Something I love about Worm is how well it subverts (or just avoids) the rugged individualism that a lot of superhero stories fall into. Even the most powerful beings (with the obvious exeption of truly inhuman entities like Zion or the enbringers) are beholden to society and its systems.
It's why the protectorate worked so well as a deconstruction of superheroes. It's not that any of them are too powerful and at risk of snapping like how most dark takes of superheroes are, it's that all of them are still fundamentally in a position of enforcing society's will. Someone like Miss Milita or Arms Master isn't that powerful from their shard abilities alone (at least in the broader context of the universe), but they wield massive amounts of power as given to them by society to enforce its laws through violence. And as we've seen from people like Miss Milita, they don't have the same power to go against society. Having superpowers doesn't allow you to escape the power that society has over people. Like, any member of the Wards could easily kill any prt director (prt directors who are secretly parahumans aside), but every prt director wields power over Wards, because of the societal power they have.
I think the best example of this Weaver as a probationary member of the Wards, vs Shadow Stalker as a probationary member of the Wards. Weaver is forced to move to a different city, given extremely strict rules to follow, and before the deal is made for her to join the Wards, she's in real danger of being put in the birdcage. Meanwhile, Shadow Stalker is never really restricted on her ability to commit the same type of violence she was committing as a vigilante, to the point where joining the Wards was basically a promotion for her. This is because the crimes that Shadow Stalker committed were fundamentally in service to the system, while Weaver/Skitter's crimes were all things that subverted the system's power. The reason why Skitter was treated as a more serious threat than any other teenage villain once she started holding territory, was that her crimes were a threat to the state's power.
The thing that makes the protectorate morally corrupt isn't that any of them have personally chosen evil. It's the much more subtle and realistic way all of them are fundamentally working to uphold society, and at higher levels they're complicacy in cauldron's crimes. Someone like Alexandria isn't someone actively trying to hurt people, she's someone whose decided that she's going to violently enforce everything wrong with society, up to protecting the practice of human experimentation, because she's so intwined in those systems.
It allows for plotlines that are so much more interesting than what most superhero stories are capable of, because when you break out of the mold of rugged individualism, you can have stories that are more complex than bad person wants to do bad and good person has to punch them. Like, Worm's awareness of systems power over people allows for such unique storylines. From large scale things like the effort to expose cauldron or the undersiders conquest of Brokton Bay, to small scale things like Foil leaving the Wards to be with Perian. Hell, even just the fact that Worm can have a character like Perian who is relatively low powered and rarely fights, but whose story is still relevant, and who still has an effect on the plot, is an example of what breaking from rugged individualism has done for Worm.
Also, it should be noted that the one time a character dose become the type of rugged individual whose will alone is what matters, with everyone else becoming irrelevant, it's when Taylor becomes Khepri, and it's shown to be fundamentally horrifying. Khepri is the one human in the plot of Worm who is above all societal systems, at it makes her something both extremely disturbing, and extremely tragic.
