Oh god. Thank you. Coil kidnaps weak Thinkers. That's all. There's a very clear set of reasons for this. It's not just about power but synergy.

So his fanon self kidnaps far more people than makes sense. Consider that, in canon, he basically offered everyone else the carrot and not the stick, to the point that his actions with Dinah were actually surprisingly ruthless to someone else that he's already kidnapped.

One of those fanon peeves.

I've never really got this. I've seen people seriously argue it, sure, but it's never flown for me.

Coil's problem isn't some issue with Dinah's power making him more likely to die. It's a) a bottleneck there so he's not omniscient and b) he's an optimizer. The reason he loses in canon is because he's busy optimizing against someone that has plot armor.

 

So he doesn't go to base and ends up giving Dinah to New Wave along with all of his information in his base. Or nukes the building killing Dinah and New Wave leaving Taylor as an unknown enemy that is gunning for him. Or Lisa turns on him leaving him fucked anyways. He loses no matter what happens. His safe timeline isn't an I win button, it's an 'I dont happen to die' button.

 

Another one of Coil's biggest advantages was that no one knew his power, his real life identity and generally underestimated him (because a lot of his real success was in the form of proxy gangs like the Travelers and Undersiders). He relied a lot on that secrecy in addition to Dinah and his own power.

 

And he was only found out because Skitter was there when he was putting the final touches together. If you want to have an AU you have to create some reason why you'd figure out his identity and it better be good (it probably won't).

He really is a horrible character for fanfiction. You can't really ignore him but the path that Wildbow took to neutralizing him was very specific. He works in canon because Wildbow plotted events to deal with his bullshit. Fanon? Not so much.

I feel the same way about Amy (to a lesser extent).

So I do sympathize with people who have him grow an Idiot Ball instead of a head, try to kidnap the wrong Altpower!Taylor and promptly get that ball-head blown up.

 

Question for the more knowledgable readers of Worm:

Do any of you recall, after Taylor became Khepri, the female cape from an alternate Earth who she had trouble overtaking? People were worshipping her, or something in that vein. Was her power ever showcased?

Shame the Worm Wiki is so bare. Considering how Worm-crazy SV and SB are, you'd think there'd be a nice cape compendium or something.

 

I think so. Hold on, let me find it. I think the cape in blue had a lot of unrelated powers.

Here we go:

 

Bets she was like Fortuna and got a shard from Eden when she crash landed.

 

Thanks, luv. All the Alt!power Taylor stories, and no one ever used hers? She took over an entire word... That's pretty badass.

 

To be fair, that world had very, very few capes. Earth Bet would have wrecked her (and did, I suppose).

 

That's my guess, too. Maybe even has a 'live' Eden shard like Fortuna.

I've never seen an Empress altpower fic, and there are only one or two where she's a major character. The most memorable is the post-canon fic Succession where she plays a big role. It explains her multiple powers as being the result of a Butcher-like shard that jumps hosts while accumulating powers with time. The premise of the fic is that the current Empress chooses (repaired) Victoria as her successor.

Succession
by QuantumWhales and WyldCard4
http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/succession-worm.285171/

I thought the fic had several good points, like some unusually interesting concepts and a fair take on the parts of post-canon worm it explored (there are too few post-canon fics!). The authors abandoned the fic, though, citing some problems with the tone/characterization, and a lack of planning causing the plot to have structural problems that prevented a satisfying conclusion, e.g.

Spoiler

Empress and her friends were pretty OP, so their heroic opposition came off as weak/ineffective, and gave the story a mood of unrelenting 'villains always win, ending will be tragic'

 

Not necessarily.

I mean, people like Nilbog are S-class threats as presumably natural triggers.

The Worms were planning to use a variety of different distribution techniques over 300 years, and were also expecting to be around to curb some of the worst excesses.

Since they weren't there were a few natural triggers (or triggers not claimed by Cauldron) that could have wrecked their worlds. In fact, it's actually the introduction of Eden's OP shards that prevented just that.

Between people like Nilbog, Sleeper,Dragon and all the shit that WoG tells us Contessa stopped who knows if someone could have taken over another world with a natural trigger?

 

It's not that her power is OP, it's that she has it at all. As I recall, Scion and Eden decided before arriving that they were only going to give shards to one version of Earth because they wanted the best possible scenario to sow chaos in and give the shards the best chance of gathering new data as possible.

In Scion's interlude there was mention of an earth with a monoculture that he passed over in favour of Earth-Bet. I suspect that the Empress ruled over that world, since even powers don't give you that much of an advantage when it comes to world conquest.

Also, the number of shards in that universe (I think it was eight, total) suggest that either the shards haven't budded or that there was only one shard to begin with, which then budded into the eight that exist there now. Given that Eden crashed in the early 80s, the thirty years between then and Khepri should have made for lots of shards, except if there was only one to begin with and the shardholder and she kept careful control over who was able to use superpowers and who wasn't.

