What's up with Spacebattles' obsession with redeeming Emma and Madison

 

Uh, very rarely do I see anyone attempting to redeem them. More often than not it seems they want revenge against them. But then again I don't read every snippet/story.

 

Yeah, I generally love Thinker6, but the main plot of the story seems so uninteresting. Does anyone really give a fuck about Emma at all, other than her dying a drawn out, hopefully painful death?

You can find a role for Emma as a minor antagonist or have her be friends with Taylor when the story starts, sorta filling the bitchy girl-friend role that Tattletale got in canon. But a redemption story? Perhaps the main problem is how un-relateable it makes Taylor. No one wants Emma to be Taylor's friend after more than a year of continuous bullying other than Taylor herself. There is also the problem of whether it makes seem OOC. Would canon Taylor accept an apology and want to make up with Emma at this stage? I think not, but other people may have different opinions, and I think there may have been a throwaway line or two in canon to that effect.

I am still reading this story because I love Thinker6's stories and would probably read his(her?) shopping list. There is also the fact that Taylor starts out unrelatatable in canon as well -- She had superpowers and still didn't touch her bullies because of a moral quibble (I mean, really?). Worm Taylor became awesome later on, and may be this Taylor would as well. I do hope that this is just a way for the author to overcome a writer's block in his other stories -- I would much rather read an update to Weaver Nine or Memories of a Simurgh Victim than this.

 

The story is obviously a tragedy.

Taylor was completely broken by being stuffed into the locker. She focused solely on that one shining bright future where everything would be alright again and Emma was her friend like she used to be.
This story isn't about redeeming Emma. The story is about Taylor breaking down.

 

Yea that was the vibe I was getting as well.

 

I forced myself to read through the first 4 chapters before it started getting good. But yes, this looks like it is going to be about Taylor focusing on becoming friends again... which can and will ruin everything else.

 

That.

There was literally an update today that threw all of the redemption stuff into question.

It might be a redemption fic, it might not, but the reasons for Taylor being focused on that are clear and the fic's greatest sin is not rushing any character development on that front.

tl;dr: Too early to tell.

 

In what way is what Emma did more insidious and despicable than what Voldemort did?
Emma was a particularly horrible bully who mentally and physically abused Taylor, and basically ruined her life.
Voldemort killed Harry's parents.
The second seems kind of much worse. Despite everyone's justified hate for Emma what she did is not actually worse than murder.

 

The difference is in how personal it is. Voldemort killed Harry's parents and tried to kill him because of a prophecy. The only reason he tried was to eliminate a threat.

Emma was traumatised by some gangbangers and decided the best way to make herself feel better was to bully her best friend to suicide. If Taylor hadn't Triggered she'd have killed herself and her blood would be on Emma's hands. So while Emma didn't kill Taylor's parents, she did take a personal and prolonged interest in making her life a living hell.

I'd say they're pretty equally bad, but in different ways.

 

I just can't make that jump to what Emma did being as despicable as murder.
Agree to disagree I suppose.

 

On the other hand, one is a 50 year old adult who has freely decided to do what he did, kill Harry parents and try to kill Harry as a toddler. Even if you argue that he was warped over the years, it had always been his choice to pursue the dark arts and with it the dangers it carried with it. The other is a traumatized 14-15 year old lashing out in cruel ways to another 14-15 year old, after being warped by her saviour, who is another unstable and traumatized 14-15 year old, depending on when the bullying started.

So, yeah, it was an extremely shitty thing to do and despicable, but it is quite the stretch to go and say that Emma is objectively worse than Voldemort, even if we were to only take those two instances into account. (you know, disregarding the hundreds of other people that Voldemort killed/tortured or had killed/tortured)

No one is saying Emma is blameless, however, she is not, by any stretch, even in the top 10 of bad people in Worm. Neither is Sophia, for that matter, albeit she is bit of a different story, admittedly.

Traumatized youth or not, they should be held responsible for their actions and it certainly doesn't absolve them, but that's still something to consider.

As to the story at hand, I am intrigued but then again, for reasons I cannot explain, I have a fondness for bully redemption stories and I hope this story will continue with its interesting path, as it does seem to go for more than just rekindling the friendship there.

 

By the by, Wildbow has said (in a quote I believe is in this thread) that Taylor would have moved school rather than commit suicide had she not triggered.


For myself, I'm following Number Girl. I don't think it will be either a redemption story or a tragedy, but rather that Taylor will get close to the future she's wanting and then something will interfere and smash it all to pieces (or she'll decide for herself that because of the changes she's undergoing to get Emma back that her concerns have shifted). Basically, I have faith in Thinker6 to do something interesting with this, so I'm following.

 

I think that the problem is not that Emma is irredeemable but that she needs to go through something bad enough that people decide she payed for what she did and since all she did was voluntary then it would take a long while to make a change in personality believable. Two possibilities come to mind immediately so there are probably others.

