#john c. mccrae

[doyouknowthischaracter]

DO YOU KNOW THIS CHARACTER?

[jennifer-hamilton-wb]

Talking to my mom about Wildbow’s portrayal of addicts:

Me: you can tell, in-text, that the author really hates addicts- Mom: Wait he hates attics? Why would an attic even show up in the story? Is he part of Anne Frank’s family /s ? 

[a-ffection]

Watch "Control - Worm Animated Short" on YouTube

[simurghed]

draw the travellers right now

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Terrible Visions

A scrambled timeline is a timeline that has proceeded much like ours, except that some particular facet has been mixed up all over the place. For example, in the scrambled timeline we will consider today, our world's fictional stories have been told by different people, and in different ways.

Bryan Lee O'Malley, in this alternate timeline, is best known as the cartoonist responsible for Homestuck, a popular comic series about a group of children who become embroiled in a cosmic-scale video game known as Sburb. Although Homestuck is probably most often associated with the cult classic Edgar Wright-directed film adaptation released in 2016, the comics themselves are highly-regarded, and the film brought a new audience to them. Netflix has commissioned an animated continuation, The Homestuck Epilogues, which is due to be released soon.

Andrew Hussie, on the other hand, is a figure you're likelier to know if you're overly online. His "MS Paint Adventures" series - most notably including Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, which is kind of like Homestuck but weirder and hornier - have firmly remained a fixture of obsessive Twitter fandom culture. It doesn't help that the best-known iteration, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, is infamous for stretching thousands of pages of meandering digressions out of a simple and focused narrative starting point. Scott Pilgrim fans have developed something of a toxic reputation, which is not entirely deserved - although of course Knives discourse is interminable, and back in the fandom's heyday there were reportedly incidents of fans assaulting each other "for being evil exes".

Scott Pilgrim fandom was very big back in the day, though, and consequently it was a nexus for other creative figures who would go on to surpass Hussie. Perhaps foremost among these is indie developer Toby Fox. He was literally living in Hussie's basement when he produced ROSEQUARTZ, a universally-beloved retro Goonies-like RPG about a human hybrid boy born to a race of gem-based aliens. He's now developing an episodic spiritual successor, RAZORQUEST, with more overtly dark themes. It revolves around an inheritance dispute among a demon-summoning family.

Other foundational figures in this timeline's internet culture include Alison Bechdel, who helped get the webcomic scene started. Although she's now more seriously acclaimed for her personal memoirs, her gaming webcomic Press Start To Dyke, which premiered in 1998, was once everywhere. It had a broad appeal, and at its height, it was common to see even straight guys sharing pages from it. Time has not been especially kind to it, though, and at this point its main legacy is test.png, a meme spawned by one of the comic's most ill-advised pages.

Then there's John C. McCrae, more often known by his pseudonym Wildbow. A prolific and reclusive author of doorstopping "web serials" - long-form fiction published online - McCrae's best-known serial is still his first, Wind, a noir superhero story set in an alternate history where capes are mostly just a subculture of unpowered vigilantes. Wind landed in a culture already rife with comic book deconstructions, like Alan Moore's 2002 graphic novel Worm Turns, but it nonetheless managed to stand out from the pack with its extensive cast of characters and its themes of coordination problems and the end of the world. Later McCrae web serials include Part (the first "Otherverse" serial; an urban fantasy story about a couple who die in a car accident and find that they have become ghosts), Tear (a "biopunk" story set in a collapsing underwater city), Warn (the controversial Wind sequel), and Play (the second "Otherverse" serial, set in a small Indiana town that helps hide a psychic girl from the CIA).

Last and perhaps least, we should discuss J. K. Rowling. Far and away the most famous of any of these authors, Rowling's name is inseparable from the YA series that she debuted with, the Luz Noceda books, which remain her one successful work. Although it was heavily derivative of older fantasy novels - like Jill Murphy's Academy For Little Witches, or Philip Pullman's Methods Of Rationality trilogy - Luz Noceda was still a monumental and unprecedented success in the publishing industry, and the film adaptations were consistent blockbusters. The final book, Luz Noceda and the Watcher of Rain, contained some allusions to a romantic relationship between Luz and her recently-redeemed associate Amity. Rowling confirmed that this was her intent in subsequent interviews and indicated that she had fought her publishers for it; the film would then go on to escalate matters slightly further.

