Mostly a Worm (and The Power Fantasy) blog. Unironic Chicago Wards time jump defenderShe/her
165 posts
Taylor the Survivor
This is a key moment for Taylor's character arc, helping her dad salvage what they can in the aftermath of the endbringer attack. The high school insecurities are just a memory and stepped fully into her role as a masked parahuman. She's growing into her potential, even as the line between Taylor and Skitter begin to merge in dangerous ways. Physically at ease and confident; I wanted to include the knife she wore but it didn't work with this pose.
That being said, I don't know why it struck such a visual chord with me. Emma seeing her old victim from the car was just a vivid scene to me, I knew I had to draw her.
i wiah we saw grue operating solo at some point bc itd be so funny to see him blanket a building in darkness, walk in, steal stuff and walk out with no one able to do a thing about it
the undersiders are so funny
Grue: A little too general as a ward or weaverdice power, especially with the side effects of "blocks other non-visible EM radiation" and "messes with breaker powers". The EM blocking could be made more obvious, and/or rely more on Brian's conscious thought; "i'm blocking radio" "they're not using radio they're using microwave transmission" "fuck". It's also a little easy in terms of control, and this might be fixed by making it un-malleable (so he can't make distracting shadow-duplicates, it's just smoke that expands a little once he's created it).
Tattletale: In terms of weaverdice trigger-gen Lisa would be a master/thinker, so a social thinker fits. Her "super deduction" should be restricted down to people's tells only, and maybe other things that are directly connected to a relationship, or something social. She can still kind of do things like know people's powers, but only by reading what people think those powers are. Some kind of resource mechanic to feed her power might also be necessary, but lets leave it there for now.
Skitter: Mostly fine, but only because she's a double trigger. Maybe she could face down a trump who un-does this, to give her a control system with different "modes" like Aiden/Chicken Little? Alternatively maybe restrict her in terms of which arthropods she can control (only spiders, or only insects), or make her control range be shaped like winslow high school (rectangular, she is at corner point of it and has to swing it around to decide where to control/attack) instead of spherical.
Bitch: Weaverdice character creation says that a Master "creates minions or has a means of compelling others to take certain actions". As Rachel is doing neither of those things (her dogs already exist!) she needs either a real master power to control/influence her dogs, or she needs a different trigger, to make her a "TWOxNINE" trump. Maybe her foster mother was a parahuman?
Imp: Since her trigger was a very "immediate, in-your-face threat", she should be a striker. Maybe she can create weapons like a swords of shadow that create an amnesia effect on hit? This would give Aisha more control over her amnesia effect, but would be more in-keeping with weaverdice power-gen rules.
Regent: He can't actually fully control anyone, and can only jerk one limb at a time, distracting people instead of controlling them, like the younger heartbroken in Ward.
controversial opinion: i really like when worm characters have crisies about the whole "alien supercomputer is in my brain and subconsciously influencing me, i can't trust my own mind" thing BUT i think that it takes away from worm's theme of how trauma affects people on a deep level if shards are ACTUALLY seriously interfering with how people act.
Taylor being paranoid about her passenger is such a fun character trait. Like none of her friends really seemed to give much of a shit when they learned about passengers from Bonesaw, but Taylor consistently notes the times her passenger acted without her consent, she tries to talk with it, communicate with it, just anything to learn what this thing that can control her without her say wants with her. One of my favorite little details is that during the timeskip this was the focus of a lot of her therapy sessions with Yamada, trying methods like hypnosis to communicate. I think part of it is that she's inherently just paranoid about the fact that this thing is helping her sometimes and she doesn't know why and she HAS to figure it out because no one would help out of the kindness of their heart, and another part is just that she can't bear to not be in control and this is something that threatens that in a very ominous way.
Another aspect of her paranoia towards her passenger is that she doesn't want to take blame for her own actions I think. During the Behemoth fight when her ally tried to shoot Phil Sē, she pulled the gun off target with silk and got him killed. She's the one who pulled the string, but because she's genuinely unsure if it was her being wary or her passenger setting up the string she settles on the second option because it absolves her of the possible blame or need to admit she's paranoid and ready to betray people in an instance. When Glenn shows her the video of her being the most terrifying fucker in existence she ignores how horrifying she is and fixated on how her passenger moved her, and then she doesn't have to think about the fact that she'd fit right into the ranks of the Slaughterhouse Nine because well, she can blame her passenger and focus on that instead. This applies to other people too, she sees Lung not using his power and thinks that maybe he's concerned about his passenger like she is. She projects hard onto Sophia in my opinion when she says that she got violent because of her passenger. If this person she doesn't like isn't to blame for everything she inflicted on Taylor, the surely Taylor can't be blamed for the violent steps she took to take over a city. It's another way she rationalizes everything to herself, if something is so bad that she can't justify it immediately there's always the excuse of "my passenger made me do it." But crucially, Taylor ends up being aware of the fact that she's doing this during Gold Morning.
And I think it's really good that this is something she grows and accepts about herself. It's wonderful growth for a character who's so often too stubborn to move herself forward. She's generally more in touch with her passenger during Gold Morning, like the time when she thinks that her and her passenger were in agreement in wanting to hurt Scion on the oil rig. No one else in Worm really seems to accept their passengers, Riley is questioning how much of herself has been subsumed by it, Eidolon is always annoyed it doesn't give what he wants, and most other people don't even know about them. But Taylor forms a bit of a symbiosis with hers after a long time rejecting it at every turn. I think this quote really sums up her feelings towards the end.
