[Discord] LHC:
by the way in American slang “buzz” is used a lot to refer to public spread of information, which is what happens to the Empire 😛
also a siren sounds kind of like buzzing I guess
Ah, yeah… I’ve been thinking more along the line of rumors, which implies a lot more uncertainty and somewhat more hushed tones, but that makes sense.
bookwyrmbaneoftheplothole:
So now that we’ve established that everyone is going to come together to fight the Endbringer, who out of the characters we’ve seen so far do you expect to show up to defend Brockton Bay?
The Undersiders are a given, of course, but other than them…
- A bunch of Wards, Protectorate and New Wave members (the New Wave members that got introduced in Buzz will probably have a more important role in Arc 8).
- The Travelers (being nomadic, they may not have as tight a bond with Brockton Bay as most characters we know, but they work for Coil and, assuming he’s been honest about his goal, he has a strong interest in keeping the city intact), Circus, Roadblock, Coil’s soldiers.
- Faultline’s crew will probably only help if paid for it, though I’m sure there’s plenty of people willing to pay (Coil, perhaps?).
- The Protectorate may call in some big shots from out of town, maybe even some of the biggest shots, like a Triumvirate member or two.
- I seem to recall there being at least one more hero team around. *does some rereading of his own blog*Ah yes, from chapter 2.2, “the Guild” was mentioned [here] alongside New Wave. We haven’t seen anything else about them yet – maybe it’s time for them to become relevant?
- The Empire may or may not contribute – it might be divided, with some members contributing (in some cases so they have some claim to honor now that their identities are out). Tattle might even be able to convince Purity to help in order to repay the Undersiders for helping her get Aster back, or Purity might decide to help for the sake of Aster’s home.
- Hell, maybe Skidmark and his gang of drug addicts will be of some help. Maybe.
- I’d imagine there’ll be some new characters. Some of the opportunities I’ve mentioned above – Protectorate members from out of town, the Guild – but we might also get to meet some of the solo heroes and villains in the city.
Basically, pretty much everyone with the decency to. Obviously if that many people show up, we’ll probably focus on some a lot more than others, in which case I’m thinking the New Wave members from the Battle of Light are prime suspects, as well as any newcomers.
lastthingsfirst:
www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/classic-novel/ is this you?
Hah! …yes.
(#the character even looks a little like me)
Megalovania might be appropriate Endbringer music. 🙂
Let’s be real, Megalovania is always appropriate. 😉
…
okay that’s a lie I can think of plenty of situations where it’d be inappropriate as hell to play it
but you know, for epic battles and such.
That said, I think we should also consider Carne Vale.
“Alec: Hufflepuff. For now.” Please keep us abreast of any changes.
I will.
Honestly, the main reason I put him in Hufflepuff was that I don’t feel like I know him well enough to put him anywhere else yet. He ended up in Hufflepuff because of Hufflepuff’s willingness to “take the rest”, not because of the core values of the house.
Unlike Rachel, but apparently Wildbow doesn’t agree with my assignment on that one, which I’ll look into in the next post.
Wildbow didn’t do the Hogwarts house thing for all the characters but he did do it for Rachel, and his opinion is that she would be in Ravenclaw. Shark can get you his full explanation from the WoG repository, nothing spoilery about it.
Interesting. Sharks said she’d give it to me only if I asked, and I did, so let’s take a look at this.
I did skim the top of it when she sent it to me, and I have to say, I wasn’t expecting the format.
“Well,” Hagrid said. He seemed a bit put out, but he wasn’t in a position to say so. “Well. I’ve never seen anything take to, well, anything quite so fast as Fluffy there’s taken to you.”
Welcome to the official Worm Hogwarts AU, it seems!
I love the idea of Rachel and Hagrid bonding over their appreciation of monstrous dogs, and Fluffy taking to Rachel.
Even with her stocky build, which was closer to Hagrid’s body type than the average eleven year old’s,
Hehe. Reminds me of that one Tumblr post that tried to make sense of how Hagrid was described… hang on, let me see if I can find it.
