History YMMV / Ward

* BrokenAesop:
** Ward is initially presented as a story about overcoming the hardships of the past in order to pursue a better tomorrow, exemplified both through the initial setting being a city being constructed in the aftermath of the end of the world and the main cast all being members of a therapy group all wrestling with their own mental issues. What seems like a strong foundation for these themes however gradually crumbles away further and further as arcs progress. The heroes rarely outright win, the City collapses into starvation and anarchy and is eventually abandoned entirely while the main cast either die or backslide mentally until they're even ''less'' in control of their mental issues than they were at the start. This comes to a head in the Last arc, wherein a final act of desperation against Titan Fortuna and the Simurgh, the superpowered cast intentionally infects themselves with a virus that is guaranteed to ''kill them'' while giving them twisted and unpleasant dreams, in order to screw up the data that the entities are collecting and irreparably damage the cycle. What was ostensibly a story about overcoming trauma ended up looking like "sometimes you simply can't change yourself or your situation for the better, and then the next best thing you can do for the world and everyone you know is give up and die". Many readers did not take it well, risking a BrokenBase...
** ...However, it was later revealed that all the capes could be revived should the unpowered citizens of the world choose to revive them in time, which everyone appears to have known going in, meaning that the actual intended lesson was something more like "sometimes in order to change yourself or your situation for the better, you have to place your faith and hope in others and rely on their help and support". Indeed, the epilogues support this: the characters who have reached out for help and support are the best off mentally and physically by the end (e.g. Victoria), while those who push others away are doing the worst (e.g. Chris). This is much closer to a standard [[AnAesop family-friendly Aesop]]...
** ...But it's also clear that there was a real risk that the unpowered would choose to let them die anyway and many of the more cynical capes believed that this would happen, but accepted the virus anyway, so for them, it may as well have been suicide. Not helped by the fact a large part of the story portrayed the overall relationship between normal people and parahumans as decidedly distrustful and negative; as well as all the characters themselves going about things as if it were suicide. So between the ending flying in the face of how people as a whole were largely portrayed throughout the story, combined with the author having characters avoid mentioning or reacting to the finer details of the plan, there's some argument about whether the original message of recovery stands strong, or if the "they always knew they would be revived" argument is an AuthorsSavingThrow.
** A number of plot points were dropped by the wayside either to speed the plot up or due to the author's real life unhappiness with writing the story and wanting it finished, and do so in a way that is worse than if they weren't raised in the first place.
*** The anti-parahuman's very legitimate criticism of parahumans receiving blatant favoritism and disproportionate power are brushed aside at the end and the group mocked and marginalized before being strawmanned by a literal child, which unintentionally proved them right on almost every count.
*** The central theme of becoming a better person is side-stepped when the protagonists help the Wardens set up an interdimensional gulag with inhumane conditions, with the specific intention of 'disappearing' troublesome villains into it, to make the other villains more afraid of stepping out of line. Beyond some initial doubts, the morality of this is never questioned, and it is ultimately abandoned for being impractical. In particular, Sveta's journey to self-actualization never made as much progress through her own efforts or bonds as it did when Victoria got frustrated and made a DealWithTheDevil with a villain to solve her problems for her in exchange for better conditions in the gulag.

* BrokenAesop: [[ZigZaggedTrope Zig zagged]] with [[AnAesop a regular Aesop]].

* AuthorsSavingThrow: The interlude where March attacks Brockton Bay received heavy criticism from readers. She went FromNobodytoNightmare that was a nuisance Foil dismissed in Worm, to an organizational threat earlier in Ward that could chase away the Undersiders but not capture them, to (with only intermittent boosts from the [[SuperEmpowering power amplifier]] she'd just recruited): completely trouncing the prepared and concerted efforts of multiple powerful heroes including Dragon, Defiant (and their many drones), Golem, Narwhal, and Vista without a single loss on her side; demonstrating superhuman agility, stamina, and durability leaping between rooftops and shrugging off machine-gun fire in contrast to how Operator Red and the Harbingers had recently emphasized AwesomenessByAnalysis powers don’t make one unstoppable; and personally killing off popular characters [[spoiler: Vista, Tempera, and (implicitly) Withdrawal]]. Accusations of her being an InvincibleVillain joined with criticism of her being a cliché PsychoLesbian. The very next interlude [[spoiler: reveals Vista faked her death and kills March off]], and it’s established afterwards that [[spoiler: Withdrawal]] also survived.

