Minor ramble: Why is Pale so looooooooong though?

[astridplus]

Title: Minor ramble: Why is Pale so looooooooong though?
Major Warnings: Abuse
Summary: I give my thoughts on themes and structure I've had bouncing in my head for a couple years. Contains vague descriptions of Ward's ending; I avoided any specific plot or character details. Spoilers for all of Pale.

Even by the standards of a Wildbow serial, Pale is long, at nearly twice the word count of his next longest work. The chapters are enormous and often meander, covering a couple of major story events and then filling in the rest with "fluff". It can make the story hard to get through, particularly in those arcs that darken in tone and seem like they might not go anywhere. There is a point to it, though, and Wildbow hardly wastes the space. One of Pale's biggest themes is processes that take a long time to get right, and could not work nearly as well as they did if they'd been compressed into smaller, more concise pieces. Each of Pale's protagonists struggled in a major way with one of these slow problems over the course of the first half of the story. Verona's relationship with her parents, Lucy's confrontations with racism, and Avery's social isolation are all tackled then. Crucially, though, they're all issues that are full of ambiguity. Lucy doesn't know how to tell when something is genuine racism and when something is paranoia; Avery's struggle isn't something that most people around her really understand even when she tells them unambiguously about it, and the audience was left unsure about who was really justified in the fight between Verona and her father for most of the story's first act. It makes the characters and the audience uncomfortable, and there aren't any easy or quick solutions to those problems. Instead, each protagonist must learn to constantly take baby steps in that direction and offer support when necessary. It ends up being really rewarding to experience to the end, and I feel like I've taken a lot of value out of it for the time invested.

The conventions of modern storytelling prize efficiency above almost all else. Analytic structures like Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" distill the different elements of a story into a single chain of key events, and many of the most successful new stories in recent memory follow that structure to a T. These stories invoke a kind of structural symbolism, in which the heavily simplified events, characters, and settings we see in fiction are taken as representatives of the wider concepts they're supposed recall. The grand battle between good and evil is centered on one climactic duel between hero and villain; the mystical far-off land is conveyed by the token character of that identity we see; and the horror of evil is shown when the mastermind literally or figuratively kicks the dog. This plays nicely with the way our psyches process information, as we are already psychologically designed to understand concepts via representative samples and to form judgments based on those representatives. But when we are surrounded by this kind of hypercondensed storytelling, it can cause us to form bad judgments about the things that we don't understand well enough to take in critically. For instance, abusive parenting is ubiquitous in Western fairy tales. We see parental figures who play favorites among their children, who obsessively control every aspect of their child's life, or who constantly heap verbal and physical abuse on them. For the sake of efficient storytelling, this is often conveyed through a small number of memorable and unambiguously evil moments; Cinderella is forced to live in a cellar without being given meals, and is made to constantly clean up after her own sisters. The focus on making it concise and clear for the sake of the flow of the story means that it stops resembling real people's experiences of abusive parenting. After all, if it isn't what we see in our stories, could it really be that bad?

A major, explicit part of Wildbow's aim in writing Pale was to communicate how these issues might actually arise in real life, and how they might be satisfyingly resolved, all without sacrificing resonance for the sake of brevity. Verona's relationship with her father isn't defined by a set of unambiguously evil actions. There certainly are memorable moments, and one in particular gets frequently mentioned; these don't dominate their relationship in a major way, they aren't necessarily complete justifications on their own for seeing Brett as abusive, and he doesn't have one of those major tantrums depicted directly in a chapter until arc 9. Instead, we're treated to the sight of him complaining, deflecting, crying, and shoving more chores at Verona whenever he shows up. All unpleasant things, but the "Can We Talk About the Girls?" extra material showed that he was still capable of presenting himself more positively sometimes, and there were arguments in the comments over whether he was truly being abusive or if he was just mildly unpleasant with a very "difficult" child. Inside the story, the Child Services worker assigned to her case never came to much of a conclusion on that either, even as Verona was secretly moving into her Demesne and cutting off contact. It was hardly a simple solution—even with magic, it's difficult for a 13-year-old to become properly independent from both parents, with no support from either, and the process was never truly done until we saw her in the final epilogue, reaching legal adulthood and with her livelihood fully in her own hands. The other two protagonists had similar arcs, reaching the point of being mostly "over it" by the story's original end point, but not yet having all the tools to put their solutions fully into practice. There were very few proper, structurally symbolic culminating moments in those arcs, except, of course, for the Implement, Familiar, and Demesne rituals. Those rituals don't serve to show that development as it happens, though, but to show how far they've already come that they can commit to these big decisions.

