"So how much worse can this get? It can only get SO much worse than basically being sent to hell right? Oh wait. Guess it can. Time to stop because my heart is beatong too fast and I'm sweating from this writing". This is Pact. The worsening effect worm has every arc hits pact every two or three chapters. God damn
Worm feels tangible. Superman is a paragon, Batman is our fear of the dark, Spiderman is anyone who chooses to be a hero, Iron Man is the wrong person doing the right thing. Taylor is none of these, she is not a paragon or an avenger, not what we should be or what we want to be. She is reality.
Oh man, that's one of the big reasons i love Worm so much. It's a bit of a tick of mine (a really annoying one to my friends) to pick apart stories for "Why don't they just X?" and the answer is almost always because the author is human and has blocked me on Twitter. I totally get i'm the asshole here. But it's just really really nice to find a story that's nearly impervious to that kind of dissection, like Wildbow has just Impressed the hell out of me with this. I'm planning to read Twig next, i may dip into Ward because i'm curious but Worm had me almost Too invested, i binged it harder than i should have and i wanna chill a bit.
a further bit of insight to the chaos of Ward from the PoV of the Scion-as-Author comparison is the realization that the mutations, broken powers, and the other myriad results of shards now being, for lack of a better word, directionless, in Ward is the realisation that the comparison holds even more water now, because without a narrative/writer/directing force behind the action that is the shard now, Ward is a result of the pressurized lightning that was the Entities and Cauldrons meddling no longer having a target or a medium of control. Ward is less a story about humanity as labrats for a greater being, and more of humanity afte rthe death of god, and the loss of it's meaning or direction. Tl;dr Ward is about damaged people further being damaged, quite literally, by their power and in turn also damaging society around them, where Worm was about Humanity attempting to break a cycle, and unfortunately locking themselves into another, arguably worse, cycle.
I feel you dude. I'm trying to get my friends to read Worm too, and I'm worried they'll get turned off by the first few chapters. Especially because _I_ nearly got turned off by the first few chapters, when I didn't know that it was about superhumans. "Oh boy, another bullied character, boohoo." The last friend that I recommended it to read past that and got to 2.1, then stalled. Apparently he doesn't like reading on his phone. I've recommended some of my favourite webcomics to him, and I think he'll like those since he's into webcomics too, but it still sucks. I've got another friend that I think would really like it(he's into "unconventional superhero stories"), but he's an English Major and is always reading five books at any given moment, so he just doesn't have the time. I'm crossing my fingers hoping he'll check it out in the summer, but I'm worried I'll never have anyone to discuss this amazing series and universe with. My plan is to start him off on 3.6 with instructions to go back to the beginning when he finishes the chapter, as well as send him a whole bunch fanart to convince him. He's really into massive Godzilla monsters and Kaiju and the like, so I'll send him a bunch of Endbringer art. I've got loads saved to my phone. My only issue is figuring out a good time to enact my plan; there never seems to be a good moment. Okay, my actual biggest issue is that my friend has a bit of a phobia when it comes to biting and stinging insects. I'm not sure exactly how bad it is, but he described it as pretty severe. So what should I do? Should I not tell him, and hope that he doesn't get scared off by Taylor's power? Or should I warn him, and just hope that I've got him interested enough in the setting/premise that he's willing to look past it?
@@_modernmage Oh, terribly. He never said no, and he kept on saying that he would try to find time for it, but I think he was just too polite to shut me down entirely. I don't talk to him that much anymore because the internet in my town sucks and we can't play online with a decent fps. It sucks, because even without Worm, we've got a lot of common interests and we've known each other for two years now. He's a lot of fun to talk to, especially when you get him going on history/literature stuff. But he lives really far away and we're going to be attending different schools next semester, and it's hard to find a good time to talk to him because he has his own friends back home. So it's probably going to wind up being another lost friendship.
6:39 lol absolutely. The entire Worm was this sort of staircase of presenting the reader with a really f'd up situation, and you wonder if things could get any worse. And yes somehow they do every time. Even after the GM
@@JayManiac Can't you use that same reason for worm though? Why are the shards pinning people against one another? Because the writer wants to create conflict Or why does the aliens even exist in the first place? Because the writer just wanted to tell the story
@@friedfrog5447 That is, really, one of the problems with Worm. Wildbow wanted to tell a superhero story without all the bullshit justifications. And then came up with a bunch of bullshit justifications for his superhero story.
@@friedfrog5447 it's already answered in the story. The entities want to LEARN better uses for their powers, to get a better understanding of these concepts they picked up while travelling, which would help them with travelling, gathering resources and using LESS resources to function, a VARY daunting problem they had as a species. And what better environment for ANY creature, ESPECIALLY humans, to innovate in? Conflict and mortal danger, it's the best way to discover new ways to use these concepts like time, and stuff. Also, it's already shown to us that these creatures BY DEFAULT are drawn towards conflict, it's all they ever new, it's how they functioned before they started looking for new way to function without eating eachother. Also, as to WHY do they exist? Is there really a NEED for an explanation for the existence of another creature other than us in the VAST scope of the universe, let allow the MULTIVERSE? Not all alian stories EXPLAIN why there exists other creatures than us, that isn't even something WE can explain for OUR existence, outside of religious reasons(if you believe in religion, we were made by god, if you don't, then there really is not explanation for our existence other than, we exist). Most horror stories with other worldy creatures don't explain WHY they exist, but sometimes HOW, or how they affect US. That's not really a question.
