Title: Stopwatch
Author: VereorNox
Taylor triggers with a Thinker (?) ability where she only perceives time as long as she is moving. Pretty much like Superhot if any of you know about that game, it's not a crossover though.

I'll give this story a light 3 out of 5 atm. The update rate is pretty good since just today he added 3 chapters to it. Chapters aren't really long though. I do have to stretch my credibility that Taylor acts the way she does at times but whatever.

 

^Yeah, the writing is alright.

These stories with an AltPower!Taylor have been done and redone, but the last updates have added a few interesting twists to the mix. Not to mention Taylor's character in itself is refreshing, a lot less disillusioned than she was in canon. A good read, and depending on what happens next, I could see it go into the Library if it's put up for review.

 

My only criticism of this one so far is that it could do with a second person editing it for flow and sentence structure. The grammar is alright, but he sometimes slips up with typos and the occasional stilted sentence. Definitely not bad though.

 

My criticism is that all of the characters are OOC. Seriously, just rename them and I genuinely would not have guessed that these were supposed to be the characters from Worm. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if these "new" characters were interesting, but they're not, in my opinion.

Also the story suffers from "too many events in too few words" syndrome. The story isn't completely awful, but I don't like it.

2/5

 

The story is tightly paced, but it it's too quick. I think Taylor is characterized fine, but only because the story is so tightly paced in comparison to how Taylor experiences actual moments of time, that... well, we lose touch with her after the first chapter's through.

Well, let's put it this way. If I were writing Stopwatch, I'd have probably devoated ten thousand words to pointless monologuing per chapter. Because I like detail and because Taylor's power is a glutton for time to think, Taylor would probably logically think through every situation she's faced with to the point of utter boredome - actually, bore is the right word here; Taylor's power is quite literally "bore into every situation". Ultimately, a story like this would be such a chore to read - 500 words of action and 10,000 words of Taylor-based introspection. Nobody would read this thing.

Stopwatch, as it's written currently, is 10,000 words of reasoning and characterization-development removed. What we have is WYRIWYG - What you read is what you get - a starkly different, maturer Taylor as a result of deliberating every little action. How did she arrive at this current personality? Who the fuck knows at this point, but I guess we might find out, if she delves into her deeper reasoning at all, ever.

We're too disconnected though. A story like this needs a stronger emotional connection. If we're going to silence Taylor's development, we need more character interaction to get in touch with her again. So far, she's just done some crazy stunts, which isn't all that great for keeping in touch with her character.

Considering how short the story is, I've already devoted too much thought to it, but I do like the concept -- and the execution as it is right now is still better than what I could pull off.

 

Ugh, one part of Stopwatch was pretty stupid.

Spoiler

Taylor refusing treatment to fix her legs. It's incredibly selfish, refusing in apparent "self-sacrifice," but in reality putting untold physical, mental, economic strain on her dad. Taylor doesn't seem to notice or care. It's actually kind of gross.

2/5.

 

That's explained in the latest chapter:

Spoiler

She feels that she'd cause her dad even more stress if she had her legs, because she'd be unable to stop herself from jumping into more dangerous situations for thrills.

 

So instead she rolls to them in a wheelchair? I haven't read the story, and I have no intention too, but that sounds pretty stupid.

 

No, she's trying to stop herself from getting into it in the first place. Although, the new chapter shows

Spoiler

Danny is sick of her shit.

 

As Dark Belra said, she felt that as long as she was stuck in the wheelchair she wouldn't be able to get into anything too bad. Not saying I agree with her though, definitely think she's being ridiculous. Newest chapter addresses that though.

 

While it was something to read at first, Stopwatch had its issues:

1) Pacing was far too fast. I'm not saying this because there wasn't any introspective moments, but because it appears as if there was a list of things the author wanted to accomplish and they were ticked off one at a time directly after another with little in the way of much needed filler. I don't know if it was intentional or not.

2) Since it's an alt!power I understand the need and expect Taylor to be developed differently. Danny was fairly well played out until the last couple of chapters. Then he just flew totally off the rails into OC-Rage!Abusive!Danny. And Taylor fell into "I deserved it" idiocy.

