Latest Posts by khepris-worst-soldier - Page 6

>be me, pizza guy in shittiest port town on Earth Bet

>terrible tips and get robbed for pizza so often I have honest to god decoy pizzas

>get called to deliver to this weird old warehouse like three times a week and have to roll the dice on how it's gonna go

>there's this whole Burger King Kid's Club worth of diverse teenagers that live there and I never know who I'm gonna get

>worst kid there is the one that answers the door 90% of the time. I hate this little fucking shit

>black haired boy. Dainty little prince pretty boy type. Always the one who calls the orders in, and always gives some stupid ass fake name like he's fucking Bart Simpson. "I.C. Weiner" and "I.P. Freely." That kind of shit.

>like half the time I think I'm delivering a depression-meal since he's dressed like he just woke up, and I'd feel bad except he makes some smartass remark every time, and since I see him every other goddamn day, it's almost always the same joke. Also tries to get free pizza by saying it's 30 minutes or free, except no one has done that program since like 1993, so he's pulling shit from tv. I don't need a fucking comedy routine from a kid in cookie monster pajama pants. Bad tipper. Whatever cash he has in his pocket.

>he's on the shitlist because, and I don't know how the fuck he does this, but every time the pizza is "late", this fucking kid trips me somehow. Or I drop my phone or the pizza bag or keys. Swear to god this kid has Home Alone tripwires or something.

>and every time it happens. Every fucking time. This little bastard says "have a nice trip."

>would say he's a cape, but every cape I've ever met has had some kind of presence, and I'm not giving that much credit to someone with a four-hair teenage mustache

>hate this smug little fucker and I'd have him blacklisted if this fucking building and its weird teenage polycule didn't make up like 50% of our orders for the neighborhood. 0/10, I hope you die

>be me, Brockton Bay pizza man. Deliver to welding building. Name on order is "Dick Hardly." Little prince opens the door. He has a sidekick. Black girl counterpart. They give me matching shit-eating grins. I hate my fucking job.

god i love imp (big spoilers)

you know, the more i think about worm, the more i realize that aside from skitter, imp is one of the best fleshed out characters. and the amazing thing is how her characterization is all in the background where people don’t notice it. just like imp herself.

Keep reading

attention everyone we have reached my personal favorite Line in worm

I stepped toward Sundancer and offered a hand to help her up.  She flinched away. Oh.  My hands were bloody.  I dropped the offered hand to my side. “Let’s go,” I suggested.

there are a lot of good Lines in worm, and while i will acknowledge that many of them are sort of objectively more powerful culminating moments than this one, this one is still My Personal Favorite. Oh. My hands were bloody.

it's been obvious through the early arcs that taylor has a lot of repressed anger: she beats the shit out of rachel, even after being bitten. she outright admits to the other undersiders that she hasn't taken subtle revenge on the trio at school because she's afraid she would take it too far/it would obviously be her. she is, initially, unnerved by violence: she's a bit scared by the gun present in the loft, it creeps her out that brian knows every way to break a person's body, she feels guilt about the idea of any civilians being hurt during the bank robbery. but she still beat up rachel, and she still shoves bugs up the wards' noses during the robbery, and she still gleefully rides rachel's dog and laughs and hollers from the joy and the adrenaline rush of victory afterwards.

the expression of this repressed anger thru violence escalates further when her concussion leads her to slapping emma in the mall. in the principal's office, when it's clear that nothing she or her dad says will garner help with the bullying, she shouts and slaps papers off the table and asks what would happen if she brought a knife to school. after she and her dad leave the meeting, she calls lisa:

“Hey.  How did it go?” I couldn’t find the words for a reply. “That bad?” “Yeah.” “What do you need?” “I want to hit someone.”

lisa invites her to a raid on the ABB so she can do that, and it's soo. Sooo Very. to watch how she cuts loose on it. she's so angry rachel notices it in how she's standing, and she's still confused about how rachel noticed. she's a confident leader when the fight goes crisis mode, she responds to rachel bucking against her orders by consistently shouting at rachel to "NOT fuck with me right now," she acts nigh-suicidally aggressive during her fight with lung, and she snarls "don't fucking underestimate me" when she takes him out using a caterpillar dipped in newter's blood.

