It didn't bother me that much that the heroes overlooked offing Tagg/Alexandria - mostly because a) the people involved understood that Alexandria had basically engineered that entire situation, and b) the people less involved were fed a sanitized version of the story. Plus, everyone who was calling themselves a hero at that point had to be doing some massive soul-searching given the recent (recent-ish? I can't remember the timeline that well) Cauldron revelations.

I'm mostly in agreement with you about the other stuff. The whole "1 million words devoted to 3 months, 50,000 words devoted to two years" thing is a problem, and one that should definitely be addressed in edits. I think I read some of the author's comments about struggling with the timeskip issue, and empathizing with the way he described being caught between a rock and a hard place, but I can't remember the details.

I also didn't think the whole Chicago Wards -> Slaughterhouse 9000 arcs were that compelling. Mainly because it felt like dicking around when the Godzilla Threshold had moved past that level of conflict.

 

They dislike Alexandria for unethical practices, and yet make a double (and probably more) murderer a ward, someone who had a hundred page long rap sheet? Also, the team captains and Brockton Bay wards all knew of the murder. The BB wards even saw in person Alexandria drowning in bugs and tried to save her.

IIRC Wildbow has said he will split the Chicago wards arc into two. Somehow I don't think that will address the main concern of Taylor having moved past that level of conflict and the Chicago wards being as interesting as cardboard cutouts, especially when compared to the Undersiders.

I wish he would avoid Hero!Taylor altogether. The better option IMO would be Taylor escaping from the Protectorate HQ and the Undersiders actually going through with the War they were trying to desperately avoid. Other countries - enemies of the PRT - could support them after Tattletale releases details of the human experimentation, both in a show of having higher moral ground and to discredit the PRT. Maybe a few people die until Contessa interferes and forces them to sit down and make peace. The time skip could show Taylor managing her territory and occasional conflicts with Villains like Heartbreaker. Oh well, its a good idea for a fanfic at least.

 

Justified murder, arguably. And I'm admittedly fuzzy on "who knew what when," but I'm pretty Alexandria at this point isn't just painted as vaguely unethical, she's a) been exposed as sockpuppeting an organization whose guiding principal was putting non-parahumans in charge and b) being a member/leader of a secret organization so cartoonishly evil that human experimentation is, like, only the third-worst thing they do.

Wasn't that the whole point of that huge PR stunt with unveiling Weaver? Paint her in a better light, and Alexandria in a worse one?

Oh, man, I really hope not. Contessa only works in very, very small doses. Her "I win" power is to plot what Panacea's power is to the human body.

Although, I do have an extremely crack-y one-shot I want to write about Contessa going on a series of blind dates, and what the path to "victory" on those dates would be.

 

The productive option for Ward Years Taylor, I think, is to focus on her turning the Chicago Wards into roving troubleshooters. The raid on Topsy, repeated, escalated, opposed, betrayed, etc - two years of street level action, but with PR and bureaucratic and resource constraints. (Having an amoral, extremely wealthy, thinker backing you and giving you retries is street level on easy mode - and that's how you reset the Godzilla threshold. In theory).


This is not the standard use for a Wards team, and you can get character development for the other members as they go from being Wards to being those Wards.

 

To Contessa dating sims are real life.

 

It's less MoI and MoL, the story it inspired. Her not having a Corona thingamajig would be an interesting plot development, except I'm pretty sure Taylor randomly tells people her Tinkertech isn't Tinkertech. (and not the general she's selling shit to)

Perhaps my disdain for the comment section is bleeding into the fic, because my memory has been tainted ever since someone seriously argued that the PRT would get in trouble for attacking ordinary-human excellence by arresting the obviously parahuman Taylor.

Did you read his previous draft? Almost the exact same thing happens with Sophia. It seems like WB is fond of shoehorning Taylor into the villain role.

The post-Leviathan issue is a good example of this sort of shoehorning. When he writes himself where one conclusion alone is acceptable then all of a sudden someone has to be a mega-asshole to justify that conclusion being unpalatable.

Part of the reason Taylor in the Wards has problems. The well has been thoroughly poisoned.

 

It had to do with a number of reasons, the main portion surrounding Dinah's prediction that Jack Slash was going to bring about the end of the world, and her working with Dragon and Defiant on outing Taylor.

It's far too complicated without this stretching into a Hero Taylor dissertation. Taylor just thought the best way to go about everything was to turn herself in, get leniency for the Undersiders, and attempt to go hero so she could be in on what was going down with Jack.

If you check out the interlude after Behemoth bites it, it seems like half the PRT directors don't want her out of jail, period. It's only the fact that her helmet camera footage of the fight made it to the internet, and she winds up with the most credit for taking out an Endbringer that she gets a chance at all. Even then, she gets shit on in Chicago by the director there until she pulls big political wins out of her ass for the mayor.

