What are your thoughts on a Worm adaptation? What's the best way to cut down the monster serial known as Worm and capture the essence of it in another format?
Comic book series VS. television series? Animated VS. live action?
For the unaware, Worm is a cape story that deconstructs many superhero universe and superpower tropes, and is known for the wide range and intelligent use of its powers. The full text of Worm can be accessed for free here:
parahumans.wordpress.com
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Watch/read MHA instead
Already finished it.
Still not finished (Speck 30.6), but I don't see it ever being adapted well as anything other than a comic. As a cartoon it's too edgy for kids and there's no way it could get the necessary budget for live action.
Yeah, it's hard to tell at first what audience Worm is aiming for. The beginning feels very YA, and then it goes into ultraviolence pretty quickly.
Anime would be able to do it right, but the special effects would be just as expensive as live action.
there only one person who could adapt worm and that person is zack snyder
Go to bed Zack
after his daughters death worm is the perfect thing for him to get into it fits all the stuff he likes
Whats the abridged series?
unironically that might be a good idea
It's Worm you can enjoy without having to go through all 1.7 million words.
>The beginning feels very YA, and then it goes into ultraviolence pretty quickly.
This is what threw me when I tried to read through it for the first time. It's difficult to correlate how she acts pre attacking those random goons to during it.
just use the tv tropes page
just get max landis
I think Shyamalan could do a decent job at it.
You won't see those twists coming.
and if it sucks no one can really blame it on shyamalan cuz really source material and all that noise
Just give me Animated. Getting tired of L.A. already with a few exceptions like Legion & Constantine.That way you won't have to take any liberties cutting out content that would cost more to film with real life props nor will it obviously look fake at points. We also need more adult themed/serious cartoons & cape stories work better animated but everyone is sucking L.A. It would sorta be the next Batman or Justice League, Spiderman (94 or Spectacular) or Avengers (EMH). That's where it should stick at if place on TV.
It also definitely could work in a Comic adaption.
Also Secret Worm Thread? Did it work out anywhere else? Seemed to be a success here. I don't get why the last time I saw it, it was deleted in /lit/ besides sperges.
I nearly dropped it the first time because the beginning was like every other TV teen drama.
Bullies throwing juice on their victims?
I swear I saw it on Glee.
I like animated, but the production process is so damn long. Like 9 months to produce one 25 minute episode, and inflexibility once you've started the process and outsourced the assets.
It also shoves it firmly into the content rating of PG-13 or lower if it's aimed at an American audience. People seem to take Live Action adaptations more seriously instead of thinking of it as kiddie comic shit.
I'm conflicted.
I'm just fininsing reading it (interlude 29) and I tried going blind and I honestly got surprised by most of the twists, the only conplain that I could make is about Clockblocker and Grue fates, best boys didn't deserve it.
Worm's themes are about choice, cost, and consequences. A story doesn't feel like it has stakes if people can't roll the wrong dice at any moment. That's what I'd say separates Worm from many other cape stories. No one has plot immunity.
>PG-13
Then put it on more adult channels. Hell, Adult Swim/Toonami would love it & would definitely not put it there. Then it gathers traction for not try to stick to peoples ideas of 'Norms'. Maybe even Netflix since they also been so supportive lately.
put alec there as well
unless you're a girl
[spoilñer]no, seriously, basically all female characters that we liked and cared are alive at the end, to the point that the undersiders is all females now. the only exception to this might be alexandria but she was a cunt so its alright[/spoiler]
I get that and that's why I got so engaged about the story in the first place, i'm just saying that how they went out made me fucking depressed.[Also Grue would probably be alive if he didn't went to the oil ring when Taylor asked him, that just makes it fucking worse dude].
I forgot about that, you are right.
And I just forgot how to make the fucking spoilers.
The only way I can see live action Worm made above PG-13 is to make everything about it more adult. Age up the teenage cast, cast adult actors for the high schoolers. Taylor is 15 at the beginning of Worm. Studio executives and focus groups would balk at the image of a realistic (and ugly looking) 15 year old girl doing the crazy shit Taylor does, like carving out Lung's eyes.
