Meh, I like Copacetic, but I've found I see things from a different perspective than most. Like the whole tower-of-whatever scene. A lot of you, it seems, read that and said: "Oh mah gosh, that's so lame and cheesy and over-the-top." And I said, "She just made a giant tower of fucking bugs. I bet those folks in the crowd are shitting themselves. I know I would be, that's fucking gross, and I'm not half as afraid of bugs as some people," so the scene wasn't all that bad to me. And considering the wealth of nerds in that world, much like this one, it got her point across.

Yeah, the story is angsty, but Taylor is an angsty person, so I'm fine with that. I don't recall the writing being all that bad either. Less clunky, I think, than Journey of the Dragonfly, and that's another one of my favorite Worm fics.

Though I'm wondering how Neo Annette hasn't become a cape yet. She was given an Alexandria-type shard waaaay back near the beginning of the story. Where the fuck is she?

3/5, because despite my liking it, the plot just seems to be "Do seemingly random shit until big-bad arrives", and that's worth a point deduction, I think.

 

It's not about it being lame and cheesy and over the top - although it is - it's about something much more fundamental to storytelling.

Good stories can and do get away with ridiculously over-the-top shit, but they're set up properly. They fit the tone of the story.

Imagine if in the last book, Harry, Ron, and Hermione - instead of sneaking into Hogwarts and learning about Aberforth and Ariana and meeting a bloodied Neville in the passageway to the Room of Requirement, had instead gone to the Burrow, recruited Arthur Weasley, broken in to a UK army base, and had him enchant a FV4034 Challenger heavy assault tank with the same spells as the Ford Anglia and stormed Hogwarts like a scene out of Saving Private Ryan?

Like... just, no. Doesn't pass the smell test. Narrative consistency is a thing.

 

That's pretty funny actually, but I don't see how it correlates to the situation in Copacetic. Yeah, the scene could have been a lot better - Taylor's range was like statewide at that point, right? - but my SOD meter wasn't bothered. Though I do wonder why more vehicles and such weren't enchanted in Harry Potter.

 

Because then they would have a sentient and heavily armed tank roaming around Hogwarts.... you don't kill a snake infestation with radioactive gorillas.

 

I'm not sure I agree with your analogy there.

Taylor acts more like a powerhouse than she was in canon. The canon Taylor would never have been able to make such a construct, but Copacetic has pretty consistently built her up to that. This is post-Khepri Taylor, and one who apparently can give out Shards. Also one who throughout the fic has been shown to be quite intimidating whenever she talks to the point she caused someone to Trigger just with some biting words. I can believe that Taylor forming a giant tower out of bugs as an intimidation technique.

So I'm not sure I agree that it was narratively inconsistent.

The issue here is just that Copacetic made her too powerful throughout the narrative, so any conflict can be solved with a display like that without any real struggle for Taylor.

 

Honestly, at least for me, it's less what it was and more how it was presented. There was this whole big build-up pretty clearly leading to something "awesome", most likely some kind of big, powerful speech as that seemed to be the author's go-to up to that point in the story, and that's pretty much what happened, but it wasn't awesome, "awesome", or any possible derivative thereof. It was just kinda pathetic.

It was supposed to be an awe-inspiring and thoroughly intimidating display, but it was utterly ruined by almost every aspect of it. The wording of the speech was stilted and unnatural, which immediately robbed it of most of its impact, the prose spent entirely too much time on describing people being scared and horrified instead of trying to instill that feeling in the reader, the pacing and tone of the whole sequence was moderately schizophrenic, the focus was scattershot at best and seemingly couldn't decide if the reader should be in Taylor's head or the audience's, and then it was capped off by a cheesy reference to a movie that by all rights Taylor shouldn't even know existed, let alone been familiar enough with to rip a scene right out of it. Not to mention the hugely unnecessary and tension-breaking "A GOD AM I" spiel she went on while that was going on.

Like I said earlier, the core idea was perfectly sound and it could have been done really well, but it just wasn't. It came across as way too "try-hard", for lack of a better word; like a young child trying to be intimidating and ferocious to an adult for the first time. And as a direct result, instead of being the big, powerful moment the author clearly intended, my reaction was basically "Aww, that's adorable. Taylor thinks she can sit at the big boy's table now.".

 

As far as the speech goes, I actually agree. I think it was a little too cheesy, not just the situation, but the speech itself, to be taken completely seriously. Some of the previous ones were better done, especially the first speech at the lecture, but this one fell flat.

That said, overall, I like Copacetic. It's not as good a fic as, say, Cenotaph or Working Title (I still prefer that name), it doesn't have the same gravitas and the pacing and tension isn't done as well. It's still an enjoyable read and I find myself interested in where it's going. Yes, there are issues with the story, things that were tweaked and became less compelling as a result, but it's a fun popcorn flick - F7 rather than MI5.