Why the frick are trannies going on about worm suddenly? I enjoyed it and Pact back in the day, sure wildbow is a cuckolded moron, but it wasn't a troony WN and it's far too much reading for those adhd porn addicts to digest anyway. There must be some israelite discord bullshit afoot. One of those deranged "antifa" chomos is grooming homosexual zoomers in worm now, what the frick, you subhumans are not long for this world.
Isn't that the forum where obese autistics would talk about "halo vs star trek" fanfiction? I would not be surprised if it's troon city there, now. So then, what, some bald child molesting israelite posted a thread there talking about worms power level and the little troony wiki/tvtropes brigade ate it all up (without actually reading anything, naturally)?
Pretty much. Trump broke SB. It used to be just another nerd site with a pretty active user-fiction section, but ORANGE MAN BAD caused people to go berserk. Now a vast plurality are some form of troony or other freak and most seem to believe that the world is somehow more right-wing now than it was in the 50s.
Lmao what in the frick is this, people genuinely think Taylor Hebert, mild mannered Canadian teen girl, with boring liberal cosmopolitan values, is a dark and twisted villain?
I must say, I read worm believing that Taylor was bitterly, deeply counterrevolutionary, that she was completely opposed to any kind of situation that would upset the status quo of zogmerican hegemony, which is villainous, sure, but not in a way that the story or its characters (even its villains) are EVER conscious of, let alone try to cast her as such. People say she's a murderous evil b***h and I'm over here like, what the frick? Taylor goes out of her way, well above and beyond the expectations and norms even of her super-powered setting, to help random strangers.
What did she do to make people so offended? I do not get it. Worm's primary audience was left leaning liberal millenials, just like wildbow and Taylor, and all the time I see people freaking out and saying how evil she is... why? Literally what is the basis for this opinion? I can understand why you might consider her evil, because she stands for the system of usury and israeli child sacrifice, but no more so than any other cape in the setting. What is the deal??
They love to take things where she was TEMPTED to do something bad and extrapolate that to her being evil all the time. I don't know why.
Wildblow is clearly a yurigay and he writes like a yurigay (I don't mean to say that as an insult, just a statement of fact).
We also know that battle boarders and "Rationalists" are a big part of the currently active and "evangelistic" (for lack of a better term) Worm fandom and how those demos are disproportionately autistic.
Combine the previous two items with the self-evident link between the autistic-yurigay complex and AGP-induced trooning, especially in communities where such identities can result in an increase of social cachet, and you get a pretty straightforward explanation for why trannies all abuzz over Worm and its sequels.
No, Rationalists would be closer to stuff like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationalist Wiki/LessWrong types of internet autists. Effective Altruism is probably one of the bigger Rationalist things that have gotten a lot of press.
Imagine the kind of people who enjoyed the entirety of Harry and the Methods of Rationality Fanfic
It's not dead, it's popular among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and software developers, who are disproportionally influential these days. It had its origins in the online atheism of 2000s, but it's moved away from that.
Anyone got that article about the medieval conspiracy theory that knights were just worms in armor?
Some things never change.
The worms were always here.
>/tg/ won't shut the frick up about something called worm >kinda tired of it >sounds kinda edgy too >get a night shift job and need something to read >frick it i'll give it a try >plow through it really quickly without ever really noticing that it's supposed to be considered long >see someone post about worm on /tg/ >enter thread >it's relentlessly shitposted to death and everyone hates it
Funny how that works.
Worm is one of those stories that has no payoff. yes the set up is all cool but you never get anything for your trouble. things just keep getting worse.
Is Worm to the superhero genre what Madoka was to the Magical Girl genre?
Madoka was good because it has a lazer focus on character development and character arcs that doesn't overstay it's welcome
Worm is a web serial with all of the negative writing connotations those words entail. an overly drawn out, bloated mess. If worm where structured like madoka magica, the end bringer fights would have happened on episode 4, 7 and then 11 would begin with ~~*zion*~~ going nuts.
I love long fics, but the reason they work is because often they simply flesh out details and give you down time. Worm doesn't have down time, it's just one trainwreck after another.
It's terrible. It's practically unplayable; the work of an amateur that barely could be called a designer attempting to make a system around an inconsistent and poorly though-out web novel. The only way it even works is that you really can make any RPG system work if you ignore its mechanics as much as possible and you put a ton of effort into it, but there's really nothing in the game that would make that effort worthwhile.
this was my attitude towards magical burst as well but I just got laughed at for making home brew changes by all the casual Ganker gays who didn't see any of the problems. my fixes weren't perfect but they where hardly to the systems detriment, the damn game is just as playable as weaver dice.
I’d suggest blades in the dark for the
Madcap heistery. I like the narrative power generation method (you generate the trauma, everyone else generates the power from it, but it’s otherwise not worth playing
the problem is the RPG is dogshit and the gangs glow with a realism practically unheard of. israelites creating a gang of totally legit nazi thugs that somehow own the ~~*medical industry*~~ to make sure the goyim never forget the holomeme even as the world literally crumbles to dust from endbringer attacks and murderhobos is exactly the play they would make.
When I want to play bug depression girl I just bring her to settings that aren't shit isekai style.
I wouldn't know I just make everything in pathfinder 1.0
>worlds greatest healer loses her shit and rapes her sister
woman with the literal I win button asks all the wrong questions.
Author of semi popular super hero setting hates fans for not reading his supernatural horror stories instead so phones in a sequel for express purpose of shooting down every fan theory he can.
>Author of semi popular super hero setting hates fans for not reading his supernatural horror stories instead so phones in a sequel for express purpose of shooting down every fan theory he can.
It's a shame too, because Victoria was a better protagonist than Taylor. Ward's pacing was so fricked though. It somehow felt like it took forever to get anywhere yet was also moving too fast. He also skipped over everyone in shard space despite seeing character frick up past events and getting to have Manpower and Shielder fleshed out as characters a bit would have been cool to see.
>Victoria was a better protagonist than Taylor
God, no she wasn't. Pretentious high strung c**t who was so painfully by the book that she became boring to read. Taylor had the benefit of being unreliable and slightly insane due to her power affecting her cognition. Also Victoria is never wrong (if she thinks someone is evil then by god they're going to be evil) and Ward suffers for it.
It's wild to me that anyone was excited for a sequel to anything by wildbow. The man started fumbling the ball around the halfway point in both Worm and Pact and things kept going downhill from there. I still finished them, but years later once the sequels were announced and released? Zero desire to pick that back up from where I left it. Never read Twig, but that's more about me not being a huge fan of biopunk.
Scion being evil was the most obvious twist in the world. My friend actually thought he would turn out to not be evil since it was such a cliche, even by that point.
No, not at all. Madoka more or less recontextualized the magical girl genre into "Magical Girls but Edgy" for years upon years on end. Worm has had basically no impact on the Superhero genre, primarily because it does nothing that nobody else wasn't already doing or hadn't already done.
>because it does nothing that nobody else wasn't already doing or hadn't already done.
I don't know any other superhero story with "powers are indifferent living beings with their own amoral agenda".
I think so. I always got strong parallels between him and Danny.
>Victoria was a better protagonist than Taylor
God, no she wasn't. Pretentious high strung c**t who was so painfully by the book that she became boring to read. Taylor had the benefit of being unreliable and slightly insane due to her power affecting her cognition. Also Victoria is never wrong (if she thinks someone is evil then by god they're going to be evil) and Ward suffers for it.
Half the time Taylor was more like a camera than a character. And Ward had much bigger problems then Victoria's moralizing.
>Half the time Taylor was more like a camera than a character
This is one of the better parts of Work, Taylor especially at the start isn't a Mary Sue whom the entire world revolves around, and while her shard is fricking busted overpowered it only really gets to be used to its full potential in the very endgame, and even then it's a very natural progression and feels earned, and isn't some bullshit ULTRA INSTINCT ass pull, and requires the aid of other specialized characters like Panacea to specifically alter her brain and shard to do so. "I have the power to control bugs" was always known to be not technically true, since she was controlling spiders from day 1, and it was clear her inability to control more complex organisms was a lack of quantitative power, not qualitative. Since beings with shards are the most powerful existences in the setting, someone going from "I can control bugs and spiders" to "I can control people, including those with shards" was a fun way to have gross bug girl with seemingly weak powers become the most powerful superhero alive and save the day.
Taylor's power set also allows her to deliver exposition and spy on/hear about stuff diegetically without it coming across as cheap or obvious author fiat plot dumping which helps make the worldbuilding segments feel less forced
>at the start isn't a Mary Sue whom the entire world revolves around
Yeah, at the start. But then you get shit like the Manikin fight where bugs are doing shit waaay beyond what they're actually capable of. The Alexandria fight is the worst of it though. It was clearly a scene Wildbow thought of early on and thought was cool, but wasn't willing to accept it just didn't work, at least in the way he handled it. For someone who can think dozens of times faster than a normal person, she sure did die stupid.
I remember the Alexandria fight and the first Lung fight as being pretty silly and even at the time I first read it I thought it was poorly done and the exact opposite of how you should write somebody with Taylor's powers fighting. "MUH BROWN SPIDER VENOM" handwaving doesn't change the fact Lung should simply never have been disabled by mundane animal toxins, nevermind it's highly questionable they'd ever be capable of penetrating his skin and entering his bloodstream to begin with. This became retroactively EVEN MORE moronic when Lung was retconned into "UMM ACTUALLY" being an Endbringer-tier superpower capable of turning into fricking Godzilla and 1v1ing the most powerful beings in the setting. A fricking tarantula is not going to work on him, I'm sorry that's stupid. I get that wildbow meant it as a "OH SHE MIGHT BE THE CREEPY BUG GIRL BUT DON'T YOU DARE UNDERESTIMATE HER!" moment but it was fricking stupid, she lives in an inhabited urban area not the Amazon rainforest and most opponents are some variant of capeshit brick with enhanced speed and durability, a spider cannot physically keep up with their movement let alone pierce sword-proof skin.
Also Alexandria just shouldn't be capable of suffocation as-written, her stasis powers let her survive being inside raging flames and the fricking equivalent to the sun, a bug crawling into your lungs is not more traumatic than 100000 degrees of heat or vacuum pressure
>Also Alexandria just shouldn't be capable of suffocation as-written, her stasis powers let her survive being inside raging flames and the fricking equivalent to the sun, a bug crawling into your lungs is not more traumatic than 100000 degrees of heat or vacuum pressure
Apparently, her timelocked brain cells still need oxygen.
>Apparently, her timelocked brain cells still need oxygen.
Right but even if you accept that (frankly moronic) premise, there's a million other things that she's encountered that should have killed her before Taylor's dumb fricking mouthful of bugs. If she still needs oxygen she can't survive explosive decompression or the vacuum of space or even be in a fricking fire too long, SMOKE INHALATION would be 10x as dangerous as somehow a bunch of fruit flies physically flying into her lungs and she encountered many world ending threats who would have essentially had so much heat/flames/pressure/debris around them at all times that a low-tier b***h who STILL NEEDS TO FRICKING BREATHE would have been instantly smoked. If her invincible body and time locked cells are able to survive all those, then the mere physical presence of biological matter in her lungs wouldn't pose any issue. It's like saying Pneumonia is worse than BEING INSIDE THE FRICKING SUN. Now I know wildbow has absolutely no math or science background and it's a capeshit setting but this is one of those things that was simply too fricking dumb it kills suspension of disbelief even accepting it's a comic book story. He should AT LEAST have made Taylor prepare some Kryptonite magic spiders for the boss fight with anti-alexandrian superpowers or something, instead of literal mundane insects somehow scooped up from the streets of totally -not-vancouver
7 months ago
Anonymous
In fairness, spiders crawling into your lungs is way, way more fricking horrifying than something like smoke inhalation. I imagine Alexandria could have held her breath or some shit in other circumstances, but lungs full of crawling bugs? There's no way you're keeping those out once you start gagging at them.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Alexandria is so strong, her coughs and lung spasms should have gone off like a bazooka. Strong enough that it would literally kill bugs and deafen anyone too close to her. Just fly away for like a minute to hack them up and get something to protect your face better.
7 months ago
Anonymous
true.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Stop typing like a tumblrina you fricking gay c**t
7 months ago
Anonymous
You talking to Manic, he's physically incapable of not being a massive homosexual.
7 months ago
Anonymous
You mean from the BattleTech threads, because that's not me...
How do you guys come up with appropriately shard-y powers? Like, is just some basic irony (girl locked with bugs and rot gets bug power, girl lacking info gets a power that will give her all the info she needs and would have been perfect to save the one person she couldn't save) or is there anything more you do?
>his power solved his inability to defend his valuable work by sharply curtailing how much work he can do that is valuable enough to need defending
Jesus christ that's gotta frick someone up. Does the guy like stop to consider "hey I haven't really done all that many new projects in some time" and wonder what's up with that.
Yea, but Taylor’s irony shard was that she didn’t have enough information because she overlooked people as being”below” her. “I’ll just ignore their petty games.” Now she can’t ignore the petty small things.
I don't really know how to give interesting powers out of a Monkey's Paw wish, especially when you also have to make sense of the Shard's function and all that jazz.
If you're starting out just focus on the iront, shard functions matter little beyond making sure the power also functions in a way to encourage the person's worst personal tendencies and offers a very imperfect solutions.
Basically you just need to become a good writer. Figure out fun trigger events and work power concepts from them. Understand the character, their hang ups, how this specific trigger event brings them to their lowest, and then figure out a power that would keep them there. The power gen docs can be helpful for this or completely awful, ngl.
Usually for me I just find something to dig into. A guy triggers from constantly failing after succeeding once, he gets a power that disincentivizes him from repeating the same actions. If you want flavor, use emotional state to help add an elemental aspect to it.
>Worm thread on /tg/
Nice. I read it for the first time a few months ago, really enjoyed it. Ward's boring as frick though I got to the end of Arc 14 and haven't gone back to finish it.
Pact was decent up until the absolute dogshit fricking ending and the fact literally none of the magic worldbuilding ever mattered or came into effect, and the family's secret demonology powers never actually did anything except be a massive pain in the ass. Also blackguards are stupidly overpowered and came across as Mary Sue donut steels with all the power and none of the moronic liabilities and drawbacks that the people who did the full seal of solomon did. But Christ that ending was terrible.
Twig was alright and I read it before trannies had to infest literally every single piece of media so I didn't even mind the Jamie shit too much but I still think Sy is a colossal cuck for NO WAY gay'ing Mary for literally no reason whatsoever especially since the guy he shoves her towards did absolutely nothing to recruit her or care about her and immediately dropped dead. But whatever I'm used to wildbow writing cuck characters, it's the curse of him being a fricking leaf
>never read any Worm >don't even know if it is a series of novels, an online fanfiction, a collaborative universe, I just don't know, never bothered to research >only know worm through the popular cyoa floating around >have used that cyoa as a basis for a campaign once >ended up together with a girl playing with us, newcomer to the group >we're moving in together next September
Thanks Worm.
It's weird how Taylor is actually really boring as a protagonist. The side-characters are all universally more interesting than she is, and I was completely lost at all the cosmic stuff.
Wildbow's Lausanne games were highly lethal and pretty cool, though.
I feel that the story never really embraces the concept, though. There's one fic about a school shooter being hunted down by one his bullies, and it's told from the latter's perspective.
Possibly the single most spiteful story I've ever read.
It's part of the charm imo.
It's a reasonable person's (at least, reasonable teenager's) descent into villainy, without any massive contrivances, due to unreasonable circumstances.
>There's one fic about a school shooter being hunted down by one his bullies, and it's told from the latter's perspective.
'A Separate War', right? That one was really good.
Sadly dead. Even by Worm standards, Pax is a huge piece of shit, which makes him really entertaining. Apparently it was cut because of the neo-Nazi part
In brief, the story is about a boy called David who triggers and butchers his entire class with shadow-beast powers. One of his bullies, Ryan, also triggers with the power to shoot shame-inducing needles, and fights him off. Ryan becomes a hero called 'Pax', and resolves to hunt down David (now known as 'Nightfall') and murder him.
According to the author, Pax would later team up with a Fallen warlord to hunt down David. Said Fallen warlord is openly racist, is depicted as the biggest Chad ever, and the hottest girl in the city as well as the sister of one of Pax's teammates are clandestinely fricking him.
Apparently, a Fallen neo-nazi hunting down a boy named 'David' while fricking his groupies was a violation of the content standards on SB.
fans: >omg realistic take at cape setting!!
reality: >most capes should be easily killed by any random hobo who can shoot straight with a handgun >but this doesn't happen, just because the author has decided that capes should be confronted by other capes in coreographed fights. No in-universe explanation exists why they aren't gunned down by randos. Guns are rarely present, and when they are, they turn out useless purely due to plot armor
To be fair, it's difficult to reconcile cape settings with guns.
Just make all capes bulletproof? That's lame, capes are more interesting if they're vulnerable outside their special trick.
Remove all guns from the setting? But how? "An extra powerful gunpowder-controlling villain explodes all gunpowder everywhere in the world!" sounds... ok but gimmicky.
I am not sure if it was explained in Worm in Ward, but Wildbow did say that gun control is much tighter in the USA then in our universe, Contessa making 2nd amendment right people have "accidents"
Earth Bet's USA to clarify.
I think it could work, from what I understand the NRA and the like were nowhere near as big as they are today vs they were in the 80s which is when Worm's timeline splits from ours.
>Just make all capes bulletproof?
There is some benefit for making every super above baseline in terms of physicality. mostly the acknowledging that every ''peak human'' is well above that. >Remove all guns from the setting? But how? "An extra powerful gunpowder-controlling villain explodes all gunpowder everywhere in the world!" sounds... ok but gimmicky.
That sounds kinda funny for some reason.
I am not sure if it was explained in Worm in Ward, but Wildbow did say that gun control is much tighter in the USA then in our universe, Contessa making 2nd amendment right people have "accidents"
The PRT and company frick with all branches of law. its pretty moronic by hey they are just the C.I.A and F.B.I on steroids.
>There is some benefit for making every super above baseline in terms of physicality. mostly the acknowledging that every ''peak human'' is well above that.
That reminds me of how despite being a skinny teenage girl, Taylor has the physical fortitude of an action movie hero.
Its not a realistic cape setting, its mostly trying to work backwards into making sense of a baseline superhero setting. ''Realistically'' most people would have no reason to get into superheroic shenanigans so the setting gives them reasons to do so.
Real life kind of already disproves this in that organized crime already exists. If some leaders & drive by shooters among criminals also have superpowers that can be nothing but a boon to their illicit works. That any good man with a gun ‘could’ kill 8/10 powered characters with his bullets doesn’t have to make it an invalidatingly likely since repeat violent criminals are already a real thing and they don’t all just die on their first outing.
here's my party from the Worm inspired game I'm running (and have been running for about 3 years now). Left to right we've got: >breaker: changer brute. turns flat and stretchy, regenerates. ecoterrorist, smokes weed >garbage tinker. also has a thinker power to intuit the value of items. literally Dan from Dan Vs >changer brute. redistributes her body mass to bulk up specific limbs or change proportions. Wheelchair-bound disaster, became unplayable due to plot and got swapped for a different unpictured character >master/brute/thinker. can seamlessly swap his body out for an exact copy while his real self astral projects. the copy is an automaton that can (sometimes) be controlled with greater accuracy than his real body and is free to die without consequence to his astral projected self, which can generate a fresh new body around itself. despite having a power that made him functionally immortal he died anyway and has been swapped for a different unpictured character >master/shaker. Has a largely not-yet-fully understood power revolving around summoning clowns and accessing shardspace. smelly failgirl >striker mover/breaker. absorbs stores and discharges electricity. can move along currents. Guerrilla DJ and the de facto party straight man
At the beginning I was the only one who had read Worm at all. The game started off with our party unaligned and almost immediately devolved into them becoming villains and destabilizing the area in a never ending cycle of escalation. Unintentionally true to Worm form
What system are you running and how's it working out for you?
How closely does your game hew to the Worm setting?
My group played a Worm campaign a while back using Mutants and Masterminds.
The party played a group of Protectorate and Ward 'heroes' who pretty immediately turned dirty, some were breaking the law because "it's the only way to get things done and really clean up the streets" while others just wanted a cut of that sweet drug money for themselves. By the end they'd turned the town into their little fiefdom; the local political establishment and law enforcement were on board, while of the two remaining gangs in town, one now answered to them and the other didn't really exist but was just an cover for when the heroes needed to do something off the books.
Party consisted of >A stealth/ambush/fear control tinker. Triggered as a teenage runaway fleeing an abusive and controlling family. Somewhat Armsmaster-like in motivation but complicated by the fact his powers didn't lend themselves to PR-friendly heroics. >Lightning blaster with a trump subrating. A former cop turned "hero" when an arrest went bad. Essentially a walking taser with the ability to target capes through their powers and briefly nullify them in the process. >Brute/thinker. An industrial diver injured in an accident at depth. Able to swap between a superhumanly strong and durable but somewhat cognitively impaired brute state or a superhumanly smart and borderline-precognitive thinker state but at the cost of being wracked by pain, spasms and weakness. >Shaker. A teen girl triggered after being buried in a avalanche while on a family ski trip. Able to manifest a localised snowstorm that grants some degree of telekinesis over anything her snowflakes are stuck to. >Changer/brute. Another girl, this one triggered after CPS took her away from her Sarah Connor-style militia nut family. Precognitive element to her changer form, adapting to what she might face in the future.
Huh, I didn't think about it at the time but I wonder if there's a reason the two girls in our group went for Wards (albeit both 16+) while the rest of us played Protectorate heroes.
Nah. One of the reasons I asked is that our GM has talked about running another Worm campaign next and I'm wondering if there's a better supers system out there that I should suggest.
Nah. One of the reasons I asked is that our GM has talked about running another Worm campaign next and I'm wondering if there's a better supers system out there that I should suggest.
I used the Weaverdice system for party chargen, but everything else is Wild Talents. It can, without hyperbole, easily stat out any power you can think of
I still wish they'd make a new edition of Wild Talents, or Monsters and Other Childish Things. It surprises me that the one-roll engine doesn't get more made for it. Maybe DG is easier to market so they keep writing for it instead.
Reminder she was going to leave her teacher and his family to get killed by Leviathan for the crime of not forcing her to accept help for her bullying and only saved him because of some twisted sense of moral superiority.
"Taylor is a bad person" is not exactly a subtle message in Worm, anon. She literally becomes a fricking criminal murderer at the first chance she gets, and one of her best friends is a body-jacking rapist who gets off on mind controlling women to frick himself (he is later martyred and treated like a hero because he died saving his current slampiece from getting squashed by a Kaiju, with precisely zero introspection on anyone's parts)
Yes, Taylor is a profoundly fricked up person that does awful things and uses some moronic moonlogic to justify them to herself, did the entire Undersiders thing not clue you in?
Yes, I know, but you wouldn't know it from most of the fan base.
Yes, Taylor is a profoundly fricked up person that does awful things and uses some moronic moonlogic to justify them to herself, did the entire Undersiders thing not clue you in?
She's often later does her moonlogic as you say, but later is vindicating by the author, which left me with the impression she might just be the author's waifu whose moonlogic happens to turn out right because the author likes her
The funniest part of the whole story is when she shoots a baby in the face and successfully rationalizes it to half the fanbase as somehow morally justified.
cause its a first person story. dude Taylor fricking tricks herself into believing Grue just went off to live peacefully in a shed
7 months ago
Anonymous
It's really weird that Golem sort of goes "Yeah, you did what you had to do" and never mentions it again. Did he even ever find out that Taylor shot his baby sister? I don't think she ever told him.
7 months ago
Anonymous
He was very aware, his interlude makes it clear he does not call her out on it because he is scared of her.
Mind you she trained him to fight with his powers and still consistently kicked his ass
I never got a good grasp of whether we're supposed to take her perspective as Objectively Correct (sanctioned by the author) or as biased.
