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Something I’ve only occasionally seen mentioned is how Cauldron capes still have a degree of irony between their power and their trauma
Take Coil. While moments away from being rescued from Nilbog’s monsters, he is faced with a split-second choice: to kill his superior officer or to not. He didn’t know which was the right call, whether it was possible for them both to survive or whether letting his superior live would have doomed them both. And so, he made his choice, and was left to deal with the consequences of it. And then he drinks a vial and is given the ability to delay the making of any such decisions, until the consequences were known.
Or Battery. She wants powers to take down Madcap, and gets powers that operate similarly to his but perform better. Except, of course, only for a handful of moments, leaving her ultimately worse off than him. She loses to him 7 times, and only wins on the 8th because Legend is there
Truly the tragedy of Taylor is that she was just, the best at violence and discovered this at a time in her life when she had nothing else. Is it any surprise that she ended up as a creature of nought but violence when people only cared about her in relation to her capacity for violence?
list of times taylor hebert used other peoples powers better than them:
when she told genesis to create a body that looked like crawler with the s9 riding on his back
when she used clockblockers power to bisect echidna. this literally fundamentally changed the way clock used his own power
when she made doormaker open and close portals overlapping each other so that the portals were effectively moving (granted this was only possible with the help of taylors multitasking power)
help me add more things to the list
nobody move. i've just successfully articulated the sentiment that taylor's power turns her into a panopticon because she was living in one & explained her trigger in a way i feel satisfied with for the first time in my life
the concept of the panopticon is not just about surveillance, but about creating an environment where people cannot be sure whether or not they are being surveilled, and thus must constantly act under the assumption that they are. which is exactly what happened to taylor--we see from when we first meet her in the school that she's anticipating attack from every possible direction to avoid it, and the one time she lets her guard down a fraction and assumes she's found a safe spot to hide from abuse, she's targeted with the juice spills. and this is after her trigger event, but it's clear she behaves this way because it was beaten into her over the entire course of the bullying. it's what she describes when she recounts the trigger:
“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I made a friend, one of the girls who had sometimes joined in on the taunting came to me and apologized. ... Her approaching me and befriending me was one of the big reasons I could think the harassment was ending. I never really let my guard down around her, but she was pretty cool about it. “And for most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break, nothing. They were leaving me alone. I was able to relax.” I sighed, “That ended the day I came back from the winter break. I knew, instinctually, that they were playing me, that they were waiting before they pulled their next stunt, so it had more impact. I didn’t think they’d be so patient about it. I went to my locker, and well, they’d obviously raided the bins from the girls bathrooms or something, because they’d piled used pads and tampons into my locker. Almost filled it.”
the precise moment when she stopped consciously anticipating and preparing to react to abuse--when she relaxed, when she stopped acting as if the lack of danger didn't mean that she couldn't still be hurt at any time--is when she was brutally reminded that she's never safe. she's still in the panopticon. she isn't literally being watched every second, she isn't literally in lifelong danger of having her vulnerabilities exploited, but it feels like she is. she can never ever be sure she's safe.
so she triggers, and she gets a power that turns her into a panopticon, and lets her watch everyone right back. it lets her regain control by turning her into a source of danger that could attack anywhere, from any direction, any time, fully unexpected.
& the reason her power enables her to watch Everyone--not just a single person, or a few people--but Everyone, is that the other major aspect of her trigger is the trauma of facts like this:
“It was pretty obvious that they had done it before the school closed for Christmas, by the smell alone. I bent over to throw up, right there in a crowded hallway, everyone watching. Before I could recover or stop losing my breakfast, someone grabbed me by the hair, hard enough it hurt, and shoved me into the locker.”
"All I could think was that someone had been willing to get their hands that dirty to fuck with me, but of all the students that had seen me get shoved in the locker, nobody was getting a janitor or teacher to let me out."
for months, for years, she was in a community where everyone regularly witnessed her humiliation and abuse, and everyone, dozens and dozens of kids and teachers, either contributed to it or was knowingly, silently complacent. this is what sticks with her: the idea that she is so universally reviled, so deserving of revile, that any crowd of witnesses would, without hesitation, consign her to the filth of the locker.
what else is she supposed to conclude, but that everyone she interacts with is a threat? that she can't drop her guard ever again, because no one will be coming to help her if she does? of course she has to become the panopticon. of course she has to watch everyone, all of the time, if she wants to stop it from happening again. of course she has to live among the teeming lowly and crawling things she has been taught via one firm shove that she is worth less than, and of course she has to use them to watch everyone back. and it would be inaccurate to say that doing this--monitoring everything with her bugs--makes her feel safe. all it does is allow her to remain in a constant state of paranoia and traumatized hyper-vigilance more efficiently.
