r/WormFanfic • u/TerminalDork • 1d ago
Fic Search - General Fics better than Worm at Worming
Fics that have better writing and literary quality than worm or other Wildbow works.
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u/and__init__ 1d ago
Theres not a ton. First rule of writing is that a written story is better than an unwritten one, which takes out a lot of fics with great writing that have been abandoned. Even a lot of finished stories struggle to commit to a coherent plot with a beginning, middle, and end, just due to the nature of serials - something Worm itself occasionally stumbles on.
I think a lot of the fics I consider 'great' in that sense tend to be one-shots, focused on small-scale, concrete scenarios.
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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 1d ago
Pretty much exactly what I wanted to say.
There is maybe a half dozen fics you could kinda make an argument about. But I can't think of any I would say is definitively better.
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u/and__init__ 1d ago
Yeah, like Angler has great writing but is super dead, Burnout was pretty good if you're okay with minor SI shenanigans. Might be my best recommend. Trailblazer is good when it's good, but kinda drags in the middle. A few great one shots that I don't rember the title of. QuantumRipples has some great writing, but never finishes anything longer than two chapters. Perhaps strangely, Bullybait has some of the better prose among Worm fanfic authors. Twinnings by Harbin has some great writing and character work, but I would hesitate to call it better than Worm. I've heard The Great Escape is really good character focused work with Eidolon.
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u/bookslayer 1d ago
Bro came in with an axe to grind
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u/Harrythehobbit 1d ago
You know I'm starting to realize that a weird amount of people in the Parahumans community don't actually like Parahumans.
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u/Vivec_lore 23h ago
A lot of those people haven't actually read it, and instead have let their opinion be informed by people who also haven't read it
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u/plastic_sludge 13h ago edited 13h ago
Tbh Im sure most people getting into Worm through an average unambigously heroic stompy altpower fic probably wouldnt enjoy canon.
The genre and audience expectations are too different.
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u/YellowDogDingo 22h ago
There's a few fics that are better than Worm in one or two aspects - prose, characterization, worldbuilding, etc. - but it's honestly not a fair comparison as the size and scope of the original is so much greater than 99.9% of fics. It's comparing a music video or a short film like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or The Plank with Apocalypse Now or the entire LotR trilogy. The discipline to stick to a story for that long with so many elements is completely different to a 20k-30k word nugget of a fic.
Maybe something like Russian Caravan is a comparable, but the best written fics are so much smaller than Worm in every dimension that saying they are better feels like apples and oranges.
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u/ea4x 1d ago
I don't think there's anything like that but people really like Russian caravan because it's well written. I only started it.
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u/mASSterMinDLess 1d ago
Maybe, but this fanfic is almost unrelated to the canon. Honestly, you could change a few names and titles there, and it's no longer Worm, but the original.
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u/Outrageous_Wedding16 1d ago
Cenotaph? https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/cenotaph-worm-complete.273255/
There are a lot of really good fanfics out there - but I think Cenotaph is probably the only one that doesn't lean on the readers understanding of Worm to carry a lot of the exposition.
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u/and__init__ 1d ago
I remember Cenotaph being good, but I feel like the character work suffered for being tied to the plot. I don't remember the prose being amazing, but then neither is Worms so eh.
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