There have been many lengthy and heated online arguments as to whether the references in the book itself constitute text or mere subtext. Whatever your stance on this discourse, a new complication has been introduced recently: although she has put out no official statement on the matter as of yet, it has become quite apparent from Rowling's shrinking network of contacts and her conspicuous silences that she is certainly TERF-sympathetic, and likely an outright TERF herself. For many, this is leading to a critical reevaluation of the social values inherent in the Luz Noceda series; others, to say the least, are holding off on that kind of reappraisal.

Anyway, Scott Pilgrim just beat Luz Noceda in a Twitter poll for Most Gay Media, and people are piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed

[henghost]

Twig Liveblog for Arc 1

i have finished the first arc of john c mccrae's "twig" 😮

so far i am enjoying it far more than i anticipated!! wildbow's prose, while still clunky, is far from the worst it's ever been, and i'm willing to tentatively admit that he seems to have an uncharacteristic respect for pacing and structure here (...which he would forget by his next project, but that's beside the point).

more importantly: sy is my fucking guy! i've decided that even if he commits wholly unjustifiable acts in the coming arcs i will defend him at all costs. i would lay my life down for this bratty horny munchkin. (very exciting to have a wildbow character who feels romantic and physical attraction to other people, by the way: i really loved that scene where the schoolgirls sort of neg him a little bit and he can't help but stare at their legs and press his face into their chests). i find myself loving him for the same reasons i first loved taylor: the burning hatred for authority, the anti-social tendencies (very funny interaction where lillian says to him that she dislikes being called "lil" and sy proceeds to refer to her as lil internally like five times in the next paragraph lmao).

i love all the other creatures and characters! the psycho vat-grown girls are entertaining. excellent first interlude. i love the setting, all wet and hot, smelling of excrement and rotting bodies.

PREDICTIONS (or, embarrassing myself for your entertainment)

i think there are too many pointed references to gordon having a "hidden dark side" for it not to come to a head at some point, but maybe that's too easy

mary and sy will kiss 🥺

helen will experience a crisis of loyalty that she is unequipped to handle

[ewingstan]

So the whole idea of Twig’s setting is that instead of writing Frankenstein, Mary Shelley figured out how to reanimate and stitch together life. I have some ideas for how this would go if he chose a different author:

Tick: Instead of writing The Time Machine, H.G. Wells creates a....you get the picture. The Lambs are agents of a British Crown who want to ensure a future goes their way. Think Ars Paradoxica if the government didn’t just use time travel to ensure things went their way, but to ensure the world looked the way they wanted it to. Also would probably have a lot of future beings/technology taken from potential futures that will now never be.

Bite: Instead of writing Dracula, Bram Stoker discovered how to use blood for longetivity and enhanced abilities. The lambs are thralls for a vampiric Crown Empire, ruling over a populace they see as cattle. Wildbow gets in weekly Reddit arguments disputing any perceived antisemitic themes.

Maze: Instead of writing House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski figures out how to use people’s own psychology to bend the geometry of 3D spaces, creating rooms larger on the inside than on the outside and able to grow in novel ways. This gets adapted into attempts to improve housing, create unlimited storage, etc., but the psychological nature of the process creates a memetic chain reaction in which people who learn about the existence of such abnormalities accidentally impose it on other rooms and buildings in less-controlled fashions. The result is a world where most inside spaces are inhospitable labyrinthine worlds unto themselves, occasionally collapsing in on themselves as their inhabitants die and leave no psychological imprint to continue growing off of. The only known way to impose some control over your living space is to create layers of meta-narrative over your own relationship to your home, which allows for more nuance and control to be wielded against the expanses. The lambs are a group of specially engineered psychologies meant to impose meta-narratives onto psychological spaces in ways that render the spaces more habitable (or at least more useful) to their handlers, but run into problems as the narrat[  ] begin to get [         ] by the spaces they’re depl[   ] against.

