Quote Originally Posted by Rynjin View Post
And all of the above is why Twig is by far Wildbow's best work.
I could never get into Twig, because I really don't enjoy children as characters. Or at least, Wildbow's take on children characters.

Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
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I couldn't figure out if the author intended to have 40 chapters and then just got bored with the wards really fast, or if he/she got bored. The first 20 chapters are in three months, the next 10 over three years.

Personally I could have stopped reading at Coil dying (or Skitter killing Alexandria) and been perfectly fine with it. The original character arc really terminates when Emma sees Skitter defeat Dragon using school children, and then Skitter realizes she is going to become a monster if she doesn't stop.


I really appreciate that Practical Guide to Evil had a big party split and then smoothly put it back together.
Spoiler: Worm Timeskip and Ending
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I like the ending, I feel it's very thematic with Taylor's journey. She's someone who sacrificed parts of herself every step of the journey, and ends with her sacrificing what makes her a person at all. And in the end her reward is to become a monster. To be unceremoniously executed (yes, I maintain that she dies at the end) to protect the world from her.

The timeskip though? Was without a doubt the weakest part of the story. The Wards get barely any screentime, and what little they do has basically nothing to do with who Taylor becomes. They put in two new Endbringers, and we don't actually get a full fight scene with either of them. Not to mention all the BS of Taylor in prison, the PR stuff, ect. It all combines for a really weak lead up to the end arc with the Slaughterhouse 9000 and the fight against Scion.

The Slaughterhouse 9000 was only mediocre as well. It had some cool moments, but the majority of it was irrelevant. The stuff not dealing with Jack directly was basically a time waster. Which brings us to the Scion fight, and I feel they did a pretty good job at that. A threat so great that humanity can't win, and so humanity stops trying and starts infighting. And Taylor desperately trying to find a way to be relevant against a threat of that magnitude. And nothing working until she well, sacrificed her sanity. Even that wasn't enough, it just put her on enough of a threat level to buy time for the rest of the Undersiders, who were the only people she refused to enslave, to give her the actual solution.

But for all of that? In doesn't come anywhere close to the fight against Coil or Enchinda or Tagg/Alexandria in quality. That was where the story was at it's best.