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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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I recall a lot of interest in the Worm discussion, so I'm just quoting the whole conversation. Spoilers abound.
eaglejarl said:
Wildbow worked backwards. He said "I want a world that looks exactly like the comics but has some sort of justification behind it; how do I get that?"

Here's what he was looking for: A very small percentage of people have superpowers. They wear spandex instead of tactical gear. Some of them rob banks, others punch bank robbers in the face. Some of them have supertech but that tech has had zero impact on the world. There are periodic attacks by non-human threats which justify teamup issues.

Here's what he needed in order to accomplish that:

  • You get powers by having a space worm stick itself in your brain. The space worm then influences you towards punching.
  • The space worms come from bigger aliens (Entities) who are trying to learn new things and gain new powers in order to prevent the heat death of the universe, but think the best way to do that is to make primitives punch each other instead of recruiting them as research assistants.
  • The Entities have advanced tech abilities because they crashed on and destroyed advanced-tech worlds. Which means there are other aliens in the galaxy, they are advanced enough to have gravity manipulation and other BS, yet the Fermi Paradox is still a thing and the human race was able to evolve in the first place. Why? Because the author says so, that's why.
  • Tinkers can't be useful on anything other than a very local scale because the author says so, that's why. "Because tinker tech requires constant maintenance" is a stupid answer -- use your tinker powers to build a series of robots to do the maintenance. Have the robots maintain each other, or have the Tinker periodically swing in to do the maintenance. Or just build a giant production line that produces the stuff fast enough that you can treat it as disposable. Of course, that doesn't matter because...
  • ...there are Endbringer monsters who attack on a regular schedule. One of them is a precog who will stop anyone who tries to do anything really positive with their powers.
  • The PRT thinks that "we need villains to help with Endbringer attacks, so we should let them run around doing bad things instead of putting them in the Birdcage and only letting them out when we need them" is a sensible plan.
  • The PRT also thinks "all of our heroes have major psychological issues, but it's not worth having a horde of psychologists work with them every day."
  • There are in fact heroes and there are in fact rogues. None of them use their powers in really positive ways even when it's pretty obvious. For example, Panacea heals people on an individual basis instead of coming up with biologicals that could do the work.

Side points:

In the beginning all parahumans were good, but then one guy had an embolism so suddenly some parahumans because villains. After that more parahumans became villains than heroes so there could be lots of punching. It would make perfect sense if people had been mostly villains from the beginning -- psychologically messed up + superpowers is a perfect recipe for villainy -- so starting with "everyone is good" was a needless complication without justification.


The "wear brightly-colored spandex instead of tactical gear, even when you work for a government agency" is never explained. I suppose it was just a cached thought? "According to comics superheroes wear spandex. I am a superhero, therefore I will wear brightly-colored spandex."



So, yeah. I have a lot of problems with Worm. Despite my problems I acknowledge that the story is mechanically excellent and the characterizations are well done and highly varied. The pacing does not follow a normal beat structure (it escalates too much for too long without a break, then has long periods of drag) but it really carries you along during the intense periods, which is likely enough to get you through the drag. Worm has been wildly successful for valid reasons, to the point where it has been compared to Watchmen and Wildbow has apparently been repeatedly approached for adaptations. I admire his achievement and his success (although I admit to a certain degree of envy :> ) and I understand the reasons behind it.
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HoratioVonBecker said:
Okay, the Birdcage thing is a really good point. I can still see it as a result of Accursed Bureaucracy!, but it does seem like the sort of thing people would get around to solving, because the world is a scary place.
...Unless Cauldron was working against it, because they think a War On Crime with capes involved is a really bad idea. I have a new headcanon.
The spandex thing... I think most government capes do wear tactical gear, actually. As for the colors, it's a cultural thing. I buy the line about most people (at least in America) treating cape fights as a flashy type of football. It meshes with the evidence I saw.
Tinkers are rarely able to build factories; it's why Masamune was so valuable. And even so, we don't really see enough of the world to to know how much they've changed. Perhaps they're the main reason the world looks reasonably modern, despite the extensive logistical damage.
The Entities are bestial, stupid (Eden had to link with Abaddon to realize that peace was viable), and presumably move much faster than most civilizations. Assuming that civilizations are really rare in the Wormverse, which seems reasonable considering that the Entities arrived at Earth from outside our galaxy, civ-eating Entities plus the numerous methods for civilizations to self-destruct seem entirely sufficient to explain Fermi's Paradox.
'Heroes can die while superheroing' sounds like a decent reason for people to stop always being heroes, but I read it as people starting to become rogues, and then later, villains appear. Also, keep in mind that Cauldron had the most influence in the early days.
I notice a distinct lack of complaints about Cauldron. Did you try to ignore them, because their lack of judgement was that painful? Because it was really something.
Have you enjoyed Twig, by the way?
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eaglejarl said:
"Lock up all the bad guys" is literally the default action for a police(ish) force. They had to make a positive choice, and then continually double down on that choice, to leave villians running around loose. It's not a question of 'solving' anything, it's just doing what they were created to do.



