Worm is great and all, don't get me wrong, but it's far from the only fish in the sea. I've put together a list of several different web serials that I feel deserve more attention, and that may interest people who are interested in Wildbow's works for one reason or another. Oh, and before you ask I have run this by the mods, since absolutely none of this is Worm fanfiction.

To make things simple, I've categorised these serials into three distinct genres; science fiction, fantasy (including urban fantasy) and superhero stories:

Science Fiction

Menschenjaeger (Ongoing)

The reason I'm making this post, and the reason I put Science Fiction first, is that there are two stories in particular I want to plug. Menschenjaeger is the first of those. I've been following it almost since the very start, having randomly stumbled across it on Royal Road's Latest Updates page, and while it's a lot bigger than it was then it still deserves so much more attention than it receives. On the surface, it's a sci-fi dystopia novel following a worker in a garage who loses her job and decides to take up new employment as a contract killer for one of the many gangs that are vying for control of her neighbourhood, but beyond that premise it's one of the most deceptively in-depth stories I've come across.

The setting is incredibly well-realised, full of both vast spectacle and the grounded reality of how people live in this post-post-apocalyptic world. The premise of the setting is that the cataclysmic Lastwar left the skies of Earth permanently filled with a layer of impenetrable smog that renders the sun at midday to a barely visible red smear in the black sky. Sharkie, the main character, is one of the denizens of Savlop-2, a city in which innumerable people live huddled around their electric lights. Specifically, she's a resident of D-Block, an impoverished neighbourhood in which the darkness is never far away, and the ruling hand of Admin is as iron-clad as it is distant.

On the surface, it sounds like one of any number of edgy stories out there in which the main character is some insufferable know-it-all who's always shown to be in the right - no matter what they do or say - even as they treat the people around them with contempt. And that's where Menschenjaeger really stands out, because it has some of the healthiest and most well-fleshed-out character dynamics I've ever come across. Sharkie herself bucks the trend by being downright likeable, with a healthy attitude towards meeting new people and enough hobbies, quirks and interests to show that killing people with a handheld industrial saw is her job, not her whole life.

Every other character in the story is also incredibly well done, to the point where it's impossible to tell whether they're there for a single chapter or they're going to be a major recurring side-character. They'll come into the story, interact with Sharkie, and in that short space of time it'll become clear that they all have their own lives and interests that have led them to this point and will continue long after they leave Sharkie's narrative. In fact, the one thing they all have in common is that none of them are really letting the dystopia of the setting bring them down.

The whole story seems to have this theme of making the best of what you have and living life to the fullest in spite of all the problems pressing down around you. Everyone the main character meets has their passions, and those passions are what help make life in the incredibly bleak setting bearable. It might be fast cars, loud music, pride in their work, discovering history, helping others, gratuitous ultraviolence or reverse-harem light novels, but everyone has their own way of making the most of the dystopia, rather than letting it grind them down.

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Meat (Ongoing)

Meat... Meat is something completely different, and the second reason I made this post. I have never seen a setting quite like this. It's a dying world, a dying city. Not the metaphorical death of abandonment or urban decay, though that is part of it, but a real, literal death.

Everything in the world is alive, in one form or another. It is biopunk in the truest sense of the term, stripped of all but the faintest images of the humanity that may or may not have come before. The Crawling City is a great beast lumbering along as its body slowly fails and dies, picked apart by carrion who might as well be bacteria in comparison. In the midst of that world, a mother and a machine gives birth to her last child.

This world is shown to us through the eyes of that child, Bee, whose newborn naiveite offers a window through which the world, and its horrors, can be understood, even if her own limited perspective can colour the perception of certain things in a way that's easy to miss if you aren't paying attention. Her innocence and her struggle for survival in a world she is too young to understand makes for compelling reading, even as she falls foul of the dying city and the nature of the world.

All of this is told through narration that can be beautiful, horrifying, or some combination of the two. The story is evocative in its grotesqueness, always making sure you know just how inhuman this society and these people are, something that's only heightened by the tantalising hints of what came before.

There's little more I can say without spoiling, and this story is something that needs to be experienced in its entirety rather than spoiled in a review. Suffice to say, it's an experience like no other, and one I wholeheartedly recommend you try. There was a long time when I was the only person reading and commenting on this story, and it deserves so much more than that. If you enjoyed the stranger interludes of Wildbow's works - focusing on inhuman concepts and mindsets - you may find yourself drawn to Meat as I was.

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The Last Human (Ongoing, Three Complete Books)

A deep sense of age seeps into every part of The Last Human. The story is set in a city built upon ruin after ruin, whose richest inhabitants are still poor compared to what came before them.

