What are you reading?

[Dracos]

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/bleach-worm-arana.305947/page-419#post-60127231 - Arana has also been nice/powertrippy but in kind of a good way.

It has Taylor, dead, post-GM, in early bleach-verse in a sense.  She's a hollow, surviving.  And it takes every chunk of story in bleachverse literally...  which has the entire life and death cycle as a truly terrible state of affairs.  Taylor first tries to survive, then protect still living friends, then become strong enough to get a fiefdom...and then realize that No, There Is No Heaven In This Setting...Everyone Gets The Suck and try and do something about it.  The big bleach players are definitely still out there and dangerous, but not yet really on screen outside of one very dangerous unmasked hollow.

[Jason_Miao]

Drac had a few posts in the past about The Wandering Inn, so once I was looking for something to read, I went and read that.  Caught up to the newest chapters late last week.

[Dracos]

Enjoyed it?  It's got a lot of good parts.

[Jason_Miao]

Enjoyed it?  It's got a lot of good parts.

Yes.

Not without its flaws of course, the worst of which is that there's a shade of US ethnocentrism.  But...it's an isekai video-game system webnovel, and that's the worst thing I can pick out?  That's pretty good.

[Anastasia]

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/daystar-worm-exalted-crossover-au.773104/

A Worm/Exalted crossover. It's okay, it gets better as it goes. It requires some SoD stretching for how Taylor is, but she firms up at the story goes.

[Dracos]

Enjoyed it?  It's got a lot of good parts.

Yes.

Not without its flaws of course, the worst of which is that there's a shade of US ethnocentrism.  But...it's an isekai video-game system webnovel, and that's the worst thing I can pick out?  That's pretty good.

Honestly the goblins place in the world bugs me after a while.  They're just entirely in too many categories.  Pests that can breed world shaking terrors do not get ignored.

Author is also a bit unsure on Tech.  Is more modern human tech game changing or not?  It gets handwaved in some places as no real threat, and in others 'oh no, trebuchants of doom'.

But it's got a lot of goodness.  Haven't started on book six yet.

[Jason_Miao]

Honestly the goblins place in the world bugs me after a while.  They're just entirely in too many categories.  Pests that can breed world shaking terrors do not get ignored.

I've been wondering if the writer deliberately planned the goblin thing out, or whether it just developed into that while backfilling the history of the world.

Author is also a bit unsure on Tech.  Is more modern human tech game changing or not?  It gets handwaved in some places as no real threat, and in others 'oh no, trebuchants of doom'.

A couple of thoughts on that:

Spoiler: ShowHide

(1)  Every time there's a discussion of tech v magic, the magic side always has some pat answer why they'd win.  But the conversations always involve someone who doesn't actually understand technology.  There's only one character in this story who actually knows how to make things, and she's both a loner and willing to die to block tech transfer.  The writer might be setting up a grand fake-out where some modern army invades, and the magic counters don't quite work the way they are supposed to.  Or maybe the author just doesn't know enough about science or engineering to write a character who understands any of that, so is just avoiding the topic.  I suspect the latter, because...

(2) If magic works the way that humans describe it, the world ought to have been conquered by mages centuries ago, RPG-skills notwithstanding.
(a) One of the conversations about firearms vs a fantasy army went along the lines of: "Well, your guns work by using fire, right?  I'll just get a mage to stop fire from working over a large area.  Sure, it's expensive, but I can get it done." 

Wait, so mages can stop energetic reactions over a wide-scale area?  Because nerves work off of minute electrical impulses.  So do brains.  If magic makes long-distance wide-scale energy cessation possible, standing armies would have become obsolete because a single mage would just mass kill them - just turn off energy for a five minutes and it's done.  Maybe it takes a nation-state's budget, but so does maintaining standing armies.  I'll bet the annual budget for feeding a few mages is a bit more tolerable than feeding 10,000 soldiers.

(b) Ceria casually commits violations of entropy.  And during part of the story she's relatively poor for an adventurer, so evidently cryomancy isn't nearly as difficult as the stop-energy spell.  So, Ceria + chemist, material scientist, or atomic physicist, and you've just unleashed godlike powers.

Based on that, I think that "tech" is the culture, not the actual technology.  Which is fine; the author doesn't really try to set up elaborate systems of mechanics for either video game-world or explain the physics of real-world so it's all good. 

But it's got a lot of goodness.  Haven't started on book six yet.

Yes.  Read lots of the back chapters off my phone.

Book 6 is just about done.  Since you haven't read it yet, I'll avoid any specific comments, and just say that I liked how the 2nd to last plot twist was executed a bit more than the last plot twist in this volume, but that's a matter of taste.

