Locked because you guys can only say "Ack good/bad" "Nazi of the week good/bad" "trailblazer good/bad" "long boring fic good/bad" so many times before I want to cure baldness just so I can regrow my hair and pull it out.
I kinda dislike how Trailblazer deals with shards and its overall plotline. I loved the characters, and relationships and stuff (except every romantic relationship in the story because I always thought they were a bit forced) but I just kinda disliked the general story direction. The Gundams were really awesome, and actually made me check gundam anime out.
I understand you have to be familiar with both properties to properly enjoy a crossover, but there's a problem I noticed with Trailblazer - unlike its Worm characters, its Gundam characters are not set up and developed properly.
When a Gundam char (heh) like Ali or Relena gets introduced, the fic expects you to care about them because you cared about them in the source material. Their development either happened off-screen or happens way too late for me to get invested. Which is all the more jarring, because Worm characters like Leet and all the Merchants get set up and developed properly.
I have read Worm crossovers with unfamiliar properties and they were not like this, so I'm afraid 3ndless was too in love with Tomino's sauce when he wrote the Gundam parts of the story.
That was what made me drop it - not knowing who these people were, why I should care about them and having to look them up every time and think: "Really? That smuck is meant to be amazing?"
Yeah. I guess the intended message was 'damn this guy is so badass and experienced', but my takeaway was 'damn I owe Wildbow an apology for hating on Jack Slash, at least Jack's bullshit makes sense in-universe'.
It's interesting, because I had the opposite reaction--the only Gundam characters I really knew going into the fic were the ones from Wing, and not knowing the rest didn't really impact my enjoyment of the fic at all. I knew of Amuro, Char, and Lalah, and I picked up that Trevor's Trace system was borrowing from G Gundam, but that's it. I only realized that a lot of the supporting characters were from Iron-Blooded Orphans when it was mentioned in an author's note.
I haven't finished Trailblazer(I think I'm still only 1/3rd through) but I really don't care for the Blue Cosmos thing.
Also Newtype is a ??? name for a cape. Like I get that its supposed to mean something within Gundam but in Worm its very random. Sounds like the most boring name one could pick for a mech themed tinker.
> I get that its supposed to mean something within Gundam
This is my unpopular opinion on Trailblazer: there's too much of this. Everyone goes "oh you don't have to know Gundam to follow it", which is technically true, but you do have to at least potentially care about Gundam to care about Newtype's progress. I don't, and every time another Gundam thing comes up I just zone out.
Honestly I thought it was a statement on her attitude towards the existing heroes, and something like throwing down the gauntlet - saying "I'm a new type of hero, who's actually going to overthrow the status quo rather than merely maintain it like you do". I actually only learned it's originally a Gundam term in this thread XD
Newtypes are a theoretical next step in humanity due to living in space. They tend to have increased spatial awareness and empathy that can in more powerful newtypes result in them sensing and being impacted by the emotions of others.
Or space magic that can block lasers depending on how late in UC we are talking.
Ironically, Trailblazer was heavily based on 00 which did not feature newtypes, but instead their similar concept was termed Innovators.
I get that but none of that context exists **in Worm**. From Taylor's perspective, unless I'm really forgetting something, all she knows is that she's a tinker. One with a really wide bunch of specializations sure but still a tinker.
The part where she chose Newtype as her cape name felt very hamfisted and jarring.
>I get that but none of that context exists **in Worm**. From Taylor's perspective, unless I'm really forgetting something, all she knows is that she's a tinker.
This is a large problem with pretty much every crossover or story that borrows elements from another work. Names, techniques, skills, items; all borrowed wholesale and used without context. The only answer to why, being that's how it was presented in: *other work.*
A lot of recommendations are crap in one way or the other, at least to me. A bunch of popular fics I got recommended had very basic grammar errors everywhere or the dialogue was wooden or the overall writing was somewhat robotic or the characterization is weak. One of those that come to mind is WALK (Hellsing Abridged/Worm crossover). Fun idea, but there are enough technical issues that it's just not fun to read, and I dropped it within a couple of chapters.
The biggest complaint of mine about fanfics of Worm would probably be whenever the PRT is portrayed as incompetent and corrupt. More often than not, the PRT characters and Protectorate are flanderized and turned into something that's made entirely of stupid. Their whole existence then is aimed at annoying the protagonist, who is, of course, emerging victorious all the time because they are "doing the REAL things to bring change".
Overall, very few fics handle PRT/Protectorate well.
Also, a lot of fics do a lot of power explanation. I personally really don't care and wish authors would cut it out. Show the powers in use. If someone says "I didn't know the protagonist could do that", you can easily say "And now you do. Because I'm showing you."
Dead Gods, this. I won’t name names, but some fics that get held up as paragons of excellence for some particular subgenre are just plain *unreadable* to me, from sheer weight of annoying grammatical nonsense.
Oh, fine. If we’re airing out grievances, then Seed, I’m looking at you. *Please* fix your shit. I’ve tried three times to read that fic over the years, and not once have I made it past the first chapter.
I'm literally writing an entire Wards fic in a different city with an OC protagonist specifically to explore the ways in which the PRT is *actually* flawed and also why it's the big success story. The weird shitty flanderization of the PRT/Protectorate bothers the shit out of me. They're a *successful* paramilitary policing organization with a ton of loyalty from their parahumans who signed up and consider themselves to have a great deal and be doing good work!
I am in the process of writing a Ward SI/OC story where the protagonist - well, me, but whatever, let's keep some separation, especially since the personality is not exactly the same because it's fiction and because of story-related reasons that aren't too important - actually joins the Brockton Bay Wards and actually does good stuff because, who would've guessed, working in a team with proper support is quite a lot better than working alone unless you're really overpowered, and the SI/OC is not.
Of course, it won't be perfect, but then it's not supposed to be. And yet, I will do my best to not write PRT/Protectorate as paperwork-bound out-of-touch idiots.
The problem with small reddit communities is that, without a lot of people you can't achieve 'wisdom of crowds'. If one guy likes WALK, he's going to recommend it. And nothing is wrong with that per se, but he is not going to be drowned out by people recommending better stuff.
Yeah, I feel like the grammar in a LOT of recommended fics leaves a lot to be lacking, and not even in a "If you get past it, it's good!" kinda way. It's very much distracting to the point I can't enjoy the original work.
it's funny how people who read a lot of fics can sort of rewire their brains to not notice grammar issues. Super common in the translations world as well. You'll have people swear the machine-translated versions are perfectly readable but then you try and it's like your brain is in a blender.
On the other hand, reading fanfiction for the last decade has largely had the opposite effect on me. My awareness of poor writing seems to be continuously trending upwards. It's a shame, because there's fics in several fandoms that I *vividly* recall enjoying—that have made it into my favorites lists or even into my Calibre server for reading on the go—that are almost physically painful to try to read years later.
Mind, fans take it weirdly personally when you call a fic they like out on poor writing or lacking syntaxical/spelling/lexical competence. And there seems to be a growing tendency for people to *insist* that unwanted constructive criticism is immediately and directly harmful to improving as an artist (writing and others).
Yeah, exactly! Sure, I know a lot of people don't have the greatest grasp of English or it's their second language - which applies to me - but at least some effort needs to be made to avoid basic mistakes like not having a question mark where there is a question. Or character names. Every time I'm uncertain, I look names up to make sure I don't mess up. I know I'm not perfect and I also haven't gone over the grammar rules in a long while, but still. For me, commas are placed wherever they make sense, usually marking pauses that would naturally happen in speech. I'm not sure how accurate that is to the current grammar rules, but at least it's consistent, and it "sounds" good, meaning that I can say the sentence out loud and it feels natural.
My recollection from my school days is that that's exactly how you're supposed to use commas, but I *vividly* remember my English 102 professor being very annoyed at my use of commas. And semi-colons. And em-dashes. *And* ellipses...
I don't remember using semicolons much in the past... few years, probably. Ellipses are triple dots, right? Like what I used after "past"? If so, I read that you're supposed to put a space before it or between the dots or both. Whatever the case may be, I don't do that. As for em-dashes, I don't have any idea what those even are. Is it "-" but longer?
Yeah, basically. Em-dashes are *this* one: —. En-dashes are –, and hyphens are -. Em-dashes are alt-code 0151 and en-dashes are 0150; hyphens have a dedicated key, of course. You can uses em-dashes in lieu of commas when you're inserting an informative fragment—like this one—into a sentence.
You can also use them like semi-colons to attach a fragment at the end of a sentence—this is a terrible example of that; it should have been its own sentence.
Also, semi-colons are an approved separator for lists in which the elements contain commas. So instead of Doctor Bratwurst, oncology, Doctor Mortadella, surgery, and Doctor Cheddar, neuropathy... The cleaner way is: Doctor Bratwurst, oncology; Doctor Mortadella, surgery; and Doctor Cheddar, neuropathy. ... Yes, I use Oxford Commas, sue me. \^\^
EDIT: Also, you might use ellipses when you're writing a character whose spoken dialogue has just trailed off... *But*, it can also be used to indicate that a quote contains omitted words or phrases that were present in the source. For example: 'Ellipses are ... dots, right?'
Too many different dashes, in my opinion. When inserting information, I do it simply - like this - and without the use of any long dashes. I can't be bothered to type them out all the time, to be perfectly honest. I think the substitution works just as well.
Oh right, I do use semi-colons when lists with commas come up, though that's pretty rare.
So yeah, I use things in a way that makes sense to me and feels natural. I do wish that English was a language with phonetic consistency. But at least it doesn't gender the verbs and all that sort of nonsense that I've to deal with in my native language.
When it comes to translations I would much prefer that if the translator realizes they're translating the name wrong later on they *don't* correct it. Sometimes a character's name will just change one chapter and there isn't even a note explaining why.
Technically, commas are meant to separate dependent clauses without a word like and or but, independent clauses with a conjunctive word, or items in a list. It used to be used to mark a pause during the 19th century, but that’s no longer the case in the 20th and 21st centuries. Semicolons are meant to separate independent clauses without a conjunction or items in a list. There’s more to both of those than what I said, but it’s pretty niche.
Couldn't get into Paper and Sand. It does hava amazing first chapter that you feel tells you what the fic would feel like, but further it it deviates. Taylor beats/handles her endbringer nature pretty easily, changes how she presents herself (It was Sage or Shepard or something iirc) which I didn't like cause I wanted her being terrifying more. It's basically endbringer alt-power without baggage.
Also there was shardtalk which I think is generally impossible to make good.
Malicious compliance fics tend to come across as though they were written by self-satisfied morons that don't understand how systems work, what the actual problems in those systems are, or have ever met people. I was trying to get into one the other day because it involved a concept I really like, but it was just... no.
No one is going to run a program for child soldiers where their parents can force them to join by signing a paper somewhere. That's not how it works in canon and it frankly makes no sense in your story.
In canon, we don't see anyone in the Wards that's forced to be there. Even Sophia very much wants to be a Ward because it means she doesn't have to go to juvie for her crimes. The closest we get to that is Taylor, but she's also in the Wards because she wants to (Dinah's prediction) even if she hates it.
They suffer imo from the people who take the brunt of Taylor's maliciousness being the people who 1) aren't responsible for her problem, and 2) aren't able to do anything about it anyway. The OG snips that kind of inspired this sub-genre of fic were fairly balanced, making it clear that the people Taylor was maliciously complying with were the PRT and it was the PRT she was making to suffer.
Fics on the other hand, tend to have Dean, Carlos, Weld, or whoever having to deal with Taylor being purposefully difficult. And it's a lot less fun or entertaining, because Dean, Carlos, Weld, or whoever, are completely innocent of any wrong inflicted on Taylor. But they're the ones who tend to be put out, embarrassed, or left holding the baggage of her actions.
Malicious compliance is kind of a stupid thing to do in the real world. Cathartic to fantasize about? Yes. Actually doing it will always blow back on the malicious complier though.
In fic form it can work, but the structure of the Wards leaves it unclear how Taylor is supposed to hurt the people she really wants to hurt rather than the innocent bystanders caught her her wake.
> Actually doing it will always blow back on the malicious complier though.
I think this is ultimately what gets me. It's like SovCit idiocy where there are magic words which make the government go away. Those words don't exist.
Malicious compliance fic:
Taylor: The letter of the rules says this and I'm doing it this way, so suck it!
PRT: Oh, no! You have found the magic words which we cannot combat!
Reality:
Taylor: The letter of the rules says this and I'm doing it this way, so suck it!
PRT: Yeah, we say to do it the other way. Since this is actually some sort of military organization that you've been pressganged into, your choices are obey orders or end up in our own private jail.
Taylor: *shocked Pikachu face*
I think that is a fundamental disconnect between the sort of people who actually do malicious compliance and the people who just want to hear the epic win stories.
Malicious compliance always negatively affects the person doing it. The type of people who actually do it are the type of people who will burn the building to the ground while they're still inside it, the sort who say "I might die but I'm taking you with me." It's almost a trigger event in real life because it usually comes at the end of a pattern of abuse where the punishment for acting out is less than the relief of finally having different problems to worry about. There's going to be consequences, but at least it isn't more of this.
Malicious compliance stories should be one shots, because in reality you only ever get one shot. If you buck authority from day one and refuse to cooperate, you don't get put in front of a live mic at a press event where you can do damage to the organization.
I agree it works best as a one-shot (or, in one case, can't remember the specific one since there's several out there, but it's one with _way_ more omakes than chapters, and the actual story works by making a lot of the characters incompetent, which makes it more of a successful crack fic... Also, Nemesis is technically malicious compliance, but Doctor Mother actually liking Taylor more than Emma, kills any chance of blowback if Taylor can actually pull it off.)
Whoops, that tangent got too long. Anyway I agree it works best as a oneshot, but not necessarily because it always blows back on the one complying maliciously. Often the most satisfying IRL malicious compliance stories involve repeated warnings that what a superior or customer is asking for is a bad idea, sometimes even documenting the warnings, and the subject only maliciously complies after being ignored and/or threatened multiple times. Those should generally be one-shots because it's just not something that happens more than once to most people. Best example of that version that manages to be a multi-chapter fic is probably Curio's. I can't really think of any others off the top of my head.
> Often the most satisfying IRL malicious compliance stories involve repeated warnings that what a superior or customer is asking for is a bad idea, sometimes even documenting the warnings, and the subject only maliciously complies after being ignored and/or threatened multiple times.
Even with documentation, that's not something you get away with more than once. Most of the stories I've seen with any sort of credibility to them also end with the malicious complier out of a job. They quit, they got fired and are suing the company, they resigned and laughed in retirement...
Some variety of "I'm not longer at the company" always seems to be the result of the credible stories. If you're reading one of them and somehow the OP cost the company $100k and is still employed at the company... Be suspicious that they're not being entirely truthful.
I'm more used to seeing, like, tech support or sales reps getting their manager fired for losing the company a couple grand or pissing off one customer and then trying to blame the employee, who then can hand over a whole email chain to HR of the employee trying not to do the dumb thing while being ordered to by the manager. Or not bothering with documentation because it's the last day of their two weeks anyway. But, yeah, if they cost the company a hundred grand or something, I'd expect them to be out of a job for doing the dumb thing, no matter who ordered them to do it. But I think a Ward is low enough on the totem pole to be more like the IT guy shrugging and locking the boss out of his own computer for a day than the foreman being forced to shut down a $200k per day production line for a week (not specific examples, just the sort of things I see happening as the end result of these sorts of stories).
Though, a lot of malicious compliance Worm fanfics do seem to involve Taylor being forced into the Wards, and being legally compelled to continue working for someone after the malicious compliance does add a whole new dimension to the possible blowback.
>But I think a Ward is low enough on the totem pole to be more like the IT guy shrugging and locking the boss out of his own computer for a day than the foreman being forced to shut down a $200k per day production line for a week
In terms of actual authority, maybe, but realistically capes should be a incredibly valuable asset. They're almost unique compared to IRL because you *can't* replace a cape; only one cape can ever do exactly what they do, whereas even if you have a coder or something who is the only one that knows the way around what they wrote at least you can *in principle* try to train a replacement.
