Wildbow's Worm completed in 2013. Eleven years later, its fanfiction community is more active than most current TV shows' fandoms. SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity collectively host tens of thousands of Worm fics — alternate powers, fix-it timelines, crossovers, original characters, and explorations of corners of the Parahumans setting that the original story only touched.
If you've read Worm and want to dive into the fanfiction, or if you're curious about the community without having read the source material, here's where to start.
Read Worm first
This needs saying. Worm is 1.7 million words and available for free on WordPress. It's worth reading before the fanfiction. The fanfiction community assumes deep knowledge of the setting — characters, power mechanics, trigger events, the Entities, Cauldron, the Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse Nine. Fanfics will reference these without explanation.
That said, some fanfiction works well enough on its own if you've absorbed the setting through cultural osmosis. The community is large enough that you can find explanations for any concept you encounter. But the experience is richer if you've read the original.
The essential tropes
Worm fanfiction has developed its own vocabulary and recurring patterns:
Alt-power. The most common format. Taylor Hebert triggers with a different power. This changes everything. The best alt-power fics use the power change to explore character, not just to make Taylor stronger. Glassmaker gives her fire and serenity instead of bugs and paranoia. Trailblazer gives her Tinker abilities inspired by Gundam. A Cloudy Path gives her Supreme Commander tech and explores the moral weight of wielding weapons of mass destruction.
Crossover powers. Taylor gets powers from another fictional universe. Taylor Varga gives her lizard-demon powers from the anime Vandread. It's long, silly, and beloved. Kill Them All is a gamer-fic crossover where Taylor can visit other fictional worlds. Both are massive and have shaped the fandom's crossover conventions.
Fix-it fic. The story follows canon until a specific divergence point, then things get better. This is satisfying if you found Worm's relentless escalation exhausting. It Gets Worse is a crack fic where Taylor's power is literal luck — the universe conspires to make things work out for her, often through Rube Goldberg chains of coincidence. It's hilarious and genuinely warm.
Post-GM (Gold Morning). Stories set after Worm's ending. Taylor in a new world, usually depowered, dealing with the aftermath. Copacetic is the classic. The Student follows her as she tries to live a normal life. These tend to be quieter, more character-focused than canon.
Where to start
For the definitive alt-power: A Cloudy Path — LacksCreativity
Taylor triggers with Tinker abilities based on Supreme Commander, a strategy game about building armies of giant robots. The story is notable for taking the implications of that power seriously — mass-producing war machines has consequences, and the story doesn't let Taylor escape them. The writing is strong, the pacing is deliberate, and the moral weight of the power is explored thoroughly. At over a million words, it's one of the longest and most respected Worm fics.
Available on SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity.
For the best execution: Cenotaph — notes
Taylor's first night out goes differently. She doesn't join the Undersiders. What follows is a tightly plotted AU that diverges from canon early and follows the consequences through the major stations of Worm's plot. Notes's prose is clean and efficient, and the characterization is sharp — this feels like Worm with a different path, not a fanfic that's lost the source material's voice.
The fic spawned a trilogy (Cenotaph → Wake → Legacy) and established many of the conventions that later alt-power fics follow.
Available on SpaceBattles.
For something lighter: Glassmaker — JinglyJangles
Taylor triggers with pyrokinesis and the mental state of someone who's found inner peace. She makes glass sculptures. She eats a streetlight. She's happy. At under 30,000 words, this is a short, beautiful character study that shows what Worm fanfiction can do when it steps away from escalation and explores who Taylor could be.
Available on SpaceBattles and AO3.
For the ambition: Trailblazer — 3ndless
Taylor triggers as a Tinker who can build mecha from the Gundam franchise. This should be a crack premise. Instead, it's a 1.6 million word epic that runs parallel to Worm's timeline, builds its own original endgame, and explores themes of heroism, legacy, and what it means to be a symbol. The Gundam elements are integrated thoughtfully rather than as window dressing.
Available on SpaceBattles. Complete.
For the crossover: Taylor Varga — mp3.1415player
Taylor merges with a demonic lizard entity from another universe and gains the ability to manipulate matter at a fundamental level. She uses this power mostly to mess with people, create chaos, and protect her city through increasingly absurd applications of essentially unlimited power. The story is 2 million words of low-stakes fun — almost no dramatic tension, but enormous charm and genuine humor. Not everyone's taste, but foundational to the fandom's culture.
Available on Sufficient Velocity. Ongoing.
For the post-GM feels: The Student — BeaconHill
Years after Gold Morning, Taylor is in college on an alternate Earth, depowered and trying to build a normal life. The story follows her navigating academia, relationships, and the shadows of her past. Quiet, character-focused, and a welcome counterpoint to the action-heavy majority of Worm fic.
Available on SpaceBattles.
For the sheer scale: Kill Them All — ShayneT
Taylor gets Gamer powers — a LitRPG system that lets her level up, gain skills, and eventually travel between fictional universes. The premise is pure power fantasy. The execution builds to cosmic scale and genuine stakes. The crossover worlds (DC, Marvel, Buffy, Star Trek) are treated with respect, and Taylor's progression through them is surprisingly coherent given the scope.
Available on SpaceBattles. Complete at over 600,000 words.
How to read these
Most Worm fanfiction lives on SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. The thread-based format means you'll read using threadmarks to skip reader discussion. AO3 hosts some Worm fic as well, but the community's center of gravity is on the forums.
If you want to track ongoing Worm fics without manually checking threads, Storywatch supports SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. Paste a thread URL and the tracker picks up new threadmarked chapters automatically. The forum format doesn't send email notifications for updates in any useful way, so a tracker is particularly helpful for following multiple ongoing fics.
The Worm fandom is unusual even by fanfiction standards. The source material is complete, the creator is active in other projects, and the community has had over a decade to develop its own canon of conventions, tropes, and expectations. The best fics stand alongside the original as works of serious science fiction. Start with something that matches your preferred tone — the range from "cosmic horror" to "Taylor opens a bakery" is wider than you might expect.