What do you mean? That people have obviously been inspired and so has taken and used the idea themselves too? Or varients of it? To be honest, aliens testing humanity isn't an original idea, but the reasoning behind it is what is mostly original in Worm/Ward/Parahumans, and the fact that they give the humans and other species they test powers, but even that happens in older stories. The idea harkens all the way back to ancient literature, including the Bible, where sometimes people would be tested by God or other powerful beings, and there are even stories of people getting special privileges or even supernatural powers and if they used them wrong, they'd be punished. That wasn't to collect data, per say. Humans also test other species - animals - in some ways. Giving them tools and such sometimes.
Fun fact, the biggest bad of Worm actually makes an appearance in the very first arc, though you'd never realize it if you weren't looking. Honestly this fact makes me very, VERY concerned about what might be going on inside Nursery. Of course, I'm only about halfway through Arc 6, so I could be WAY off base here.
Re: the cosmic stuff: there are not 2 entities, there are an uncountable number of them spread through space and dimensions, and whenever each duo/trio of entities is done with a particular planet, they gather all the energy from that planet and all the hundreds of alternate dimension versions of it and cause an explosion that births *more* entities. The ones we see are the descendants of the original warrior/thinker pair. Them finding the fan-named abaddon is an astronomical statistical near-impossibility, because the universe is so uncomprehensibly vast, but is made possible by the fact that there are gazillions of those fuckers.
Part of what makes Worm and Ward so engrossing is the way each chapter ends with a hook, some little cliffhanger or insinuation that makes you desperate to know what happens next, it leaves questions to simmer for a while and then delivers a satisfying answer (a good example is with characters that are talked about long before appearing or whom we only know a bit about at first.)
That is what you get with serialized fiction. It happens basically all the time with stuff like Worm or Shades of Grey where each chapter has to entice the reader to come back in a couple weeks or months when the author posts the next one.
I love this video, and I had never really thought about what you bring up here before. That said - the trouble with Worm’s ultimate premise, with Scion and Eden and so on, is that it’s all spoilers. This is stuff you learn in-story, so you can’t tell it to someone who’s never read it to entice them into reading it. All you can do is cite genres ‘superhero dark young-adult’ or the ‘premise’ we’re given in the first couple of chapters: ‘Taylor suffers from bullying and has bug-control superpowers’.
>Beeing done with the story >implying you can be done with worm >implying everything you read after worm isnt just a 3 rate fanfiction in comparison nothing matters anymore help
@@JayManiac Pretty sure his point wasn't that the video spoils the story, but that using your premise to describe the story to a new reader wouldn't really work.
@@androkguz It IS the core to the story. Every major plot point comes from the actions of Eden and Zion. Even if the readers don't know it until very late in the story, that IS the core premise. Aliens showing up and giving powers to people who are likely to fight each other, with an end goal of devouring all of them after they show the aliens new ways to use those powers.
I also enjoyed Simurg related stuff for similar reasons. Her whole thing is hanging Checkov's guns around, allowing for making some plot lines more cathartic without concerns for plausibility: "she meddled to that end" kind of takes care of suspension of disbelief, allows drama to be theatrically "too perfect". Whish it was utilized more...
Talking about shards really just shouts spoilers without giving anything about what the story really is about. Almost nothing of the story is *actually* about the shards. It's about how the characters overcome obstacles that are placed before them. Shards are just background explanation. They only matter for Scion and that's really the last 10% or less of the novel.
While not the reason for the weaknesses another reason capes are not stronger is because more power means more data streaming to your brain a human brain which never evolved to handle such huge extra loads of data in the first place when taylor gets her shard unshackled it litteraly starts to fry her brain out so power out put limit is a safety feature so that you don't die a loophole to this would be a biotinker or any tinker with augmentation capabilties augmenys your brain enough to be handle it now that would be op
The reason the shards do what they do in story is to solve the heat death of the universe which TBH makes no sense if you spend 10 seconds thinking about why they haven't figured it out with Parallel universe hopping, time looping, and literal physical constants tinkering.
There are some videos where you can click off, read/watch the source material, and then come back to the video a couple hours later to finish it. This is not one of those videos.
Kind of inaccurate as the "premise" you give we literally don't learn about till 3/4 through the story, the initial premise that isn't a spoiler, is girl want to become a superhero, got her power after being bullied, decides to become a villain instead because one Hero was an asshole? (TBH Armmaster's actions seemed pretty reasonable up till the Leviathan arc which again was well after Taylor was going to switch sides.)
I'd probably say it's "Girl from a broken home is bullied so hard she get a creepy superpower, then tries and fails to be the hero she's always wanted to be."
