Any fans of Constellations, Must Love Dogs showed up on my radar recently. Features a self-insert dog with the powers of a developer's console from Bethesda games. 15k words so far and it's fun, borderline crack, and doesn't have the weight of weeaboo like an Okami crossover.

 

I've been kind of into a new Worm story I found but it has a terrible name.

Freaky Friday by TheGreatGimmick

16 chapters - 74,000 words

The story starts with Sophia pulling Taylor out of the locker and finding her bleeding to death. Sophia freaks out, Taylor triggers with the ability to switch bodies with someone and takes Sophia's body and Sophia dies in Taylor's body. It's also quite a big AU. All of NEw Wave is dead bar Victoria, Shielder, Laserdream and Brandish and the author says he wants to keep the story local.

At the very least, it's worth trying out.

 

This story already scored points with me by killing off Amy. The author didn't handle the identity situation really well, and the discussions about it dragged on quite a bit, but I think we're going to see some real actions soon.

 

An intriguing power that doesn't seem to just be a blatant anime rip-off, a competent PRT, and (at the very least) semi-decent writing make this look like it could well be quite good fic going forward.

My only real complaint links with previous complaints I've made, although about rewriting fics.

Whilst it is a relief to not have PHO interludes based on RP in the SB thread, the interludes are often rewatching events we've already seen, but from a different viewpoint.

And that's nice, as it clears some issues (like Missy's being distant, for a small example), I'd rather the story progressed, and these minor details were either forgotten about or explained later on.

 

There is a fatal misunderstanding about interludes in the Worm fandom. People use them as reaction chapters and as a means of seeing how "awesome" or "bullshit" the MC is. If you go back and read Worm you'll see that interludes are rarely looking back on the previous arc. They're used as a way to expand the world or to explore a particular characters past. Unfortunately reaction chapters are the kind of thing easy to digest trash that gets the people going.

 

I liked the concept, but it did not hold my interest. I quit after two long interludes were then immediately followed by an entire chapter of Taylor talking to her lawyer. The writing was technically sound but I could not stand the pacing.

 

At first I was a bit hopeful with Sophia Hess dying instead of being tortured once a chapter for the rest of the fic, but it's clear this is just going to end up as your standard power-shuffle-wank Taylor with no limits that really matter. Manager 2.0, just through obfuscation.

 

The author said the main idea behind this story was writing a ShadowStalker!Taylor. Taylor will spend most of her time as Shadow Stalker apparently, even if she uses her main power sometimes.

 

It's pretty clear from some things Dragon is implying that higher ups are interested in her power mainly because she can do a shuffle where she ends up back in Shadow Stalker, but random loyal PRT agent #473 gets to switch bodies with Lung, and all this takes is getting the two of them onto the same football field Lung is on. It's completely broke.

On top of this I can see a Cauldron interlude in the threadmarks, which means this story is definitely escalating to those higher ups soon and all this dumb shit will be happening. If the author wanted to write Shadow Stalker Taylor, the power should have limits which prevent permanent exchanges that don't involve Taylor.

 

Those are valid points, but the author stated that the story will stay street level for the time being and the Cauldron interlude was written to explain why they won't immediately start using the body-switching power in greater power games. They have no intention to write Cauldron politics yet.

 

This bothers me so much, nearly as much as all the alt!power crossover stuff, but this is not relegated to the Worm fandom alone. Game of Thrones has the same thing, where people feel obligated for some reason to use the same exact formatting as canon with povs from a bunch of characters, to the point where it actually detracts from the story. Like, there's no reason you can't just write a GoT story solely from Jon Snow's perspective, and it's the same thing here. If you don't need an interlude, or if the interlude doesn't actually advance the story in a meaningful non-arbitrary way, then there's no reason to actually do it.

 

I actually had a run in with an author a long while back where I reviewed saying that the chapter had essentially had everyone's reactions to a fight, with no real content added just characters gushing and standing in awe/fear from 20 different points of view. I suggested that maybe a few of these could be cut out, and he lashed out quite angrily about how "people want to see what X thought about it". Dropped the story, and all others by the author on the spot.

If I can accidentally skip a chapter, and not feel even a little lost, I should probably stop wasting my time.

 

My issue with that story is it has a similar failure of many other alt-power stories.

Starts off strong. Taylor kills Sophia and bam drama. Maybe what, 10k words of interesting story?

Then BAM! ~60K words of people going, "but what should we do now?"

"I dunno, how about you go back to being a story?"

