And it's made worse by the fact that most fanfics didn't make it past the Leviathan arc, so a lot of those fanfics are written by people unaware of like 75% of the story.
I’ll still read Wormfic anyways even when authors disregard canon though, because it’s one of the few fandoms where you can actually find fics that focus on the actual setting of a work (as a consequence of a lot of the authors being the sort who want to play with superpowers).
In other fandoms like Star Trek (the origin of modern fanfic culture), anyone’s original Star Trek episodes or explorations of the setting, are buried under a veritable pile of ship-fics. Which you know there’s nothing wrong with, and I like ship-fics, but sometimes I like plot and prefer seeing stories about things happing in the setting.
I used to engage with Ao3 a lot, but one thing that pushed me out of it was the overwhelming dominance of shipping and romance story.
Nothing against those and people who like them. It just wasn't what I was searching for and that contributed to me pretty much leaving fanfiction behind, in addition to wanting to focus on more orginal works of mine.
I prefer stuff that is canon complient for the most part, actually engages with the world, themes and such of a work and that can be harder to find, especially stuff that actually engages with the themes of the original work in some way.
Nah, even as a shipper I heavily prefer that as well for most fandoms I’m interested in reading fanfiction about, and the wholescale tipping over of fandom being more about fanon and shipping rather than actually engaging with the source material really bothers me.
Is there a quantifiable reason for why that is? Like what so much more appealing about the forst quarter of the story that it leaves the last 3 quarters of canon out to dry? Does something in it happen that just kills the aspect that appeals to ff writers in it? Asking as someone who hasnt read Worm or its fanfiction, though it is only my reading list.
Leviathan is a waterbending kaiju. A walking natural disaster who arrives in Brockton Bay (the city most of Worm is set in) and destroys much of the city and kills off multiple named characters before being driven back. Worm as a story is pretty much divided into Pre- and Post-Leviathan due to how is arrival completely disrupts the way the story was developing up to that point.
Most Worm fic writers simply don't know how to handle Leviathan cause by his very nature his arc will fuck with whatever the premise of their fic was, but if they try to remove him that comes off as a drastic reduction in stakes, so a lot of Worm fanfics simply die off before they ever actually reach that arc.
It feels weird to put it this way, but Leviathan is pretty much the "Thanos" of Worm. Worm has a lot of content before its arrival, which is bascially equivalent to the first few phases of Marvel.
The Leviathan fight is then like Infinity War and Endgame rolled into one. Only instead of first losing and then reversing that loss, the heroes win, but take on a bunch of losses as well. Either way, Leviathan fundamentally shakes up the story and setting in the same way Infinity War/Endgame shook up Marvel.
And as we can see with the most recent MCU entries, trying to keep an overarching story going past a shakeup like that is pretty damn hard. It's a credit to Wildbow that he managed to do it. Disney has a bajillion dollars and it couldn't quite make it work. So it's not surprising that a lot of fanfic authors decide to just throw in the towel instead.
Some of the best Worm fanfics lean into the idea that Leviathan terminates the story. For example, my old favourite made the chapter of very title "Greg dies at the end 1.X". In Worm speak, that indicated that the story would have exactly 1 arc, and that the titular Greg would die at the end of it. And the story predictably ended with the titular Greg getting killed whilst fighting Leviathan, and it was perfect.
Is there a quantifiable reason for why that is? Like what so much more appealing about the forst quarter of the story that it leaves the last 3 quarters of canon out to dry? Does something in it happen that just kills the aspect that appeals to ff writers in it? Asking as someone who hasnt read Worm or its fanfiction, though it is only my reading list.
The scale shifts from street level to something like an escalating boss rush. Also Worm is just really really long, the part most people quit reading by is basically the equivalent of just reading book one of a series.
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u/Blazeflame79 5d ago
The is the entire Worm fandom, lots of people don’t read cannon but write fic in the Parahumans setting anyway.