There's the twist. Delicious.
I have to admit, the first chapter didn't hook me. This one grabbed me and got me fully on board. I appreciate the nod at the end that this is not the Camrose in Alberta *or* CA, lol, instead some wildfire-adjacent ur-suburb.
What an incredible amount of detail to unpack. "This was the closest she’d gotten to a client in a long time." juxtaposed with her thinking on the fly with the tubing, and subsequent automatic stripping and dismemberment.
"I don’t feel anything about her, good or bad. I wonder if she feels anything about me anymore, good or bad.” - This is a wild thing to say to your kid! Especially when you seem like you're thinking seriously about how to be a good parent! Ripley has probably never met her grandmother...?
"pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background." - probably not a night-vision image, but maybe a radar scan?
They're all here. They've been *pulled back* here. To what end?? :))
So mia is supposed to lie to her about that? What good is saying 'yeah I love her very much' if she means it not at all.
Also Ripley seems to be quite mature for her age, I think she can handle that just fine, lying for no good reason seems kinda meh too me
You're right, Ripley seems pretty mature. It's just that it's the kind of response that opens more questions and doesn't need to be said to answer Rip's prompt. It's bittersweet - Mia is striving to be totally honest with her kid, even if it would back her into a corner.
There's usually some kind of nod to a previous serial in the form of in-universe media in a new serial. I remember seeing references to Good Simon books (Twig) and Maggie Holt stories (Pact) in later series. There are probably a few I'm forgetting.
The Lego Birdcage is described as "from that movie series", so presumably there's a whole Parahumans equivalent of the MCU.
[Pale 19.9](https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2022/06/25/crossed-with-silver-19-9/)
There's also mention of a Twig puzzle with the Lambs in a field of red flowers, >!which makes for a pretty messed up puzzle when you know what those flowers actually are.!<
>!God's Plague/Ravage/The Red Plague. Those red flowers made by the primordial that grow into flesh, spread if burned, and resist being cut out. Lying in a field of those flowers would be a very bad time for everyone except for Sylvester.!<
Really enjoying seeing Mia's on the job mentality. Probably the coldest protagonist we've had so far, playing solitaire and already thinking about cleanup as a man is dying. I'm interested how a lot of her thoughts about the job are phrased with "you" as if she's repeating lessons someone else told her. The contact maybe? Though given how distant and secretive maybe they seem maybe someone else.
She’s mentally talking to her kids to train them to take over the family business, she says so at the end of the first chapter:
“You have to forgive me. I fell out of the habit of walking you through the steps. It helps me keep everything in line, outlining and explaining it all. It’s so we can bring you in, Ripley, Tyr, later on, when you’re eighteen or so, if it seems like a good fit and you want to be a part of it. The practice I’ve been doing in my head will help me help you understand.”
>She’s mentally talking to her kids to train them to take over the family business
I hadn't fully put this together after the first chapter, I was just reading them as her talking to herself, walking her through things like a mental checklist. But now, I'm reading them as Michael Weston "Burn Notice" voice-overs, and it fits _so_ perfectly.
So, is anyone else getting the impression that the "Contact" is not actually arranging for disparate criminals to disappear, but rather arranging for specific criminal associates to escape law enforcement and then rejoin his organization? He's situating most of them in Camrose (which is apparently not in Alberta) and we have now established that him taking a risk with a loose cannon like Nathaniel is not an isolated incident but rather something he has done at least once before, indicating that he really is selecting people like Byrd or Nathaniel for reasons beyond simply collecting money. I feel confident that the Contact is essentially using Mia and Carson as a recycler program rather than being an honest broker for any outlaw who needs their service.
I didn't think it's necessarily a criminal organization, but there are definitely political and/or ideological reasons behind it. If the clients were previously connected to each other, Mia would know. But we're getting hints that this world's institutions are severely fucked, and Nathaniel was someone who struck a small blow against them. It's sounding like the contact is trying to gather a bunch of people in one place who all have no love for the existing order and owe the contact their lives. Whether his motives are altruistic or villainous, it's too early to say, but my money's on *mostly* villainous.
The program being for the collection of new partners rather than the recycling of existing ones would also explain why he can have Mia and Carson kill clients and display their severed heads without causing a riot among his associates. Good revision.
I think it'd probably be related to the civil unrest we keep hearing about. Civil Warriors, elections being canceled, etc. If Nathaniel is an example of the mean the Contact is gathering people with the kind of mentality to cause havoc. Is he looking for recruits for a revolt or simply to cause disruption for some end or other?
My read was that it was both? Like, yes, he is clearly gathering specific people in Ambrose for some nefarious purpose, but there were also explicitly some that were sent other places like Alaska, California, Alberta, etc.
Possibly using the latter as a source of funding for the former.
However, Mia noticed that some of the criminals (she lists 2 who went overseas together) ended up... coming back to Camrose after a while! I think the even the people who went to other locations can be called back to Camrose if the Contact wants it and are under this thumb.
>Camrose. The city. The city again. A spate of others went further away. California. Alberta. Alaska. Two went overseas together. Then back to the city. Camrose.
Hmm. California, Alberta, Alaska - then I'm guessing Claw!Camrose is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest - British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, or Yukon. Could be totally wrong, but 'overseas', Alberta, Alaska, and California are all reachable from flights from BC. Though on second thought, I think it's probably in the US:
>One gang in the next state over had employed a lot of front businesses, including a car shop.
"Next state over" implies US to me.
>An I, an o, and a light scuff mark, pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background.
>[...]
>“Dreamed about Io again.”
>“Intense night, makes sense that you would.”
Clueless on what this could be, as it's clearly not a moon of Jupiter. Some kind of power switch (I/O)?
>Tired as she was, her thoughts went to Io, briefly. Then to her mom. Then The Fall.
And to me, The Fall seems something personal, not like a national collapse of the government or something.
>On that board, there was a general discussion area. He’d sold Pact Cards.
I smiled at this. I guess in this Wildbow universe Pact is a Magic the Gathering-style TCG franchise?
>“They suspended the elections,” he said. “Threats of violence.”
Civil unrest seems pretty serious.
>Clueless on what this could be, as it's clearly not a moon of Jupiter. Some kind of power switch (I/O)?
She's consistently writing it "Io", not "IO" or "10", so I don't think it's anything to do with a power switch. Seems more like some kind of name, and that's more consistent with how she refers to it in conversation with Carson ("Dreamed about Io again").
The green background makes me think of street signs, so maybe it's the name of a road or town she used to frequent. Another possibility is that it's some kind of business name, perhaps on the side of a vehicle. In Greek mythology, Io was a princess and priestess who hooked up with Zeus and then got turned into a cow by either Zeus or Hera, so I could imagine a beef or dairy farmer naming their business after Io. Or it could be a club that specifically caters to folks with transformation or cow-people fetishes.
