Come on, DLP tearing SB to pieces regardless of how much hot air SB spews is clearly the more interesting part.

 

My favorite so far.

Who knew Wildbow was a closet DLP fan?

 

Might have to do with the fact that he's on our IRC server every day, without fail?

 

See, here I am fucking around on the boards... :facepalm

 

God!Tattletale...Yeesh.

I thought Noelle was bad but her power spreads across the Thinker/Tinker barrier to just a general nightmare.

 

Im actually surprised that no one in the SB thread picked up on that.

XD

As for mods laying down the law over there:

Ack's post from what I hear definitely violated the rules.

But everything else? It's suffering from, what I like to call, the creeper dilution.

Ie. If everything is "creepy" behaviour than nothing will be.

Like Sinclair said nothing in her thread over on SB violated any rules. My post there was as "risque" as it gets and even then it was akin to the "lol one sided lust."

But oh no thats creepy that bad.


The phrase Oppression intensifies is said half jokingly but thats half. It is completely serious.

I suppose its better than being too Lax at the cost of "Suppress. EVERY. THING."

 

It's one of the reasons that I genuinely prefer the community here, it's a bit smaller in terms of active posters and there tends to generally be less asshattery all around. The only reason I even bother with SB is because every now and then it can be enjoyable to get involved in a discussion, that said, some of the rules are silly but at the same time there's a lot of the membership that ARE genuinely creepy weirdos and the rules keep them from getting even more out of hand than they do already. I ill-advisedly ventured over to QuestionableQuesting out of morbid curiosity. Cat pictures were required - and not a whole lot in terms of written prose freaks me out after years following various fandoms and the invariable dregs that any successful franchise attracts.

In that vein it's nice to see A Survivor is Born over here given it may attract actual comments about the plot rather than just what powers Taylor has. Have to admit I wish there was more Worm fanfic on DLP, or at the least that it attracted more attention when it was posted here (notes and Heather being the two authors I can think of off the top of my head that have active stories up in WbA).

 

I'm just enjoying the reactions from that little snippet. It shows the very different thought processes that go through the minds of your typical DLPer/Spacebattler.

I've come to think of it in terms of the scientist vs artist. Where Spacebattles is very much about logical, rational thought (not surprising given the fandoms it grew from) DLP is all about the story, about striking the balance between internal consistency and dramatic flair.

Hell, I could even couch it in terms of Wildbow's own stories. Worm is much more SB's playground where knowing the powers of everyone and working out what they're theoretically capable of is a very advantageous skill to have. Pact is where DLP would shine; the abstract and the symbolic play as much of a role in how things work as any logical categorising does.

In short, both views have their advantages... but I'd much rather read a story by someone with a flair for the dramatic than someone who knows everything about the structure of storytelling but no ability talent for telling one.

 

Meh, let's not go too far. SB is large enough that most of our "good" stories come from there. The Wormverse threads may be full of munchkinry and altpowers,xovers and the rest, but there's enough diversity that for every fic that starts that way and makes it out of that thread there's another "good" fic, a fic full of drama and life. After all, how many of the much-maligned munchkiners actually get a good few thousand words under their belt?

I feel as if we're allowing the perception of posters to affect the perception of authors.

It's a hub, you get what is in the fandom. I think it's quite telling that Heather's fic was there first.

 

Let's be honest here, the posters aren't too far removed from the majority of the authors. Out of the hundreds of Worm stories posted there, there's probably less than ten I could describe as good. Maybe another ten I could generously describe "not completely horrible."

I don't have anything against SB besides the moderators, the downtime, and the reviews. It's a perfectly fine place to place any casual story you're writing, or for people like me who find WBA somewhat frightening. I'd probably post there in an attempt to find my more egregious mistakes, and then post to DLP to fix all the rest.

So I'm not interested in a DLP v SB conversation, I just wanted to say that a 1:1 ratio of shit stories to "stories full of drama and life" is delusional. I'm not denying there's some great stuff there, but you could drown yourself in literary diarrhea on that forum.

