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

What's the sitch? said:
It has a wide varied villain base, a shadow cabal, kaijus, powers that can be easily swapped, yet vague enough in certain parts that you can change things around, it also connects with people that were bullied a lot and had shitty school experiences.
Click to expand...
A decent ammount of those dweebs deserve to be bullied lol.
 
TheRejectionist said:
General questions for anyone : why write fics?
Click to expand...

Because people really like a story or setting or a set of characters, but the actual official story doesn't quite line up with what they wanted, so they write a fic that suits their tastes. Or they finished consuming the official content and want more. I do agree that if you're going to go through the effort or writing thousands of words of fiction that you mind as well make it your own, even if it means just filling the numbers off, but people in this day are very attached to the official stuff and have difficulty letting go of that.

Another thing is that a fanfic gives the author higher immediate gratification, since there are fans of the pre-existing work who will click to read it. It is much harder to get people to check out some new, unknown story or book. It takes a long time to cultivate a good name as a creator of original stories. It sucks to spend a lot of time thinking about your story and then pouring in the effort trying to translate that into words and making it good to read, publishing it... and then crickets.
 
Last edited:
Terthna said:
What I want to know is, why is Worm the thing that so many people are obsessed over that it needed its own Creative Writing subforum? It's nothing special; and outside of Spacebattles and Spacebattles adjacent communities, relatively obscure.
Click to expand...
It's easy for starting fics for ... just give Taylor a different power, have her fight Lung, and then uuuh, I dunno?
 
Terthna said:
What I want to know is, why is Worm the thing that so many people are obsessed over that it needed its own Creative Writing subforum? It's nothing special; and outside of Spacebattles and Spacebattles adjacent communities, relatively obscure.
Click to expand...
Speaking only for myself here.

Worm is a fairly interesting setting. The way supers get powers is fairly unique and lends itself well to fan writers due to the easy ability to slot in different powers from ,not only the setting itself, but from settings across fiction.

Even if you aren’t writing Taylor, who I’d argue is actually the least interesting part of her own series, OC’s and SI’s (spits) can still be fairly interesting in the hands of even a mediocre author.

It’s also a semi-familiar setting, what with the timeline divergence from mainline earth being very recent and super hero settings themselves being near ubiquitous to the majority of nerd culture.

Add in a somewhat fun stable of characters with their own interesting powers and backstory, and you have a fan-fiction gold mine for nerds and geeks.

Ironically enough, Worm isn’t near as big on fanfiction.net or the other fan fiction sites. I think I’ve seen more long form worn content on the three forums than on any of the other fanfiction repositories.

Though Worm fics also tend to die quick. The Leviathan arc is notorious for being the graveyard of Worm fanfiction.
 
I honestly despise the endbringers. They are just trauma generators and destroy potentially interesting fics whenever they show up the 3 or 4 times a year.

But if you don't have the sandbagging near unbeatable monsters attacking all the time the setting completely breaks down because why not just get a good sniper and get rid of most of the villains in a couple of days.

Nope, you have to let the villains terrorize the populace because they might help against the endbringers.

Interesting for the setting I suppose, but ugh.
 
Bigking321 said:
I honestly despise the endbringers. They are just trauma generators and destroy potentially interesting fics whenever they show up the 3 or 4 times a year.

But if you don't have the sandbagging near unbeatable monsters attacking all the time the setting completely breaks down because why not just get a good sniper and get rid of most of the villains in a couple of days.

Nope, you have to let the villains terrorize the populace because they might help against the endbringers.

Interesting for the setting I suppose, but ugh.
Click to expand...
Superheroes is a surprisingly hard genre to get right. Especially once you start trying to add rationality into the mix, because inherently Capes are reliant on the highly irrational notion that the best way to fight crime is to dress up like a bat and patrol until you see a criminal in an alleyway, at which point you punch him in the mouth.

Supers are thus really reliant on suspension of disbelief built up from literal decades of existing inertia produced by the comics industry, and when you start pulling on the threads by trying to rationalize or explain the nonsensical side of comicry the entire story structure tends to pull apart like your sweater was woven out of cotton candy.

There's probably a halfway decent essay on why it's so hard for anybody to get modern super stories to work properly.
 
Carrot of Truth said:
Can someone give me a TL;DR version of whatever the fuck Worm is?
Click to expand...
A canadian guy decided to write a superhero story. But make it as grimderp as possible.

Space alien with clarketech fractal worms bigger than planets are trying to solve entropy. So they they land on a habitated planet, split up "shards" that give rando super powers, but only to people with immense mental trauma and while also compelling the person they give power to to engage in conflict. They have the ability to just casually and easily transfer things across parallel dimensions of reality. which they use to simulate a lot of their powers. and also hide the shards in unused parallel earths. despite being "multiversal", you don't have any cameos from other settings. it is only "real" alternative universes

They do this to evolutionarily select new better powers. as well as figure out ideas on how to use their own powers. because they are very AI like (despite not being AI) and are thus extremely lacking in imagination and creativity.
After they get all the data they need, they blow up that planet in all itirations of it across the multiverse to propel themselves across dimensions.
Oh, and the shards often each parks on a single different parallel earth.