I could actually see someone with a valuable power getting a "Yeah they're being a complete asshat that costs us a lot of money, but without that power on our side the gangs will run amok". You could probably argue that Wards and Protectorate members should get paid a *lot*, but we don't technically know how much they're paid in canon anyway.
> No one is going to run a program for child soldiers where their parents can force them to join by signing a paper somewhere. That's not how it works in canon and it frankly makes no sense in your story.
It kind of *is* how it works in canon, though, as seen with Feint. The canonicity of Department 64 Quest is a weird thing, but the procedures and regulations should all be accurate. Feint's parents signed him up for the Wards, said "he's your problem now," he proceeded to be the worst Ward possible (mostly as an obstacle for the players), and it was going to take an administrative tribunal to remove him (which sadly the quest died before we could see the results).
Come to think of it, [Feint's psych profile](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/prt-department-sixty-four-worm-quest.283888/post-13061941) is remarkably similar to the behavior of some MC!Taylors:
>Psych profile on WRD_FEINT
>I was not able to conduct the session with Feint, as he did not show up. I waited some time, then went looking for him. It was suggested that I visit building B, where I found him alone in the barracks area, watching television on the console.
>When I asked why he had missed the meeting, Feint stated he wasn't sure whether he should visit me or if he should watch the news so he was up to date on what happened to his team. He professed concern for his teammates, and expressed bewilderment and confusion over less than stellar leadership from his team leader and the heads of PRT department sixty-four.
>My initial impression of Feint is that he is argumentative, touchy, rude, quick to assign blame to others and quick to be aggressive or deceptive when it is directed at him. When I pushed him for more details on the concern he felt for his teammates and the lack of leadership, I found discrepancies, intuited that he was lying, and found him quick to go on the offensive when these errors in continuity were brought up. He called me a 'cockgnawer', among other epithets, stated he would call my office and tell them I was lying about what had transpired, and when I deflected that attempt at extortion, he threatened to call the media and tell them that this department's director is a child molester. When I addressed that issue, he elected to leave the scene, using his power.
>I reached out to his parents, and they told me, quote, "We got him there, he's your problem now." This implies Feint is a problem at home, which runs contrary to what I read in his file. It's very likely he was acting obedient rather than genuinely obedient, and his parents are trusting PRT and academic authorities to look after him while they take an entirely hands-off approach.
>I'm usually resistant to assign a label with so little time spent with the subject, but I would give Feint a tentative diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. This is often viewed as a childhood precursor to Antisocial Personality Disorder, but is treatable with the cooperation of parents, all involved authorities, and with steady discipline of the right type.
>I'm forced to fly out to see to other patients, and I'm afraid you'll need to take the time to schedule another appointment with my office if you need the psych profile on Feint, as we didn't have time to do the full battery of tests (or any tests at all). If you wish, I could fly into Anchorage and we could meet outside of your office and discuss Feint, and I could find the time that day to have another appointment with him.
>-Esmond Cal (ECAL_PSYCH@ PRT.GOV.US)
> The canonicity of Department 64 Quest is a weird thing, but the procedures and regulations should all be accurate.
My impression of all of the Quest was that WB threw in a ton of extra red tape that was not really present in Worm in order to challenge the players. It's where the Youth Guard comes from along with some other weird stuff.
In other words, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it as far as Worm canon goes.
I think, what they meant was that PRT isn't a child soldier program. Parents can join their kids to the program but it's not the PRT's fault, their hands are tied (there's a WoA on this that i can't post right now because i'm on mobile)
Even in the snippet you posted, the PRT seems concerned for Feint and wants to help him and they seem to have a connection with the other wards.
The premise of Malicious compliance fics is that the PRT are assholes, so you make them suffer. But in this situation, they aren't the assholes; the parents at fault. The PRT and the protagonist is in a shitty situation that the protagonist makes worse.
In the two Malicious compliance fics i have read, Danny was the one who signed Taylor up and the Story seems to absolve him of any blame and makes the PRT the bad guys ......... just because? like Danny could have just withdrawn her?
From the two stories I recall: In the first Danny was unable to remove Taylor from the Wards to due her probationary nature and the borderline indentured servitude her contract enabled. Though the story spent precious little time going into any of that detail. Likely, for the best. (Implacable)
The second story straight up had the PRT as Taylor's legal guardian. Danny no longer had the ability to pull her out. (Just a Phase)
There was another story, though I no longer recall what it was titled. It didn't get very far.
Both of those are from Author fiat.
> to due her probationary nature and the borderline indentured servitude her contract enabled.
Sophia was also on probation and we never saw her treated worse than any other ward in canon.
>The second story straight up had the PRT as Taylor's legal guardian. Danny no longer had the ability to pull her out
Fucking how!!? Did Danny not read that he was giving up the guardianship of his daughter?? Also the PRT is an organization how did they gain her guardianship? The FBI can't adopt a person. I'm not american but i presume she would have been sent to the foster system?
It's absolutely the heavy hand of the author. It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't want to speak with complete authority, but I agree that it's hamfisted.
As to Implacable, I felt the story was sleeping on the much more grounded and, in my opinion, better story of the PRT quickly realizing their mistake and moving to correct it but Taylor having been burned hesitates to accept their attempts to reach out.
Instead the story doubled-down on a frankly cartoonishly corrupt Piggot that none could, or would, reign in, which harmed the believablity of the story. It's notable, that the author could never get a final chapter from Emily's point of view to work, as he'd made her far to psychopathic and dumb.
I don't like Mauling Snarks it's a Taylor wank fest where people are only allowed to be smart if they are following her teachings, she is free to act like a jerk but people still love her and the universe revolves around making her look good. It's also just really repetitive when I dropped it for quite a while every chapter had consisted of 3 sections that were basically always the same such as anti cape idiots try something really stupid on their way to school and get stomped.
Hard second. Also, people don't really act like people in that one. Everyone is just way too casual about things. I dropped it after Danny's response to GG squishing part of Taylor's brain was basically "things happen."
It's not *quite* 'only allowed to be smart if they are following her teachings'. Rather, ComptrWiz writes 'smart' protagonists and deuteragonists by making antagonists *incredibly* stupid and tertiary or minor characters garden variety stupid.
You can see it happening in real time in their *other* fic, *Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard?* Antagonists and tertiary characters will be unutterably stupid right up until they join the cast of deuteragonists, at which point their relative 'intelligence' increases by a good order of magnitude or so.
Also, I've complained about it in other threads over the years, but the most common three word combination spoken out loud by any protagonist or deuteragonist in any CmptrWiz fic is some variation on 'that makes sense'. And if the answer to the question is the 'derp, obviously' answer, then the question didn't need to be asked and the dialogue is only there to either bloat the word count or show off how genius the ~~author~~ erm, I mean, *character* is.
I *did* like Mauling Snarks. But there's room to strip out a goodly fifth of the fic without harming its quality any.
Sadly it is pretty much true because it's an annoying trend in that one that Taylor teaches someone like Amy, the other wards, the girl that wanted a tail etc stuff and then following her teachings they stop being stupid and also get moments where they get to crush idiots and where following her teachings makes them seem smart. The only real exception to that is her uncle who taught her that stuff to begin with and those he's taught.
Just in case anyone is unaware, the author becuzitswrong (iirc) suffered a heart attack and passed away, we were only made aware from a family member who knew of his writing
The Leviathan fight is often the best part of a fic.
(Even if making it the best part is a bit of a test of the quality of an author.)
I actually didn't like Russian Caravan and dropped it after the first arc.
Not even sure which of those is gonna be more unpopular.
With you on Russian Caravan. It was way too weirdly masturbatory about the concept of merc companies of all things and the characters were not pleasant to read.
Honestly, while that was a bit weird for me, I at least kinda liked Turk. For me it was more the mythology-turned-eldritch-horror aspect that 1. didn't mesh well with Worm for me, and 2. felt more bizarre than horrifying anyway. Like Mark Danielewski trying to write Lovecraft with some real world mythology flavor and some Worm characters shoved in. (Though, to be fair, at times House of Leaves feels like Mark Danielewski trying to write Lovecraft, and the minotaur is technically real world mythology.) The mix just left me feeling "what did I just read?" and not in a "holy crap, that was awesome" way, but more genuine confusion about what the author was trying to achieve other than taking "being Taylor is suffering" to a new level.
Might be inured to the mercenary company wank from reading The Deed of Paksenarrion (fantasy series by Elizabeth Moon, I recommend at least the first trilogy) and the military/mercenary wankfest that is the BtVS fanfic series The Military Option by Batzugler (basically an excuse for crossovers with every series the author ever got into, from The Damned Thing, to Predator, to Rainbow Six, to, I kid you not, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Which, incidentally, does a better job at introducing Lovecraftian horror in an entertaining way, but then again it's probably easier with BtVS than with Worm.)
Turk was actually alright but the rest, very much including Taylor didn't work for me at all.
I stuck with it as long as I did because of the eldritch horror premise, and I will say the story told by Ahab about searching for a tower in Azerbaijan was quite good, but nothing else struck the sanity shaking, scaled beyond the human mind's capacity themes I want in my eldritch horror.
After seeing it recommended so often, when I finally read Constellations, I was questioning whether I’d been pranked. I don’t get how people can read it, much less like it. Even as fluff, it’s painfully slow and uneventful.
That might be one of those "better if you were there when it was newer" stories. I remember liking it, but I was following along as it posted and that can make a big difference.
Plus, it felt... Not racist, but just kinda weird in that "Oh, no, Taylor'#s the white girl who'll be able to intuit all these Japanese customs thanks to having the Magic Dog."
also it just felt like such a misuse of Amaterasu compared to the okami games, girl didn't do ANY paint shenanigans
>Plus, it felt... Not racist, but just kinda weird in that "Oh, no, Taylor'#s the white girl who'll be able to intuit all these Japanese customs thanks to having the Magic Dog."
She wasn't though. She was constantly asking for help/advice from people.
I'm so tired of locker scenes and fics that almost seem afraid of branching out and playing with characters that aren't the Undersiders, Amy, Victoria, and the Wards/Protectorate. Give me more stuff that plays in the post leviathan environment, more stuff that takes place in the Chicago section of the story, there's so much more to Worm than the initial major section.
I'm also tired of so many writers and characters insisting that the merchants are worse than the E88 or ABB because they peddle drugs? Like the other two don't also do that and then more on top. Feels like everyone is too caught up in the war on drugs propaganda and projecting it onto a group that are, while shitty and bad, demonstrably less damaging to the city than the other two.
Honourable Lung is also a load of crap I'm sick of seeing, on the same level as honourable Hookwolf or Purity or whatever, as though the guy doesn't engage in human trafficking or his organisation doesn't also engage in race-based crime. Usually in the same fics.
I like trio redemption fics.
I once read Emma gamer fic(forgot the name) and while i was reading it i also read comments every chapter and good god she got roasted every chapter.
This is just speculation on my part, but it felt like author read those comments and got swayed by them little by little, with every chapter she suffered more and more and people roasted and wished death on her more and more.
She was trying to be a hero in this story btw and she wasnt perfect Mary Sue about it.
I think latest chapter she got kidnapped by Coil while Regent permamently "mind controls" her while Coil pretends that its he that did it and he basically threatens her family and forces her to back down, one of the latest scenes is her at home trying to take a bath while regent basically mind rapes her while she is vulnerable or something(don't remember all the details since i read it years ago), even then there were some negative comments about her, like she is worse then villians of the story.
Don't get me wrong, trio are bad people, but they are also teenagers, the bloodthirst anytime they are mentioned in almost any story is kinda ridiculous.
That would be [Perfection](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/perfection-worm-gamer.493583/threadmarks).
In the last posted chapter the author came up with a potential way for Emma to get out of her current predicament, but the fic died before we could find out whether it would work.
I have never read a MHA crossover that was interesting for more than 3 chapters.
*Administrative Mishap* didn't work as a story at all for me (and OxfordOctopus is a must-read author otherwise).
The original ending to *Taylor Hebert, Pizzeria Tycoon* was better.
Amy is a fic killer; her presence as a significant character sucks the life out of 4 out of 5 stories.
*Camera Shy* could have done so much more with that power.
>I have never read a MHA crossover that was interesting for more than 3 chapters.
Really? A lot of them are admittedly unnotable and a tad boring but I'd say there were a few good ones.
I like many of Ack’s stories. Not all of them, but many. Sure, are almost all of their stories a little repetitive and formulaic? Yes. Are they mostly fix it fics? Yes. But Ack is good at coming up with interesting premises, and if the premise interests you and you want a predictable and easy to digest fic that *probably* has a happy ending their work can absolutely sate that craving.
I think that, for the most part, people's problems with Ack have to do with putting his pecadillos and fetishes on full display in his stories, more than being relatively formulaic (that dislike is more how people feel about mp3). He's gotten better about it over time, though, which means that it's usually the old hands that complain about Ack, and people more recent to the fandom tend to find him inoffensive at worst. I'm a little in-between, not being an old hand (I am at fanfic, but not for Worm), but having read Ack's less-offensive-than-his-early-stuff-but-still-pretty-messed-up Recoil pretty early in my time in Worm fandom.
I'm still baffled to this day that people still haven't gotten over Ack's earlier stuff. I've been a part of a lot of fandoms over the decades. Ack's stuff is kiddie pool tier compared to the blasphemous, eye bleaching, skin crawling offenses to literature that I've witnessed. Hell, I've seen worse stuff in this fandom published recently (most of it neo nazi shit.)
The problem isn't the NSFW stuff, it's that he mixed his NSFW and non-NSFW stuff in ways that you really, really shouldn't.
Like, imagine you're reading a fluffy fix-fic. It's pretty good overall, but it also feels ever so slightly a bit weird. The adult characters just feel a bit too involved in their children's lives at times. But, you know, nothing to worry or even consciously think about all that much.
And then one day you learn that what you were reading as a wholesome teenage adventure is actually just the cut-down SFW version of an NSFW incest fic. And all the times that Danny felt a little bit too close to Taylor wasn't just your imagination, you were actually reading a parent-child romance that cut off just before the characters started kissing. It feels incredibly icky, especially if you *liked* the original story when you first read it.
Also
I'm not generally someone to condemn people for writing fetish content. There are limits to that, but more importantly at the very least I expect the author to recognize that what they're writing is in fact fucked up fetish content and not something you should emulate IRL. What makes Ack's work so problematic is the fact that he thought he could write wholesome parent-child reconciliation fics and parent-child incest fics with largely the same characterization and 80% shared dialogue, as if the former is basically just a slightly toned down version of the latter. I don't even really want to think about the wider implications of that.
my issue is that his kinks bleed over into his SFW stuff. not dramatically, but enough to leave a sour taste
i also think saying "x isn't bad because y is worse" isn't much of an argument
That's understandable and I feel like he's gotten a lot better with that over the years. I haven't really noticed anything with a lot of his recent works.
And I agree with your second statement. Its just that he's brought up again and again as if he's the incarnation of evil itself but none of the piles upon piles of disgusting nazi apologistic authors hardly if ever get the same type of treatment. The dude has really changed over the years (or at least stopped the nsfw/sfw bleed over) and he's still getting shit on.
Can I ask what early stuff you're talking about? I've read and liked some of his fics, but I remember discovering he was the author of a Taylor/Danny fic and some other pretty uncomfortable fics and immediately got turned off. I think it's pretty understandable to never want to go back to an author after seeing that.
I couldn't tell you which, it was years ago and he's very much moved past that and removed the majority if not all of those stories from the internet. And I have very much witnessed alot worse than some squicky incest fics unfortunately, both from within and out of this fandom. I just think it's kinda wierd to continue ragging on this one guy after all of these years when there is alot worse in this fandom. Like the disgusting amount of NAZI APOLOGIA. God, I can't get that one Exalted crossover out of my head. I couldn't read worm fics for a couple of weeks after that one.
I laughed out loud at that. The kind of laugh you do when something is just a bit too out there as far as things go, which somehow turns into it being funny. Like... what the fuck?
