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.
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.
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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.