Title: Memories of a Simurgh Victim - Diabolus ex Machina
Author: Thinker6
Rating: M. (AOOO listed Graphic Depictions Of Violence/Major Character Death, with that and my own interpretation, I'll go with M.)
Genre: General.
Status: WIP
Fandom: Worm
Pairings: None listed, but Amy/Victoria seems likely (if...not in a happily-ever-after way).
Summary: The Simurgh comes to Brockton Bay. The Endbringer who sees the future has plans for the city. Victoria Dallon and Taylor Hebert must race against time to save the ones they love, before they are driven mad by the Endbringer's song.
Link: AOOO or Spacebattles

Basically, the Simurgh turns up instead of Leviathan, and we get a first-hand glimpse at just how screwy she can be. Echidna is out, Coil's base is screwed, and a bunch of characters are getting profoundly affected. Thus far, it seems to be going for a slow build up on the shit really hitting the fan - some recent chapters could even be interpreted as bringing positive outcomes - but I think it's quite clearly laying the seeds for some really horrible events.

That isn't to say that it's slow-paced - we jump almost immediately into the action of a Endbringer fight - but that I think that Thinker6 is approaching the threat of the Simurgh correctly, with the impacts being felt several months down the line (as we saw with Echidna).

We're given the POV's of Victoria and Taylor, with more of a focus on Victoria lately, though apparently we're about to return to Taylor. The characterizations and POV of both are captured very well, especially the Victoria ones, which I found myself missing when we went to Taylor. In general, though, everyone seems well characterized, with no bashing on anyone but a general feel of realism/competency to all the characters, even with biased POV. (For example, Victoria's views on Dragon are countered by the actual text and Amy's responses.)

Well written in general, as well. Nothing that blows you out of the water, a la TGoC, but the focus clearly isn't on that. Characters well characterized, fighting done well, and the mind-altering/influencing is done particularly well.

Spoiler

Amy's mind-healing was particularly well-portrayed, as is her recent self-delusion about the Simurgh stealing her memories.

(Unfortunately it uses indenting to display flashbacks, which don't show up on the AOOO download I used, so that made it slightly hard to read at points.)

Don't read if you want a fluffy or fix-it story. This is the Simurgh done well, and it should be about as happy as watching a train inexorably head off the tracks can be.

It's still in the opening stages, but we're 50,000 words in and there's clearly enough (IMO) to make a judgement, so I think it's worth recommending.

4.5/5 from me. Potential to go up or down, depending on how the plot goes from here, but if it sustains at current quality, it'll probably be a 5/5.

 

Its always fun to screw around with Victoria and Amy's fucked-up relationship. Also, best Coil ever. The Simurgh is the best. This story is awesome.

4.5/5. On the scale of Amelia to Weaver Nine, its on the level of Here Be Dragons. It certainly has potential to be the greatest worm fic ever - but the author said that he is unlikely to complete it.

 

5/5, excellent story. Thinker6 writes good well crafted fight scenes, character development, and psychological horror.

 

The wonderful thing about this is that it isn't unrelenting misery. There's been a few moments which devoid of context could even be happy, which makes them all the more horrifying.

So far I think this is easily one of the best wormfics.

 

I love this story. Particularly the chapters focused on Victoria and Amy. Those two crazy kids can never catch a break.

The only bad thing about this story is that, thanks to the omake interludes, I don't think I"ll ever look at the Simurgh the same way again.

 

DAMN IT.

Damn it.

I already have so much on my plate. I'm reading Avatar of Victory and it's LITERALLY 1.5 million words, and I'm trying to get the next chapter of my own fic out, and now I have to read this, too, because damn.

In summary and on point, I have very high hopes for this based on that crack omake.

 

Been absolutely loving this.

Spoiler

Apart from Amy's attempts at healing Victoria, which were amazingly done, another thing that stood out to me was how Simurgh's influence is portrayed. How even when Victoria realizes the Simurgh has been showing her memories to try to make her hate Carol, the Simurgh slowly starts to twist those thoughts into a hostility to everyone else in the world.

So far 4.5/5, but I really hesitate to give it a rating with only 50k words.

As Nemrut described it once "Good Worm fics either die early as heroes, or live long enough to become Amelia". And stories like Cloudy Path, Atonement, etc have all let me down as they continue on.

 

Amelia was always terrible. Atonement is a better example. Also, Weaver Nine, Cenotaph and Wake are all reasonably long and very good.

As for this story, I think I'm with love with the Simurgh. The slow horrifying love story of Amy and Victoria, and then those omakes. I can't wait to see the effects of the Simurgh's manipulations on Taylor. A crazy, paranoid Taylor would destroy worlds. The only problem with the story is I cannot see too many satisfactory endings, since any sort of happy ending would mean the Simurgh failed, which of course isn't possible.