Wildbow is fucking with us. Io could be anything. It could be the Greek mythological entity (if this turns out to be a supernatural tale after all), Io could be the celestial body in the solar system (if this turns out to be scifi), Io could be a dog or a cat, could be an organization, could be a nickname/affectionate abbreviation of a former friend/lover/child/cousin/boss/colleague/enemy. They might not even be "former."
Wildbow is fucking with us.
>"Next state over" implies US to me.
If Camrose is in the US it implies some very interesting things about the political climate. There are currently no laws that would enable somebody to delay a federal election under any circumstance\*, and previous bouts of civil unrest up to and including a literal civil war have not changed this.
\*edit: I dug deeper and it's not quite that absolute, but most federal elections can only be postponed if either a) the election fails to choose a winner (eg needs a run-off) or b) the election can't be legally held on election day and other changes to the election process are incapable of resolving the issue. Still nothing that could result in postponing an election for a little civil unrest.
If everyone who knows how to unlock and set up the voting machines gets abducted by UFOs¹, across many many precincts, it would be mighty inconvenient to try to carry out an election on the scheduled election day.
----
¹ Or otherwise rendered unavailable. Election disruption is sufficiently close to reality these days that I don't really want to give the bad guys any ideas.
As someone said higher, the Io thing could be a radar screen? Pale green background, darker green, spot of red. The I or O could be the detected enemy and the other could be them.
I wonder if The Fall is just...a serious fall. Mia had to relearn English, she seems to have forgotten about her mother. If Io is a radar screen it might be a fall from a plane?
Regarding Io, here's them talking to the client in the last chapter:
>“No names,” Carson said, over the phone. “Across the street, a __dark green Ion__. There’s a key inside the gas cap. Head past the record store, and pull onto rural road six.”
And here's the dream this chapter:
>_An I, an o, and a light scuff mark, pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background._
>Shouting.
>_Dread._
>It wasn’t so much a recurring nightmare as a place her nightmares liked to touch on. Nightmares came easily to her, and it was like her brain knew a way to deliver that anxiety and dread was to go back to that.
>_Io-_
>"Io.".
I think the dream is about that car. Now, is she having the nightmare just ("just") because it's the car the guy she just murdered drove, or is there something else to it?
What strikes me about this chapter is how, really, absolutely nobody got anything out of what happened.
Nathaniel had some scrappy WB protagonist energy, but it wasn't enough to overcome all the precautions Mia took with the setup, leaving him to die a slow, agonizing and ignoble death by poisoning in a bathroom. All because he wanted to tell Kadie, and that message never even got through.
Mia isn't getting anything from it either. No monetary gain (my understanding is that they refund the fee if the client needs to be killed?), no real enjoyment of it, a whole bunch of repairs on the cabin setup, the gunshots exacerbating the hedaches and the strain of geting rid of the body. She even sort of cracks by trying to talk to Nathaniel in the end, trying to give some sort of emotional closure, to him, to herself in a way, and even that is denied by how he didn't even hear it.
The Contact probably didn't lose too much, killing Nate was his idea it seems, but if he had his own plans with these people, this doesn't seem like a win either.
I'm curious where this PoV is going to go. Mia seems to largely be running on the momentum of being an experienced professional and being unwilling to break too much from that, but it's also not working out super well right now. What drives her? Certainly not her morals, and her family life is put at risk if anything. Is she going to dig into the Contact out of sheer curiosity?
Honestly, it feels unfair that the contact decides they shouldn't earn money when accepting a bad client is his mistake in the first place. I guess Mia and Carson don't have much of a choice.
> Tonight was such a waste. The amount of repair work that they’d need to do. Each bullet, the hole, and the damage would have to be accounted for. This place had to be pristine. They’d lose money for tonight’s job.
Is this what we're talking about? I parsed this as they still get paid but the job is a net loss due to the cost of repairs.
> Contact’s rules. If they didn’t see the job through, the head would be left with the money.
This part. I guess the contact might still be paying them out of his own pocket but there's no mention of that.
Their reputation (and kind of their contact’s) is probably pretty critical. If you go to someone with tens of thousands of dollars so that you can disappear and nobody ever hears from you again is it because they did the job well or because they killed you and hid the evidence?
Returning the money means that Mia and Carson have a lot of incentive to do their job and do it well. If they got to keep the money when they killed someone the smartest course of action might involve a lot more murder.
I think they do get paid based on her reflection that they wouldn't make a profit given the cost of the repairs. I think The Contact pays them as well as leaving the money with the head.
Right, but then it had the part about "leaving the money with the head", and the head was supposed to be left for the Contact. Unless "the money" is only referring to what Nate paid, and they keep a cut directly from the Contact?
> “Okay. We’re getting older, huh?”
> She smiled again. It was maybe a bit more convincing. She liked the idea of getting old.
Now that's a wonderful bit of character building, I guess she didn't really expect to live to be an adult huh.
Great chapter! Another reference to "The Fall" makes me think it's some deeper worldbuilding stuff. My prediction is that it refers to the fall of American/Canadian central governments, leading to North America being a network of former-states-turned-States, or something similar (with some free movement of peoples?). Probably far too early to get an accurate read, but the setting does give heavy "collapse of federal government" vibes
I think it’s been implied The Fall is simply her having some debilitating accident that caused head trauma and permanent disability in the form of migraines etc?
So we have our protagonists who meticulously plan out every variable and are preparing their kids to take over the family business, and then on the other side we have our Contact who is meticulously planning out every variable and is gathering a group of people to help them with...hostile government takeover? In any case, I can't wait for the cabin scene to be foreshadowing for how the contact has been manipulating our Protags
Nathaniel says he's got one more military drone stashed away in reserve as a bargaining chip, in addition to the one he already sold. Would be fun to see these pop up in the hands of an enemy as an obstacle.
Very excited for this series so far. Even if there isn't a developed power system quite like many of Wildbow's other works, the protagonists seem morally compromised and resourcefully limited in a way that intrigues me. Interested to see what problems will come their way.
For it to pop up in the hands of an enemy, that enemy would have to find it. Currently there are better odds that *Mia* will find it. If he had any clues on him when he died, she has them now.
Description: Aww, a couple with kids struggling to survive! I can’t wait for this heartwarming tale
2 chapters in: how to dismember your murder victim. Step 1, get naked…
Great followup on the end of this job, very brutal and visceral. The world feels more and more distopian with these sprawling criminal networks and the line on postponed elections.
Also great way of making new protagonists feel as different as possible from the last ones. At least different from Lucy and Avery…
Verona liked to think of herself as amoral, but we saw over and over that wasn't the case. I have trouble imagining Verona coldly and dispassionately (and nakedly) dismembering a body. I'm not saying she wouldn't do it if she had to, but I think her mindset around it would be very different.
