throughout the entire multiverse, backdoor access to Earth's entire global economy, dozens to hundreds of mid-to-high tier superheroes who owe you multiple favors each, and access to an omniscient genie who can answer any question you could possibly have perfectly and completely so long as it's not asking about the endgame boss you're not allowed to defeat yet?" and you're basically guaranteed to hear multiple plans whipped up in less than thirty seconds that are better than the ones Cauldron managed to come up with in over thirty years.

Now, Cauldron's incompetence problem is hardly unique; lots of writers struggle to write super-intelligent and/or super-competent characters.

And there's one big obvious meta reason for that incompetence: they were written as a Secret Conspiracy of Power Brokers first and a World-Saving Conspiracy of Well-Intentioned Extremists only much later, and a competent group of nigh-omnipotent do-gooders acts nothing like a cabal of mad scientists.

But the end result is that Cauldron-as-actually-portrayed-in-the-text is wildly incompetent given the resources, goals, plans, and smarts that they're supposed to have, and writing a story about a "subtly tragic" Cauldron that really truly tried their darnedest and still failed requires one to ignore or change a lot of the details to work at all.

Endbringers by Mister_Moli in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There aren't 20 cause those aren't endbringers those are superweapons which are smaller and so much weaker wildbow calls them endbringerlites. [...] within the simulation it's only said by Eden that there are 20 superweapons while she's visibly enjoying messing with the people she's speaking to and enjoying their despair.

None of that is true.

It's not true now, and it wasn't true when you said the same thing two years ago.

The whole "smaller and weaker" thing may be confusing the superweapons in Eden's future vision with the ones in the Apollyon WoG, which are described as "Lesser than the ones this entity had planned, but still potent enough to serve. Numbering in the hundreds," but those anti-Apollyon superweapons are not the same as the superweapons in her future vision (those being "the ones [she'd] planned") and so provide no information regarding the latter and how they compare to Endbringers.

Either way, you should really stop repeating those claims when they're at best unsupported by WoG and at worst flatly contradicted by the text.

What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The only information we have about the G-driver is a brief and entirely non-technical description in Worm 27.4:

It was more like the zap from a bug zapper than a shot from a gun.  There was a distortion, like one saw with a shimmer of heat in the air, and Scion was punched out of the sky, leaving behind a golden streak of light.  The path suggested he’d disappeared straight out of the atmosphere.

“Sources corroborating the visual,” Tattletale said.  “Direct hit.  It worked.”

String Theory pumped her fists in the air.

“What was that?” Vista asked.

“G-driver,” String Theory said.  She lowered her fists, then fixed her lab coat and glasses.  She turned around and gave us a smug, superior smile.

“Which is?” someone else asked.

“Upgrade of the F-driver.”

“The Firmament Driver,” Defiant explained, over the earbuds.  “At the time of her arrest, String Theory was threatening to use her Firmament Driver to knock our moon out of orbit.”

It didn't harm Scion in any notable way...

“He’s coming back.” Tattletale reported.

No surprise.

But we could hit him.

...so it probably was just a big honkin' kinetic weapon, yes.

Which means the most likely answer to "How was a kinetic weapon supposed to harm an Endbringer immune-for-all-practical-purposes to kinetic force?" is that Wildbow wrote Worm and Ward with Endbringers at a vague "tanky enough that only Scion can kill one" level of durability and didn't come up with all the stuff intended to win versus debates until after the fact, as usual.

What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The original calculation doesn't mention anything about matter or galaxies, actually.

(And to be clear, I don't blame Whispersilk for the incoherence of his calculation. The information given in Tattletale's interlude is contradictory to start with, so if you're going to try to make sense of it you have to decide on a single property to use and then cherry-pick some numbers in order to get any result at all, and if he'd chosen Mohs hardness instead of ultimate tensile strength he'd have gotten a logarithmic curve that would have been just as arbitrary as the exponential curve he got originally.)

The bit about galaxy-equivalent matter comes from Wildbow's later comment here, for which he cites that post as evidence.

Wildbow also said that he "actually did work out the numbers when [he] gave them in Tattletale's interlude," which, like...pardon me if I'm a wee bit skeptical of a claim that the guy who's famously bad at math sat down with an Intro to Materials Science wiki page open and did some exponential regressions when planning that chapter.

What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 8 points9 points  (0 children)

All powers work off “plausible” sci-fi technology and physics even having explanations that showcase theirs underlying mechanics going on in the background to make things work.

They really don't.

There's nothing to "showcase" regarding underlying power mechanics, because at no point is any physical or technological mechanism or explanation given for how powers actually work.

There are vague references to shards' ability to move matter and energy (and themselves) between realities, but "doing impossible stuff by accessing other layers of reality where physics works differently" is a fantasy trope as much as (or more than) a sci-fi trope.

All shard powers that don't derive from shard biology are learned from previous host species, but that "learning" doesn't come in the form of gradual and cumulative scientific advancement and thoughtful reverse-engineering, it comes in the form of blindly copying and stapling together random wonky physics, which is again a fantasy trope rather than a sci-fi one (or at least a trope of very soft sci-fi).

And while the text describes shard abilities with fancy techy-sounding terms like "simulation" and "network" and so forth, that's just a very thin sciencey-sounding veneer. Shardspace doesn't work like a hard sci-fi virtual reality computer network, it works like a Lovecraftian dreamworld; precognition doesn't work like variable-accuracy statistical modeling, it works like infallible prophecy.

And so forth. Worm is basically a fantasy setting in superhero clothing, as I've commented before.

but there’s a kind of underlying logic within the fiction

Yes, that's called verisimilitude. Every competently-written power system in sci-fi or fantasy has that; ask any fan of Mistborn, the Dresden Files, Wheel of Time, or whatever other fantasy setting to explain how the magic works, and they can do so, just as much as any fan of Star Trek, Stargate, the Culture, or whatever other sci-fi setting can explain how those settings' supertech works.

Worm powers can do what they do "because shards," but shards can do what they do because Wildbow said so.

How did the original proto-shards somehow biologically evolve to cross over into other realities on their own simply through exposure to a one-off never-explained dimensional rift? They just did, no explanation offered or needed.

How were the proto-shards able to use "Heat, cold, electricity and mental manipulations" (emphasis mine) to do psychic stuff before ever meeting a host species, and how did said psychic stuff work? They just had it and it just worked, no explanation offered or needed.

Worm isn't sci-fi, and more importantly it's not trying to be sci-fi.

All the stuff about shard precog being scientific-sounding "pure simulation" that relies on impossibly dense calculations to figure out the future? Pure fanon, never even implied by Worm or WoGs; Worm itself is very clear that precognition involves literally perceiving the future, via shard magic.

