How Taylor Hebert Agreed to Be a Slut [Worm/Slut Life]

1) No, I have never and absolutely will never read Worm.
The worldbuilding has from all the fanfics I've read got enough of what I find to be plot holes to fly Eden through. The tone is constantly full of grim derpiness, the protagonist is mentally ill (the most annoying type of protagonist I know of, though clearly sociopathic minmaxers are a close second).

2) Hence I suggested it as "well, IF that could be done it would be a viable choice"... then got dogpiled by a bunch of "would absolutely not let patients anywhere near Panacea" folks.

Yes, Ack, I hate Carol as much as you do. But she's just another worldbuilding plot hole: A criminal lawyer with a black-and-white worldview is more than just a paradox. It is a Missingno. tier error.

 

Then I suggest, with all due respect, that you don't post judgement on canon characters without reading canon.

My headcanon is that when she's being a lawyer, she thinks like a lawyer. When she's being Brandish, she thinks like Brandish.

 

1. Bah, you don't need to read Harry Potter itself, just fanfics, to know that he's an idiot who let way too many innocent people die for his dire need to be a noble git (if he'd reductored the lethal-force-using enemy to bits in the Ministry of Magic it would be proof of Death Eater attack AND would very likely have prevented Teddy from becoming an orphan, or even the Year 7 muggleborn genocide in the first place). Reading enough fanfics (with varying divergence points from canon) of ANYTHING gives you a clear enough view of the original to at least be able to identify the main problems.

2. Sounds reasonable. But she must be better at being an AI than Dragon to be able to toggle so easily, clearly, and reliably.
Carol Dallon can pull her head out of her ass (and put it back in) on command. What an asshole! *gets infracted for terribad puns*

 

I agree. I've never read canon Worm before, though I tried too but I couldn't get past the first part. I just... have a low tolerance for Grimdark (or Derp whichever is more suitable) and the stuff Taylor went through in high school (I think?) was too much for me as I too didn't enjoy my high school time. But despite my inability (though I might force myself eventually) to read Worm hasn't stopped me from enjoying the fandom, I especially love your Worm stories Ack.

Also my favorite character besides Taylor is Ames and I just enjoy when Ames gets the help she needs. I know enough of canon to know that Ames isn't in a good place mentally and I love reading stories where she gets some much needed help.

 

The trouble is, fanfics are written with the biases of the writers in mind. If you haven't read the original, you haven't seen the intent of the original writer.

Nope.

The personality doesn't change, but the goals (as expressed by "what can I achieve in this persona") are different. As a lawyer, she deals in shades of grey. As a superhero, black and white.

 

The saddest part of this.... You actually think you're right. Hint, you're not.

Basically, you're saying "I watched 'Enterprise' and 'Star Trek: Discovery' (both of which barely qualify as fanfiction in the ST universe), so I can point out all the plot holes from 'Star Trek: The Original Series', as well as all the problems with Gene Roddenberry's vision. And let me tell you, Kirk was a womanizing bastard who didn't follow ANY rules and should be locked up for rape, Spock should have been running Starfleet since he's the smartest in the universe, and Sulu should have been the captain."
(for the record, saying that to an actual ST fan will get you punched... Hard)

Fanfiction is fanfiction because it's different than the source material. You're essentially trying to identify someone you've never met by sight, using only their portrait as drawn by Picasso as a reference.

 

Are you... still doing this? It's been so many years, I was expecting, I don't know, something.

 

This would be a far less ambiguous post if you mentioned who you were talking to, and about doing what...

Pronouns are meaningless without Nouns to reference to.

 

I think he meant this story, is it still continuing? THough I could be wrong.

 

It was started just over two weeks ago...

 

Like I said, I could be wrong.

 

Overall, heavily seconded.

In some cases, however, it's legitimately hard to read the original (whether because the original is ridiculously long and/or complicated - such as Naruto, some versions of DC and/or Marvel, LotR/Silmarillion, or arguably Worm - or because it's extremely badly written and/or cringey, such as some versions of MLP).

Also, in a few cases, the original writer comes around and directly says something along the lines of "no, no, you're having it all wrong, my actual intent was completely different", regardless of whether said "actual intent" has anything to do with what is actually described in the written story.
And in some of those cases, for all we know (the Hermione/Ron pairing in HP comes to mind as a particularly likely example), perhaps the original writer did in fact intend it that way, they just happened to completely bungle the way it comes out in-story.

 

As a follow up to my previous post on the topic... I actually remembered something from a while back that's actually relevant to the source material vs fanfiction topic.

Go back many many (many many many many) moons, back to the days of 56k dial-up modems being the fastest internet around, when the savvy could wrangle an unlimited free trial of said internet from AOL (I spent 5 years on a perpetual free trial with no breaks in service, lol).

