In Name Only.
Because it has top tier world building, a bunch of interesting characters, and it has some really great villains you can set up against your SI/version of Taylor: the Empire, Lung, Slaughterhouse 9, Coil, the Echidna, the Endbringers, Scion.
Top tier Building ?
An extremely long web serial novel involving superheroes. It's very meandering, dark, and pretty much built around everything being bad all the time. If I had to sum it up entirely, it would be "The ends justify the means, but the road to hell is still paved with good intentions so life is going to be shit for everybody no matter what you do." It strongly follows Rationalist Fic tropes.
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I disagree with pretty much everything you have to say here, but this isn't a Worm thread so I'll try to put my response together in a new separate thread.An extremely long web serial novel involving superheroes. It's very meandering, dark, and pretty much built around everything being bad all the time. If I had to sum it up entirely, it would be "The ends justify the means, but the road to hell is still paved with good intentions so life is going to be shit for everybody no matter what you do." It strongly follows Rationalist Fic tropes.
There's really no clear story arc and it gets increasingly repetitive as it goes on. It does have rather vivid characters and great interactions early on, though the worldbuilding is nonsensical and the author's fetish for making everything as grimdark as possible grinds the worldbuilding badly with its continuous diabolus ex machina.
It has a strong start and then falls apart more and more the longer it drags, and it drags a freakin' lot (equivalent to a book over 7,000 pages long). Unsurprisingly nearly every fanfic is an alt power that covers that strong start and then dies when it gets past those initial events where the story begins to decay. It's notable that very few fanfics actually capture Worm's feel, most are far more upbeat and positive, usually having a alt-power to make things happier when runs completely counter to Worm's initial themes where good powers don't go to good people and vice versa.
The story got hugely signal-boosted when Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, gave it rave reviews so if you like that sort of writing it will be right up your alley.
Interview with Wildbow
In 2011, JC “Wildbow” McCrae launched the first chapter of Worm. Within two years, it was finished with 1.75 million words. In 2014, near the end of my Junior year in college, I discov…
Grimdark superheroes
I seen it described as Evanglion meets Watchmen.
This is the fourth or fifth time I have explained but it's a superpower web novel it's a popular sandbox for writers for a myriad of reasons.
Primarily ease of setting. If you're writing, say, a Scooby Doo fanfic you don't need to work as hard on describing the characters, everybody knows what the gang looks like. Also, you don't need to expend five chapters on elaborate worldbuilding to explain why four teens are visiting a haunted house or how come their dog can talk, readers are already primed for that. Fanfics can generally get to the meat of the story significantly faster than original stories.
I would have thought that would be to the detriment of its popularity on Spacebattles, considering how often I saw people there mock the Rationalist genre of fanfiction.An extremely long web serial novel involving superheroes. It's very meandering, dark, and pretty much built around everything being bad all the time. If I had to sum it up entirely, it would be "The ends justify the means, but the road to hell is still paved with good intentions so life is going to be shit for everybody no matter what you do." It strongly follows Rationalist Fic tropes.
There's really no clear story arc and it gets increasingly repetitive as it goes on. It does have rather vivid characters and great interactions early on, though the worldbuilding is nonsensical and the author's fetish for making everything as grimdark as possible grinds the worldbuilding badly with its continuous diabolus ex machina.
It has a strong start and then falls apart more and more the longer it drags, and it drags a freakin' lot (equivalent to a book over 7,000 pages long). Unsurprisingly nearly every fanfic is an alt power that covers that strong start and then dies when it gets past those initial events where the story begins to decay. It's notable that very few fanfics actually capture Worm's feel, most are far more upbeat and positive, usually having a alt-power to make things happier when runs completely counter to Worm's initial themes where good powers don't go to good people and vice versa.
The story got hugely signal-boosted when Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, gave it rave reviews so if you like that sort of writing it will be right up your alley.
Interview with Wildbow
In 2011, JC “Wildbow” McCrae launched the first chapter of Worm. Within two years, it was finished with 1.75 million words. In 2014, near the end of my Junior year in college, I discov…
Very few of them have actually read it. No really. The difference between the actual Worm story and the fanon popular Spacebattles is immense. It doesn't help that Worm is so ungodly long and verbose and very few Fanfics make it past Leviathan so reading the whole thing isn't needed for a simple alt-power fic that's going to die in a few chapters.
God "Rationalist" style fictions are entertaining for the comments around the stories alone.
Worm is like Mass Effect, Familiar of Zero, or Dragon Age in that it's a largely functional story with comprehensive worldbuilding, yet it's so messed up that it's easy to find ways to "fix" or "improve" the setting without trying hard or ruining the base appeal. That it has a modular mechanic for bringing in crossover elements is also very convenient and fun to remix hundreds of times.
Basically, it comes down to the basic idea of "Wouldn't it be cool if ____?"
I mean, I like fictions made by other people, therefore logically I probably REALLY like something I'd write myself. Thus I made Zeno the character. But then I needed some sort of world for him to be in, so I made his world, and so on.