Ah yes, here it is.
(Bear in mind the smaller figure is Harry, who’s small for his age.)
Rachel struggled to keep her feet as three massive heads fought for her attention. A tongue licked the side of her head, and her hair, which had already been sticking up in virtually every direction, was left even messier.
D’aw.
“Uh huh,” Rachel said. “Good boy. Boys. Whatever. You can stop now. Gotta- Unf. Gotta get to my room, or the stupid painting won’t let me back in. Stupid older kids yell at me if I sleep on the stairs.”
This was written before Deathly Hallows came out, right? The Ravenclaw common room doesn’t have a painting on the door, it has a knocker that asks you a riddle.
…
I imagine that would infuriate Rachel so much.
Hagrid eyed the girl’s house colors dubiously.
…or maybe this was actually taken into account and Rachel is trying to pretend she’s a Gryffindor?
She reached up, scratching the beast’s jowl, rubbing it against its teeth. The other heads knocked her this way and that, fighting for the same treatment. “He needs bones.”
“What?” Hagrid asked, surprised.
Ahh, Hagrid’s being out-dogownered.
Yeah, sure, that’s a word.
“He needs bones!” Rachel said, very loud.
“No, lass. I’m not deaf, though I might be if you keep that up. Why are you saying he needs them?”
“His teeth are bothering him.”
Chew toy!
He gave her an appreciating look, which was just about the only thing he could do, without either giving up the secret to handling Fluffy or making the girl’s situation worse.
Honestly, I feel like Rachel might figure out the secret on her own.
I mean, not by accidentally playing music nearby Fluffy (not really a Rachel thing to do, it seems), just by her innate understanding of dogs.
“Aye, girl, you’re right. I’m just surprised you figured it out. Hard to get anything big and strong enough for a creature like him.”
“Whatever. Oof. I need to go now. Help me make him stop?”
Hagrid sighed.
Maybe the girl wouldn’t figure it out.
Nah, if you actually do it in front of her she’ll notice it immediately, I think.
“Cover yer ears,” he said.
She managed.
He did the usual, humming the same song he’d used to lull Fluffy to sleep when Fluffy had been just a pup.
He expected to have to explain, curious looks, or something of the sort.
Instead, the girl just collected her scattered things, wiped her spit-slick hair down, and opened the door to go.
Hah! She doesn’t care.
(Doesn’t mean she hasn’t figured it out, though.)
“Don’t get so turned around again, y’hear?” Hagrid said.
Kinda sounds like this happened as she accidentally wound up in the Fluffy room and Hagrid happened to be there. Or arrive there later to find his pet being affectionate with one of the first-year students.
“Uh huh,” the girl replied. “Bye Fluffy. See you soon.”
Hagrid blinked a few times. By the time he processed the idea, the girl was already gone, feet clumping on stairs.
Hehe, of course she can’t stay away.
He poked his head out the door, ready to tell her not to, but his heart wasn’t in it. He had his fondness for animals, and as Dumbledore had mused, the only thing that might hold an equal space in Hagrid’s heart might be his desire to pass on that fondness.
Yeah, it’s absolutely something Hagrid can relate to.
He’d been a little caught off guard, seeing the girl, but talents were talents, and the House prized individuality. Little Rachel Clegane was definitely an individual.
Rachel Clegane? That’s interesting. Why would she have a different surname in this AU? Hm…
He saw her stop at a fork in the hallway.
She turned around, clearly irritated.
“I know my way around a city, or outdoors, but this stupid place is a stupid maze,” she said, her voice too loud, carrying all the way to him.
Hehe, yeah, Hogwarts is kind of a terrible place for people like Rachel, who get easily annoyed by unnecessary complication. It’s not even just a stupid maze, it’s a stupid ever-changing maze.
“You want to go right, lassie,” he said.
At least today.
She looked one way, then the other.
She raised one hand, counting on her fingers.
“Point,” he said.
She pointed down one hallway.
Does she not know her right and left? Or are there too many ways to the right?
“Yeh,” he said. “You’ll find house Ravenclaw that way. Don’t get turned around now.”
