CarlManvers2019
Writers Blocked Douchebag
Well, I can’t help but think things as anime/manga
Then I remember how ugly everyone, even the “Top Hero” who’s surprisingly unliked and uncharismatic, Eidolon is
Worm WORM/Parahumans: Explaining, Discussing, Complaining. Lets do one or another!
- Thread starter Bigking321
- Start date
Well, I can’t help but think things as anime/manga
Then I remember how ugly everyone, even the “Top Hero” who’s surprisingly unliked and uncharismatic, Eidolon is
Bigking321
Well-known member
It's a super hero setting where people can get powers by having the worst moment of their lives and snapping. There's more to it then that but spoilers.
It's known for being excessively grim and unhappy.
In spite of that it's a pretty interesting setting so it's exploded in popularity for fanfics.
If you don't like it you will quickly be very annoyed at it the sheer amount of worm fics taking up space.
I don't care about spoilers as I have no intent of ever jumping in.
Is this SB only, or like a widespread thing? How did it start?
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
It's a webnovel, one of those super-long-running types with one and three quarter million words (For comparison, the entire Wheel of Time cycle across fifteen doorstopper volumes is four million). It's not SB/SV only but it's significantly more popular there than anywhere else I've run into. Myself, I found I didn't care for the frentic pacing and it reminded me way too much of Rational!Fic so I dropped it fairly early and never looked back.
f1onagher
Well-known member
Its a superhero web novel. The novel itself is strictly mediocre, but the world's meta-mechanics make it absolutely perfect for crossover fanfiction and given that creative writing is heavily imitative in nature it just snowballed. Its not a SB/SV only thing, but its definitely the center of mass for the fandom. At the end of the day its a crossover fad series like Familiar of Zero, Mass Effect, and Tanya the Evil, but for some reason it had a lot more staying power.
Thanks. Did it originate on SB or did they just form a fanbase around it?
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I wouldn't swear to it but I believe it started on WordPress.
f1onagher
Well-known member
It's hosted on another site, wordpress I think. The fanbase popped up on SB when someone figured out that Exalted's Exaltations function very similarly to Worm's Triggers and the rest is history. SB creative writers, myself very much included, love crossovers and Worm might as well have been custom made to facilitate them.
Tellingly 90% of the fanfiction is set in the first (and best) arc of the story while 9% is set during or after the finale. The middle of the novel is an interminable slog and if you do read it I strongly suggest you skip everything after Leviathan and before Golden Morning. Trust me, you won't miss much. I more strongly advise you to skip it unless you are really keen on bootleg superhero universes. I read it during breaks on a landscaping job and I honestly kind of regret it no matter how bored I was.
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The other thing about Worm is that the original author is a misanthropic ass who deliberately forced all of this characters to carry ultra XL sized idiot balls, made sure every single organization in the setting carried super ultra XXXXXXXL sized idiot balls, and had the gnostic mindset that if something is perfectly divinely perfect in all ways that it was utterly and uselessly corrupt and evil.
Which also is fanfic bait for when you have some interesting underlying premises, but they are being executed by a rabid hateboner.
Which also is fanfic bait for when you have some interesting underlying premises, but they are being executed by a rabid hateboner.
*shrug* I enjoyed Worm quite a bit.
There's nothing inherently woke about it, except the neo-Nazi's as big villains during the early arcs (neo-Nazi's are not a powerful force taking over whole cities, come on. They're a fringe joke, and a cliche as antagonists). On the other hand, I never read nor intend to read any of its fanfics. I ignore the existence of fanfics in general, can't imagine how people can read that crap, especially those who read it without reading the source material.
There's nothing inherently woke about it, except the neo-Nazi's as big villains during the early arcs (neo-Nazi's are not a powerful force taking over whole cities, come on. They're a fringe joke, and a cliche as antagonists). On the other hand, I never read nor intend to read any of its fanfics. I ignore the existence of fanfics in general, can't imagine how people can read that crap, especially those who read it without reading the source material.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
I recall back in the day I you cold go for a multiple pages in Creative Writing, before coming upon the first non-Worm fic. So before de-worming I stuck Original Fiction subforum.
f1onagher
Well-known member
Nah the opposite. Nothing she did was wrong, hard women make hard decisions, the authorities were never in the right even when trying to stop mass murders, etc. It actually wasn't an unusual stance for many there, but he was notable for being both outspoken and able to punctuate his sentences.
