Worm is pretty good, but it runs into the issue that the continuing escalation of the narrative's scope, and a considerable time-skip partway through the story, can (depending on the reader) lose the aspects that drew a reader's interest in the first place.
Now that it's finished, it seems like it would work better if edited into a print or ebook format. The narrative could be split into two or three books with each designed to have self-contained storylines, making the differences in focus and scale less jarring.
It also has the same basic problem that most superhero fiction does, where a lot of the setting as presented is constructed to allow contrived superhero punch-ups and doesn't make that all that much sense in the context of how the characters and their powers would actually affect the world.
This problem is kind of a given if you want people running around in colorful costumes and capes, though, unless it's a setting where superhumans have only just appeared, like in the excellent novel Turbulence (http://www.amazon.com/Turbulence-Samit-Basu-ebook/dp/B00B0LP...).
Wildbow didn't state that. In fact, he's compared GRRM's issues with later GoT books to the fact that GRRM needed but ultimately decided against/was forced to avoid a timeskip.
Wildbow stated that the timeskip suffered for poor execution and a lot of IRL stuff that was going on at the time (including a semi-forced 2 week break from all internet/computer stuff mid-arc), and he intends to rewrite it and cover different bases for the published final version.
Hey, since bumping into this thread (have read much of HPMOR) I decided to check out Worm and it's excellent - have read ~1000 pages (out of around 10K on my device), half on the site and half on, for convenience's sake, an ebook version I found floating around. I'll be donating in a second here, but I really would rather (for whatever reason) have made it a transaction and bought a copy in some legit epub or mobi form from you, the author.
It's a bit late to hope for a response, but I'm somewhere around 7.08 - should I wait for a revision or just read on and revise my opinion later? At any rate thanks for writing and I hope you get the book deal you very richly deserve.
Now that it's finished, it seems like it would work better if edited into a print or ebook format. The narrative could be split into two or three books with each designed to have self-contained storylines, making the differences in focus and scale less jarring.
It also has the same basic problem that most superhero fiction does, where a lot of the setting as presented is constructed to allow contrived superhero punch-ups and doesn't make that all that much sense in the context of how the characters and their powers would actually affect the world.
This problem is kind of a given if you want people running around in colorful costumes and capes, though, unless it's a setting where superhumans have only just appeared, like in the excellent novel Turbulence (http://www.amazon.com/Turbulence-Samit-Basu-ebook/dp/B00B0LP...).