'Practice un-makes perfect, a modest review of Pale and an overview of the Thing around it'

When it was confirmed that Wildbow would be returning to the world of Pact (arguably pound for pound/arc for arc/sentence for sentence his best written work) my genuine anticipation was marked by stark hesitation. Yes, the ‘Pactverse’ probably best suits Wildbow’s ideas and imagination (where Worm (and Ward especially) feel at times constrained by its superhero conceit, Pact’s world super-naturally‘is’) this would have to be a serial written after Ward. Meaning, what made Pact great (among Wildbow’s serials and on its own merits), the Go-go-go pacing, novelty setpieces, and, most importantly, the relative clarity in Wildbow’s writing, have immediately since then given way to laborious stumbling blocks of language. Which puts me, your humble reviewer-guy, in a somewhat tricky spot, which I’ll get into later. Just believe me when I say this, I’m not trying to be mean, offensive, or what-have-you here, these are just my thoughts, my impressions on this story I’m reading (though just prefacing this might perhaps say something on how perceived Wildbow and the fan community he’s concocted to be, more on that later).

To get right into it, Pale starts off promisingly enough. A prologue that sets up the central conflict, the Blood and Moon and Beast all evoke wonderful imagery, a sense of dread that fits, all while through the language-lens of a character I could rather follow for the entirety of the whole thing. We don’t, of course, but our alternatives come with their own promises.

Pale swaps the usual I-am-navel-gazing first person we’ve become accustomed to with Wildbow with instead three protagonists, whose perspective we rotate between chapters. It’s a noteworthy experiment, especially when they all make good first impressions. If the prologue was Wildbow’s best Pact impression, then the shift to the protagonists proper telegraph something different, at least initially. Pale is going to be a story that’ll go there (evocative horror material) and also go there (a sort of Sabrina the Teenage Witch but with preteens and spookier spooks). A not-so delicate balance because there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t work on principle, and Wildbow promises to maintain that act, less a tightrope and more walking a straight line on a hardwood floor.

The problem with promises, then, especially in the Pact/Pale-verse, is that the consequences are triply more devastating when broken.

For all the praise Wildbow deservedly deserves in terms of imagination, creature-design, and worldbuilding that to the more enthused fan I’m sure is so clever and detailed (I’m tempted to respond by risk-quoting Tyler Durden here, ‘How’s that working out for you?), the medium of language continues to be his stumbling block, words continue to get in the way. And yet this seems entirely unnecessary. Wildbow is possessed by a unique writer’s spirit of writing too much and yet too little. The prologue is great until it starts to run a little long, then it’s just good, the protag-trio sweat too many unnecessary details (though of course is necessary because Wildbow might think to draw on it more than several arcs later, less laying the groundwork and more dumping everything on the floor and picking and choosing what to use at random), how many words does it take for a girl to mow a lawn until we’ve reached parody? And what is a ‘murder-disappearance’ anyway? The supposed central crime (Pale is also, at first, structured like a mystery) is kept intentionally vague in a manner that feels less like some type of supernatural mystique, that the magical world they operate within leads to less traditional transgressions that mere mortals cannot comprehend, and more the author isn’t used to this genre, and so keeps it muddied to perhaps save his skin, should he get lost in his own design (not helped by the Wildbow brand of Sprawl, less to the effect of Epic, and more Distraction Until it Overtakes, like when the trio careen off to a separate Wizarding School and all their narrative entrenchments, Ellrovian plotting this is not).

But, really, the plot could have been about anything, subject hardly factors in at a juncture like this, but rather its representation. It’s the (not so) little things. Take out the qualifiers, the ‘saids’ and the ‘told hers’ and the ‘asked’ and the fluff gestures and the dialogue falls flaccid, five serials to come to the conclusion that Wildbow has no innate sense of rhythm. Longer sentences (and works) can have rhythm, just read The Crying of Lot 49’s opening salvo (or she supposed executrix), but Wildbow simply cannot, or more charitably, cannot afford to, literally, if one considers his Patreon pays him to write a certain way.

