Holy fuckballs, this story got long.

Would you believe that I set out with the intent to write 50k-75k words? That we were going to cleave even more closely to canon, that Danny was going to pursue legal action against the Barnes's, that Taylor and Clockblocker were going to catch Levi in a cage of bone, or that Tay was going to find out Sophia's civ ID? That Eidolon wasn't going to figure out his shard-eating power, that the story was going to delve into post-Levi Bay with no clear end point, and just in general end up as a haphazard story without any real meaning.

Also, holy fuckballs this got big.

So, you know Ring-Maker? That one LotR/Worm crossover that has over a thousand pages of comments and is a whole lot of fun? That's the bar I'm measuring myself against. Not because it's the best Wormfic (though I enjoy it, Burn Up and Life Bends Down both make me literally stop what I'm doing to read them), but because it features a more-powerful-than-canon Taylor who quickly abandons the rails of canon (with a dash of violence and murder). It's easily the most popular fic currently updating in the fandom and is one of the stories I read consistently. That has 1k likes on Glimmer 1.1.

Algor Mortis 1.1 has almost 700.

I can't explain how weird that is.

If I assume, conservatively, that one in two people who read the fic drop a like, that puts readership at over one thousand people. I've seen a thousand people in person, and that's a stupid amount of individuals with their own lives, hobbies, and other stuff to do than read my mediocre fanfic. I have fanart. I predicted fucking none of this, and I've loved every second of it. I've met ThirdCircle, brontokz, and all of you folk, and it's been oddly nice communicating with people as H4T and not as me.

But beyond all of that, I made something. It's not perfect, not even close. I could go back and edit the whole thing from chapter one, cut at least ten thousand words, iron out plot holes, and do a million other things that could turn it into something better.

It's ugly, tonally inconsistent, constructed from a number of sub-par sentences, and basically a mess. But it's also mine.

Anyway, enough of me babbling. Let's focus on questions, answers, and my opinions:

What I did good:

Hookwolf, Oni Lee, Kid Win, Piggot, etc: the side characters. For whatever reasons, the interludes came out really well in this fic. There's a reason I ended on three of them.

Powers: I told myself that I wasn't going to use Marquis's strategies. I didn't. I told myself that Taylor's view of violence would be way more metal than a normal person's. That happened. Self-rated 9/10.

OC's: 90% of them don't have triggers, but they were fun to make, and a lot of them are apparently charming.

What I did alright:

Writing: from a technical level, I screwed up a fair amount of stuff, rushed some of the earlier chapters, and worried too much about the word count. On the other hand, it was legible, basically made sense most of the time, and relative to the rest of Worm fanfics is actually pretty decent. I'm no Percadium or Gaia (read her stuff!), but I'd like to think I was above average.

Consistency: I put up a chapter every week except for one. I hit the holidays I like the most with omakes, and only had to resort to writing sidestory for six weeks. If I didn't miss a week and didn't have to delve into writing omakes instead of real chapters, I'd put this under the good section, but I didn't.

Music: Fic probably would've been better without it, but if I'm not having fun the fic's not worth writing, and one guy thanked me for it. (y'all on fanfic dot net didn't get it).

Where I fucked up:

This is an alt-power Taylor, but it was meant to be a shard swap: I don't have a trigger that makes sense for Amy, and Taylor's power should be fundamentally different. False advertising.

Plot: The first arc of this story is AltPower!Taylor garbage. Bullying, Lung fight, then the story happens. TBH, I'm probably going to delete those first three chapters, use the space to set up an omake/fanart index, a page linking the best chapters of the story, and then start on Isidis's interlude. I could've handled the Undersiders meeting better, and there are a lot of little things I'd like to iron out.

The Endbringer fight. It went on for two arcs, and that was an arc too long. I did want to wrap things up that way, but the way I did it probably could've been condensed to a more reasonable timeframe.

The Ending: it was abrupt, didn't follow through on three or four plot lines, and is honestly closer to me nuking canon to get out of writing the story.

