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Hero fanarttt

But, anyway, “There was an alternate version of you, born at the same time with identical genes and an identical body and circumstances, you sometimes shared her dreams. She was almost objectively a better person than you, more beloved by her friends, more helpful to strangers, more stable and in tune with her body and power. She died a hero, mourned by some of the most important heroes in the world. And now whenever you’re interacting with anyone who knew her, you just know they’d rather have her back than be forced to deal with you.”

Hero fanarttt

Tried to reference @elcuervoborracho ‘s famous Hero art (the one on the wiki) you know the one

havent painted in a while! have an antares

remember when she turned into a bug

They all have their normal tools, ie Bitch has her dogs, Lisa has her gun, etc

Worm is a superhero reconstruction. What would have to be true about the world for the comic books to be real? The central conceit is that people trigger and get their powers when they experience intense trauma, and their power is a twisted funhouse mirror of that traumatic experience. Every time you exercise your power, you are necessarily recalling your trauma.

Worm is about children’s rights, the abuse inherent to the structure of the nuclear family, and the way young people bully each other. It’s about several teenage girls trying their best to play with the bad hand they were dealt.

Taylor Hebert is a teenage girl who’s a hair away from dropping out of high school because of the cruel and prolonged campaign of bullying run by her former best friend. One of these incidents was so horrible that something that only happens to a tiny fraction of people happened to her: she triggered, and now she can control bugs. She’s trying to figure out how to use her powers and how to be a hero to escape her awful life, when she falls in with a bad crowd. The Undersiders are a group of teenage villains out for cash and a thrill. She joins up so she can learn their identifying information and turn them in but…they’re nice. She’ll get to turning them in later. She swears.

The things I love about Worm:

- Wildbow (the author) isn’t afraid to commit to changing the status quo. The world as Taylor knows it changes dramatically on several occasions.

- Taylor is a creative, smart, and ruthless character. She’s at her best when the odds are overwhelming. It’s a real pleasure to watch someone be so good at what they do.

- The stakes are ever-escalating. This is pretty hard to pull off in a story without the Supernatural villain-of-the-season power creep problem but I really think it works here. The problems and villains all causally relate to each other.

- Taylor never really gets more powerful per se to deal with her problems, but she gets more creative with her plans, recruits more willing and unwilling allies, and flips the script. fabulous to watch. God I love her.

The first time I tried to read Worm I bounced off it. The first two arcs are kind of painful to read because of how intense the bullying is and how miserable Taylor is. The second time, I devoured it in two weeks.

Things to be warned about regarding Worm. I can be more specific if anyone is interested:

- It is very 2008 in its politics. This means there is anti-Black racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-addict rhetoric, fatphobia, and queerphobia. In my recollection, the anti-Asian racism is the most pervasive of these issues. At times it is deeply unpleasant to read.

- Not a ton of gore by volume, but the gore is explicit and really nasty. If you can imagine the attack vector of bugs…

- It explicitly deals with gnarly topics like bullying, domestic abuse and child neglect, the prison system, medical abuse, and vigilante justice. It does not always handle these topics well.

- Bad pacing in the first several arcs; bad pacing for a section about 3/4 through.

I love Worm a lot. I think it’s worth it. I can talk about it endlessly. If you’re not interested in reading about superheroes, bugs, or child abuse, it’s not the book for you. Otherwise, check it out

Throughout Worm it's evident how the labels "Hero" and "Villain" are used to signify support or opposition of the establishment more so than actual morality. Heroes use it as a thought-terminating cliche whenever a villain starts making too much sense -- "but you're a villain!" -- and ignore the many heroes who break the rules once they've already secured their place in the system. I mean, I love Defiant, but would he ever have gotten a chance to become Defiant if he'd done what he did as a villain? I have a strong feeling he'd be either dead or birdcaged.

Do I think climate change isn't real? No, man, of course not. That shit's, like, physically evident, which you would know if you ever went outside.

Get it twisted, you're just pretending to be edgy to regain a semblance of control over this chaotic mess of cause and effect we call life. You think you really care about the environment? You motherfuckers won't even try to eat vegan, but you'll support a giant water lizard killing thousands of people to tip the ozone meter up five percent? Maybe try eating a mushroom for once in your life before you start fronting about being an ecoterrorist. "You're not vegan either"? I ate vegetarian for a year, brother, I know where I stand on this hill. And I know that when Leviathan comes for Vancouver that I'll be eating green with everybody else in the doomsday bunker, happy that my neighbors are alive next to me, cause unlike you freaks I still believe in the power of the human spirit and the good of the everyman.

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.