It's been many years now since I read Worm in full and in the intervening time I have heard all manner of critiques of the story, that the prose is bad, that the Travellers' arc is bad, that the timeskip is bad, that the timeskip is good but the post-timeskip material is bad, that Wildbow hates X demographic, or at the very least writes from a blinkered straight-white-male perspective, or that it's too edgy, or that it's too liberal, or that it's too fash, or that it's too long, or that Ward is so bad it retroactively makes Worm bad, or that the early arcs are a slog, or that Wildbow cannot write realistic teenagers, and man I'm sorry but like 90% of these common talking points mean nothing to me.
Like, okay, I can pretend to understand why proseheads struggle with the narration. For me Wildbow's prose is like drinking water. It gets the job done. But sure, someone who thinks a good book is basically like a very long poem is not going to find any poeticism in Worm. Sometimes people talk about wanting an animated adaptation of Worm (more in the past, before Invincible, when it felt like there was a gap in the market and also like such a thing might plausibly happen) and I never understood that, because for me Worm is kind of an ugly story and I can't imagine it looking like anything other than Misfits or Dr. Horrible. Pssh, there's your prose.
I also think that Taylor's perspective does often carry the author's own unexamined biases. For me I think it's the sinophobia stuff that stands out most starkly, but y'know, it's a long story, I'm sure you can make the case for a lot of different -phobias. Lizzie has been listening to the fan audiobook and sometimes I overhear something and just shout "WHAT?" from the other room. I am convinced some of the things I've heard will have been edited out in the years since the audiobook was recorded. But to be totally honest, I think—like, the way I would put it is that Taylor is prejudiced in the way lots of bullied teenage girls are, right?
There are obviously certain things which aren't just Taylor talking, which are baked into the world—but most of the expressions of bias are filtered through Taylor's narration, and these paint a picture of Taylor as a very complicated, often childish, but fiercely opinionated character. People talk about how Taylor reads as gay because of how Wildbow describes other female characters, compared to the male characters, and I'm like—sure! Yes! That is one of the things that makes Worm a good story. Taylor's bizarre, contradictory, oblivious sexuality is awesome actually. Her bizarre, ill-formed politics are great.
And what I don't want to do is give the impression that I think Worm is secretly good only in some kind of death-of-the-author way, where I'm implying it's written by an idiot and only good by accident. It's not! It's good on purpose! There are loads of cases where Taylor's narration says one thing, but through the events of the story, it is clear that something else is happening: most notably with Taylor's plan to infiltrate the Undersiders, but also the doublethink she employs around her father and the bullies. Breaking Bad is a common point of comparison to Worm and I can see where that's coming from.
Whenever I overhear some random bit of the audiobook, I'm just gripped by it. The escalation is astonishing, even knowing going in that it's an exercise in escalation. It pushes the superhero genre in so many weird, interesting directions—it's often less a Marvel movie and more a disaster movie, a horror movie, or a sci-fi flick. There are often events that feel viscerally unfair and unjust, or stakes that feel totally impossible, and the creativity in how Taylor pushes past these low points is honestly sick. Worm was a Herculean labour. It demonstrates a rare empathy in the ensemble. It somehow, first try, gets right a sort of pacing that much, much bigger television shows, movies, novels, can only dream of. "Fuck it, we'll do it live!"
At this point I've not just read a bunch of cape comics, but I've also read/seen a lot of cape comic deconstructions, and on the basic level of who the superheroes/villains are and what their powers do, Worm is in a league of its own. Soon I Will Be Invincible, one of the best-known published novels with a similar premise, does not have a single character in it with powers as interesting as even the most forgettable Worm crowdfiller. Invincible (as in, just Invincible, the comic, the cartoon) manages a few.
I just think that, if we're being fair, taking the whole Worm into account, then it deserves credit for so many things. I think a lot of the criticism comes from fans who have posted about the story too hard and burned themselves out on it. Moreover, the mere fact of its popularity means that the X% of its readers who are just sort of dumb or crazy is actually gonna work out at quite a lot of people and quite a lot of posts. It also means that people whose tastes are completely orthogonal to the story, for whatever reason, get pushed into reading it and then get mad that they don't like it and have wasted so much time on it because it's so long. The minute you start skimming it, reducing it to a bullet-pointed list of plot beats, struggling to actually inhabit Taylor's POV, you'll lose it.
(This is also pretty much how I feel about Worth the Candle haters, though I do think Worth the Candle is substantially better to begin with. Also, I often see people talk about Worm and A Practical Guide to Evil in the same breath, and I feel similarly about A Practical Guide to Evil to how the Worm haters feel about Worm, I just don't get it at all; the two of them are night and day, in my view.)
