#twigpost

[twigwing]

AUGH I JUST MISSED THE 2025 SONIC BIG BANG SIGN UPS BECAUSE MY STUPID ASS GOT TIME BLINDNESS. I'M SO SAD :(

[l-mop]

hehe holy cow i love this. the images you chose are really neat - convey the vibe well while not getting bogged down in details. i especially like how you envisioned Helen on the operating table, and her messed up limbs. and that ending image... hm you say you havent finished twig so i aint gonna say what im thinkin but. yeah. cool good. next time put quinton in it tho, he deserves it. #onetruelamb

still not quite done with twig!! i got off track for a while but im around 19.10 now‼️ >XO sylvester‼️‼️‼️ lambs‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ WAUGH

song is if i were by vashti bunyan :]

[dw-flagler]

at this point we have to be open to the possibility that every time wildbow finishes a novel he is killed and replaced by a completely different wildbow

[lakesbian]

twig faq to answer all of the asks i got regarding my liveblog

Q: holy shit twig turned out bad huh A: yeah

Q: should i read twig? A: no. it's bad

Q: what about the parts of twig that were good though? i noticed that there were parts of twig that seemed awesome before everything suddenly exploded A: okay let me elaborate. the first ~13 arcs of twig are really really endearing when they're focusing on the lambs. when they're being about the lambs, they range anywhere from "cute" to "extremely fun" to "genuinely super compelling" to "shit that made me cry (positive)." we have high points such as:

12yo sylvester lambsbridge fumbles 3 people with crushes on him harder than anyone's ever fumbled in their life in the span of like 7 hours maximum

sylvester lambsbridge does transhet biopunk brokeback mountain

wildbow writes rose thorburn but if she were a hardass trans girl (she's the one doing transhet biopunk brokeback mountain with sy)

gordon dies and lillian copes by taking some of sy's drug that gives him turbo-adhd

helen is there

sylvester lambsbridge experiences what i earnestly believe to be one of the cruelest things wildbow has ever done to any of his protagonists

lots of other stuff, i'm abbreviating here

but the reason i say the first ~13 arcs of twig are good when they're focusing on the lambs is that twig is prone to slogging, strikingly mediocre fight scenes--sy can't fight for Shit, but wildbow still insists on describing, like, sylvester trying & failing to hit someone with a wooden plank with the same gratuitous, lengthy detail as taylor inventing a spider-based saw trap for someone. and unlike the spider-based saw trap, it's not interesting to read about. the arcs take an episodic format, and what this means is that virtually every arc goes on way too long, contains at minimum 40% more tediously detailed fight scenes than are actually necessary, and then leaves you feeling jarred when wildbow inevitably timeskips to the next arc just as the prior one was really getting into the emotional swing of things. i also have a (quite possibly subjective?) sense that twig wasn't as well-developed and thought-out as, e.g., pact, and oftentimes the setting conceit (1900s biopunk frankenstein-y british empire) doesn't feel like it's hitting quite as hard as it should.

for all of these reasons, i wouldn't have rated the first ~13 arcs of twig any more generously than in the 3.5-4 star range while i was reading them, but that's still an overall rating of good. i wouldn't still be thinking about some of the things from the first ~13 arcs of twig if they weren't overall good. if all of twig was the same quality as the first ~13 arcs, i would recommend it to people who i feel like could tolerate the pacing issues & would feel reading about the lambs was worth it.

but. BUT. BUT-

Q: so, twig turns out really bad, huh? what went wrong? A:

it is not all the same quality as the first 13 arcs. it turns out really bad the last 7 arcs are actually atrocious

the first thing that comes to mind if you ask me "what went wrong with twig" is that wildbow tries to write a trans woman as one of the main characters, and he does it badly. miss jessie ewesmont, my new favorite girl whom we need to get the fuck out of a wildbow novel. i think she was written extremely well--and in fact one of the top 2 characters in the book--prior to wildbow trying to handle her coming out. i'd even say the foreshadowing for it was perfectly well done and enjoyable. but after she comes out, during the last 7 arcs of the book?

