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Amelia, Worm AU [Complete]

Reader mode
First off, I want to thank TanaNari for writing an epic, awesome fic.

Second, I loved the ending. The idea of an immortal Space-Whale-Zach and the eternally suffering Emma who is constantly trying to bring him back down.

Third, the idea that the Parahumans of Bet have adapted, learnt and are now taking the hunt to the Entities....freaking awesome.

Well done.
 
Zach!Emma, just after taking down an Entity:

[OM NOM NOM]

Zach, seriously? We're not even eating it, really.

And?

Sigh. I give up.

Come on, you know you want to.

I do not.

Yeah, you do.

Fine.

[OM NOM NOM]

[OM NOM NOM]

And for the finishing touches.

Don't you dare -

[BURRRRRRP]
 
So I'm not sure if this is just me, but the way this fix fic ended didn't really leave me feeling like it was all that 'dark'.

Throughout the whole of the story, things have been getting progressively better for pretty much everyone, and even the end of it was pretty feel-good-y, especially since it's paving the way for all the entities to die, which I'm sure the rest of the universe will appreciate.

Compare with (the first ending, ignoring the Coil reset that never went anywhere part of) Silence: Taylor hits proto-entity and Scion's counterpart reawakens, absorbing her into part of itself. All the parahumans die, what's left of Taylor sort of convinces the Thinker to get Scion to leave so they can come back at some other point in time. Fix fic because, hey, the earth is saved, but almost every single character is dead, Taylor's stuck as a lonely voice inside a dimensional parasite desperately failing to control it.

Acceleration: Congratulations Taylor, you've just polished off the Nine, saved the town and Dinah, and your life is absolutely ruined forever. Also, everyone (outside a few people) consider you a massive threat so good luck with that.

Not really many completed fics that end up taking a dark turn though, so it's a little hard to provide examples, and it's (probably highly) debatable whether I should be holding these up as 'fix' fics but I figure that if Amelia is then they could be too.

My point (there actually is one, shocking but I'm getting there) is that I wouldn't consider this to be the 'darkest' fix fic that it set out to be. I don't have a problem with the ending, just the classification I guess.

*edit*
Also, I just sorted the Creative Writing thread by replies, and you've got roughly 3 times more replies than every other thread on the first page combined.
 
Daunmi said:
So I'm not sure if this is just me, but the way this fix fic ended didn't really leave me feeling like it was all that 'dark'.

Throughout the whole of the story, things have been getting progressively better for pretty much everyone, and even the end of it was pretty feel-good-y, especially since it's paving the way for all the entities to die, which I'm sure the rest of the universe will appreciate.
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It really depends on how you look at it. The original Taylor, the one we can track from canon, died friendless, heartbroken and alone. That's pretty dark... Not to mention the whole... mindmerging subplot between shard pairs. Sure, it's painted in a nice light, but that's what makes it so creepy.

Honestly, the darkest aspects of the fic are the ones that are treated as trivialities. Shard based mindfuckery, body horror on a massive scale, serial immortality, broken people fixing each other... at the cost of their humanity. Sure, it was a Good End, but only at the cost of the characters we are all familiar with losing themselves and becoming something infinitely greater, and staggeringly inhuman.
 
dasstan said:
The original Taylor, the one we can track from canon, died friendless, heartbroken and alone.
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If you separate each clone from the original, which I really can't, then she died about 2 (?) years ago in the story. She's been out of it for ages, and the story is only vaguely related to her by proxy. Which is still bad, sure, but she's got nothing to do with whether or not the story is dark since that's pretty much just Worm canon and that Taylor is barely in this story at all. Friendless, heartbroken and alone. She might not have died in the end, but that's still how it left her.

Where as the current Taylor died surrounded by friends, fighting (mostly) united with her allies against a force they were aware of well in advance, after getting married to someone who had been there for her in a way no one else could understand for the last few years. That sounds pretty damn good to me.

dasstan said:
Not to mention the whole... mindmerging subplot between shard pairs.
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I'm not sure how this matters since the people who're merging are (as far as I can tell) all clones of people who're already dead anyway. I don't think you should be able to have this both ways.

In addition to this:
dasstan said:
Sure, it's painted in a nice light, but that's what makes it so creepy.
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Why?

They're all already under:
dasstan said:
Shard based mindfuckery
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the same as they've always been. It's a little more noticeable compared with the canon 'conflict' deal shards impose, but it's at least beneficial, and actually helps negate harmful impulses.

I know you can say it's bad to mess with people's minds, but that's basically (very basically) what relationships do anyway.

dasstan said:
body horror on a massive scale, serial immortality
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There's a lot of people out there who wouldn't give a rats ass about being a clone, getting cloned, or living forever through cloning. I've never really thought about it before, but apparently it just doesn't bother me, so I think on these I'll just disagree and leave it at that.

dasstan said:
broken people fixing each other... at the cost of their humanity
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You could argue that once you get superpowers you remove yourself from the human condition/mindset to begin with. I wont, because that's a pointless argument.

But they didn't really lose their humanity. They changed, sure, but they're still themselves, and by the time they merge they've already made a choice that they're happy being with each other as each other. They're still thinking mostly human, they're still looking out for the people they left behind since they recognize the connection between them, the various earths still weigh on their mind somewhat.

It doesn't seem to me like they lost all that much really.

dasstan said:
Sure, it was a Good End, but only at the cost of the characters we are all familiar with losing themselves and becoming something infinitely greater, and staggeringly inhuman.
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They didn't lose themselves. They might have changed over the years (as all people do), grown closer to each other (as decent couples do), and tossed away the idea of limiting their lifespans (which a lot of people would love to do), but I wouldn't call them staggeringly inhuman.

In form, sure. Mentally? Well, that's another argument entirely, and I really don't want to debate 'what is humanity' online. At all.

Anyway, my point isn't that 'Amelia is a perfectly happy story', it was that whilst there's parts of it that are sad or troubling (or sadly troubling/troublingly sad), and characters have a bad time of it plenty of times, it doesn't feel like a sad story to me in any way.

It's not some tragedy, where the character's suffering is the entire point of the plot, and it's not the reverse (is there a term for this?) where everything comes up smelling of roses. It's just a straight, plain, everyday* story, where good things happen, bad things happen, and characters live out their lives. Not the 'darkest fix fic' I've read at all.

* these aren't meant to be taken as an evaluation of the story's value itself, just the tone of the story. I know they sound a bit insulting but I couldn't figure out any other way to say it.
 
Well, it's been a long strange ride. I started reading Amelia in October. I don't know when exactly, though my first comment on the SB Amelia thread dates to the 29th. I know I was reading for a while before that. That was less than 30 chapters in. No one back then, except maybe TanaNari himself, had any idea what kind of roller-coaster we were in for. I was there daily for the rest of it. Last I checked, my most liked post on SB ever was in the Amelia thread about drunk Scion. I was there when the banhammer came down. I was one of the first to suggest QQ as an alternative to SB. I've been here for the ethics debates and watched the repeated arguments over the nature of self versus clone. I've been reading for almost the full 8 months, getting my daily doses of good fic.

Thank you, TanaNari for your time and effort. It has been greatly enjoyed. I look forward to your original work.
 
Actually, who was that one Chicago ward who went inside of things (like buildings) and manipulated them? From the Behemoth fight. Can't recall the name, can't be bothered to look it up.
 
Given that Crawler was glassified early on, and Lung depowered during the Scion battle, probably not :p
 
pepperjack said:
Actually, who was that one Chicago ward who went inside of things (like buildings) and manipulated them? From the Behemoth fight. Can't recall the name, can't be bothered to look it up.
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Wasn't that Genius Loci?
 
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