 

Wasn't impressed by Freaky Friday, tbh. Had a few good moments and the writing is solid but overall, it didn't really have anything to truly distinguish itself from countless other altpower Taylor fics as it is still mostly hitting the same beats, if only slightly differently.

The reshuffle of the worldbuilding with this new take on New Wave being dead and Brandish now leading a vigilante team that frequently also goes against the law is an interesting tidbit until you realize that it was just mentioned once and never again so far and that Glory Girl is still a thing in this world and basically identical to her canon counterpart even though she shouldn't be.

Similarly, no New Wave in BB should have had some impact on the landscape and power dynamics of the city but it seems to be virtually the same regardless, even though the Wards team is also bigger.

The problem is, there is this veneer of innovation and change but it's still just a shallow paint job because the mechanics are still the same as every other alt power Taylor story.

That said, I still read it, even if I was only skimming the Cauldron segment but I doubt I will keep up with the updates.

It is a solidly written one though, I'll give it that. And Taylor in Sophia's body is an interesting concept but honestly, I would have rather Taylor try to fake her way through Master-Stranger protocols and having to navigate being on a team where everyone hates her and thus having to deal with the consequences of trying to keep her secret while trying to do good in a way that isn't as assholish the way Sophia did it or have it be solely a street level thing or whatever.

This right now, it's just Taylor joining the Wards after legal shenanigans with Piggot, after being told how amazing and OP her power is. The fact that Caille was mildly amusing throughout doesn't change the fact that nothing new or interesting happened.

I also dislike, but this is just a pet peeve, that characters notice character traits or flaws that are only obvious to us after reading the complete work to the main character after two conversations simply because the author knew it and dumped it into Taylor, like Taylor noticing Miss Militia tending to defer to authority, whoever it is, which is just weird. Miss M. stuck by the Protectorate because she believed in their mission and that they were overall a force of good, even if a deeply flawed one and one that could be redeemed and thus stuck to its rules and laws, not that she just obeys whoever is in the room with her.

I dunno, at least that's what I took away from Miss M.

 

Is Worm the absolutely worst fandom with regards to stations of the canon or what? And on top of that, it seems writers think the mere what-if of an alt-power is a substitute for a real plot - and for emotional and thematic depth, for that matter.

It's the equivalent of the Naruto fandom basically only having mokuton/sharingan/kenjutsu altpowers, or Harry Potter being almost exclusively about alt-houses. Which of course in reality is not the case - even when the fics in these fandoms are bad, they are bad in a diverse and unpredictable way, which also means when you find good fics they often have some novel selling point.

I genuinely don't understand why Worm has such a problem. Is it just because alt-powers are easy to write (or at least start)? So bad writers just pile into the genre while in other fandoms they are at least manifold in their shitiness? Or is it because people are too wedded to both Taylor-as-protagonist and the canonical storyline of Undersiders-Leviathan-etc that they see alt-powers as the only change they can make?

I found the Greg Veder gamer stories diverting, at least for a time, because (a) they weren't about Taylor, and (b) it covered areas totally different from canon.

 

I think it's largely because something like 95% of the fandom is on Spacebattles, so there's a lot of memes and shared idea spaces that dominate it. It doesn't help that Spacebattles primary audience is quasi-autistic manchildren, as that really dampens the breadth of exploration and focuses instead on numbers.

 

All too brutally true.

@Zombie I agree a big part of the problem is authors letting their stories be influenced by what the readers want. The story ends up a hodge-podge of "cool" audience-desired stuff with no respect for consistency and no thought for depth.

Letting your readers dictate your story is not unlike letting the patients run the mental asylum, or the animals the zoo. It ends in tears, always.

 

Eh, I have to say that I often find the critic of Worm a bit overblown. In my opinion the fandom has had quite a few interesting and different stories (though I admit that nearly none of them are truly finished), many of which took considerable different approaches to the story. And I think it is important to remember that Worm itself not only suffers its fair share of inherent issues but is also far from the most popular setting out there so comparing it with the true juggernauts of fanfiction makes little sense to me. If anything it seems astonishing to me that there is still so much Worm fanfiction being produced, even if it is mostly limited to a handful of sites like SB and SV - most fandoms would be happy to have such an active fanbase.

But admittedly Worm (be it fanfiction or original) has never been more than a guilty pleasure to me and I look at its fan-fiction if it appears to have an interesting and entertaining catch (and I certainly have far better things to do than read comments on either SB or SV)

 

As someone who has followed both Harry Potter and Naruto among many other fandoms I really don't get the notion Worm is special, the fandom has basically followed the same path every other fandom that grows beyond a few scattered people. It just is far younger and has a hundredth of the number.