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Pactverse #2
Pale
A modern supernatural web serial by Wildbow, set in the same universe as his 2014-2015 serial Pact. Reading Pact or prior knowledge of the setting is not mandatory for reading Pale.
The story updates with new chapters twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, with chapters grouped into novel-like arcs. Expect to see interlude chapters dividing up the arcs, expanding on the story from other perspectives or in other formats, and there may even be supplementary material appearing in the midst of those arcs.
The story updates with new chapters twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, with chapters grouped into novel-like arcs. Expect to see interlude chapters dividing up the arcs, expanding on the story from other perspectives or in other formats, and there may even be supplementary material appearing in the midst of those arcs.
Unknown Binding
Published May 5, 2020
122 people are currently reading
578 people want to read
About the author
Wildbow
8 books880 followersWildbow (real name John C. McCrae, born in 1984), is a Canadian writer of Web Serial Novels.
His works include:
Worm
Pact
Twig
Ward (sequel to Worm)
(From http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...)
His works include:
Worm
Pact
Twig
Ward (sequel to Worm)
(From http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...)
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 4, 2020
On a sentence-by-sentence level, this is easily the best book Wildbow has written. And that, in turn, is just about the highest praise I could ever give a book.
January 5, 2021
* This review ran a little too long for the character count, despite edits, so what follows is the first half of my review, the review of Pale, with the link provided being the thing in full, including the second half, a brief overview of the community that surrounds it, because to understand it is a part of 'understanding' Pale (arguably the more important section).
https://pastebin.com/h5YsYj9c
'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.
Once again, link to whole thing, second half included: https://pastebin.com/h5YsYj9c
https://pastebin.com/h5YsYj9c
'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.
Once again, link to whole thing, second half included: https://pastebin.com/h5YsYj9c
April 22, 2021
Pale. What is there to say about it? It's a serial that, by Wildbow's own admission, no longer marks him as an 'early writer.' It's a serial that was written after Wildbow expressed distress with the act of writing Ward, the divisive sequel to the cult hit Worm, to the extent that he wished to stop writing. It's a serial that is said to something new and refreshing for Wildbow - a shorter work, one with a different focus and method of storytelling.
The thing about Pale, though, is that it has been dogged by controversy from the very start. Even before posting, the previous title of the story exposed the persistent lack of minority perspective that hounds Wildbow's body of work. And the way Wildbow responded to the audience reflected, again, an inability to accept blame or failing. In a way, it encapsulates Pale perfectly - it's a response to some of the concerned voices in his fanbase, and yet it doesn't actually do anything differently, much less better.
You'll note that I'm yet to really discuss Pale as a text. This is because Pale is a web serial, and so much of it, positive or negative, is tied up in the meta aspect of Wildbow's trajectory as a creative who is writing, for all intents and purposes, live before a studio audience. Frankly, it's impossible to discuss the text without discussing everything surrounding it, because the everything surrounding it is the reason for the issues within the text.
What's unfortunate about Pale is that it begins well. It's not hard to see why people think it's Wildbow's best work yet, but the whole artifice crumbles immediately. Within Pale, there is some of Wildbow's worst writing, too. Focusing a story on young children is a choice that is, with all due respect, ballsy. Even for well-respected best selling writers. It's much more so for someone whose fiction has never really been defined as having its strength in interpersonal interaction. Wildbow is many things - a fantastic worldbuilder, an imaginative guy, a writer with a solid work ethic - but he is not a writer who has a handle on interpersonal drama or interaction, which is why it's so maddening to see him put more and more emphasis on it. A critical eye can quickly figure out that Wildbow isn't so much writing what he knows, but what he doesn't know, which leads to this persistent issue of wondering if you're reading a story written by an alien or a robot.
So, Pale falls apart quickly. But even then, that's par for the course. What's more remarkable is that it's the first serial of Wildbow's where I've found the subject matter questionable-at-best. Why are there so many chapters mentioning, or focusing on, the sex lives of middle schoolers? Why are there chapters where they ogle older characters, or have such a focus on dressing and undressing? What is with Verona's father? Why, precisely, did Wildbow need to remind his commenters and fans not to be creepy? I have had many discussions about Pale where people express disbelief and/or concern with the content. While there's nothing explicit in Pale - as far as I'm aware - there's a lot of stuff that is weird.
All in all, I recommend reading Imjustasguilty's review. When you get right down to it, I'd just be echoing what they said and, frankly, it's better than anything I could do. Everything they say about the wider context of Wildbow's work and how it's influenced both him and Pale is correct. Pale is a story where it is only good in the context of his wider work, and the flaws are only truly apparent within that same context. As a text, it just happens to exist. But if Ward was the first sign that Wildbow needed to get away from his fans, find an editor, and find some financial (and creative) freedom, then Pale is the siren screaming in the dead of night, the warning that it might be too late.
I mean, what's next - a sequel to Twig?
The thing about Pale, though, is that it has been dogged by controversy from the very start. Even before posting, the previous title of the story exposed the persistent lack of minority perspective that hounds Wildbow's body of work. And the way Wildbow responded to the audience reflected, again, an inability to accept blame or failing. In a way, it encapsulates Pale perfectly - it's a response to some of the concerned voices in his fanbase, and yet it doesn't actually do anything differently, much less better.