In fairness, the issue with criticizing Cauldron is that their entire course of action is set by alien space magic -- they ultimately do what they do because Contessa tells them to. It's hard to criticize anything when the author has a cop-out answer for literally everything.



A quick spin through the images on the Worm wiki suggests that the heroes are wearing clothes more like a circus acrobat than a SWAT officer.


My first suggestion was robots; factories were an afterthought. Comments on robots?

As to seeing enough of the world...if Tinker tech was making it into the mainstream then the signs would be blindingly obvious.


Citation wanted on that last claim. A civilization with STL colonization can fill a galaxy in a million years or so. The Entities acquired their tech from other civilizations, which means that at least one civilization had portals, gravity warping, etc. Given that tech they should have filled the galaxy in just a few dozen millenia. Humans should never have been able to evolve in the first place.



I haven't looked at Twig or Pact.
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HoratioVonBecker said:
Pretty sure that's on the courts and the prison-builders, actually. It's one of the weakest parts of the worldbuilding.

The fanart takes a lot of liberties. But yes, heroes don't tend to have full SWAT gear, and even the basic police officer kit is smaller and less obtrusive. (Due to Tinkers, presumably.)

If Richter was forced to keep his AIs shackled by Entity Safety Protocols, I seriously doubt Von Neumann machines are kosher, and even Basic Maintenance Robots probably violate the techsharing rules. Honestly, most of the problems with Tinkers are solidly Zion's fault, and that isn't super obvious on a cursory read.

Eh. We don't hear a lot about the techbase, so it's hard to say.

It's implied that Entities steal and combine techbases quite quickly, and split each cycle. I infer that they're probably faster than most civilizations, and that they're actively hunting the most advanced. Plus, if interuniversal travel is both nontrivial and non-obvious to anything that didn't evolve with it, which is neither supported nor denied by the text, then interstellar civilizations may be rarer than one per universe.

Twig is brilliant, although one of the monsters disturbed me, and Pact is clever throughout the first half and insane throughout the second. Also I've been reminded about the project I mentioned, and the deadline is Thursday. Talk later?
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eaglejarl said:
To all those who were interested in why I disrecommend Worm:

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/reasons-i-dislike-worm.38634/

Also, did someone here award me premium features? I don't recall buying them myself, yet I've just been told that that's what the star by my name means.
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I assume it's because you can designate your co-QMs as threadmasters that way.
Would have been more effective if they'd told you, but on the other hand, it's funnier this way.
 
Oh. I missed the chance to edit before voting ended.

Hm. I'm not displeased with the winning plan, though.

eaglejarl said:
Also, did someone here award me premium features? I don't recall buying them myself, yet I've just been told that that's what the star by my name means.
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Ooh, fancy. Does that mean @Velorien and @OliWhail can finally have some measure of authority around this lawless wasteland?
:V
 
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I'm pretty sure that means @eaglejarl needs to invite people, actually. Unless it's possible to make the thread public?
E: Um, I guess I could do that. It'll need to wait a while, though - maybe asking a mod how to use your new powers would be faster?
 
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HoratioVonBecker said:
I'm pretty sure that means @eaglejarl needs to invite people, actually. Unless it's possible to make the thread public?
E: Um, I guess I could do that. It'll need to wait a while, though - maybe asking a mod how to use your new powers would be faster?
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Meh. I am insufficiently invested in this topic.

Summary: There are too many aspects of Worm that reduce to "because the author says so" for my taste.
 
Velorien said:
Inoue-sensei looked him in the eye. "I don't know how you could have missed it," she said in a monotone voice. "That token was there all along."

"I don't know how I could have missed it," Hazō agreed. "That token was there all along."
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Huh, I feel like this is a trick we should make a point of learning. Especially given that genjutsu isn't a huge stretch for us and this sort of thing should give us a big boost to Deception.
 
Cariyaga said:
Sudden respect for Konan.
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Why's that?

Not that Konan doesn't deserve mad props anyway, for being the only person to attain S-rank power levels without a Bloodline Limit, formal training in her area of specialisation, or secret knowledge gained from someone else. (Her closest competitor is Kisame, who has an artefact sword, a summoning scroll and legendary chakra reserves).
 
Velorien said:
Why's that?

Not that Konan doesn't deserve mad props anyway, for being the only person to attain S-rank power levels without a Bloodline Limit, formal training in her area of specialisation, or secret knowledge gained from someone else. (Her closest competitor is Kisame, who has an artefact sword, a summoning scroll and legendary chakra reserves).
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I never realized how destructive paper could be, mostly. ...I mean, sealing aside.

Fair point there, though. She's also probably the best ninja for how little anyone knows about her even in canon.

e: Also, if we have our way, she'll have competition in Akane for "S-rank without bloodline limit"... although, she has the Pangolin jutsu so maybe nevermind.
 
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