Title: Copacetic
Author: Materia-Blade
Rating: T
Genre: Sequel Fic
Status: Ongoing
Fandom: Worm.
Summary: "This fanfic is an attempt at a continuation, following Taylor in her new world, where with the death of Scion and the albeit temporary opening of a portal, powers are only just beginning to spread. Starts roughly six months past the final epilogue."
Link: Spacebattles
TvTropes: Here
Alt Link: Fanfiction.net

A fic that attempts to continue Worm, post-Scion, and how Taylor attempts to live a calm and quiet college life. It doesn't work out. I can't really say much more without spoiling anything, but due to later developments feeling like a bit of a wank, I rate it 4/5.

 

I found this story to be extremely tame, and quite boring, when I read it a few months back. I honestly can't even remember if I finished it. It seems to get more praise than is warranted. 3/5

 

I'll agree with Anarchy that Copacetic is a story that's received more praise than it may deserve, but it isn't as if it's awful. The worldbuilding is interesting, and though a few things happen that made me roll my eyes (Everyone being terrified of her, Danny gaining powers, Taylor and shards) it still holds itself as above the bell curve of Worm Fanfiction. 4/5

 

This, except I'm not more inclined to be forgiving because the rest of the fandom is so bad. 3.5/5 (but rounding up)

Good, but nothing special and with a few eye-rolling moments which drag it down.

 

It definitely gets points for being a post Worm fic and it had a really strong start but it lost me after a few chapters and I never found back. Maybe I'll give it a try later on again and will like it more but so far, 3/5 seems fair.

 

I was mildly interested in this for a while, but pretty much everything after Danny triggered made me wince. It's been long enough since I dropped it that I can't offer much specific critique, but as it stood it was deserving of a 3/5.

 

I really enjoy Copacetic and it's probably one of my favourite Worm fics.

Taylor was an awesome character in canon and almost single alternate power fic makes her less badass, less interesting and with less complex character development. I'm surprised there's a less post-Worm fics, since I want to read more about that Taylor we read about and how she continues her life after.

Copacetic is focused more about exploring Taylor as a character, and how she tries to live a normal life to keep her Dad happy, only to continuously fail because of who she is. I really enjoyed seeing her trying to make new friends, trying to adjust to being a college student and not jumping straight into things right away. All of that is written reasonably well.

What ruins Copacetic's chances of being a great fic is that Taylor is made too goddamn powerful. Her canon powers allowed her to be a goddamn criminal warlord of a city, and in the past she took down an alien God. That should be enough to give her some internal struggles to interact with anyone else, but instead the fic keeps adding more.

Spoiler

Instead she gets the ability to give other people Triggers at will. And she gets to directly communicate to her own Shard. Plus her own bug power is taken to 11 and made way too powerful.

Taking just her bug power boost, when Reid's family is kidnapped, rather than creating Sauron's Fucking Tower, I'd rather have read about her going Skitter on their asses. Using her combat skills honed against stronger opponents in Bet, along with her usual MO that was so successful there - being vicious, tactical and hitting fast. In Worm, Taylor was never about overpowering an opponent through brute strength. She'd beat them through the skills she has being a Bet Veteran, not through her power alone (which she could've done even if she was a new trigger with a strong enough ability).

Her saving monstrous capes, causing Triggers and keeping her Khepri powerset does nothing for the story. In fact, it ruins it because the President even admitted that if she went rogue and took over a section of USA, he still wouldn't risk trying to stop her because she was too strong. That really reduces any impact of her history coming back to bite her. There needs to always be that risk that in using her skills, she risks becoming a criminal again.

Finally, Danny triggering also ruins the concept. It was initially about her trying to be normal to please her father. If Danny remained a normal, that conflict would continue to be a thing as Taylor slowly realizes she's going down the same path that ruined their relationship the first time. But by having him Trigger, it completely removes that aspect of the story and gains nothing in return.

So yeah, overall I love the concept of being focused on character exploration of what is such an interesting canon character, but this is later ruined by cheap thrills of making Taylor too damn powerful with the focus moving away from that. It's a real shame, because if it had stayed on track, it could've easily been 5/5.

As it is, 4/5. Because despite all the problems, it still remains one of my favourite Worm fics, and whenever it does update I get all excited. But only really because there's nothing else like it in the fandom.

