Nazgus, regarding your first spoilered point, it was also one of the things that made me stop reading the story.
It is part of the overall problem of Ack's writing, the characterisation and how the immediate plot is shaped around them, a problem in all his stories to some degree.
A strong protagonist bias/plot armor without the restraint to make it feel plausible, where the character get away with way too much, and succeed where they shouldn't. The chararacters always feel kinda self congratulatory, when they feel in the right (which is always) and when they succeed (success in inevitable, in the end), and sometimes comes across as almost unbearable smug to me.
It's why I stopped reading Security. Just one fist-bump too many from some middle aged fat guy that would have made the average teenager roll their eyes and think 'adults are lame'.

 

I actually really liked Skein. Maybe the ending was a little weak, but I was a big fan of the power descriptions and interactions.

 

It made me wonder why no one in the story was thinking it weird that a fat middle aged security guard was taking an interest in a female teenage high school student. Even going so far as to attach himself to her family. At one point, Taylor got into Mike's car to go to the bank robbery, but the school authorities knew nothing about this. All they saw was a girl in an adult authority figure's car.

This unquestioned acceptance is one of things that made it hard for me to suspend my disbelief reading Security, and it's one of the recurring elements that appear in other Ack fanfics. The other ones are the weird, same-y, sometimes cringy dialogue, caricatured canon characters, recycled OCs, and the obvious revenge fantasy plots.

Skein isn't that bad. I don't read fics unless they've been recommended or praised, and usually fics are not recommended unless there's a reason for it. I don't think I've rated any fics I've reviewed here below a 2/5, except for my review for Meta, which I couldn't stand for its deliberately incomprehensible writing style. On an objective level, the technical writing for Skein is excellent. The way the power was written is what makes it worth reading. No other fic has a power quite like Skein!Taylor's, and few other fics have writing as creative or expressive. And unlike Burn Up, the narration stays consistent and focused instead of wandering around in a JinglyJangles-esque half-lucid dream state. The combination makes it unique.

I couldn't rate it higher because Skein lacked things I look for in a story. A clear idea of plot direction was the main one. What has happened so far in the fic? Can I guess where the story is going, what conflicts it will tackle, based on what has happened? Should I make a bet that the story will die before it is completed, because the scope of the powers is too ambitious to be realistically kept to small-time vigilante crime fighting, and there is nothing that discourages authors more than writing themselves into corners when starting projects that are too ambitious?

I have no idea what Skein!Taylor's goals are beside the generic "Being a Hero". I have no idea what her status with Tattletale is. The ten chapter bitch fight felt meaningless because after all that, they're not besties, and they're not enemies, and Taylor would have been neither better nor worse off if she had never met her on the bus. The only thing it did was level up her powers, which she could have done mentally attacking anyone else. I have no idea what might happen, what scale of conflict the author is going for, because Mind Reading, or Mind Raping, whatever you want to call it, is a Simurgh-tier power. Street level conflict just feels underwhelming when the power has just been getting stronger every time Taylor experiments with it.

So far it feels more like an extended power testing scene than a story.

 

While the story has its issues, I think you have your facts wrong in this instance. Mike (fat security guard) used a teacher's car, Gladly caught and confronted them leaving the school, then reported him to Blackwell, and they contacted Danny. Mike was taken to task when they returned to the school.

Granted, after a series of unlikely events, nothing happened to him other than a "don't do that again without letting us know."

 

I think you're right now that I think about, it's a long time since I read Security, what's really the problem instead is that there might have been a scene with some sort of reaction, but then afterwards there were no consequences whatsoever, part of the heavy handed plot armor.

Regarding Skein, I could never get into it, the power description is pretty well done, but there really was nothing to engage me when I read the first bits. I haven't read the 'battle' with Tattletale, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would find frustrating rather than enjoyable.

 

That's what I didn't like about Security. Not so much that he took Taylor to the bank robbery, but that he did it without following the proper procedure, and no one really cared enough to give him any real consequences for doing it the wrong way. Schools have a procedure for signing out students who need to leave class to get somewhere, like a dentist appointment. They're there for a reason. During school hours, students are under the duty of care of the school. There are laws about this. With how much the Winslow principal cares about lawsuits, it would be reasonable for her to make sure procedure is followed, if only so she won't get hit by a lawsuit for negligence.


