I suspect almost no one likes it for what it is, and most are just swept up by its reputation. Like, someone completely new to it will likely give up by the time anything worthwhile happens.
Unfortunately, you are quite likely correct in this assessment. That almost no one likes it for what it is, I mean. I have been completely blown away by how real it gets in dealing with very serious and real social issues, and for that reason I disagree with the assessment that it's overrated. However, I do get where you can say that if you are coming at it from the perspective that people rate it highly just because it's middle act is so mentally scarring.
I think, however, you may be surprised at just how many people ARE able to see what this series is really going for. It seems a little in-your-face with it even if you pay attention to just how good some of the therapists in this series tend to be. I have said repeatedly when describing this series that I'm almost positive the author's a practicing psychologist who has dealt with some real shit in terms of cases and seen some serious stuff in terms of failures in the system, because those exact kinds of issues get portrayed WAY too well in this series.
I planned on reading it in the past but I was so sick of capeshit that I never got past a few chapters. I heard it's good tho. Also I was binging mother of learning and jp novels like mushoku tensei at the time. Still sick of the genre but I read some if they're good like The Perfect Run.
I kinda stopped reading Umineko about half-way through chapter 7 when it brought in the whole "witch hunter" thing to the arrangement. I thought it was kinda interesting up till that point, but then I just went "Nope!"
Yeah, that was the sort of ending (or near-ending) that is so bad it ruins everything that came before it. This one especially because it specifically re-contextualizes everything that happened before. I hated it.
I mean, yeah, I DID catch on that all the witches were people who had suffered some sort of severe abuse, and that their power only worked if there's a mundane non-magical method to do the same thing, and the way to defeat their power is to find that non-magical explanation. But... seriously, come ON! Time-traveling inter-dimensional witch hunting organizations? And they just plop these characters foreign to the story up until this point into the middle of everything? Just coming out of nowhere like that? Seriously, no thanks.
About the only purpose chapter 7 serves, from what I could see of the 1st half, is to provide all the non-magical explanations to the people who are too slow to figure it out for themselves. It really served no other purpose. And, I don't think it was necessary at all to provide such an explanation. A lot of the stuff that was going on in Umineko is the sort of thing that is far more powerful if it's left to the reader to figure it out and/or imagine. (Especially that part with the "reincarnation" of Beatrice.)
I kinda stopped reading Umineko about half-way through chapter 7 when it brought in the whole "witch hunter" thing to the arrangement. I thought it was kinda interesting up till that point, but then I just went "Nope!"
Yeah, that was the sort of ending (or near-ending) that is so bad it ruins everything that came before it. This one especially because it specifically re-contextualizes everything that happened before. I hated it.
I mean, yeah, I DID catch on that all the witches were people who had suffered some sort of severe abuse, and that their power only worked if there's a mundane non-magical method to do the same thing, and the way to defeat their power is to find that non-magical explanation. But... seriously, come ON! Time-traveling inter-dimensional witch hunting organizations? And they just plop these characters foreign to the story up until this point into the middle of everything? Just coming out of nowhere like that? Seriously, no thanks.
About the only purpose chapter 7 serves, from what I could see of the 1st half, is to provide all the non-magical explanations to the people who are too slow to figure it out for themselves. It really served no other purpose. And, I don't think it was necessary at all to provide such an explanation. A lot of the stuff that was going on in Umineko is the sort of thing that is far more powerful if it's left to the reader to figure it out and/or imagine. (Especially that part with the "reincarnation" of Beatrice.)
More fucked up than Bonesaw? Or are you just giving her a pass because she's 12 years old and definitely fucked-up in the head, thus doesn't need to be held to normal moral standards?
(We're talking about the girl who does live surgeries on people without anesthesia, just for the sake of making them suffer, and usually alters them in some kind of incredibly horrific way that puts Junji-ito style body-horror to shame. And they're STILL ALIVE when she's done with them!)
More fucked up than Bonesaw? Or are you just giving her a pass because she's 12 years old and definitely fucked-up in the head, thus doesn't need to be held to normal moral standards?