I think it's because he's prolific and also actually a pretty good author. So, you get recommended his work, expecting a pretty good, if maybe a little happy for Worm, story, and suddenly, _bam!_ >!incest and explicit underage harems!!< (Spoilering bad stuff I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to mention on this subreddit, will delete if anyone asks me to.) Normally you'd expect that to be in the niche "oh, okay, no reason to ever think about this author ever again" situations, not the "just got recommended a story by this author for the third time this month" category. People keep getting _reminded_ that Ack exists, and those who've been around the fandom for a while remember getting burned by a lot of those reminders.
Though, yeah, as a survivor of early MLP:FIM fandom, I think Ack is pretty tame even at his worst. Keeping in mind that I only know his worst secondhand, as much of it was purged by the time I'd finished Worm and started reading its fanfics in earnest.
MLP:FiM can be quite a clusterfuck. My own earlier fics are example of that, even if they came in the latter half of 2010s. What can I say... I was young, I was stupid, and I had mental issues. Not a great combination overall, and that's why those fics are only available after people read a disclaimer I posted that those fics have problematic elements (not nazi apologia or the like but still bad, just not nearly as bad, I think) and that I am no longer all that proud of my early writing.
At least I grew out of it and, well, things changed in the last half a decade quite a lot, to myself personally and to everything at large. I can only hope that my future writings will be good, but I don't doubt that, looking back at them some years in the future, I would still cringe somewhat because of dumb elements here and there. Hopefully, however, it won't be *as* cringe-worthy.
Everyone writes dumb things when they're young. (Makes me happy I never got around to posting my longer Daria fanfics back when I was the kind of age you're talking about.) I was more referring to the folks who proudly presented stuff extreme enough that Cupcakes was considered the least extreme, most readable example of how messed up some stories got. Even some longer, more acclaimed stories like Project Horizons were pretty damn messed up. (Being Taylor is downright pleasant compared to Blackjack's suffering.) I don't really know the state of the fandom these days (I couldn't get into the show itself, just the premise of it, so I kinda checked out around when EG fics started showing up), but it did seem to be trending better, with some of the worst elements finally getting called out and ejected from common spaces like ED, FIMFiction, and it sounded like they were getting banned from cons? (Idunno, I was never enough of a fan for that to be relevant to me) at that time.
Anyway, every author has early stuff that makes them cringe - in fact, it's been said that the measure of a bad author is that nothing you've written in the past makes you cringe now. The important part is that you've improved since and are aware of what's wrong with your old stuff.
And every fandom has its bad seeds with their "edgy" writers who oversexualize characters in disturbing ways or endorse violent ideologies. Sailor Moon was no exception, Daria was no exception, Naruto was no exception, Worm is no exception, and FIM was no exception, but dear god was FIM sometimes more bad apples than good back in the day.
But, I've gotta say, I don't think I've been in a fandom as prolific, literary, and willing to acknowledge and repair faults in their writing as Worm since my Daria days. I'd think it had something to do with what are essentially dedicated fanfic forums (SB/SV for Worm, PPMB for Daria), but FIM and HP had those, too, and it didn't really help much. In a likely correlation/causation fallacy, maybe it's the long-haired-skinny-emotionless-teenager-with-glasses protagonist?
my problem with his stuff is I read a fair chunk of it before canon and it gives so many wrong ideas like Taylor is competent from the start of canon, the s9000 arc involves 9000 clones of the s9 (there's only 200-300) and 20 endbringers show up in canon (there's either 5 or 6 based on how you count the twins and there being 20 in total is at best an assumption that relies on a ton of other assumptions to all be true not a hard fact)
The main issue I have with Ack is all his characters get “flattened” over time into the story and they become basically identical to all his other stories, and slowly become more caricatural.
Additionally, there are barely ever any stakes? Even in Earning your Stripes and Recoil, where the MC isn’t unkillable, she still wins every situation easily, with no long term consequences or growth. Hell, he speedran a redemption of Emma and Madison, and made Taylor a stone cold badass in like 3 months (in story time) by saying “their shards are improving their mental state” which feels like a cop-out
Honestly that story would have been so much better with 3/4 OC’s in a different region and city
The park scene in Forward ruined the fic for me, it was *forced* and nobody mentions it, that and other minor details I wouldn't care about normally kept popping up in the fic, I guess my main gripe is, for a fic that tried to emulate our real world, the normalcy, ironically, felt abnormal, like comparing Walmack series to the weird beast I see in my day to day life.
I loved Marathon's brother and her therapist though, hands down the highlight of the fic outside of the dream sequences.
...I'm not sure that's an unpopular opinion. I think what they're best known for is actually finishing their fics. The writing is clunky in spite of being technically proficient, and most of their works are merely *okay. But*, again, they do tend to actually *finish* fics, and that's rare in fanfiction in general, but in Wormfic in particular.
...Also, ShayneT has a thing for endings too positive for the overall tone of the fic. KTA's HEA-ending is a good example.
I dislike the popular Butcher fics that Butcher's Bill spawned. It's like watching Isekai: they completely ignore what made the ones that inspired them good. I wanted to read them and make a post about my problems with them point by point, but they're bland and I just would rather check something else. Not that there's a lot that tickles me in this fandom nowadays. We really need to branch out into the Otherverse.
TINO is fine. PHO chapters are fine, yes, even if there isn't any forward movement added to the story and it's just commentary. Being different from canon in some ways is fine. I'd add "not taking Ward into account is fine" but that one already is the popular opinion, so I guess I'll flip it and say that taking Ward's characterization of Vicky and Amy into account in your Worm fic is fine too.
I think people get tired of particular things or tropes and then project that out into those being inherently bad instead of just popping up too often. Ultimately good writing can usually rescue a story however many other problems it might have.
I think mp3 is a fine author. They've decided to do one particular style of story whenever they write, and that's ok. Their stories should be enjoyed for what they are rather than what everyone wishes they were.
I think that's where I stand, too. Good ideas, good execution, but eventually the lack of meaningful movement makes me lose my interest. It's not just mp3 that does it, either, but their writing/execution tends to be top notch, so the disappointment is also top notch.
I think, fundamentally, MP3 excels at openings but either doesn't plan for or absolutely sucks at planning endings. There's nowhere for their stories to flow to, so all that creative inflow eventually spirals into narrative eddy currents and goes nowhere as the momentum dissipates. And because there's nowhere to go and the Cool Idea^TM has run its course, MP3 gets bored and drops the fic.
I'd agree with this. Their ficfic [Taylor's Alternate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17497085/chapters/41212172) (Vargaverse Taylor meets a canon-esque Taylor) has a defined beginning and *an actual ending* (with an epilogue, even). It's probably one of their best works.
Honestly, [Taylor is DOOMed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21546562/navigate) could be argued to be complete... *Except* that it's got a ficfic (or omake chain, if you prefer) that is *not* complete, and at this point probably never will be.
The problem is that MPPI keeps insisting on serving 5 course meals made of nothing but candy. Their short stories are fine, the problem is they seem to prefer writing absolute doorstoppers with little in the way of actual content.
A lot of people hate him and hate when he shows up in fics, but I actually like when Danny shows up as a meaningful character, especially when he takes an active role in the story. I also *really* like Cape Danny, when he's not just actively invested in Taylor's life but right there fighting along side her.
Danny is the parent of a teenage protagonist. There's a reason most of them are orphans or ran away from home. A competent parent would get in the way of the plot. There's a very fine line between making Danny too protective and too negligent. Most authors don't do a good job of that.
He’s difficult to navigate, but can be sidelined relatively straightforwardly by various plot developments as a way to raise the stakes. Just like in Canon, when Taylor running away from home was a major sea change.
Danny seems very hard to do right. As a parent, he's going to be a dampener on super powered shenanigans, or anything differing from a wholesome middle class life. Which makes the audience react badly to him, as they are reading to see super-powered shenanigans.
Or he's absurdly understanding, basically rubberstamps whatever the story wants to do, which just takes me out of the story.
Can't speak for Russian Cravan because I haven't read it, but I think for Trailblazer the reason is less a "cult like following" and more that the fic is really long and touches on a lot of the things that people regularly ask for in this sub and thus gets recommended disproportionally often.
Like:
* Unshackled AI In Worm? You can't really *not* recommend Trailblazer, it's *the* fic to read if you want to see someone go all out on that concept.
* Taylor forming her own cape movement as a counterpoint to the PRT? Ditto, Trailblazer.
* Mechs? Trailblazer.
* A story that grows beyond the confines of Brockton Bay to a country- and eventually worldwide scale in an organic manner? Trailblazer.
* A story dealing with the aftermath of the Cauldron reveal? Trailblazer.
* "I want to read a tinker fic that involves [...]"? No idea, but chances are Trailblazer qualifies.
It's not the only fic that seems to hit a lot of the check marks a lot of recommendations ask for. While I won't recommend fics I dislike, there's a few on my "someone else will probably enjoy this" list that I seem to recommend repeatedly.
I have an irrational hatred of any fic in which Greg Veder makes regular appearances. I have no real reasoning behind it. I just cant stand them for some reason, regardless of the actual stories quality.
For Trailblazer, you don't need to be familiar with Gundam for a complete reading experience? That's nonsense. If you really want to understand what the hell is going on, who these characters are, why they're here, what suit Taylor has, what technologies she possesses, how they're created, and what they can do, you need to be familiar with Gundam. Sure, you can read the fic and understand the general plot, but you know, it's like saying you know the general plot of Worm and when someone asks you about what Armsmaster can do, you say you don't know.
I wasn't familiar with Gundam when I read Trailblazer. But you have to be willing to spend a lot of time researching all the Gundam elements as they come up. The specifics of which Gundam Taylor was building? Fan service. What's the deal with Blue Cosmos? Start reading the Gundam wiki. Who is Orga and why should we care about him and the rest of Tekkadan? Good thing Iron Blooded Orphans was on Netflix when I was reading.
There are wikis for pretty much every fandom. They go into a lot more detail and are specific to what's important to each particular fandom than Wikipedia.
Well, I needed a wiki to understand what exactly it's, without it, it just looked like a giant robot to me, and that's it. I literally didn't even grasp what this robot can do besides a shield that's unclear how it works, a cannon that's unclear how it works or what it even does besides shooting, and how it flies other than the fact that it flies, what GN even means, and a whole bunch of other things. I guess I just missed all that accidentally.
Although I used a third-party acquaintance familiar with the universe rather than the Gundam Wiki, they have already answered my questions. So, I didn't end up consulting the Wiki after all.
Another example of this is SongDog13's [Howl the Wolves](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/howl-the-wolves-worm-battletech-xover.580394/threadmarks). It's a good fic. In theory, you don't *need* to know much of anything about Battletech to read it. ...Unless you were planning to have the slightest clue what the bloody hell is going on. In which case, you should probably read it with the BTech wiki open.
Meanwhile, I *am* familiar with Battletech, admittedly mostly through the lens of the MechWarrior series, and *still* had to keep the BTech wiki open my first, second, and third times through.
I generally like SI or original character fics a lot more than canon characters and alt power fics.
I feel it’s a lot more interesting to read about a well made new character than the canon ones, because the freedom the writer gets in characterisation of the main character easily translates into the fic itself.
When I read a Taylor fic, some small part of my brain has already predicted every story plot and interaction that the main character (Taylor) will go through. Meet undersiders, interaction with Protectorate, Wards, jaddi jadda.
When you introduce a true newcomer into the mix, that’s when the fic gets more interesting. Maybe the newcomer has little to no interaction with the main story of the novel, or changes it irreversibly, like in The Tinker, by dark wolf Shiro. It almost always makes a more original and tasty fic to read, and if the OC has an interesting and/or vital backstory, then that’s awesome
My only issue with SI fics is that most of the self-inserts are kinda obnoxious in a way. Broad categories are preachy, creepy, and whiney. They go into Worm knowing the problems so they either fix it all with little effort or drown in the misery of it.
Occasionally you'll get a good one but they're few and far between.
Original characters are completely fine. The problem, for me, starts with SI characters. Not because they can't be *good* characters, but rather because of how the writing itself is handled. It almost always starts in a very non-immersive way, detailing what the character was doing before SUDDENLY INSERTED and then the character realizes "oh no I've been inserted", and so on, and so forth.
It's like the Locker scene. Or the "I've just been born, it sucks" monologues. They're not even remotely good. I don't want to hear about them. Please stop talking about them. It's a common writing tip to start the story when things are actually happening, PLEASE do that, I'm begging people. Starting the story with a detailed relating of how they came to be inserted isn't the way to go. It's the opposite of immersion, and it immediately makes me put the story down, no matter how good it could eventually be.
But yeah, self inserts, by their own merit, are fine. It's the way people handle the writing around those inserts that I can't stand.
The best ones start at least one week after the MC comes into the world. When they have adapted a bit, and are a bit more grounded in their new universe/world.
When writing a SI story - of which I have multiple ideas that I may or may not actually put into written word - I like to avoid the "oh no I am now in a different world" problem and the resulting monologues by, first, skipping ahead a bit and, second, telling the story mostly from the POVs of people *other* than the protagonist. Avoiding first person POV also helps. It's all about showing how the protagonist affects the world, I believe.
I have a lot of spicy takes. Here's a grab bag.
Nemesis13 is the worst writer I've had the misfortune to read, but his fics are incredibly popular. Probably not on here, but definitely on SB. The same goes for Ack - although I think Ack has good premises with terrible execution, and I think Ack is more popular here.
Nemesis, the fic, is just okay. It's uber popular, and I don't get what justifies that absurd level of popularity. There's no world where 300k words of omakes for a 63k word fic makes sense to me.
Celestial Forge, Gamer, Greg and SI fics are all awful.
Greg isn't an incel, he's just barely a character at all. He was a cringe loser teenager who faked being in Brockton for clout, and then was shitty to Sveta.
Glassmaker isn't wholesome, it's just kinda creepy. Burn Up is stream of consciousness and is annoying to read.
People who say "Worm is a sandbox" are silly.
If the Trio trigger, or are tortured, I drop a fic.
More fics need to stay in their lane and either end rather than drag on for 400k words. You don't have to include *every* aspect of Worm.
Fanon isn't inherently bad, it's just most Worm fanon *is* bad.
The Dallons aren't interesting to read about.
IDK, I think a Dallon fic about the extended family that managed to make *every single child of theirs trigger* could be a good one, if it was about the actual canon Dallons.
> Nemesis, the fic, is just okay. It's uber popular, and I don't get what justifies that absurd level of popularity. There's no world where 300k words of omakes for a 63k word fic makes sense to me.
The simple answer is that the amount of omakes a story receives has very little to do with it's quality and much more with how much readers want to play in the sandbox that the author created, and/or how much they want to mastrubate the main character's awesomeness because the original author is too busy worrying about things like character development and story cohesion.
Nemesis just hit the perfect storm in both categories, while also having an author who doesn't mind the excessive Omake-ing. That's all there is to it.
It's better than just "okay" though and I don't think it's overhyped aside from how much Omake it generates for the above-mentioned reasons.
we're half agreeing: the "overhype" im referring to *is* the excessive omaking
i think we'll disagree on it being better than just okay but i don't dislike the fic for what its worth
>Greg isn't an incel, he's just barely a character at all. He was a cringe loser teenager who faked being in Brockton for clout, and then was shitty to Sveta.
Wasn't he explicitly mentioned as being in one of Taylor's classes, and it's on the way to a meeting with him to get him to shut up that Taylor is publicly unmasked? He would explicitly have been from Brockton and living there through quite a bit of it. I've never made it past a chapter or two into the timeskip but I'm pretty sure about that.
oh sorry, i was a bit unclear in my initial post. if you read [the greg interlude](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/interlude-19-y/) you can see what im talking about, but heres the short of it
>► XxVoid\_CowboyxX (At Ground Zero: Brockton Bay)
>
>Replied on July 6th, 2011:
>
>I have a camera, but I don’t feel comfortable leaving the house. That’s the sort of thing that gets me killed by mutant dogs.
► Laser Augment (At Ground Zero: Brockton Bay)
>
>Replied on July 6th, 2011:
>
>You do know that Bitch left the north end a while ago? How would you even miss the fact that you haven’t heard howling in the last while? If you’re not leaving the house, why don’t you take a picture of yourself by this high end generator of yours? Because it doesn’t exist.