You'll note that I'm yet to really discuss Pale as a text. This is because Pale is a web serial, and so much of it, positive or negative, is tied up in the meta aspect of Wildbow's trajectory as a creative who is writing, for all intents and purposes, live before a studio audience. Frankly, it's impossible to discuss the text without discussing everything surrounding it, because the everything surrounding it is the reason for the issues within the text.
What's unfortunate about Pale is that it begins well. It's not hard to see why people think it's Wildbow's best work yet, but the whole artifice crumbles immediately. Within Pale, there is some of Wildbow's worst writing, too. Focusing a story on young children is a choice that is, with all due respect, ballsy. Even for well-respected best selling writers. It's much more so for someone whose fiction has never really been defined as having its strength in interpersonal interaction. Wildbow is many things - a fantastic worldbuilder, an imaginative guy, a writer with a solid work ethic - but he is not a writer who has a handle on interpersonal drama or interaction, which is why it's so maddening to see him put more and more emphasis on it. A critical eye can quickly figure out that Wildbow isn't so much writing what he knows, but what he doesn't know, which leads to this persistent issue of wondering if you're reading a story written by an alien or a robot.
So, Pale falls apart quickly. But even then, that's par for the course. What's more remarkable is that it's the first serial of Wildbow's where I've found the subject matter questionable-at-best. Why are there so many chapters mentioning, or focusing on, the sex lives of middle schoolers? Why are there chapters where they ogle older characters, or have such a focus on dressing and undressing? What is with Verona's father? Why, precisely, did Wildbow need to remind his commenters and fans not to be creepy? I have had many discussions about Pale where people express disbelief and/or concern with the content. While there's nothing explicit in Pale - as far as I'm aware - there's a lot of stuff that is weird.
All in all, I recommend reading Imjustasguilty's review. When you get right down to it, I'd just be echoing what they said and, frankly, it's better than anything I could do. Everything they say about the wider context of Wildbow's work and how it's influenced both him and Pale is correct. Pale is a story where it is only good in the context of his wider work, and the flaws are only truly apparent within that same context. As a text, it just happens to exist. But if Ward was the first sign that Wildbow needed to get away from his fans, find an editor, and find some financial (and creative) freedom, then Pale is the siren screaming in the dead of night, the warning that it might be too late.
I mean, what's next - a sequel to Twig?
January 29, 2024
I have been reading Pale as it released from the very beginning in 2020 until the end. As such I am clearly suffering from a severe and acute case of Stockholm Syndrome, and you shouldn’t trust a single thing I say. But to try and step back a bit – Pale is the best 4 million word serial I have ever read, and very nearly even good.
The story follows Avery, Lucy and Verona, precocious and for various reasons marginalized teenagers in a decaying Canadian ski town. They are recruited by a council of the various ghouls, ghosts and goblins who live in the shadows of the town to be its Official Witches and investigate the mysterious death of the Carmine Beast, the greater spirit who stood as judge over all contests of struggle and violence in the region (less in the hopes that find anything and more so that any nosy outsiders can be truthfully told it has already been handled). Being of a protagonist-ey bent, they rapidly exceed their new patrons’ expectations, especially the ones among them who had a hand in the murder. After that it’s basically just literally several million words of things escalating further and further out of anyone’s control.
Or, I kid, but it really is impossible to talk about Pale without forgrounding its length and medium, I think. This is a serial which ran continuously with at least one update a week for more than three years, and (to grab another story about child wizards to compare) is roughly four complete Harry Potter series’ in length. Beyond being an entirely superhuman accomplishment as far as writing productivity goes, this had unavoidable effects on the story as it was being told. It also makes it literally impossible to provide anything like a complete plot summary in a review short enough that anyone will read it. So just take my word that there’s a lot of it, and we’ll come back to the others length-related issues.
This is an urban fantasy book, and a kitchen sink one at that – it’s clearly one of the underlying principles of the setting that it should, insofar as possible, be able to fit every type of storybook monster and horror movie plot and twilight zone episode within it somewhere. Underlying and ordering it all is the axiom that (almost) nothing magical can lie. The world will only respond to your word if its actually worth something – contradicting or gainsaying yourself harms your karma and sets the universe against you, breaking a sworn oath is an open invitation to fates worse than death. The natural consequence of this is that every practitioner (wizard, basically) worth shit has been trained from birth to be an asshole genie and most of the really powerful Others (catch-all term for supernatural creatures) come by it naturally.
None of which is new – this is the second serial Wildbow has written in the setting – but they do combine to make a bunch of amateur detectives investigating a murder really, really fun. The heroines POVs also offers a great way to introduce the setting to the reader, or, at least, provides an excellent justification for in character exposition dumps – and to be clear, this is a series with lore. I consider this an absolute win, but if you don’t like elaborate asides about random monsters or marginal otherworlds that clearly exist only because the author thought they were cool, then this is not the series for you. (On the other hand, most of them are absolutely cool). The world is vast, and the story is full of asides and tangents about things that could easily sustain a novel in their own right.
