Title: Here Comes The New Boss (Nothing Like The Old Boss)
Author: HowlingGuardian
Rating: M
Genre: Action/Drama
Status: WIP
Fandom: Worm
Pairings: N/A
Summary: Taylor Hebert has some big, horrible boots to fill. But she's going to walk her own way.
(Butcher Taylor AU)
Link: Spacebattles

I've been following this for a short while and so far it's been pretty enjoyable. The premise is that the Teeth make a play at returning to Brockton around the start of canon, only for Butcher to fall afoul of some bug controlling cape and die, around the same time that Taylor was forced into her locker. Probably a coincidence or something, I dunno. The spin here is that Taylor has the ability to temporarily suppress the personalities of the previous Butchers, so it's more like a group of unwanted life narrators rather than a gibbering descent into insanity. The story is about Taylor doing what she thinks is right - that is, becoming a hero - while having some fairly distinctive baggage.

The writing is competent and solidly done; the characters feel real and distinct. The plotlines are engaging, nothing feels like an asspull and the stations of canon don't appear to be on this line. It has a respectable update rate without making me think the author is going to burn out. Even when it deals with things that always seem to be cringe in other stories (Taylor 'dealing' with the bullies now that she has powers) it does so in a way that makes sense and doesn't feel like a cathartic power fantasy.

Overall, I'll call this a good example of a well written Wormfic that doesn't fall into any of the normal pitfalls and even does some new and interesting things, which is a breath of fresh air in a fandom that can be as stagnant as this one. 4/5 at the moment, and if it continues at this quality I'll change that to 5/5 upon completion.

 

This sounds incredibly familiar - I'm sure I've read it before, but I'm not currently following on SB or Ao3, so I must have either dropped it, or forgot to watch.

I'll give it another go, see if I've actually read it. What I remember, it was definitely a stand-out in terms of plot, but I think it still hit some of the more normal problems with Wormfics. I'll retry, and provide an actual review.

 

I don't really have anything good to say about this story. Sure, people can say that I'm seeing what I want to see, so whatever. Here's the review I wrote a month ago when I read it:

Here Comes the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss). Honestly, this story might as well be named Here Comes the New Story (Same as the Old Story). I don’t think there was a single innovative thought in the entire story. Like, if one of the story’s only redeeming features is something that it *doesn’t* do, then there’s a problem (fwiw, there’s no PHO scenes, and no interludes existing just to react to Taylor doing something. There are plenty of pointless interludes though).

There’s the usual Wharf fight. Instead of Lung or whatever Empire cape is the flavor of the month, there’s the flavor of the year Mush fight. I’ve seen this guy in this role way too often. He’s always just a sack of hit points that takes multiple people to take town, and often successfully fights off a team for multiple minutes. It’s dumb. Here I guess we at least see Shielder get more than a second of screen time (though he has yet to appear again), and there’s Glorygirl.

Uhg. Is there a single person who actually likes this kind of Glorygirl characterization? It’s the usual BS of being overbearing and aggressively confrontational. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to see her much after the Mush fight, but after her literally random appearance at Parian’s shop, that hope was dashed.

And again, is there anyone who likes this Panacea? I guess people must because she inevitably ends up on screen far too often. Right now the most recent scene was the whole cliche “heal Taylor and discover her secret.” Yawn.

Spitfire is the sidekick of choice. I guess she’s somewhat underused in fanon, but there’s still been nothing of interest involving her. Maybe eventually, but right now her involvement just feels contrived.

The Butcher stuff… I kinda wish it was better executed. Right now there’s just a bunch of voices talking to her. How can someone write that many voices without devolving them into their most basic components? I don’t think you can, and as a result, I have no attachment or interest in any of them. It’s also quite jarring, to the point where it’s mentioned in story. Like, when they all start talking with Taylor, she’s literally just standing there in story, staring off into space while others around her are waiting. There’s got to be a better way to handle that.

On that note, what is up with her Tinker power? How does someone assemble a car in 20 minutes, or build an actual functional weapon in the middle of a battle in seconds? I get the whole Tinkers are BS thing, but usually the main downside is that it takes a ton of time to actually build their stuff. One of the exceptions is Simurgh, and that’s not a good comparison.