 

Re: spoilers - apparently I'm not as up-to-date as I thought I was. Unfortunately, it sounds like its problems have only gotten worse, and I now have no desire to catch up.

 

I dropped this a long while ago, and it was pretty terrible. Lots of angst, everyone and their cousin triggering, lots of talking about the good old days and how the parahumans back then were more hardcore or something. I don't honestly remember any redeeming features, other than the fact that the technical writing was good.

 

Ehh, I can't in good conscience rate this one very highly. It started pretty decently; there were a few rocky patches, where the author just couldn't quite manage to get the characters to cooperate and instead of rolling with it, he broke them into the plot with a nearly-audible crack, but by and large it was pretty solid.

Then it started slowly getting progressively more silly, and the aforementioned breaking happened more and more often, until it finally reached the point where I just couldn't take anymore. I think the moment that broke it for me was when Taylor used hundreds of millions of bugs to make a life-sized replica of Barad-dur (complete with glowing Sauron eye) and giving a supposedly-badass-but-really-laughably-pathetic speech about how she sees all and knows all.

It was clearly supposed to come across as a, to borrow a phrase, Crowning Moment of Awesome, but it ended up reading like a little kid trying to pretend she's all grown up now and overcompensating way too hard, and then all of the author characters started running around in a blind panic, absolutely terrified of her for it. I couldn't stomach reading any more after that.

2/5 from me, 3.5 if you only count the parts before she got her powers back.

 

...she does what?!?

 

Yes.

Now to be fair, in-context, it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounds, but not nearly enough so to justify it.

 

I actually found it even more ridiculous in context.

I really wanted to like Copacetic. I still think the concept is a great idea for the story, and early on the flaws were all things I could overlook. The characterization flaws were mostly small issues, and the endless masturbation over how awesome Taylor was in the past was vaguely tolerable when it was used for contrast with her present self. By the time I dropped it, though, it was basically Exalted-cross-tier for self-indulgence, which completely drowns out the remaining good parts.

I'd give this a 4/5 if it was abandoned sometime before the Eyespy interlude, but the story as a whole is more like 2/5.

 

Pls explain.

Because that seems... hardly possible.

I remember reading this story a while ago and finding it just generally over-the-top. The writing, the dialogue, the plot, pretty much everything was just slightly too "I am going to make sure this moment lands, god damn it, and you as the reader are going to like it."

I dropped it sometime after Taylor's dad triggered, I think? I have a memory of Taylor being carried someplace by a flying superhero and her freaking out / angsting out over something, and that might have happened a little later, and I dropped it then?

Won't rate, as it was too long ago to really provide meaningful insight, but what I've read so far in reviews here jives pretty well with my memory. I'd put it at like 2/5 or maaaaaybe 3/5 if I was feeling really really really generous?

Had to comment when I heard about the LotR Sauron eye tower of bugs. That's the kind of idea you get at 2 AM, giggle about on IRC for a couple minutes, and then immediately discard, because come on now.

 

This is true of all of Materia Blade's stories. I don't think there is a single story of his that I could read more than 2 chapters of.

Couldn't get past chapter 1 in this. The writing style just irks me.

 

As Agayek said, it's not as retarded as it sounds within the context. Like, while you're actually reading it, it sort of does feel a bit epic, even though you consciously know it's cheesy. Same story with the other stuff.

Copacetic builds up to these points alright, and then goes over the top when you do hit the climax as if the author is worried it won't make enough of an impact otherwise.

You do actually describe the writing style perfectly though. I've noticed this out of a lot of SpaceBattles writers.

 

The context is that somebody had just kidnapped one of her friends and his family in order to try and extort/control her, so she had a news guy and his cameraman set up and kinda casually built the tower behind her as a show of power while she was giving the aforementioned speech to be broadcast to the kidnappers.

The core concept of what the author was trying for is perfectly sound, but from a reader's perspective, the LOTR reference inappropriately shoehorned in ruined it.

 

This story was good before Taylor became god. 4/5.

 

This fic is good. It was even better before Taylor becoming OP and the ever looming threat of the new entity.

Though tbh I am not sure how much of what the shard, Tales said is true. It seems to be entirely too helpful or harmful depending on the situation and the threats are too vague. I will not be that much surprised if Tales turn out to be the final villain.

4/5 for now.