(We're talking about the girl who does live surgeries on people without anesthesia, just for the sake of making them suffer, and usually alters them in some kind of incredibly horrific way that puts Junji-ito style body-horror to shame. And they're STILL ALIVE when she's done with them!)
Basically Jack got to her, forced her to keep her parents alive through her surgeries and all she could remember from them was to "be a good girl". I sort of just gave her a pass for the shit she gone through. And also Franken Fran. And maybe because I'm a sexist.
So yeah, trauma bad.
Like how that Wind goddess bitch caused a good professor to become a mannequin with isolation fetish.
Like how the main bitch nearly got raped and become a power obsessed bitch who thought that bullying her "weak" friend is a show of power.
I tagged Jack's parents because there was no explanation as to their fucked up behaviour to their kid, or were they all high on LSDs and paranoia that they gone full fucked up?
Good lord, 1,680,000 words... It's longer than In search of lost time. I never liked superheroes (or villains) much. I noted on why in a different thread before. Anyway, it's stupendous! To think some people have that many ideas in adult years too.
Good lord, 1,680,000 words... It's longer than In search of lost time. I never liked superheroes (or villains) much. I noted on why in a different thread before. Anyway, it's stupendous! To think some people have that many ideas in adult years too.
Yeah, that's hardly my thing either. I'm mostly into Isekai and time-loop and other REALLY high-magic and high-fantasy stuff. Worm, however, really got me because it's just one of those things that is such an exemplar that you can easily just ignore the genre and just enjoy it for being really good.
Kinda like Madoka Magica. You could absolutely hate magical girl anime but you'd love Madoka Magica, because it's just GOOD and it also turns everything you think you know about magical girl anime on it's freaking head. Worm does much the same for the superhero genre. And I'm not talking the way something the likes of "The Boys" does it. I mean, for one thing, "The Boys" had to contrive a scenario to make the super heroes into bad guys. It also didn't JUST make them bad guys, it also gave them all the mentality of toddlers throwing temper tantrums and their villainy is on a cartoon villain level (even with all the wanton homicide and rape.)
Worm doesn't make the super heroes bad guys. It makes the super heroes human, with human flaws, who deal with stress and trauma and their own egos which winds up making them make bad decisions and exercise some overall incompitance, and that incompitance in turn makes others (like the MC of the series) suffer horribly. There is plenty of blame to go around for the horrible things that happen in Worm, but very few of the major players, including among the villains, can be called outright evil. And even those who ARE incredibly and horrifically evil can be seen as a necessary evil that has to be tolerated for "the greater good" in far too many scenarios.
Worm is a series that just loves to live in the grey area, and I'm thinking maybe the Slaughterhouse 9 are the only unmitigatedly evil force that has zero excuse to be tolerated in the series. Yes, there is exactly 1 group that is MORE evil than the S9, but it also just so happens that this one group that is so evil that someone throws the line "I'm not going to question your morals, because I know you have none" at them, just so happens to be trying harder than any of the other forces in the story to save the world. So, yeah. Really complicated grey-area shit.
(EDIT: Ok, actually, The Merchants were also pretty unmitigatedly bad.)
EDIT 2: Ok, and Heartbreaker, but he's... yeah, spoiler.
He's 100% off screen. Gotta admit though, he does have a presence regardless, especially given how much of a non-threat he ultimately turns out to be. All of his presence is felt by way of 2 of his oldest children who very much have a big part in the story, but his daughter Cherish outright says he's a looser on a downward path. And, as though to put truth to the statement, he gets killed having never even made a single on-screen appearance or even had any of his efforts to deal with the main cast demonstrated on-screen either, warranting only a few mentions in passing.
Here's a funny thought. Worm is an Isekai. It takes place in a parallel Earth, and there are characters in the story (though not anybody from the main cast) who come there from the version of Earth that's supposed to be ours.