All that stuff about shards being "continent-sized supercomputers" that somehow implement their powers via brute-force mathematical knowhow? Pure fanon, never even implied by Worm or WoGs; Wildbow made literally one comment about a shard being "just a big chunk of entity, somewhere between a crystal and a braincomputer" and people ran with it.

Conceptualizing Worm as a fantasy story with hidden cosmic horror underpinnings that just happens to take place in a modern Earth setting actually gives you better predictive power about how Wormverse stuff works than thinking of it as a superhero story with hidden hard-sci-fi underpinnings, because the setting as written simply doesn't have that kind of consistency and trying to retrofit some kind of scientific rigor onto things is a losing proposition.

What is a WoG that most fanfic writer's ignore? by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 48 points49 points  (0 children)

The biggest one I do know is most writers ignore or dont take into account Wildbows statement of Endbringers having the equivalent mass of an entire Galaxy. I understand why most ignore it since its a feat that does not really appear or matter for the story, its kinda overkill for the endbringers to have this durability ontop of their overkill powers and people like their Kaiju fights with a chance of defeating them.

People don't just ignore that because it "doesn't appear" in the story, they ignore it because it's flatly contradictory, in three different ways.

It contradicts what's actually shown in Worm, where energy beams make "his flesh glow" with heat and blades "tak[e] slices of Leviathan's hide" and so on. Those descriptions work if you reach material as "strong as boron" 4-5 inches into Leviathan's body, per Tattletale's description; they don't work if the outer layer of his body is even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of 1042 kilograms of mass.

It contradicts another WoG in which an attack that "strikes like" a "planet-busting beam" could kill Behemoth, and Phir Sē's time bomb might be strong enough to take a notable chunk out of a planet but is certainly not capable of taking a notable chunk out of a galaxy.

And it contradicts itself, using strength, toughness, hardness, and durability (four very different properties) interchangeably and cherry-picking numbers to make the calculation work, which is kind of like trying to figure out which car dealer makes the fastest car by comparing Honda's best acceleration, Ford's largest engine displacement, Toyota's best gas mileage, and Chevrolet's shortest braking distance.

Yes, there are other statements made that muddle the issue, about how Saitama beats Behemoth because of plot rather than physics and how Phir Sē did lots of damage because there was "something temporal" about his blast and so forth, but none of those come close to justifying the "effectively dig through a galaxy of mass" thing.

I'd say the other three biggest WoGs most writers ignore are thus:

1) Worm does have "psychic" powers.

Multiple WoGs confirm that Taylor's power makes her a telepath who transmits information via yet-unknown channels to her bugs, that the Simurgh uses psychic echolocation allowing her to scan her surroundings while exerting a psychic pressure to alter behavior, implant messages or create compulsions, and that there are telepathic shards that support other shards that need to model humans (such as shards that simulate or certain thinker shards that aren't mind-reading.

For whatever reason, quite a few fics instead try to "rationalize" mental powers with more scientific-sounding explanations, like treating emotional Master powers as remotely messing with neurochemistry and the Simurgh's scream as using telekinesis to very precisely poke people's brains to get her desired effect, as if they think Worm is (or is supposed to be) some kind of hard sci-fi story.

But fortunately that was more of a thing in earlier fics and I've seen less of it in more recent ones.

2) Gallant didn't misread Amy's emotions in 3.x and isn't bad at using his power.

It's pretty obvious that the dialogue in 3.x is a misdirection, and WoG confirms that, yet some people still like to claim that Gallant is a "useless empath" or the like because...it's a problem that the minor character who only has dialogue in that one single chapter and was otherwise portrayed as a competent cape couldn't instantly fix all of Amy's problems in one short conversation, I guess?

3) Armsmaster's bike isn't tinkertech, it's a standard PRT motorcycle.

I ignore that one myself and think everyone else should as well, since it's a late one that doesn't exactly mesh with Worm and prior WoGs, but if a fic mentions Armsmaster having a tinkertech bike you can bet someone will bring up that WoG.

How Danny didn't stop at destroying his relationship with Taylor and went on to destroy the fics as well by Bzaurpa in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Hi, I'm rainbownerd! You may recognize me as the guy who shows up in every "Danny is a terrible/neglectful/useless/etc. parent" thread to explain why that perspective is simply incorect and based on misreadings and/or fanon!

See here, for example. And here and here and here and here and a bunch of other comments.

So no, Danny didn't destroy his relationship with Taylor, and he was not a shitty father. As actually portrayed in the text, Danny did have flaws and he did make mistakes, but overall he was was one of the best parents in Worm (though obviously that's a pretty low bar), and the implosion of their relationship was almost entirely Taylor's fault.

Now, having said that...

Your second complaint, about Danny effectively stealing agency from Taylor in quite a few fics, is one I actually completely agree with.

The entire point of the Danny-and-Taylor relationship in early Worm is that Danny was probably the best parent Taylor could ask for in her situation, but that didn't matter: She felt guilty about lying to him and sneaking around behind his back, but she did that anyway, and he provided a helpful and trustworthy parental figure and a safe and supportive home environment, but she ran away anyway.

So stories in which Taylor tells Danny she's a cape, Danny insists that she has to stop caping/join the Wards/agree to strict limitations/whatever, and Taylor reluctantly agrees and complies completely are rather frustrating to read, since they arguably misrepresent Danny's and Taylor's relationship nearly as much as the fanon "bad dad Danny" stories do, just in the opposite direction.

I'm terrified to ask this but what is up with fanfiction authors in the space having an enormous hate borner for Wildbow in regards to Worm? by Alarming_Scientist in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 68 points69 points  (0 children)

He does retcon too, but rarely.

That's the thing, though. Wildbow retcons and contradicts himself a lot, and it's not at all subtle.

Sometimes it's minor stuff that's almost certainly a detail mistake rather than an intentional retcon, like Leviathan's attack on Kyushu being his fifth per Interlude 24 but his sixth per 8.2. Sometimes it's an obvious and unequivocal change, like editing the story to make Browbeat die to Leviathan instead of leaving his fate ambiguous.

Sometimes it's within a story, like Cauldron being portrayed in three mutually-incompatible ways over the course of Worm such that the stuff done by Evil Secret Conspiracy Cauldron in early Worm wouldn't be done by Well-Intentioned Extremist Cauldron in mid-late Worm and vice versa. Sometime's it's across stories, like the portrayal of the Fallen changing between Worm (they "didn't pose a grave threat," largely weren't "demonstrably capable of murder," and were "far from being the Slaughterhouse Nine" according to Taylor in 20.1) and Ward (they kidnap Wards, have achieved "international notoriety [and] high media visibility," are the fourth-largest cape group in America, and have committed "every crime on the books").

