"Why won't anything interesting happen?" Taylor whined. Not over the radio, but she still whined.
"Nothing interesting happening is a good thing," Dean countered.
"I'm torn between the two viewpoints," Brian admitted. "Boring can be good, but it is so boring."
Well... that IS what happens when you spend well over a hundred thousand words buffing up your heroes and hero alliances while simultaneously nerfing or outright removing villains. I mean, Lung as the local bar-fighter rather than the terror of the Bay. Jack Slash as a highly regarded psychologist rather than the terror of the nation. The Undersiders as Wards. Etc. There's nothing for anyone to do because it was intentionally written that way. Others have complained around the 27-29th chapters that the story is sort of boring, and they're right.
To be fair, it was announced on page 1 that this wasn't a fic
BASED ON conflict. What I gleaned from that, incorrectly it turns out, is that while there wouldn't be a fight or two every chapter, instead there would be more buildup and background between fights. More worldbuilding, less grimderp. I didn't think it would be utterly lacking in any conflict or tension whatsoever.
EVERY good story has some kind of conflict, whether it be man vs. man, man vs. nature, or man vs. himself. This isn't a story. This is a long exercise in worldbuilding. Everything that "goes wrong" is fixed within a chapter or two, usually as an excuse to garner some new buffs for the heroes as a result. There's no tension, no... plot? Just a continuous sequence of "heroes level up for free" events. It's basically a training-fic.
I just finished chapter 31 out of 66, and literally nothing important has happened. Even though the characters are slowly starting to distinguish themselves, there's still nothing for any of them to do, so they just wander from day to day doing basically the same thing over and over. Which is probably why it's taking so long for the characters to become people rather than cardboard cutouts. And yeah, canon Worm was really dark and depressing. Not every story has to be. But at least there was a reason for the characters to do things other than "Well, it's another day. What can I do today to avoid being totally bored?"
There's nothing memorable or interesting about this fic. I kept waiting for all of that buildup to go somewhere, for the heroes to actually DO SOMETHING with all of their powers, and it never happened. Maybe it will in the next 35 chapters. But I'm not going to be reading about it. I can't keep going with this.
Watching Taylor blunder from unintentional victory to unintentional victory is far worse than watching her blunder from failure to failure. At least when she fails there was something she was striving for. Here, she just exists, and I'm out of patience waiting for that to change. It's mostly my own fault for reading a story explicitly declared as not being based on conflict. I misinterpreted just how absolute that was, and wasted two days waiting for something never intended to happen.
Thanks to CmptrWz for posting. The basic grammar and writing structure is quite good. The characterizations slowly get better as the chapters pass. But there's never a plot, so I'm moving on to something else.
- especially since this is a non-sucky S9-in-name-only this time, who've raised the bar for all other alt-S9s high indeed.) 