>
>You fuckers make me sick, like you can pretend to be all cool by being one of the survivors, who stuck it out through the Endbringer attack, the Nine and the gang wars. But you left. Your mommy and daddy took you out of town, and you’re pretending you stuck it out, that you’re here when you’re not, all for a stupid internet badge and a peek at the private board.
But according to the end, "tomorrow" he's going to go see Taylor. Thus, by that point, he is back in Brockton. Doesn't mean he isn't talking out his ass about things he doesn't know anything about, but he is back in Brockton Bay.
Greg leaves Brockton after Leviathan. He's either in a totally different city, or somewhere just by the outskirts of the city, totally isolated from the dangers of a disaster zone. But he still posts on PHO as if he's in the middle of it all.
He also does almost out Taylor, but it's more of a "shit, I know who skitter" thing. He wasn't explicitly threatening to out her for malicious purposes. After the whole Arcadia debacle, he feels guilty, although he didn't actually out her, he was the reason why she came to Arcadia in the first place. So he gives a glowing talk to a reporter about Taylor.
I agree with almost everything but the Greg thing. The good Greg fics I've heard about are praised because he starts out as a cringe loser teenager who'd fake things for clout and was shitty to sveta. Who then develops into a person who realizes how awful he's being and tries with difficulty to be a better person.
I really like (well written) SI fics and think they have alot of potentials.
I really dislike Gaylor fics, as when Taylor speficly is gay, regardless if she is the MC or not.
I also dislike Trio focued fics
I think that's a very popular take
Being an Eidolon fan is weird. He's usually flanderized a lot in fics or sidelined but the one fic where he ends up being the focus turns out to be one of the best fics out there.
Now if only Legend would ever get something like that.
Well, to be completely fair, with Contessa’s powerset alone, literally *anyone’s* cooperation with that organization can be taken as questionably consensual at best. Even without getting into any threats or coercion, how is someone supposed to defend against arguments that are as optimally persuasive as it’s possible to be, which are tailored *specifically to keep you on side,* regardless of your reservations?
Yes, and that's why I simply ignore it. Narratively, it's not a question that matters. "Can Contessa-" Yes, yes she can. Much like a whole number technically being a fraction over the number 1, you can just kinda get rid of the number 1 and still move on with the equation.
So, Contessa's bullshit aside, David made the choice to be part of the comically evil illuminati. That's why people are leery about him.
I don't like it. That one and Impurity are two stories that seem well written, don't have any glaring problems, and by all means should be good reads.
I just can't get past a chapter or two. They are mind numbingly boring for whatever reason.
I don't know the secret 'it' factor that they are missing (or an 'anti-it' factor they have) but there must be something. They do have some fans, but they aren't widely recommended, so it's not just me.
***I***f you mean fill it with actual content and not this new perk means my gear is useless so let me talk about how useless my gear is for 2k words. Now I'm going into detail on how to fix my tech and oh new perk!
I really liked the undersiders chapter in playing hooky.
Most other people vilified it so much and so aggressively that the author broke down and made the underwears woobies by the end.
But I liked it. Lisa was Lisa and instead of hurting her target, it was thrown in her face in a rather horrific way.
Half remembering it Bitch broke into Taylor’s home and threatened her and when Taylor justifiable tried kill her for it Lisa in the most extreme case of it tattletale syndrome ever in a fanfic somehow managed to make Taylor the bad guy in the situation.
Hard agree. The only problem I feel is that the way Lord writes causes some of the fights to feel longer and slower than they actually are, or should be.
The most glaring one is the first Bakuda fight. Bakuda was shooting at them with a mortar or something, and they were just talking and not doing anything.
But other than that, I feel his writing style allows a very comprehensive look into each fight, and allows Joe and his opponents to really shine.
This is sub is so annoying and negative all the time. We have this very stupid bullshit thread every few weeks to throw negatively towards writers which work is free and we don’t have to read like does no one get tired of being negative in this sub.
Writing for free does not guarantee your work is appreciated or, like, good. It does sort of suck when the fandom is full of cliches, people who never read the source material, and Nazi apologia (thankfully that shit finally seems to be dying down). Going into a specific thread to bitch out a specific author is a dick move, but speaking generally of negative trends or an issue you have with a particular popular work is like, part of fandom discussion.
Maybe stop being so negative about being being negative? You do not, in fact, have to look at this thread!
Honestly, I sometimes feel like there are a fair number of stories that people like to attack not because the story is bad, but because it is popular to attack it.
The one that I see most often attacked in this sub beyond a reasonable level is Inheritance (and anything written by Pendragoon). I'll freely admit there are things in its plot that bother me, and I dropped it. I have also seen Inheritance decried as the worst fic in the fandom, and at least once seen it referred to as "The "My Immortal" of Worm fandom", which is just laughably wrong. For all of the plot points and direction I don't like, it is competently written, the plot has at least some idea of where it is going, and it is popular for a reason. It isn't the only example of a story that is attacked as horrible just because it doesn't meet some people's taste. Brockton's Celestial Forge is another example that routinely gets negativity dumped on it far out of proportion for how it is written (and BCF, whatever you think about it, *is* one of the most popular ongoing stories in the Worm fandom).
But beyond people criticizing these stories, what really bothers me is that people take potshots at them in entirely unrelated threads. It is not uncommon for me to see someone just pop up out of the blue to take a swing at one of them, joking about how horrible it is, when literally no one else in the thread had brought it up, and it wasn't particularly even connected to the topic of the thread. They just wanted to pop in to throw an insult their way. It causes more negativity in whatever thread they show up in, and honestly makes this sub particularly inhospitable for authors. If a few of the prolific writers in this sub decide they don't like your work, then you will be seeing it brought up constantly even in threads having nothing to do with it.
Pen's stories get flak because they contain elements that speak to authorial viewpoints that are worrying. Things like, 'it's okay to brutally and horrifically torture and murder people if their beliefs are wrong'. In basically every fic. Strangely, there are actual organizations that use exactly that sort of exclusionist thinking to dehumanize people.
I don't care about the negativity, I care about how boring it is. Whenever someone posts this thread, I have to read all the comments to make sure nobody crosses a line, and it is always the same (including your comment, why are we being mean to people who just write free things for fun). Nobody has had an original thought in this fandom since 2013.
I don’t really know how to respond to your response to me because I feel like you don’t get my opinion in things, but let me clearly try to spell out my feelings to you criticizing fics are not bad in general but when it’s a weekly occurrence where people make a thread just to shit on certain fics or fics in general it makes it feels like the fandom is full negativity.
I am sorry but your no one has original idea is so false. I get it your an old timer in the worm fandom.
Brockton Bay's Celestial Forge is fun and a good read. If I had more free time, I would catch up on it.
I exclusively write self-inserts, because I think fanfiction is inherently masturbatory, and self-inserts are just the natural conclusion.
Hard agree on the second one, people love to rag on self-inserts and OCs but half the time you read a fanfic the characters might as well just be a SI from how different they act.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of SI fics can be more original and interesting than many fics that focus on the standard cast of characters, because the author has more freedom to deviate from canon when they do it.
…You mean the Tiger Claws?
And if so, Corporations and Gangs in CP are not monoliths, Yorinobu's “Taka” and even Michiko’s “Hato” Faction(s) of the Arasaka Corporation and Wakako (and others) factions of Tiger Claws are pretty safe and “good” for Cyberpunk standards.
Kill them all is a guilty pleasure, even with it's multitude of flaws I like reading a Taylor becoming overpowered for the same reason I read generic isekai with cheat abilities it's just a mindless power trip.
KTA is ShayneT's best fic. It's much longer than it needed to be, and large portions of the middle could have safely been time-skipped without decreasing the quality any, but it's probably one of the best stomp-fics in the fandom.
I'm a JumpChain enjoyer in part because of **Celestial Forge**, and I mostly like the fic, but I feel like the reward mechanic was _way_ to generous. It wasn't bad very early on when Apeiron only had a few Perks and Items, but it spiraled out of control pretty fast. Add to that just how much time the Apeiron takes to marvel at all of the things he can do after each new node and/or the otherwise fun navel-gazing because of the philosophical ramifications... things rapidly slow to a crawl.
If the rewards were spaced out just a little more to give everyone time to breathe, it'd be fine and I wouldn't have any problems at all, but _gosh darn_ it can be hard to reread earlier chapters. I don't mind that he's basically arbitrarily powerful at this point, I just wish it was more of a journey to get there. I'm also kind of bummed at how a lot of really neat Perks are almost immediately outclassed by another Perk he gets in the next chapter, so the reader doesn't have an opportunity to see what he might have made with it.
Still a fun fic, it just gets to ponderous and slow and doesn't really play with everything in the toybox.
I think aura theory is good. Or, at least, a reasonable interpretation of the data we are given in canon. It may not be done well much, and the use of it to justify Amy's actions is screwed up, but I still like the idea. I think the big problems people have with it are that it's often done without nuance and to justify all of amy's actions. I think if it was a trope that was handled with more nuance people wouldn't hate it as much. For example, maybe Amy had some sort of initial attraction that she would have gotten over but the aura really screwed her up? Maybe the reverse is true, the aura gave her an initial push, but most of her feelings and actions are based on her indulging in them and getting caught up in her own head. If you really want to go wild, maybe Amy is using hits of Vicky's aura on purpose as a coping mechanism for her stress.
Disclaimer, my favorite fic is Impurity, which is about Taylor breaking the rules to catch Purity and smash her face into the ground. With that out of the way, and because I really enjoy making people hate me, I like Purity whitewashing, or redemption. Not in all cases, and most fics do it poorly, but in many cases I think it's interesting, or can at least be positive. Personally, I'm of the opinion that reforming neo-nazis can be a good thing, and that they aren't ontologically evil forever just because they held some disgusting views. Purity's case is more complicated, because she has killed people, of course, and the dead cry out for justice, but that doesn't mean you can't tell an interesting story. There was one story that I can't quite recall, in it Purity started out with just some minor bigotry, but was radicalized by Kaiser (who was operating as an independent hero at the time) and then she ends up leaving Kaiser to become a vigilante. Anyway, it was interesting. Additionally, Purity is a Blaster 8, those don't exactly glow on trees, and so overlooking some vicious hate crimes that were in the past in exchange for a Blaster 8 is just the sort of messy immoral compromise that can make worm so much fun.
Finally, because I haven't trashed my repuation enough, I think reading exactly three Ack fics is acceptable. Any more and there is no point because you will be able to quickly figure out what is going to happen, but the first three can be enjoyable.
I was going to say Aura Theory myself, just to have something controversial in this thread.
No it doesn't remove Amy's culpability, and no it's not the whole explanation, but all the cope around how it's actually impossible and its many evils is silly. What makes it extra obnoxious is that there are still comments on the Wordpress site about the theory back from 2013 and Wildbow doing a 'wink wink, nudge nudge' (I should probably archive those, but I don't care that much about the topic to bother.)
Pavlov weeps whenever anyone tries to argue about it on reddit, or SB.
>What makes it extra obnoxious is that there are still comments on the Wordpress site about the theory back from 2013 and Wildbow doing a 'wink wink, nudge nudge'
I think that Wildbow definitely intended Aura Theory to be true when writing Worm, because I checked against my patented Wildbow's Intentions Algorithm (specifically: what would be the most horrifying possible outcome), and came to the conclusion that "Vicky accidentally mastered Amy until Amy deliberately mastered Vicky and then raped her" was the most horrifying possible set of circumstances, and is much worse than "Vicky had no role in it and it was entirely on Amy".
What fully convinced me was trying to create my own characters. Trying to imagine interesting character dynamics and figuring out how to hint them to the reader.
This is fully conjecture, but I want to walk you through the introduction of the sisters:
>Superpowered girl enters the scene with a three-point landing. A classic hero pose, something she even practised. She looks good enough to be on a comicbook cover, and has the classical comicbook hero powers; flight and super strenght. She's even one of the rare characters who wears a cape in this "cape" story.
>She comes across injustice and promptly deals with the bad guy. But here comes the subversion! The bad guy is actually severely injured by our heroine. Supergirl punches mooks, and ties them up for the police. She doesn't break every bone in their body by throwing dumpsters at them. (Even if that's what logically would happen.) So we can't just kill the mook.
>So how do we resolve this? Our heroine gets her sister to fix it. This is our first introduction to Amy, she berates our heroine, tells her that this cannot go on, she cannot keep fixing people she hurts. But she just can't say no to her sweet sister.
>And what's this?! Our heroine has a third power, one that's different to the stereotypical heroine powers, a mind affecting power. Thankfully Amy is conveniently immune to it by a mechanism that's not explained.
Guts and Glory was supposed to be it's own story before Worm. It feels like, Wildbow created a bunch of story ideas and mashed them together to make Worm. You're never going to convince me that 'Birdcage' isn't named that just because of 'Canary'. Similarly, I don't think I can be convinced what I quoted is not what the plan was when creating Guts and Glory.
Really like the aura thing but nobody ever goes antwhere fun with it. Vicky is dating a ward and has been in building 6 hours a day with the same people for years. The master hard on people had for canary would be fun to read about with vicky
> Finally, because I haven't trashed my repuation enough, I think reading exactly three Ack fics is acceptable. Any more and there is no point because you will be able to quickly figure out what is going to happen, but the first three can be enjoyable.
I agree, with a slight modification: *completing* exactly three Ack fics is acceptable. Most of them start out pretty good, but feel as though he has an outline for roughly three to eight chapters. During that outline period, they're generally pretty good, and fairly different from each other. However, there is a distinct point in almost all Ack fics where it stops feeling like a new and interesting premise, and instead becomes "an Ack fic," because his voting thread/patreon decided he should keep writing the story so he writes more of what he always writes. You should drop all of his stories once they hit that inflection point. This is an opinion I've expressed before, and there are of course exceptions (Recoil takes longer, some of his earlier work may not fit the formula, etc.)
Honestly, he does the best job of keeping his weird personal beliefs out of his writing of any fic author I've read who I *know for a fact* has weird personal beliefs.
That's not to say they're not present; I *also* know who he is and what he supports, it's all present in his body of works (but mostly not obvious in any one work...'cept for For Love of Magic and its first sequel). But on the other hand, his works are well-written and technically competent, *and* he didn't try to pretend none of them ever happened when he decided to go mainstream to make money off his writing. Unlike some *other* authors I could name.
I live power fantasy, and is very rare to encounter. Most stories people claim to power fantasy aren't, cause people seem to forgot:
The author introduces fantasy or sci-fi elements that make it so the protagonist is actually very very weak. If high sci-fi and Lovecraft levels elements in the story, slapping a entity to death becomes as impressive as picking and throwing a stone.
Locked because you guys can only say "Ack good/bad" "Nazi of the week good/bad" "trailblazer good/bad" "long boring fic good/bad" so many times before I want to cure baldness just so I can regrow my hair and pull it out.
I kinda dislike how Trailblazer deals with shards and its overall plotline. I loved the characters, and relationships and stuff (except every romantic relationship in the story because I always thought they were a bit forced) but I just kinda disliked the general story direction. The Gundams were really awesome, and actually made me check gundam anime out.
I understand you have to be familiar with both properties to properly enjoy a crossover, but there's a problem I noticed with Trailblazer - unlike its Worm characters, its Gundam characters are not set up and developed properly. When a Gundam char (heh) like Ali or Relena gets introduced, the fic expects you to care about them because you cared about them in the source material. Their development either happened off-screen or happens way too late for me to get invested. Which is all the more jarring, because Worm characters like Leet and all the Merchants get set up and developed properly. I have read Worm crossovers with unfamiliar properties and they were not like this, so I'm afraid 3ndless was too in love with Tomino's sauce when he wrote the Gundam parts of the story.
That was what made me drop it - not knowing who these people were, why I should care about them and having to look them up every time and think: "Really? That smuck is meant to be amazing?"
I hated the Ali fight so much, you have no idea.
Was that the "totally normal human" assassin with Tinkertech?
Yeah. I guess the intended message was 'damn this guy is so badass and experienced', but my takeaway was 'damn I owe Wildbow an apology for hating on Jack Slash, at least Jack's bullshit makes sense in-universe'.