Chapter Sixteen

Can you just claim "friend of the family" and take a kid off the school campus? When I was in school, there had to be written confirmation signed by the parent, or the person had to be on the emergency contact form that the student submitted to the school.


Yet Mike gets to breeze past a lot of things because of the way the story is written, and no one makes a big fuss that he was in the girls' bathroom for the first intervention he made in the bullying campaign, and no one questioned that he's only known Taylor and Danny for a week, but is somehow a friend of the family. I know that everyone hates the phrase "author fiat", and I hate using it, but this is pretty much author fiat.


Chapter Two

Can a security guard even do that?
It's not like they're real police officers.


With Ack fanfics, you have to suspend your disbelief if you want to enjoy the story. And even if you do that, they're not guaranteed to be enjoyable.

 

Yeah, pretty much, unless the place they're guarding has provisions for multiple security guards of differing genders. As long as they announce themselves loudly, which he did. That and he had a female teacher with him at the time, in the background. Ack, in real life, is a security guard; he'd know.

 

The Undertakers is a new story by Farmerbob. It's an AU and diverges after Bakuda captures the Undersiders. Only three chapters out and there are a lot of changes from canon.

Spoiler

Bakuda decides to make an example of the Undersiders. She initially uses a power suppression bomb to capture them. She gets Uber and Leet to record a video of them being unmasked, and with the video rolling, detonates two more bombs. One is an organic to silicate converter and the second a time lock sphere. Then the ABB and Uber and Leet leave.

The power suppression runs out just after the organic to silicate conversion starts allowing QA to reconnect to Taylor. QA decides that the parameters have changed and responds by changing Taylor to a light absorbing silicate based life-form.

The best part: In chapter three, Danny is killed.

I'm not very happy with the latest chapter. The interaction between characters feels strange. People are acting sensibly and Taylor is acting out of character. But, I really like the concept and want to read more.

 

Spoiler

You say the third chapter is good for killing Danny and while I enjoyed that, I feel like the story got worse every chapter.

The first chapter was strong as a hook, nothing interesting to say to that.

Second chapter is okay. It was mostly a reactionary chapter and while everything with the PTR before they met Taylor was okay, I just started to get angry as it went along. Contessa was mentioned because half of the possibly good stories needs to bring her up just to tell the readers, yes, this story just seems like it could be okay but it's not. Like what the hell is the point of bringing up Contessa? Maybe it will lead into something later but does the story really need it at this point?

Armsmaster attempting to arrest Skitter silicon monster thing was also stupid but this is Armsmaster before his canon growth so I can let it slide.

Then the third chapter. I was just bored with it. Armsmaster managed to admit he forgot Coil was stated to be Calvert... uhhhhhhhhh. Okay? Then he managed to connect that maybe Skitter would attempt to save her family... he could have said something about that in the second chapter maybe?

Danny refusing to leave the building in a decent amount of time amuses me. I'm not sure if it is because the author is attempting to write Danny as in character as a stubborn man or trying for some dramatic irony. Danny also stating that he should have worn a hat right before he got spotted and killed right after made me giggle. I'm not sure if that is terrible or great writing.

The chapter ends including lines such as this from the police officer.

""Don't do it. I know what you want to do. I'd probably want to do the same thing in your shoes.""

Then Skitter runs away swearing to kill those that have wronged her and I just got bored with the thing.

I'm not a fan even though I wanted to be.

 

I've been reading Recoil https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10286919/1/Recoil It's probably been recommended here before, as some of the author's other stories are, and this one is long as fuck. Or if it hasn't, maybe because it's just that bad.

Anyways, I'm not sure what I see in this story. It has all the signs of a bad story. It uses the standard timetravel mechanic via Phir Si, which is pretty much the equivalent of Harry Potter going to the Department of Mysteries.

Taylor goes back to 1988 Because Reasons. She also happens to appear in Brockton Bay's bay, because that makes sense considering she was just at the canon Behemoth attack, and of course the person to rescue her is her own father, except he's 19. And, Because Reasons, she doesn't have her powers, so essentially Muggle!Harry.

Yet despite all that I keep reading. I'm not sure why. There's bound to be something that gets me to stop, because it's happened before when I last tried reading it and couldn't make it past the first chapter.

