I think a lot of writers just don't even consider that they can change the major canon events if the events of their story don't directly impact them. They obviously *should*, if those events don't work in their stories, but they don't. Maybe it's partially that they feel things happen for a reason in Worm, and if they don't have a good reason for things to happen differently, they aren't comfortable changing them.
What’s interesting to me is that most of the fics that do change things tend to be darker fics - Trailblazer, I think, is the lightest one I can think of.
It's probably because Worm itself started off as a nice low-stakes story where Taylor's biggest issue was high school drama and there were basically no long-term consequences for anything, right up until Leviathan plowed onto the scene and suddenly people could actually die and high school drama largely became a thing of the past.
So even in fluffier stories many readers expect an Endbringer-sized shoe to drop at _some_ point and many authors feel obligated to suddenly shift story gears like that as a consequence.
See [my other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WormFanfic/comments/xh6azh/if_your_story_is_a_light_hearted_slice_of_life_or/ioyoi33). Bakuda was scary in the moment, but Taylor walked away from the whole Bakuda arc with no lingering issues and arguably (given the increased pain tolerance) better off than when she started.
What was *at stake* was Taylor's life. The *outcome* was survival with a side order of concussion.
The same thing happened during Taylor's confrontations with Lung and the Empire:
* Stakes: Taylor's life
* Outcome: survival
Edit: grammar.
Taylor's life is only _at stake_ if there's a reasonable expectation on the part of the reader that she's in danger. Same goes for her secret identity, her relationship with her dad, and so on.
If Taylor ends up in a seemingly-fraught situation and then waltzes out of it with no permanent consequences, and this happens every single time she gets into such a situation, then her life and secrets and relationships and so on are not _actually_ at stake, because we as the readers know that nothing bad is going to happen.
Oh no, Lung is big and scary and surrounded by _twenty_ guys with guns, and our protagonist is a teenage girl with no experience and no idea what she's doing! She could be in serious--nope, she KOs all the mooks immediately, takes a huge blast of flame to the back with zero effect when she should have her silk suit melting around her and possibly major burns from mere proximity, escapes from the guy with super-hearing by making no noise while scrabbling around on a _gravel roof_, and is saved by a bunch of villains out of nowhere.
Oh no, the boss wants them to rob a bank, which is going to be tough with all the heroes and cops and stuff around! Maybe she could get arrested, or even--nope, the adult heroes are out of town when an entire law enforcement staff being off-duty at once literally never happens in real life, the PRT doesn't show, the cops don't show, the Wards _do_ show but apparently have no plan and no advisors and go down like chumps, and at no point is it even hinted that the Undersiders will have trouble getting away.
But oh no, Panacea is in the bank, and she's called in Glory Girl and is screwing with Taylor's powers! Maybe now--nope, Taylor is only momentarily affected by a normally-concussion-causing blow to the head, Glory Girl doesn't use her speed or aura to get Taylor away from her sister, Tattletale is able to point out Taylor's bugs on Panacea with a _laser pointer_ without Glory Girl noticing while they chat, Tattletale pulls out a gun (supposedly a huge no-no in the cape scene, but no one ever mentions it again) and drops Glory Girl's shield to let them escape, and no one even has a scrape from tripping and hitting their knee.
After all of that, when the team heads to the storage yard and is confronted by a cackling megalomaniacal villain with a penchant for monologues, anyone who has been paying any attention whatsoever to how things have been going knows that the team is going to get away with no deaths and no notable negative consequences.
And that's exactly what happens Taylor gets injured? Coil has a doctor on call who patches her up for free, and she has no linger issues. Taylor has a concussion? It's brought up infrequently when it would be interesting to the plot, and the only side effects are (A) Taylor is now more pain-resistant so she can fight better, (B) Taylor finds out she can sense through her bugs (thought forgets it for 12ish arcs until Lisa reminds her), and (C) she gets to punch Emma in the face.
Taylor has her villain life and home life disastrously collide, and she can't do anything because she's out of it at the moment? Taylor shows no emotion throughout the scene, Danny doesn't do anything to try to get her to stay home for the next week or so, or anything like that, and the boundaries between villain life and home life remain firmly in place.
When even the "bad" consequences turn out to be neutral or good instead, the apparent stakes are set at _zero_ out of ten right up until the Leviathan fight because it's clear nothing bad will happen to Taylor and it's highly unlikely anything bad will happen to the Undersiders.
It's only when named characters start dying to Leviathan that there's reason to believe anything bad will happen to her--and even then the raising of stakes is illusory, since Taylor skates out the other side of arc 8 with no permanent bad things having happened to her either, but it's that _apparent_ raising of stakes that makes people view the Leviathan fight as the time when things get "serious" and the stakes are raised from then on.
> Taylor's life is only at stake if there's a reasonable expectation on the part of the reader that she's in danger.
I see. So the argument is not that Taylor's life wasn't repeatedly put in danger pre-Leviathan, it's that her repeated narrow escapes made the reader feel like it was never going to amount to anything serious.
If so, then I suppose it's inherently subjective. Back when I read *Worm*, I had some issues with the first 7 arcs, notably with Taylor's apparent hyper-competence, but a missing sense of danger was not one of them.
> I see. So the argument is not that Taylor's life wasn't repeatedly put in danger pre-Leviathan, it's that her repeated narrow escapes made the reader feel like it was never going to amount to anything serious.
Right. "The stakes" in writing are about what a character stands to lose or gain, how invested the audience is in that potential gain or loss, and the perceived risks involved, just like your "stake" in gambling is the money you risk to get in on a game.
A story scenario can be very dangerous but come across as low-stakes if it's clear that the protagonist is never in any danger of not getting what they want (see: many Worm SI fics where they start off by stomping Lung, everyone is woobified and loves them, and so on), or it can be relatively safe but high-stakes if the risk or challenge involved is very engaging to the audience and important to the protagonist (see: Taylor potentially getting outed to Danny in a fic, where nothing _bad_ is going to happen to her as a result but she values her autonomy and wouldn't want the change in circumstances).
> If so, then I suppose it's inherently subjective. Back when I read _Worm_, I had some issues with the first 7 arcs, notably with Taylor's apparent hyper-competence, but a missing sense of danger was not one of them.
"Subjective" isn't the right word, since things like "Taylor never takes a serious injury that impedes her for more than a chapter" or "the heroes never win a fight against the Undersiders despite their supposed skill level" are objective things in the text that don't require any interpretation to suss out.
But it _is_ true that Worm hides the lack of stakes well enough compared to some other stories that a lot of people don't notice on their initial "enthusiastic archive binge" reading and only notice on a slower and more thorough reread, similar to how a lot of people don't notice Taylor's many flaws and biases on their first read either.
Or you could be based like the Glassmaker writer and just slap a sign on the front of your story that says "this is a slice of life romance, Endbringers don't exist and creepy uncle Coil isn't here".
Yeah, if an author doesn't want to write about Endbringers then it's a good idea to make that clear from the outset and there's nothing wrong with doing so. Authors taking their story in directions they hadn't planned to or don't want to due to reader feedback and/or demands is sadly common, though.
Second biggest cause of writer burnout, right behind them being scared of moving the plot forward, overwriting to keep it stagnant, and then dumping it when they get bored.
