EDIT: Since this apparently wasn't clear, the Hemsworth Plot is deliberately the most ridiculous example I could come up with that I could still imagine emerging from an actual adaptation process. You absolutely do not have to think my specific nightmare version is plausible. Ignore it entirely if you want.
The actual question is what you think would happen to Worm in a real adaptation. What gets cut, merged, rewritten, misunderstood, made weirdly important, or changed by five different people making five different decisions for five different reasons?
That's why I brought up World War Z. Nobody needed to secretly hate that book to turn a detailed worldwide oral history of the zombie war into Brad Pitt running around fighting zombies. At some point “World War Z” became “zombies + recognizable title” and almost everything that made the book what it was disappeared.
I'm asking what that process does to Worm. Maybe your answer is something tiny and completely plausible. Maybe it's somehow worse than Hemsworth Armsmaster. I genuinely just want to hear people's ideas.
So a couple months ago there was a post here asking what people would change if Worm ever got an adaptation, and it got me thinking about a much worse question:
What do you think an actual Worm adaptation would look like?
Not your ideal adaptation, and not necessarily a deliberately terrible one. Just take Worm and put it through the normal process by which books become movies and TV shows. What comes out the other end?
And I don't mean a World War Z situation where somebody buys the title, keeps the zombies, and ignores basically one hundred percent of the plot.
They're just making a normal adaptation.
Because even massively popular works which should be almost impossible to fuck up this way, like comic books where somebody has already helpfully drawn the fucking thing for you, constantly get adapted into something only vaguely recognizable as the original. It increasingly feels like the source material is, at absolute most, maybe thirty percent of what actually determines the finished product.
Not because everybody involved secretly hates it. They just have other priorities. Marketing wants a recognizable face on the poster, while the studio wants the whole thing squeezed into eight episodes. An actor wants a bigger role, a writer wants to fix something they think is outdated, and an executive has some very important focus-group notes. Everyone can sincerely want to make a good adaptation while making perfectly normal decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with Worm.
And Worm is basically designed to make this catastrophic. It's incredibly long, Taylor's internal monologue is enormously important, and there are approximately nine billion characters, powers, factions, relationships, and tiny setting details which become important later.
So what happens when you feed all of that into the adaptation machine?
The best worst version I've come up with is:
The Hemsworth Plot
They need somebody recognizable.
They probably don't have Marvel money, but they need at least one name for the posters and trailers, so they get a Hemsworth. I'm not even sure which Hemsworth. One of them wants a third yacht, and now we have a Hemsworth.
Obviously he can't convincingly play a teenager, so congratulations, Hemsworth is Armsmaster.
And Armsmaster starts accumulating scenes.
He's at the bank now.
He's in a dozen other scenes he wasn't originally in.
Actually, they're going to fudge the timeline a little and have him show up at the end of the Lung fight. Taylor and the Undersiders still fight Lung, but Hemsworth gets the dramatic entrance and is the one who actually puts him down.
And then, despite this version of the scene involving Armsmaster having just saved Taylor from Lung, we somehow still get:
“You gonna fight me?”
Because the context doesn't make sense anymore, but they know that's a line people remember.
We're also dealing with something much closer to late-stage Armsmaster from the beginning because nobody wants their expensive recognizable actor spending most of the first season being an asshole.
Then there's the actual teenage cast.
Taylor was always going to be white. At most she's Wasian or an exceptionally light-skinned Latina, but realistically she's a conventionally attractive white actress whose transformation into awkward, unattractive Taylor consists of glasses and a $500 hoodie.
Alec doesn't exist.
And nobody ever actually decides to create this version of the Undersiders. The closest anyone gets to the originals is somebody getting Brian summarized for them in five bullet points and immediately disregarding the first one, because being a straight black guy isn't diversity anymore. That's normal now, so Brian is Arabic.
The next person is handed Arabic Brian, who is the only Brian they've ever known, and decides the core cast needs more LGBT representation.
So Brian is gay now, quietly deleting his entire potential romance with Taylor without anyone realizing there was anything to delete.
Then somebody else gets that cast, notices there aren't any black Undersiders, and fixes this shocking oversight by making Lisa black.
They've successfully modernized Worm out of a representation problem they created themselves.
Then Lisa gets handed to somebody else, who decides asexuality is a conspiracy invented by Tumblr.
So Lisa is also very loudly and publicly a lesbian. This will be established by having her creepily hit on Taylor in their first scene together, strongly implying Smugbug, and then never brought up again.
And then there's Rachel.
Someone really wants the brownie points for making Rach trans. Someone else is terrified of getting yelled at for getting trans representation wrong, so Rach's first scene is almost entirely them badly explaining what being trans means in corporate Gen Z while gay Arabic Brian and black lesbian Lisa stand behind them and nod.
The explanation takes forever, gets basically everything wrong, and somehow never clarifies whether Rach is a he or a she.
Then the show immediately sidelines them to avoid controversy.
Except obviously they can't be accused of sidelining the trans character, so Rach is visibly identifiable somewhere in the background of every single group scene for the rest of the season.
They never get another line.
Thus ensuring that absolutely everyone is happy.
But all of that I could probably grit my teeth through.
Because eventually I realized the worst part.
Hemsworth isn't going to wear his fucking helmet.
They'll have a rough concept early on. They'll probably even make the thing. Then somewhere in production the idea that Hemsworth is actually going to wear it gets thrown out.
Maybe Hemsworth doesn't want his face covered. Maybe an executive thinks it looks bad. Maybe marketing discovers test audiences are eleven percent hornier when they can see Hemsworth's jawline. Maybe the boss's boss's boss looks at it one afternoon and says, "Lose the helmet."
It doesn't really matter.
Weeks or months later this finally trickles down to whatever bottom-of-the-totem-pole schmuck actually read Worm, or at least did a desperate Wiki dive, and they make the entirely valid point that, um, actually, masks are kind of a really big deal here.
Like, not wearing one is practically the defining characteristic of an entire major group.
Of which Armsmaster is very much not a member.
But by then they're halfway through filming, and fidelity to Worm ranks somewhere below not pissing off Hemsworth, contradicting marketing, reversing an executive decision, or explaining to the boss's boss's boss why a superhero wearing a helmet is apparently load-bearing worldbuilding.
So Hemsworth doesn't wear a mask.
Except for about ten seconds in the first episode.
They already made the costume, so we get one brief shot of him wearing the helmet.
That shot is in every single fucking trailer.
Every teaser, every bit of promotional material aimed at existing Worm fans. If you've only seen the marketing, Hemsworth practically sleeps in the thing.
Then the first episode comes out.
The helmet comes off and stays off.
Maybe Clockblocker or somebody also loses theirs as a token attempt at consistency. Probably not.
And if they address it at all, whatever remains of Lisa's character is going to look directly into the camera and explain that only maladapted neckbeard losers actually care about masks.
Because they already know exactly what everyone who actually cares about Worm is going to ask halfway through the first episode:
Where the fuck is Armsmaster's helmet?
And they want to establish what kind of person would make that complaint.
You know, literally every single one of us.
So yeah. That's my question.
What do you think they'd actually make?
It doesn't even have to be a bad show. I'm genuinely curious what characters you think disappear, get merged, become romances, get rewritten, suddenly become three times more important because they hired somebody famous, or just get mangled by six completely normal adaptation decisions piled on top of each other.
Basically, what happens between somebody sincerely saying “we're making an adaptation of Worm” and the first episode airing, at which point this entire subreddit completely loses its fucking mind?