 

Just throwing this in here. I'm not sure if that Ryuugi is the same as the one on here but I think so.

Pretty interesting crossover story with DC. Since I am not that versed in the comics I don't know the DC storyline but I think it's fairly interesting. Especially since the last interlude...

Just 31k words, don't know if a review thread is appropriate yet.

 

He is indeed the same one.

 

just finished reading Of Wasps and Wizards by Rhydebl

it seemed like a good idea at the time, i hadn't read anything worm or dresden files related in a while and this is one of those fusions that basically starts with the 'Myrddin is Harry Dresden' premise i've seen a few other times in other fics.

tl;dr-- this one's prolly just a 2.5-3/5 guilty pleasure, if that.

the story is not new-reader friendly at all. you have to know a lot of worm to understand the characters and a lot of dresden files to know the overall plot. which is also kinda bad because the plot dumps you right into the middle of Fool Moon without any buildup and doesn't really explain a whole lot of the background.

secondly, while the manner of the cross is interesting—this is a full on fusion where magic has existed as it always has and the appearance of parahumans has simply made it easier for the wizards/fae/vampires to move about more freely—the way taylor was dumped into it was less so. it started with a bit of promise, the Leviathan fight in BB went south and almost everybody she knew had died. this could have opened up an interesting, isolated dynamic between taylor and dresden, possibly making use of the Chicago branch of the PRT/wards/rogue's gallery that doesn't seem to appear much outside of canon.

despite this break and the potential... everybody from brockton bay starts trickling back in some form or another. kidnapped by red court! random haunting that requires an exorcist or at least a consultant! wanting to hunt down and talk to taylor because... reasons?

and despite all these flaws for some reason i'm still reading it. guilty pleasure, as i said, or maybe i'm just that starved for another dresden story. i have no clue.

 

Haha I was just looking where to talk about this fic.

A brief summary to get anyone interested. After the end of Worm Taylor manages to get her hands on a yellow ring from the DC universe and she uses it to be Oracle on a planetary/multidimensional scale.

What is really interesting about this story is that Ryuugi is not afraid to shake things up and make full use of the various characters of the DC universe. It's actually looking more and more like the Reed Richards is useless trope, which is so prevalent in comics won't be hapenning here.

 

I feel like it's too massive of an attempt tbh. I can see Ryuugi binding himself in even tigther knots with eac of his ANs. Despite being a pretty cool story i dont think it'll have much of a life after a certain point. Kudos to him tho. Most woulnd't even dare.

 

I like it enough when there is story but there have been more ANs than story segments so that's a bit of a bummer.

 

Ok, I read this. It's good, but not great. There's some spelling and grammar mistakes, and it's a bit hard to follow at times due to all the superhero names (especially the parts where they're using civilian names intermixed). I don't know if that's something Ryuugi will fix at some point, but I don't think he's been uploading his stories to FFN at all recently (last I checked someone else had stolen the entirety of his Gamer story).

This story suffers the same way that many of Ryuugi's crossover stories do, same way that Worm crossover stories do. It's the fact that the crossover is completely arbitrary and unnecessary. Sure, maybe Ryuugi has an actual plan further down the line for Taylor, but right now, nothing has been done with Taylor that couldn't have been done by just creating a new DC hero.

There really is a crossover stigma with worm, and this story really doesn't overcome that. I see what Ryuugi is trying to do with what is there in regards to Taylor. Like, the Administrator stuff, and you (presumably) see her do something in an interlude with her bugs, but right now, I think the story would actually be better if it was just DC.

 

I like the story, and don't care about the very minor issues it has. The thing I do care about is how these ANs or Q&A sessions after each snippet wind up being longer than the actual chapter itself. This was accomplished in this round of ANs.

It's like, write the damn story and fuck all the little nitpickers that have some manic desire to point out every little, tiny, insignificant issue that doesn't have anything to do with anything. The original comics themselves had more inconsistencies, problems, and issues than they're pointing out.

 

Yeah, for every story segment we get random tidbits on DC and bullet-points on all the cool things Taylor is doing over the world offscreen that we aren't going to see, so yeah, it makes following the story a bit annoying.

Especially if you're following the thread and get a notice that Ryuugi updated it with a 2-4k snippet only to find out it's replying to some bullshit DC trivia nitpick.