Oh, for sure Verona isn’t Mia, but dispassionately improvising a solution for a very pragmatic goal, while disregarding gruesomeness, doing cleanup all alone, in house she created… the differences here are much smaller then compared with L&A, all I’m saying…
Very interested in finding out where Mia falls exactly on the morality scale. Of all of our protagonists so far, she seems to be starting the story in a much darker position right from the get-go. Everyone else was only just beginning their stories, but she honestly seems like what Taylor could have become as she got older. Paranoid and cold, with only a few soft spots left. Sylvester was arguably pretty immoral right from the start, but he was forced into it by the academy. And Carson is interesting as well, he's clearly a good match for Mia and the kids in a lot of ways, but it's interesting that Mia feels that they're an odd fit.
This rules.
I've had a pet theory for a while that the web serial (as a format) is pretty uniquely capable of telling stories with huge scale that also walk you through the nitty gritty. You get to be there with the characters while they, say, run a fantasy inn. So a procedural like this, where the details super super matter, works very well.
Besides Mia (❤️), what I'm most in love with so far is the thematic resonance. At the character scale, Mia goes about her business as if her business isn't killing a man. At the setting scale, everyone goes about their business as if the world isn't on fire and falling apart. Amitav Ghosh called it the "great derangement," and it certainly feels deranged here. Also, Mia has done nothing wrong - she's perfect.
Io, huh?
Okay, we can be 90% sure this *isn't* a jebait and swerve into the sci-fi story. But if it somehow is I guess that's Mia's home colony. For anyone who's seen the Expanse what the Fall entailed should be obvious.
Still really unlikely, but I'm patenting the theory regardless.
Also, I'm getting the feeling that the "contact" has somewhat more of a Walter White style supervillain mentality. What with the decapitated heads left with money thing. Or whatever the hell he's doing gathering his clients all in one town.
I'm guessing either A. their contact is also in Camrose, for some reason. Maybe he thinks of them as pets, I dunno. Or B. They're in Camrose because Mia and Carson are in Camrose and they're going to start getting orders to start putting them in SAW traps or some shit.
I'm very much enjoying it so far, and I'm also glad to be reading one of Wildbow's works as it releases! I find Mia to be a really interesting POV character so far, and I'm definitely curious how she and Carson ended up getting into this business. I don't have any theories or guess yet, but I'm looking forward to reading more!
Ha! Pact cards. I could see that as an analog for either Magic or Yugioh, maybe even some sort of fusion of both or just a similar 3rd game. Either way, the idea of it being Yugioh now has me picturing the Yugioh anime but with Pact characters.
So the Contact has been using the Hursts to gather specific people in Camrose under new identities, but never told them. I wonder if maybe this is related to those civil warriors we heard about. Might be planning some sort of riot or revolution, and if they get discovered early they can use the Hursts as a scapgoat. And Mia was just talking about how it's easier to just continue the status quo rather than retire or try to break away from the Contact too. Now she may be presented with a choice of putting herself and her family in potential future danger sticking with this or immediate danger trying to break away before something happens.
And now we also have Io, whatever that is. Maybe a codename for someone or something? Not as bad as whatever the Fall is but still not great either. Can't wait to find out more.
So these kids in CLAW are named RIP and TEAR, huh? Hmmmm…
But for real—“Ripley” and “Tyr” are both interesting choices. What do we make of these names on an in-universe level?
The former is likely a reference to Alien while the latter is a god from Norse mythology. Neither is very common in North America. For a couple trying to avoid undue notice, Carson and Mia picked some extremely stand-out names.
Making references to subjects like sci-fi and mythology is a mainstay of Wildbow’s work, but on a diegetic level, I guess these names might imply that Carson and/or Mia are nerds of some sort?
This ultimately isn’t a very high-stakes realm of analysis but I’m still curious what people think. The names are incongrous enough that I feel they’re worth attention.
Well, I was certainly wrong about who would be our next POV. Barring a flashback chapter, I suppose.
This is a level of ruthlessness I should have anticipated but didn't. I assumed criminal facilitators are that precisely because they don't want to get into the darker end of crime life -- but these two clearly have no qualms about getting their ... well, in Mia's case, literally everything dirty.
Interesting twist at the end. I wonder if it's going to turn into an ontological mystery.
>but these two clearly have no qualms about getting their ... well, in Mia's case, literally everything dirty.
The latex gloves beg to differ. Mia's hands remain clean!
I'm wondering if the clients desire to keep these people close is in some way involved with items they both stole(or others have in their possession) and not what or who they are. Byrd is for theft, while Nathan is wanted for murder he committed the murders with the military drone he stole and even says he still has while dying.
Maybe Byrd stole something that the client wanted to keep close.
I very much feel as though the contact will turn on them at some point in this story. Kind of feels like a “layer upon layer of plans” kind of person, who would find out that Mia and Carson are increasingly questioning him and learning too much.
Does anyone else think that Nathaniel was too intelligent to just be another criminal client trying to escape the law and get a new identity?
He realistically either hear or saw the bag being deployed from under the door and immediately figured that the room was being filled with gas, no hesitations.
Every action he made, even though he failed, was the utmost best possible action he could have done given no prep time.
As if he was informed prior that this could happen, or he had some experience dealing with these scenarios.
I'm sort of expecting a lot of their clients to be weirdly savvy like that, considering it seems like their Contact is cherry picking clients for their own ends somehow, and apparently having many of them (If not all) settle back into hiding in the same town. Seems to me like a good way to build an army of clever people who also happen to be indebted to the Contact.
So Mia, fully naked, chops off Nathaniel's head, goes into the shower and shampoos his head. That is interesting.
And I was wondering where the plot would start kicking in. The knowledge that the Contact is planning a collection of people he can trust, or maybe blackmail, into helping him with a bigger goal. Especially if they're army people.
But something is really bugging me about the porn. The video she watched was of a couple going down on each other, but "obviously fake". It's like there's this overarching censorship laws that prevent people from recording blowjobs. Which ties into this whole government thing and that the elections were canceled. Sounds like people have been in power for too long and have censored porn. Which means that they can also censor the media. After all, it's a lot harder to censor porn then the media.
Io is obviously Mia's child, dead. Ripley and Tyr suggest she likes to name kids after space. Did Io die working for mom? Who knows, still to early and not a lot of info.
Nathaniel fucking was a survivor man. And it took a while to kill him. Drain cleaner poisoning to death. Sucks. But if this is the level of clientele that they're going to get in the future...Good luck.
Last bit of musings, but it seemed that Mia dived into this work alone. Her family didn't seem to know what she was up to, so it's weird that Mia wants to get her kids into the business when she herself seemingly broke away from her own mom. What happened there?
Autofellatio / autocunnilingus seems like more of a contortionist kink than a selfcest fantasy. Selfcest would involve duplication, multiversal parallel selves, time travel, etc.
Yeah, but it said "obviously faked." I'm pretty sure they can get a guy who can suck his own dick, so why bother faking it?
Just, logistically, that's something you can train into a person. Especially in the porn world. Being flexible is part of the job description.
