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Your favourite poem is This Be The Verse: Worm

You were born into a wealthy family that was torn apart from greed about an inheritance: Pact

Your family probably sucks but weren't that important to you. The real influence on your life was your found family (note: this influence wasn't necessarily for the better): Twig

Your parents raised you as a child celebrity: Ward

Your father’s parenting style is best described as being a patriarch: Pale

You are a family abolitionist: Claw

Worm - I think Worm generally has more incidental bad parents than it as commentary on Bad Parenting, the way so much of his other works do. The various bad parents are all varying kinds of bad, but if you were to tie it all together, Worm's bad parents all make a point of how much it can suck for parents to be the general fallback plan for societal troubles. Those parents can simply ditch (like Rachel's mom) and ignore/neglect the problem (like Brian and Aisha's mom, Lisa's parents, Rachel's foster parents), if they aren't straight up the problem themselves (like Heartbreaker, Lisa's parents again). But even if they are well-meaning, they can simply not be up to the task of helping you (Danny, arguably Aisha and Brian's dad).

(The Dallon-Pelham Torment Nexus comes up later.)

So I'd say Worm is for the people who, for whatever reason, just really wish they'd had someone else to lean on and be able to rely on, back when they were kids.

Pact - This is when Wildbow starts taking a closer look at the family as an institution. Really, the Thorburns have a lot in common with the Thrombeys from Knives Out, albeit with the nastiness turned up just that bit more by diabolical influences. Stabbing each other in the back for every advantage they can get, until there is an Outside Threat, at which point they suddenly band together. I think that matters more than the wealth both of them have. Pact as a whole is about the weight of tradition and how hard it is to escape that harmful nonsense, and in so many of the families in Pact this expresses itself in families absolutely failing to end the cycle of abuse, as well as being incredibly insistent that you don't hurt the family (by reputation, primarily), without ever quite caring about whether it hurts you.

So Pact is for the people stuck in families where the loyalties and the supposedly all-important social bonds only ever seem to go one way.

Twig - With the protagonists being science projects, their parents aren't exactly the biological ones, but rather, symbolically, the heads of their science projects (although Mary gets to deal with both). The protagonists, as a result, were created with a purpose, and their existence is constantly evaluated on how well they are fulfilling that purpose, and if they seem to be growing in directions their 'parents' don't like, they can fully expect that to be nipped in the bud right then and there.

So Twig is for the people whose parents had A Plan for them, and who absolutely refused to let them deviate from that plan. Basically for people who identified a lot with Marissa from Worm.

Ward - Ward's stance on parenting shows itself in the Dallon-Pelham Torment Nexus. This is a family where there is no distinction between public and private, where the people in it do not get any private space to process normal human feelings, because they're a superhero family without secret identities and masks to hide behind, so they have to be always on! This finds echoes in Rain's 'family', where he has Mama Mathers looking over his shoulder constantly, and Byron and Tristan entirely unable to ever be free from one another. Once you add Kenzie to the mix, it becomes clear that much of Ward's commentary surrounding family involves the performance of family. Victoria has some distance from that environment, though, so Ward has an underlying element of processing the abusive environment you grew up in, rather than simply experiencing it, and then carrying that knowledge along with you as you start taking care of children yourself. Ashley and Victoria share custody over Kenzie, after all, and the jokes about Victoria and Lisa both keeping the children in the divorce aren't without basis.

So yes, Ward is for people who grew up having no real private life, constantly having to be on, but also very much for people who've come out of those shit environments, and now want to make sure they don't saddle their own children with all that baggage.

Pale - Oh boy. Where Ward was more about looking back on your childhood with bad parents, Pale just drops you right in the middle of those experiences, and makes them more visceral than they've ever been. Of all of Wildbow's stories, it's Pale that really portrays the ethical horror of being a child, of having to be dependent on someone, but surely it should be someone else. The underlying element in both Verona's family life and Avery's is having parents who... really aren't prepared for the job, and struggling to recognise this. Brett continues to heap task after task upon Verona, whittling away at her ability to be a child with every emotional, physical and psychological demand he makes of her, while Avery's parents fail to have an underlying strategy to their five kids to the point where they inadvertently reward the behaviour they don't want to see, and punish the behaviour they do, leaving Avery to feel like she's drowning in invisibility.

