If you've perused spacebattles or sufficient velocity recently you'll have found a good number of celestial X fics (grimoire, menagerie etc)
For those who don't know what this entails essentially it's a sortof... random power creep system? Every x words, you get random thing from bag of powers/items/companions/skills
As you can probably guess, it gets very much too much very quickly
And I find these things fascinating because they represent a form of narrative I consider antithetical to the basic principles of story telling.
There are a lot of issues, so I just wanted to rattle a few off:
1. Power creep: Right, so let's say I'm writing idk, a game of thrones fanfic. It's a celestial whatever SI OC (which I hate as a descriptor, it's an oc insert not an si at that point). I draw spy skills, neat, next chapter I draw super strength, cool, next chapter I draw magical runes. At this point already there's not much in setting that can threaten me. We are on chapter 3. Now, can you build a narrative with an OP protag. Yes. But it is difficult. It requires a good amount of thought in how you're going to handle it (for example, you can do the 'despite their powers they're only one person and can't solve everything' route). This storytelling set up is just not conducive to being able to handle this sortof theme.
2. Power as a premise: this is fundamentally an issue with a lot of fanfic, especially worm fanfic. A description of a power is not a premise. The lack of further planning past that description is why a lot of these fanfics die so quickly. An issue I especially find frustrating with celestial x fics is best illustrated by one I haven't read but have heard of. I haven't read it because its on QQ. It was a game of thrones insert. Apparently the first roll was skyrim blacksmithing, 2nd was a big skyrim mine that protag could move around. So we have an expert blacksmith able to make semi magical weapons. So: I legit think there's something potentially interesting here if we adjust it a bit. What if a random GoT peasant was gifted with the skills to make magical weapons and armour? We know valerian weapons are highly prized. The guy is just a peasant but he can make a lot of money quickly, but the maneuvering around him? Trying to secure his favour or manipulate him, to get access to these weapons. The conflict that can be caused by the weapons, what happens when each house can have multiple valerian equivalent swords. Or if one house manages to monopolise him. Etc etc. That all sounds potentially interesting. But because its a celestial x fic what probably happened is 2 chapters later he got the power to shoot lasers out of his eyes and the next he got functional immortality. It's a story set up that can throw out potentially interesting ideas through a monkey with a typewriter style set up but also fundamentally can't do anything with them because by the time you've started thinking about the implications you're onto the next power.
3. Word count. So many of these tie power gain to word count. It is an insane thing to do. For so many reasons. A) so the new power needs to be explored. Let's say we roll every 5000 words. Depending on the writer you're gonna spend a few thousand of those writing about the character thinking about the power. Especially as 90% of these are self inserts that need to fellate themselves over how cool the new ability is. That leaves probably about 40% of the writing to be dedicated to actual story beats. That's not a story, that's essentially a list of powers. B) Additionally it means there's no struggle to progress. The character could literally sit in their room for 3 days and come out a god. It torpedoes any chance of an interesting story. C) there's other reasons but this is me shotgunning before bed.
4. Power irrelevance. You know syndrome from incredible whole thing about how if everyone's super, no ones super. Similarly if you have a 1000 powers, none of them really... matter. I know this seems paradoxical with my last point, but like, let's say we are 20 chapters in and they roll magical singjng. We'll throw it on the pile with the 90 other forms of magical power we have and maybe the author will remember it in 5 chapters for a random scene before it becomes irrelevant. Why should I care at this point.
5. Difficulty structuring plotlines. Let's say we are doing a storyline in the worm verse. Author wants to set up narrative of trying to fix noelle (character heavily distorted by her power if this somehow escapes containment). They're buzzing along: they have a magic rune thing, they try setup some sortof return to normal rune. They have a conceptual doohickey, force the concept of wellness on her etc. Then next chapter they roll the power to turn off other people's powers. Oh well, there's a potentially interesting narrative thread gone. I'm glad I wasted my time reading through the last few chapters, should've known a literal dice roll would have solved the issue.
It's not much and there's so many other issues, but I just wanted to shotgun a few out because I do find the recent popularity of this setup interesting.