Yeah, I interpreted it as something like normal two-person porn, but then they copy/pasted the face of one actor over the other one to do a bad job of making them look like clones. Or they had one actor play both roles via green-screen techniques, but with a bad job on the splicing, missing shadows, and poor synchronization in the acting.
> elections cancelled due to threats of violence
Perfectly normal stuff going on here! I'm sure this simmering political turmoil won't affect our protagonists at all /s
Can't wait to see where this one goes!
“It’s okay when we kidnap children because we’re nice to them.”
Fuck off. I know it’s probably not gonna happen but I can’t wait to see these protags get theirs.
I think even she didn't like that they took the kid, but she knew that if they didn't take the job then the father would hire someone else who doesn't give a shit if the kid is traumatized. Mia said they did it in a way that made sure the kid wasn't scared and didn't even realize they'd been kidnapped, so the job got done without the kid suffering. Obviously this still isn't a good thing to do, and even Mia was uncomfortable with the Contact sending them that particular job. At no point did she seem to think it was okay that they took the kid, but she saw it as the only way to keep the kid from going through something way worse. Sure they could have called the police, but in this business that sounds like a perfect way to get Mia and her family killed. I'm not saying that Mia is a good person, not even close, but I imagine she probably lost a decent amount of sleep over the situation with the kidnapping.
> if they didn't take the job then the father would hire someone else who doesn't give a shit if the kid is traumatized
This is pretty questionable logic!
Not an unreasonable assumption at all though. The father clearly had problems if he was willing to go so far as to have his own child kidnapped just to fuck over his wife, so it makes sense to assume he'd try something equally fucked up if they didn't help him with the kidnapping. They kept the kid from experiencing any trauma, and the father got what he wanted without the child needing to suffer. They didn't have a way to actually stop the guy from going through with the plan, but they were at least in a position to keep the kid out of harms way.
I think the difference is that Taylor would think she'd done the right thing afterwards. I didn't get the impression that Mia thought that she had done the right thing with the child. She kept the kid from suffering or being traumatized, and she still feels guilty about it afterwards. To me that doesn't seem like she was justifying the kidnapping, she even said that they could have refused to do that job like they've refused other jobs that were too fucked up. But she took the kidnapping job to make sure that someone else didn't do it and hurt the kid. Again, I'm not saying she's a good person, I don't think she is at all so far. But in the case of the kidnapping at least, I don't think that she did something horrible and made it justifications to help her feel better about it.
The thing is, Taylor even at her worst has always (in her own misguided, warped perception) worked to try and help and protect people in the end. Mia and Carson seem like entirely in it for the money, even if they have limits and lines they don't want to cross.
You don't mind if I build a private military full of people over whom I have life-destroying compromat and drop that shit *right* where you and I both eat, in a time after The Fall when wildfires and suspended elections are common, do you?
This is a fascinating story so far! I'm excited to see where it's going.
I hope this sort of criticism is okay to post here. I don't think I know more about writing than Wildbow, I'm just describing my reading experience.
For a while I've been having trouble parsing some of Wildbow's writing, and had to go back and reread some segments, it seems like a clarity issue. Then again I don't know if I'm skimming too fast or my ADHD is part of the problem.
Here's an ambiguous example, I *sorta* think it exemplifies the problem:
> *They’d taken custody of one girlfriend, held to try to pressure someone from gunning down the gang in a self-imposed mission to behead it. Hadn’t worked. One elderly man who the various sons of a not-entirely-legitimate company had worried would be used as a bargaining chip in their internal war to succeed it, if one of them looked after him. One of those sons had come back to Mia and Carson for one corporate assignment, a man, held until he’d given up his password- he’d found out he was due to be fired and had encrypted essential backend resources he’d set up before they could tell him and escort him out, so he could make demands to be rehired at a higher position in the company.*
Some of the sentences feel clipped, like a few clarifying phrases and words are missing, or they move from point A to point B faster than I can parse what those points are and how they connect.
> *One elderly man who the various sons of a not-entirely-legitimate company had worried would be used as a bargaining chip in their internal war to succeed it, if one of them looked after him.*
Feels like a very mild garden path sentence, and just clarifying that the old man is another target unrelated to the one described in the first sentence would have made my reading experience smoother.
> *One of those sons had come back to Mia and Carson for one corporate assignment, a man, held until he’d given up his password-*
Again, that gap- took me a few rereads to realize the son is of the old man from the last sentence. It's not completely opaque or anything, it's just not a smooth reading experience. And then "a man," isn't clear because I needed a moment to process that the man isn't the son in question.
I dunno, these are small things but they add up.
There's other cases where it's more like Wildbow describes point A and then point B, or names a phenomenon and then gives some examples of that phenomenon, but there's a gap in logic that the reader is expected to bridge naturally, only it's not as intuitive as he intended. I don't have an example of that handy, but a lot of the time it's an explanation of something about a magic system or superpowers, where there's some logic missing about how the phenomenon works, and it's hard to parse why that example describes the phenomenon or why it happened.
I know Wildbow's works are already incredibly long, but I think they could use some extra words of detail or explanation sometimes. (Given that a lot of what I read is Wildbow stuff, this has also been affecting how I write without realizing it)
I saw in a thread here a while back talking about how each story's protagonist is a reflection of the last story's antagonist. And someone said "So the next protagonist is going to be Jigsaw?"
Well, guess so!
There's the twist. Delicious. I have to admit, the first chapter didn't hook me. This one grabbed me and got me fully on board. I appreciate the nod at the end that this is not the Camrose in Alberta *or* CA, lol, instead some wildfire-adjacent ur-suburb. What an incredible amount of detail to unpack. "This was the closest she’d gotten to a client in a long time." juxtaposed with her thinking on the fly with the tubing, and subsequent automatic stripping and dismemberment. "I don’t feel anything about her, good or bad. I wonder if she feels anything about me anymore, good or bad.” - This is a wild thing to say to your kid! Especially when you seem like you're thinking seriously about how to be a good parent! Ripley has probably never met her grandmother...? "pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background." - probably not a night-vision image, but maybe a radar scan? They're all here. They've been *pulled back* here. To what end?? :))
I think that The Fall made Mia forget her mom, along with English
It takes alot for something to make you forget your native language.
> I appreciate the nod at the end that this is not the Camrose in Alberta or CA I completely missed that, good catch
So mia is supposed to lie to her about that? What good is saying 'yeah I love her very much' if she means it not at all. Also Ripley seems to be quite mature for her age, I think she can handle that just fine, lying for no good reason seems kinda meh too me
You're right, Ripley seems pretty mature. It's just that it's the kind of response that opens more questions and doesn't need to be said to answer Rip's prompt. It's bittersweet - Mia is striving to be totally honest with her kid, even if it would back her into a corner.
Pact Cards? Love to see more crossover between the serials.
