Vespa

Taylor’s bug-powers are way more expansive, kind of a mix between Nemesis and Taylor Varga, the latter makes sense.

Very typical mp3.1415player stuff, with all of their issues in full display.

The ratio of “stuff happens” to “words I had to read” felt even lower than Taylor Varga (which I enjoyed), so I almost dropped it out of boredom.

Issues

For a long stretches of time word count nothing happens like at all, with occasional bit of action or (a bit more often) “smug events”.
And I’m even mostly ok with that, even if it gets boring at times.

But what really grates, is that every. single. character. speaks with the same cadence, dictionary and mood about how they all admit the wrongdoings and everything is going to be better and how they love each other, from Taylor to Armsmaster to Director Piggot to nazis to random cops to the mayor to Undersiders - and they keep talking like that about the same things, on repeat.
It’s just.. uggh.
Also most of the authorities mentioned are hyper-competent and very anti-corruption as soon as they find out about like Winslow or whatever, my suspension of disbelief is violated thoroughly.

It’s a bit hard to find concrete examples, it’s just the overall tone of “everything is so sickeningly and unnaturally great and dandy and everyone (except like.. Coil, who’s defeated swiftly) is a such a good person”.
Even if they are not actually good people (nazis, Cauldron, Coil before he died, etc), they still have the same identical cadence and so on.

Speaking of Coil, in Taylor Varga they literally no joke mentally tortured him - sure, it’s deserved, but it kind of highlights the fakeness of how good people they really are.
In Vespa Taylor straight up just murders him and feels literally nothing about it lol. Like usually I am annoyed when for half of the fic the protagonist is crying about killing some unredeemable bad guy who totally deserved it, but like at least mention some turmoil, esp. if you’re established as a lawful good person and not a hyper-rational maniac or something.

Also there’s a lot of author fiat ensuring that the main characters succeed etc etc, like I’m not too against it, but sometimes the amount of rube goldberg stuff that “just happened” so that the canon threat is out of the picture is very crack-y.

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