Transposition, or: Ship Happens [Worm/Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio | Arpeggio of Blue Steel]
- Thread starter ensou
- Start date
- Crossover
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Indeed. Still better than freaking out and destroying the city, though.
First, I will contend that emotion is often the impetus for creativity. Sociopaths still feel emotions, they simply lack the ability to empathize, which is a very different prospect from lacking emotions entirely. Your basic Fog mind has no concept of the past or the future, and no creativity, so it makes sense to think that the less human Taylor's thinking, the more she'll be inclined towards simple solutions. Especially ones that have worked before.
More to the point, since when have the Fog had 'zero problems with collateral damage'? They've always had restrictions on attacking inland targets with ship-grade weaponry. Particularly population centers. I don't know if Taylor still has those restrictions, but she very well might.
What's the difference? Emotions are a major facet of what the Fog gain from Mental Models. Things like the motivation needed to innovate, or the ability to realize and regret mistakes, and learn from them. Those are all based in emotion. It's such a huge facet of human thought that it's hard to accurately model a human mind without it.
Re: Removing the fight
If you had to force yourself to do it, it probably wasn't a good idea. Perfect fine with it being removed from the chapter. I'm not hugely critical, but I will admit I wasn't blown away by the fight. It was okay.
The Deathwing fight was...actually a bit better? Some of that's from the nature of Uber and Leet, I think. They react appropriately to Taylor's actions. Namely, by being impressed/panicking, and not pushing their luck. The same was true of Squealer. Bakuda, though, almost has a death-wish. She's a newbie villain with something to prove, and it shows in her actions and plans, many of which no experienced villain would undertake. She escalates and doubles-down when she shouldn't, and it can be hard to do that convincingly.
If I might make a suggestion, you could approach this from a completely different direction. There's a lot of ways you could approach this. But I think they mostly boil down to doing something that means Taylor simply can't use the obvious approach, and (this is the important bit) making that clear to Taylor from the very beginning. Force her to actually plan ahead of time, gather data on the situation, and, most of all, think. If it's clear that she can't just charge in from the outset, that makes it a lot more understandable, I think.
As to how to do that, I have some ideas. You could have Bakuda get into a hostage situation. Maybe she captures Vista in a fight with the Protectorate, or maybe she uses the implanted bomb people. Or maybe she pulls the EMP gambit again. Either way, have her threaten something important to Taylor, and make it so that Taylor can't use as much Brute force in solving the problem.
You could also not use Bakuda at all, and instead involve Coil. Maybe get her involved with saving Dinah. Or maybe just have Coil focus his attention on her, as his biggest threat. Have him screw with her plans to eat the ship graveyard. Or have him try and blackmail her. Whatever the impetus, by necessity, fighting someone like Coil effectively requires thinking outside-the-box.
There are other options. Empire 88, the Merchants, Circus (okay, that might be pushing it). Or maybe Saint, or Accord, or some other villain. Hell, the S9 or Endbringers, if really necessary. If Bakuda, or any of BB's villains, isn't doing it for you, try something completely different.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Another possibility is enlisting the aid of someone else to write the fights. It might gall you as a writer, but it's a viable strategy, particularly for fanfic.
I think, perhaps, the reason why you tend to have overpowered protagonists in your stories is because you don't like writing fights, and writing a good fight between two relatively evenly matched sides can be especially challenging.
That said, one way to approach fights is to make them all about the characters. See the lightsaber duels in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Or the attack on the Death Star in A New Hope. There, the action is merely a way for the characters to be in difficult, dangerous situations, and have their characters face challenges of the emotional and physical variety and deal with them. Luke having to deal with losing his old friend. Having to face overwhelming odds. Getting bailed out by his friend. Learning to trust something he doesn't really understand over a piece of equipment he doesn't know will work. Han's decision to come back after all. Leia watching this decisive and all-important battle unfolding, hoping against hope that not only it will work, but that the people she's come to care about will survive. And so on.
So long as you nail that, people will overlook less-than-logical action sequences. Like, say, why the Death Star didn't scramble the hundreds of fighters it undoubtedly had to intercept the Rebel fighters long before they got to the Death Star. Or how a torpedo makes a 90-degree turn on a dime in space. Or why the fighters entered the trench so far ahead of their target, rendering themselves vulnerable for so long. People overlook it, because it's such a great action sequence in terms of characters, emotions, and drama.
It's totally fine to write about a character's skill, or power, or tactics, in a fight. But if you were to write the fight between Luke and Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, you wouldn't be talking about any of that. You'd be talking about the emotions, about the characters, about the relationships, about the psychology, etc. I mean, hell, for much of that fight, Luke hides from Vader, refusing to fight him. And even that is tense, gripping, and engaging. Not because it's super-descriptive or an intense battle of skill, but because it's a clash of these two characters' mentalities and desires.