Actually maybe Wildbow’s tendency to issue poorly thought out proclamations about his stories to win arguments with his fans is a good thing, as it forcibly introduces otherwise naive readers to the idea of the death of the author
The thing with the epilogue, is that in 30.7 when Contessa asks whether Taylor was a monster, a bully, or whether she “was really a hero” I took it to mean that her decision on whether to save Taylor or not was based, at least partially, on the answer to that question. If this is accepted, then the answer to whether the epilogue is real is also the answer to whether she was ultimately a monster or a hero and vice versa.
whats the general consensus on wormblr about what happened to taylor? i dont see people talk about the final chapter very much, but when they do it seems they usually take the text at face value, that taylor is powerless and on earth aleph (my preferred interpretation). but elsewhere on the internet people discuss the wog more, and a lot more people seem to believe she died or is in a coma or something other than stuck on aleph.
This moment in particular is super special to me, out of all of worm. Is the starkest window into her inner world, this is probably the first and only time where she actually expresses out loud to another person the fact that she actually took some pride in being a bad ass supervillain, where she actually gloated about being "bad". She was aware of how deranged she was and she actually liked it a little.
This is a taylor we almost never get to see
>be me, pizza guy in shittiest port town on Earth Bet
>terrible tips and get robbed for pizza so often I have honest to god decoy pizzas
>get called to deliver to this weird old warehouse like three times a week and have to roll the dice on how it's gonna go
>there's this whole Burger King Kid's Club worth of diverse teenagers that live there and I never know who I'm gonna get
>worst kid there is the one that answers the door 90% of the time. I hate this little fucking shit
>black haired boy. Dainty little prince pretty boy type. Always the one who calls the orders in, and always gives some stupid ass fake name like he's fucking Bart Simpson. "I.C. Weiner" and "I.P. Freely." That kind of shit.
>like half the time I think I'm delivering a depression-meal since he's dressed like he just woke up, and I'd feel bad except he makes some smartass remark every time, and since I see him every other goddamn day, it's almost always the same joke. Also tries to get free pizza by saying it's 30 minutes or free, except no one has done that program since like 1993, so he's pulling shit from tv. I don't need a fucking comedy routine from a kid in cookie monster pajama pants. Bad tipper. Whatever cash he has in his pocket.
>he's on the shitlist because, and I don't know how the fuck he does this, but every time the pizza is "late", this fucking kid trips me somehow. Or I drop my phone or the pizza bag or keys. Swear to god this kid has Home Alone tripwires or something.
>and every time it happens. Every fucking time. This little bastard says "have a nice trip."
>would say he's a cape, but every cape I've ever met has had some kind of presence, and I'm not giving that much credit to someone with a four-hair teenage mustache
>hate this smug little fucker and I'd have him blacklisted if this fucking building and its weird teenage polycule didn't make up like 50% of our orders for the neighborhood. 0/10, I hope you die
>be me, Brockton Bay pizza man. Deliver to welding building. Name on order is "Dick Hardly." Little prince opens the door. He has a sidekick. Black girl counterpart. They give me matching shit-eating grins. I hate my fucking job.
god i love imp (big spoilers)
you know, the more i think about worm, the more i realize that aside from skitter, imp is one of the best fleshed out characters. and the amazing thing is how her characterization is all in the background where people don’t notice it. just like imp herself.
Keep reading
attention everyone we have reached my personal favorite Line in worm
I stepped toward Sundancer and offered a hand to help her up. She flinched away. Oh. My hands were bloody. I dropped the offered hand to my side. “Let’s go,” I suggested.
there are a lot of good Lines in worm, and while i will acknowledge that many of them are sort of objectively more powerful culminating moments than this one, this one is still My Personal Favorite. Oh. My hands were bloody.