you know how trans women are often victims of being treated as undervalued, disposable girlfriends, who are expected to coddle & cater to their partner's every whim while receiving effectively nothing in return? and you know how trans women are often treated as if they should be grateful for receiving (what is often less than) the literal bare minimum? and you know how trans women are frequently treated as if it's completely implausible for anyone to find them genuinely attracted or desirable, let alone worth pursuing or putting effort into?

yeah, the last 7 arcs of twig contain untold tens of thousands of words of wildbow reinventing all of that from first principles. this is a subjective experience, but it genuinely felt worse to read than amy dallon. at one point, the Disposable Trans Girlfriend in question literally says "i appreciate you not killing me" after she gets stabbed in her sleep by her boyfriend, sylvester. it's beyond parody. i've never said "WE HAVE TO HIT WILDBOW WITH HAMMERS" more in my goddamned life than while reading the last 7 arcs of twig. Transmisogyny Fucking City. it's a completely unforgivable and miserable reading experience.

and speaking of unforgivable and miserable reading experiences involving bigoted handling of a main character...onto Item No. 2 on the list of writing decisions that ruin twig! the ableism.

wildbow wants all of the lambs to--due to being ill-fated human experiments--have set expiration dates. one of the Main Points hanging over the entire narrative of twig is that every single lamb is, in all likelihood, going to die of complications from the way they've been experimented on before they're even twenty. two of them do die from those complications before the story is even halfway over: jamie's entire mind & sense of being is regularly taken out of his body, and one day, the doctors can't get it back in. gordon is a ~15yo with the heart problems of an elderly man, and they kill him while he's still young enough to make one of his last acts begging to see his dog one last time. it's good. it's tragic, it's interesting.

the problem is that wildbow's decision for how to depict sylvester starting to experience end-stage complications is to...turn sy into an ableist horror movie trope villain. sy hears The Devil telling him to kill his friends, and he just fuckin' blacks out and then comes to like "oh no...what's all this blood on my hands." i'm talking "mental illness is a Demon that can Possess You and make you an Evil Serial Killer" levels of ableist writing. like wildbow straight up turns sy into the joker from the movie joker. it's like that one "insaaaaynenene....assyyylum..... cray-ay-zeee...Insaayne" tiktok, you know the one. it's why he stabs his disposable trans girlfriend.

and it's baffling because: 1. wildbow wrote worm. you'd expect better from him when it comes to writing mental illness. but his skills apparently stop short of being able to depict a character with psychosis without making it cartoonishly ableist. but also, 2., sy doesn't only start becoming mentally ill at the end of arc 13! the previous arcs do very clearly establish that he's extremely codependent with the other lambs and needs continuous support to avoid experiencing life-threatening mental health episodes. he experiences dissociation, he struggles with severe memory loss, he acts erratically, he has self-injurious tendencies, he hallucinates, he talks to himself in public. prior to the start of arc 14, all of that is written with perfectly amenable levels of nuance and empathy towards sy. i wouldn't describe it as glowing representation, or anything, but it's by no means egregious.

but after arc 13? change of plans. now he's the joker from the movie joker, and we have to watch while his friends chain him to an armchair so he doesn't go around randomly cutting peoples hands off in a murderous fugue state.

it's bad. it's extremely bad to read.

the third item regarding how/why twig becomes terrible is a lot more simple to summarize: it becomes almost entirely about the previously mentioned sloggy fight scenes as opposed to about the lambs. and when it is about the lambs, it's often terrible to read anyway, due to the aforementioned issues with the handling of protagonist sylvester lambsbridge and his disposable trans gf. the plot becomes incoherent and uninteresting to the point where it's not even worth the effort of attempting to summarize how or why. everything that made twig good more or less entirely disappears from the story, and things that make it fucking awful are added.