Taylor: I'm going to actually stop bullet pointing this, because I need to rant for a minute.

Taylor, Taylor, Taylor. So many know your name, and so few know you. I'm in the latter category, by the way. I've talked with people who do know her well, listened to their explanations, and while I got them intellectually I simply can't think she made decisions that made sense. For that matter, I reject Wildbow's very premise of a school as bad as Winslow, again, a product of knowing bad things happen but not seeing it. Rein (great fic, go read it!) helped me make sense of Taylor (a little), but I still don't actually like writing her.

What does the word salad above mean? It means that the PoV character for this story was someone I fundamentally don't believe can exist, has motives I don't understand, and is otherwise so different from myself that it's like trying to write from the perspective of a beta fish.

In hindsight, starting this fic under this premise was a mistake.

But I did it anyway.

Now... now I think I understand her a little more. I still think she's wrong, that Wildbow has set up a wildly implausible if not impossible premise, but it kinda makes sense. If I squint. And have two doubles in thirty minutes.

Now, what do I think of Collagen?

I think that I started with a good idea, wrote a bad plot, executed it mostly well, and had fairly ridiculous success in an area I didn't think about (which is to say literally every single interlude). Overall, between a 5/10 and an 8/10. The high points are original and well done within the alt!Taylor subgenre of Wormfic and the bad parts rarely get worse than generic, though things on a whole skew towards the lower bound. I would never write this again, simply because if I were to start again I'd actually try to make QA!Amy and Shaper!Taylor rather than CorpseGrafter!Amy and Marquis!Taylor.

But hey. It happened, people seem to have enjoyed it, and it's complete. That last part is particularly satisfying.

Will there be a sequel?

Probably not. I have no idea how GM would be handled, what Endbringer would spawn in response to Eidolon figuring out how to eat shards (yes, eat, not drain), how Cauldron would adapt, etc. This plot is over.

So why is it 'probably' and not 'certainly'?

Simply put, in a conversation I had with Ghoul King (author of Monster, another fic you should read!), they revealed how many questions are still unanswered. While I've run out of plot for now, there's probably enough here for another story, albeit on that's still lurking somewhere in my mind. It's not a sure thing either way, so I'm not making promises. IRL issues are popping up (nothing serious, but a lot eating into my free time) and I'm not sure how much I'll want to write MORE Collagen. I might start editing this story, smooth over some plot issues, change some stuff, and if that joggles something loose in my brain...

That's in the future, though, and I make no promises.

Will you write something else?

I am writing something else! Birb Quest updates biweekly, and is a way to keep my finger on the pulse, metaphorically speaking. I have exactly zero longer term projects in the works (Bloody Casanova is more or less dead, as is Somewhere Over the Rainbow), but never is a very long time. I also want to work on original fiction, so that's necessarily going to decrease the amount of time I can devote to fanfic. I have a snip thread where I'll be posting shorter pieces and experiment with prompts. Maybe one of those will turn into something longer?

If I do write something else, it probably won't be Taylor-centric. Well, unless it's the Collagen re-write. Or an all-interludes story.

Why did you make us like Hookwolf?

Because his power is the closest analog to Taylor's in Brockton Bay. Also, because I subsist on chaos and confusion, and making basically decent people enjoying seeing a Nazi on screen felt like a very Mel Brooks thing to do.

To clarify, you weren't supposed to like Alabaster! Spacebattles, why!? He's a Nazi! By choice!

Is the Dragonslayer storyline canon?

Yes, it is.

Is Second Chances canon?

Wouldn't you like to know?

Will future Omakes by other writers be canonized?

It depends. If it's as good as anything I write or better and I read it? Absolutely. If it's not (very much a subjective judgement here) or if I forget? Then no.

I've written a few things which are not canon to Collagen, but might be worth reading if you have literally nothing else to do. Some are complete, some are not. Make of them what you will. They'll be posted in short order after this.