Okay so I missed the big wave of criticism, but I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring. Mind you, the last thing I read was around Operation Berlin, and it's been quite a while.
This is not the worst story I've ever read. It may, however, be the worst story I've enjoyed nearly this much.
And I do mean both of those things. I enjoyed it for quite a while, and even after coming to the conclusion that it wasn't actually good I still kept reading for a while. I think I was even caught up once. I mean, I did have it on follow.
It's worth noting, by the way, that you're not hated because you're bad. Think of Twilight, or Nickelback. Lots of fiction is terrible, and people ignore it. People hate Twilight, or Ambience, because they're bad /and popular/.
With that said, let's start with: What's good about the fic?
You have lots of meaty, entertaining description. The actual moment-to-moment prose-style is pretty good, even if the content tends to be on the ham-handed side.
The plot rapidly descends into total what the hell is going on past Little Rock, but I still followed it because, no matter how ridiculous it got, I wanted to hear more of it. I wanted to see what happened next, no matter how much I ended up disliking it.
Even if the setting's details may not make sense, the setting is an interesting premise!
You write like a lunatic possessed by a devil.
The bad stuff:
There are so many things that don't stand up to logical scrutiny in plots and setting and what the hell ever. But honestly? I think you know that, and you're way too busy writing furiously to care.
You killed Damon because LOL IT'D BE FUN. I'm not even mad that you killed Damon. Character death can be done well, and I might argue that it worked out well in the end for his character arc (more on that in a bit), but it is not the thing you should do on a whim. If you want characters to suffer, you can do that just as well (and often more renewably) by keeping them alive. And then you [REDACTED BUT PRETTY OBVIOUS] and I'll need to read up before giving my thoughts on THAT subject but it sounds about as ridiculous as everything about Damon.
Generally speaking, the OCs were nothing memorable.
The Fleet Logs were completely skipped over because I only cared about the plot at that point, IIRC.
A lot of the villains are just ridiculously horrible blobs of evil, as far as I remember. If they had good characterization, well, I really can't remember it.
The complicated: Damon.
Damon Damon Damon, you edgelord son of a bitch. You remind me of Gilgamesh from Fate/stay Night, although the differences are very significant. If I had to say one thing, the problem with Damon is that he's the protagonist. See, he's not blatantly villainous. Jerkish, yes. Edgy as fuck, yes. He's definitely not EVIL. But...As far as I can remember, he's really never 'heroic'. Not even anti-heroic. He throws himself in the way of danger, like a badass protagonist, seemingly because he thinks too highly of himself, or because he's gotta do everything himself, or something along those lines. Pride or arrogance or stubbornness, whatever. I only ever remember him getting righteously furious at evil in front of him, but that's not the same as actively doing nice things. (Correct me if I'm wrong and he goes out of his way to make the world a better place sometime.
) His stated goals? To take over the world, a world that, if the beginning lore suggests much, is doing pretty decently without him, all things considered. He's not evil, but... he's not very sympathetic. In fact, I think this is the main reason why the villains seem so cartoonishly evil. Damon HAS to go up against raw evil for us to root for him. It works, I did root for him, but now I feel I was mostly just rooting AGAINST the other guy. And the other guy is not interesting, just grimdark. So very grimdark.
Also he was kind of weird in general. Like, candy cigarettes?
tl;dr: the story is actually pretty fun as long as you don't think about it too closely. But when you start thinking about it, it falls apart a bit. At least in the beginning.
Remember: There's no shame in going back and fixing things up.
