Just Like That Character in Worm (Holden)

## Introduction

*In order to best convey the community's relationship with the content some plot details are revealed and/or discussed. Apologies are given to those who do not wish to be spoiled.*

Clocking in just shy of
1.7 million words, the sci-fi superhero web serial *Worm* is a wonderful way for readers to annually void a month of their
lives. Written in easily digestible chunks reminiscent of Mark Twain’s first
published stories,  *Worm* has grown
from humble beginnings on wordpress and the forums of Spacebattles.com, to
being legitimately considered for T.V. adaptation.  As the author, J.C.
McCrae (known online as Wildbow), chugs away at *Worm’s* sequel following the completion of two other web serials, *Pact* and *Twig, Worm* continues to magnetize fans of smart super heroics from across
the web. What distances *Worm* from
many other web serials and superhero stories, however, is the online community
that’s blossomed around it. Known for attracting 40 to 60 readers a day from T.V.
Tropes alone in 2015,  *Worm* boasts
a robust internal wiki, a flourishing subreddit, and dozens of glowing reviews
from online newsstands. Oft compared for their equally captivating methods of
worldbuilding, *Worm* is crowed by many
communities as this generation’s *Watchmen.*  *While these claims can’t be wholly endorsed, there are similarities to*
be noted between the two. It is with these similarities, and how both stories
handle graying moralities, that their most enriching readings unfold.

Moore’s *Watchmen* is lauded as the greatest amongst
the manysatirizations of super heroes
that emerged during the 90’s. As seen in it it’s T.V. Tropes page,  *Worm* is the 2010’s continuation of the
tradition, through its subversion of many common comic book tropes. Known explicitly
for having many of its characters die and stay dead, *Worm’s* lack of pulled narrative punches mirrors that of *Watchmen*. Between *Worm’s* gigantic cast and *Watchmen’s*
*tightly focused one, the ways in which their characters explore the realist*
aspects of a super powered world are done so through clever use of alternative
storytelling. From Rorschach’s journal to the in-story *Tales of the Black Freighter, Worm* matches *Watchmen* blow for blow with the shifting narrative perspectives of its
interlude chapters and xenofiction. When a character’s mind or body is undone amidst
a firefight of bullets that turn you inside out, then back again and inescapable
bubbles of looped time, the reader is still enraptured with how *Worm* can weave in a narrative of
isolation, indifference, and abandonment by authority. Morality, too, is not
ignored. There are multiple scenes, and even plot arcs, that hinge around the
main character’s degrading ethics, and *Worm’s*
*readers love to quibble on Reddit about how right this character’s actions*
are. In turn, it is on forums like Reddit that much of *Worm’s* earliest popularity sprang from, and even be argued to be the
only place where this success could have originated.

In interviews,
Wildbow is known for crediting his earliest success with both favorable reviews
by smaller, but still well known, online literary critics, but also the nature in
which he has released his work.  Wildbow chose a web serial format because
he had always been able to start a new work, but never able to finish one. By
breaking down his writing into more manageable portions and then adhering to a
strict release schedule of twice a week, he’s been able to spur himself towards
the limelight.  From there, however, Wildbow has leveraged his consistency and
online presence into a hallmark of his. Across Spacebattles, Giant in the Playground,
IRC chatroom and others, he is known for personally responding to the
questions of fans. There is even a massive, archived thread on Spacebattles known
as the “word of god repository” where every canon utterance of his on the forum
has been stored.  Wildbow’s world building is even so extensive, that *Worm’s* personalized wiki has become a hub
of both information and community activity.  Many articles included on the
wiki’s front page are emblazoned with fan art that matches even Wildbow’s own
ideas of what characters look like. From here, these online community centers
like the subreddit or the wiki, can expand and combine until they’re a truly
unified group. In doing so, *Worm’s* online
community reaches the zenith at which it most closely aligns with the concepts
discussed in this class. Between the network of fan, creator, and content, interpretive
disputes, authorial intentions, and knowledge communities emerge from within *Worm’s* literary chrysalis to become the literature
that has dominated the minds of fans worldswide.

## Interpretive Disputes

Due to the enormous scope of the content that spans *Worm’s* literature, it is impossible to
detail every instance of debate within the fanbase. However, there are enough
notable instances of conjecture amongst the readers that interpretative disputes
within *Worm* can be discussed. The first
dispute worth talking about spans the entirety of *Worm,* and is the blurring morality of the main character, an ostracized
teenage girl with an unlikable super power named Taylor Hebert. When Taylor first
goes out in her homemade costume to fight a local gang lord, she’s mistaken for
a supervillain by a group of supervillains her age and is then sucked into
their world. Though she initially planned to join the villains to retrieve
information on them to deliver to the police, Taylor finds herself with the
only actual friends she’s had in years, and throughout the beginning of the
story she’s increasingly reluctant to betray her new friends. While this all smacks
of classic young adult literature, the story enters its first major trope subversion
when the city that the story takes place in is destroyed, and Taylor finds
herself as one of the increasingly powerful gang lords that she herself set out
to stop.

