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Strongly seconded. Sturgeon's law applies to web serials, in spades - most of them are terrible, and a very few are good. Worm is remarkably good. It starts out looking like a YA exploration of bullying in high school, with superpowers being a straightforward and unoriginal metaphor. This is wildly misleading. Like the best of any genre fiction, it takes the generic conventions... and then takes them seriously. What would it mean to live in a world where some people routinely laugh at the laws of physics, where unique powers mean every military or law enforcement action can quite plausibly run into an Outside Context Problem? Where there's no way to sort out who will trigger into superpowers before they do, and where there are existential threats requiring every available cape? So much fiction in this genre takes a world exactly like our own, but with superpowers. This author recognizes that a world which had superpowers in it... could never be a world exactly like our own. The story is grim, the story is dark, and yet there are occasional flickers of heroism, all the brighter for the contrast. The YA intro is an artifact of the unreliable viewpoint of the protagonist - a teenager who, often enough, thinks as teenagers tend to do. Or fails to think, also as teenagers tend to do. Strongly recommended.
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Jun 18, 2013 23:25
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Yeah, there's a pretty reliable quota of WTF in Worm - at least once a week, sometimes more often, something happens that leaves you thinking 'So how, exactly, do things get worse from here?' and at least once an arc something happens that fundamentally changes your understanding of the Wormverse. Still, the last time an Interlude carried that much main-plot advancement, rather than showing a new perspective... Regent's interlude? Never? There were a number of things I thought were possible, in this fictional universe - what came up tonight wasn't one of them. Which makes me think that there's something I'm missing about the implications, something that ties it more closely to the two-year precog out there. Ra's pretty strong. Wish it updated regularly. Worm's an outlier on quality, but there's literally nothing like it for regularity.
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Jun 22, 2013 08:35
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There's quite a vigorous post-update analysis community out there, scattered across various websites and IRC channels, and loosely centered on the site's own comments. Any insights so far? Current expectation is probably an update this Thursday, so less waiting... this week, anyway. ETA: and it was a doozy. sizuka2 fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 04:26
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Interviewing Leather is solid. You know it's got a sequel running right now, Interviewing Trey?
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Jul 17, 2013 07:00
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