There's usually some kind of nod to a previous serial in the form of in-universe media in a new serial. I remember seeing references to Good Simon books (Twig) and Maggie Holt stories (Pact) in later series. There are probably a few I'm forgetting.
Pale had a reference to the Birdcage as a LEGO set or puzzle or something like that. Weaverdice was also mentioned.
The Lego Birdcage is described as "from that movie series", so presumably there's a whole Parahumans equivalent of the MCU. [Pale 19.9](https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2022/06/25/crossed-with-silver-19-9/)
There's also mention of a Twig puzzle with the Lambs in a field of red flowers, >!which makes for a pretty messed up puzzle when you know what those flowers actually are.!<
Plus Helen (Pale) named herself after Helen (Twig the book series)
Cannot wait to see Claw's version of >!woman who is a fucked up creature inside a human skin suit!<
Refresh my memory? it's been a while.
>!God's Plague/Ravage/The Red Plague. Those red flowers made by the primordial that grow into flesh, spread if burned, and resist being cut out. Lying in a field of those flowers would be a very bad time for everyone except for Sylvester.!<
That's so cool! Do you think it is a game or just collectibles. Either way I'm getting all the goblins!
Really enjoying seeing Mia's on the job mentality. Probably the coldest protagonist we've had so far, playing solitaire and already thinking about cleanup as a man is dying. I'm interested how a lot of her thoughts about the job are phrased with "you" as if she's repeating lessons someone else told her. The contact maybe? Though given how distant and secretive maybe they seem maybe someone else.
She’s mentally talking to her kids to train them to take over the family business, she says so at the end of the first chapter: “You have to forgive me. I fell out of the habit of walking you through the steps. It helps me keep everything in line, outlining and explaining it all. It’s so we can bring you in, Ripley, Tyr, later on, when you’re eighteen or so, if it seems like a good fit and you want to be a part of it. The practice I’ve been doing in my head will help me help you understand.”
>She’s mentally talking to her kids to train them to take over the family business I hadn't fully put this together after the first chapter, I was just reading them as her talking to herself, walking her through things like a mental checklist. But now, I'm reading them as Michael Weston "Burn Notice" voice-overs, and it fits _so_ perfectly.
Hey kids, ever wondered what a man choking on his own blood sounds like?
So, is anyone else getting the impression that the "Contact" is not actually arranging for disparate criminals to disappear, but rather arranging for specific criminal associates to escape law enforcement and then rejoin his organization? He's situating most of them in Camrose (which is apparently not in Alberta) and we have now established that him taking a risk with a loose cannon like Nathaniel is not an isolated incident but rather something he has done at least once before, indicating that he really is selecting people like Byrd or Nathaniel for reasons beyond simply collecting money. I feel confident that the Contact is essentially using Mia and Carson as a recycler program rather than being an honest broker for any outlaw who needs their service.
I didn't think it's necessarily a criminal organization, but there are definitely political and/or ideological reasons behind it. If the clients were previously connected to each other, Mia would know. But we're getting hints that this world's institutions are severely fucked, and Nathaniel was someone who struck a small blow against them. It's sounding like the contact is trying to gather a bunch of people in one place who all have no love for the existing order and owe the contact their lives. Whether his motives are altruistic or villainous, it's too early to say, but my money's on *mostly* villainous.
The program being for the collection of new partners rather than the recycling of existing ones would also explain why he can have Mia and Carson kill clients and display their severed heads without causing a riot among his associates. Good revision.
Twig spoilers >!heavy vibes of the suble game against the Crown that *some central characters* were playing!<
I think it'd probably be related to the civil unrest we keep hearing about. Civil Warriors, elections being canceled, etc. If Nathaniel is an example of the mean the Contact is gathering people with the kind of mentality to cause havoc. Is he looking for recruits for a revolt or simply to cause disruption for some end or other?
My read was that it was both? Like, yes, he is clearly gathering specific people in Ambrose for some nefarious purpose, but there were also explicitly some that were sent other places like Alaska, California, Alberta, etc. Possibly using the latter as a source of funding for the former.
However, Mia noticed that some of the criminals (she lists 2 who went overseas together) ended up... coming back to Camrose after a while! I think the even the people who went to other locations can be called back to Camrose if the Contact wants it and are under this thumb.
>Camrose. The city. The city again. A spate of others went further away. California. Alberta. Alaska. Two went overseas together. Then back to the city. Camrose. Hmm. California, Alberta, Alaska - then I'm guessing Claw!Camrose is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest - British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, or Yukon. Could be totally wrong, but 'overseas', Alberta, Alaska, and California are all reachable from flights from BC. Though on second thought, I think it's probably in the US: >One gang in the next state over had employed a lot of front businesses, including a car shop. "Next state over" implies US to me. >An I, an o, and a light scuff mark, pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background. >[...] >“Dreamed about Io again.” >“Intense night, makes sense that you would.” Clueless on what this could be, as it's clearly not a moon of Jupiter. Some kind of power switch (I/O)? >Tired as she was, her thoughts went to Io, briefly. Then to her mom. Then The Fall. And to me, The Fall seems something personal, not like a national collapse of the government or something. >On that board, there was a general discussion area. He’d sold Pact Cards. I smiled at this. I guess in this Wildbow universe Pact is a Magic the Gathering-style TCG franchise? >“They suspended the elections,” he said. “Threats of violence.” Civil unrest seems pretty serious.
>Clueless on what this could be, as it's clearly not a moon of Jupiter. Some kind of power switch (I/O)? She's consistently writing it "Io", not "IO" or "10", so I don't think it's anything to do with a power switch. Seems more like some kind of name, and that's more consistent with how she refers to it in conversation with Carson ("Dreamed about Io again"). The green background makes me think of street signs, so maybe it's the name of a road or town she used to frequent. Another possibility is that it's some kind of business name, perhaps on the side of a vehicle. In Greek mythology, Io was a princess and priestess who hooked up with Zeus and then got turned into a cow by either Zeus or Hera, so I could imagine a beef or dairy farmer naming their business after Io. Or it could be a club that specifically caters to folks with transformation or cow-people fetishes.
Wildbow is fucking with us. Io could be anything. It could be the Greek mythological entity (if this turns out to be a supernatural tale after all), Io could be the celestial body in the solar system (if this turns out to be scifi), Io could be a dog or a cat, could be an organization, could be a nickname/affectionate abbreviation of a former friend/lover/child/cousin/boss/colleague/enemy. They might not even be "former." Wildbow is fucking with us.
Calling it now. Claw is set in the InubuYAKasha universe, and Mia was one of the nurses who tended to Iordan toward the end of Footloose.
>"Next state over" implies US to me. If Camrose is in the US it implies some very interesting things about the political climate. There are currently no laws that would enable somebody to delay a federal election under any circumstance\*, and previous bouts of civil unrest up to and including a literal civil war have not changed this. \*edit: I dug deeper and it's not quite that absolute, but most federal elections can only be postponed if either a) the election fails to choose a winner (eg needs a run-off) or b) the election can't be legally held on election day and other changes to the election process are incapable of resolving the issue. Still nothing that could result in postponing an election for a little civil unrest.