For example her first read of Armsmaster seemed incredibly biased, she saw him as some unreasonable butthole when to me he seemed entirely reasonable at least when compared to her, but then later Armsmaster really turned out to do some vicious scheming, vindicacting her.
wildbow normally writes his viewpoint characters as scumbags with a selective heart of gold for their close friends, it's a lot more obvious taylor's meant to be a piece of shit if you've read his other works where there's not even the "WELL, I WAS BULLIED SO IT'S MY RIGHT TO BE A CAPESHIT SCHOOL SHOOTER!" defense. Nobody is under any illusions Sy wouldn't jump at the first chance to be a war criminal even in our earth.
Lmao what in the frick is this, people genuinely think Taylor Hebert, mild mannered Canadian teen girl, with boring liberal cosmopolitan values, is a dark and twisted villain?
I must say, I read worm believing that Taylor was bitterly, deeply counterrevolutionary, that she was completely opposed to any kind of situation that would upset the status quo of zogmerican hegemony, which is villainous, sure, but not in a way that the story or its characters (even its villains) are EVER conscious of, let alone try to cast her as such. People say she's a murderous evil b***h and I'm over here like, what the frick? Taylor goes out of her way, well above and beyond the expectations and norms even of her super-powered setting, to help random strangers.
What did she do to make people so offended? I do not get it. Worm's primary audience was left leaning liberal millenials, just like wildbow and Taylor, and all the time I see people freaking out and saying how evil she is... why? Literally what is the basis for this opinion? I can understand why you might consider her evil, because she stands for the system of usury and israeli child sacrifice, but no more so than any other cape in the setting. What is the deal??
My point was simply that Taylor Hebert is about one step removed from Ben Shapiro. Despite her phenomenal powers the biggest dream she has is keeping weimerica afloat for a little longer - not even out of the delusional troony "NAFO ultranationalism" you see these days, but simply because she just uncritically believes in cable news and the government. In other words, she is very unremarkable in her thoughts about the world, and in worm, there's characters who enjoy subjecting others to eternal torment, it just baffles me that Taylor has such an "evil" and "offensive" reputation, when she's like a less charismatic, dorkier, and more conservative version of Buffy.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Taylor is some girl who gets moderate superpowers, and after that cares mostly about her friends and local municipality.
You're more or less asking "why isn't every main character in every work of fiction a communist revolutionary?", which isn't a question you'll find much symapthy for here. This really isn't the website for you.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm not calling her out for not being a communist, and you're light-switch
-braining at me because I used a naughty no-no word. My point was that Taylor is basically just a very mundane and inoffensively normal teenage girl, when viewed in the context of her setting. She doesn't seem like a villain or even do anything particularly villainous throughout the entirety of worm. She does commit crimes, but goes way, waaaay out of her way to avoid killing and injuring people. I am just trying to understand what the problem is that so many people have with her. What is there to hate about Taylor apart from her mediocrity?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Probably that all of Wildbow's other protagonists are utter pieces of shit, so people who start fingering themselves to this oh-so-brilliant author start compulsively looking for what made Taylor so awful. Or they take Tattletale's final speech to her as some genuine "reason you suck speech" and not the bitter b***hing of a girl watching her best friend commit suicide and hating herself that she can't do anything better to offer an alternative.
McCrae can write characters very well, but his worlds and stories are typically awful. He delights in making things as agonizing and miserable as he can, and seems to hate his readers even more than the likes of Harlan Ellison.
So I think that one of the reasons why there's this sudden push that Taylor is awful is these pozzed fad-chasers convincing themselves that because they enjoyed Worm it means Wildbow is a good writer and not that he captured lightning in a bottle with good characters and a passable story (ultimately it made about as much sense as comics at the time), so they consoom his other miserable sadomasochistic drivel.
Thus inundated with an avalanche of awful people being awful, they feel the desperate need to recontextualize Taylor as having always been a terrible person rather than admit that they just read millions of words of misery due to mistaken fandom.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'll be honest, I've only read Worm and Pact, and I don't care to investigate Ward (Twig was never interesting to me, I hate stories about children) but while you could probably call Rose an utter piece of shit I don't think that could apply to Blake, it's like, yeah, dude was a weird homosexual hippie bohemian but he didn't do anything wrong to anybody, that would make you say "omg what an evil guy".
Like, what did Taylor actually do that people find to be so objectionable? I'm trying to remember an occasion where she wasn't just trying to do some generic Marvel hero scheme to resolve a given situation.
7 months ago
Anonymous
She contemplated letting a guy who was at the very least complicit in her cartoonish levels of abuse die, then didn't let him die. Uh... She threatened to not save a guy who was dying of anaphylactic shock, then saved him. She made friends with a bunch of villains who were better people than the heroes, and went about being a better hero than the heroes...
Oh, I know! She shot a baby! ...Who had been tortured and mutilated by the grimderp brigade and was potentially the key to the world's end, making it a horrifically extraordinary circumstance.
Also she killed Girlboss Superman, which apparently the author intended to be a villainous moment but I saw as a triumph because we knew Alexandria was a horrible person using emotional torture on someone who'd already surrendered, just to be an abusive c**t.
And on the topic of abuse, the only way Taylor's abuse in her school makes a lick of sense is if we do the same job as Disney Marvel/Star Wars fans and do the writing for him. There's no fricking way a black girl in the Nazi capital of the US gets away with bullying a white girl to the point of continual physical abuse. The only explanation, which McCrae never thought of, is if the nazis use Sophia as a recruitment tool. "Look at this porch monkey, brutalizing people. Join us and we'll make people like her stop being monsters."
In a story that actually made sense, the entire Hess family would be dead after the first six months of continued abuse, much less two years.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I don't think Kaiser was low to the ground enough to go "lets target this specific bully"
Also even if she had faced backlash the Wards would have just relocated her
7 months ago
Anonymous
The US is a gay liberal paradise who consider E88 to be domestic terrorists (probably fair, admittedly), but yeah the racial dynamics at play in Worm make no sense.
I didn't like that Shadow Stalker had such a pivotal power, or in general, how characters like her would pop up to be annoying with their Mary Sue bullshit only for everyone else to have to play by normal rules. And she had the insufferable lesbian romance which really wasn't fun or interesting for even a single moment, and in the end she was never even really punished for her actions. She's way worse than Taylor in every way.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Are you mixing up shadow stalker and foil? Shadow stalker's powers were largely irrelevant.
Also, yes, foil's introduction with her blatantly cruising for pussy first and last as her goals while on patrol was obnoxious as frick and she never really won me back after that. 100% wouldn't have been treated as a sympathetic character if it was a guy.
>providing no explanation as to how ordinary people haven't taken to lynching criminals.
There is an explanation, it just sucks. Cauldron did it.
I absolutely hate contessa being created as the handwavium explanation for everything that doesn't make sense about the setting.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Huh, I guess they fused into one person in my head, but you're right.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>There's no fricking way a black girl in the Nazi capital of the US gets away with bullying a white girl to the point of continual physical abuse. The only explanation, which McCrae never thought of, is if the nazis use Sophia as a recruitment tool. "Look at this porch monkey, brutalizing people. Join us and we'll make people like her stop being monsters."
Taylor looks israeli enough for neonazi wannabe teenagers to not give a shit. Very curly black hair, vaguely weird face, and her last name being Hebert makes it really easy for someone to call her a heeb and have it stick. Pretty much every single white person with curly hair got shit on for being a "jew" when I was in high school, so I wouldn't be surprised if the e88 hanger-ons decided to let the black girl bully the 'jew' girl and treated it as daily entertainment.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm still suspicious that Taylor is meant as a israelite. It's never stated, which you'd think it would be due to the prominence of E88 characters in Brockton Bay, but she does just check a lot of boxes on the israelitedar. Her dad being a mousy, wimpy failure, plus her total lack of hesitation for commiserating with nonwhites; it doesn't mean wildbow wrote her as a israelite but I think he left the door open so he could one day.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I don't think she's actually a israelite due to that scene with Brian where it just doesn't really click in her head why someone would feel extra threatened by the E88 since, in her mind, they're just one more gang in the pile. If she were actually a israelite she'd have understood and felt the same way as him.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Taylor seems to attract labels though, just look at how much of the readerbase thought she was being written to end up with b***h
I think it's just because she's such a blank slate outside of her major traits
7 months ago
Anonymous
I hated b***h from the moment she showed up until the end, she is easily my most disliked character in Worm. Ugly, autistic, man-hating, lumpenprole criminal, and with such a lame and annoying power. I fricking hate the 'animal companion' type character, mixed with fricking pitt mommy memes, she's just the absolute worst.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>man-hating
Anon she's canonically a bawd, she's just too brain damaged to have a relationship beyond that
7 months ago
Anonymous
You might be right but my mental image of b***h is identical to "fugly butch lesbian biker chick". I don't remember her sleeping with anyone, but I could have just blacked it all out. b***h is the only major character who I never found even a tiny bit likeable or interesting.
7 months ago
Anonymous
it's very much a background detail but basically she'll find a guy to frick until he starts getting feelings or says something she considers dumb, then he's replaced
7 months ago
Anonymous
I hated b***h from the moment she showed up until the end, she is easily my most disliked character in Worm. Ugly, autistic, man-hating, lumpenprole criminal, and with such a lame and annoying power. I fricking hate the 'animal companion' type character, mixed with fricking pitt mommy memes, she's just the absolute worst.
>insufferable pit mommie character that the fandom thought would end up with the main character
Okay, you guys have succeeded in attracting my attention. QRD on Worm and this b***h character in particular as well as her relationship with Taylor?
Is it worth reading Worm if I'm an adult? I see it has over 7000 pages and I usually prefer my capeshit in comic book form but I've given up on modern Big 2 comics because the editorial at Marvel and DC is a complete shitshow.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Honestly just read the first couple of arcs and see if you like it, if you don't click with it its not worth reading on, but
>tl;dr >superpowers showed up about 50 years ago, because some gold fricker called Scion appeared from the sky one day >society has evolved around this, with hero teams, commercialisation and the like >powers are acquired via trauma >Main character has bug control powers (Taylor) >Goes out heroing, gets mistaken for a villain because she made a pitch black insect looking costume >gets recruited to a gang of villains, b***h, shadow controller, rapist and the brains >keeps saying "One more week of this and I'll go tell the heroes what I know, I'm actually a hero" to herself
To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
7 months ago
Anonymous
Supernatural deductive power?
7 months ago
Anonymous
OK thanks anon. I will do so
Could you give me a qrd on why people thought Taylor and b***h would end up together
7 months ago
Anonymous
Probably not a good one, issue with a 7000 page serial is that you forget the little details
Basically b***h works on dog logic, assert dominance, try to be the alpha and Taylor routinely steps around her bullshit and tries to get closer to her, but it ends in friendship rather than yurigayging
7 months ago
Anonymous
b***h is genuinely neurologically fricked up and is functionally a smart dog shaped like a human. She develops a close friendship with Talor and the sort of close bond a person might have with their dog can be mistaken for romantic shit if that dog looks like a human. It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian. That plus b***h looking like a stereotpyical butch lesbian? Yeah, people made connections. There's some other more spoilery things too that I don't feel like typing up.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Alien chatgpt bolted to her brain.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
I think Tattletale herself describes it like a 3d sudoku puzzle, where if she gets some information her power will start filling in blanks. Except that if she gets bad information it can give her wrong info, kind of like how if you put a number in the wrong place in a sudoku puzzle it will throw other numbers off.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>sheltered nerdy girl meets a girl who wears a dog collar >nerdy girl pwns dog collars major foe >girl with dog collar hates nerdy girl because she seems weak and not cutthroat out of the costume >dog collar gets growing respect & admiration for nerdy girls cunning & ruthlessness >she’s one of 2 characters Taylor kisses in the book >sees dog collar after a time skip and is like “damn she really got manly…. Hot tbh”
7 months ago
Anonymous
She’s constantly thinking stuff like this
7 months ago
Anonymous
7 months ago
Anonymous
Taylor might honestly be the single most bisexual character I've ever read. I don't know if it's because Worm was the authors first story and so it's a case of a man writing a woman like he imagines women to be, but damn. You cannot tell me Taylor wouldn't frick pretty much any of the Undersiders given the right situation. She'd probably frick a couple heroes, too. Hell she got pretty close to fricking Jack.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Taylor sizes up how frickable every character she meets is, and we know this because it's a first person story. We also know this is a Taylor exclusive trait because we've seen first person perspectives of other characters by this author.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Hell she got pretty close to fricking Jack.
No. I liked elements of the character creation but the system is held together by duct tape and Jack Slash simps.
>Jack Slash simps.
I've literally never gone to a school with lockers big enough to fit a teenager in. Even tall lockers are either too narrow, or have non-removable shelving.
[...]
Wildbow walked back on conflict drive stuff. This could be baseless, but I've gotten the impression with a lot of stuff in Worm/Ward, he goes >wildbow: [stuff involving how powers screw with peoples minds or certain characterization details] it's a 4/10 >the fandom: it's a 9/10 >wildbow: actually, its a 1/10
Except with Amy, who I feel like he made worse because of how much the fandom likes her. Reading some of his earlier comments, he pretty heavily implies Amy had raped Victoria long before Ward and that she was a ticking time bomb, but it felt more like while she was a victimizer, she was also a victim of her own impossibly high self-imposed standards and Jack Slash rather than her being the seed of evil. Heck, if I remember right, he even said that if she had ended up joining the S9, Theo would have managed to eventually talk her down during the S9000 arc.
[...] >To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
Sherlock Holmes on Ritalin.
[...] >It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian.
While I completely understand this view, I always took more do to her low self-esteem when it comes to her own appearance.
>Jack Slash
Speaking of Jack, anyone else pissed that such a psychotic butthole was just left to do whatever, just because he was SOMEHOW involved with making Zion Snap and kill everything?
7 months ago
Anonymous
What do you mean by "left to do whatever"?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but wasn't the reason he was able to create the Slaughterhouse 9 pretty much only because he was part of the Zion prophecy or whatever?
Like, he wasn't all that great at fighting Endbringers, right?
7 months ago
Anonymous
He had literal shard-based plot armor. His power would give him hints, convince other powers to sabotage their own hosts to let him live, and call members of the S9 to him if he was in danger.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>He had literal shard-based plot armor.
Bleh, I kind of have to agree with the earlier assessment that Wildbow was too in love with miserable settings.
Bonesaw could have been a Hero!
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Bonesaw could have been a Hero!
Bonesaw was a hero in Ward. In the epilogue, she got parole for literally saving the world (reminder that the other psychos in the Bird Cage got pardoned after killing Scion).
7 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, but I'm talking without most of the baggage being tortured by Jack...
7 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, but the same is true for Jack. He could have been one of if not the world's greatest hero if King never found him.
7 months ago
Anonymous
If it wasn't for his gaggle of murder hobos, a police sniper and/or a drone strike would end this man's career. The one campaign my group and I did in this system ended when the DM wrote himself into a corner and dropped Slash infront of us. I am forever annoyed I couldn't give that knife nut the Armstrong treatmen.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>She contemplated letting a guy who was at the very least complicit in her cartoonish levels of abuse die, then didn't let him die.
He offered to help and she told him off because she thought it would make things worse. She was probably right, but a single teacher can only do so much. He might have been able to do more, but not much, and he didn't deserve to be singled out for her contempt.
I think a bigger reason people view Taylor as evil is because she deludes herself about her own virtue. The best example off the top of my head is during the hostage situation at the bank. She totally would have bit the shit out of someone with a black widow if they did something dumb like charge her even though she didn't think she would. Plus, she hurt a lot of people who didn't deserve while stubbornly insisting on moving forward with her one-sided "infiltration" of the Undersiders. And people hate hypocrites.
7 months ago
Anonymous
killing aster was easily considered villainous but i guess in the context of the target audience maybe we really are supposed to think killiing a white baby of a nazi mother is morally gray
7 months ago
Anonymous
Why do you post such slander? Please tell the class the detail you left out, the circumstances in which Taylor shot Aster and why.
7 months ago
Anonymous
killing aster was easily considered villainous but i guess in the context of the target audience maybe we really are supposed to think killiing a white baby of a nazi mother is morally gray
Why do you post such slander? Please tell the class the detail you left out, the circumstances in which Taylor shot Aster and why.
Wasn't the baby going to be tortured in a Grey Boy loop?
7 months ago
Anonymous
I think you're misreading him. He's complaining that Taylor didn't give the world an actual Holocaust, not that she wasn't a commie.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Commie anon is just pointing out that Taylor is fairly mundane and her reputation as the evil psycho b***h that you might here through internet cultural osmosis is undeserved.
7 months ago
Anonymous
anon you have the reading comprehension of a corpse.
I LOVE ISRAEL
I LOVE AMERICA
Capitalism is dead and we killed her. Even Orthodox Judaism will be unable to resist her killers. All who oppose us will be trampled under heel by the new and present age of technofeudal aristocracy. My hapa progeny shall be gene-optimized by holistic market-analysis algorithms. I will follow the technique and attain true temporal happiness. Long Live the New Economy!
>I never got a good grasp of whether we're supposed to take her perspective as Objectively Correct (sanctioned by the author) or as biased.
I'm late but I'll just say there's a reason b***h was introduced as a character.
A lot of people miss the whole "powers frick with your brains" aspect wasn't meant to just be oddball capes like b***h, but applies to every single non-Cauldron cape, ever. Taylor is compelled by the Administrator shard to dominate and subjugate, to have everyone obey her because only she can make the correct plans and coordinate everyone (because the Administrator cannot think in any other way). She cannot function without control. She is completely and thoroughly corrupt and biased.
A lot of other capes have their thought processes just as corrupted by their powers, but you were really supposed to figure that out with Taylor.
Another subtle cue for that is that whenever Taylor sees someone using a power, she immediately tries to think up better ways she'd use that power (instantly dreams as if she were controlling them).
I have heard this argument before and obviously it's what wildbow wanted to do with it by the end but I still don't buy it. Taylor is a little bit more logical than a normal person, but only a very, very little bit more. All of her behavior, and I would say even up to the end of the story, discounting the brief period where she's obviously isn't in control of her actions, can be explained as normal, rational thought processes from Taylor Hebert's brain.
Her shard makes it easier for her to think, but it doesn't seem to direct her thinking. Perhaps the idea is that her shard chose her because she was the most suited to it, I dunno, but Taylor doesn't ever justify anything she does except in the most explicit terms. That is to say, I would not agree that Taylor is "completely and thoroughly corrupt and biased". If QA was piloting her like b***h's shard was piloting b***h, Taylor would never waste all the time she wasted with the Undersiders.
>A lot of people miss the whole "powers frick with your brains" aspect wasn't meant to just be oddball capes like b***h, but applies to every single non-Cauldron cape
This is interesting, I didn't catch this when I first read Worm. I'm going to need to reread it with a list of Cauldron vs non-Cauldron characters to see how big of a thing this is in the story. W/so many unhinged characters, now I'm wondering how much of that is non-Cauldron curated shards mucking with people.
For a sample, Gallant is a Cauldron cape who was more or less the glue holding the team together, an IED defusal specialist trying to slowly pacify Amy, and, as a bonus, Gallant was theoretically going to be so big a problem for Coil in a scenario where he didn't die that Coil would need to straight up fricking murder Gallant if he didn't leave on his own. Coil would not need to do anything of the sort with the other Wards, and the other Wards are all various shades of fricked up.
Granted, on the other side of the Cauldron cape spectrum we've got possibly Acidbath, possibly Butcher, definitely Gray Boy... So your mileage kind of varies.
Teenager with deep seated trauma issues, lack of parental support, that gets tormented by her best friend and her new friends before being considerably brain damaged by a space whale god, specifically to give her the most ironic, b-grade superpowers it can manage via extradimensional brain-altering parasite, for the sole purpose of unbalancing her to see how she uses them.
Why do people think there are so many villains in the setting? The magic space whale wants you traumatized, unstable, feeling helpless and unable to deal with things, specifically so you lash out with your powers.
One thing I find odd about that is how Taylor kept her head down for six fricking months. QA is probably a incompetent a shard but this stuff still feels weird for some reason.
Fricked up person with good intentions becomes more fricked up and more selfish as time goes on
Man, I loved Worm, so much I'm scared of re-reading it
One thing I find odd about that is how Taylor kept her head down for six fricking months. QA is probably a incompetent a shard but this stuff still feels weird for some reason.
My guess is that it was both more relaxed than other shards and because it knew she was gearing up and getting ready to lash out
I started reading Worm a bit after it ended, I remember a lot of guys shat on the Golden Morning arc/time skip but I remember liking it outside of Eidolon dying like a b***h.
Worm was the only wildbow work I finished >Pact
The misery pron got too much for me, I remember I stopped at around the part Blake came back from the dead and was trapped in a mirror. I was also too moronic for the magic system. >Twig
I actually liked it a lot, but got side tracked by other things, I think the last I read was around the gay one dying? >Ward
In liked it, but never finished. Don't remember when I stopped, sometime after the cultists were raided >Pale
Haven't read it, maybe I'll give it a shot since it seems well-liked here.
>My guess is that it was both more relaxed than other shards and because it knew she was gearing up and getting ready to lash out
I was mostly talking about how she failed to trigger Danny and Taylor's severe autism.
Taylor was a lot smaller at the start. She was shorter than Lisa at the start of Worm and taller than her like a year later. Teenage growth spurt and all that. I think Taylor was 15 at the start of the story, and had been prepping for like 6 months for hero stuff, and the locker was a few months before that. So reasonably we can say that Taylor was probably 14, maybe just turned 15 when the locker happened. A skinny kid that age that hasn't hit their growth spurt yet could absolutely fit in a locker.
I've literally never gone to a school with lockers big enough to fit a teenager in. Even tall lockers are either too narrow, or have non-removable shelving.
>I never got a good grasp of whether we're supposed to take her perspective as Objectively Correct (sanctioned by the author) or as biased.
I'm late but I'll just say there's a reason b***h was introduced as a character.
A lot of people miss the whole "powers frick with your brains" aspect wasn't meant to just be oddball capes like b***h, but applies to every single non-Cauldron cape, ever. Taylor is compelled by the Administrator shard to dominate and subjugate, to have everyone obey her because only she can make the correct plans and coordinate everyone (because the Administrator cannot think in any other way). She cannot function without control. She is completely and thoroughly corrupt and biased.
A lot of other capes have their thought processes just as corrupted by their powers, but you were really supposed to figure that out with Taylor.
Another subtle cue for that is that whenever Taylor sees someone using a power, she immediately tries to think up better ways she'd use that power (instantly dreams as if she were controlling them).
Wildbow walked back on conflict drive stuff. This could be baseless, but I've gotten the impression with a lot of stuff in Worm/Ward, he goes >wildbow: [stuff involving how powers screw with peoples minds or certain characterization details] it's a 4/10 >the fandom: it's a 9/10 >wildbow: actually, its a 1/10
Except with Amy, who I feel like he made worse because of how much the fandom likes her. Reading some of his earlier comments, he pretty heavily implies Amy had raped Victoria long before Ward and that she was a ticking time bomb, but it felt more like while she was a victimizer, she was also a victim of her own impossibly high self-imposed standards and Jack Slash rather than her being the seed of evil. Heck, if I remember right, he even said that if she had ended up joining the S9, Theo would have managed to eventually talk her down during the S9000 arc.
Honestly just read the first couple of arcs and see if you like it, if you don't click with it its not worth reading on, but
>tl;dr >superpowers showed up about 50 years ago, because some gold fricker called Scion appeared from the sky one day >society has evolved around this, with hero teams, commercialisation and the like >powers are acquired via trauma >Main character has bug control powers (Taylor) >Goes out heroing, gets mistaken for a villain because she made a pitch black insect looking costume >gets recruited to a gang of villains, b***h, shadow controller, rapist and the brains >keeps saying "One more week of this and I'll go tell the heroes what I know, I'm actually a hero" to herself
To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
>To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
Sherlock Holmes on Ritalin.
b***h is genuinely neurologically fricked up and is functionally a smart dog shaped like a human. She develops a close friendship with Talor and the sort of close bond a person might have with their dog can be mistaken for romantic shit if that dog looks like a human. It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian. That plus b***h looking like a stereotpyical butch lesbian? Yeah, people made connections. There's some other more spoilery things too that I don't feel like typing up.
