That One Crawler Clone Who Survived Dragon's Nanothorn Net Nearly Became As Dangerous As OG Crawler In

That one Crawler clone who survived Dragon's nanothorn net nearly became as dangerous as OG Crawler in a week and I would have loved for it to have gone somewhere.

wildbow did a good job of writing fights where powers interact in unique ways, but i think he fell short in the s9k arc. i think its possible he gave himself too much to work with, and then struggled to deliver.

think about it, 281 capes, and the various combinations of smaller groups they couldve formed, and thats just one side of the fight. coming up with entertaining situations for all of them to fight against the combined efforts of the undersiders, protectorate, and wards is a tall order even for wordcount georg.

in the end, he kinda went with the easy way out for much of the s9k - seven cherishes get killed at once, eight siberians get killed at once, eight harbingers get killed or captured at once - and i cant entirely blame him. thats certainly an easier solution than writing eight different encounters with siberian and eight different encounters with harbinger, considering both of them are nearly impossible to kill.

i think ultimately, just from the sheer number of characters he wrote into the story, he set himself up to run out of interesting ideas for fights (although i will say i enjoyed the harbinger situation quite a bit, it didnt feel like a cop out the way the siberian cube did).

Some of the most annoying worm fans are the ones who are so poisoned by power scaling nonsense that their only criticisms are nitpicks like "Jack not being able to lose to parahumans is bullshit" or "Lung gets worfed because he always loses to Taylor how is only X level"

They forget that these elements are in here for narrative reasons and not so you can put these characters on a fake Tier list and argue with strangers on r/Whowouldwin.

Jack not losing to parahumans challenges many the characters notions about treating regular humans as an after thought and shows that maybe powers are not the best solution for every situation.

This same thing applies basically any superhero or action story.

I mean from a certain point of view it makes sense. Think about it:

• You can't join the ABB unless your Asian

• You can't join Empire 88 unless your white and bigoted

• You can't join Coil unless your ex military

• Faultline's crew don't seem to recruit henchmen unless you count Gregor's delivery boy

• The Undersiders also don't recruit henchmen until after the leviathan attack

That leaves you with either Uber and Leet or The Merchants. Both of whom are pretty shitty options all things considered

Uber and Leet had minions???

I feel like Worm sort of abandoned the idea of casual minion joining (as in, sort of open secret) until the S9. Which makes sense, because joining a supervillain to help them commit crimes is, uh, illegal and you wouldn't want that spreading around. Which makes it odd to see it here so early

Things you never say to someone who just came out (Worm Editition)

Sylvester what are you doing here?!?!

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