Worm WORM/Parahumans: Explaining, Discussing, Complaining. Lets do one or another!

What the fuck kind of setting is this anyway? Sheesh.

Oh, and in other news, it appears that Whitehall is on its latest iteration of the "Democrats are really right-wing" circlejerk.

A couple people pointed out that a lot of their positions are left-wing even in Europe. What they also don't seem to consider is that, looking at most of the world, Western Europe is actually much more left-wing than the eastern part (to say nothing of much of the world which either doesn’t have political freedoms or is outright repressive so parties don’t matter).
 
f1onagher said:
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.
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this kind of setting just doesn't appeal to me. Getting sympathy from me is only have of your battle as a character you have to keep. If it gets to the point where your only defining trait is a narcissistic psychopath and you're the best your universe has to offer, then it gets to the point where I'd be content with your universe just getting black holed. I'm actually at that point with marvel or at least the mutants.

Also was Worm written by a tumblrite or twitterite? Cause this sounds like something written by SJWs for SJWs.
 
KilroywasNOTHere said:
Also was Worm written by a tumblrite or twitterite? Cause this sounds like something written by SJWs for SJWs.
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The going criticism I see a lot of places (As someone who's not read Worm) is that the author has some extreme issues with authority themselves, and whether that's ideological or personal it's a noticeable enough 'thing' that it affects some people's suspension-of-disbelief with the story/characters.

Worse than anything else, the author is Canadian. :p
 
KilroywasNOTHere said:
this kind of setting just doesn't appeal to me. Getting sympathy from me is only have of your battle as a character you have to keep. If it gets to the point where your only defining trait is a narcissistic psychopath and you're the best your universe has to offer, then it gets to the point where I'd be content with your universe just getting black holed. I'm actually at that point with marvel or at least the mutants.

Also was Worm written by a tumblrite or twitterite? Cause this sounds like something written by SJWs for SJWs.
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Interestingly enough no. I've seen Wildbow interact with various fans and I never got a tumblerina vibe. He(?) is definitely Canadian and has one of the weirdest anti-authoritarian vibes I've ever witnessed. It's neither libertarian nor anarchist and is more obsessed with the people who have authority rather than the concept of authority itself. Insomuch as it is reflected in his writings it really does feel like a teenage rejection of authority than any coherent or functional worldview.

And as a Canadian, the dude is definitely a very soft socialist, socially liberal, and has no bloody clue how a gun works at all.

The appeal of Worm is that is a legitimately off-brand superhero story with a coherent cosmology, flawed but functional worldbuilding, and built-in crossover mechanic. That makes it fanfic bait of the highest level which eventually turned itself into a self-sustaining reaction. I would bet good money that the majority of the people that took part in the Worm fandom on SB never actually read the story at all.

It's an interesting phenomenon to observe and you can see it rhymed in older fanfic fads like Mass Effect and Familiar of Zero along with the weird SB obsession with Victoria by William Lind.
 
Navarro said:
A grimdark supers setting based on a mashup between Watchmen and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
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There was a dude I used to clean up and flower up rp posts for who would go out of his way to have great cosmics in his super hero themed RP destroy the Wormverse usually by accident.

Or port over the main character because the main villain of the setting who was an expy of Darkseid and Amon would devour Taylor Ala that devil man scene where the Arch demon eats a loli.

It was really amusing but also kinda pathological.

Worm seems to inspire that kind of hatred though.
 
What's the sitch? said:
Yeah I've read atleast a few of those so I'm still wondering where all the alleged actual Nazi Taylor fics are.
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I have read or looked at most of the Worm fics on SB for the last 5ish years.

There are a couple where she gets pressed ganged. But the only one that really springs to kind is Auks fic where it shows Taylor falling in with the Empire becasue they are supporting her in school. It was actually somewhat interesting with how the Nazis gave the soft sell and used PR to look mainly acceptable till Talyor already has foot in the gang. It is to bad that Auk dropped becasue 2016 and TDS.

There are also some decent and bad fics with Talyor teaming up witb Purity. But snice even in Worm she was trying to not be part of the Empire anymore it is normally a redemption story. There was a half way decent one with her as Talyor stepmother and dealing with the PRT and Empire.

There is also a new one that was mentioned with Talyor as an intern which got locked beacsue someone threw a hissy fit becasue the Nazis where not EVIL ALL THE TIME and instead could put on a polite face and did nice things for people they liked while still being racist to others.

But this has been a growing thing on SB snice the Whitehall purges. There is a group of posters that are active in Whitehall that report and derail any story that they find problematic ie anything they don't like politically.
 
Argent said:
There was a half way decent one with her as Talyor stepmother and dealing with the PRT and Empire.
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I remember that one. I really enjoyed it.

Really got into how redemption is hard and overcoming past associations is sometimes nearly impossible even if you completely stop the association itself. And the wrongs of painting people with a broad brush and making assumptions.

Good stuff.

The only part I didn't enjoy as I recall was Danny still got the short end of the stick. Making him a manic depressive that didn't really interact with Taylor in meaningful ways.
 
Sobek said:
What even is WORM anyway? Never quite understood it.
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A dystopian superheroes web serial, it's good for supplying nerd power fantasies and is sandboxy as hell. But it also doesnt help that its story ended rather mediorcrely despite the fact that it initially seemed promising making it a prime target as a "fix it FIC setting' on par with Game Of Thrones.

So it isnt great, it isnt terrible either, rather it checks a list of what is popular amongst writers or viewers on SB or other forums like it.
 
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Sobek said:
What even is WORM anyway? Never quite understood it.
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Some mediocre-sounding web novel about capeshit with a main character that sounded like hypster bait.

I enjoy neither web novels nor capeshit, nor hypster bait, so I gave it a hard pass.

SB was quite obsessed with it, and that obsession has actually managed to continue for 5 - 8 years.

As to X as a coffeeshop type fiction,well I got a frigging Cyberpunk Cafe visual novel/adventure off of GoG a while back.(What, it was cheap)

I think Starbucks is the only form of social interaction any of these artsy hipsters get, tbh.
 
I've read Worm. Overall it was "alright". Looked at in chunks it seems pretty well written. But it became apparent as the story went on that the author had a bad tendency to just completely 180 characters personalities with little to no warning. It's especially bad in the sequel, which I couldn't even finish.

Basically any character that wasn't "on screen" all the time was liable to flipflop personalities because the author kept forgetting how he last wrote them.
 
Honestly, I rather enjoy well-written Worm fics, because the universe is ripe for good fanfiction. On the other hand, the majority of Worm fiction is crap. That being said, the majority of MOST fanfiction is crap.

But there are plenty of gems among the crap in all fandoms, and once you learn basic pattern recognition you can generally pick out the gems without getting too invested in the story itself. For one thing, if the author spends the first chapter pontificating on their sexual orientation, it's probably a crappy story LOL.
 
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