DEAR READER
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blake kathryn
Cosmic Funnies
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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JVL
@theartofmadeline
Not today Justin
Stranger Things
Today's Document
Xuebing Du
oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Love Begins
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Product Placement
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@piscoto
Grue didn't have powers, of course. Nothing a few smoke grenades couldn't make up for. Where'd he put them? Big burlap sack, the whole story he was carrying this thing. Taylor didn't notice? Well yeah, she was kind of distracted around him if you recall, this isn't so hard to understand.
Actually it was smoke coming out of his ears because he got so mad about the bureaucracy involved in adopting Aisha. No he still didn't have powers, he's just like that sometimes.
I updated Dada (https://archiveofourown.org/works/27616831/chapters/67564753), my worm fanfiction that's just a lot of wacky random things happening unless one's got an understanding of Worm, the Worm fandom, random things the author of Worm said on social media, Worm fanart, and fanfics I wrote nearly a decade ago. Should it still be ongoing? Probably not, but I really want to at least write a Slaughterhouse 9 arc. A very silly one. The Slaughterhouse 9 are a bunch of brand new evil blorbos here to shake up Brockton Bay when they arrive in mid Worm. To adjust for this already being a fanfic and the Slaughterhouse 9's presence already being expected, a second and superfluous group of Slaughterhouse 9 members has been added who are effectively posing the same threat to the Slaughterhouse 9 that the Slaughterhouse 9 pose to everyone else: a bunch of weirdos who are weirdly invested in them have arrived from out of town. And in this case out of fic, cos they're all references to one fic or another I've already written. Leading the team is Nice Guy as he appeared in Nice Guy's Amazing Adventures with those Chaps he met from the Slaughterhouse, my first fanfic if you willingly ignore all the worse ones I've written. And Live From Killington, the fan audio drama I made much later. The man wishes he was Jack Slash. Desperately. His showboating is ruined/supported by his ability to be ignored by those around him. The team's pet is a trans rendition of Crawler from #Too_Advanced, a forum quest thing where readers would write in and ask Crawler questions. It wasn't very good but it was pretty fun to do. Big horrible therian. Self proclaimed world's smallest kaiju. Feracity was a fanfic thing I wrote starring a nonbinary version of Night Hag, based off a random headcanon that since her fantastical powered up transformation is just a goth lady, that that's probably still a big change from normal. Night Hag's in DADA like this, albeit a bit more aware of post-Worm matters. And to help confuse matters, there's two versions of Damsel of Distress. One of the two, Ashley, is written like the Damsel from Distress Quest and Audacity, two forum quests I ran that were jokingly dubbed Kittius' play by post RPG by my friend Pita Enignma on account of my friend Kittius having a lot of wicked suggestions and helping form my impression of a much louder and more manic rendition of Damsel of Distress, based on her appearances and the information available before she became a main character in Ward. Ashley's appearance is based off of Creator Crash/Pabel and Nine's rendition of her, while her backstory is an exaggerated rendition of the one fans got to know and love. She's contrasted with her "sister" Daphne, herself inspired by various wild fanfiction versions of the character from so early on post Worm that they didn't even have her secret identity available. While she's from a no powers coffeeshop AU and she runs a small business, her personality hews closer to Ward's version of Damsel of Distress. What is their goal? What sinister plans do they have? Why are two of them shop window dummies? How have they gathered from multiple fanfictions to assail another? Find out in Dada, in amongst a sea of other absurd nonsense clogging the skeleton of a retelling of Worms tale of heroes and villains and escalating dramatic battles to save the world from madness and destruction.
holy shit it's you? you have a wonderful way with words! I wasn't around for the golden age of wormfic, but I have a pretty solid understanding of the fanfic tropes purely by the way you parody them. So excited!!
"looks like we need some heavy hammer-shaped objects to break through this Brute's defenses. but watch out! they deal damage to organic lifeforms!"
The malleable Weld:
Now, I will freely admit that many fics act like fixing the various issues faced in the story Worm would be very easy. And they wouldn't be. SI fics are often like this, though some of them show their work and lay their groundwork.