it's been obvious through the early arcs that taylor has a lot of repressed anger: she beats the shit out of rachel, even after being bitten. she outright admits to the other undersiders that she hasn't taken subtle revenge on the trio at school because she's afraid she would take it too far/it would obviously be her. she is, initially, unnerved by violence: she's a bit scared by the gun present in the loft, it creeps her out that brian knows every way to break a person's body, she feels guilt about the idea of any civilians being hurt during the bank robbery. but she still beat up rachel, and she still shoves bugs up the wards' noses during the robbery, and she still gleefully rides rachel's dog and laughs and hollers from the joy and the adrenaline rush of victory afterwards.
the expression of this repressed anger thru violence escalates further when her concussion leads her to slapping emma in the mall. in the principal's office, when it's clear that nothing she or her dad says will garner help with the bullying, she shouts and slaps papers off the table and asks what would happen if she brought a knife to school. after she and her dad leave the meeting, she calls lisa:
“Hey. How did it go?” I couldn’t find the words for a reply. “That bad?” “Yeah.” “What do you need?” “I want to hit someone.”
lisa invites her to a raid on the ABB so she can do that, and it's soo. Sooo Very. to watch how she cuts loose on it. she's so angry rachel notices it in how she's standing, and she's still confused about how rachel noticed. she's a confident leader when the fight goes crisis mode, she responds to rachel bucking against her orders by consistently shouting at rachel to "NOT fuck with me right now," she acts nigh-suicidally aggressive during her fight with lung, and she snarls "don't fucking underestimate me" when she takes him out using a caterpillar dipped in newter's blood.
all of this happens in relatively subtle increments. she doesn't notice how she progressively becomes comfortable expressing herself and taking charge instead of withdrawing or acting insecurely during the course of the mission. she doesn't notice that she's not horrified by dealing with newter's wound or seeing the sniper's broken leg. back in unmasked society, she was forced to consider how many of her aggressive actions were the result of the concussion loosening her impulse control--here, she repeatedly yells at bitch without a second thought. it's a place where her violence and anger isn't only acceptable but necessary. the circumstances normalize her outbursts and comfort with violence to her, leaving her blind to how alienated and dissociated and repressed and traumatized and furious and just Fucked Up she has to be to face down lung and then dig his eyes out.
when she says that she "doesn't believe in eye for an eye," in arc 4 alec asks her why the fuck she's a supervillain. his implicit assertion is clear: being a villain is, for him, about taking your revenge for being hurt out on whoever you can manage or justify, even if they're not the person who originally hurt you. and taylor thinks she's not doing that. but hey: she goes beyond just "hitting someone" and into literally taking lung's eyes as a culmination of the cathartic violence she's been engaging in as recompense for how she was mistreated earlier.
and the person who serves as a more "normal" reference point for how far taylor just escalated is sundancer: horrified by the idea of having to use her sun to hurt people, shocked by how casually violent taylor has been, flinching away from taylor when she turns to sundancer after committing that violence & tries to offer sundancer help.
because, oh. her hands are bloody. she hadn't even noticed how bloody they were getting, but they are.
deeply evocative one-line reminder of how taylor has changed in these first five arcs, without even noticing. and the best part is that, while the imagery of "oh. my hands were bloody" does convey that change in an incredibly brief and powerful way, the fact that taylor is saying it still means even she hasn't really realized. she thinks it's mainly just about the superficial, literal blood on her hands, and not the metaphorical blood on her hands that sundancer is disturbed by. it's good.
Thinkin’ About Alexandria
An important thing to keep in mind about Alexandria, I think, is that she (and the rest of Cauldron’s inner circle) have been sticking like glue to an organizational schema she developed when she was fifteen, using power-assisted cognition but the life-skills, worldview and experience of a fifteen year old; I think this goes a long way towards explaining why her mindset was finding the most efficient way to martially oppose villains instead of, say, finding a way to financially disincentivize villainy through social safety nets. (alternatively, she wanted society to be a thunderdome of sorts to get everyone trained up for gold morning, but that’s got just as many holes that could be explained by being fifteen.)
Her power answered her fear that she’d die without getting to grow and change by arresting all her biological processes and permanently locking her into her late-teens-early-twenties; she has to pretend in order to seem as old as she actually is. Her cognition is completely offloaded to her power; her brain is vulnerable, but it isn’t clear if she’s actually doing any thinking with that thing. Unmovable, unbreakable, clad in fortress imagery, sticking like glue to a specific plan, and a specific value (they’ll be alive, that’s all that matters) derived from her own root fear of death, her preference for mutation over death by cancer, which she projects onto everyone else in the world and uses to justify everything she does to them. Incredible calculative power, incredible resources, incredible martial power, and a fighting style that, to my recollection, consists of hitting the other guy until they stop moving.