>It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian.
While I completely understand this view, I always took more do to her low self-esteem when it comes to her own appearance.
>I've literally never gone to a school with lockers big enough to fit a teenager in. Even tall lockers are either too narrow, or have non-removable shelving.
I've taught at a school and had to tell the 14 year olds to stop climbing into the lockers, so I guess YMMV.
>To the burgers out there, how ''realistic'' is the bulling in worm?
the locker scene is excessive but highschool girls are fricking VICIOUS and demonstrably inflict way more long-term psychological damage than male bullying which is almost exclusively somebody calling you a homosexual or getting into some fights. girls will ruin each other's lives, spread life-destroying rumors and hound people even at home, and generally avoid at all costs actual physical confrontation or accountability.
worth noting Worm takes place in a world that is not exactly modern day america. the timeline split from our world's in ~1980 and has been getting more and more different ever since
can someone (medicated) explain what people's issue with Ward was? I personally thought the writing and characters were strictly better but I often just see people say "it's bad" and never elaborate
For me just some parts, particularly the end, were huge slogs to read through. I think the highs are pretty high in Ward and I like all the characters but the lows are far worse than anything in Worm. It's just a pretty mixed bad
Yeah I dropped it when I reached a slog. It was just fricking awful.
Wildbow in general seems to have this problem. I don't know what it is; I remember someone saying something about him being massively antiauthoritiarian on some level, and I think I agree. He just seems incapable of writing certain things in an interesting way, and so whenever he reaches a point where he has to it's barely readable at best.,
Yeah. The Mideast and Africa are about the same as normal - an endless orgy of rape and murder with revolving warlords - but with superpowers; China is supposed to be some imperial force but never actually makes a difference in the story...
The potentially most interesting thing is national-socialism making a triumphant return in Europe, but despite the Gessellschaft supposedly controlling a significant portion of the continent we don't see anything major from them: instead they're for some reason happy to supply a single neo-nazi coven with guns and superpowered weirdos. Also apparently they have ways to induce powers and brainwash people but haven't conquered the planet yet.
Again, Wildbow loves miserable settings but his masturbatory adoration of such exceeds his capability to actually write them.
A world where the arrival of superpowers caused nations to abandon international cooperation and all become violently isolationist - because how can anyone engage on the global stage when death and destruction reign within their borders? - would have made far more sense and been more interesting, rather than paying lip service to how awful the world is but providing no explanation as to how ordinary people haven't taken to lynching criminals.
>Again, Wildbow loves miserable settings but his masturbatory adoration of such exceeds his capability to actually write them.
Exactly!
I'm starved for Worm content. What fanfics should I read now?
Maybe I should write some kind of alternate worm, now that I have my fukkin meds.
One of the problems though is the motivation of the Entities: To survive the heat death of the universe. I've never liked this. It's so decontextualised.
But what to replace it with? An outside threat perhaps.
Limiting the Entities a bit could also work; apparently they're almost everywhere in the entire universe, which is just an obscene amount, and makes the outside threat a problem, as there's nowhere left to BE an outside.
Possibly some kind of other alien threat. A divergent evolution of entities? Other multidimensional entities?
>To survive the heat death of the universe
Pretty sure that's not actually their goal. Zion already has tools to create energy, they're just not efficient enough yet, for example. Entities actually regard entropy as something they'll overcome on the way. Their real main goal is to make better weapons so they can out-compete other entities, IIRC.
Ward showed that Entities aren't hostile to each other, as they're all working towards the same goal. If I remember right, it isn't just overcoming entropy, but never running out of things to do. What good is living forever if you're just vibing in the void of space for all eternity? For the Warrior and Thinker, the Cycle was more than a means to an end, it was also something they could do together, which was a luxury and experience the hyper-competitive base state of Entities couldn't do before they were space-faring.
>For the Warrior and Thinker, the Cycle was more than a means to an end, it was also something they could do together, which was a luxury and experience the hyper-competitive base state of Entities couldn't do before they were space-faring.
They could have just wrote fanfiction like the rest of us!
Yeah, but the same is true for Jack. He could have been one of if not the world's greatest hero if King never found him.
>Yeah, but the same is true for Jack. He could have been one of if not the world's greatest hero if King never found him.
I might have come in too late or just missed that bit.
Funny thing is my sister once had a story idea sort of like Worm like a decade ago; Where a girl with the stereotypically "Evil" powers of Plant Withering sort of accidentally saves some Politician and ends up getting switched over to the "Hero" track.
It's really good. Huge universe with a frickton of fascinating characters and creative uses of powers. I'd say it's hard to read any other superhero story when you've read Worm... besides Worm fanfics.
>I'd say it's hard to read any other superhero story when you've read Worm... besides Worm fanfics.
...Of course now we have My Hero Academia, which is sort of Worms antithesis...
7 months ago
Anonymous
>...Of course now we have My Hero Academia, which is sort of Worms antithesis...
unfortunately I dont want to read any fanfic by a woman that would draw this.
Like undertale, MHA is too full of fujoshi and gutter tier yume's to be worth digging through the ashes for anything good.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Your loss...
7 months ago
Anonymous
if you have anything above 100k words to recommend I'll look but I refuse to turn over a single stone.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>...Of course now we have My Hero Academia, which is sort of Worms antithesis...
Its a odd mirror now that I think about it. even the main gripes I have with have significant parallels.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>even the main gripes I have with have significant parallels.
Which are?
Honestly one of the best parts of MHA is that it has Optimism where Wildbow would drag out Misery.
7 months ago
Anonymous
does he really need to post it?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>does he really need to post it?
I mean I've fallen quiet behind on the anime, but I'm pretty sure it keeps it's Optimistic tone.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Which are?
The MC's set up moronation at the start of the series. the bully bullshit just annoys the me because I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff. I want to scream at the screen and tell Taylor and Izuku to do something.
In MHA this feels worse because UA is supposed to be decent but nothing gets done so the rest of the cast needs to act out of character when character A or B enters the scene.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>the bully bullshit just annoys the me because I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff. I want to scream at the screen and tell Taylor and Izuku to do something.
Well MHA at least has the excuse that Japanese Culture is notoriously toxic when it comes to addressing social issues, especially when it comes to the suffering of an individual.
>In MHA this feels worse because UA is supposed to be decent but nothing gets done so the rest of the cast needs to act out of character when character A or B enters the scene.
Well what is suppose to be Bakugo's Character Development was that, while his stellar potential eclipsed his shitty personality in the tiny backwater district Midoriya and he grew up in, at the premiere level of UA EVERYONE is suppose to have that same kind of potential, thus highlighting that he is a rather shitty person.
To be fair, wanting to be a Hero for the sake of doing good for goodness sake is something that is just NOW sinking in for him if what I've heard is current.
no u.
welp, I'm off to work and this thread is almost at 300 anyway.
reminder to all of you morons to post on /fanfic/ and stop ignoring the smug e-girl., I am tired of having to use space shitters to read fic discussion and while we squabble I would take this 1000 days over even one more day reading some subhuman's opinion on why hazel potter is a girlboss for sticking it to those biggots.
>I am tired of having to use space shitters to read fic discussion
Yes, most of the homosexual writers on Space Battles or SV just write TINO alt power garbage, with lesbian shipping, because they're bottom of the barrel gays fishing for easy wins.
Hilariously, the few people who are good at writing a proper Taylor and co. are also MASSIVE power hungry shitters (looks at that homosexual Ridtom). The only reason I stick around is for the odd gem in the rough.
>Yes, most of the homosexual writers on Space Battles
Oi, you don't get to complain until people start explicitly writing insults about you into said fics!
7 months ago
Anonymous
>To be fair, wanting to be a Hero for the sake of doing good for goodness sake is something that is just NOW sinking in for him if what I've heard is current.
Bakugo is just irritating, the fact that no one takes him down a peg in fricking UA of all places is stupid. that and I just find him boring as shit but that could be said about everyone in MHA.
How many of those fics claim that magic has been a thing in Worm from the very first cycle, but the entities were too stupid to realize that their powers worked by magic?
I don't recall any fic with that to be honest.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Anon this stupid shitserial insults both weebs and chuds.
Ridtom, and a bunch of other prolific Worm/Ward authors, are all part of the Gaylor Discord, which is a Discord that revels in writing about, justifying, or otherwise pushing online the idea that Taylor is gay. The premise of this Discord is already kind wtf, but it's the internal, under the hood shit that it does that's the real problem. You see, just like all other Lefty Discords its real use is to push prominent members into positions of power (petty as it is) and to abuse it for all it is worth.
Now, Ridtom isn't necessarily the biggest Gaylor poster (Ridtom is a Vicky stan), but it's his connection to this Discord, and now Space Battles moderators (He's Amicus) that is where issues are starting to show up. Space Battles used to have a fairly broad range of moderator types, being a Vs./Debate board, but over time the moderators have become increasingly Reddit tier, and people like Ridtom are the next generation of the take over.
Here's an example. It used to be on Space Battles that words like moronic or reeeeeee, or other typical internet lingo were mildly accepted (you couldn't use it to attack others, but it was okay to use it in the abstract) and there were moderators that defended it. Now though, with the newer crop of moderators, many of whom are part of the Gaylor, or other groups pushing Lefty topics, a board that was mostly hands off has become increasingly homosexual, of which Ridtom is a symptom of.
If you're a popular Lefty author you can get away with a lot more shit than someone who doesn't tow the party line. Ridtom isn't the only one of course, their are many more.
Basically I'm b***hing about watching Space Battles turn into yet another cesspit of a forum, and b***hing at the obvious bad actors taking part in it.
[...]
Ooof, I knew a few posters who were disliked by 'The Community' who had that treatment. I assume just like them no moderator ever called the other party out on their bullshit?
If you dont like it be part of the fricking solution. Shill /fanfic/. The board is dead so they cant complain if new posters arrive and anyone who doesnt belong will be driven out by the +Black folk loicsance
7 months ago
Anonymous
>If you dont like it be part of the fricking solution. Shill /fanfic/. The board is dead so they cant complain if new posters arrive and anyone who doesnt belong will be driven out by the +Black folk loicsance
What is /fanfic/ bro?
7 months ago
Anonymous
My question exactly, what is this guy talking about?
7 months ago
Anonymous
My question exactly, what is this guy talking about?
I'd assume Ganker, but their about as good at writing Literature as /tg/ is at playing Traditional Games...
7 months ago
Anonymous
Hey anon, maybe you're right, I only really got the vague impression he was part of Gaylor from in-thread discussions, so fair enough if he isn't part of Gaylor. Maybe I was getting the other group and Gaylor mixed up? The rest of my post though, and the gist behind it, I stand by though. Ridtom and other Lefty types are shitting another site up, as they do, and it's bothersome to say the least.
Also, fricking kek at Gaylor having their own boiler plate argument for Amy/Victoria. At that point just fricking admit you're in it for the porn and not the romance.
[...]
Dykeshit is a tried and true part of fanfiction, but yes, Taylor dykeshit is pervasive and almost always a sign that the author is part of a little fetish club or is trying to get more readership via scissor shipping.
I think making Taylor gay specifically makes me mad because she literally has one romantic/sexual interaction in the whole fricking series, and it's an extremely masculine man, and yet, the gays will write whole fricking essays (or that one guy who wrote a fricking series of them) trying to justify how she's TOTALLY a closet lesbian you guys. Don't you know, she once described Laserdream and Lady Photon as having heart shaped faces, she must be a dyke ya'll.
[...]
Both of these are good, but every time I see Trailblazer I'm just reminded of how we could have had A Cloudy Path finish by now if it wasn't for homosexual 'reviewers'.
[...]
I'm sorry anon, I literally don't know what /fanfic/ is.
My question exactly, what is this guy talking about?
>newbies poisoned by /general/s and israelitegle hamstringing search engines cant find
smug lo.li
7 months ago
Anonymous
> I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff.
I was taught to go to the teacher, and to never EVER defend myself. (That got me punished)
The teachers did fricking nothing.
Even when I was sexually assaulted by other boys.
Some possible motivations: >The cycle is how Entities develop to compete with each other, but now it is more like a sport to them than an evolutionary struggle for survival. >Their FTL travel, while interstellar, is not yet intergalactic, and their precognitive abilities has shown them a potentially more powerful species in a different galaxy, so they develop either to actively seek out and destroy the others, or to be prepared for their arrival. >The cycle is the Entities' way of uplifting lesser species. The worthy will band together despite the adversity and trauma they suffer to trigger and be uplifted into a fellow space-faring race, the unworthy ones will destroy themselves. Either way it is all by their own hands and would have eventually headed that way regardless, the Entities are just a catalyst to accelerate it (or so their thinking would go)
while these possibilities sound more interesting than the canon cycle I don't think they would work with the author's allegory. the entities are supposed to mirror writers fricking with fictional worlds or something like that.
>the entities are supposed to mirror writers fricking with fictional worlds or something like that.
Which Entity is Wildblow supposed to be in this scenario? Warrior, Thinker, Loner?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Which Entity is Wildblow supposed to be in this scenario?
I guess he would be warrior because he is the inciting incident. its more of a broad strokes thing.
Basically any point where she could of gone to the Protectorate of her own volition and let someone else handle the situation instead of compromising her morals, yeah things are materially better off with her acting how she did and are better for her person but were all morally corrosive.
However I fully admit my own moral biases here as a consider morality at risk of oblivion as inherently more just than concessions for survival. Better to be a Martyr than a Monster and all that.
Yeah, she was pretty irrational on that front. I know she would probably get screwed over but it was still the best option.
It's because Ward has all the same writing flaws and foibles that Worm does, but with way less interesting characters, a fricking dogshit setting, actively shits on previous fan favorites, has a protagonist that is everything wrong with regular capeshit stories, and is super meandering.
Ward could easily have been a DC or Marvel product, right down to the pretty, but troubled, blonde woman trying to 'find herself' while learning to be a better person/saving the day. It's fricking wild that their are people who didn't clue into how much Victoria fits in with Nu-Marvel or Nu-DC character writing.
Speaking of characters. Good fricking god, what the frick is Wildbow's problem with fan favorites? Like, you'd think this gay was specifically trawling the internet for everyone's opinion on who was the best character and the most popular fan theories and then specifically going out of his way to shit all over that. The few fan faves that don't get dunked on are forced into the background via irrelevancy despite being objectively far more powerful (and interesting) than the fricking C-list squad lead by a B-list b***h with sister issues.
Oh yeah...sister issues. Wildbow somehow managed to retroactively ruin Vicky and Amy as Worm characters while never resolving their conflict in Ward AND managed to somehow make the whole thing boring and daytime TV levels of drama. FFS, Victoria's whole character in Worm was that she was well meaning, but prone to overdoing it on mooks. Is that explored at all now that we're in her head? No. Amy's whole schtick was that she was a self-fulfilling prophecy between herself and her mother, she wasn't born evil, she was made that way, but the flashbacks in Ward all but cement that she was 'destined' to be a villain. It wasn't REALLY her family that made her snap, no, she was just born a c**t. UGH frick off Wildbow you monstrous homosexual.
Ward is just Nu-Worm. Frick that. He wrote it for the money, nothing more.
I love all the new characters in Ward and Vicky really worked for me. I already hated Amy so I'm just going to assume from now on that all Ward-haters are disgusting Amy stans
That's okay, everyone else already knows Ward enjoyers were autistic troons projecting their delusions onto a pretty white b***h.
I've literally never gone to a school with lockers big enough to fit a teenager in. Even tall lockers are either too narrow, or have non-removable shelving.
[...]
Wildbow walked back on conflict drive stuff. This could be baseless, but I've gotten the impression with a lot of stuff in Worm/Ward, he goes >wildbow: [stuff involving how powers screw with peoples minds or certain characterization details] it's a 4/10 >the fandom: it's a 9/10 >wildbow: actually, its a 1/10
Except with Amy, who I feel like he made worse because of how much the fandom likes her. Reading some of his earlier comments, he pretty heavily implies Amy had raped Victoria long before Ward and that she was a ticking time bomb, but it felt more like while she was a victimizer, she was also a victim of her own impossibly high self-imposed standards and Jack Slash rather than her being the seed of evil. Heck, if I remember right, he even said that if she had ended up joining the S9, Theo would have managed to eventually talk her down during the S9000 arc.
[...] >To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
Sherlock Holmes on Ritalin.
[...] >It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian.
While I completely understand this view, I always took more do to her low self-esteem when it comes to her own appearance.
The problem with these implications is that he doesn't show them at all during Worm. In Worm we get >Amy is a grouchy closeted lesbian who has a terrible home life with her mother >She is easily swayed by Vicky's bad behaviors but doesn't mind because le secret sister crush >Amy is stressed because she thinks she's going to turn into a villain because her mom also thinks that she will
All of the truly heinous shit that Amy does is post Jack, but then Wildbow goes onto Ward and retroactively makes it so that Amy was a monstrous piece of shit pre-Jack? Did...did he forget his own metaphor about self fulfilling prophecies? Because that's what Amy is, she's a direct and obvious metaphor about becoming what you fear.
Speaking of Wildbow and his background shit. This man is worse than fricking Rowling for authorsplaining their setting to people. Like, Black person you write a frickload of story text in very little time, if you want to show these cool details FRICKING WRITE AN INTERLUDE THAT SHOWS IT. My god is that annoying.
Take Kaiser for example. Wildbow has stated that Kaiser doesn't actually believe the shit E88 espouses, he's just in it for the power and his dear old dad left that power structure behind so he took it. You know what would have been cooler than reading that info in a comment? Reading a fricking interlude that showed it.
Interludes are consistantly excellent but they're not always better than non-interlude chapters during peak Worm (Leviathan arc & beginning of S9 arc & Taylor's pre-Alexandria killing).
Yes, and we needed more of them. Especially ones that show Taylor from the outside. My favorite chapter is when Glenn Chambers shows Taylor what a fricking nightmare she looks like on the outside to people. It bothers me greatly that their were so few interludes that showed the average person's interaction with #ALLTHEBUGS. That's also probably why their is such a big disconnect between people's perceptions of Taylor. We never get a concrete chapter of her hypocritical bullshit from the outside, we never really get a chapter that screams 'this girl acts like she's unhinged' even though we the readers know on the inside she's kind of a lonely dork who thinks she's helping.
sounds like you spend too much time online
No you.
7 months ago
Anonymous
We should have more PHO interludes. The concept of an in-universe Ganker commenting on the crazy events happening in the world is fricking cool.
>There was a long period of time, from perhaps around 2004 to 2015ish, where it seemed like Blizzard could make good games, but were simply disinterested in doing so. Like, they had all this talent, but philosophically were only interested in making garbage.
Hey guys did you know about Abbadon!
I liked the cast, but the pacing was horrendous and Wildbow skimmed over some potentially interesting stuff too often, like everyone fricking around in shard space after the dream plague. Instead we got like half a scene with Gallant, Swansong telling her she was actually trying to bodyjack her clone, and Victoria mentioning she'd talked to Manpower and Shielder. The same Manpower and Shielder who we've never seen do anything. Also, Amy never felt like a threat do to how much of a screwup she was. Her revelation at the end was literally she should do nothing ever, because she always just makes things worse. And she's right.
Having read Worm and currently readin the final act of Ward (Ward was a mistake) I don't know that the setting is really unique enough to specifically run a parahumans game (vs a generic supers game)
I mean aside from the designations, the endbringers and the titans, it's just shitty murrca with occasional portals to even more moronic regimes (i.e. Shin)
Yeah. The Mideast and Africa are about the same as normal - an endless orgy of rape and murder with revolving warlords - but with superpowers; China is supposed to be some imperial force but never actually makes a difference in the story...
The potentially most interesting thing is national-socialism making a triumphant return in Europe, but despite the Gessellschaft supposedly controlling a significant portion of the continent we don't see anything major from them: instead they're for some reason happy to supply a single neo-nazi coven with guns and superpowered weirdos. Also apparently they have ways to induce powers and brainwash people but haven't conquered the planet yet.
Again, Wildbow loves miserable settings but his masturbatory adoration of such exceeds his capability to actually write them.
A world where the arrival of superpowers caused nations to abandon international cooperation and all become violently isolationist - because how can anyone engage on the global stage when death and destruction reign within their borders? - would have made far more sense and been more interesting, rather than paying lip service to how awful the world is but providing no explanation as to how ordinary people haven't taken to lynching criminals.
>I don't know that the setting is really unique enough to specifically run a parahumans game (vs a generic supers game)
It basically is a generic supers setting, and that's part of what makes it good as a ttrpg setting imo.
It's a generic supers setting with a unified explanation for the emergence of powers which I find much more compelling for a tabletop campaign than going MCU where one character might have his powers as a result of divine heritage, another from generic superscience, another from magic and another from X men-style mutation; that shit's cheesy. The method by which powers emerge also ensures at least some form of dramatic tension in a character's backstory and motivations. Finally, it provides just enough of an explanation for the common Supers tropes (why is everyone running around in masks and capes, why haven't the superscientists catapulted technology into the future, why is the government letting everyone get away with this, etc) that you can cheerfully stop thinking about them
My group's only played the one Worm campaign so far but it went well
[...] >insufferable pit mommie character that the fandom thought would end up with the main character
Okay, you guys have succeeded in attracting my attention. QRD on Worm and this b***h character in particular as well as her relationship with Taylor?
Is it worth reading Worm if I'm an adult? I see it has over 7000 pages and I usually prefer my capeshit in comic book form but I've given up on modern Big 2 comics because the editorial at Marvel and DC is a complete shitshow.
I enjoyed it. It's not some great work of literature and it's definitely not for everyone but I'd say it's worth reading the first few arcs to see if it's something you might enjoy
OK thanks anon. I will do so
Could you give me a qrd on why people thought Taylor and b***h would end up together
>Could you give me a qrd on why people thought Taylor and b***h would end up together
Honestly, I never got that vibe. Probably just LGBT homosexuals reaching for anything that reflects their own pathology. Both Taylor and b***h have straight relationships over the course of the story.
On the other hand, b***h is desperate for social connection with another person, recognising that she's fricked in the head and missing out on something important as a result, so when Taylor tries to work around b***h's cognitive impairment it does prompt some self-reflection on the part of b***h that could be interpreted to resemble a dude from /LULZ/ trying to navigate a relationship he doesn't want to frick up.
>Both Taylor and b***h have straight relationships over the course of the story.
So do the congressmen who get caught abusing their male staffers and sucking dick in airport bathrooms. I didn't get gay vibes off Taylor and b***h's friendship, but let's not act like straight relationships precludes homosexual activity.
>Trailblazer for the excellent Emma redemption arc. >Lord Doom, because it's fun. >The Cenotaph trilogy. >Wound, because it almost manages to fix Ward (Post-Ward Amy centered fic)
Meta: Very cool concept where Worm (the webnovel) is posted on PHO two months before the start of Worm, having the entire Wormverse react to it chapter after chapter. Unfortunately dead but the concept is brillant.
Intrepid: Emma / Madison / Sophia redemption (Emma and Madison trigger when they realize how fricked up their bullying has been), tons of new powers.
The Great Escape
It follows Eidolon in an AU where there is a breakout from the Birdcage shortly after the big reveal during the Echnida arc. I've reached the point where he's entered the quarantined town of Freedom chasing after Gavel and it's fricking fantastic. Really cool characterisation, interesting powers (and struggle to get the most out of his powers) and nice world-building dealing with characters and places that are pretty much just an aside in the main story.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/27459643/chapters/80030023
actually its the parents fault for passing the buck. troony jannys are mad though so I'll probably be banned for daring to speak up against an awful institution that was partially responsible for most of my woes.
[...]
Minorities usually stick to bullying each other, not the white students, and I never saw them getting away with shit the white students couldn't.
its more likely the teachers doing the cry bullying.
Amy is the actual main character of the Wormverse.
>S-class threat by herself. >Created Khepri. Has her hands directly in Scion defeat. >Became multiversal ambassador pioneer in Shin, launching the first large-scale diplomatic operation between world. >Raped her sister and turned her into a monster, traumas that would later lead Victoria to become the person she is in in Ward and who saved the world. >Also created the giant clones of capes which were also S-class threats in themselves and helped saving the world against the Titans.