But on the other hand, in Worm, information is an incredibly potent weapon, and there's a lot of things I could tell the PRT/Protectorate and Cauldron that - if they believed me (and that's the key thing, innit?) - would go a long way to making resolving the problems faced by the various characters onscreen in worm a hell of a lot simpler.
(simple things aren't always easy).
Like, if I can get the PRT to listen, well, telling them that Max Anders is Kaisar is pretty useful information. The PRT doesn't inherently respect the "unwritten rules", though they don't reject them wildly, so they may not just arrest him, but they'll definitely keep a closer eye on Medhall. If I can convince someone like Piggot I'm not talking out of my ass, I can explain to them about Thomas Calvert being Coil and how his powers work, and ways around it - again, beating him isn't easy, but it is simplified, massively.
If I can tell them about Dinah being kidnapped and what that means, about the fact that getting Grue to switch sides could be done by helping him with his sister and protecting his family. If I can point out they could spare themselves a lot of issues with Rachel Lindt if they just let her train dogs and left her alone (and the full details of her 'murder' and why it's not really her fault... if they believed me)
There's a lot of ifs and there's gonna be more, but with knowledge of what did happen, and how, it's a lot easier to resolve a lot of problems.
I can tell Cauldron about what's really going on with Eidolon's powers and the Endbringers - actually resolving the Endbringers is not so simple, but the connection between Eidolon's Shard and the Endbringers alone provides vital information. If I can convince them. If I can convince them, I can tell them that beating Scion requires bullying into committing suicide, more or less (Admittedly, I'd need to finish reading the GM arcs to articulate the details properly, but still).
Amy and Vicky? That whole thing rides on rails. actually resolving Amy's myriad of issues is hard. Preventing things going the way they did? End-running 11h and 15.x is doable with a few conversations, in theory.
Siberian is unkillable? Tell the PRT about Manton and Siberian being a projection. Crawler? Tell them about how a Bakuda Bomb turned him to glass (admittedly, executing this idea will not be so simple, depending on access to Bakuda and her bombs but still). Jack Slash? Explain how his power cheats and - after you've managed to take out his biggest meatshields - send a whole lot of people with knife-proof armor and heavy weapons at him. All of those would not be easy to put into effect, true, but they're fairly simple solutions. Jack Slash never lost to normals before because he always has his fellow S9 capes around him to cover his ass if someone gets shotgun-happy, but once you get rid of the really hard to kill ones... I mean Shatterbird isn't a Brute. Bonesaw's got all her plagues in her, so that one's less simple, but I mean, Burnscar died to Parian of all people, if I recall correctly. Manny the Kinless? A little harder, but a big enough boom.
There'd be casualties, maybe a lot of them, but it could very well working pretty well.
Executing these information provided solutions is absolutely easier said than done. Getting anyone to believe you is absolutely easier said than done.
Worm, as a universe, has a lot of things going on, and 'fixing' the entire Wormverse would be hard, but I think some people ignore how much resolving these issues becomes so much simpler when you have the necessary information.
I think some people are so attached to the level of suckitude in the Wormverse that they forget a lot of that is authorial thumb-scaling (which is entirely valid and not at all a critique of Wildbow, to be clear) and how a lot of the rest is just... the protagonists lacking critical pieces of information.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not and never going to write an SI story, because that's just not a thing I personally have any interest in writing. Also, I don't think I would be able to convince anyone of anything all that well. Not without getting myself killed along the way.
finally starting Ward a good few months after finishing Worm!!
i've been putting it off because, truth be told, i wanted more Taylor. i know Ward isn't Worm 2, but i'm done brainstorming and theorizing over how the universe works or what happened to all the other characters.
expect a liveblog! or not, i might forget if the story gets particularly cash money
WORM ENDING SPOILERS
WORM ENDING SPOILERS
im aware the ending is supposed to be ambiguous right, like we don't know for sure if Taylor is really having a good time on Aleph or if she died or is in a coma.
