It took way, way longer than I expected and I actually fell behind in other reading to do this, but I finally managed to complete Wildbow’s latest web serial Pale. It is his longest work to date and that seems to have surprised Wildbow himself because he explicitly set out to write an investigative procedural story with a less ambitious scope. I do think it’s his best writing to date and I love both the characters and the setting. That said, it is far, far too long. Too many conflicts devolve to physical combat when other forms of resolution are narratively more interesting. Wildbow is insistent on providing a backstory on every single character who shows up, no matter how minor. The whole world is just unnecessarily big. As much I enjoyed the main narrative and the protagonists, I found this to be a real slog to get through at times. I’m both happy to have read this but also relieved that I’m finally done, if that makes sense.

In the small ski town of Kennet in Canada, three young girls, barely teenagers really, are awakened to the practice of magic by the Others, or non-human denizens, of the town. Two of them, Lucy and Verona, already best friends. The third, Avery, joins them to form a trio of witches. This was done because a ruling power of the region, the Carmine Beast, has been slain by an unknown party. The Others are worried that this will provide a pretext for human magic users, or practitioners, to interfere with their town. They therefore create practitioners of their own and assign them the task of investigating the murder. Along with being provided with a pool of magical power, the three girls must learn magical practices and skills, background knowledge of the magical world and make connections with the practitioner community. All three turn out to be exceptionally talented and in time, each specialize in a different role and domain of expertise. They also take the case more seriously than the Others expect, working to unmask traitors within the council of Kennet itself as the guilty parties. At the same time, they must fight off increasingly powerful outsiders who are interested in claiming the town as their own seat of power.

With a final word count of more than three million words, the synopsis offers only the barest glimpse of what Pale grew to be about. Even though Wildbow picked the small setting to limit the story’s scope to sprawl out of control, it still grew far beyond its initial premise. There are story arcs which cover the trio attending a regional magic school, the very many fights they engage in against multiple waves of invaders, alternate realities in which they might have made different choices or led different lives, a ridiculous number of interlude chapters showing the perspective of their allies and enemies and so much more. Like so many of the modern web serial writers, Wildbow seemingly never met a story he didn’t want to tell so you get everything, absolutely everything in excruciating detail. In a way, this is very satisfying if you’ve ever been frustrated by how some of favorite books skip over the slice-of-life moments. For example, ever wondered how parents might react to finding out that their daughter is secretly a magical girl who protects their town from eldritch horrors? Pale delivers, in spades. Want a detailed dissection of how a magical school is actually run including the logistics of feeding and housing students? Wildbow has got you covered.

One very nice touch, found at least in the opening sections, is that the text is accompanied by supplemental materials. So you have the notes of the three girls, handwritten in their own thoughts, about the lessons they’ve had and their impressions of the people they’ve met, detailed descriptions of specific magical rituals, weaknesses of enemies, observations about magical objects and much more. One of the trio, Avery, later comes to specialize in Path-running, that is navigating through pocket dimensions in order to short-cut through the real world and earn boons. Each of these Paths are practically mini-worlds of their own with unique rules, so each time Avery steps into one, there is so much exposition. Then there are dream worlds, realms like the Ruins and the Abyss, some rituals create special spaces of their own. There are so many types of Others, so many types of magic that different practitioner families specialize in and even so many types of Aware, humans who are on the periphery of the paranormal world but haven’t been awakened to become practitioners.

As an exercise in worldbuilding, Pale is terrifyingly expansive in scope. It’s so much fun at first as the reader gets to learn about the world of magic and nonhumans along with the trio as they dip their toes into it. But there’s so much of it and it never ends. The world gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It even got to the point where it stretched my suspension of disbelief. One key constant of the urban fantasy genre is that we have something like our normal world and the paranormal elements in it are a secret hidden from the masses. In this case though the supernatural world grows so large that the real world ends up feeling like a pale reflection of it than the other way around. The narrative includes so many other worlds of such richness and depth that it feels wrong to privilege the real world of unknowing innocents above them. It actually becomes a problem for the lore as so much of it hinges on the Seal of Solomon meant to protect humans. In the end, it feels like such a small thing set against the scale of the larger universe.

Another big problem for the story is that Lucy, Verona and Avery really do not comes across as 14-year-olds at all. The Others who awakened them comment on how surprisingly effective they are. They are able to get into the heads of practitioners who are decades older, psychologically undermining them. By the end, the primary antagonist even wonders if they are even human. As other readers note, it makes more sense to mentally age the protagonists up by a few years. One thing I do like is the extremely fine brush by which Wildbow is able to paint different shades of emotions and types of relationships. For example, Lucy is portrayed as a character with a strong sense of justice, perhaps too much so as she is easily offended by small gestures and a casually chosen turn of phrase. Yet Wildbow is able to break down the meaning of these seemingly inconsequential elements so precisely and place them within a larger context that I end up being convinced that she has a point after all. The same goes for relationships between characters. Verona is aromantic yet sexual. I don’t think I’ve quite understood what that particular combination meant before this and there are so many characters in here, each with personality traits that are unusual to me and yet seemingly part of the modern cultural landscape.

In a way, this is exactly the kind of story I once craved. So long that it never seems to end, never skimps on anything down to the tiniest detail, bold enough to wander at will to cover every possible side story. I do think that even a younger version of myself would have wanted to see conflicts resolved in more varied ways than combat. Now that I’m older and maybe wiser, I find that it’s overwhelming. There’s too much of it and often, less is more. There are so many arcs that the impact of each is muted. It beggars belief that all this happens in something like the span of a single year. Wildbow would be a much better writer if he acquired some discipline and sense of restraint. So reading this was a very satisfying experience to me but the thought of having to do anything like this again is very daunting and I don’t think I can fairly recommend this to others. I’ll still keep myself updated on his latest works but I really don’t know if I can stomach reading another epic like this.