Chum

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Sam Small is a 14-year-old superhero-in-training. Sam Small can bite through steel and smell you bleed. Sam Small has an addiction to violence.

Chum is a story about superheroes, supervillains, people with powers who reject either label, sharks, fishing, Philadelphia, chimpanzees, flowers, cancer, teeth, memes (in the informatics sense), rationalization, cognitive dissonance, how fascists suck, parents, and people who read comic books a little too much.

What to expect:A web serial structured like a comic series. Slow-burn slice-of-life with bursts of action that steadily turns into action with bursts of slice-of-life. This story takes a bit to get going, and isnotrecommended for people looking for bite-size literature or light novels. If you want something with more immediate action from the word "go", this may not be the serial for you, and I recommend you check out one of the other lovely stories on this site. Each arc of Chum is roughly a novel's worth of words (70-100k or so).

Feedback can be left in the comments or directed to my private messages.

This is a mirror of the Chum wordpress website, which can be found atchumstory.wordpress.com, will be about an update or two ahead of this one, and has a denser, less frequent update schedule. Chapters on Royal Road are separated into parts to help fill a daily upload schedule. Expect at least 10000 words per week.

There is now aChum TvTropes PageandChum Wiki(be wary of spoilers!) that could use some TLC. Feel free to contribute, if desired.

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2023
Author: bstdev

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.0/ 5.0
Followers: 942
Views: 939,525

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(10)

PotassiumRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This is a story about a teenager superhero, one amongst many, but this one shines in creating a real teenage for us, the insecurities, home and school life and the somewhat harebrained ideas that populate the teenage mind. The story is well written, with few to no grammatical mistakes or misspellings. The protagonist feels real and the powers interesting, I intend to follow with interest this fiction.
SashalingRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Can't express just how real sam feels as a character and how touching her journey has been to read. I'm so excited to see more of her story and see how she grows and changes in response to the challenges ahead. The portrayal of sams family life is masterful and the scenes focused on her home life are some of my favorite. The world feels astonishingly real.
SurvRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The easiest way to give an impression of this story is to imagine the struggles of Peter Parker and strip the “amazing” for grit.
Sam, our protagonist, starts off exactly as one would remember it to be when they were 14 and had grown shark teeth after being chopped up by a boat propeller. Yup, this is a world of Super Heroes and Villians! She finds herself surviving a near death experience undergoing an awakening event which is a phenomena that began to occur in an alternate universe of Earth some 40 years ago. Having been one of the lucky few to have gained powers made to help her survive death in a perilous moment of life and death, we watch Sam go from receiving paperwork to use her powers as a proverbial concealed carry license to meeting Lady Liberty. The strongest hero in Philadelphia. With this chance encounter Sam steps into a world of intrigue where above all else, there’s always a person trying to survive behind the mask.
CHUM finds itself filled with a carnage of growth but surprisingly little bloodshed because the days of rampaging villians being able to run free is long since over. The heroes of the world have formed teams and thrown them into a prison called Daedalus, making the traditional villain a thing of the past. The ones that didn’t find themselves captured following a rapid world wide sweep chose to go to ground forming criminal enterprises hidden through shell companies or legitimate businesses tinged with corruption.
This series is filled to the brim with an impressive collection of side stories and extra chapters detailing how world functions and the cast of characters is acting as the highlight for the series. Story arcs are well done and each stage of Sam’s continued escapades really endear you to the character.
If you’re at all a fan of super hero stories that show both sides of their life then this is a story worth your time.
GafaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This story is quite well written, and a blast to read, I'm excited for the frequent updates. It takes a few chapters to really get into, but when it takes off it takes off! The characters are extremely well fleshed out, and makes actions that follow their motivations, which is sometimes hard to find. Author keep up the great work!
GaleighRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The story follows a young teenage girl finally getting her firat taste of the real adult world via a traumatic incident that left her with powers.
It does a great job of showing her dealing with her new status as a super hero while grounding her with her family and friends (pre and post powers)
Worth a read for anyone who enjoys coming of age, super heroes, and political conspiracy.
Note 1: I usually read on the blog and this review is based on reading up to ch. 45.
Note 2: because I know some people look for it; the MC is very Bi and her discovering that is part of her story.
DouxChampagneRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
Chum is exactly the kind of story I've been missing in my life. It's a superhero story following the growth of Samantha Small, a fourteen year-old girl with a brutal set of powers and a growing sense of determination to use them. The story is still in its infancy, but I can already tell its going to be a hit on RR.
Story (4.5): The story itself is just gorgeous. The world, the powers, the raw emotion it evokes almost every chapter? It's a incredible. It gives off very similar vibes to Worm, though perhaps a little less grim on a world-wide level. Small-scale, the fights the characters find themselves in are not only well done technically, they feel absolutely brutal: these characters are getting seriously injured, no one walks away from a fight perfectly fine, and the scars that remain afterwards are slow to heal for most. It really feels like characters are scrambling for their lives as best they can. The overarching story is still developing, but it shows a lot of promise.
Style (4/5): Brilliant work for most everything, except the lore dumps. Every few chapters is a large bulleted list of events that happened in the timeline or interesting quirks of the world's media. While they're interesting in a worldbuilding sense, they are also very artificial and difficult to read. While I'm no literature expert myself, I really must recommend to the author to begin distributing mentions of these events naturally into the story, or convert them into a narrative (perhaps a news article/ journalists report / forum boards references some of these events while describing current newsworthy events in the story?) . Exceptions to this are the reports on supers or the 'bracing effect' article. They make great stand alone, narrative-focused chapters.
Grammar (5): Nothing to say, great work.
Characters (4.5): Realistic and well-rounded, though at times grating or foolhardy (though, most of the characters are children, so that is actually quite the plus for some of them!).
GLMRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
This story is weird, it has more effort and thought put into it than most other stories here on royal road, even the top ones, and the prose and writting are damn great.
BUT, and this is a very big but, the story itself doesn't feel... Interesting? Engaging? Like, I expected much more, but it just doesn't ever feel like a I'm invested in it.
The MC herself is one of the causes, like dont get me wrong she is well written, but she is not a good main character for this kind of story, and her powers as of yet (shark teeth that can bite through metal, short range injury detection sense, and weak regeneration) are not nearly enough to compensate to just how uninteresting she is.
Doesn't help that the plot feels a little disconnected, the story itself makes several points that Samantha shouldn't be a Superhero with her powers, yet the plot demands it.
But in my opinion the biggest flaw of this story is that it leans far too heavily on Slice of Life, and this story has entirelly too much teenage angst as its plot to be enjoyable as a Slice of Life, those are meant to be carefree and easily digestible, not this.
Overall, its a damn slow burn superhero story, where the MC's powers are not really interesting enough to serve as a driving force, the MC is still a teen not yet ready to get into interesting conflicts without the plot stronghanding it and making her act like a dumbass (which most teens are truth be told). And the Slice of Life sections in between the superhero ones are so grantingly boring Idk how I got through them.
If this wasn't written as well as it is, I doubt I would have gotten past the first few chapters.
I'd say give it a read, see if you vibe with it. I sure as hell dont.
LackiesRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
So Chum does a really good job of depicting the thought process of a 14 year old, and it turns out I dislike that... a lot. At first it was merely slightly awkward to read, but interesting in a sort of stylistic or literary way that was enough to continue. Soon as Samatha hit high school though the second hand cringe kicked in harder than an episode of The Office, and I literally could not continue.
Honestly its to bstdev's credit that I reacted strongly to it, but I didn't enjoy it.
I also didn't like the chapters with like gov't information and legal briefs as they to overstayed their welcome. Turning a neat piece of world building into the slog that actually reading the legal briefs they are emulating would be.
Otherwise, the novel is technically and grammatically competent, and will probably resonate with others every bit as strongly as it pushed me away. So I think it can be worth a try.
CestarianRoyal Road
★★★ 2.5
Slow burn slice of life about a Jewish girl with shark teeth, that's what this seems to be.
A 14 year old with the intelligence of an 8 year old, being a 14 year old.
I couldn't get into it. I am 4(5?) chapters in, it's been quite a lot of text, but absolutely nothing has happened.
I don't particularly care about Samantha or any of the other characters, Samantha has been quite well introduced but I kinda don't like her. The other characters all just seem unimportant so far.
Now maybe if there was an exciting plot or something to keep me engaged I would like it, but there doesn't seem to be one. I mean there is a plot, it's just boring as hell so far.
Nothing in this story really managed to grab me. It seems all around overrated. Certainly not even close to being a rival to worm at least.
Heart of the StarRoyal Road
★★★ 2.5
The writing itself is good and the characters are fun, but I bounced off the story because it fails on a core concept level. The story doesn't manage to make me understand / believe in why Samantha is a superhero.
Her powers are pretty much useless for it and she's only 14. So it feels like the entire world / story are bending over backwards to try and gloss over how her being there is a terrible idea.
This leads to some tonal dissonance between the stakes the story is trying to present and the inherent absurdity of the situation.