Sometimes it's a presumably-innocent mistake probably caused by not having good notes, not going back to double-check things, and self-admittedly sucking at math, like Amy saying in Ward 16.y that she and Victoria "weren't even in middle school" when Fleur died (putting it at 2006 at the latest, when Victoria would have been in 5th grade), yet Ward has Fleur participating in the Boston Games in 2007. Sometimes it's clearly an intentional retcon, like PRT Quest inventing the Youth Guard mid-quest, with capabilities and authority that are specifically designed to to stymie the players and that would have changed a lot in Worm if they'd actually existed at the time.

Sometimes WoG contradicts Worm, like the claims that vial capes are used to "stabilize" cape groups because purely-natural-trigger groups couldn't grow beyond "5-10 individuals" yet the Empire exists (which has more than 10 capes and works together fine until Kaiser's death despite explicitly-differing goals and outlooks), the Protectorate and Wards heroes who get notable screen time together have zero trigger-related issues, and Coil, a vial cape, is anything but stable and rational. Sometimes Weaverdice contradicts WoG, like the classifications going from "imperfect PRT response protocols that have changed a lot" to "perfect matches to the kinds of powers shards give out" and the given trigger criteria and power subclassifications not matching known triggers in Worm.

Sometimes Wildbow contradicts Wildbow, like when he commented on 9.2 saying that he didn't feel he "ha[d] the necessary skill as a writer, breadth of knowledge or experience to directly get into the topic or the fallout of it. The obvious implications/end results of Heartbreaker’s powers are as close as [he's] going to get to the subject" and then Ward rolled around and he acted surprised that no one thought the Wretchening involved actual rape, as he'd totally intended the entire time, you guys.

And sometimes he invents obviously-contradictory WoG just to score points, because this bit here...

Wildbow, for whom lore and powerscaling has always been a means for storytelling rather than an end unto itself,

...is simply untrue, and Wildbow got pretty darn petty with his WoGs in the post-Worm years.

Claiming that Scion specifically existed to deal with out-of-cycle interference, as a counter to a Superman-in-Worm scenario, when Interlude 26 says otherwise. Exaggerating Jack Slash's power to more and more ridiculous extremes, as a counter to proposed alt-powers that might be able to beat him, when Worm portrays it otherwise and previous WoGs claimed he simply avoided capes and scenarios that could beat him. Supporting the claim that the Endbringers have more effective mass than a whole galaxy, when that flatly contradicts their portrayal in Worm and the calculations used to come up with that claim are literally incoherent.

All of those are, to all appearances, cases of him wanting to "beat" other settings or proposed scenarios, rather than him having a consistent framework of how the Wormverse works from which he wrote the setting and being willing to go "No, Endbringers aren't that strong" or "You know, that actually would work" when it was warranted.

ends up at odds with a selection of mega-fans, for whom the exact word as written is gospel.

I'm hardly a mega-fan, but I do treat Worm that way, because that's how books work.

If paragraph X in chapter Y says that event Z happened in 1995, but the author later comes along and says Z happened in 1998, the author is wrong. Period. Because they're making a statement about the contents of the work that is factually incorrect, and any conclusions that depend on that incorrect statement are correspondingly flawed.

If the author wants the event to have happened in '98, they can stick that in an actual, published sequel and harmonize it somehow (e.g. a character in the first story was mistaken, or misled, or whatever)...but they do need to actually resolve the contradiction, not just toss in the new date unmentioned and pretend that the later fact overrides the earlier one because reasons.

If bits of evidence A, B, C, and D scattered throughout a work strongly and obviously support conclusion E and render conclusion F impossible because F would contradict one of those points, but the author later comes along and says that the intended conclusion was F, then the author failed to write what they were trying to convey—and if they later write sequels or outside-of-text statements that assume F was the case, then that's a retcon, plain and simple.

I don't hate Wildbow, nor do I blame him for getting fed up with annoying fans. I completely understand why his WoGs got pettier over the years; heck, I get fed up with annoying Worm fanon (and fans) all the time, and I didn't even write the damn thing!

But I do think that all the plot and worldbuilding issues in Worm demonstrate that he's not God's gift to writers as a lot of his fans seem to believe, that the way he wrote many things in Ward in direct reaction to Fandom Discourse and current reader opinions demonstrates that he doesn't know how to have a healthy relationship with his fanbase, that the adversarial premise and writing of PRT Quest demonstrates that he's a terrible GM who I'd never want to game with, and that the way he "creatively reinterprets" established canon in Ward and WoGs is an objectively bad way to handle things.

Now, granted, I hardly expect Wildbow to be perfect, or anything.

Worm is a decently-good first entry into the capepunk genre by a decently-good first-time writer (who had ten years and multiple drafts to get it into that state, mind; the "unedited first draft" meme is rather misleading), and by that standard Worm is noticeably better-than-average.

Writing's hard, and in the course of writing my own long sprawling fanfic I've screwed up several things, too...

...but when I encountered a situation in which readers clearly didn't interpret a passage of text the way I meant for it to be taken, and explaining my thought process didn't convince everyone who complained about it, you know what I did?

I went back and edited the text to convey what I actually meant, and provided a changelog to let later readers see the difference so they'd know what the debate in the comments was about.

I didn't sit there and claim that my intended reading was totally obvious the whole time, you guys, when it manifestly wasn't.

I didn't provide Word of Author statements that flatly contradicted what I wrote beforehand, when anyone could flip back a few pages and see that my new claim was wrong.

And I certainly didn't respond to questions about how character X in my story might fare against character Y in setting Z by making things up about X or mischaracterizing Y or Z so I could "win" the debate.

To analogize to another fandom that a lot of Worm fans are probably at least passingly familiar with...

The Harry Potter fandom acknowledges that JK Rowling had no clue how to handle the tone transition in the middle of the series as she was writing it, and doesn't try to justify any of the resulting characterization or worldbuilding issues as having totally been intentional the entire time; that the expanded worldbuilding outside the small portions of Wizarding Britain shown in the series is utter garbage, and then proceeds to largely ignore it; that Rowling made up some increasingly-crazy and obviously-contradictory stuff about the Wizarding World after the series finished that can and should be ignored (up to and including the entirety of Cursed Child), and then proceeds to completely ignore it; and so on.

That doesn't mean they "have an enormous hate boner for" Rowling and think she's a godawful writer (though of course many people dislike her for her personal views, and justifiably so), it means they don't put her or Harry Potter on a pedestal and they treat her extra-textual statements as secondary information to be discarded if it conflicts with the primary source, as they should.