The other way the exposition is provided is through occasional Extra Materials mini-chapters (quite regular during the beginning of the story, less so as it goes on), which are just excerpts of in-universe documentation – specifically things that the protagonists or occasionally another major character would have been reading. Everything from class notes to chatlogs to investigation summaries as written by one of the girls to local social media posts to a dozen other things. Surprisingly good graphic design on most of them too, which really helps sell them as in-universe artifacts and as ways to characterize the implied authors/readers. It’s very much to the serial’s detriment that these fade away as it goes on.
The series has three protagonists, and chapters alternate between each of their POVs and internal narration. It actually does an excellent job differentiating between Lucy, Avery and Verona and giving them their own distinct voices and making each compelling in their own right (not that I don’t have my favourite, but). While the book’s not perfect about it, on the whole they mostly feel like unusually bright and dedicated teenagers (and increasingly incredibly traumatized child soldiers with variably healthy coping mechanisms), rather than short and legally disabled adults.
As is fairly common with web serials, the normal chapters are intercut with interludes from the perspective of some more minor character. Across all Wildbow’s works, these are honestly where he really shines most, I think. They’re each essentially short stories introducing and providing the history and characterization of someone from their own point of view, in the process more often than not totally recontextualizing their role in the story so far, with how they advance the actual plot almost incidental half the time. If I wanted to sell someone on the setting with as little investment as possible, I would probably just link them the first interlude – the first 90% of the chapter is a really quite good standalone horror story about a totally normal kinda shitty kid getting drawn into and being consumed by an occult living ritual (with its own creepy song! And cannibalism!)
Wildbow is actually an incredibly gifted character writer - both as a web serial author (but on the whole that’s not really any great accomplishment) and just, generally. Despite having an absolutely comically sprawling cast (like, dozens, minimum. If you told me hundreds I’d believe you), he manages to give the vast, vast majority of ones that matter their own distinct aesthetics, voices, and even their own little character arcs and plotlines. Even as much as I complain about bloat and pacing, it never stops being a joy to just spend time in any of the three protagonists’ heads, and I was deeply invested in them achieving their dreams in a way I rarely if ever am for fictional characters.
Now, the complaining. Wildbow is, as I said, one of the best character writers I know working today. The same cannot be said for his skill writing action scenes – which is incredibly unfortunate, because there are so, so fucking many of them. Some serve a real narrative purpose or showcase some bit of characterization, but most could honestly be cut by 90% and you wouldn’t lose anything except wordcount – even the ones which should be there tend to drag on past their natural end because of the book’s love of making things as desperate and hardwon as possible. Which I wouldn’t necessarily mind but like, there are individual action set-pieces that are longer than some published novels. At a certain point exhaustion sets in. If I had to guess, I’d put this down to the fact that when you’re writing 10k words a week and don’t have any concrete ideas of where to go next with the plot worked out, just extending the action scene and throwing some new monsters or puzzles or reversals of fortune at the heroes can eat up a chapter and buy you some time – but just because it’s an understandable consequence of the serial format doesn’t mean I need to like it.
Perhaps reading far too much into it, but if I had to guess, I would say the story’s more structural issues stem from the same thing. Pale was originally planned as a (relatively) short and (relatively) light serial, but in the process of writing rapidly ballooned past all planning and expectation. Which like, as I said, I just enjoyed spending time in the various protagonists’ heads and seeing them develop, but at a certain point you can absolutely start to see the plot starting to outpace all planning and spinning off in multiple entirely new directions that were pretty clearly informed by whatever idea Wildbow was turning over in his head at the time. Sometimes this worked out very nicely – I still love Avery’s whole Thunder Bay/accidental love triangle arc. Sometimes it’s a bit mixed – Wonderkand is a very fun idea, but tonally and aesthetically is kind of a mismatch with 90% of the rest of the setting. Sometimes, well – did anyone like the extended Aurum/Dark Fall trial sequence? But even aside from individual arc quality, if you are someone who cares even slightly about things like ‘pacing’, ‘narrative discipline’, or ‘plot points/foreshadowing not going in weird directions or fading in the background because the author just forgot/kind of lost interest in them in the course or writing a novella weekly for three years’ then oh boy is this not the story for you.
A similar sort of thing happens, I think, with the story’s themes. Pale is from the beginning very explicitly concerned with ideas of punitive versus rehabilitative justice, an already slightly fraught use of the subjugation/binding of magical creatures as a metaphor for oppression and colonization, and just generally with the idea of building a better world in the hidden corners of the current one. The story, well, remains very interested with those subjects, but having any coherent viewpoint on them falls to the wayside compared to coming up with ways to advance the plot or dilemmas to throw at the protagonists or just vivid bits of imagery in the moment. This more or less generalizes – I kind of get the sense that Wildbow set out wanting to write something that goes against his narrative reflexes/habits, but as the story went on and the writing piled up they just kind of crept back in. Certainly for a story that take pains at first to emphasize how hellish and cruel long term binding and confinement are, the happy ending involves a lot of various cruel and torturous prisons that are portrayed as somewhere between necessary and just. The big final villain also more or less works on a character level, but thematically is basically the single worst choice of anyone the protagonists faced down across the entire story.
