Title: This Is Your Only Purpose
Author: Ringed in Spears
Rating: T
Genre: Sci-Fi
Status: Work in Progress (63k words thus far, with nearly daily updates of 1-2k)
Summary: A girl wakes up amid the ruins of humanity, and needs to find her way through the landmines of the past. Guardians and Risen are not who they used to be. They are reborn in the Light. But consequences still linger.
Link: SV

The Worm fandom is a mess, and always seems like the horse that's been beaten twice past death - but every time I think I'm out, some wise guy comes along, turns that mess into music, and sucks me back in.

Enter this fic.

The Destiny fandom has always been hurting for long, coherent fics (that aren't an extended excuse for someon's self-insert to power-bottom Cayde, Shaxx, Uldren or Zavala) - something that isn't aided by most of the canon universe and lore revolving around the classic MMO messiah the form of the Young Wolf/Guardian.

This fic neatly sidesteps that issue by setting the fic in the dark ages before the founding of the City, when the first Guardians were called the Risen, and many of them took one look at their functional immortality and super powers and went 'oh, so I'm god then' and became tyrants.

The brilliance of crossing Worm, and Taylor Hebert into such a time and setting becomes immediately obvious when you imagine how Taylor, at the end of Worm, would react to meeting the Vanguard (given what we know about them now, lore-wise).

Ringed in Spears has been extremely consistent about updating, and really has a talent for the Hemingway-esque minimalism that is sort of a hallmark of the lore entries about Hunters, Shin Malphur and the time before the City. I've invited them over to DLP to post in the WbA, but in the meanwhile, I figured 60k was enough substance to put up for review.

 

Interesting. If im not familiar with destiny would I be able to follow along if i gave the fix a try?

 

Almost certainly. The fic is very much from the perspective of someone trying to figure out what the fuck this all is. Case in point: 60k in, Taylor still doesn't feel confident enough to even name herself.

 

So I read chunks of this last year and admittedly I set my expectations high because of the person who recced it, but found it entirely unremarkable. Forgettable enough that coming back to review it a year later, all I can think is that my eyes definitely saw tens of thousands of those words at one point.

I think the most fundamental problem is that it's all telling and hardly any showing.
'The girl did this. The girl said that. The girl's jaw clenched.' I just don't find the style of writing engaging or interesting. The brevity here aspires to Hemingway but lacks his punch. As a side note, I really ought to read some more Hemingway.

The writing is clean, to the author's credit, but all for the worse when it highlights the dullness inherent to the conceit of amnesiac characters. Because the entire cast has had their memories mostly wiped, they all come across as OCs with distilled essence of Worm character to them, which feels somehow worse than out-of-character/in-name-only canon castings.

I'd say some of it is the fact that I'm not at all invested in Destiny's story. Sure I don't need to know about the game to read it, but it definitely feels like I should need to know in order to care about it. I know more about the Worm side of things, but as before, they all might as well be blank slates or player characters without any of their experiences to justify their personalities. I think the most Worm-like quality of the story is the bleakness omnipresent in the original serial.

The characters' motivations, or lack thereof, seem hollow. Aside from surviving the post-apocalyptic setting, they're driven by traits that feel largely unearned. Furthermore, the revival mechanic severely undercuts the tension and the stakes, even with the threat of losing the ghost as well. The fight scenes have some amusing moments but they lack drama. I don't find myself engaged.

Skimming the more recent updates, I can see that there's movement towards integrating more elements from Worm, but at an abysmally slow pace. Maybe if I played Destiny I would be eagerly anticipating the next story beat or setpiece reveal, but coming in as a blank slate reading about blank slates trudging through some desolate wasteland, I don't see the hook. I'm just glazing over words at that point.

2/5. If it were worse grammatically but more fun to read I'd be more generous in hesitantly recommending at around 3/5. Unfortunately it's mechanically sound and terminally interesting.