Escalation. It’s inevitable, and this story is no exception. It’s what's going to happen when you take a city that already has like 60+ capes in canon, and then add a few dozen more. The problem is the fight scenes quickly turn into a drag. The words just start blending together and my eyes start to glaze over multiple paragraphs and not miss out on anything. It’s like half the story is fight scenes. It’s too much.

Onto the writing. I’m sure some people will say that the writing quality is one of the story's redeeming features. It’s not bad, but it can definitely use some work. Specifically, the dialogue. There’s more characters sneering, snarling, grunting and growling than a zoo. Gotta tone it down with the dialogue tags.

If I had to give it a rating, I'd have to give it a 2/5. It's competent enough, but there's nothing going on in this story that makes me want to read the next chapter (and I'm assuming there's been a handful of new chapters release for this since I read it last month).

 

I am a bit surprised that you would classify this as a boring rehash of canon/fanon since in my opinion one of the positives of the story is that largely avoids doing precisely that. We don't have a locker scene, we don't have the conflict with Lung, we don't have pages upon pages of cringy content with her father/Winslow, both Undersiders and Wards have had practically zero screentime and practically none of the other common events of early Worm like the various heists or direct jumps into all the late-Worm powerescalation/conspiracy stuff.

To me this is in my many ways exactly the kind of Worm fanfiction I like, focused on Brokton bay and gang related stuff, not tied to closely to canon, utilising rarely used characters and the conflict being relatively low intensity compared to the world ending events and capes so common with the Butcher stuff adding an interesting twist to it.

And I get that GG and Panacea can be problematic, especially with that interpretation, but they had a rather limited presence so far and I far prefer them over yet another rendition of OP Tattletale or Coil. And the same is true of the portrayal of her tinker powers, I will take unreasonably quickness over pages upon pages of boring design and resource gathering or Op weaponry any day of the week.

So I will give this 3,5/5 for being one of the few Worm story I have read in the last year+ that I did not quit after five minutes.

 

It's like I said, I'm not going to rate a story positively because of what it *doesn't* do. You have to look at what the story is actually doing, and when I consider that, it's not really that impressive. That it doesn't have a locker scene or bullying lawsuit BS doesn't automatically make it a good story, or that that is the only thing my enjoyment of a story is predicated by. It's just a single hurdle, and it does mean that there is a much higher chance of me actually being able to finish the story, which I managed. What of the other hurdles? Things such as worldbuilding, an interesting plot, well-developed characters? As I sit here in retrospect, I have to ask myself a few questions - Did I enjoy the story? Was it entertaining? Was it interesting? Does it do enough for me to want to follow it week by week? The answers to all of those, for me, is a resounding no.

 

I really like this one. I think it's one of the best active worm fics. It avoids most of the bad worm tropes, is competently written, no Mary Sue Taylor. The plot moves a bit slowly and feels a bit directionless.
At the moment I would give it a 4/5, might go down if there isn't some actual plot progress in the foreseeable future or characters devolve into bad caricatures of the canon versions.

 

Okay, so blasted back through this in a day or two.

So far as Worm fics go, this isn't bad. I've not seen a Butcher!Taylor fic manage to actually get going for quite a while, they often seem limited to the first few chapters, and then run out of steam. Here, the author's managed to keep it going quite nicely, and avoid the majority of the canon rails, which is excellent.

For the most part, the writing is good enough? No major SPG breaks, or weird word choices to pull me out of reading, although there's a lot of talking, so there's a lot of line breaks. It makes the text look weird when you're not reading it.

Talking of the talking, the individual butchers are almost done amazingly. They each have different voices, they each want different things, but there's 14 of them, and they're not all major players, so some of them kind of drop into obscurity until they come back up again. Those of those that come up repeatedly (Rotter and Anchorage come to mind) are great, especially for OCs.

Panacea is not a hopeless woobie who needs saving; interludes aren't PHO segments, or used to jerk off how amazing Taylor is; and nobody shits on canon.