It wasn't all easy street.

 

The PR stunt was for the general public IIRC. The Heroes know that the Simurgh explanation was BS since Cauldron formed the Triumvirate and the Triumvirate precedes the Simurgh.

I would hardly call Cauldron cartoonishly evil even if they were introduced as such. Contessa, after all, did kill Eden, who would have made the entire multiverse her bitch. Cauldron did a whole lot more good than evil with that act alone, its just that they took the motto 'For the Greater Good' to a whole new level.

Then move the New Delhi confrontation here. You need at least one instance of Contessa showing off her power to convince the reader that she, and by extension Cauldron, are more or less invincible and an entity killing threat.

Scrib :

The whole Taylor-Sophia thing might seem manufactured, but that is forgivable as long as the story is fun, and the Undersiders were fun. Besides, if Taylor was to be Vigilante after Leviathan, she would have teamed up with the Undersiders to beat the S9 anyway, and probably Coil and Echidna too (I doubt Wildbow would have made them antagonists after putting so much effort into making them likable characters), making the entire point of leaving the Undersiders moot. Narratively, Taylor remaining with the Undersiders was the best case scenario at the time. This is in contrast to Taylor's time in the Chicago Wards, which served no narrative purpose whatsoever, and infact brought down the story quite a bit.

I am quite surprised that there there aren't more asshole Heroes than there are. Given that the two practical choices for parahumans are to either be a Hero or be a Criminal, I would expect a lot of people who don't really give a fuck about other people to be Heroes. Then again, may be people in Worm think differently than I do, and most assholes chose to become Villains.

notes :

That is indeed possible, but isn't it better to avoid the Wards altogether? None of the Chicago Wards are important after the Wards arc. Well, other than Golem, but Skitter would have been better served in that role anyway.

Covering the two years as a Warlord is much more natural for Taylor than her being given a completely new role with so little build-up and purpose. Oh well, that's my take anyway. Different people would have different opinions.

(I just want to read about the Undersiders' operation against Heartbreaker, Dammit.)

Heather_Sinclair :

I understood the in-story purpose. I meant the narrative purpose. Taylor in the wards doesn't really add much to the story as a whole. After the wards arc, they are pretty much non-entities.

EDIT:

Those PRT directors always struck me as too stupid to live. They know Taylor's already killed two PRT directors. She killed Alexandria, for fuck's sake. They know she is a hardened criminal who would kill when provoked. They know that she will attack and escape (at the very least) rather than go to the Birdcage. And yet they provoke her, make her their open enemy and threaten to Birdcage her, all right in front of her. WTF do they think they're going to accomplish?

A random question : The Heroes know that Taylor killed Coil and The Butcher, yet completely ignore it? Did Butcher have a kill order on his head?

 

The PR stunt was an effort to try to bring the Protectorate back together after being fractured when everyone found out who Alexandria was. They manufactured a Smirgh Effect story and said that was why she went bad. This way they can show everyone is working together heroes and villains alike, blah blah blah to fix what was wrong.

 

Well I don't begrudge anyone for liking it. The author is capable of writing, clearly. I just don't like the interludes at all. It's just a matter of personal preference, I suppose.

I honestly had disassociated Golem from his first appearance with Jack Slash. You are completely right, that scene in the apartment was really good.

I had thought that Theo would actually be an interesting character when I first read that part, but he was so unbelievably dull. I really wish that the Wards arc had never happened.

Hadn't seen this post before I made mine. I could not agree more with this. So disappointed with that section of canon.

 

Just dropping in to say thanks for giving those stories a shot! The others aren't necessarily better, but they're certainly different. The series that I've been writing have different styles and atmospheres, so if you didn't like one you might like the others. Personally I consider the Slaughterhouse Nine Power Taylor stories the weakest, since most of them are not-so-serious snippets to explore an idea, rather than a full story, but the others aren't to everyone's taste, either.

(BTW, if you're reading Weaver Nine, I recommend reading the AO3 or FF.net versions, since a few of the chapters have edits/improvements.)

---

Ha, the rest of this post got really long. TL; DR: ideas for stories about Taylor's time with the Chicago Wards, and Taylor's time in the Birdcage.

As some people have said, the Chicago Wards didn't catch peoples' attentions. But I think it's deeper than that. I don't think they were actually bland personalities. For instance, they have distinct personalities in all their verbal repartee.

No, I don't think they're simply blank slates. In a way they're worse than blank slates: their personalities don't matter to Taylor. She doesn't care about them and she need to. They don't have an effect on her fate, her hopes and dreams. And canon implies that this doesn't change during her whole time with the Chicago Wards. By the end of years with them, she's less attached than she was from months with the Undersiders.