One of them is Emma regretting putting Taylor in the locker upon seeing her. Problem is that this clashes with Emma's new vision of the world. So it would either be an Emma centric story focused in character development in which she tries to reconcile her vision with the guilt she is feeling (that maybe was building up for a while) or not an Emma centric story in which case it would be in the background, not a main element. In both cases it would be slow, Taylor would want to have nothing to do with her (staying as far away as possible) and Emma would not discover Taylor has powers until she is at least halfway through the change since otherwise she would feel vindicated. In fact, she would have to stay as far away from Taylor as possible for this to happen, in part because of guilt, in part because with the locker she feels she wn and doesn't feel the need to bully Taylor anymore because she is disconnected from her previous life. The furthest away from Taylor Emma is in this story, the better. Suffice to say, this is the less satisfying way to go about it.

The other way is to put Emma again in a situation of a victim and present her with another ideology to deal with it. Have one of her parents die and make her experience what Taylor went through with Annette, make her family stay in Brockton Bay, make her have a fall out with Sophia and then when she is at her lowest put her in another dangerous situation and be saved by someone she can consider strong but that cares for others. heck, make it Skitter who as a warlord tries to protect people and have her save Emma not because she cares about her but because she no longer cares about her. Then Emma tries to hang on on Skitter's territory to be closer to the new "hero" and needs direction after the last tragedies she had and Taylor completely ignores her. Interactions would be between Emma and Skitter. Emma sees Skitter as predator and doesn't quite understand why she does what she does and slowly shifts her view to the strong protect the weak to be worshiped while Taylor feels uncomfortable about having someone like Emma admire her so she treats her coldly and scary which ironically reinforces Emma's view of her as a predator. Though I feel this story shouldn's focus on this either but it being a subplot.

 

Thanks everyone for your comments about the Number Girl story! They're very useful to me as a writer.

That story seems to be getting a pretty wide range of reactions here and on SB/SV, where some people like the story and others find the premise/execution very unappealing, typically saying that they find Taylor's motivations unbelievable (or believable but unsympathetic). I get the reasons people have been writing here for both sides of the argument.

I didn't expect that some people would have big negative responses to the premise, but I should have. People have a very wide variety of ideas about what bullying/justice/punishment/redemption should be like:

- Can a bully who goes past a certain point ever be forgiven? Do they have to be punished for their sins and suffer before being forgiven, or is a change in their character enough to redeem them? If they used to be your friend and betrayed you, should you be more persistent in trying to redeem them, or should you be more outraged and push them away? Should you handle them differently if the reason they were bullies was because they were hurt or bullied in the past? Should you try to redeem them, to turn them into better people, in the first place? Or should you drop them and push them out of your life? Or should you get revenge with your newfound power and kick them to the curb?

- Where does the victim's happiness come in? Is the victim obligated to seek justice and punish the sinner, even if what would make them happiest is to just stop everyone's pain and go back to happy days with their best friend?

- How does the picture change when powers come in? Normal humans have to accept that some bullies don't have a realistic chance of being redeemed, of reforming, no matter what they try. The best thing they can do is push the bullies out of their lives, or get them punished and incarcerated, to minimize the damage they cause. Should they change their attitude if they get a power that tells them that some of those bullies have a real possibility of changing for the better, gives them a leg up in figuring out how to change them, and shows them what the future consequences will be if they succeed?

Everyone has a different answer to all these questions. And everyone who has been in a school and seen bullying - or has been the perpetrator or victim - has personal experience and strong emotional reactions. In that sense, I've found the discussions the fic sparked really interesting, both among those who agree/sympathize with Taylor's point of view and those who think otherwise.

EDIT: One more point. Some people say that Taylor's obsession with getting Emma back as a friend is a bit much. But remember that the story so far is (1) taking place over a very short span of time, just a few days of subjective time (so the apparent obsession may be a temporary state of mind) (2) right after her trigger event, which involved a heavy focus on Emma (both as the source of betrayal and cause of the event, and in the vision she saw of the 'golden future' where they were friends again), and (3) she's in constant debilitating pain, which makes it hard to do much more than focus on the task directly in front of her.

If Taylor gets a chance to relax, get her bearings, take time to think, and get a little distance from her trigger event, she'll probably lose some of her focus and apparent obsession, and regain some perspective of the big picture. Though by that point she might have gone down a path far enough that is hard to reverse course.

For comparison: we don't have Word of God on this, but at the same point in canon when Taylor was in the psych hospital after her trigger, I bet she had a similar obsession with resolving the Emma situation. Thinking again and again "Why did she betray me?" "How could they stoop so low?" "Am I going to suffer this for the rest of high school?" "What can I do to stop it?". Except since her power was bugs instead of a Thinker power that lets her do social-fu, the outrageously unlikely solution "turn Emma back into a friend" wasn't really on the table.

Wow, that's a high compliment!

I completely agree, the Number Girl story isn't as 'objectively' good as Weaver Nine or Memories - or at least, not as 'subjectively' good in terms of the qualities that I personally tend to like in a story.