So, you know, conclusion number one that I’m drawing from all of this is that Alexandria is Taylor with all the world’s resources at her back and no one to ever tell her no. Conclusion two is that Alexandria is subtly in the same kind of power-induced arrested development as Contessa; she’s got the brains and the brawn to think up and execute bad plans perfectly, she faces no criticism or scrutiny, she (usually) faces no consequences. She’s not “stand-on-a-beach-for-three-days-in-a-stupor” levels of brainscorched by her power but there’s a real degree to which I read the training wheels as never having come off with her. I get a vibe of R/Iamverysmart permeating Cauldron’s set-up and self-assuredness, and this is part of why.
Conclusion three (the big obvious one) is that she’s a metaphor for institutional inertia. When she dies and the Protectorate uses her as a scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with them it’s very obviously self-serving but it’s also not, like. Incorrect. She’s a synecdoche for everything wrong with the system. Rigid, inflexible, callous, arguably necessary but nearly impossible to remove or change or challenge.
And then she gets replaced by a guy whose whole schtick is that he can mix and match the best properties of wildly different component elements on the fly to create the best possible response to any problem.
Thinkin’ About Cauldron
I’m aware of the way it breaks some people’s suspension of disbelief, and I’m aware that it comes across as silly or incompetent to many, but it is deeply, deeply important to me on a thematic level that Cauldron is tiny. The tinyness is what makes them a functional foil to Taylor; you spend the whole book thinking that this is just an escalation of the problems Taylor has with Monolithic authority, and then the curtain is pulled back and you realize that the “Monolithic authority” is actually just six or seven people who are on a first name basis with each other, using their top-tier information-gathering and coordination-based powers as a force multiplier to get around their small numbers as they unilaterally seized control. (Hey, sorta like the Undersiders.)
And, furthermore, their tinyness is a stand-out example of the kind of coordination problems the book has been examining the whole time- Cauldron should be bigger, the inner circle should have more people in it, and the fact that they’ve expanded so slowly, from two to seven-ish full members, with so much of their inner circle not even having the full picture of the threat they’re up against, is deeply indicative of their wagon-circling Atlas Complex. It has to be them, they have to do it alone, or they are going to be found out and crushed.
And to be fair, they aren’t actually wrong in their assessment that they’ll be found out and crushed if they aren’t extremely careful about who they bring into the loop; overlooking the remaining entity entirely, Legend’s concern that the governments would try and coopt the power-granting process is, like. Correct. That is a thing that would happen, given the number of wormverse groups already trying to do that in some form. Siberian bit them in the ass, The Dealer bit them in the ass, and a big part of Ward is the multi-directional slapfight over the remaining Cauldron infrastructure that starts up as soon as it isn’t in a position to defend itself anymore.
There’s a real chicken-and-egg thing going on here, where it’s not clear if their paranoia is warranted given how other power players in the setting tend to behave, or if other power players in the setting behave the way they do downstream from Cauldron’s paranoia, manipulation and compartmentalization. A recurring theme with Worm is that keeping secrets and holding back resources is going to lead to terrible things happening even if keeping those secrets was a reasonable decision with the information you had available to you. You see this with Phir Se, with the Echidna fight, with the politicking over Khonsu. Cauldron is just, like, the epitome of that Morton’s Fork- be honest and open, and potentially lose everything, or, you know, be Cauldron, with all that entails.
I've never made any connections between Worm and the Captain America mythos before. Spill some ink?
Okay, so from a purely aesthetic perspective, the gimme is Miss Militia. She's the most obvious "Captain Patriotic" in the roster, she has the power of GUN, she's the only one who actively buys into the mythology of America specifically. She's a Kurdish woman occupying an aesthetic niche generally held by a rugged squinty white guy. She's an output of the melting pot narrative. She's sort of a rendering of what a grounded superhero who somehow became very aesthetically into America might look like. Not in the craven marketing-driven way of Homelander or Comedian, not in the jingoistic maniac way of USAgent or Peacemaker. She buys it in the broadly left-liberal (USamerican connotation of that term) safe, friendly, reclamative way. Why, what a great rehabilitation of the archetype!