What is most surprising, however,
is how both Taylor and the reader are drawn to the conclusions that out of what
could have happened in the story, this was one of the better paths. Taylor
reasons that even if her and her fellow villains are a major presence in the
city’s underworld, at least they’re the ones in control of it. Sure, they might
be a bunch of kids with dubious morals, but at least they aren’t the white
supremacists or the torturous paramilitary organizations that they’re vying
against. When Taylor defeats one of the most powerful villains in the city, she
doesn’t just kill them, she murders them. The main character of the story
commits an undeniable crime when turning them into the police would have
sufficiently removed them from play, and both Taylor and the reader are exhilarated
by this. She killed this individual because she needed to prove to the child
that they’d kidnapped and exploited, through orchestrating Taylor’s own actions,
that they could no longer hurt them. She killed this individual because some
people are just too horrible to even have the chance of being free. She killed
this individual because they fucked her over, and god damnit, no one in power
is ever going to fuck her over again.

Naturally, having the
main character being an abject murderer but still having much of the audience
root for them is a lot for some other readers to handle. This is where the forum
threads are locked after hours of heated debate, but also where some of *Worm’s* greatest online critiques come
into play. Not only are these discussions on many character’s moralities taking
place on forums like Spacebattles and Reddit to this day, but they were taking
place in the comments sections of the Wordpress hosted chapters hours or even
minutes after they were aired. Because the fanbase was able to debate and
respond to the content so quickly via the nature of an online platform, Wildbow
was able to respond in an equally rapid way. Though this serves as a fine segue
into the authorial intention heading of this article, it also serves as a
channel to the second and most notorious instance of an interpretive dispute
within the fandom.

After the final chapters
of *Worm* hit the proverbial shelves of
the world’s greatest metaphorical library, fans sprung to debate the ambiguity of
Taylor’s fate. It was unclear if she had died at the story’s end, or instead
evaded the slimmest of odds and managed to squeeze out a happy ending in a world
without any happy at all, but by the time two years had gone by Wildbow himself
stepped in to end the debate. In a Reddit post now famous within the community,
he clearly stated that the “bad” interpretation was the true one, and that
everyone could go home instead of speculating that she was going to be the protagonist
of the not yet announced but still hypothesized sequel. Then Wildbow turned around
and commented on his own Reddit post, “/just kidding. Or am I?”  Though such
a response isn’t necessarily limited to an online platform, the impact of his
message was only enhanced by the speed and platform of his delivery. As stated
previously, Wildbow was known to both comment frequently in online fan spaces,
and to commonly lay down the law as to whether or not a fan theory had any
basis. By responding in such a complex fashion to a question that required a
concise answer, using internet “slang” that is known for being purposefully obtuse,
Wildbow has only fanned the flames further. In doing so, Wildbow has solidified
this specific interpretive dispute within the minds and legend of the *Worm* community, as well as his most
general authorial intentions.

## Authorial Intentions

To include a small bit of remediation in an article
that otherwise would be unable to find sufficient literature, Wildbow has been
known to say that he has never seen accurate fanart of a very distinctive, and
plot relevant character.  While this is largely irrelevant to the greater scope
of the *Worm* community’s interactions
with the author, it is a tell of his regarding how he presents himself to the
readers. Wildbow is Wildbow instead of J.C. McCrae, because he is familiar enough
with the online communities that he got his start in, that he can use his username
as an online persona of sorts. Subsequently, J.C. McCrae publishes under J.C.
McCrae instead of John McCrae because he both wants to distance himself from
the Canadian poet of the same name and because he prefers the anonymity of a pseudo-pseudonym.
While this is by no means a bad thing, it does set a precedent for how Wildbow presents himself as an author. By routinely engaging with the readership in
such a friendly manner, Wildbow has developed a persona that acts as the face
of the fandom. However, when Wildbow presents himself in a way that’s contrary
to this he and the fandom often clash.

One
way in which Wildbow’s online presence manifests is that he is a moderator of
the Parahumans subreddit which serves as the main subreddit for all his writing.
While he usually doesn’t have any problem with fanart, and even has some very
positive relationships with the most prominent artists, he prefers to keep most
of the meme fanart out of the main subreddit. In March of 2018 one of the most
prominent artists, who goes by the name Ionsheep, made a piece of joke artwork referencing
another of the fandom’s biggest authorial intent/interpretative disputes of how
Wildbow once said that a character’s power could have been used in the story in
a specific way to defeat a major villain.  The artwork became very popular
on the subreddit, but Wildbow wanted it taken down due to him feeling that it
was off topic enough to put into the less trafficked meme subreddit. The
community disagreed with him, and it sparked serious discussion on how much
these public online spaces were Wildbow’s to curate and how much they belonged
to the fans. Eventually, the piece remained on the main subreddit, but it was
one of the more prominent instances within the fandom where the creator clashed
with the readers.  Ultimately, the incident
was another incident that put Wildbow’s place as the creator into perspective.

