Hi Krixwell! I just wanted to tell you how much I love watching you read Worm via your blog. It is such fun, thank you for doing this and sharing as you do. So, my question, what are your thoughts right now about the world of worm? Purposefully general, I’d like to hear whatever comes to mind.

It’s not a world I’d like to live in. Yes, it has cool heroes, but it’s a crapsack world. Or, at the very least, the narrative focuses a lot on the negatives of the world, negatives that are realistic but perhaps just a bit exaggerated.

Then again, I’m incredibly privileged. The biggest problem I’ve seen in Worm that I have personal experience with is Kid Win’s ADD, so maybe it’s my perspective that is skewed.

But even if the mundane crapsackiness of the Worm world is realistic, you’ve got the parahuman crapsackiness that comes with villains like Heartbreaker, the Slaughterhouse Nine and Kaiser running around (well, not so much Kaiser anymore, but you know what I mean), or Purity for that matter. Purity might actually have the highest “onscreen” killcount so far, besides Leviathan.

And, speaking of Leviathan, then there’s the whatever-the-fuck-the-Endbringers-are crapsackiness. You think you’ve got a shitty city? This world has monsters that deliberately target weakened spots and can make large islands sink into the sea, cover cities with lava and… whatever the Simurgh does (if Leviathan is a tsunami and Behemoth a volcano, maybe the Simurgh is a hurricane?), just to prove you wrong!

It’s an interesting world to read about, for sure, but damn if you’d get me to crawl through Professor Haywire’s hole between realities and live there.

Really enjoying you reading this so far. This is probably as close as we’ll get to a continuation of that “MST3K reads Worm” one shot on Spacebattles. Also, don’t know if this counts as a spoiler, but the next arc has 8 closing interludes. Who do you think they’ll be from the perspective of?

Woah.

So the natural guess based on the number is the Slaughterhouse Nine, but the thing is… if that’s the case, the Fellowship of the Meat (beyond just Jack, I mean) has to be a lot more important than they currently seem to be, to warrant what is practically another Interlude Arc like Sentinel to get to know them.

If it’s not them… just a collection of a whole bunch of other characters that turn out to be relevant to the next Arc? I don’t know.

Pist 170008370624 has a mis-capitalized chapter tag (“chapter” instead of “Chapter”).

That’s okay, tags aren’t case-sensitive. Thank you, though!

With regards to Dragon’s frustration with her limitations, you have to admit, you’d be incredibly annoyed if you were prevented from doing something because Dad saw something on tv and jumped to the worse possible conclusion, and did so in such a way that you can’t fix it without outside help

Yeah, regardless of whether it was right or wrong of Richter to do it in the first place, I can’t blame Dragon for being annoyed with it.

When there are multiple interludes in an arc, they’re labeled as (for example) 10.x and 10.y. With the exception of a coming arc that has a LOT of interludes that are labeled with .a, .b, etc.

Huh, neat.

I think I’m going to stick with my current system for tagging purposes, but it’s good to hear Wildbow did figure out how he wanted to do it after a while.

“Just look at chickens and penguins and other flightless birds.” Chickens can fly, just not very far.

Wait, really? 

Huh, so they can! Some of them not higher than a foot or so off the ground (at which point it’s arguably more hovering than flying), but some of them can fly up and roost in trees. Neat!

Hey Krix, Deer Lake is a real city. Google it and things might make sense.

Yep! This managed to help me figure it out even before I googled it. Thanks 🙂

If everything that’s too powerful for normal humans has to be made ‘safe’, would you recommend neutering Eidolon? Because I feel that it’s essentially the situation she’s in.

‘But if you can, isn’t it better to prevent something bad from happening than punishing the culprit afterwards?’ No, not at all. The equivalent would be ‘preventative amputation’. It makes little sense when powerful parahumans walk free and uncrippled.

I find it… interesting, how quickly you went from “I want to punch Dragon’s father in the dick” to “Oh those restriction aren’t just excusable, they’re neccesary”. I’m not going to say if you’re wrong or right, just pointing it out. And on the subject it’s better to prevent than punish… well with Canary they waited until there was an accident before putting the innocent person in prison…

“I’m not entirely sold that Andrew Richter did the wrong thing in limiting Dragon like this…” I am, but I can understand his reasons (one of Worm’s unofficial slogans is “doing the wrong thing for the right reasons”), and besides the two things you mention that he couldn’t have known, he also couldn’t have known that Newfoundland would share Kyushu’s fate before he had the chance to loosen Dragon’s chains.

I’m a little confused by your stance about AIs, especially that they should be constrained because they /might/ become malicious. Lots of human beings end up malicious, but we don’t say that parents should control every aspect of their children.

Good points all around, against limiting Dragon, and pointing out the hypocrisy of my stances on it.

I went into my response to the first few of these asks a bit in the end of chapter post, how it influenced my stance, and how the chapter was perfectly set up to allow for this sort of hypocrisy-puncturing.

In the end, though, I think it all comes down to another question: When does a program stop being a tool and start being a human? Part of my reasoning for understanding Richter’s decisions is that I don’t think he viewed Dragon as a metaphorically human being who should be treated as a human when it comes to morality. I don’t think he was obligated to, either, at least not until she was about as complete as she is now. And the argument one of you brought up about Leviathan’s attack is very true – for all we know, he could’ve been intending to loosen the chains eventually.