here's my theory: so first of all, there's no mention of Glaistig Uaine taking the QA shard. sounds like something she'd do if Taylor died, no?
but the dream is almost way too clean. what, she's doing all fine and dandy on Aleph, suddenly not brain damaged? i'd love that but it just doesn't scream "unnecessary suffering" like Worm usually does.
my proposal: the Cherish treatment.
what if Taylor underwent Cherish style surgery and got turned into a brain-in-a-jar to be kept technically alive and hopefully prevent her catastrophically powerful shard from finding a new host? it happened to Butcher, didn't it? whoever made the prison (probably Bonesaw with some help) could've done a small mercy and implanted a nice dream there too, in contrast to the bullshit Cherish is suffering
worm mfs be like "yeah, i can turn God into a fine mist with this power"
Imagine having a pet insect in Brockton bay
Just staring at the vivarium deep into the dark hours of the night holding a roll of duct tape because you've heard that the undersiders are doing shit and you don't want skitter stealing your mantis.
i wonder if she was nice enough to let go of pet bugs. like surely the effort of breaking out of a vivarium and house outweighs the benefit of like, a single tarantula
It is worth considering that Eden and Zion are the only entities we really know the operating methodology of. Abbadon (the third one) we know nothing about how it experiments, as I gather, unless there's a WoG somewhere.
For all we know, Earth got the absolute worst pair of entities possible, the ones who are most cruel and dickish in the impacts their experiments have on the subjects.
Maybe other Entities don't prioritize conflict as much. Don't give powers to the traumatized. Maybe they even want to focus on cooperation.
Like, presumably, there's still eventually a 'blow up the planet in all universes' end of cycle, once the experiment is done, but what they do until they get there could vary wildly.
On the other hand, Eden and Zion could be the better end of the spectrum, and other entities subject their test subject species to much, much worse shit.
I headcanon Abaddon as a chill lowkey kinda guy who saved Earth on purpose. Unlikely but the idea grew on me.
Something that makes steam come out my ears, reflexively, is when I find a prose superhero work where the backcover pitch contains some variant of the assertion that "things are less clear cut than in the comic books" or "heroes and villains aren't as different as you've been lead to believe" or any variant thereof. I've been trying to curb this reflex, because this is A.) an idea that's present to some degree in every postmodern cape thing and B.) genuinely hard to phrase succinctly and gracefully for a general audience that doesn't have feldspar-and-quartz levels of familiarity with decades of genre inside baseball; the idea being worded in an insipid way on the back cover doesn't necessarily speak to the actual execution. But it does make me suspect that part of why I didn't bounce off Worm was that there was no marketing-team-generated descriptor on the back of the hard copy for me to roll my eyes at
the average superhero fiction fan probably only knows the character arcs for Skitter and one or two members of the Slaughterhouse Nine
making costumes out of spider silk call that tailor hebert
bonesaw cloning her chimeras call that the slaughtermouse nine
you ever think about how cool of a cape name skitter is. she could have been stuck with “bug” for all 30 arcs. man, she got fucking lucky dude
They wanted to go for a badass Pestilence but some brit had dibs on the name already
bro got turned into an underwater brain jar presumably
Trickster vs Ballistic (the full saga)
alright here's the full thing I have to cut it short because it's gonna be nagging me forever lol
Why not change places with Ballistic so he's the one flying head-first into a concrete wall?
ooh so that was actually my first idea (I even wanted Cody to drop in unexpectedly and un-splatter Ballistic off the wall for round 2)
turns out anything swapped by Trickster keeps its own momentum, so swapping with Ballistic would result in Trickster still moving at high speeds and crashing into a stationary ballistic who is now behind him
name a single thing taylor ever did even once
not explicitly depicted but she definitely tried to use bugs to clean her teeth so she could save time on doing something else. fish style just nibbling at the plaque
Hello! I am reading worm for the first(ish) time and decided to make some illustrations as I read! Here is some character illustrations from the first chapter.
I plan to post as I make these so stay tuned!