** In general, ''Ward'' sometimes faces accusations of this due to its sheer length. Although it only has 20 arcs to ''Worm's'' 30, ''Ward'' is actually longer at 2.0 million words to 1.68, and so each individual chapter and arc is longer.

** A number of plot points were dropped by the wayside either to speed the plot up or due to the author's real life unhappiness with writing the story and wanting it finished, and do so in a way that is worse than if they weren't raised in the first place. The anti-parahuman's very legitimate criticism of parahumans receiving blatant favoritism and disproportionate power are brushed aside at the end and the group mocked and marginalized before being strawmanned by a literal child, which unintentionally proved them right on almost every count. The central theme of becoming a better person is side-stepped when the protagonists help the Wardens set up an interdimensional gulag with inhumane conditions, with the specific intention of 'disappearing' troublesome villains into it, to make the other villains more afraid of stepping out of line. Beyond some initial doubts, the morality of this is never questioned, and it is ultimately abandoned for being impractical.

** Amy's behavior throughout Ward paints her as a far worse person than she is commonly depicted based on Worm, with some readers taking her self-absorbed nature and actions in arc 9 in context with some of her more questionable actions in Worm and declaring her a narcissist.

** Amy's behavior throughout Ward paints her as a far worse person than she is commonly depicted based on Worm, with some readers taking her self-absorbed nature and actions in arc 9 in context with some of her more questionable actions in Worm and declaring her a narcissist. When questioned regarding the matter, Wildbow himself confirmed that [[https://old.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/ciscq1/question_about_amy/ev8y062/ Amy physically abusing Vicky was heavily implied in Worm]].

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: As expected of a Wildbow story, this is a common complaint, though this reaches a peak in Arcs 11 and 12 due to non-stop chapters of the heroes continually losing, beloved side characters being killed off or horribly tortured, things going from bad to worse, and all of this with no victories, respite, or sign of things getting better. The ending of the Heavens arc mollified this somewhat, with March dead, Vista alive, Cradle captured and all of his victims fully healed.
** This issue only worsens with the introduction of the Titans, a band of InvincibleVillain [[PhysicalGod Physical Gods]] each on the level of an Endbringer against whom the cast stands absolutely no chance of winning, carve through multiple named characters with ease, and multiply in number whenever a cape passes the DespairEventHorizon, which is quite often. Audience outcry reached a fever pitch with the Last chapter, wherein the last-ditch plan to defeat the Titans involves intentionally infecting themselves with a lethal virus that causes bizarre and twisted dreams, to mess with the Shards' memory recording systems, something that many felt amounted to the cast giving up and committing mass suicide. This caused no small amount of controversy among the fans, with some stepping back from ''Ward'' as a whole, seeing it as an outright ''offensive'' handling of an incredibly sensitive topic, especially when the theme of the story [[BrokenAesop ostensibly]] was ''overcoming'' despair. Shortly afterward it's revealed that going in all the capes who accepted the virus knew that the unpowered people of the world would be given the ability to revive them, turning this into AnAesop about placing your life in the hands of others when your problems are too much for you to handle on your own... but given how this aspect of the plan was deliberately avoided being discussed, and all the characters personally reacted to the situation as though it was suicide, some still view this as an AuthorsSavingThrow rather than the intended lesson all along.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: While Rain is generally one of the most popular characters, a small but vocal portion of the fandom is much more critical of him. The story doesn't shy away from showing how much of a scumbag he was before and shortly after his trigger event, and his change of heart apparently coming from his cluster's personality bleed can make his attempts at redemption feel completely undeserved. His prominence in the early parts of the story doesn't help either. The reveal in arc 12 that his HeelFaceTurn was genuine, and that the personality bleed actually came from Cradle helped convert a good number of those readers to his side, but for others, it was way too late and still doesn't make up for what he did.
** A fair number of readers found Victoria to be an unsympathetic protagonist, given her increasing brutality (reminiscent of her days as Glory Girl), judgmental nature and tendency to ignore the (entirely justified) critical opinions of regular humans and the anti-parahuman faction. The story ends with Victoria and her colleagues discussing the best ways to undermine the way that regular, unpowered humans were supposedly given a greater degree of power and control.