She's also deeply, deeply afraid of rocking the boat. She's got a deepseated childhood trauma related to the bad things that happen when she puts herself in a leadership role. She goes along to get along. When she's proactive, it's usually to point a gun at Tattletale to stop her from upsetting the status quo. She sits through a lot of situations where Steve Rogers, as commonly modeled, would probably plant himself like a tree by the river of truth and go, "Hey, this is fucked up." She more or less capitulates to Undersider domination of the city, in a way that predisposes us to think of her as a voice of reason after all these total nuts that Skitter's been up against- but would Taylor "to relinquish control is a form of ego death" Hebert really be willing to leave someone in charge of the local Protectorate branch who she thought couldn't be corralled? She looks like a beacon, but doesn't- indeed, probably can't- ever truly behave like one. I mean, you can debate the on-the-spot morality of any given one of her judgement calls, that's actually one of the less exhausting Worm Morality Debates to have- but in aggregate, a person in American flag garb who actually meaningfully criticizes the paramilitary organization they're part of is not gonna survive long in that role!
So again, she's the gimme from an aesthetic standpoint. But what I don't really see a lot of discussion of is how Cauldron plays into the riff.
Captain America is institutional, but in a comically morally uncomplicated way. The serum was originally mana from heaven, granted to a living saint, conveniently divorced from any nitty-gritty sausage-making process and even-more conveniently divorced from the horrible consequences of giving the, uh, the U.S government a replicable super soldier process. And in fairness to Captain America, this is 100 percent something the overall mythos eventually patched to my satisfaction; the sausage-making process eventually revealed as prototypical government fuckery driven by human experimentation on black servicemen, the overall Marvel Setting littered with failed attempts by the U.S. Government to recreate that golden goose so they can have their fun new jackboots. (In Ultimate Marvel, this is how almost all contemporary superhumans were created, and this is a state of affairs with a body count in the millions or billions.)
Cauldron draws you in with the same noble rhetoric about greater goods, the same one-off proprietary irreplicable formula- but you don't get the luxury afterwards of representing nothing but the dream. You aren't partnering up with a plucky crank scientist with a heart of gold. You're selling your soul to an organization with an agenda. The narrative makes no bones about the fact that everything you do is fundamentally tainted by the fact you opted into an end product created through torture, kidnapping and human experimentation. You don't get to pull a Kamen Rider by going rogue or opting out or making good use of the fruit of the poisoned tree; you are owned, and everything you do has this Damocles sword hanging over your head- when are the people who bankrolled this going to come to collect?
So that's the question of "who would willingly dress like that" covered, and the question of who creates a serum like that. What about the question of who takes a serum like that? I'd argue that Eidolon is the examination of that. Pre-Cauldron David reads to me like pre-serum Steve Rogers viewed through a significantly bleaker lens. They're both sickly kids desperate to serve, rocketed to the pinnacle of human capability by an experimental procedure. But for Steve Rogers, the crisis was that he had a specific vision of the world and was frustrated by his inability to carry it out. Before the serum he picked fights over what was right and wrong and got his ass handed to him; afterwards he picked those same fights and just started winning instead. The serum neatly solved a problem he had, and to the extent that his mindset is influenced by his pre-serum experiences, it's generally constructive; a desire to protect the weak, help the helpless, an appreciation for people who stand up for what's right even when they're clearly gonna get pancaked for their trouble. So ultimately there's no dark side, downside, or underlying neurosis ascribed to his initial impulse to take that serum.
But with David, it's not a tragic case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. He isn't a preternaturally-noble soul, out to represent the best elements of the American ideal- he kind of represents the inverse, a guy who's been failed at every level while utterly convinced that he's the problem. He's actively suicidal because he's a wheelchair-bound epileptic in an economically-depressed socially-backwards rural town in the 1980s, and he's spent his 18 years of life internalizing the idea that he's worse than useless unless he can somehow find a way provide value to something larger than himself. Doctor Mother finds him in the aftermath of a suicide attempt spurred by his rejection from the army- and he didn't even want to join the army specifically, necessarily, he just needed his situation to be literally anything else, and he took what he thought he could get. And then he finds himself in a position to become a superhero, so he does that, molds himself into that, subordinates himself to that, builds his entire sense of self and values around the value he can provide in that role. No grand design or sacred principles carried over through the metamorphosis. Just relief at finally, finally having something that looks like an answer to the question of what he's supposed to do.