Well I don't totally agree with you on all of the analysis. (I find outright meta narratives to be obnoxious sometimes "Hey! Hey didn't you realize you're reading a story? Lol screw you for being invested!") Also find the idea of suspension of disbelief to be not that hard in a superhero story (Maybe we're really going overboard with explaining this. Or maybe, JUST MAYBE... The world and its people are more complicated than just saying "Lol, cuz there'd be no story otherwise. :p") but I really liked the summary you gave. I haven't read Worm or Ward yet and I'm really excited to get to it now that I know what to expect. Nice work ^^
Power ratings in Worm are used primarily as engagement protocols for the PRT- for that kind of power, it’d probably depend on how it was used. At the very least, the use of it to escape situations would warrant a mover rating, and if backwards time travel is possible a thinker rating would be guaranteed as well.
I lovwd worm from the very first fanfic I read "Skitterdoc 2077" I continued to read fanfics until eventually I read worm, and I still loved it. Literally my only criticism is Wildbow failing to actually write Taylor as straight. Taylor does not ever come off as straight, ever. But I live the fanfiction of the story. I love seeing how terrible, awful relationships that make everyone worse for it happen and I want to see more of it.
I haven't finished Worm, I only got up to part way through Leviathan, but I still consider it one of my favorite stories. I've been meaning to go back and finish it, but I don't want to start over even though I should. There's an audiobook version posted, so I might just listen to that.
I couldn't agree more! I would just add that further evidence of Worm's perfect premise is the wealth of amazing fanfiction that it's spawned. Some of these fanfics are as good as Worm itself, and do nothing but *enhance* my appreciation for the source material: Weaver Nine, by Thinker6 (archiveofourown.org/works/2776352/chapters/6226538) Memories of a Simurgh Victim, by Thinker6 (archiveofourown.org/works/3140468/chapters/6809048) Slaughterhouse Nine Power Taylor: One-shots (archiveofourown.org/works/2778341/chapters/6231791)
The real suspension of disbelief moment in Worm is the "Locker Incident". I realize the Trigger Event is Taylor's 'call to adventure', but it is so improbable that it could Only be a plot by a third party influence. (In this case a Meta plot by the author).
There's a whole lot of stuff that happens in Worm that only happens because Wildbow wanted a crapsack world. The Locker is just one of the more blatant ones. And, really, most are a result of him just not doing the research more than anything else.
Nope. Despite all the lauding I get about Worm, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has better "creative" ability exploitation. The grimdark never strikes a cord in me and feels forced (maybe because I'm exposed to Cherish-esque influence daily, who knows). And despite it being a supposedly deconstruction of the superhero genre, the whole notion of grown men dressing in costumes is as stupid as Tattletale puts it, and so is the "parahumans should refrain from hurting each other mortally" rule. Only Coil and Number Man thinks of using sniper rifles because parahumans aren't supposed to be killed...(rolls eyes) yeah, you do know snipers are far from omnipotent otherwise we would only need snipers on our battlefields, right. Anyways. It's overrated to me.
I wonder what would happen if Panacea messed with Eidolon's Corona Pollentia? I don't think that would help anything(the opposite really), but the thought occurred to me while brainstorming.
You need to kill simurgh first and foremost to get anything done about killing endbringer. Without her masterminding any possibilities you could get pretty far on endbringer kill plan. Example: Dragon unchained....
Ey what? Spoilers man. The story never tells you anything about "Shards", "Aliens" or a cycle or whatever, not even until act 8, which is roughly where I'm at. Also I don't think the premise is that unusual. It's just the basic reality-grounded teenage-superpowers setting, like in X-Men fashion.
@@JayManiac Comes from people skipping the first minute or two as soon as they hear "hello, I'm X and my favorite yada yada" talk after just a few seconds in, assuming it's going to be sponsor advertisement or brownnosing, so you rather skip that instead of having to listen to it for an entire minute or two.
@@sephyrias883 gotcha, i didn't know that. Well i'm not gonna attack you for your watch style, but you can understand that when i dedicate a full section of script to a spoiler warning in the first ten seconds and still get comments like this it's a little annoying.
@@JayManiac I get your point and you're not really at fault, it has simply become a reflex of some sort after having watched thousands of videos with an irrelevant 1 minute intro or adds after the adds.
I tried to get into it but all those organisations and random words that mean something but expect me to open a wiki page make the story feel like a cage to read.
Al chile encontrar videos de Worm en español es ... Pues la comunidad en español es nula xd. Así que vengo a ver contenido en inglés a ver si le entiendo de alguna forma :'vvvvvv por qué no puse atención en clase de inglés papu :'b
I really love Worm and Ward, but it's a slog to get through and I have to take massive breaks just to get through the bullshit my favourite characters have to get through due to their own decisions.
