I feel like Stronger is going to end up badly. I fear he's going to take too many retarded suggestions from that thread and give Taylor every ability under the sun.

 

Yep. That's why I will never post anything I write to SB or SV. Can't stand munchkins.

 

can you explain what munchkin means? I hear that term thrown around a lot.

 

Yeah, Stronger is not going well, imo. Being able to charge every item each day is incredibly broken. There's no way that was Dauntless's power in canon; either he or someone in the PRT hoping he'd take on the Endbringers would have made him charge literally everything in site instead of just his shield, spear and boots.

I think Cenotaph had a better take on it, where he could only charge once a day, and it accumulated really slowly. So he had to make a tradeoff between offense, defense, mobility, etc. instead of getting OP like in Stronger.

Go Gently is a nice fic. Feels like a slice of life kind of fic, which is rare in Worm.

Weaver Nine is great, but the Endbringer!Wank is too much. I posted above why I thought Leviathan was treated badly, particularly his bypassing of the manton effect and the core's obscene durability, but that ending of the fight was even worse. When Behemoth died in canon, his final attack is disrupted by Grue's darkness and Scion subsequently killing him. Presumably if an Endbringer is dead, the effects of their powers should stop, but instead, when Leviathan is reduced to 1/16th of his core (with no ill effect, which is ridiculous), he manages a giant Wave of doom with a never before seen ability he pulls out of nowhere.

Almost made me drop the fic. But the aftermath is nice.

I dread seeing the rest of the Endbringer wank. He'll probably do something like have Simurgh casually bypass the Manton effct, have Behemoth fly with repeated explosions (granted, he does that in canon, albeit clumsily, nright beofre he dies), or something equally ridiculous.

 

It's a term originally from D&D, I believe, which is essentially an alternative label for "that guy that takes everything way too seriously, rules lawyers everything, min/maxes his character through rampant abuse of loopholes and 'creative use of game mechanics', and is a colossal jackass who ruins games". The classic example is that of the guy who makes the level 1 character that can one hit kill a god, or set up the Peasant Railgun.

It's evolved a bit over time, but the core of it still remains. It's a generally-negative label given to people who are obsessed with performance over everything else, and are given to finding and wildly abusing any kind of loopholes or flaws they can find in the system for maximal advantage.

In the context of Worm, the term is frequently applied to Taylor because of how she used her power. She took something that, at first glance, doesn't seem very strong or useful, and made herself into one of the most dangerous people on the planet through creative use of her abilities.

 

I like SB/SV; I post there a lot, I've put a few of my humor snippets up there. But 90+% of the posters in the Creative Writing forums make syed look good.

 

My opinion on Go Gently has flipped.

Spoiler

My first indication of uneasiness was the interlude where Taylor’s shards/buds were talking. It pissed me off. One, shards are completely alien to human understanding, they wouldn’t have human senses of humor or sarcasm, especially buds which are newly born. Two, it seems like the story is going to treat having multiple buds as being stronger as a cape, instead of just influencing how what Taylor’s base power is going to be. Three, I’m pretty sure that’s not how powers work. You get a shard/bud, and that’s it. When your trigger event happens, the shard pings off nearby shards to change what power it’s going to manifest as. So if the author wanted Taylor to be influenced from several types of powers, she could have had her trigger with Lung / Danny / other people in the area.

That’s just one thing. Klael and I got into an in-depth discussion about this fic last night and the more I looked at it, the more stupid it seemed.

Just the idea of Taylor being left alone in Brockton Bay at age twelve. First, that’s illegal. Danny didn’t want to take her away from her friends, but his move to Boston is sanctioned by the PRT. In what world would the PRT let him leave his barely teenaged daughter behind without adult supervision? It’d be fine if she was sixteen, seventeen. But twelve? I can see the newspaper headlines now.

“Superhero abandons twelve-year-old daughter alone so he can fight crime in another city”

The PRT wouldn’t let Danny leave her behind, or at least would find some other guardianship for her.

Danny didn’t even set her up with any contacts. Taylor’s only adult supervision is the people in her apartment building, who Danny doesn’t know and hasn’t met. She interacts with Kenta, her only neighbor, but it’s normal for her not to see him for a month. Danny doesn’t send any of his cape / PRT associates to check in on her. In fact, it’s like the PRT doesn’t know she exists. Sure, Emma and Sophia are in the Wards and can watch her, but that’s not a substitute for a parent and they don’t live with her.