all of this happens in relatively subtle increments. she doesn't notice how she progressively becomes comfortable expressing herself and taking charge instead of withdrawing or acting insecurely during the course of the mission. she doesn't notice that she's not horrified by dealing with newter's wound or seeing the sniper's broken leg. back in unmasked society, she was forced to consider how many of her aggressive actions were the result of the concussion loosening her impulse control--here, she repeatedly yells at bitch without a second thought. it's a place where her violence and anger isn't only acceptable but necessary. the circumstances normalize her outbursts and comfort with violence to her, leaving her blind to how alienated and dissociated and repressed and traumatized and furious and just Fucked Up she has to be to face down lung and then dig his eyes out.

when she says that she "doesn't believe in eye for an eye," in arc 4 alec asks her why the fuck she's a supervillain. his implicit assertion is clear: being a villain is, for him, about taking your revenge for being hurt out on whoever you can manage or justify, even if they're not the person who originally hurt you. and taylor thinks she's not doing that. but hey: she goes beyond just "hitting someone" and into literally taking lung's eyes as a culmination of the cathartic violence she's been engaging in as recompense for how she was mistreated earlier.

and the person who serves as a more "normal" reference point for how far taylor just escalated is sundancer: horrified by the idea of having to use her sun to hurt people, shocked by how casually violent taylor has been, flinching away from taylor when she turns to sundancer after committing that violence & tries to offer sundancer help.

because, oh. her hands are bloody. she hadn't even noticed how bloody they were getting, but they are.

deeply evocative one-line reminder of how taylor has changed in these first five arcs, without even noticing. and the best part is that, while the imagery of "oh. my hands were bloody" does convey that change in an incredibly brief and powerful way, the fact that taylor is saying it still means even she hasn't really realized. she thinks it's mainly just about the superficial, literal blood on her hands, and not the metaphorical blood on her hands that sundancer is disturbed by. it's good.

Thinkin’ About Alexandria

An important thing to keep in mind about Alexandria, I think, is that she (and the rest of Cauldron’s inner circle) have been sticking like glue to an organizational schema she developed when she was fifteen, using power-assisted cognition but the life-skills, worldview and experience of a fifteen year old; I think this goes a long way towards explaining why her mindset was finding the most efficient way to martially oppose villains instead of, say, finding a way to financially disincentivize villainy through social safety nets. (alternatively, she wanted society to be a thunderdome of sorts to get everyone trained up for gold morning, but that’s got just as many holes that could be explained by being fifteen.)

Her power answered her fear that she’d die without getting to grow and change by arresting all her biological processes and permanently locking her into her late-teens-early-twenties; she has to pretend in order to seem as old as she actually is. Her cognition is completely offloaded to her power; her brain is vulnerable, but it isn’t clear if she’s actually doing any thinking with that thing. Unmovable, unbreakable, clad in fortress imagery, sticking like glue to a specific plan, and a specific value (they’ll be alive, that’s all that matters) derived from her own root fear of death, her preference for mutation over death by cancer, which she projects onto everyone else in the world and uses to justify everything she does to them. Incredible calculative power, incredible resources, incredible martial power, and a fighting style that, to my recollection, consists of hitting the other guy until they stop moving.

So, you know, conclusion number one that I’m drawing from all of this is that Alexandria is Taylor with all the world’s resources at her back and no one to ever tell her no. Conclusion two is that Alexandria is subtly in the same kind of power-induced arrested development as Contessa; she’s got the brains and the brawn to think up and execute bad plans perfectly, she faces no criticism or scrutiny, she (usually) faces no consequences. She’s not “stand-on-a-beach-for-three-days-in-a-stupor” levels of brainscorched by her power but there’s a real degree to which I read the training wheels as never having come off with her. I get a vibe of R/Iamverysmart permeating Cauldron’s set-up and self-assuredness, and this is part of why.

Conclusion three (the big obvious one) is that she’s a metaphor for institutional inertia. When she dies and the Protectorate uses her as a scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with them it’s very obviously self-serving but it’s also not, like. Incorrect. She’s a synecdoche for everything wrong with the system. Rigid, inflexible, callous, arguably necessary but nearly impossible to remove or change or challenge.

And then she gets replaced by a guy whose whole schtick is that he can mix and match the best properties of wildly different component elements on the fly to create the best possible response to any problem.

Thinkin’ About Cauldron

I’m aware of the way it breaks some people’s suspension of disbelief, and I’m aware that it comes across as silly or incompetent to many, but it is deeply, deeply important to me on a thematic level that Cauldron is tiny. The tinyness is what makes them a functional foil to Taylor; you spend the whole book thinking that this is just an escalation of the problems Taylor has with Monolithic authority, and then the curtain is pulled back and you realize that the “Monolithic authority” is actually just six or seven people who are on a first name basis with each other, using their top-tier information-gathering and coordination-based powers as a force multiplier to get around their small numbers as they unilaterally seized control. (Hey, sorta like the Undersiders.)