All three of those stories share the 'core' of the protagonist's POV - complex internal thought processes, emotions, forming relationships, learning lessons about themselves and others, etc. But Weaver Nine and Memories have a lot more additional elements that I tend to like (i.e. all the elements listed above: expansive worldbuilding based on lots of details throughout canon, lots of characters with complex social and battle interactions, a darkish world where the protagonists have unusual motivations, etc.)

There's a big reason for that: it's a lot harder to write a story with all those other elements! When writing each new chapter, there are so many things to think about and double-check: juggling all the elements in the right proportions, weaving them together so they reinforce and synergize instead of intefering with each other, making sure they're consistent with the worldbulding from past chapters, planning ahead to make sure they'll help me set up the next ones in future chapters...I find each chapter taking progressively longer to write, and being a little more work/less fun to write! The inspiration for each new chapter or scene is as strong as ever, but welding them into the story takes a while, and the chapters tend to get quite long.

So the Number Girl story is sort of an experiment! Trying to write a story where the chapters are shorter, with fewer characters and fewer elements to juggle. Not to say I'm not doing worldbuilding/battles/etc, but just that haven't been my focus so far, and would probably be less so than the others. I definitely plan to go back to my other works in the future, but this might be a break to let me 'recharge my batteries'.

...

As a side note, I was surprised how many 'likes' the Number Girl story has been getting in some places. It seems like it has a pretty wide appeal! I think a lot of it is the different style - in fact, many of the same things I mentioned above that make the story 'subjectively' less appealing to me, seem to make it more appealing to others. Maybe this is a general rule in fiction?

Most of all, Number Girl is far more accessible than my other works:

Weaver Nine and Memories have worlds that are dark and rather weird, the protagonists have many abnormal motivations (e.g. mass murderer/Simurgh-affected protagonists), large casts of characters, lots of fights with complex power interactions and strategies, and are based on plot elements that only come up in the late parts of Worm, and then add to it with expansive worldbuilding that draws on a obscure details from canon and adds a lot of new ones.

Whereas Number Girl's world is lighter (the FF.net story is even rates Teen so far), a very small cast of characters with (so far) simple motivations, has no complex multi-power strategies, draws on plot elements from the very start of Worm that all readers know and hasn't (so far) done much new worldbuilding, and is a situation that lots of readers are familiar with and maybe going through right now (high school life, bullying, seeking justice or redemption).

So in many ways Number Girl is a much simpler story than the others, but it seems that simplicity has an appeal of its own.

 

Weaver Nine is a grand adventure tale. Memories is a disaster story with all the relationship stands that entails (as that's what disaster tales are inevitably about) This seems to be more is a personal story; two broken people working with what tools they have. It's a interesting story and I have money on our being a tragedy, but I can fully understand why some people dislike it.

Personally I'm a much bigger fan of W9, but I'll try to put my thoughts to paper as to why I don't think the first few chapters of NG worked that well tonight. I think my main issue is that Taylor's desperation didn't really shine through, and didn't drag the reader onto her thought train

 

Interesting. Having just got up to date, I found I had a very different feel from the story.

As opposed to an slightly more lighthearted redemption fic you seemed to be alluding to, this came across as dark and disturbing to me. As Ayreon said, it feels like Taylor broke in that locker and has latched onto this goal (where in canon she latched onto a dream of being a hero). The way she interacts with Emma feels manipulative and wrong. The last chapter seemed to almost suggest Taylor will be adopting many reprehensible actions in search of results, and this will just keep compounding. Your description certainly seems to suggest a different outcome to it all. Interested to see where it goes anyway.

Partly agree with you this. In real life, murdering someone's family (and many of your friends) is probably a lot worse. But in a piece of fiction? Emma's personal, targeted torture of Taylor for no real reason felt a lot worse than Voldemort's more calculated and warlike actions. For the readers, it feels more emotional.


On the topic of the redemption of Taylor's bullies as a story concept, I think the problem is too many authors have their characters do a complete 180 degree flip in personality and worldview abruptly at the start of the fic. They don't gradually build to it, and the result is you're left with some cheesy scenes and complete strangers.

Probably my favourite Worm execution of that concept was Tyrant. It wasn't so much redemption as it was about reconciliation. Sophia never really got redeemed (at least where the story got abandoned). She didn't do a complete 180 flip in her personality (or even her world view really). More like, she gained respect and genuine friendship for Taylor's cape persona, only to later suffer a huge shock when she realized that it was Taylor and she had been wrong about her. That made for an interesting dynamic that I would have been interested in reading more of.

In comparison, take Emma's redemption in Atonement. While that one scene was powerful and amazing, Emma's character does a complete flip and she becomes a complete (boring) stranger. Madison never really irritated me as much, but if Taylor was still alive, I imagine she would. Nyctapohia was similar, where we deal with a character who might as well be a stranger. All three redemption stories just felt a bit cheesy.