![]() ![]() Other than a few glaring examples (Victoria and Amy in particular, many of the returning characters from Worm to some degree, and a few others), the characters are phenomenal. Wildbow’s biggest strength has always been character writing.One of the major themes, as supported by Victoria’s cop mentality, is “the carceral system is good □”.(it got edited to “do you have a preferred pronoun” but you can’t slip that by me John. The story hates addicts and describes them offensively every time one is onscreen, there’s a lot of homophobia in the way certain characters are written, he seemed to forget everything he knew about mental illness, there’s a good dose of racism and anti-semitism, and at one point one of the main characters asks a trans girl “do you have a pronoun”. Wildbow’s biases come out in full-force.Wildbow had no idea how to write a post-apocalyptic setting and it shows, so it’s a horrible mishmash of nonsense where he just decides what exists as it did and what doesn’t based on what makes it easier for him to write without any real sense of cohesion or sensibility. It starts off as a character flaw, but it feels like Wildbow started to forget that that’s what it was supposed to be and over time the world and plot sort of starts warping around her to vindicate her mindset, which isn’t enjoyable at all because it turns her into Guy Who Is Always Right which is never an interesting protagonist, especially since what she’s right about is stupid. Victoria’s cop mindset ends up just being more and more correct the more the story goes on.I don’t mind her being in the main team, she’s a character I enjoy disliking, but there are two other characters on her team who would make much more sense and be much more interesting as protagonists (those being Rain and Ashley). Her personality doesn’t lend itself nearly as well to being a POV character, her moral greyness and complexity starts out interesting but ends up flattening out into “she’s a cop and a hypocrite and never experiences any pushback or consequences for it”, and while she has a decently compelling character arc she doesn’t grow or change nearly as much as Taylor did. She might have been if she was written by the Wildbow who wrote Taylor, but that version of him was long gone by the point that he was writing Ward. To put this character backslide in relief, she has a new girlfriend in Ward, and you’d expect that to be a plot thread where she learns how to move past Victoria and learn to love someone else, but instead of that the girlfriend is in both personality and appearance just Victoria But Evil. Every single scene that Amy is in grinds the story to an absolute halt so that Victoria can spew vitriol at her and Wildbow can try desperately to go “See look!! This is a Bad Person who you Should Not Like and everyone who enjoys her should stop doing that now!” Amy also gets character-assassinated, because he removed all nuance from her to try to prevent people sympathizing with her and turned her into just an ontologically evil obsessive who doubles down on her quest for incest pussy with very little other depth or growth, which is very far from the tragic sympathetic antivillain she was in Worm. The above is especially glaringly prevalent with Amy. ![]() This was exacerbated by the fact that he was reading the comments as the story was being published and responding to critiques from the comments in the following chapters, which would already be a bad idea even if the people commenting didn’t have the worst takes out of the entire Worm fanbase. He has a fatal flaw where he gets really mad if people have opinions or interpretations of characters that aren’t exactly how he intended them to be read, so a huge part of Ward is him attempting to beat the reader over the head with “this is what you SHOULD think of this character”. The primary emotion driving Wildbow while he was writing Ward was spite.Hello!! Other people have made writeups about the issues with Ward before, but I’ll gladly give you a pros and cons list! ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |