#worm meta

"My visions were about my protectiveness of Noelle, Cody's were about his hate for me, and the others got ones making them feel depressed and scared," -> observations, also correct

"Simurgh is pushing them to inaction, Cody to force me into making certain moves, me to obsess over saving Noelle, which I know I'd do some bad shit for" -> short-sighted, but correct

"I'm the centre of her plan" -> conclusion, wrong

Now, with that out of the way- I THINK WORM SUCKS

Okay just kidding. It’s good, I like it a lot… but for the most part, I like it despite its protagonist, rather than because of her. And not just because I think the story contorts itself around her in a frustrating way, although it very much does do that. It’s just that, at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s much about her that makes for an interesting viewpoint character.

At the end of the day, what actually motivates Taylor? She starts off wanting to ‘be a hero,’ but gives up on that pretty quickly, yet never really commits to ‘being a villain’ either. It’s not saving the world, either, that’s just basic self-preservation. Her real motivation is simple- protecting her friends, and having them continue to like her. She continues being a villain explicitly for the latter reason (once Coil is dead and Dinah is free there’s no real reason for her to remain a villain other than that), and does most of what she does in service of the former.

Self-preservation and the desire to protect one’s friends are fine primary motivations for a main character… in the right context. For the former, we need only look at Blake from Pact, whose life is in constant danger through pretty much the entire book, so he never gets the chance to develop any goals beyond ‘stay alive,’ and instrumental to that, ‘get stronger.’ That’s fine- it would be weird if Blake was really preoccupied with some other goal considering all that’s happening to him during the events of that story.

Likewise, in the latter case, you have Sylvester from Twig, whose desire to protect his friends is important because their lives are considered expendable, so wanting to protect them motivates him to act proactively and pursue other goals. He even extends his definition of ‘friends’ to basically all experiments, which eventually pushes him to take on the entire Academy and Crown, because he’s got a problem with what they do to his fellow experiments and him. That’s a great motivation for a character! (Twig is the best thing Wildbow has ever written and I hope it never gets a sequel.)

On the other hand, Taylor wanting to protect her friends is a much weaker motivation, because they are almost never in any danger that they didn’t put themselves in. I can’t really cheer for her beating up on Protectorate heroes to save her pals because they chose to take over an entire city. That’s on them. Of course, Taylor is incapable of not perceiving it as unjust persecution, because she has a literal victim complex, and rightfully so, she was a victim for a long time, but not for most of the events of the story itself.

So when it comes down to it, her motivation is basically ‘me and my friends should be able to do whatever we want, and get to kill anybody who tries to stop us.’ Which isn’t an especially compelling motivation from an outside perspective! If she was really driven to be the best parahuman criminal in the city, and supplanting Coil as a crime lord was her plan all along, that would at least be interesting, but she just kind of gets dragged along into everything, and then retroactively justifies it in her mind by deciding the people opposing her are ‘bullies.’

As a consequence of this, Taylor doesn’t really stand for anything, either. She does plenty, but in many ways she’s still basically a passive protagonist, going in whichever direction the flow of the narrative takes her. It just so happens that the narrative flows very quickly, so she never ends up spinning her wheels too long (badly mixing metaphors there, I know), but if things weren’t constantly happening for her to respond to, Taylor really wouldn’t end up doing much on her own.

So- we’ve established why I think Taylor makes for a weak protagonist. Let’s take a look at who I think would make for a compelling replacement.

Number one with a bullet, it’s your boy Theo. I’ve touched on this recently elsewhere, but I want to make a more comprehensive pitch for him now. You might say ‘but isn’t Theo also largely reactive and motivated by self-preservation?’ To a degree, yeah- most of what he does in the story is motivated by not wanting to get killed by Jack Slash. But even if you take Jack out of his story completely, he would still have a more interesting motivation than Taylor. The heroic scion (heh) of a villainous legacy trying to atone for his parents’ misdeeds is a way more interesting story than whatever she has going on. The thing with Jack is just a cherry on top.