Contrary to what the title may suggest, the main character is not, in fact, the last human. Instead, the story follows Eolh, a sapient avian thief struggling to make a living in the slums of a city occupied by a brutal and arrogant empire. The setting is seen through Eolh's eyes, and his familiarity with it helps to emphasise the awe he feels at the mysteries he sees.

This lends the story an incredibly engaging atmosphere, one that blends religion and technology to create a keen sense of something far greater than Eolh could ever comprehend. It's a slow burn, lasting eight chapters before even describing the colour of Eolh's plumage, which only further helps build up the incredible style of this story.

Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend The Last Human. The characters are rich and engaging, and the story limits itself to a very small cast so you'll never get overwhelmed. The plot itself is an engaging odyssey throughout fascinating and fantastical environments, all tied together by a cohesive style that really helps bring across the reality that Eolh and his entire civilisation are standing on the shoulders of giants.

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Starwalker (Four Complete Books)

Starwalker follows the AI of an experimental starship that's set to test a new means of faster than light travel, an AI that is entirely aware that it is much more aware than it should be. She has a personality in a way that AIs really shouldn't, and she gradually starts to uncover strange blocks and circumstances both in her own memory and among her ship and her crew. The early parts of the story essentially follow the Starwalker as she tries to uncover just what happened before she was activated, as well as the mystery behind her current abnormal state of being.

I've read a fair few AI protagonist stories out there, like Post-Human and Quod Olim Erat (although I didn't get far into the latter) and while I enjoyed them, they never quite brought across the feeling that the protagonist really was a program on a piece of hardware. With the former, the perspective was a little too omniscient. With the latter, the AI was in an android body for as far as I'd read.

Starwalker, on the other hand, really nails the feel of the perspective. The plot is told through log reports, presented as the Starwalker automatically filling what should be routine status updates with her own thoughts and musings, and the narration manages to bring across just how limited the Starwalker is in her perspective. A great deal of attention is paid to the blocks on the Starwalker around when she can and can't monitor crewmembers, and her cameras have a physical presence that limits her field of view, so there's some things that she's simply incapable of seeing.

This also adds a real sense of tension to the divide between her and the crew. She might like many of them, and respect most of the rest, but she has to work around them because they have a great deal of authority over her, and ultimately can just reset her if they think it's to their benefit. All in all, it makes for a truly unique reading experience that I would wholeheartedly recommend, were it not for a single caveat that I feel obliged to warn you about.

The grounded feel of Starwalker was what drew me into the story, and it was what kept me reading right up until the end of the second book. However, the end of that book was marked by a turn away from that grounded feeling that caused me to lose interest in the narrative. The new fantastical direction of the story was just too far from what I was interested in, although your mileage may vary and the first two books are still basically flawless as far as my admittedly niche interests are concerned.

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Fantasy

Into the Mire (One Complete Book, One Seemingly Abandoned Sequel)

Into the Mire takes place in a really fascinating fantasy setting, where black powder has long since entered the scene in a big way. Rifles are as common as swords, and much more common than magic. The story follows a team of demobilised soldiers turned mercenaries as they're hired by a former commander to head into a swamp in search of some mystery or another, and that's where the story becomes truly unique.

The story does incredible work with its setting, making the swamp feel like a very real and very dangerous ecosystem. It's almost its own character, driving the plot as much as the actual cast. The characters suffer through the terrain, and that suffering fuels their individual arcs. It's a very unique way of doing things. As if that wasn't enough, the first book is entirely complete and is an actual book with a beginning, middle and end rather than a story arc with delusions of grandeur, so you don't need to worry about an abrupt ending.

The second book builds on the foundations of the first and is a fun enough read, but it's not essential if you only want to read something that's complete. It's also really well written; the sort of quality I'd expect from a traditionally published work.

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Sokaiseva (Ongoing)

Much like Pact and Pale, Sokaiseva is set in a modern world with magic pressing inivisibly at the seams. This is where the similarities end, however, as while Wildbow's magical works deal with small groups of independent practitioners, the response to magical incidents in Sokaiseva's New York are instead the business of organised magical mercenary companies.

The protagonist is Erika Hanover, a child soldier in one of those companies, recruited when her aptitude for magic became apparent at twelve. At the time, it was all she ever wanted. She was powerless, but then she had all the power she could ever need.

However, far from revelling in the inherent edge of such a premise, Sokaiseva instead uses it to show the traumatising effects conflict can have on a young mind, and her time with the mercenaries has stunted both her development and her sense of morality in a way that even her fellow soldiers are able to recognise.

It's a very unconventional coming of age story that aims to span a decade of Erika's life, and the story teeters between horror, slice of life and surreal absurdist nightmare.

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It's Only Another End Of The World (Complete)

This story opens with a man being invited by his girlfriend to watch a rehearsal of her theatre company's production of a play called 'The King In Yellow,' and things swiftly go downhill from there.

