I've spent an upsetting amount of time thinking about why Rain sucks so bad. I read Ward as it updated, as I had a lot of interactions with the fandom, as I discussed it daily with other people who, like me, were way too intense about an online web serial. But the one conclusion I agreed with most of them about was that Rain sucks. Like, in a story about a group of people who all need redemption, he's the only one in the group who doesn't seem to have any of that past person in him. The story tells us he does, with exchanges like
āBlacks, Hispanics, Asians, Natives, Middle Easterners, then gay, trans,ā Tristan rattled off. āDeeper than that,ā Rain said.Ā āI had to start with re-figuringĀ womenĀ and how I thought about them.Ā Iām still pretty shitty, as much as Iām trying, because I hear you rattle that off and my first thought is āsome of these arenāt like the othersā and I have to stop myself.ā āYouāve said a few things,ā Chris said. āProbably.ā
But we never actually see him like that. We never see Rain go "trans women aren't women" or quote Ace Ventura or something like that. He is a fairly milquetoast character who doesn't have much going for him in the way of character traits, which is a little odd in a group like Breakthrough where every single member is a flavor of fuckhead.
It is Very Bad Literary Analysis to blame something on the author, but I do have a theory about how this happened. Wildbow has said he considered Rain for protagonist of Ward, and parts of that still come through in the text - the first big arc relates to him, a lot of the secret mechanics that the story unveils are first hinted at through him (he's far from the only member of Breakthrough with power fuckiness, but we never see Chris, T&B, or Sveta deal with entities in the very direct way he does) - but he is also fairly flat as a character, and doesn't have *that* much to do. I suspect Wildbow, when planning Ward, was dealing mostly with the contingent of fans he spoke to: A few die-hard nerds on Cauldron in the few channels he frequented at the time, people on r/parahumans, his IRC friends... While he was aware of the worst parts of the fandom he didn't have to deal with them directly. Rain, as planned, was not a problem in his eyes. Actually writing Ward forced the worst parts of the fandom (yes, worse than Amy stans) to his attention, as many of them were interacting with the parts of the fandom he interfaced with. I think Wildbow realized that if he had a main character, one who is vital to the narrative, say these bigoted things, he would encourage the worst parts of his fandom, and I believe Wildbow is someone who doesn't want to encourage the bigots. I'm highly critical of him, but he is someone who dislikes bigotry to an extent that he'd try to fix it. I think some Ward choices come from that, and I think Rain being kinda dull is part of that. However, another part of Wildbow is that, as much as he "improvises" these stories, he does have a hard time letting go of plot beats if he likes them. The worst example of this is the plague at the end of Ward, timed perfectly with COVID, that had half the fandom in a state of constant outrage. So he kept Rain, figured he'd do something interesting with him, but didn't really figure it out by the time Rain entered the narrative in 2.5. He didn't re-figure who of5 was, he just worked on his instincts and tried to write his way out of where he got except he never quite did and the result is that Rain is someone we are told was totally a bad person offscreen, where the guy we get is basically an average egg.
