Note how out of 8 Undersiders we lost 2, or exactly 25%, to Leviaphan

Cod dammit!

Wildbow bested me again…

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Homestuck spoilers below

Since Coil can somehow control timelines, then what he’d be in Homestuck terms? A male witch of time (imagine Coil dressed in which outfit) or a Lord of Time? What do you say?

Closer to a Lord. Way I see it, a Witch changes, whereas a Lord decides and embodies. Coil doesn’t so much change time as decide which of two timelines continues as the alpha. Compare with Lord English seemingly being the main decider of what constitutes the alpha timeline on a broader scale in Homestuck.

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So, they waited almost a week after the battle before putting up that monument. I think you can take it as pretty much a given that they double checked everything pretty carefully. The armbands are good, but no one thinks they’re prefect.

Yeah, that’s fair.

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[Discord]

Sharks:
oh oh one last thing
because leviathan is over
y’know how you had trouble predicting deaths?
that’s because WB rolled dice for each and every character in this fight
including taylor

Krixwell:
Oh damn

Sharks:
i won’t tell you if he ever does this again or not

Krixwell:
I guess Wormverse Einstein was wrong.

The ultimate seat-of-your-pants writing technique – making it random. Even for the focus character! Damn, Taylor dying would’ve been quite the development. As if it wasn’t already unclear where the story’s going from here.

(I’ll be going over my death predictions from the end of 8.1 in the Arc Thoughts post, by the way.)

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Heck, if I remember correctly, Wildbow was /planning/ on Taylor dying and gave her a low chance of survival. However, not only did she beat the odds, but /the character he was planning on replacing her with/ died instead.

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IIRC the plan was actually for Taylor to die and Aegis to be the new protagonist. Whoops!

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To add on the “death by dice roll” reveal… characters actually had modifiers on it depending on their place in the fight and their powers. Taylor had very low odds. Wildbow expected her to die. He had the story planned for her dying. And then she didn’t. Near-Invincible Alexandria almost died. No-weakpoint Aegis died. Squishy bug girl survived.

Ahaha! That’s RNG for ya!

I was rather surprised when Aegis died, but man, I can’t help but imagine Wildbow’s reaction. Especially if he rolled Aegis before Taylor and had to worry about both of them dying. Though given what I’ve been told before about Wildbow going through several protagonists before settling on Taylor, I’m sure he’d think of something.

I suppose this means that Wildbow had to go through a similar process as the one Taylor did in 8.8. “Well then, Taylor survived and Aegis didn’t. What do I do with her character now?”

…hm, I wonder, would following Aegis mean leaving the wreck of Brockton Bay behind? I mean, would they still go through with the rearrangements of the Wards in the wake of an Endbringer attack?

If so, it seems like Wildbow intended to get rid of both the current protag and the specific setting, and got stuck with both… for now, at least. Not gonna lie, I hope it stays that way, especially now that Taylor seems to have come up with a long-term objective.

In any case, I respect that Wildbow didn’t take his artistic license to ignore the dice when they fell in ways that didn’t match his plans.

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Hi krix! Love following your read through, such fun. What do you hope happens next? I’m leaving the question purposefully vague to hear whatever comes to mind.

Well, the exact future is very uncertain at the moment, but Taylor has set herself a long-term goal and may have come up with a plan for how to accomplish it, so I’m interested in seeing exactly what she has in mind.

I hope what she has in mind does involve the Undersiders. Especially Lisa… you may have noticed me describing her as my favorite character a couple times over the last few chapters, so of course I want the plot to continue involving her.

Relatedly, I’m interested in the restoration of Brockton Bay. I guess that doesn’t really fall under “happening next”, but it’s something I do want to see gradually happening over the course of future Arcs, even if just in the background.

As for the more immediate “next”, Interlude 8 (*grumble grumble*), I have no clue what I want to happen. I do have a feeling we might be checking in with the heroes – Legend, maybe, or perhaps Weld? (I want to get to know Weld… primarily because I lowkey ship him with Taylor, based only on the smile he gave her in 8.1.) A look into how New Wave are handling their losses would also be nice.

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“I’m sure there have been written some really good fanfics about this.” Also a lot of shitty ones. Sturgeon’s Law is in full force here. I do have some recs for good fics where Taylor joins the Wards and encounters Sophia, but I’m guessing you’re going to want me to hold on to them until after you’ve finished Worm.

Yeah, Sturgeon’s Law is a given…

As for when I can read fics, I guess you’ll have to come back in like half a decade, yeah. 😛

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The words “Heroic” and “Sacrifice” do show up in Armsmaster’s plan. Just not at all in the context you thought about.

Hah! True that.

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Have you watched Stranger Things? OMG, I didn’t knew this. Its so cool. Have you liked it? Would you watch season 3 too? Who was your favorite character(s)? So glad to meet another fan of this awesome TV series, especially one that I love to read his blog.