@@thexenosaiyan Basically Tinkers powers when you stop to think about them, are held together by glue and ducktape. A lot of theme have their powers based off a theme rather than technical knowledge, for example Armmaster can do anything as long as he can make it portable, Bakuda can make "bombs" despite the fact that time bombs, Explosives, etc all have very different branches of physics and technical knowledge that aren't remotely comparable, but she can't branch out to different time stuff because its not a "bomb" which at this point is just "Thing that does a thing in an AOE when its set off" also in terms of how their powers work, based off what I said it seems to imply their shards just beam the knowledge of how to build a thing like a script kiddie, but other scenes seem to imply they have some craftsman understanding of how their own and others tinker tech works which contradicts the first point I made. (Like with Bakuda admiring the Birdcage like a fellow artist.) Second how the Tinker's tinker they basically have their shard break physics for them, they literally build things that if you gave instructions to a normal person step by step they couldn't because their shards fudge physics to make them work, which is why if they aren't maintained or "Reset" by their creators their gear breaks down and can't be mass produced, unless their shard magic's it to be mass produced (But in that case it becomes more a Thinker power.) All it does to the Reed Richards is useless problem is over specialize it and give an explanation for it that falls apart under inspection. Basically each Tinker is basically a Striker. Also I brought this up in another comment, but the Shards motives for giving people powers....makes no sense, how does giving people powers and watching them try to screw each other over help solve the heat death of the universe? If they can casually create Black Holes, Alter Time, Timeline Hop, Etc and that still won't work. (Which btw implies the energy that allows one to open a door to a parallel universe cost more than the offset of the free energy within that universe.) Then having what is existentially a game of Sims with Super Powers play out isn't going to do shit. I appreciate how intricate the Shard System is, but the inuniverse justification is just kinda wacky and only works on a metatextual level of authors and characters like this video implies, but I prefer more when the inuniverse explanation holds water, not the meta explanation. That make any sense?
1:19 Read it? No. But watch it? Absolutely. Especially if cute girls are involved. While I'm a huge fan of Worm fanfiction, I have never had any interest in reading the source material. While I love the characters, setting and power mechanics Wildbow created, I do not care for the story he chose to tell with them. It's much the same reason I mostly stay away from Warhammer 40k materials. I like certain aspects of it, but don't like the direction the creator's have chosen to go with it.
Re: the cosmic stuff: there are not 2 entities, there are an uncountable number of them spread through space and dimensions, and whenever each duo/trio of entities is done with a particular planet, they gather all the energy from that planet and all the hundreds of alternate dimension versions of it and cause an explosion that births *more* entities. The ones we see are the descendants of the original warrior/thinker pair. Them finding the fan-named abaddon is an astronomical statistical near-impossibility, because the universe is so uncomprehensibly vast, but is made possible by the fact that there are gazillions of those fuckers.
"Where will they go? Somewhere better? Somewhere worse? Could it even get any wor -- OH, oh God, yes it could!"
The whole Worm in one line.
Every work by this author in one line.
"So how much worse can this get? It can only get SO much worse than basically being sent to hell right? Oh wait. Guess it can. Time to stop because my heart is beatong too fast and I'm sweating from this writing".
This is Pact. The worsening effect worm has every arc hits pact every two or three chapters. God damn
EGGSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
*Nursery Flashbacks*
YES IT COULD
@@FlameHidden When it comes to Pact, I really hope the Demons win, I really do.
"Could it even get any worse? Oh god, yes it could..." The real premise of Worm
The idea of Tinkers is honestly the best to come out of the superhero/superpower genre in decades imo.
Tinkers are cool but thinkers are my favorite power class
The way Wildbow crafts each power genre is so beautiful
Sometimes i get so caught up in the ‘tinkers are terrible’ thing in the fandom that i forget they’re actually quite good
Worm feels tangible. Superman is a paragon, Batman is our fear of the dark, Spiderman is anyone who chooses to be a hero, Iron Man is the wrong person doing the right thing. Taylor is none of these, she is not a paragon or an avenger, not what we should be or what we want to be. She is reality.
yes, best comment
Exactly
She is also an angsty teenager that I don't want to read about.
@@Corgiॐ then don't loser
Except she has exactly zero ability for conflict resolution cause wildblow has a tenuous grasp on how humans interact
Oh man, that's one of the big reasons i love Worm so much. It's a bit of a tick of mine (a really annoying one to my friends) to pick apart stories for "Why don't they just X?" and the answer is almost always because the author is human and has blocked me on Twitter. I totally get i'm the asshole here.
But it's just really really nice to find a story that's nearly impervious to that kind of dissection, like Wildbow has just Impressed the hell out of me with this. I'm planning to read Twig next, i may dip into Ward because i'm curious but Worm had me almost Too invested, i binged it harder than i should have and i wanna chill a bit.
Have you already read pact because it is quite incredible to read about such a dreary magic system
a further bit of insight to the chaos of Ward from the PoV of the Scion-as-Author comparison is the realization that the mutations, broken powers, and the other myriad results of shards now being, for lack of a better word, directionless, in Ward is the realisation that the comparison holds even more water now, because without a narrative/writer/directing force behind the action that is the shard now, Ward is a result of the pressurized lightning that was the Entities and Cauldrons meddling no longer having a target or a medium of control. Ward is less a story about humanity as labrats for a greater being, and more of humanity afte rthe death of god, and the loss of it's meaning or direction.
Tl;dr Ward is about damaged people further being damaged, quite literally, by their power and in turn also damaging society around them, where Worm was about Humanity attempting to break a cycle, and unfortunately locking themselves into another, arguably worse, cycle.
It. Gets. Worse.
This sums up Worm in one sentence.
Also the name of a really good fanfic.
Damn, the parallel of Scion-to-author is a really interesting take. I swear this story gets better every time I hear someone's analysis.
Well, if you compare Scion to the author, would that mean Wildbow is hella depressed?
@@anirobrien7004 wildbow need therapy and everyone who read his works know that.
Yep. My boy need therapy. Because this story doesn't really make much sense at times?
