Miss Understanding Fixes Her Life
is a Worm fanfic by dstarr17 in which Taylor and Danny separately trigger with parahuman powers and neither tells each other. This is only the beginning of an ever-escalating chain of misunderstandings and confusions between the two.
This fic has examples of the following tropes:
- Accidental Murder: Due to the limitations of her power, Taylor will often attack criminals by issuing a general "bite and sting these guys" order to her bugs, shifting her sphere around the area to scout for other targets, and then pinging her bugs to disperse or shift targets when her targets stop moving. As a result of this, she goes through several fights without realizing just how much damage her bugs are doing, and only realizes what she's done when she sees her cape persona described by the PRT in an official press release as a dangerous vigilante with a double-digit body count.
- Contrived Coincidence: Right after Taylor comes to suspect Hannah might be pregnant, she gets into a fight, is hit in the head by shrapnel from an explosion, and gets a concussion that leaves her nauseous (which Taylor takes for morning sickness) and requires her to rest and recover for a few weeks.
- Poor Communication Kills: Absolutely everywhere in the relationship between Taylor and Danny. Danny doesn't tell Taylor about his power or how he came to meet Miss Militia, which causes her to draw the wrong conclusions about why he seems to have turned his life around, why he got a girlfriend out of seemingly nowhere, and why she can tell he's lying to her about something. She in turn keeps her own powers secret, which causes Danny to draw the wrong conclusions about what's going on in Taylor's life.
- Power Incontinence: Taylor's bug control functions in a zone which she can expand and contract, as well as moving it around within her functional radius of about a mile. However, her fine control is inversely proportionate to the size of her control zone. If she expands her control zone to cover her entire functional radius, all she gets is the existence and rough position of all bugs in her radius. As she shrinks her control zone, she first gets access to the bug's senses, then the ability to issue general commands, till finally at the minimum control radius of about ten feet she can control the bugs as if they were an extension of her own body.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Danny and Miss Militia correctly guess that Taylor is a parahuman, but base that primarily on her defeating Hookwolf by throwing a can of pepper spray and having it blow up in his face - the one fight she won using entirely mundane tactics.
- Wicked Stepmother: Averted. Taylor admits that Hannah is actually a pretty nice person, and that if she wasn't dating Taylor's father the two of them would probably get along pretty well. Taylor's problem is one part resentment towards anyone who would replace her actual mother, and one part resentment that Danny (apparently) was willing to shape up and pull himself out of his slump for Hannah when he wouldn't do it for Taylor.