Let me put it like this: There was one planned liveblog session a while back that got postponed because I had been watching Stranger Things 2 with my parents for a few hours, and we wanted to watch more. I think that was announced around 8-9 PM… by 3:30 AM we had accidentally marathoned the entire season.

So yeah, Stranger Things is really good and you should all watch it if you can.

As for the last two questions: Yeah, I’m very much looking forward to whenever Stranger Things 3 comes out. And while my favorite kid is either Dustin or Max, my favorite character overall is definitely Joyce, especially in season 1.

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Hope you don’t mind this, but I’m a bit surprised that you’re a norwegian and you have such a great sense of humor. I always believe norwegians and scandinavian people in general to be some VERY serious people, if not the most serious people in the whole world.

Huh. That’s certainly not the impression I get looking at this culture from within… though maybe you’re basing that impression on southern Norwegian people? I do live in a part of Norway with a relatively informal culture.

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“Oh my cod she’s right they’re totally a bunch of drama royals” Yeah, pretty much. And that has affected the divide between a bunch of people dressing up and playing cops and robbers, and the more serious stuff like the endbringers is interesting. I think Armsmaster is an example of that balance and what happens when it is violated.

Absolutely. Tattletale’s theory seems to hold water, and it’s very interesting how it all works, and what happens when it doesn’t.

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So, they waited almost a week after the battle before putting up that monument. I think you can take it as pretty much a given that they double checked everything pretty carefully. The armbands are good, but no one thinks they’re prefect.

Yeah, that’s fair.

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Fun fact: Chapter 7.9, the fight with Empire Eighty Eight where coil saved the undersiders hides in? Wildbow wasn’t satisfied with the chapter so he rewrote it. The original chapter is the other reality mentioned.

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When 7.9 (the beginning of the Night/Fog fight) was originally published, Wildbow received negative feedback, agreed with it, and rewrote the chapter with substantial changes, taking down the old version after a few hours (essentially the only time he did that). He said in the comments after the update that “The previous chapter is canon in many respects.” In the comments of 8.8, Wildbow announced that the original 7.9 is, canonically, the alternate reality that Coil eventually scrapped.

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Interesting backstory regarding Coil’s use of his power in Arc 7: There were two times during the writing of Worm where Wildbow was so unhappy how a chapter turned out that he deleted it a few hours after posting and re-wrote it from scratch. The first one of these was 7.9. At the time, Wildbow made some cryptic comment that the original version was still “canon in many respects.” 8.8 makes it clear what he meant by that.

Huh, that’s a really neat way to tie that in with the story!

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Just to set the record straight, Flashbang, Narwhal and Night were all on the list of losses from 8.3, but were NOT on the monument. So it looks like they all made it. It’s hard to tell at this point for some of the others, because Taylor never looked at the A-E side of the monument. Also, if we assume that the first side also had 12 names, like the second and third sides, that puts the total death count at 46 capes plus 8 dogs (maybe 47 if Zigzag counts as two).

At least New Wave got to keep one of their men, I suppose.

Also, I didn’t think of the possibility of Zigzag possibly being one person with two civilian names until now. Besides other reasons why a cape may have had two civilian identities, maybe there were some multiple personality shenanigans going on there? It would kind of fit the name.

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Leviathan, from the Bible: Any hope of subduing it is false; the mere sight of it is overpowering. Who can strip off its outer coat? Who can penetrate its double coat of armor? When it rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before its thrashing. Arrows do not make it flee; slingstones are like chaff to it. It laughs at the rattling of the lance. It leaves a glistening wake behind it. It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all that are proud. Armmy never had a chance.

That’s all very accurate to the Leviathan in Worm… I’m kind of surprised to see that even the water echo reflects something from the original description.

I suppose it’s very fitting that the downfall of Armmaster, who practically embodies the sin of pride, would be tied to him pridefully attempting to kill an enemy based on a being specifically described as “king over all that are proud”.

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(Homestuck spoilers below)

I’d peg Coil as a Prince of Doom, of sorts, or a Prince of Time MAYBE. Probably Doom.

Hm. I have a hard time seeing Coil as a Prince (”destroy aspect and destroy through aspect, directly”, with a bonus tendency to lack the aspect) or a Hero of Doom (limitations, rules, restrictions, sacrifice)… I’d interpret a Prince of Doom as someone who breaks the rules of reality, and that doesn’t really describe Coil for me.

A Prince of Time would be someone who destroys time, death, progress and/or destruction, and destroys through those. I could sort of see part of this if you define picking a timeline as destroying the other, but I’m not quite sold on it.

That said, with how varied classpect theories are, you could be interpreting these very differently than I do.

Which brings me to another thing: Sharks has asked me to ask you all to either limit Homestuck asks, or provide explanations. Sharks hasn’t read Homestuck, so she has been forced to rely on friends to explain these things to her so she could judge whether they were spoilery to me. So if you could try to help her out on this, that would be appreciated.