Wapsi Square Forum

jwhouk wrote:Sorry, I'm not going THAT far back. My name's not Tolstoy

Or Hubbard!

Atomic wrote:

jwhouk wrote:Sorry, I'm not going THAT far back. My name's not Tolstoy

Or Hubbard!

jwhouk is Old Mother Hubbard!?

Heh. Someone is weaving a whimsical tale here... that's quite clear!

shadowinthelight for win!

Dave wrote:Heh. Someone is weaving a whimsical tale here... that's quite clear!

Nice hit on the actors name there.

jwhouk wrote:Sorry, I'm not going THAT far back. My name's not Tolstoy

I thought it was Proust.

I would say a person that writes fiction as long as this comic has been going and doesn't change isn't living. If I compare what I wrote when I first found this comic and what I write now, the differences are substantial. Comic artists like Paul have to make a choice, shift the nature of their existing comic or start a new one. Mythology isn't actually a big area of study for me, I've learned more here than much of anywhere, but the forums fix what I miss.

Having stopped reading Wapsi for over a year and only recently having caught up, I think I can offer a slightly different opinion.

Personally, I love it. I love all the supernatural stuff, the issues the characters go through, and just about everything else. Now that I'm all caught up again, I'm going to try to actually continue keeping up as the comic is updated now.

However, just because I love it doesn't mean I can't point out a couple of things that have bothered me. Namely, the massive leaps of logic that Paul seems to assume his readers are all capable of. Massive information dumps and huge revelations that, honestly, should have been stretched out and slowed down a bit more. Lots of things that have happened after Jin's mental stability was restored (which was back in 2011, I believe) have felt far too rushed. The comic seems to be skipping over important plot points and only belatedly revealing this important information, almost as an afterthought. And there are plenty of "soft-retcons" where new comics start contradicting old stuff from several years ago. The MiB seems to have come out of nowhere and its origins make very little sense, and all the new things we've learned about Brandi and Bud just don't seem to fit at all with what's been previously revealed.

This doesn't mean I'll stop reading any time soon, but it just annoys the heck out of me.

Ember Quill wrote: The MiB seems to have come out of nowhere and its origins make very little sense, and all the new things we've learned about Brandi and Bud just don't seem to fit at all with what's been previously revealed.

Of course the MIB appear out of nowhere! They were invisible, as they're supposed to be.

Surprise!

Atomic wrote:

Ember Quill wrote: The MiB seems to have come out of nowhere and its origins make very little sense, and all the new things we've learned about Brandi and Bud just don't seem to fit at all with what's been previously revealed.

Of course the MIB appear out of nowhere! They were invisible, as they're supposed to be.

Surprise!

And Paul has made it clear in many strips that everyone has been keeping something or another from everyone else by any method even out and out lying.

Mark N wrote:

Atomic wrote:

Ember Quill wrote: The MiB seems to have come out of nowhere and its origins make very little sense, and all the new things we've learned about Brandi and Bud just don't seem to fit at all with what's been previously revealed.

Of course the MIB appear out of nowhere! They were invisible, as they're supposed to be.

Surprise!

And Paul has made it clear in many strips that everyone has been keeping something or another from everyone else by any method even out and out lying.

What I'm trying to say is that the story's gotten really inconsistent lately. With the Calendar Machine (and to a lesser extent, the subsequent storyline about Jin's Schizophrenia), there was a lot of buildup. A LOT of buildup. Things sometimes came out of nowhere, but not very often and usually in a fairly believable way. There was a sort of internal consistency within the storyline.

That internal consistency seems to be gone.

You're talking about a woman who woke the Aztec/Mayan god of ALCOHOL, for cryin' out loud.

The resolution of a conflict like the calendar machine (a crisis of literal galactic proportions) was a major ending point of a plot line that pretty much made the entire comic. When that happened, it seemed to me Paul had to shift back to "slice of life" mode. That's interesting and all, but in terms of story intensity, it's nothing to "we have to put our lives on the line by following the instructions of a crazy woman in the hopes that she knows how to fix a time loop that resets the galaxy".
...
I don't know about you, but it doesn't make sense to just jump right back into the "buildup" phase.
The internal constancy I believe you speak of is a product of an overarching, "save-the-universe" level plot line. Those, in my opinion, shouldn't happen right after each other.

(I, GlytchMeister, do not believe that any of my opinions are objectively superior to any other opinion. Any preference made by myself to my own opinion is meant to be taken purely as a subjective preference... Just because I like creamy peanut butter more than crunchy doesn't mean I think creamy is objectively superior in any way to crunchy. Please don't flame me.)