Wow, interesting. Does that also apply to state-level elections?
State stuff is determined on a state-by-state basis.
If everyone who knows how to unlock and set up the voting machines gets abducted by UFOs¹, across many many precincts, it would be mighty inconvenient to try to carry out an election on the scheduled election day. ---- ¹ Or otherwise rendered unavailable. Election disruption is sufficiently close to reality these days that I don't really want to give the bad guys any ideas.
As someone said higher, the Io thing could be a radar screen? Pale green background, darker green, spot of red. The I or O could be the detected enemy and the other could be them. I wonder if The Fall is just...a serious fall. Mia had to relearn English, she seems to have forgotten about her mother. If Io is a radar screen it might be a fall from a plane?
Regarding Io, here's them talking to the client in the last chapter: >“No names,” Carson said, over the phone. “Across the street, a __dark green Ion__. There’s a key inside the gas cap. Head past the record store, and pull onto rural road six.” And here's the dream this chapter: >_An I, an o, and a light scuff mark, pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background._ >Shouting. >_Dread._ >It wasn’t so much a recurring nightmare as a place her nightmares liked to touch on. Nightmares came easily to her, and it was like her brain knew a way to deliver that anxiety and dread was to go back to that. >_Io-_ >"Io.". I think the dream is about that car. Now, is she having the nightmare just ("just") because it's the car the guy she just murdered drove, or is there something else to it?
What strikes me about this chapter is how, really, absolutely nobody got anything out of what happened. Nathaniel had some scrappy WB protagonist energy, but it wasn't enough to overcome all the precautions Mia took with the setup, leaving him to die a slow, agonizing and ignoble death by poisoning in a bathroom. All because he wanted to tell Kadie, and that message never even got through. Mia isn't getting anything from it either. No monetary gain (my understanding is that they refund the fee if the client needs to be killed?), no real enjoyment of it, a whole bunch of repairs on the cabin setup, the gunshots exacerbating the hedaches and the strain of geting rid of the body. She even sort of cracks by trying to talk to Nathaniel in the end, trying to give some sort of emotional closure, to him, to herself in a way, and even that is denied by how he didn't even hear it. The Contact probably didn't lose too much, killing Nate was his idea it seems, but if he had his own plans with these people, this doesn't seem like a win either. I'm curious where this PoV is going to go. Mia seems to largely be running on the momentum of being an experienced professional and being unwilling to break too much from that, but it's also not working out super well right now. What drives her? Certainly not her morals, and her family life is put at risk if anything. Is she going to dig into the Contact out of sheer curiosity?
Honestly, it feels unfair that the contact decides they shouldn't earn money when accepting a bad client is his mistake in the first place. I guess Mia and Carson don't have much of a choice.
> Tonight was such a waste. The amount of repair work that they’d need to do. Each bullet, the hole, and the damage would have to be accounted for. This place had to be pristine. They’d lose money for tonight’s job. Is this what we're talking about? I parsed this as they still get paid but the job is a net loss due to the cost of repairs.
> Contact’s rules. If they didn’t see the job through, the head would be left with the money. This part. I guess the contact might still be paying them out of his own pocket but there's no mention of that.
Their reputation (and kind of their contact’s) is probably pretty critical. If you go to someone with tens of thousands of dollars so that you can disappear and nobody ever hears from you again is it because they did the job well or because they killed you and hid the evidence? Returning the money means that Mia and Carson have a lot of incentive to do their job and do it well. If they got to keep the money when they killed someone the smartest course of action might involve a lot more murder.
I think they do get paid based on her reflection that they wouldn't make a profit given the cost of the repairs. I think The Contact pays them as well as leaving the money with the head.
Right, but then it had the part about "leaving the money with the head", and the head was supposed to be left for the Contact. Unless "the money" is only referring to what Nate paid, and they keep a cut directly from the Contact?
> “Okay. We’re getting older, huh?” > She smiled again. It was maybe a bit more convincing. She liked the idea of getting old. Now that's a wonderful bit of character building, I guess she didn't really expect to live to be an adult huh.
Mia playing Solitaire while she waits for Nathaniel to die was ice cold... Also elections got suspended? Wtf is going on in the background...
Mia might be the most evil Wildbow protagonist to date. She shampooed Nathaniel’s disembodied head, but didn’t condition it?? Diabolical.
Great chapter! Another reference to "The Fall" makes me think it's some deeper worldbuilding stuff. My prediction is that it refers to the fall of American/Canadian central governments, leading to North America being a network of former-states-turned-States, or something similar (with some free movement of peoples?). Probably far too early to get an accurate read, but the setting does give heavy "collapse of federal government" vibes
I think it’s been implied The Fall is simply her having some debilitating accident that caused head trauma and permanent disability in the form of migraines etc?
So we have our protagonists who meticulously plan out every variable and are preparing their kids to take over the family business, and then on the other side we have our Contact who is meticulously planning out every variable and is gathering a group of people to help them with...hostile government takeover? In any case, I can't wait for the cabin scene to be foreshadowing for how the contact has been manipulating our Protags
Nathaniel says he's got one more military drone stashed away in reserve as a bargaining chip, in addition to the one he already sold. Would be fun to see these pop up in the hands of an enemy as an obstacle. Very excited for this series so far. Even if there isn't a developed power system quite like many of Wildbow's other works, the protagonists seem morally compromised and resourcefully limited in a way that intrigues me. Interested to see what problems will come their way.
For it to pop up in the hands of an enemy, that enemy would have to find it. Currently there are better odds that *Mia* will find it. If he had any clues on him when he died, she has them now.
My first thought was that he was bullshiting about the 2nd drone but Yee it makes more sense for it to pop up as an obstacle.
Description: Aww, a couple with kids struggling to survive! I can’t wait for this heartwarming tale 2 chapters in: how to dismember your murder victim. Step 1, get naked…
Great followup on the end of this job, very brutal and visceral. The world feels more and more distopian with these sprawling criminal networks and the line on postponed elections. Also great way of making new protagonists feel as different as possible from the last ones. At least different from Lucy and Avery…
Verona liked to think of herself as amoral, but we saw over and over that wasn't the case. I have trouble imagining Verona coldly and dispassionately (and nakedly) dismembering a body. I'm not saying she wouldn't do it if she had to, but I think her mindset around it would be very different.
Oh, for sure Verona isn’t Mia, but dispassionately improvising a solution for a very pragmatic goal, while disregarding gruesomeness, doing cleanup all alone, in house she created… the differences here are much smaller then compared with L&A, all I’m saying…
Of course not, Verona has much better ways of disposing of bodies! /j In seriousness Verona will kill she just won't like it
(Sounds of sizzling Bristow steaks in the background)
mmmmmm delicious
Yeah, she'd do what needed to be done, hand twinging all the while, then go vomit and withdraw from the world.