** The last time we saw Jack Slash, he was joyfully corrupting Scion, successfully convincing the latter to turn on humanity and initiate a genocide of the human race, and has received everything he wanted in the form of widespread destruction and carnage. When we check in on him at the end of ''Ward'', he's spent two years in a TimeLoopTrap with a caved-in chest cavity, and all that [[SmugSnake smug]] bravado has left him. Instead, he's left a hollow shell of himself, [[DrivenToSuicide yearning for death]] but unable to die, finally experiencing a fraction of the agony he's visited on countless innocents over 20 years. You'd be forgiven for feeling some dark satisfaction in the fact that, even after the heroes have obtained the power to free people from Gray Boy's loops without causing a TimeCrash, ending Jack's torment is as low as possible on their priority list.

* NeverLiveItDown: Due to her questionable decisions and death at the hands of Chris and Amy, Goddess is generally depicted as a braindead moron who relies on her raw power to do all the dirty work for her. While it's true that she is a poor tactician and strategist, she is good at using the resources available to her and listens to the advice of her subordinates, and her stupidity is often overblown to memetic proportions by the fandom.

** A number of readers argue that the story would have been more interesting is Rain had been the main protagonist, and that with the amount of screen time he has, he [[{{Deuteragonist}} basically is anyways]], as well as being much more intimately connected to cluster triggers (being in one himself) and the importance of dreams (as the chosen gimmick of his cluster). Interestingly, a number of his more vocal critics (see the UnintentionallyUnsympathetic entry) state that they would have less of a problem with him if he ''was'' the protagonist, as they would have had more time to learn to appreciate him.

** A fair number of readers found Victoria to be an unsympathetic protagonist, given her increasing brutality (reminiscent of her days as Glory Girl), judgmental nature and tendency to ignore the (entirely justified) critical opinions of regular humans and the anti-parahuman faction. Indeed, the story ends with Victoria and her colleagues discussing the best ways to undermine the way that regular, unpowered humans were supposedly given a greater degree of power and control.

* ArcFatigue: Arc 9, Gleaming, despite having its fair share of fans, can definitely be this to some people. The arc is the longest in the story so far, clocking in at 15 regular chapters and 4 interludes, and is emotionally exhausting as well. The arc begins with the entire team being mind-controlled by Goddess, who then uses them to gather her army at the prison. While the main characters have plenty of wins, all of them are pyrrhic due to the fact that they all ultimately advance Goddess's goals. There are a bunch of hope spots sprinkled throughout, which are then taken away. This all culminates in Breakthrough finally freeing themselves from her control and Goddess dying, but at this point some will just be too exhausted to care. To top it all off, the arc was published over a period of ''more than two months'', which makes the issue even worse for readers who read it as it was being published.

** Ward is initially presented as a story about overcoming the hardships of the past in order to pursue a better tomorrow, exemplified both through the initial setting being a city being constructed in the aftermath of the end of the world and the main cast all being members of a therapy group all wrestling with their own mental issues. What seems like a strong foundation for these themes however gradually crumbles away further and further as arcs progress. The heroes rarely outright win, the City collapses into starvation and anarchy and is eventually abandoned entirely while the main cast either die or backslide mentally until they're even ''less'' in control of their mental issues than they were at the start. This comes to a head in the Last arc, where in a final act of desperation against Titan Fortuna and the Simurgh, the superpowered cast intentionally infects themselves with a virus that is guaranteed to ''kill them'' while giving them twisted and unpleasant dreams, in order to screw up the data that the entities are collecting and irreparably damage the cycle. What was ostensibly a story about overcoming trauma ended up looking like "sometimes you simply can't change yourself or your situation for the better, and then the next best thing you can do for the world and everyone you know is give up and die". Many readers did not take it well, risking a BrokenBase...

** ...But it's also clear that there was a real risk that the unpowered would choose to let them die anyway and many of the more cynical capes believed that this would happen, but accepted the virus anyway, so for them it may as well have been suicide. Not helped by the fact a large part of the story portrayed the overall relationship between normal people and parahumans as decidedly distrustful and negative; as well as all the characters themselves going about things as if it were suicide. So between the ending flying in the face of how people as a whole were largely portrayed throughout the story, combined with the author having characters avoid mentioning or reacting to the finer details of the plan, there's some argument about whether the original message of recovery stands strong, or if the "they always knew they would be revived" argument is an AuthorsSavingThrow.