Navarro
Well-known member
I haven't even read Worm and I know Taylor is meant to be an anti-hero at best. It's like some people have no ability to parse ambiguity at all in fiction.
f1onagher
Well-known member
A first person narration automatically instills sympathy for the main character regardless of their actions since we see their internal justification. I've said before that Worm would never work without said first person perspective since what Taylor and her friends do over the course of the series is so odious and occasionally blinkered that no one would be sympathetic towards them in the slightest. Its why I actually enjoyed a lot of Worm fanfiction, it rewrote Worm characters to be legitimately likable and heroic rather than the human debris they were in canon.
Of course, combine people that are unable to step outside of the narrative and the staggering number of those who never read the webnovel and instead got everything through the echo-phone that is the fandom and the trends that shaped the Worm forum on SB and made it the bane of everyone who didn't like it makes a lot of sense.
I never read it. The Fandom turned me off from it dealing with it as a Moderator. But now I have a sort of morbid fascination. So....what are some examples of how Taylor is a shit human being?
She shot a baby dead because it was about to be trapped in a localized time-loop where it would suffer the pain of having his throat slit open. That was a pretty controversical one. Another example was her taking over the crime world of Brockton Bay to save the niece of the city's mayor. She made it a habit of forcibly taking relief-materials from emergency responders and distributing them herself. Her gang took over their own parts of the city and did whatever they wanted. She made loopsided demands in return for her surrender, and when refused, didn't even attempt to negotiate. It was going to the highway or her way, all the time. A few years later, she left the hero group and returned to her gang because she liked it more there. In the final parts of the story, she ordered one Endbringer to kill a gang called Gesellschaft because they decided they weren't going to try and fight the local god as a warning to anyone thinking of desertation. Oh yeah, and she enabled the Undersiders or whatever they were called to become the worst gang of Brockton Bay.
On paper, her actions might be excuseable, but if I were to ever meet her, I'd get the hell away from her because she's genuinely a shitty person despite claims to the contrary.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
...Right so, honestly, no.
Like, you're dropping 90% of the context. The baby was in the hands of "Joker Knock Off" who includes in his "Joker Knock Off Repertoire" "Breaking people into villains", and pretty much literally everyone agreed that Grey Boy Loops were "fate worse than death by a lot" territory. Taking over the crime world was to save the mayor's niece who was A. The second most OP human precog in the setting(the most OP managed to move through a cloud of bugs without disturbing a single one, sooo), and B. Taylor was partly at fault for the girl getting kidnapped to become a drug addicted pet oracle who was probably also raped. AS for the emergency relief stuff, it's worth noting that A. She was hardly the only one doing that, and B. the city was genuinely in bad enough shape that relief workers straight up couldn't get the stuff everywhere it was needed, and part of that included the people Taylor had taken responsibility for. Her "lopsided demands" were literally "you don't mess with my friends and let me be actually useful" which... well. Also, there's an interesting question of just how much room to bargain the government actually had at that point, and not just because the Undersiders were arguably the strongest cape group in the country at the time(seriously, for all that they didn't really like the flaunt it, they'd started at "very strong" and gotten much much stronger by this point), but also because the government had pretty comprehensively fucked up in several major and public ways and, like, much of the city straight up trusted Taylor more than them at this point anyway.
Gessellschaft was A. Literally Nazis, and B. Deserting in a fight for ALL THE EARTHS doesn't actually get you anything.
The Undersiders had the most power in Brockton Bay by the end, but given their competition for "worst" included "Forcibly Addicting You to Our Product" Merchants, "Literal Nazi's" Empire 88, and "Asian Nazi's lead by either Rage Dragon of the opinion that fear is the best governing tool or 'Sticks a Bomb in your head and calls it recruitment' Bakuda" Azn Bad Boys... Yeah no, the Undersiders at their worst don't even rate.
