What are some things you believe worm does better and / or worse then other superhero stories and why?
This list is basically entirely going to be things that it does better, because I'm legitimately pressed to think of any way in which it's pointedly worse than the median superhero story (any specific representational issue or storytelling problem over which it rightfully catches heat, I can bury you in big-two comics which are significantly worse on that front, even if there are also examples that are better on those same fronts.)
Power System- Worm is the gold standard and likely will remain so. There have been other systems that attempt to tie powersets to the personality traits of the users, or attempt to use powersets as a characterization tool, but none that do so with the granularity and consistent quality of the parahumans setting. The powers themselves are all incredibly interesting on top of that, and moreover Worm is one of the few works that actually successfully integrates the answer to the question of where powers as a phenomenon come from into the climax of the story in a way that's thematically appropriate instead of an investment-killing escalation of stakes. When a show like Gen V has a professor bloviating about what it specifically mechanically means for a hemokinetic to be able to "control and perceive blood," that constitutes, for me, the most out-there esoteric piece of superhero media that most of the population will ever consume getting .05 percent of the way to how Worm handled that question.
Science Heroes/Reed Richards is Useless: Worm has such a well-thought-out approach to super-science and tech-based heroes- both to the question of why such figures don't upend the world as we know it, and to the matter of individual speciation of tech-based capes. It's actually fairly common for "tech as a superpower" to crop up in postmodern cape fiction such as Wild Cards or X-Men, but the idea of hyperspecialized gimmick-gadget supervillains like Mad Hatter or Mr. Freeze being the result of speciated technopathy is so perfect as to be infuriating, because how can you even improve on that?
Worldbuilding and Cape Politics- a significant chunk of this is just a byproduct of the story's immense length and lack of page-count restrictions, but Worm is simply much better at fleshing out out A.) the relevant power blocs in the story, B.) the logistical limits that those power blocs face, C.) how practical power ebbs and flows between the power blocs over the course of the story. Despite occasional self-admitted bouts of numbers-illiteracy on Wildbow's part, here are ways in which The Protectorate simply rings more true as an actual organization that could exist than Vought from The Boys or Team Tomorrow from Abberant or basically any other story that claims that there's one central superheroic authority. The Brockton Bay gang war is one of the best-rendered supervillain gang wars I've ever encountered, if not the best. And the runner up is from Astro City, a long-running comic by a single creative team with a setting bible that you could kill a guy with if you threw it.
Protagonist: Again, an emergent quality of the book's sheer length and the affordances of prose vs illustration in rendering Taylor's internal headspace, but she's in the running for superhero fiction POV character of all time. There's just so much to work with. So much that people are still catching on and unpacking the specifics of 14 years later. You can get a comparably dense and layered interpretation of Superman or Batman or Spider-Man if you amalgamate the contributions of all the different authors over their half-century-to-a-century of publication history. Maybe Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man ran long enough and was dense enough for that iteration of Peter to end up as a similar object of analysis. But Taylor is absolutely lapping Mark Grayson from the 144-issue run of Invincible, for example.
Cast Gender Balance- One thing about Worm is that, for a work where addressing the historical gender inequities of the superhero genre isn't a foundational element of the story's brand, it's one of the best at putting it's money where it's mouth is on gender equity in the primary cast- fully rendered and agentic female characters all across the moral spectrum who actually do shit. I ran the numbers on this once and the cast doesn't have a totally equitable 50-50 split, but having Taylor and Lisa and Rachel and Aisha front and center, let alone secondary and tertiary characters like Dragon and Alexandria and Parian and Flechette and Doctor Mother and Contessa and Bonesaw, already puts it ahead of a ton of other stories in the genre, all without feeling like a self-aware correction. The adaptation of Invincible is going out of it's way to include more female characters (e.g. Shrinking Rae) and to provide more screen time and internality to those characters; this is super visible as a feminism-minded correction to anyone who's read the original comic, but numerically it's still batting well below Worm. The Boys has gone out of it's way to punch up the characterization and internality and character arcs of its female characters, and to add well-rendered female characters who didn't exist in the comic; again, a super visible correction to anyone who's read the comic and it's still, numerically, batting well below Worm. And, once again, the reason both of these bat well below Worm is that Worm's status as a gargantuan prose novel means that there's simply more room for incredibly-well-rendered female characters- I'm pretty sure we meet close to as many capes in the first eight arcs of Worm as the entire casting budget and screentime allowances of The Boys could accommodate over it's whole series run.
Fight Scenes are one area in which I'll entertain arguments of Worm as being worse than the average capething is, but this is tentative and subjective. The reality is that most capefic has the shortcut of being either illustrated or filmed, and the visual component automatically gives a leg-up when it comes to blocking out fights; Worm's fights, meanwhile, are thought by many to be bloated and meandering. However, I'm not one of the people who thinks that. I think Worm's fight scene's fucking rock, and that the prose medium coupled with Taylor's enhanced proprioception allows for really well-executed, easy-to-visualize fight sequences with delightfully rendered blow-by-blow and give-and-take. Throw into the analysis that a lot of comic book slugfests can be blocked with wildly varying levels of skill and creativity and visual clarity, and that a lot of filmed cape stuff is absolutely allergic to anything but jump-cuts and shakycam, and- once again, that there are no constraints on the number of participants that can be involved in a Worm battle due to someone having to film or draw the thing- I ultimately think that Worm's fight scenes can't honestly be assessed as falling anywhere below the middle of the pack for the genre as a whole. Your mileage may vary, of course.
The recurring drumbeat here, of course, is that Worm's ahead by all these metrics because it's in a medium that allows for greater density of detail, and from there it laps every other prose capework I've ever read by virtue of the fact that it's just much much longer- more space for more characters, more asides, and for information and worldbuilding to be drip-fed to the reader rather than having to come in in big uncomfortable expodump chunks in order to give the audience what they need to keep things moving. Ultimately lot of what I think is uniquely good about Worm is just contingent on the fact that it's long, but also finite- a long march to a specific, satisfying narrative conclusion, rather than a superheroic mythology that keeps having additional twists and turns bolted onto the back half to keep the money rolling in.