The second half of the story mirrors the progression we saw in the first half, but on a broader level than just the three protagonists. The first and second acts, in true Wildbow fashion, were about making messes, and surviving the ensuing chaos. Miss chose those three for their collective ability to challenge systems and hierarchies, and challenge them they did. They weren't especially organized or forward-thinking about it, though, and those moments came back to bite them on multiple occasions. The way they took down Alexander and Bristow left the door wide open for Musser to arrive and do even more of what they hated; and the way they approached the Carmine Conspiracy (particularly Lis and the Choir) ended up denying them resources and relationships that they could have used to keep Charles from enacting his plan or to more effectively protect the town from witch hunters and enemy practitioners. This intentionally strays from the common fantasy story structure in which when the biggest antagonist is defeated, the forces of evil simply collapse and the status quo is restored. Charles additionally deconstructs what the idea of an antagonist even is, as he isn't given a single kick-the-dog moment, but instead a long, slow spiral into undercutting all the morals he supposedly had in the first place. If it isn't taking down the big bad that saves the world, then what does?

It's ultimately the slow buildup of support and power that the Trio built up over the course of the story that allows them to properly, satisfyingly solve the problems that Pale's antagonists brought to the surface. Each incremental positive that each protagonist adds to their roster doesn't seem to affect much in the grand scheme of things, but that "power of friendship" adds up quite substantially over the eight months the story takes place over. The crowning moments of the later two acts—Verona's Founding, Lucy's Sword Moot, and Avery's Promenade solve, among other things—are still relatively simple and quick compared to the effort the girls undertook to make them possible in the first place. The interludes are one method Wildbow uses to undercut that kind of overemphasis, by centering someone entirely new into the limelight and showing their own contribution to the biggest moments of the story. It's not a new technique, but here it's supported in that function by so much of the rest of the story.

Pale isn't the first time Wildbow's tried to get this juxtaposition to work. Ward is also structured in a similar "question-answer" format, in which Victoria and each of her teammates are posed with a problem with no easy answer and slowly work through it with each other's help. Each of those characters does make substantial progress in some direction over the course of the story (with perhaps one exception), but around the halfway point it starts to become clear that there's a bit of a conflict between the kind of story Wildbow wanted to tell and what that particular setting and cast seemed to end up actually doing. The Parahumans setting is known for violence, chaos, and forces no one can hope to control, to the point that the world doesn't really function from a storytelling perspective if those things aren't present. Main characters that heavily backslid during those moments of crisis ended up undercutting the answer part of the question-answer style that the story was going for, as if it was saying "No, actually, true improvement and trauma recovery is near-impossible when you aren't given the room to do so." The relatively optimistic ending turned much of that around, but in order to do so it contained some of those moments I referred to at the beginning as structurally symbolic, which make it unclear how much of that improvement can really be attributed to that recovery process, and how much is contained in the inner world of the powers themselves. The writing fatigue Wildbow himself was going through at that point was, I believe, a large part of that, and of why the last act of the story felt much faster and more chaotic than the rest of the story. The slow, meandering nature of the earlier parts was, even when it was difficult to read, absolutely vital to properly communicating the intended message.

At its core, Pale is a story about doing things right. The Kennet trio make many of mistakes, starting in the very first arc with the Hungry Choir. Each of the girls is languishing under the weight of problems they don't even know could be meaningfully addressed. The process of actually fixing them is long, complicated, and iterative; something that the web serial format is well-suited to showing. Wildbow's process of developing the structure to properly do justice to these themes itself has benefited from being long, complicated, and iterative, and the little personal moments where the actual work happens are some of the most touching or heartwrenching he's ever written. I'm glad Pale was given the space to properly develop all the ideas it was going for, and that they all came together to support each other like this.