Title: Inspired Voyage
Author: SIDoragon
Rating: M
Genre: General Fics
Status: WIP 120K
Fandom: Star Trek Voyager / Crossovers
Pairings: None so far
Summary: N/A

Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/inspired-voyage-st-voyager-si.791005/reader/

A lengthy Star Trek fic & one of the best i've found (not that there are many anyway). It revolves around Voyager gaining a Section 31 passenger (the OC) just before their trip the the Delta quadrant & applies a more realistic narrative than the TV series. The author is following the canon episodes whilst substantially expanding apon them to make their own story - none of the reading the transcripts nonsense.

The main downside I feel is the charactization of Janeway which comes across as bashing for the sake of it although the author argues otherwise.

3/5

 

Forgot to mention that the MC is a Worm CYOA (Inspired Inventor) using ST:V meta knowledge and is a Augment, and is Section 31. Kind of an important plot point to not include. We must hit all the cliches of an SI/OC in the ST-verse here.

Given that, I'm kind of a sucker for a decently written Star Trek FF that doesn't concentrate solely on sex and romance. Technically it's sound. The MC is obviously OP'd, but is keeping it hidden fairly well. Janeway & Chekotay bashing, but that's virtually unavoidable with a Voyager fic unless a total character rewrite is involved. Being it's hosted on Spacebattles, of course there is tech fapping, and massive discussions about what tech is better for the MC to "invent".

The Augment and Sec 31 is virtually useless with the Inventor power at play, and the story could be much better without it. It's just makes him... edgier(?) I guess? Totally useless.

If you can still read it after knowing all this, then I highly recommend the "Read Only" option.

Definitely not library worthy. More of a guilty pleasure reading. Still, I enjoy keeping up with it.

2/5

 

Same as above, really. It can't be anything more than 2/5 because it's just so cringe to read sometimes. I can understand not liking some characters, but setting them in stone, disabling character development for them, simply to further shitting on them is just... pointless. Yes, Tom Paris has his faults, but he grows beyond them, becomes more. But because the SI is here, that's obviously not going to happen.

Voyager isn't even close to being a favorite Star Trek show for me, so it's not like I'm a fanboy defending anyone's character from it.

All in all, this just reads like one of those boring and annoying self-insert fics where the author places themselves in a setting to show how superior they themselves are. And that's not particularly good reading, unless you yourself are aligned with the author in their opinions.

 

I read this a few days back, got bored of it and didn't finish it. The "points spending" like RPG levelling was lame. Heather has nailed down what is wrong with it though.

2.5/5.

 

I enjoy the fic for what it is though SI could be a little more limited in his powers because right now only thing that stops him from breaking the setting is his insistence to not break the setting. Which is fine when you don't feel you're really risking the lives of people you started to care about, but after the last episode should change.

Then the authors probably cornered themselves with Janeway's behaviour. They said she's going to stay as the captain, but her last actions should be impossible to hide from and be accepted by most of the crew.

 

With the words "for what it is" sums it up for me almost perfectly; it's why I continue reading... that and the lack of decent ST fics.

The MC has stirred the pot enough that I don't think Janeway will last beyond this latest rout, with Chakotay looking sideways at her in the last chapters and WTFing, and Tuvok doing nearly the same thing from his station. One thing I did notice is that the author has stopped Chakotay, et al, bashing altogether since the 'come-to-jesus' meeting in the ready room. Now it's just a strict Janeway bashfic. He'll let the Command officers take her out once the current crisis is over, if my guess isn't wrong.

 

Chakotay's attitude changed like I expected Janeway to change, but it's too late for that to happen. And from what other PoV we got, only Tom is unaware of how little she's in charge at the moment making it impossible for her to continue her command unless it's somehow in a name only.

 

I don't know if it's that Chakotay has changed so much as we haven't really seen much of him in order to decide. I keep expecting him to break out into a spirit quest at any moment, but he doesn't. Maybe he has changed! Anyway, Janeway should have adjusted a little since the ready room meeting, but she's gone full Ahab against the MC instead.

Once she's out of the way then hopefully the plot will smooth itself out into a normal story instead of a bashfic every other chapter. Here's hoping!

 

Best ST fic I've read in years. The fandom doesn't really have a lot of quality fics appearing so anything new and unique is appreciated. There were a few parts that were pretty dry in the beginning, the technical talk integrating new tech onto the ship and all. But I've enjoyed the characters themselves, along with the changes that have been made to security. A competent and well thought out Section 31 isn't really something I've seen done before either.

I give it a 4/5. Probably gonna make me binge Voyage soon to. So bonus points for that.