3) The author seems to be getting into the habit of writing something odd or over the top and then explaining it in a couple of sentences in a later chapter when all the negative feedback comes in from readers. I guess he/she expects that everything will be cool after that and then it just gets worse. I doubt it'll get any better.

 

That is actually exactly what I'm doing. I started the fic after speaking with Halt and NuScorpii about it for a while and wondering why the fic I poured so much effort into (Spirit of Nature) wasn't really getting much in terms of attention. I know it also has its issues, which I've been trying to fix and hope to fix after I finish it and go back to edit it.

Then I thought why shouldn't I just write something without effort? Just write, fuck grammar, fuck pacing, fuck logic and all that and just keep writing and posting as quickly as I could.

And look at this. It goes way and above 150 likes per chapter, discussion within 5 days that reached half of what Spirit of Nature's thread reached in one year.

Right now I'm just enjoying the fact that I'm able to write a lot, as bad as it is. Thank you for taking time to poke at all that, I'm not sure how long I'll keep up the pace either way and it will probably end up abandoned like everything else I wrote because I have absolutely no plan.

 

I get wanting to just write for writing's sake. There's all sorts of reasons including receiving attention in the form of comments, and you'll likely pick up some new readers for SoN in the process. That's always good.

Thing is, you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot in the process by producing "badfic", which has the opposite effect, driving potential readers away from future projects that are associated with your name. Typically, writers get better with practice... well, some do anyway if they're serious about their work. One badfic most likely won't be a big deal, but you don't want to make it a habit.

I guess it's all about what you want out of your effort. If comments or reviews is your goal then I can point to tons of highly reviewed stories on ff.net that are absolute garbage, but the writers are popular for some reason. Meh.

 

My main goal is mostly writing for people to enjoy it, but there's something horrible about this right now. I don't want to have the 'easy' way out. Yes, this is badfic that is incredibly popular for hitting all the right notes to drag a lot of SB readers onto it, but it feels hollow, not really as satisfying as having people enjoy SoN, because it feels like my effort isn't appreciated while the one I don't put any effort in becomes more and more popular.

I will continue this until I'm exhausted and burned out, and I guess I'll see how many readers for SoN this earned me afterwards.

 

Spirit of Nature is the one where Taylor and co. are transported into like, a medieval realm? I like that one. It's interesting. And I'm relatively picky. Well, very picky. And judgmental.

 

Yes, that's the one. It had a very slow start but I've been trying to pick the pace up slightly. Seems like I still have a way to go.

 

Aside from Cenotaph and Weaver Nine, I don't think any of the other Worm fanfics are any good. Marahel was promising, but it eventually became so pointless you could kill Golem and nothing about the canon storyline would have changed.

In general, I can't help but feel that the quality of fics in the Worm fandom is just bad. It just seems like every other story has either (A) horrible characterization/massive OOCness/reads like it was written by a 13 year old, or (B) is premised on a shitty idea, or (C) has an interesting idea but is terribly executed and horribly paced, or (D) even when well executed has a limited shelf life, or (E) has no overarching point/the story seems to have been written with no real purpose in mind/goes nowhere.

Thinking more carefully about it, I think it's probably not the case that Worm fandom is especially shit - it's more of the fact that we at DLP devote disproportionate attention to it, and yet the fandom is actually pretty small. If the Worm fandom were the size of HP or Naruto, the sheer volume of fics available mean that for any X number of fics recommended, they're just less likely to be shit.

 

Worm fandom definitely isn't any better or worse than any other, if we're talking in super generality. Volume does have a thing to do with it, but to be fair, nothing compares to the size of Naruto and HP - they have hundreds of thousands of stories on ff.net, whereas Worm just has a couple thousand plus whatever is on spacebattles.

Despite saying that, I actually think that on average the quality of a Worm fic is better than the average Naruto fic. Feel free to disagree, but it's not hard to find shitty Naruto fanfiction - you can scan pages and pages blindly and get nothing. Whereas, I can open spacebattles and skim through a couple pages and find something halfway decent fairly easily... Sure, good Worm fiction is usually short-lived or hard to come by, but the average story is serviceable. Let's be thankful the worst offenders to the fandom are angst and bullying, whereas HP and Naruto suffer from overabundance of pointless action and smut.

Stopwatch is definitely better and more coherent than the average Hogwarts year one retread, or the average retread in general.