I'm 6 chapters in and already loving this.  A friend of mine just read through it the past few months and got me into it, but he described it as though it were a comic or something.  So happy to see he was wrong...

The only sympathetic character associated with the white supremacists is Kayden/Purity, who appears to be basically bullied into it by her neo-nazi husband and the entirety of what makes her sympathetic is that everything she does is based around protecting her daughter. (It later turns out that she's not as nice as she looks in the interlude you linked--you already saw her berserk button if you read that, and, well, it gets pushed, and it gets ugly.)
The rest of them are all clearly evil--by the standards of most of the other villains, even--and the majority get some pretty nasty fates.

What the author does do is try to portray all the characters as... well... characters, rather than caricatures. There's an interlude from a dog's perspective, from an interdimentional god-like entity's perspective, from complete psychopaths' perspectives.

Sorry that an author is good enough to pose the idea that horrible people are still people sometimes.

(Spoilers, if you want to know how the white supremacists get treated after that interlude:
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Kaiser: uncooperative jerkface willing to murder nonwhites while taunting them about everything. Tries this on Lung, gets knocked out. Tries this on a giant monster, gets ripped in half.
Hookwolf: He's not the typical white supremacist, more of a warrior-nazi. He gets brainwashed and recruited by a roaming band of serial killers, then anticlimactically impaled with an omnidimentional rapier.
Kayden: Aster gets taken by Child protective services, she goes on a murderous rampage and destroys buildings and people and junk until she finds out where Aster is being kept. Then the setting's most successful mostly-humanoid serial killer thinks about torturing her by killing Aster and Theo in front of her, then decides to wait 2 years to see if Theo can trigger. Then she gets trapped in a time loop while being cut, while Aster is being kidnapped by said band of serial killers, which is basically a literal hell.
Night and Fog: Creepy sociopaths who are married and go through the motions of a healthy marriage, but are mutually faking the whole thing to the point that it creeps out the other neo-nazis. Their powers are terrifying, and their final fate is about the same as Kayden's.
Crusader: Decides to abandon Theo on a rooftop, then ... I don't remember, I think he gets stuck in one of those loops, too; he was with Purity at the time.
Victor: a skill-vampire who gets body-controlled by Regent. I don't remember if we hear from him again after that.
Stormtiger and Cricket: I don't remember their ultimate fates (they get beat and bloodied a lot, but everyone does, really), but they're portrayed mostly like proto-Hookwolves. Which is to say, jerks who like hurting people.
[/spoilers]

Agreed about the Wheel of Time; sometimes it seems like the differences between men and women is one of the major points of the whole thing.

The Worm universe basically branches from our own at some point in the 1980s, and most people who gain superpowers do so through what is called a trigger event; that is, when something really awful happens. So third world countries, women and minorities are over represented in the cape population, simply because they tend to have it worse on average. This screws with the balance of power in some ways; someone noticed pretty far through that there did not appear to be much if any sexism, what with powers leveling the field, but radical groups like Empire Eighty Eight (the neo-nazis) and end-of-the-world cults get enough power to be serious threats rather than the crazy people in the news.
This also means the balance is in favor of villains--the people who have trigger events are most likely to react in bad ways, or to have issues with the legal system, etc, so heroes are outnumbered pretty badly. Villains also get more minions, what with being villains, but getting labeled a hero usually means one must cooperate with the powers that be, which has the benefit of getting military support when needed.
The nasty side-effect of that last bit is that not cooperating with the existing structure as much as possible causes lots of coordination and image problems. So there are plenty of "in name only" on both sides of the coin. (Plenty of, but not overwhelmingly so. Many of the so-called villains are genuinely scumbags (the neo-nazis, for example), and many of the heroes are actually heroic. It's the ones who toe the line who tend to advance the plot, though.)

(At some point, the author admitted to starting out writing primarily horror, which explains a great deal. For example, the group of villains based on horror movie stereotypes. They even had a creepy clown at one point, but that one's dead by the start of the story.)

@Cae sounds interesting in that way, though I don't know about darkabomination's comments, since moral ambiguity and amxt get so rammed down your throat in the world of general fiction it doesn't really interest me anymore, still worse when it seems the author is doing it for it's own sake.

i mean Jim butcher's dresden "oh no! it's so sad I haven't had a girlfriend for four years! and I have yet another power that's going out of control"

Oh for god's sake grow a bloody spine!