 

A new chapter is out and did Janeway just tried to murder MC?

 

That's what it looks like. I mean seriously... I can see character bashing, given that canon Janeway is not written very well, but this is "Dumbledore busting the room and yelling WAT THE FUCK ARE U MUthER FUKERZ DOING!!1!" levels of bashing. Wow!

 

I was digging this fic when it first started and it actually had me posting in the thread on sb, 50,000 words later I’ve been banned from the thread for a month and given two warnings one for “obviously trolling” when I argued that canon!Janeway is actually competent and that the Janeway in this fic is a blithering idiot. It’s criminal what they do to Janeway in that thread.

 

It's obvious that there's a large contingent that is anti-Janeway for whatever reason. That's fine. There's a reason that bashfics exist. I can even see a number of reasons that they dislike her -- as I said before about her character being written poorly in canon. For diehard Trek fans, bad writers can really make them hate what they've done to the 'verse. Some of the things in the show were very "WTF are they doing? That's not right!"

With that said, it's a fanfic that's obviously not going to change no matter how much logic is applied in the thread arguments. It's something we've seen over a decade in the HP verse -- evil-Dumbledore is gonna be evil. The author wants it to be a Janeway bashfic so it'll be one. It's just sad that the author doesn't show her thought process through the interludes he writes. It might have made a little more sense instead of the delusional/insane Janeway that's popped up in the last few chapters.

Instead of a power struggle between the MC and Janeway, which was what I thought this story was going to use as a way to keep the MC from going full-on Gary!Stu, Janeway has simply been turned into a random evil character that must be put down because she is clinically insane at this point.

 

Yeah, it's weird, there was this side story chapter with Sisko and a Romulan spy that I found a lot more compelling then the same Voyager bash stuff he was doing. The character Shepherd has implied that Janeway eventually improves over the course of the show, but I guess he's not bothering with that yet... I still mostly like it, but we'll see if it careens completely off the rails.

 

I really don't see how she could improve at this point, barring some random mind control deus ex that she was being controlled or something. Even if they brig her and the doctor "fixes" her brain, Janeway is a mostly dead character for the plot, only being useful for bashing purposes in the future. Meh.

The sad part is that I enjoyed the story, for the most part, up until now.

Janeway served a decent role as a crew antagonist in the beginning. Here's to hoping the author doesn't slot another character he hates into the role and gives the them same final treatment.

 

I've been following this story for a while. At first, I was under the impression that we were getting an unreliable narrator and that there was more going on behind the scenes. Like, the fact that the SI already hated Janeway coupled with the Shepard insert being Section 31 and therefore being used to looking for ulterior motives meant that he was reading into things that weren't there. So when he says things like "she spoke quietly, so as to make us hang on to her words" it was really just Janeway speaking quietly--no manipulations intended. I even made a remark to that effect in the thread that the author agreed with it.

The Janeway obstructionism continued again and again. Shepard can't do this because Janeway wouldn't like it. Shepard tried to do that but Janeway stopped him. Eventually it became that she wasn't rejecting ideas because they were bad, she was doing so because they came from Shepard. I kept expecting for her to get better over time, as she began to grasp the fact that they were completely on their own outside any support system and some things needed to change. In the original show, this was how the Maquis were treated--they could be seen either as freedom fighters or terrorists, and their methods clashed with that of Starfleet, but they came to integrate and begin to work together because they have to. Not so with Shepard for some reason.

The first strike for me was how the Banean story was handled. This seemed to be the perfect time for us to see an alternate side of Janeway--that no matter how she feels personally about Shepard, she recognizes that he is part of her crew and that he is trying to work for their betterment and survival. When she found out about how Shepard was drugged and attacked, she should have instantly leaped to his defense. Instead she thinks of Shepard's actions as murder instead of self-defense and if the Banean method of punishment hadn't been so inhumane from her perspective, I'm fully convinced she would have turned him over for "justice."

The second strike for me was when we finally had Janeway and Shepard airing their grievances with each other after the freighter. I was hoping that there was some very good reason for why Janeway was treating Shepard as she did. Like, we had some equivalent event to the Arrival DLC from Mass Effect. He had to do some absolutely heinous thing in order to prevent a bigger disaster. Instead all we got was vague suspicions. Turned out that she just didn't like Shepard because he was Section 31 and therefore didn't fit into her neat and clean vision of Starfleet. The third strike for me may be coming soon, depending on how these next few chapters go.