Meta: Instead of writing Worm, John C. “Wildbow” McCrae figures how how to use tissues from a dead space entity to give others—

[cmaidaartworkblog]

I’m expecting a pretty limited audience for this one but exactly one person I follow was already happy to see these, so here are my sketches of the members of the Undersiders, in their civilian identities, from the online serial “Worm” by Wildbow/John C. McCrae. I read the entire series back in 2015-16, and now I’m reading it again for the first time since then : ) From top-left to bottom-right, there’s Rachel Lindt/Bitch/Hellhound, Lisa Wilbourn/Sarah Livsey/Tattletale, Brian Laborn/Grue, Alec/Jean-Paul Vasil/Regent, Aisha Laborn/Imp, and Taylor Hebert/Skitter. One of these days I might color this in, and draw their in-costume portraits as well. Mechanical pencil on a blank piece of receipt paper, 2022

[sarandipitywrites]

Nine People You Want To Get To Know Better

i was tagged by @lordfenric-writes and @winterandwords - thank you!

Current Book I'm Reading: Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbard and Disfigured by Amanda Leduc. Just finished No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull and Siren Queen by Nghi Vo. all highly recommended!

Last Song I Listened To: Cyberhex by Motionless in White

Currently Watching: making sporadic attempts to watch? Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War; Rise of the TMNT; Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated. probably others that i've neglected so long i've forgotten.

Current Fic I'm Reading: okay, so i'm just going to define fic as "not traditionally published" and not necessarily just fanfic, although i will indicate which is fanfic (FF) and which is original fic (OF) sooo...

The Archivist's Journal (OF) by @autumnalwalker

Worm (OF) by John C. "Wildbow" McCrae

The Red Prison (FF) by @adhdavinci

A Stain that Won't Dissolve (FF) by @not-poignant

Obedience (OF? FF? it's dungeons and dragons) by @space-writes

The Infinite Sadness (OF) by @blind-the-winds

Next On My Watch List: i don't dare add things to my watch list. i am not skilled at watching things.

Current Obsession: working on The Art of Empty Space. resisting the urge to edit Dead Roots, Dark Water. There are two wolves inside me and they both want to scream about my writing.

i'll tag (no pressure!) @starlit-hopes-and-dreams @kaiafosterwrites, and @aalinaaaaaa, plus an open tag for anyone who wants to share :)

find the blank template under the cut:

Current Book I'm Reading:

Last Song I Listened To:

Currently Watching:

Current Fic I'm Reading:

Next On My Watch List:

Current Obsession:

[our-arospec-experience]

Aromanticism in Media

Literature:

Willbourn Lisa - Parahumans by John C. McCrae

Nevian and Cal - The White Renegade by Claudie Arseneualt

Rivka - A Harvest of Ripe Figs by Shira Glassman

Georgia, Jess, and Ellis - Loveless by Alice Oseman

Gwen Vere (allosexual and aromantic) - An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Arèn - A Broken Promise by Lynn E. O'connacht

Wasp - Archivist Wasp / Latchkey by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Claire/Claude, Denise Jalbert, Emmanuelle, Livia, and Yuri - Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault

Television:

Alastor - Hazbin Hotel

Peridot - Steven Universe[23]

Caduceus Clay - Critical Role

Lilith Clawthorne- The Owl House

Monkey D.Luffy - One Piece

Senku Ishigami - Dr.Stone

Edward Elric - Fullmetal Alchemist/Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

Saiki K - The Disastrous Life of Saiki K

(https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/Aromantic#History)

[skitter-queen]

parahumans character: John C. McCrae

triggered when he ran out of Wildbow Snax™ 😔

[psychotrenny]

Would you still love me if I was a self-published web serial by John C. "Wildbow" McCrae and the first installment of the Parahumans series, known for subverting and playing with common tropes and themes of superhero fiction?

[autistictaylorhebert]

obviously fandom wiki is bad in general and the pact and worm wikias are both out of date+missing a lot of information, but man i do miss the times when i could browse the pactverse wikia without being forced to see John C McCrae's whole ass bare face against my will.

[f1rewalk3r]

congrats to John C. “Wildbow” McCrae, five time winner of the “most soy webserial author alive” award

[simurghed]

John C. McCrae “Wildbow” i will get you. And you will be got

[lilliankillthisman]

Wildbow is the pen name of John C. McCrae, a Canadian author best known for his 2016 online serial novel Twig. While he had written less popular serials before, Twig rapidly gained a cult following, drawing praise and attention for its excellent character work and skillful deconstruction of the common tropes of the established biopunk genre. While his later works have not attained the same following, he retains a wide fanbase, including on the dedicated subreddit r/parahumans, named for the mostly-human experiments the series revolves around.