I’m accentuating the negative here, and part of that is just because I’m a miserable husk of a human, but it’s also just that Pale’s real problems tend to be structural, while its high points are much more particular and specific, and hard to sell without immense amounts of context – there are so many random side characters who get more compelling stories than the actual protagonists of some books I’ve read this year, and a half dozen scenes that are pretty permanently burned into my memory. My favourite dynamic involves a character whose only present for, like, 3% of the story max.
At one point the story was intended to end with Arc 13, followed by a hiatus and then a sequel. I still think this would have been the correct choice, even that ending would rip my fucking heart out and also possibly get Wildbow literal bombs mailed to his house. Still – if you can stand that sort of ending and also are the sort of person to read million-word web serials to begin with, that would be my recommendation. Get to that point, and then decide for yourself how invested you are in spending time in the heads of the protagonists and in the world. Or read Pact, which is like a fifth of the size and ostensibly set in the same setting – though leans so much further into horror than urban fantasy for tone that functionally there’s a lot of discrepancies.
The story follows Avery, Lucy and Verona, precocious and for various reasons marginalized teenagers in a decaying Canadian ski town. They are recruited by a council of the various ghouls, ghosts and goblins who live in the shadows of the town to be its Official Witches and investigate the mysterious death of the Carmine Beast, the greater spirit who stood as judge over all contests of struggle and violence in the region (less in the hopes that find anything and more so that any nosy outsiders can be truthfully told it has already been handled). Being of a protagonist-ey bent, they rapidly exceed their new patrons’ expectations, especially the ones among them who had a hand in the murder. After that it’s basically just literally several million words of things escalating further and further out of anyone’s control.
Or, I kid, but it really is impossible to talk about Pale without forgrounding its length and medium, I think. This is a serial which ran continuously with at least one update a week for more than three years, and (to grab another story about child wizards to compare) is roughly four complete Harry Potter series’ in length. Beyond being an entirely superhuman accomplishment as far as writing productivity goes, this had unavoidable effects on the story as it was being told. It also makes it literally impossible to provide anything like a complete plot summary in a review short enough that anyone will read it. So just take my word that there’s a lot of it, and we’ll come back to the others length-related issues.
This is an urban fantasy book, and a kitchen sink one at that – it’s clearly one of the underlying principles of the setting that it should, insofar as possible, be able to fit every type of storybook monster and horror movie plot and twilight zone episode within it somewhere. Underlying and ordering it all is the axiom that (almost) nothing magical can lie. The world will only respond to your word if its actually worth something – contradicting or gainsaying yourself harms your karma and sets the universe against you, breaking a sworn oath is an open invitation to fates worse than death. The natural consequence of this is that every practitioner (wizard, basically) worth shit has been trained from birth to be an asshole genie and most of the really powerful Others (catch-all term for supernatural creatures) come by it naturally.
None of which is new – this is the second serial Wildbow has written in the setting – but they do combine to make a bunch of amateur detectives investigating a murder really, really fun. The heroines POVs also offers a great way to introduce the setting to the reader, or, at least, provides an excellent justification for in character exposition dumps – and to be clear, this is a series with lore. I consider this an absolute win, but if you don’t like elaborate asides about random monsters or marginal otherworlds that clearly exist only because the author thought they were cool, then this is not the series for you. (On the other hand, most of them are absolutely cool). The world is vast, and the story is full of asides and tangents about things that could easily sustain a novel in their own right.
The other way the exposition is provided is through occasional Extra Materials mini-chapters (quite regular during the beginning of the story, less so as it goes on), which are just excerpts of in-universe documentation – specifically things that the protagonists or occasionally another major character would have been reading. Everything from class notes to chatlogs to investigation summaries as written by one of the girls to local social media posts to a dozen other things. Surprisingly good graphic design on most of them too, which really helps sell them as in-universe artifacts and as ways to characterize the implied authors/readers. It’s very much to the serial’s detriment that these fade away as it goes on.
The series has three protagonists, and chapters alternate between each of their POVs and internal narration. It actually does an excellent job differentiating between Lucy, Avery and Verona and giving them their own distinct voices and making each compelling in their own right (not that I don’t have my favourite, but). While the book’s not perfect about it, on the whole they mostly feel like unusually bright and dedicated teenagers (and increasingly incredibly traumatized child soldiers with variably healthy coping mechanisms), rather than short and legally disabled adults.
As is fairly common with web serials, the normal chapters are intercut with interludes from the perspective of some more minor character. Across all Wildbow’s works, these are honestly where he really shines most, I think. They’re each essentially short stories introducing and providing the history and characterization of someone from their own point of view, in the process more often than not totally recontextualizing their role in the story so far, with how they advance the actual plot almost incidental half the time. If I wanted to sell someone on the setting with as little investment as possible, I would probably just link them the first interlude – the first 90% of the chapter is a really quite good standalone horror story about a totally normal kinda shitty kid getting drawn into and being consumed by an occult living ritual (with its own creepy song! And cannibalism!)