And you know, you know that if Steve Rogers was facing down the barrel of being depowered, he'd smile and nod, he'd Cincinnatus that shit. It's happened before. But for David, the emotional trauma and self-worth issues that caused him to roll the dice on a Steve-Rogers treatment never really went away. When would it? He's been Providing Value as a ten-ton Hammer Against Evil for thirty years. No family, no social life. Certainly, no incentive on his handler's part to lance his Atlas complex. So he barrels towards atrocity in the name of remaining useful. Admittedly, this is where the comparison breaks down in a significant way; Captain America is much more of a symbol than he is an irreplicable powerhouse, so it's not catastrophic if he's taken off the board. Eidolon is so unbelievably powerful that his myopia and self-centeredness actually do align with a real problem everyone else is gonna have if he loses his powers. But in terms of the starting points- I think that Steve Rogers embodies the myth about why you'd want to join the army that badly. Eidolon is, I think, much more closely modelling why you'd actually want to join the army that badly.
Something I haven’t really seen talked about is how the Undersiders mirror Taylor’s bullies.
Obviously, each member of the trio torments Taylor differently: Madison creates little annoyances and pranks, Sophia is animalistically violent (predator-prey) (obviously this is part of the bad racial politics of worm) and Emma engages in psychological warfare based upon specific knowledge of her victim.
Meanwhile, in the Undersiders, you have Regent, who causes little slip-ups in his opponents, Bitch, who is animalistically violent (dog) and Tattletale, who engages is psychological warfare based upon specific knowledge of her victims. And in Grue, you have a Mr Gladly; an authority figure who is meant to reign his charges in but whom fails utterly after making only token efforts.
And Taylor is completely fine with this! I don't think she even really notices, let alone cares, because, with the exception of Bitch (whom she establishes dominance over), this isn't turned against her. Taylor holds a knife to Amy's throat while Tattletale threatens to ruin her life, and she doesn't even have a second thought.
Taylor, above anything else, has the need to be important, or at the very least not be on the sidelines.
In 25.2, when the Simurgh attacks flight BA178, Taylor is despondent because she wasn't able to go to the fight and wasn't able to help. This despite the fact that the flight went well.
And then Scion shows up and she can't do anything to him. Once again, she is sidelined. And so she invents stuff to do, so that she can be doing something and be important. Recruiting the Endbringers, attacking the Yangban and the Elite, going after Cauldron and even getting Panaceaed are all part of her running around like a headless chicken, trying not to be idle.
That this leads to the death of a thousand refugees is simply evidence of this reading; that she is not trying to help for the sake of helping, but for the sake of this need. That it is so short, and Taylor angsts so little about it, shows how far Taylor has fallen into this tendency.
At the start of Worm, she believes that she will go to hell for holding the bank hostage. At the end, she barely feels bad about killing a thousand people.
Hmm, after rereading the bit where the Undersiders and the Guild sic Leviathan on a refugee camp and kill a thousand people, I think maybe Lisa and Colin deserve everything bad that happens to them forever
so I finally picked up a comic book, and I'm starting to suspect that what I thought was a specific type of bad worm fanfic voice is actually normal superhero comic voice.
post was probably by @lakesbian they do like all the Alec character analysis’
I'm fricken stupid as hell having these kinds of revelations days after the fact, but I read a character analysis on Alec that tapped into the reason his power is the way it is; that it takes 15 min to an hour to act, can only control a max of 4 at a time and that his nerve map memory imprint thing or whatever that lets him resume control instantly is basically permanent, and how all of that was because he's the kind of Master who only needs a small group to stand up for him and protect him (the other members of his family/HB's cult) vs someone like Taylor's Master power where she needed minions that could be found everywhere, which could watch everything and attack from every direction. Alec needing members of his family to physically act in his defense (rather than feel emotions for him or have his mind take over theirs) but getting an ability to force them to do so. <- All of this covered by the post, just bringing it up to give context to my thought;
DOESN'T THIS RECONTEXTUALIZE AISHA WILLINGLY GIVING HERSELF OVER TO HIM?!
All his minions during his warlord arc are probably paid for, or weren't aware that being around him 24/7 meant he could hijack their nerves.