Fricking ungrateful setting, give her a fricking medal.
vicky should a squished her with that rock. Amy is such a a fricking blight. Literally female Huey. Everyone gives her rope cause she's pathetic but she's a fricking rat who uses that to her advantage. Any time she's called out she goes "no! its not MY fault! YOURE the monsters!" and the very second we're in her head she's revealed to be full of shit and she knows it
Bonesaw and Panacea are my favorite characters. I just wish we got fanart of that scene where Riley is just really tired and completely forgoes the bonesaw persona to chug down coffee
Worm's been on my list of shit to read but I know jack shit about it outside of it involving superheroes and it dealing with the cruel reality of it all. Does it hold up, is it basic or is it just shlock like most dime a dozen web novels?
It's okay, but later arcs can get absolutely interminable. The fights feel very odd for the genre, they tend to stretch for extremely long periods of time, where most superhero fights tend to be short, brutal and highly kinetic.
Here, you get the feel of an MMO raid where no one is particularly committed.
Honestly my favourite fight was when Coil tried to kill Skitter by shooting her in the chest and dumping her into a burning house, and then shooting at the fricking windows. That whole thing felt pretty intense compared to just about everything else.
it's schlock, maybe you ran into worse but it's just misery porn. I cant even recommend to you a siingle fanfic in it that's good and I've read quite a few. the best one is so I woke up as a dungeon, now what. it has some awful boring chapters too but at least it has some good shit to contrast all the boring edge slop.
So you have read through this enormously long novel, and after that even looked up many fanfics of it, and you hate it all.
Why do you do this to yourself, Anon? Why do you spend all your time on "boring edge slop"?
Go outside, feel the wind, see the clouds, do things you actually like, read things you actually like. Noone is keeping you hostage. You're free.
I've been reading fanfiction since I was 10. Generally speaking anon, I can tell you right now that you are right in general, but I am in my 30s, not my late teens. I work, I take care of my family, and I have little time but to do physical labor to the sound of text to speech in my ear. Reading long fics means I don't have to sit there fricking with my phone. the story just keeps on trucking. I made a thread about this on /fanfic/ but worm is just a source of easily searchable fics. for a while that was enjoyable, but the more focus they put on the nazi shit the less I can tolerate it, and the isekai stories have their own problems.
If you want a long story I consider to be good search "a witch in broad daylight". worm though is just not. it's got good characters I want more of, but I am not going to bother writing in it, and I'm not able to recommend any particular fic. In any case I know which fics I like because I will reread them.
>If you want a long story I consider to be good search "a witch in broad daylight" >A Witch in Broad Daylight is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Adventure/Comedy/Horror Alternate Universe Fic
maybe you just have utterly shit taste, anon
>I judge books by their cover
curious, you want advice from someone who reads stuff and has more information to work with than you, but when you don't get the answer you like this is the result.
It's better than sky by the way.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm certainly going to judge MLP fanfiction as an unacceptable territory.
7 months ago
Anonymous
your loss, reddit
It's really good. Huge universe with a frickton of fascinating characters and creative uses of powers. I'd say it's hard to read any other superhero story when you've read Worm... besides Worm fanfics.
cute joke. There's no point in fascinating characters if there's no payoff,
It's because Ward has all the same writing flaws and foibles that Worm does, but with way less interesting characters, a fricking dogshit setting, actively shits on previous fan favorites, has a protagonist that is everything wrong with regular capeshit stories, and is super meandering.
Ward could easily have been a DC or Marvel product, right down to the pretty, but troubled, blonde woman trying to 'find herself' while learning to be a better person/saving the day. It's fricking wild that their are people who didn't clue into how much Victoria fits in with Nu-Marvel or Nu-DC character writing.
Speaking of characters. Good fricking god, what the frick is Wildbow's problem with fan favorites? Like, you'd think this gay was specifically trawling the internet for everyone's opinion on who was the best character and the most popular fan theories and then specifically going out of his way to shit all over that. The few fan faves that don't get dunked on are forced into the background via irrelevancy despite being objectively far more powerful (and interesting) than the fricking C-list squad lead by a B-list b***h with sister issues.
Oh yeah...sister issues. Wildbow somehow managed to retroactively ruin Vicky and Amy as Worm characters while never resolving their conflict in Ward AND managed to somehow make the whole thing boring and daytime TV levels of drama. FFS, Victoria's whole character in Worm was that she was well meaning, but prone to overdoing it on mooks. Is that explored at all now that we're in her head? No. Amy's whole schtick was that she was a self-fulfilling prophecy between herself and her mother, she wasn't born evil, she was made that way, but the flashbacks in Ward all but cement that she was 'destined' to be a villain. It wasn't REALLY her family that made her snap, no, she was just born a c**t. UGH frick off Wildbow you monstrous homosexual.
Ward is just Nu-Worm. Frick that. He wrote it for the money, nothing more.
this anon goes over it well enough.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>There's no point in fascinating characters if there's no payoff
There's a big fricking payoff battle at the end of the world.
Were you the type of reader who couldn't follow Khepri's decaying narrative?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Anon I'm sorry you are 12 but no, a huge battle with lazer beams is not actually a payoff, otherwise episode 1 of starwars would be regarded as a great film equivalent to the first starwars.
The payoff of an interesting character is in the writing not the special effects, and given worm is only writing it's a poor showing that the characters in question don't develop in any meaningful way over the course of some 7000 pages. This is the problem with serials, they are rarely EVER written well because of this issue.
7 months ago
Anonymous
The character payoff WAS Khepri.
Taylor deciding to mangle herself to take control was her character development. It was completing her slide to total amorality and surrendering to her inability to trust others with anything at all.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Anon thats not character development. in fact it would be safe to say taylor doesn't actually have a character at all because her attitudes and desires and needs are plastic all throughout the story.
To put it in more tangible terms for your low IQ, what exactly does taylor want in this scene? what lie is she overcoming about herself that helps her get what she wants? You can't answer because she's not developing, she doesn't have an emotional need, nor is mangling herself resulting in the destruction of what she wants. If she had ground up the undersidiers and everyone she knew in the fight and the story made that explicit, maybe you'd have a point, but that doesn't happen. Taylor isn't punished or rewarded, she just wins. there's a reason she's referred to as memetic escalation.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>what exactly does taylor want in this scene?
Everyone to work together. >what lie is she overcoming about herself that helps her get what she wants?
Holy shit, there is more to character development than overcoming your own lies. There is more than one story in the world.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Holy shit, there is more to character development than overcoming your own lies. There is more than one story in the world.
Dumber words have not been spoken.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Black person thinks the monomyth is all there is to storytelling. Your brain is rotted. Read a real book sometime. Instead of MLP fanfiction.
7 months ago
Anonymous
What do you mean by "payoff"? There are payoffs everywhere in Worm.
It's in Ward that the story goes literally nowhere, zero resolution for Amy - Vicky conflict, basically every character ends at the same point they started, etc.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I would argue the same for most of worm too. There's really not much of anything satisfying to me. admittedly, I don't like tragedy, but even among tragedy it's pretty sloppy.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Just because things don't get better doesn't mean there's no payoff.
Things can get worse in payoffs.
7 months ago
Anonymous
again, for that to work the character has to be doing the wrong thing, see
No? I'm going to call you out on this one anon. Wildbow wrote a character who *should* have been an unreliable narrator, who *should* have been unjustified in a bunch of her choices narratively....except, her actions literally led to her saving trillions of humans from extinction precisely because she was the person she started the story as, a bullied control freak desperate to have everything work the way she thinks it should.
The issue is, Wildbow throws in that line at the end where she shows all these regrets, but narratively we see she was totally right all the fricking time. Their was no misunderstanding on her part, the world really was as unfair and corrupt as she thought it was.
Her and Cauldron sharing the same duality (especially with her and Alexandria basically being mirrors of each other) was great, and one of the more clever things in the story, but it's ruined because unlike Cauldron, Taylor's brand of nonsense is proven justified. Her regrets might work for her as a character, but they sure don't establish a great moral for the story itself.
The real takeaway moral from Worm is that the ends totally do justify the means if the ends are big enough.
Why do you post such slander? Please tell the class the detail you left out, the circumstances in which Taylor shot Aster and why.
shut up bucket head
7 months ago
Anonymous
You're the bucket headed homosexual here otherwise you would realize you're talking to two different people.
shooting a baby in the head was literally the wrong thing to do. She's wrong all the damn time and makes tons of mistakes and acts like a fricking crazy person. Like yes, she saves the day, but she did it the wrong way. The tagline of the series is literally "Doing the Wrong Thing For the Right Reasons"
>MUH TAGLINE
Okay, and he failed at that lol.
Shooting Aster was "literally the wrong thing to do" and yet the narrative never once punishes her for this. Like, come on Black person, THEO IS RIGHT THERE. He doesn't even call her out for it, he doesn't attack her, he doesn't try and get revenge for his sister during GMorning, thus spoiling her attempts to save the world, etc.
If you think at any point Taylor's bad actions result in her losing anything of narrative significance you weren't paying attention at all.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>zero resolution for Amy - Vicky conflict
There was resolution. Amy accepted she ruins everything she touches and decides to frick off forever for real this time, and Victoria stopped looking for an excuse to commit sororicide.
7 months ago
Anonymous
honestly I really like what Ward has to say about forgiveness. Forgiveness isn't something Victoria could have gotten from Amy. If Amy was dead at the beginning of the story Victoria would have still had to get over it by herself. She learns to accept what happened to her and comes to terms with it.
Amy, on the other hand, doesn't reach that because she refuses to look inward. Amy blames everything on other people and outside factors. That's also why Amy makes such bad choices all the time, because her rationale is "welp, this is out of my hands. I can't be held responsible so the horrors I commit aren't my problem".
7 months ago
Anonymous
(You're talking to at least 2 different anons here. I'm
So you have read through this enormously long novel, and after that even looked up many fanfics of it, and you hate it all.
Why do you do this to yourself, Anon? Why do you spend all your time on "boring edge slop"?
Go outside, feel the wind, see the clouds, do things you actually like, read things you actually like. Noone is keeping you hostage. You're free.
but not the other posts)
It just reminded me of something I often see with video game players, a person puts in perhaps over one thousand hours of playtime into a game, sacrificing all these hours from his life that he'll never get back, and yet he only ever describes his experience in negative terms - he's trapped, he hates it but can't escape!
And the negativity born from this bleeds over into other areas of his life, so he begins down a spiral of vitriol towards any random thing, such as other entertainment media, or even people around him in real life.
Then I'd want to shake him by his shoulders so he'd fall out of this routine and do literally anything else, either try some random other games (ideally finite and short ones) or seek some other thing entirely.
7 months ago
Anonymous
oh dont worry I'm more than capable of dropping stuff. I sunk just as many hours into x4 but now refuse to play the genre.
to me, I am always looking for stories that make me feel good. A witch in broad daylight is easily the gold standard. I've listened to it close to 25 times. It's intensely enjoyable with satisfying simple character arcs. I want more like it but don't know where to look. the latest worm fic I dipped my toes into almost had 80% of its promis but it ruined it about 2 arcs in.
I bought a custom voice called rosie from acapela group's app. It's not perfect but it's much better than the stock israelitegle voices.
>so I woke up as a dungeon, now what
You can't recommend this one? Really? It's barely a Worm fanfic at all and instead a really intricate and elaborate dungeon-core setting of the author's design. Quite frankly the world building is immensely satisfying and if Aku-Dono was smart she would just rewrite the story so Taylor isn't from Worm and is just a generic isekai and go from there, because hot damn, I'd rather have this be an original web serial than Worm itself.
[...]
Burn the coal, pay the toll
[...]
Ugh, the mods on Space Battles are your typical 'This website has a no hugbox rule....except when the ideas hurt our delicate progressive sensibilities in which case frick you'. It's kind of odd to me how disconnected that message is on there. Like, you'll have stories about Taylor just being as fricking gay as possible, lezzing out with anything with breasts, but you'll have other stories where an adult (Yang from RWBY) does a burlesque show (only by mention, it doesn't go into sordid detail) and suddenly the fricking hammer comes down, because 'muh minors' or some shit.
I hate them so much.
[...]
Worm 100% suffers from Naruto syndrome as well. The author creates some really interesting side characters, with deep backstories and motivations, but because Taylor can barely be bothered to give a shit about them we don't see any of it.
It has worms problem of interludes but without characters I give a shit about. the ones with the king are good but most of the interludes are actually really bad or edgy trash. it makes for hard listening. I'd prefer characters find out these things first hand. the chapters that focus on the town and taylor are all 9/10 but the interludes generally are hit and miss.
>so I woke up as a dungeon, now what
You can't recommend this one? Really? It's barely a Worm fanfic at all and instead a really intricate and elaborate dungeon-core setting of the author's design. Quite frankly the world building is immensely satisfying and if Aku-Dono was smart she would just rewrite the story so Taylor isn't from Worm and is just a generic isekai and go from there, because hot damn, I'd rather have this be an original web serial than Worm itself.
when I found out taylor fricks Brian i dropped wilbrows worm hard. I just read isekai worm fics now.
Burn the coal, pay the toll
In brief, the story is about a boy called David who triggers and butchers his entire class with shadow-beast powers. One of his bullies, Ryan, also triggers with the power to shoot shame-inducing needles, and fights him off. Ryan becomes a hero called 'Pax', and resolves to hunt down David (now known as 'Nightfall') and murder him.
According to the author, Pax would later team up with a Fallen warlord to hunt down David. Said Fallen warlord is openly racist, is depicted as the biggest Chad ever, and the hottest girl in the city as well as the sister of one of Pax's teammates are clandestinely fricking him.
Apparently, a Fallen neo-nazi hunting down a boy named 'David' while fricking his groupies was a violation of the content standards on SB.
Ugh, the mods on Space Battles are your typical 'This website has a no hugbox rule....except when the ideas hurt our delicate progressive sensibilities in which case frick you'. It's kind of odd to me how disconnected that message is on there. Like, you'll have stories about Taylor just being as fricking gay as possible, lezzing out with anything with breasts, but you'll have other stories where an adult (Yang from RWBY) does a burlesque show (only by mention, it doesn't go into sordid detail) and suddenly the fricking hammer comes down, because 'muh minors' or some shit.
I hate them so much.
It's really weird that Golem sort of goes "Yeah, you did what you had to do" and never mentions it again. Did he even ever find out that Taylor shot his baby sister? I don't think she ever told him.
Worm 100% suffers from Naruto syndrome as well. The author creates some really interesting side characters, with deep backstories and motivations, but because Taylor can barely be bothered to give a shit about them we don't see any of it.
unfortunately with /fanfic/ shadowbanned the state of discussion of fan writings will never get better. its always going to be in pozzed forums like SB and SV. Ganker regularly shoas threads about fanfics as well.
It's really good. Huge universe with a frickton of fascinating characters and creative uses of powers. I'd say it's hard to read any other superhero story when you've read Worm... besides Worm fanfics.
In what sense? If we're talking "Which party is closest to being played by real players?" The answer is the Undersiders. Selfish dickheads that occasionally do good is peak player character.
If the question is "Which of these groups would make for a better cast of characters to play in a TTRPG?" I would probably say Breakthrough. The Undersiders are kind of good at one thing, whereas Breakthrough is a lot more like a traditional party with all the bases covered.
the moral of worm is that taylor's means weren't justified by the end and she became what she hated. She even says if she could do it different she would
that's not enough. there needs to have been a course of action taylor could have taken to get what she wants, even if the course of action is a mental one. and if she doesn't follow that logic, she can't get what she wants.
Black person thinks the monomyth is all there is to storytelling. Your brain is rotted. Read a real book sometime. Instead of MLP fanfiction.
monowhat now? its hardly the only way to write a story, but you are talking specifically about writing iinteresting characters with payoff, when you are admitting objectively that there's no payoff, and others already outlined exactly how that happened. Taylor may be the most likable of the characters but her needs are hardly consistent through out any of the story.
>does he really need to post it?
I mean I've fallen quiet behind on the anime, but I'm pretty sure it keeps it's Optimistic tone.
Anon the problem is keeping that tone in the face of so much death and destruction by the enemies makes it obvious the protagonists are immoral and shifts the genre from noble bright to grim bright.
>Anon the problem is keeping that tone in the face of so much death and destruction by the enemies ... and shifts the genre from noble bright to grim bright.
Maybe, but the entire point is they have to keep working towards that brighter future regardless.
Otherwise, that Death and Destruction is just going to overwhelm and subsume them.
Hell, the entire conflict between One-for-All and All-for-One is whether it is better to suffer as the noble Hero for the sake of others, or become the Demon King just for one's self.
>Maybe, but the entire point is they have to keep working towards that brighter future regardless. >Otherwise, that Death and Destruction is just going to overwhelm and subsume them.
they are taking actions that explicitly proliferate death and destruction and wrapping it in a pretty "we saved him bros, we did it" bow. it would be one thing if this was in a characters past or something and we see the character slowly work hard to make up for their mistakes, but that doesn't happen, instead because of the nature of these fights being a climax the protagonist is talking them down in the middle of them murdering people, placing the safety of the villain above that of infants. If your daughter was killed because of this would you really say the shit coming out of your mouth right now? There's a reason 3dpd lap up this trash anon.
>but you are talking specifically about writing iinteresting characters with payoff, when you are admitting objectively that there's no payoff
Holy shit Black person you are talking to yourself and not addressing a single point of mine at all.
I'm not the one who posted the claim that worm does have payoff and if you are not the one who admitted it doesn't It's not my problem if you jumped in to defend the point anyway.
No? I'm going to call you out on this one anon. Wildbow wrote a character who *should* have been an unreliable narrator, who *should* have been unjustified in a bunch of her choices narratively....except, her actions literally led to her saving trillions of humans from extinction precisely because she was the person she started the story as, a bullied control freak desperate to have everything work the way she thinks it should.
The issue is, Wildbow throws in that line at the end where she shows all these regrets, but narratively we see she was totally right all the fricking time. Their was no misunderstanding on her part, the world really was as unfair and corrupt as she thought it was.
Her and Cauldron sharing the same duality (especially with her and Alexandria basically being mirrors of each other) was great, and one of the more clever things in the story, but it's ruined because unlike Cauldron, Taylor's brand of nonsense is proven justified. Her regrets might work for her as a character, but they sure don't establish a great moral for the story itself.
The real takeaway moral from Worm is that the ends totally do justify the means if the ends are big enough.
I wouldnt say its particularly clever at all imho. while it is the scaffolding for a good narrative, the idea of making a character be a foil but use the same powerset is tride and true. Particularly if that source of power is yucky, like mind control or reality warping.
shooting a baby in the head was literally the wrong thing to do. She's wrong all the damn time and makes tons of mistakes and acts like a fricking crazy person. Like yes, she saves the day, but she did it the wrong way. The tagline of the series is literally "Doing the Wrong Thing For the Right Reasons"
again, for that to work the character has to be doing the wrong thing, see [...]
[...]
shut up bucket head
doing the wrong thing and having it work is bad writing from a character payoff perspective. going against the need of a character is supposed to result in a backstep for what the character wants.
welp, I'm off to work and this thread is almost at 300 anyway.
reminder to all of you morons to post on /fanfic/ and stop ignoring the smug e-girl., I am tired of having to use space shitters to read fic discussion and while we squabble I would take this 1000 days over even one more day reading some subhuman's opinion on why hazel potter is a girlboss for sticking it to those biggots.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Can we all agree that alt-power fics are trash? Because they are. It doesn't help that like 90% of fics advertised as crossovers are an OC in a Taylor suit with a power from another series.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Yes, most of the homosexual writers on Space Battles or SV just write TINO alt power garbage, with lesbian shipping, because they're bottom of the barrel gays fishing for easy wins.
Hilariously, the few people who are good at writing a proper Taylor and co. are also MASSIVE power hungry shitters (looks at that homosexual Ridtom). The only reason I stick around is for the odd gem in the rough.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Ridtom
What did he do?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Ridtom, and a bunch of other prolific Worm/Ward authors, are all part of the Gaylor Discord, which is a Discord that revels in writing about, justifying, or otherwise pushing online the idea that Taylor is gay. The premise of this Discord is already kind wtf, but it's the internal, under the hood shit that it does that's the real problem. You see, just like all other Lefty Discords its real use is to push prominent members into positions of power (petty as it is) and to abuse it for all it is worth.
Now, Ridtom isn't necessarily the biggest Gaylor poster (Ridtom is a Vicky stan), but it's his connection to this Discord, and now Space Battles moderators (He's Amicus) that is where issues are starting to show up. Space Battles used to have a fairly broad range of moderator types, being a Vs./Debate board, but over time the moderators have become increasingly Reddit tier, and people like Ridtom are the next generation of the take over.
Here's an example. It used to be on Space Battles that words like moronic or reeeeeee, or other typical internet lingo were mildly accepted (you couldn't use it to attack others, but it was okay to use it in the abstract) and there were moderators that defended it. Now though, with the newer crop of moderators, many of whom are part of the Gaylor, or other groups pushing Lefty topics, a board that was mostly hands off has become increasingly homosexual, of which Ridtom is a symptom of.
If you're a popular Lefty author you can get away with a lot more shit than someone who doesn't tow the party line. Ridtom isn't the only one of course, their are many more.
Basically I'm b***hing about watching Space Battles turn into yet another cesspit of a forum, and b***hing at the obvious bad actors taking part in it.
>the bully bullshit just annoys the me because I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff. I want to scream at the screen and tell Taylor and Izuku to do something.
Well MHA at least has the excuse that Japanese Culture is notoriously toxic when it comes to addressing social issues, especially when it comes to the suffering of an individual.
>In MHA this feels worse because UA is supposed to be decent but nothing gets done so the rest of the cast needs to act out of character when character A or B enters the scene.
Well what is suppose to be Bakugo's Character Development was that, while his stellar potential eclipsed his shitty personality in the tiny backwater district Midoriya and he grew up in, at the premiere level of UA EVERYONE is suppose to have that same kind of potential, thus highlighting that he is a rather shitty person.
To be fair, wanting to be a Hero for the sake of doing good for goodness sake is something that is just NOW sinking in for him if what I've heard is current.
[...] >I am tired of having to use space shitters to read fic discussion
[...] >Yes, most of the homosexual writers on Space Battles
Oi, you don't get to complain until people start explicitly writing insults about you into said fics!
Ooof, I knew a few posters who were disliked by 'The Community' who had that treatment. I assume just like them no moderator ever called the other party out on their bullshit?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Ooof, I knew a few posters who were disliked by 'The Community' who had that treatment.
It wasn't even "The Community," just the one Eldritch British butthole.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Ridtom doesn't seem to be in Gaylor, though. At least, Discord doesn't show him being in there. If anything, from what I heard the vague author group Ridtom is part of has this vague distate for Gaylor, mostly because of how much Gaylor likes their Amy/Victoria shit, down to actual consistent argumentation in favor of incest.
He and the group certainly are very lefty though.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I prefer dykeshit but in Taylor's case it's a consistant red flag that the writing is about to nose dive even if that's unusual compared to normal isekai. Most likely it being linked to some shitcord cabal is a valid reason.
Intrepid and Trailblazer are good.
While I liked the writing in these and how it used the characters neither could escape the fact that it was still brockton bay and i still didnt care what happens to it because its 100% some demented characture of an author unintentionally creating a glowop.
Wait a second, there are people who think that killing Aster was a bad choice?
Shit UP buckethead
7 months ago
Anonymous
Hey anon, maybe you're right, I only really got the vague impression he was part of Gaylor from in-thread discussions, so fair enough if he isn't part of Gaylor. Maybe I was getting the other group and Gaylor mixed up? The rest of my post though, and the gist behind it, I stand by though. Ridtom and other Lefty types are shitting another site up, as they do, and it's bothersome to say the least.
Also, fricking kek at Gaylor having their own boiler plate argument for Amy/Victoria. At that point just fricking admit you're in it for the porn and not the romance.
