Oh, Wildbow must’ve forgotten to put the link there.

 

That portion of the epilogue is Imp's, so whenever someone reminds Wildbow to put the link up, he claims he's forgotten.

/explaining the joke

 

Just to inform others who may not be aware, Wildbow is currently running a community quest story called PRT Quest. The posts are linked right at the very top of the page

 

Reading the background info is pretty cool. Gives a view into how the Protectorate and PRT run themselves, even in smaller areas.

 

Good find. I've always been interested in how the PRT operates. Skitter was kind of not the most reliable narrator when it came to them.

 

Yeah, we really need some more smart votes, it's kinda painful to watch right now. And considering I'm on the villain team that's saying something.

 

I'd vote, but that requires signing up for a Spacebattles account.

 

Quick question, is there any easier way to read this, such as an ebook or pdf of some sort?

 

If you hop onto IRC, someone can probably hook you up. Ask in #darklordpotter or #parahumans.

 

So I read through the epilogue again today and noticed a couple of things that I'd missed before.

First and foremost, Tattletale knows that Taylor is alive, as does Imp. Dinah thinks she's alive too, and given the way her power works it likely means that Taylor is showing up in one of the futures she's seen. I think Imp was around for the Contessa meeting/brain surgery and is the one who told Tattletale that Taylor is alive and in another world.

A secondary note is that Taylor's power is still alive and well on Earth Bet; the little boy that can control birds gained a copy of her shard when it matured. He's the one who drew pictures of the Entities too, iirc.

 

My fan theory is, the device that locks Earth Aleph (the one Taylor is in during the epilogue) also locks the Shard out. Ie, the Shards are all in different dimensions and the Administrator Shard can't reach Taylor. However, Shards bud, so the little boy who got a bud might just have gotten a shiny new (small) Shard.

 

Finally read this monster, and as the ratings imply, it's fantastic. It's long enough to have forgotten some of the critique I had in mind, but I do remember a few places where a competent editor could tighten up this excellent story. I didn't read all 96 pages of posts here or any other supplemental material, so I apologize if I'm just repeating what you've seen elsewhere.

Vocabulary: a ton of authors are guilty of this, but Wildbow gets stuck on certain words and overuses them. At first, "headspace" was just some slang Taylor thought, and she eventually said it aloud. Friends tend to pick up slang from each other, so it wasn't too surprising when Tattletale picked it up. It actually awed me that he'd put that much effort into such a minor detail, but then at least one other person that hadn't interacted with them too much used it. Then everybody used it. I went from kind of liking the word to being annoyed when I saw it again. "Copacetic" may be the same story: Taylor and Tattletale said it back and forth, but then one of the big heroes used it out of nowhere (I think; I may be misremembering, though).

Also, the word "shard" was used far too many times at the end.

One part of the story that made my eyes glaze over a bit and therefore put the story down for a little while was the Butcher arc. It reminded me of anime filler: barely connected to the rest of the story. Wildbow didn't even follow up on the possibility that Cherish became the next Butcher. I think I would have felt less annoyed that the Slaughterhouse Nine came back as the story's main villains if that arc didn't exist.

Lastly, I was a little disappointed that the Endbringers weren't explained very well at the end. I was expecting Earth had (or maybe even was) a long dormant or dead Entity that still automatically spit out the Endbringers because of the proximity of Scion and Eden. Or the Endbringers were Entities themselves, perhaps. The Simurgh PoV did read an awful lot like the Scion PoV, after all. Eidolon creating them didn't really feel like it made sense to me.

Anyway, I don't rate much around here, but with such minor flaws this is an easy 5/5.

 

Eidolon's shard was one of Eden's powerful shards that was meant to create unkillable monsters that loomed over humanity and ideally furthered the conflict between parahumans. We get that much in Contessa's interlude. From what we saw, they weren't supposed to be such an active force, but being that Cauldron perverted Eidolon's shard and that Eidolon was such a glory hound, it caused the (relatively few) Endbringers that he created to be much more active than they were originally imagined to be.

Presumably Eidolon's Trump ability was meant as a sort of "choose your own powerset" that the Endbringer shard would use to sculpt the individual Endbringers.

I know people complain about the fact that we weren't explicitly spoon fed this explanation, but there you have it.

 

Funfact, what Howdy just said has never been confirmed and is just a theory some people constantly claim is canon.

 

Sorry for the necro, but I found this cool fanart of Taylor and wanted to share: Pic.

 

Now that you've necroed it... Has anyone heard any news about when the edited version of Worm might be released?

 

Last mention of it was in March AFAIK.

 

Recent post.

 

So does this survey confirm

Spoiler

that at the end of the story Taylor is in a Coma? Because it says "Epilogue Arc // Valkyrie, D&D, Rachel, Teacher, Taylor in Coma" or do you think Wildbow is trolling?

 

Spoiler

Honestly, I don't see how Taylor can be in a coma from a writing standpoint. The epilogue starts off in another person's POV. Is the old lady in a coma too? /sarcasm. If it is true, I'll rage. Just let Taylor have her happy ending and don't backtrack over a year later.