** The last time we saw Jack Slash, he was joyfully corrupting Scion, successfully convincing him to turn on humanity and initiate a genocide of the human race, and has received everything he wanted in the form of widespread destruction and carnage. When we check in on him at the end of ''Ward'', he's spent two years in a TimeLoopTrap with a caved-in chest cavity, and all that [[SmugSnake smug]] bravado has left him. Instead, he's left a hollow shell of himself, [[DrivenToSuicide yearning for death]] but unable to die, finally experiencing a fraction of the agony he's visited on countless innocents over 20 years. You'd be forgiven for feeling some dark satisfaction in the fact that, even after the heroes have obtained the power to free people from Gray Boy's loops without causing a TimeCrash, ending Jack's torment is as low as possible on their priority list.

*** By the conclusion of Arc 9, most fans will agree that while both could have handled things better and had their fair share of blame, Byron undoubtedly has the moral high ground.

** Is Chris a completely amoral monster that used Breakthrough solely to further his goals, or does he see them as friends on some level? Him using one of his serums on Rain to save his life and risk exposing his secret suggests the latter, but he also doesn't seem particularly fond of them in his interlude. His offer to give Victoria to Amy has also seen debate. Was this something he was actually thinking of doing, or did he just say to manipulate her further?

** The last time we saw Jack Slash, he was joyfully corrupting Scion, successfully convincing him to turn on humanity and initiate a genocide of the human race, and has received everything he wanted in the form of widespread destruction and carnage. When we check in on him at the end of ''Ward'', he's spent two years in a TimeLoopTrap with a caved-in chest cavity, all that [[SmugSnake smug]] bravado has left him. Instead, he's left a hollow shell of himself, [[DrivenToSuicide yearning for death]] but unable to die, finally experiencing a fraction of the agony he's visited on countless innocents over 20 years. You'd be forgiven for feeling some dark satisfaction in the fact that, even after the heroes have obtained the power to free people from Gray Boy's loops without causing a TimeCrash, ending Jack's torment is as low as possible on their priority list.

** Homer, despite only appearing during flashbacks in March's interlude, has been well received due to his cool design, unique weapon choice, and surprisingly sympathetic characterization.

** A number of readers argue that the story would have been more interesting is Rain had been the main protagonist, and that with the amount of screen time he has he [[{{Deuteragonist}} basically is anyways]], as well as being much more intimately connected to cluster triggers (being in one himself) and the importance of dreams (as the chosen gimmick of his cluster). Interestingly, a number of his more vocal critics (see the UnintentionallyUnsympathetic entry) state that they would have less of a problem with him if he ''was'' the protagonist, as they would have had more time to learn to appreciate him.

** Rain. His situation in the beginning of the story is so completely hopeless that one can't help but feel sympathy for the guy.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: While Rain is generally one of the most popular characters, a small but vocal portion of the fandom is much more critical of him. The story doesn't shy away from showing how much of a scumbag he was before and shortly after his trigger event, and his change of heart apparently coming from his cluster's personality bleed can make his attempts at redemption feel completely undeserved. His prominence in the early parts of the story doesn't help either. The reveal in arc 12 that his HeelFaceTurn was genuine, and that the personality bleed actually came from Cradle helped convert a good number of those readers to his side, but for others it was way too late, and still doesn't make up for what he did.

* ArcFatigue: Arc 9, Gleaming, despite having its fair share of fans, can definitely be this to some people. The arc is the longest in the story so far, clocking in at 15 regular chapter and 4 interludes, and is emotionally exhausting as well. The arc begins with the entire team being mind-controlled by Goddess, who then uses them to gather her army at the prison. While the main characters have plenty of wins, all of them are pyrrhic due to the fact that they all ultimately advance Goddess's goals. There are a bunch of hope spots sprinkled throughout, which are then taken away. This all culminates in Breakthrough finally freeing themselves from her control and Goddess dying, but at this point some will just be too exhausted to care. To top it all off, the arc was published over a period of ''more than two months'', which makes the issue even worse for readers who read it as it was being published.