I prefer dykeshit but in Taylor's case it's a consistant red flag that the writing is about to nose dive even if that's unusual compared to normal isekai. Most likely it being linked to some shitcord cabal is a valid reason.
[...]
While I liked the writing in these and how it used the characters neither could escape the fact that it was still brockton bay and i still didnt care what happens to it because its 100% some demented characture of an author unintentionally creating a glowop.
[...]
Shit UP buckethead
Dykeshit is a tried and true part of fanfiction, but yes, Taylor dykeshit is pervasive and almost always a sign that the author is part of a little fetish club or is trying to get more readership via scissor shipping.
I think making Taylor gay specifically makes me mad because she literally has one romantic/sexual interaction in the whole fricking series, and it's an extremely masculine man, and yet, the gays will write whole fricking essays (or that one guy who wrote a fricking series of them) trying to justify how she's TOTALLY a closet lesbian you guys. Don't you know, she once described Laserdream and Lady Photon as having heart shaped faces, she must be a dyke ya'll.
Intrepid and Trailblazer are good.
Both of these are good, but every time I see Trailblazer I'm just reminded of how we could have had A Cloudy Path finish by now if it wasn't for homosexual 'reviewers'.
Anon this stupid shitserial insults both weebs and chuds.
[...]
If you dont like it be part of the fricking solution. Shill /fanfic/. The board is dead so they cant complain if new posters arrive and anyone who doesnt belong will be driven out by the +Black folk loicsance
I'm sorry anon, I literally don't know what /fanfic/ is.
7 months ago
Anonymous
From what I heard Ridtom's specific group suffers from (honestly rightful) elitism regarding Spacebattles, but with political reasons being just a part, and with the major reason being Spacebattles being fricking moronic, as shown with the The Underside of Gotham committee comment incident.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>The Underside of Gotham committee comment incident.
the what
7 months ago
Anonymous
a bunch of morons were upset with the way a Worm/DC crossover fic had a fight go down, and a guy from that thread assembled the thread's criticism (which was moronic) and brought it to the Ao3 comments. It was 'waa the Undersiders should've won harder', but with undertones of extreme moronation and unsubtle demands to rewrite a prewritten story as to make the committee's suggestions work.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Anon that shit is hilariously one of the main reasons I hate sb. It's not enough to drop something they demand it be remade to fit their tastes.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>almost always a sign that the author is part of a little fetish club or is trying to get more readership via scissor shipping.
Reminds me of the Avatar Taylor quest on Spacebattles. At least for me, the lesbian stuff felt fetishistic.
7 months ago
Anonymous
You are not wrong but I still enjoy them for some reason.
7 months ago
Anonymous
How many of those fics claim that magic has been a thing in Worm from the very first cycle, but the entities were too stupid to realize that their powers worked by magic?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Intrepid and Trailblazer are good.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Alt power is trash primarily because you are stuck in brockton bay with it's awful forced power struggle between ~~*Kaiser permanente*~~ and honorary aryan booty blasters. The turf war between the two that dominates the beginning arc of every alt power fic destroys my interest in reading it.
>doing the wrong thing and having it work is bad writing from a character payoff perspective
Not if you're trying to make your character become a worse person.
Taylor had to completely shed her morality to win. She won, and the cost was her sanity and every other goal she ever set for herself being permanently revoked. By all rights she would have paid for it all with her death, but instead she just gets to be a friendless pariah of another world and try to figure stuff out without any reward beyond permitted life.
>doing the wrong thing and having it work is bad writing from a character payoff perspective.
Nonsense >going against the need of a character is supposed to result in a backstep for what the character wants.
This Black person acting like there is only one way to write a story. Nah bro.
As a different anon let me break down a clear thematic narrative arc. Taylor and The Queen Administrator.
At the beginning of the story Taylor is a girl who has suffered from trauma in her life this trauma causes her to seek control and thematically manifests as QA.
Despite this Taylor wants to be a good person, she wants to be a hero and do good for those around her, yet at every step in the story she makes choices that while materially successful compromise that ideal of who she wanted to be and help her develop her powers.
Khepri is the final stage of this chain of moral compromise, a final break with morality and the dominance of the QA over Taylor.
Which after the day is saved can only end with her getting a bullet in the head as the ultimate consequence, but she did in fact save the world so instead of oblivion her cost is lifelong penance via being forced to basically start her life over with a lack of control, the trauma is still there but the power is gone and she is going to have to live with it.
Anon you have yet to establish any sort of emotional need tailor left unfulfilled that could have gotten her what she wanted. Without it it's just suffering porn, which is exactly how everyone described worm in this thread.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Basically any point where she could of gone to the Protectorate of her own volition and let someone else handle the situation instead of compromising her morals, yeah things are materially better off with her acting how she did and are better for her person but were all morally corrosive.
However I fully admit my own moral biases here as a consider morality at risk of oblivion as inherently more just than concessions for survival. Better to be a Martyr than a Monster and all that.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Anon that is not a need. A need is internal not external. It's something the hero needs to figure out about herself if shes going to get what she wants. >go to the protectorate
FfA hahahahah for fricks sake anon you dont get it at all.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Ignoring morality and Taylor for a moment, I'm not really sure why villains outnumber heroes so much. I've never seen any evidence that the Protectorate doesn't pay well or have good benefits, and as shown with Assault, even notorious criminals can get work. Becoming a parahuman is awful, but it can also be an automatic out of poverty in exchange for basically becoming a celebrity-cop.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Intrinsically it would be because the protectorate are actually the bad guys. Rogues and the occasional villain team are the only real choice.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Why do violent psychopaths tend to become criminals instead of signing up for Blackwater or whatever to shoot brown people for better pay and somewhat higher risk?
Questionable decisionmaking, that's why.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>I'm not really sure why villains outnumber heroes so much.
setting aside the space whale frickery, their villains have a better hold over parahuman society so they have a better chance of recruiting people. even if their influence is growing weaker it still there.
>Save Aster
How? Give me the sequence of action Taylor should have done at this point. Reminder that she had one second to make a snap decision with the S9 about to jump in a portal and disappear with Aster to do nightmarish things to her.
Couldnt give you any exact sequence of events because at that point things are so fricked in terms of how taylor operates and how the rest of the bay reacted to all this in the first place. Wilbrow cancer and misery porn at its finest. But a morally good taylor would have made the friends needed to make it work. That's how writing is supposed to work in the first place.
If you are instead making an arguement on philosophical grounds though, I would be forced to tell you to shut up bucket head.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I don't give a shit what decisions led to that exact situation.
Taylor has 1 second to do a snap decision with the S9 ready to leave the place with Aster, and all she has is a gun.
One option is to kill Aster. Another option is to let the S9 put Aster into eternal torture.
What is your third option?
7 months ago
Anonymous
Already told you.
7 months ago
Anonymous
You're moronic. Ever took an IQ test? You should, you might get some record for hitting a new, never-seen before low.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah I got 120 or thereabouts. Real in person test.
As far as I can tell, yes. Attempting to save someone and condemning them to hell in the process of failing is morally superior to a mercy kill for a lot of people.
Thanks for Worm thread. Worm makes me happy. Remember when running Worm RPGs it's always more fun to go trigger event first, rather than going power first and working backwards from that.
People who said that wildbow retconn’d Amy to be worse have never met a toxic lesbian who wants to frick because sure she’ll be nice before there literal on the pahebrape
take that you WORM
Classes:
>boymoder
>hon
>chaser
>twinkhon
>gigapassoid
Taylor’s definitely a twinkhon
Nobody said anything about pancakes
Pancakes? What's wrong with pancakes?
go back to tttt please I hate reading these moronic gibberish words because baby trannies think they're funny
Why the frick are trannies going on about worm suddenly? I enjoyed it and Pact back in the day, sure wildbow is a cuckolded moron, but it wasn't a troony WN and it's far too much reading for those adhd porn addicts to digest anyway. There must be some israelite discord bullshit afoot. One of those deranged "antifa" chomos is grooming homosexual zoomers in worm now, what the frick, you subhumans are not long for this world.
SpaceBattles
Isn't that the forum where obese autistics would talk about "halo vs star trek" fanfiction? I would not be surprised if it's troon city there, now. So then, what, some bald child molesting israelite posted a thread there talking about worms power level and the little troony wiki/tvtropes brigade ate it all up (without actually reading anything, naturally)?
take your meds
It's most of their fan fiction section.
Pretty much. Trump broke SB. It used to be just another nerd site with a pretty active user-fiction section, but ORANGE MAN BAD caused people to go berserk. Now a vast plurality are some form of troony or other freak and most seem to believe that the world is somehow more right-wing now than it was in the 50s.
They love to take things where she was TEMPTED to do something bad and extrapolate that to her being evil all the time. I don't know why.
Wildblow is clearly a yurigay and he writes like a yurigay (I don't mean to say that as an insult, just a statement of fact).
We also know that battle boarders and "Rationalists" are a big part of the currently active and "evangelistic" (for lack of a better term) Worm fandom and how those demos are disproportionately autistic.
Combine the previous two items with the self-evident link between the autistic-yurigay complex and AGP-induced trooning, especially in communities where such identities can result in an increase of social cachet, and you get a pretty straightforward explanation for why trannies all abuzz over Worm and its sequels.
Rationalists? You mean, liberal skeptic New Atheism types? Bit of a dead demographic.
No, Rationalists would be closer to stuff like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationalist Wiki/LessWrong types of internet autists. Effective Altruism is probably one of the bigger Rationalist things that have gotten a lot of press.
Imagine the kind of people who enjoyed the entirety of Harry and the Methods of Rationality Fanfic
It's not dead, it's popular among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and software developers, who are disproportionally influential these days. It had its origins in the online atheism of 2000s, but it's moved away from that.
Westrons (including men and ogres) are chiefly characterised by their hatred of magic, all of which they associate with fell deeds.
Oops wrong thread
>worm rpg
Frick off and finish making season 2 of smiling friends, Zach
Anyone got that article about the medieval conspiracy theory that knights were just worms in armor?
Some things never change.
The worms were always here.
I thought "a terrible worm in an iron cocoon" was a metaphor, not a literal accusation
>tfw you will never wrestle a Hunter into the mud at Agincourt and executing it with a magnum shot to the back
Holy shit this homosexual is actually spamming this gay shit.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/90524398/#90524398
We used to have 200+ post threads on worm so chill a little
>/tg/ won't shut the frick up about something called worm
>kinda tired of it
>sounds kinda edgy too
>get a night shift job and need something to read
>frick it i'll give it a try
>plow through it really quickly without ever really noticing that it's supposed to be considered long
>see someone post about worm on /tg/
>enter thread
>it's relentlessly shitposted to death and everyone hates it
Funny how that works.
Thoughts on
?
Based entirely on what I know from cultural osmosis and having never gotten into any magical girl stuff, it seems like it.
I kinda just dropped the story around the Slaughterhouse 9 arc, I just couldn't be assed for yet another "and the rock keeps rolling downhill" arc.
Worm is one of those stories that has no payoff. yes the set up is all cool but you never get anything for your trouble. things just keep getting worse.
Madoka was good because it has a lazer focus on character development and character arcs that doesn't overstay it's welcome
Worm is a web serial with all of the negative writing connotations those words entail. an overly drawn out, bloated mess. If worm where structured like madoka magica, the end bringer fights would have happened on episode 4, 7 and then 11 would begin with ~~*zion*~~ going nuts.
I love long fics, but the reason they work is because often they simply flesh out details and give you down time. Worm doesn't have down time, it's just one trainwreck after another.
Is weaver dice any good or should I learn another system like M&M?
It's terrible. It's practically unplayable; the work of an amateur that barely could be called a designer attempting to make a system around an inconsistent and poorly though-out web novel. The only way it even works is that you really can make any RPG system work if you ignore its mechanics as much as possible and you put a ton of effort into it, but there's really nothing in the game that would make that effort worthwhile.
Thanks for the warning.
this was my attitude towards magical burst as well but I just got laughed at for making home brew changes by all the casual Ganker gays who didn't see any of the problems. my fixes weren't perfect but they where hardly to the systems detriment, the damn game is just as playable as weaver dice.
Wild Talents is more lethal.
I’d suggest blades in the dark for the
Madcap heistery. I like the narrative power generation method (you generate the trauma, everyone else generates the power from it, but it’s otherwise not worth playing
No. I liked elements of the character creation but the system is held together by duct tape and Jack Slash simps.
This tbh ka. The weaverdice system is really fun for making character concepts and powers but run the game in literally anything else
the problem is the RPG is dogshit and the gangs glow with a realism practically unheard of. israelites creating a gang of totally legit nazi thugs that somehow own the ~~*medical industry*~~ to make sure the goyim never forget the holomeme even as the world literally crumbles to dust from endbringer attacks and murderhobos is exactly the play they would make.
When I want to play bug depression girl I just bring her to settings that aren't shit isekai style.
I wouldn't know I just make everything in pathfinder 1.0
why did they make it so op? it's basically the best class under every aspect
Rate my Tapeworm Sorcerer.
>Social outcast becomes psychotic bug controller.
>worlds greatest healer loses her shit and rapes her sister
woman with the literal I win button asks all the wrong questions.
Author of semi popular super hero setting hates fans for not reading his supernatural horror stories instead so phones in a sequel for express purpose of shooting down every fan theory he can.
>Author of semi popular super hero setting hates fans for not reading his supernatural horror stories instead so phones in a sequel for express purpose of shooting down every fan theory he can.
It's a shame too, because Victoria was a better protagonist than Taylor. Ward's pacing was so fricked though. It somehow felt like it took forever to get anywhere yet was also moving too fast. He also skipped over everyone in shard space despite seeing character frick up past events and getting to have Manpower and Shielder fleshed out as characters a bit would have been cool to see.
>Victoria was a better protagonist than Taylor
God, no she wasn't. Pretentious high strung c**t who was so painfully by the book that she became boring to read. Taylor had the benefit of being unreliable and slightly insane due to her power affecting her cognition. Also Victoria is never wrong (if she thinks someone is evil then by god they're going to be evil) and Ward suffers for it.
I thought Pact was better than his cape cuckery but I actually enjoy misery porn.
It's wild to me that anyone was excited for a sequel to anything by wildbow. The man started fumbling the ball around the halfway point in both Worm and Pact and things kept going downhill from there. I still finished them, but years later once the sequels were announced and released? Zero desire to pick that back up from where I left it. Never read Twig, but that's more about me not being a huge fan of biopunk.
when I found out taylor fricks Brian i dropped wilbrows worm hard. I just read isekai worm fics now.
Is Worm to the superhero genre what Madoka was to the Magical Girl genre?
Sort of, but really it was during a time when everything went "and then lovercraftian horrors" as a plot twist
Aliens or just ancient horrors that evolved on Earth and then went to sleep for a long time?
Scion being evil was the most obvious twist in the world. My friend actually thought he would turn out to not be evil since it was such a cliche, even by that point.
No, not at all. Madoka more or less recontextualized the magical girl genre into "Magical Girls but Edgy" for years upon years on end. Worm has had basically no impact on the Superhero genre, primarily because it does nothing that nobody else wasn't already doing or hadn't already done.
>because it does nothing that nobody else wasn't already doing or hadn't already done.
I don't know any other superhero story with "powers are indifferent living beings with their own amoral agenda".
The Boys
Shouldnt it be judged more in the online media space?
>avengers fully ripping the gold morning ending without the impact of building up the cast of characters
what wormer should I draw
I think a flat headed wormer would be cool, could you draw one of these?
I think so. I always got strong parallels between him and Danny.
Half the time Taylor was more like a camera than a character. And Ward had much bigger problems then Victoria's moralizing.
>Half the time Taylor was more like a camera than a character
This is one of the better parts of Work, Taylor especially at the start isn't a Mary Sue whom the entire world revolves around, and while her shard is fricking busted overpowered it only really gets to be used to its full potential in the very endgame, and even then it's a very natural progression and feels earned, and isn't some bullshit ULTRA INSTINCT ass pull, and requires the aid of other specialized characters like Panacea to specifically alter her brain and shard to do so. "I have the power to control bugs" was always known to be not technically true, since she was controlling spiders from day 1, and it was clear her inability to control more complex organisms was a lack of quantitative power, not qualitative. Since beings with shards are the most powerful existences in the setting, someone going from "I can control bugs and spiders" to "I can control people, including those with shards" was a fun way to have gross bug girl with seemingly weak powers become the most powerful superhero alive and save the day.
Taylor's power set also allows her to deliver exposition and spy on/hear about stuff diegetically without it coming across as cheap or obvious author fiat plot dumping which helps make the worldbuilding segments feel less forced
>at the start isn't a Mary Sue whom the entire world revolves around
Yeah, at the start. But then you get shit like the Manikin fight where bugs are doing shit waaay beyond what they're actually capable of. The Alexandria fight is the worst of it though. It was clearly a scene Wildbow thought of early on and thought was cool, but wasn't willing to accept it just didn't work, at least in the way he handled it. For someone who can think dozens of times faster than a normal person, she sure did die stupid.
I remember the Alexandria fight and the first Lung fight as being pretty silly and even at the time I first read it I thought it was poorly done and the exact opposite of how you should write somebody with Taylor's powers fighting. "MUH BROWN SPIDER VENOM" handwaving doesn't change the fact Lung should simply never have been disabled by mundane animal toxins, nevermind it's highly questionable they'd ever be capable of penetrating his skin and entering his bloodstream to begin with. This became retroactively EVEN MORE moronic when Lung was retconned into "UMM ACTUALLY" being an Endbringer-tier superpower capable of turning into fricking Godzilla and 1v1ing the most powerful beings in the setting. A fricking tarantula is not going to work on him, I'm sorry that's stupid. I get that wildbow meant it as a "OH SHE MIGHT BE THE CREEPY BUG GIRL BUT DON'T YOU DARE UNDERESTIMATE HER!" moment but it was fricking stupid, she lives in an inhabited urban area not the Amazon rainforest and most opponents are some variant of capeshit brick with enhanced speed and durability, a spider cannot physically keep up with their movement let alone pierce sword-proof skin.
Also Alexandria just shouldn't be capable of suffocation as-written, her stasis powers let her survive being inside raging flames and the fricking equivalent to the sun, a bug crawling into your lungs is not more traumatic than 100000 degrees of heat or vacuum pressure
>Also Alexandria just shouldn't be capable of suffocation as-written, her stasis powers let her survive being inside raging flames and the fricking equivalent to the sun, a bug crawling into your lungs is not more traumatic than 100000 degrees of heat or vacuum pressure
Apparently, her timelocked brain cells still need oxygen.
>Apparently, her timelocked brain cells still need oxygen.
Right but even if you accept that (frankly moronic) premise, there's a million other things that she's encountered that should have killed her before Taylor's dumb fricking mouthful of bugs. If she still needs oxygen she can't survive explosive decompression or the vacuum of space or even be in a fricking fire too long, SMOKE INHALATION would be 10x as dangerous as somehow a bunch of fruit flies physically flying into her lungs and she encountered many world ending threats who would have essentially had so much heat/flames/pressure/debris around them at all times that a low-tier b***h who STILL NEEDS TO FRICKING BREATHE would have been instantly smoked. If her invincible body and time locked cells are able to survive all those, then the mere physical presence of biological matter in her lungs wouldn't pose any issue. It's like saying Pneumonia is worse than BEING INSIDE THE FRICKING SUN. Now I know wildbow has absolutely no math or science background and it's a capeshit setting but this is one of those things that was simply too fricking dumb it kills suspension of disbelief even accepting it's a comic book story. He should AT LEAST have made Taylor prepare some Kryptonite magic spiders for the boss fight with anti-alexandrian superpowers or something, instead of literal mundane insects somehow scooped up from the streets of totally -not-vancouver
In fairness, spiders crawling into your lungs is way, way more fricking horrifying than something like smoke inhalation. I imagine Alexandria could have held her breath or some shit in other circumstances, but lungs full of crawling bugs? There's no way you're keeping those out once you start gagging at them.
Alexandria is so strong, her coughs and lung spasms should have gone off like a bazooka. Strong enough that it would literally kill bugs and deafen anyone too close to her. Just fly away for like a minute to hack them up and get something to protect your face better.
true.
Stop typing like a tumblrina you fricking gay c**t
You talking to Manic, he's physically incapable of not being a massive homosexual.
You mean from the BattleTech threads, because that's not me...
>Panacea
>specialized
She's a god that can do anything she wants.
How do you guys come up with appropriately shard-y powers? Like, is just some basic irony (girl locked with bugs and rot gets bug power, girl lacking info gets a power that will give her all the info she needs and would have been perfect to save the one person she couldn't save) or is there anything more you do?
I just shamelessly copy other people's concepts.
>his power solved his inability to defend his valuable work by sharply curtailing how much work he can do that is valuable enough to need defending
Jesus christ that's gotta frick someone up. Does the guy like stop to consider "hey I haven't really done all that many new projects in some time" and wonder what's up with that.
Yea, but Taylor’s irony shard was that she didn’t have enough information because she overlooked people as being”below” her. “I’ll just ignore their petty games.” Now she can’t ignore the petty small things.
I don't really know how to give interesting powers out of a Monkey's Paw wish, especially when you also have to make sense of the Shard's function and all that jazz.
If you're starting out just focus on the iront, shard functions matter little beyond making sure the power also functions in a way to encourage the person's worst personal tendencies and offers a very imperfect solutions.
Basically you just need to become a good writer. Figure out fun trigger events and work power concepts from them. Understand the character, their hang ups, how this specific trigger event brings them to their lowest, and then figure out a power that would keep them there. The power gen docs can be helpful for this or completely awful, ngl.
Usually for me I just find something to dig into. A guy triggers from constantly failing after succeeding once, he gets a power that disincentivizes him from repeating the same actions. If you want flavor, use emotional state to help add an elemental aspect to it.
>Worm thread on /tg/
Nice. I read it for the first time a few months ago, really enjoyed it. Ward's boring as frick though I got to the end of Arc 14 and haven't gone back to finish it.
Her unlocking the limiters on her powers at the end is mega kino
For me, it's Pale
I'm still getting through that one. Pact was great though.
Pact was decent up until the absolute dogshit fricking ending and the fact literally none of the magic worldbuilding ever mattered or came into effect, and the family's secret demonology powers never actually did anything except be a massive pain in the ass. Also blackguards are stupidly overpowered and came across as Mary Sue donut steels with all the power and none of the moronic liabilities and drawbacks that the people who did the full seal of solomon did. But Christ that ending was terrible.
Twig was alright and I read it before trannies had to infest literally every single piece of media so I didn't even mind the Jamie shit too much but I still think Sy is a colossal cuck for NO WAY gay'ing Mary for literally no reason whatsoever especially since the guy he shoves her towards did absolutely nothing to recruit her or care about her and immediately dropped dead. But whatever I'm used to wildbow writing cuck characters, it's the curse of him being a fricking leaf
>never read any Worm
>don't even know if it is a series of novels, an online fanfiction, a collaborative universe, I just don't know, never bothered to research
>only know worm through the popular cyoa floating around
>have used that cyoa as a basis for a campaign once
>ended up together with a girl playing with us, newcomer to the group
>we're moving in together next September
Thanks Worm.
The real, healthiest approach to Worm.
I don't understand. Do you mean a TTRPG where everybody plays as worms?
>I want to eat the fallen leaf
>Okay, give me a decomposition roll
It's weird how Taylor is actually really boring as a protagonist. The side-characters are all universally more interesting than she is, and I was completely lost at all the cosmic stuff.
Wildbow's Lausanne games were highly lethal and pretty cool, though.
I feel that the story never really embraces the concept, though. There's one fic about a school shooter being hunted down by one his bullies, and it's told from the latter's perspective.
Possibly the single most spiteful story I've ever read.
Taylor bothers me with her inaction at the start. her personality is ass but I like her as Skitter, playing the game and problem solving.
It's part of the charm imo.
It's a reasonable person's (at least, reasonable teenager's) descent into villainy, without any massive contrivances, due to unreasonable circumstances.
>There's one fic about a school shooter being hunted down by one his bullies, and it's told from the latter's perspective.