My biggest problem with this story is how the SpaceBattles thread is being run. It's basically an echo chamber where people keep going on and on about how amazing Shepard is and how evil Janeway is, and the mods keep cracking down on any dissent. There are 14 staff posts on the thread. Now, I get that discussing 'canon' Janeway doesn't provide any real feedback to the author about his version of Janeway, but come on!

Additionally, his handling of how canon went bugs me. When you see someone in the story do something stupid for the plot reasons, there's a couple of ways to handle it. Either you just say they were stupid or you give them good behind-the-scenes reasons for why they did something. Janeway in the first couple seasons was all over the place because she was being written by several different authors with different perspectives on how she should act. As a single author, he can control how she acts...and he chooses to write her as an actual psychopath. Just...why?

 

New chapter came out, trying to hamfist a reason for Janeway hating Shepard so much: apparently Section 31 had some dealings with her father, who designed starships, and when they took out one prototype ship for a test flight, things went wrong and her father and her fiance died.

Overall, the chapter is tedious as usual, it's just going over everything that happened in the past, except from Janeway's perspective. Seems like just a way to delay the confrontation between Shepard and Janeway for yet another chapter. And to insert shit that doesn't make sense, like Janeway believing Seska could have been an ally to the ship. Or thinking of how B'Elanna got tricked by Shepard due to her "thuggish Klingon nature". That's a direct quote. Oh and then she goes to think how B'Elanna made herself less human with that, i.e. becoming lesser.

She looks upon Chakotay as a lesser as well, not wanting to become friendly with him, lest he infect her with his Maquis thinking. She denies taking one ship for fear Chakotay would captain it, becoming her equal and having the option to defy her afterwards.

And why she blew up the latest ship captured by Shepard and his team? She wanted to kill Shepard, plain and simple.

So yeah, everything that everyone thought was going to happen did: Janeway is a fullblown lunatic, salivating and snarling at the thought of Shepard being alive, hissing in anger, being outraged that he didn't die when she tried to have him killed.

The bashing has come outright now, there's no longer any chances for Janeway to be redeemed, in fact, I suspect her aligning herself with some antagonists down the line, in a distorted attempt to 'save' her crew by killing them, as the author has written as much in this chapter.

So you know what? This goes down to 1/5. Fuck his technical writing. Fuck anything good about this. If he can't be bothered to not let his personal biases influence his writing and character development, rather than just his opinions and views (which would be totally normal and acceptable), what's the fucking point in reading all this?

Self-inserts fanfics like this are the ones that make everyone else wary of reading anything with a SI in the first place.

 

While I'm not a big fan of latest chapters, maybe it will get back to what I liked about this fic and we will get SI inventing a new tech and using it to help improve Voyager's ability to survive their journey.

 

I pretty much agree with everything you've pointed out. This was not, in any way shape or form, canon Janeway in the slightest. I'm not a Janeway fan at all, and I thought this was a simple butchery of the character for nothing else than to show how awesome the (augmented, Section 31, Worm OP-powered, SI) the MC is. It's devolved that much.

I still give it 2/5 for technical aspects alone.

This latest interlude was a simple abortion in writing. His explanation in earlier discussion was that Janeway never really earned her Captain pips and that it was mostly nepotism that got her the position. So obviously that means she's psychotic, paranoid to the point of murder, delusional as to her motivations, and... fuck I could keep going. Maybe next chapter she should be hearing voices of her dead father and twitching in her straight jacket. I mean double wow!

Pretty sure somewhere in the first couple of chapters the MC said (during the massive amounts of technobabble) he could develop tech that would get them home in little time, but then there would be no story. As far as getting back to normal... uh, I can only hope. I mean is there much of a crew left?

 

There's been a trend that Janeway's actions have gotten more erratic over the course of the story. At first it was arguable that she was in the right, but that the SI's unreliable narration (& the complaints of the thread readers) simply painted her in a negative light. For example, she successfully prevented the polaric explosion from the planet in episode 3 using a time-travel exploit. However, the thread was angry about it since Shepard's plan involved allowing the explosion in order to scavenge the planet's technology & cultural output. So the narrator could be salty even though Janeway made the correct decision.

That characterization has been repeatedly undermined by both narrative and exposition until now she is simply a racist with an actual mental illness. Janeway calling Torres "thuggish" has racial overtones for U.S. readers. There's also an interesting line about how she can't stand to look her crew in the face because she's seeing "black veins of corruption."

It's too bad that we didn't get an actual conflict between Shepard's worldview and Janeway's, but if an author wants to write a bash-fic then no amount of charitable reading will be able to uncover interesting content in a narrative that simply isn't there.

1/5


Edit to add: The thread's insistence on name-calling ("Insaneway", etc) makes the discussion really tough to follow.