It's sensible in a way, given Taylor's mindset at tha time, but...it's an anti-fertile ground for stories. "Weaver and her adventures with her crew of followers who she canonically never connected to and didn't care about very much."

Compare the first taste of the Undersiders to the first taste of the Chicago Wards.

Undersiders: from introduction to Bank Job.

In Taylor's first real meeting with them (when she meets them to consider their offer), she was running an 'undercover' gambit that weighed entirely on trying to figure out their personalities and avoid detection. They were something new and scary to her, a villain group. And they make a big gesture to her unmasking themselves and extending her trust, at a time when she didn't have any friends, and giving her a box of money. All of this infuses the events with emotional impact, particularly Taylor's attempts to understand the new group of allies-but-secretly-enemies.

Then, Bitch attacks her, makes her want to leave the team, then Grue makes her reconsider. Then the team proposes a bank robbery, her first real crime, and she has to decide if she'll agree and how to convince them to take her suggestions to keep civilians safe, while hiding her heroic aspirations. All of these interpersonal interactions are saturated with emotion for her, and trying to figure out how their minds work, to pull off her own plan.

Then, during the bank job, we see how their personalities affect the fight - Taylor and Grue have to negotiate Bitch's emotions to keep her from starting a fight, then Taylor and Tattletale have to work together in a tense confrontation depending on judging people's personal reactions, then Tattletale asks her to keep her Panacea-missing mishap secret from the others.

If you had to summarize the emotions behind their interactions at this point, it would be:

"Skitter and the Undersiders: the inexperienced girl torn between her new friends who are teaching her to be a villain, and her Bitchy teammate who hates her guts but inspired her to hit back for the first time in her life, and her secret plans to outsmart and betray her new friends to the authorities, and her fears of her Dad finding out and bringing her house of cards crashing down."

Chicago Wards: Behemoth fight to Topsy fight.

In Taylor's first meeting with the Chicago Wards, she's given impromptu command of them during an Endbringer fight...but she's not occupied with "how can I wrangle the team's interpersonal issues". She's almost purely occupied with "how can I use them as tools to defeat the Endbringer", and hoping they'll obey orders. And for the most part, they behave as good and proper tools. Just a tiny bit of personality-wrangling comes through, about helping Cuff to overcome her inexperience and contribute. No one suffers emotional breakdowns in the face of adversity that she or other team members have to wrangle to make them survive.

And despite her assumed command she doesn't seem heavily invested in their fates, nor are their fates tied to hers. In fact, at one point she gives them orders and then effectively ditches them - in the middle of an Endbringer attack - to go off on her own, visit the Undersiders, visit Phir Se, and finally come back to rejoin and coordinate with them again.

The same thing shows up in the Topsy fight, and in her other interactions too. The Wards are in a better emotional state than the Undersiders, and she doesn't need to figure out how their minds work to pull off her plans or to save her skin. They don't even show that much hesitance around the famous villain as you might expect - if anything, she's a 'girl' who has to prove herself again. And she's not interested in them, either. She's not invested in them as friends. She's training for the apocalypse, and cold to them, treating them a little more than teammates. They even remark on this. She's even practically estranged from her Dad, too, during this time.

In a sense it's fine character development for Weaver. But it's harder to find a driving emotional interest there. If you stay compliant with the simple interpretation of canon:

"Weaver and the Chicago Wards: the aloof leader with a sketchy past, and her crew of mostly-okay-with-it competent employees, and her Dad who she can't connect to in her once-a-week phone conversations but she mostly-succesfully puts that out of her mind."

You have to make an effort to work in ways for their personalities to matter to Taylor. Like maybe:
---
Weaver goes over the line in a mission and pressures Cuff into doing something that breaks the rules. Then Tecton and Golem subtly pressure Cuff into feeling obligated to cover for Weaver, so Weaver isn't put back in jail for violating probation. But Cuff doesn't want to - she resents the 'ex'-villain for making her commit a villainous (in her view) act. She tells Grace what happened, and Grace - who had always been one of Weaver's skeptics - backs her up, and pressures her in the other direction, to confront Weaver more aggressively than Cuff would like.

Now Weaver has to navigate this personality/emotion landscape to stay out of jail and achieve her dreams, of helping Golem fight Jack and his apocalypse. But that makes her feel more pressure to get a big success on a mission. On the next mission, she pushes harder for a big win, but that makes her get faced with a situation where she has a choice between hard alternatives: breaking the rules again and risking going to jail, putting Golem's life be at risk, or letting Cuff get captured by the villains. Each option will give her heartbreak of her own, and make different teammates turn for her or against her, and will color their interactions forevermore...
---
The problem is, a situation like this might make a good story...but it seems unlikely that Taylor and the Wards would then have had the same aloof, cold but emotionally neutral relationship they had in canon after the timeskip. Somehow it feels wrong to me, compared with the canon depictions.

