#and it often belies a sense of intellectual superiority/assumed lack of interiority that I don't like to see on myself in the mirror

[artbyblastweave]

I’ve tried and failed to get my thoughts out the door on this a bunch of times, but one thing about Worm is that I feel that it isn’t particularly didactic when it comes to its themes of decisive strongwoman authoritarianism vs ossified-but-marginally-more-accountable institutions, it doesn’t have a specific answer, the utility and glaringly obvious failure modes of both dynamics are on display throughout the book and often right on each other’s heels, Taylor’s decisive actions are frequently obviously the correct moral choice given the options available to her but are downstream of the poor decisions she made to get into a bind where she has to act alone, many of the Protectorate’s policies are obviously sound precepts to maintain from, like, a rule-utilitarianism standpoint but don’t survive contact with reality, the capstone of the book is an act of stunning unaccountability that worked but also wasn’t necessarily the only thing that could have worked.

 The book doesn’t, to my mind, provide a clear resolution to this question (because there isn’t one) and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that fandom morality debates down this channel are some of the most genuinely heated and aggressive that I’ve seen. My Big Discourse Nightmare Scenario for Worm getting big has never so much been the representational stuff, because I suspect a lot of that would get sniped in the edit now that people’ve been complaining about it for 10 years. It’s the idea of the book catching the attention of people who feel like stories are obligated to answer these questions (and in a specific way!) instead of just raising them or exploring them.

#Time for some tag falsetto voice that I also want to include but don't want to upset the punchiness of the first two paragraphs #One thing I don't really like to do is generalize about dark matter fandom- #which is the term I use for when people assume that there's a seething unseen mass of hypothetical fans #who MIGHT #be behaving in an irritating way #or reading the work incorrectly #it's the group-level version of Making Up A Guy To Be Mad At #and it often belies a sense of intellectual superiority/assumed lack of interiority that I don't like to see on myself in the mirror #that said #I feel reasonably confident that this would be a thing #based on that recent spate of Breaking Bad posts #showcasing people taking pride in their refusal to engage with what the show was saying and doing #in favor of the sanitized wholesome version that lives in their heads #wormfic #to an extent #already demonstrates trends in this direction through the tendency to flatten/woobify/run defense for everyone #instead of engaging with how fucked up everyone is #that's flavored by the spacebattles/reddit approach but it's a similar impulse I think #in the end I don't think I'm wrong per se #to imagine a hypothetical subset of worm readers who Fundamentally Do Not Get It in the way I'm describing were the book to get big #because it's a numbers game #But! #It also feels senselessly uncharitable to dwell on their hypothetical existence too much #and sometimes hypothesizing them in the first place feels like it's toeing that line #so feel free to jump in if you feel like I'm #you know #doin the thing #worm #wildbow #parahumans