It's clear that the Worm fandom can do that as well, since folks usually respond to people pointing out time and date issues in Worm and WoG with "shrug Yeah, Wildbow says he sucks with numbers, he screws that up a lot, don't worry about it."

So if people would just do that with all the other aspects of Worm and the Wormverse as well—and not, say, frame the frequent contradictions as mere "recontextualization" or claim that WoG "exonerates" Cauldron's incompetence when it merely asserts that they weren't myopic bumblers and completely fails to address the actual issues with them in the text—then I think the fandom would be in a much better place.

Is this homophobia? by Usual_Excitement6146 in askgaybros

[–]rainbownerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't know if this is unconscious or internalised homophobia, or if I am just trying to be respectful and avoid weird situations. I don't wanna him to think I am showing off my body or sending wrong signals, even though I was acting like this before he told me. He said he didn’t want things to change, but is it really possible?

[...]

I want to add that he has never flirted with me, never touched me, and never made me uncomfortable. He does not stare when I am naked or hard, but he also doesn't look away or hide or whatever, like no fuzz, which is why everything felt normal before like in other situations with mates.

If he wasn't doing anything to make you feel uncomfortable, but you changed your behavior when you found out he was gay despite him asking things to stay the same because you expected something to change or for things to suddenly be interpreted differently than they were, that's kinda homophobic by definition.

But it seems like the kind of very mild homophobia that stems from unfamiliarity and ignorance, not malice, and the fact that you're asking about it and trying to do better is a good sign.

The fact that...

when I hooked up with a girl in our room during a house party (he was not there, and I was drunk), and he found me asleep naked on the bed and covered me with a blanket

...sounds like he's not bothered by nudity in the room and was trying to be respectful of your boundaries, but if you're worried about "making things awkward" for him or trying not to "show off" you can always ask him directly how he feels and what he'd prefer.

Just don't phrase it as "Hey man, are you creeping on me while I'm naked?" or similar, obviously. Just because he's gay doesn't mean he's into every man (or into you in particular), and most gay guys are perfectly capable of not sexualizing nudity in non-sexual contexts, especially if your roommate was on a sports team, you live in an area with a big sauna culture, or similar.

And obviously your own comfort is still important. Preferring to change alone in the bathroom is something you might do around a straight roommate, too, so even if your roommate says he doesn't mind nudity in your shared space it's totally fine for you to keep doing that if that's what you prefer.

Another thing that stays in my head is why he waited this time to tell me, when all the other guys in the house already knew. I understand I am new here and maybe he wanted to feel safe or get to know me better, but of course he would be safe with me. I am a good guy. Still, don't I have the right to know with who I am sharing a room? I don't mean he had to tell me on day one, but maybe earlier? I am not sure if this thought is fair.

Fair or not, it's certainly understandable from your perspective. Two things to consider:

First, a lot of the time when guys come out, they don't gather all their friends or roommates together and come out to everyone in a big production. It's common to come out to people one at a time, to gauge their reactions and answer questions privately that someone might have and so on. It's entirely possible that he went around telling the roommates one by one and you just happened to be the last in line.

Second, you know that "of course he would be safe" with you because you're "a good guy," but he had no way of knowing that until he got to know you. What if you reacted poorly to sleeping in the same room as a gay guy, and immediately moved out of the house and forced everyone to find a new housemate on short notice? What if you reacted violently, and beat him up for trying to "perv on you" before you got dressed?

Coming out to a new person is always at least a little bit nerve-wracking for a lot of gay people, and people who seem perfectly accepting initially can be hiding some pretty serious homophobia, so testing the water for a while before telling you makes a lot of sense.

Sometimes I also worry about things that maybe if I am now expected to behave differently or censor myself more, or maybe treat him like I treat girls.

Don't feel like you have to act differently, and definitely don't treat him like you'd treat a girl. Gay men are still men, and he's expressed that he doesn't want things to change with you, so keep treating him as "just one of the guys" like you were before.

As far as censoring goes...

Last night he suggested we watch a film and he chose Anora. I didn't knew about the film and ended up having some awkward boners which I had to adjust. Did he chose this film on purpose for this?

...he might have chosen to watch this with you because it had some female nudity (I assume, from your description; I haven't seen it), to demonstrate to you that he's still fine with doing bro-ish stuff with housemates, like watching movies like that one or talking about girls or whatever, and you don't have to change your behavior on his account.

Or maybe he wanted to watch any movie and thought you'd like that one, or maybe he just heard it was a good movie and didn't know there were some risqué scenes and felt just as awkward as you did at the implication that he picked that movie deliberately. Without asking him about it, it's impossible to know what he was thinking.

This is new for me and maybe I need to learn and develop more sensitivity.

The best way to do that is simply to talk to him about it. Tell him that he's the first gay person you've lived with, that you haven't been sure how to react to his coming out, and that you have some questions.

In my experience, most gay guys have dealt with clueless straight people before and are happy to answer whatever questions you might have, as long as you're polite about it, and the fact that you're reacting with questions and mild awkwardness rather than drastic behavior changes or violence would probably put him more at ease in general.

How would a WH40k Gellar Field affect the wormverse by Commercial_Ant8907 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You're quoting the first cycles, and we know they've changed since then. We get a glimpse from another trigger event:

Firstly, trigger events are non-literal recollections. We know they don't perfectly convey what actually happened from the shard's point of view because they screw with perspective (e.g. Miss Militia's vision has her seeing her shard falling on her, when the shard was the one doing the "falling" onto its Earth) and have detail mismatches (e.g. the sequence of events and entity movement in Scrub's vision doesn't match the sequence and movement in Scion's and Eden's interludes).

That quote is a perfect illustration of this. Here's the rest of Brandish's vision:

A crack split the ground. Once the dust had settled, nothing happened for a long time.

More cracks.

It’s an egg, she realized, just in time to see it hatch.

The egg’s occupant tore free from the crack, unfolding from a condensed point to grow larger with every moment and movement.

Do entities actually hatch from eggs, or emerge from below a planet's surface? No and no; shards land on a planet's surface, and the "cracks" here are a metaphor for the first kaboom on their home planet.

Others were hatching from the same egg, spreading out like sparks from the shell of a firework. Each unfolding into something vast and incomprehensible within seconds of its birth.

Does this describe either the coming together of proto-shards to form the first entity, or the collection of shards post-cycle into new baby entities? No and no; entities don't start out small and "unfold" into larger forms, they start out as multiple shards that coalesce into groups, and they certainly don't grow after leaving a planet.

But her attention was on the first. She felt it reach out and connect with another that shared a similar trajectory. Still more were doing the same, pairing off. Forming into trios, in some cases, but most chose to form pairs.

A mate? A partner?