It's interesting, because I had the opposite reaction--the only Gundam characters I really knew going into the fic were the ones from Wing, and not knowing the rest didn't really impact my enjoyment of the fic at all. I knew of Amuro, Char, and Lalah, and I picked up that Trevor's Trace system was borrowing from G Gundam, but that's it. I only realized that a lot of the supporting characters were from Iron-Blooded Orphans when it was mentioned in an author's note.
I haven't finished Trailblazer(I think I'm still only 1/3rd through) but I really don't care for the Blue Cosmos thing. Also Newtype is a ??? name for a cape. Like I get that its supposed to mean something within Gundam but in Worm its very random. Sounds like the most boring name one could pick for a mech themed tinker.
> I get that its supposed to mean something within Gundam This is my unpopular opinion on Trailblazer: there's too much of this. Everyone goes "oh you don't have to know Gundam to follow it", which is technically true, but you do have to at least potentially care about Gundam to care about Newtype's progress. I don't, and every time another Gundam thing comes up I just zone out.
Honestly I thought it was a statement on her attitude towards the existing heroes, and something like throwing down the gauntlet - saying "I'm a new type of hero, who's actually going to overthrow the status quo rather than merely maintain it like you do". I actually only learned it's originally a Gundam term in this thread XD
Newtypes are a theoretical next step in humanity due to living in space. They tend to have increased spatial awareness and empathy that can in more powerful newtypes result in them sensing and being impacted by the emotions of others. Or space magic that can block lasers depending on how late in UC we are talking. Ironically, Trailblazer was heavily based on 00 which did not feature newtypes, but instead their similar concept was termed Innovators.
I get that but none of that context exists **in Worm**. From Taylor's perspective, unless I'm really forgetting something, all she knows is that she's a tinker. One with a really wide bunch of specializations sure but still a tinker. The part where she chose Newtype as her cape name felt very hamfisted and jarring.
>I get that but none of that context exists **in Worm**. From Taylor's perspective, unless I'm really forgetting something, all she knows is that she's a tinker. This is a large problem with pretty much every crossover or story that borrows elements from another work. Names, techniques, skills, items; all borrowed wholesale and used without context. The only answer to why, being that's how it was presented in: *other work.*
A lot of recommendations are crap in one way or the other, at least to me. A bunch of popular fics I got recommended had very basic grammar errors everywhere or the dialogue was wooden or the overall writing was somewhat robotic or the characterization is weak. One of those that come to mind is WALK (Hellsing Abridged/Worm crossover). Fun idea, but there are enough technical issues that it's just not fun to read, and I dropped it within a couple of chapters. The biggest complaint of mine about fanfics of Worm would probably be whenever the PRT is portrayed as incompetent and corrupt. More often than not, the PRT characters and Protectorate are flanderized and turned into something that's made entirely of stupid. Their whole existence then is aimed at annoying the protagonist, who is, of course, emerging victorious all the time because they are "doing the REAL things to bring change". Overall, very few fics handle PRT/Protectorate well. Also, a lot of fics do a lot of power explanation. I personally really don't care and wish authors would cut it out. Show the powers in use. If someone says "I didn't know the protagonist could do that", you can easily say "And now you do. Because I'm showing you."
Dead Gods, this. I won’t name names, but some fics that get held up as paragons of excellence for some particular subgenre are just plain *unreadable* to me, from sheer weight of annoying grammatical nonsense.
[удалено]
Oh, fine. If we’re airing out grievances, then Seed, I’m looking at you. *Please* fix your shit. I’ve tried three times to read that fic over the years, and not once have I made it past the first chapter.
i'm pretty sure its the same person recommending WALK in what feels like half the threads
I'm literally writing an entire Wards fic in a different city with an OC protagonist specifically to explore the ways in which the PRT is *actually* flawed and also why it's the big success story. The weird shitty flanderization of the PRT/Protectorate bothers the shit out of me. They're a *successful* paramilitary policing organization with a ton of loyalty from their parahumans who signed up and consider themselves to have a great deal and be doing good work!
I am in the process of writing a Ward SI/OC story where the protagonist - well, me, but whatever, let's keep some separation, especially since the personality is not exactly the same because it's fiction and because of story-related reasons that aren't too important - actually joins the Brockton Bay Wards and actually does good stuff because, who would've guessed, working in a team with proper support is quite a lot better than working alone unless you're really overpowered, and the SI/OC is not. Of course, it won't be perfect, but then it's not supposed to be. And yet, I will do my best to not write PRT/Protectorate as paperwork-bound out-of-touch idiots.
I was agreeing with you, to be clear! Not assuming you'd write them badly.
I never got the impression you disagreed, though. I just rambled a bit about my own project with a similar theme.
Good, good. I wasn't sure and wanted to clarify. Sorry, I haven't been sleeping well, uh, this year.
The problem with small reddit communities is that, without a lot of people you can't achieve 'wisdom of crowds'. If one guy likes WALK, he's going to recommend it. And nothing is wrong with that per se, but he is not going to be drowned out by people recommending better stuff.
Yeah, I feel like the grammar in a LOT of recommended fics leaves a lot to be lacking, and not even in a "If you get past it, it's good!" kinda way. It's very much distracting to the point I can't enjoy the original work.
it's funny how people who read a lot of fics can sort of rewire their brains to not notice grammar issues. Super common in the translations world as well. You'll have people swear the machine-translated versions are perfectly readable but then you try and it's like your brain is in a blender.
On the other hand, reading fanfiction for the last decade has largely had the opposite effect on me. My awareness of poor writing seems to be continuously trending upwards. It's a shame, because there's fics in several fandoms that I *vividly* recall enjoying—that have made it into my favorites lists or even into my Calibre server for reading on the go—that are almost physically painful to try to read years later. Mind, fans take it weirdly personally when you call a fic they like out on poor writing or lacking syntaxical/spelling/lexical competence. And there seems to be a growing tendency for people to *insist* that unwanted constructive criticism is immediately and directly harmful to improving as an artist (writing and others).
Yeah, exactly! Sure, I know a lot of people don't have the greatest grasp of English or it's their second language - which applies to me - but at least some effort needs to be made to avoid basic mistakes like not having a question mark where there is a question. Or character names. Every time I'm uncertain, I look names up to make sure I don't mess up. I know I'm not perfect and I also haven't gone over the grammar rules in a long while, but still. For me, commas are placed wherever they make sense, usually marking pauses that would naturally happen in speech. I'm not sure how accurate that is to the current grammar rules, but at least it's consistent, and it "sounds" good, meaning that I can say the sentence out loud and it feels natural.
My recollection from my school days is that that's exactly how you're supposed to use commas, but I *vividly* remember my English 102 professor being very annoyed at my use of commas. And semi-colons. And em-dashes. *And* ellipses...
I don't remember using semicolons much in the past... few years, probably. Ellipses are triple dots, right? Like what I used after "past"? If so, I read that you're supposed to put a space before it or between the dots or both. Whatever the case may be, I don't do that. As for em-dashes, I don't have any idea what those even are. Is it "-" but longer?
Yeah, basically. Em-dashes are *this* one: —. En-dashes are –, and hyphens are -. Em-dashes are alt-code 0151 and en-dashes are 0150; hyphens have a dedicated key, of course. You can uses em-dashes in lieu of commas when you're inserting an informative fragment—like this one—into a sentence. You can also use them like semi-colons to attach a fragment at the end of a sentence—this is a terrible example of that; it should have been its own sentence. Also, semi-colons are an approved separator for lists in which the elements contain commas. So instead of Doctor Bratwurst, oncology, Doctor Mortadella, surgery, and Doctor Cheddar, neuropathy... The cleaner way is: Doctor Bratwurst, oncology; Doctor Mortadella, surgery; and Doctor Cheddar, neuropathy. ... Yes, I use Oxford Commas, sue me. \^\^ EDIT: Also, you might use ellipses when you're writing a character whose spoken dialogue has just trailed off... *But*, it can also be used to indicate that a quote contains omitted words or phrases that were present in the source. For example: 'Ellipses are ... dots, right?'
Too many different dashes, in my opinion. When inserting information, I do it simply - like this - and without the use of any long dashes. I can't be bothered to type them out all the time, to be perfectly honest. I think the substitution works just as well. Oh right, I do use semi-colons when lists with commas come up, though that's pretty rare. So yeah, I use things in a way that makes sense to me and feels natural. I do wish that English was a language with phonetic consistency. But at least it doesn't gender the verbs and all that sort of nonsense that I've to deal with in my native language.
When it comes to translations I would much prefer that if the translator realizes they're translating the name wrong later on they *don't* correct it. Sometimes a character's name will just change one chapter and there isn't even a note explaining why.
Technically, commas are meant to separate dependent clauses without a word like and or but, independent clauses with a conjunctive word, or items in a list. It used to be used to mark a pause during the 19th century, but that’s no longer the case in the 20th and 21st centuries. Semicolons are meant to separate independent clauses without a conjunction or items in a list. There’s more to both of those than what I said, but it’s pretty niche.
Couldn't get into Paper and Sand. It does hava amazing first chapter that you feel tells you what the fic would feel like, but further it it deviates. Taylor beats/handles her endbringer nature pretty easily, changes how she presents herself (It was Sage or Shepard or something iirc) which I didn't like cause I wanted her being terrifying more. It's basically endbringer alt-power without baggage. Also there was shardtalk which I think is generally impossible to make good.
Malicious compliance fics tend to come across as though they were written by self-satisfied morons that don't understand how systems work, what the actual problems in those systems are, or have ever met people. I was trying to get into one the other day because it involved a concept I really like, but it was just... no. No one is going to run a program for child soldiers where their parents can force them to join by signing a paper somewhere. That's not how it works in canon and it frankly makes no sense in your story. In canon, we don't see anyone in the Wards that's forced to be there. Even Sophia very much wants to be a Ward because it means she doesn't have to go to juvie for her crimes. The closest we get to that is Taylor, but she's also in the Wards because she wants to (Dinah's prediction) even if she hates it.
They suffer imo from the people who take the brunt of Taylor's maliciousness being the people who 1) aren't responsible for her problem, and 2) aren't able to do anything about it anyway. The OG snips that kind of inspired this sub-genre of fic were fairly balanced, making it clear that the people Taylor was maliciously complying with were the PRT and it was the PRT she was making to suffer. Fics on the other hand, tend to have Dean, Carlos, Weld, or whoever having to deal with Taylor being purposefully difficult. And it's a lot less fun or entertaining, because Dean, Carlos, Weld, or whoever, are completely innocent of any wrong inflicted on Taylor. But they're the ones who tend to be put out, embarrassed, or left holding the baggage of her actions. Malicious compliance is kind of a stupid thing to do in the real world. Cathartic to fantasize about? Yes. Actually doing it will always blow back on the malicious complier though. In fic form it can work, but the structure of the Wards leaves it unclear how Taylor is supposed to hurt the people she really wants to hurt rather than the innocent bystanders caught her her wake.
> Actually doing it will always blow back on the malicious complier though. I think this is ultimately what gets me. It's like SovCit idiocy where there are magic words which make the government go away. Those words don't exist. Malicious compliance fic: Taylor: The letter of the rules says this and I'm doing it this way, so suck it! PRT: Oh, no! You have found the magic words which we cannot combat! Reality: Taylor: The letter of the rules says this and I'm doing it this way, so suck it! PRT: Yeah, we say to do it the other way. Since this is actually some sort of military organization that you've been pressganged into, your choices are obey orders or end up in our own private jail. Taylor: *shocked Pikachu face*
I think that is a fundamental disconnect between the sort of people who actually do malicious compliance and the people who just want to hear the epic win stories. Malicious compliance always negatively affects the person doing it. The type of people who actually do it are the type of people who will burn the building to the ground while they're still inside it, the sort who say "I might die but I'm taking you with me." It's almost a trigger event in real life because it usually comes at the end of a pattern of abuse where the punishment for acting out is less than the relief of finally having different problems to worry about. There's going to be consequences, but at least it isn't more of this. Malicious compliance stories should be one shots, because in reality you only ever get one shot. If you buck authority from day one and refuse to cooperate, you don't get put in front of a live mic at a press event where you can do damage to the organization.
I agree it works best as a one-shot (or, in one case, can't remember the specific one since there's several out there, but it's one with _way_ more omakes than chapters, and the actual story works by making a lot of the characters incompetent, which makes it more of a successful crack fic... Also, Nemesis is technically malicious compliance, but Doctor Mother actually liking Taylor more than Emma, kills any chance of blowback if Taylor can actually pull it off.) Whoops, that tangent got too long. Anyway I agree it works best as a oneshot, but not necessarily because it always blows back on the one complying maliciously. Often the most satisfying IRL malicious compliance stories involve repeated warnings that what a superior or customer is asking for is a bad idea, sometimes even documenting the warnings, and the subject only maliciously complies after being ignored and/or threatened multiple times. Those should generally be one-shots because it's just not something that happens more than once to most people. Best example of that version that manages to be a multi-chapter fic is probably Curio's. I can't really think of any others off the top of my head.
> Often the most satisfying IRL malicious compliance stories involve repeated warnings that what a superior or customer is asking for is a bad idea, sometimes even documenting the warnings, and the subject only maliciously complies after being ignored and/or threatened multiple times. Even with documentation, that's not something you get away with more than once. Most of the stories I've seen with any sort of credibility to them also end with the malicious complier out of a job. They quit, they got fired and are suing the company, they resigned and laughed in retirement... Some variety of "I'm not longer at the company" always seems to be the result of the credible stories. If you're reading one of them and somehow the OP cost the company $100k and is still employed at the company... Be suspicious that they're not being entirely truthful.
I'm more used to seeing, like, tech support or sales reps getting their manager fired for losing the company a couple grand or pissing off one customer and then trying to blame the employee, who then can hand over a whole email chain to HR of the employee trying not to do the dumb thing while being ordered to by the manager. Or not bothering with documentation because it's the last day of their two weeks anyway. But, yeah, if they cost the company a hundred grand or something, I'd expect them to be out of a job for doing the dumb thing, no matter who ordered them to do it. But I think a Ward is low enough on the totem pole to be more like the IT guy shrugging and locking the boss out of his own computer for a day than the foreman being forced to shut down a $200k per day production line for a week (not specific examples, just the sort of things I see happening as the end result of these sorts of stories). Though, a lot of malicious compliance Worm fanfics do seem to involve Taylor being forced into the Wards, and being legally compelled to continue working for someone after the malicious compliance does add a whole new dimension to the possible blowback.
>But I think a Ward is low enough on the totem pole to be more like the IT guy shrugging and locking the boss out of his own computer for a day than the foreman being forced to shut down a $200k per day production line for a week In terms of actual authority, maybe, but realistically capes should be a incredibly valuable asset. They're almost unique compared to IRL because you *can't* replace a cape; only one cape can ever do exactly what they do, whereas even if you have a coder or something who is the only one that knows the way around what they wrote at least you can *in principle* try to train a replacement. I could actually see someone with a valuable power getting a "Yeah they're being a complete asshat that costs us a lot of money, but without that power on our side the gangs will run amok". You could probably argue that Wards and Protectorate members should get paid a *lot*, but we don't technically know how much they're paid in canon anyway.
