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Wolf Spider (Worm) (Complete)

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Man, this was excellently done. I've never seen anyone write a more tolerable Greg without totally sacrificing his core characterization as a chronically oblivious perpetual fuckup. This Greg is deeply in-character and believable for Greg Veder, and yet I don't hate him and I don't hate reading the scenes where he's present, lIke I always do with Greg; hell, I even kind of like this dumb kid. Nicely done.
 
I wonder if Greg will trigger?

He's tangentially involved with at least two capes, and Sophia has enough experience to bud off...

I wonder what sort of tinker/thinker power Sophia would bud off, actually, as that's the sort of stress Greg is dealing with... Maybe a normal bud with the shadow changer thingy could work too, he doesn't seem that happy with who he is right now.
 
This is the most sympathetic Greg I've ever read. Great chapter. I wonder if he's going to trigger - seems like he could get a thinker or tinker power from this long-term stress.
 
I'm going to be a minor voice of dissent, and say that I would really rather Greg not trigger.

Why is it that everyone always pushes for people to trigger who didn't in canon? He hasn't gone through anything that he considers traumatic, so I'm not sure why he would trigger, and I'm not terribly interested if he does.
 
veteranMortal said:
I'm going to be a minor voice of dissent, and say that I would really rather Greg not trigger.

Why is it that everyone always pushes for people to trigger who didn't in canon? He hasn't gone through anything that he considers traumatic, so I'm not sure why he would trigger, and I'm not terribly interested if he does.
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Agreed. There's a very strong tendency in Worm, and even moreso in the fandom where "only parahumans matter." I for one find it rather refreshing to have at least a few characters who are important to the narrative who aren't capes.
 
Excellent chapter! I can't really say anything that hasn't been said already, but I can say that Greg's last name is canonically spelled Veder, not Vader. Keep up the great work; looking forward to the Leviathan arc!
 
Self aware Greg is kind of heartbreaking, tbh. I like that your take on him feels like a person and not a caricature.

I'm very curious to see how you handle the endbringer, especially seeing as this hasn't been a particularly combat orientated fic…

Night_stalker said:
A world where Legend is gay, openly.
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I've never felt like that was a very compelling argument toward substantial changes to social norms. (I know, I know, it's the one wildbow gave, but eh… it doesn't feel very believable that one celebrity coming out changes the world when in our world … that… isn't how it worked.) Even now IRL, there's enough prejudice and violence that outing someone isn't a great plan.
 
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spacemonkey37 said:
Agreed. There's a very strong tendency in Worm, and even moreso in the fandom where "only parahumans matter." I for one find it rather refreshing to have at least a few characters who are important to the narrative who aren't capes.
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It's funny - the most important non-parahuman character in canon is Danny, and he is the most disliked character in the fandom, pretty much, excluding Krouse and Saint.
 
The Laurent said:
but I still would say that he has a somewhat stronger presence than Piggot.
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My main disagreement is that PIggot's big conflict with Taylor has way more pathos, at least to me, than most Danny interactions. 16.3 is a great chapter for challenging Taylor's morals and getting under her skin, and Danny doesn't have a strong moment I can point to like that. His closest thing is her saying goodbye with the bugs, or him trying to lock her in the house, and honestly? Canon didn't convey those very well, and Danny is a prop more than a character there.

Edit: And this doesn't factor into Taylor's story as much, but Danny in canon is basically in stasis whenever Taylor isn't in the room, while a lot of other characters had at least the beginnings of an arc. Danny's interlude comes really early, and doesn't give him room to show any changes in his mindset or let him evolve. Compare that to Piggot, who gets regular appearances in Arc 9 and the S9 arc, two interludes, and the aforementioned kidnapping scenes where she actually gets to play off Taylor.
 
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The Laurent said:
She didn't trip, she didn't stumble, she moved with an effortless, beautiful grace that had him staring. It wasn't even… it didn't seem like grace at all. It seemed like thoughtlessness. But then it kept on getting her to step over the bullies, step around their little verbal traps, and he knew that she struggled with it still.
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Also, this isn't being commented on, but it's very interesting to me. In Canon, we know that Taylor eventually got to a sort of inhumanly precise way of moving.

Like, compare!

All around me, PRT employees were howling in pain, their cries silenced by the lack of an audio feed. Either the camera hadn't picked it up, or Glenn had muted it. They thrashed. One reached for me, for the me on the screen, and I could see how I moved out of the way without even glancing at him. The swarm concealed me at the same time, briefly obscuring the Skitter in the video from both the man on the ground and the security camera. When it parted, she had shifted two or three feet to the left. A simple step to one side in the half-second she couldn't be seen, but it misled the eyes.
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Taylor is developing her awareness earlier in some ways here, I think. She's been struggling to learn how to hear voices faster, how to pick out details on people, and I think her localized omniscience is kicking in.
 
Vindictus said:
I wonder if Greg will trigger?

He's tangentially involved with at least two capes, and Sophia has enough experience to bud off...