Like Anarchy, I wonder about the Tinker thing, but I kind of just skipped over those in text. For making the car, I assumed it was something along the lines of finishing off Squealer's half-finished job, and the weapon is more pulling out a shaped piece of metal, but looking back on it definitely leaves an area that could be improved.

3.5, rounding up to a 4/5

 

So, it's a few years later, and the story recently passed 100 chapters; it's been updating fortnightly for a while (though there's a short break right now for Christmas). It looks like the author is in this for the long haul, and the word count per actual elapsed time seems broadly comparable to canon Worm.

Reviewing some of the points that others have raised in light of later events:

- "the stations of canon don't appear to be on this line" - Yeah, they really aren't. The only things I can think of offhand that resemble canon are things that logically would still happen anyway, like Coil bringing the Travellers into town, or Lung recruiting Bakuda, and those certainly don't play out the same way as canon. There are sometimes cases where you can see a bit of a nod to canon events, but in quite different circumstances (eg Taylor at one point fights Lung and rots his crotch off, but it's not her debut night, she's been called in to help bail out some Protectorate capes he was chasing).

- "Taylor 'dealing' with the bullies now that she has powers" - Can't say too much without spoilers, but I will say that in a recent arc she gets a rather cathartic resolution that doesn't involve her going looking for revenge.

- "I don’t think there was a single innovative thought in the entire story." - Isn't the whole idea of a fleshed-out somewhat-in-control Butcher!Taylor rather innovative all by itself? I know the author cited The Butcher's Bill as inspiration, but that one was pretty short and incomplete. Also, The Butcher's Bill named the Butchers, but it didn't try to give each of them distinct voices and personalities, which Here Comes the New Boss does in spades. The way Taylor talks, debates, negotiates, and sometimes leans on them for support is a big part of the story. Plus, with the canon events being mostly out the window, he's written a whole new timeline, where the Empire fights the remnants of the Teeth as Elpis gradually whittles away some of their numbers, and the ABB is stronger than ever...

I also don't recall having read another story where Taylor has five cape identities going on (her public face, Elpis; her hidden identity as Butcher; and three minor identities she creates using different subsets of her powers so she can get things done without them being associated with Elpis) - certainly not in 2020. The Weaver's Web has her create two personas, but that started in 2023.

- "Is there a single person who actually likes this kind of Glorygirl characterization? ... aggressive and overly confrontational." - I mean, she's not more aggressive in her first encounter with Elpis than she was in canon interlude 2.x, where she kicked a dumpster into the air to knock down a guy trying to limp away. Here, she's a bit overbearing to her cousin, and she reacts a bit judgementally to the news that Elpis assembled a flamethrower to fight Mush, but she's generally cheerful and helpful.

Later chapters, she has a fairly positive opinion of Elpis, they work well together several times, then she goes through a very rough patch involving Amy (though not the canonical brain-warping).

- "How does someone assemble a car in 20 minutes, or build an actual functional weapon in the middle of a battle in seconds?" - I'd say it's mostly because she was putting together existing pieces. She assembled a car by taking apart several other cars (and she had Glory Girl and Shielder helping with that). The flamethrower was just putting together an existing fuel tank, hose, valves, etc, which she could just pick up from the workshop she was in at the time. Also, her Tinker speciality in "mechanical systems" has excellent synergy with super-strength and covert matter-shaping, so it's pretty plausible to cobble something basic together quite fast.

In any case, her Tinkering is a relatively weak power and never rises above street level. She can tune up the Chariot, she can make retractable blades for her armour, she can soup up the gears on a bicycle so it can take the strain of cycling with her full strength (thus reaching car speeds), but she's never going to be able to build a giant transforming mecha or anything like that. One of the more impressive pieces she builds, IMO, is her sonic spear, designed to imitate a mixture of Cricket's ultrasonics and Butcher's pain projection, but again, it's all street-level. If you're worried about the Butcher plot being lost amongst epic Tinkering - nah, that doesn't happen.