I guess we're stuck hoping for a western animated adaptation which won't ruin Worm by being cheap or shitty. Pls no low poly 3D.
>mfw just finished re-reading it yesterday
im fucken hyped, i really hope we get to see lots of imp and the heartbroken in the sequel
also, anime adaptation is the only way to go in my opinion, the story is very anime-ish with its length, its intricate fight scenes, its cosmic battles for the end of the world and what not
There were more female characters than male characters in Worm, I'm pretty sure. They mentioned in-story that girls trigger more often than boys. If you considered the Undersiders an average representation of cape groups, they had 6 girls (counting Imp, Parian, and Foil) and 2 guys.
Also, Alexandria.
My ideal would be a Hollywood or GoT level high budget for an episodic TV show. A high quality anime adaptation is second for storytelling and visuals.
Taylor's narration is what makes the story, but it's also something that's hard to translate to the screen. How do you explain paragraphs of exposition without overloading the audience? Anime could do this, since voiceovers and thinking moments are normal for the medium. Though sometimes I wish they didn't, because they put in the middle of fight scenes, and then they lose their sense of action and pacing.
Worm can't be made into a movie. Too long, too in Talyor's head, too expensive to do live action. It would have to be serval movies, which isn't going to be picked up.
However What I think would be Cool for a movie is the Slaughterhouse Nine. Superpowered horror is under explored in film. So either have the S9 arc from canon be the movie, or Wildbow can whip up a short(er) story from Pre Brockton Bay S9. Marching up against the Protectorate.
Movie would be Hard R. But Deadpool and Logan showed that isn't a impossibility.
A movie about invincible Superpowered serial killers mowing through hero and villains alike?
Try and pitch that to a studio.
And taking casualties in return. The S9 lost quite a bit in Brockton Bay and even more with Defiant and Dragon hunting them afterwards.
But yeah dream scenario.
Basically a snuff film. It would be boring. Jack is interesting because his shard gives him cheat codes. A slasher flick about super villains without the extra dimension of being driven by space entities would make it p generic imo. I want Worm, not a generic horror movie with a tiger lady, Dr. Alice, and a Joker expy.
there is an opportinity of that happening i guess, the story is long enough that by the time we get to when the real shit happens special effects and budget due to popularity get finally up to snuff
but the real enemy here is having to adapt the story so american audiences can stomach it, after what happened with american gods im weary, we have a black protagonist fighting against white supremacists for a good portion of the story. if it ever gets to hollywood that whole portion will become a lot more heavy handed.
also im afraid they'll end up turning taylor into a hunger games "grrrr im so tough" strong female character instead of the fucked up angry gremlin she was for most of the story.
she's supposed to be creepy and off putting and they'll make her hollywood ugly no matter what wildbow says
The author has said he prefers episodic TV format over a movie. He even wrote an episode breakdown for how he'd structure the first season if it was a TV show. The problem is that so far, producers who showed interest in doing Worm want to change things he isn't okay with. Only a production company that absolutely loved Worm would be allowed to adapt it.
One in a million chance it'll come true, right?
A man can dream though, a man can dream
>they'll make her hollywood ugly
Some of her ugliness is only in her head though. She described herself as unattractive, but it was when she was a bully magnet with zero self esteem. Sure, she's not a Hollywood fixer upper that looks like a super model when the glasses come off, but I don't think she's hideous. She's tall, slender, fit, and has long dark hair. Not really ugly traits even if her face is butter.
I was okay with Grue being sidelined, but Clock deserved better
There's a good chance he's going to be in Worm 2 if the epilogue with Valkyrie is any indication.
Honestly I felt that the Undersiders were always going to force a win or stalemate after arc 10, that shit broke my suspension of disbelief. But even if they never got a clean win, some improbable bullshit would always justify Taylor's bullshit.