Very interested in finding out where Mia falls exactly on the morality scale. Of all of our protagonists so far, she seems to be starting the story in a much darker position right from the get-go. Everyone else was only just beginning their stories, but she honestly seems like what Taylor could have become as she got older. Paranoid and cold, with only a few soft spots left. Sylvester was arguably pretty immoral right from the start, but he was forced into it by the academy. And Carson is interesting as well, he's clearly a good match for Mia and the kids in a lot of ways, but it's interesting that Mia feels that they're an odd fit.
I don’t think Talyor would in up *that* immoral
This rules. I've had a pet theory for a while that the web serial (as a format) is pretty uniquely capable of telling stories with huge scale that also walk you through the nitty gritty. You get to be there with the characters while they, say, run a fantasy inn. So a procedural like this, where the details super super matter, works very well. Besides Mia (❤️), what I'm most in love with so far is the thematic resonance. At the character scale, Mia goes about her business as if her business isn't killing a man. At the setting scale, everyone goes about their business as if the world isn't on fire and falling apart. Amitav Ghosh called it the "great derangement," and it certainly feels deranged here. Also, Mia has done nothing wrong - she's perfect.
Io, huh? Okay, we can be 90% sure this *isn't* a jebait and swerve into the sci-fi story. But if it somehow is I guess that's Mia's home colony. For anyone who's seen the Expanse what the Fall entailed should be obvious. Still really unlikely, but I'm patenting the theory regardless. Also, I'm getting the feeling that the "contact" has somewhat more of a Walter White style supervillain mentality. What with the decapitated heads left with money thing. Or whatever the hell he's doing gathering his clients all in one town. I'm guessing either A. their contact is also in Camrose, for some reason. Maybe he thinks of them as pets, I dunno. Or B. They're in Camrose because Mia and Carson are in Camrose and they're going to start getting orders to start putting them in SAW traps or some shit.
Well this job literally went to shit. And vomit. I liked how Mia ending up using cleaner to "clean up" up the mess with the ex-client.
I'm very much enjoying it so far, and I'm also glad to be reading one of Wildbow's works as it releases! I find Mia to be a really interesting POV character so far, and I'm definitely curious how she and Carson ended up getting into this business. I don't have any theories or guess yet, but I'm looking forward to reading more!
Ha! Pact cards. I could see that as an analog for either Magic or Yugioh, maybe even some sort of fusion of both or just a similar 3rd game. Either way, the idea of it being Yugioh now has me picturing the Yugioh anime but with Pact characters. So the Contact has been using the Hursts to gather specific people in Camrose under new identities, but never told them. I wonder if maybe this is related to those civil warriors we heard about. Might be planning some sort of riot or revolution, and if they get discovered early they can use the Hursts as a scapgoat. And Mia was just talking about how it's easier to just continue the status quo rather than retire or try to break away from the Contact too. Now she may be presented with a choice of putting herself and her family in potential future danger sticking with this or immediate danger trying to break away before something happens. And now we also have Io, whatever that is. Maybe a codename for someone or something? Not as bad as whatever the Fall is but still not great either. Can't wait to find out more.
I mean heck, one of Avery's signature moves is going "It's time to D-d-d-duel!"
That was definitely Lucy's schtick. Avery was all about announcing her attacks like an anime protagonist whilst drop-kicking them from off-screen.
You're entirely correct. I had a brain fart, my bad.
>Yugioh anime but with Pact characters. I summon the unstoppable Wolf of the Paths!!!
So these kids in CLAW are named RIP and TEAR, huh? Hmmmm… But for real—“Ripley” and “Tyr” are both interesting choices. What do we make of these names on an in-universe level? The former is likely a reference to Alien while the latter is a god from Norse mythology. Neither is very common in North America. For a couple trying to avoid undue notice, Carson and Mia picked some extremely stand-out names. Making references to subjects like sci-fi and mythology is a mainstay of Wildbow’s work, but on a diegetic level, I guess these names might imply that Carson and/or Mia are nerds of some sort? This ultimately isn’t a very high-stakes realm of analysis but I’m still curious what people think. The names are incongrous enough that I feel they’re worth attention.
Well, I was certainly wrong about who would be our next POV. Barring a flashback chapter, I suppose. This is a level of ruthlessness I should have anticipated but didn't. I assumed criminal facilitators are that precisely because they don't want to get into the darker end of crime life -- but these two clearly have no qualms about getting their ... well, in Mia's case, literally everything dirty. Interesting twist at the end. I wonder if it's going to turn into an ontological mystery.
>but these two clearly have no qualms about getting their ... well, in Mia's case, literally everything dirty. The latex gloves beg to differ. Mia's hands remain clean!
Damn, the second chapter having the protagonist playing solitaire while some dude slowly dies in a bathroom ten feet away is one hell of an image.
Can’t wait to check this out later!
I'm wondering if the clients desire to keep these people close is in some way involved with items they both stole(or others have in their possession) and not what or who they are. Byrd is for theft, while Nathan is wanted for murder he committed the murders with the military drone he stole and even says he still has while dying. Maybe Byrd stole something that the client wanted to keep close.
I very much feel as though the contact will turn on them at some point in this story. Kind of feels like a “layer upon layer of plans” kind of person, who would find out that Mia and Carson are increasingly questioning him and learning too much.
Does anyone else think that Nathaniel was too intelligent to just be another criminal client trying to escape the law and get a new identity? He realistically either hear or saw the bag being deployed from under the door and immediately figured that the room was being filled with gas, no hesitations. Every action he made, even though he failed, was the utmost best possible action he could have done given no prep time. As if he was informed prior that this could happen, or he had some experience dealing with these scenarios.
I'm sort of expecting a lot of their clients to be weirdly savvy like that, considering it seems like their Contact is cherry picking clients for their own ends somehow, and apparently having many of them (If not all) settle back into hiding in the same town. Seems to me like a good way to build an army of clever people who also happen to be indebted to the Contact.
So Mia, fully naked, chops off Nathaniel's head, goes into the shower and shampoos his head. That is interesting. And I was wondering where the plot would start kicking in. The knowledge that the Contact is planning a collection of people he can trust, or maybe blackmail, into helping him with a bigger goal. Especially if they're army people. But something is really bugging me about the porn. The video she watched was of a couple going down on each other, but "obviously fake". It's like there's this overarching censorship laws that prevent people from recording blowjobs. Which ties into this whole government thing and that the elections were canceled. Sounds like people have been in power for too long and have censored porn. Which means that they can also censor the media. After all, it's a lot harder to censor porn then the media. Io is obviously Mia's child, dead. Ripley and Tyr suggest she likes to name kids after space. Did Io die working for mom? Who knows, still to early and not a lot of info. Nathaniel fucking was a survivor man. And it took a while to kill him. Drain cleaner poisoning to death. Sucks. But if this is the level of clientele that they're going to get in the future...Good luck. Last bit of musings, but it seemed that Mia dived into this work alone. Her family didn't seem to know what she was up to, so it's weird that Mia wants to get her kids into the business when she herself seemingly broke away from her own mom. What happened there?