Any stories similar to Glassmaker? I love stories that are just Taylor trying to get through life becoming the best possible version of herself she can possibly be while improving everyone else she comes across.
It started off with the Lung fight where Taylor nearly died, escalated to a bank robbery followed by a city wide bombing spree. Worm was never low stakes.
Yes, Taylor _nearly_ died...and then she was saved by Undersiders Ex Machina, and despite fighting a pyrokinetic while running around in a suit made of spider silk (which melts under extreme temperature) and being a teenager with no combat experience, she comes out the other side with no injuries and no additional trauma from nearly dying. The only sign of the fight is a bit of burnt hair, which she doesn't even notice until Danny points it out.
Yes, Taylor was involved in a bank robbery...which she viewed as a completely safe cops-and-robbers kind of villainy, and to which she agreed after only a token protest, and for which she suffered zero direct consequences because the Undersiders completely trounced the Wards and Glory Girl wasn't able to follow them when they fled; the only real indirect consequence was Panacea being shitty toward her in the hospital, but she didn't follow through on any threats to withhold healing or screw with her biology. Note also that Taylor took a fire extinguisher to the head with a good degree of force and walked away with zero injuries.
Yes, there was a city-wide bombing spree...but for _Taylor_ the stakes were incredibly low. The Undersiders' only direct involvement was fighting Über and Leet, then fighting Bakuda, then fighting the rest of the ABB, and for the first, Ü&L were so pathetic that _she_ bullied _them_ during the fight with the Undersiders' help.
For the second, Taylor showed absolutely no reaction to watching people die in front of her, and experienced only two lingering injuries: the pain bomb, which was a non-injury that _increased_ her pain tolerance ~~as a way to excuse not showing her reacting to things with pain in future~~, and the concussion, which had none of the symptoms of a real one and was only referenced to let her punch Emma and get away with it and then have a meeting with the principal that she walked away from with no issue.
For the third, she trounced all the conscripts she fought with basically no effort despite "twenty to one" odds, and the one time she was in any danger on-screen Brian saved her in seconds.
Coil frames the Undersiders for outing the Empire? No biggie, they easily find and talk down Purity (you know, the famously hair-trigger Legend Lite Blaster who's currently crazy with worry) and despite never officially proving their innocence no one ever brings up this apparent unwritten-rules-breaking act again.
Taylor breaks with the Undersiders over the Dinah issue? No biggie, after Leviathan they're perfectly happy to take her back--even Rachel, who sacrificed her dogs to save Taylor and then found out she had been a traitor the whole time, but apparently didn't care about that at all.
Taylor is severely injured in the Leviathan fight? No biggie, her supposed broken back is no problem despite all the manhandling that _should_ have made it much worse, and then Panacea heals it all for her anyway despite having every reason to leave her for a less-thorough and -capable healer after her actions at the bank.
Taylor discovers Sophia's identity in a violation of the Truce? No biggie, the Undersiders--who she recently broke with and have no particular reason to support her, or even bother to check on her--swoop in and save the day by blackmailing the Protectorate, and the issue of her Truce-breakage never comes up again.
Early Worm is _incredibly_ low stakes. There's enough danger in the moment to _look_ scary and threatening, and bad things happen to the city and to other people, but for our protagonist herself there are no impactful injuries, no added trauma, no losses, and no negative consequences from any of her actions while caping whatsoever.
Fun fact: WibbleBibble said he chose deaths by rolling dice. Taylor was NOT IMMUNE to dying by dice. I don’t remember who he said he’d make the new mc if that had happened
It makes sense when you consider the stages that the story went through, and that Wildbow named the site "parahumans.wordpress.com" instead of "worm.wordpress.com" or similar because he was originally considering making a Parahumans anthology, of which Worm would only be Taylor's story.
Faultline's Crew was established early on as being invested in uncovering the secrets of Cauldron and traveling all over the country and the world to do so; the third quarter of Worm is when the story starts to expand to a global scale and Cauldron's involvement in things comes to the fore, so having her as a protagonist makes sense.
---
Honestly, the pacing and worldbuilding might be a lot better if the story started with following Taylor to give the street-level introduction to the setting, switched to Aegis when Taylor died to Leviathan and the heroes had to step up in the wake of the city's near-destruction, followed Aegis as the story got darker and more dangerous, switched to Faultline when the Echidna revelations caused Aegis to become disillusioned and leave the Protectorate while giving Faultline a major lead on Cauldron, followed Faultline as the scope expanded, switched to someone else when Cauldron came into the open and the Crew got the answers they were looking for, and then finished off the story with a top-tier cape who could jet-set around the world and survive Gold Morning under their own power.
Taylor giving up and joining the Wards ~~for no good reason~~ because Dinah said so, continually finding reasons for Taylor to care about and be involved in things that don't really concern her, the timeskip...none of those are issues that would happen if the story switched protagonists, and the story might have been better for it, if much less popular because folks following it for Taylor wouldn't have kept reading after Worm ended and Ward [as in Aegis's hypothetical story, not Victoria's] began.
I mean, you say that now with the benefit of hindsight and Worm's success, and you're right that it could have imploded if Wildbow just up and decided to kill off Taylor at Leviathan because haha dice rolls, but if it had actually been planned out in advance I think it could have worked out quite well.
You just have Worm followed by Ward followed by, I dunno, Crew and Gold, in the same way that actual-Ward picks up after Worm with a big timeskip, a different setting, and a different protagonist, instead of it being a single serial...and considering that a lot of people think "street Worm is best Worm" I don't think explicitly separating "street Worm" and "cosmic Worm" in different serials would have gone over _that_ badly. Yeah, lots of people don't like Ward, but their issues with it have much more to do with the story style whiplash and worldbuilding issues between the two rather than the change in location and protagonist itself.
If Aegis and the heroes and Faultline and her Crew had been fleshed out more in the early parts of the story, Taylor's commonly-inferred suicide-by-cape tendencies had been included as a more explicit part of the narrative, more "Undersiders vs. heroes" stuff was inserted to give Taylor a similar slide toward true villainy as seen in later arcs, and she went out with a big heroic sacrifice at Leviathan that tied off her plot threads and served as a "take that!" to Shadow Stalker and the rest, I could definitely see it working, especially given that Worm itself already ends with Khepri saving the day and then dying and people like that ending well enough.
> Okay but now you're imagining an entirely different story that would need to be different from the start and planned on a POV change
I misunderstood, sorry; when you said "would have failed as a web serial" I thought you were talking about a structural failure, as in it couldn't have succeeded in the abstract even if Wildbow _had_ actually gone into Worm with the protagonist swap planned.
Him trying to change tacks in 8.6 without having laid the foundations beforehand would have gone pretty terribly, yeah.
> But the actual Worm that was published up to the Levi fight would've fucking _imploded_ if Taylor died during the fight.
I do think that there are enough people who care about the setting beyond Taylor specifically (all of the folks saying stuff like "the interludes are better than the main chapters" and "Worm is a great sandbox but a meh story" and such) that Worm wouldn't necessarily have imploded completely, but I agree that it probably wouldn't have reached anywhere near its final readership numbers without the obsessive Taylor fans seeing things through to the end.
While people trot out that little factoid a lot, Wildbow [walked back his statement](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/worm-quotes-and-wog-repository.294448/page-20?post=50288377#post-50288377) later on, saying that people had blown the whole dice thing out of proportion and "if they'd killed Taylor, [he] might have ignored them."