Wildbow is actually an incredibly gifted character writer - both as a web serial author (but on the whole that’s not really any great accomplishment) and just, generally. Despite having an absolutely comically sprawling cast (like, dozens, minimum. If you told me hundreds I’d believe you), he manages to give the vast, vast majority of ones that matter their own distinct aesthetics, voices, and even their own little character arcs and plotlines. Even as much as I complain about bloat and pacing, it never stops being a joy to just spend time in any of the three protagonists’ heads, and I was deeply invested in them achieving their dreams in a way I rarely if ever am for fictional characters.
Now, the complaining. Wildbow is, as I said, one of the best character writers I know working today. The same cannot be said for his skill writing action scenes – which is incredibly unfortunate, because there are so, so fucking many of them. Some serve a real narrative purpose or showcase some bit of characterization, but most could honestly be cut by 90% and you wouldn’t lose anything except wordcount – even the ones which should be there tend to drag on past their natural end because of the book’s love of making things as desperate and hardwon as possible. Which I wouldn’t necessarily mind but like, there are individual action set-pieces that are longer than some published novels. At a certain point exhaustion sets in. If I had to guess, I’d put this down to the fact that when you’re writing 10k words a week and don’t have any concrete ideas of where to go next with the plot worked out, just extending the action scene and throwing some new monsters or puzzles or reversals of fortune at the heroes can eat up a chapter and buy you some time – but just because it’s an understandable consequence of the serial format doesn’t mean I need to like it.
Perhaps reading far too much into it, but if I had to guess, I would say the story’s more structural issues stem from the same thing. Pale was originally planned as a (relatively) short and (relatively) light serial, but in the process of writing rapidly ballooned past all planning and expectation. Which like, as I said, I just enjoyed spending time in the various protagonists’ heads and seeing them develop, but at a certain point you can absolutely start to see the plot starting to outpace all planning and spinning off in multiple entirely new directions that were pretty clearly informed by whatever idea Wildbow was turning over in his head at the time. Sometimes this worked out very nicely – I still love Avery’s whole Thunder Bay/accidental love triangle arc. Sometimes it’s a bit mixed – Wonderkand is a very fun idea, but tonally and aesthetically is kind of a mismatch with 90% of the rest of the setting. Sometimes, well – did anyone like the extended Aurum/Dark Fall trial sequence? But even aside from individual arc quality, if you are someone who cares even slightly about things like ‘pacing’, ‘narrative discipline’, or ‘plot points/foreshadowing not going in weird directions or fading in the background because the author just forgot/kind of lost interest in them in the course or writing a novella weekly for three years’ then oh boy is this not the story for you.
A similar sort of thing happens, I think, with the story’s themes. Pale is from the beginning very explicitly concerned with ideas of punitive versus rehabilitative justice, an already slightly fraught use of the subjugation/binding of magical creatures as a metaphor for oppression and colonization, and just generally with the idea of building a better world in the hidden corners of the current one. The story, well, remains very interested with those subjects, but having any coherent viewpoint on them falls to the wayside compared to coming up with ways to advance the plot or dilemmas to throw at the protagonists or just vivid bits of imagery in the moment. This more or less generalizes – I kind of get the sense that Wildbow set out wanting to write something that goes against his narrative reflexes/habits, but as the story went on and the writing piled up they just kind of crept back in. Certainly for a story that take pains at first to emphasize how hellish and cruel long term binding and confinement are, the happy ending involves a lot of various cruel and torturous prisons that are portrayed as somewhere between necessary and just. The big final villain also more or less works on a character level, but thematically is basically the single worst choice of anyone the protagonists faced down across the entire story.
I’m accentuating the negative here, and part of that is just because I’m a miserable husk of a human, but it’s also just that Pale’s real problems tend to be structural, while its high points are much more particular and specific, and hard to sell without immense amounts of context – there are so many random side characters who get more compelling stories than the actual protagonists of some books I’ve read this year, and a half dozen scenes that are pretty permanently burned into my memory. My favourite dynamic involves a character whose only present for, like, 3% of the story max.
At one point the story was intended to end with Arc 13, followed by a hiatus and then a sequel. I still think this would have been the correct choice, even that ending would rip my fucking heart out and also possibly get Wildbow literal bombs mailed to his house. Still – if you can stand that sort of ending and also are the sort of person to read million-word web serials to begin with, that would be my recommendation. Get to that point, and then decide for yourself how invested you are in spending time in the heads of the protagonists and in the world. Or read Pact, which is like a fifth of the size and ostensibly set in the same setting – though leans so much further into horror than urban fantasy for tone that functionally there’s a lot of discrepancies.
March 14, 2023
I do wonder when Wildbow will finally discover that his true passion is writing RPGs.
But I digress. "Pale" isn't as bad as it could be, just quick look at "Ward" will prove it. In "Pale" if you skip around 60%, a half of what remains is quite interesting and engaging. Of course the author still writes characters often as if they knew future events which retrospectively justify their behavior. Also, like always, enigmatic figures control the plot and many of antagonists are undefeatable until they're suddenly aren't.
The strangest thing is that till around a half-point of the story, it all seemed to built towards something more meaningful with all parallels between different characters, groups, numerology, plot beats etc. But fandom didn't notice and it was abandoned.
Shame. It could have been good.