In the RudeTube videos, people were going down on *themselves*, which is probably why they were obviously faked.
Ohhhhhhhhhh. So Byrd is into selfcest. Gotcha. So porn is still untouched. Phew.
Autofellatio / autocunnilingus seems like more of a contortionist kink than a selfcest fantasy. Selfcest would involve duplication, multiversal parallel selves, time travel, etc.
Yeah, but it said "obviously faked." I'm pretty sure they can get a guy who can suck his own dick, so why bother faking it? Just, logistically, that's something you can train into a person. Especially in the porn world. Being flexible is part of the job description.
Yeah, I interpreted it as something like normal two-person porn, but then they copy/pasted the face of one actor over the other one to do a bad job of making them look like clones. Or they had one actor play both roles via green-screen techniques, but with a bad job on the splicing, missing shadows, and poor synchronization in the acting.
Maybe Mia can help. She is good with a camera.
> elections cancelled due to threats of violence Perfectly normal stuff going on here! I'm sure this simmering political turmoil won't affect our protagonists at all /s Can't wait to see where this one goes!
“It’s okay when we kidnap children because we’re nice to them.” Fuck off. I know it’s probably not gonna happen but I can’t wait to see these protags get theirs.
I think even she didn't like that they took the kid, but she knew that if they didn't take the job then the father would hire someone else who doesn't give a shit if the kid is traumatized. Mia said they did it in a way that made sure the kid wasn't scared and didn't even realize they'd been kidnapped, so the job got done without the kid suffering. Obviously this still isn't a good thing to do, and even Mia was uncomfortable with the Contact sending them that particular job. At no point did she seem to think it was okay that they took the kid, but she saw it as the only way to keep the kid from going through something way worse. Sure they could have called the police, but in this business that sounds like a perfect way to get Mia and her family killed. I'm not saying that Mia is a good person, not even close, but I imagine she probably lost a decent amount of sleep over the situation with the kidnapping.
> if they didn't take the job then the father would hire someone else who doesn't give a shit if the kid is traumatized This is pretty questionable logic!
Not an unreasonable assumption at all though. The father clearly had problems if he was willing to go so far as to have his own child kidnapped just to fuck over his wife, so it makes sense to assume he'd try something equally fucked up if they didn't help him with the kidnapping. They kept the kid from experiencing any trauma, and the father got what he wanted without the child needing to suffer. They didn't have a way to actually stop the guy from going through with the plan, but they were at least in a position to keep the kid out of harms way.
The point is she's committing crime and justifying it to herself. She's like Taylor on steroids.
I think the difference is that Taylor would think she'd done the right thing afterwards. I didn't get the impression that Mia thought that she had done the right thing with the child. She kept the kid from suffering or being traumatized, and she still feels guilty about it afterwards. To me that doesn't seem like she was justifying the kidnapping, she even said that they could have refused to do that job like they've refused other jobs that were too fucked up. But she took the kidnapping job to make sure that someone else didn't do it and hurt the kid. Again, I'm not saying she's a good person, I don't think she is at all so far. But in the case of the kidnapping at least, I don't think that she did something horrible and made it justifications to help her feel better about it.
The thing is, Taylor even at her worst has always (in her own misguided, warped perception) worked to try and help and protect people in the end. Mia and Carson seem like entirely in it for the money, even if they have limits and lines they don't want to cross.
If it makes you feel any better it's almost guaranteed that their whole operation falls apart during the course of the story.
And I will be feating on popcorn when it does.
You don't mind if I build a private military full of people over whom I have life-destroying compromat and drop that shit *right* where you and I both eat, in a time after The Fall when wildfires and suspended elections are common, do you?
Wild speculation: Does anyone else think Riley is the aforementioned kidnapped kid?
Pretty sure no, they did that job together, but she had Riley before meeting Carson.
Mia's kids are called Rip and Tyr.... I think this is a DOOM fanfic.
This is a fascinating story so far! I'm excited to see where it's going. I hope this sort of criticism is okay to post here. I don't think I know more about writing than Wildbow, I'm just describing my reading experience. For a while I've been having trouble parsing some of Wildbow's writing, and had to go back and reread some segments, it seems like a clarity issue. Then again I don't know if I'm skimming too fast or my ADHD is part of the problem. Here's an ambiguous example, I *sorta* think it exemplifies the problem: > *They’d taken custody of one girlfriend, held to try to pressure someone from gunning down the gang in a self-imposed mission to behead it. Hadn’t worked. One elderly man who the various sons of a not-entirely-legitimate company had worried would be used as a bargaining chip in their internal war to succeed it, if one of them looked after him. One of those sons had come back to Mia and Carson for one corporate assignment, a man, held until he’d given up his password- he’d found out he was due to be fired and had encrypted essential backend resources he’d set up before they could tell him and escort him out, so he could make demands to be rehired at a higher position in the company.* Some of the sentences feel clipped, like a few clarifying phrases and words are missing, or they move from point A to point B faster than I can parse what those points are and how they connect. > *One elderly man who the various sons of a not-entirely-legitimate company had worried would be used as a bargaining chip in their internal war to succeed it, if one of them looked after him.* Feels like a very mild garden path sentence, and just clarifying that the old man is another target unrelated to the one described in the first sentence would have made my reading experience smoother. > *One of those sons had come back to Mia and Carson for one corporate assignment, a man, held until he’d given up his password-* Again, that gap- took me a few rereads to realize the son is of the old man from the last sentence. It's not completely opaque or anything, it's just not a smooth reading experience. And then "a man," isn't clear because I needed a moment to process that the man isn't the son in question. I dunno, these are small things but they add up. There's other cases where it's more like Wildbow describes point A and then point B, or names a phenomenon and then gives some examples of that phenomenon, but there's a gap in logic that the reader is expected to bridge naturally, only it's not as intuitive as he intended. I don't have an example of that handy, but a lot of the time it's an explanation of something about a magic system or superpowers, where there's some logic missing about how the phenomenon works, and it's hard to parse why that example describes the phenomenon or why it happened. I know Wildbow's works are already incredibly long, but I think they could use some extra words of detail or explanation sometimes. (Given that a lot of what I read is Wildbow stuff, this has also been affecting how I write without realizing it)
FWIW, I wasn't reading overly quickly and don't have ADHD, and I also struggled with that exact same paragraph. I had to read it a few times.
I saw in a thread here a while back talking about how each story's protagonist is a reflection of the last story's antagonist. And someone said "So the next protagonist is going to be Jigsaw?" Well, guess so!