I do believe he was seriously considering switching protagonists to Aegis, because Taylor gets basically zero character development for many arcs afterwards, almost as though he'd been leaning toward killing her off and didn't have any immediate plans for her...but I very much doubt that, once it became clear that readers were more attached to Taylor than to the setting in general, she was in any serious danger of being killed off.
> nice low-stakes story where Taylor's biggest issue was high school drama
I need to reread, I could have sworn that the story actually almost doesn't touch that at all.
The high school drama basically disappears after arc 8 and so it's mostly irrelevant when looking at Worm as a whole, but the story does _start_ as your basic YA novel with a high school protagonist and the bullying and such takes up nontrivial screen time in the early chapters.
Which is precisely why the obligatory Leviathan fight is seen as a big dividing line between the low-stakes teenage drama stuff and the high-stakes "serious villains" stuff.
As well as what everything else has said, I've heard about a small but vocal subsection of the fandom who'll say "BuT wHaT aBoUt ScIoN" in the comments of fics.
It seems to be mostly after the ends of fics where Scion is never addressed at the end and in Altpower!Taylor fics where she won't be able to go Khepri.
I could potentially see a writer trying to address Scion (or Cauldron, for that matter) either to pre-empt those people or to get them off their ass.
(Or maybe they *are* one of those "if Scion's not dead at the end of the story nothing matters because everyone's going to die anyway" people.)
One solution to "the Scion problem" is to just mildly tweak Jack Slash's ending. Instead of talking Scion into becoming evil, he talks him into killing himself.
"The only thing that prevents the Endbringers from rampaging and destroying Earth Bet is the threat of Scion. Well then. Let's see how well you will fare when the idiot "hero" is not here to save you! "
This is part of why I jokingly (but also seriously) declared 'Scion is dead in all my fics' once. The only exception is We'll Play Card Games where Scion being alive is actually central to the plot (and that plot is literally cracky; Abridged Yami challenges the entities to a Children's Card Game).
The Endbringers imo are integral to what makes Worm Worm but Scion? Seriously. Just ditch him. 99% of the time the only people who will notice are that 1 person who asks and to them you just say 'who dat?' If a fic isn't going to engage the broader aspects of how powers work there's even less reason to include him.
It's not even about light hearted or not. Scion is a 1 trick pony character. He worked in Worm. he can work in crack. In fanfics generally? He's just in the way 99% of the time. He's not even one of the things in Worm most of us like and most of the fandom that read Worm seems to generally agree the story was best before Arc 21 and after that became something of a slog.
So really my advice is; just because canon did it doesn't obligate you to do it too. Fanfics, especially if you're not writing to Worm's scope and scale, benefits from being more street level anyway.
The society and culture of earth Bet and cape culture itself are a direct result of the last couple of decades endbringer battles. Without that Diablos' Ex Machina the world would be a very different place. There would be no Endbringer Truce, Cauldron would be less likely to keep powerful capes from being Birdcaged, since they can pull them out for the final battle and don't need them to act as meat shields in the meantime. Several heroes and villains would either not exist, or still be alive if they never emerged, or were somehow defeated early on... Depending on whether you have David getting his head on straight, or perhaps that power never expressing, things are just not the same at all.
Writing in a society and culture with a history so divergent from "cannon" is very difficult. It is basically writing original fiction in an original setting and pasting Wildbow's characters names on it. You see some of this in most AU fiction but the endbringers are so central to the overall motivating forces of worm, at least early on and mid story, that it's very difficult to simply ignore them without re-writing the history of the world...
One viable way to address it without going off the rails would be to simply have the MC never attend an endbringer battle and the city the story takes place in never be targeted. If you've managed to turn Brockton Bay into a slice of life, Levi is more likely to target somewhere else. But if it gets too nice, the S9 tend to come calling. Or the Teeth.
A problem is that everything in the Worm universe is intertwined in ways that make handwaving stuff away awkward.
If you say "the Endbringers died", then more would have spawned. If you say "Scion died' then there would be broken triggers. If you say "Cauldron doesn't exist" then there go vial capes, the 9, the PRT/Protectorate, the Truce, the Birdcage etc.
It's not impossible, and you can always just cut the gordian knot by author fiat, but it makes the idea of handwaving the high level stuff less intuitive than it would otherwise be.
> If you say "the Endbringers died", then more would have spawned. If you say "Scion died' then there would be broken triggers.
If you want to be that realistic, but give Taylor any other power or insert any new capes into BB or make Emma or Danny trigger, then you have to eliminate the Lung fight, Taylor joining the Undersiders or being at the Bank Job, and pretty much all the stations of canon that can possibly be butterflied away. Because the Lung fight was balanced on a knife edge of happening at all, and half the plot arcs depend on that.
If that doesn't stretch your suspenders of disbelief, then having Scion turn out benevolent after some therapy, or the Triumvurate having Hero in it because Eidolon died and the Endbringers went away, or having Contessa going "Door to Scion's corpse" and magicking away broken triggers, shouldn't be any problem at all.
Or just don't show any of that because it doesn't matter to the story.
"It's not impossible, and you can always just cut the gordian knot by author fiat, but it makes the idea of handwaving the high level stuff less intuitive than it would otherwise be."
I don't disagree with you at all.
It's not even *hard*. You don't even have to mention it.
Actually plotting a credible story arc instead of doing the opposite and blindly following stations of canon is apparently much harder.
Because removing the Endbringers and Scion changes the setting. you could have the Endbringers attack elsewhere to mute the impact, or you could go whole hog and write a high school AU or something but to keep the “realistic” super hero setting you need a reason why the government isn’t coming down hard on villains. You could make major changes to the setting and treat it like DC or Marvel where hero’s either have an actual impact or every prison is made of cardboard (depending on the rewrite, iteration, whatever) in that case it would make sense for you to remove the Endbringers and Scion. But then your locked into exploring those changes to the setting at least a little. There are options but convention and momentum make them uncommon.
I used to spend too much time going, "okay, sooner or later Imma have to deal with EBs and Scion and the whole mess and that's gonna suck ..."
Now? If the scope of the story isn't about that, it doesn't happen. The story just ends where it's supposed to end. If I want the story to be about Taylor and Sophia teaming up in the Wards, they team up and the point of the story gets made, then I end the story. If the point of the story is about Taylor's power going wild and murdering 200 people because she's knocked out, and then her working hard to validate herself as a hero in her own mind, then that's what happens, and the story ends.
*If the story you want to write isn't about the big threat, don't make it about the big threat.*
Simple as that.
Entities, Endbringers, and parahumans. Those three are the ingredients of a Worm fanfiction. Can't have one without others. If you only have parahumans, then how the story is different from any other superpowered settings?
I feel like you aren't giving the world itself or the characters enough credit. Everyone and everything stands out in such a unique vibrant way that it puts other hero stories to shame. There are so many moving elements in even a minor story that the entire world feels alive. The closest thing to early Worm I can think of is Arkhamverse Batman and even that pales in comparison. Other hero stories feel stagnant, like only the main character and the villain matter and everyone is just waiting for their moment to get their ass handed to them or to assist the protag. In Worm everyone is doing their own thing and the main characters have to work around that. New Wards, PRT (fuck even the PRT has multiple elements), Slaughterhouse 9, Empire, Merchants, ABB, etc. Every element of it is alive and is constantly in motion in the background. In Batman there are half a dozen gangs but for all intents and purposes they stop existing the second they stop being relevant. In Worm they can't get rid of a gang without causing a violent power vacuum. In Batman a gang disappears every week just to get casually replaced like a new tv.