And, furthermore, their tinyness is a stand-out example of the kind of coordination problems the book has been examining the whole time- Cauldron should be bigger, the inner circle should have more people in it, and the fact that they’ve expanded so slowly, from two to seven-ish full members, with so much of their inner circle not even having the full picture of the threat they’re up against, is deeply indicative of their wagon-circling Atlas Complex. It has to be them, they have to do it alone, or they are going to be found out and crushed. 

And to be fair, they aren’t actually wrong in their assessment that they’ll be found out and crushed if they aren’t extremely careful about who they bring into the loop; overlooking the remaining entity entirely, Legend’s concern that the governments would try and coopt the power-granting process is, like. Correct. That is a thing that would happen, given the number of wormverse groups already trying to do that in some form. Siberian bit them in the ass, The Dealer bit them in the ass, and a big part of Ward is the multi-directional slapfight over the remaining Cauldron infrastructure that starts up as soon as it isn’t in a position to defend itself anymore.

 There’s a real chicken-and-egg thing going on here, where it’s not clear if their paranoia is warranted given how other power players in the setting tend to behave, or if other power players in the setting behave the way they do downstream from Cauldron’s paranoia, manipulation and compartmentalization. A recurring theme with Worm is that keeping secrets and holding back resources is going to lead to terrible things happening even if keeping those secrets was a reasonable decision with the information you had available to you. You see this with Phir Se, with the Echidna fight, with the politicking over Khonsu. Cauldron is just, like, the epitome of that Morton’s Fork- be honest and open, and potentially lose everything, or, you know, be Cauldron, with all that entails.

I've never made any connections between Worm and the Captain America mythos before. Spill some ink?

Okay, so from a purely aesthetic perspective, the gimme is Miss Militia. She's the most obvious "Captain Patriotic" in the roster, she has the power of GUN, she's the only one who actively buys into the mythology of America specifically. She's a Kurdish woman occupying an aesthetic niche generally held by a rugged squinty white guy. She's an output of the melting pot narrative. She's sort of a rendering of what a grounded superhero who somehow became very aesthetically into America might look like. Not in the craven marketing-driven way of Homelander or Comedian, not in the jingoistic maniac way of USAgent or Peacemaker. She buys it in the broadly left-liberal (USamerican connotation of that term) safe, friendly, reclamative way. Why, what a great rehabilitation of the archetype!

She's also deeply, deeply afraid of rocking the boat. She's got a deepseated childhood trauma related to the bad things that happen when she puts herself in a leadership role. She goes along to get along. When she's proactive, it's usually to point a gun at Tattletale to stop her from upsetting the status quo. She sits through a lot of situations where Steve Rogers, as commonly modeled, would probably plant himself like a tree by the river of truth and go, "Hey, this is fucked up." She more or less capitulates to Undersider domination of the city, in a way that predisposes us to think of her as a voice of reason after all these total nuts that Skitter's been up against- but would Taylor "to relinquish control is a form of ego death" Hebert really be willing to leave someone in charge of the local Protectorate branch who she thought couldn't be corralled? She looks like a beacon, but doesn't- indeed, probably can't- ever truly behave like one. I mean, you can debate the on-the-spot morality of any given one of her judgement calls, that's actually one of the less exhausting Worm Morality Debates to have- but in aggregate, a person in American flag garb who actually meaningfully criticizes the paramilitary organization they're part of is not gonna survive long in that role!

So again, she's the gimme from an aesthetic standpoint. But what I don't really see a lot of discussion of is how Cauldron plays into the riff.

Captain America is institutional, but in a comically morally uncomplicated way. The serum was originally mana from heaven, granted to a living saint, conveniently divorced from any nitty-gritty sausage-making process and even-more conveniently divorced from the horrible consequences of giving the, uh, the U.S government a replicable super soldier process. And in fairness to Captain America, this is 100 percent something the overall mythos eventually patched to my satisfaction; the sausage-making process eventually revealed as prototypical government fuckery driven by human experimentation on black servicemen, the overall Marvel Setting littered with failed attempts by the U.S. Government to recreate that golden goose so they can have their fun new jackboots. (In Ultimate Marvel, this is how almost all contemporary superhumans were created, and this is a state of affairs with a body count in the millions or billions.)