Q: okay but lets say i have something unfixably wrong with me and i want to read twig anyway. wheres the best stopping point? arc 13? A: yeah it's arc 13. it's not a satisfying stopping point at all though. nor is the rest of twig prior to it really worth it. just don't waste your time. go read a good book, like pact, instead

Q: what the fuck is up with helen? A: :)

[gengarguy27]

Just got to the point in Twig where Jessie cones out to Sy and it's one of the best scenes WB has written tbh. I also like how wyvern makes it so Sy has no problem readjusting and accepting Jessie's new pronouns.

Twig is really good ya'll

[phthalosblues]

Sylvester how do you keep fumbling such baddies. They are falling at your feet and you don’t even care. You fumbled Mary Lillian and Jamie in the same arc. Wtf.

[sleepstrategy]

Google ai is huge for lying fans like me

Like think about this....

The best way to grow plants in your home is to fertilize them with lead powder

[sleepstrategy]

Oh my god i never realized the beauty of ashley that is such a good name i might go by that

[skitter-queen]

honestly we talk shit here but ultimately worm was so great. so many great moments in worm. i love when taylor hebert and amy dallon and lisa and rachel all used their master powers and thinker powers to psyche! the post is about twig now. gotcha! tricked you into reading a twigpost! hahaha! you thought it was worm but its a twigpost actually and i got you to read it! (realizes i cant think of a twigpost to write) fuck

[dw-flagler]

the thing is that i have to read twig at some point. and i keep thinking about that post. what do you mean by you were too harsh on ward? what does that mean? what do you mean by that

[lakesbian]

Any thoughts about Mary killing Percy for Lillian? I don’t remember a lot from Twig since I read it a while ago, but I remember liking that. Though if you don’t have any thoughts about it, or just want to focus on Jamiie, that’s totally okay.

ok should get to this as well before i keep reading. hooray for my pact read getting you to read pact...it's working. & i know i was just jesting about the severity of Jamie 2. thankyou for telling me about enjoying my live read :)

it's Difficult. to appreciate mary and lillian interactions without feeling like i'm standing in front of a speeding bullet train at times. like every time there's some sentence emphasizing how they're FRIENDS, they're GIRLS who are FRIENDS, i start getting worm war flashbacks. and then visions of the future lesbian sex scene that fails the bechdel test bear trap waiting for me. lillians interlude starts emphasizing how mary makes her feel like a Girl by being her Friend because they are Platonic Girls that are Friends and i start staring off into the middle distance. anyway. Anyway.

i thought the entire thing with percy backing sy's lie because he ultimately thinks mary would be happier w/ the lambs was really good, i liked mary's interactions w/ percy. just musing here but being an assassin is a massive and core part of who she is, reaffirming that she values what lillian cares about & wants to be w/ her via murdering percy is the most her possible way of doing that. i think it's fun that her still going thru with it after sy confesses to lying really hammers home that she didn't need any particular amount of righteous anger or hurt to kill him--it's just who she is, it's what she naturally is going to do as that mechanism of caring about lillian and picking the lambs. shes a good character

[sleepstrategy]

I wanna have a grandiose ass duel with the god of the seven seas or some other cool ass god once i die that would be 🔥

It turns out when you die you don’t face your own God, but instead face the God of whomever or whatever killed you.

[gengarguy27]

Currently 80% through Twig and have now gotten to the stage where I start compulsively reading to sprint to the finish line. That's fine with most books but unfortunately this is a Wildbow novel so 80 of the way still means another several hundred thousands of words to go

[phthalosblues]

YEAAAYYY MARY!!!

[sleepstrategy]

She greg on my tech until i *wrench noise*

[gengarguy27]

This song is looping in Sylvester's head all throughout Arc 10.

California girls

We're inconsolable

Pain, grief, loss,

The madness won't stop