Wildbow's Pact- discussion thread

[LaCroix]

Well, you pushed the king off the throne.

Now try to keep it.

[Raw Shark]

Well, you pushed the king off the throne.

Now try to keep it.

Yeah, I remember that game getting a little ugly sometimes when I was a kid.

[LaCroix]

Well, you pushed the king off the throne.

Now try to keep it.

Yeah, I remember that game getting a little ugly sometimes when I was a kid.

Now add weapons, magic, mythical creatures, bogeymen, and demons...

[Raw Shark]

Spoiler

[madd0ct0r]

I disagree

[Alkaloid]

Huh. Well I didn't see that coming.

I disagree

With what?

[madd0ct0r]

With rawsharks thoughts. A day or more two to let everyone catch up and I'll be more elaborate

[Raw Shark]

With rawsharks thoughts. A day or more two to let everyone catch up and I'll be more elaborate

Spoiler

I'm more sad that it's over than at the way it ended. Blake got about the happiest ending that he could've, I just enjoyed the setting and was hoping for more from it even though I knew the shark was thoroughly jumped and that Wildbow was wrapping it up sooner than Worm when the two biggest threats established in the first plot arc got combined into a single antagonist without an even worse replacement at least name-dropped.

[LaCroix]

I'd have loved a more elaborate ending, too, but for wildbow standards, we got a golden handshake.

It feels fitting that nobody(even we) knows about hat happened to the town that fell into the abyss. And I feel happy that Blake can ride motorcycles again.

[Raw Shark]

[snip] It feels fitting that nobody(even we) knows about hat happened to the town that fell into the abyss. And I feel happy that Blake can ride motorcycles again.

Not to mention literally flying, and fucking with his pet peeve, careless motorists. Considering that his original destiny was DOOM DOOM DOOM FOREVAH he got off pretty light.

I picture Jacob's Bell becoming a new "neighborhood" of the Abyss. It looks like a small town in Ontario, but everything feels wrong. It's always deep winter, random strangers on the street look as crazybadnuts as a Hanson Brother, and you risk either wearing yourself out slogging through hip-deep snow or breaking something slipping on ice every second that you are upright and in motion, and freezing to death when you're not. Bogeymen created here tend to resemble practitioners in their behavior, if they weren't practitioners previously, and several of its Bogeys are very territorial, especially the rage-fueled, dualistic entity that occupies the part that looks like Hillsglade Forest, and the residents of the north side powerful enough to survive the fall but not powerful or slippery enough to escape it. Big Bad Kathy finds her way here from the Library eventually, if somebody doesn't summon her. She runs the only functioning restaurant in the Abyss, where they serve the weak to the strong in exchange for services or trinkets.

[madd0ct0r]

With rawsharks thoughts. A day or more two to let everyone catch up and I'll be more elaborate

Spoiler

I'm more sad that it's over than at the way it ended. Blake got about the happiest ending that he could've, I just enjoyed the setting and was hoping for more from it even though I knew the shark was thoroughly jumped and that Wildbow was wrapping it up sooner than Worm when the two biggest threats established in the first plot arc got combined into a single antagonist without an even worse replacement at least name-dropped.

So the way I see it was Pact was wildbow's first work as a writer. It wasn't until near the end of Worm he was actually starting to make enough money to support himself, and his own epilogue to Pact talks about how this year has been him learning more about schedules, time management and expectation management then necessarily word smithing.

Pact is incredibly self concious. The engine of the world, the idea of the spirits that infuse everything issuing magic based on karma, connections and theatrics replicates the effect of having hundreds of comments of feedback every few days on the latest piece of writing. Only a few of these comments are critical in the technical sense. Far more talk about characters as though they were real. Even in the comments section, the audience's disbelief is still suspended and this constant low level chatter about character's motivations and actions is reflected in the ebb and flow of spirits in Pact. Wildbow even has some of his character's talk dismissively of the spirits as 'having short memories and poor ability to link events. If you locked a man in a room with noose, they probably wouldn't apportion the blame correctly.' He values his audience, but he dosen't necessarily approve of all their opinions, or enjoy having to include fan service where it isn't part of the larger story

The larger story is another key thing. Pact's system of magic is much more nebulous then in Worm. People like arranging and organizing and thinking about complicated systems, this entire forum was built on it, but so is a huge amount of the attraction of both Worm and Pact. Look at Rawshark trading ideas on implements in this very thread. The implement, the familiar and the demense. Only one of those was fairly clear cut, and that's the one people are playing with. Wildbow clearly understood the attraction of the system since he reintroduced it after Worm, and the Demense and familiar could easily have gone down the same route had he not decided to, from very early on in the story to blur the edges of categories and fight against this attempt to pidgeon hole everything. It's stifling for a creative writer, and I suspect that's an underlying thing behind his 'no genres, just take a look' approach to Twig. It was an experiment to see how far he could carry the audience away from spirit pokemon, and one I think he feels failed. Twig as a setting naturally lends itself to pseudo-scientific rules that drive the pattern seeking brains crazy in trying to get to the bottom of them.

Layers within layers is another variant of that, and one Worm was notorious for, and one Pact was notorious for hinting at, promising and never quite delivering on. Part of that is time. Pact is a lot shorter and builds a more complex world then the alt-modern superhero scape of Worm. The imagery of Faysal (worst angel ever) as wheels within wheels is a bit of a call back to the complex underlying rules I suspect Wildbow formulated, but lost interest in showing. Faysal himself is quickly reduced to a teleportation plot device at the finale (we've seen that before) and the complex interactions of humans, devils and angels is simply swallowed up by the Abyss, the only part of the system that was fleshed out in time for the conclusion. It's sad we didn't get to see more of it, as I think that's where the heart of Pact was, rather then the bickering practitioners.

[madd0ct0r]

I'm trying to get a 'evolve an other' game going over on reddit. any takers?
http://au.reddit.com/r/EvoGames/comment ... ernatural/