Like, Taylor is the actual "Making Hard Decisions" girl, not "Hard Woman making Hard Decisions" and definitely not doing it "While Hard", she doesn't like that she felt she had to make those decisions, she'd make them again with the same knowledge but she'd rather not need to.
And like, let's not ignore that her starting point is "Literally every authority has directly failed to do their job in relation to me at every opportunity".
EDIT: also also
there's this
forums.spacebattles.com
Like, you're dropping 90% of the context. The baby was in the hands of "Joker Knock Off" who includes in his "Joker Knock Off Repertoire" "Breaking people into villains", and pretty much literally everyone agreed that Grey Boy Loops were "fate worse than death by a lot" territory. Taking over the crime world was to save the mayor's niece who was A. The second most OP human precog in the setting(the most OP managed to move through a cloud of bugs without disturbing a single one, sooo), and B. Taylor was partly at fault for the girl getting kidnapped to become a drug addicted pet oracle who was probably also raped. AS for the emergency relief stuff, it's worth noting that A. She was hardly the only one doing that, and B. the city was genuinely in bad enough shape that relief workers straight up couldn't get the stuff everywhere it was needed, and part of that included the people Taylor had taken responsibility for. Her "lopsided demands" were literally "you don't mess with my friends and let me be actually useful" which... well. Also, there's an interesting question of just how much room to bargain the government actually had at that point, and not just because the Undersiders were arguably the strongest cape group in the country at the time(seriously, for all that they didn't really like the flaunt it, they'd started at "very strong" and gotten much much stronger by this point), but also because the government had pretty comprehensively fucked up in several major and public ways and, like, much of the city straight up trusted Taylor more than them at this point anyway.
Gessellschaft was A. Literally Nazis, and B. Deserting in a fight for ALL THE EARTHS doesn't actually get you anything.
The Undersiders had the most power in Brockton Bay by the end, but given their competition for "worst" included "Forcibly Addicting You to Our Product" Merchants, "Literal Nazi's" Empire 88, and "Asian Nazi's lead by either Rage Dragon of the opinion that fear is the best governing tool or 'Sticks a Bomb in your head and calls it recruitment' Bakuda" Azn Bad Boys... Yeah no, the Undersiders at their worst don't even rate.
Like, Taylor is the actual "Making Hard Decisions" girl, not "Hard Woman making Hard Decisions" and definitely not doing it "While Hard", she doesn't like that she felt she had to make those decisions, she'd make them again with the same knowledge but she'd rather not need to.
And like, let's not ignore that her starting point is "Literally every authority has directly failed to do their job in relation to me at every opportunity".
EDIT: also also
there's this
[Worm/FGO] Gold
To be clear, there's a lot of stuff that comes off as fairly reasonable from the perspective of an incredibly emotionally abused fifteen to sixteen year old, in the sense that it's entirely logical that someone Taylor's age, in her situation, would believe that, say, the powers that be are all...
forums.spacebattles.com
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f1onagher
Well-known member
Worm is, among many, many other things, about the loss of innocence. Over the course of it, Taylor transforms from a regular bullied teenager to a sympathetic Batman villain, to a brutal warlord protected from performing atrocities only by dint of Plot, to the kind of ends-justify-means person who kills or spares people based on her own whims and values. This is all facilitated by a plot that bends itself into a pretzel to justify Taylor and her friends, but there is a strong throughline of "When they do it it's bad, when we do it it's good" regarding things like violence, lethal force, and authority.
In-universe everything Taylor does is justified, but like I said, reality has to stretch beforehand to pull off some of these stunts. Urabrask, Shadows and I could probably go for pages about it, but I've seen it all regurgitated to death, so I'll just say this: Taylor is a bad faith individual with a narcissistic understanding of morality. Any slight against her and her's is awful, but she can do whatever she wants and should suffer no consequences for it.