None of my friends wanted to read past "Cranberry juice" they all tough it was to lame.
Feels bad
I feel you dude. I'm trying to get my friends to read Worm too, and I'm worried they'll get turned off by the first few chapters. Especially because _I_ nearly got turned off by the first few chapters, when I didn't know that it was about superhumans. "Oh boy, another bullied character, boohoo." The last friend that I recommended it to read past that and got to 2.1, then stalled. Apparently he doesn't like reading on his phone. I've recommended some of my favourite webcomics to him, and I think he'll like those since he's into webcomics too, but it still sucks. I've got another friend that I think would really like it(he's into "unconventional superhero stories"), but he's an English Major and is always reading five books at any given moment, so he just doesn't have the time. I'm crossing my fingers hoping he'll check it out in the summer, but I'm worried I'll never have anyone to discuss this amazing series and universe with. My plan is to start him off on 3.6 with instructions to go back to the beginning when he finishes the chapter, as well as send him a whole bunch fanart to convince him. He's really into massive Godzilla monsters and Kaiju and the like, so I'll send him a bunch of Endbringer art. I've got loads saved to my phone. My only issue is figuring out a good time to enact my plan; there never seems to be a good moment.
Okay, my actual biggest issue is that my friend has a bit of a phobia when it comes to biting and stinging insects. I'm not sure exactly how bad it is, but he described it as pretty severe. So what should I do? Should I not tell him, and hope that he doesn't get scared off by Taylor's power? Or should I warn him, and just hope that I've got him interested enough in the setting/premise that he's willing to look past it?
Don't hype it up to much that the only advice I can give you
@@dankm3m3s66 Um, a bit late for that. I think I've got him interested though. I'm actually sending him the chapter and fanart today. Wish me luck!
@@kieransaul2711 how did it go?
@@_modernmage Oh, terribly. He never said no, and he kept on saying that he would try to find time for it, but I think he was just too polite to shut me down entirely. I don't talk to him that much anymore because the internet in my town sucks and we can't play online with a decent fps. It sucks, because even without Worm, we've got a lot of common interests and we've known each other for two years now. He's a lot of fun to talk to, especially when you get him going on history/literature stuff. But he lives really far away and we're going to be attending different schools next semester, and it's hard to find a good time to talk to him because he has his own friends back home. So it's probably going to wind up being another lost friendship.
6:39 lol absolutely. The entire Worm was this sort of staircase of presenting the reader with a really f'd up situation, and you wonder if things could get any worse. And yes somehow they do every time. Even after the GM
Why does Superman have a Kryptonite weakness?
Me: To give his poor V.A. a couple of days off?
Because whoever's currently writing him can't figure out how to tell an interesting story without crippling Superman during the climax.
Finally someone is doing some good worm stuff on youtube
I'm flattered! I, too, noticed the startling and saddening lack of worm content here, and figured I'd give it my best shot, glad you enjoyed!
@@JayManiac I know right Ive looked around youtube and worm content is severly lacking.
@@JayManiac Can't you use that same reason for worm though? Why are the shards pinning people against one another? Because the writer wants to create conflict
Or why does the aliens even exist in the first place? Because the writer just wanted to tell the story
@@friedfrog5447 That is, really, one of the problems with Worm. Wildbow wanted to tell a superhero story without all the bullshit justifications. And then came up with a bunch of bullshit justifications for his superhero story.
@@friedfrog5447 it's already answered in the story.
The entities want to LEARN better uses for their powers, to get a better understanding of these concepts they picked up while travelling, which would help them with travelling, gathering resources and using LESS resources to function, a VARY daunting problem they had as a species.
And what better environment for ANY creature, ESPECIALLY humans, to innovate in? Conflict and mortal danger, it's the best way to discover new ways to use these concepts like time, and stuff.
Also, it's already shown to us that these creatures BY DEFAULT are drawn towards conflict, it's all they ever new, it's how they functioned before they started looking for new way to function without eating eachother.
Also, as to WHY do they exist? Is there really a NEED for an explanation for the existence of another creature other than us in the VAST scope of the universe, let allow the MULTIVERSE?
Not all alian stories EXPLAIN why there exists other creatures than us, that isn't even something WE can explain for OUR existence, outside of religious reasons(if you believe in religion, we were made by god, if you don't, then there really is not explanation for our existence other than, we exist).
Most horror stories with other worldy creatures don't explain WHY they exist, but sometimes HOW, or how they affect US.
That's not really a question.
Worm kinda ruined me. Now I see Entity experiments in almost every story I read/watch
Well they are multiversal...
What do you mean? That people have obviously been inspired and so has taken and used the idea themselves too? Or varients of it? To be honest, aliens testing humanity isn't an original idea, but the reasoning behind it is what is mostly original in Worm/Ward/Parahumans, and the fact that they give the humans and other species they test powers, but even that happens in older stories. The idea harkens all the way back to ancient literature, including the Bible, where sometimes people would be tested by God or other powerful beings, and there are even stories of people getting special privileges or even supernatural powers and if they used them wrong, they'd be punished. That wasn't to collect data, per say. Humans also test other species - animals - in some ways. Giving them tools and such sometimes.