 

I think that people in this thread are being undeservedly critical and even derogatory towards Space Battles. SB has a different approach to curating their members posts and applies different standards. Consequently they have a much, much larger membership base and probably more creativity and output in the Worm fandom in a single day than we have in a month.

I'm happy that SB exists and that we can reap the benefits of it by reading the good fics produced there even if the SB community as a whole isn't a place I'd feel comfortable being a part of.

SB, like FF.net, isn't perfect, but the Worm fandom is greatly enriched by its existence.

tl;dr: Live and let live.

 

He was here once upon a time as well. TBH, I can't remember the last time I saw him post on SB though.

 

This is true, but I just wished some of the decent SB authors would post their stories to FF.net or literally anywhere that is designed to host fanfiction. I can't get update alerts for a story on Spacebattles, so the only way to keep up with a fic is to intermittently check the index post on the thread and see if there is a new update. Inevitably this means I lose interest in keeping up with stories that are a WIP pretty quickly.

Even worse is when there is no index post. Not long ago I was interested in reading that Robert Baratheon GoT quest, but the index stopped being updated with new links fairly early into the story from what I could tell. I was like "as if I'm going dig through hundreds of shitty SB posts to try and find your updates".

Also I don't really like reading on the dark blue background - dark green is obviously where it's at.

 

Oh don't get me wrong, I like SB/SV. I'd say a good majority of the people over there are pretty cool, whether authors or just regular forum goers. But you're right, they're way bigger, and as a consequence there's a larger number of idiots as with anything people get involved in.

As for update alerts, you just need to click the 'Watch' button near the top right corner, sends you alerts to 'Watched Threads' page. Makes shit so much easier.

 

Haven't been enough new recommendations so I was excited to find this earlier today.

Firefly is a relatively new story set in an AU version of Brockton Bay. The most major change so far is Lung and the ABB. In this, Lung is female and less crazy than the canon version. Both the ABB and E88 are much bigger than they were in canon with many more capes on both sides. What I'm really enjoying about the story is the worldbuilding that's starting to appear and the surprising cape lineups in both the ABB and the E88. I put some of the interesting changes to lineups in spoilers below; shouldn't ruin the story if you check them out, but will take some of the surprise out of it.

Spoiler

Fem!Lung and the ABB:
Panacea
Parian
Taylor (as of last update)

E88:
Regent

Coil:
Bakuda (Implied)

 

So they are not racial gangs anymore? I haven't read it and I know I shouldn't judge it before that but the first impression the spoiler gives me is that the author wants to have the ABB as the "cool" gang. Kind of heavy handed at that.

Is there anything else about the plot you can say besides who teams with who? It doesn't seem very interesting otherwise.

 

Still pretty early (if you compare to Worm timeline-wise, it's about where she joined the Undersiders) so I'm sure things will escalate and change in time, but here's what's going on so far:

Spoiler

The ABB and E88 have been in a stalemate with each controlling large amounts of the city and fighting, but not all out warring. Taylor learns about Coil trying to set the ABB and E88 against each other in open warfare so he can make a play for control of the city. She decides that the best way to keep the city from being torn apart is to work with the ABB. It's pretty clear she's just looking to fit in somewhere and is rationalizing her decision this way, but she does quite a bit of the same in Worm so I don't have a problem with that part.

As for the author making the ABB the good, cool gang, that's a legitimate criticism. However, I'm fairly sure that's more due to Taylor's bias than where it's going as they still do all the illegal and immoral things you'd expect from a gang. Like I said earlier, Taylor is just using her super-rationalizing powers to ignore it. Danny has a much more realistic view of what's going on, but he's ignored as usual.

 

I didn't read past the initial snip but

Spoiler

Taking away the racial aspect and adding fan favorites like Panacea kinda makes you the cool gang, regardless of what the characters in the story rationalize.

That said, this is just a quick reply. I'll make up my mind on it after I read the fic.