[Anastasia]

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/veni-vidi-vici-worm-fi-ft-gabriel.786361/

A Worm story with a quasi SI who isn't familiar with the setting. Has some rough spots and takes too long to get going, but it's gotten good the last few chapters.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-other-way-worm-hero-taylor.764905/page-13#post-61512151

The Other Way updated. It's okay, it's the sorta thing some people like but I'm eh on it at best.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/still-defiant-worm-defiant-peggy-sue.789799/

Defiant is sent back to a bit pre canon during the final battle of Worm. Shenanigans ensue. It gets points for a good style that uses a certain sparsity well and feels different from other fics.

[Dracos]

There's moments where the characters of the Wandering Inn are like 'mass produced guns would end this world because of the bugs' and others where 'hey a trebuchaunt changes the nature of battle for this city that has literally been a war center for decades' and yeah, others where they handwave off the notion of flying bombers.  Miss Eidetic isn't the only one who gets it, but yeah it really could be unreliable narrator.  Problem is the other characters who do get it don't, even in their own internal dialogue, go 'they really don't get it' either.  Again, ugly spot in a good series.

The Sierra Madre is over:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8601250/42/A-Dead-World

Alexandra takes the stage:
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/bleach-worm-arana.305947/

Endbringer endbrings:
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/so-im-a-spider-flat-what-worm-kumo-desu-ga-nani-ka.732418/

Adorable kid party vs pun dungeon, for plays:
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/there-is-no-epic-loot-here-only-puns-dungeon.590739/

[Anastasia]

I read that chapter of Arana.

[spoiler]

A few notes. I haven't read anything else of note in story, just a snippet or two. I'm not familiar with Bleach. That being said, it feels like it falls into the same thing most Ryuugi fics fall into with Taylor: Basically Taylor running everything, being right and altogether the worst parts of personality. I was bored about halfway in, despite the concept of the interlude being interesting. I've gotten to the point where I don't read anything Worm that Ryuugi writes, since it feels like it's the exact same take on Taylor each time.

To be fair, Taylor having issues, making bad choices and being controlling is part of why I have a low opinion of her in canon. It's also why I consider her a villain protagonist by about the bank robbery.

[Dracos]

Arana:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Eh, that is fair...but that interlude is set against the backdrop of bleach taken literally.  Bleach as an afterlife has like a dozen terrible ends and some modestly okay ones and nothing good.  Taylor is coming from a place there of having looked basically everywhere to see "There's no heaven, nobody gets what they deserve, virtually everyone ends up miserable" and is trying to put together a group to change things.

Alexandra in that hasn't really had a chance to see that at all and Hero has been set with keeping a primitive village on the brink of survival for a decade (Based in the outlands which Bleach basically goes: Aside from this tiny area, it becomes increasingly uncivilized as it goes out, and godly government doesn't care).

It does definitely feel like a similar note to his Exalted Worm fic, though both give Taylor some supernatural reason to be right (Clariyovent support or Solar support).  Bleach taken literally though really is a shithole universe with literally dozens of 'villain' characters in series whose premise is 'this is a shithole, I can do better, now using evil methods for that because by the way, I live in the land of unending torment'.

Bleach sort of plays both cards with folks directly going on as they were as spirits (virtually all on camera usage) or being born/reincarnated as spirits (Rukia's entire backstory + anyone of any importance in afterlife setting) but most of what taylor rails against in this seems reasonably substantiated: People don't get decent afterlives with their loved ones, most people just descend into cannibalism (Hollows) until they are killed brutally.

[Dracos]

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/classical-hero-worm-pjo.396446/

This is pretty basic.  It's missing really seeming to hint at:
1) why is percy there
2) Why is he missing his stuff but not all his stuff
I mean it talks about it...but it doesn't give it any grounding other than 'it happened and nobody knows'.

There's this enormous dark horse group as well introduced and as of yet given no real grounding (outside of they can't practically exist in worm).

Aside from that it's sort of a rogue hero story.  Putting together a hero team of misfits and generally making a mess a bit from not Getting the setting.

[Anastasia]

Arana reply:

[spoiler]

I'll pass on the Bleach comments since yeah, not familiar with it. This may make sense in the context of the story, my real thoughts are about Ryuugi's style of writing Taylor.

To be entirely honest, I don't like most of what Ryuugi writes besides the Games We Play (and that's unabashedly different enough from default RWBY that it's almost an original work). The way he writes his protagonists rubs me the wrong way. Like I've seen him write some Sailor Moon and I don't like his Usagi at all. It's very much a Messiah Usagi and it doesn't do much for me.

[Anastasia]

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

This is okay, a guilty pleasure sort of fic for me. It's one part fix fic, one part SI and one part Worm CYOA set on Voyager. It might turn out interesting, it might now, but right now it's kept me reading.

[Anastasia]

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/usagi-serenity-and-i-sailor-moon.56323/

A neat Sailor Moon fic. The idea of the reincarnations impacting the Sailors is one with a lot of interesting territory to explore.