Worm

Hey at least Skitter didn't deliberately try to provoke her enemy into massacring a school.

It says outright in the text that Taylor has Protagonist Centered Morality, as a result of her bullying, during the Alexandria interaction

I'd agree with The Handle's view that Worm is indeed a "tragedies caused by people forced into their circumstances" sort of story.

Still, I find that the narrative seems to lean too hard towards sympathy for Taylor over her opponents (admittedly, the fact that the vast majority of it is from her viewpoint probably biases the narrative). Not having seen that many of Wildbow's comments, I'm uncertain whether he genuinely believes that Taylor's viewpoint is more sympathetic than her opponents', or whether he's trying to make a point that Taylor seems to have something of a martyr/persecution complex. The comments section is full of support for Taylor though.

How explicitly are we talking, here? The main impression left on me after the Alexandria interrogation was Taylor's constant "oh poor me I'm being bullied" thoughts. I don't recall Taylor doing any self-reflection on how her bullying experience has shaped her worldview, perhaps I may have missed it.

Edit: Oh, yes, speaking of asshole moves Taylor has pulled. Cherish. Taylor and Tattletale apparently managed to identify Cherish's location, and instead of putting her out of her misery, they load her brain up with fourteen psychos and drag her out into an even remoter location at sea. Yes, Cherish is a sadistic, sociopathic monster, but doing something like that is still crossing a line.

I've also realised that Tattletale grates on me because not only does she engage in the cruelest kind of psychological warfare, she clearly enjoys doing it. Yes, it's possibly the only way to weaponise her power, but she takes entirely too much joy in doing it, and she does it purely to stoke her ego and maintain her self-image as the smartest person in the room.

edited 13th Jun '15 11:50:56 AM by ashnazg

Yeah, fuck Taylor. I'd almost rather root for the Simurgh.

I liked Worm until the post-Behemoth timeskip. The way Wildbow handled the new Endbringers was just terrible.

edited 13th Jun '15 1:01:00 PM by GrandPrincePaulII

I'm not all the way through Worm yet, but I'm also getting pretty annoyed with Taylor as a viewpoint protagonist. Especially when it used one of my most hated tropes: a character makes a negative judgement about someone based on little-to-no evidence, but the story later shows their assessment was right all along.

I mean, all the reasons Armsmaster gave for not supporting Taylor's undercover work? Those were completely accurate; she had no chance of keeping her agenda secret from the Undersiders' boss, and committing a "harmless" bank robbery to maintain her cover did far more harm than good. Taylor decides the reason Armsmaster isn't supporting her is because he's a jealous prick who only cares about his reputation, but rather than portray this as her disparaging someone because he's saying things she doesn't want to hear, the story makes sure to show, beyond any doubt, that Armsmaster really is as much of a glory-seeking asshole as Taylor decided he was.

Er, that's more like Taylor making a way too accurate assessment due to authorial fiat, Death Note style. But from his dialogue and actions you could totally see that he was a jealous prick who only cared about reputation. He's pretty damn terrible at hiding it. The fact that his assessment is accurate is beside the point. He's not wrong, but he's an asshole.

The problem with Worm is the same with many other works with young protagonists. It treats bullying as the worst possible crime in the universe. That is definitely not the case in this universe and much less in Worm's.

I mean, after the Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse 9 shenanigans, I don't understand why the story focused so much on the bullying suffered by the protagonist when she had already seen and experienced worse things.

My personal theory is that this is a case of "Write what you know" going terribly wrong.

Well, bullying's a lot more personal.

As far as I am concerned, it's practically up there with rape in the list of things that can ruin a person's life in the very long term, and causes deep wounds which take a tremendous amount of work to heal, if ever.

Speaking of which, Tattletale's totally a bully, she just happens to be on "our" side, which incidentally demonstrates why, from the bully's perspective, it just doesn't seem such a terrible thing to do.

edited 13th Jun '15 2:22:50 PM by TheHandle

Yep I cringed at every time Tattletale used her power to tear apart someone. I Taylor was on the other side they would be archenemies.

Heh, I cheered. Her glee is infectious.

edited 16th Jun '15 5:30:36 AM by TheHandle

I remember when I first started reading it, I thought Tattletale was secretly Emma. I don't pay much attention to appearance descriptions so I missed the hair color thing.

Having finally finished the story, I feel relieved that the "Taylor is always right" impression doesn't carry on all the way through the series. It comes a bit late for my liking, but Taylor finally gets around to acknowledging that sometimes her actions are pretty extreme. Often necessary and justifiable, but still extreme.