** Ward is initially presented as a story about overcoming the hardships of the past in order to pursue a better tomorrow, exemplified both through the initial setting being a city being constructed in the aftermath of the end of the world and the main cast all being members of a therapy group all wrestling with their own mental issues. What seems like a strong foundation for these themes however gradually crumbles away further and further as arcs progress. The heroes rarely outright win, the City collapses into starvation and anarchy and is eventually abandoned entirely while the main cast either die or backslide mentally until they're even ''less'' in control of their mental issues than they were at the start. This comes to a head in the Last arc, where in a final act of desperation against Titan Fortuna and the Simurgh, the superpowered cast intentionally infect themselves with a virus that is guaranteed to ''kill them'' while giving them twisted and unpleasant dreams, in order to screw up the data that the entities are collecting and irreparably damage the cycle. What was ostensibly a story about overcoming trauma ended up looking like "sometimes you simply can't change yourself or your situation for the better, and then the next best thing you can do for the world and everyone you know is give up and die". Many readers did not take it well, risking a BrokenBase...

** After dealing with Cradle's bullshit throughout Arc 11, the heroes go on the offensive in arc 12 and, despite his power-up, turn the tables on him with use of Rain's enhanced emotion power. They slowly takes his allies out of the equation one by one, then take away his bargaining ship by tracking the signal he uses to undo the damage of his whip, culminating with him cornered between Victoria, Sveta, Rain, and a welcoming party consisting of Citrine, the Number Man, and more, leading to one hell of a satisfying climax.

** This issue only worsens with the introduction of the Titans, a band of InvincibleVillain [[PhysicalGod Phyiscal Gods]] each on the level of an Endbringer against whom the cast stands absolutely no chance of winning, carve through multiple named characters with ease, and multiply in number whenever a cape passes the DespairEventHorizon, which is quite often. Audience outcry reached a fever pitch with the Last chapter, wherein the last-ditch plan to defeat the Titans involves intentionally infecting themselves with lethal virus that causes bizzare and twisted dreams, to mess with the Shards' memory recording systems, something that many felt amounted to the cast giving up and committing mass suicide. This caused no small amount of controversy among the fans, with some stepping back from ''Ward'' as a whole, seeing it as an outright ''offensive'' handling of an incredibly sensitive topic, especially when the theme of the story [[BrokenAesop ostensibly]] was ''overcoming'' despair. Shortly afterward it's revealed that going in all the capes who accepted the virus knew that the unpowered people of the world would be given the ability to revive them, turning this into AnAesop about placing your life in the hands of others when your problems are too much for you to handle on your own... but given how this aspect of the plan was deliberately avoided being discussed, and all the characters personally reacted to the situation as though it was suicide, some still view this as an AuthorsSavingThrow rather than the intended lesson all along.

** The Pharmacist is by far the most popular of the disposable fodder capes, thanks to her insanely cool power of setting other powers on fire, her memorable fight scenes, and being taken down by Victoria in a scene straight out of slasher movie (Victoria being the slasher). Many fans were disappointed that she didn't show up again after arc 9, and that there's a good chance she's dead.

** In ''Worm'' Tattletale bitterly remarks that Victoria triggered after becoming upset at a children's basketball game. In ''Worm'', the frank description is supposed to illustrate how easy it is for second-gen capes to trigger whereas first-gen capes like Taylor and Lisa have to go through the worst days of their lives up to that point. In ''Ward'' we learn more about the details of that trigger, that Victoria triggered as the result of deep seated feelings of inferiority, realizing her parents were bored and ignoring her ''at her own basketball game'' because they were so preoccupied by superhero issues that they didn't notice their own daughter's best efforts to capture their attention. Stack onto that the fact that a stronger girl on the other team was also effortlessly mopping the floor with her, when she wanted so hard to be strong to be a hero, and it's clear that Victoria's trigger was no less traumatic or came from a place any brighter than Taylor's.

* NeverLiveItDown: Due to her questionable decisions and death at the hands of Chris and Amy, Goddess is generally depicted as braindead moron who relies on her raw power to do all the dirty work for her. While it's true that she is a poor tactician and strategist, she is good at using the resources available to her and listens to the advice of her subordinates, and her stupidity is often overblown to memetic proportions by the fandom.

** Victoria. In Daybreak alone she fights off a group of villains almost single-handedly, gets fired from her job for helping people, and then her mother manages to destroy her relationships with both parents.

** Erin. She's stuck living with the Fallen, her family are starting to subscribe to their beliefs while she wants nothing to do with them, and she's so attractive that she's likely to be forcibly married to a much older Fallen member whether she likes it or not.