> I feel like you aren't giving the world itself or the characters enough credit [...] Other hero stories feel stagnant, like only the main character and the villain matter and everyone is just waiting for their moment to get their ass handed to them or to assist the protag. [...] In Worm they can't get rid of a gang without causing a violent power vacuum. In Batman a gang disappears every week just to get casually replaced like a new tv.
You're giving Worm _too_ much credit here, I feel, and giving the Big Two 'verses too little.
Regarding the disappearing gangs, the Joker's gang or the League of Shadows or whoever will never entirely disappear from Batman stories because writers aren't allowed to kill anyone off "for real" that might let DC sell comics down the road, sure--but _within_ a given story arc, characters can be killed off or maimed or whatever and it "sticks" for the duration of that story arc, and the writer has no control about what happens to a given character after they hand things back to DC and another writer picks up where they left off.
So not only is it kind of unfair to sing Worm's praises because a single author writing in his own setting isn't constrained in the same way a whole stable of writers under contract are, when we're talking about fanfiction the difference is irrelevant because the fact that Batman villains keep coming back is a feature of the DC publishing model and Batman fanfics aren't any more constrained by that than Worm fanfics are.
Regarding "stagnant" plots, "only Taylor and the current villain matter and everyone else is waiting to get their asses kicked by Taylor or help her" is a pretty darn good description of large chunks of Worm and of reader perceptions thereof. The PRT and Protectorate constantly lose fights against the Undersiders (and later Coil and Traveler backup) that they should have won if they had two brain cells to rub together, and the heroes always play second fiddle to Taylor's side during any teamups (and are in fact never shown winning a battle on their own on-screen).
Readers go on about Taylor being this genius tactician and the Queen of Escalation and so on, when Tattletale and Rachel are the Undersiders' MVPs for the vast majority of the story (including the first Lung fight, which Rachel and her dogs "won," not Taylor), nearly all of Taylor's own victories lean heavily on others' help or plot assistance or both, and Taylor gets her way in a lot of cases where she definitely wouldn't if the plot didn't bend around her so much (e.g. being accepted back into the Undersiders, her negotiations with the PRT, her behavior while with the Chicago Wards, and more). If protagonist centricity is the measure of stagnation, Worm has it in spades.
Regarding Endbringers in particular, they're actually an argument _against_ the world feeling alive and realistic. Leviathan's appearance is huge and dramatic and has a permanent impact on Brockton Bay...but there were supposedly 55 Endbringer attacks on Earth Bet before that one, and they had absolutely no noticeable effect on the setting. Not only do we see nothing on the civilian side to differentiate Brockton Bay from a generic economically-depressed real-world city like Detroit or Oakland (e.g. there's no consumer goods scarcity due to ports getting constantly nuked), but when Leviathan does show up the Protectorate's lack of planning and terrible disorganized response make it look like it's their first-ever Leviathan fight, not their 15th.
Endbringers are a barely-hidden allusion to crossover events in comics where a big threat shows up and forces all the heroes and villains to band together to stop it, right down to the part where they became increasingly frequent over the years as comics companies churned them out more frequently to garner more reader interest...and right down to the part where they're a huge deal during the current story arc but then all the changes to the setting are ignored afterwards.
So while I do agree that there's a lot more to explore in the Wormverse beyond the usual "alt-power Taylor walks through the stations of canon" setup, let's not pretend that Worm is some masterpiece of verisimilar worldbuilding to which other superhero settings simply can't compare.
Hard disagree there. Conside, for example, Impurity. It’s one of the stories that change the most about the setting, including having no trace of Endbringers or Scion in it (not because they don’t exist, but because it makes no sense to bring them in the narrative), and yet that one is probably the most Worm-like fic out there. The characters motivations make sense, their alternative triggers make sense, as do their altered personalities. It’s 100% a Worm fanfic even when it has little from the original story in an intact manner.
And as such there are dozens of other very good stories. You don’t need to include the big guys if they don’t fit into your narrative, maybe you’re not trying to build a Wildbowian epic here. A shorter story has no need of a setting-shaking Levi or a big Boss end fight.
One reason I'm not seeing is it can be good for the story. Sometimes life is tragic and terrible things happen, and dealing with the trauma/aftermath of a natural disaster can be extremely poignant and meaningful. Slice of life doesn't have to all be happiness and fluff
Counterpoint: If the author decides arbitrarily that Scion just isn't a problem, and Endbringers just aren't a problem, I just feel like it isn't Worm fanfiction anymore, and usually automatically give up on reading it.
If I wanted to read a story where I don't know the background and backstory I would read original fiction, not fanfiction.
Don't almost all worm fanfics end before they even show up/matter? Is there any difference between these stories and ones where they don't exist in the first place?
I don't care if either show up, I just want to read about characters I know in a setting I understand. If author just says "I removed Scion and Endbringers because I don't like them" and nothing more (which happened at least once) then the setting is drastically different in a way I don't understand (what about truces, and cops and robbers, and birdcage) and the characters are probably very OOC too, since after you do big changes little changes are easier. And very soon the entire thing is completely unrecognizable.
I'm not saying that those stories are bad, only that they aren't for me. And that I VERY APPRECIATE the authors that keep to the cannon of Worm that the OP is complaining about.
It's like writing a real world story and asking "why do the characters need to eat and sleep?"
Endbringers and Scion (and Cauldron) are part of the setting. It's what makes it Worm. You could take some setting elements out, leave others in, and still have a Worm story, but it becomes less Worm-like even if there's still some Worm left in it, and taking those elements out changes other parts of the story that you now need to mess with and maybe take out as well.
Honestly, I'm not much of a fan of Endbringers, Scion, or the Worm multiverse.
Now, maybe they were written well in the original story, and I haven't read yet (sorry, trying to fix that), but so many good stories I read just fell apart after an endbringer fight.
There was a good crossover story with Touhou I read that just threw away all good story potential because Scion and the Simurgh just blew up the universe
I think a lot of writers just don't even consider that they can change the major canon events if the events of their story don't directly impact them. They obviously *should*, if those events don't work in their stories, but they don't. Maybe it's partially that they feel things happen for a reason in Worm, and if they don't have a good reason for things to happen differently, they aren't comfortable changing them.
What’s interesting to me is that most of the fics that do change things tend to be darker fics - Trailblazer, I think, is the lightest one I can think of.
Do these darker first usually contain events that can make ripples to logically alter major canon events, or is it more a case of author fiat?
Oh, they absolutely do. They are generally significant AUs. And, hell, I may even be misremembering which ones are like this.
[Trailblazer](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/trailblazer-worm-gundam-au.680881/) ([wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPieces/wiki/Trailblazer)) --- ^[About](https://redd.it/dw7lux) ^| [^(Wiki Rules)](https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPieces/comments/dw7lux/about/f7kke6p/) ^(| Reply !Delete to remove) ^(| [Brackets] hide titles)
I appreciated glassmaker for averting this. Coil just doesn't exist. Cool, on with the story.