Earth gets a pair of entities that travel together. Warrior (male) and Thinker (female).
Just before they reached earth a 3rd entity cross them (abbadon) who is actually rather chill. Instead of blowing up planets he lets the species he interacts with evolve with his powers. eventually they usually ascend into some sort of ascended mental gestalt and he peacefully parts from them.

So they come across and he starts "exchanging data" with thinker by rubbing each other. which pops some shards, trades others, etc.
And one of his super powerful shards called eye of abbadon gets traded over. As eden is crashing into earth she accidentally distributes it to a rando woman in a bronze age alt earth. It gives her the power of "path to victory". it can simply guide her to do anything her heart desires. So she used it to kill eden. before dying eden restricts it so it cannot work work on entities (the space worms) or endbringers (weapon platforms).

The warrior is wandering around depressed not knowing what to do because his wife is dead.

Meanwhile her corpse is being dissected for dead shards to be used to make test tube powers by a secret cabal dedicated to saving humanity from the entities "no matter the cost".

Every 3 months a city is destroyed by an endbringer which also kills a bunch of parahumans (supers) trying to stop it. there are 51 of those weapon platforms. but only 3 are active at a time... they were not supposed to be active at all this early into the cycle. But one of the top heroes in the world was depressed at the "lack of challenge" so his subconscious / shard provided by activating the endbringers.

The author has some really weird misconceptions.
He insist there is no supernatural and all the powers are based on real science taken to 11 despite a bunch of powers being clearly conceptual magic.
souls are unknown and if they do exist have nothing to do with shards despite what some powers indicate.
precogs are pure math done by planet sized space computers and not actually time travel (as time travel is impossible) despite having multiple time related powers...

the world is non deterministic. but somehow despite being non deterministic precogs can use a big computers to accurately predict the future. Even though in a non deterministic universe it does not matter how much processing power you have, you cannot predict the future even with an infinitely large computer.
The end bringers should have more mass then the entire universe because he does not understand exponents.
etc. etc. bunch of other technical issues / contradictions like that.

The main story is set in brockton bay. an american city rife with gangs. you got nazi caricature. you got asian nazies. you got drug dealers so bad the make the other two look better in comparison. and the MC who is a determinator that never gives up and frankly has so many mental issues that it would be a mercy if someone mind controlled her.

It is a very popular fanfic setting. Interestingly every fic set in it, no matter how awful, turns out to be a fixfic by sheer dint of how fucked up the original was.

Also the author reeed hard at some people thinking some people are good people in the setting (ex: panacea. the cute healer girl) so he threw a tantrum then character assassinated them in a sequel.
 
Last edited:
Free-Stater 101 said:
I need to really may a thread for this crappy question, just to link people towards because at this rate I am certain it's the same damn people asking this question over and over playing dumb for kicks.
Click to expand...

No one has ever actually explained what it was to me before until now, I know it had something to do with super powers but that was about it.
 
mrttao said:
A canadian guy decided to write a superhero story. But make it as grimderp as possible.

Space alien with clarketech fractal worms bigger than planets are trying to solve entropy. So they they land on a habitated planet, split up "shards" that give rando super powers, but only to people with immense mental trauma and while also compelling the person they give power to to engage in conflict. They have the ability to just casually and easily transfer things across parallel dimensions of reality. which they use to simulate a lot of their powers. and also hide the shards in unused parallel earths. despite being "multiversal", you don't have any cameos from other settings. it is only "real" alternative universes

They do this to evolutionarily select new better powers. as well as figure out ideas on how to use their own powers. because they are very AI like (despite not being AI) and are thus extremely lacking in imagination and creativity.
After they get all the data they need, they blow up that planet in all itirations of it across the multiverse to propel themselves across dimensions.
Oh, and the shards often each parks on a single different parallel earth.

Earth gets a pair of entities that travel together. Warrior (male) and Thinker (female).
Just before they reached earth a 3rd entity cross them (abbadon) who is actually rather chill. Instead of blowing up planets he lets the species he interacts with evolve with his powers. eventually they usually ascend into some sort of ascended mental gestalt and he peacefully parts from them.

So they come across and he starts "exchanging data" with thinker by rubbing each other. which pops some shards, trades others, etc.
And one of his super powerful shards called eye of abbadon gets traded over. As eden is crashing into earth she accidentally distributes it to a rando woman in a bronze age alt earth. It gives her the power of "path to victory". it can simply guide her to do anything her heart desires. So she used it to kill eden. before dying eden restricts it so it cannot work work on entities (the space worms) or endbringers (weapon platforms).

The warrior is wandering around depressed not knowing what to do because his wife is dead.

Meanwhile her corpse is being dissected for dead shards to be used to make test tube powers by a secret cabal dedicated to saving humanity from the entities "no matter the cost".

Every 3 months a city is destroyed by an endbringer which also kills a bunch of parahumans (supers) trying to stop it. there are 51 of those weapon platforms. but only 3 are active at a time... they were not supposed to be active at all this early into the cycle. But one of the top heroes in the world was depressed at the "lack of challenge" so his subconscious / shard provided by activating the endbringers.

