I feel as though it would just be nice if it was addressed and dealt with. In the actual story, it felt as though it was just left unfinished, like it the author would come back and fully address it at some point but something kept escalating and had to be dealt with. Even what happened to Sophia never felt finished to me. Emma's part seemed almost finished and I feel as though one more interlude with her would have left me satisfied but I guess it doesn't change all that much.

 

Plus, she was there for the big reveal of Taylor's identity and we got to see her "Oh shit, I am so dead" face. I felt it was really satisfying since they sent a whole team against her and she controlled the situation anyways, driving the point home. You get that and the imp interlude at the end, showing that she did turn the tables on them, that she was too big for them and they knew it.

 

Hell, did you want her to have Emma eaten alive or something? Taylor came to the realization that she'd built herself into one of the most powerful figures in the city, gained a story group of friends, and accomplished more in a few months than Emma or Sophia would likely do in their entire lives. That's pure catharsis; she's a popular leader, Emma's a high school bully.

You don't need Emma talking about how she'd wronged Taylor or any of that bullshit. You got an extremely strong impression from their encounter outside Arcadia that Emma realized that Taylor was now way out of her league. Spoonfeeding anything more or having the revenge take place in some sort of punch up would have completely missed the point.

Taylor won. She completely and utterly rose above her tormentors. She made Emma into a bit part. If that's not a glorious victory for her worthy of closing out the plotline, I don't know what is

 

Two things:

1) It was normal, run-of-the-mill bullying done to Taylor. Barring the locker incident, nothing the trio did would earn so much as a second look from most high school students. The thing with the locker was a bit beyond "normal" bullying, but not by that much. What Taylor went through happens damn near every day in schools in the US. It's a sad fact of life.

2) How is Emma being made utterly insignificant not an end to the subplot? She stopped mattering, and there would have been just as much impact on the story if a bridge had been dropped on her. How is that in any way not a conclusion to the arc?

 

Where the hell did you grow up? Just what they did to Taylor in the first chapter went way beyond any high school bullying I've ever seen.

 

It just felt like nothing was resolved, and that Taylor had bigger problems to deal with. Thats not exactly a satisfying conclusion. I'm gonna stop derailing now.

 

San Francisco, and, barring the locker, nothing Taylor went through was at all out of the ordinary for bullying behavior. Stolen homework, passive-aggressively being insulted, being randomly tripped while walking down halls, etc, are all fairly standard bully tactics. For the most part, little of it is truly meant maliciously, but kids tend to be cruel fucks when they don't think things through.

Taylor's situation, on the whole, is on the worse end of average, insofar as it's a very targeted and deliberate campaign of cruelty, but, except for the biohazard locker, no individual incident was beyond the everyday bully tactic.

Edit:
@Sree: You still haven't answered the question. How is "Emma no longer matters to Taylor in any way, shape or form" not a resolution to the subplot? I get your point, and if it was a thread that had been left hanging, I would agree with you, but the entire thing was concluded quite firmly with Taylor's realization that Emma was a petty thug who she had already grown well beyond. What more was there to say about it? Does Emma's own realization that she's a terrible person actually contribute anything, at all?

 

Being forced to eat lunch in a bathroom and having rancid juice or soda or whatever it was poured all over her goes a little further than stolen homework. I guess a city school's rougher than what I went through though.

 

It wasn't rancid at all. She ate lunch in the bathroom to avoid the bullies (something I never had to do, but I knew people who did similar things, like not having a 'hang out spot' like the rest of the school did, etc), they came in and discovered she was in there, so they had the bright idea to dump the juice they had brought for lunch on her to amuse themselves for a few minutes. It's kinda like the same thought process everyone has had at some point in their lives, where they see something they don't like (like, for example, a segment from Fox News, or a direct-to-SyFy movie, etc) and they suddenly feel the urge to call it stupid or heckle it or whatever.

Exact same thought process happens with people IRL, and kids are generally much worse at controlling the impulse.

Also, do remember that Wildbow has said pretty much everything that happened to Taylor was a modified retelling of a real account of bullying he either experienced, saw, or was told about.

 

I can fully believe the bullying, it's pretty terrible where I live. I just hate how incompetent the school is at handling it. And this time I'll really stop >.>

 

Oh. I must've been conflating it with the locker incident.

