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WIP Setanta by Ritic - T - Worm

Discussion in 'Worm' started by Vira, Oct 3, 2015.

  1. Vira

    Vira Third Year ~ Prestige ~

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    Title: Setanta.
    Author: Ritic, but posted to the internet by Errant Vagrant.
    Rating: T.
    Genre: Continuation.
    Status: In-Progress.
    Fandom: Worm.
    Summary: Twenty years after Gold Morning, the world still isn’t back on its feet, but it doesn’t stop three siblings from making a place of their own. Twenty-five chapters.
    Link: Wordpress, Spacebattles.

    You know, I went trawling on Spacebattles for new Worms fics once I realized we got a shiny new subforum, but I didn’t expect to find something like this.

    Scion’s destruction of Earth Bet sent it back a century in technology. No oil, roads destroyed, strange creatures called wildlings endlessly attacking settlements, and lethal trigger events tearing cities apart. The cape scene has vanished, heroes and villains and the codenames that came with them replaced with the grim reality of humans struggling together.

    This story won’t appeal to everyone. At times it can be slow or boring, but this is one of the rare few Wormfics that has not only rejected the indulgent all-powerful Taylor, self-inserts, or random crossovers, but has expanded the universe into something entirely new, a logical extension of Worm. A lot of the details are still not known, things are referenced and not explained, but this is a writer who knows what he’s doing.

    The cast is almost all OCs. Canon characters are a rarity and while they’re sometimes mentioned or seen, they’re in the background. Instead the story focuses on three siblings, the mercenaries Jorden (the protagonist) and Sarah, and their Tinker brother Chris, as they live their lives in and around New Brockton as they take on jobs. All the characters are fleshed out and while I wouldn’t say they’re incredibly interesting and exciting, they feel real.

    The only writing flaw that stood out to me is that Jorden blushes a lot. Otherwise, the writing’s fine.

    There's just so many mysteries, I'm interested in seeing where things go.

    Obviously, something is going on with Jorden. When he dreams, he talks to his “Mom” who teaches him things like languages, but isn’t consciously aware of it. It’s implied this dream woman is Taylor and while we’ve seen Jorden’s parents in story, there’s evidence to suggest that Jorden and his siblings were all adopted from different families. Since Jorden’s dark skin is constantly mentioned, he’s right age to be Taylor and Brian’s kid.

    Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if Panacea was behind the wildlings, though she may or may not be dead by now.
    Despite its slow middle, I admire this story’s ambition, world building, and depth, so I won’t go lower than 4.5/5.
     
  2. yak

    yak Moderator DLP Supporter Retired Staff

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    I made it through the first arc, Soil. The writing is good, the characters are mostly believable, and there's obviously a mystery about the nature of the characters and world which is being trickle-fed to the reader.

    My problems with the story are that I don't care about these characters. I should be eager for them to win a new contract when their old one expires, but I'm not. Apparently the main character really needs to save money for something, but I have no idea what it is, so I don't care. And the main character is a goddamn self-sacrificing idiot. The other characters are fully aware of his flaws, but it doesn't stop them from being grating.

    There are a lot of characters introduced by name, and I can't keep track of them with my pea-sized brain. Some guy with model toys is getting picked on in an office environment and he has kids and a threesome-relationship and why should I even care enough to figure out who these people are? The named characters all just sort of merge into one another for me.

    And because I don't care about the characters, I find the story pretty boring. I don't really care about what little plot I've seen. There is no hook. Nothing to grab me by the balls and hold my attention.

    Then, there's the world. I hate to rag on the worldbuilding because it's obvious that the author put a lot of thought into it, but he just gets things wrong - or the reasons for the state of the world being as they are are way beyond what's we can reasonably assume happened.

    Hydro-electric power ran out because no-one thought to maintain them? What bullshit is this? We've been building hydro-electric power generators since the late 1800s. Even if we can't keep the old plant's running [and I'd argue against that point], we could build replacements 100 years ago. Now that the population is smaller, there's dramatically smaller power requirements, so you don't need all of the generators going at once.

    At their most basic form, hydroelectric generators are simple devices.

    Disposable pens are still being made. I'd like to know how they're manufacturing perfectly spherical tiny ball bearings and perfectly machined brass sockets in a world without industry. Or the plastic ink reservoirs in a world running out of hydrocarbons, yet still able to make perfect plastics.

    There's a reason why ballpoint pens never took of until post-WW2 even though we'd been playing with the concept since the late 1800s. They're damn hard to make.

    Apparently railway lines were destroyed, so we just gave up on them. No. You rebuild them and because they're shoddy you just run your trains at 5km/h or something. It still beats horse and cart because of scale and because it runs at night and in all weather. How else do you transport large amounts of food around efficiently?

    If you can't do diesel anymore, then you go back to boilers and steam engines. We haven't forgotten how to make them.

    Then there's the author's horse and cart solution. We start off with cars, strip out the motor and other non-necessities, then get the reins into the cabin somehow, leaving the windshield intact. Look, that's great and all, but how on earth is the driver meant to see past the horse team's asses when he's sitting down in the driver's seat of a car? He needs to be a helluva lot higher than that.

    There are just a lot of things like this going on in the worldbuilding. Even water is apparently an issue for some reason. We've had horse driven pumps for as long as miners have been going below the water table. Heck, that's the reason we talk about engines in terms of "horse power". And then you gravity feed it from a water tower.