This brings me to the point of Taylor’s attitude. It took me a while to come up with a phrase that describes her personality. I finally settled on ‘3D anime character.’ This has nothing to do with the Japanese table thing or the culture she’s picking up, I thought that was well done. It’s her personality that bugs me.

For one, she’s stupid. Taylor is very smart. She’s twelve/thirteen and can be oblivious, but not this damn oblivious. She should be noticing Danny is a cape. She knows Gumshoe moved cities at the same time as Danny. Even if he’s been keeping his distance from her, she should notice something weird happening to her remaining parent, especially so soon after Annette’s death.

This brings me to Taylor’s depression and anger at being abandoned by her father so soon after her mother died. Oh wait, she’s not angry or depressed. She shows moments of anger to Danny, but there’s no long-lasting effects. She’s twelve/thirteen and is perfectly all right at living on her own. She’s not scared or depressed at her situation, which she should be. Ever heard of latchkey children? This is what I think of when a child is left at home for long hours. It's not supposed to be cool.

Taylor is an anime character. She feels real, with reliable emotions and personality, but it’s shallow. It doesn’t go in-depth enough, and misunderstands the consequences of her history.

All the characters are anime. Sophia in particular. She’s a sociopath. You can feel her real personality in the interludes with the Wards, but in this fic, it’s treated as a quirky character trait. Taylor and Sophia would never be friends, because Sophia is so into her predator/prey mentality. Making fun of weaker people, bullying, looking down on anything she considers to be a prey characteristic. In canon, she pushed Emma to live out her predator dreams, and I don’t see why Taylor staying friends of Emma would change that. I also don’t accept Emma keeping her cape life a secret from Taylor. Once Sophia approved of her, she’d be jumping at the chance of bringing her best friend on board.

I bet $10 that Lung’s hand in the underage sex trade is never mentioned.

I change my previous rating.

3/5.

It has good prose and moments to draw you in, but the more I think about it, the more stupid it is.

 

I'm having similar thoughts, though the fluffy writing and prose appeals to me in the sea of locker room scenes, shocking "Iv;e had an idea fro a taylor with x" prompts and just generally poor writing.

I suppose I'm a sucker for a whimsical piece, even if I never read it again.

4/5 for me at this point.

 

Just got through a new story:

Subduction

Premise is Taylor with a power changing power joins Faultline's crew to pay for Danny's medical bills. Only 4 bits up so far, but all of them were very good.

 

Going to Faultline gives it some uniqueness, but it's writing is average at best. Taylor is out-of-character, and making her appear as a Tinker is nearly as bad as a Trump. Is it only fanon that Tinkers are highly sought out? The author mentioned at the end of one chapter (in the drabble thread) that Scion is dead somehow and Contessa went on vacation to a different dimension. The idea is so stupid that I'm hoping it wasn't included in the actual thread because the author realized their idiocy.

 

Was mentioned that Scion hadn't been seen in 2 years, I believe.

This one isn't going anywhere. Premise is just bad. Power is bad and poorly explained. Bad.

Also agree that Weaver Nine took a poor turn with the Leviathan fight. Far too much focus on how awesome Leviathan was and all the cool super weapons that were being put to use. And I don't get the narrative purpose for wiping out half the eastern seaboard. A bit too extreme for the situation.

Go Gently has been... different so far. I personally do like Sophia depicted as something other than a frothing at the mouth S9 trainee, but I agree that the characterization with her and Emma is way off. Taylor seems uncharacteristically oblivious, and I too absolutely despised the interlude. What the fuck was he even trying to write?

 

Yeah, Taylor's power rendering her alternately blissed out or comatose at powers is just terrible.

The only decent Worm fics I can think of are Ryuggi's stories and snippets (though I felt his Lung!Taylor one had a super duper out of character Taylor which the rest of the story made up for; same with his Jack!Taylor, who is a HUGE change from canon!Taylor), Weaver Nine (even with the problems I mentioned above), Cenotaph and its sequel, and a couple of snips here and there. There's an Alchemical!Taylor that's pretty decent, but the fluff for Exalted and its over-the-top descriptions kinda annoy me.

Silent was shaping up to be, if not amazing, at least original. Then it had the most retarded Leviathan fight of all time (with icicles of all thing somehow injuring Alexandria) and it stopped updating.

