Psycho Gecko’s comments alone are enough reason to go back and scan the comments after you finish. He writes an ongoing web serial called World Domination in Retrospect. (IIRC, he started it after some encouragement in the Worm comment section.)

Nice! I’ll have to keep that in mind.

If I were to read that web serial, though, I’d hope the characters weren’t like Genoscythe. There’s an enormous difference between Genoscythe and the edgier Worm villains, and it’s that Genoscythe, from the description that was given [here], would just be edgy for the sake of edgy. I know it was a joke, but it says something about Psycho Gecko’s sense of humor.

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When you’ll finish Worm, will you read its continuation: Worm 2? Because Wildbow is currently writing Worm 2, you know.

I do plan to liveblog Ward (I failed to avoid learning its name, though I tried), yes, assuming I’m still up for it when/if I finish Worm. The latest ETA I’ve been given for that is June 2021, and a lot can happen in that time.

Currently, there are several things I’d like to read between Worm and Ward, too. Such as Guts & Glory (and other such drafts that are available) and maybe a shorter, perhaps unrelated project, as a break from the Wormverse before returning to Ward.

I’m actually kind of glad Wildbow has such a head start on me when it comes to Ward, by the way. I’d prefer not to catch up with an ongoing work, and at our respective rates, Ward may very well be finished by the time I finish reading Worm.

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For the next while, there are going to be a lot more interludes than usual, because of what that other ask mentioned about Wildbow’s experiments with stretch goals.

Oh, huh, alright. That ought to be interesting, if perhaps a pain to speculate on. :p

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Funny how you once feared that Worm was your typical high school drama and now one of the main characters puppeteers someone from the most famous group of mass murderers in America and it’s treated like a background detail. The escalation is real

I know, right? Once upon a time, Taylor’s biggest problems (besides the Harpies) were the risk of Lisa finding out what her true intentions were (and that turned out moot), and the risk of getting arrested for small fry crimes.

But yeah, I was so clueless back at the very start. I mean, seriously, I was so blind that I didn’t even know it was about superpowers until Taylor demonstrated hers! I thought Mr Gladly was talking about the seaside land formation when he asked about capes, theorized about “Gestation” and “Worm” referring to some parasitic alien brewing in Taylor, and about the Triumvirate being the leaders of a dystopian society, wildly trying to figure out how this high school drama “shifts from the hellish landscape of high school to the more uplifting bombed-out city fairly quickly”…

Despite my regrets regarding the negativity I showed towards Gestation 1.1, that was still a good time.

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“I was so clueless back at the very start,” I say, as if I’m not still clueless.

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The Othersiders is an AU 130k dead fanfic, in which every Undersider has a different interpretation of another Undersiders power. For example Lisa has a Thinker power mapping all nerves in a body which shows her where to strike to exploit all weaknesses, Taylor has unlimited multitasking, etc. The trigger events are different, so differing backstories, personalities and group dynamics. Alec is leader. I haven’t read it yet, but I hear it’s quite good. Major spoilers for you, of course 🙂

Interesting. It’s not quite what I was talking about re: the Othersiders (as defined in 15.2) presumably being a recurring fanfic trope, but it does sound pretty cool!

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I was recently trying to think of how could I describe what Amy did to Victoria since the exact details are purposefully witheld from us. I came up with “Amy, in her lost and derailed mindset, looking at and caring for the one person she cared for the most, for the last time, used Victoria’s flesh as a canvas, to paint all that she would miss when she was gone from her life.”

That’s beautiful.

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Per 11.e, Rune is in fact in the Chosen.

+

Rune was always in the Chosen. She’s there in 11.e.

Ah, right. Yeeah, I kinda got my wires tangled a bit during this chapter.

Lisa’s explanation for why Rune might be with Night and Fog doesn’t help, in the long run. Lisa first said everyone present was a member of the Chosen and then suggested that Rune might be the only Chosen there and the rest would be Pure. Then more Chosen showed up.

Shit’s confusing.

Maybe she got the situation backwards, and Night and Fog wanted to join the Chosen for some reason?

It’s possible that they were meeting for re-merging negotiations, but then why wouldn’t Purity, the Pure’s leader, be there too?

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I can’t believe Krix just ignored one of the funniest (IMO) parts in Worm. How do you NOT find a cheery grin and “Hi! I’ve killed hundreds of people and maimed thousands” funny? HOW, KRIX? HOW?!?

Oh, I do, that was great! I’m sorry for failing to make that clear.

Shit-eating, snarky, really on-point Alec is best Alec. :p

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Regarding human breeding experiments, it might be a good idea to review the Wikipedia article on eugenics.

Yeah, I suppose that is what that’s all about. I did kind of realize that shortly after making my first post about this, following it up with the one about the Nazis doing it [both links: here].

I do still think the edited writing prompt puts an interesting twist on it. I don’t know of any real concentrated eugenics effort that lasted for anywhere near the duration the prompt asks for.

What if some secret cult has been doing eugenics in the shadows for a thousand years, and one day we get to meet the product of that process – a being that’s supposedly human in the same way a chihuahua, a rottweiler and a St. Bernard are all supposedly the same species as a grey wolf?

Bonesaw would probably love it.

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Franken Fran is the nice/sane version of Bonesaw. Which is not to say that she doesn’t do some fantastically horrific things, but they’re usually misguided rather than malevolent. Usually.

Nice. Though I actually think the exact same thing applies to Bonesaw, and it’s a big part of why I like her so much as a character.

She’s not malevolent, really. She’s not out to hurt people for the sake of it, like Jack is. From her own perspective, she’s just an artist who happens to work with the human body as her canvas, and she doesn’t have the slightest concept of the idea that it’s wrong to do that.

It’s not her fault everyone’s a critic.

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Bonesaw’s whole “artist” thing, of course, makes the end of Amy and Victoria’s story even more fitting. A big part of why that was such a satisfying ending was that is acted as an answer to Bonesaw’s claim that she and Amy were alike in some ways. And a result. Bonesaw set Amy on a downward spiral and made them alike.

There’s one crucial difference, though: Amy knows what she did was wrong.

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I think the ending of this chapter is really interesting because it kind of implies that Taylor thinks literal Nazis are less deserving of the Regent treatment than Sophia.

That’s a very good point. It displays a kind of self-centered bias that’s been a part of Taylor’s character since the very beginning. Anything Sophia did is a hundred times as bad because it directly involved Taylor.

Though I’m not sure she really did think that? She did show surprise, but to me it mostly just reads like she’s annoyed that she didn’t know about this plan.