Cauldron draws you in with the same noble rhetoric about greater goods, the same one-off proprietary irreplicable formula- but you don't get the luxury afterwards of representing nothing but the dream. You aren't partnering up with a plucky crank scientist with a heart of gold. You're selling your soul to an organization with an agenda. The narrative makes no bones about the fact that everything you do is fundamentally tainted by the fact you opted into an end product created through torture, kidnapping and human experimentation. You don't get to pull a Kamen Rider by going rogue or opting out or making good use of the fruit of the poisoned tree; you are owned, and everything you do has this Damocles sword hanging over your head- when are the people who bankrolled this going to come to collect?

So that's the question of "who would willingly dress like that" covered, and the question of who creates a serum like that. What about the question of who takes a serum like that? I'd argue that Eidolon is the examination of that. Pre-Cauldron David reads to me like pre-serum Steve Rogers viewed through a significantly bleaker lens. They're both sickly kids desperate to serve, rocketed to the pinnacle of human capability by an experimental procedure. But for Steve Rogers, the crisis was that he had a specific vision of the world and was frustrated by his inability to carry it out. Before the serum he picked fights over what was right and wrong and got his ass handed to him; afterwards he picked those same fights and just started winning instead. The serum neatly solved a problem he had, and to the extent that his mindset is influenced by his pre-serum experiences, it's generally constructive; a desire to protect the weak, help the helpless, an appreciation for people who stand up for what's right even when they're clearly gonna get pancaked for their trouble. So ultimately there's no dark side, downside, or underlying neurosis ascribed to his initial impulse to take that serum.

But with David, it's not a tragic case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. He isn't a preternaturally-noble soul, out to represent the best elements of the American ideal- he kind of represents the inverse, a guy who's been failed at every level while utterly convinced that he's the problem. He's actively suicidal because he's a wheelchair-bound epileptic in an economically-depressed socially-backwards rural town in the 1980s, and he's spent his 18 years of life internalizing the idea that he's worse than useless unless he can somehow find a way provide value to something larger than himself. Doctor Mother finds him in the aftermath of a suicide attempt spurred by his rejection from the army- and he didn't even want to join the army specifically, necessarily, he just needed his situation to be literally anything else, and he took what he thought he could get. And then he finds himself in a position to become a superhero, so he does that, molds himself into that, subordinates himself to that, builds his entire sense of self and values around the value he can provide in that role. No grand design or sacred principles carried over through the metamorphosis. Just relief at finally, finally having something that looks like an answer to the question of what he's supposed to do.

And you know, you know that if Steve Rogers was facing down the barrel of being depowered, he'd smile and nod, he'd Cincinnatus that shit. It's happened before. But for David, the emotional trauma and self-worth issues that caused him to roll the dice on a Steve-Rogers treatment never really went away. When would it? He's been Providing Value as a ten-ton Hammer Against Evil for thirty years. No family, no social life. Certainly, no incentive on his handler's part to lance his Atlas complex. So he barrels towards atrocity in the name of remaining useful. Admittedly, this is where the comparison breaks down in a significant way; Captain America is much more of a symbol than he is an irreplicable powerhouse, so it's not catastrophic if he's taken off the board. Eidolon is so unbelievably powerful that his myopia and self-centeredness actually do align with a real problem everyone else is gonna have if he loses his powers. But in terms of the starting points- I think that Steve Rogers embodies the myth about why you'd want to join the army that badly. Eidolon is, I think, much more closely modelling why you'd actually want to join the army that badly.

Something I haven’t really seen talked about is how the Undersiders mirror Taylor’s bullies.

Obviously, each member of the trio torments Taylor differently: Madison creates little annoyances and pranks, Sophia is animalistically violent (predator-prey) (obviously this is part of the bad racial politics of worm) and Emma engages in psychological warfare based upon specific knowledge of her victim.

Meanwhile, in the Undersiders, you have Regent, who causes little slip-ups in his opponents, Bitch, who is animalistically violent (dog) and Tattletale, who engages is psychological warfare based upon specific knowledge of her victims. And in Grue, you have a Mr Gladly; an authority figure who is meant to reign his charges in but whom fails utterly after making only token efforts.

And Taylor is completely fine with this! I don't think she even really notices, let alone cares, because, with the exception of Bitch (whom she establishes dominance over), this isn't turned against her. Taylor holds a knife to Amy's throat while Tattletale threatens to ruin her life, and she doesn't even have a second thought.

RIP Victoria Dallon you would have loved that stupid blue cop from League Of Legends

If Lung didn't kill Bakuda in the birdcage, I could see Amy and Bakuda making each other worse, somehow.

I could write an Amy×Bakuda piece. I really could.

let’s play a game called is it bad writing or bad faith takes on very small snippets of a greater whole

Taylor, above anything else, has the need to be important, or at the very least not be on the sidelines.

