On Worm and Grunt

For those of you who are fans of my writing and willing to follow me fandom blind here is a brief explanation of the setting Worm by Wildblow. 

The Tagline for the Series is 'Doing the Wrong Things for the Right Reasons' so you can easily imagine why many of my longtime fans have requested I work in this fandom. Worm is a superhero story set in Earth Bet, and is grimdark as fuck. The superpowered people, called parahumans, get their powers from breakdown scenarios, either something acutely traumatic, slow burn trauma that they can't escape from over time, or a mix of both. The source of the powers drives conflict, so all the 'Capes' range from in desperate need of therapy to in desperate need of a loony bin they can't get out of. Because of this, even the good guys tend to be fucked up people. 

The cities on Earth Bet get attacked regularly by kaiju called Endbringers, and despite the plethora of awesome powers available, by the start of the story the Capes and militaries of the world have never managed to defeat an Endbringer, and the cities they attack are often completely destroyed or quarantined due to mass mind control. 

To combat these threats, the local Illuminati make sure nothing ever gets better on Earth Bet to maximize humanities exposure to suffering and thus maximize the number of Capes produced in the hopes that either a savior is someday born, or the possibility of multiple powers working together with perfect coordination will deliver mankind from the long drawn out apocalypse. 

Meanwhile the actual apocalypse spends his days flying around being a perfect if mostly braindead hero, only ever one bad day away from just saying fuck it and destroying Earth Bet and all its curated sister universes. 

Narrative wise, Worm is a masterclass in worldbuilding overflowing with creativity with initially strong character building, but poor and ultimately circular and repetitive character arcs, that in the final third pretty much looses the plot and ends in a way that kinda works but most people find dissatisfying. 

Now for an explanation of our leading man. 

I have two series that I write most people are likely familiar with Levid's Magical Wheel of Reincarnation and It's stories Actually Invincible, Son of Jiraiya, In Cyberpunk with the Fallout System, and Path of the Hungry Bear. I started that series to attact an audience, but my real love is Ultimate Krogan and it's spinnoffs. That is where our MC is from. 

In Ultimate Krogan, my MC was hit in the head so hard that copies of his consciousness flew across the Omniverse and transmigrated into any character I want to write as a new Grunt. While grunt started as a Krogan doing anything he could to defeat the Reapers as swiftly as possible in Mass Effect, the audience didn't want to part with him after he got the W, so I invented a method of omniversal travel both obscene and gruesome. Basically, when Grunt and his partner Jack, get drunk and fuck they can do it so well that the universe can't handle it, and sends them onto the next universe where upon arrival they land atop someone during a cannibalistic fugue state and devore that person, adding their powers both biological and supernatural and memories to their own. 

As a fragment of the original, the MC of this story looses his massive biological and supernatural prowess but maintains his cognitive capabilities as well as his many mental diseases. At the core of his personal philosophy is the trauma of frequently losing everything he has and almost everyone he cares about. This resulted in him adopting highly destructive coping mechanisms such as completely ignoring the past and the future, and focusing only on the present, and treating almost everything he encounters like a joke. On top of this the frequent memory dumps (entirely of very villainous characters) adds a layer of Schizophrenia and DIDS, that once again Grunt entirely ignores unless he has a mental breakdown of which their have been a couple. 

Despite all this, Grunt is high performing, easily being the most charming of my protagonists, and I mean this as in the behaviors Grunt displays when in control of himself tend to be so rawly charismatic that the audience falls in love with him, not using ascribed characterization to tell you he is charismatic. 

He also has an IQ of around 1880 at this point, and that is a conservative estimate making him roughly a third as intelligent as Rick Sanchez, a character so intelligent he is nigh omni-capable. Using that intelligence, Grunt has studied and in many cases mastered the technology of the major factions in the universes he has visited: Mass Effect, Star Wars, Gears of War, Halo, X-Men Evolution, as well as encountering the Grineer from Warframe and the Ravagers from EDF during his stay in an Alternate Mass Effect. On top of this he has a special connection to the world of Brutal Legend and the primordial beast Ormagoden, so don't be surprised if he starts doing magical shit by playing Heavy Metal music. 

Also he can defeat any ghosts or spirits by calling upon Jesus. Typically by shouting, "The power of Christ compels you, bitch!" 

An important note is that although Grunt suffers from quite severe mental illness and deals with it in an unhealthy way, mental illness is never glorified in my stories. My protagonists will never start hearing voices in his head telling them to get up and get back at it, or how to correctly proceed with the plot. When Grunt experiences psychotic breakdowns it is always treated as something tragic and horrific rather than empowering. The most prominent example of this was when he told a woman (Locust Queen Gears of War) he was about to rape that he was completely lost and sometimes has no idea who he is. Despite his numerous flaws and general unwellness, Grunt has an IQ of 1880 and can work around and through his problems so long as he has a cause or a romantic partner worth doing so for (Mordor for the Orcs). Otherwise he typically satisfies his dark urges in magnificent bastard style in a hopeless loop always pursuing the next great distraction as seen in It's Me, Dio!.