 

So I read this. The omakes were funny as hell, and what drew me in in the first place. I will say that I like the premise a lot - an artful train wreck can be a satisfying read in its own way. A couple very, very good scenes between Amy and Victoria - as someone stated above, Amy repeatedly trying to fix Victoria was a great moment, and kind of horrifying as well. I LOVE that we're mostly in Victoria's head, and seeing Amy's reactions. It's way more brutal that way, in a good way.

Also, the title-drop scene, when Victoria is spinning a hopeless daydream about how they'll escape the city and live as artist hermits... that was really, really good.

However, there is one thing really bringing down the fic, and that's the dialogue. It's kind of hard to explain my problem with it, but I'll give it a go:

Basically, it's that it's unnatural. Too many phrases that sound off or wrong as spoken words, too many cliches (by that, I mean stock phrases like "The world is your oyster.")

A few examples:

Holy exclamation points, Batman. And just say it to yourself in your head: "There's something important you need to know!" - it's clunky. No one talks like that. (Yes, I'm aware that this Brandish is a clone - the dialogue is still off.)

Every single one of those phrases is a well-worn, cliched piece of stock dialogue. One, you wouldn't even notice. This is five, one after the other.

That's... not quite right. TT has snark, and she can be flippant, but she's smoother about it. And a little more shocking, but in a calm, tweak-your-nose way. Eh, I know it seems minor, but I'm focusing on it because it really is rather close, but doesn't quite work. Taylor, similarly, doesn't quite ring true either. She's too brash, and loses some of her trademark think-it-through implacability.

Anyway. Grading on a Worm fanfic curve, this is an easy 4/5, but within the scope of all fanfiction it's more like a 3/5 - about the lowest level of something I'll read all the way through and enjoy.

 

Thanks for including my fic in your Library, and thanks for your comments and compliments!

I just added two new chapters to the fic returning to Taylor's POV. We start to see where Taylor's desires and the Simurgh's influence are taking her.

I'm glad you guys like the premise and the execution! I was impressed with Wildbow's concept of the Simurgh, and his depiction of her attacks in the Migration arc, so I wanted to do justice to it here.

Hmm, as far as inspirations for the premise...

To me, the most striking thing about the Simurgh is how she affects peoples' psychology and relations with other people. So the impact would be conveyed best if she affects people whose psychologies and relationships we're intimately familiar with and are invested in.

But the canon attack didn't do this: it was focused on the Travelers, a separate team from Worm's protagonists, who we didn't know that much about beforehand because they had always been standoffish and kept lots of secrets. I noticed this caused some readers to have a muted emotional reaction. Some even said things like "I'm skimming this interlude arc and waiting to get back to the real protagonists"!

IMO this was an unavoidable compromise for Wildbow when writing canon Worm. Making the protagonists be the focus of a Simurgh attack would give the impression that they were destined for a Bad End, which would affect readers emotional investment for his mega-length story. Plus as Wildbow says 'Behemoth kills heroes, Leviathan kills cities, Simurgh derails plotlines'.

Well, if you can't have it in canon...that's what fanfic is for! That's why I wanted to read a fic showing a Simurgh attack through the eyes of our protagonists. Since there wasn't one already written, I decided to try my hand at writing it myself!

Thanks for your feedback. I completely agree. I've recently noticed that I have a tendency to write dialogue by drawing upon a 'library' of phrases, and a lot of those phrases are stiff or cliched to varying degrees. They 'get the job done' in terms of having the character communicate their ideas, but the voice is off. When I re-read my stories and I come across lines where I used those phrases I get get a mental 'ping', a sense of "hey, this isn't quite right."

The specific sentences you pointed out are all ones that pinged me as 'off'. So I think you picked good examples. In retrospect, the two chapters I just added have a fair number of these too. If I ever edit the story for a 'final' version maybe I should go back and revise those parts to make them sound more natural.

Heh, Worm fanfics tend to be lower-quality than fanfics as a whole? I'm not very familiar with other types of fanfic, so my internal quality meter might be miscalibrated.

 

Nice, I'll definitely give them a read.

Regarding the quality thing, I wouldn't say that, exactly. I'm coming at it from a perspective of mostly having read Harry Potter fanfic, and it's a more mature population, if only time-wise. The high end of HP stuff is on a different level than the high end of the other fandoms I've dabbled in. Again, that's just personal opinion.

Although, I will say, purely holistically, that I remember clicking out of way more Worm fics than other fandoms. Maybe it's just that the universe lends itself to interesting ideas that fall victim to some fundamental writing mistakes?

 

Two new chapters certainly were the first experiences I've had in the Worm fandom (canon or fanfic) where the Undersiders are actually portrayed as criminals lacking with a basic level of morality. Like easy enough to ignore a bank robbery where no one got hurt, harder to deal with the scenes that are occurring in this fic at the moment.

As for the Worm fandom, as Newcomb said, it's not nearly as big as Naruto, HP or some of the other fandoms we follow on this site. For those mature fandoms, there are a large number of high quality, full length fics around to set a standard.

