Wormfic - Blog Posts

So I'm working on a fic currently and I was trying to mentally map how I view the layout of the Hebert house so I made a whole floor plan. I'm aware of the one wildbow made, but I wasn't when I started, and I like mine better anyway.

The stairs into the basement are directly below the stairs to the 2nd floor, should help orient things.

Floor 1 + yard

Floor 2

Basement

I figure the whole property sits on a full acre, in the older residential part of the docks, so not surrounded by apartments or townhouses but also not an excessively wealthy area. Where the middle class used to be before the economic downturn hit Brockton Bay.

is cherish in my neighborhood, why did I wake up this morning with a slaughterhouse nine au in my head??? brain, explain

Only wrote like, 2000 words over the last 10 hours, but that was all refining and adding to an outline so whatever! If I was writing a chapter at the moment I would probably be a lil disappointed with it, but I'm making an outline and those 2k words translates to 30 different scenes/events in the fic and progressed the plot through another month and a half.

So I'm happy :D

now, hypothetically, how does one find a "beta-reader"

the fic isn't written yet, still working on the outline, but I feel like I'm going to need earlier feedback than hoping for comments when I start to publish it

is there a store to get one, or do I need to go on a quest to acquire, the beta-reader? hypothetically

"Tilt" is pretty good, "Dakka" is fun, I love "Marionette", "Paths Diverged" if you're into pillbug, "Here Comes The New Boss (Nothing Like The Old Boss)" is great

Had to look through my Worm bookmarks for a minute for these, all on ao3 by the way

someone know some good and interesting hero taylor fanfic?

I definitely feel like worm, and the fanfics, are at their best when it's "worm the dark superhero story" and not "worm the superhero sci fi story".

Just sort of weakens the setting and world? And I hate how much of a sword of damocles Scion is for so many fics because if you don't change enough about the setting to where Gold Morning doesn't happen, then the plot might have to go there and that doesn't feel like it works for every fic. I admire a fic who states outright in the tags or authors notes that "Hey, Scion just fucked off to be depressed about his alien girlfriend, this story won't have a gold morning" because it lessens that narrative weight that works for canon worm, but not the plot of every fanfic.

Some of my favorite wormfics (Shamus, Postdiluvian Road) are concentrated cape stories about what being a small-time player in the world actually looks like.

Canon Worm is great for what it is, and it also has a narrow focus and pathway of escalation that I love, but I don't think the majority of fics need to follow in the footsteps of.

Haven't read Ward but every mention of stuff from Ward that I see in the wiki (Firmament, Shardspace, Titans, etc) makes me groan.

huge worm spoilers below the cut

honestly, despite the fact that it was baked into the story from the very beginning, i genuinely feel like worm and fanfiction thereof is served well by kind of ignoring the whole source behind the powers.

like obviously the Entities’ goals drive a lot of the conflict (both a storytelling term and literal fights) but frankly i feel like worm is best when it’s about the people living in a world that just kinda fuckin sucks.

‘what if everything was worse and also people had superpowers and do very human things with them’ is way better than the whole interdimensional space whales that have inserted a thing into a bunch of peoples brains that gives them superpowers but also makes them want to fight so that they can explode everything

and don’t get me started on everything in fucking ward

Oh boy, something i have been dying to talk about while brainstorming wormfic ideas in my notes document for the last two months.

I really enjoy the idea presented here of the differentiation between a pure alternate power scenario, where the trigger happens off-screen and the story starts after the fact and a scenario where the divergence from canon directly results in an alt-power occurring to whoever the protagonist of choice is (almost always Taylor, let's be real).

In regard to tagging, I figure it's probably safe to tag "alt-power" if one appears at all despite the circumstances, though that might depend more on the premise of the fic, where the "what if" moment takes place.

Really can't wait to write a more worm-centric fic following my current crossover one, which does feature an alt-power but it's kind of weird and I've yapped about it so much to the people commenting on the fic.

If you're taking the name literally, alt-power fic includes every fic where a main character has a different power from canon, but when people talk (or complain) about alt-power as a genre, the stuff they're talking about is usually stuff that is not implied by that definition. So I'm curious - where do you all draw the line of what is and isn't an alt-power fic?

For me personally, I would call something alt-power if "what if the protagonist's power was this?" is the primary thing the fic is about, with all other changes that canon made either to enable or as a result of the different power. Therefore, I do not consider fics where the primary "what if" is about something other than the protagonist's power, even if a consequence of that change is that a character triggers with a different power. So I would consider fics like Camera Shy or Monster alt-power fics, but not, say, Here Comes The New Boss.

Anyway, mostly I was thinking about this because I was trying to decide if any of the fics that I'm writing/want to write count as alt-power fics, because some of them definitely contain some of the elements that people mention when they're talking about alt-power fics, like, say, taking place in Brockton Bay pre-Leviathan. But to use Broken Crown as an example, the change to Amy's power wasn't the thing that I set out to write about, it just seemed like a natural consequence of that thing (though I imagine some people would disqualify it from their own definition purely for not having Taylor as a protagonist)