Back then I used to read a LOT of Ranma 1/2 fanfiction. Dozens of regular fics and hundreds of crossovers (why were so many Ranma/Sailor Moon crossovers so damned good? Boggles the mind). The thing was.. I'd never seen a single episode of the anime, nor read a single page of the manga, I knew absolutely nothing about the source material at all except what I had learned from fanfiction.

Eventually I got interested enough to look up the anime, and I found a download (I think it was a torrent, but it might have been through something like KaZaA) of the entire Ranma 1/2 series, and all of it's movies... That was 80 GB (video compression kinda sucked back then).

Now you have to understand, on dial-up downloads were SLOW, and you couldn't use your phone while the computer was connected.

I spent around 9 months straight (no, I'm not joking) downloading this 80 GB repository of the Ranma 1/2 anime, leaving my computer connected online an average of 18 hours a day doing nothing but downloading this anime.

When I finally finished the download the whole thing... I watched 2 of the 7 seasons, and none of the movies, and I deleted the whole thing and never looked back... Because frankly it was kinda garbage, and the fanfiction was several orders of magnitude better.

------

Now with Worm we have a kinda inverse of that situation. Worm is SOOOO much better than the vast majority of its fanfiction. I'm not saying it's without its problems, because it does have a fair number of them, but there are only a few fanfictions of Worm that actually approach being as good as Worm canon is, and even fewer that surpass it.

 

For fans of grimdark, that is (and I don't even mean grimderp/black comedy, just plain grimdark).

I happen to mostly dislike non-comedic grimdark, so I haven't read Worm so far... not willing to subject myself to what's likely to be several days' worth of constant depressingness. Sorry.

 

Good at grimdark you mean. It's got more mental baggage involved than Evangelion, and that was written by an actually depressed guy! Generally mental baggage is the most HATED character trait in fiction because if we wanted that stuff we could just look at reality!.

When I learnt Wildbow said that A Cloudy Path is the closest fanfic to Worm's dominant tone I wrote off the possibility of ever reading Worm.
You can check up the events of the Last Battle (SB thread after the quit announcement, and then the SV thread being a calmer discussion thereof before it was locked) on the ACP threads to get how badly we thought of the plot pacing, character development, and general tone of uselessness and hand-wringing (at least up to end up Arc 22, I skimmed 23 and 24 because nothing obvious changed, it was all just action sequences just like the preceding arcs).

Then I learnt Wildbow said that it was the closest to Worm's canon tone. Right up to the deus ex machina author fiat hand-waving of "oh Taylor was dying before the Butcher arc so couldn't focus econ!" being basically equivalent to Contessa interrupts.

 

A Cloudy Path may have been the closest to Worm in tone, but there's a LOT more to a work of fiction than the tone, and Worm is definitely far superior to A Cloudy Path in all the ways that matter. (and ACP did go WAY overboard on Taylor's powers. There's munchkining, and then there's bending the rules and laws of the universe over the desk and fucking them in the ass for no reason other than 'because I can'.... Guess which one ACP is)

Also, the very fact that you keep referencing 'Contessa interrupts' is just showing off that you don't know what you're talking about. News flash, they didn't happen often in Worm, hell arguably they didn't happen at all in Worm; because every single time Contessa showed up.. (wait for it)... There were actual plot reasons that were perfectly logical in the setting (not saying Contessa herself was logical, saying that how she was used as a character was logical).

Contessa was never a true Deus Ex Machina, because her powers are inherently flawed and most of the 'problems' she solved could have been handled by other characters in the setting. Hell, it's Contessa's power that's responsible for The Thinker (Eden) forgetting to land when entering Earth's atmosphere.

Wow... You must really hate all of the Marvel and DC universes then.

Wolverine is probably your most hated character of all time; not to mention people like Spiderman, Batman, The Flash, Silver Surfer, etc.

Then moving out of the superhero genre (of which 95% of the characters have severe mental baggage), you have such horrors as Lord of the Rings universe, which obviously no one liked and everyone hated, because who could like Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir, Theoden and the worst and most hated of all, Gollum... LOTR just has too many to list.

How about some anime then? Hellsing Ultimate, enough said.

Hell, 1/2 the characters in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic have quite a bit of mental baggage.

Oh wait, people loved all of those things, didn't they ? But that can't be right, because you said that mental baggage is something near universally hated.

 

I meant Ack, still doing the Worm fanfiction thing essentially unchanged after so long. Wouldn't you get bored after the first couple fics? There are so many different stories to write out there.

 

Ah... so THAT'S that you meant... good point. We ccan only hope but ultimately it's up to Ack if he wants to step out of his comfort zone.

 

I'm writing different stories. Yes, they're based in Worm, but they're different stories. (Also writing a novel, but that's got a ways to go).

Or are you saying that one Worm fanfic is the same as all the rest?

My 'comfort zone', I presume you mean, being Worm fanfic.