What the hell has happened to characters who are just vaguely decent? shocking as it might sound, for all the world contains lots of scumbags and closit villains and saidists and sociopaths, there actually are! some people who just feel compassion for others and will go out of their way to be reasonable occasionally not because they think it's the law or they're making up for past wrongs or they have some great complex, just because it's sort of the way they are and what they do and they actually feel that the good of others is occasionally worthwhile.

This is one reason I really enjoyed the game of thrones books (don't know about the series), since characters really rn the gammet of motivations and experiences and moralities, which made the world feel far more real.

I've also noticed a thing about web cerials often descending despite a good idea. I once read a truly horrible series on podiobooks which had a great premise, what would happen if a bunch of tabletop rp players actually became! their characters. The problem, the author pretty much had no idea how most rp worked, represented all of his players as a bunch of adolescent boys with obsessions about one thing (the one girl was a completely naive romantic fool), and finally has the hole thing basically descend into debauchery and characters randomly murdering each other for no readily apparent reason, ---- indeed I found myself wondering if that was how they behaved, how the hell were they a coherent rp group in the first place?

I read to the end because I have an inherent problem with finishing books half way through, but why such a good idea turned into such a pile of putrescence I don't know, ---- again, where's the editer?

as I said I don't know about worm, it's something I might have to look at though to be honest I've got more than enough in audio to keep me busy. Right now I'm reading the 2003 sequel to the classic day of the triffids, written in conscious mirroring of John Wyndham's style by Simon Clarke,and really enjoying it, especially how close to wyndham's mentality and style Clarke is, heck the book even feels! in it's background assumptions as if it were written in the 50's,  which for a modern author is highly impressive.

I think grimdark might be an understatement. Somehow, that doesn't bother me, even though I'm kinda wishing something genuinely upbeat would come out of the literary ether any day now.
Regarding the writing: yeah, the lack of an editor shows in the first few arcs. Eventually, the author started saying that there wouldn't be any further corrections to the early arcs, since they'll probably receive major rewriting if it winds up in ebook format. (A specific weakness that came up a lot in discussions was sensory descriptions; this gets a bit better after a while, but it's noticeable.)

I've heard recommendations for Tales of Mu, though I haven't looked into it (And they usually aren't more specific than "Oh, by the way, there's sexuality out the wazoo", which tells me nothing other than that it's in that category of things I'd be reluctant to read if the people recommending it hadn't made decent (and tamer) recommendations in the past).

Worm is dark. The first arc isn't the best, I'd say (I was skeptical until about chapter three or four, then the plot kept me reading; the first chapter makes it sound like it's going to be pretty typical, and the writing improves as it continues, so... yeah... I don't blame anyone who dislikes the first couple chapters.). But it ... gets worse. Then the protagonists do something awesome and pull through... and it gets worse again.
It has its share of genuinely good characters, but most of them get tied up in things that limit what they can do. The top three heroes, for instance, are mostly just working out of a desire to do good (though one of them might be a bit... ah... well... one of them not so much), but they're tangled up in a nasty conspiracy they can't afford to abandon. (The one with the most moral integrity is actually left out of most of the conspiracy's secrets because they know he won't like the shadier tradeoffs they have to make.)

Then there are people who can't play as nice as they'd like because of the nature of their powers; some who pretty much have to engage in psychological warfare and subterfuge, which just upsets everyone.

The most likable characters, IMO, are the nicer ones (I'd count Taylor among them, even though she resorts to some pretty dark tactics when circumstances call for it--see the first fight in the series). And Tattletale, though everyone who hates her definitely earned the right to their hatred.
Though there is this nasty tendency for most of the more heroic characters to stay in the background most of the time. Which sucks; some of the best bits are in their chapters.

I think the author does have an affinity for broken characters, though. . Some of the comments have indicated that all the early ideas that eventually led to Worm with Taylor as the main character focused on other, even more messed up people.