(Atonement is a great character motivation in general, which is part of why Rain would have been a far superior protagonist for Ward than Victoria, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

Obviously you’d have to rework the story somewhat significantly to make him work as the protagonist, but I think it’s doable. If you wanted to keep things as much the same as possible, you’d probably start with Theo already in the Chicago Wards, and tell the story of how he got there in recurring flashbacks. Taylor could also still be in the story, I actually kind of think she’d work better as a supporting character (as long as you got rid of some of the truly ridiculous shit she did like killing Alexandria). Seeing her training Theo from his perspective would be very interesting, since canon Worm skips pretty much all that stuff.

Next pick: Weld. You might think you’re detecting a theme here, but not so much, actually. Weld’s story is more about him becoming disillusioned with the Protectorate, and even with being a hero in general. But unlike Taylor, who gives up on being a hero roughly three chapters into Worm, that would be a slow arc, starting with him as a true believer, who over the course of the entire story loses his faith and quits to found his own team. It’s worth noting too that the Irregulars weren’t just an independent hero team, but mercenaries, which suggests Weld has soured on the ‘hero’ thing overall.

Plus, Weld has a very solid motivation- finding out who the hell turned him into a Case 53. That’s an actual goal he could pursue over the course of a story and get closure for! We could see his relationship with Sveta actually develop, watch him try to manage the internal tensions of the Irregulars, and go up against Cauldron, which Taylor only really interacts with incidentally until the very end of the story.

Third choice: Faultline. We know a lot less about her than any of the others I’ve named so far- her interlude is so unmemorable I actually forgot it existed before writing this. We never learn her actual name (I’d keep ‘Miss Fitts’ because I like the pun but modern wildbow is a joyless monster so he’d probably change it) or even her trigger event, but I still think she’d make a solid choice. Clearly Wildbow agrees because she was the protagonist in an earlier draft of the story.

Much like Weld, she has a strong motivation in wanting to track down Cauldron, and I think the cast of characters surrounding her is more interesting than the Irregulars, and arguably even the Undersiders themselves.

My next choice is gonna be controversial, but… Armsmaster. Yeah, he starts out as an antagonistic force in Worm, but only because Taylor perceives literally every authority figure in existence as her enemy. His actual story is really compelling, not least because I firmly believe he was framed for the armband thing. That interpretation isn’t canon, but the facts fit, and I think it makes Worm a hundred times more interesting, so I choose to believe it.

So you have a kind of autistic, extremely driven but also somewhat self-involved hero, who gets framed for something he didn’t do, loses everything, and has all the people whose respect he was hoping to earn turn on him. And he comes back from that! Tell me that isn’t a more interesting story than Taylor, who never meaningfully loses a fight or has anything taken from her.

Bonuses for him include: getting to see him fight Leviathan one on one from his perspective, getting a better look at the inner workings of the Protectorate and Guild, giving his relationship with Dragon more development, and seeing a Tinker actually do some tinkering, which is something we’ve basically been completely denied across two books.

And finally, we have the wildcard option: someone else entirely. There are vast swathes of Worm’s world left entirely unexplored, and I’m sure there are plenty of more interesting protagonists hiding somewhere in them. People with more interesting powers, histories, and motivations than the protagonist we actually got. Or Victoria. Goddamn do I wish we got someone other than Victoria for Ward. Rain was right fucking there, hoW DO YOU FUCK THAT UP AAAA

But I also feel like it undermines the way Wildbow was trying to deconstruct superheroes.

Alright, what am I talking about? There are a few ways you can look at how Wildbow handles classic superhero tropes, even beyond the deconstruction/reconstruction dichotomy. For starters: One thing that strongly influenced Worm's worldbuilding was a desire to explain as many quirks of classic superhero settings as possible.

For instance, why does supertechnology so rarely trickle down from superheroes/villains to affect normal people? Wildbow posits that, however slick this supertechnology might look, on the inside it's a bodged-together mess that only keeps functioning if the tinker keeps actively bodging patches together, which nobody without a superhuman understanding of that technology can practically accomplish.

The conflict drive was probably designed to address one of the obvious questions raised by superhero worlds: Why does (almost) everyone with superpowers use them to either commit or fight crimes? Why don't more people just use them for normal work, or new kinds of "super-work," or just to mess around without any responsibilities? Because an alien in their head told them to.

