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  • Jan 22

    Anybody here read any web serials?

    Worm

    Complete | Superhero, Science Fantasy, Grimdark | 6.4k pages

    " An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for he right reasons. "

    First web serial I ever read and have re-read probably 3 times despite it's massive length. Worm feels like a roller coaster that's constantly accelerating. Great setting and action writing. Takes superhero tropes and subverts them, finished in 2013. Starts off as a cliche "bullied girl" but rapidly becomes something else. The author is only known by his online name "Wildbow" and has a surprisingly large fanbase, and this story has a sequel called Ward I didn't find as captivating.

    I'm now reading another web serial by the same author, called

    Twig

    "The year is 1921, and a little over a century has passed since a great mind unraveled the underpinnings of life itself. Every week, it seems, the papers announce great advances, solving the riddle of immortality, successfully reviving the dead, the cloning of living beings, or blending of two animals into one. For those on the ground, every week brings new mutterings of work taken by ‘stitched’ men of patchwork flesh that do not need to sleep, or more fearful glances as they have to step off the sidewalks to make room for great laboratory-grown beasts. Often felt but rarely voiced is the notion that events are already spiraling out of the control of the academies that teach these things."

    Again, another very cool setting the author has come up with. Follows the story of "Sylvester" who is an experiment and his team of other experiments as they complete assignments/missions for their Academy and grapple with coming to terms with their short lifespans, lack of freedom, and their parahuman abilities.

    Web serials are usually on-going projects that release weekly/bi-weekly/monthly so I find them cool as a concept kind of reviving the magazine serials popular in the victorian era. Even though I only read complete ones.

    Here's a nice link with a list of some popular ones: reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/9arleb/a_curated_introduction_to_web_serials

    So anybody read any good ones? And if you read Wildbow you a real one