Easier said than done.
And there’s the Ravenclaw bit. At this point, the text seems to switch to more direct commentary by Wildbow:
House Ravenclaw is defined by the element of air. Rachel is itinerant, free ranging, definitely an individual. The house favors individuality, and tends to take good care of eccentrics, of which Rachel is one, even if she’s less a mad scientist eccentric and more an oddly shaped peg demanding an oddly shaped hole to fit into. She’s dedicated and deeply interested when it comes to her particular pursuits.
Hm, yeah, I can get behind this. It’s a different approach to house sorting than what I was working with, but equally valid. Honestly makes more sense, really.
Houses tend to get pigeonholed, but just like Neville and Ron weren’t really archetypically brave (though they came into their own with the right company), the Ravenclaws don’t have to fit a bookworm archetype.
True that.
They don’t all get top grades in every class, but rather, each finds their individual areas of expertise – for Luna Lovegood, it was the esoteric stuff. For Rachel, it’s the care of certain magical creatures. Given a chance to grow, and the right group, she can relate the care of dogs to the care of other magical creatures, she can find her niche in the group, when the Ravenclaws gather in study groups to learn, and they gather the best students in each given area, Rachel is an automatic invite.
I’m very much liking this take on Ravenclaw House and Rachel.
How does the hat sort? It looks to the student’s wishes. What does the student really need? Neville needed the right people to grow as a person and get over his deeper traumas (the loss of his parents foremost among them), while Rachel needs acceptance, with Acceptance being one of Ravenclaw’s chief virtues.
Honestly, Acceptance also seems to be a Hufflepuff thing, at least if you go back to the founders. According to the Hat, each founder wanted children with specific virtues, and while Hufflepuff also had core values, she was willing to take anyone who didn’t fit in the other houses too. And while the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs sort of blend together for me in my memory of the books sometimes, I seem to recall background Ravenclaws often being more judgmental? I don’t know, maybe it was the other way around.
Still, Acceptance being a Hufflepuff thing doesn’t prevent it from also being a Ravenclaw thing, and maybe it’s more in the forefront for sorting into Ravenclaw.
Anyway, yeah, I do really appreciate Wildbow’s take on it. I’ll have to keep this kind of thinking in mind for future house assignments I do.
About mentioning Lovecraftian horrors but never reading them, don’t worry, I think 99% of guys talking about them didn’t. The closest I got to reading a Lovecraft book was this scene and Warhammer 40k’s Warp
Yeah, “Lovecraftian horror” has really surpassed actual Lovecraftian literature and become a trope/genre of its own.
The spiked traps were used a lot in the Vietnam war, there were even instances of traps being coated with feces so if someone walked out alive, they would get some terrible infections
Yikes.
krix pls, it’s not karahindba, it’s karahindiba. this tiny and meaningless thing is RUINING my experience /overdramaticness
Worry not! I caught myself doing that after a few posts of it, and went back after the liveblog ended to fix it. 🙂
(I don’t usually edit anything before the latest quote in my regular liveblog posts, but fixing typos and misspellings is fair play.)
Miss Militia is kurdish. Kurdistan’s primary language is kurdish, not turkish. Kurdish individuals are often multilingual, but turkish is not he mother tongue.
+
Kurdish people do not fucking speak Turkish dude. That’s one of the things that caused the entire issue.
+
To clarify on the previous thing, assuming Miss Militia would speak Turkish because she’s Kurdish is literally ignoring why the Kurds rebelled against Turkey in the first place. They tunneled over political and cultural discrimination. They rebelled over Kurdish being made illegal. It’s perfectly reasonable for a Kurdish person born in Turkey to not speak Turkish if her parents were part of those seeking independence.
I didn’t know this until Sharks let me know partway through the session. I know a total of two Kurdish people, both of whom speak Turkish and rarely if ever talked with me around about the conflict, so I had no reason to believe that Kurdish people in Turkey wouldn’t know Turkish.
