Post-Leviathan Taylor went to Arcadia to confront Greg, wound up getting into it with Emma and went to the principal's office.

This is about as bad as she thinks about the principal, because right after is when she's alerted that Dragon and Defiant come for her. The principal covers for as long as she can, so I would think she's earned Skitter's good graces even though it didn't work in the end.

 

I know the scene.

My point was that aside from the "perversion of justice" piece Taylor doesn't seem to be upset about it at all. She lives in a pragmatic world, not an ideal one, and she doesn't dwell on this point, granted, mostly because she has other shit to worry about two minutes later.

 

I'll grant you the transfer thing, it seemed to have slipped my mind (somehow) that Sophia in particular was over a barrel, I was probably going off the stuff that Wildbow said about troublesome Wards in general being hard to control.

I'm not sure I agree that Taylor isn't bothered. She is. She just has things to do/she's moving beyond that particular issue as we saw in that very chapter. A more raw Taylor, still pissed about the bullying? I doubt she'd take it well.

Would she avoid joining? I dunno, I don't think you can say that she 100% wouldn't join. But my point wasn't that she would never, ever join, it was that fanfic writers can and do make it happen with the minimum amount of angst when they want to.

 

I just reread that particular scene when I was searching for the relevant passage. There are more relevant ones, specifically concerning the conversation she has with Charlotte in the cafeteria, where she understands that the principal just wants to protect her students, period. No matter what it takes, even going so far as to stall the Protectorate from storming the school and letting Skitter go free.

I still don't get the impression that she's all that bothered. Annoyed that shit's the same all over, maybe, but not much past that.

Joining the Wards: I've read dozens of fics that have something happen during the Armsmaster scene (after Lung) where she accepts his proposal, or Miss Militia is the one that shows up and she accepts.

The problem is that they quickly turn to crap and then the author doesn't know what to do. Either that or she goes out of her way to capture all the Undersiders and it quickly becomes crap again. It's an endless series of crap.

 

Huge difference between the incompetence/corruption of a principal post-Leviathan and Slaughterhouse Nine and everyone at Winslow and the PRT (and even Taylor) beforehand.

I'm not sure why they would turn to crap tbh. Now the writer has a good excuse to reign in their hate-boner for Coil and to focus on the Wards team yet that doesn't happen.

It doesn't seem like an inherently more difficult premise, though I suppose some people will suffer because the Wards seem more passive and they don't have canon to guide them.

 

I'm not so sure it's corruption/incompetence that as played across. Leviathan and S9 may very well have something to do with the principal's attitude. It seems to me that she listened to what was going on, both sides, before she got to asking who everyone was. Having a competent security guard that witnessed everything didn't hurt.

It was after she found out that Taylor's name was on the list that Lisa sent that things went weird, like having Taylor stay after and ask if she was satisfied with Emma's punishment.

Wards: It's because they get too involved goofing around with the Wards, munchkining her powers, dozens of Lab tests so they can rate her, blah blah, blah.

They don't have a plot in mind, just the initial set-up, which speaks loads about the group at SB. I can't count the number of posts that start with, "What if Taylor triggered with XXXXXX's power." And that's it.

No plot, no general outline, no ideas, nothing past the new power. They don't think how to get past the first 10k words so they spend an additional 60k working on powers and shipping.

You and I know it can be done and know how it can be done. It means a virtually all new plot, and people can't be bothered to work one out. Sure some events are going to be the same or similar, but it won't hold for long.

Given that change, one of the things that brought Leviathan to BB was all the crap going on. If things smoothed out, just a little with her being a Ward, he might not have come, the S9 wouldn't have come to take advantage of the aftermath, and it might have been 15 years later when Scion went on his rampage, because Jack Slash never would have been chased and cornered by Weaver.

There's plenty to do in that amount of time.

 

When I was using the word corruption I thought it was too strong. The word I was searching for at the time and couldn't find was complicity. Whether she handled it right or wrong you are in some sense complicit if you take "suggestions" from supervillains, regardless of how practically useful it is.

Sure, she made good decisions and then -seemingly- tainted it in Taylor's eyes.

But I'm saying that Taylor is far, far more willing to accept that taint and move on because Taylor isn't the same. And she recognizes that Brockton Bay isn't the same either. She can let it go because she has shit on her mind.

A Taylor a few months from her trigger event? It's a much harder sell, especially if you start buying into the fanon theory that the school was complicit rather than just incompetent.

The challenge format in the Wormverse threads work fine if you want to browse there and occasionally run into a cool snippet that will probably never be a story . Of course, when you want more you need more.

 

I can agree with that. She's looking at it from a different perspective and massively different circumstances.

The Wormverse threads is where I'm seeing most of the Powerz! ideas. Granted, as of late, there seem to be countered with a number of suggested scenarios, just nothing that I'd ever write -- or read for that matter -- that seem to be surrounding some obscure Manga or Anime that everyone seems to know but me.

 

I feel like SB never reads anything that I have ever.

And honestly, the Worm fandom, and other fandoms, on that site just seem to want to do crossovers with more crossovers and so on. I'm getting to the point that I pretty much skip over anything that is a crossover. Nearly ended up skipping over your story because of that.

 

The problem is the way it breaks down.

