Quote:Dartz wrote:That does sound really interesting actually. I might do that...I dunno. I was going to have the intial meeting with the undersiders never happen, Lung never gets captured, and so the city stays stable while Doug and Taylor go after Coil (under Doug's mistaken assumption that the guy seems "relatively safe" for him to go after with a newbie cape in tow), and let things develop from there.
That wasn't really what
It's too easy to jump to Taylor's defense and do just another fixfic. It' not really an existing plotline that grabs your interest. X comes along from Y settings It's low hanging fruit that's been picked to death. Sure, do yous not think it'd be far more fun to have her and Doug fighting for a bit, before he finds out her background? It's part what made DWII so good - fighting the Knight Sabers over an ideological misunderstanding. He's in conflict with the main characters for a legitimate reason, and it's a fair enough fight.
He sees Warlord Taylor as the enemy, the big villain. She's very likely to distrust anyone with any semblance of authority unless they meet outside the cape scenario.
They're far more fun fighting each other. And it's far more likely.
The big reason Taylor's so popular and sympathetic is that we ride along with her for all her internal justifications and decisions and see her convincing herself every step of the way. She's the hero in her own story. You never really see her from an outsider's perspective.... not entirely anyway. We get Miss Militia making few points about her and her friends completely ignoring all the social mores of the cape world. And Doug is the perfect outsider to show the darker side of her, without her reasoning.
He drops in and has to learn about the world very quickly. Okay, PRT do the organised hero thing. Those are villains. Hey, it's not *that* different. Then, throw in the Endbringers and the switch between Holy Fuck what is That to, enh, it's only a 6-dimensional being meeting with Scion. What marks do Shards make on people in magesight? Stuff like that. Doug's freaking gonzo in settings, but in a lot of way's he's a victim of his own power as the others, just not as overtly. His real killer Power might be able to spot people with Powers in civil life - which pops him right up against the unwritten rules. Whether he's too pragmatic to follow them, or too pragmatic to ignore them depends.... he doesn't have family to protect, for a start.
The only reason people bey the Geneva Convention is because they have an interest in the enemy obeying the Geneva Convention.
There're so many more potential beans of entertaining conflict there that can captivate readers with possibility.
Doug + Taylor -v- the universe is..... well, it's stations of the fanfic canon that.
Anyway, a useful thread: http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/t ... read.3783/
Edit: I don't want to seem neagtive - I didn't mean to be like that.
I wanted to do the fix-fic thing with Doug lets me do something- or rather, a combination of somethings- that I can't do with the current roster of capes, and is difficult to do plausibly in Worm alone.
One- Have Taylor be an independent hero, giver her a mentor who can guide her through this mess, but keep it so that Taylor remains isolated from friends her own age. I want to maintain her loneliness and pain for a bit (probably the duration of the story), while still giving her someone she can talk to. That core character interaction was the heart of my idea. Here, Taylor deciding to talk to her Dad- and request to join the wards- was to come after a long stretch of character development; only for things to blow up somewhat when Sophia comes to light. However, capes being what they are in Worm, having an independent hero in Brockton Bay that's also stable and experienced enough to be a good mentor raises both eyebrows. Thus, Doug. He's a natural fit for the role.
At the same rate, I also want to focus on the helplessness of the situation- the crime situation in Brockton bay is a hell made from criminal balance of power, where any major attempt to clean things up will certainly make things worse in the short run, and may not accomplish anything in the long run. (Another part of the rationale for going after Coil in the beginning- he's possible to properly get rid of).
However, I do like your idea as well. So...hmm...Ok. I'll re-adapt my "independent Taylor with adult Mentor but still isolated" concept using Touhou project instead of Drunkard's walk. I wanted to do a Touhou project crossover, but it had been looking like a fairly generic fix-fic, and I couldn't get it to go anywhere. Re-adapt the concept using Reisen or Yuyuko, maybe Kiene. I have to muck with Yuyuko's character less, but Reisen lets me draw parallels with Tattletale a bit and I don't have to think up of a solution why Youmu and Taylor don't become friends.
Meanwhile, I'll go with your idea for the Drunkard's walk crossover- though I do have to think through plot and characters a bit. It is more interesting plotwise, but I'd have to reread that part of worm.