All in all, I think Pale is for people, especially younger ones, who just want to feel seen, and have a narrative they can lean on for what something better might look like, both in support from your friends, but also support from a broader community.

Claw - Claw is complicated, what with it following a child kidnapper as its first protagonist. Mia and Carson are a pair of neurodivergent parents who put a ton of effort into their kids, and it isn't misplaced effort, either. They took the time to sit down and create a strategy for how best to support their children in their development and enable them to make the choices they want about their own lives... albeit slightly nudging them towards the murder-for-hire career path. A lot of people who came from abusive homes made jokes about Mia kidnapping them when Claw started, because good god she's a lot of what most people wanted from their parents. The problem is, of course, that Mia's parenting doesn't just exist within that ideal little bubble (even leaving aside the constant surveillance): she broke a home to get her daughter, which absolutely wrecked Natalie in a way that left her a worse parent to her second kid, and when Mia's life comes crashing down around her, it's her children suffering for it.

Still, on the whole, I think Claw, out of all of these works, has the most empathy for parents and parenting as a genuinely incredibly difficult skill. It also, I think, shows what good parenting does for a child's ability to advocate for herself, even when things get hard.

Seek - Seek takes the lack of privacy that Ward played with and turns that up to eleven, making it a fact of life that everyone can always see everything you've been up to, including your own broader family. On top of that, I think Seek is interested in why parents have children, and that this being... utilitarian can mess up the child in question (with Orion being the metaphorical child of whoever put all those people on the Superstructure). A's parents had her... apparently mostly because it'd be a new experience, and then pushed all her emotional care onto an AI, Orion was put together to fulfill some nebulous purpose he was not informed of, and Winnie, definitely the most loved out of the three, was quickly subsumed within the same purpose of the rest of the family, with her ability to pursue her own desires ever dangled in front of her like a carrot.

Do I think climate change isn't real? No, man, of course not. That shit's, like, physically evident, which you would know if you ever went outside.

Get it twisted, you're just pretending to be edgy to regain a semblance of control over this chaotic mess of cause and effect we call life. You think you really care about the environment? You motherfuckers won't even try to eat vegan, but you'll support a giant water lizard killing thousands of people to tip the ozone meter up five percent? Maybe try eating a mushroom for once in your life before you start fronting about being an ecoterrorist. "You're not vegan either"? I ate vegetarian for a year, brother, I know where I stand on this hill. And I know that when Leviathan comes for Vancouver that I'll be eating green with everybody else in the doomsday bunker, happy that my neighbors are alive next to me, cause unlike you freaks I still believe in the power of the human spirit and the good of the everyman.

That's right.

He doesn't respect women.

In his very first appearance he calls his grandmother - his dying grandmother, who worked hard her whole life to pass something down to her grandkids - the c word. This is a misogynistic term for a woman that a good man would never use.

Throughout the book, he refuses to treat Rose with respect. He ignores her opinions and advice. He doesn't consult with her on important decisions like taking a familiar. He doesn't trust her. And this is when dealing with a female version of himself - can you imagine how he treats other women?

Note that he didn't even consider taking a female familiar - what does that say about him?

We also know he doesn't pay attention to women. Despite days of working with her, he didn't notice that Mags had been replaced by a faerie. We know from Pale that faerie are not that impressive, so the most likely reason is that he simply wasn't interested in the most accomplished woman on his side. Incredibly disrespectful.

Even when faced with a sphinx thousands of years old, capable of gutting him in an instant, he prefers to goad her with a reference to the murder of her mother by a violent, patriarchal figure.