The world is coming to an end. There's nothing that can be done about it, no intervention that could hope to stop it. It simply is. All that remains is to see the different ways in which some small fraction of humanity might endure the coming apocalypse and pick the least terrible option.

Such is the burden placed upon the main character's head, and the story follows him as he is presented several possible alternatives for mankind, all with the looming inevitability of the apocalypse hanging over his head.

Consequently, there's an incredible sense of finality to the story, merged in with suitable elements of tonal whiplash as Cody finds life in the strangest of places and the strangest of ways. It really dives deep into what it means to be human, and which parts of that meaning would be worth sacrificing if it meant survival.

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Void Domain (Complete)

It's a premise you may have heard of before. A magically gifted child is handed a one in a lifetime offer to attend a school in which they can learn to hone their talents. But Brakket Magical Academy isn't Hogwarts, it's in the Northwestern United States, not Scotland, and it's on its last legs, with enrolment at an all-time low.

Nor is Eva a conventional student. For one, she's basically a runaway. For two, she's being mentored by a man three times her thirteen years of age, who keeps the mythical Greek figure and giant spider demon Arachne as a familiar.

And the mysteries just keep piling on from there. The school has been able to afford a full scholarship for every student, there are strange-smelling men wandering around the college town and the exact connection between Eva, her mentor and Arachne is still unclear.

Void Domain's take on a magical modern world is an interesting one. It's set comparatively soon after the great masquerade keeping the magical and mundane worlds separate was shattered by a crisis that simply couldn't be contained, so while magical is now a known (if barely understood) quantity, the actual magical communities remain secretive, while magical organisations act with a total disregard for all authorities save their own.

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Superheroes

Stone Burners (Ongoing) (Royal Road link)

This is the web serial that gave me my love of Case-53s, before I even knew what Case-53s were. The main character decides to name herself Olivia because she saw the name in a magazine and thought it sounded nice. The reason she doesn't have a name of her own is that she woke up naked in an alleyway with no memories of how she got there and several distinctly draconic features. Namely wings, a tail, and scales and claws below her elbows and knees.

To make matters worse, Olivia soon discovers that people mutating into monsters is apparently a fairly common phenomenon. She's what's known as a Feral, and they're called that because all of them, without fail, are near mindless monsters with an irresistible urge to lash out against anyone they see. So, no matter how much she might protest otherwise, in pure legal terms the response to seeing Olivia in the street is to call Animal Control.

Fortunately, the world doesn't work in purely legal terms, and Olivia soon finds herself drawn into the orbit of a small group of vigilantes and outcasts as they're drawn into the escalating violence of a local crime lord and the suspicion of the local superhuman police force.

Stone Burners takes the kitchen sink approach to superpowers, with random powers rubbing shoulders with ancient magical artefacts, super science and a guy who can teleport but whose main claim to fame is owning a gun and a hockey mask.

The setting is definitely darker than Worm, but that contrasts well with Olivia's brightness. She's innocent in a lot of ways, and good natured even in bad company. Still, if you're just looking for the closest story on this list to Worm, Stone Burners is the one for you.

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The Legion of Nothing (Ongoing)

If you're looking for a story about a teenager who sets out to become a superhero and actually manages to stick the landing, this is the one for you. Nick Klein does have an advantage over Taylor in that regard, however, since his grandfather was The Rocket; a founding member of the Grand Lake Heroes League.

Following the death of his grandfather, Nick inherits his art deco power armour along with the abandoned headquarters of the League. Nick is still friends with the other grandchildren of the League, all of whom have had the good fortune to inherit the same magic, powers or altered super-soldier genetics as their parents and grandparents, and together they set out to resurrect the Grand Lake Hero League.

It's a much more earnest depiction of heroism, from the main character's Golden Age-style power armour to the inherent small-town nature of an organisation that calls itself the Grand Lake Heroes League, and that can be an absolute breath of fresh air.

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Summus Proelium (Ongoing) (Royal Road Link)

This story is written by Cerulean, who you may remember as the author of such Wormfics as Intrepid and Atonement. I've only just started reading this one myself, but given where I'm posting this I figured I'd put it in here anyway.

Cassidy Evans is the daughter of an incredibly wealthy Detroit family, who gains powers while running away from the murder she just witnessed. At the same time, she discovers that the world of supervillains is closer than she ever could have guessed, and has to work against a city-wide conspiracy to bring them to justice.

In spite of the odds against her, Cassidy remains an optimistic and fun character to follow, but part of her optimism and attitude is undeniably because of her almost ludicrously privileged upbringing and lifestyle. Dean would probably be a good point of comparison from Worm. Still, similarly to The Legion of Nothing, this story is worth reading if you want a more upbeat and genuine take on heroism.