** A fair number of readers found Victoria to be an unsympathetic protagonist, given her increasing brutality (reminiscent of her days a Glory Girl), judgemental nature and tendency to ignore the (entirely justified) critical opinions of regular humans and the anti-parahuman faction. Indeed, the story ends with Victoria and her colleagues discussing the best ways to undermine the way that regular, unpowered humans were supposedly given a greater degree of power and control.

* SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped: Trying to do good after having committed wrongdoings is a laudable thing that should be encouraged, but it doesn't erase your past actions, nor does it grant you automatic redemption and forgiveness from your victims after doing an arbitrary amount of "good".

*** However it was later all but confirmed that Sveta was in fact Dimi rather than Nayet, making Sveta a [[{{Transgender}} trans woman]]. Why the flashback portion of her interlude was from Nayet's perspective is anyone's guess, but a common theory is memory bleed similar to the one between Ashley and Edict.

** Others have done line-by-line comparisons of Amy's thoughts and words in Worm and Ward and pointed out a large number of discrepancies, leading many to view the differences between her portrayals in each serial as a retcon of her character arc.

* FanNickname:
** Victoria's shard is often referred to by fans as Waste, [[SpellMyNameWithAThe the Waste]], or sometimes even [[GratuitousJapanese Waste-Chan]].
** The Harbinger clones have been dubbed 'the Number Lads'.
*** The Harbinger that's been having regrets about his actions and wants to save Sveta from the others has been nicknamed 'Irrational Number'.
** The alternate dimension that the agents hang out in has been dubbed "Shardspace".
** The appearance of the titans has been dubbed the "Titanomachy".

* UnfortunateImplications:
** The Last Arc features the cast infecting themselves with a fatal illness in a last-ditch effort to defeat the Titans by inducing pre-death bizzare and twisted dreams to screw up shard's data collection mechanism, and thereby irreparably damage the cycle. The already clear connotations with a mass-suicide in a cult-like environment are further exasperated when fan-favorite characters like Tattletale and Ratcatcher voice objections to the plan are treated as in the wrong and are peer-pressured either into acquiescing with the plan or participating in it. The symbolism of the cast infecting themselves with a deadly disease is further worsened as the chapters were released during the 2020 Cornavirus Pandemic. While the author realized the horrible implications of what he wrote and [[WordOfGod openly stated]] at the time that there was more to the plan than what had been shown, the symbolism of the capes killing themselves caused a massive controversy in the fanbase and alienated a large number of fans. A number of those were won back when the [[TheReveal the full plan was unveiled]]: the cure for the virus was left in the hands of the unpowered people of the world, who could collectively choose to revive them before the virus ran its course, and were a large enough group making enough individual decisions that they couldn't be countered in time by Titan Fortuna. Every infected cape knew this going in, and the unpowered did wind up choosing to save the capes, so for many fans this changed the message to "when you can't overcome your problems on your own, sometimes the best way to recover is to place your faith and trust in others" and won them back. Still, not every fan was convinced by this argument.
** In Last 20.10, Damsel refuses to be infected, only for Swansong to successfully take over her body and accept the infection. A lot of fans were very uneasy- or downright uncomfortable- with this, pointing out that A, Damsel's worst fear was being replaced by Swansong and yet nobody remarks on how Damsel is essentially being erased; and B, Damsel did not consent to be infected and Swansong consenting for her is like getting consent from somebody having a psychotic breakdown.

*** His actions during his reunion with Breakthrough in Arc 14 raise even more questions. He's become a lot meaner than before, now throwing around genuinely hurtful insults to Breakthrough rather than the vitriolic banter from earlier in the story. He also uses a serum of his to render Victoria unconscious and set up a meeting between her and Amy. On the other hand, some have interpreted his actions as lashing out due to his fear of getting close to people, and convincing himself he does not need anyone to succeed. Despite his repeated insistence that he does not care about Breakthrough, he also decides to lie to the guards after catching them sneaking out to get electronics, and later uses ExactWords to fool a lie detector for their benefit. Whether that was to save his own dignity in failing to stop them, or because he genuinely decided to help them remains to be seen.
** Ever since Sveta's interlude came out, fans have been debating whether Sveta was Nayet or Dimi- the first part of the interlude was from Nayet's perspective, but it was noted that Dimi was drawing fish and swirls the way Sveta does.
*** 16.8 adds to the confusion by making Sveta's dream sequence from the perspective of Dimi, not Nayet.
*** However it's later all but confirmed that Sveta was in fact Dimi rather than Nayet, making Sveta a [[{{Transgender}} trans woman]]. Why the flashback portion of her interlude was from Nayet's perspective is anyone's guess, but a common theory is memory bleed similar to the one between Ashley and Edict.