In 25.2, when the Simurgh attacks flight BA178, Taylor is despondent because she wasn't able to go to the fight and wasn't able to help. This despite the fact that the flight went well.

And then Scion shows up and she can't do anything to him. Once again, she is sidelined. And so she invents stuff to do, so that she can be doing something and be important. Recruiting the Endbringers, attacking the Yangban and the Elite, going after Cauldron and even getting Panaceaed are all part of her running around like a headless chicken, trying not to be idle.

That this leads to the death of a thousand refugees is simply evidence of this reading; that she is not trying to help for the sake of helping, but for the sake of this need. That it is so short, and Taylor angsts so little about it, shows how far Taylor has fallen into this tendency.

At the start of Worm, she believes that she will go to hell for holding the bank hostage. At the end, she barely feels bad about killing a thousand people.

Hmm, after rereading the bit where the Undersiders and the Guild sic Leviathan on a refugee camp and kill a thousand people, I think maybe Lisa and Colin deserve everything bad that happens to them forever

you know what. im going to follow my heart so we can move on with the wormread and just copy-paste what i said about danny in chapter 6.9 on discord with some minimal editing because it's not pretty but the general thesis is there and i don't feel like making it into proper paragraph form

okay so the thing thats fucking killing me abotu 6.9 is that danny is literally like. he tries to call taylor a nickname only her mom called her once he realizes he's fucked up bad and is trying to recover whichi s insane [because it's obviously going to be upsetting to her by reminding her of her mom being gone, and it also indicates that his fall-back for something going wrong w/ taylor is to try to appeal to her by poorly copying someone else's parenting style] and he also randomly tells her about how her mom wanted to move her a grade ahead but he wanted her to stay in school with emma to make her happy. and he's been Stewing On That despite knowing it's objectively not his fault (and i am reminded of how in his interlude he spends time Stewing about how he wishes annette were there to give advice) and he also cops up to the fact that that the whole thing about "being her parent and not her ally" (<- demented thing to say for obvious reasons) wherein he locks her in a room and demands emotional vulnerability from her even as she's becoming visibly upset & compares his actions to emma's was her grandmother's idea and then. here's the real kicker. once lisa shows up and prepares to take taylor away there are any number of actions a parent confident that they're doing the right thing for their child would normally do in response--not, like, Good actions, but things that a parent would be likely to pull. threatening to call the cops bc blah blah you're my daughter, wanting to speak to lisa's parents, any form of power move pulled over these two teenage girls but instead he speaks to lisa like she's an equal authority over taylor and seriously asks if she's "okay with this" (i should remind you of the concussion chapter where lisa is doing some insane power move shit over taylors dad covertly establishing herself as more competent at caring 4 her than him lmao) which is just like. it's so glaringly wildly obvious how this guy has Zero confidence in himself as a parent so he generally does nothing and then while he's doing nothing he oscillates btwn rationalizing it to himself as allowing her privacy/dignity, getting angry at himself/calling himself a coward, or getting mad at TAYLOR and blaming HER for not being the one to take initiation to be vulnerable with him and, like. he literally does make functional decisions prior to this for a bit! he's good and supportive at the meeting with the school board about the bullying!!! but it doesn't immediately solve literal years of distance between them that have led to taylor having to take decisionmaking for her wellbeing entirely into her own hands w/o being able to tell him about it [& having literally no route for human connection or support other than the undersiders] so he just completely crumbles on his own calls and seeks out/takes completely shit advice from taylor's grandma instead so i very much think what's insinuated here is like. especially given that he knows he has anger issues and never wants to Be Scary with them. he might have frequently leaned on annette for parenting decisions before she died and/or is really fucking haunted by the time(s) he didn't listen to her and it went wrong and now that she's gone he's just kinda floundering and trying to toss the baton for parental decisionmaking onto anyone else, including, at one point, the literal teenage girl who shows up to help taylor run away from his house. insane ! also. thinking about how taylor says her grandma (maternal) never liked her dad. that man would literally rather talk to the mother of his dead wife, who hates him, and take her advice than go 'yeah ithink im gonna keep using my own judgement for compassion towards my daughter' fucking worst anyones ever done it this guy has the spine of a twizzler it's great