@@Luka1180what he means is that now every story he sees, his brain goes "Huh, i bet a Entity is behind this"
Fun fact, the biggest bad of Worm actually makes an appearance in the very first arc, though you'd never realize it if you weren't looking.
Honestly this fact makes me very, VERY concerned about what might be going on inside Nursery. Of course, I'm only about halfway through Arc 6, so I could be WAY off base here.
Well yeah the first chapters about Taylor
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Yeah, even if nursery isn't the big bad, she still fucking scares me
I don't understand, could you elaborate please?
@@3bodYking99 Which part? Worm's big bad or Nursery? Because I was wrong about Nursery. She's still super disturbing, though
"Make friends with bugs. Each give is taylor made..." I see what you did there
"Hey, I wonder if shardnanigans have a place anywhere else in fantasy"
Ha, I'm pretty sure I got that reference
Re: the cosmic stuff: there are not 2 entities, there are an uncountable number of them spread through space and dimensions, and whenever each duo/trio of entities is done with a particular planet, they gather all the energy from that planet and all the hundreds of alternate dimension versions of it and cause an explosion that births *more* entities. The ones we see are the descendants of the original warrior/thinker pair. Them finding the fan-named abaddon is an astronomical statistical near-impossibility, because the universe is so uncomprehensibly vast, but is made possible by the fact that there are gazillions of those fuckers.
Part of what makes Worm and Ward so engrossing is the way each chapter ends with a hook, some little cliffhanger or insinuation that makes you desperate to know what happens next, it leaves questions to simmer for a while and then delivers a satisfying answer (a good example is with characters that are talked about long before appearing or whom we only know a bit about at first.)
That is what you get with serialized fiction. It happens basically all the time with stuff like Worm or Shades of Grey where each chapter has to entice the reader to come back in a couple weeks or months when the author posts the next one.
I love this video, and I had never really thought about what you bring up here before. That said - the trouble with Worm’s ultimate premise, with Scion and Eden and so on, is that it’s all spoilers. This is stuff you learn in-story, so you can’t tell it to someone who’s never read it to entice them into reading it. All you can do is cite genres ‘superhero dark young-adult’ or the ‘premise’ we’re given in the first couple of chapters: ‘Taylor suffers from bullying and has bug-control superpowers’.
>Beeing done with the story
>implying you can be done with worm
>implying everything you read after worm isnt just a 3 rate fanfiction in comparison
nothing matters anymore
help
Then you read Pact and Twig. Its not like the guy has stopped writing at least twice a week ever since he started this
A practical guide to evil
I mean if you use that description of the premise, it spoils the biggest revelation of the series
0:07
@@JayManiac Pretty sure his point wasn't that the video spoils the story, but that using your premise to describe the story to a new reader wouldn't really work.
That's not really the premise of worm anyway. That's the biggest reveal.
@@androkguz
It IS the core to the story. Every major plot point comes from the actions of Eden and Zion.
Even if the readers don't know it until very late in the story, that IS the core premise. Aliens showing up and giving powers to people who are likely to fight each other, with an end goal of devouring all of them after they show the aliens new ways to use those powers.
I remember reading the entirety of worm and getting soooo confused about that part. This dude explains it so well lol
Worm is the perfect tragedy with a perfectly tragic happy ending.
Correct.
Then there's Ward, which is just tragic.
wildbow is doc scratch confirmed
I also enjoyed Simurg related stuff for similar reasons. Her whole thing is hanging Checkov's guns around, allowing for making some plot lines more cathartic without concerns for plausibility: "she meddled to that end" kind of takes care of suspension of disbelief, allows drama to be theatrically "too perfect". Whish it was utilized more...
I must ask you one simple question good sir *leans in close to the mic* SB? SV? *pause* qq? Wait no take it back that's going to far!
why not all three?
SB cause of ryuugi
Why, I'm a fan of all sev- three! I mean three!.
Just started the Worm series , to me Worm is a lesson of how to get out of a hole by digging deeper.
Talking about shards really just shouts spoilers without giving anything about what the story really is about.
Almost nothing of the story is *actually* about the shards. It's about how the characters overcome obstacles that are placed before them.
Shards are just background explanation. They only matter for Scion and that's really the last 10% or less of the novel.
While not the reason for the weaknesses another reason capes are not stronger is because more power means more data streaming to your brain a human brain which never evolved to handle such huge extra loads of data in the first place when taylor gets her shard unshackled it litteraly starts to fry her brain out so power out put limit is a safety feature so that you don't die a loophole to this would be a biotinker or any tinker with augmentation capabilties augmenys your brain enough to be handle it now that would be op
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏i remember this one! it's very good
The reason the shards do what they do in story is to solve the heat death of the universe which TBH makes no sense if you spend 10 seconds thinking about why they haven't figured it out with Parallel universe hopping, time looping, and literal physical constants tinkering.
Shards are intelligence 100, wisdom zero. They have no creativity with the powers they have and use humans as a think tank
There still the Big Rip of the universe
nice interpretation !
Thank you!
I've now read Worm. This video is what made me read it. Thank you. Thank you so fucking much. It is now my favorite book.
There are some videos where you can click off, read/watch the source material, and then come back to the video a couple hours later to finish it.
This is not one of those videos.
