Another possibility, brought to you by Worm. (Destiny)

by Dagoonite, Somewhere in Iowa, lost in a cornfield., Sunday, March 08, 2015, 12:57 (3343 days ago) @ Quirel

That name has been cropping up on the Spacebattles forums of late.

Not sure if I'm going to read through all thirty arcs. Sounds a lot like Heroes.

Of late? I'm pretty sure it got its first spark of popularity there. Well, there and TV Tropes.

Honestly, it's not actually very many Heroes. Villains, on the other hand...

It's really not that bad, surprisingly. It does wear on at the end, with the last two or three arcs starting to wear on you, and it takes a while to ramp up -- about the ABB arc, maybe the Endbringer arc being where it hits its stride, and it doesn't slow down for quite some time. There are quite a few capes to keep track of, but the author does a good job of making them each distinctive and easily recognizable.

I'll also be the first one to admit, the author has problems writing teenagers. This is important since the main character starts off at 15 years old, but frequently reads like she's 30. The most teenager-ish of the main cast is the plucky comedy relief, which is annoying.

But it's also one of those books that takes its subject matter seriously, and you see the honest psychological issues with being a hero or a villain. One character's powers triggered when her foster mother tried to drown her dog as punishment, leading to the mother's death. The character ran afterwards, and is rather severely messed up for it; she can't read or write due to the young age when her powers developed, has no chance of maintaining a secret identity, and has interpersonal issues like you wouldn't believe. You don't see that a lot, really. Usually in fiction, people forced into a life of crime since childhood become savvy criminals with glamorous lives.

I also like the care at which almost all characters are presented with. One gang of superpowered criminals are white supremacists, and we get to see inside a couple of their heads. Interestingly, they're presented as people with all the good and bad that comes with it. In a way, it's the good parts about them that make the horrible beliefs even worse; you could like these people if they weren't so focused on something so nasty. It never glamorizes those beliefs, but shows it for how ugly it is while still allowing the character to be a human without being a caricature.

Just be forewarned that if you do start reading it, things get worse. Things always get worse, and the author tends to end chapters and arcs in a cliffhanger.