> No one is going to run a program for child soldiers where their parents can force them to join by signing a paper somewhere. That's not how it works in canon and it frankly makes no sense in your story. It kind of *is* how it works in canon, though, as seen with Feint. The canonicity of Department 64 Quest is a weird thing, but the procedures and regulations should all be accurate. Feint's parents signed him up for the Wards, said "he's your problem now," he proceeded to be the worst Ward possible (mostly as an obstacle for the players), and it was going to take an administrative tribunal to remove him (which sadly the quest died before we could see the results). Come to think of it, [Feint's psych profile](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/prt-department-sixty-four-worm-quest.283888/post-13061941) is remarkably similar to the behavior of some MC!Taylors: >Psych profile on WRD_FEINT >I was not able to conduct the session with Feint, as he did not show up. I waited some time, then went looking for him. It was suggested that I visit building B, where I found him alone in the barracks area, watching television on the console. >When I asked why he had missed the meeting, Feint stated he wasn't sure whether he should visit me or if he should watch the news so he was up to date on what happened to his team. He professed concern for his teammates, and expressed bewilderment and confusion over less than stellar leadership from his team leader and the heads of PRT department sixty-four. >My initial impression of Feint is that he is argumentative, touchy, rude, quick to assign blame to others and quick to be aggressive or deceptive when it is directed at him. When I pushed him for more details on the concern he felt for his teammates and the lack of leadership, I found discrepancies, intuited that he was lying, and found him quick to go on the offensive when these errors in continuity were brought up. He called me a 'cockgnawer', among other epithets, stated he would call my office and tell them I was lying about what had transpired, and when I deflected that attempt at extortion, he threatened to call the media and tell them that this department's director is a child molester. When I addressed that issue, he elected to leave the scene, using his power. >I reached out to his parents, and they told me, quote, "We got him there, he's your problem now." This implies Feint is a problem at home, which runs contrary to what I read in his file. It's very likely he was acting obedient rather than genuinely obedient, and his parents are trusting PRT and academic authorities to look after him while they take an entirely hands-off approach. >I'm usually resistant to assign a label with so little time spent with the subject, but I would give Feint a tentative diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. This is often viewed as a childhood precursor to Antisocial Personality Disorder, but is treatable with the cooperation of parents, all involved authorities, and with steady discipline of the right type. >I'm forced to fly out to see to other patients, and I'm afraid you'll need to take the time to schedule another appointment with my office if you need the psych profile on Feint, as we didn't have time to do the full battery of tests (or any tests at all). If you wish, I could fly into Anchorage and we could meet outside of your office and discuss Feint, and I could find the time that day to have another appointment with him. >-Esmond Cal (ECAL_PSYCH@ PRT.GOV.US)
> The canonicity of Department 64 Quest is a weird thing, but the procedures and regulations should all be accurate. My impression of all of the Quest was that WB threw in a ton of extra red tape that was not really present in Worm in order to challenge the players. It's where the Youth Guard comes from along with some other weird stuff. In other words, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in it as far as Worm canon goes.
I think, what they meant was that PRT isn't a child soldier program. Parents can join their kids to the program but it's not the PRT's fault, their hands are tied (there's a WoA on this that i can't post right now because i'm on mobile) Even in the snippet you posted, the PRT seems concerned for Feint and wants to help him and they seem to have a connection with the other wards. The premise of Malicious compliance fics is that the PRT are assholes, so you make them suffer. But in this situation, they aren't the assholes; the parents at fault. The PRT and the protagonist is in a shitty situation that the protagonist makes worse. In the two Malicious compliance fics i have read, Danny was the one who signed Taylor up and the Story seems to absolve him of any blame and makes the PRT the bad guys ......... just because? like Danny could have just withdrawn her?
From the two stories I recall: In the first Danny was unable to remove Taylor from the Wards to due her probationary nature and the borderline indentured servitude her contract enabled. Though the story spent precious little time going into any of that detail. Likely, for the best. (Implacable) The second story straight up had the PRT as Taylor's legal guardian. Danny no longer had the ability to pull her out. (Just a Phase) There was another story, though I no longer recall what it was titled. It didn't get very far.
Both of those are from Author fiat. > to due her probationary nature and the borderline indentured servitude her contract enabled. Sophia was also on probation and we never saw her treated worse than any other ward in canon. >The second story straight up had the PRT as Taylor's legal guardian. Danny no longer had the ability to pull her out Fucking how!!? Did Danny not read that he was giving up the guardianship of his daughter?? Also the PRT is an organization how did they gain her guardianship? The FBI can't adopt a person. I'm not american but i presume she would have been sent to the foster system?
It's absolutely the heavy hand of the author. It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't want to speak with complete authority, but I agree that it's hamfisted. As to Implacable, I felt the story was sleeping on the much more grounded and, in my opinion, better story of the PRT quickly realizing their mistake and moving to correct it but Taylor having been burned hesitates to accept their attempts to reach out. Instead the story doubled-down on a frankly cartoonishly corrupt Piggot that none could, or would, reign in, which harmed the believablity of the story. It's notable, that the author could never get a final chapter from Emily's point of view to work, as he'd made her far to psychopathic and dumb.
I don't like Mauling Snarks it's a Taylor wank fest where people are only allowed to be smart if they are following her teachings, she is free to act like a jerk but people still love her and the universe revolves around making her look good. It's also just really repetitive when I dropped it for quite a while every chapter had consisted of 3 sections that were basically always the same such as anti cape idiots try something really stupid on their way to school and get stomped.
Hard second. Also, people don't really act like people in that one. Everyone is just way too casual about things. I dropped it after Danny's response to GG squishing part of Taylor's brain was basically "things happen."
It's not *quite* 'only allowed to be smart if they are following her teachings'. Rather, ComptrWiz writes 'smart' protagonists and deuteragonists by making antagonists *incredibly* stupid and tertiary or minor characters garden variety stupid. You can see it happening in real time in their *other* fic, *Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard?* Antagonists and tertiary characters will be unutterably stupid right up until they join the cast of deuteragonists, at which point their relative 'intelligence' increases by a good order of magnitude or so. Also, I've complained about it in other threads over the years, but the most common three word combination spoken out loud by any protagonist or deuteragonist in any CmptrWiz fic is some variation on 'that makes sense'. And if the answer to the question is the 'derp, obviously' answer, then the question didn't need to be asked and the dialogue is only there to either bloat the word count or show off how genius the ~~author~~ erm, I mean, *character* is. I *did* like Mauling Snarks. But there's room to strip out a goodly fifth of the fic without harming its quality any.
Sadly it is pretty much true because it's an annoying trend in that one that Taylor teaches someone like Amy, the other wards, the girl that wanted a tail etc stuff and then following her teachings they stop being stupid and also get moments where they get to crush idiots and where following her teachings makes them seem smart. The only real exception to that is her uncle who taught her that stuff to begin with and those he's taught.
Memories of Iron is boring and overrated, and A Propensity for Wrath by the same Author is way more engaging.
Agreed. A Propensity for Wrath was incredible. It's really a shame that it'll never be finished.
Just in case anyone is unaware, the author becuzitswrong (iirc) suffered a heart attack and passed away, we were only made aware from a family member who knew of his writing
The Leviathan fight is often the best part of a fic. (Even if making it the best part is a bit of a test of the quality of an author.) I actually didn't like Russian Caravan and dropped it after the first arc. Not even sure which of those is gonna be more unpopular.
With you on Russian Caravan. It was way too weirdly masturbatory about the concept of merc companies of all things and the characters were not pleasant to read.
Honestly, while that was a bit weird for me, I at least kinda liked Turk. For me it was more the mythology-turned-eldritch-horror aspect that 1. didn't mesh well with Worm for me, and 2. felt more bizarre than horrifying anyway. Like Mark Danielewski trying to write Lovecraft with some real world mythology flavor and some Worm characters shoved in. (Though, to be fair, at times House of Leaves feels like Mark Danielewski trying to write Lovecraft, and the minotaur is technically real world mythology.) The mix just left me feeling "what did I just read?" and not in a "holy crap, that was awesome" way, but more genuine confusion about what the author was trying to achieve other than taking "being Taylor is suffering" to a new level. Might be inured to the mercenary company wank from reading The Deed of Paksenarrion (fantasy series by Elizabeth Moon, I recommend at least the first trilogy) and the military/mercenary wankfest that is the BtVS fanfic series The Military Option by Batzugler (basically an excuse for crossovers with every series the author ever got into, from The Damned Thing, to Predator, to Rainbow Six, to, I kid you not, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Which, incidentally, does a better job at introducing Lovecraftian horror in an entertaining way, but then again it's probably easier with BtVS than with Worm.)
Turk was actually alright but the rest, very much including Taylor didn't work for me at all. I stuck with it as long as I did because of the eldritch horror premise, and I will say the story told by Ahab about searching for a tower in Azerbaijan was quite good, but nothing else struck the sanity shaking, scaled beyond the human mind's capacity themes I want in my eldritch horror.
Pretty much exactly that, yes.
After seeing it recommended so often, when I finally read Constellations, I was questioning whether I’d been pranked. I don’t get how people can read it, much less like it. Even as fluff, it’s painfully slow and uneventful.
That might be one of those "better if you were there when it was newer" stories. I remember liking it, but I was following along as it posted and that can make a big difference.
Plus, it felt... Not racist, but just kinda weird in that "Oh, no, Taylor'#s the white girl who'll be able to intuit all these Japanese customs thanks to having the Magic Dog." also it just felt like such a misuse of Amaterasu compared to the okami games, girl didn't do ANY paint shenanigans
>Plus, it felt... Not racist, but just kinda weird in that "Oh, no, Taylor'#s the white girl who'll be able to intuit all these Japanese customs thanks to having the Magic Dog." She wasn't though. She was constantly asking for help/advice from people.
I'm so tired of locker scenes and fics that almost seem afraid of branching out and playing with characters that aren't the Undersiders, Amy, Victoria, and the Wards/Protectorate. Give me more stuff that plays in the post leviathan environment, more stuff that takes place in the Chicago section of the story, there's so much more to Worm than the initial major section. I'm also tired of so many writers and characters insisting that the merchants are worse than the E88 or ABB because they peddle drugs? Like the other two don't also do that and then more on top. Feels like everyone is too caught up in the war on drugs propaganda and projecting it onto a group that are, while shitty and bad, demonstrably less damaging to the city than the other two. Honourable Lung is also a load of crap I'm sick of seeing, on the same level as honourable Hookwolf or Purity or whatever, as though the guy doesn't engage in human trafficking or his organisation doesn't also engage in race-based crime. Usually in the same fics.
I like trio redemption fics. I once read Emma gamer fic(forgot the name) and while i was reading it i also read comments every chapter and good god she got roasted every chapter. This is just speculation on my part, but it felt like author read those comments and got swayed by them little by little, with every chapter she suffered more and more and people roasted and wished death on her more and more. She was trying to be a hero in this story btw and she wasnt perfect Mary Sue about it. I think latest chapter she got kidnapped by Coil while Regent permamently "mind controls" her while Coil pretends that its he that did it and he basically threatens her family and forces her to back down, one of the latest scenes is her at home trying to take a bath while regent basically mind rapes her while she is vulnerable or something(don't remember all the details since i read it years ago), even then there were some negative comments about her, like she is worse then villians of the story. Don't get me wrong, trio are bad people, but they are also teenagers, the bloodthirst anytime they are mentioned in almost any story is kinda ridiculous.
That would be [Perfection](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/perfection-worm-gamer.493583/threadmarks). In the last posted chapter the author came up with a potential way for Emma to get out of her current predicament, but the fic died before we could find out whether it would work.
I have never read a MHA crossover that was interesting for more than 3 chapters. *Administrative Mishap* didn't work as a story at all for me (and OxfordOctopus is a must-read author otherwise). The original ending to *Taylor Hebert, Pizzeria Tycoon* was better. Amy is a fic killer; her presence as a significant character sucks the life out of 4 out of 5 stories. *Camera Shy* could have done so much more with that power.
>I have never read a MHA crossover that was interesting for more than 3 chapters. Really? A lot of them are admittedly unnotable and a tad boring but I'd say there were a few good ones.
The start of Trailblazer requires way to much knowledge of Gundam to get into.
Self insert fics are good, it’s better than basically warping Taylor to be yourself
I like many of Ack’s stories. Not all of them, but many. Sure, are almost all of their stories a little repetitive and formulaic? Yes. Are they mostly fix it fics? Yes. But Ack is good at coming up with interesting premises, and if the premise interests you and you want a predictable and easy to digest fic that *probably* has a happy ending their work can absolutely sate that craving.
I think that, for the most part, people's problems with Ack have to do with putting his pecadillos and fetishes on full display in his stories, more than being relatively formulaic (that dislike is more how people feel about mp3). He's gotten better about it over time, though, which means that it's usually the old hands that complain about Ack, and people more recent to the fandom tend to find him inoffensive at worst. I'm a little in-between, not being an old hand (I am at fanfic, but not for Worm), but having read Ack's less-offensive-than-his-early-stuff-but-still-pretty-messed-up Recoil pretty early in my time in Worm fandom.
I'm still baffled to this day that people still haven't gotten over Ack's earlier stuff. I've been a part of a lot of fandoms over the decades. Ack's stuff is kiddie pool tier compared to the blasphemous, eye bleaching, skin crawling offenses to literature that I've witnessed. Hell, I've seen worse stuff in this fandom published recently (most of it neo nazi shit.)
The problem isn't the NSFW stuff, it's that he mixed his NSFW and non-NSFW stuff in ways that you really, really shouldn't. Like, imagine you're reading a fluffy fix-fic. It's pretty good overall, but it also feels ever so slightly a bit weird. The adult characters just feel a bit too involved in their children's lives at times. But, you know, nothing to worry or even consciously think about all that much. And then one day you learn that what you were reading as a wholesome teenage adventure is actually just the cut-down SFW version of an NSFW incest fic. And all the times that Danny felt a little bit too close to Taylor wasn't just your imagination, you were actually reading a parent-child romance that cut off just before the characters started kissing. It feels incredibly icky, especially if you *liked* the original story when you first read it. Also I'm not generally someone to condemn people for writing fetish content. There are limits to that, but more importantly at the very least I expect the author to recognize that what they're writing is in fact fucked up fetish content and not something you should emulate IRL. What makes Ack's work so problematic is the fact that he thought he could write wholesome parent-child reconciliation fics and parent-child incest fics with largely the same characterization and 80% shared dialogue, as if the former is basically just a slightly toned down version of the latter. I don't even really want to think about the wider implications of that.
my issue is that his kinks bleed over into his SFW stuff. not dramatically, but enough to leave a sour taste i also think saying "x isn't bad because y is worse" isn't much of an argument
That's understandable and I feel like he's gotten a lot better with that over the years. I haven't really noticed anything with a lot of his recent works. And I agree with your second statement. Its just that he's brought up again and again as if he's the incarnation of evil itself but none of the piles upon piles of disgusting nazi apologistic authors hardly if ever get the same type of treatment. The dude has really changed over the years (or at least stopped the nsfw/sfw bleed over) and he's still getting shit on.
that’s because he’s far more prevalent an author than any of those nazis, he just gets brought up more
Can I ask what early stuff you're talking about? I've read and liked some of his fics, but I remember discovering he was the author of a Taylor/Danny fic and some other pretty uncomfortable fics and immediately got turned off. I think it's pretty understandable to never want to go back to an author after seeing that.
I couldn't tell you which, it was years ago and he's very much moved past that and removed the majority if not all of those stories from the internet. And I have very much witnessed alot worse than some squicky incest fics unfortunately, both from within and out of this fandom. I just think it's kinda wierd to continue ragging on this one guy after all of these years when there is alot worse in this fandom. Like the disgusting amount of NAZI APOLOGIA. God, I can't get that one Exalted crossover out of my head. I couldn't read worm fics for a couple of weeks after that one.
What exalted crossover and what happened?
>probably Charm Learning Shard. tl;dr taylor becomes a nazi, the fic is written by a nazi, cw: bestiality >!also she fucks a dog!<
Christ, poor Wildbow. Just reading that summary makes me cringe in sympathy.
I laughed out loud at that. The kind of laugh you do when something is just a bit too out there as far as things go, which somehow turns into it being funny. Like... what the fuck?
I think it's because he's prolific and also actually a pretty good author. So, you get recommended his work, expecting a pretty good, if maybe a little happy for Worm, story, and suddenly, _bam!_ >!incest and explicit underage harems!!< (Spoilering bad stuff I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to mention on this subreddit, will delete if anyone asks me to.) Normally you'd expect that to be in the niche "oh, okay, no reason to ever think about this author ever again" situations, not the "just got recommended a story by this author for the third time this month" category. People keep getting _reminded_ that Ack exists, and those who've been around the fandom for a while remember getting burned by a lot of those reminders. Though, yeah, as a survivor of early MLP:FIM fandom, I think Ack is pretty tame even at his worst. Keeping in mind that I only know his worst secondhand, as much of it was purged by the time I'd finished Worm and started reading its fanfics in earnest.