For a fight like Taylor with Bakuda, you could have focused more on Taylor's horror and outrage at Bakuda mercilessly and horrifically killing her own men like they were worthless to her. About her having to overcome that and being absolutely determined to chase Bakuda down and end her. Or how her emotional subroutines totally shut down, leaving her in an emotionless Terminator mode, letting her kill Bakuda with overwhelming force and complete ease...only for her emotional subroutines to then turn back on, and she absolutely reels at all of the horror and shock and outrage and disgust hitting her all at once, and reeling from what she just did (and how it was so, so easy, and she didn't feel a thing). It could have been a curb-stomp battle without any real tactics being employed, and it still would have been fresh and engaging.
StattStatt
Supplier of suspenders for your disbelief
- Location
- On one of your shoulders
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sometimes it just takes three left turns to make a right. Even if the fights haven't been the best around, everything else surrounding Taylor and her inner struggles, interactions and such have just been too good to just let this story go. The fact that you care this deeply about your writing and your fans' input here is much more than some other really popular fanfic writers can claim. You just keep doing what you do and everything will turn out a-okay. :3
- Location
- Lake superior, Minoc
I vote for not as Baku blowing up the graveyard like that would get noticed by ever one. Like, say vista noticing while on the job and thinks, "oh-shit my awsome shipthinker bff lives there" and she runs off to tell Beardmaster.
The best part of that chapter was the family chat and really.. being outed by a fork. That's what your good at roll with it, Don't need to force in fight scene's that don't work.
- Location
- Canada
Vista: "Why did you turn your original lance into a halberd?"
Armsmaster: "Because I liked my beard too much to let the nickname Beardmaster continue, not to mention lances tend to require so much technique that Legsmaster and Dancemaster were honest candidates in the early days for a nickname for me. Halbeard was an acceptable compromise. It also gives me more space to pack functionality in."
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Unfortunately, that still leaves Taylor in the state of having to learn that the curb-stomp approach is not always viable.
Admittedly, having to fight Coil (or Accord, amongst others) could accomplish that rather neatly, but Bakuda does have some upsides for this. She's willing to cross lines other villains won't, which does open up tactics other villians don't have, like hostage situations. Her tactics also have a fair amount of shock value, as you said, which can be helpful in jarring a character out of a rut.
She's also got a really ridiculous power-set, that lends itself to traps, and is actually a threat to Taylor all on it's own, which Coil and Accord might not be. They'd need powerful subordinates/allies/unwitting pawns to really threaten Taylor physically. Not so with Bakuda, who can actually disable her WFA, via her time-stop bombs.
Speaking of which, that could salvage this fight's concept. Have Bakuda use the Take-5 bomb much earlier in the fight. Maybe have it replace the bomb that nearly took out her Armor. Shut down the tool that Taylor has most relied on to tank blows much earlier in the fight. Make her have to use her other powers, like her nanomaterial, creatively to make up for the loss of her most used power. That's actually a nice way to leverage Bakuda's firepower to force creativity on Taylor's part.
I think the concept is actually quite salvageable, with some major alterations. If Taylor's WFA was taken out of commission earlier in the battle, that would drastically change the entire tone of the fight. And I think it would change to be much more in-line with what ensou is looking for, which is less 'Taylor SMASH' and more tactical. E: Though I could be completely wrong about that. Like I said before, if Bakuda really just doesn't work, try someone else.
Last edited:
The_Letter_K
Certified Character
- Location
- ...IJ_LM...
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It sounds like you have your path, then. This story is a lot of fun. I trust you to take it in a good direction. So long as it doesn't go the way of Taylor Varga* then I'll stick around.
*(Endless imagination porn with no sign of any actual conflict mixed with a weird sort of assimilating friendship harem and then stretched over hundreds of thousands of words.)
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Psh, of course not. The assimilating friendship harem is in AFHB, duh.
- Location
- Germany
With all this arguing about the fight scene, I just wanted pipe up and say I really liked the scene with Taylor and Danny, and that I kinda hope we'll have an interlude for him at some point in the nearish future (possibly looking it up and finding that she's taken down not just one but two dragons already (she is publicly credited for Lung here, right? I forgot) (also I now picture Dragon being wary of her trying to add a third dragon to her name)).
- Location
- On a Journey Through The Decade
Same, I was surprised when I read that people seemed to have a problem with it. Maybe it's just because Bakuda is one of the characters in Worm that I like to see get stomped on the hardest.
Epsilon Rose
The King of Unrest
It sounds like this decision is for the best. After all, if you're not having fun writing a fanfic, what are you doing.
More usefully, I think you're having to force these fights, rather than have them flow naturally, for a reason. Stories are about drama and conflict and a curb stomp is neither, but that's what should logically come from most fights with Taylor. With all of her power, most fights should probably follow one of 3 forms: A) The enemy has a trick up their sleeve, so the fight becomes more about dealing with that trick so she can apply her power (and the narration and action should focus on that, rather than her plowing through things). B) The character doesn't have a trick, so it's not going to be a fight, just a speed bump where you describe a quick burst of action and the conflict comes from what surrounds the "fight". C) the would be opponent doesn't have A and doesn't want B, so they get out of dodge. Beyond that, you do a very good job of writing character conflict, which is more than enough. With as powerful as Taylor is, this could easily be one of those Worm fics that is punctuated by fights, but otherwise focuses on different kinds of conflict.