Although Worm actually shinned with its side characters and interludes.
Get me interested. or would that be big spoilers?
its a world of superheroes like marvel or dc except its all one single coherent narrative with a beggining middle and end where we get to explore the universe at every single level, from street level vigilantism to cosmic level threats and everything in the middle.
everything has real life consequences, powers are well thought out, people use them in smart, clever inventive ways, things change, there is no status quo, people act like real people
basically everything that's wrong with modern capeshit done right.
the story focuses on one teenage girl victim of bulling that tries to become a hero and ends up becoming a supervillain by accident
Local girl ruins everything
I came into this thread to say Bitch is moe.
That is all.
>The problem is that so far, producers who showed interest in doing Worm
That was ever a thing?
but the story is about taylor not about amy
Who had the best power and why was it Imp?
You mean Coil?
Pretty sure you mean Gregor the Snail
nah man, he's talking about dinah
Can the mods delete this blatant shilling already? Jesus fuck.
I was pretty sure one of the Undersiders, probably Tattletale, was going to bite the dust during arc 8. Legend said that one out of four cape defenders was going to die to Leviathan during his "motivational speech" and the Undersiders at the time had 5 members. None of them died. Had to be rolling loaded dice or something.
Read Astro City, then. For god's sakes, don't let yourself stay a Worm fan. That's a dark, dark place to be.
Funny, I pegged Grue to die at some point as soon as Skitter started dropping her sketti
Yeah, that was when I was starting to expect the same. I mean it was bad enough that Taylor went back to the undersiders after arc 8 because she happened to stumble across the only person who meant anything to her unconcious because of a strange series of contrived bullshit. But only when they had Dragon only to flail impudently in front of them, that was when I realized things weren't going to get better.
I hace some doubts about Pact and Twing, are they worth reading or should I wait for Worm 2?
Not comics
Not cartoons
Grue was boring AF
look, if you want to wait for worm 2 is not going to take long, in fact i doubt you'll manage to finish either work before worm 2 starts but with that said...
i really like pact but im telling you right now, you will come out of it unfulfilled and frustrated. in my opinion is one of the best renditions of magic i have seen in fiction and there is some incredible worldbuilding BUT the main character himself gets shat upon by the universe constantly and relentlessly, as in literally there is no breathing time on the plot, is just the guy getting his balls getting kicked 24/7 and then the story ends
as for twig, is not quite the page turner worm is, the setting (biopunk) is kind of ignored for the most part with a much bigger focus on political intrigue, espionage and mindgames, if you like cloak and dagger narratives you're probably going to like this. the main characters are not really underdogs this time around since they are technically working for the (evil and corrupt) authorities for the first half of the story as enforcers of a despotic regime. if you stick with it long enough you will get endeared to the characters and will have a reason to read it through but, again, it will take some time to get there.
im still pissed we never got to read face, peer or boil. peer specially
We're talking about turning it into Sup Forums, user. Either way, Worm threads get deleted in /lit/. Literally just hide the thread if you have a problem with it, because you can do that, or do you not know how to like /lit/?
Well thanks a lot user, I just fininsing reading worm and I wasn't sure how much time I had until worm 2, i'll probably read Pact a Twing later and I'll have your opinion in mind.
If you want to fill up the empty hole finishing Worm had on your life, I suggest reading Worm fanfic.
Pact isn't good and Twig is 90% finished.
I started reading pact after worm, currently 7 arcs in. It starts out really bland and was harder to get through in the first 2 arcs than worm, but at this point I am enjoying more than the more mediocre bits of worm but it doesn't quite have as much OH SHI- moments. I feel like wildblow tried very hard to write not-taylor, and this in turn made the overall story suffer.
I am enjoying it though. The worldbuilding is once again great, and people use their abilities in creative ways. The MC just isn't as entertaining as Taylor imo
I thought it was going to be Tattletale because she got her first interlude during the Levi battle, and it was the first Interlude any Undersider had gotten, if you don't count the dog interlude from earlier. I assumed it was a sendoff to say goodbye, so we could get her character backstory before she was killed off.