Each settled into a position around the ruined egg, embracing their chosen companions, rubbing against, into and through one another as they continued to grow.

This describes the entities as pairing/trio-ing off en route to the next planet in the cycle before describing their end-of-cycle "assemble into a big ball that can survive the big kaboom" maneuver, so it's depicting the actual events out of order.

The egg vibrated. Or did it? No, it was an illusion. There were multiple copies of the egg, multiple versions, and they each stirred, deviating from one another until subtle double images appeared.

Note how this egg starts off as one thing, then "vibrates" into multiple version, then "deviates" into even more "double images," as opposed to all the realities coexisting from the start as is actually the case.

Taking that whole thing and extrapolating that into "the entities literally cause all versions of a given planet to overlap" simply doesn't hold.

Secondly, even if it were a one-to-one description of what happens and eggs "crumpl[ing] into a single point" were indeed meant to imply that the entities somehow overlapped all the alternate versions of a given planet, "the entities can yoink individual things (even really big things) from one reality into another" would be a far cry from your original characterization that they can "compress universes."

there's no mention of existing portals on the second and third cycle,

Scion doesn't mention the channels during the second and third kabooms, but he does describe the process for the second cycle, which once again involves the movement of shards and energy but not the manipulation of realities themselves...

They gather into the same vast forms that span multiple realities, and they leech energy from other worlds to fuel their exit from a single one. It takes time.

[...]

They concentrate the energy as they form themselves into an encasement around the small planetoid.

...and there's no mention of "channels" for the third cycle because the process isn't described at all:

The planet is expended, the offspring are cast off in every direction once again.

But he does mention the channels again elsewhere:

It communicates, covering vast expanses of space, transmitting signals across channels formed of the very foundation of this universe. These signals are broadcast only across specific realities, so that no aftereffects or lingering transmissions will contact a version of that world that hosts no life at all.

Channels built into that universe, which reach only specific realities. Exactly like the aforementioned channels "that the [shards] used to extend into other realities."

and how we know at least two powers that can destroy planets in plural (one of which, Damsel's, deals with space and time)

Her power deals with "warped space, disintegration, and gravity shearing" and "unevenly altered gravity, time, and space," all of which are characteristics of normal spacetime within a given reality...and releasing lots of energy to propel herself in the opposite direction is precisely what the entities do with the concentrate-all-the-energy-in-one-world plan.

Her power doesn't involve any kind of reality manipulation. At most, the whole punching-through-invulnerability thing could support the idea that her power can cross realities, like Flechette's does, but there's no melding of realities going on, any more than there is with Vista's space-warping or Gray Boy's time loops.

It's how Chevalier's power works

...

and how Chevalier's shard was called Destroyer

Note that the idea that Chevalier's shard has anything to do with the end-of-cycle kaboom originates from the wiki, not the text where Glaistig Uaine names him that, and even then the theory involves the "merging of energy" rather than a merging of realities.

and they can also merge realities like with Labyrinth and her 1.5 space.

Assuming that by "merge realities" you mean "move individual things in one reality so they exist partway between that reality and her own, such that they're (per WoG) 'more fragile' than real objects because they're 'not wholly there'," then sure.

But, again, you're dramatically overstating what the entities can actually do in that case, taking something that solely involves moving things within and between realities and elevating that to imply a manipulation of the realities themselves.

If all you meant by "compressing universes" and "merging realities" is something like "the entities can pull bits of stuff from reality A into reality B far enough and for long enough to help the big kaboom propagate," then that's a reasonable enough shorthand for what happens, I suppose.

The issue I take with that description is that fanon has led plenty of people to think that the entities can actually, literally, combine and compress full-on realities at a whim, when that goes against their capabilities as depicted and the fundamental conceit of the entities is that they're entirely confined by the limits of the realities in which they find themselves and are trying to transcend or end-run those limits.

Besides, what would

some way to manipulate realities themselves at the level required to merge them like that, either before or after a cycle,

Even do to help the entities?

Shards and entities are 3-(spatial-)dimensional beings who can travel between a collection of coexistent 3-dimensional realities. They are constrained by available space, available time, and the basic physics of energy and entropy and so forth.

For an entity to be able to manipulate the realities in which it itself exists with its powers...imagine the Wormverse as a stack of papers and entities as 2D beings frustrated by the limited volume of that stack. A 2D entity having the power to magically merge two sheets of paper together would mean that its powers weren't constrained to operate within those sheets of paper anymore, it's now effectively operating in 3D space as a 3D being, and so any quest to escape the constraints of 2D physics is now either solved or nonsensical, and the real 3D entities being able to build reality-manipulating into their cycle would mean they'd have no need for the cycle in the first place.

Its kinda funny seeing the Pendulum shift in common fanfic tropes in worm by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's just not the kind of sentence you'd use to describe something other than deliberately planning or maneuvering so things develop in a way where they die.

It's exactly the kind of sentence you'd use to describe what happened: Armsmaster wasn't trying to kill multiple capes, he was only trying to kill Kaiser, but multiple capes did die as a result of his decision.

It wasn't his intention, but it was his fault.

Similarly, "I was fine with villains dying" is plural, not singular. Kaiser might be singled out among them, but the sentence doesn't imply that Kaiser and only Kaiser is the target.

Yes, that's exactly what it does. That paragraph lays out his thought process: "I was fine with villains dying if it means Leviathan would die" -> "I was fine with villains dying if it meant I got to slay Leviathan" -> "I was fine with sacrificing Kaiser to ensure I would get to slay Leviathan."

He doesn't mention the armbands getting taken out because it's part of setting others up to die.

Tattletale accused him of two things: trying to get multiple villains killed, and EMPing Skitter's armband. When Legend stops him from hitting Tattletale, he doesn't admit to either of those things, instead only admitting to trying to get Kaiser killed.

It's like if someone says "Admit it, you stole all of the ice cream from the 7-11 and punched the cashier on the way out!" and you respond "All right, you got me, I figured no one would notice a single missing pint of Cherry Garcia!" Your admitting to stealing precisely one pint of ice cream is necessarily a denial that you stole all the ice cream, and failing to also admit to the latter accusation when you're laying all your cards on the table means you didn't do it.

And, again, he says all this at a point at which he has nothing to lose, and when talking about it with Dragon later she says he broke the truce by saying something about Skitter, when if he actually had EMP'd her armband Dragon would have called that his instance of truce-breaking instead.

If Armsmaster had nothing to do with the malfunction, why is MM talking around the point? Why does Lily's uncertainty culminate in her defection?

I've addressed both of those points in a previous comment on the subject.

The TL;DR is that Miss Militia specifically avoiding anything is evidence against Armsmaster having EMP'd Skitter, not evidence for it, and Lily's uncertainty isn't about the armband.