More usefully, I think you're having to force these fights, rather than have them flow naturally, for a reason. Stories are about drama and conflict and a curb stomp is neither, but that's what should logically come from most fights with Taylor. With all of her power, most fights should probably follow one of 3 forms: A) The enemy has a trick up their sleeve, so the fight becomes more about dealing with that trick so she can apply her power (and the narration and action should focus on that, rather than her plowing through things). B) The character doesn't have a trick, so it's not going to be a fight, just a speed bump where you describe a quick burst of action and the conflict comes from what surrounds the "fight". C) the would be opponent doesn't have A and doesn't want B, so they get out of dodge. Beyond that, you do a very good job of writing character conflict, which is more than enough. With as powerful as Taylor is, this could easily be one of those Worm fics that is punctuated by fights, but otherwise focuses on different kinds of conflict.
Kemayo
A Certain Cheerful Tone Of Voice
- Location
- Missouri
Sounds wise. Write what makes sense to you in the context of the story, not what you feel some obligation to provide. I'm certainly not reading this for the sake of a series of vs matches, but rather for the fun character interactions like the "coming out" scene in the first half of the chapter.
@ensou just do what you think is best, whilst the fight scene wasn't the best. You don't need to remove the chapters just, put them at the top in spoilers to remind yourself of the mistakes that where made.
Last edited:
Does she even has a class in mind, Battleship, Cruiser and frigate?
globalwarmth
ruining the weather.
- Location
- Polar ice caps
it was very enjoyable but the slow Terminator 2 walking instead of the speed she displayed with both dragon fights has raised a few concerns about her combat and self preservation protocols. The expected behavior of an almost emotionless combat machine that has been brought close to death and sees the murderer of innocents (good motivation) within range should have been to efficiently and ruthlessly dismantle the treat as fast as she did Emma's state of mind.
This did not pan out and she'll probably be presented with another type problem that can't be solved with brute force for the character growth that was supposed to happen here. my guess is kidnapping of someone she cares about so she has to do more information gathering and remote operations.
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's being considered and is likely.
Sounds like omake material. :P
Nope, just an Experimental Platform.
- Location
- usa
Yeah, actually this is a pretty good way of putting it. The Bakuda fight part has now been cut out, but I think that was the biggest problem I had with it. Given that Bakuda hired Uber and Leet to mess with Relentless so she can get data on her, the trap she set for Relentless was pretty disappointing as if she didn't use any of that data to make plan at all. And given how disappointing Bakuda's plan was, it should have been a curb stomp especially with the abilities Taylor showed previously. Trying to make it not a curb stomp makes things non-consistent.
Actually, I've found your fights other than the Bakuda one in this story pretty well handled, even the Deathwing one. I didn't really see anything wrong with it that it needed to be redone, though I think I remember some people saying how the cuts back and forth between the fight and Uber and Leet's comments to be detrimental to the flow. Not sure I agree with it though.
- Location
- Canada
Good, because the Tempest is trash for cost-effectiveness compared to the Summit, or hell any of the regular Tier 3 Battleships in Supreme Commander. Its only gimmick is its ability to build Tier 1-2 naval units or T3 engineers when surfaced... and the ability to submerge.
...Oh, this isn't Supreme Commander, oops
Noodle Incident trope?
Actually, there's some merit to this. Remember how Vista was able to warp Taylor due to her being non-biological? Circus has Hammerspace as one of their powers. What if they fight and Circus touches her, is told by their power that they can steal what they're touching (thinking it's just the armour) and then steals Taylor wholesale? Do they sell Relentless to the highest bidder? When she gets out, does she swear to destroy Circus or is she terrified of them? How do the heroes and villains react to Relentless being trumped by a petty crook like that? What do the nanomachines in the Graveyard do while Taylor is incommunicado? Etc
Appletank
Acquire Cheese
Did someone say robot ships?Good, because the Tempest is trash for cost-effectiveness compared to the Summit, or hell any of the regular Tier 3 Battleships in Supreme Commander. Its only gimmick is its ability to build Tier 1-2 naval units or T3 engineers when surfaced... and the ability to submerge.
...Oh, this isn't Supreme Commander, oops
- Location
- Texas
Bakuda has an interesting power set, but it's absolutely terrible for writing big, dramatic fight scenes. The problem is that she's a squishy normal human with powerful attacks but no meaningful defense. So logically, any fight she has with a high-end opponent should be over very fast. Either she catches her enemy with a bomb that one-shots them, or they quickly turn her into a smear on the pavement.
Really, what made the fight scene so weak was the fact that Taylor basically just stood there and let Bakuda rain attacks down on her. If they'd been trading blows the fight would have been over in a couple of paragraphs.