...and then doing All That & severely triggering taylor's trauma from the bullying in the process completely shatters any trust he had built with her, catalyzing her realization that she wants to be able to have meaningful relationships with the undersiders & leading to her running away to leave with them! i don't think anyone can say for sure whether or not danny Not doing this would have led to taylor turning the undersiders in before realizing that she would regret it, but oh fucking boy does he make SURE she doesn't go thru with it. and it would be bad to call the cops on a bunch of systematically neglected traumatized teenagers regardless of how much crime they're doing so you know what maybe we should actually thank danny for his Shit Parenting stopping taylor from being a narc

i just saw a "be like taylor be a voter" poster and my first thought was "Taylor Hebert... i wonder if taylor would endorse voting..." then my second thought was that it wasn't taylor hebert it was the name of some random invented made up example girl who we should be like and only on my third thought did i realize it meant taylor swift. im the exact inverse of those people who come onto my obvious fandom posts to go "omg i thought you meant taylor swift"

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

The Three Commandments

The thing about writing is this: you gotta start in medias res, to hook your readers with action immediately. But readers aren’t invested in people they know nothing about, so start with a framing scene that instead describes the characters and the stakes. But those scenes are boring, so cut straight to the action, after opening with a clever quip, but open in the style of the story, and try not to be too clever in the opener, it looks tacky. One shouldn’t use too many dialogue tags, it’s distracting; but you can use ‘said’ a lot, because ‘said’ is invisible, but don’t use ‘said’ too much because it’s boring and uninformative – make sure to vary your dialogue tags to be as descriptive as possible, except don’t do that because it’s distracting, and instead rely mostly on ‘said’ and only use others when you need them. But don’t use ‘said’ too often; you should avoid dialogue tags as much as you possibly can and indicate speakers through describing their reactions. But don’t do that, it’s distracting.

Having a viewpoint character describe themselves is amateurish, so avoid that. But also be sure to describe your viewpoint character so that the reader can picture them. And include a lot of introspection, so we can see their mindset, but don’t include too much introspection, because it’s boring and takes away from the action and really bogs down the story, but also remember to include plenty of introspection so your character doesn’t feel like a robot. And adverbs are great action descriptors; you should have a lot of them, but don’t use a lot of adverbs; they’re amateurish and bog down the story. And

The reason new writers are bombarded with so much outright contradictory writing advice is that these tips are conditional. It depends on your style, your genre, your audience, your level of skill, and what problems in your writing you’re trying to fix. Which is why, when I’m writing, I tend to focus on what I call my Three Commandments of Writing. These are the overall rules; before accepting any writing advice, I check whether it reinforces one of these rules or not. If not, I ditch it.

1: Thou Shalt Have Something To Say

What’s your book about?

I don’t mean, describe to me the plot. I mean, why should anybody read this? What’s its thesis? What’s its reason for existence, from the reader’s perspective? People write stories for all kinds of reasons, but things like ‘I just wanted to get it out of my head’ are meaningless from a reader perspective. The greatest piece of writing advice I ever received was you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them. So why are the words there? What point are you trying to make?

The purpose of your story can vary wildly. Usually, you’ll be exploring some kind of thesis, especially if you write genre fiction. Curse Words, for example, is an exploration of self-perpetuating power structures and how aiming for short-term stability and safety can cause long-term problems, as well as the responsibilities of an agitator when seeking to do the necessary work of dismantling those power structures. Most of the things in Curse Words eventually fold back into exploring this question. Alternately, you might just have a really cool idea for a society or alien species or something and want to show it off (note: it can be VERY VERY HARD to carry a story on a ‘cool original concept’ by itself. You think your sky society where they fly above the clouds and have no rainfall and have to harvest water from the clouds below is a cool enough idea to carry a story: You’re almost certainly wrong. These cool concept stories work best when they are either very short, or working in conjunction with exploring a theme). You might be writing a mystery series where each story is a standalone mystery and the point is to present a puzzle and solve a fun mystery each book. Maybe you’re just here to make the reader laugh, and will throw in anything you can find that’ll act as framing for better jokes. In some genres, readers know exactly what they want and have gotten it a hundred times before and want that story again but with different character names – maybe you’re writing one of those. (These stories are popular in romance, pulp fantasy, some action genres, and rather a lot of types of fanfiction).

Whatever the main point of your story is, you should know it by the time you finish the first draft, because you simply cannot write the second draft if you don’t know what the point of the story is. (If you write web serials and are publishing the first draft, you’ll need to figure it out a lot faster.)

Once you know what the point of your story is, you can assess all writing decisions through this lens – does this help or hurt the point of my story?