    This isn't rocket science. It's the basic role of a government to secure food, water, power, defense.

    It's like the world found tinkers and then collectively said, "welp, there's no point being smart any more. All engineers and tinkerers [in the classical sense] are to be fed to the sarlac pit." It's Lex Luthor's nightmare scenario come true.

    I'd give this story a 4/5 effort, but given the flawed world building and the characters I don't care about and the plot that feels like eating mushy oats, it's a 3/5.
     
  3. Quick Ben

    Quick Ben In ur docs, stealin ur werds.

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    This is something I always thought about when reading canon worm. How much did the capes change people in terms of ingenuity and shit like. So that might be what the author was going for.

    Anyway good review. I'm hesitant to check it out. The self sacrificing idiot sounds like it will annoy me too much(got sick and tired of this characters from watching too much anime) for me to bother.
     
  4. yak

    yak Moderator DLP Supporter Retired Staff

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    Last edited: Oct 5, 2015
  5. Ritic

    Ritic Muggle

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    Hi. I'm not good with public forums, but yak said I should respond here. Sorry in advance if I'm not very good. This also isn't to belittle any of the points yak made; I'm just explaining my logic behind some of my choices.

    Hydroelectric power has been around for over a hundred years, but not to the scale that we see today. The majority of the parts necessary to make repairs for the machinery of that scale aren't made overly regularly and require special machines, so it isn't like there's a stockpile laying around. This is compounded by the fact that so much of humanity died in Scion's rampage and have since scattered. There are few places where parts can be made to the scale of the existing infrastructure, and initially many of the few remaining people with the knowledge weren't easily accessible any longer. Without power or trained skill, machining those parts is more difficult.

    As to why it went without maintenance, there were a million other problems going on before it was too late. When power lines were restored and they found that there was electricity flowing, people made an erroneous assumption. People make mistakes, especially people who are mostly concerned with the fact that the supply of food has been severed, buildings are in danger of collapse, there are still tremors, there are giant channels cut all the way down to the aquifer by Scion's flybys, Earth Bet is cooling, there are corpses littered everywhere, and disease is running rampant. With Earth Gimmel not having some of the logistical problems of Earth Bet, as well as not being cluttered with things that cause painful memories, many people fled there. Again, making matters worse.

    By the time that those in New York Bet realized that there wasn't anybody actually manning the power stations, the problems were piling up. Then there's the wildlings and... I'm sure you can understand. The power supply issue for New York Bet itself has since been rectified, but they want to get the old stations back up and running to restore power to the eastern seaboard. They want to build hydroelectric plants in Earth Gimmel as well, and they finally have the properly educated people to do so. They have been slowly securing the materials for it as well.

    Part of the main issue with the reconstruction is still the financial aspect, as stupid as it sounds. As the Spanish anarchists discovered, people will only work for food for so long. Money allows for the value of a person's work to be measured. In order for the money itself to be worth anything, you have to have something backing it up. Goods, services, maybe gold, whatever. If you say, "Build a house and you'll get food," what happens during the winter when those people can't build houses? That sort of confusion took years to work out as there wasn't a global economy anymore to help the process along. Many communities having their own local economy only complicated matters further.

    In many ways, the biggest roadblocks to rebuilding civilization itself was humanity and the old civilization and the standards it set. Had everybody set down rationally and approached all the difficulties they faced logically, it would have been far different. Sadly, we are also emotional creatures, a fact that the shards make worse. The destructive triggers didn't help matters, either.

    Twain (which appears in the second arc) is a community most well-known for Tinkers and Thinkers, especially "garbage Tinkers" that specialize in turning scraps into something useful. This allows it to have a serious edge in production capabilities. However, most of the actual production that's useful to humanity doesn't rely on either class -- it's people with old-fashioned mundane training and knowledge who can make use of the often unreliable Tinker technology to give their efforts a jumpstart. This is where the ballpoint pens and other items come from. Unfortunately, Twain was built in the cave systems around Hannibal, MO, meaning that space is frequently an issue. This means that building some of the parts for the hydroelectric dams and the like is beyond their capabilities.

    Railway lines suffer the issue of the channels that Scion dug in the earth. The earthquakes caused by those channels also made the land uneven, further making matters difficult. Modern railways also require a good deal of maintenance. That said, yes, steam powered trains are making a comeback. Securing the materials necessary, transporting the rails, and manpower are still issues that slow it down.

    I will admit, I made a stylistic blunder while describing the horse and cart. Jordan thinks of every pre-Gold Morning vehicle as a car, even a semi truck. To him, not having lived in the era of internal combustion vehicles, there isn't much of a point in thinking of them separately like that. The original ones were modified trucks, busses, and certain vans, allowing the driver the clearance to see over the horses. I figured that people would start by adapting what they have on hand before looking to "new" methods. Maybe I should have thought it through more. I can't say for sure.

    I'm going to stop there. I'd like to say that none of his points are wrong in my opinion. I may not agree with them, but they're things that I maybe should have thought through more or found a better way of explaining. Every story that I write gives me valuable lessons to learn for my next story. So please, nobody ever hesitate to say if something works or doesn't work for them. So long as you explain why you feel a certain way about my work in a civil manner, I have no reason to complain.

    Thank you, and I'm going to go hide again now.
     
  6. Nuhuh

    Nuhuh Dastardly Shadow Admin Retired Staff

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    I haven't read your story yet but I wanted to say that quoted part shows you have the right attitude. You will do just fine here.
     
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