Also. The Turkish-Kurd conflict took place mostly in Turkey. It was Kurdish people in Turkey, rebelling against Turkey rule because they were being politically and culturally oppressed. It makes perfect sense for her village to have those trees in a village nearby because the village is almost certainly in Turkey despite being a village of Kurdish people.
I take it you’re using “Turkey” in a way that excludes the Kurdish part of it, right?
The possibility of a Kurdish village in western Turkey did occur to me, just very late.
Looking up Kurdistan pine trees indicates that there are pine trees in Kurdistan. Mostly in mountain areas, might just be too small a pocket to indicate on the map
+
I think there’s some slight overlap in northern Kurdistan, near the Armenian border.
+
[submission] vegetalss4:
The mighty Kurdish Pinetree, note it’s awe-inspiring realness ;-P
Fair enough. I was operating off a global-scaled Wikipedia map with no borders for Kurdistan on it.
thats-rough-buddy:
Don’t forget that from 1982 onwards, things didn’t necessarily play like they did in our earth
True. The existence of parahumans might’ve caused the Turkish-Kurd conflict to take a different course.
I’m pretty sure Miss Militia triggered in a conflict that didn’t happen in our timeline because things butterflied post-Scion-showing-up.
Well, we know this wasn’t some different conflict that started because of parahumans unless they were around before 1982 and unknown to the public. The war definitely started in 1978 (it had already been going for seven years by the time of her trigger event, which was twenty-six years before present day, which is 2011) and involved Turkey, which lines up perfectly with the Turkish-Kurd conflict.
Surprised at how little you talked about Miss Militia’s vision during her trigger event. Would like to hear your thoughts on those.
Hm…
Karahindiba is kind of a mystery, but maybe if I take a step back from Hana, it might be closer to an answer. Hannah kept indicating in her narration that she thought something like that might have happened to others without them remembering it, though at first I thought she was talking about the soldiers and other children present. But then she asked Dragon if she remembered it, and maybe I should’ve put more thought into that moment than I did.
It seems like Miss Militia currently thinks Karahindiba (or whatever sent it, or its species, or something like that) is the source of parahuman abilities, and that all parahumans experience it but then forget. But because Miss Militia’s power involves separating a part of her psyche from herself, she remembers.
I don’t know if she’s right about that, but whatever Karahindiba is, I got the distinct feeling that it was something real, even if it only manifests in people’s minds.
…heh, if it does happen to every parahuman, Hana certainly got a better view of it than, say, Taylor.
Which characters are your favourites so far? And which characters are you hoping to learn more about?
I suck at picking favorites in general, but I do like Lisa a lot. Taylor’s pretty great too.
As for characters I’d like to learn about, Alec is a priority. We’ve learned his backstory, what used to drive him, but I’d like to see more clearly what drives him nowadays. Hopefully the reveal of his backstory will allow that to happen over the next few Arcs.
I also wouldn’t say no thanks to more about the Wards.
a-wandering-intern:
Who do you think Dragon is? What do you think their powers/role is?
Dragon is the personification of the Interludes.
No, I’m kidding, but look: We first heard of her in Interlude 5, we met her in Interlude 6 and now she was in Interlude 7 too.
Anyway, here’s what I know: Dragon is a high-profile Tinker, considered the best by Bakuda, though her specialty is unknown so far. Security measures, maybe? She’s the creator and overseer of the Birdcage, but she also seems to have other high-standing roles in the Protectorate judging by Interlude 7. She’s also been known to make Tinkertech armor, damaged examples of which have been stolen by the Dragonslayers and used for villainous purposes.
She also might only exist in video form. :p
[essay in ask form]
Arc 7 is a very different sort of arc from the last few, and one that I, personally, was only able to appreciate in retrospect. As you’ve seen, most arcs obviously have some amount of action, but that doesn’t mean the action is always the climax. The real climax of Arc 7 was Taylor’s falling out with the Undersiders in 7.12. That’s really what the whole arc, and even a lot of the earlier stuff, was building up to.
