Whoops yea, my bad. Portals are still pretty epic though.

 

She might have lost the habit of keeping her glasses tightly in control when she went blind for a while. No matter how poor her vision is she can always get around; she just needs the glasses to read, look at screens, or see fine detail in social situations.

Also yeah, the saved the world once already thing is pretty wtf. Also the Endbringers not being involved with anything but themselves (Maybe not even the Passengers? That'd be a serious wtf.) It's curious to wonder if the Simurgh is actively coordinating the Endbringers, or if she's just another subservient cog in the machine of the Designer, like a Chess AI that plays very well but isn't actually intelligent with a will of its own.

 

Nope. She needs them to see with any detail at all if she can't tell what people look like from across a table. My eyes aren't as bad as hers are described, but I still need my glasses on if I want to be able to see without blurring beyond a foot or two distance. I mean, I can just about tell what I've typed if I take them off now. Hers are worse.

Sure, she cheats with bug senses, but I feel it's a bit of an easy way out for Wildbow if he doesn't want to describe the new characters with much detail. There are other, better ways of doing so. We've met all but the Thanda and Moord Nag, so it shouldn't be that difficult to conceal their identities, if that's the aim.

 

Did it say anywhere that she no longer keeps her glasses by her bedside? I'm confused by why you're bringing it up. In any case, the blue eyeholes in her mask have perscription lenses, and she had that next to her bedside.

Oh, and a long time ago, when Taylor first found out about Shatterbird being in town (way before Shatterbird actually makes an appearance) she takes some anti-glasses measures and switches to contacts.

 

It's a moot point, though maybe something worth pointing out as a "change" for Skitter? It's a small detail, but small details help us understand characters better. I wear glasses, but in the morning, I'm happy to wander around blind. I guess I like having fuzzy vision at times, at least when I'm waking up. Could be a character quirk for her, or it could be something she's developed because of some change or another in her life. It could just be that she's so in-tune with her bugs at this point that her human senses seem less important, she "sees" well enough with her eyes closed at this point, right? It's how she got around half-blind those couple of days.

Actually, it's too bad the story didn't start when Skitter got her powers. She couldn't control them at first, so she could see even while she was asleep, right? Must have been a horrifying experience at first. In the hospital she must have thought she was going mad.

 

Okay. We're explicitly entering the endgame now. Really interesting chapter. Seemed quite rushed, though. Going to re-read it just to sort everything out.

 

Yeah, this arc is moving way, way too fast. It's more confusing than entertaining.

 

I think these timeskips are getting a little out of hand. The previous chapter involved massive changes to the political landscape of the story, and then this one is a substantial timeskip?
That works for an epilogue, not so much for the middle of an arc.

Actually, an interlude/epilogue from Imp's PoV for the second half or from Grue's PoV if Imp wasn't lying would be interesting, and then bring it back in with Taylor recapping the scene as the introduction of the next book.

Mostly I want to watch someone mess with Taylor. That sounds like fun.

 

Really don't want an Imp interlude. At this point, I'm not that interested in the Undersiders. An interlude from Scion or Cauldron would be my top option.
Edit:
My comments from wordpress:

"The format was a little difficult to follow, but a great chapter nonetheless. The pacing is uneven, but if you’ll fix it or modify it eventually, complaining now won’t help.
I do have some issues unrelated to that with it:
Namely, while Khonsu seems relatively safe from Scion, since the power that allows the rest of the heroes to continue to engage him (the Thanda cape’s power) probably won’t affect Scion and thus, he can flee from him, there’s no reason for the following Scion intervention to have not ended with the Endbringer’s defeat:

“Paris, December 19th, 2012 // Simurgh
Notes: Victory by Scion.
Target/Consequence: see file The Woman in Blue. See file United Capes.”

While the heroes might think this the norm since they didn’t expose her core, Scion’s kill order should have provoked him to kill Simurgh, and since she can’t teleport, her survival seems very doubtful to me. Scion has shown the ability to fly as fast as her before, so why didn’t he kill the Simurgh?

This seems a bit plotholey to me.

Additionally, I see Tosu and Bosu as quite vulnerable to Scion’s intervention. If he starts to fight them, they don’t seem particularly mobile enough to escape his attention like Khonsu can. But there’s been no contact between them and Scion, so we’ll see what happens later.