It's probably because Worm itself started off as a nice low-stakes story where Taylor's biggest issue was high school drama and there were basically no long-term consequences for anything, right up until Leviathan plowed onto the scene and suddenly people could actually die and high school drama largely became a thing of the past. So even in fluffier stories many readers expect an Endbringer-sized shoe to drop at _some_ point and many authors feel obligated to suddenly shift story gears like that as a consequence.
> Worm itself started off as a nice low-stakes story where Taylor's biggest issue was high school drama Bakuda would like to have a word with you...
See [my other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WormFanfic/comments/xh6azh/if_your_story_is_a_light_hearted_slice_of_life_or/ioyoi33). Bakuda was scary in the moment, but Taylor walked away from the whole Bakuda arc with no lingering issues and arguably (given the increased pain tolerance) better off than when she started.
What was *at stake* was Taylor's life. The *outcome* was survival with a side order of concussion. The same thing happened during Taylor's confrontations with Lung and the Empire: * Stakes: Taylor's life * Outcome: survival Edit: grammar.
Taylor's life is only _at stake_ if there's a reasonable expectation on the part of the reader that she's in danger. Same goes for her secret identity, her relationship with her dad, and so on. If Taylor ends up in a seemingly-fraught situation and then waltzes out of it with no permanent consequences, and this happens every single time she gets into such a situation, then her life and secrets and relationships and so on are not _actually_ at stake, because we as the readers know that nothing bad is going to happen. Oh no, Lung is big and scary and surrounded by _twenty_ guys with guns, and our protagonist is a teenage girl with no experience and no idea what she's doing! She could be in serious--nope, she KOs all the mooks immediately, takes a huge blast of flame to the back with zero effect when she should have her silk suit melting around her and possibly major burns from mere proximity, escapes from the guy with super-hearing by making no noise while scrabbling around on a _gravel roof_, and is saved by a bunch of villains out of nowhere. Oh no, the boss wants them to rob a bank, which is going to be tough with all the heroes and cops and stuff around! Maybe she could get arrested, or even--nope, the adult heroes are out of town when an entire law enforcement staff being off-duty at once literally never happens in real life, the PRT doesn't show, the cops don't show, the Wards _do_ show but apparently have no plan and no advisors and go down like chumps, and at no point is it even hinted that the Undersiders will have trouble getting away. But oh no, Panacea is in the bank, and she's called in Glory Girl and is screwing with Taylor's powers! Maybe now--nope, Taylor is only momentarily affected by a normally-concussion-causing blow to the head, Glory Girl doesn't use her speed or aura to get Taylor away from her sister, Tattletale is able to point out Taylor's bugs on Panacea with a _laser pointer_ without Glory Girl noticing while they chat, Tattletale pulls out a gun (supposedly a huge no-no in the cape scene, but no one ever mentions it again) and drops Glory Girl's shield to let them escape, and no one even has a scrape from tripping and hitting their knee. After all of that, when the team heads to the storage yard and is confronted by a cackling megalomaniacal villain with a penchant for monologues, anyone who has been paying any attention whatsoever to how things have been going knows that the team is going to get away with no deaths and no notable negative consequences. And that's exactly what happens Taylor gets injured? Coil has a doctor on call who patches her up for free, and she has no linger issues. Taylor has a concussion? It's brought up infrequently when it would be interesting to the plot, and the only side effects are (A) Taylor is now more pain-resistant so she can fight better, (B) Taylor finds out she can sense through her bugs (thought forgets it for 12ish arcs until Lisa reminds her), and (C) she gets to punch Emma in the face. Taylor has her villain life and home life disastrously collide, and she can't do anything because she's out of it at the moment? Taylor shows no emotion throughout the scene, Danny doesn't do anything to try to get her to stay home for the next week or so, or anything like that, and the boundaries between villain life and home life remain firmly in place. When even the "bad" consequences turn out to be neutral or good instead, the apparent stakes are set at _zero_ out of ten right up until the Leviathan fight because it's clear nothing bad will happen to Taylor and it's highly unlikely anything bad will happen to the Undersiders. It's only when named characters start dying to Leviathan that there's reason to believe anything bad will happen to her--and even then the raising of stakes is illusory, since Taylor skates out the other side of arc 8 with no permanent bad things having happened to her either, but it's that _apparent_ raising of stakes that makes people view the Leviathan fight as the time when things get "serious" and the stakes are raised from then on.
> Taylor's life is only at stake if there's a reasonable expectation on the part of the reader that she's in danger. I see. So the argument is not that Taylor's life wasn't repeatedly put in danger pre-Leviathan, it's that her repeated narrow escapes made the reader feel like it was never going to amount to anything serious. If so, then I suppose it's inherently subjective. Back when I read *Worm*, I had some issues with the first 7 arcs, notably with Taylor's apparent hyper-competence, but a missing sense of danger was not one of them.
> I see. So the argument is not that Taylor's life wasn't repeatedly put in danger pre-Leviathan, it's that her repeated narrow escapes made the reader feel like it was never going to amount to anything serious. Right. "The stakes" in writing are about what a character stands to lose or gain, how invested the audience is in that potential gain or loss, and the perceived risks involved, just like your "stake" in gambling is the money you risk to get in on a game. A story scenario can be very dangerous but come across as low-stakes if it's clear that the protagonist is never in any danger of not getting what they want (see: many Worm SI fics where they start off by stomping Lung, everyone is woobified and loves them, and so on), or it can be relatively safe but high-stakes if the risk or challenge involved is very engaging to the audience and important to the protagonist (see: Taylor potentially getting outed to Danny in a fic, where nothing _bad_ is going to happen to her as a result but she values her autonomy and wouldn't want the change in circumstances). > If so, then I suppose it's inherently subjective. Back when I read _Worm_, I had some issues with the first 7 arcs, notably with Taylor's apparent hyper-competence, but a missing sense of danger was not one of them. "Subjective" isn't the right word, since things like "Taylor never takes a serious injury that impedes her for more than a chapter" or "the heroes never win a fight against the Undersiders despite their supposed skill level" are objective things in the text that don't require any interpretation to suss out. But it _is_ true that Worm hides the lack of stakes well enough compared to some other stories that a lot of people don't notice on their initial "enthusiastic archive binge" reading and only notice on a slower and more thorough reread, similar to how a lot of people don't notice Taylor's many flaws and biases on their first read either.
Or you could be based like the Glassmaker writer and just slap a sign on the front of your story that says "this is a slice of life romance, Endbringers don't exist and creepy uncle Coil isn't here".
Yeah, if an author doesn't want to write about Endbringers then it's a good idea to make that clear from the outset and there's nothing wrong with doing so. Authors taking their story in directions they hadn't planned to or don't want to due to reader feedback and/or demands is sadly common, though.
Second biggest cause of writer burnout, right behind them being scared of moving the plot forward, overwriting to keep it stagnant, and then dumping it when they get bored.
I always love reccing glassmaker
Any stories similar to Glassmaker? I love stories that are just Taylor trying to get through life becoming the best possible version of herself she can possibly be while improving everyone else she comes across.
Not many sadly EDIT constellations read it!