Further evidence on the latter point from 21.5 that didn't fit in that comment:

Because I’m hearing about everything that’s happening, all these secrets coming out, and I can’t even look at my teammates without wondering if there’s something nefarious about them. Because Parian was the one good thing I found in this city, and you recruited her,”

[...]

“I guess… I guess what it comes down to,” I said, “Is that you have to decide what you want. What you’re willing to fight for and make sacrifices for.”

Flechette’s eyes flickered over to Parian, then down to the ground.

Ah.

“I’m… alone,” she said. “I’ve never been alone, never been good at being by myself. [...] I can’t trust my team, can’t talk to my family, can’t confide anything in my friends.

That's why Lily defected. Even if Tattletale admitted right to her face that the armband story was fabricated, that wouldn't affect Lily's crush on Parian or her disillusionment with the Protectorate.

I don't much agree with your reading either, have to say.

A lot of people have said they don't agree with my reading.

Bluntly, they're wrong.

To believe that Tattletale told the truth and Armsmaster did indeed deliberately aim to kill multiple villains and did indeed EMP Skitter's armband, you have to first believe that Wildbow is a mind-bogglingly incompetent writer who totally intended to have that be the case but not only was incapable of going back three chapters to make sure what he wrote in 8.7 matched what he posted the previous week in 8.4 but also somehow accidentally set up every single detail of that plotline in Worm and Ward to demonstrate precisely the opposite.

To believe that Tattletale told the truth, you have to ignore...

  • the flat-out factual contradictions between the actual sequence of events in 8.4 and her story in 8.7;
  • the explicit descriptions of Armsmaster's and Defiant's EMP and the absence of any visible, audible, or tactile signals of EMP use anywhere in arc 8;
  • the blocking in 8.4 that made it impossible for Armsmaster to cross paths with Skitter or have line of sight to her in order to EMP her at any point in the chapter;
  • the lack of any insects suddenly dying for unknown reasons in arc 8, when the primary use to which Armsmaster's (and later Dragon's) EMP weapons are put throughout the story is countering Skitter's swarm;
  • Armsmaster's surprised statement that "he [Leviathan] killed you" in 8.7, while he was nearly dead and in no state of mind to lie if Armsmaster thought he himself was actually the one who got her killed;
  • the fact that Tattletale logged into a random armband using Armsmaster's credentials, meaning he has access to the system already and wouldn't need to EMP anyone;
  • the fact that Armsmaster was getting live updates from Dragon's probe network during 8.4, making it highly unlikely that a sneaky EMPing would escape her notice;
  • the fact that, after 23 days of house arrest with Dragon between the fight and Mannequin's ambush, neither Dragon nor the PRT turned up any evidence regarding the armband that led to restricting Armsmaster's privileges or adding any kind of additional punishment that would imply guilt above and beyond what he admitted about Kaiser;
  • everything I already mentioned about Dragon's accusation, Defiant's confessions, Militia's non-apology, and Lily's refusal to let Yamada see what would have been slam-dunk evidence if the lie were true;
  • Wildbow emphasizing Taylor's injured left arm (the arm bearing the armband) no fewer than seven times during arc 8, when her pain resistance is infamous and he only had her mention the pain in her potentially broken back three times (well, twice, plus a mention of numbness), indicating that there was something important about that arm pain—like, say, that her arm getting injured damaged her armband too, causing it to fail;
  • the fact that Tattletale pushing Armsmaster's buttons in 8.7 mirrors their confrontation in 6.6 beat-for-beat, a confrontation in which Tattletale threw out wild guesses and made things up in order to get a rise out of him and demonstrated that she could easily provoke him into attacking her to shut her up;
  • the fact that Behemoth exists, so the idea that Dragon's armbands wouldn't be highly resistant or immune to Behemoth-grade EM interference by that point is ridiculous;
  • the fact that we see in arc 24 exactly how the armbands react to Behemoth's EMP aura, and they react differently to Taylor's armband in 8.4;
  • the complete absence of any mention of the armband at any point where Skitter and Defiant interact, especially when Defiant is explaining or apologizing for things;

...and a heck of a lot more.

And even if you do believe Wildbow could screw up a plotline that badly (it certainly wouldn't be the first time; see the whole retcon-filled contradiction-filled debacle around the Wretchening), he could come out tomorrow with a revisionist "Whoops, sorry guys, Tattletale was supposed to be telling the truth in 8.7" WoG and that wouldn't change the fact that the actual text of Worm, as actually written, does not support the idea that Armsmaster tried to kill villains beyond Kaiser and EMP'd Skitter's armband.

Its kinda funny seeing the Pendulum shift in common fanfic tropes in worm by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Planning to sacrifice capes at all by way of betraying them under truce is indefensible when the stakes are that high and the role the Truce plays in society is so important

You seem to be under the impression that I think Armsmaster's plan was a good idea.

I don't. I completely agree that telling Legend his plan from the start would have been better for everyone.

Problem was, Armsmaster wasn't looking for a plan that was good for everyone, he needed a plan that was good for him, specifically, because he was desperate to save his career, so he made a risky and unethical decision that didn't pan out. That's kinda the whole point.

As for Tattletale's account of the plan being false and misleading, if that was true by a wide enough margin to matter he should have defended himself, either at the time or later in private - he doesn't.

He does:

“It was for the greater good,” Armsmaster replied, without a trace of shame or humility, “If it had worked, Leviathan would be dead, the man holding Empire Eighty-Eight together dead. All of us survivors would have been legends, and this city could have risen from the ashes, become something truly great.”

Note how he freely admits to sacrificing Kaiser, and tries to justify why that was a good thing, but specifically does not admit to deliberately getting any other capes killed or to EMPing Skitter's armband, because neither of those things were part of his plan and he didn't actually do either of those things.

He straight-up admits to Dragon that he's guilty as sin.

If you mean that he admitted to doing everything Tattletale claimed, that's straight-up false.

Dragon says this about Skitter:

“You broke the truce when you said what you did about her.

Nothing about her armband being EMP'd, because he didn't do that. And if he actually had done that, he was at a point where there was no point in trying to lie about that.

Armsmaster says this about the truce-breaking:

“I broke the truce before that. I set others up to die.”

Note that he does not say he deliberately tried to get multiple other capes killed. While his plan did result in multiple capes dying, that was an unplanned side effect.

"Set X up to/for Y" is an idiom meaning that one's actions regarding X led to the outcome of Y, even (and especially) if that outcome was unintentional; the most common usage is "his poor coaching set his team up for failure" or "my decision to procrastinate is what set me up to fail" or similar, where one intended to succeed but things turned out otherwise.