While he had made the
story and was able to have much of what he said taken as “word of god,” by
putting his work out onto the internet Wildbow had lost full ownership of his
work.  “The Death of the Author” is a common literary critique and trope that
argues against the author’s agency after a work has been published. While his
work hasn’t been taken up by any publishing houses that the community knows of,
Wildbow’s work is now inherently tied to its fans through their interpretations
of it, and Wildbow himself could be in an authorial handicap of sorts. He is still
very much a driving force behind his work’s interpretation, but he isn’t in
full control. Rather, he can only use his online presence to steer discussion
in direction that he feels is appropriate for his work. As of now the ship hasn’t
blown off course but seeing as the sequel to *Worm* is much more divisive amongst the community in terms of its
themes and content, how long this will continue remains to be seen.

## Knowledge Communities

By their very nature, almost all of *Worm’s* fans belong to a knowledge
community seeing as *Worm* is currently
an online only media. While *Worm* is
long and its community well established, it was also Wildbow’s first major
written work. At the outset of its writing, Wildbow was still learning how to
motivate himself as a writer, let alone be a consistent one, and there are
times where it shows in the story. For years Wildbow has talked of publication
but refrained from giving concrete dates for not wanting to get fan’s hopes up.
In this indefinite interim, fans have compensated by both writing extensive
amounts of fanfiction, as many fandoms are wont to do, and by taking up the
mantle of recording *everything* there
is to know about *Worm.* Despite its
status as a cult classic, the *Worm* wiki
has more content than most wikias dedicated to a given television show. And
like most wikias, the Parahumans wiki is entirely fan run. Out of the nearly 1.7
million words of *Worm* and the half a
million words of the sequel as of this writing, the community has scoured the
text for anything that could be relevant to the average reader and everything that
couldn’t. Many side characters who show up for one or two chapters often have
their own wiki pages and fanart to accompany them. When they don’t, they’re
included in many of the mass character-description pages on the wiki or
original website.

Another
facet of knowledge communities within the greater *Worm* community, is how the community regards spoiling content for
the series. Again, as touted by the T.V. Tropes page on *Worm,* the web serial is famous for is “wham episodes” where the
story takes an abrupt and irreversible turn.  Many readers consider these “wham
episodes” to be some of the highlights of the series, as they’re the most obvious
of *Worm’s* many trope subversions. Thankfully,
the *Worm* community doesn’t have any
more bad apples than any other fandom, and generally is very considerate about
not spoiling content for others. On the front of the wiki and T.V. Tropes pages
bright warnings are given that the content is spoiler heavy and to read further
is at your own risk. The community polices itself to the best of its ability and
is known for its kindness in that regard. This article is even an example of
this, as it talks about several major plot points within the series to
illustrate the story’s relationship with its community but has both indicated
that there will be potential spoilers ahead and tried to keep them as vague as
possible.

Ultimately, however, not everything
can be omitted while still providing enough of a hook to draw the reader in.
Within the *Worm* online community and
the greater web serial sphere, spoilers for *Worm*
*will occasionally crop up due to its proliferation, but can, on occasion,*
be a boon. As sated previously, in *Worm’s*
*earlier years of online presence sites like T.V. Tropes were often the biggest*
sources of new readership because they offered enough information on the story
to entire people into the community but didn’t give away enough to drive them
off. Inversely, there are also those who might have been attracted to *Worm* based on what they have heard about
the story. *Worm* is known for its
subversions of common super hero tropes because it does them well. If a reader
is wanting to read a darker series where seemingly plot relevant characters aren’t
immune to death by way of logical circumstance, then *Worm* does have that to offer. Either way, the community of *Worm* often flexible in its response to
newcomers and new content. Whether the dark content and dubious morality drives
away these newcomers is uncertain, but nonetheless a strong draw for many, many
others.

## Additional Links

Homepage for the serial itself

Parahumans subreddit

T.V. Tropes page

Parahumans wiki

Worm Quotes and word of god repository

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Creative Writing Guild interview with Worm Author J.C. McCrae.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Balloon Day Today I Asked: Wildbow Interview
3. ↑ GeeksUnderGrace Worm Review
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Worm's page on T.V. Tropes
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Worm Quotes and Word of God Repository
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Parahumans Wiki
7. ↑ The greatest troll the Bow ever told.
8. ↑ A specific Spacebattles quote referring to the Simurgh.
9. ↑ The best meme artwork around.
10. ↑ Worm Homepage

1. ↑ Leviathan and credited author
2. ↑ Skitter and referenced artist.