Arcs 3-6 were all basically escapism for Taylor. Being in the Undersiders was a fun way for her to get away from her shitty life, and the arcs are structured to reflect that. All four of those arcs start with Taylor hanging out with her new friend, and then build up to some big fight scene. The fights can get a little dangerous and scary at times, but the Undersiders always end up winning in a satisfying way. Above all else, they’re fun, because they’re fun for Taylor.
But then at the end of 6.9, things changed. Taylor finally Decided to make the villainy stuff her life, instead of just an escape from her life. Once she did that, the castle stuff started feeling like real life, instead of just an escape from it. Suddenly Coil isn’t such a great boss, the guy she has a crush on doesn’t feel the same way about her, she didn’t completely get away from the bullies, and the Undersiders aren’t really on the same page as her when innocent people are in danger.
There are fight scenes, but they don’t feel like the satisfying victories in earlier arcs, because they aren’t. The Undersiders didn’t win here, they just survived, and they were lucky to even do that. They were completely out of their league in this fight, and they suffered for it. This is one of the first times it really feels like an Undersider – or a dog – could die. This all leads up to 7.12 when Taylor finally realizes the Undersiders aren’t the people she thought they were.
And so Taylor finally realizes that she might have made the wrong Decision back in 6.9. That’s what the arc was building towards. The narrative leads you to expect that this arc will be like Arcs 3-6, because that’s what *Taylor* thinks it’s going to be like. Arc 7 was showing her that she was wrong about what being a supervillain would really be like.
Ooh, this is a very interesting analysis. I think you’re absolutely right – with this reading, the deviation of this Arc from the structure we’ve gotten used to (I got so used to the structure that I started treating some of it like it was almost as guaranteed as the Interludes between Arcs – take a look at my use of the phrase “combat section”, for instance, or my assumption that 7.11 would be the last chapter) becomes a masterful artistic touch to highlight the difference between – to paraphrase you – treating this as an escape from her life and treating it asher life.
It’s gonna be very interesting to see how whatever Taylor decides to do next affects the structure of the Arcs.
Lucky you: you need to work to wake up early. I haven’t managed to wake up past 6:30 AM for the last week or two. I just find myself wide-eyed, looking at my clock to confirm that yes: I am awake.
(in response to this postponement post)
For the last week or two, 6:30 AM is more like when I finally fall asleep.
I have Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (comes with my ADD), which makes it difficult to get to sleep at socially acceptable times, but at least when I’m forced to wake up at a consistent time in the morning, it helps keep it to like 2-4 AM instead of letting it slide out to 6:30, so that’s why I’m trying to force myself to do that despite not having an actual job (yet) that requires me to wake up right then.
[Discord] Sharks:
oh
one more thing
Someone told me to remind you of a post you made a while back.
“BTW, if your name is Colin, I apologise for involving you with the white supremists.”
Ahaha!
[Discord]
a deterministic universe may have no free will
but it has the illusion so who cares
Also thats what Worm is so i have an attachment to it
Whoops, I just stumbled across this comment in a conversation I wasn’t part of, on a Discord server that doesn’t usually talk about Worm or have a rule against it.
(It seems this person does read my blog, so I want to say: Don’t worry, I don’t blame you. It’s a small thing, and I’m not even sure you knew I was on that server.)
For whatever it’s worth, I was already getting this impression to some extent. I mean, we literally have a character who claims to be able to control fate.
On the other hand, we have a character who expresses the chance of different outcomes with incredible precision…
So yeah, I’m not entirely certain about this myself, but we’ll see how it develops.
[Discord]
LHC:
Hey, do you want a purely wordcount-based projection for what day you’ll finish Worm? 😀 I just completed the calculation, I don’t think it should be accurate because I think you’ve sped up over time, but it should still be funny 😀Krixwell:
Sure!LHC:
Based on the number of words you have read since you started on Thursday, January 19th of this year, you will finish Worm on Thursday, October 6, 2022. 😀Krixwell:
Huh, I guess the talk of “five years” a while back was fairly accurate, then 🙂
For future reference, the current date is November 20, 2017.
Krixwell Liveblogs 