Yeah, I did think of Angra Mainyu a bit, but I'm not super familiar with Fate, so it was mostly in passing. If this was gonna turn into an alt!power, it'd probably end up feeling a bit like Angra Mainyu though. With the whole... saddled with the sins of others and all that shit.
Oof. I can see why you wrote that (and I always enjoy poking fun at the Worm fandom) but that's dark.
The next step is seeing it unironically shared on r/Wormfanfic as an example of how Blackwell acts by people who haven't read canon Worm
Lol. It wouldn't surprise me if there's readers out there that would buy into it. The same crowd that unironically go for like... abusive civilians in Naruto or whatever. I would hope we're past that point in the fandom, but... there's always a few that still go for it. Or maybe I just drop those fics and forget them?
Like I mentioned, the genesis for this idea was a thread in the subreddit a couple days ago about whether Winslow staff were actively malicious, or just incompetent. I got to thinking about if they are malicious then why, someone commented about the thought behind that fanon being that Taylor is basically a lightning rod for Sophia's aggression, and it morphed into this acid trip.
My muse is a lazy brat that doesn't respond to requests. Hence why I've got 20k words of unfinished BNHA fic sitting for months, and then popped this out in one sitting.
But yes, you've been here for a long while, and I really appreciate that. It's funny you mentioned Noblesse Oblige - that was another where I worked my ass off on those chapters and struggled hard to get them out, and then lost momentum when I realized the story I was planning was some massive, 400k word epic in the vein of Worm. I've always been sad I didn't continue it, but also... I'm glad I didn't? I'd rather stop early on than lose momentum halfway through.
Burn Up is one of my favorite fics in the fandom. Maybe of any fandom. Top 10, at least. It's just so good. I do feel like Burn Up understands what a lot of bad, angsty fics don't - that the anguish is not an end to itself. Hurting the protagonist is not a substitute for... well, progression, growth, story... A lot of things. Too many people internalized not just the dreadful "queen of escalation" meme, but also "Being Taylor is Suffering."
And I think maybe we're all guilty of that at one time or another. There's a catharsis in watching characters have bad things happen to them, but it loses meaning without the contrast of something to balance it out. But a lot of bad fics just go "okay, we'll have her suffer and the rest will fall into place" and they just... don't work.
Anywho, thank you to everyone who commented. The reader reaction to Azazel has actually made me like it a bit better, honestly.
