Worm

It was mentioned before Leviathan showed up wasn't it? He wants to be able to get custody of his sister from his dug addicted mom and he needs a lot of money and a few other things to do so.

Yeah, yeah, it's a pity that he can't get that from the Wards. Also, his sister is a hilarious supervillain.

Man, saturday's epilogue was a bit of a roller-coaster ride, wasn't it?

I'm not even much of a shipper, but Dragon and Defiant finally getting their god-damn happy ending made my day. If there's a list of people who deserve to live happily ever after, those two (especially Dragon) would probably be at the very top.

Okay, Saturday's epilogue?

HELL yes. Dragon had one of the most brutal cases of Earn Your Happy Ending that I've seen for a while, and if there's anyone that deserved it, it's her. Defiant too, for that matter. Zeus to Hephaestus, heh. He started off as kind of a Jerkass, but by the end of the story, he's done some serious growing up. Good on him.

Also, Teacher is so boned.

Apparently, not quite so boned. I kept expecting/hoping for a dragon suit to come crashing through the wall like the kool-aid man during his epilogue.

Also, the very last chapter should be going up soon.

So it's over.

Taylor LIVES! I wish her luck in all her future endeavors.

edited 18th Nov '13 9:30:52 PM by rmctagg09

Hah, I knew it! Excellent, this pretty much deals with all of my remaining misgivings about the ending.

But, man, Grue has been dead all along? That makes a lot of the criticism he took in the comments for apparently chickening out of the final battle look pretty harsh.

With what Bonesaw did to him, it didn't surprise me that he'd be incapable of fighting after seeing her again.

Oh yeah, I never personally felt he chickened out. I thought that he'd been sort of oddly dropped from the story, but I could understand why he'd just go "nope" and shack up with Cozen.

Copy-pasted from the chapter comments:

And so ends Worm, 1,681,859 words long. It consists of 513,923 Interlude words (those not from Taylor’s perspective). These make up approximately 30.56% of the story. The average chapter is 5551 words. The average Interlude is 6589 words.

The longest chapter is Scarab 25.3 (11193 words). The shortest is Insinuation 2.1 (1382 words). The longest Interlude is 26 (10772 words). The shortest is Interlude 4 (2782 words).

The longest arc is Monarch (92008 words). The shortest is Gestation (17446 words). The arc with the most words per chapter is Sting (8511). The arc with the least is Gestation (2492).

So many words...

So would you say it was good? I'm early in it.

I'm up to colony. It has its ups and downs. It's still too grimdark and keeps missing out on clear opportunities to be fun and upbeat.

I'd say it's definitely worth reading those million-plus words As mentioned above, it's got great worldbuilding and some really inventive powers, as well as a really well set-up Myth Arc.

As for missing out on being fun and upbeat... well, YMMV, I guess. It's not completely grimdark, it has a few light-hearted moments here and there, but, well, it's supposed to be a somewhat grim story.

Personally, I think grim stories are only bad if they devolve into grimderp, ie bad things happening purely to show how terrible and edgy things are. Worm is far from that, IMO.

edited 20th Nov '13 4:12:49 AM by gaunt88

Yeah, but it's still Joss Whedon-esque in the misery it heaps on its characters. Also, the protagonist's love interest was literally Stuffed Into The Fridge.

edited 20th Nov '13 4:30:25 AM by TheHandle

Two things - one, probably should spoiler that.

Two, I disagree with that last point. That doesn't happen at all. Stuffed in the Fridge occurs when a love interest is created just to be killed to make the protagonist upset and motivate them. That's not the case here.

edited 20th Nov '13 4:32:49 AM by gaunt88

See, that's the problem with spoilers; I haven't gotten there yet. I meant the part where Bonesaw did her thing.

Bah, you're right, my mistake. I hate the spoiler-avoidance tango as well.

I'd certainly argue that the Bonesaw thing doesn't count as Stuffed into the Fridge in anything other than a surface, literal sense. For a start, it's Brian who gets the powerup from it, not Taylor.

One, you've made my spoilering moot by revealing exactly what was inside the spoilers. Two, I did say "the protagonist's love interest was literally stuffed into the fridge". Grue is not the protagonist. Brian got stuffed into the fridge. He survived it, but that's beside the point; his horroble suffering was used as a motivator for the protagonist.

Then again, anything involvng the Nine turns this into an Exploitation Tale full of gratuitous Gorn and Body Horror. Do we get to find out what Bonesaw's backstory is?

Yes.

I dunno, I think its impact on him was portrayed as more significant than its impact on Taylor. I mean, obviously, we saw a lot of it through Taylor's eyes, but she's the protagonist, and we don't count every case of something horrible happening to a protagonist's close acquaintances as Stuffed into the Fridge.

That's why it's a literal example, not an actual example, unless it counts as a Downplayed Trope.

Just how 'hardcore' is this series any way?

I was kind of looking for something light...