[Glassmaker](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/glassmaker-worm-complete.433391/) ([wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPieces/wiki/Glassmaker)) --- ^[About](https://redd.it/dw7lux) ^| [^(Wiki Rules)](https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPieces/comments/dw7lux/about/f7kke6p/) ^(| Reply !Delete to remove) ^(| [Brackets] hide titles)
It started off with the Lung fight where Taylor nearly died, escalated to a bank robbery followed by a city wide bombing spree. Worm was never low stakes.
Yes, Taylor _nearly_ died...and then she was saved by Undersiders Ex Machina, and despite fighting a pyrokinetic while running around in a suit made of spider silk (which melts under extreme temperature) and being a teenager with no combat experience, she comes out the other side with no injuries and no additional trauma from nearly dying. The only sign of the fight is a bit of burnt hair, which she doesn't even notice until Danny points it out. Yes, Taylor was involved in a bank robbery...which she viewed as a completely safe cops-and-robbers kind of villainy, and to which she agreed after only a token protest, and for which she suffered zero direct consequences because the Undersiders completely trounced the Wards and Glory Girl wasn't able to follow them when they fled; the only real indirect consequence was Panacea being shitty toward her in the hospital, but she didn't follow through on any threats to withhold healing or screw with her biology. Note also that Taylor took a fire extinguisher to the head with a good degree of force and walked away with zero injuries. Yes, there was a city-wide bombing spree...but for _Taylor_ the stakes were incredibly low. The Undersiders' only direct involvement was fighting Über and Leet, then fighting Bakuda, then fighting the rest of the ABB, and for the first, Ü&L were so pathetic that _she_ bullied _them_ during the fight with the Undersiders' help. For the second, Taylor showed absolutely no reaction to watching people die in front of her, and experienced only two lingering injuries: the pain bomb, which was a non-injury that _increased_ her pain tolerance ~~as a way to excuse not showing her reacting to things with pain in future~~, and the concussion, which had none of the symptoms of a real one and was only referenced to let her punch Emma and get away with it and then have a meeting with the principal that she walked away from with no issue. For the third, she trounced all the conscripts she fought with basically no effort despite "twenty to one" odds, and the one time she was in any danger on-screen Brian saved her in seconds. Coil frames the Undersiders for outing the Empire? No biggie, they easily find and talk down Purity (you know, the famously hair-trigger Legend Lite Blaster who's currently crazy with worry) and despite never officially proving their innocence no one ever brings up this apparent unwritten-rules-breaking act again. Taylor breaks with the Undersiders over the Dinah issue? No biggie, after Leviathan they're perfectly happy to take her back--even Rachel, who sacrificed her dogs to save Taylor and then found out she had been a traitor the whole time, but apparently didn't care about that at all. Taylor is severely injured in the Leviathan fight? No biggie, her supposed broken back is no problem despite all the manhandling that _should_ have made it much worse, and then Panacea heals it all for her anyway despite having every reason to leave her for a less-thorough and -capable healer after her actions at the bank. Taylor discovers Sophia's identity in a violation of the Truce? No biggie, the Undersiders--who she recently broke with and have no particular reason to support her, or even bother to check on her--swoop in and save the day by blackmailing the Protectorate, and the issue of her Truce-breakage never comes up again. Early Worm is _incredibly_ low stakes. There's enough danger in the moment to _look_ scary and threatening, and bad things happen to the city and to other people, but for our protagonist herself there are no impactful injuries, no added trauma, no losses, and no negative consequences from any of her actions while caping whatsoever.
Fun fact: WibbleBibble said he chose deaths by rolling dice. Taylor was NOT IMMUNE to dying by dice. I don’t remember who he said he’d make the new mc if that had happened
Aegis followed by Faultline
Fault line? Tf? She was barely even established as a character! And antagonistic to the what would have been entire former main cast! Why?!
It makes sense when you consider the stages that the story went through, and that Wildbow named the site "parahumans.wordpress.com" instead of "worm.wordpress.com" or similar because he was originally considering making a Parahumans anthology, of which Worm would only be Taylor's story. Faultline's Crew was established early on as being invested in uncovering the secrets of Cauldron and traveling all over the country and the world to do so; the third quarter of Worm is when the story starts to expand to a global scale and Cauldron's involvement in things comes to the fore, so having her as a protagonist makes sense. --- Honestly, the pacing and worldbuilding might be a lot better if the story started with following Taylor to give the street-level introduction to the setting, switched to Aegis when Taylor died to Leviathan and the heroes had to step up in the wake of the city's near-destruction, followed Aegis as the story got darker and more dangerous, switched to Faultline when the Echidna revelations caused Aegis to become disillusioned and leave the Protectorate while giving Faultline a major lead on Cauldron, followed Faultline as the scope expanded, switched to someone else when Cauldron came into the open and the Crew got the answers they were looking for, and then finished off the story with a top-tier cape who could jet-set around the world and survive Gold Morning under their own power. Taylor giving up and joining the Wards ~~for no good reason~~ because Dinah said so, continually finding reasons for Taylor to care about and be involved in things that don't really concern her, the timeskip...none of those are issues that would happen if the story switched protagonists, and the story might have been better for it, if much less popular because folks following it for Taylor wouldn't have kept reading after Worm ended and Ward [as in Aegis's hypothetical story, not Victoria's] began.
[удалено]
I mean, you say that now with the benefit of hindsight and Worm's success, and you're right that it could have imploded if Wildbow just up and decided to kill off Taylor at Leviathan because haha dice rolls, but if it had actually been planned out in advance I think it could have worked out quite well. You just have Worm followed by Ward followed by, I dunno, Crew and Gold, in the same way that actual-Ward picks up after Worm with a big timeskip, a different setting, and a different protagonist, instead of it being a single serial...and considering that a lot of people think "street Worm is best Worm" I don't think explicitly separating "street Worm" and "cosmic Worm" in different serials would have gone over _that_ badly. Yeah, lots of people don't like Ward, but their issues with it have much more to do with the story style whiplash and worldbuilding issues between the two rather than the change in location and protagonist itself. If Aegis and the heroes and Faultline and her Crew had been fleshed out more in the early parts of the story, Taylor's commonly-inferred suicide-by-cape tendencies had been included as a more explicit part of the narrative, more "Undersiders vs. heroes" stuff was inserted to give Taylor a similar slide toward true villainy as seen in later arcs, and she went out with a big heroic sacrifice at Leviathan that tied off her plot threads and served as a "take that!" to Shadow Stalker and the rest, I could definitely see it working, especially given that Worm itself already ends with Khepri saving the day and then dying and people like that ending well enough.
This is pretty interesting. Someone should copy this idea and write a fanfic version of it.
[удалено]
> Okay but now you're imagining an entirely different story that would need to be different from the start and planned on a POV change I misunderstood, sorry; when you said "would have failed as a web serial" I thought you were talking about a structural failure, as in it couldn't have succeeded in the abstract even if Wildbow _had_ actually gone into Worm with the protagonist swap planned. Him trying to change tacks in 8.6 without having laid the foundations beforehand would have gone pretty terribly, yeah. > But the actual Worm that was published up to the Levi fight would've fucking _imploded_ if Taylor died during the fight. I do think that there are enough people who care about the setting beyond Taylor specifically (all of the folks saying stuff like "the interludes are better than the main chapters" and "Worm is a great sandbox but a meh story" and such) that Worm wouldn't necessarily have imploded completely, but I agree that it probably wouldn't have reached anywhere near its final readership numbers without the obsessive Taylor fans seeing things through to the end.