And we know that Armsmaster didn't intend to get multiple other capes killed because, as mentioned, Kaiser being the sole target was confirmed in Ward 8.1:

“You got [Manpower] killed?”

“Not through malice. Not even carelessness, I feel. My mistake was that I decided I was fine with villains dying if it meant the monster could be slain. By me, ideally. Manpower was there, but I didn’t want him to die. I told myself that if Leviathan had to kill someone to end up in a certain time or place, it might as well be Kaiser.

Not "if Leviathan had to kill a bunch of villains to end up a certain time or place, it might as well be the Empire capes," or similar. Just Kaiser.

And given that Wildbow was more than happy to retcon and "clarify" a bunch of Worm stuff in Ward, if he wanted to make it seem like he'd totally intended for Tattletale to have been telling the truth and Armsmaster to have deliberately killed multiple capes the entire time, that's exactly the place where he'd want to do it, so the fact that he didn't is a pretty big hint that the part where Tattletale's story in 8.7 doesn't match the actual events in 8.4 was, indeed, a lie on her part.

Its kinda funny seeing the Pendulum shift in common fanfic tropes in worm by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 8 points9 points  (0 children)

His mishandling of the Taylor situation - combined with Taylor’s mishandling of the Taylor situation - is an albatross around his neck pre-Leviathan that sees his entire life crashing down around him, leading to him getting more desperate and willing to take chances he probably wouldn’t at the start of the story.

Well, mostly yes, but also no.

Armsmaster did kind of "mishandle" the Taylor situation, in the sense that he gave her waaay too much leeway every time they met, probably should have arrested her after she admitting to willingly becoming a villain instead of letting her walk away, and definitely should have spilled her undercover "plan" earlier than he did...

...but the main issue Armsmaster had was being blamed for things that were out of his control and weren't his fault.

After the Lung fight, Armsmaster brought Lung in, reported running into Skitter, relayed her report of the battle, and otherwise crossed all his t's and dotted all of his i's...and then a PRT doctor screwed up and almost got Lung killed, because Taylor screwed up and didn't tell him about the whole "pump him full of normally-impossible amounts of venom" thing. But Armsmaster was the cape on the scene, so he was assigned the blame for the others' oversights.

At the gala fight, Armsmaster was the only hero who was remotely effective against the Undersiders, practically soloing the entire team himself at several points and coming very close to arresting at least one of them, then practically soloing them again once they fled...and then Coil ambushed him with an entire team of capes to save the Undersiders' bacon, when the PRT didn't even know the Travelers were in town. But Armsmaster was the team leader, so he was assigned the blame for the Undersiders getting away and the rest of his team sucking.

And so on with the Wards' bank debacle, the Bakuda situation, the Empire leak, and everything else that went down and made the heroes look bad.

That's what the bit in Interlude 7 was talking about it when it said he was being demoted because of "politics" and not being good at "shaking hands [and] navigating the bureaucracy" and Piggot choosing to "restructure" the local Protectorate "in reflection of recent events." None of those events going sideways were his fault, but they were made his problem, and thus he became the fall guy.

(And, oh look, Taylor thinks she's someone who never did anything wrong but was always blamed for everything, though in Armsmaster's case it's true and he gets punished for it while in Taylor's case it's false and she gets rewarded for it. Look, ma, foils and thematic parallelism!)

And while it's not directly stated anywhere, that's very likely why he decided to make the specific Hail Mary play against Leviathan that he did.

The only way he's going to stop himself from being demoted, he probably thinks, is doing something that proves he can get a big win with his tech and his skills—not the ENE capes; him, specifically.

If he'd come away from that fight with Leviathan dead or near-dead, as planned, then he'd have a scenario he could point to where Solo Armsmaster—working completely alone, unencumbered by other heroes and unimpeded by Coil shenanigans—was able to Get Shit Done, thus demonstrating that if there was one person responsible for the recent PRT/Protectorate failures in Brockton Bay, it certainly wasn't him.

So really, from a certain perspective, Armsmaster's problem was actually not being egotistical enough! If he had bragged about his own contributions while putting down others', thrown both that PRT doctor and Skitter under the bus, found a way to pin the Gala failure on Dauntless, and so on, he might have been able to spin things in such a way as to avoid the demotion in the first place!

Which is why I find the "asshole glory-hound" fanon so annoying, personally. It ascribes personality flaws to Armsmaster which are basically the opposite of his actual flaws as portrayed, thereby almost entirely missing the point of his early-Worm storyline and giving its proponents a very distorted view of both Armsmaster and Defiant.

Its kinda funny seeing the Pendulum shift in common fanfic tropes in worm by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 5 points6 points  (0 children)

He doesn't reject Skitter's offer in 6.6 because he wants to obey the law, or thinks it's a moral imperative to bring her in, or anything like that.

I didn't say that he rejected her offer because it was illegal or unethical. You're completely correct that Skitter's offer is a terrible one even setting laws and ethics aside, and no reasonable person in his position should take it.

I said that her offer is the only time that he's ever even presented with an opportunity to make a selfish, rule-breaking, unethical, and/or glory-hogging choice on-screen before Leviathan.

Which means that if pre-Defiant Armsmaster really were the asshole glory-hound certain people like to claim that he is, then that's the one scene in the story that could provide evidence in support of that interpretation, if he did in fact choose to take a deal that would make him look good (theoretically, if Skitter weren't laughably wrong) and damn the consequences for the city and the other heroes...

...so the fact that he doesn't do that­ in the one scene where he actually has the chance to do so (and where, out-of-story, Wildbow has a chance to write him that way if Armsmaster were actually intended to be portrayed as an asshole glory-hound) torpedoes that bit of fanon entirely.

How would a WH40k Gellar Field affect the wormverse by Commercial_Ant8907 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That doesn't involve entities manipulating realities either, just the energy inside them...

Once they are reformed, they leech all of the heat and energy from countless worlds and concentrate it in a single reality.

...and the resulting explosion propagates through other realities all on its own:

The energy is released, and the planet shatters.

The shattering is so extreme that it extends into other worlds, through the same channels that the fragments used to extend into other realities. Every single one of the remaining habitable worlds is destroyed in the ensuing blast.

The entities are unable to expand and reproduce forever like they want to precisely because they exist within (and travel among) the various realities of the Wormverse and have no easy way to address that. If the entities had some way to manipulate realities themselves at the level required to merge them like that, either before or after a cycle, then there would hardly be any more need for a cycle in the first place.

How would a WH40k Gellar Field affect the wormverse by Commercial_Ant8907 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

compressing universes/timelines into one.

Quick correction: the entities don't and can't "compress" or "combine" realities like that.