I guess I'd really have to make it an AU for it to work, and it would still feel awkward. It's one thing to have a divergent premise from canon, it's another to have a divergent emotional atmosphere.

"Chicago Wards, now with 200% more psychological issues and angst than canon, injected for the sake of adding drama to the story."

It might be interesting, but when there are so many other parts of the story that already have emotional ties and depth where they feel natural and canonical rather than manufactured by the fic author, most people won't find it a tempting target.

Dragon Unbound by truebeasts is a long post-Worm fic I've been enjoying.

The Birdcage!Taylor fic idea is one that people have talked about for a long time. I've brainstormed ideas myself, but the big obstacle that I (and other authors I'm sure) have run into is: Taylor's power is about bugs, and where will she get bugs in the Birdcage? Given that the PRT doesn't let Tinkers take supplies with them to give them a defense (and supplies are super scarce in the Birdcage), I doubt they'd let her take bugs. If she doesn't have bugs, how will she survive longer than a week? You saw what Marquis thinks about what happens to people in the Birdcage who are weak and don't have anything to give.

A few ideas I came up with when I was thinking about the idea:

---
- Taylor manages to smuggle bugs into the Birdcage in some way. Given that she'd be imprisoned in a bug-free area beforehad, this seems very hard. She'd have to do something hardcore like burrow the bugs under her skin before she got caught, I guess. Don't know how she'd keep them alive in captivity. Dragon notices it with her tinker scanning machines but decides not to comment in the spirit of giving Taylor a chance to survive. Once in the Birdcage, Taylor takes out the bugs and has to race to breed them into a force she can use, with the limited food/space she has available.

- Taylor sent into Lustrum's wing (since her mother used to be her student). Makes friends with Canary? Given that Canary survived there and is implied not to use her powers much, maybe Taylor could? (Though if Taylor had killed Alexandria before going to the Birdcage, Lustrum might not have liked her, given that she made Canary honor Alexandria with a dirge.) Or maybe Canary is afraid of Taylor? Next: becomes subordinate to one of Lustrum's lieutenants. Then: ???

- Taylor meets Glaistig Uaine, who recognizes the Administrator shard and wants to keep her close so she can collect her spirit when she dies. Barters with Lustrum to bring Taylor into her cell block, and uses her vast array of powers to make her some bugs. Tells Taylor to help entertain her during her long vacation in the Birdcage. Next: Glaistig Uaine entertained by Taylor's tales of victories over Lung. Tells Taylor to have a rematch with Lung, using Lung's previous attack on GU's cell block (when he killed Bakuda) as an excuse for the fight. If Taylor wins, GU will give her a high place in her cell block. If Taylor loses, GU will take her shard, and she can look forward to living for three hundred years by her side with the other fairies.

- Taylor somehow comes to ally with Amy (managing not to be killed by Lung the instant he sees her (I doubt Lung is the type to refuse to kill his nemesis while she's in her weakened state), and somehow not meeting a horrible fate the moment she enters the men's section). Somehow convinces Amy to make her bugs. Next: Taylor and Amy cooperate to help follow Amy's insights about the source of powers? Taylor sweet-talks GU into helping?

- Taylor sent into Birdcage soon enough after Amy that Amy hasn't revealed her powers yet. She sells info about Amy's powers to a cell block leader in exchange for temporary protection. Next: ???
---

The other big problem: if she does manage to survive and get her bearings, what next? What are her hopes and dreams? Does she hope to escape, or get revenge on the people who put her inside, or help the Undersiders? I don't think that's so interesting. A "Taylor breaks out of the Birdcage" fic seems cliche - the whole point is that you can't break out.

But what dreams could she have while trapped inside? Live for the sake of other people? She doesn't know anyone there, and most of them are monsters! At the point in canon when she'd be caged, she's not the type to form fast emotional connections in that situation.

The best thing I can think of is that she's not put into the Birdcage alone. She's put in with someone else, maybe one of the Undersiders. They promise to help each other surive, no matter what it takes. Maybe Grue or Regent, so there's tension as they have to figure out whether to live together, and if so, whether to live in the men's or women's side; that way, you can have interactions with characters from both sides.

Or the whole Undersiders are put in en masse, and they try to take over a cell block. Though it's hard to see the Undersiders being captured, knowing they might go to the Birdcage, with all of them being taken alive...

Anyway, anyone please feel free to use any of these ideas or take them as inspirations. I won't have time to write them, so someone else may as well!

 

Am rather partial to the Undersiders getting Birdcaged idea. Getting them all captured shouldn't be that big of a deal. Maybe a more panicked/immediate response from Legend and Eidolon after Alexandria is killed? Would really matter since the story can pick up when they enter the birdcage.