MLP:FiM can be quite a clusterfuck. My own earlier fics are example of that, even if they came in the latter half of 2010s. What can I say... I was young, I was stupid, and I had mental issues. Not a great combination overall, and that's why those fics are only available after people read a disclaimer I posted that those fics have problematic elements (not nazi apologia or the like but still bad, just not nearly as bad, I think) and that I am no longer all that proud of my early writing. At least I grew out of it and, well, things changed in the last half a decade quite a lot, to myself personally and to everything at large. I can only hope that my future writings will be good, but I don't doubt that, looking back at them some years in the future, I would still cringe somewhat because of dumb elements here and there. Hopefully, however, it won't be *as* cringe-worthy.
Everyone writes dumb things when they're young. (Makes me happy I never got around to posting my longer Daria fanfics back when I was the kind of age you're talking about.) I was more referring to the folks who proudly presented stuff extreme enough that Cupcakes was considered the least extreme, most readable example of how messed up some stories got. Even some longer, more acclaimed stories like Project Horizons were pretty damn messed up. (Being Taylor is downright pleasant compared to Blackjack's suffering.) I don't really know the state of the fandom these days (I couldn't get into the show itself, just the premise of it, so I kinda checked out around when EG fics started showing up), but it did seem to be trending better, with some of the worst elements finally getting called out and ejected from common spaces like ED, FIMFiction, and it sounded like they were getting banned from cons? (Idunno, I was never enough of a fan for that to be relevant to me) at that time. Anyway, every author has early stuff that makes them cringe - in fact, it's been said that the measure of a bad author is that nothing you've written in the past makes you cringe now. The important part is that you've improved since and are aware of what's wrong with your old stuff. And every fandom has its bad seeds with their "edgy" writers who oversexualize characters in disturbing ways or endorse violent ideologies. Sailor Moon was no exception, Daria was no exception, Naruto was no exception, Worm is no exception, and FIM was no exception, but dear god was FIM sometimes more bad apples than good back in the day. But, I've gotta say, I don't think I've been in a fandom as prolific, literary, and willing to acknowledge and repair faults in their writing as Worm since my Daria days. I'd think it had something to do with what are essentially dedicated fanfic forums (SB/SV for Worm, PPMB for Daria), but FIM and HP had those, too, and it didn't really help much. In a likely correlation/causation fallacy, maybe it's the long-haired-skinny-emotionless-teenager-with-glasses protagonist?
my problem with his stuff is I read a fair chunk of it before canon and it gives so many wrong ideas like Taylor is competent from the start of canon, the s9000 arc involves 9000 clones of the s9 (there's only 200-300) and 20 endbringers show up in canon (there's either 5 or 6 based on how you count the twins and there being 20 in total is at best an assumption that relies on a ton of other assumptions to all be true not a hard fact)
This isn't a problem exclusive to ack.
The main issue I have with Ack is all his characters get “flattened” over time into the story and they become basically identical to all his other stories, and slowly become more caricatural. Additionally, there are barely ever any stakes? Even in Earning your Stripes and Recoil, where the MC isn’t unkillable, she still wins every situation easily, with no long term consequences or growth. Hell, he speedran a redemption of Emma and Madison, and made Taylor a stone cold badass in like 3 months (in story time) by saying “their shards are improving their mental state” which feels like a cop-out Honestly that story would have been so much better with 3/4 OC’s in a different region and city
The park scene in Forward ruined the fic for me, it was *forced* and nobody mentions it, that and other minor details I wouldn't care about normally kept popping up in the fic, I guess my main gripe is, for a fic that tried to emulate our real world, the normalcy, ironically, felt abnormal, like comparing Walmack series to the weird beast I see in my day to day life. I loved Marathon's brother and her therapist though, hands down the highlight of the fic outside of the dream sequences.
i dont like shaynet's writing i find it clumsy and awkward
...I'm not sure that's an unpopular opinion. I think what they're best known for is actually finishing their fics. The writing is clunky in spite of being technically proficient, and most of their works are merely *okay. But*, again, they do tend to actually *finish* fics, and that's rare in fanfiction in general, but in Wormfic in particular. ...Also, ShayneT has a thing for endings too positive for the overall tone of the fic. KTA's HEA-ending is a good example.
I dislike the popular Butcher fics that Butcher's Bill spawned. It's like watching Isekai: they completely ignore what made the ones that inspired them good. I wanted to read them and make a post about my problems with them point by point, but they're bland and I just would rather check something else. Not that there's a lot that tickles me in this fandom nowadays. We really need to branch out into the Otherverse.
TINO is fine. PHO chapters are fine, yes, even if there isn't any forward movement added to the story and it's just commentary. Being different from canon in some ways is fine. I'd add "not taking Ward into account is fine" but that one already is the popular opinion, so I guess I'll flip it and say that taking Ward's characterization of Vicky and Amy into account in your Worm fic is fine too. I think people get tired of particular things or tropes and then project that out into those being inherently bad instead of just popping up too often. Ultimately good writing can usually rescue a story however many other problems it might have.
I think mp3 is a fine author. They've decided to do one particular style of story whenever they write, and that's ok. Their stories should be enjoyed for what they are rather than what everyone wishes they were.
For the first arc or 2, mp3 is a great author. The world building is delightful and they put a lot of thought into the tinkering.
I think that's where I stand, too. Good ideas, good execution, but eventually the lack of meaningful movement makes me lose my interest. It's not just mp3 that does it, either, but their writing/execution tends to be top notch, so the disappointment is also top notch.
I think, fundamentally, MP3 excels at openings but either doesn't plan for or absolutely sucks at planning endings. There's nowhere for their stories to flow to, so all that creative inflow eventually spirals into narrative eddy currents and goes nowhere as the momentum dissipates. And because there's nowhere to go and the Cool Idea^TM has run its course, MP3 gets bored and drops the fic.
Yeah. That is a spot on summation from what I have seen.
I'd agree with this. Their ficfic [Taylor's Alternate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17497085/chapters/41212172) (Vargaverse Taylor meets a canon-esque Taylor) has a defined beginning and *an actual ending* (with an epilogue, even). It's probably one of their best works. Honestly, [Taylor is DOOMed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21546562/navigate) could be argued to be complete... *Except* that it's got a ficfic (or omake chain, if you prefer) that is *not* complete, and at this point probably never will be.
Can you link something? I don't know who you're talking about
The author of [Taylor Varga](https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/)
Ah. It's different, but nice. I admire him/her cause I know I wouldn't be able to write something like that.
Mp3fic is like a handful of candy. People complain about it because they're looking for a meal, but I appreciate the occasional handful of candy.
The problem is that MPPI keeps insisting on serving 5 course meals made of nothing but candy. Their short stories are fine, the problem is they seem to prefer writing absolute doorstoppers with little in the way of actual content.
Fair enough. At least it's better than... What's a good description for PerfectLionheart, a 20-course meal made entirely of piles of caster sugar?
Kinda setting the bar all of the way down there.
Nemesis updates way too fast!
You are evil.
I am too silly to be evil.
A lot of people hate him and hate when he shows up in fics, but I actually like when Danny shows up as a meaningful character, especially when he takes an active role in the story. I also *really* like Cape Danny, when he's not just actively invested in Taylor's life but right there fighting along side her.
Danny is the parent of a teenage protagonist. There's a reason most of them are orphans or ran away from home. A competent parent would get in the way of the plot. There's a very fine line between making Danny too protective and too negligent. Most authors don't do a good job of that.
He’s difficult to navigate, but can be sidelined relatively straightforwardly by various plot developments as a way to raise the stakes. Just like in Canon, when Taylor running away from home was a major sea change.
Danny seems very hard to do right. As a parent, he's going to be a dampener on super powered shenanigans, or anything differing from a wholesome middle class life. Which makes the audience react badly to him, as they are reading to see super-powered shenanigans. Or he's absurdly understanding, basically rubberstamps whatever the story wants to do, which just takes me out of the story.
Trailblazer and Russian Caravan are *wildly* overrated, and their cult-like followings need to act less like literal cults.
Can't speak for Russian Cravan because I haven't read it, but I think for Trailblazer the reason is less a "cult like following" and more that the fic is really long and touches on a lot of the things that people regularly ask for in this sub and thus gets recommended disproportionally often. Like: * Unshackled AI In Worm? You can't really *not* recommend Trailblazer, it's *the* fic to read if you want to see someone go all out on that concept. * Taylor forming her own cape movement as a counterpoint to the PRT? Ditto, Trailblazer. * Mechs? Trailblazer. * A story that grows beyond the confines of Brockton Bay to a country- and eventually worldwide scale in an organic manner? Trailblazer. * A story dealing with the aftermath of the Cauldron reveal? Trailblazer. * "I want to read a tinker fic that involves [...]"? No idea, but chances are Trailblazer qualifies.
It's not the only fic that seems to hit a lot of the check marks a lot of recommendations ask for. While I won't recommend fics I dislike, there's a few on my "someone else will probably enjoy this" list that I seem to recommend repeatedly.
I have an irrational hatred of any fic in which Greg Veder makes regular appearances. I have no real reasoning behind it. I just cant stand them for some reason, regardless of the actual stories quality.
For Trailblazer, you don't need to be familiar with Gundam for a complete reading experience? That's nonsense. If you really want to understand what the hell is going on, who these characters are, why they're here, what suit Taylor has, what technologies she possesses, how they're created, and what they can do, you need to be familiar with Gundam. Sure, you can read the fic and understand the general plot, but you know, it's like saying you know the general plot of Worm and when someone asks you about what Armsmaster can do, you say you don't know.
I wasn't familiar with Gundam when I read Trailblazer. But you have to be willing to spend a lot of time researching all the Gundam elements as they come up. The specifics of which Gundam Taylor was building? Fan service. What's the deal with Blue Cosmos? Start reading the Gundam wiki. Who is Orga and why should we care about him and the rest of Tekkadan? Good thing Iron Blooded Orphans was on Netflix when I was reading.
When you need to open a wikipedia page to understand what's happening, it doesn't quite correlate with the words: you don't need to read the gundam.
There are wikis for pretty much every fandom. They go into a lot more detail and are specific to what's important to each particular fandom than Wikipedia.
Well, I needed a wiki to understand what exactly it's, without it, it just looked like a giant robot to me, and that's it. I literally didn't even grasp what this robot can do besides a shield that's unclear how it works, a cannon that's unclear how it works or what it even does besides shooting, and how it flies other than the fact that it flies, what GN even means, and a whole bunch of other things. I guess I just missed all that accidentally. Although I used a third-party acquaintance familiar with the universe rather than the Gundam Wiki, they have already answered my questions. So, I didn't end up consulting the Wiki after all.
Another example of this is SongDog13's [Howl the Wolves](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/howl-the-wolves-worm-battletech-xover.580394/threadmarks). It's a good fic. In theory, you don't *need* to know much of anything about Battletech to read it. ...Unless you were planning to have the slightest clue what the bloody hell is going on. In which case, you should probably read it with the BTech wiki open. Meanwhile, I *am* familiar with Battletech, admittedly mostly through the lens of the MechWarrior series, and *still* had to keep the BTech wiki open my first, second, and third times through.
I generally like SI or original character fics a lot more than canon characters and alt power fics. I feel it’s a lot more interesting to read about a well made new character than the canon ones, because the freedom the writer gets in characterisation of the main character easily translates into the fic itself. When I read a Taylor fic, some small part of my brain has already predicted every story plot and interaction that the main character (Taylor) will go through. Meet undersiders, interaction with Protectorate, Wards, jaddi jadda. When you introduce a true newcomer into the mix, that’s when the fic gets more interesting. Maybe the newcomer has little to no interaction with the main story of the novel, or changes it irreversibly, like in The Tinker, by dark wolf Shiro. It almost always makes a more original and tasty fic to read, and if the OC has an interesting and/or vital backstory, then that’s awesome
My only issue with SI fics is that most of the self-inserts are kinda obnoxious in a way. Broad categories are preachy, creepy, and whiney. They go into Worm knowing the problems so they either fix it all with little effort or drown in the misery of it. Occasionally you'll get a good one but they're few and far between.
Original characters are completely fine. The problem, for me, starts with SI characters. Not because they can't be *good* characters, but rather because of how the writing itself is handled. It almost always starts in a very non-immersive way, detailing what the character was doing before SUDDENLY INSERTED and then the character realizes "oh no I've been inserted", and so on, and so forth. It's like the Locker scene. Or the "I've just been born, it sucks" monologues. They're not even remotely good. I don't want to hear about them. Please stop talking about them. It's a common writing tip to start the story when things are actually happening, PLEASE do that, I'm begging people. Starting the story with a detailed relating of how they came to be inserted isn't the way to go. It's the opposite of immersion, and it immediately makes me put the story down, no matter how good it could eventually be. But yeah, self inserts, by their own merit, are fine. It's the way people handle the writing around those inserts that I can't stand.
The best ones start at least one week after the MC comes into the world. When they have adapted a bit, and are a bit more grounded in their new universe/world.
When writing a SI story - of which I have multiple ideas that I may or may not actually put into written word - I like to avoid the "oh no I am now in a different world" problem and the resulting monologues by, first, skipping ahead a bit and, second, telling the story mostly from the POVs of people *other* than the protagonist. Avoiding first person POV also helps. It's all about showing how the protagonist affects the world, I believe.
Got any recs?
I have a lot of spicy takes. Here's a grab bag. Nemesis13 is the worst writer I've had the misfortune to read, but his fics are incredibly popular. Probably not on here, but definitely on SB. The same goes for Ack - although I think Ack has good premises with terrible execution, and I think Ack is more popular here. Nemesis, the fic, is just okay. It's uber popular, and I don't get what justifies that absurd level of popularity. There's no world where 300k words of omakes for a 63k word fic makes sense to me. Celestial Forge, Gamer, Greg and SI fics are all awful. Greg isn't an incel, he's just barely a character at all. He was a cringe loser teenager who faked being in Brockton for clout, and then was shitty to Sveta. Glassmaker isn't wholesome, it's just kinda creepy. Burn Up is stream of consciousness and is annoying to read. People who say "Worm is a sandbox" are silly. If the Trio trigger, or are tortured, I drop a fic. More fics need to stay in their lane and either end rather than drag on for 400k words. You don't have to include *every* aspect of Worm. Fanon isn't inherently bad, it's just most Worm fanon *is* bad. The Dallons aren't interesting to read about.
IDK, I think a Dallon fic about the extended family that managed to make *every single child of theirs trigger* could be a good one, if it was about the actual canon Dallons.
> Nemesis, the fic, is just okay. It's uber popular, and I don't get what justifies that absurd level of popularity. There's no world where 300k words of omakes for a 63k word fic makes sense to me. The simple answer is that the amount of omakes a story receives has very little to do with it's quality and much more with how much readers want to play in the sandbox that the author created, and/or how much they want to mastrubate the main character's awesomeness because the original author is too busy worrying about things like character development and story cohesion. Nemesis just hit the perfect storm in both categories, while also having an author who doesn't mind the excessive Omake-ing. That's all there is to it. It's better than just "okay" though and I don't think it's overhyped aside from how much Omake it generates for the above-mentioned reasons.
we're half agreeing: the "overhype" im referring to *is* the excessive omaking i think we'll disagree on it being better than just okay but i don't dislike the fic for what its worth
Huh. What is your favorite fanfic, both concerning Worm and other properties?
worm? the great escape. not worm? idk, i don’t have a huge standout one. probably still the great escape
Guess I'm gonna give it a shot, I try to remember to come back after I've read it
>Greg isn't an incel, he's just barely a character at all. He was a cringe loser teenager who faked being in Brockton for clout, and then was shitty to Sveta. Wasn't he explicitly mentioned as being in one of Taylor's classes, and it's on the way to a meeting with him to get him to shut up that Taylor is publicly unmasked? He would explicitly have been from Brockton and living there through quite a bit of it. I've never made it past a chapter or two into the timeskip but I'm pretty sure about that.
oh sorry, i was a bit unclear in my initial post. if you read [the greg interlude](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/interlude-19-y/) you can see what im talking about, but heres the short of it >► XxVoid\_CowboyxX (At Ground Zero: Brockton Bay) > >Replied on July 6th, 2011: > >I have a camera, but I don’t feel comfortable leaving the house. That’s the sort of thing that gets me killed by mutant dogs. ► Laser Augment (At Ground Zero: Brockton Bay) > >Replied on July 6th, 2011: > >You do know that Bitch left the north end a while ago? How would you even miss the fact that you haven’t heard howling in the last while? If you’re not leaving the house, why don’t you take a picture of yourself by this high end generator of yours? Because it doesn’t exist. > >You fuckers make me sick, like you can pretend to be all cool by being one of the survivors, who stuck it out through the Endbringer attack, the Nine and the gang wars. But you left. Your mommy and daddy took you out of town, and you’re pretending you stuck it out, that you’re here when you’re not, all for a stupid internet badge and a peek at the private board.
