/lit/ - Literature

>>18510638
I read Worm when I was a teenager and enjoyed it. My tastes have changed since then, I probably wouldn't enjoy 1 mil+ words of capeshit today, but I still have a lot of respect for the author's hustle. The fact that a random internet autist was able to make a living through their passion project, and through sheer hard work, is pretty inspiring ngl.

Worm's strengths are its characterization and atmosphere, like >>18510996 says. The nature of the setting's rules mean that superpowers are being doled out to damaged and highly flawed people. Death is common, and fates worse then death aren't all that rare. Every character feels like he or she is standing on the edge of a cliff, just one push away from total moral degradation. The important characters are all fun to watch while also having compelling personal conflicts, and the world is much bigger then all of them. The setting is straddling a cliff just as much as its characters, with the planet as a whole approaching societal collapse at best, Armageddon at worse. Its easy to see how our protagonist, Taylor, faced with (seemingly) total apathy of the people in charge, makes the moral compromises she does, and its easy to root for her quest to save the world. But the world is bigger then Taylor, and there are factors in play that she either isn't aware of, or isn't mature enough to comprehend. The more extreme Taylor's actions get, the more the reader starts to fear that her noble intentions aren't accomplishing much more then furthering social issues the good guys have been trying to mitigate from the beginning.

The story is filled with great ambiguities, and nails the illusion of a vast world where even the minute characters are going through their own shit. All that said, I'd have a hard time recommending it to someone unless they were already interested. Despite its strengths, its still a first draft, the prose and pacing can get pretty rough. There are lots of story chunks that are a huge slog to get through, especially right in the beginning. Fans will tell you to push through to arc 8, and yeah at arc 8 the story improves dramatically, but by that point you've already read a full novel's worth of words. If you're story takes that long to properly get going, that's a legitimate problem. I'd maybe be willing to go back through it again if there was ever a rewrite and official publication, but its starting to look like that'll never happen.

Overall, 6.5/10. If you're the type who turns his nose at genre fiction, Worm definitely won't change your mind, but if you have a passing interest in web serials, Wildbow, or unusually good capeshit, it could be worth your time.