Grue, Regent, Imp and Tattletale are dangerous people, Taylor has options, several of which you have outlined and only Bitch seems to be the odd girl out, although I think her smuggling one dog in could work. Dragon considers herself owing Taylor one anyway, so, maybe overlooking bugs and a dog could work? I mean, who is going to know/tell? It's not like the other inmates can issue complaints.

 

Thinker6 :

Are you sure there are no bugs in the Birdcage? I forget its description in canon, but it seems like bugs would survive anywhere. Either way, a few bugs and she can breed a whole lot of them.

Alternatively, an alt!power Taylor could be thrown into the Birdcage, kinda like how your Burnscar!Taylor almost got thrown in there. That would work too.

The main draw of Birdcage!Taylor is an exploration of the social structure of the inmates of the Birdcage. I think its a given that Taylor somehow befriends GU - its the only conceivable way in which Taylor could escape. Then again, Taylor is nothing if not innovative. Maybe she finds some other way to escape that doesn't break the reader's SOD.

There is nothing to say that only early Taylor is imprisoned. She almost got thrown in the Birdcage later in the story as well. Of course, as you said, you need a motivation and plotline for after the breakout. Saving the world is enough motivation for Taylor if it happens after the prophecy. She persuades GU to help her escape, so GU breaks her out, along with everyone else, including the most murderous criminals with the largest kill counts. Many of them have a personal grudge against her from their time in the Birdcage. Maybe Teacher can be the main antagonist. Dragon had been doing her best to see Taylor released, but now Teacher wants to enslave her. 'Kill Teacher' makes for a perfectly good plot -- everyone hates Teacher.

Really, you just need one good plot point after the escape. The main draw of the fic will be the internal Birdcage politics and the relationship between Taylor and the other capes - GU, Marquis, Lung, Lustrum, Canary, Amy, Teacher. Its the relationship with GU that intrigues me the most.

Other Worm stories I would love to see :

1) An AU in which Marquis rules BB and his daughter Amelia is the most feared Villain in the city. Amy using the full extent of her power and emulating her father's methods to earn his approval could make for a scary AU.

2) A version of Taylor who is consumed in thoughts of revenge. Maybe Piggot kills some of her teammates in the S9 bombing. Taylor is distraught with grief and holds the Heroes responsible. She vows to destroy the PRT and personally kill those responsible.

3) An AU where Sophia, Emma and Taylor are a Vigilante team. The divergence could be something as mundane as Taylor taking up Martial arts after her mother's death, leading Emma to keeping her around after her attack. Taylor and Emma could be either natural or Cauldron triggers - they could somehow get the latter from the E88. They are all very ruthless in their takedowns, leading Armsmaster to try to arrest them. Things take a bad turn when the Trio accidentally kill him while resisting arrest. Amy (who they befriended before) reluctantly helps them cover up, only for the truth to come out via Tattletale/ Noelle, thus turning them Villain. I've actually been thinking quite a bit about this one.

4) A world where Taylor manages to kill Jack Slash and rule Brockton Bay (and perhaps a few other cities) as a Warlord for years. On the surface, Brockton Bay thrives, but Taylor has become increasingly ruthless over the years, with a large kill count under her belt. The protagonist need not be Taylor, it could be a new cape she recruited for her organization. Or it could be early Worm Taylor who somehow traveled to an Alternate time period. Heh, WannabeHero!Taylor would be in for quite a shock.

5) Mentor!Alexandria. Thinker6's Shatterbird!Taylor made me want more of this. The AU irony will be awesome, as will Taylor being pulled more and more into Alexandria's Greater Good. This could also tie in with Cauldron!Taylor.

6) A good time travel story with everything going to shit right from the beginning. May or may not be in canon's time period. Surprisingly, Taylor's noble goals of killing the two most powerful Heroes in the world (Scion and Eidolon) don't get her as many allies as she expected.

7) Further exploration of the international cape scene. Ryuugi managed this very well with China, but India, Russia, Europe and Africa remain completely unexplored. This could tie in with either (5) or (6).

8) A post-Worm fic. I don't have any idea how this would go about if the story's longer than a one-shot, but I want to see it anyway.

Hopefully someone with much better writing skills than mine (*cough* notes *cough* Thinker6) can deliver on some of the more popular ideas that no one has made into a story yet.

I was going to add Taylor vs EvilClone!Taylor, but I realized Thinker6 is already delivering on that. Can't wait for the showdown there. Is EvilClone!Taylor the main antagonist or just a side villain? I have always wanted to how well Taylor does without morals holding her back, so hopefully we see an antagonist!Taylor with all the innovation and competence of the original.

 

I should really stop using "bad" when talking about technically well written stories that aren't too my taste. I didn't like it because it was very very silly and like 300 words long per snippet. It was not to my taste at all, but it was technically well written.