And does anyone actually take Verona’s father seriously? He’s a characterized bastardization of Abuse, only haunting in his un-reality, but really is just funny in its attempt. He’s a caricature of this type, goofy in actual appearance, but unfortunately realistic to those whose own gaze has been traumatically skewed. Not a slight on anyone’s perception, but anyone who considers this character to be an actual attempt at realism should rather re-consider (hardly matters if Wildbow claims to have drawn this character from real people/real quotes, those things may be real but the character portrait he sketches is not. The average person knows what a horse looks like, can the average person draw a realistic horse, with all its detail and musculature?), a similar effect has been noted among other scenes in Wildbow’s writing, namely the parent-teacher conference scene in Worm, a scene that mechanically Makes No Sense, which says something more about what the reader is projecting onto a scene rather than the author’s skill of realizing that scene through their own use of language.

I could go on here, and I will briefly. Most fans will point to the chapter 1.z as a good standalone and evidence as Wildbow’s supposed ‘growth’ as a writer since the Worm/Pact days. Rather I’d argue it instead proves how Wildbow’s current style eviscerates any good idea that threatens to surface unmarred. Like this excerpt, ‘The thing ascended the stairs.  It wore his mother’s clothes, it had his mother’s hair, but it didn’t move like her, and like Peyton’s pictures, it had a giant hole instead of a face.  Also like Peyton’s, the hole was framed by teeth, like a mouth stretched open as wide as it could go, teeth large, stretched out from forehead to chin.  The interior was like a mouth’s, but darker.  Small streams of drool leaked out from between teeth and over the lip, making the front of her dress wet.’ Dry description blunt what is admittedly a decent monster design, but the thing reads like a note-to-self than an attempt to stir fear within a reader, or even a general unease, like the for-whatever-reason-not-infrequentment mentions of the girls dressing and undressing. If you want true horror, there it is.

Anyway, it almost seems redundant now, to get into how overly long the chapter was, taking too long to actually start, the ritual too convoluted and drawn out thus losing any narrative momentum, the action made unclear by murky prose (in a reading with several others all noted similar issues, this is a trust-me kind of analysis but it is endemic of everything post-Pact). How can people read this and think it good writing? How can people see Zack Snyder movies and consider them good? As Led Zeppelin sez, It Makes Me Wonder.

I could stop here, briefly mentioning the occasional bits of decent interaction between the trio, when they’re allowed to teens qua teens and not Wildbow Protagonists, their perspective stays in the third person yet they lapse into narcissistic gazing of their navels, Verona’s I-don’t-want-to-be-human-anymore shtick fails to land as intended, Extra Materials in the form of in-world book excerpts/maps/comics that attempt to solve the above mentioned issues (though applying incorrect solutions to correct lessons learned), the quirky and fun Other designs (legitimate flashes of brilliance), how goblins are handled compared to Pact, how Pale’s mere existence bolsters the universe of both Pact and itself, insofar as the Earth of Annie Hall and Taxi Driver are deepened by an abstraction that they take place on the same planet. Overall, however, Pale, um, does not stack up to the heights Pact made easy (you’re welcome for not going for the obvious pun there), and yet precisely for the same reasons that the fans will claim Pale over Pact.

I could stop here, but really Pale isn’t a novel, it’s a web serial, two very different things, meaning that Audience plays a more poignant role between Author and Text. Here, we’ll shift from a Pale review as such and pull back to a wider context.

Now to introduce one of Wildbow’s favorite devices, the Author-Audience-Text triangle, in which, in his own words ‘There’s a degree of interaction between each. The author to the audience, the author to the text, and the audience to the text, and vice versa for each. Be mindful of this.’ Be mindful indeed. We’ve discussed (in ‘brief’) Author and Text, time to look at Audience.

To some degree or another the author curates the audience they attract, their works appeal a certain way to a certain reader and so collect more of them together, and you go from there. If Wildbow is, by his own admission, a writer who doesn’t read, then his average audience is one that only reads Wildbow (I liken this to the meme of the guy who has only ever seen the Boss Baby movie now watching Goodfellas, ‘I’m getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this!’). With notable exceptions here and there, because there exists decent criticism, especially when Ward was winding down, one generally gets the impression, upon perusing the various fan communities, that most of the enthusiasm stems from the fact that Wildbow’s serials are among the first books that they allowed themselves to like that wasn’t assigned reading, and thus exists among them an out-of-proportion conflation of his talents. If Pale really is a mark above Pact, then wait until they read literally anything else.