But I don't think this is necessary. Wildbow provides plenty of capes with motivations for fighting/doing crime that aren't narrowly applicable to that character's situation. Look at the Undersiders: Brian needs the money, Lisa was coerced, Taylor's going through a self-destructive spiral of trying to make a difference the only way she can, Rachel's psyche was so ruined by her trigger event that she couldn't pass a job interview if she tried, and Alec...well, okay, superpowered abusive dads are pretty specific.

Beyond that, he does a passable job (especially in Ward) of establishing systemic motivations for going into crime-fighting. (I mean, beyond systematic failures that encourage large numbers of individual motivations.) The most dramatic, I'd argue, is the implicit duty parahumans have to do something about S-class threats. Parahumans who fail to live up to that expectation, who settle for being rogues with normal jobs, are looked down upon. That's a pretty neat setting detail!

But it's weakened with the conflict drive being the apparently biggest reason so many capes get into conflict. And it doesn't just weaken those other explanations for the same idea, it weakens other aspects of Worm's deconstruction.

I'm going to steal a conclusion from Blastweave:

Worm says, needing superheroes would be terrible.

And I feel like that's very true. Earth Bet is a world that undeniably needs superheroes, needs larger-than-life people with the power to stop threats on an inhuman scale. Wildbow then frames that world in a way that makes it clear what the effects of that would be—both the direct effects of living in a world where Endbringers trash a city every three months, and the consequences of institutions constructed to address those threats.

Needing superheroes would be terrible. But what if we dropped the conflict drive?

The conflict drive is an external factor, stapled onto the superhero formula to make it work better. Its presence implies that it is necessary, that things wouldn't be this bad without such an alien space bat.

The conflict drive weakens anything you could say about superheroes by giving you an out to those conclusions. Oh, there's nothing inherent to the premise of superhumans regularly coming to blows that makes the setting more perilous for the average man, worsens standards of living, or encourages the growth of callous institutions; it's probably just the conflict-creating alien worm in every superhero's head.

The conflict drive doesn't add nothing to Worm, but I don't think it's a net good for the narrative. Imagine another version of Worm which emphasizes human reasons people turn to capedom while dropping the shardsy ones; what is lost?

...

I’m currently making my way through arc 15 of Worm, and I got to thinking about the Ward’s and Protectorate’s attitude towards the Warlord of the Boardwalk.

Because on the one hand, I get Taylor’s frustration with how all the heroes are acting distrustful and high-and-mighty when she’s been busy keeping the boardwalks livable. She’s supplying doctors and food rations without asking anything in return! She’s organizing people to set up shelters and tear down dangerous structures! She is demonstrating a concern for the people in her territory that goes above and beyond any possible selfish motivations, so being treated as just another villain is kind of ridiculous. Hell, arguably the only hero who has done as much to aid the disaster victims directly is Amy/Panacea, through the hospital visits (and that didn’t exactly end well). Any other hero lecturing Skitter would, from Taylor’s point of view, be a huge hypocrite.

But then, its not like the heroes are sitting around on their asses. We read how the Wards ran themselves ragged in the aftermath of the endbringer attack, and even with their exhaustion they resented being called in from patrols because it meant they weren’t busy helping. Yes, this was mostly just watching out for and stopping active crime, and yes, its appropriate to ask why this was the only post-disaster service being done by the heroes. But at the same time, the streets were full of neo-nazi gangs stealing food supplies! Crime was actively hampering the recovery effort, so focusing your effort on rooting it out when that’s the main thing you’re good at makes sense.

And you can see why the heroes wouldn’t be inclined to automatically trust Taylor despite all her work on the Boardwalk. If you’re worried about gang violence, then its a natural reaction to get worried when a villain starts recruiting people to her employ en masse, especially when you know that she’s engaged in a turf war with pretty much every faction in the city.

Plus, there’s the fact that for all the good Taylor does for her people, she’s basically turned her territory into a panopticon. Bugs are watching everyone, all the time, and will actively start biting people who aren’t busy working. You might argue that this is justified considering just how dire the city has gotten: things are so dangerous that having Bug Brother looking out for Merchants or Chosen is a comfort. And you can’t have freeloaders when supplies are so scarce, the recovery needs all hands on deck! But you could also argue that Skitter had basically set herself up as a dictatorial force promising security for the price of freedom.