 

It was abnormal, run of the mill bullying; a bit more then normal, but still at a point were people would say "Yea, a bad case of bullying."
Bullying is sadism, pure and simple. That's nothing new.

Trigger events are all over the place and not an indication of how dangerous the situation is. The're born from isolation, not death threats.

Often, there really is no good resolution or closure. Stuff just passes away, gets less and less pressing until going back to solve it feels petty and no longer fitting. It passes into the background but, depending on the situation, may loom in the background (Scion getting bullied to death, Taylor still on her stop the bullies spree even just before she got jailbroken).

 

Last post I'm making on this subject:

Sadly, the bullying in Worm wasn't very unusual at all. The only thing that was mentioned that seemed at all out of the ordinary for a public school was the locker incident, and even that is only surprising in that it took so long before she was let out by anybody. The way the bullying was dealt with was also entirely par for the course as far as the school goes.

I don't know where you went to school where this would be considered unduly shocking. I hope that one day maybe everyone will find it so.

Moving away from that, I would like to say one more time that I personally believe Emma's fadeaway was a flawless end to that arc, and that if an interlude had been written it would have lessened the impact of it. Emma is not going to feel guilty about what she did to Taylor. Maybe given time to mature and realize the full impact of her actions she might one day feel guilty, but in the short term? She's going to feel scared. She's going to feel confused. And as a result of that confusion, she'll probably just feel angry at Taylor for not reacting to the bullying as she wanted her to.

I'd just like to reiterate here: there is no realistic way for the author to make Emma repent for her actions at all. Any action Emma made as reparation would be motivated only from fear, not from any actual guilt. All an interlude would have done is confirm to us that Emma is still a relevant person in this story, and the entire point of that particular storyline is that she is not, despite all of the terrible things she did attempting to be important. Once again: literally the absolute most crushing form of revenge that can be had on Emma has already been had, and asking for anything more is just looking for something to satisfy your own personal sense of justice by trying to force her character into feeling a guilt that realistically she would never feel.

===

On the topic of the thread, Cenotaph is, I think, pretty clearly the best Worm fic out there. I haven't seen anything new and interesting pop up lately, but I'm also not really certain where to look. Are ff.net and spacebattles pretty much the only places where Worm fanfic can be found these days?

 

Dude, I hate to break it to you... but if a girl getting locked in a locker filled to the brim with used tampons isn't a surprising occurrence at your school, then you need to transfer. Like yesterday.

 

It's been several years since high school, but all of the public schools in my area aren't much fun. I had a better go of it than most, but public school, especially in areas with a great deal of poverty like the one I live in, is fucking horrible, and I sometimes really envy people who apparently went to much nicer schools than I did.

Just as an aside, transfer isn't always a possibility. There were only two public schools I could have gone to in my area, and transferring would have been almost impossible because of transportation issues.

Perhaps I overstated my position, however. The tampons would be shocking because of the amount of preparation implied, whereas I feel a lot of bullying happens as a result of poor impulse control. Someone getting locked into their locker, though, not particularly shocking.

...I'm really bad at this 'this is my last post' shit.

 

I can't read Cenotaph, just like I've stopped reading Wormfic.

It's drab. Boring. Cliche and repetitive. I can name off the first five events in fucking order, without missing a beat. Nobody tries anything new or exciting. Even HP had stuff like what Japanese Jew wrote, and insane AUs like Lords of Magic, way back in the day.

Worm's got nothing. Taylor is bullied, different powers, join the Wards, talk to fucking Clockblocker, bullying repercussions or "Sophia is needed for Endbringers", fight Lung. It's boring. You'd think that for a story with a world as interesting as Worm's was before the timeskip, people would do something different.

You want Trigger events? Taylor triggers during Leviathan's attack. Taylor triggers in the car crash. Taylor triggers during the Slaughterhouse Nine. There are so, so, so many fascinating ways that Taylor could trigger that aren't in the fucking locker. I'm so done with that locker it isn't even funny. The fanfiction in Worm is stagnating incredibly hard, which is one of the main problems people are having with the fandom. It's hard to be impressed by the same story told in six different ways, you know? Just like how little attention we give canon rehashes, Worm is currently nothing but canon rehashes "But with a tweeeest!"