#I don't know why i wrote mia going ohoho

[ewingstan]

I think what I love about Claw is that the protags don’t feel like they’d be protags in other WB stories.

Mia and Carson would be mooks or lieutenants to Coil, Tattletale, or Cauldron that Taylor and Victoria would barely interact with beyond potentially fighting them if need be. Val gives big sierra/charlotte/natalie/presley energy.

Ditto for Pact, Pale, and Twig (no spoilers because idk how far you are in those stories).

But because of this world in particular, they feel perfect for having the spotlight shining on them, if that makes sense.

I do agree that Mia and Carson have the vibe of people who'd be side characters in another story. I mean, the closest character I can think of to Mia's archetype is the vacuum cleaner guy in Breaking Bad, who's very memorable but is barely interacted with. For wildbow characters, she almost feels more like Piggot than anyone else. Piggot in a story where her startling effectiveness and ruthlessness wasn't rendered useless by virtue of not belonging to a superhuman.

There's isolated aspects of her that fit into the typical wildbow protag mold, particularly her ability to gain and use an incredible amount of information others couldn't (traits shared by main protagonists like Taylor and Sy as well as deuteragonists like Lisa, Jessie, etc.) What sets her apart (outside the obvious context of her being an adult parent) is her limitations. She doesn't have Taylor's powers or Sy's charm, which allow them to adapt to new information on the fly and instantly set new plans into motion. Instead, she relies on being so well-prepared that there's nothing she faces that she doesn't already have a plan for.

This changes the whole mode of storytelling. Rather than "how is the wildbow protag gonna use her wits to get outta this one?", its "lets slowly pull back the curtain on the complex machine of a plan the protagonist has put into place for just such a situation." Its a subtle difference, but it has a big impact on how the protag is characterized and what the audience's reaction to big moments are. Like narrating a tense firefight, vs lovingly describing the design of a complex rifle you made a while back and finally get a chance to use. There's a big difference between "oh wow, she just made a bomb to deal with the guys chasing her!" and "oh wow, she's had a bomb in her trunk the entire time on the off-chance someone started chasing her."

Carson's whole "unflappable amoral ladykiller" thing actually is pretty common in protagonists, I've seen bookshelf-filling series that star those types. Whats different about him is that rather than being a hyper-competent one-man army like those characters tend to be, Claw is pretty upfront about the fact that he'd be a two-bit drifter if he wasn't working with Mia. Being that dependent on someone else for your effectiveness bucks a trend not only in shlocky pulp protagonists, but in wildbow protagonists specifically, since wildbow loves taking away his guys allies and resources away only to have them still come out on top and display how they're incredible on their own.

Valentia I might disagree with slightly, if only because she reminds me a lot of Taylor both in her backstory and how her action gets narrated. She fits much more into the "desperate on-the-fly thinking" mold of the average wb protag than Mia "ohoho, you stumbled onto yet another of my landmines" Hurst.

#clawblr #wildbow #mals reads claw #mals says #I don't know why i wrote mia going ohoho #she's not an ojou-sama #oh and ive read pact and twig