After that, I thought the Undersiders weren't going to die on any of their battles, only get their shit wrecked hard if they lost. Like Tat's face after Jack slashed her. Behemoth was probably the biggest shit got real moment, as much as Leviathan was to the first part of the story.
>Pact isn't good
I whole-heartedly disagree.
Pact is DIFFERENT. Very different. Most of the hate it gets is from Wormy's who want Worm-2, and it's not.
The world of Pact is, in my opinion, better than Earth-bet. Deeper lore, better backstory, more depth, eminently hatable bad guys, huge twists, overcoming all odds, the works.
My favorite character, out of everything Wildbow has written to-date, is Greeneyes.
Greeneyes is best girl.
>Greeneyes is best girl.
My favorite depiction of her.
So horrible.
So adorable.
well just as a warning, the turning point where for most fans pact goes to shit is TORONTO
and i agree, blake doesnt have the same drive to change things for the better and help people, he just wants to be left alone and survive. like, at the end of the day Taylor choose her way all trhough out and she cant blame that on noone else but herself. blake was put in a shitty situation from the beggining and never quite manages to regain his footing, also he comes off as far more spiteful and angry towards the world than taylor does.
and yes, the world building is fantastic, everytime they start getting into this huge exposition dumps about how magic works and the symbolism of it all is always the best part of the story
who's your favorite character so far?
Uh, help?
>best girl
that's a funny way of spelling the sphinx name
but i think we can all agree rose is worst girl by far
Oh yes I would totally recommend Astro City.
Pact is great and it is way easier to root for Blake than Skitter.
Life in the Big City is the first volume.
Except for some background stuff and the occasional sequel story you can read it in pretty much any order.
Good to know, thanks
I found it emotionally exhausting and
lacking the immediate charm of Worm. If you only read Worm for the capes, you can skip Pact without missing much.
>deconstruction
Different user, why is it bad? Is it cause apparantly the story can get depressing or....is it like all fanbases & has a bad side?
Comic translation akin to the dark tower would be the most viable adaption. It'd take to much cgi to translate powers and the constant fights to live action and cartoons can't show the Mature stuff. That leave only comics And china cartoons
Meh, I'd watch that.
Biter is the most powerful cape!
Consider: Crawler's genitalia
>They are 7 tentacles with eyes and 2 mouths
>And they spit acid cum
Its fucking depressing that's why, like drowning kittens, depressing.
is just the inherent nature of being part of a fandom that gets no new content for years
things fester
also the work is so big and dense that you can get lost doing nothing but speculation and fanwank of every tiny little detail
i think we all know who the strongest cape really is
has anyone read the comic adaptation a fan did? you can only get it through patreon
but seriously, what the fuck was his problem?
I'm up to TORONTO rn famalam, Blake just crossed paths with The Eye in battle. I guess I read more than I remember, I thought it was 7 arcs but it has been a week.
Not sure about my favourite character, maybe Rose? Not because she's particularly great, I just feel like the characters in general just aren't very good. They all have something about them that makes me think they are really close to being really cool but they fall flat in some way. The demons and nameless Others are more entertaining than the humans desu. The lawyers are pretty good too, but I haven't really seen enough of them to call qt evil lawyer waifu best girl.
They're inside his body...
So what? Lots of animals have it that way.
mass mind control,mass corruption,eldritch power,death perception, perception of the fourth wall...? I dunno
Sleeper's power is to know Parian's true power, which is to know Sleeper's power.
I'm guessing it's some sort of mass mind control if Khepri couldn't take him. He subsumes dimensions.
Khepri could have taken him but she chose not to because it would have been more trouble then it's worth.
>more trouble
Sort of implies it would be more difficult. I.e take more mind control portals then a regular cape.
Meaning we can cross out sleeper having anything tough enough to harm scion as part of his arsenal.