But I digress. "Pale" isn't as bad as it could be, just quick look at "Ward" will prove it. In "Pale" if you skip around 60%, a half of what remains is quite interesting and engaging. Of course the author still writes characters often as if they knew future events which retrospectively justify their behavior. Also, like always, enigmatic figures control the plot and many of antagonists are undefeatable until they're suddenly aren't.
The strangest thing is that till around a half-point of the story, it all seemed to built towards something more meaningful with all parallels between different characters, groups, numerology, plot beats etc. But fandom didn't notice and it was abandoned.
Shame. It could have been good.
November 12, 2023
Wildbow's best work, and my favourite piece of media, bar none. This is Pactverse #2, but it's designed to be a standalone story. Having said that, I read Pact first, (followed by the miniseries Poke) and have no regrets.
On to Pale:
Every part of this series and the worlds contained within are so intricately designed to fit together perfectly. Character drives plot, and the setting is built to be a living, breathing thing that moves to support the story or hammer home the themes. I can't recommend this book enough. I'm going to miss following along week to week, allowing the chapters enough time to sit with me. And a lot of these moments are going to stay with me for a long time. 5 stars doesn't feel like enough, so here's an extra 2 ⭐⭐. 7 feels like a good number.
On to Pale:
Every part of this series and the worlds contained within are so intricately designed to fit together perfectly. Character drives plot, and the setting is built to be a living, breathing thing that moves to support the story or hammer home the themes. I can't recommend this book enough. I'm going to miss following along week to week, allowing the chapters enough time to sit with me. And a lot of these moments are going to stay with me for a long time. 5 stars doesn't feel like enough, so here's an extra 2 ⭐⭐. 7 feels like a good number.
November 4, 2021
This book series has kept me captivated the whole way and I can't wait to get to the next chapter! I love the way the characters have developed and the family dynamics! Confusing to me at times, but it always explains itself if you keep reading.
My daughters have a podcast about this book (which got me reading it), Pale in Comparison. https://www.doofmedia.com/paleincompa...
This is outside the box, but I've made lots of handmade greeting cards with the Pale theme! Take a look here! https://www.pinterest.com/createwithc...
My daughters have a podcast about this book (which got me reading it), Pale in Comparison. https://www.doofmedia.com/paleincompa...
This is outside the box, but I've made lots of handmade greeting cards with the Pale theme! Take a look here! https://www.pinterest.com/createwithc...
October 13, 2023
Wow, what a journey. Over all my impression is positive. The young girl/woman underdog fighting against overwhelming odds is my jam and we were blessed with three of them in this story. If there was one issue I had it would be the pacing in that it felt like our heroines were careening from crisis to crisis, but the author does a good job of acknowledging and addressing this.
Lastly, I would have appreciated a longer epilogue of our heroines enjoying their best lives having come through the other side of this epic journey.
Lastly, I would have appreciated a longer epilogue of our heroines enjoying their best lives having come through the other side of this epic journey.
April 19, 2021
It started off with a bang, but is currently limping along off in the Canadian wilderness going no where. Reminiscent of a D&D game that began with an interesting premise, but months later is completely off the rails and focused more on the characters menagerie of pets than the plot.
July 2, 2024
After many months, I’ve finally finished this 20k page behemoth. And let me tell you, it was incredible. Truly, a generation-defining work of art (if only more people read it). Wildbow is far and away my favorite author, and I adamantly believe that he’d go down as one of the all-time greats if more people knew about him. Y’all probably didn’t know I was even reading this at all because I never talk about Pale (or even Worm), but man…I don’t even know where to begin. I could write my own book digging into the themes, the prose, the emotions, and everything else. But just read it for yourselves. It’s long, but it’s so so worth it.
September 21, 2021
I don't know what to say about Pale aside from the fact that it's my current favorite novel, period. Wildbow's works have legitimately changed me as a person, and I love every chapter. If you haven't started, now's a great time to pick it up, as it's in the home stretch now. The podcast Pale Reflections is a good companion to listen to for discussion and themes, and I recommend it too.
July 25, 2024
4.5 Cherrypops/5
Serials are WEIRD man! Finally finished this behemoth, which I clocked at 10,000 pages but a review here said 20K? So either way, huge. No singular books are this big, yet technically that is what this is, so by what barometer am I to judge and rate this? It's closer to a manga right? A longer-form thing that gets written in segments over a long period of time, filled with good arcs and bad arcs. Pale is imperfect, but how can a thing that is around the length of the entire Discworld series not have flaws?
Wildbow is one of my favorite authors, flaws and all. I have always celebrated Wildbow's ideas, I eat them right up. The things he crafts, especially at the rate he does so, monumental in achievement. Every setting he has created thus far is one that I find myself wanting to create in, Pactdice or otherwise. His execution can get a little wonky, climaxes don't always work for me (Titan stuff in Ward comes to mind, a little bit of Charles stuff here), and indeed sometimes I wonder if things REALLY had to go as long as they did (maybe an issue of the medium).