'A Separate War', right? That one was really good.
Sadly dead. Even by Worm standards, Pax is a huge piece of shit, which makes him really entertaining. Apparently it was cut because of the neo-Nazi part
>neo-Nazi part
What
In brief, the story is about a boy called David who triggers and butchers his entire class with shadow-beast powers. One of his bullies, Ryan, also triggers with the power to shoot shame-inducing needles, and fights him off. Ryan becomes a hero called 'Pax', and resolves to hunt down David (now known as 'Nightfall') and murder him.
According to the author, Pax would later team up with a Fallen warlord to hunt down David. Said Fallen warlord is openly racist, is depicted as the biggest Chad ever, and the hottest girl in the city as well as the sister of one of Pax's teammates are clandestinely fricking him.
Apparently, a Fallen neo-nazi hunting down a boy named 'David' while fricking his groupies was a violation of the content standards on SB.
fans:
>omg realistic take at cape setting!!
reality:
>most capes should be easily killed by any random hobo who can shoot straight with a handgun
>but this doesn't happen, just because the author has decided that capes should be confronted by other capes in coreographed fights. No in-universe explanation exists why they aren't gunned down by randos. Guns are rarely present, and when they are, they turn out useless purely due to plot armor
To be fair, it's difficult to reconcile cape settings with guns.
Just make all capes bulletproof? That's lame, capes are more interesting if they're vulnerable outside their special trick.
Remove all guns from the setting? But how? "An extra powerful gunpowder-controlling villain explodes all gunpowder everywhere in the world!" sounds... ok but gimmicky.
I am not sure if it was explained in Worm in Ward, but Wildbow did say that gun control is much tighter in the USA then in our universe, Contessa making 2nd amendment right people have "accidents"
Earth Bet's USA to clarify.
I think it could work, from what I understand the NRA and the like were nowhere near as big as they are today vs they were in the 80s which is when Worm's timeline splits from ours.
>Just make all capes bulletproof?
There is some benefit for making every super above baseline in terms of physicality. mostly the acknowledging that every ''peak human'' is well above that.
>Remove all guns from the setting? But how? "An extra powerful gunpowder-controlling villain explodes all gunpowder everywhere in the world!" sounds... ok but gimmicky.
That sounds kinda funny for some reason.
The PRT and company frick with all branches of law. its pretty moronic by hey they are just the C.I.A and F.B.I on steroids.
>There is some benefit for making every super above baseline in terms of physicality. mostly the acknowledging that every ''peak human'' is well above that.
That reminds me of how despite being a skinny teenage girl, Taylor has the physical fortitude of an action movie hero.
not fortitude, but pain tolerance. early in the story she gets brain damage and its the first and last time she passes out from pain
Its not a realistic cape setting, its mostly trying to work backwards into making sense of a baseline superhero setting. ''Realistically'' most people would have no reason to get into superheroic shenanigans so the setting gives them reasons to do so.
the first cape to die really was killed by a random hobo though
Real life kind of already disproves this in that organized crime already exists. If some leaders & drive by shooters among criminals also have superpowers that can be nothing but a boon to their illicit works. That any good man with a gun ‘could’ kill 8/10 powered characters with his bullets doesn’t have to make it an invalidatingly likely since repeat violent criminals are already a real thing and they don’t all just die on their first outing.
here's my party from the Worm inspired game I'm running (and have been running for about 3 years now). Left to right we've got:
>breaker: changer brute. turns flat and stretchy, regenerates. ecoterrorist, smokes weed
>garbage tinker. also has a thinker power to intuit the value of items. literally Dan from Dan Vs
>changer brute. redistributes her body mass to bulk up specific limbs or change proportions. Wheelchair-bound disaster, became unplayable due to plot and got swapped for a different unpictured character
>master/brute/thinker. can seamlessly swap his body out for an exact copy while his real self astral projects. the copy is an automaton that can (sometimes) be controlled with greater accuracy than his real body and is free to die without consequence to his astral projected self, which can generate a fresh new body around itself. despite having a power that made him functionally immortal he died anyway and has been swapped for a different unpictured character
>master/shaker. Has a largely not-yet-fully understood power revolving around summoning clowns and accessing shardspace. smelly failgirl
>striker mover/breaker. absorbs stores and discharges electricity. can move along currents. Guerrilla DJ and the de facto party straight man
At the beginning I was the only one who had read Worm at all. The game started off with our party unaligned and almost immediately devolved into them becoming villains and destabilizing the area in a never ending cycle of escalation. Unintentionally true to Worm form
thanks doc
What system are you running and how's it working out for you?
How closely does your game hew to the Worm setting?
My group played a Worm campaign a while back using Mutants and Masterminds.
The party played a group of Protectorate and Ward 'heroes' who pretty immediately turned dirty, some were breaking the law because "it's the only way to get things done and really clean up the streets" while others just wanted a cut of that sweet drug money for themselves. By the end they'd turned the town into their little fiefdom; the local political establishment and law enforcement were on board, while of the two remaining gangs in town, one now answered to them and the other didn't really exist but was just an cover for when the heroes needed to do something off the books.
Party consisted of
>A stealth/ambush/fear control tinker. Triggered as a teenage runaway fleeing an abusive and controlling family. Somewhat Armsmaster-like in motivation but complicated by the fact his powers didn't lend themselves to PR-friendly heroics.
>Lightning blaster with a trump subrating. A former cop turned "hero" when an arrest went bad. Essentially a walking taser with the ability to target capes through their powers and briefly nullify them in the process.
>Brute/thinker. An industrial diver injured in an accident at depth. Able to swap between a superhumanly strong and durable but somewhat cognitively impaired brute state or a superhumanly smart and borderline-precognitive thinker state but at the cost of being wracked by pain, spasms and weakness.
>Shaker. A teen girl triggered after being buried in a avalanche while on a family ski trip. Able to manifest a localised snowstorm that grants some degree of telekinesis over anything her snowflakes are stuck to.
>Changer/brute. Another girl, this one triggered after CPS took her away from her Sarah Connor-style militia nut family. Precognitive element to her changer form, adapting to what she might face in the future.
Huh, I didn't think about it at the time but I wonder if there's a reason the two girls in our group went for Wards (albeit both 16+) while the rest of us played Protectorate heroes.
Have you looked at any other supers systems, I've only played Mutants and Masterminds, but have heard some good things about Sentinels RPG.
Nah. One of the reasons I asked is that our GM has talked about running another Worm campaign next and I'm wondering if there's a better supers system out there that I should suggest.
I used the Weaverdice system for party chargen, but everything else is Wild Talents. It can, without hyperbole, easily stat out any power you can think of
I still wish they'd make a new edition of Wild Talents, or Monsters and Other Childish Things. It surprises me that the one-roll engine doesn't get more made for it. Maybe DG is easier to market so they keep writing for it instead.
What was her deal
Reminder she was going to leave her teacher and his family to get killed by Leviathan for the crime of not forcing her to accept help for her bullying and only saved him because of some twisted sense of moral superiority.
"Taylor is a bad person" is not exactly a subtle message in Worm, anon. She literally becomes a fricking criminal murderer at the first chance she gets, and one of her best friends is a body-jacking rapist who gets off on mind controlling women to frick himself (he is later martyred and treated like a hero because he died saving his current slampiece from getting squashed by a Kaiju, with precisely zero introspection on anyone's parts)
Yes, I know, but you wouldn't know it from most of the fan base.
Yes, Taylor is a profoundly fricked up person that does awful things and uses some moronic moonlogic to justify them to herself, did the entire Undersiders thing not clue you in?
She's often later does her moonlogic as you say, but later is vindicating by the author, which left me with the impression she might just be the author's waifu whose moonlogic happens to turn out right because the author likes her
The funniest part of the whole story is when she shoots a baby in the face and successfully rationalizes it to half the fanbase as somehow morally justified.
Oh shit, I FORGOT ABOUT THAT. It's just never mentioned again.
cause its a first person story. dude Taylor fricking tricks herself into believing Grue just went off to live peacefully in a shed
It's really weird that Golem sort of goes "Yeah, you did what you had to do" and never mentions it again. Did he even ever find out that Taylor shot his baby sister? I don't think she ever told him.
He was very aware, his interlude makes it clear he does not call her out on it because he is scared of her.
Mind you she trained him to fight with his powers and still consistently kicked his ass
woman moment.
I never got a good grasp of whether we're supposed to take her perspective as Objectively Correct (sanctioned by the author) or as biased.
For example her first read of Armsmaster seemed incredibly biased, she saw him as some unreasonable butthole when to me he seemed entirely reasonable at least when compared to her, but then later Armsmaster really turned out to do some vicious scheming, vindicacting her.
wildbow normally writes his viewpoint characters as scumbags with a selective heart of gold for their close friends, it's a lot more obvious taylor's meant to be a piece of shit if you've read his other works where there's not even the "WELL, I WAS BULLIED SO IT'S MY RIGHT TO BE A CAPESHIT SCHOOL SHOOTER!" defense. Nobody is under any illusions Sy wouldn't jump at the first chance to be a war criminal even in our earth.
Lmao what in the frick is this, people genuinely think Taylor Hebert, mild mannered Canadian teen girl, with boring liberal cosmopolitan values, is a dark and twisted villain?
I must say, I read worm believing that Taylor was bitterly, deeply counterrevolutionary, that she was completely opposed to any kind of situation that would upset the status quo of zogmerican hegemony, which is villainous, sure, but not in a way that the story or its characters (even its villains) are EVER conscious of, let alone try to cast her as such. People say she's a murderous evil b***h and I'm over here like, what the frick? Taylor goes out of her way, well above and beyond the expectations and norms even of her super-powered setting, to help random strangers.
What did she do to make people so offended? I do not get it. Worm's primary audience was left leaning liberal millenials, just like wildbow and Taylor, and all the time I see people freaking out and saying how evil she is... why? Literally what is the basis for this opinion? I can understand why you might consider her evil, because she stands for the system of usury and israeli child sacrifice, but no more so than any other cape in the setting. What is the deal??
>Taylor was bitterly, deeply counterrevolutionary
My point was simply that Taylor Hebert is about one step removed from Ben Shapiro. Despite her phenomenal powers the biggest dream she has is keeping weimerica afloat for a little longer - not even out of the delusional troony "NAFO ultranationalism" you see these days, but simply because she just uncritically believes in cable news and the government. In other words, she is very unremarkable in her thoughts about the world, and in worm, there's characters who enjoy subjecting others to eternal torment, it just baffles me that Taylor has such an "evil" and "offensive" reputation, when she's like a less charismatic, dorkier, and more conservative version of Buffy.
Taylor is some girl who gets moderate superpowers, and after that cares mostly about her friends and local municipality.
You're more or less asking "why isn't every main character in every work of fiction a communist revolutionary?", which isn't a question you'll find much symapthy for here. This really isn't the website for you.
I'm not calling her out for not being a communist, and you're light-switch
-braining at me because I used a naughty no-no word. My point was that Taylor is basically just a very mundane and inoffensively normal teenage girl, when viewed in the context of her setting. She doesn't seem like a villain or even do anything particularly villainous throughout the entirety of worm. She does commit crimes, but goes way, waaaay out of her way to avoid killing and injuring people. I am just trying to understand what the problem is that so many people have with her. What is there to hate about Taylor apart from her mediocrity?
Probably that all of Wildbow's other protagonists are utter pieces of shit, so people who start fingering themselves to this oh-so-brilliant author start compulsively looking for what made Taylor so awful. Or they take Tattletale's final speech to her as some genuine "reason you suck speech" and not the bitter b***hing of a girl watching her best friend commit suicide and hating herself that she can't do anything better to offer an alternative.
McCrae can write characters very well, but his worlds and stories are typically awful. He delights in making things as agonizing and miserable as he can, and seems to hate his readers even more than the likes of Harlan Ellison.
So I think that one of the reasons why there's this sudden push that Taylor is awful is these pozzed fad-chasers convincing themselves that because they enjoyed Worm it means Wildbow is a good writer and not that he captured lightning in a bottle with good characters and a passable story (ultimately it made about as much sense as comics at the time), so they consoom his other miserable sadomasochistic drivel.
Thus inundated with an avalanche of awful people being awful, they feel the desperate need to recontextualize Taylor as having always been a terrible person rather than admit that they just read millions of words of misery due to mistaken fandom.
I'll be honest, I've only read Worm and Pact, and I don't care to investigate Ward (Twig was never interesting to me, I hate stories about children) but while you could probably call Rose an utter piece of shit I don't think that could apply to Blake, it's like, yeah, dude was a weird homosexual hippie bohemian but he didn't do anything wrong to anybody, that would make you say "omg what an evil guy".
Like, what did Taylor actually do that people find to be so objectionable? I'm trying to remember an occasion where she wasn't just trying to do some generic Marvel hero scheme to resolve a given situation.
She contemplated letting a guy who was at the very least complicit in her cartoonish levels of abuse die, then didn't let him die. Uh... She threatened to not save a guy who was dying of anaphylactic shock, then saved him. She made friends with a bunch of villains who were better people than the heroes, and went about being a better hero than the heroes...
Oh, I know! She shot a baby! ...Who had been tortured and mutilated by the grimderp brigade and was potentially the key to the world's end, making it a horrifically extraordinary circumstance.
Also she killed Girlboss Superman, which apparently the author intended to be a villainous moment but I saw as a triumph because we knew Alexandria was a horrible person using emotional torture on someone who'd already surrendered, just to be an abusive c**t.
And on the topic of abuse, the only way Taylor's abuse in her school makes a lick of sense is if we do the same job as Disney Marvel/Star Wars fans and do the writing for him. There's no fricking way a black girl in the Nazi capital of the US gets away with bullying a white girl to the point of continual physical abuse. The only explanation, which McCrae never thought of, is if the nazis use Sophia as a recruitment tool. "Look at this porch monkey, brutalizing people. Join us and we'll make people like her stop being monsters."
In a story that actually made sense, the entire Hess family would be dead after the first six months of continued abuse, much less two years.
I don't think Kaiser was low to the ground enough to go "lets target this specific bully"
Also even if she had faced backlash the Wards would have just relocated her
The US is a gay liberal paradise who consider E88 to be domestic terrorists (probably fair, admittedly), but yeah the racial dynamics at play in Worm make no sense.
I didn't like that Shadow Stalker had such a pivotal power, or in general, how characters like her would pop up to be annoying with their Mary Sue bullshit only for everyone else to have to play by normal rules. And she had the insufferable lesbian romance which really wasn't fun or interesting for even a single moment, and in the end she was never even really punished for her actions. She's way worse than Taylor in every way.
Are you mixing up shadow stalker and foil? Shadow stalker's powers were largely irrelevant.
Also, yes, foil's introduction with her blatantly cruising for pussy first and last as her goals while on patrol was obnoxious as frick and she never really won me back after that. 100% wouldn't have been treated as a sympathetic character if it was a guy.
I absolutely hate contessa being created as the handwavium explanation for everything that doesn't make sense about the setting.
Huh, I guess they fused into one person in my head, but you're right.
>There's no fricking way a black girl in the Nazi capital of the US gets away with bullying a white girl to the point of continual physical abuse. The only explanation, which McCrae never thought of, is if the nazis use Sophia as a recruitment tool. "Look at this porch monkey, brutalizing people. Join us and we'll make people like her stop being monsters."
Taylor looks israeli enough for neonazi wannabe teenagers to not give a shit. Very curly black hair, vaguely weird face, and her last name being Hebert makes it really easy for someone to call her a heeb and have it stick. Pretty much every single white person with curly hair got shit on for being a "jew" when I was in high school, so I wouldn't be surprised if the e88 hanger-ons decided to let the black girl bully the 'jew' girl and treated it as daily entertainment.
I'm still suspicious that Taylor is meant as a israelite. It's never stated, which you'd think it would be due to the prominence of E88 characters in Brockton Bay, but she does just check a lot of boxes on the israelitedar. Her dad being a mousy, wimpy failure, plus her total lack of hesitation for commiserating with nonwhites; it doesn't mean wildbow wrote her as a israelite but I think he left the door open so he could one day.
I don't think she's actually a israelite due to that scene with Brian where it just doesn't really click in her head why someone would feel extra threatened by the E88 since, in her mind, they're just one more gang in the pile. If she were actually a israelite she'd have understood and felt the same way as him.
Taylor seems to attract labels though, just look at how much of the readerbase thought she was being written to end up with b***h
I think it's just because she's such a blank slate outside of her major traits
I hated b***h from the moment she showed up until the end, she is easily my most disliked character in Worm. Ugly, autistic, man-hating, lumpenprole criminal, and with such a lame and annoying power. I fricking hate the 'animal companion' type character, mixed with fricking pitt mommy memes, she's just the absolute worst.
>man-hating
Anon she's canonically a bawd, she's just too brain damaged to have a relationship beyond that
You might be right but my mental image of b***h is identical to "fugly butch lesbian biker chick". I don't remember her sleeping with anyone, but I could have just blacked it all out. b***h is the only major character who I never found even a tiny bit likeable or interesting.
it's very much a background detail but basically she'll find a guy to frick until he starts getting feelings or says something she considers dumb, then he's replaced
>insufferable pit mommie character that the fandom thought would end up with the main character
Okay, you guys have succeeded in attracting my attention. QRD on Worm and this b***h character in particular as well as her relationship with Taylor?
Is it worth reading Worm if I'm an adult? I see it has over 7000 pages and I usually prefer my capeshit in comic book form but I've given up on modern Big 2 comics because the editorial at Marvel and DC is a complete shitshow.
Honestly just read the first couple of arcs and see if you like it, if you don't click with it its not worth reading on, but
>tl;dr
>superpowers showed up about 50 years ago, because some gold fricker called Scion appeared from the sky one day
>society has evolved around this, with hero teams, commercialisation and the like
>powers are acquired via trauma
>Main character has bug control powers (Taylor)
>Goes out heroing, gets mistaken for a villain because she made a pitch black insect looking costume
>gets recruited to a gang of villains, b***h, shadow controller, rapist and the brains
>keeps saying "One more week of this and I'll go tell the heroes what I know, I'm actually a hero" to herself
To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
Supernatural deductive power?
OK thanks anon. I will do so
Could you give me a qrd on why people thought Taylor and b***h would end up together
Probably not a good one, issue with a 7000 page serial is that you forget the little details
Basically b***h works on dog logic, assert dominance, try to be the alpha and Taylor routinely steps around her bullshit and tries to get closer to her, but it ends in friendship rather than yurigayging
b***h is genuinely neurologically fricked up and is functionally a smart dog shaped like a human. She develops a close friendship with Talor and the sort of close bond a person might have with their dog can be mistaken for romantic shit if that dog looks like a human. It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian. That plus b***h looking like a stereotpyical butch lesbian? Yeah, people made connections. There's some other more spoilery things too that I don't feel like typing up.
Alien chatgpt bolted to her brain.
>To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
I think Tattletale herself describes it like a 3d sudoku puzzle, where if she gets some information her power will start filling in blanks. Except that if she gets bad information it can give her wrong info, kind of like how if you put a number in the wrong place in a sudoku puzzle it will throw other numbers off.
>sheltered nerdy girl meets a girl who wears a dog collar
>nerdy girl pwns dog collars major foe
>girl with dog collar hates nerdy girl because she seems weak and not cutthroat out of the costume
>dog collar gets growing respect & admiration for nerdy girls cunning & ruthlessness
>she’s one of 2 characters Taylor kisses in the book
>sees dog collar after a time skip and is like “damn she really got manly…. Hot tbh”
She’s constantly thinking stuff like this
Taylor might honestly be the single most bisexual character I've ever read. I don't know if it's because Worm was the authors first story and so it's a case of a man writing a woman like he imagines women to be, but damn. You cannot tell me Taylor wouldn't frick pretty much any of the Undersiders given the right situation. She'd probably frick a couple heroes, too. Hell she got pretty close to fricking Jack.
Taylor sizes up how frickable every character she meets is, and we know this because it's a first person story. We also know this is a Taylor exclusive trait because we've seen first person perspectives of other characters by this author.
>Hell she got pretty close to fricking Jack.
>Jack Slash simps.
>Jack Slash
Speaking of Jack, anyone else pissed that such a psychotic butthole was just left to do whatever, just because he was SOMEHOW involved with making Zion Snap and kill everything?
What do you mean by "left to do whatever"?
Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but wasn't the reason he was able to create the Slaughterhouse 9 pretty much only because he was part of the Zion prophecy or whatever?
Like, he wasn't all that great at fighting Endbringers, right?
He had literal shard-based plot armor. His power would give him hints, convince other powers to sabotage their own hosts to let him live, and call members of the S9 to him if he was in danger.
>He had literal shard-based plot armor.
Bleh, I kind of have to agree with the earlier assessment that Wildbow was too in love with miserable settings.
Bonesaw could have been a Hero!
>Bonesaw could have been a Hero!
Bonesaw was a hero in Ward. In the epilogue, she got parole for literally saving the world (reminder that the other psychos in the Bird Cage got pardoned after killing Scion).
Yeah, but I'm talking without most of the baggage being tortured by Jack...
Yeah, but the same is true for Jack. He could have been one of if not the world's greatest hero if King never found him.
If it wasn't for his gaggle of murder hobos, a police sniper and/or a drone strike would end this man's career. The one campaign my group and I did in this system ended when the DM wrote himself into a corner and dropped Slash infront of us. I am forever annoyed I couldn't give that knife nut the Armstrong treatmen.
>She contemplated letting a guy who was at the very least complicit in her cartoonish levels of abuse die, then didn't let him die.
He offered to help and she told him off because she thought it would make things worse. She was probably right, but a single teacher can only do so much. He might have been able to do more, but not much, and he didn't deserve to be singled out for her contempt.
I think a bigger reason people view Taylor as evil is because she deludes herself about her own virtue. The best example off the top of my head is during the hostage situation at the bank. She totally would have bit the shit out of someone with a black widow if they did something dumb like charge her even though she didn't think she would. Plus, she hurt a lot of people who didn't deserve while stubbornly insisting on moving forward with her one-sided "infiltration" of the Undersiders. And people hate hypocrites.
killing aster was easily considered villainous but i guess in the context of the target audience maybe we really are supposed to think killiing a white baby of a nazi mother is morally gray
Why do you post such slander? Please tell the class the detail you left out, the circumstances in which Taylor shot Aster and why.
Wasn't the baby going to be tortured in a Grey Boy loop?
I think you're misreading him. He's complaining that Taylor didn't give the world an actual Holocaust, not that she wasn't a commie.
Commie anon is just pointing out that Taylor is fairly mundane and her reputation as the evil psycho b***h that you might here through internet cultural osmosis is undeserved.
anon you have the reading comprehension of a corpse.
I LOVE ISRAEL
I LOVE AMERICA
Capitalism is dead and we killed her. Even Orthodox Judaism will be unable to resist her killers. All who oppose us will be trampled under heel by the new and present age of technofeudal aristocracy. My hapa progeny shall be gene-optimized by holistic market-analysis algorithms. I will follow the technique and attain true temporal happiness. Long Live the New Economy!
>I never got a good grasp of whether we're supposed to take her perspective as Objectively Correct (sanctioned by the author) or as biased.
I'm late but I'll just say there's a reason b***h was introduced as a character.
A lot of people miss the whole "powers frick with your brains" aspect wasn't meant to just be oddball capes like b***h, but applies to every single non-Cauldron cape, ever. Taylor is compelled by the Administrator shard to dominate and subjugate, to have everyone obey her because only she can make the correct plans and coordinate everyone (because the Administrator cannot think in any other way). She cannot function without control. She is completely and thoroughly corrupt and biased.
A lot of other capes have their thought processes just as corrupted by their powers, but you were really supposed to figure that out with Taylor.
Another subtle cue for that is that whenever Taylor sees someone using a power, she immediately tries to think up better ways she'd use that power (instantly dreams as if she were controlling them).