There are the altpower suggestions, then there's the crossovers that I have a 50% chance of having any interest in or knowledge about and then there's the scenarios which I'll have a 30% chance of being interested in (but would take a long time to get any resolution out of if anyone does in fact write them).

Suddenly, when I break it down for myself, the altpower suggestions start looking like something you can actually read and come out feeling at least a bit satisfied with*. Otherwise you might as well stay out of the thread completely and wait for a fic to get 10,000 words down.

See: this writer's sig for an example of quick fun.

 

I usually give the first snippet a read, even if I don't know the author or the cross. If I can't understand what's going on then I skip it... which is a lot. But sometimes there are some interesting ones.

There's one peeve I've got and that's the esoteric openings where the writer is trying to meld their cross with the weird method Wildbow did during trigger events, so the entire snippet is one line, one word sentences.

Trajectory

Intent

Effect

Bullet

Laser Beams

Agreement

WTF?

 

Think I remember a couple of snippets in the Wormverse idea thread based on that premise.

Iirc, it was from the PoV of Weld coming in to take over leadership of the BB Wards since everything went to hell after Weaver's "transfer"

 

I remember that one and I quite enjoyed it but I am one for depressing stories.

 

Oh. Speak with the Dead updated again. The feels.

For those who haven't read it it's basically a Glastig Uaine Taylor who died in the locker and has to depend on ghosts to affect the world. Except she picks up the worst people. And you somehow end up empathizing with them.

I know we were talking about people not having a plan beyond "Taylor gets an OP shard!" but I think this fic is that prompt done right. No power-testing or stomping or anything. It's more character-centric than anything.

If only all those fics were written like Carnage or SwtD...

 

So what are some points of divergence you would be interested in seeing? For me, these are some I"d be interested in seeing done in fics:


- Amy/Panecea reluctantly joins the Undersiders when offered.

- Taylor doesn't join the Wards after killing Alexandria, and continues expanding her power base with the Undersiders.

- Coil fails to kidnap Dinah and so the Undersiders have no reason to betray him.

- Danny dies with Taylor's mom.

- Grue dies in Taylor's first Endbringer fight. (Maybe he could have been saved if not for Armsmaster's sabotage)

- Bonesaw tortures Glory Girl to get to Amy instead of Mark.

 

This...can't happen.

 

Can't is a strong word. It's much like having Taylor join the Wards without a Bad End.

It's doable, but difficult. Taylor/the Undersiders would have to have something that would prevent the government and the full might of the Protectorate from coming down on them like the wrath of God. The only one that immediately springs to mind is more than a little absurd without some major changes earlier on (basically, Echidna ends with a mostly-sane Noelle agreeing to team up with them), but I'm sure someone putting adequate thought into it could come up with something.

 

In regards to the Undersiders Dilemma...

It's the same principal as Hogwarts for Harry Potter, or the Land of Waves arc for Naruto. It's the element of the known, where the first and perhaps strongest impressions are made on the readers for characters and a setting. Sure, you'll love other characters more in time or prefer putting the protagonist somewhere else, but that's where the story kicked off in canon, and that's where you think it's logical to kick it off yourself. Only whatever changes you've made (Different Shard, Harry was raised by Sirirus Black, Naruto has the Rinnegan, etc...) suddenly run smack dab into a confusing morass of canon and fanon. Do you want to toe the line with canon, with only your own changes to Taylor as an impacter? Well, that's not very interesting to read or write, is it? How much can you change, and still justify Taylor with the Undersiders with the same reasoning she did in canon? But wait, they're the Undersiders. Taylor's first friends after Emma, such a significant impetus for her plot and character development, we can't just throw them away...

And so on and so forth. Because they want to write their super-awesome power idea for Taylor, but they've got no clue to go about it without maintaining the plot-train they wanted it to be in (aka Canon with slight changes), and wind up giving up after they personally acknowledge it's not working.

 

If you push the divergence point back then it's not the same AU I was saying couldn't happen sensibly. So your statement is inert, practically speaking. What we need is a viable example without altering anything else. And we don't have one.

Sure, anything is possible. But the likelihood of this happening in a manner that worked is pretty small. It's certainly much, much smaller than the chance of avoiding a murder spree with the Wards.

And, quite frankly, I probably wouldn't want to read a fic where it did happen. The fandom has some very...strong ideas about the PRT and the government that I just don't share, and watching them try to model their behavior in a way that isn't completely skewed towards Protagonist-centered Morality will almost certainly be an unpleasant task.

For example: the Undersiders threatening the government with a barely-stable S-class threat and everyone getting out of this okay. Can work as a plot device but how many writers can be trusted with it?

 

I really just hate it when people have the exact same trigger event but magical new crossover powers! The point of the trigger is that a person's worst moments affect what powers they're getting, yet it's constant locker rehashes.

Granted, it's somewhat difficult, which is why the only fic where I changed Taylor's power referred to the trigger in passing (and it was done by putting her in a different place mentally, by having her actually believe she was weak and broken thanks to the constant bullying), but still, it's just annoying. Canon Taylor wanted control back over her life, and had the physical effect of the locker be insects, hence bug control powers.

Really wish my hard drive hadn't crashed though, I had a few more chapters of that and Silver Age Wards on it >.>