As other reviews have pointed out there are few online spaces to critique Wildbow works where you are not shamed by the community for having anything negative to say. Even more interestingly, those spaces also have the creator themselves lurking and reading your words. I once posted in a discord how happy I was to have something as big and engrossing as Pale during the pandemic, and Wildbow himself chimed in and said thanks! It really struck me, the literal author of the work is paying attention to my reading. This is fairly unheard of in most media spaces, if I write a review on Letterboxd I don't expect cast and crew to see my kind (or unkind) words. If all fiction had that kind of engagement, would it change how people talk about a work? I know for me it would, thinking about it made me want to mind my words and couch them in a way that is more digestible as I (a layman) pick apart a person's beloved creation. Now you could argue that is a better world to live in, and maybe you'd be right, but it's certainly not the norm yet.
I have to imagine I am not the only one to feel this way, the dynamic going from metaphorically shooting a bullet from afar to getting up close to the author with a verbal knife. If you couple that with fandom loyalty I imagine there is indeed some truth to the phenomenon some folks have alluded to, that the community around Wildbow works mitigates some growth as an author. Pretty sure another review here gave the Stephen King quote, "The worst thing for a talented young author is universal praise", and I think that's apt as well.
All of which to say, Wildbow's issues as an author may be less likely to improve over time given the circumstance. But also, maybe that doesn't matter? I know I'm definitely down to read more giant fantastical books (if not doorstoppers, Book Boulders?), and his fanbase is loyal, nurturing, and profitable. Maybe it's a-okay the way things are.
This turned into thoughts about Wildbow, but I also want to stress that I loved this book. I think what it had to say about disability and inclusion (Others just being people with different flavors of Ability) as well as approaching conflict with the sympathetic mindset of the Kenneteers has been so impactful to me. A lot of works I've seen recently have looked at the idea of where to draw the line in conflict (The Boys S3 comes to mind); how can one justify holding back even when it costs and the enemy will stop at nothing to obliterate you? Is it naive to pull punches and not do everything possible to ensure the Homelanders or the Abe Mussers of the world get stopped? I consider Pale to be a great argument for why its important to have lines in the sand and boundaries to not cross. Pacing was weird at times, and the final conflict with the central antagonist didn't quite stick the landing I think it wanted to, but those are small things in what was so fun to read.
Serials are WEIRD man! Finally finished this behemoth, which I clocked at 10,000 pages but a review here said 20K? So either way, huge. No singular books are this big, yet technically that is what this is, so by what barometer am I to judge and rate this? It's closer to a manga right? A longer-form thing that gets written in segments over a long period of time, filled with good arcs and bad arcs. Pale is imperfect, but how can a thing that is around the length of the entire Discworld series not have flaws?
Wildbow is one of my favorite authors, flaws and all. I have always celebrated Wildbow's ideas, I eat them right up. The things he crafts, especially at the rate he does so, monumental in achievement. Every setting he has created thus far is one that I find myself wanting to create in, Pactdice or otherwise. His execution can get a little wonky, climaxes don't always work for me (Titan stuff in Ward comes to mind, a little bit of Charles stuff here), and indeed sometimes I wonder if things REALLY had to go as long as they did (maybe an issue of the medium).
As other reviews have pointed out there are few online spaces to critique Wildbow works where you are not shamed by the community for having anything negative to say. Even more interestingly, those spaces also have the creator themselves lurking and reading your words. I once posted in a discord how happy I was to have something as big and engrossing as Pale during the pandemic, and Wildbow himself chimed in and said thanks! It really struck me, the literal author of the work is paying attention to my reading. This is fairly unheard of in most media spaces, if I write a review on Letterboxd I don't expect cast and crew to see my kind (or unkind) words. If all fiction had that kind of engagement, would it change how people talk about a work? I know for me it would, thinking about it made me want to mind my words and couch them in a way that is more digestible as I (a layman) pick apart a person's beloved creation. Now you could argue that is a better world to live in, and maybe you'd be right, but it's certainly not the norm yet.
I have to imagine I am not the only one to feel this way, the dynamic going from metaphorically shooting a bullet from afar to getting up close to the author with a verbal knife. If you couple that with fandom loyalty I imagine there is indeed some truth to the phenomenon some folks have alluded to, that the community around Wildbow works mitigates some growth as an author. Pretty sure another review here gave the Stephen King quote, "The worst thing for a talented young author is universal praise", and I think that's apt as well.
All of which to say, Wildbow's issues as an author may be less likely to improve over time given the circumstance. But also, maybe that doesn't matter? I know I'm definitely down to read more giant fantastical books (if not doorstoppers, Book Boulders?), and his fanbase is loyal, nurturing, and profitable. Maybe it's a-okay the way things are.
This turned into thoughts about Wildbow, but I also want to stress that I loved this book. I think what it had to say about disability and inclusion (Others just being people with different flavors of Ability) as well as approaching conflict with the sympathetic mindset of the Kenneteers has been so impactful to me. A lot of works I've seen recently have looked at the idea of where to draw the line in conflict (The Boys S3 comes to mind); how can one justify holding back even when it costs and the enemy will stop at nothing to obliterate you? Is it naive to pull punches and not do everything possible to ensure the Homelanders or the Abe Mussers of the world get stopped? I consider Pale to be a great argument for why its important to have lines in the sand and boundaries to not cross. Pacing was weird at times, and the final conflict with the central antagonist didn't quite stick the landing I think it wanted to, but those are small things in what was so fun to read.