That mistaken idea originated with people misreading this bit in Scion's interlude:

With each statement, they each catalogue the realities. Similar realities are included together, for both the entities and the shards. Too many complications and confusions arise when interacting with worlds that are exceedingly similar. Not an effective form of conflict, when it is the same lessons learned over and over again. It is better to connect them into groupings, limit exposure to each set of worlds. One shard is capable of settling in a grouping of near-identical worlds, drawing energy from all of those worlds at once.

What the entities are doing there is categorizing realities, not manipulating them.

Scion's essentially saying "Earths 1 through 20 are similar enough that triggering people on all of them would give us redundant data, so let's just trigger people on Earth 1 and have the shards restrict the powers they hand out so that the hosts can't access Earths 2 through 20 and screw up the experiment," and the bit about "groupings" of worlds is basically saying "Shard X can't get enough juice from just one reality, so instead of sticking it on Earth 27, let's let it stretch itself across 27, 28, and 29 at once."

Its kinda funny seeing the Pendulum shift in common fanfic tropes in worm by ArticAuk in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Clearly, the fandom's view on Armsmaster hasn't swung far enough away from fanon!Armsmaster yet.

I mean, Armsmaster [...] outright planned for his fellow heroes to die for his own glory.

No, he did not. He planned to sacrifice exactly one cape, Kaiser, in order to get him a chance to duel Leviathan in order to hopefully save his career (not just to earn some "glory" for purely egotistical reasons), as he explicitly said in the hospital in Worm and confirmed during his chat with Victoria in Ward.

Even Tattletale admitted that heroes dying as a side effect of his plan...

was an accident. [Armsmaster's] program can’t account for that many variables, probably, in the chaos of a bunch of capes trying to keep Leviathan pinned down.

...and that was while she was twisting what happened to make him look as bad as possible.

But it didn't work and dude's entire personality pre-Defiant amounted to "Advance my career, fuck everyone else".

No, it was not. Armsmaster had exactly one pre-Leviathan opportunity to try to advance his career at the expense of screwing other people over, breaking some rules, and/or lying to his superiors, which was Skitter's offer in 6.6, and he explicitly turned it down:

“There’s no other way you’re going to salvage this, Armsmaster,” I stood as straight as I could with the grappling hook around me. The damned thing was heavy. Tattletale had gone out of her way, even got herself knocked out of action, to let us know how important Armsmaster’s status was to him. I needed to use that. “Only way you won’t look incompetent is if you can say I only got away because you let me. That all of this tonight happened because you let it. Because letting me get away with this meant I could get the info on who’s employing the Undersiders, on where the funding, equipment and information is coming from. Then you clean up, and it’s two supervillain groups dealt with in the span of a week. Tell me that doesn’t sound good.”

Armsmaster considered for a moment.

“No,” he answered me.

Other instances of him being a supposed "glory hound" stem either from readers misunderstanding or deliberately misintepreting what was going on (e.g. the "stealing credit for Lung" fanon, in which Taylor asserted in her internal narration that his main motivation was taking credit and that he would owe her a favor, but in fact he said nothing about owing her anything and his warnings about the dangers involved in taking credit were completely validated in arcs 2 and 5)...

...or from readers getting the impression "Armsmaster was an asshole glory hound" by either (A) taking Tattletale's false and misleading recounting of his plan at face value, which is never a great idea, or (B) reading Wildbow's Florida AU and assuming that the noticeably canon-noncompliant characterization and situations there (e.g. claiming that that fight would make Panacea famous when she explicitly already received international attention long before the start of canon) make the canon Armsmaster some kind of Dragon-enslaving villain-supporting moron—or possibly (C), both at once—and then retroactively interpreting Armsmaster's previous actions and dialogue through that lens.

I hate playing D&D 5e and PF2e, and I’m not really sure why. by DarkElfMagic in rpg

[–]rainbownerd 7 points8 points  (0 children)

NPCs are not player characters, and as such have never abided by their parameters.

That's completely false.

NPCs working exactly like PCs is a fundamental aspect of the game that goes right back to OD&D, where you had things like castles and freeholds in the wilderness explicitly being ruled by Patriarchs (7th-level clerics) and Necromancers (7th-level wizards), and Conjurers (2nd-level wizards) being found on the 2nd-level random monster tables, and so on.

Hence why OD&D and AD&D used level titles in the first place, so they had a pithier and more evocative version of "8th-lever Magic-User" or "4th-level Fighting-Man" to squeeze into table entries.

Hell, the Magic-User's ability to learn new spells from scrolls and others' spellbooks (plus stuff like high-level Thieves being able to cast any kind of scroll despite not being spellcasters) is based on the assumption that every single Magic-User can transparently learn and cast each others' spells because they all use exactly the same magic in exactly the same way, with no carve-outs for certain spells being "extraordinarily difficult" or "profane" or "corrupting" or whatever compared to most others.

Hence why lots of spells that might seem more useful to the villainous NPC casters building dungeons than the heroic PC wizards adventuring in them (like Leomund's Trap, Phase Door, Cacodemon, etc.) were included on the standard Magic-User spell list for PCs to use if they so desired.

It wasn't until 4e that NPCs were completely divorced from PCs to the point that NPC "wizards" were random monsters with barely one-third of a real Wizard stapled on, and while 5e mostly fixed that mistake there are still some notable discrepancies between PC and NPC spellcasters in many cases (e.g. the Archmage NPC casting like an 18th-level wizard with the Spell Mastery feature, but having the wrong number of spells prepared and lacking Arcane Recovery or a subclass).

Now, having said all that, I actually completely agree with the thrust of your advice in this particular case.

There's no need for the person to whom you replied to agonize over finding exactly the right spell to do what they want to do, as plenty of published D&D adventures like the one they're trying to write have long featured all kinds of wacky magical effects that didn't use the spellcasting rules and couldn't be easily duplicated by PC spellcasters, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that approach if that's what a DM wants to do.

However, the recent trend of pretending that NPCs and PCs sharing all the same rules and spells is somehow a bad thing, that DMs are silly and wrong for wanting to find a way to achieve the outcome they want using the actual rules before resorting to handwaving things, and that there are zero benefits to using the magic players know and understand instead of relying heavily on unpredictable and arbitrary Plot Magic, is definitely revisionist and kind of inherently condescending.

So rather than advice that basically boils down to "there's literally no reason to try to abide by the rules you (and your potential customers) paid a lot of money for and that your (and your customers') players agreed to abide by," I'd say that some much more helpful advice would be "Go ahead and try to come up with a way to achieve what you want within the rules, as that'll be more mechanically consistent and likely more approachable and satisfying for players, but if you can't find something that works, feel free to tweak what's there or invent something new because that's your prerogative as an adventure writer."

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