All of the world building is amazing
"Alien Jesus" XD
Kind of inaccurate as the "premise" you give we literally don't learn about till 3/4 through the story, the initial premise that isn't a spoiler, is girl want to become a superhero, got her power after being bullied, decides to become a villain instead because one Hero was an asshole? (TBH Armmaster's actions seemed pretty reasonable up till the Leviathan arc which again was well after Taylor was going to switch sides.)
I'd probably say it's "Girl from a broken home is bullied so hard she get a creepy superpower, then tries and fails to be the hero she's always wanted to be."
It’s a nice premise but on Spacebattles it’s rampant and stall fics that are not different.
"Taylor made" hahaha
Well I don't totally agree with you on all of the analysis. (I find outright meta narratives to be obnoxious sometimes "Hey! Hey didn't you realize you're reading a story? Lol screw you for being invested!") Also find the idea of suspension of disbelief to be not that hard in a superhero story (Maybe we're really going overboard with explaining this. Or maybe, JUST MAYBE... The world and its people are more complicated than just saying "Lol, cuz there'd be no story otherwise. :p") but I really liked the summary you gave. I haven't read Worm or Ward yet and I'm really excited to get to it now that I know what to expect. Nice work ^^
What power classification would non-Manton Limited time travel be?
Power ratings in Worm are used primarily as engagement protocols for the PRT- for that kind of power, it’d probably depend on how it was used. At the very least, the use of it to escape situations would warrant a mover rating, and if backwards time travel is possible a thinker rating would be guaranteed as well.
Worms? Worms armageddon
Do you have any links to the discussions you mention around 4:50? I'd be intrigued to see them!
I lovwd worm from the very first fanfic I read "Skitterdoc 2077" I continued to read fanfics until eventually I read worm, and I still loved it. Literally my only criticism is Wildbow failing to actually write Taylor as straight. Taylor does not ever come off as straight, ever. But I live the fanfiction of the story. I love seeing how terrible, awful relationships that make everyone worse for it happen and I want to see more of it.
Alright I’ll read it I keep seeing it around but never heard anyone talk about it till now
DESTINATION.
AGREEMENT
i've never liked and subcribed so quick in ma life
nobledark
Good hi!
I haven't finished Worm, I only got up to part way through Leviathan, but I still consider it one of my favorite stories. I've been meaning to go back and finish it, but I don't want to start over even though I should. There's an audiobook version posted, so I might just listen to that.
i think the premis in worm is "everything and everyone is fucked".
I couldn't agree more! I would just add that further evidence of Worm's perfect premise is the wealth of amazing fanfiction that it's spawned. Some of these fanfics are as good as Worm itself, and do nothing but *enhance* my appreciation for the source material:
Weaver Nine, by Thinker6 (archiveofourown.org/works/2776352/chapters/6226538)
Memories of a Simurgh Victim, by Thinker6 (archiveofourown.org/works/3140468/chapters/6809048)
Slaughterhouse Nine Power Taylor: One-shots (archiveofourown.org/works/2778341/chapters/6231791)
great analysis !
I don't know what you mean by Best Premise, but Cinderella really is one of the eight basic plots you learn in creative writing.
Path to Good Stories
The real suspension of disbelief moment in Worm is the "Locker Incident".
I realize the Trigger Event is Taylor's 'call to adventure', but it is so improbable that it could Only be a plot by a third party influence. (In this case a Meta plot by the author).
There's a whole lot of stuff that happens in Worm that only happens because Wildbow wanted a crapsack world. The Locker is just one of the more blatant ones. And, really, most are a result of him just not doing the research more than anything else.
Have you read Choujin X? It's the closest thing I've seen to Worm in any medium right now.
Ward PSA when?
I am thinking of reading this series
I am currently reading this series
love it
lmfao
can heavily relate to taylor
Nope. Despite all the lauding I get about Worm, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has better "creative" ability exploitation. The grimdark never strikes a cord in me and feels forced (maybe because I'm exposed to Cherish-esque influence daily, who knows). And despite it being a supposedly deconstruction of the superhero genre, the whole notion of grown men dressing in costumes is as stupid as Tattletale puts it, and so is the "parahumans should refrain from hurting each other mortally" rule. Only Coil and Number Man thinks of using sniper rifles because parahumans aren't supposed to be killed...(rolls eyes) yeah, you do know snipers are far from omnipotent otherwise we would only need snipers on our battlefields, right.
Anyways. It's overrated to me.
Worm has good fanfics
What would be the easiest way for someone with knowledge of Worm canon to end the Endbringers?
Kill eidolon. Or exile him to another earth.
@@androkguz You can do nothing about the Endbringers themselves.
I wonder what would happen if Panacea messed with Eidolon's Corona Pollentia? I don't think that would help anything(the opposite really), but the thought occurred to me while brainstorming.
You need to kill simurgh first and foremost to get anything done about killing endbringer. Without her masterminding any possibilities you could get pretty far on endbringer kill plan. Example: Dragon unchained....
Chevalier can potentially cut an endbringer down to its core if given enough time
Hello its been years and I'm still reading the fic.haha i tried others but couldn't.
Im at a Limbo here.
I have read first arc but my god that is rad
Did I miss a page?
