Worm

It's not "hardcore", à la "The Dark Knight Returns" or "Technolyze" or "Fallout Equestria", and more heavy, à la "The Wire" or "Metal Gear Solid 4" or "Ghost In The Shell". It's a big ball of emotional pain and wobbling painfully from one crisis to another with barely any time to recuperate or mend your wounds. You start with a protagonist getting Narutaru levels of bullying, and it keeps getting worse from there.

as long as it's not painfully exploitational or 'edgy'.

edited 23rd Nov '13 6:19:35 AM by joeyjojo

Nah, like, the things happening are edgy, but they're presented like the normal painful horror of daily life. There's no embellishment, no lingering, no revelling. It's surprisingly clean even when describing the most horrifying gorn.

Im on chapter 21 now, and.. at this point it is bothering me that Skitter is still able to have her bugs attack. Uhm. Anyone at all. Directly. She is the main villain of the city, and she has exactly one power. Everyone, down to non-powered grunts ought to be packing hard counters against insects at this point. It isn't like the typical cape costume would look /much/ sillier of you bug-proofed it. But so far, the only person to actually prepare to fight bugs is Defiance and his bugzapper. That said, it also struck me kind of hard that Taylor really is not pushing very hard on the non-combat uses of her power. She has area control of all insect life in a large area. That basically boils down to "I own the local ecosystem". Pest control is only scratching the surface.

She could start doing agriculture!

Agriculture, aquaculture, ecological remediation, landscaping, earthworks.. She is also a walking panopticon, which.. is exceedingly valuable. Without a block to her power, she ought to be able to find out nearly anything at all. In general, I would say that the story undersells the "utility" potential she logically has at the same time it oversells the combat potential - given what powered combat is like and the fact that the dragon and other good-guy tinkers exist, just about everyone that is not out-and out invulnerable really ought to have been wearing uniforms that were ABC-warfare standard compliant before she even arrived on the scene. But if that had been the case, her only combat move of any efficacy at all would have been "tie people up in spidersilk" Which would have stopped working pretty fast as people got issued solvents.

edited 24th Nov '13 11:53:30 AM by Izeintime

I find the fights in this series so tiresome, I just try to slog through them until I get to the interesting bits; the character moments, the plannings, the strategies, and so on. But the fights themselves feel like so much filler to me.

I have to disagree there, I find the fights to be some of the best parts of the series just for "So how's Taylor going to think her way out of this one?" factor.

So I just started reading this today. Pretty interesting so far, though I'm worried it will be too depressing from what I've heard.

Anyway, I have a feeling that Emma is secretly Tattletale.

Why do you think Emma's Tattletale? IIRC Emma has a completely different hair color than TT does.

edited 24th Nov '13 8:20:18 PM by doineedaname

I don't remember the hair color being mentioned, but I rarely pay attention to physical descriptions anyway. The reason I thought that was how Emma seemed to know exactly what to say to make her feel as bad as possible.

But it got jossed the very next section after I posted that. Oh well.

New prediction: Taylor will end up joining the Undersiders for real and accidently become the enemy of the protectorate. Even if she wanted to rat on them, Tattletale makes that pretty much impossible, but she'll probably quickly develop friendship anyway. Tattletale is really scary in general.

P.S. I'm at the end of arc 2 and only 2% through. I guess the arcs must get much longer as it goes. Homestuck Syndrome.

P.P.S I just had the fridge stuffing spoiled by looking at the last page. Guess I should stop doing that.

edited 24th Nov '13 9:28:15 PM by storyyeller

Tattletale's power is pretty scary, yeah.

As for Taylor not taking her power to its natural extreme and becoming an agriculture goddess, I had a similar thought about Rime the other day. She can create huge chunks of ice out of nowhere - is that ice fresh water? Why isn't she solving the world's water crisis?

Still, a certain fact that gets revealed much later on might explain this ( namely, that Shards are hard-wired for conflict and do the same thing to their hosts).

edited 24th Nov '13 9:57:26 PM by gaunt88

... and she meets with Armmaster. So that's how this is all going to go horribly wrong.

That's not even the start of it. Poor Colin.

... and there goes any possibility of Taylor turning in the Undersiders, though I'm surprised she maintained the delusion for so long.

Also new prediction: Bakuda blows up the city, probably posthumously.

Incidentally, by pure coincidence my roomate started reading it today too. But he reads faster than me and he said something really serious just happened.

That describes... a lot of chapters in Worm But I'm guessing I know the event he means.

Well assuming that it's not the Undersiders meeting Coil, then I won't be finding out tonight. I've been reading too much anyway.

Edit: Well just got up to the end of Arc 7. So I guess whatever my roommate was talking about is going to happen really soon. I've just been wondering whatever happened to Bukada and her bombs. They should have all gone off since Lung killed her, but there's no mention of that. Also the description of the nuke EMP pulse feels like Checkovs Gun.

edited 26th Nov '13 4:42:20 PM by storyyeller

Well I just finished Act 8. Man was that heavy. Wham Episode barely covers it. For some reason I couldn't help thinking of Pacific Rim though. Incidentally, I guess this is confirmation that they were able to disable Bakuda's deadman's switch somehow.

Nice to finally get an explanation of Coil's powers.

Not sure what you mean by "poor Colin" though. Initially, I thought you meant that he made a heroic sacrifice during the Kaiju fight, but nope he survived and turned out to be responsible for a bunch of the deaths. Not seeing any sympathy there.

I'm pretty sure that Bakuda was lying about the dead man switch. The closest she had to one was the mega bomb she built.

He's a genius autist who can't relate to normal people and desperately desires recognition and respect and love, Citizen Kane style, and who works his ass off for that harder than Rock Lee, and who's still destined to be surpassed by some other naturally gifted tinkers. He's a Jerkass Woobie. His life sucks so much.

edited 27th Nov '13 2:38:14 PM by TheHandle

Guess I haven't seen enough of Colin's perspective yet. So far, the only hints of that were Tattletale's speech to him after the penthouse party and Hana's interlude at the end of act 7.

Edit: Just got to Regent's chapter where he's controlling Sophia. Man is he scary.

Edit2: How is Night still alive? Didn't she get killed in the Endbringer attack? Also hope Tattlelive lives. I thought she was going to die during the Endbringer attack too, but this time seems even more serious. And the Slaughterhouse Nine might just have the power to kill off important people for real.

edited 29th Nov '13 7:18:27 PM by storyyeller

I just finished 16.13. Talk about a Wham Episode.

I think the comments are right that if this were a TV show, that'd be one of the season finales.

Hmm, considering what comes next I'd probably make it a mid-season finale, maybe. That part of the story is harder to break into equal "seasons" than what comes before and after.

edited 3rd Dec '13 8:54:30 PM by gaunt88

Maybe it could be told via flashbacks interspersed later on?

Actually, there's a few arcs later on from where you're at that might work well structured like that in our hypothetical Worm TV series. Start the season with Taylor surrendering to the PRT as a hook, then flash back to her setting it all up..