- "Spitfire is the sidekick of choice. I guess she’s somewhat underused in fanon, but there’s still been nothing of interest involving her. Maybe eventually, but right now her involvement just feels contrived." - Spitfire represents an opportunity for Taylor to reflect on both what she's done right, and done wrong. Their friendship is certainly not all smooth sailing, but Taylor can still look back and say that she's glad she reached out. I actually think it's impressive how the author considered how Spitfire would be feeling, even when Taylor as the narrative point of view was overlooking it, until it all came to a head - and even then, things were neither a cakewalk nor were they suffering for its own sake. Difficulties and trials, but hopeful outcomes.

- "Panacea is not a hopeless woobie who needs saving" - Later chapters have developed her a lot, gradually taking her from impotently hostile, through suspicious and having a lot to think about, then snarky and grumpy while being helpful, to not wanting to admit that she and Taylor are friends now, to being happy about it. Not that she ever stops being snarky, of course. And, like her sister, she goes through a horrible time.

On the whole, I feel like the story has struck an excellent balance between difficulty and triumph. Taylor is challenged a lot and has a lot of setbacks, but she's also able to see success in a way that canon Taylor really struggled to do. Also, it has very much established its own identity as a story, not merely applying a few divergences to canon, but putting in the work to establish a whole new coherent timeline. I'd be inclined to give it at least 4 stars.

 

I did try to re-read this recently, maybe like 4-6 months ago, and I made it maybe to around the 100k mark and I still didn't like it. I understand giving it a chance, and people will always say it gets better later, but that was an entire books worth of words. I'm not sure if thats farther than I made it the first time. I think there was some fight with some Merchant OC capes, and I found it underwhelming, most OC capes are. Still had a lot of issues with the Tinker stuff in the story, and thats kind of a problem since thats the thing.

I still think it's a 2/5. I know it's extremely popular, and apparently if only 99 out of 100 people like it, people will use their very first post on the forum to white knight it to that 1/100, which is cute. The story is popular enough that it has spawned a bunch of copycat fics. Of course a lot of them just emphasize how bad SBitis is and how desperately the fandom needs to detach from that site. I did give a lot of them a try, and made it quite far in that woobiesider!teeth one, which I would say I probably like more than this fic, but it's still a 2/5 at best.

 

That's kind of vague. Can you be more specific about things you did/n't like?

At first I drew a blank, but then I realised you're talking about Spittoon and Mudslide. Which, yeah, they were underwhelming, but I reckon that's kind of par for the course for Merchant capes, right? They did give Taylor some difficulty at first, but once she took the initiative back they didn't last long. Ultimately they were just part of one chapter and haven't reappeared since; they were never meant to be more than a speedbump AFAICT.

If you want more epic fights than that, pretty much every later arc has one:

Spoiler

Arc 5 has Elpis and Armsmaster vs most of the Empire, especially Fenja.
Arc 6 has Elpis vs Lung, and a joint invasion of Coil's base.
Arc 7 has Elpis with her full powers vs Hookwolf, followed by the heroes taking on the whole Empire at once to stop them from breaking him out.
Arc 8 has Elpis and the Undersiders vs the Travellers.
Arc 9 has Elpis going all-out to slaughter her way through an army of Noelle-clones.
Arc 10 has Elpis vs Shadow Stalker, less epic but quite satisfying.
Arc 11 has Leviathan, plus an interloper.

Although your earlier comment also complained about "half the story being fight scenes", so maybe you don't actually want more epic fights? I'm pretty sure canon Worm had a comparable amount of fight scenes per word count, anyway.

Again, can you describe those issues more specifically? I don't think the "assembled a new device in 20 minutes" aspect comes up again, she generally works on each project for hours to days depending on its size, even in her workshop where she can freely use Stoneknapper's power. As far as I can see, your comments above haven't listed any objections to her Tinkering except for that one time it was arguably too fast; are there other problematic aspects that linger through the rest of the story?

If there are genuine problems, Howling Guardian is pretty good at listening to feedback. In many cases he just continues to write the story he wants to write, but on two occasions (5.10 and 8.9) he has agreed that a chapter needed work, and given it a substantial rewrite - which in both cases was generally applauded as a much better version. There's not much an author can do, though, with feedback as broad as "it had issues" or "I didn't like it."

Do you mean Inheritance? Or something else?