So really, it didn't need to be better, just different. I've started reading Weaver Nine on Ao3, and I am finding it very interesting so far.

As for the birdcage idea, I really like it. If it doesn't explicitly say that there are no insects in the birdcage, I'd imagine that some would find their way in. Even if it did say there were no insects, I bet that some could slip past the sensors.

Did it state the area of the birdcage boundaries? Would Taylor's range fall within that range?

 

Question the assumption: I tend to think that the reason that the canonical attachment to the Chicago team doesn't exist is simply because Wildbow hit a wall in writing Scarab: IIRC, he'd intended an arc of interludes, followed by a few arcs of Chicago... but it wasn't there when he reached for it, the preplanned S9000 arc was, and he writes to a deadline. It's the one significant time I think the deadline discipline cost him.

And on the idea that Ward!Taylor offers fewer moral dilemmas... there's lots of room to write moral dilemmas as part of the PRT. For particular resonance, put Taylor in the position of having to ride herd on a 'Sophia' - same reason I had Piggot withhold intelligence from Weld. It's one thing to say 'that's wrong!', and quite another to come up with a better solution in the face of resource and priority constraints.

Plus, plenty of fun with 'you either die a villain, or live long enough to become a hero.'

Put it another way: I think writing the Ward years works better as a divergence AU, rather than trying to make it mate up neatly with the canon resumption after the time-skip.

 

A lot of people who do the Wards!Taylor have Sophia carted off so she can play nice with everyone else and then assert her will on the system from the inside. What I think might be interesting is if Taylor actually integrates well into the PRT to everyone else's detriment. Let her actually be good at maneuvering the bureaucracy and cling to it as a sort of power over others. In canon she's relying on herself because the system has failed her. But what if the system works? What if it works all too well?

Basically give her a reason to go super-lawful because she has a support structure and create conflict out of that. Basically do power corrupts in a different fashion than the usual BEEEEEEEEEEES!

 

No problem. It's something authors need to get used to in criticism. As you say, when people say "This fic is bad," sometimes it means "This fic was bad for me, but some other people might like it." but other times it means "This fic is bad objectively, and you should feel bad for writing it.", so it's good to write criticism in a way that makes it clear.

Yeah, I agree. That's partly why I'd be partial to a fic with just Taylor in the Birdcage, or Taylor + 1-2 other Undersiders, rather than the whole crew with her. It means more direct engagement on a personal level with the Birdcage culture, rather than having familiar team interactions to act as a buffer. For instance, if you want to be a cell block leader, you need trustworthy lieutenants to watch your back while you sleep. And given that everyone in the Birdcage is already webbed into their own complex web of loyalty ties, it's very hard as a new resident to win any strong capes over to your side. If Taylor has 2+ Undersiders there with her, they can try to beat a cell block leader and the rule the block by working in shifts, with much less reliance on the other inmates. If Taylor is alone, or with just 1 ally, then she's forced to engage with the existing culture and work her way up through the hierarchy, deal with showing strength, threats of betrayals from every corner, making sure all the strong capes in the cell block feel that they'll be worse off if Taylor gets taken out and replaced by someone else.

It's also why I'd be partial to a fic with a 'stays in the Birdcage' plot, rather than an explicit 'breakout from the Birdcage' plot. Maybe she'd get let out by Cauldron for Gold Morning, or for some equally bad crisis. But if you make your protagonist have the driving goal of breaking out, if you let readers expect that she'll be getting out...it seems too played-out, to me.

So many fic stories are expansive, with the idea that the character will amass more and more power, eventually rule a city or lead a nation, and do some impossible feat like raising the dead or killing a God. IMO it's a breath of fresh air to have a more constrained setting, and that's part of what makes the "stuck in a jail" scenario of the Birdcage so interesting in the first place. With humble goals like "survive the week" and "get in Lustrum's good books" and "make Canary smile for once" and "win Head Exploding Girl's respect so she doesn't kill me". If the readers (and Taylor, too, if escape is her main focus) see the Birdcage culture as a temporary diversion to be overcome, it loses the central conceit of "this is the new life that you have to fight tooth an nail to make your place in, where getting the girl in the cell next door to hold a grudge against you could be fatal because she's the one you'll need to trust to have your back in ten years' time, because this place and these people are all you'll have for the rest of your life".

Not to say that a fic that did those points in a different way would be bad, it's just that those are the ways I'd find most interesting.

I don't think it's certain, since we don't know the distance between cell blocks, but I'd bet that Taylor's range would extend for more than one cell block. Probably at least 2-3, maybe more depending on the architecture.

