Alright, well that really escalated quickly.

 

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So are those swords magic? They must be magic.

 

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I'm left wondering what's going to happen though, because it wouldn't fit the story for the Queen of Summer to fall to Ranger, but I don't see Ranger as the type to back down from a fight.

On a separate note, Ranger letting all the soldiers die without a care was stone cold. Didn't really realize just how narrow her interests in the Empire are until that and the death threat to Cat. She genuinely doesn't care in the slightest about any of it.

 

Ranger is The Badass. I actually feel sorry for the Queen of Summer, how does she stand a chance against Ranger. Though I get the feeling Ranger has more of a counting crow attitude towards her hunts, such as taking the eye of the Winter Prince or how she likes to just go and fuck with the Dead King. Very strong chapter and it's interesting to see how Masego shifts and how powerful his name will be.

Honestly though I want a story of Ranger going around doing Ranger shit for the fun of it. The Calamities would be a chapter or two because that's how little of her time it really garnered. Everything else would be her hunting down the most powerful people she can.

 

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I'm not really feeling Woe as a group name.

It's lots of little things, like calamity being an event while a woe is a difficulty or problem, or woe being much less used, or even the fact that woe is etymologically from a much older root while the Woes are newer than the Calamities causing a weird ordinal dissonance. Even just speaking aloud 'Cat is one of the Woes', I find woes doesn't scan as well.

Am I just being overly picky?

 

Nope, it sounds stupid.

 

Read the entire thing over the last week or so, and I'm hooked. I wouldn't say it's the best thing I've ever read or anything, but it's easily one of the most entertaining stories I've read in ages. I've genuinely had to choke back laughter on a few occasions, because I've been reading it at work and don't want to get weird looks. So many awesome characters, and I love the concept.

 

Well, it's been a month since the last part of this storyline, but it's worth the wait to see the planning behind the Calamities, how the foreshadowing of Captain's death gets avoided, and just how crazy awesome Black is by being able to consider absolutely every single thing he's ever witnessed.

But it does support my suggestion a month back about Black planning ways for the Calamities to die for the Woes (still a silly name, but it'll possibly grow on me) to take over.

So much so that either so many people think it would be out of character that it has to be forcefully pointed out that Black is actively considering killing people he loves, or it's heavily foreshadowed enough that the obvious becomes a subversion.

 

So I finally binged through this. It's alright.

Semantics Incoming: This isn't original fiction. It's an Age of Wonders fanfiction, with some of the classes names changed/expanded. The mechanics are almost identical to AoW3, many of the names are straight up ripped from the AoW 3 Human city name list, and many of the setting elements are extrapolations of what some of the elements from mods would do to a more naturalistic society- Dedicating an empire to Good or Evil, for instance. There's a liberal helping of material from other settings, like DnD, Warcraft, etc., etc.- but in form and function this is a fanfiction.

The strength of this piece is definitely in the setting development. I'm definitely enjoying Praes' cartoonish villainy as culture, that the Gods of that made Creation basically made it as an ethics discussion, and even the premise that the Named get drawn into predictable patterns as part of a morality play for divine entities. Hell, the kingdom of Callow is well realized enough to have an interesting perspective on the nature of why peasant levies are able to beat back a dark lord/lady's army. I like a lot of the little sayings sprinkled into the dialogue, and some of the quotes heading chapters up are worth a chuckle.

Characterization is a bit hit or miss. Heiress is an interesting lens to view Praesian culture through, Catherine is at least somewhat interesting as a deviation on the Everyman archetype, and Robber is fun. Others, like the Black Knight especially, are absolutely awful. Magical Memetic Batman is one of the most boring things to read about for me. Actually, most of the Calamities are quite uninteresting, though Malacia has had some great moments, particularly in the last couple of chapters. Most of the characters are uninspiring at best, and downright insipid at worst. The Wandering Bard is an interesting deconstruction of comic relief at least, even if I find her character a bit dull.

I'm not really feeling particularly enthused with the coming of age/rise to power of Squire as a story. It has the worst bits of Ender's Game and The Chronicles of the Black Company mixed together. I think I would have enjoyed this setting and story more if Catherine chose not to be Named, and how interacting with the characters out of a children's story affected her. Otherwise, it's a intentionally cookie-cutter YA fantasy novel.

Here's the biggest gripe I have with this piece: A Practical Guide to Evil doesn't really make sense as a story unless you have meta knowledge about how stories function, but is predictable if you have that information. Christ, where do I begin? Every damn character is dangerously genre savvy to the point of absurdity and borderline Spacebattles competent. They all act like they've got a copy of TVtropes in their brain. It warps the story in ways that are terribly predictable and turns everything into a "I know you know I know that you know," game. Catherine is the least Genre-Savvy of the bunch, and its what makes her bearable to read. The author tries very hard to do an Alan Moore-esque deconstruction of traditional narrative, like Watchman basically, and misses the goddamn point so blatantly it's almost cringeworthy.

Then we get to the rather shallow discussion of morality in a morally absolute world. So much of the story rests on this thinly veiled argument for "Greater Good" style philosophy. What I find suspension of disbelief breaking is how positively the actual evil characters react to Catherine's Grey Guard/Lawful Neutral ethos. The whole "Good is equally dangerous as Evil" thing has been done to death, and it falls flat here. Catherine's steady "moral decline" doesn't ring true when she hasn't encountered anyone who can even make a case for either side of Good or Evil. Maybe the Tyrant will be that person.

