Haggis. Hummus. [here] I don’t know maybe your language does something with the spelling.

As for the “hummus” confusion, you were probably thinking of “haggis”

you might be getting hummus confused with haggis! I definitely did as a kid!

“Well, then. Why do I associate it with Scotland??” I’m not really sure, but the only logical answer I can think of was your brain confusing Scotland being the home of hummus instead of haggis. Bit of a stretch, I know, but it’s all I got.

Mixing up hummus and haggis?

Ohhh. Yeah, that sounds like something I would do.

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[Reddit comment thread on a post about Sandara’s Leviathan piece]

[deleted user]:
How much do I have to pay to get worm animated into a series? This really kicks ass.

EnterAdman:
I feel like I read somewhere that it’s being adapted into live action something. I’ll see if I can find where I saw that.

Wildbow:
There are no current plans to adapt Worm to live action. There was some talk in the start of 2016. That was a movie production company (that’s done movies with blockbuster, international releases) wanting to helm things and work with a related TV studio to get Worm to the little screen. I’m not wholly sure, but I think that’s stalled/dead in transit.

It’s the way it goes. As an agent remarked to me, book publication is doom, gloom, doom, gloom, doom, gloom, you’re never going to succeed- but wait! Hey! Success! Somehow! At the same time, movie/Tv production is hype! Success incoming! This is going to be awesome! Look at all these great people who want to work with us! Woo! Hype, hype, hype- oh sorry no, not going to work out, bye. (If you even get the bye; sometimes it’s just getting ghosted)

Part of it is just how very many hoops there are to jump through in tv/movies. You’re not shooting for that one in a million shot. It’s fify one-in-a-hundred shots.

In the fall of last year I got swamped with 20+ interested people (production companies, producers, scriptwriters, agents) in the TV/movie sphere, most for Worm (some for Twig). One discussion/possibility re: a Worm animation project was moving ahead for a while, with ongoing discussions through fall, winter and the spring of this year, but the person in question (who would be in my top three people to work with in animation, if not my very top person) had other obligations and I was busy. So discussions on that & one other promising project (for similar reasons) are tabled at least until next year.

I’m not the type to get my hopes up even when someone reaches out and is like, “Hi Wildbow, I’m the guy who made some of your favorite pieces of media from your childhood, and I’d really like to work on something TV/movie related with you.” The rationale for that -my personal feeling- is that while Worm has its warts and wrinkles (it’s basically first draft work and it had waxing and waning as real life got in the way) it’s good enough that it’s generating its own very awesome fan community. Sandara’s work is one of the chief examples of the very awesome things fans are doing because they liked Worm as much as they did. And extending from that rationale & feeling is the belief that, with a little patience and a lot of work, Worm will get out there in print, and it’ll have enough momentum on its own that future tertiary projects are nigh inevitable.

[submitter’s caption]

Krixwell wanted to know if TV shows are a possibility for what Wildbow has written

Ahh, well, it’s a shame none of it seems to be working out, but hey, people in the business being interested is still a pretty good start!

And if it were to end up in TV form (movie sounds like a bad idea due to the amount of stuff that would need to be either cut or crammed), we’d want it to be done right! Maybe Netflix would be a good company to have in on this, at least on the quality front.

From what we know there is a possibility for Worm being traditionnally published or adapted to a screen, big or small. I believe it’s nothing serious though. There are like… people who look for ideas, I think people like those are the ones who contact the Boar to talk with him before making pitches to their respectives studios. I think we’d heard more if it had gotten past the pitch stage.

That makes sense. The executives probably don’t have the time to go read enough of Worm to get a good idea of how good it’d be as a TV series, or harbor doubts that it’d work out with regards to making a good adaptation within the budget and time constraints, that kind of thing. It’s a shame, but it’s fairly understandable.

Re: Scotland, you were probably thinking of haggis. Re: Worm TV show, yeah it’s been discussed. There’s some hurdles to making it happen, partly because the story itself is hard to adapt in some places (how would you film the miasma?) and also because Wildbow doesn’t want to compromise the quality too much. There’s a fandom meme about a publisher wanting to change the first line to “‘Take that you worm!’ said Emma.”

Hmm. Filming the miasma might be tricky, yeah. Do you film what’s literally happening, or what Taylor thinks is happening? Do you have voiceover for Taylor’s thoughts (though that might be needed in more places)?