As for bugs in the Birdcage, we can't really say from canon, but my guess is that there are few. My guess is that they don't explicitly let in bugs. The inmates are probably transferred from a prison where they were strip-searched, forced to go through mandatory screening and health checks. And remember how carefully they ration everything - the exit is in some secure tinkertech facility, and even the air inside the one-way elevator is carefully rationed. Dragon's facility gave me the feeling of a 'clean room', like a scientific lab. where no outside influences are allowed and seeing a bug is grounds for re-checking the security.

I'm sure some bugs do get inside. There are probably some bugs that made it in on peoples' clothes. I'm not sure how well they'd survive. Bugs tend to need damp places, and food supply. But I got the impression that everything's in plain view in the Birdcage - the walls aren't exactly the type where bugs can hide inside - and all the food is carefully rationed out and monitored by the inmates. In Marquis' cell block, with the super-clean Spruce as a lieutenant, I bet he'd find and kill all the bugs and annihilate their waste without leaving a trace. In other cell blocks, conditions might be better for bugs.

Maybe I'm pessimistic. If nothing else, I bet a sizeable fraction of the inmates have lice and various skin parasites and internal parasites. Or maybe Taylor could finally develop an ability to sense the super-small skin mites that lots of people have, and use it for tracking people.

Heh, we'll see if I get to finish writing it! It might be a while before I can do the next chapters, sadly.

Yeah, I agree. The Wards situation had plenty of potential for emotional ties, personality conflicts, and moral dilemmas (like the ideas you and I and Mutton came up with just now). Your "Taylor is in charge of a Sophia - can she do better than the system that gave her so much pain?" idea seems like the sort of scenario that Wildbow would love. Doubtless it would not be easy, and the results would be mixed. Actually, I wonder if this is what Wildbow intended for the implied situation during the timeskip where Taylor helped convert the foul-mouthed Mockshow/Romp from a villain to a hero.

It's just that canon was written in such a way to suggest that those scenarios somehow didn't come up, that Taylor stayed fairly cold and distant for the duration. I think your explanation is along the right lines. Wildbow skipped ahead to his prepared material on the S9000. He probably had ideas in mind for this type of character development and team building to occur during that time. But it would seem weird to the readers to suddenly jump ahead to a very different Taylor, with very different relationships, friends and family attachments, mood and emotional makeup, carrying 'life lessons' that she learned but we never saw. So Wildbow ended up doing the simplest kind of timeskip, with her character development frozen for the duration, so the readers could pick up her life where they left off. Almost as if Taylor had been frozen in one of the cyrogenics capsules along with the S9. It's a hard dilemma as an author. He doesn't want to write another 4 million words about her two years on the Chicago Wards, but...

 

I thought Emma suffered an accident, partly because it's public knowledge she bullied Taylor and Skitter has a lot of followers in Brockton Bay.

Or something.

 

Thinker6 did a fantastic job of summing up a lot of my thoughts regarding canon Worm.

A great summary of the pre-Leviathan Worm is exactly what you said:

Leviathan saw the end of that "arc" and the focus and themes of the story change.

Taylor has made a conscious decision to become a supervillain under the guise of doing the right things for the wrong reasons and a very dim view of the Protectorate. From here, she is faced with a constant barrage of major threats above her level which require her to go all out and hold nothing back.

None of those fights (with the exception of attacking Triumph and his family) really forced her to be confronted with any moral dilemmas. The Merchants were scum, the S9 were a whole new level of evil, Coil was her excuse to stay in the Undersiders, Echidna was too much of a monster at that stage and the Teeth/Fallen were clearly bad guys.

Taylor doesn't get a break at all between these conflicts. She doesn't just chill and hang out with the Undersiders like before, she doesn't have a chance to live a single week without threats or conflict. She has no chance to wind down or even be a bit introspective and understand how these events have effected her.

The psychological effect this has had on Taylor only really becomes clear in her response to her outing. Having gotten into the mindset of fighting abominable threats, when she feels she's been attacked, her reaction is not to hold back. She storms the PRT headquarters, attacking all the 'innocent' employees there and threatening Tagg's wife. Up until that point, every conflict had seemed pretty ethically clear cut, but this is the first time Taylor has really had no good justification for doing what she did - it was revenge, pure and simple.

I think at that point she finally had a chance to realize she was headed in a direction she really didn't want to go. Coupled with Dinah's advice of "cutting ties", the looming end of the world prediction and her want to reconnect with her Dad, she had enough reasons to try to put a stop to it in the most abrupt way she could. As Dinah herself says it to Tagg - "If she didn’t come here voluntarily, she probably would have become meaner."

The climax to a build up that started from Leviathan was her killing Alexandria and becoming Weaver.

So summarizing it in the form Thinker6 presented:

"The second part of Worm is about Taylor confronting a string of terrifying and dangerous threats without a break, as she unknowingly descends into the role of a becoming a genuine supervillain. This is a build up to the point where she realizes what she's becoming, and looks for a dramatic change in her role"

So after a climax like that which ended with a complete setting and cast change (moving to a different city and losing contact with all the main side characters), what we really needed was for the tension-level in the story to have been brought back down.