>then its worth
It's gotta be a master/shaker/stranger effect/hivemind. If sleeper was an s-class blaster, tinker or thinker khepri would have snagged his ass in an instant to use as a frontliner/ incorporate in the thinktank/ use to build stuff.
Some kind of trump seems most likely, both for explaining why controlling him is more trouble than it's worth and why everyone is so reticent to discuss his actual powerset.
Then again, "Young Adult" is a pretty broad category that also includes shit like Animorphs. Other than a few Bonesaw sequences I don't think it strays too far out of that age range.
what intrigues me so much is that she says he is sitting on a chair reading a book, so this is not some freak like crawler or the ash beast and he is not some crazy warlord like moord naag
if he is a hivemind i suspect he doesnt have a central body, as long as even one of his bodies is alive he is alive as opposed to taylor or alec that if you take the man body down the whole system collapses
Nilbog best boy.
And also that the fans are all collected in one or two hubs, and one of the biggest ones is Spacebattles. Which is full of anal retentive circlejerkers who obsess about power levels and hypothetical Who Would Win situations. They can turn any Worm discussion into a power debate. Their only saving grace is the amount of fresh fan content they produce.
MHA is garbage shonen disguised under good designs with your known-all-too-well character archetypes, friendship-fueled-power-boosting shonen magic included.
The only reason I can see, which follows a bit of the speculation of the other user, is that Sleeper might just be an imagination-(un)limited Shaker of some kind, that has broken powers in the sense that they don't respond to him. That would mean that if Khepri wanted to assume control, she'd have to isolate everything around him everytime he was used. He might usually keep HIMSELF asleep so the powers only affect his "bubble". When that was shattered, he kinda just wandered into the nearest way out of the planet, maybe he just didn't want to fuck anything up really.
In-story there are classifications of powers with numbers to how dangerous to the population they are, the larger number used being 12 (off the charts, historic amounts of power). One guy asked him what a Tinker 15 would look like in this setting. Well:
>You can build anything, and you can manifest advanced materials with which to build more, secreting it from your body. Further, your produced gear upgrades itself over time.
However, this comes at a cost. Your volition is gone, the shard is in full control, and in the course of its building frenzies, you're a mind trapped in a body that has been altered to a cyborg state, every limb and joint bending painfully in the wrong directions as you scurry and lurch this way and that, vomiting out materials that tear up your throat and mouth, and knock teeth loose, or feeling red hot agony as ceramics and hyperspecialized alloys thrust their way out of your body in spears and slabs.
Because the shard doesn't know how to take care of a human body, you fester, maggots eat dying flesh, you starve, and the solutions the shard devises and tinkers to sustain its host only barely keep you sustained, hauling you back into existence when your body or mind start to give. It needs you sane, for the occasional reference, so it drugs you to do just that.
Your waking existence is forever dying and slowly going mad, but never quite getting that release, filled with dread for those moments that are absolute torture, where the shard produces materials. Your sleeping existence is worse, because you get a sense of how the shard thinks, and of why things are the way they are.
The author sure is a cheery fella.
Some people say it's bugs eating Lung's nuts that's too violent. I'd say it's stabbing Bakuda in the foot that is the beginning of the family unfriendly escalation. Then you have cutting out Lung's eyes, and shoving bugs down Clockblocker's eyes and nostrils, and having spiders crawl over hostages at the bank.
It's not blood and gore that makes Worm adult, but all the implied and more subtle horror that's scary. If you've seen the scarab beetle scenes in The Mummy, that's how scary Skitter's spiders are.
liveaction and animation, while both rather costly, I'd think the latter would be favored, just because the internal monologues are so important to Worm. Mr. Robot pulls some of those off, but they happen just a couple times every episode. In Worm its constant, but I think something animated might just work.
That or a comic, something like Hunter x Hunter, that has sometimes entire pages of text, pic related
cont. People forget that the characters which in visual adaptation have to show some sort of visible reaction to things, in Worm, are 100% masked 90% of the time. Yeah, I'm thinking comic