October 30, 2024
Self-publishing is great, but if you are going to self-publish, it is still important to make your writing the best it can be. This story was way too focused on describing irrelevant, mundane details and took too long to get to the point. Although word count was not a limitation due to the story being posted online, it felt like the author did not respect the reader's time.
January 16, 2024
Magical. I dare say this is the best magic system I’ve ever come across. Delightful, suspenseful, emotional, fervently compelling, endlessly creative, surprisingly funny. As a die-hard magic system/worldbuilding lover, somehow the character beats, relational development, and slice-of-life stuff more than keeps pace with the fantastical magic and wild fight scenes.
January 16, 2024
As always wildbow delivers with a great urban fantasy setting and a deeply intriguing mystery to hook you in.
November 23, 2023
In contention with Worm as his best story.
September 6, 2023
The longest book I've ever read. It has some of the best author-done illustrations I've seen, and the setting of the story has permanently taken over how I think about fantasy and horror.
It drags on way too long though, is annoyingly moralistic, and as much as it tries, there's not much satisfying build-up to awe-inspiring dramatic moments. This is to some extent an inherent problem with the serial format, but Worm and Pact did it better.
It was a slog to read, and there are chapters in the last third I've probably not fully read because they were so boring to get through. I'm so happy to be finished, and I can't wait to successfully run an RPG in the setting.
It drags on way too long though, is annoyingly moralistic, and as much as it tries, there's not much satisfying build-up to awe-inspiring dramatic moments. This is to some extent an inherent problem with the serial format, but Worm and Pact did it better.
It was a slog to read, and there are chapters in the last third I've probably not fully read because they were so boring to get through. I'm so happy to be finished, and I can't wait to successfully run an RPG in the setting.
January 2, 2025
Wildbow puts other writers to shame, just in terms of the volume of high-quality writing he puts put. And Pale is his crowning achievement.
September 12, 2025
Phenomenal range of characters and unique depths and voice to them all
Read
November 12, 2025Lucy, Avery, and Verona have their hands full dealing each with their uniquely dysfunctional families, but they have a run-in with the local youth choir and things just go downhill from there.
November 25, 2025
Longest piece of literature I’ve ever read, wasn’t bored for a second. Also came with the strongest case of post book depression i’ve had
November 16, 2025
Oh boy. This is a big one. Nearly 4 million words about a trio of teenagers in the Otherverse.
For those not aware, this plays in the same universe as Pact.
Now for this behemoth of a webnovel... it's great. Part of that is the sheer volume of content, the amount of time we get to spend in each characters head and how real-world issues like abusive dads or annoying siblings to first crushes and partners get explored. Not to mention the magic system which is something entirely too complex and expansive to get into.
At its heart it's a murder mystery with magic as investigation tools, while also being about the coming-of-age of three teenage girls and witches alongside the heaps of issues, both normal and magical, they have to deal with. This is at the moment the only work from wildbow I can recommend without any issues, as long as you get over the sheer size of it. No issues other than stylistic ones come to mind, chapters with 10k words on average for example, that's up to a month of only reading Pale depending on your reading speed.
His prior works (only the first two since I didn't read Twig and Ward), Worm, Pact, were also big, but more than that, they were exhausting, they had non-stop action or escalation. But with this work it's finally reached a sufficient equilibrum, there is a good amount of slice-of-life between the action, and the stakes get acknowledged, debated and treated with the deserved amount of respect by most participants.
The highs are very high, mostly belonging to arc finales and satisfying character arc conclusions, while the lows aren't low enough to discourage from continuing onwards.
If you've got time and want to get into intrigue and complex magic, alongside a very large cast of human and non-human characters, this is the work for you. Highly recommended!
For those not aware, this plays in the same universe as Pact.
Now for this behemoth of a webnovel... it's great. Part of that is the sheer volume of content, the amount of time we get to spend in each characters head and how real-world issues like abusive dads or annoying siblings to first crushes and partners get explored. Not to mention the magic system which is something entirely too complex and expansive to get into.
At its heart it's a murder mystery with magic as investigation tools, while also being about the coming-of-age of three teenage girls and witches alongside the heaps of issues, both normal and magical, they have to deal with. This is at the moment the only work from wildbow I can recommend without any issues, as long as you get over the sheer size of it. No issues other than stylistic ones come to mind, chapters with 10k words on average for example, that's up to a month of only reading Pale depending on your reading speed.
His prior works (only the first two since I didn't read Twig and Ward), Worm, Pact, were also big, but more than that, they were exhausting, they had non-stop action or escalation. But with this work it's finally reached a sufficient equilibrum, there is a good amount of slice-of-life between the action, and the stakes get acknowledged, debated and treated with the deserved amount of respect by most participants.
The highs are very high, mostly belonging to arc finales and satisfying character arc conclusions, while the lows aren't low enough to discourage from continuing onwards.
If you've got time and want to get into intrigue and complex magic, alongside a very large cast of human and non-human characters, this is the work for you. Highly recommended!
October 21, 2023
Current peak of the Web Serial format.
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