We needed to see how Taylor, the 16 year old teenager, was dealing with all this. We needed her to be introspective, struggle to interact with her new teammates, struggle with her habits she picked up as a supervillain and deal with how everyone viewed her.

As notes said, an arc or two focused on them taking down some local threats would have been fantastic (and I reckon this might be what Wildbow is hoping to write for the published version of Worm). We'd see her instinctive reaction to go all out against them - as she did with the S9, Fallen, Teeth, Coil, Echidna, etc. She'd struggle, and get frustrated. Her team may dislike or be scared of her, looking for any hint of Skitter to get rid of her. But in the end, her experience would help and some team bonding would occur throughout.

Instead we get just a handful of scenes based around this, and straight back into it. Cauldron's involvement in the Las Vegas mission, Behemoth, new Endbringer, then a time skip.

The fights seem to be trying to keep getting bigger and bigger in magnitude and continue that crescendo of conflicts - but we've already had our climax. So they just end up feeling dull and unemotional.

Of course, the threat of Scion makes it very hard to allow the tension to fall away when it's precisely that focus which is driving Skitter, but that could've been made into a plot point. She's focused, obsessed and has little time for anything else, but her new teammates force their way into her life and force her to calm down a bit.

Like everyone else, as I read Worm, I found that Wards section really boring and pointless. But having gone back and reread sections, there are actually some fantastic scenes in there - Taylor's meeting with the Ward leaders, her test mission against the Adepts, her facing down the PRT directors, little interactions here and there. They all are actually really enjoyable as standalone scenes, the issue is they weren't tied together properly. Tie them together with very low intensity, low tension and character focused scenes, and I think that entire Wards arc will be brought to life.

The issues you talk about were pretty much the same ones I had. I'd love to see Taylor in the Birdcage, but all the ideas I have for it are really that one gimmick. Once you get a few chapters down, where do you go from there?

As you said, the focus should be that constrained setting. Just surviving, making allies, interacting with a host of interesting characters (and the Birdcage has a lot of them), becoming a cell block leader, etc.

This could eventually build to her getting let out with the other inmates to fight Scion, Khepri never makes an appearance and they kill Scion another way, then she starts carving up territory in the post-Scion world along with the various allies she'd made in the Birdcage.

This is one I've really wanted to see. If you want a bit of cheese instead of something dark, you can even have it being a Victoria/Amy story.

A twist on that I was thinking about is a dimension travel fic that sees Amy get transported to a world (perhaps around the time Siberian is chasing her) where she's exactly that.

This is probably the number 1 fic I want written in the Worm verse, and have since it started. It really is a "What if Taylor stayed in the Undersiders" fic, just without the looming threat of Scion.




Another idea I had following on from that Amy one is a bunch of dimensional crossing ones. Imagine a story that saw Skitter switch places with a Taylor in a world where she joined the Wards from the start? These sort of things were really popular in the HP fandom, but haven't seen any in Worm yet.

Don't really agree with that assessment. Firstly, they don't think she's a hardened criminal who kills when she's provoked by small things - otherwise she WOULD be in a Birdcage. If they're honestly scared of her, while they're in the seat of their power, they really have a good reason to be putting her in the Birdcage.

And besides, I don't think they ever threatened her with the Birdcage (apart from Tagg). They just wanted to keep her in juvenile detention for as long as possible, only bringing her out for Endbringer fights.

In the end, I'm sure they were struggling to comprehend what the end of the world really meant. To Taylor, it was simple - the end of the world is coming, do everything you can to stop it. To them? They're trying to run an organization, and its not exactly easy to go into the mindset of "This may not even exist in two years", so they're falling back to their normal method of thinking.

 

That's one thing that bugged me a little - Taylor basically hits her 'Line in the Sand' moment after seeing Dinah, I thought it was kind of a pivotal point in her character's development.

Her reasons for comming back always felt a little flimsy to me. After finding out Shadow Stalkers ID and Armsmaster's treatment of her I can understand her distrust of the PRT and being disillusioned about the heroes but I always thought she'd be a lot more reticent to accept Lisa's olive branch than she was in cannon.

I think it's Shadow Stalker's chapter in the ward's arc where it hints at Skitter operating solo. I'd have liked to see that explored a bit more. The idea of some kind of rogue Taylor story set post-leviathan intrigues me. I think she has enough of a rep at that point she could probably succeed, at least for a while. 'Nursing a Grudge' kind of explored this but it hasn't been updated for a long time and seemed to be heading towards Taylor/Amy territory

It's interesting the parallels between Purity and Taylor at various points in the story they are both trying to distance themselves from their former ties but can't quite seem to leave them behind.