Remove ads

Wolf Spider (Worm) (Complete)

Reader mode
What no Leviathian? Blasphemy!

I honestly can't think of any other fic that has an endbringer other than Leviathan actually attack Brockton. So kudos for doing something new.
 
Anyway, taking bets on how many criminals captured by Taylor end up freed as a result of this: it's one of the amazing background frustrations of Taylor for this fic.
 
I've seen a few fics make it Ziz, but only one other comes to mind where it's Behemoth - and that one's Alchemical Solutions, so the fight's not the standard sort.
 
Qwertystop said:
I've seen a few fics make it Ziz, but only one other comes to mind where it's Behemoth - and that one's Alchemical Solutions, so the fight's not the standard sort.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Behemoth has the downsides of never really showing a solid fight (the canon one gets cut off by Phir Se and then Scion, it's not like the heroes were doing very well before that) and not having as much of an interesting story hook as the Simurgh. So he doesn't get to be in the limelight very often.

Personally, I think he's underplayed in some ways. Poring over it, Behemoth shows the most attacks and effects of any Endbringer that we see on screen. He's like a muscle wizard? The durability and smashing things are the obvious traits, but he also has range on par with either of his siblings, a lot of precision destruction compared to Leviathan, and he's a great choice to let heroes try and showboat and set up dramatic encounters and last stands.
 
Barnaby said:
Exactly. Like a lot of parahumans, Parian never really explores or even understands the full potential of her powers. That's sort of why I always saw her as the could-have-been heroine of Worm. There's a subtly powerful ability in the hands of someone never quite put into the right circumstances to escalate everything.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Kind of missing the point I think.

I believe what @gourdcaptain was referring to was how frustratingly vague and trollish Wildblow has been about the whole thing, teasing us with implications that Parian's power has some ultra hax potential that she just never discovered while not giving us the slightest damned clue about what the hell that is supposed to be. We barely get a glimpse of her power and it doesn't work in a way that makes the slightest bit of sense, any super potential it might have is essentially going to have to be a asspull anyway because there's no way you can logically extrapolate what we've seen into being some kind of Behemoth counter, though heavens know people have tried. Tried and failed, with Wildblow offering no insights other than to say that every theory is wrong.

Its... frustrating to say the least and I would have preferred if he just didn't mention it at all if he has no intention of ever revealing it anyway.
 
NemoMarx said:
Behemoth has the downsides of never really showing a solid fight (the canon one gets cut off by Phir Se and then Scion, it's not like the heroes were doing very well before that) and not having as much of an interesting story hook as the Simurgh. So he doesn't get to be in the limelight very often.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The VERY downside is that he's called the Hero Killer for a reason.

One possible result of this fight is that Brockton Bay drives him off because Sabah gets a chance to FINALLY show why'd she be effective against Behemoth. Honestly if they don't drive him off QUICK, BB is most likely going to be condemned -- water comes and water goes but radiation is forever, baby. Even if they DO win, most likely the local parahumans will be devastated.

Maybe this will be the push the PRT needs to stop dicking Taylor around? HAHAHAHAHAH, gods I crack myself up. More likely than not they jail her on a trumped-up charge. I kinda hope not -- trying to out-grimderp Worm never goes well.
 
The fic Resonance has Taylor triggering when Behemoth attacks BB, and being a hero in the aftermath of that. Can't wait to see the aftermath here. There's tons of fics showing a flooded city post-Leviathan, but hardly any that tell of living in the types of hell the other two Endbringers leave behind.
 
Dr. Mercurious said:
One possible result of this fight is that Brockton Bay drives him off because Sabah gets a chance to FINALLY show why'd she be effective against Behemoth. Honestly if they don't drive him off QUICK, BB is most likely going to be condemned -- water comes and water goes but radiation is forever, baby. Even if they DO win, most likely the local parahumans will be devastated.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Also, thinking on this. Leviathan is the one who does wide area effects, who waterlogs an entire city and brings decay and ruin in that kind of abstract way. When he kills people, it's almost impersonal, the effect of him passing by or casually lashing a tail.

Behemoth is the Hero killer, not the city killer. NYC rebuilt after him, after all. He can do things like irradiate an entire city, but when we see his power it's more orchestrated than that.
I reoriented myself and flew up to the edge of the roof to peek at the battle. Behemoth had melted down part of the metal arm and fashioned the melted metal into a superheated lump. A second lump, cooler and not yet fabricated into an aerodynamic shape, was sitting beside him. Alexandria tried to strike it away, but he caught it with one claw. He superheated it, shielding it from Legend and Eidolon's fire with his body, then heaved it into the air. The projectile flared intensely as it left his kill range, following nearly the same path as before.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Bemmy takes the time in the middle of a fight to craft things. He stops and suddenly shoots fire at slums, burning them building by building. He targets specific capes with lightning or fire, he goes out to meet the Triumvirate and acts like they're personal rivals or something. So the question isn't what he does to the city in total, it's what does he do specifically? What neighborhoods does he try and raze, what buildings are melted. He often goes for power plants, for instance.
 
Dareth said:
I love the idea of a super-duper-gay hero team consisting of Taylor, Rachel, Lily, Sabah, and random others.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You mean a super *fabulous* team

NemoMarx said:
The Behemoth fight is one of the nicer things about post timeskip Worm, honestly.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The Behemoth fight was pre-timeskip.

Dr. Mercurious said:
Maybe this will be the push the PRT needs to stop dicking Taylor around? HAHAHAHAHAH, gods I crack myself up. More likely than not they jail her on a trumped-up charge.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The PRT probably wouldn't trump up charges to arrest her, they would just use heavy-handed tactics to try and force her into joining the Wards, which would backfire, given Taylor's pathological mistrust of authority figures.