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation:

* MemeticMutation: [[{{Memes/Ward}} Has its own page here.]]

** The Last Arc features the cast infecting themselves with a fatal illness in a last-ditch effort to defeat the Titans by inducing pre-death bizzare and twisted dreams to screw up shard's data collection mechanism, and thereby irreparably damage the cycle. The already clear connotations with a mass-suicide in a cult-like environment are further exasperated when fan-favorite characters like Tattletale and Ratcatcher voice objections to the plan are treated as in the wrong and are peer-pressured either into acquiescing with the plan or participating in it. The symbolism of the cast infecting themselves with a deadly disease is further worsened as the chapters were released during the 2020 Cornavirus Pandemic. While the author realized the horrible implications of what he wrote and [[WordOfGod openly stated]] at the time that there was more to the plan than what had been shown, the symbolism of the capes killing themselves caused a massive controversy in the fanbase and alienated a large number of fans. A number of those were won back when the [[TheReveal the full plan was unveiled:]] the cure for the virus was left in the hands of the unpowered people of the world, who could collectively choose to revive them before the virus ran its course, and were a large enough group making enough individual decisions that they couldn't be countered in time by Titan Fortuna. Every infected cape knew this going in, and the unpowered did wind up choosing to save the capes, so for many fans this changed the message to "when you can't overcome your problems on your own, sometimes the best way to recover is to place your faith and trust in others" and won them back. Still, not every fan was convinced by this argument.
** In Last 20.10, Damsel refuses to be infected, only for Swansong to successfully take over her body and accept the infection. A lot of fans were very uneasy- or downright uncomfortable- with this, pointing out that A, Damsel's worst fear was being replaced by Swansong and yet nobody remarks on how Damsel is essentially being erased; and B, Damsel did not consent to be infected and Swansong consenting for her is like getting consent from somebody having a psychotic breakdown.

** The Last Arc features the cast infecting themselves with a fatal illness in a last-ditch effort to defeat the Titans by inducing pre-death bizzare and twisted dreams to screw up shard's data collection mechanism, and thereby irreparably damage the cycle. The already clear connotations with a mass-suicide in a cult-like environment are further exasperated when fan-favorite characters like Tattletale and Ratcatcher voice objections to the plan are treated as in the wrong and are peer-pressured either into acquiescing with the plan or participating in it. The symbolism of the cast infecting themselves with a deadly disease is further worsened as the chapters were released during the 2020 Cornavirus Pandemic. While the author realized the horrible implications of what he wrote and [[WordOfGod openly stated]] at the time that there was more to the plan than what had been shown, the symbolism of the capes killing themselves caused a massive controversy in the fanbase and alienated a large number of fans. A number of those were won back when the [[TheReaveal the full plan was unveiled:]] the cure for the virus was left in the hands of the unpowered people of the world, who could collectively choose to revive them before the virus ran its course, and were a large enough group making enough individual decisions that they couldn't be countered in time by Titan Fortuna. Every infected cape knew this going in, and the unpowered did wind up choosing to save the capes, so for many fans this changed the message to "when you can't overcome your problems on your own, sometimes the best way to recover is to place your faith and trust in others" and won them back. Still, not every fan was convinced by this argument.

** A number of readers argue that the story would have been more interesting is Rain had been the main protagonist, and that with the amount of screen time he has he [[{{Deuteragonist}} basically is anyways]]. Interestingly, a number of his more vocal critics (see the UnintentionallyUnsympathetic entry) state that they would have less of a problem with him if he ''was'' the protagonist, as they would have had more time to learn to appreciate him.

** Ward is initially presented as a story about overcoming the hardships of the past in order to pursue a better tomorrow, exemplified both through the initial setting being a city being constructed in the aftermath of the end of the world and the main cast all being members of a therapy group all wrestling with their own mental issues. What seems like a strong foundation for these themes however gradually crumbles away further and further as arcs progress. The heroes rarely outright win, the City collapses into starvation and anarchy and is eventually abandoned entirely while the main cast either die or backslide mentally until they're even ''less'' in control of their mental issues than they were at the start. This comes to a head in the Last arc, where in a final act of desperation against Titan Fortuna and the Simurgh, the superpowered cast intentionally infect themselves with a virus that is guaranteed to ''kill them'' while giving them twisted and unpleasant dreams, in order to screw up the data that the entities are collecting and irreparably damage the cycle. What was ostensibly a story about overcoming trauma ended up looking like the FamilyUnfriendlyAesop "sometimes you simply can't change yourself or your situation for the better, and then the next best thing you can do for the world and everyone you know is give up and die". Many readers did not take it well, risking a BrokenBase...

* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: When the plot point of Victoria's fake diary was introduced, the entire fandom drowned in theories about it, with various popular ones centering around the idea that Victoria's shard was responsible for it somehow, mostly through pupeteering her body when she was asleep. When subsequent chapters revealed that not only was Victoria's diary not an isolated incident, but Teacher was the one behind it as well, several fans were disappointed that the culprit was the most "predictable" option and that those theories could have made for a more interesting plot.

* HolyShitQuotient:
** The end of Shadow 5.5: Rain's cluster summons their pre-hired army to go after the Fallen. The members of this army include the Hollow Point villains, a few of the mercenary team from the Daybreak arc, Tattletale and her mooks, Imp and the Heartbroken, Parian and Foil, and Bitch and her dogs. Of the last few examples, none of them except for Tattletale and her mooks had been confirmed as still alive before then.
** Nearly all of the finale fight in the Last arc. They ''cut the Simurgh in half!'' Sleeper finally appears in person!

** ...But it's also clear that there was a real risk that the unpowered would choose to let them die anyway and many of the more cynical capes believed that this would happen, but accepted the virus anyway, so for them it may as well have been suicide. Not helped by the fact a large part of the story portrayed the overall relationship between normal people and parahumans as decidedly distrustful and negative. So between the ending flying in the face of how people were largely portrayed throughout the story, combined with the author having characters avoid mentioning the finer details of the plan, there's some argument about whether the original message of recovery stands strong, or if the "they always knew they would be revived" argument is an AuthorsSavingThrow.

** This issue only worsens with the introduction of the Titans, a band of InvincibleVillain [[PhysicalGod Phyiscal Gods]] each on the level of an Endbringer against whom the cast stands absolutely no chance of winning, carve through multiple named characters with ease, and multiply in number whenever a cape passes the DespairEventHorizon, which is quite often. Audience outcry reached a fever pitch with the Last chapter, wherein the last-ditch plan to defeat the Titans involves intentionally infecting themselves with lethal virus that causes bizzare and twisted dreams, to mess with the Shards' memory recording systems, something that many felt amounted to the cast giving up and committing mass suicide. This caused no small amount of controversy among the fans, with some stepping back from ''Ward'' as a whole, seeing it as an outright ''offensive'' handling of an incredibly sensitive topic, especially when the theme of the story [[BrokenAesop ostensibly]] was ''overcoming'' despair. Shortly afterward it's revealed that going in all the capes who accepted the virus knew that the unpowered people of the world would be given the ability to revive them, turning this into AnAesop about placing your life in the hands of others when your problems are too much for you to handle on your own... but some still view this as an AuthorsSavingThrow rather than the intended lesson all along.

** ...But it's also clear that there was a real risk that the unpowered would choose to let them die anyway and many of the more cynical capes believed that this would happen, but accepted the virus anyway, so for them it may as well have been suicide. So there's some argument about whether the original message of recovery stands strong, or if the "they always knew they would be revived" argument is an AuthorsSavingThrow.

** This issue only worsens with the introduction of the Titans, a band of InvincibleVillain [[PhysicalGod Phyiscal Gods]] each on the level of an Endbringer against whom the cast stands absolutely no chance of winning, carve through multiple named characters with ease, and multiply in number whenever a cape passes the DespairEventHorizon, which is quite often. Audience outcry reached a fever pitch with the Last chapter, wherein the last-ditch plan to defeat the Titans involves intentionally infecting themselves with lethal virus that causes bizzare and twisted dreams, to mess with the Shards' memory recording systems, something that many felt amounted to the cast giving up and committing mass suicide. This caused no small amount of controversy among the fans, with some stepping back from ''Ward'' as a whole, seeing it as an outright ''offensive'' handling of an incredibly sensitive topic, especially when the theme of the story [[BrokenAesop ostensibly]] was ''overcoming'' despair.