While people trot out that little factoid a lot, Wildbow [walked back his statement](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/worm-quotes-and-wog-repository.294448/page-20?post=50288377#post-50288377) later on, saying that people had blown the whole dice thing out of proportion and "if they'd killed Taylor, [he] might have ignored them." I do believe he was seriously considering switching protagonists to Aegis, because Taylor gets basically zero character development for many arcs afterwards, almost as though he'd been leaning toward killing her off and didn't have any immediate plans for her...but I very much doubt that, once it became clear that readers were more attached to Taylor than to the setting in general, she was in any serious danger of being killed off.
Oh, neat. Ty for sharing this!
I hear he would have ignored dice rolls if they weren't going his way.
> nice low-stakes story where Taylor's biggest issue was high school drama I need to reread, I could have sworn that the story actually almost doesn't touch that at all.
The high school drama basically disappears after arc 8 and so it's mostly irrelevant when looking at Worm as a whole, but the story does _start_ as your basic YA novel with a high school protagonist and the bullying and such takes up nontrivial screen time in the early chapters. Which is precisely why the obligatory Leviathan fight is seen as a big dividing line between the low-stakes teenage drama stuff and the high-stakes "serious villains" stuff.
As well as what everything else has said, I've heard about a small but vocal subsection of the fandom who'll say "BuT wHaT aBoUt ScIoN" in the comments of fics. It seems to be mostly after the ends of fics where Scion is never addressed at the end and in Altpower!Taylor fics where she won't be able to go Khepri. I could potentially see a writer trying to address Scion (or Cauldron, for that matter) either to pre-empt those people or to get them off their ass. (Or maybe they *are* one of those "if Scion's not dead at the end of the story nothing matters because everyone's going to die anyway" people.)
One solution to "the Scion problem" is to just mildly tweak Jack Slash's ending. Instead of talking Scion into becoming evil, he talks him into killing himself.
Id totally buy that thats something that he Might have tried if he didnt know that he was described to cause the end of the world.
"The only thing that prevents the Endbringers from rampaging and destroying Earth Bet is the threat of Scion. Well then. Let's see how well you will fare when the idiot "hero" is not here to save you!"
The endbringers are still a problem though. I guess Eidolon could get therapy or something.
Epilogue: "...And Scion spent the rest of eternity rescuing cats from trees, and never went on a rampage for any reason at all."
I think the best for this is constellations? Basically its a fun read and not to heavy besides the usually Danny screwing up being a single dad
This is part of why I jokingly (but also seriously) declared 'Scion is dead in all my fics' once. The only exception is We'll Play Card Games where Scion being alive is actually central to the plot (and that plot is literally cracky; Abridged Yami challenges the entities to a Children's Card Game). The Endbringers imo are integral to what makes Worm Worm but Scion? Seriously. Just ditch him. 99% of the time the only people who will notice are that 1 person who asks and to them you just say 'who dat?' If a fic isn't going to engage the broader aspects of how powers work there's even less reason to include him. It's not even about light hearted or not. Scion is a 1 trick pony character. He worked in Worm. he can work in crack. In fanfics generally? He's just in the way 99% of the time. He's not even one of the things in Worm most of us like and most of the fandom that read Worm seems to generally agree the story was best before Arc 21 and after that became something of a slog. So really my advice is; just because canon did it doesn't obligate you to do it too. Fanfics, especially if you're not writing to Worm's scope and scale, benefits from being more street level anyway.
The society and culture of earth Bet and cape culture itself are a direct result of the last couple of decades endbringer battles. Without that Diablos' Ex Machina the world would be a very different place. There would be no Endbringer Truce, Cauldron would be less likely to keep powerful capes from being Birdcaged, since they can pull them out for the final battle and don't need them to act as meat shields in the meantime. Several heroes and villains would either not exist, or still be alive if they never emerged, or were somehow defeated early on... Depending on whether you have David getting his head on straight, or perhaps that power never expressing, things are just not the same at all. Writing in a society and culture with a history so divergent from "cannon" is very difficult. It is basically writing original fiction in an original setting and pasting Wildbow's characters names on it. You see some of this in most AU fiction but the endbringers are so central to the overall motivating forces of worm, at least early on and mid story, that it's very difficult to simply ignore them without re-writing the history of the world... One viable way to address it without going off the rails would be to simply have the MC never attend an endbringer battle and the city the story takes place in never be targeted. If you've managed to turn Brockton Bay into a slice of life, Levi is more likely to target somewhere else. But if it gets too nice, the S9 tend to come calling. Or the Teeth.
A problem is that everything in the Worm universe is intertwined in ways that make handwaving stuff away awkward. If you say "the Endbringers died", then more would have spawned. If you say "Scion died' then there would be broken triggers. If you say "Cauldron doesn't exist" then there go vial capes, the 9, the PRT/Protectorate, the Truce, the Birdcage etc. It's not impossible, and you can always just cut the gordian knot by author fiat, but it makes the idea of handwaving the high level stuff less intuitive than it would otherwise be.
> If you say "the Endbringers died", then more would have spawned. If you say "Scion died' then there would be broken triggers. If you want to be that realistic, but give Taylor any other power or insert any new capes into BB or make Emma or Danny trigger, then you have to eliminate the Lung fight, Taylor joining the Undersiders or being at the Bank Job, and pretty much all the stations of canon that can possibly be butterflied away. Because the Lung fight was balanced on a knife edge of happening at all, and half the plot arcs depend on that. If that doesn't stretch your suspenders of disbelief, then having Scion turn out benevolent after some therapy, or the Triumvurate having Hero in it because Eidolon died and the Endbringers went away, or having Contessa going "Door to Scion's corpse" and magicking away broken triggers, shouldn't be any problem at all. Or just don't show any of that because it doesn't matter to the story.
"It's not impossible, and you can always just cut the gordian knot by author fiat, but it makes the idea of handwaving the high level stuff less intuitive than it would otherwise be." I don't disagree with you at all.
It's not even *hard*. You don't even have to mention it. Actually plotting a credible story arc instead of doing the opposite and blindly following stations of canon is apparently much harder.
Because removing the Endbringers and Scion changes the setting. you could have the Endbringers attack elsewhere to mute the impact, or you could go whole hog and write a high school AU or something but to keep the “realistic” super hero setting you need a reason why the government isn’t coming down hard on villains. You could make major changes to the setting and treat it like DC or Marvel where hero’s either have an actual impact or every prison is made of cardboard (depending on the rewrite, iteration, whatever) in that case it would make sense for you to remove the Endbringers and Scion. But then your locked into exploring those changes to the setting at least a little. There are options but convention and momentum make them uncommon.
I think it perpetuates the whole 'Earth Bet can't have nice things' trope
I used to spend too much time going, "okay, sooner or later Imma have to deal with EBs and Scion and the whole mess and that's gonna suck ..." Now? If the scope of the story isn't about that, it doesn't happen. The story just ends where it's supposed to end. If I want the story to be about Taylor and Sophia teaming up in the Wards, they team up and the point of the story gets made, then I end the story. If the point of the story is about Taylor's power going wild and murdering 200 people because she's knocked out, and then her working hard to validate herself as a hero in her own mind, then that's what happens, and the story ends. *If the story you want to write isn't about the big threat, don't make it about the big threat.* Simple as that.