Hell, Overlady, by Earthscorpion has a more nuanced take on this sort of story, and better writing to boot.

Overall, the best I can give this is timewaster status. 2.5/5 all the way.

 

One characterisation/world-building point I would make is that I found myself losing track of who was who in terms of some of the secondary cast, like where the Exiled Prince was from, or who some of the secondary Praesi nobles were, or what it meant that someone was from Procer rather than Deorath. Given that most of them get killed fairly quickly though, it's a relatively minor issue.

 

I think that's by design. The whole point of the Named is that they're special but highly replaceable, like dropping someone into a very awesome suit of armor, and that everyone else is only important as an object manipulated by Named. This is intended as a deconstruction of the concept of a protagonist, since narrative structure is part of how that reality operates, obviously people would be able to document it and react to it.

 

While I really like Overlady, I don't think they're coming at the same concept. Overlady is stories as history; he's building a world where people do actually pledge themselves to good or evil, there are orcs in the world, and demons do have a city in Hell to get raided by Heroes but that's similar to how we had a bunch of Nazis to bomb.

Guide on the other hand, is doing stories as metaphysics. Stories are how the world explicitly works; the rule of three, gaining an edge by casting yourself as the underdog, so on and so forth.

Personally I think Guide has several significant flaws (it enjoys going "we flipped the genders, aren't we clever far too often and does it poorly) and goes too YA at times, but it's still an enjoyable piece of fiction.

 

This is splitting hairs, dude. I'd say Overlady and APGtE fall into the "female protagonists doing 'bad things' for 'good reasons'," archetype that's been gaining traction online for the past couple of years. Also, while Overlady is much more low key about it, stories are very much a part of the metaphysics of the universe. Hell, that's the whole point of Gnarl's character. After all, Evil always finds a way.

The difference is that it's not about gaming narrative structure- it's about how narrative structure affects the more human elements of the story.

 

I think you're missing what makes the stories so different, namely that the historical take is driving towards "what sort of setups make this kind of story happen" while Guide's metaphysical take comes at it from the exact opposite direction, taking the stories as given and seeing how people react to that. While they appear similar on the surface, the fundamental structure is very different.

That said, I 100% agree with the rise of the "dark female protagonist for the greater good" trend. It's especially annoying in Guide because the lead has a fairly masculine voice. Toss in the poor social commentary which is endemic to the genre and I roll my eyes a lot.

So if we want to paint the genre that wide then sure, I agree and blame Worm, a pox upon it's house. But I don't think it's a particular useful lens to apply when going with "this sort of story" lest we roll up a tremendous amount of fiction into it

 

Err... You may very well be completely missing the point. I'm not saying they're literally identical approaches, I'm saying that they both use similar plot structures to examine the concept of Objective Morality as it relates to narrative metaphysics.

Due to the hamfisted and railroaded nature of how Guide enforces narrative structure in the world, anything about the characters' agency is destroyed, thus everything becomes predictable. The story becomes a series of if/then logic gates with a veneer of rule of cool.

Overlady is a softer touch, but narrative structure is still directly part of how that universe works. Great examples of this include the whole arc in Amestreldam, The Comte de Mott arc, the Black Emperor, Jessica's character arc, the Princess's character arc, and of course Gnarl (who

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may or may not be a primordial shard of Evil attached to a staff that possess whoever owns it

. However, the sentient beings have shaped the culture of the narrative conflict and the nations work to take advantage of it in more symbiotic ways.

Basically, same species, different subspecies.

Eh, to be entirely fair, Worm is not entirely at fault. It's definitely a bandwagon fic. I'm reasonably sure that Overlady started before Worm was published online. If it's anyone's fault, I'd blame Alexandra Erin and Tales of MU. for this type of story. Many of the imitators like The Gods are Bastards, are directly responsible for the worst aspects of this genre.

 

I don't really buy that they're examining Objective Morality; they're both just playing with anti hero tropes dressed up in classical story telling in order to poke at different concepts. No more than say, The Punisher or any other popular story that conflicts ends and means.

And I don't really see characters losing their agency in Guide either; it's whole premise is about how a bunch of characters find their agency to step outside of the traditional story structure and can they're successors hold on to it. This is explicitly stated in the text even by one of the antagonists and the fight of the story/role against individual agency is an in universe conflict which a decent bit of text is spent on.

But yes, Overlady can't really be traced to Worm; it's very much an ES with through and through. I'd argue that Worm was the breakout hit that really got the web fiction ball rolling on this particular setup, but I could be totally wrong here.

 

I think the Woe name becomes slightly less awkward and dumb if it's not pluralized. The Woe vs the Woes, like how Ranger said it. Also "Catherine is one of The Woe" rather than "is a Woe". Still awkward and weird, and not as good a name as the Calamities. Probably won't be worth the inevitable constant jokes either.

 

Agreed. Still a bit silly though

 

New chapter out. I am a bit tired of the plots within plots within plots discussion in the past few chapters. Feels like everyone's just jerking off over how much better their knowledge of meta-narrative elements is than their respective opponents on the 4-D chessboard that they're playing on.

The Wandering Bard is a mean eldritch monstrosity with a million faces, the Black Knight is an evil accountant playing on a spreadsheet, and the Tyrant is a prepubescent Joker, disfigurements and all.

I'd like to get back to Cat killing things, but even that's been infected with the "gotcha!" elements of the past chapters.