Wildbow is seeking editors.

 

Holy fuck, a Worm TV series could actually be the most awesome thing ever.

 

Honestly, think it has more potential as a cartoon/anime, but I'm ready to be proven wrong.

 

Definitely agree with this. Would love to see UFOTable or another reputable animation studio pulling it off.

Can't see pulling off a lot of the effects we see in Worm, especially with some of the more dramatic powers, convincingly on live-action without an enormous budget. Just the Leviathan fight alone would probably be enormously expensive to pull off convincingly.

I'm curious how Taylor's powers would be convincingly portrayed, especially her multi-tasking.

There is a worrying dimension to a visual adaptation though—a lot of Worm's action is internal: Taylor does quite a bit of introspecting throughout the serial and I suspect a combination of visual cues and added lines of dialogue are going to be needed to sell the same broad impression.

 

Ideally, either Gen Urobuchi for anime or Greg Weisman for cartoons would take the helm there.

As for her internal thoughts, well, I guess you could either have Taylor narrate, a bit like in Veronica Mars, for example, but that has the potential to be cheesy.

Maybe, the multitasking could be portrayed with a splitscreen? Splitting the screen in like 8 or something, and have the same scene play out from various POVs, bugs and Taylor.

 

Honestly, I kinda doubt it'll be amazing, I'm just hoping for good enough that it makes people check out the books. That way, Worm will get more readers. More readers, means more fanfic writers who don't write AltpowerTaylor fics. =P

 

In a perfect world, a Worm television series would be picked up by Netflix. It would get a budget and creative freedom that most shows don't get.

In reality it will probably end up airing on FOX, be butchered to high hell, and canceled after episode 3.

 

Worm would really need a Rome / Game of Thrones style treatment by HBO to be viable on TV. The whole thing just screams "immense budget required" and its not exactly family friendly either.

 

It's interesting to think about some of the changes that would be made to the story to fit the particular medium.

For a TV show the violence and language would need to be toned down significantly if they were to air it on a network. So, many changes it would hardly be recognizable (I can't see Worm being given the leeway that Hannibal was given, it was an established franchise). Also I can't see them directly adapting any of the fight scenes. They would have Taylor doing a lot more than just directing bugs.

For an anime, there would be big changes to either the setting, or the characters, or both. They would either move the setting to Japan, or they would change the background of several of the main characters (at least one of the Undersiders, maybe more) because all of the major Japanese characters are ABB gangsters, and that's just not going to fly in an anime.

 

If I were to make a TV show out of Worm, I'd just take the setting and come up with an entirely new story with mostly new characters that have budget-friendly powers, and sticking much more to early Worm's tone. Could even just make it an episodic show about some low-level supervillains and avoid developing a real plot entirely.

 

Bring on the suffering I say.

 

I've always mused on how a TV show or anime would turn out.

Gen Urobuchi with Ufotable would be the ideal for an anime. One of the best parts about Worm are the really huge cast of absolutely epic characters with their own little eccentricities, and anime does that sort of thing really really well. Even shitty shounen anime manage to pull off some absolutely badass characters. Can you imagine how characters like Lung or Kaiser would translate as anime characters? The Triumvirate? Contessa? Slaughterhouse Nine?

The most climatic scenes in the story would also be handled pretty well in an anime form I think, which as a medium does a fantastic job of implementing scenes in a suitably dramatic fashion as say, Taylor being outed.

The other thing is when anime directors do an anime adaption of a manga/VN, they usually do a reasonable job (these days at least) of being accurate to the source content and as long as it got enough episodes and a decent budget, I'd be confident it'd generally be true to source content and it'd really just come down to stylistically how it was executed. With the one exception of the setting. I cannot imagine it being adapted and kept in America at all. It may not be the end of the world, changing everything to Japan and making a few minor changes to the back story while keeping everything else the same.

For a TV show, I think the potential to fuck it up is a whole lot more. Directors in America love taking more of a "creative" approach to their work, and adaptions are rarely 1:1. Furthermore, Worm is quite different from the rest of the booming superhero genre and it'd suck to see an adaption try to cheapen it into another minor superhero flick. I imagine any Producers who buy into it would be interested in, at the very least, the concept. The problem is if their interest stops there. And they just love the settings and world, but have very little interest in Taylor's story and instead make a story about an Avengers like team with a male protagonist because they think that'll sell better. That'd be the worst possible scenario.

On the other hand if it's adapted by someone like HBO, being true to the source content and with big budgets to do it justice, it could be absolutely amazing. One of the best TV series ever. The superhero genre is really booming at the moment, but Worm has a whole lot that could make it stand out from anything else - it could become the Game of Thrones of the superhero genre. Make things like Avengers seem like a light action flick in comparison. Hopefully any producers would see it that way.

There's all sorts of really interesting things you could do with it format wise. For instance, I was thinking something cool could be that all the interludes fall into mini-episodes and never actually shown in the series (which could be purely from Taylor's POV).

Any trailers or advertisement campaign could be work really well in the form of a campaign that never actually shows Taylor in any of them - instead showing snippets of what has happened in this world prior to Taylor - Endbringers appearing, S9 killing Hero, Japan being hit by Leviathan, etc. That'd be a really cool way of getting people's interest without spoiling anything, but also letting people know the epics it will eventually reach.

 

I'm expecting an Eragon/Dresden-esque take on this. I'm actually almost entirely certain it will be garbage.

 

Cartoon or anime for sure. I just can't see it happening in live action with a budget this side of the moon. Hell, doing the costumes right would probably bankrupt most productions.

Honestly, I don't think it would translate into any visual medium well. There are some things that would be amazing (endbringer deaths as background noise to their appearances instead of being an occasional thing inserted into the text), but there are way too many things that could be so easily fucked up for me to be excited.

Worm has serious pacing issues already. I wouldn't want to see an adaption until the original has some work done on it.

 

I also can't wait to watch a show about a teenage girl being bullied and making a bunch of stupid decisions.

 

Don't you mean stupid decisions that lead to awesome.