Wednesday, 1 October 2025
Last year I had worked my way through a bunch of Manga. Most of which was, frankly. Not Good and not good in uninteresting ways, so there wasn't much to talk about, especially for me, the girl that doesn't talk much.
This year, I've picked up a whole bunch of different web fiction serials, I want to talk about a bunch of them, but we'll see how well I can keep it up.
And if I'm going to talk about web serials I might as well start with the big one that looms over the genre still, Worm by Wildblow, aaaaaaand, it was, well, okay? It's been like, at least half a year at this point since I finished it, talked about it with my partner a bunch who read it as a kid while it was coming out but I never really got around to sorting out my feelings on it fully. So... let's try?
Super hero fights as power puzzles is fun, but that eventually slips away into audience rugpulls and one-upping twists. The constant need to continually up the stakes with every plot arc is very Homestuck, but unlike Homestuck I don't think Worm does enough to justify it. There a couple of key points where personally, I feel like the story would have been better served with more quiet time or letting the stakes of the next arc be lower / different rather then every day is mortal peril in a new way day
For the longest time the heart of Worm is rooted in Taylor's POV and the city of Brockton is both the setting a sort of character itself. The more the narrative pulled away from either / both of those things, the lest interested I was to the point by the end I was regularly skipping or skimming through multiple chapters.
I will maintain everything to do with the Slaughthouse 9 arc (never mind bringing them back jesus why) was a mistake and a convenient marker for where the story really starts to come apart.
Also like, I don't really know how to begin to address how the story handles Race, Racism, Nazis, or Queerness. Uh... to say it handles it Badly feels like understating it. Maybe, if I'm generous some of this is just things aging badly in our modern nightmare times of resurgent nazism but... yeah. At the best possible reading, I'm inclined to think the author at time of writing was very uh... ignorant. And probably incurious. Which makes for putting all this stuff into your super hero power fantasy story a very... odd decision. But like I said, I don't even know how to begin to unpack all that. To do it justice would take more mental work then I can spare at the moment, I think
Over all though, I found reading Worm to be a very... interesting experience? Chapters were not as long as I was worried they would be! After trying to pick up works like Dorley Hall and Unjust Depths I had gotten the impression that serial fiction writers were putting out novellas every update as just like, a standard thing, which is an extremely intimidating prospect for trying to pick up something. Very glad now to know that was wrong, those are just outliers!!!
I see now how it became such a cult phenomena back in the day and why it still has such an active fan-base. When it has the juice, it has the fucking juice. Taylor and her friends are fun to see bounce off each other. The city they live and the struggles they have are compelling. It's uh, it's a shame about everything else!
When Worm was actively coming out serially, I completely missed the train. I was a Homestuck girlie and the internet circles I frequented were more focused on webcomics at the time. Which feels weird now in retrospective given how the two are effectively contemporary to each other? Big, extremely long productions with enthusiastic fan-bases and full of questionable writing decisions and unsustainable output levelsI feel like this is coming out really negative so let me just conclude with saying I enjoyed reading Worm more then I didn't. I'm not the type to power through books out of some sunk cost feeling. I will drop a motherfucker without even blinking rather then suffer through something. I just also. Feel all this about it too.
I feel like this is coming out really negative so let me just conclude with saying I enjoyed reading Worm more then I didn't. I'm not the type to power through books out of some sunk cost feeling. I will drop a motherfucker without even blinking rather then suffer through something. I just also. Feel all this about it too.
i have more serials I want to ramble, especially Team Butterfly Forever by open_sketch so... stay tuned? maybe? about but i'm making no commitments as to when or how often i do these besides wanting to get through my list before the end of year