Overall...honestly, despite the complaints about the series being dark, I felt that things went too well for the protagonists in many cases. Perhaps the partitioning of the story into explicit arcs exacerbated the impression, but it seems like every major problem ends up getting solved by Taylor coming up with some idea. And her solutions are often of the "wait, no one's thought to try that yet?" variety...her solutions work while others' ideas don't mostly due to protagonist fiat, it seems.

Still, many characters were memorable. Dragon is wonderful, and I have a liking for Number Man and Contessa (overpowered though their abilities might be). And Sveta breaks my heart.

That's why I love stories featuring historians or history buffs as protagonists. They avert this problem exactly by reducing present problems to previously solved ones. Long live Legend Of Galactic Heroes !

To be fair though, coming up with clever and unexpected ideas is very common in this series. It's like Jojos Bizarre Adventure with superheroes instead of Stands.

edited 20th Jun '15 3:26:16 PM by TheHandle

I've been watching a lot of JJBA, and it struck me how worm-y (by which I guess I mean non-traditional and intelligently applied) a lot of the stand powers are. It actually left me a little disappointed - after Worm places such an emphasis on teamwork and synergy, jojo ended up just being a long string of one-on-ones.

Anyway, back on topic, Dragon is indeed wonderful, and may be one of my favourite characters in anything, ever.

Oh, it bugged me how ineffectual Cauldron proved to be at the end, though. Maybe anvils had to be dropped about how shadowy conspiracies are bad, but come on, they've apparently been so competent at their operations for decades and suddenly become utter failures at the end?

(Though I suppose perhaps they may have been relying on Contessa's power to maintain their status quo, so once Scion's immunity to her power came into play, they got stuck. Surely they could have done better on the "force people to work together" front though.)

Yep Contessa was the real driving power behind Cauldron.

If it helps there was WoG on what a world without Cauldron (after Contessa killed Eden) would've been like and things would've been far worse without them, and that there were some minor things they were involved in that didn't come up in story but that they supposedly were unable to handle that they actually did. In the end they just got fucked over by people being immune to Contessa.

edited 10th Jul '15 8:55:09 PM by doineedaname

I finally finished worm today.

I read up to 22.2 in a 1 and a half week binge around April last year. I really enjoyed it, and more so stoped because of burn out than anything else.

I started up again a couple of weeks ago, but because of exams I stopped at 30.4 because I wanted to read all of the rest in one siting^note I'm not good at finishing the last bit of things sometimes, not because I don't enjoy them, but just because.

I thought overall Worm was an excellent story, the strongest parts for me lie in the worldbuilding on the universe and the Interludes. I am also quite fond of how realistically Grue and Taylor's relationship played out.

One thing about the story that hit me as a little strange as I was browsing the wiki pages on characters is Coil's power.

It's almost on the level of the Number Man or the Contessa in how useful it is, without the imminent combat applications. But the way it works is just on such a large scale.

If he'd lived when they started making portals into alternate universes, I wonder if it would have been possible to enter those split universes he creates. Could have given them a lot more manpower if it worked that way. Although I doubt it did considering Scion never used that power as far as I know.

edited 16th Nov '15 9:54:09 PM by 32ndfreeze

I'd say that Coil's power is incredibly useful, but still not quite at the same level as Contessa's or Number Man's, who basically have "I Win" buttons (Contessa almost literally, Number Man perhaps less so). Like Coil notes, he's vulnerable whenever he collapses one of the timelines (and he has to do that on a reasonably frequent basis in order for his power to be much use). Put him in a high-intensity situation and he won't be able to diverge the timelines fast enough...in fact, that sort of describes what took him out in the end.

(Of course, he could try to use his power to avoid precisely this kind of situation, but there's limits on how feasible that is.)

3timeline!Coil would be extremely powerful, but still not as powerful as Contessa. Contessa is just ridiculous.

If you think about it, Contessa's power is a little like what Coil's would be if he could do infinite timelines simultaneously. Except that she's not consciously experiencing every timeline, just the most favorable one.

edited 12th Dec '15 11:39:50 AM by storyyeller

And... I haven't even read that far but... does Skitter find a way around that?

What, Contessa? No.

As the story was going, I was fully expecting Skitter to defeat the Simurgh eventually.

The Endbringers are weird. It's never really explained what they are, though they do still appear in the vision of the timeline where Eden survived. Anyway, with the exception of Behemoth, none of them are killed, they just sort of stop attacking and team up with the heroes.

edited 12th Dec '15 1:41:15 PM by storyyeller