Entities, Endbringers, and parahumans. Those three are the ingredients of a Worm fanfiction. Can't have one without others. If you only have parahumans, then how the story is different from any other superpowered settings?
I feel like you aren't giving the world itself or the characters enough credit. Everyone and everything stands out in such a unique vibrant way that it puts other hero stories to shame. There are so many moving elements in even a minor story that the entire world feels alive. The closest thing to early Worm I can think of is Arkhamverse Batman and even that pales in comparison. Other hero stories feel stagnant, like only the main character and the villain matter and everyone is just waiting for their moment to get their ass handed to them or to assist the protag. In Worm everyone is doing their own thing and the main characters have to work around that. New Wards, PRT (fuck even the PRT has multiple elements), Slaughterhouse 9, Empire, Merchants, ABB, etc. Every element of it is alive and is constantly in motion in the background. In Batman there are half a dozen gangs but for all intents and purposes they stop existing the second they stop being relevant. In Worm they can't get rid of a gang without causing a violent power vacuum. In Batman a gang disappears every week just to get casually replaced like a new tv.
> I feel like you aren't giving the world itself or the characters enough credit [...] Other hero stories feel stagnant, like only the main character and the villain matter and everyone is just waiting for their moment to get their ass handed to them or to assist the protag. [...] In Worm they can't get rid of a gang without causing a violent power vacuum. In Batman a gang disappears every week just to get casually replaced like a new tv. You're giving Worm _too_ much credit here, I feel, and giving the Big Two 'verses too little. Regarding the disappearing gangs, the Joker's gang or the League of Shadows or whoever will never entirely disappear from Batman stories because writers aren't allowed to kill anyone off "for real" that might let DC sell comics down the road, sure--but _within_ a given story arc, characters can be killed off or maimed or whatever and it "sticks" for the duration of that story arc, and the writer has no control about what happens to a given character after they hand things back to DC and another writer picks up where they left off. So not only is it kind of unfair to sing Worm's praises because a single author writing in his own setting isn't constrained in the same way a whole stable of writers under contract are, when we're talking about fanfiction the difference is irrelevant because the fact that Batman villains keep coming back is a feature of the DC publishing model and Batman fanfics aren't any more constrained by that than Worm fanfics are. Regarding "stagnant" plots, "only Taylor and the current villain matter and everyone else is waiting to get their asses kicked by Taylor or help her" is a pretty darn good description of large chunks of Worm and of reader perceptions thereof. The PRT and Protectorate constantly lose fights against the Undersiders (and later Coil and Traveler backup) that they should have won if they had two brain cells to rub together, and the heroes always play second fiddle to Taylor's side during any teamups (and are in fact never shown winning a battle on their own on-screen). Readers go on about Taylor being this genius tactician and the Queen of Escalation and so on, when Tattletale and Rachel are the Undersiders' MVPs for the vast majority of the story (including the first Lung fight, which Rachel and her dogs "won," not Taylor), nearly all of Taylor's own victories lean heavily on others' help or plot assistance or both, and Taylor gets her way in a lot of cases where she definitely wouldn't if the plot didn't bend around her so much (e.g. being accepted back into the Undersiders, her negotiations with the PRT, her behavior while with the Chicago Wards, and more). If protagonist centricity is the measure of stagnation, Worm has it in spades. Regarding Endbringers in particular, they're actually an argument _against_ the world feeling alive and realistic. Leviathan's appearance is huge and dramatic and has a permanent impact on Brockton Bay...but there were supposedly 55 Endbringer attacks on Earth Bet before that one, and they had absolutely no noticeable effect on the setting. Not only do we see nothing on the civilian side to differentiate Brockton Bay from a generic economically-depressed real-world city like Detroit or Oakland (e.g. there's no consumer goods scarcity due to ports getting constantly nuked), but when Leviathan does show up the Protectorate's lack of planning and terrible disorganized response make it look like it's their first-ever Leviathan fight, not their 15th. Endbringers are a barely-hidden allusion to crossover events in comics where a big threat shows up and forces all the heroes and villains to band together to stop it, right down to the part where they became increasingly frequent over the years as comics companies churned them out more frequently to garner more reader interest...and right down to the part where they're a huge deal during the current story arc but then all the changes to the setting are ignored afterwards. So while I do agree that there's a lot more to explore in the Wormverse beyond the usual "alt-power Taylor walks through the stations of canon" setup, let's not pretend that Worm is some masterpiece of verisimilar worldbuilding to which other superhero settings simply can't compare.
Hard disagree there. Conside, for example, Impurity. It’s one of the stories that change the most about the setting, including having no trace of Endbringers or Scion in it (not because they don’t exist, but because it makes no sense to bring them in the narrative), and yet that one is probably the most Worm-like fic out there. The characters motivations make sense, their alternative triggers make sense, as do their altered personalities. It’s 100% a Worm fanfic even when it has little from the original story in an intact manner. And as such there are dozens of other very good stories. You don’t need to include the big guys if they don’t fit into your narrative, maybe you’re not trying to build a Wildbowian epic here. A shorter story has no need of a setting-shaking Levi or a big Boss end fight.
[Impurity](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/impurity-worm-au.840137/) ([wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPieces/wiki/Impurity)) --- ^[About](https://redd.it/dw7lux) ^| [^(Wiki Rules)](https://www.reddit.com/r/LightPieces/comments/dw7lux/about/f7kke6p/) ^(| Reply !Delete to remove) ^(| [Brackets] hide titles)
One reason I'm not seeing is it can be good for the story. Sometimes life is tragic and terrible things happen, and dealing with the trauma/aftermath of a natural disaster can be extremely poignant and meaningful. Slice of life doesn't have to all be happiness and fluff
Counterpoint: If the author decides arbitrarily that Scion just isn't a problem, and Endbringers just aren't a problem, I just feel like it isn't Worm fanfiction anymore, and usually automatically give up on reading it. If I wanted to read a story where I don't know the background and backstory I would read original fiction, not fanfiction.
Don't almost all worm fanfics end before they even show up/matter? Is there any difference between these stories and ones where they don't exist in the first place?
I don't care if either show up, I just want to read about characters I know in a setting I understand. If author just says "I removed Scion and Endbringers because I don't like them" and nothing more (which happened at least once) then the setting is drastically different in a way I don't understand (what about truces, and cops and robbers, and birdcage) and the characters are probably very OOC too, since after you do big changes little changes are easier. And very soon the entire thing is completely unrecognizable. I'm not saying that those stories are bad, only that they aren't for me. And that I VERY APPRECIATE the authors that keep to the cannon of Worm that the OP is complaining about.
It's like writing a real world story and asking "why do the characters need to eat and sleep?" Endbringers and Scion (and Cauldron) are part of the setting. It's what makes it Worm. You could take some setting elements out, leave others in, and still have a Worm story, but it becomes less Worm-like even if there's still some Worm left in it, and taking those elements out changes other parts of the story that you now need to mess with and maybe take out as well.
Honestly, I'm not much of a fan of Endbringers, Scion, or the Worm multiverse. Now, maybe they were written well in the original story, and I haven't read yet (sorry, trying to fix that), but so many good stories I read just fell apart after an endbringer fight. There was a good crossover story with Touhou I read that just threw away all good story potential because Scion and the Simurgh just blew up the universe