But here comes Aisha and she's like "I want you to take over my body." and I was initially thinking ooh it's just a parahuman version of sexual experimentation, teenagers do that, I get it, I won't pretend it doesn't happen but DOESNT THIS MEAN SHE BASICALLY ASKED HIM TO GIVE HER HIS TRUST? Like, all he needed to not trigger was probably someone in his family or the tight knit cult standing up to Heartbreaker (not going to happen) but still? And Aisha is coming along and saying "I'm that someone. I trust you. You can trust me. You're not your father, you won't abuse this, I'm giving you consent under the jokey teenager, not serious guise of fooling around with you wearing my skin."
Maybe that plays into why Aisha goes after Heartbreaker, why she adopts the Heartbroken and why she makes that her mission. To continue his legacy after his death, to be the kind of person the Heartbroken needed the way Alec needed someone. She does kinda do that with Taylor too, fucking up Nero later on, though beyond those two examples I kinda struggle to nail down where she's continued a loved one's legacy. Oh, except maybe where she helps Taylor in Brian's place during GM. That could work too.
I'm still figuring out how to Tumblr but if I find that post again I'll link it here in the replies.
I think (and i’m probably dumb) it’s supposed to be he splits the timeline then in one he leads into doing the coinflip and if he gets it right he follows it, in the other he delays and doesn’t flip so if he gets it wrong he just never flipped and he flips later, but the might be wrong and make less sense
IT DOESNT MAKE SENSE that coils power was able to make a coin flip the same every single time. he can only use 2 universes theres a 50% chance it’s gonna be heads. in his 2 universes theres only a 25% chance that one of the two flips will be heads. he gets double luck but theres no reason why it wouldnt be tails in both universes yeah. that doesnt make sense
i’ve never seen it but supposedly the show Static Shock has something similar to this with one character having super intelligence and making machines but then one episode has him lose his powers and his equipment stops working despite the fact that in most pieces of media this wouldn’t happen
“Even my most loyal. Bitch of a thing to do. Not the actual procedure of sticking the things inside their heads. After the first twenty, I could do the surgeries with my eyes closed. Literally. I actually did a few that way.”
i'm sure there's at least some of it out there that i'm not aware of, but worm is genuinely the only superpowered media i can think of off the top of my head where technology-based superpowers feel this meaningful. tinkers in worm aren't just people toting around sci-fi weapons that feel ubiquitous in the setting, they're the only people who have those weapons, and they have them because they're breaking the rules for how technology should work on a very fundamental and unnerving level. i would like to hear someone with more complete knowledge of the genre at large talk about this (@artbyblastweave ?) because something about how tinkers are written in worm feels special to me. like, from my not-very-into-cape-media PoV it feels like in most other works people w/ the tech-based powers aren't explicitly doing anything special--it's typically presented as if what they're doing is fully plausible within the normal bounds of the universe in question, and their reliance on it might even make them less interesting or more vulnerable than people with "real" superpowers. batman, iron man, etc. and worm sidesteps this entirely by not only giving tinkers extremely inventive, iconic, and powerful toolkits, but by constantly casually reinforcing that what they're able to do is just as unnatural as someone shapeshifting or shooting lasers. bakuda doing brain surgery with her eyes closed! riley making functioning blood replacement out of shit she scrounged up in her kitchen! it doesn't matter if you take the tech away, because their schtick as a cape isn't having the money to put together a purportedly-regular power suit or bag of gadgets, it's having the ability to build a bomb with a couple of nails and the lint in their pocket in the 5 minutes someones back was turned. i simply cannot go back to media where people with gadget-based cape identities don't textually have inhuman capabilities with technology after reading worm, because worm just Does It Better
there’s something else that’s really interesting about Scion that’s revealed in this chapter though
and that is that Scions an asshole
now that feels obvious with him blowing up Britain but specifically because of how Jack convinces Scion to start killing he tells him to do what his ancestors did which for Entities is the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do
the whole point of Entities is to stop entropy since they realized the old way of just fighting an consuming was going to cause them to die out and yet Scion decides to revert to the old ways and kill everything and there by ruining the Simulation and stopping any progress on the entropy problem which is the exact opposite of what Entities want to do
this means to other Entities specifically Scions a huge self important asshole
Very confused by sting interlude 3; don’t really get what happened
to be fair a lot of it is new user who just finished Worm wanting to express their thoughts or having just made a realization and wanting to say it which I’d say is actually nice if a bit stupid
I love r/parahumans so much. "let's get something straight jack slash is NOT that clever" WE KNOW. let's get something straight the sky IS blue circles ARE round. are we going to learn our ABCs next