Ey what? Spoilers man. The story never tells you anything about "Shards", "Aliens" or a cycle or whatever, not even until act 8, which is roughly where I'm at.
Also I don't think the premise is that unusual. It's just the basic reality-grounded teenage-superpowers setting, like in X-Men fashion.
Second comment like this, 0:07 guys, it's not that hard
@@JayManiac
Comes from people skipping the first minute or two as soon as they hear "hello, I'm X and my favorite yada yada" talk after just a few seconds in, assuming it's going to be sponsor advertisement or brownnosing, so you rather skip that instead of having to listen to it for an entire minute or two.
@@sephyrias883 gotcha, i didn't know that. Well i'm not gonna attack you for your watch style, but you can understand that when i dedicate a full section of script to a spoiler warning in the first ten seconds and still get comments like this it's a little annoying.
@@JayManiac
I get your point and you're not really at fault, it has simply become a reflex of some sort after having watched thousands of videos with an irrelevant 1 minute intro or adds after the adds.
and i can also add you are blathering
True
I feel like you might not like Devil is a Part Timer.
Tailor made or Taylor made 🤔
I'll see myself out now.
: )
2:04
I tried to get into it but all those organisations and random words that mean something but expect me to open a wiki page make the story feel like a cage to read.
Everything gets explained later on in the story
th-cam.com/video/5sgY-i1JSJs/w-d-xo.html
Now, THAT is how you actually make a GOOD Worm.
Al chile encontrar videos de Worm en español es ... Pues la comunidad en español es nula xd.
Así que vengo a ver contenido en inglés a ver si le entiendo de alguna forma :'vvvvvv por qué no puse atención en clase de inglés papu :'b
Ha. "Taylor made"
I really love Worm and Ward, but it's a slog to get through and I have to take massive breaks just to get through the bullshit my favourite characters have to get through due to their own decisions.
and I can also add you have no hook cause you're too busy ranting
tbh Worm "solves"half of the plot holes in Super Hero Fiction by being arbitrary, it's like solving Noah's Ark problems by going "Well Magic."
What do you mean "by being arbitrary"?
@@thexenosaiyan Basically Tinkers powers when you stop to think about them, are held together by glue and ducktape. A lot of theme have their powers based off a theme rather than technical knowledge, for example Armmaster can do anything as long as he can make it portable, Bakuda can make "bombs" despite the fact that time bombs, Explosives, etc all have very different branches of physics and technical knowledge that aren't remotely comparable, but she can't branch out to different time stuff because its not a "bomb" which at this point is just "Thing that does a thing in an AOE when its set off" also in terms of how their powers work, based off what I said it seems to imply their shards just beam the knowledge of how to build a thing like a script kiddie, but other scenes seem to imply they have some craftsman understanding of how their own and others tinker tech works which contradicts the first point I made. (Like with Bakuda admiring the Birdcage like a fellow artist.)
Second how the Tinker's tinker they basically have their shard break physics for them, they literally build things that if you gave instructions to a normal person step by step they couldn't because their shards fudge physics to make them work, which is why if they aren't maintained or "Reset" by their creators their gear breaks down and can't be mass produced, unless their shard magic's it to be mass produced (But in that case it becomes more a Thinker power.) All it does to the Reed Richards is useless problem is over specialize it and give an explanation for it that falls apart under inspection. Basically each Tinker is basically a Striker.
Also I brought this up in another comment, but the Shards motives for giving people powers....makes no sense, how does giving people powers and watching them try to screw each other over help solve the heat death of the universe? If they can casually create Black Holes, Alter Time, Timeline Hop, Etc and that still won't work. (Which btw implies the energy that allows one to open a door to a parallel universe cost more than the offset of the free energy within that universe.) Then having what is existentially a game of Sims with Super Powers play out isn't going to do shit. I appreciate how intricate the Shard System is, but the inuniverse justification is just kinda wacky and only works on a metatextual level of authors and characters like this video implies, but I prefer more when the inuniverse explanation holds water, not the meta explanation.
That make any sense?
also I can add you are too taking too long
Did anyone else get banned form the worm discord ?
1:19 Read it? No. But watch it? Absolutely. Especially if cute girls are involved.
While I'm a huge fan of Worm fanfiction, I have never had any interest in reading the source material. While I love the characters, setting and power mechanics Wildbow created, I do not care for the story he chose to tell with them. It's much the same reason I mostly stay away from Warhammer 40k materials. I like certain aspects of it, but don't like the direction the creator's have chosen to go with it.
That's a terrible way to try to entice people to read. The logline you give spoils half the fuckin' story for folks who haven't read it.
Tbf he did say it had spoilers and he made a whole separate spoiler free video that he directs those who haven't read the book yet too.
Re: the cosmic stuff: there are not 2 entities, there are an uncountable number of them spread through space and dimensions, and whenever each duo/trio of entities is done with a particular planet, they gather all the energy from that planet and all the hundreds of alternate dimension versions of it and cause an explosion that births *more* entities. The ones we see are the descendants of the original warrior/thinker pair. Them finding the fan-named abaddon is an astronomical statistical near-impossibility, because the universe is so uncomprehensibly vast, but is made possible by the fact that there are gazillions of those fuckers.
But only two (or three if you want to include Abaddon) of them are relevant to the story.