Worm is similar to the Familiar of Zero fandom where it has a great base for short-length B-grade concepts which are really more about playing around with different ideas on Taylor's powers more than anything else (ie, the perfect sandbox for your typical SpaceBattles author). Within these, there certainly is a wide scale of quality, and fics that sit on the higher end of that scale stand out a lot and so comparatively, fics may seem a lot better than what they actually are. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't some fantastic fics within small fandoms, but it's hard not to normalize your ratings/reviews to what the peak of the fandom is at the moment.

A stand out fic in the HP/Naruto universe on the other hand, is one that stands out amongst over a million fics and 15 years of fandom. The readers have become accustomed to and bored of the usual cliches, read almost every single concept you can come up with and hence only something that is a bit different and has a near-perfect execution stand out.

 

That's true. Although, remember that in this fic we're seeing events from inside Taylor's head. You might get a different impression if you saw it from an Undersider's POV. To be fair to them, they're all in a desperate situation. Under attack by an Endbringer and under a time limit to escape the city on pain of death or worse. They might do and say things that they normally never would.

That said, it's not entirely unfair either. The immoral act Taylor focuses on for much of these chapters - the Undersiders being willing to stay with Coil after they found out about Dinah - is one of the points in canon that made a lot of readers sit up and take notice, too. Thinking "Whatever else the Undersiders are, they're villains. They do immoral things for their own gain."

...

Actually, I always thought a great fanfic premise would be a world where there was no Endbringer attack in Brockton Bay. Taylor finds out about Dinah, wants to save her, quits the Undersiders, and then...what can she do? She outlines her situation pretty well in the "Taylor 1" chapter of this fic. She's gotten herself trapped in an impossible dilemma.

The Endbringer attacks in canon and in my fic give her nudges that push her to resolutions:

With canon Leviathan, she's pushed to go all-in and stay with the Undersiders:
- Taylor finds out Shadow Stalker's identity (making her strongly opposed to going to the PRT about what she knows)
- the Undersiders come to support her and reveal Armsmaster's treachery to save her skin (making her feel obligated to them)
- Armsmaster reveals her own plans of treachery to the Undersiders (making her feel even more obligated/guilty to them).

With Simurgh in my fic...well, you see how it pushes her. She gets an opportunity to save Dinah and she seizes the chance to go all-in and be a hero.

But if there was no Endbringer attack...what would she do? Will she tell Dinah's parents? Give the PRT anonymous tips about Coil's organization? Come clean to Danny and try to make him go into hiding for his own protection? Surrender herself to the PRT, tell them everything she knows about Coil, and beg them to let her help them take him down? Or try to storm Coil's base by herself? It's such a desperate dilemma that it seems like good fuel for interesting stories, where authors could come up with creative approaches she could take.

Hmm, I did read some of the Familiar of Zero fanfics on spacebattles and I see the trend you guys are talking about. I guess part of it is that both settings have built in 'slots' that in setting are filled with random effects selected from a wide range (e.g. a mage's summon, a parahuman's power). That makes it easy for an author's imagination to generate fic ideas which consist of plugging in their own idea, or a crossover idea, and seeing if it creates a cool scene ("What if Louise summoned X?" "What if Taylor had the power to X?"), without having to give much thought to whether it makes a good story ("The Guiche fight would be cooler if Louise summoned Galactus! Can you imagine the look on Guiche's face? Ha ha ha!").

 

I'm enjoying this fic, mostly because of the characterization for the characters. I'm still hesitant to rate because we don't have much of an idea on the broader plot, on what the repercussions of this attack will be.

For one, this might be by some metrics the most unpredictable Simurgh attack for the Simurgh. You have two of the most powerful precogs in the setting in the city, which we know disrupts her precog. You have Noelle and company fighting alongside the heroes against the Simurgh, and if Noelle manages to clone any precogs, Simurgh is in for an even more unpredictable time. This is in addition to the extra firepower Noelle and clones bring to the table.

So I'm excited because this can be a very bad day for the Simurgh or a very good day, because Noelle and Panacea are such bombs in canon, just waiting to explode.

 

I don't know about other people, but I certainly prefer Grue's system of morality to Taylor's -- first family, then team, then Rest of the World. Taylor's morality principles are so damn inconsistent -- there are times when it seems like she would nuke the whole planet if it means saving her precious Dinah.

(I am quite sick of every single fanfic having Dinah saved. Can't we kill her off instead just this once? Please? )

Nice update. It is fascinating to see the Simurgh twisting Brian's desire to remain strong for others to paint him as a monster. Good to see the more vicious side of Bitch as well -- most fanfics portray her as an overgrown puppy in need of love or something equally ridiculous.

(While I would love to see Dinah eaten alive by bats or something similar, I would settle for a painless death as well. Pretty Please?)

The whole setting is fascinating as well. So many evil clones -- I wonder what will happen when the Simurgh leaves and they start wrecking havoc. It had a lot of potential in canon as well, but sadly none of the clones survived Echidna's death.

I wonder how would the Undersiders and Victoria/Amy unintentionally fuck over the world. Looking forward to it.

(Die, Dihah. Just fucking Die.)