 

Ah. +1. Eden was planning to suck every world dry by the end but I don't think they ever got past the early stages (fucking Bet as foreplay).

So we're supposed to assume that every other power was unnatural? I suppose I was assuming that someone with powers had opened the portal to Earth Aleph from the Aleph side but it was the other way around.

 

I thought the entity interlude has them sprinkling some smaller amount of shards over other dimensions, in preparation for an eventual larger multi dimensional conflict or as a contingency in case Bet is ruined too badly to support a large population.

 

Yeah, I remember that too. I checked the interlude, but all I could find was this passage:

But I think that refers to the shards' actual bodies settling into different realities, not where the hosts are. Maybe it's in there and I just missed it.

I remember that during the Traveler interludes, it was mentioned that Earth Aleph had some capes too, but not as many or as varied as in the main universe.

I do think something's weird about the Blue Empress. Taylor noted it, and the Empress has too many unrelated powers. She's a Trump, Master, Blaster, and a Brute, and they're all powerful. That fic that Thinker6 linked gave a good explanation for it, but I wonder if she'll appear in Worm's sequel. She was certainty mentioned in the post-Speck interludes.

 

I think in Eden's interlude and some of Wildbow's WoG he mentions that Eden was planning on basically carefully managing conflict in Bet to keep it as creative and intense as possible without destroying Bet. Then, if Bet does boil over and become a lot less productive (in terms of shard-shard conflict), she'd move on to different worlds.


Here's a quote from Spacebattles' WoG thread:
"Wildbow said: ↑
They can alter the shards they put out there, before the shards hae mature, because a connection is maintained. No connection = 'dead' shard.

Eden!Earth is broken up into xenophobic groups, any alliance with outside groups turns out disastrous. For the most part, ethnic groups and countries are independent, defending their own borders, but there's often further divisions within said group, with villains and/or civilians against totalitarian states, or some such. Major countries with high population are often divided further (as we see in the interlude).
If people start forming alliances/peace and Eden sees it as too much trouble to sabotage, then she sics an Endbringer Lite on them, and then works with the remains.

Eden's tinkers aren't so limited in mass production and often outfit armies, which helps to spur things on. In key places, shards for cloning, plant and population growth, and resource production shards are deposited, to help crushed areas revive. Eden might liken it to pruning a tree - except she's pruning humanity to produce maximum conflict without utterly destroying it.

If Eden!Earth falls, she moves on to another, with a different tactic, or she sets things up for one earth to fight another - with seeds already planted here and there."

 

Thanks for the rec. I never would have found it otherwise. And you're right, there aren't nearly enough PostSeries!Worm fics.

 

You're welcome. I think that Succession fic won't appeal to everyone, both because of the flaws the authors mentioned, and because of its emotional atmosphere and subject matter which aren't to everyone's taste. But I still enjoyed it quite a bit because of the aspects I liked, and there were several scenes I found to be evocative.

Spoiler

To expand on the 'not for everyone' point: the fic has an oppressive emotional atmosphere from a focus on flawed, self-destructive people dragging each other down through toxic relationships. Some people can't stomach that kind of thing, but I thought the author wrote it very evocatively to the point that it was fascinating in a kind of horrific way. Like watching a car accident in slow motion.

In retrospect, I think Succession was an inspiration for the Amy+Victoria parts of my Memories of a Simurgh Victim fic. Although their relationship turned out very different in my fic, the emotional atmosphere and their ways of relating to each other have some parts in common.

 

Read it and I am pretty fond of it. I like her take on the MCU and its characters. Am a bit unsure on Taylor, I never like it when a character from universe A monologues to characters from universe B how much of a badass they are. I mean, here it was handled better than in a lot of other stories, but I guess I just would have preferred if someone else had done it for her, like Brunhilde briefing them or something.

Other than that, yeah, really interesting, would like to read more.

Also checked out the Ack fic and I am sorry, Taylor is just too smart to fall for any of the race bullshit talk. It should take more than two conversations to make her think

I can believe Taylor falling in with the Empire 88, but I will never believe Taylor actually believing all that race bullshit. I can see her making friends(out of desperation) and justifying their beliefs to a degree, maybe even thinking she can reform a few peers and how they had been brought into this by their parents and whatnot, social pressure, families, I don't know.

But not this, where two talks with just one guy make her partly swallow this unreasonable and insane ideology. Maybe it gets better, I don't know, but that's as far as I got.

 

Its an Ack Fic. All things that happen must serve the purpose of lesbian/incest/underage sex. Because reasons.


Actually I kind of want to read that now.

No not the underage sex. The one where Taylor makes allies of convenience/desperation of the 88 and then having to deal with the fact that her "friends" are really nice and good people until something like "because of the fucking Jews, amirite people?" happens.

I dont know where I'm going with that.