I have heard this argument before and obviously it's what wildbow wanted to do with it by the end but I still don't buy it. Taylor is a little bit more logical than a normal person, but only a very, very little bit more. All of her behavior, and I would say even up to the end of the story, discounting the brief period where she's obviously isn't in control of her actions, can be explained as normal, rational thought processes from Taylor Hebert's brain.
Her shard makes it easier for her to think, but it doesn't seem to direct her thinking. Perhaps the idea is that her shard chose her because she was the most suited to it, I dunno, but Taylor doesn't ever justify anything she does except in the most explicit terms. That is to say, I would not agree that Taylor is "completely and thoroughly corrupt and biased". If QA was piloting her like b***h's shard was piloting b***h, Taylor would never waste all the time she wasted with the Undersiders.
>A lot of people miss the whole "powers frick with your brains" aspect wasn't meant to just be oddball capes like b***h, but applies to every single non-Cauldron cape
This is interesting, I didn't catch this when I first read Worm. I'm going to need to reread it with a list of Cauldron vs non-Cauldron characters to see how big of a thing this is in the story. W/so many unhinged characters, now I'm wondering how much of that is non-Cauldron curated shards mucking with people.
For a sample, Gallant is a Cauldron cape who was more or less the glue holding the team together, an IED defusal specialist trying to slowly pacify Amy, and, as a bonus, Gallant was theoretically going to be so big a problem for Coil in a scenario where he didn't die that Coil would need to straight up fricking murder Gallant if he didn't leave on his own. Coil would not need to do anything of the sort with the other Wards, and the other Wards are all various shades of fricked up.
Granted, on the other side of the Cauldron cape spectrum we've got possibly Acidbath, possibly Butcher, definitely Gray Boy... So your mileage kind of varies.
I can fix her
Space whale frickery for the most part. honestly her whole set up feels moronic.
Teenager with deep seated trauma issues, lack of parental support, that gets tormented by her best friend and her new friends before being considerably brain damaged by a space whale god, specifically to give her the most ironic, b-grade superpowers it can manage via extradimensional brain-altering parasite, for the sole purpose of unbalancing her to see how she uses them.
Why do people think there are so many villains in the setting? The magic space whale wants you traumatized, unstable, feeling helpless and unable to deal with things, specifically so you lash out with your powers.
One thing I find odd about that is how Taylor kept her head down for six fricking months. QA is probably a incompetent a shard but this stuff still feels weird for some reason.
Fricked up person with good intentions becomes more fricked up and more selfish as time goes on
Man, I loved Worm, so much I'm scared of re-reading it
My guess is that it was both more relaxed than other shards and because it knew she was gearing up and getting ready to lash out
>scared of re-reading it
everything post-leviathan holds up
I started reading Worm a bit after it ended, I remember a lot of guys shat on the Golden Morning arc/time skip but I remember liking it outside of Eidolon dying like a b***h.
Worm was the only wildbow work I finished
>Pact
The misery pron got too much for me, I remember I stopped at around the part Blake came back from the dead and was trapped in a mirror. I was also too moronic for the magic system.
>Twig
I actually liked it a lot, but got side tracked by other things, I think the last I read was around the gay one dying?
>Ward
In liked it, but never finished. Don't remember when I stopped, sometime after the cultists were raided
>Pale
Haven't read it, maybe I'll give it a shot since it seems well-liked here.
>My guess is that it was both more relaxed than other shards and because it knew she was gearing up and getting ready to lash out
I was mostly talking about how she failed to trigger Danny and Taylor's severe autism.
Pale > Worm >>> POWER GAP >>> Twig > Pact >>> POWER GAP >>> Ward
Switch Pale and Pact.
The locker scene was literally impossible. A high schooler isn't fitting into a locker, especially Taylor since she's tall for a girl.
Taylor was a lot smaller at the start. She was shorter than Lisa at the start of Worm and taller than her like a year later. Teenage growth spurt and all that. I think Taylor was 15 at the start of the story, and had been prepping for like 6 months for hero stuff, and the locker was a few months before that. So reasonably we can say that Taylor was probably 14, maybe just turned 15 when the locker happened. A skinny kid that age that hasn't hit their growth spurt yet could absolutely fit in a locker.
Earth Bet has bigger lockers
I've literally never gone to a school with lockers big enough to fit a teenager in. Even tall lockers are either too narrow, or have non-removable shelving.
Wildbow walked back on conflict drive stuff. This could be baseless, but I've gotten the impression with a lot of stuff in Worm/Ward, he goes
>wildbow: [stuff involving how powers screw with peoples minds or certain characterization details] it's a 4/10
>the fandom: it's a 9/10
>wildbow: actually, its a 1/10
Except with Amy, who I feel like he made worse because of how much the fandom likes her. Reading some of his earlier comments, he pretty heavily implies Amy had raped Victoria long before Ward and that she was a ticking time bomb, but it felt more like while she was a victimizer, she was also a victim of her own impossibly high self-imposed standards and Jack Slash rather than her being the seed of evil. Heck, if I remember right, he even said that if she had ended up joining the S9, Theo would have managed to eventually talk her down during the S9000 arc.
>To other Worm readers, how the frick do you describe Tattles power? I'm almost finished with Ward and I still can't describe it succinctly
Sherlock Holmes on Ritalin.
>It doesn't help that Taylor was written by a straight man trying to write a straight woman, which resulted in Taylor coming across as a deeply closeted lesbian.
While I completely understand this view, I always took more do to her low self-esteem when it comes to her own appearance.
>I've literally never gone to a school with lockers big enough to fit a teenager in. Even tall lockers are either too narrow, or have non-removable shelving.
I've taught at a school and had to tell the 14 year olds to stop climbing into the lockers, so I guess YMMV.
To the burgers out there, how ''realistic'' is the bulling in worm?
>To the burgers out there, how ''realistic'' is the bulling in worm?
the locker scene is excessive but highschool girls are fricking VICIOUS and demonstrably inflict way more long-term psychological damage than male bullying which is almost exclusively somebody calling you a homosexual or getting into some fights. girls will ruin each other's lives, spread life-destroying rumors and hound people even at home, and generally avoid at all costs actual physical confrontation or accountability.
sounds weird as hell but fair enough.
Pretty realistic, especially her reactions and proactions.
>Source. Went to boarding school. Not female or burger, but I felt that shit.
worth noting Worm takes place in a world that is not exactly modern day america. the timeline split from our world's in ~1980 and has been getting more and more different ever since
can someone (medicated) explain what people's issue with Ward was? I personally thought the writing and characters were strictly better but I often just see people say "it's bad" and never elaborate
For me just some parts, particularly the end, were huge slogs to read through. I think the highs are pretty high in Ward and I like all the characters but the lows are far worse than anything in Worm. It's just a pretty mixed bad
Yeah I dropped it when I reached a slog. It was just fricking awful.
Wildbow in general seems to have this problem. I don't know what it is; I remember someone saying something about him being massively antiauthoritiarian on some level, and I think I agree. He just seems incapable of writing certain things in an interesting way, and so whenever he reaches a point where he has to it's barely readable at best.,
>Again, Wildbow loves miserable settings but his masturbatory adoration of such exceeds his capability to actually write them.
Exactly!
Maybe I should write some kind of alternate worm, now that I have my fukkin meds.
One of the problems though is the motivation of the Entities: To survive the heat death of the universe. I've never liked this. It's so decontextualised.
But what to replace it with? An outside threat perhaps.
Limiting the Entities a bit could also work; apparently they're almost everywhere in the entire universe, which is just an obscene amount, and makes the outside threat a problem, as there's nowhere left to BE an outside.
Possibly some kind of other alien threat. A divergent evolution of entities? Other multidimensional entities?
>To survive the heat death of the universe
Pretty sure that's not actually their goal. Zion already has tools to create energy, they're just not efficient enough yet, for example. Entities actually regard entropy as something they'll overcome on the way. Their real main goal is to make better weapons so they can out-compete other entities, IIRC.
Ward showed that Entities aren't hostile to each other, as they're all working towards the same goal. If I remember right, it isn't just overcoming entropy, but never running out of things to do. What good is living forever if you're just vibing in the void of space for all eternity? For the Warrior and Thinker, the Cycle was more than a means to an end, it was also something they could do together, which was a luxury and experience the hyper-competitive base state of Entities couldn't do before they were space-faring.
She is a white woman.
>For the Warrior and Thinker, the Cycle was more than a means to an end, it was also something they could do together, which was a luxury and experience the hyper-competitive base state of Entities couldn't do before they were space-faring.
They could have just wrote fanfiction like the rest of us!
>Yeah, but the same is true for Jack. He could have been one of if not the world's greatest hero if King never found him.
I might have come in too late or just missed that bit.
Funny thing is my sister once had a story idea sort of like Worm like a decade ago; Where a girl with the stereotypically "Evil" powers of Plant Withering sort of accidentally saves some Politician and ends up getting switched over to the "Hero" track.
>I'd say it's hard to read any other superhero story when you've read Worm... besides Worm fanfics.
...Of course now we have My Hero Academia, which is sort of Worms antithesis...
>...Of course now we have My Hero Academia, which is sort of Worms antithesis...
unfortunately I dont want to read any fanfic by a woman that would draw this.
Like undertale, MHA is too full of fujoshi and gutter tier yume's to be worth digging through the ashes for anything good.
Your loss...
if you have anything above 100k words to recommend I'll look but I refuse to turn over a single stone.
>...Of course now we have My Hero Academia, which is sort of Worms antithesis...
Its a odd mirror now that I think about it. even the main gripes I have with have significant parallels.
>even the main gripes I have with have significant parallels.
Which are?
Honestly one of the best parts of MHA is that it has Optimism where Wildbow would drag out Misery.
does he really need to post it?
>does he really need to post it?
I mean I've fallen quiet behind on the anime, but I'm pretty sure it keeps it's Optimistic tone.
>Which are?
The MC's set up moronation at the start of the series. the bully bullshit just annoys the me because I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff. I want to scream at the screen and tell Taylor and Izuku to do something.
In MHA this feels worse because UA is supposed to be decent but nothing gets done so the rest of the cast needs to act out of character when character A or B enters the scene.
>the bully bullshit just annoys the me because I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff. I want to scream at the screen and tell Taylor and Izuku to do something.
Well MHA at least has the excuse that Japanese Culture is notoriously toxic when it comes to addressing social issues, especially when it comes to the suffering of an individual.
>In MHA this feels worse because UA is supposed to be decent but nothing gets done so the rest of the cast needs to act out of character when character A or B enters the scene.
Well what is suppose to be Bakugo's Character Development was that, while his stellar potential eclipsed his shitty personality in the tiny backwater district Midoriya and he grew up in, at the premiere level of UA EVERYONE is suppose to have that same kind of potential, thus highlighting that he is a rather shitty person.
To be fair, wanting to be a Hero for the sake of doing good for goodness sake is something that is just NOW sinking in for him if what I've heard is current.
>I am tired of having to use space shitters to read fic discussion
>Yes, most of the homosexual writers on Space Battles
Oi, you don't get to complain until people start explicitly writing insults about you into said fics!
>To be fair, wanting to be a Hero for the sake of doing good for goodness sake is something that is just NOW sinking in for him if what I've heard is current.
Bakugo is just irritating, the fact that no one takes him down a peg in fricking UA of all places is stupid. that and I just find him boring as shit but that could be said about everyone in MHA.
I don't recall any fic with that to be honest.
Anon this stupid shitserial insults both weebs and chuds.
If you dont like it be part of the fricking solution. Shill /fanfic/. The board is dead so they cant complain if new posters arrive and anyone who doesnt belong will be driven out by the +Black folk loicsance
>If you dont like it be part of the fricking solution. Shill /fanfic/. The board is dead so they cant complain if new posters arrive and anyone who doesnt belong will be driven out by the +Black folk loicsance
What is /fanfic/ bro?
My question exactly, what is this guy talking about?
I'd assume Ganker, but their about as good at writing Literature as /tg/ is at playing Traditional Games...
>newbies poisoned by /general/s and israelitegle hamstringing search engines cant find
smug lo.li
> I was taught to be vocal about this type of stuff.
I was taught to go to the teacher, and to never EVER defend myself. (That got me punished)
The teachers did fricking nothing.
Even when I was sexually assaulted by other boys.
my sincere condolences that happened.
Bet you were asking for it, pussy.
Some possible motivations:
>The cycle is how Entities develop to compete with each other, but now it is more like a sport to them than an evolutionary struggle for survival.
>Their FTL travel, while interstellar, is not yet intergalactic, and their precognitive abilities has shown them a potentially more powerful species in a different galaxy, so they develop either to actively seek out and destroy the others, or to be prepared for their arrival.
>The cycle is the Entities' way of uplifting lesser species. The worthy will band together despite the adversity and trauma they suffer to trigger and be uplifted into a fellow space-faring race, the unworthy ones will destroy themselves. Either way it is all by their own hands and would have eventually headed that way regardless, the Entities are just a catalyst to accelerate it (or so their thinking would go)
while these possibilities sound more interesting than the canon cycle I don't think they would work with the author's allegory. the entities are supposed to mirror writers fricking with fictional worlds or something like that.
>the entities are supposed to mirror writers fricking with fictional worlds or something like that.
Which Entity is Wildblow supposed to be in this scenario? Warrior, Thinker, Loner?
>Which Entity is Wildblow supposed to be in this scenario?
I guess he would be warrior because he is the inciting incident. its more of a broad strokes thing.
Yeah, she was pretty irrational on that front. I know she would probably get screwed over but it was still the best option.
It's because Ward has all the same writing flaws and foibles that Worm does, but with way less interesting characters, a fricking dogshit setting, actively shits on previous fan favorites, has a protagonist that is everything wrong with regular capeshit stories, and is super meandering.
Ward could easily have been a DC or Marvel product, right down to the pretty, but troubled, blonde woman trying to 'find herself' while learning to be a better person/saving the day. It's fricking wild that their are people who didn't clue into how much Victoria fits in with Nu-Marvel or Nu-DC character writing.
Speaking of characters. Good fricking god, what the frick is Wildbow's problem with fan favorites? Like, you'd think this gay was specifically trawling the internet for everyone's opinion on who was the best character and the most popular fan theories and then specifically going out of his way to shit all over that. The few fan faves that don't get dunked on are forced into the background via irrelevancy despite being objectively far more powerful (and interesting) than the fricking C-list squad lead by a B-list b***h with sister issues.
Oh yeah...sister issues. Wildbow somehow managed to retroactively ruin Vicky and Amy as Worm characters while never resolving their conflict in Ward AND managed to somehow make the whole thing boring and daytime TV levels of drama. FFS, Victoria's whole character in Worm was that she was well meaning, but prone to overdoing it on mooks. Is that explored at all now that we're in her head? No. Amy's whole schtick was that she was a self-fulfilling prophecy between herself and her mother, she wasn't born evil, she was made that way, but the flashbacks in Ward all but cement that she was 'destined' to be a villain. It wasn't REALLY her family that made her snap, no, she was just born a c**t. UGH frick off Wildbow you monstrous homosexual.
Ward is just Nu-Worm. Frick that. He wrote it for the money, nothing more.
I love all the new characters in Ward and Vicky really worked for me. I already hated Amy so I'm just going to assume from now on that all Ward-haters are disgusting Amy stans
That's okay, everyone else already knows Ward enjoyers were autistic troons projecting their delusions onto a pretty white b***h.
The problem with these implications is that he doesn't show them at all during Worm. In Worm we get
>Amy is a grouchy closeted lesbian who has a terrible home life with her mother
>She is easily swayed by Vicky's bad behaviors but doesn't mind because le secret sister crush
>Amy is stressed because she thinks she's going to turn into a villain because her mom also thinks that she will
All of the truly heinous shit that Amy does is post Jack, but then Wildbow goes onto Ward and retroactively makes it so that Amy was a monstrous piece of shit pre-Jack? Did...did he forget his own metaphor about self fulfilling prophecies? Because that's what Amy is, she's a direct and obvious metaphor about becoming what you fear.
Speaking of Wildbow and his background shit. This man is worse than fricking Rowling for authorsplaining their setting to people. Like, Black person you write a frickload of story text in very little time, if you want to show these cool details FRICKING WRITE AN INTERLUDE THAT SHOWS IT. My god is that annoying.
Take Kaiser for example. Wildbow has stated that Kaiser doesn't actually believe the shit E88 espouses, he's just in it for the power and his dear old dad left that power structure behind so he took it. You know what would have been cooler than reading that info in a comment? Reading a fricking interlude that showed it.
Speaking of interludes, can we agree that interlude chapters of Worm were constitently much more interesting than non-interlude chapters?
Interludes are consistantly excellent but they're not always better than non-interlude chapters during peak Worm (Leviathan arc & beginning of S9 arc & Taylor's pre-Alexandria killing).
Yes, and we needed more of them. Especially ones that show Taylor from the outside. My favorite chapter is when Glenn Chambers shows Taylor what a fricking nightmare she looks like on the outside to people. It bothers me greatly that their were so few interludes that showed the average person's interaction with #ALLTHEBUGS. That's also probably why their is such a big disconnect between people's perceptions of Taylor. We never get a concrete chapter of her hypocritical bullshit from the outside, we never really get a chapter that screams 'this girl acts like she's unhinged' even though we the readers know on the inside she's kind of a lonely dork who thinks she's helping.
No you.
We should have more PHO interludes. The concept of an in-universe Ganker commenting on the crazy events happening in the world is fricking cool.
sounds like you spend too much time online
>There was a long period of time, from perhaps around 2004 to 2015ish, where it seemed like Blizzard could make good games, but were simply disinterested in doing so. Like, they had all this talent, but philosophically were only interested in making garbage.
Hey guys did you know about Abbadon!
I liked the cast, but the pacing was horrendous and Wildbow skimmed over some potentially interesting stuff too often, like everyone fricking around in shard space after the dream plague. Instead we got like half a scene with Gallant, Swansong telling her she was actually trying to bodyjack her clone, and Victoria mentioning she'd talked to Manpower and Shielder. The same Manpower and Shielder who we've never seen do anything. Also, Amy never felt like a threat do to how much of a screwup she was. Her revelation at the end was literally she should do nothing ever, because she always just makes things worse. And she's right.
Having read Worm and currently readin the final act of Ward (Ward was a mistake) I don't know that the setting is really unique enough to specifically run a parahumans game (vs a generic supers game)
I mean aside from the designations, the endbringers and the titans, it's just shitty murrca with occasional portals to even more moronic regimes (i.e. Shin)
Yeah. The Mideast and Africa are about the same as normal - an endless orgy of rape and murder with revolving warlords - but with superpowers; China is supposed to be some imperial force but never actually makes a difference in the story...
The potentially most interesting thing is national-socialism making a triumphant return in Europe, but despite the Gessellschaft supposedly controlling a significant portion of the continent we don't see anything major from them: instead they're for some reason happy to supply a single neo-nazi coven with guns and superpowered weirdos. Also apparently they have ways to induce powers and brainwash people but haven't conquered the planet yet.
Again, Wildbow loves miserable settings but his masturbatory adoration of such exceeds his capability to actually write them.
A world where the arrival of superpowers caused nations to abandon international cooperation and all become violently isolationist - because how can anyone engage on the global stage when death and destruction reign within their borders? - would have made far more sense and been more interesting, rather than paying lip service to how awful the world is but providing no explanation as to how ordinary people haven't taken to lynching criminals.
>providing no explanation as to how ordinary people haven't taken to lynching criminals.
There is an explanation, it just sucks. Cauldron did it.
>I don't know that the setting is really unique enough to specifically run a parahumans game (vs a generic supers game)
It basically is a generic supers setting, and that's part of what makes it good as a ttrpg setting imo.
It's a generic supers setting with a unified explanation for the emergence of powers which I find much more compelling for a tabletop campaign than going MCU where one character might have his powers as a result of divine heritage, another from generic superscience, another from magic and another from X men-style mutation; that shit's cheesy. The method by which powers emerge also ensures at least some form of dramatic tension in a character's backstory and motivations. Finally, it provides just enough of an explanation for the common Supers tropes (why is everyone running around in masks and capes, why haven't the superscientists catapulted technology into the future, why is the government letting everyone get away with this, etc) that you can cheerfully stop thinking about them
My group's only played the one Worm campaign so far but it went well
I enjoyed it. It's not some great work of literature and it's definitely not for everyone but I'd say it's worth reading the first few arcs to see if it's something you might enjoy
>Could you give me a qrd on why people thought Taylor and b***h would end up together
Honestly, I never got that vibe. Probably just LGBT homosexuals reaching for anything that reflects their own pathology. Both Taylor and b***h have straight relationships over the course of the story.
On the other hand, b***h is desperate for social connection with another person, recognising that she's fricked in the head and missing out on something important as a result, so when Taylor tries to work around b***h's cognitive impairment it does prompt some self-reflection on the part of b***h that could be interpreted to resemble a dude from /LULZ/ trying to navigate a relationship he doesn't want to frick up.
>Both Taylor and b***h have straight relationships over the course of the story.
So do the congressmen who get caught abusing their male staffers and sucking dick in airport bathrooms. I didn't get gay vibes off Taylor and b***h's friendship, but let's not act like straight relationships precludes homosexual activity.
So how does one achieve negentropy?
i hate how everyone now always wants to play edgy freakshit like this
That's not the bobbit worm.
I'm starved for Worm content. What fanfics should I read now?
>Trailblazer for the excellent Emma redemption arc.
>Lord Doom, because it's fun.
>The Cenotaph trilogy.
>Wound, because it almost manages to fix Ward (Post-Ward Amy centered fic)
Seconding all of them, and I'd add:
Meta: Very cool concept where Worm (the webnovel) is posted on PHO two months before the start of Worm, having the entire Wormverse react to it chapter after chapter. Unfortunately dead but the concept is brillant.
Intrepid: Emma / Madison / Sophia redemption (Emma and Madison trigger when they realize how fricked up their bullying has been), tons of new powers.
The Great Escape
It follows Eidolon in an AU where there is a breakout from the Birdcage shortly after the big reveal during the Echnida arc. I've reached the point where he's entered the quarantined town of Freedom chasing after Gavel and it's fricking fantastic. Really cool characterisation, interesting powers (and struggle to get the most out of his powers) and nice world-building dealing with characters and places that are pretty much just an aside in the main story.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/27459643/chapters/80030023
For semi-crossovers, I recommend Queen of the Swarm or Seek.
How would you make rules for god-like entities getting KEKED and their waifu-worms getting mindbroken by BIG LONER SHARDS
Minorities usually stick to bullying each other, not the white students, and I never saw them getting away with shit the white students couldn't.
>allow the exceptional to rise to the top
Lol
Lmao even
You're a loser so it's the schools fault for not making you succeed
actually its the parents fault for passing the buck. troony jannys are mad though so I'll probably be banned for daring to speak up against an awful institution that was partially responsible for most of my woes.
its more likely the teachers doing the cry bullying.
Amy is the actual main character of the Wormverse.
>S-class threat by herself.
>Created Khepri. Has her hands directly in Scion defeat.
>Became multiversal ambassador pioneer in Shin, launching the first large-scale diplomatic operation between world.
>Raped her sister and turned her into a monster, traumas that would later lead Victoria to become the person she is in in Ward and who saved the world.
>Also created the giant clones of capes which were also S-class threats in themselves and helped saving the world against the Titans.
Fricking ungrateful setting, give her a fricking medal.
vicky should a squished her with that rock. Amy is such a a fricking blight. Literally female Huey. Everyone gives her rope cause she's pathetic but she's a fricking rat who uses that to her advantage. Any time she's called out she goes "no! its not MY fault! YOURE the monsters!" and the very second we're in her head she's revealed to be full of shit and she knows it
Nah, that's just the cartoonishly evil and dumb version of Amy in Ward. Worm-Amy is different.
Bonesaw and Panacea are my favorite characters. I just wish we got fanart of that scene where Riley is just really tired and completely forgoes the bonesaw persona to chug down coffee
Worm's been on my list of shit to read but I know jack shit about it outside of it involving superheroes and it dealing with the cruel reality of it all. Does it hold up, is it basic or is it just shlock like most dime a dozen web novels?