Because I've written:
Me, in Worm
Taylor goes back 22 years to save the world. All she has is Lisa in her head and her own inborn badassitude. Plus Aster Anders.
Marquis beats the Brigade and raises Amelia himself
Taylor is attacked and her power kills hundreds. Then Sophia joins the Undersiders.
Taylor becomes weirdly lucky, to the point that insane coincidences screw up every single attempt to hurt her.
Danny is John Wick
Emma is killed in the alley. Sophia recruits Taylor as a vigilante. This does not go well.
Taylor ends up with a friendly Endbringer who looks like a teenage boy. Coil leaves town.
Taylor dies in the locker, but gets better
Taylor makes friends in detention after kicking the shit out of Madison
Taylor screws up against Lung and ends up joining the Wards and making friends with Shadow Stalker
Sophia opts out of Gold Morning and spends the next few years in jail. When she's released, she ends up in a hero team with Glory Girl.
Taylor and Dinah swap powers and start building a dream team.
Contessa and Doctor Mother gank Eden and start setting up to save the world.
Panacea finds out that her father is Marquis and demands his release from the Birdcage
Mike Allen (from Security!) ends up in Panacea's head. then Scion's.
A Cauldron cape ends up facing a sadistic hero with no memory of how he got there.
Shadow Stalker murders Grue. Lisa murders her new team leader. Taylor murders Sophia. Panacea mindwipes Vicky. Life can only get better ... right?
Taylor joins the Empire and gets machine control powers.
Taylor gets trump powers and joins Uber & Leet. Lung is displeased.
Taylor becomes a dragon and causes Armsmaster a lot of problems.
Worm is a Matrix construct.
A ship from the Human Polity ends up in Worm

Yeah, they're all the same. Just saying.

 

I stand corrected.

But what I meant is... huh... don't know what I was trying to say originally. Just sounded good at the time I guess.

 

Hey Ack would you be willing to put links on all those, I think I've read most of them, but I want the whole collection

 

Look in my sig.

 

Which one was this?

 

Heroes & Villains

 

1. ACP is the latter because, as someone else said in the Last Battle, Lisa had zero chance of putting up with being nearly stomped over and over again when Taylor could easily avoid such. It fucked over Lisa's intelligence, all possible character growth, etc. so badly that when the need to no longer be plateaued enough to be a pond of utterly dead still water showed up, the author could not overcome it and quit.

2. "But we do not tell our children stories of the mentally traumatized so that they will know such exist. You knew mental trauma existed before you could speak, before you could walk. We tell our children stories of mental trauma because those stories had or were of heroes. We tell our children stories of mental trauma so that they will know mental trauma can be BEATEN!" -Paraphrased from some author-
But you are correct, I could have worded it better. "The common symptom of mental trauma known as WANGST (aka Whiny Angst), with common sub-symptoms of continual depression, lack of learning from experiences, and regularly feeling sorry for oneself, is one of the most annoying things in fiction." I don't remember Wolverine being particularly wangsty or failing too badly to learn life lessons.

For contrast to wangst, Ack's characters (in the less grim fics of his, i.e. the ones I've read) are VERY receptive to learning lessons, such as "It Gets Worse" having Taylor learn to enjoy life readily instead of, say, self-flagellating over bad things happening to people plotting against her.

 

Yeah.... You're not gonna find much 'wangst' in Worm either, save maybe the first few chapters. Angst sure, tons of the stuff; but wangst? Nope. (OK, maybe Panacea had a bit of wangst...)

 

Something tells me if this was a line on TVTropes it would be linked to this page:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Understatement

 

And there you go saying you know canon because you've read fanfiction again.

Panacea had NOWHERE NEAR the amount of wangst fanfiction oft portrays her with. Again, Panacea is a big ball of angst, with just a smidgen of wangst mixed in.

One of the typical tools used by authors not that good with characterization is to take the extremes of the character, the good and bad, and just work with those aspects of them; because they know, on some level, that they can't properly give the characters life on their own merits. Almost no fanfiction authors (with some notable exceptions) are good with characterization, so you end up with distorted views of the characters at their most extreme levels, without the characters actually having reason to be that way in the fanfic's context. And without the matching context for the character being that way... We end up with people like you, who think they know everything about that character.

Even seeing the exact same events, portrayed exactly the same way, but from a different perspective, can drastically change your understanding of a character. I saw a video on youtube a few days ago that perfectly explains this concept, gimme a sec to find a link....




Funnily enough, looking at it from a certain (and non-euclidean) angle... the person in Worm with the MOST amount of wangst... Was Sophia Hess.

 

There may even be a certain amount of schadenfreude involved

 

The XKCD What-If response to someone asking about the dinosaur content of their plastic dinosaur ended with a diagram.



For Worm, this would be:
Talyor Hebert: Some Wangst
Amy Dallon: More Wangst
Sophia Hess: ALL Wangst

...Which is something I can't see early canon Taylor indulging in much without feeling guilty of being non-heroic.
Man when I see that word I keep thinking of shady applications of Freud. (BTW I thought Pink Floyd was Pink Freud for a long, LONG time)...