2: Thou Shalt Respect Thy Reader’s Investment

Readers invest a lot in a story. Sometimes it’s money, if they bought your book, but even if your story is free, they invest time, attention, and emotional investment. The vast majority of your job is making that investment worth it. There are two factors to this – lowering the investment, and increasing the payoff. If you can lower your audience’s suspension of disbelief through consistent characterisation, realistic (for your genre – this may deviate from real realism) worldbuilding, and appropriately foreshadowing and forewarning any unexpected rules of your world. You can lower the amount of effort or attention your audience need to put into getting into your story by writing in a clear manner, using an entertaining tone, and relying on cultural touchpoints they understand already instead of pushing them in the deep end into a completely unfamiliar situation. The lower their initial investment, the easier it is to make the payoff worth it.

Two important notes here: one, not all audiences view investment in the same way. Your average reader views time as a major investment, but readers of long fiction (epic fantasies, web serials, et cetera) often view length as part of the payoff. Brandon Sanderson fans don’t grab his latest book and think “Uuuugh, why does it have to be so looong!” Similarly, some people like being thrown in the deep end and having to put a lot of work into figuring out what the fuck is going on with no onboarding. This is one of science fiction’s main tactics for forcibly immersing you in a future world. So the valuation of what counts as too much investment varies drastically between readers.

Two, it’s not always the best idea to minimise the necessary investment at all costs. Generally, engagement with art asks something of us, and that’s part of the appeal. Minimum-effort books do have their appeal and their place, in the same way that idle games or repetitive sitcoms have their appeal and their place, but the memorable stories, the ones that have staying power and provide real value, are the ones that ask something of the reader. If they’re not investing anything, they have no incentive to engage, and you’re just filling in time. This commandment does not exist to tell you to try to ask nothing of your audience – you should be asking something of your audience. It exists to tell you to respect that investment. Know what you’re asking of your audience, and make sure that the ask is less than the payoff.

The other way to respect the investment is of course to focus on a great payoff. Make those characters socially fascinating, make that sacrifice emotionally rending, make the answer to that mystery intellectually fulfilling. If you can make the investment worth it, they’ll enjoy your story. And if you consistently make their investment worth it, you build trust, and they’ll be willing to invest more next time, which means you can ask more of them and give them an even better payoff. Audience trust is a very precious currency and this is how you build it – be worth their time.

But how do you know what your audience does and doesn’t consider an onerous investment? And how do you know what kinds of payoff they’ll find rewarding? Easy – they self-sort. Part of your job is telling your audience what to expect from you as soon as you can, so that if it’s not for them, they’ll leave, and if it is, they’ll invest and appreciate the return. (“Oh but I want as many people reading my story as possible!” No, you don’t. If you want that, you can write paint-by-numbers common denominator mass appeal fic. What you want is the audience who will enjoy your story; everyone else is a waste of time, and is in fact, detrimental to your success, because if they don’t like your story then they’re likely to be bad marketing. You want these people to bounce off and leave before you disappoint them. Don’t try to trick them into staying around.) Your audience should know, very early on, what kind of an experience they’re in for, what the tone will be, the genre and character(s) they’re going to follow, that sort of thing. The first couple of chapters of Time to Orbit: Unknown, for example, are a micro-example of the sorts of mysteries that Aspen will be dealing with for most of the book, as well as a sample of their character voice, the way they approach problems, and enough of their background, world and behaviour for the reader to decide if this sort of story is for them. We also start the story with some mildly graphic medical stuff, enough physics for the reader to determine the ‘hardness’ of the scifi, and about the level of physical risk that Aspen will be putting themselves at for most of the book. This is all important information for a reader to have.

If you are mindful of the investment your readers are making, mindful of the value of the payoff, and honest with them about both from the start so that they can decide whether the story is for them, you can respect their investment and make sure they have a good time.

3: Thou Shalt Not Make Thy World Less Interesting

This one’s really about payoff, but it’s important enough to be its own commandment. It relates primarily to twists, reveals, worldbuilding, and killing off storylines or characters. One mistake that I see new writers make all the time is that they tank the engagement of their story by introducing a cool fun twist that seems so awesome in the moment and then… is a major letdown, because the implications make the world less interesting.

“It was all a dream” twists often fall into this trap. Contrary to popular opinion, I think these twists can be done extremely well. I’ve seen them done extremely well. The vast majority of the time, they’re very bad. They’re bad because they take an interesting world and make it boring. The same is true of poorly thought out, shocking character deaths – when you kill a character, you kill their potential, and if they’re a character worth killing in a high impact way then this is always a huge sacrifice on your part. Is it worth it? Will it make the story more interesting? Similarly, if your bad guy is going to get up and gloat ‘Aha, your quest was all planned by me, I was working in the shadows to get you to acquire the Mystery Object since I could not! You have fallen into my trap! Now give me the Mystery Object!’, is this a more interesting story than if the protagonist’s journey had actually been their own unmanipulated adventure? It makes your bad guy look clever and can be a cool twist, but does it mean that all those times your protagonist escaped the bad guy’s men by the skin of his teeth, he was being allowed to escape? Are they retroactively less interesting now?