I wonder what sort of tinker/thinker power Sophia would bud off, actually, as that's the sort of stress Greg is dealing with... Maybe a normal bud with the shadow changer thingy could work too, he doesn't seem that happy with who he is right now.
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This is pretty much the only Worm-fic where I would actually approve of Greg triggering. Its the fact that it has actual build up with Greg actually being Greg with all the cringe that implies, I'm confident that the author would write Cape Greg properly. Greg is still Greg and powers don't change that, heck powers tend to make things worse.


veteranMortal said:
Why is it that everyone always pushes for people to trigger who didn't in canon? He hasn't gone through anything that he considers traumatic, so I'm not sure why he would trigger, and I'm not terribly interested if he does.
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He's a guy who doesn't handle stress well who has recently been given the full attention of The Bitches Three and their hanger ons, who is also angsting over the girl he has a massive crush on getting a girlfriend, is despairing over being to much of a failure to not betray her trust and might end up stuck in a bathroom during a Endbringer attack. The last one in particular is the real clincher, especially since a lot of people Trigger after Endbringer attacks.

In canon he avoided post-Leviathan stress by living just outside the city but here he could end up stuck inside the danger zone for days or weeks assuming he doesn't just get caught up in the battle itself. And Endbringers are super unpredictable so maybe his mom dies here or something.


That said:
spacemonkey37 said:
Agreed. There's a very strong tendency in Worm, and even moreso in the fandom where "only parahumans matter." I for one find it rather refreshing to have at least a few characters who are important to the narrative who aren't capes.
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This is also a good point. If Greg is going to stick around and doesn't just die in the attack or fuck off then him just being a semi-confidante or even playing a similar role to Sierra and being a muggle that can do some of the less glamorous work that needs to get done to keep the Cape engines running could be more interesting than him being a Cape and joining her team.
 
Guilop said:
This was hard to read. So much fremdschämen. But at least he's aware of his flaws, so he's on the right path, I guess?
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It's great to learn that there is a word for second-hand embarrassment, and I totally agree; the chapter was excellently written, to the point where the second-hand embarrassment made it hard to read.
 
Night_stalker said:
A world where Legend is gay, openly.
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Legend is literally a part of CAULDRON, no matter how clueless he might be, and he has one of the strongest parahuman powers in the world.

I wonder why he might be able to avoid persecution and social backlash... surely it has nothing to do with the fact that this is the world where you can get away with the consequences of being a murderous cannibal as long as you're useful enough in Cauldron's endgame, right? Right?

I wonder if there might be people who aren't able to avoid persecution and social backlash... I wonder, what would the massive neo-nazi movements running amok do if they thought they could get away with it? Would they kill Legend for his degeneracy? Is he 'one of the good ones', perhaps?

I wonder what neo-nazis around the world (in Brockton Bay) would do to other people if they thought they could get away with it. After all, any homosexual they found on the streets would have committed all of the same sins as Legend, but the homosexuals wouldn't be nearly as able to defend themselves, even if they were capes.

But nevermind, that's all completely hypothetical. I'm sure that the people of Earth Bet just accepted Legend with open arms, completely unprompted, all out of the goodness of their hearts, and then inspired a massive sweeping social movement to make homosexuality accepted across the globe.
 
Subrosian_Smithy said:
I wonder what neo-nazis around the world (in Brockton Bay) would do to other people if they thought they could get away with it. After all, any homosexual they found on the streets would have committed all of the same sins as Legend, but the homosexuals wouldn't be nearly as able to defend themselves, even if they were capes.
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You don't even have to go to the nazis, honestly. The Merchants get their own digs in and try not to let gay people into their big party thing, and have to be forced pretty violently, and I can't imagine the ABB being better.

My personal headcanon is that people might attribute social progress to Legend, but he hasn't done anything that wouldn't have happened at about the same rate as the real world, and he's just a convenient face for a movement. It's like how Taylor thinks tinkertech has lead to advancements in technology but then we basically just see everything as the same or worse than real life, so if it helped at all it only counteracted other forces.
 
The Laurent said:
And here I was worried about whether I'd made a Greg that was an OC, based off of some of what one of the readers had said before.
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The reader's relationship with Wolf Spider!Greg is rather different than canon!Greg, even if he's recognizably the same character.

In canon, we learn that he's at best tolerated by Taylor. He presumes that they should be friends or more because of their shared outcast status. But to paraphrase, the popular clique is all alike but the outcasts are all outcast in their own ways. It's not really a point of commonality and Taylor's pretty clear she wants nothing to do with him and he doesn't seem to care.

In Wolf Spider he's established to actually be her friend. And while he's awkward and sometimes does presume too much, he still does his best to support Taylor as a friend. We get that characterization from the start.

Wolf Spider's Greg isn't necessarily a different person at all, but Taylor's relationship to him is very different. That difference in relationship makes Greg's crush way less creepy, and through that difference he actually knows and treats Taylor as a person.

An aside…

Greg kind of gets automatic minus points from me (and I imagine others) due to him being uncannily like poorly behaving boys and young men I grew up around. It's easy to project them on to him. There are things that he didn't do in canon, but because of that context, it's easy to imagine him doing, and those get mixed in with his character.

Others, I suspect, relate to the nerdy outcast guy and then resent the other half of his characterization, someone with poor judgment, obsessive behavior, boundary issues and a constant need to build up him self up even with the most obvious of lies.

As a result, he's pretty widely disliked, fairly or not. So when his characterization here managed to actually make him sympathetic but flawed, that got a big reaction.
 
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