The author has some really weird misconceptions.
He insist there is no supernatural and all the powers are based on real science taken to 11 despite a bunch of powers being clearly conceptual magic.
souls are unknown and if they do exist have nothing to do with shards despite what some powers indicate.
precogs are pure math done by planet sized space computers and not actually time travel (as time travel is impossible) despite having multiple time related powers...

the world is non deterministic. but somehow despite being non deterministic precogs can use a big computers to accurately predict the future. Even though in a non deterministic universe it does not matter how much processing power you have, you cannot predict the future even with an infinitely large computer.
The end bringers should have more mass then the entire universe because he does not understand exponents.
etc. etc. bunch of other technical issues / contradictions like that.

The main story is set in brockton bay. an american city rife with gangs. you got nazi caricature. you got asian nazies. you got drug dealers so bad the make the other two look better in comparison. and the MC who is a determinator that never gives up and frankly has so many mental issues that it would be a mercy if someone mind controlled her.

It is a very popular fanfic setting. Interestingly ever fic set in it, no matter how awful, turns out to be a fixfic by sheer dint of how fucked up the original was.

Also the author reeed hard at some people thinking some people are good people in the setting so he threw a tantrum then character assassinated them in a sequel.
Click to expand...
Although, to be fair to Wildbow, he did make a supernatural story after Worm (Pact), so although it doesn't exist in Worm and its sequel Ward, he's not averse to writing supernatural stuff.

Still, Worm and its setting have a ton of crippling flaws which require the suspension of disbelief to be stretched to its absolute limit.
 
mrttao said:
*SNIP*.
Click to expand...
Holy wall of text, Batman!

I skimmed over your explanation, but for you to need that huge of blob of text just to do a TL;DR is indicative that this thing is indeed huge.

So, yea, sorry, not interested.

However, from the description it sounds like this might be a perfect crossover with Dune or Lexxx, given that both have space-faieing magical worms in.

Tremmors, too, for the lulz.
 
Agent23 said:
This obsession with it on other fallen hill type forums tells me it is leftoid cancer.
Click to expand...
Let's see: straw-man Neo-Nazis, lesbians, corrupt governments, unjust justice systems, interracial relationships, homeless, unions, trans-ageism (bonesaw), trans-genderism (siberian), and pretty much every talking point that was at all relevant to the left circa a decade ago.

Leftoid cancer? I wonder why?
 
Simonbob said:
I really wish all you guys who've never read it could shut the hell up about it.
Click to expand...
The vast majority of writers and readers on SB and other sites have never read it. It's like HP at this point, where the fannon has overwritten whatever may have once been part of the original reality.

If everyone who's never read it shut up, then there would be no new worm fics, which... would be ok by me to be fair.
 
Yinko said:
Let's see: straw-man Neo-Nazis, lesbians, corrupt governments, unjust justice systems, interracial relationships, homeless, unions, trans-ageism (bonesaw), trans-genderism (siberian), and pretty much every talking point that was at all relevant to the left circa a decade ago.

Leftoid cancer? I wonder why?
Click to expand...
Just went to the site and started reading that thing, and one paragraph in, all I can say is FUCKING YUCK.
Class ended in five minutes and all I could think was, an hour is too long for lunch.


Since the start of the semester, I had been looking forward to the part of Mr. Gladly's World Issues class where we'd start discussing capes. Now that it had finally arrived, I couldn't focus. I fidgeted, my pen moving from hand to hand, tapping, or absently drawing some figure in the corner of the page to join the other doodles. My eyes were restless too, darting from the clock above the door to Mr. Gladly and back to the clock. I wasn't picking up enough of his lesson to follow along. Twenty minutes to twelve; five minutes left before class ended.
Click to expand...
I see a paragraph that could have been cut down to 2 sentences, without detracting anything to the story.
This stupid hypster train of thought just makes the MC to be a self-centered, blabbering buffoon, it is dull, it is boring and does not add anything to the story.

He was animated, clearly excited about what he was talking about, and for once, , the class was listening. He was the sort of teacher who tried to be friends with his students, the sort who went by "Mr. G" instead of Mr. Gladly.
Click to expand...
Ok, you can cut these sentences in half, use just the first half, and you'd still get your point across, the writer is either under the misleading impression that he is getting paid by the word, has a big ego and thinks that serious writers need to use 20 words where two would suffice, or suffers from impostor syndrome.

Lack of class and quality can not be fixed via repetitiveness and bloated word count.

And I know it is fashionable to write your shitty novel at the closest starbucks, but downing a dozen or so extra strong tripple coffees with an added spoonfull or ten of sugar does not help, mkay, especially if you've had 2-3 redbulls and some coke just before.

And by coke I do mean cocaine.
 
As somebody who read it, and enjoyed most of it?

If you can't even get past the first ark?


SHUT UP ABOUT IT!





I get it! You don't like it, so you'll shit up any thread about it! You've done that, so could you now bugger off!




Leave it to those who like it to talk about it. We care, you just want to shit on it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Back
Top