Also, wow. That’s a bit on the nose.

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I think that when Sierra says that “they have to pull their weight” and “we can’t baby them forever” she’s talking about the adults of the O’Daly clan, as she wants to give them a wake-up call with the children going door to door. Not sure because she says that they are eating their food and occupying their sleeping spaces, which sounds like she is referring to the kids, but other than that it sounds like she means the adults, plus she’s nice to the kids. Just wanted to share my interpretation.

It might be a bit of both, though quite possibly more targeted at the adults, yeah. At least the part about pulling their weight.

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Dear screener and/or Krixwell, I wrote some commentary on the Wildbow advice re: update consistency from my own observations, but it ended up more than twice the character limit. How would you prefer I submit such commentary, if at all? Multiple asks? A link to Pastebin or wherever?

Sharks: I’d prefer pastebin, but it’s up to you (and them.)

Multiple asks (usually marked with something like “(cont.)” or “(1/3)”) is the most common approach to this (it may not be as noticeable on this blog as on others because I tend to undo the separation when quoting the full text, unless there’s a reason they’re separated besides character limits), but Pastebin also sounds like a very good solution. Apparently Sharks prefers that one, and I’m fine with either.

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I love these chapters where we see Taylor from an outside perspective. Bugs covering the face and costume don’t even register in her narration anymore and while Atlas is just a means for flying for Taylor, for others it may look like a monster straight from a horror movie (Image Clocky’s reaction). And the Sierra bit with the kids shows us that not only the capes are affected by the situation in the city and even the muggles have character development, for the worse and better

Hi Krix, I think this is about the third time in the story you have seen Taylor from someone elses point of view. Is this noticible and impactful to you reading? Any thoughts about that as part of the story and/or part of the mechanic for telling the story?

Seeing how others see Taylor is a treat. Sierra in particular, as she and Charlotte have rather unique perspectives on Skitter, being in her closest circle but not being fellow supervillains or even parahumans (I think this is only the third Interlude to feature the perspective of someone without powers, unless you count the portions of Battery’s Interlude before she got hers).

It’s actually something I wish we’d see more often. Taylor is big on rationalization, and she’s gotten used to some really freaky things, so it’s interesting to get looks at how she comes across to someone who can’t hear her rationalizations and aren’t used to those freaky things.

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Charlotte was rescued from a Merchant party where she was being forced to dance and refusing to strip. They litterally rescued her by having one of Tattletale’s soldier “buy” her. You’re not the only one to draw the conclusion that she was raped. However WoG is that she wasn’t, though I imagine living in constant fear of possibly being raped while thugs leer at you for God knows how long is probably traumatic on it’s own.

Ah, yeah, that’s very fair.

The weird thing is I wasn’t even thinking of during her captivity. I was thinking more about before her captivity, about the events leading up to it. Still, though, you’re right, the events during her captivity, actual physical rape or no, would be traumatic enough to cause the kind of reaction she displayed on their own.

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(For Elizabeth) This could be considered a spoiler so use your judgement, but you might consider telling Krix that the “upsetting” part of the current chapter is almost over. He seems to be having trouble reading through it (as he did through similar scences in the Merchant’s mall party in Arc 11), and I don’t blame him…

“I don’t really feel up to liveblogging today either, sorry. Not sure why.” If it’s because of the grim situation where you left off, you should know by now that nothing in Worm stays the same for long. Keep reading a bit. 🙂

I think that did have a lot to do with it, yes, though tiredness from work didn’t help.

I think it might be in part the helplessness that gets to me. This was roughly how I felt for large portions of 8.3. It wasn’t quite as extended and thorough as it was back then (you may recall that 8.3 was the first and so far only time I went “if the story continues like this consistently, I’m not sure I can keep this up”), at least.

It’s not that the scene’s connotations bring up bad memories for me, like I imagine it does for a lot of other people. I don’t have personal experience with rape or abuse, and if it were straight up a trigger for me, I wouldn’t be reading the story, due to Wildbow’s general trigger warning at the very beginning. It still makes me uncomfortable and angry (at Sugita, not at Wildbow), though, and it’s something I’d rather not be sitting through in most cases.

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Re: Clocky’s reaction [above] to a ponysized beetle… at least Atlas is too big to crawl in under his eyelids.