It’s telling that the more mild opinions on Wildbow’s writing-as-writing exist in places where Wildbow himself doesn’t have direct control/influence/presence over, and in the forums where he does have those things he has laid the floor with eggshells. Don’t Ping Him, Don’t Meme This, Meme What Wildbow Tells You to Meme (the provided alternatives are usually much less funny). Thought an action scene was clunky and rushed? Feel free to bring it up, but only if you add it’s because of the POV of the given character actually, not a failure in the text to cohere. And so on. There certainly is an air of, not so far as to say toxicity, rather smog, among the communities he manages or actively participates in, not that I think it’s intentional, just only the tangle of symptoms Author and Audience get caught in when they’re allowed to even get this close in the first place (Wildbow has mentioned the community at times like a tarpit, which begs the question, where between those two particular poles does the tar come from?). Like Foucault’s Panopticon, the Audience have to self-police because the Author(ity) could be watching, Wildbow placing himself in his community in the central tower, a Big Brother figure. For all his railing against authority in his serials, there exists a quirky irony here (I’m again reminded of the special properties that Word of God authorial statements have on the community discourse, you cannot have proper ‘discussion’ without having first been mired in all obscure out-of-text nuance, anything outside or doesn’t account for it is ignored and dismissed by the Audience at large, however legitimate regardless, WoG seems fitting here).

What this creates, and what is perhaps unique to the web serial medium is this very imprisonment of Audience and Author, the latter, only being Authority in this context, is in their own way locked up with the former. In this particular scenario, Wildbow as Author created the Text, Worm, a work rough around the edges in terms of plot/prose/character but with very clear and inspired worldbuilding ideas, attracting an Audience, limited in their perspective (you’d be surprised what little superhero comics they’ve read before Worm), that rightfully loved the world for all its roleplaying gaminess, but incorrectly assumed that, if one aspect of the writing was excellent (the worldbuilding) then it follows that the rest is actually good too (how many times must we mistake unreliable narration with inconsistent characterization?). Thus, conflation. Thus, the chamber echoes. ‘If the Patreon People like bloated 9000 word chapters, then this I must provide, any proper editing be damned!’ Author leans on Audience in a way that, by design, cannot (because Audience is not Editors) support the weight, and yet Audience leans back in a way that contorts how the Text should be. If the author wants to affect the discourse around their writing, then they must write, not circumvent Text and affect Audience itself. One can have a healthy relationship with their readers, Sanderson provides an example here, but Author and Audience still maintain a separate, respectful distance. Doof Media has multiple podcasts dedicated to Wildbow’s work, that Wildbow will comment on and occasionally hop on, where they understandably heap on more praise, because the novelty of a writer actively engaging with their audience like this is still very unique, if not somewhat obscene. However, while this really is no problem at all, one can’t help but wonder, when an interplay like this exists, no matter who it is, does the Author want better readers, does the Audience want a better writer, or do each both want a friend? Within the web serial dynamic there exists a paradoxical parasocial relationship between Author and Audience.

So, psychoanalytical B.S. aside, what’s it all for? In the case of the medium of web serials, in this case Pale, it’s no surprise why it reads the way it does. Audience engagement is part of the web serial experience (until it isn’t, when it inevitably concludes and is forced to stand alone as a novel. Can it?), Audience participation has twisted the Author’s practice of the Text they read. To like Pale is to (want to) be proficient in Wildbow-ese, prose that, at bottom, takes work to read. On second thought it seems crass to bring any of this up, going back to Zack Snyder (or even Michael Bay), even the most ardent critic can admit they have a way with spectacle, but only the fanatics would dare to consider him Kubrick. Same with Wildbow, his spectacle being creating interesting worlds first, prose/plot to service it second, which is absolutely fine. All I’m saying, just don’t piss on my leg and say it’s raining.

Wildbow said it himself, ‘At the end of the day, though, I think the point an author stops listening and trying to grow is a sad day.’ Yes, true. Though, if Wildbow really wants to grow as a writer, and be the good writer his supposed fans think he is, then Wildbow should rather listen less to Audience and more to actual editors. Though we all know how he feels about that.

In the meantime, then, where the web serial can really be anything, or come about by any other method, if Wildbow really is our shining example, then we are, for the time being, doomed.