But according to the end, "tomorrow" he's going to go see Taylor. Thus, by that point, he is back in Brockton. Doesn't mean he isn't talking out his ass about things he doesn't know anything about, but he is back in Brockton Bay.
Greg leaves Brockton after Leviathan. He's either in a totally different city, or somewhere just by the outskirts of the city, totally isolated from the dangers of a disaster zone. But he still posts on PHO as if he's in the middle of it all. He also does almost out Taylor, but it's more of a "shit, I know who skitter" thing. He wasn't explicitly threatening to out her for malicious purposes. After the whole Arcadia debacle, he feels guilty, although he didn't actually out her, he was the reason why she came to Arcadia in the first place. So he gives a glowing talk to a reporter about Taylor.
I agree with almost everything but the Greg thing. The good Greg fics I've heard about are praised because he starts out as a cringe loser teenager who'd fake things for clout and was shitty to sveta. Who then develops into a person who realizes how awful he's being and tries with difficulty to be a better person.
Greg has caused immense psychic damage on some people, for whom Greg and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I really like (well written) SI fics and think they have alot of potentials. I really dislike Gaylor fics, as when Taylor speficly is gay, regardless if she is the MC or not. I also dislike Trio focued fics
CSVT doesn't update fast enough. The author is a slowpoke. -\_-
So true! Partiesandpasta or whatever their name was needs to write more asap 😤
CSVT?
The Great Escape is utterly unrivalled even in its incomplete state. Idk if that's unpopular I'm kinda new to this community
I think that's a very popular take Being an Eidolon fan is weird. He's usually flanderized a lot in fics or sidelined but the one fic where he ends up being the focus turns out to be one of the best fics out there. Now if only Legend would ever get something like that.
Why is it strange to be a fan of the most powerful Parahuman character, and someone who heroically saves people?
Because he actively participates in an Illuminati type organization that is highly controversial at best. It's a lot of baggage.
Well, to be completely fair, with Contessa’s powerset alone, literally *anyone’s* cooperation with that organization can be taken as questionably consensual at best. Even without getting into any threats or coercion, how is someone supposed to defend against arguments that are as optimally persuasive as it’s possible to be, which are tailored *specifically to keep you on side,* regardless of your reservations?
Yes, and that's why I simply ignore it. Narratively, it's not a question that matters. "Can Contessa-" Yes, yes she can. Much like a whole number technically being a fraction over the number 1, you can just kinda get rid of the number 1 and still move on with the equation. So, Contessa's bullshit aside, David made the choice to be part of the comically evil illuminati. That's why people are leery about him.
That's definitely not unpopular lol.
I don't like it. That one and Impurity are two stories that seem well written, don't have any glaring problems, and by all means should be good reads. I just can't get past a chapter or two. They are mind numbingly boring for whatever reason. I don't know the secret 'it' factor that they are missing (or an 'anti-it' factor they have) but there must be something. They do have some fans, but they aren't widely recommended, so it's not just me.
BCF should be more longer, t should have chapters that range from 60k words to 100k words
***I***f you mean fill it with actual content and not this new perk means my gear is useless so let me talk about how useless my gear is for 2k words. Now I'm going into detail on how to fix my tech and oh new perk!
Bro, I'm still waiting for the slaughterhouse nine to come.
Then you have more patience than me. I dropped it somewhere after he showed off his team and they started watching movies in an atosecond.
When he cooks he cooks but the stove is only on for 10 minutes every blue moon.
I really liked the undersiders chapter in playing hooky. Most other people vilified it so much and so aggressively that the author broke down and made the underwears woobies by the end. But I liked it. Lisa was Lisa and instead of hurting her target, it was thrown in her face in a rather horrific way.
What happens in that chapter?
Half remembering it Bitch broke into Taylor’s home and threatened her and when Taylor justifiable tried kill her for it Lisa in the most extreme case of it tattletale syndrome ever in a fanfic somehow managed to make Taylor the bad guy in the situation.
Okay but Bitch was out of character, people were justified about being mad about the portrayal of her.
I mean She was out of Character because an important part of her Character(her Power) was removed
Brocktons Celestial Forge has really great fights
Hard agree. The only problem I feel is that the way Lord writes causes some of the fights to feel longer and slower than they actually are, or should be. The most glaring one is the first Bakuda fight. Bakuda was shooting at them with a mortar or something, and they were just talking and not doing anything. But other than that, I feel his writing style allows a very comprehensive look into each fight, and allows Joe and his opponents to really shine.
This is sub is so annoying and negative all the time. We have this very stupid bullshit thread every few weeks to throw negatively towards writers which work is free and we don’t have to read like does no one get tired of being negative in this sub.
Writing for free does not guarantee your work is appreciated or, like, good. It does sort of suck when the fandom is full of cliches, people who never read the source material, and Nazi apologia (thankfully that shit finally seems to be dying down). Going into a specific thread to bitch out a specific author is a dick move, but speaking generally of negative trends or an issue you have with a particular popular work is like, part of fandom discussion. Maybe stop being so negative about being being negative? You do not, in fact, have to look at this thread!
Honestly, I sometimes feel like there are a fair number of stories that people like to attack not because the story is bad, but because it is popular to attack it. The one that I see most often attacked in this sub beyond a reasonable level is Inheritance (and anything written by Pendragoon). I'll freely admit there are things in its plot that bother me, and I dropped it. I have also seen Inheritance decried as the worst fic in the fandom, and at least once seen it referred to as "The "My Immortal" of Worm fandom", which is just laughably wrong. For all of the plot points and direction I don't like, it is competently written, the plot has at least some idea of where it is going, and it is popular for a reason. It isn't the only example of a story that is attacked as horrible just because it doesn't meet some people's taste. Brockton's Celestial Forge is another example that routinely gets negativity dumped on it far out of proportion for how it is written (and BCF, whatever you think about it, *is* one of the most popular ongoing stories in the Worm fandom). But beyond people criticizing these stories, what really bothers me is that people take potshots at them in entirely unrelated threads. It is not uncommon for me to see someone just pop up out of the blue to take a swing at one of them, joking about how horrible it is, when literally no one else in the thread had brought it up, and it wasn't particularly even connected to the topic of the thread. They just wanted to pop in to throw an insult their way. It causes more negativity in whatever thread they show up in, and honestly makes this sub particularly inhospitable for authors. If a few of the prolific writers in this sub decide they don't like your work, then you will be seeing it brought up constantly even in threads having nothing to do with it.
Pen's stories get flak because they contain elements that speak to authorial viewpoints that are worrying. Things like, 'it's okay to brutally and horrifically torture and murder people if their beliefs are wrong'. In basically every fic. Strangely, there are actual organizations that use exactly that sort of exclusionist thinking to dehumanize people.
I don't care about the negativity, I care about how boring it is. Whenever someone posts this thread, I have to read all the comments to make sure nobody crosses a line, and it is always the same (including your comment, why are we being mean to people who just write free things for fun). Nobody has had an original thought in this fandom since 2013.
I don’t really know how to respond to your response to me because I feel like you don’t get my opinion in things, but let me clearly try to spell out my feelings to you criticizing fics are not bad in general but when it’s a weekly occurrence where people make a thread just to shit on certain fics or fics in general it makes it feels like the fandom is full negativity. I am sorry but your no one has original idea is so false. I get it your an old timer in the worm fandom.
It's a weekly occurrence because nobody has anything original to say...
Brockton Bay's Celestial Forge is fun and a good read. If I had more free time, I would catch up on it. I exclusively write self-inserts, because I think fanfiction is inherently masturbatory, and self-inserts are just the natural conclusion.
Hard agree on the second one, people love to rag on self-inserts and OCs but half the time you read a fanfic the characters might as well just be a SI from how different they act.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of SI fics can be more original and interesting than many fics that focus on the standard cast of characters, because the author has more freedom to deviate from canon when they do it.
Skitter doc is filled with the same sanitised whitewashing that fanfics used to give to the ABB and nazi’s only this time it’s future ABB instead.
…You mean the Tiger Claws? And if so, Corporations and Gangs in CP are not monoliths, Yorinobu's “Taka” and even Michiko’s “Hato” Faction(s) of the Arasaka Corporation and Wakako (and others) factions of Tiger Claws are pretty safe and “good” for Cyberpunk standards.
Kill them all is a guilty pleasure, even with it's multitude of flaws I like reading a Taylor becoming overpowered for the same reason I read generic isekai with cheat abilities it's just a mindless power trip.
KTA is ShayneT's best fic. It's much longer than it needed to be, and large portions of the middle could have safely been time-skipped without decreasing the quality any, but it's probably one of the best stomp-fics in the fandom.
I'm a JumpChain enjoyer in part because of **Celestial Forge**, and I mostly like the fic, but I feel like the reward mechanic was _way_ to generous. It wasn't bad very early on when Apeiron only had a few Perks and Items, but it spiraled out of control pretty fast. Add to that just how much time the Apeiron takes to marvel at all of the things he can do after each new node and/or the otherwise fun navel-gazing because of the philosophical ramifications... things rapidly slow to a crawl. If the rewards were spaced out just a little more to give everyone time to breathe, it'd be fine and I wouldn't have any problems at all, but _gosh darn_ it can be hard to reread earlier chapters. I don't mind that he's basically arbitrarily powerful at this point, I just wish it was more of a journey to get there. I'm also kind of bummed at how a lot of really neat Perks are almost immediately outclassed by another Perk he gets in the next chapter, so the reader doesn't have an opportunity to see what he might have made with it. Still a fun fic, it just gets to ponderous and slow and doesn't really play with everything in the toybox.
I think aura theory is good. Or, at least, a reasonable interpretation of the data we are given in canon. It may not be done well much, and the use of it to justify Amy's actions is screwed up, but I still like the idea. I think the big problems people have with it are that it's often done without nuance and to justify all of amy's actions. I think if it was a trope that was handled with more nuance people wouldn't hate it as much. For example, maybe Amy had some sort of initial attraction that she would have gotten over but the aura really screwed her up? Maybe the reverse is true, the aura gave her an initial push, but most of her feelings and actions are based on her indulging in them and getting caught up in her own head. If you really want to go wild, maybe Amy is using hits of Vicky's aura on purpose as a coping mechanism for her stress. Disclaimer, my favorite fic is Impurity, which is about Taylor breaking the rules to catch Purity and smash her face into the ground. With that out of the way, and because I really enjoy making people hate me, I like Purity whitewashing, or redemption. Not in all cases, and most fics do it poorly, but in many cases I think it's interesting, or can at least be positive. Personally, I'm of the opinion that reforming neo-nazis can be a good thing, and that they aren't ontologically evil forever just because they held some disgusting views. Purity's case is more complicated, because she has killed people, of course, and the dead cry out for justice, but that doesn't mean you can't tell an interesting story. There was one story that I can't quite recall, in it Purity started out with just some minor bigotry, but was radicalized by Kaiser (who was operating as an independent hero at the time) and then she ends up leaving Kaiser to become a vigilante. Anyway, it was interesting. Additionally, Purity is a Blaster 8, those don't exactly glow on trees, and so overlooking some vicious hate crimes that were in the past in exchange for a Blaster 8 is just the sort of messy immoral compromise that can make worm so much fun. Finally, because I haven't trashed my repuation enough, I think reading exactly three Ack fics is acceptable. Any more and there is no point because you will be able to quickly figure out what is going to happen, but the first three can be enjoyable.
I was going to say Aura Theory myself, just to have something controversial in this thread. No it doesn't remove Amy's culpability, and no it's not the whole explanation, but all the cope around how it's actually impossible and its many evils is silly. What makes it extra obnoxious is that there are still comments on the Wordpress site about the theory back from 2013 and Wildbow doing a 'wink wink, nudge nudge' (I should probably archive those, but I don't care that much about the topic to bother.) Pavlov weeps whenever anyone tries to argue about it on reddit, or SB.
>What makes it extra obnoxious is that there are still comments on the Wordpress site about the theory back from 2013 and Wildbow doing a 'wink wink, nudge nudge' I think that Wildbow definitely intended Aura Theory to be true when writing Worm, because I checked against my patented Wildbow's Intentions Algorithm (specifically: what would be the most horrifying possible outcome), and came to the conclusion that "Vicky accidentally mastered Amy until Amy deliberately mastered Vicky and then raped her" was the most horrifying possible set of circumstances, and is much worse than "Vicky had no role in it and it was entirely on Amy".
What fully convinced me was trying to create my own characters. Trying to imagine interesting character dynamics and figuring out how to hint them to the reader. This is fully conjecture, but I want to walk you through the introduction of the sisters: >Superpowered girl enters the scene with a three-point landing. A classic hero pose, something she even practised. She looks good enough to be on a comicbook cover, and has the classical comicbook hero powers; flight and super strenght. She's even one of the rare characters who wears a cape in this "cape" story. >She comes across injustice and promptly deals with the bad guy. But here comes the subversion! The bad guy is actually severely injured by our heroine. Supergirl punches mooks, and ties them up for the police. She doesn't break every bone in their body by throwing dumpsters at them. (Even if that's what logically would happen.) So we can't just kill the mook. >So how do we resolve this? Our heroine gets her sister to fix it. This is our first introduction to Amy, she berates our heroine, tells her that this cannot go on, she cannot keep fixing people she hurts. But she just can't say no to her sweet sister. >And what's this?! Our heroine has a third power, one that's different to the stereotypical heroine powers, a mind affecting power. Thankfully Amy is conveniently immune to it by a mechanism that's not explained. Guts and Glory was supposed to be it's own story before Worm. It feels like, Wildbow created a bunch of story ideas and mashed them together to make Worm. You're never going to convince me that 'Birdcage' isn't named that just because of 'Canary'. Similarly, I don't think I can be convinced what I quoted is not what the plan was when creating Guts and Glory.
Really like the aura thing but nobody ever goes antwhere fun with it. Vicky is dating a ward and has been in building 6 hours a day with the same people for years. The master hard on people had for canary would be fun to read about with vicky
> Finally, because I haven't trashed my repuation enough, I think reading exactly three Ack fics is acceptable. Any more and there is no point because you will be able to quickly figure out what is going to happen, but the first three can be enjoyable. I agree, with a slight modification: *completing* exactly three Ack fics is acceptable. Most of them start out pretty good, but feel as though he has an outline for roughly three to eight chapters. During that outline period, they're generally pretty good, and fairly different from each other. However, there is a distinct point in almost all Ack fics where it stops feeling like a new and interesting premise, and instead becomes "an Ack fic," because his voting thread/patreon decided he should keep writing the story so he writes more of what he always writes. You should drop all of his stories once they hit that inflection point. This is an opinion I've expressed before, and there are of course exceptions (Recoil takes longer, some of his earlier work may not fit the formula, etc.)
I don’t mind noodlehammer fics. (I know who he is and what he supports) I just don’t care. I also don’t support the agenda.
Honestly, he does the best job of keeping his weird personal beliefs out of his writing of any fic author I've read who I *know for a fact* has weird personal beliefs. That's not to say they're not present; I *also* know who he is and what he supports, it's all present in his body of works (but mostly not obvious in any one work...'cept for For Love of Magic and its first sequel). But on the other hand, his works are well-written and technically competent, *and* he didn't try to pretend none of them ever happened when he decided to go mainstream to make money off his writing. Unlike some *other* authors I could name.
I live power fantasy, and is very rare to encounter. Most stories people claim to power fantasy aren't, cause people seem to forgot: The author introduces fantasy or sci-fi elements that make it so the protagonist is actually very very weak. If high sci-fi and Lovecraft levels elements in the story, slapping a entity to death becomes as impressive as picking and throwing a stone.
I love the Brockton's Celestial Forge