I think the Worm!fandom suffers from a couple of problems in particular:

1. Huge adherence to the Stations of Canon. Everyone has to have the locker scene, a Lung fight, Leviathan fight in Brockton Bay, the S9 coming to town, etc.

2. Massive flanderization of everyone: Sophia is not just a bitch, but criminally retarded (tlike rying to murder the protagonist in the shitty SI fic "Security"), Armsmaster being completely socially inept and an asshole, etc.

3. Some dumb way of getting Cauldron out of the picture, because everyone seems think Contessa makes telling a good story impossible (Manager comes to mind, as does Subduction, a bunch of Exalted crossovers, that Tony Stark fic, etc.)

4. Some way of incorporating a power testing scene to show Taylor's new and amazing ability off.

 

Ahh its a Welcome to Night Vale crossover, it might seem strange but Welcome to Night Vale is to put in simply strange. Here is an episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1xz8_ikMAE

He seems to be trying to convey the atmosphere of Night Vale I personally felt it was humorous.

 

This annoys me almost as much as Harry going on a shopping trip to Diagon Alley does in HP fics does. If I ever get around to writing a fic there will be no power testing whatsoever. Instinctive knowledge all the way, baby.

 

And this is where it gets bad for me: the parts of canon that fics change are also incredibly predictable. Tattletale mentions Coil and his antics early. Coil gets put down early. Something happens to Sophia early, Dinah Alcott etc,

I am willing to forgive the bullying even if I hate it simply because it's the equivalent of Harry getting a letter from Hogwarts. Sure, it's far more annoying but it's the same idea.

Power testing is fine for me, YMMV but I like the exposition. What makes it really, really suck is the predictability of fanfiction, not Worm. You take Taylor, give her a great trump power and then give her the usual anime "everyone's jaw drops when I do something" cliche and it becomes cringe.

I would love to see a power testing scene where the testers don't freak out. They take her power levels, they scribble something down and they just move on. The Wards can lose their shit but it seems to me that trained professionals...don't. They certainly don't let little kids feel as if they're the hottest shit in the building. It's one thing to be impressed. Being too impressed though?

And this seems a bit unfair but, when it comes to fanfiction writers, it's better to err on the side of caution. There's a fine line between awesome and overselling.

If she joins the Wards she'll probably have to have her powers tested. But nothing says that you actually have to show it.

 

A Cloudy Path is a thoroughly decent story. It updates regularly, is decently written, doesn't spend too much time on rehashing canon or the standard departures, doesn't have much overdone fanon bullshit, and could plausibly come to some sort of conclusion without the plot collapsing under its own weight, which puts it ahead of 90% of the stories I've read. However, it also doesn't really have anything that I'd consider exceptional, and "is a decent length story that isn't awful" isn't really enough for me to call it good.

 

Yeah, it's decent for what it is. The problem I found with it is that nothing happens. I can recall a single moment from this fic aside from the Lung and Bakuda fight. A lot of chapters go by with nothing happening aside from "Taylor tinkers in her lab." I won't say I dislike Taylor's character because there's always room for insecure characters in bad situations, but her attitude is frustrating. It's also strange for me to read about this Taylor being terrified of Lung, then go to Cenotaph Taylor who's an equal arch-nemesis to Lung.

 

I'm trying to write a Worm story at the moment I have to admit I'm a bit guilty of some of these clichés.

The locker scene is a pet peeve of mine as well. Taylor needs some kind of trigger event I've seen a few writers use something other than the locker but by and large the locker is the most convenient way to give Taylor a trigger. I agree with others its her Hogwart's letter.

I think its best to take the Worm canon approach i.e. Don't begin the story at the locker there's no need to even write the locker scene just drop some oblique mentions of Taylor's trigger event unless its absolutely relevant to the story. Start the story post 'first year' and mention the sorting in a conversation or something.

Endbringers are kind of central to the worm universe. Unless you drastically alter Taylor's personality she is going to want to show up to any local fight with one. Taylor not volunteering would be like Harry not going into the Chamber of Secrets. I have some ideas about how I'd handle the fight in my story - probably have Taylor waking up in hospital and show key things through flashbacks. You can avoid Leviathan attacking the city if you somehow spin it so Noelle is not in Brockton Bay. I have plans for The Travellers in my story so kind of hard to avoid Leviathan showing up.

Power testing scene I hope to avoid plan would be to have Taylor using power in combat intersped with flashbacks. I dunno if that will kill the pacing of the actions scenes though have to think about it some more.