I'm surprised nobody caught the dramatic irony/joke in the update.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm guessing that was Taylor thinking that Shadow Stalker would be the best person to talk to about her relationship with Rachel?
 
Mook said:
Kind of missing the point I think.

I believe what @gourdcaptain was referring to was how frustratingly vague and trollish Wildblow has been about the whole thing, teasing us with implications that Parian's power has some ultra hax potential that she just never discovered while not giving us the slightest damned clue about what the hell that is supposed to be. We barely get a glimpse of her power and it doesn't work in a way that makes the slightest bit of sense, any super potential it might have is essentially going to have to be a asspull anyway because there's no way you can logically extrapolate what we've seen into being some kind of Behemoth counter, though heavens know people have tried. Tried and failed, with Wildblow offering no insights other than to say that every theory is wrong.

Its... frustrating to say the least and I would have preferred if he just didn't mention it at all if he has no intention of ever revealing it anyway.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

He does the same thing with the actual species that Rollo was. He's like, "It's not a dog" and then spends the whole section/ saying, "No, Nope, Not" to a bunch of, "If it's not a dog, then maybe he was a X?"

And it's like: why does it matter? If it doesn't matter, tell us. If it does, you know, tell us anyways?
 
The Laurent said:
He does the same thing with the actual species that Rollo was. He's like, "It's not a dog" and then spends the whole section/ saying, "No, Nope, Not" to a bunch of, "If it's not a dog, then maybe he was a X?"

And it's like: why does it matter? If it doesn't matter, tell us. If it does, you know, tell us anyways?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This was relatively minor compared to some of my other issues with Worm, but it's definitely a turn off and something that would make me reluctant to read anything else by Wildbow even if he changed his writing style and so on.

Guessing games are okay, and can even be fun, if there's an actual resolution, but as it is, that kind of behavior comes off as...sort of dickish, I guess, and disrespectful toward the readers. I can understand being gruff or not wanting to give answers, but this is more active than that, and I'm not fond of trolls.
 
The Laurent said:
He does the same thing with the actual species that Rollo was. He's like, "It's not a dog" and then spends the whole section/ saying, "No, Nope, Not" to a bunch of, "If it's not a dog, then maybe he was a X?"

And it's like: why does it matter? If it doesn't matter, tell us. If it does, you know, tell us anyways?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Some people get a thrill out of "I know something you don't!" I guess. It usually fades as you get older.
 
As far as it goes, introducing Parian and a few other people like that was fun. I'd been thinking of a lot of them before, and I was thinking that the story was getting a little too claustrophobic.

Too few characters.

So what better way to bring everyone together to die horribly than an Endbringer attack?
 
RJamesGauvreau said:
This was relatively minor compared to some of my other issues with Worm, but it's definitely a turn off and something that would make me reluctant to read anything else by Wildbow even if he changed his writing style and so on.
Guessing games are okay, and can even be fun, if there's an actual resolution, but as it is, that kind of behavior comes off as...sort of dickish, I guess, and disrespectful toward the readers. I can understand being gruff or not wanting to give answers, but this is more active than that, and I'm not fond of trolls.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It wouldn't put me off his stories, as it's not present in the work, but it's another reason to avoid WOG like cancerous plague.

Which, I guess would be the strain from Left 4 Dead that creates Smokers.
 
Last edited:
I mean... I kind of just assumed that, given radiation is basically lots of tiny particles, and her power works better the finer the weave, that she could wear anything Behemoth throws like a puppet and punch him in his stupid face with his own powers.
 
Bailey Matutine said:
I mean... I kind of just assumed that, given radiation is basically lots of tiny particles, and her power works better the finer the weave, that she could wear anything Behemoth throws like a puppet and punch him in his stupid face with his own powers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I...
No.
Only one sort of radiation can be called particles, and given we don't see her weaving water or light together I don't think it's the case.
 
He's thinking of radioactive dust, I think. The primary way fallout spreads after a nuclear explosion, unless I miss my guess.
 
But her control of larger things was an entirely different beast. Her telekinesis fell apart when she tried to move anything heavier than a half-pound or so, her dexterity and speed in moving those objects that much slower. Worse, her telekinesis exploded, and not even in a constructive manner. It got more and more unstable as she tried to move larger things, until it simply… expanded, dissipated over an area in an attempt to extend control to a multitude of tiny, lightweight objects.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This paragraph is vague as hell, but you could read it as her being able to control tiny particles and she just doesn't think it's useful.

Porous materials worked best, because her telekinesis could soak into them, through them, and allow her to move the fabric rather than just the material within. The gaps in the fabric allowed her to feed power into the 'shell' without it building to critical mass and collapsing. Cloth worked best. Torn or ripped seams could be mended, any other damage proved easily fixable, compared to the issues sturdier material posed.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's also interesting that her power works on the gaps between the material, to some extent. She's not just controlling fabric, she's creating a TK shell that's tightly overlayed with it.

So put those together, and there might be interesting power interactions, but who knows?
 
NemoMarx said:
This paragraph is vague as hell, but you could read it as her being able to control tiny particles and she just doesn't think it's useful.



It's also interesting that her power works on the gaps between the material, to some extent. She's not just controlling fabric, she's creating a TK shell that's tightly overlayed with it.

So put those together, and there might be interesting power interactions, but who knows?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think Parian's shard is actively trying to troll its user with the most arcane ridiculous thing possible. It's inflicting its user with an equivelent of the Jojo "King Crimson, how does it work?" meme.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top