Some things are just...flat-out evil.  Racial supremacists are one of those things.  The author seems to believe that everyone has a core of good deep inside them, and so that's why it's OK to portray even the most depraved evil-doers as people.  This is not something I believe, and so that is why I can no longer continue to read this work.  I admit, most people *are* good and decent.  But Nazis and pedophiles are my two big exemptions to that; anything else can be rationalized, and any other type of person can change, accept for those two types. So I can't stomach any kind of fiction that attempts to portray them otherwise.  The comment thread where people were chastising Glory Girl for beating up a skinhead, and calling her evil for going too far, sickened me.  If she could have gotten away with it, she should have exterminated him.  What she did was bad only because she wasn't taking into account how it would effect her family and friends.  Some people absolutely cannot be rehabilitated, and it is wrong to try.

@stewie: I'm not sure that I understand your point. A book about world war II that portrayed Nazis as anything other than psychopathic evil is not! a book I would read.

exactly. The most important thing people overlook about Hitler is that more than anything else, he was as human as the rest of us. Little known fact is that when his mother was dying, a jewish doctor did his best to save her, but failed. Did he rage and kill him on the spot, no. Did he order his newly established police to send him to a concentration camp, no. He called him the world's only noble jew, and made sure he and his family were given special protection and a passport to the United States.

The fact that he could save one family writing them off as unique while condemning an entire culture to genocide, if anything is even more terrifying.And there's something to be learned in that.

If you strip away the irrational hatred and prejudice under the worst people, you'll find a normal human within those mental boundries.

Calling someone evil and justifying their deaths is exactly the same sort of prejudice at work. Remember that at the end of the day, everyone thinks they are doing the best they can, and will justify any negativity as unavoidable.

I do agree with you that they are evil. That doesn't nessessarily mean they are doing this of their free will.

In the days of slavery, why do you think that most of society agreed with those policies? Humans  are far too easily manipulated. If most other humans are continuing an action, the psychological reflex is to follow
them.

Milgram was attempting to ascertain how this worked. He determined that a person would injure another person if he was sufficiently threatened or manipulated into doing so. It's just a portion of human psychology.

Also note that if a person is set on a particular point of view, he or she wlil see his/her actions as good, not evil. Evil is a relative term, and has nothing to do with some cosmic force of good or evil in the universe. The concept is entirely determinate on the person's mind.

The author does not portray these characters as good people. The empire 88 are shown killing people, and another is shown kidnapping a child just to gain the probabilities of outcomes. They act in the way they do outwardly due to the fact that they believe in their actions. The author doesn't advocate these actions, and the main character often comments on how she dislikes the white supremacy aspect of them. The only ppeople in that environment she sides with are the 4 she initially met, and even that fades when they act in an immoral way.

Also I'm pretty sure that the main character is black, as well as Grue.

I think we're going to have to agree to table the issue.  I see no point in turning this into a multi-page flamewar, and that is really the only direction this can go.  Especially because Hitler has come up.  I've stated pretty clearly my feelings that evil is evil, and should be so treated.  I'm dismayed that the majority of people here do not, apparently, feel this way.  I'm not sure if it's out of a kind of misguided tolerance, or some sort of inexplicable moral relativism, but the off-topic section of the Audio Games Forum is not an appropriate place for us to engage in this battle. 

I originally wrote agree to disagree, and then retracted it.  I do not agree with any of you on any particular what so ever, and believe that you are all not only misguided, but dangerously, scarily, extremely, wrong in the worst possible way.  But I can't put over my feelings on the matter strongly enough without risking moderator interference. Also, the fact that I am hijacking another topic at this point, and that these replies are not threaded, are both things that are rather unhelpful.  So I will surrender the field, with the observation that any discussion that in any way excuses the actions of someone like Purity, no matter what her circumstances, is totally inappropriate for any sane human to engage in.

I realized I wasn't reacting well in time to keep myself from saying anything horribly stupid (at least not where there wasn't a delete button handy). I'm bound to say something stupid if it keeps up, so I'm hoping we can leave it dropped for now.

On further rereading, it's clear to me that the writing in the first couple sections is pretty weak compared to where it ends up. It comes across in many respects as a super Nanowrimo type thing, where major editorial stuff is left for later, unless it's something that can be corrected quickly, like typoes or one or two misleading phrases. I'm still impressed in spite of this (If not for the source of the recommendation, I might not have kept on past the first chapter, but I am very glad I did).