Thanks for a wonderful arc and a fantastic story Wildbow "

 

Some people are saying similar things in the comments, but personally, I feel like Book 1 ended with the Death of Alexandria and Taylor nominally joining the PRT, and we only got about 20% of Book 2 (The Behemoth battle and a bunch of interludes surrounding it, and presumably this last arc as well), with the other 80% burning in a fire and lost forever. It's pretty depressing.

We got to read Skitter's whole story, but we only ever got glimpses of Weaver's. I wonder how much that has to do with me liking Skitter more.

 

This is a chapter that needs to be split into several. I loved the part with Imp at the end, but it was too jumpy before that and really hurt the pacing.

 

Didn't like the part with Imp. My least favorite part, to be honest. I've never been a fan of her as a character. And the last part of this chapter was so disjointed. I had no idea what was happening until I reread it.

 

Makes sense, the disjointed aspect at least. Dunno if people check the comments but Wildbow posted:

Which explains a lot really

 

It is absolutely true that in the editing phase he can flesh out the time skip with more content to make it suitbly less frustrating because the story moved at a snail's pace for 90% of the time, with very little "cinemacy" and a lot more "real time" story telling (that is, for a lot of Worm, there is almost no time skipping, we see every day play out like clockwork) only for us to suddenly appear two years in the future without fanfare.

Between jumping from the Vegas situation to New Delhi and now THIS it feels like Skitter leaving BB has just been a rollercoaster of scattered events. We could have time-skipped everything after Skitter turned herself in and we'd still be where we are with this latest chapter. What was the purpose of any of that? It didn't really lead anywhere. It almost would have been more suitable to have all of that as flashback information like the videos, I guess, if the stuff we learned in New Delhi (or Vegas) is related to shit we'll be seeing for the next six months.

This time skip doesn't agree with me at all and I can sympathize with the challenge, but I'd almost prefer Wildbow take a break from the story and get this right than try to rush.

 

Hmm, interesting. Definitely could of been done better, but I'm thinking that Wildbow is trying to get to the part where she can write the story without anymore time skips.

Overall, I feel the passage of time is the story's biggest weakness. Too little time passed at the start, now too much time.

However, I feel like we're at the point where we won't have anymore time skips. So it'll go back to being just as it used to be, just in a vastly different social and political context.

 

I definitely agree that Wildbow went a little overboard on the time skips. This last one was especially jarring when I was reading it (though it's been edited a little now). At first I thought Taylor had been transported to the future when Khonsu teleported.

I think we needed a lot of timeskiping, but I really hope when he makes his books he expands on Weaver's early days with the Chicago Wards. Not in the same level of detail and time as the early Undersiders stuff, but more than the few chunks we got. Also, I think Bohu/Tohu's first appearance deserves an arc of it's own.

 

Um, it's not just that there was a timeskip. I mean the passage of time is important, but not that important.

What's wrong with what the author just did is... well, people keep saying "book 1 ended with Alexandria's death" but what they mean by that is that the climax of Book 1 was Skitter choosing to leave the Undersiders - a decision she had been dealing with since she first joined them. She left them and the falling action was Alexandria's death.

"Book 2" was her with the PRT / prison. Vegas, New Delhi, et cetera. There was no climax for this "arc" of the story. The climax could have been something along the lines of, "Skitter chooses something related to finding herself" - in New Delhi, she was upset because she felt like she was being herself for once, yet things went rather wrong (leaked video, PRT still didn't approve of her). We did not get any resolution for the entire arc here.

Wildbow basically said, "Shit. I want to finish this story by December. Gotta start arc 3" which is the last arc of the story. Arc 2 is left unfinished so all of those events are pretty much pointless because they didn't lead up to any conclusion. They might provide useful backdrop for this new arc, but they could have been dropped entirely and we'd still be where we are now.

 

I didn't like it . One moment we're seeing how they handle a new endbringer, Taylor is finally beginning to form new bonds with the Wards. Then its 2 years later? It just feels dissappointing. feels like we've missef half a book

 

I agree. The line "I'm meeting a legend." From Grue's ...wife is totally out of place without the context of a "book 2". Okay, so she's a bit famous by killing Alexandria and shit, but "legend"? Right.