The Whole series could be summed up with either "There are Kid Villains, then everything goes From Bad To Worse" from the story perspective, or "And still it manages to pull it off" trope-wise.
And it really manages to pull it off, quite brilliantly. By a combination of good writing, good ideas, and the author playing to her strenghts and avoiding or taking advantage of her weaknesses.
Much like some other gimdark works, while the story has an overabundance of GRIMDARKNESS it's still an enjoyable and not depressing read.
There is very little Character Development aside from the Villain Protagonist and her Dragon/Lancer, but the issue is neatly avoided providing VillainEpisodes (well, mostly hero episodes since the perspective is flipped) which give some insight on the other characters. As an added bonus they do "pause" the very fast paced narrative without (usually) outright breaking it.
(Incidentally, said dragon/lancer seems the #1 candidate for a Slash Fic, and looks like the author is egging the slashers on too)
The whole work is almost a PinkBishoujoGhetto with a very good disguise. BUT again it pulls it off very well.
It's mainly due to the disparity in both depth and originality between the male and female parts of the cast. You could take any male kid superhero from another work, swap him with (almost) any male member of the cast and the story would be the same; definitely not so for large part of the female cast.
And it pulls it off leveraging a weakness. As I wrote above most characters are somewhat bidimensional (but it's difficult to notice thanks to the dedicated episodes), so it does not really matter. And since the shallowness of the character is done with (see above) it just works.
Somewhat related to the above, the male main lead is somewhat Sue-ish, to the point he's the only "pretty" male character with any kind of meaningful development,but so far he's been enough in the sidelines you do not notice it that much, and the author sometimes takes steps to avoid Sue-ing him too much.
Final verdict: Awesome, go read it. Good story and you might enjoy the meta analysis too.
From Bad To Worse, except it gets better
Worm is good evidence that Tropes Are Not Bad.
The Whole series could be summed up with either "There are Kid Villains, then everything goes From Bad To Worse" from the story perspective, or "And still it manages to pull it off" trope-wise.
And it really manages to pull it off, quite brilliantly. By a combination of good writing, good ideas, and the author playing to her strenghts and avoiding or taking advantage of her weaknesses.
Much like some other gimdark works, while the story has an overabundance of GRIMDARKNESS it's still an enjoyable and not depressing read.
There is very little Character Development aside from the Villain Protagonist and her Dragon/Lancer, but the issue is neatly avoided providing VillainEpisodes (well, mostly hero episodes since the perspective is flipped) which give some insight on the other characters. As an added bonus they do "pause" the very fast paced narrative without (usually) outright breaking it. (Incidentally, said dragon/lancer seems the #1 candidate for a Slash Fic, and looks like the author is egging the slashers on too)
The whole work is almost a PinkBishoujoGhetto with a very good disguise. BUT again it pulls it off very well. It's mainly due to the disparity in both depth and originality between the male and female parts of the cast. You could take any male kid superhero from another work, swap him with (almost) any male member of the cast and the story would be the same; definitely not so for large part of the female cast. And it pulls it off leveraging a weakness. As I wrote above most characters are somewhat bidimensional (but it's difficult to notice thanks to the dedicated episodes), so it does not really matter. And since the shallowness of the character is done with (see above) it just works.
Somewhat related to the above, the male main lead is somewhat Sue-ish, to the point he's the only "pretty" male character with any kind of meaningful development,but so far he's been enough in the sidelines you do not notice it that much, and the author sometimes takes steps to avoid Sue-ing him too much.
Final verdict: Awesome, go read it. Good story and you might enjoy the meta analysis too.