Whether these twists work or not will depend on how you’ve constructed the rest of your story. Do they make your world more or less interesting?

If you have the audience’s trust, it’s permissible to make your world temporarily less interesting. You can kill off the cool guy with the awesome plan, or make it so that the Chosen One wasn’t actually the Chosen One, or even have the main character wake up and find out it was all a dream, and let the reader marinate in disappointment for a little while before you pick it up again and turn things around so that actually, that twist does lead to a more interesting story! But you have to pick it up again. Don’t leave them with the version that’s less interesting than the story you tanked for the twist. The general slop of interest must trend upward, and your sacrifices need to all lead into the more interesting world. Otherwise, your readers will be disappointed, and their experience will be tainted.

Whenever I’m looking at a new piece of writing advice, I view it through these three rules. Is this plot still delivering on the book’s purpose, or have I gone off the rails somewhere and just stared writing random stuff? Does making this character ‘more relateable’ help or hinder that goal? Does this argument with the protagonists’ mother tell the reader anything or lead to any useful payoff; is it respectful of their time? Will starting in medias res give the audience an accurate view of the story and help them decide whether to invest? Does this big twist that challenges all the assumptions we’ve made so far imply a world that is more or less interesting than the world previously implied?

Hopefully these can help you, too.

Back in July, I had a problem: I had finished Nona the Ninth and realised I had no idea when Alecto the Ninth would come out

I didn't feel like picking out a new novel to read every 10 days or so, so I decided I'd pick one very long book and hope it tided me over until a release date was given

So on the 19th of July 2024, I started reading Worm, and a bit over three months later, I read the final line of the final chapter on October 23rd

I have had many thoughts about this book while reading it, and since I haven't had access to the internet for the last two week, I've also had many thoughts after reading it, mainly thoughts where I was drafting this post (despite thinking about my draft for five days, now that I'm finally writing it, I can feel the whole thing fading from my mind)

TL;DR: I genuinely think the ending didn't happen

Yes, the whole "It was all a dream/purgatory" angle is very cliche, but it's a very common theory in the Worm fandom for a reason (one of those reasons being Wildbow jokingly saying Taylor's in purgatory)

For me, that reason is that Taylor is way too okay with the state of her life after Golden Morning

Throughout the book, Taylor has a consistent pattern of behaviour where she sees a problem or has a goal, decides on a means of realising that goal/fixing the problem, with anyone who attempts to get in her way being treated as part of the problem, allowing her to more easily justify using ever escalating acts of incredible violence to terrorise them into either helping her or getting out of her way

Taylor, by her own admission lives for conflict because for her things make the most sense when she has a very clear target to oppose and doesn't have to think past the near future because in the present the target is actively trying to kill her, and there are people who simply refuse to listen to her when she talks about ways to deal with the problem

Her, I dunno, ascension(?) to Khepri is just that pattern of behaviour taken to its logical extreme: the problems are Scion and people refusing to fight Scion or not working together, so she resolves the issue by resolving the issue of their free will and makes them fight in concert to bully Golden Space Jesus into killing himself

Despite the Speck arc being 174 pages of Taylor's brain being formatted by a fragment of an alien god as it remove any aspect of her personality that doesn't either facilitate acts of violence or think of new ways to commit acts of violence, Taylor has never been more herself than in that moment, hell, when she finishes scouring the multiverse for capes to turn into superpowered people puppets for her slave swarm and faces down the most powerful being to walk the earth as she realises she's beginning to forget where her mother's grave is, she stops to think about how nice it is that everyone is finally working together for once, just like she always wanted

The kind of person who does that to herself and others simply is not going to be able to adjust to civilian life, where she's going to continue to be exposed to the systemic failings that frustrated her into being Skitter in the first place only now without the tools or resources she used to effect change back on her Earth

At best, Interlude: End Taylor would be horribly depressed, and at worst feel like she's been placed in her own personal hell

For this reason, I genuinely think Contessa realised there was no coming back from what Taylor had become and decided to end her there, with the final interlude being a dying dream cooked up by her shard or something just before their connection was fatally severed, and honestly, I'm completely fine with that cause it feels like a natural conclusion for her arc, even if dream theories are always a bit contentious