Nothing. He explains all you need to know... and at the beginning he does this a little too much at times. Get through his reminiscing and you're golden.

Advice: if you want to put faces to the names he sometimes uses, there is an ME wiki out there.

 

Does Exiled improve significantly after the first few chapters? I read the beginning when it was first posted and while it wasn't bad, it didn't particularly grab me.

 

Back when it was first posted I kept up with it for a dozen or so chapters before giving up and now I didn't even remember which story it was until I read the start so your mileage may vary but I suggest you see if a few more chapters grab you since the beginning rather suffers from too much info about ME.

 

Exiled's start does suck. It's very slow and full of Mass Effect info dumps for no real reason from what I remember. Once the ball gets rolling though, around the time of the Bank Robbery, it keeps getting better.

 

I got fed up with Exiled at some point or another and stopped caring enough to read the updates. I got past the part where they recruited a bunch of people and were supposedly starting on a project to clean out the boat graveyard or something.

 

I feel like the last 3 or 4 posts I've made on DLP have been "hey, does this get any better?" and I feel kind of bad about that...

But...

What's the deal with Scarab? I saw it recommended a couple times in this thread, so I gave it a try.

I'm getting some pretty horrible flashbacks to a newly-"awesome" Harry telling his "account manager" about his life and why he's taking control of it now. Plus, who the hell uses a phrase like "break free from a destructive cycle of victimization" outside of a motivational seminar?

So, this get any better?

 

Scarab is a Sion cross. Sion is a white wolf game where you control demigods. In Scarab Taylor is the adopted daughter of Osiris.

 

Cool, thanks for clearing that up. I was mostly talking about the technical writing / storytelling aspects. You could cross Worm with Frozen for all I care. Fuck, give Elsa the Queen Administrator shard. I'm concerned with the dialogue, the character voice, the narrative flow, etc.

 

A lot of the fandom is Indy!Harry sorry, Indy!Taylor at the beginning. Now that that's out of the way, some of the more recent stories actually have engaging content instead of "Everyone shit on Taylor! Now she's gonna get hers with superawesumpowwerzzz!!!!!" plots.



There's not much worth reading if you can't see past the revenge fics pre-Aug 2014. There's a small handful, but they are few and far between.

 

A few one-shots

Heaven is Full by truebeasts

Story about Ciara/GU after the end of Worm. Pretty good take on her.

Victoria Lindt by Lavanya Six

Very intriguing premise and rather well written. Loved this one. Would have loved to read more of this.

The Magic Bullet by minuseven

A fun premise, quite liked it.

 

Well, that's disheartening. I read Cenotaph a while ago and was quite impressed by it. Captured the canon tone (especially moral ambiguity), character voices, and overall feel of Worm pretty well but wasn't a gimmicky rehash, and the writing was very solid. Was hoping there was more like that.

Thanks! I'll give those a try. I'm psyched for the Glaistig Uaine one; I thought she was a phenomenal character.

 

There's a sequel. Tone's different, more action focused, more interludes.

As for the Indy!Taylor stuff - power fantasies (and sex fantasies) are common, and even entertaining from the inside.

From the outside, well... it's an education.

Otherwise, still crosses, crosses everywhere, though no longer all Exalted crosses all the time. General pattern is using some other hero/heroine as a power template, but you do see actual people crossing over (e.g., Exiled) as well as full world fusions (no less than three hibernating TR2013 crosses - different takes on each of them).

 

Cenotaph was one of the standouts. A decent rule of thumb, but by no means a solid rule is "If it's actually finished, it's probably a decent read."
I speak of the 40k+ fics, not the one shots, there's a billion of those.

This ^ If you don't mind crossovers and OP characters there are a number of guilty pleasures that pass the time quite nicely. Most of these are power fusions. Taylor with Xxxx's power, etc. But they have an annoying habit of doing the "Insert alt!power Taylor into standard canon" with little allowance for the plot ripples this would cause, beyond revenge.

As I said before though, that seems to be changing in recent fics. I think most people are finally tired of all the rehashing and are actually trying to come up with different plots.

It's the Endbringer/Scion presence that seems to bring up the most problems. A lot of people are dead set on canon, virtually indestructible Endbringers/Scion, and they can't see past it. This is a SB problem mostly.

"That method to kill an Endbringer won't work because of blah blah blah interdimensional blah blah, solar system blah blah blah. Kaiju blah chainsaw blah blah!!!"

I'd just rather change them to be beatable, just really difficult to be kill without all the dimensional physics crap. Either that or not have them at all. Of course that has problems on its own.

 

I really feel that Worm fanfiction would be better off when one ignores the whole Cauldron and Scion thing. By all means, Scion can exist, and I do feel the Endbringers are very integral to the atmosphere as a whole, but the world ends because of Scion thing is something rather hard to write.

So, to concentrate on the street level stuff, interactions with the various characters, that would be more interesting. One shots exploring different characters at different points in canon. An AU with how things would have gone had Taylor remained with the Undersiders and had not given up, or more stories that play after canon.

Yeah, I enjoyed more than a few of the Taylor gets power X stories (as a guilty pleasure, in hindsight), but I don't think I can stomach one more "Taylor demonstrates her powers to the wards" or "talks legal stuff with Piggot so that the bullies get their comeuppance", let alone another Lung battle at the beginning.

 

I really want to see a story where Contessa/Cauldron managed to kill Scion years ago, and is now just working to keep the Endbringers from ruining the world. I think they would be a lot more interesting without the threat of the end of the universe hanging over their necks like a sword of damocles.

I want to see Taylor taking more after her dad; i.e. she has a serious anger management issue that gets her taking Emma, Sophia, and Madison head on.

 

I can see this working if you tell picky readers up front that you're hand waving the whole shard issue aside. Post Scion-death triggers were supposed to be monstrous, because of no direction from Scion... or something along those lines. It really doesn't matter.

This gets explored a lot in the Indy!Taylor revenge fics.

 

I've seen her get revenge, but I haven't seen her lash out at the three all that much. I can think of one story where Taylor straight up fights Sophia (Here Be Dragons) and a handful of others where Taylor acts a little more subtly by having her bugs bite the bejeezus out of the three. The most common revenge I see is Taylor hiring a lawyer, usually Calle because of course he'll take on Taylor's case, or joining the Wards and getting the PRT/Protectorete to go after them. Not much actual confrontation there, at least the kind I want.

 

I would actually love to see a reconciliation story, where Emma and Taylor become friends again, without any outside bullshit powers interfering or Taylor triggering differently.

Where Emma realizes that she behaved like a cruel douche and tries to make amends. Would love to see that. The closest to that was in Atonement and that had no Taylor.

 

Cauldron/Scion are a change of gears. So's the S9, for that matter, and arguably Coil. They ask different questions, they point toward different resolutions, and they can be interesting. Do agree that they can be a problem (sometimes you just want to get to [reading about the] punching!), but think it's more of a 'stations of canon' issue.

Writers who aren't interested in telling those stories nonetheless genuflecting to Cauldron/Scion 'because otherwise it's not Worm' are what makes the problem.

It's a tell/show issue. I'd be willing to bet that seeing an alt!power Taylor in a well-written fight with Wards present (opponents, allies, or spectators) would still be fun. Similarly, it's possible to invest a legal conversation with considerable tension and surprise — there's a whole subgenre of legal thrillers. As for Lung... yeah, rarely goes well.

Technically, there's a very productive use for stations of canon: it's a highly efficient way to highlight differences because the readership knows exactly how things would be but for the changes. In practice...