Caveats: I stopped reading just about when the Butchur/Fallen thing started wrapping up. Just fell off my radar.

My opinion: Iztiak's and Nemrut's combined.

As others have said, it meanders. When I was reading it, many instances of "Is this going somewhere? No? Just more talking and more waiting? " It seemed to be perpetually stuck in the "Call to Adventure" phase of a Hero's Journey.

And the crossover power, ugh. Lavanya Six has a point in that a lot of fics have Taylor get power, and then ramp up so hard and fast that it's figuratively airborne.

But this?

I feel like this "Slow burn" is burning so slowly that the stove is off to follow that metaphor.

It felt as if I could find and replace every reference to Supreme Commander and give the reason of her power as "Nanomachines" and it would not change the story at all.

I'd give it a solid 3 out of 5.


That all said, Maybe there's a good jumping back in point as Lavanya pointed out in the end.

 

A picked "A Cloudy Path" back up. It's still wordy, and Taylor spends way to much screen time/word count thinking in circles, (she's also still almost obnoxiously naive/heroic, and still has no sense of self-worth, which gets annoying) but I like it. I like the direction everything seems to be going, after the Simurgh fight and Scion fiasco.

If, like me, you dropped the fic around the time Aeon killed butcher, I recommend you start with arc 18, or thereabouts. Yeah, you miss some stuff, but nothing important that won't be referred to or mentioned later. Granted, the Echidna fight was pretty uninteresting save for a few interactions here and there, but if you skip too much, and you've never read Worm, you might be a touch lost.

4/5

 

Holy shit, it's at 1.2 million words. I don't even know where I left off. Think she was fighting the Butcher at that point. Is that around the halfway point?

I mean, it has been a few years at this point but I honestly remember nothing from what has to have been at least 500k words that I have read of this story. Might try it again, I guess, but dunno. Does it get more memorable?

 

I picked this back up a few months ago and managed to make it to arc 18 or so. The stuff that is good is really good, but there's a lot of filler and some parts that are meh. I made it to the Coil stuff, and the revelation that happened made me stop caring. And the Supreme Commander stuff is STILL completely arbitrary. I really feel like this is one of those stories that would actually be a lot better if you chopped word count in half, but even so, I might still say that this is the best fic in the fandom (which still isn't really much of a commendation considering the state of the fandom)

 

...I guess?

Spoiler

She shoots Scion after he drives off Ziz...is that memorable? And he's got some sort of scheme going on involving Taylor. And the "Supreme Commander stuff" is remnants of a failed cycle involving three entities. Apparently, they cannot understand the technology.

I also left off after she killed Butcher. I didn't try and find it. I just clicked on 18.1 and started reading. Skipped over Coil entirely.

 

Honestly I once dropped the story around the start of the Teeth arc however long ago. A few months ago I decided to re-read the thing and power through the middle shelter stuff, I think it's starting to find it's gear again although I'm not totally sold on the whole Lisa drug plot tbh. Feels a bit contrived som as to make Taylor not become friends with a former villain.

 

Contrived how? Coil made her an addict, now she's a somewhat functioning junky. And her and Taylor are definitely friends. Like, fighting-trolls-in-bathrooms type friends. Granted, I skipped over all the Coil-shit so it kinda came out of left field for me, but it fit with the background information.

 

Apparently the author has stopped wanting to write this fic to such a degree they've asked SB's mods to delete it off the face of their forums. Haven't read this, but was planning on it eventually, so if someone would be so kind as to make a backup that'd be swell.

 

Man, that seems a bit extreme. This story has made it into my yearly re-read cycle, and I've been reading it for the past two weeks again. Sure, the middle chapters suck, but everything up to Leviathan is a 5/5.

-edit- It's gone from SB. still on SV (only up through 24 though)

 

While I'm not really interested in a fic itself, I wonder - what kind of power was imported here from SupCom?

 

Taylor has access to the Aeon Illuminate tech tree. It's mostly extraneous though since nearly everything (at least the stuff that isn't plot contrived) can just be handled with in-universe mechanics, so the crossover elements are pretty much the main detractor from the story.