It's okay, but later arcs can get absolutely interminable. The fights feel very odd for the genre, they tend to stretch for extremely long periods of time, where most superhero fights tend to be short, brutal and highly kinetic.
Here, you get the feel of an MMO raid where no one is particularly committed.
you know what, I agree. I love Worm but the action tends to drag. This is why Pact isn't that great, it's basically all combat
Honestly my favourite fight was when Coil tried to kill Skitter by shooting her in the chest and dumping her into a burning house, and then shooting at the fricking windows. That whole thing felt pretty intense compared to just about everything else.
it's schlock, maybe you ran into worse but it's just misery porn. I cant even recommend to you a siingle fanfic in it that's good and I've read quite a few. the best one is so I woke up as a dungeon, now what. it has some awful boring chapters too but at least it has some good shit to contrast all the boring edge slop.
So you have read through this enormously long novel, and after that even looked up many fanfics of it, and you hate it all.
Why do you do this to yourself, Anon? Why do you spend all your time on "boring edge slop"?
Go outside, feel the wind, see the clouds, do things you actually like, read things you actually like. Noone is keeping you hostage. You're free.
I've been reading fanfiction since I was 10. Generally speaking anon, I can tell you right now that you are right in general, but I am in my 30s, not my late teens. I work, I take care of my family, and I have little time but to do physical labor to the sound of text to speech in my ear. Reading long fics means I don't have to sit there fricking with my phone. the story just keeps on trucking. I made a thread about this on /fanfic/ but worm is just a source of easily searchable fics. for a while that was enjoyable, but the more focus they put on the nazi shit the less I can tolerate it, and the isekai stories have their own problems.
If you want a long story I consider to be good search "a witch in broad daylight". worm though is just not. it's got good characters I want more of, but I am not going to bother writing in it, and I'm not able to recommend any particular fic. In any case I know which fics I like because I will reread them.
>If you want a long story I consider to be good search "a witch in broad daylight"
>A Witch in Broad Daylight is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Adventure/Comedy/Horror Alternate Universe Fic
maybe you just have utterly shit taste, anon
>I judge books by their cover
curious, you want advice from someone who reads stuff and has more information to work with than you, but when you don't get the answer you like this is the result.
It's better than sky by the way.
I'm certainly going to judge MLP fanfiction as an unacceptable territory.
your loss, reddit
cute joke. There's no point in fascinating characters if there's no payoff,
this anon goes over it well enough.
>There's no point in fascinating characters if there's no payoff
There's a big fricking payoff battle at the end of the world.
Were you the type of reader who couldn't follow Khepri's decaying narrative?
Anon I'm sorry you are 12 but no, a huge battle with lazer beams is not actually a payoff, otherwise episode 1 of starwars would be regarded as a great film equivalent to the first starwars.
The payoff of an interesting character is in the writing not the special effects, and given worm is only writing it's a poor showing that the characters in question don't develop in any meaningful way over the course of some 7000 pages. This is the problem with serials, they are rarely EVER written well because of this issue.
The character payoff WAS Khepri.
Taylor deciding to mangle herself to take control was her character development. It was completing her slide to total amorality and surrendering to her inability to trust others with anything at all.
Anon thats not character development. in fact it would be safe to say taylor doesn't actually have a character at all because her attitudes and desires and needs are plastic all throughout the story.
To put it in more tangible terms for your low IQ, what exactly does taylor want in this scene? what lie is she overcoming about herself that helps her get what she wants? You can't answer because she's not developing, she doesn't have an emotional need, nor is mangling herself resulting in the destruction of what she wants. If she had ground up the undersidiers and everyone she knew in the fight and the story made that explicit, maybe you'd have a point, but that doesn't happen. Taylor isn't punished or rewarded, she just wins. there's a reason she's referred to as memetic escalation.
>what exactly does taylor want in this scene?
Everyone to work together.
>what lie is she overcoming about herself that helps her get what she wants?
Holy shit, there is more to character development than overcoming your own lies. There is more than one story in the world.
>Holy shit, there is more to character development than overcoming your own lies. There is more than one story in the world.
Dumber words have not been spoken.
Black person thinks the monomyth is all there is to storytelling. Your brain is rotted. Read a real book sometime. Instead of MLP fanfiction.
What do you mean by "payoff"? There are payoffs everywhere in Worm.
It's in Ward that the story goes literally nowhere, zero resolution for Amy - Vicky conflict, basically every character ends at the same point they started, etc.
I would argue the same for most of worm too. There's really not much of anything satisfying to me. admittedly, I don't like tragedy, but even among tragedy it's pretty sloppy.
Just because things don't get better doesn't mean there's no payoff.
Things can get worse in payoffs.
again, for that to work the character has to be doing the wrong thing, see
shut up bucket head
You're the bucket headed homosexual here otherwise you would realize you're talking to two different people.
>MUH TAGLINE
Okay, and he failed at that lol.
Shooting Aster was "literally the wrong thing to do" and yet the narrative never once punishes her for this. Like, come on Black person, THEO IS RIGHT THERE. He doesn't even call her out for it, he doesn't attack her, he doesn't try and get revenge for his sister during GMorning, thus spoiling her attempts to save the world, etc.
If you think at any point Taylor's bad actions result in her losing anything of narrative significance you weren't paying attention at all.
>zero resolution for Amy - Vicky conflict
There was resolution. Amy accepted she ruins everything she touches and decides to frick off forever for real this time, and Victoria stopped looking for an excuse to commit sororicide.
honestly I really like what Ward has to say about forgiveness. Forgiveness isn't something Victoria could have gotten from Amy. If Amy was dead at the beginning of the story Victoria would have still had to get over it by herself. She learns to accept what happened to her and comes to terms with it.
Amy, on the other hand, doesn't reach that because she refuses to look inward. Amy blames everything on other people and outside factors. That's also why Amy makes such bad choices all the time, because her rationale is "welp, this is out of my hands. I can't be held responsible so the horrors I commit aren't my problem".
(You're talking to at least 2 different anons here. I'm
but not the other posts)
It just reminded me of something I often see with video game players, a person puts in perhaps over one thousand hours of playtime into a game, sacrificing all these hours from his life that he'll never get back, and yet he only ever describes his experience in negative terms - he's trapped, he hates it but can't escape!
And the negativity born from this bleeds over into other areas of his life, so he begins down a spiral of vitriol towards any random thing, such as other entertainment media, or even people around him in real life.
Then I'd want to shake him by his shoulders so he'd fall out of this routine and do literally anything else, either try some random other games (ideally finite and short ones) or seek some other thing entirely.
oh dont worry I'm more than capable of dropping stuff. I sunk just as many hours into x4 but now refuse to play the genre.
to me, I am always looking for stories that make me feel good. A witch in broad daylight is easily the gold standard. I've listened to it close to 25 times. It's intensely enjoyable with satisfying simple character arcs. I want more like it but don't know where to look. the latest worm fic I dipped my toes into almost had 80% of its promis but it ruined it about 2 arcs in.
Are there any specific TTS engines you use for this or just whatever's already on your phone?
I bought a custom voice called rosie from acapela group's app. It's not perfect but it's much better than the stock israelitegle voices.
It has worms problem of interludes but without characters I give a shit about. the ones with the king are good but most of the interludes are actually really bad or edgy trash. it makes for hard listening. I'd prefer characters find out these things first hand. the chapters that focus on the town and taylor are all 9/10 but the interludes generally are hit and miss.
>fanfiction
What the frick does this have to do with the actual story
>so I woke up as a dungeon, now what
You can't recommend this one? Really? It's barely a Worm fanfic at all and instead a really intricate and elaborate dungeon-core setting of the author's design. Quite frankly the world building is immensely satisfying and if Aku-Dono was smart she would just rewrite the story so Taylor isn't from Worm and is just a generic isekai and go from there, because hot damn, I'd rather have this be an original web serial than Worm itself.
Burn the coal, pay the toll
Ugh, the mods on Space Battles are your typical 'This website has a no hugbox rule....except when the ideas hurt our delicate progressive sensibilities in which case frick you'. It's kind of odd to me how disconnected that message is on there. Like, you'll have stories about Taylor just being as fricking gay as possible, lezzing out with anything with breasts, but you'll have other stories where an adult (Yang from RWBY) does a burlesque show (only by mention, it doesn't go into sordid detail) and suddenly the fricking hammer comes down, because 'muh minors' or some shit.
I hate them so much.
Worm 100% suffers from Naruto syndrome as well. The author creates some really interesting side characters, with deep backstories and motivations, but because Taylor can barely be bothered to give a shit about them we don't see any of it.
unfortunately with /fanfic/ shadowbanned the state of discussion of fan writings will never get better. its always going to be in pozzed forums like SB and SV. Ganker regularly shoas threads about fanfics as well.
It's really good. Huge universe with a frickton of fascinating characters and creative uses of powers. I'd say it's hard to read any other superhero story when you've read Worm... besides Worm fanfics.
It's the novel version of a rock rolling downhill.
which is a better ttrpg party, Breakthrough or Undersiders?
Parian is fricking saikou character design that worm doesn't deserve
In what sense? If we're talking "Which party is closest to being played by real players?" The answer is the Undersiders. Selfish dickheads that occasionally do good is peak player character.
If the question is "Which of these groups would make for a better cast of characters to play in a TTRPG?" I would probably say Breakthrough. The Undersiders are kind of good at one thing, whereas Breakthrough is a lot more like a traditional party with all the bases covered.
the moral of worm is that taylor's means weren't justified by the end and she became what she hated. She even says if she could do it different she would
that's not enough. there needs to have been a course of action taylor could have taken to get what she wants, even if the course of action is a mental one. and if she doesn't follow that logic, she can't get what she wants.
monowhat now? its hardly the only way to write a story, but you are talking specifically about writing iinteresting characters with payoff, when you are admitting objectively that there's no payoff, and others already outlined exactly how that happened. Taylor may be the most likable of the characters but her needs are hardly consistent through out any of the story.
Anon the problem is keeping that tone in the face of so much death and destruction by the enemies makes it obvious the protagonists are immoral and shifts the genre from noble bright to grim bright.
>Anon the problem is keeping that tone in the face of so much death and destruction by the enemies ... and shifts the genre from noble bright to grim bright.
Maybe, but the entire point is they have to keep working towards that brighter future regardless.
Otherwise, that Death and Destruction is just going to overwhelm and subsume them.
Hell, the entire conflict between One-for-All and All-for-One is whether it is better to suffer as the noble Hero for the sake of others, or become the Demon King just for one's self.
>Maybe, but the entire point is they have to keep working towards that brighter future regardless.
>Otherwise, that Death and Destruction is just going to overwhelm and subsume them.
they are taking actions that explicitly proliferate death and destruction and wrapping it in a pretty "we saved him bros, we did it" bow. it would be one thing if this was in a characters past or something and we see the character slowly work hard to make up for their mistakes, but that doesn't happen, instead because of the nature of these fights being a climax the protagonist is talking them down in the middle of them murdering people, placing the safety of the villain above that of infants. If your daughter was killed because of this would you really say the shit coming out of your mouth right now? There's a reason 3dpd lap up this trash anon.
yeah my favorite idea for a joke ending to Hereo Aca is "And then Dabi tripped over his feet, went supercritical and blasted Tokyo off the map."
>but you are talking specifically about writing iinteresting characters with payoff, when you are admitting objectively that there's no payoff
Holy shit Black person you are talking to yourself and not addressing a single point of mine at all.
I'm not the one who posted the claim that worm does have payoff and if you are not the one who admitted it doesn't It's not my problem if you jumped in to defend the point anyway.
No? I'm going to call you out on this one anon. Wildbow wrote a character who *should* have been an unreliable narrator, who *should* have been unjustified in a bunch of her choices narratively....except, her actions literally led to her saving trillions of humans from extinction precisely because she was the person she started the story as, a bullied control freak desperate to have everything work the way she thinks it should.
The issue is, Wildbow throws in that line at the end where she shows all these regrets, but narratively we see she was totally right all the fricking time. Their was no misunderstanding on her part, the world really was as unfair and corrupt as she thought it was.
Her and Cauldron sharing the same duality (especially with her and Alexandria basically being mirrors of each other) was great, and one of the more clever things in the story, but it's ruined because unlike Cauldron, Taylor's brand of nonsense is proven justified. Her regrets might work for her as a character, but they sure don't establish a great moral for the story itself.
The real takeaway moral from Worm is that the ends totally do justify the means if the ends are big enough.
I wouldnt say its particularly clever at all imho. while it is the scaffolding for a good narrative, the idea of making a character be a foil but use the same powerset is tride and true. Particularly if that source of power is yucky, like mind control or reality warping.
shooting a baby in the head was literally the wrong thing to do. She's wrong all the damn time and makes tons of mistakes and acts like a fricking crazy person. Like yes, she saves the day, but she did it the wrong way. The tagline of the series is literally "Doing the Wrong Thing For the Right Reasons"
again, see
doing the wrong thing and having it work is bad writing from a character payoff perspective. going against the need of a character is supposed to result in a backstep for what the character wants.
I disagree
then you are wrong.
Genuine room temperature IQ
no u.
welp, I'm off to work and this thread is almost at 300 anyway.
reminder to all of you morons to post on /fanfic/ and stop ignoring the smug e-girl., I am tired of having to use space shitters to read fic discussion and while we squabble I would take this 1000 days over even one more day reading some subhuman's opinion on why hazel potter is a girlboss for sticking it to those biggots.
Can we all agree that alt-power fics are trash? Because they are. It doesn't help that like 90% of fics advertised as crossovers are an OC in a Taylor suit with a power from another series.
Yes, most of the homosexual writers on Space Battles or SV just write TINO alt power garbage, with lesbian shipping, because they're bottom of the barrel gays fishing for easy wins.
Hilariously, the few people who are good at writing a proper Taylor and co. are also MASSIVE power hungry shitters (looks at that homosexual Ridtom). The only reason I stick around is for the odd gem in the rough.
>Ridtom
What did he do?
Ridtom, and a bunch of other prolific Worm/Ward authors, are all part of the Gaylor Discord, which is a Discord that revels in writing about, justifying, or otherwise pushing online the idea that Taylor is gay. The premise of this Discord is already kind wtf, but it's the internal, under the hood shit that it does that's the real problem. You see, just like all other Lefty Discords its real use is to push prominent members into positions of power (petty as it is) and to abuse it for all it is worth.
Now, Ridtom isn't necessarily the biggest Gaylor poster (Ridtom is a Vicky stan), but it's his connection to this Discord, and now Space Battles moderators (He's Amicus) that is where issues are starting to show up. Space Battles used to have a fairly broad range of moderator types, being a Vs./Debate board, but over time the moderators have become increasingly Reddit tier, and people like Ridtom are the next generation of the take over.
Here's an example. It used to be on Space Battles that words like moronic or reeeeeee, or other typical internet lingo were mildly accepted (you couldn't use it to attack others, but it was okay to use it in the abstract) and there were moderators that defended it. Now though, with the newer crop of moderators, many of whom are part of the Gaylor, or other groups pushing Lefty topics, a board that was mostly hands off has become increasingly homosexual, of which Ridtom is a symptom of.
If you're a popular Lefty author you can get away with a lot more shit than someone who doesn't tow the party line. Ridtom isn't the only one of course, their are many more.
Basically I'm b***hing about watching Space Battles turn into yet another cesspit of a forum, and b***hing at the obvious bad actors taking part in it.
Ooof, I knew a few posters who were disliked by 'The Community' who had that treatment. I assume just like them no moderator ever called the other party out on their bullshit?
>Ooof, I knew a few posters who were disliked by 'The Community' who had that treatment.
It wasn't even "The Community," just the one Eldritch British butthole.
Ridtom doesn't seem to be in Gaylor, though. At least, Discord doesn't show him being in there. If anything, from what I heard the vague author group Ridtom is part of has this vague distate for Gaylor, mostly because of how much Gaylor likes their Amy/Victoria shit, down to actual consistent argumentation in favor of incest.
He and the group certainly are very lefty though.
I prefer dykeshit but in Taylor's case it's a consistant red flag that the writing is about to nose dive even if that's unusual compared to normal isekai. Most likely it being linked to some shitcord cabal is a valid reason.
While I liked the writing in these and how it used the characters neither could escape the fact that it was still brockton bay and i still didnt care what happens to it because its 100% some demented characture of an author unintentionally creating a glowop.
Shit UP buckethead
Hey anon, maybe you're right, I only really got the vague impression he was part of Gaylor from in-thread discussions, so fair enough if he isn't part of Gaylor. Maybe I was getting the other group and Gaylor mixed up? The rest of my post though, and the gist behind it, I stand by though. Ridtom and other Lefty types are shitting another site up, as they do, and it's bothersome to say the least.
Also, fricking kek at Gaylor having their own boiler plate argument for Amy/Victoria. At that point just fricking admit you're in it for the porn and not the romance.
Dykeshit is a tried and true part of fanfiction, but yes, Taylor dykeshit is pervasive and almost always a sign that the author is part of a little fetish club or is trying to get more readership via scissor shipping.
I think making Taylor gay specifically makes me mad because she literally has one romantic/sexual interaction in the whole fricking series, and it's an extremely masculine man, and yet, the gays will write whole fricking essays (or that one guy who wrote a fricking series of them) trying to justify how she's TOTALLY a closet lesbian you guys. Don't you know, she once described Laserdream and Lady Photon as having heart shaped faces, she must be a dyke ya'll.
Both of these are good, but every time I see Trailblazer I'm just reminded of how we could have had A Cloudy Path finish by now if it wasn't for homosexual 'reviewers'.
I'm sorry anon, I literally don't know what /fanfic/ is.
From what I heard Ridtom's specific group suffers from (honestly rightful) elitism regarding Spacebattles, but with political reasons being just a part, and with the major reason being Spacebattles being fricking moronic, as shown with the The Underside of Gotham committee comment incident.
>The Underside of Gotham committee comment incident.
the what
a bunch of morons were upset with the way a Worm/DC crossover fic had a fight go down, and a guy from that thread assembled the thread's criticism (which was moronic) and brought it to the Ao3 comments. It was 'waa the Undersiders should've won harder', but with undertones of extreme moronation and unsubtle demands to rewrite a prewritten story as to make the committee's suggestions work.
Anon that shit is hilariously one of the main reasons I hate sb. It's not enough to drop something they demand it be remade to fit their tastes.
>almost always a sign that the author is part of a little fetish club or is trying to get more readership via scissor shipping.
Reminds me of the Avatar Taylor quest on Spacebattles. At least for me, the lesbian stuff felt fetishistic.
You are not wrong but I still enjoy them for some reason.
How many of those fics claim that magic has been a thing in Worm from the very first cycle, but the entities were too stupid to realize that their powers worked by magic?
Intrepid and Trailblazer are good.
Alt power is trash primarily because you are stuck in brockton bay with it's awful forced power struggle between ~~*Kaiser permanente*~~ and honorary aryan booty blasters. The turf war between the two that dominates the beginning arc of every alt power fic destroys my interest in reading it.
>doing the wrong thing and having it work is bad writing from a character payoff perspective
Not if you're trying to make your character become a worse person.
Taylor had to completely shed her morality to win. She won, and the cost was her sanity and every other goal she ever set for herself being permanently revoked. By all rights she would have paid for it all with her death, but instead she just gets to be a friendless pariah of another world and try to figure stuff out without any reward beyond permitted life.
>doing the wrong thing and having it work is bad writing from a character payoff perspective.
Nonsense
>going against the need of a character is supposed to result in a backstep for what the character wants.
This Black person acting like there is only one way to write a story. Nah bro.
As a different anon let me break down a clear thematic narrative arc. Taylor and The Queen Administrator.
At the beginning of the story Taylor is a girl who has suffered from trauma in her life this trauma causes her to seek control and thematically manifests as QA.
Despite this Taylor wants to be a good person, she wants to be a hero and do good for those around her, yet at every step in the story she makes choices that while materially successful compromise that ideal of who she wanted to be and help her develop her powers.
Khepri is the final stage of this chain of moral compromise, a final break with morality and the dominance of the QA over Taylor.
Which after the day is saved can only end with her getting a bullet in the head as the ultimate consequence, but she did in fact save the world so instead of oblivion her cost is lifelong penance via being forced to basically start her life over with a lack of control, the trauma is still there but the power is gone and she is going to have to live with it.
Anon you have yet to establish any sort of emotional need tailor left unfulfilled that could have gotten her what she wanted. Without it it's just suffering porn, which is exactly how everyone described worm in this thread.
Basically any point where she could of gone to the Protectorate of her own volition and let someone else handle the situation instead of compromising her morals, yeah things are materially better off with her acting how she did and are better for her person but were all morally corrosive.
However I fully admit my own moral biases here as a consider morality at risk of oblivion as inherently more just than concessions for survival. Better to be a Martyr than a Monster and all that.
Anon that is not a need. A need is internal not external. It's something the hero needs to figure out about herself if shes going to get what she wants.
>go to the protectorate
FfA hahahahah for fricks sake anon you dont get it at all.
Ignoring morality and Taylor for a moment, I'm not really sure why villains outnumber heroes so much. I've never seen any evidence that the Protectorate doesn't pay well or have good benefits, and as shown with Assault, even notorious criminals can get work. Becoming a parahuman is awful, but it can also be an automatic out of poverty in exchange for basically becoming a celebrity-cop.
Intrinsically it would be because the protectorate are actually the bad guys. Rogues and the occasional villain team are the only real choice.
Why do violent psychopaths tend to become criminals instead of signing up for Blackwater or whatever to shoot brown people for better pay and somewhat higher risk?
Questionable decisionmaking, that's why.
>I'm not really sure why villains outnumber heroes so much.
setting aside the space whale frickery, their villains have a better hold over parahuman society so they have a better chance of recruiting people. even if their influence is growing weaker it still there.
should I read worm
i like reading wandering inn sometimes
if you got the time and are looking for a new obsession
Wait a second, there are people who think that killing Aster was a bad choice?
There are frickin tons of them.
How? What's their alternative? Let Aster be tortured by Gray Boy?
Save aster homosexual. Get gud. Be the big damn hero taylor wants to be
>Save Aster
How? Give me the sequence of action Taylor should have done at this point. Reminder that she had one second to make a snap decision with the S9 about to jump in a portal and disappear with Aster to do nightmarish things to her.
Couldnt give you any exact sequence of events because at that point things are so fricked in terms of how taylor operates and how the rest of the bay reacted to all this in the first place. Wilbrow cancer and misery porn at its finest. But a morally good taylor would have made the friends needed to make it work. That's how writing is supposed to work in the first place.
If you are instead making an arguement on philosophical grounds though, I would be forced to tell you to shut up bucket head.
I don't give a shit what decisions led to that exact situation.
Taylor has 1 second to do a snap decision with the S9 ready to leave the place with Aster, and all she has is a gun.
One option is to kill Aster. Another option is to let the S9 put Aster into eternal torture.
What is your third option?
Already told you.
You're moronic. Ever took an IQ test? You should, you might get some record for hitting a new, never-seen before low.
Yeah I got 120 or thereabouts. Real in person test.
moron
As far as I can tell, yes. Attempting to save someone and condemning them to hell in the process of failing is morally superior to a mercy kill for a lot of people.
Goodbye thread.
remember to look for the smug e-girl.
Goodbye everyone :,(
Thanks for Worm thread. Worm makes me happy. Remember when running Worm RPGs it's always more fun to go trigger event first, rather than going power first and working backwards from that.
imho its better to just have characters made in a system that isn;t shit and then playing in that system.
I'm sure you have lots of friends to play with
I used to but they all moved on to 5e and also banned all the classes I like to play in that system except sword ranger.
weird thing to admit(my group is actually fun) but okay bye
anon this website is anonymous and overall in this instance if you are afraid to "admit" things i have to question why you are here
I like amy's possible character arc but she was as a whole a rather unpleasant character in practice because of wilbrow.
She’s trans https://archiveofourown.org/works/46762264?view_full_work=true
AMY SUCKS
People who said that wildbow retconn’d Amy to be worse have never met a toxic lesbian who wants to frick because sure she’ll be nice before there literal on the pahebrape