Read it and its sequel. I was kind of annoyed at how biased the author is against adopted children (Since Amy is a kid of a supervillain and is adopted, she ended up irredimebly vile to both herself and everyone else, Victoria ended up being the true hero) and how bad people got away without any punishment (it is quite rich for Tattletae to be so judgmental about Amy when she is the one who drove her into this downward spiral; she is the one who knew in which condition Amy was but refused to give the information about her whereabouts to New Wave for days because she wanted her to suffer, and she is the one who worked with the likes of Regent and Bitch and had no problem against it.)
But the author is a great writer. I can only hope to learn to be as good as this author is in several lifetimes, and this work has inspired countless writers. All in all, it is a superb and excellent piece of fiction.
Yes, it's really good! His newer stuff is even better.
I think their fight scenes are some of the best stuff I've read, they've got a talent for describing what should be rather messy complex fights in a simple, impactful way.
Yeah, the 2nd act of the series is really REALLY rough. 3rd act is a fair bit more positive, the story has a V-shaped plot. At least, in concerns to Taylor's story-arc. The world at large seems to face a bit of a constant downwards plot, but somehow the 3rd act, despite having a body count high enough to make the 1st and 2nd acts combined look like a complete joke, somehow seems a lot more hopeful and positive than the story that preceded it.
It all starts to look up a little after they kill Coil. From that moment onward, Taylor starts taking actual strides forward, she starts getting vindicated for everything she's been telling people before this point, important people start cooperating and sympathizing with her, and she starts really getting into the driver's seat of her own life and also making a major difference on the world stage. Also, she gets therapy. The therapy is somehow among my favorite parts of the 3rd act. She starts actually hearing some of the things she's needed to hear the entire story up till this point, and it's rather cathartic just experiencing that as a reader.
Yeah, the 2nd act of the series is really REALLY rough. 3rd act is a fair bit more positive, the story has a V-shaped plot. At least, in concerns to Taylor's story-arc. The world at large seems to face a bit of a constant downwards plot, but somehow the 3rd act, despite having a body count high enough to make the 1st and 2nd acts combined look like a complete joke, somehow seems a lot more hopeful and positive than the story that preceded it.
Oh, awesome! That's totally different from my experience.
For me, it was actually somewhere in the 3rd act where the ongoing darkness got to me and I just felt like "okay, I think I basically get the story arc now, but it's just depressing me, and I don't need to read further", so I stopped.
Which isn't to say I think 3rd arc of Worm is bad? Just not for me.
Oh, awesome! That's totally different from my experience.
For me, it was actually somewhere in the 3rd act where the ongoing darkness got to me and I just felt like "okay, I think I basically get the story arc now, but it's just depressing me, and I don't need to read further", so I stopped.
Which isn't to say I think 3rd arc of Worm is bad? Just not for me.
Ok, I think we might have a confusion in terminology. You just alternatingly used the terms "arc" and "act." When I say "act," I mean in the style of a 3-act play. I'm talking the final 1/3 of the story in it's entirety.
The 1st ACT would be story arcs 1-8. The 2nd act is arcs 9-17. The 3rd act is arcs 20-30. (You will notice I left arcs 18 and 19 out. This is because they are in a bit of a strange transition period where they could just as easily fit the theme of the 2nd or the 3rd act, and I'm really not sure how to categorize them. Arcs 18 and 19 have the same degree of horror and death as the arcs of the 2nd act, but they also have something of that beginning air of vindication and pulling back the veil of the 3rd act. So, I really don't know whether to call them the climactic finish to the 2nd act (because arc 17 really does manage to feel like a pretty good cap-stone to the 2nd act as it is) or the point where they're just managing to pull themselves out of the muck and into the 3rd act, but still pretty ugly looking because the climb is only just starting.)
Also, if you only made it up to the 3rd arc, then... yeah, maybe Worm really isn't for you, because it's the 2nd act, arcs 9-18, where it gets REALLY freaking dark. If you were already feeling it having not even finished the 1st act yet, I'd say you're not going to make it through the 2nd act at all.