And by towards the end I mean like, at the very end, because immediately after this thought she becomes Khepri, and yet another fucking theme and character trait cumulates and reaches its peak with Speck. God damn what a good arc. The blur between Taylor and her passenger that she always feared is finally an actual thing consuming her, and she can finally communicate with her passenger as well. I do wonder what this is like on her passengers end. It's clearly down for the idea of killing its maker, and it's heavily implied that her passenger does care and doesn't want to actually leave Taylor as a husk (too lazy to get the quote because I've been typing for 45 minutes but Contessa remarks upon the administrator claiming everything about her until there's nothing left and she feels fear that she thinks is from both her and her passenger. 30.7 I think, near the end). But there's still so much about Taylor's passenger that's unknown. Was communication something it may have wanted when Taylor kept trying to communicate, but doing so required punching holes in the connection that would lead to more bleed through and functionally destroy its host? Did it slowly grow to care for Taylor more than the cycle, or was it always wanting to fight Scion? Did Taylor's autistic swag convince a multidimensional alien made of crystal to rebel? Is Queen Administrator trans? Idk how to end this post if it's not obvious, sorry.
I disagree strongly with the people people who say taylor getting stuck on earth Alph is a fate worse than death. Obviously it’s awful that she can’t see her friends again but the ending represents her entering a place of stability and healing, where she can finally begin to live a healthy life.
I think those people see Taylor’s awkward and I’ll fitting entrance to the civilian life and feel that she’s lost her place in the world, but I think that’s part of the healing process. She’s no longer trapped in the place that forced her to do the things she did to survive. She doesn’t fit in because she has been molded in a harsh environment, and now she finally has room to change.
Amy is characterised primarily by the belief that she is destined for evil. She believes this because of her 'evil pedigree', a belief caused by Carol's emotional neglect, her temptations, primarily her desire for her sister, her ability to fulfill her temptations, through her power, and her lack of enjoyment of doing good through healing.
She doesn't really desire to do good; her stated reason for continuing healing is that "people wouldn’t understand if she stopped" and she never wanted to be a hero. Healing is a crushing obligation. But she doesn't want to be evil or to hurt people, and so she tries delay and deny her own evilness. Her rules exist for the sole reason to help her resist temptation.
She doesn't seek help because she believes that it wouldn't help, because of her inherent evil.
She loves her sister, and doesn't want to disappoint her.
Amy's obviously a controversial figure, and there's a lot of room for interpretation, especially once you add Ward into the picture, but I think that the above should be an uncontroversial foundation for discussing Amy, and that you're probably wrong if you disagree
NGL gang when I read Worm I was surprised how ultimately understandable Amy's actions were.
Keep in mind I haven't read Ward yet so I don't know all of it but in Worm Amy is clearly shown to have not been hardened enough to handle the high stakes situations that parahumans deal with everyday (y'know like a normal person) and parahumans are known to have their powers pop off without them wanting it. As well as how she was later being deliberately pushed by people who's probably some of the best non-master manipulators.
What I had heard was a repressed and predatory lesbian brainwashing and raping her sister. What I read was a frightened woman pulled too thin to think, being human, and failing because of that.
Part of the reason I want to write a fic focused on Cuff and Taylor is there seems to be some implication that Cuff is one of the closer members of the Chicago Wards to Weaver. Not enough to be considered a friend (I don’t think even Golem qualifies), but she does get picked for the Cauldron investigation strike team over most of the other members. A team Taylor seems to hold in fairly high regard (granted, Shadow Stalker and Lung make the list so again not a measure of friendship)
And one thing Arc 29 in particular does is have Cuff always seem to know how to get Taylor to listen to her and do what she wants.
Compare this to Arc 25 with Tecton spending basically half the chapter trying to convince Taylor and only getting a compromise. Though looking at the two conversations, there is a pretty distinct difference to their approach.
Tecton phrases a lot of the conversation under the idea of “we are x, so you should do this”. Sort of holding some level of authority in the fact they’ve been a team for so long. And, big shocker, Taylor isn’t exactly one for other people holding authority over her. She doesn’t really care for what she “owes” others based on their perceived relationship.
However, one thing about Taylor, at least to be gleaned from the earlier examples from Cuff, is that she does care to a degree about how she is perceived. This can be backed up in her conversation with Glenn in Arc 23
Bringing it back to the main topic, Cuff is, in essence, guilt tripping. The weaponized niceness bit (still one of my favorite Cuff moments ever), as well as the prisoner part, is basically making Taylor think “I’d be kind of an asshole if I didn’t do this”. There are some labels she’s fine with having, like “creepy”, but when it gets into some weirder territory as Cuff points out, she backs off.
I find it interesting that it’s specifically Cuff given these scenes with Taylor, especially this late into the story. It seems to establish at the very least that Cuff knows what makes Taylor tick, better than most of the other Wards.
I think that the Power Fantasy wants us to understand the characters as they are in 1999. They know what happened, they know the world made it out alive, and thus so do we. But they also look back upon the past through the lens of the present.
We see the Tokyo event as Masumi does; an episode of dissociation, Etienne reaching out to her, and violence instilled into a single memory.
The Cuban missile crisis and New Mexico festival massacre are seen through Valentina's eyes, as remembered in the present.
The killing of the Major is seen through Jacky's eyes, and thus there is an emphasis on the violence of the act, and on the elements that will come to make him regret it. And obviously, Jacky's memories of the early Pyramid is distorted and simplified, not quasi-photorealistic like the other, more flashblub memories. Eliza is pure white.
And, of course, knowing how the crises of the past went puts us into the headspace of the superpowers in the present; neither they nor us know if this crisis is one they will get through. Compare the hypothetical linear Power Fantasy; crisis after crisis is resolved without the destruction of the world. What would mark the 1999 crises as any different?
I was talking to some people about the narrative effect of the issue #3 timeline in The Power Fantasy and the phrase that comes to my mind is "disaster voyeurism". If the story had started in 1945 and proceeded linearly, we'd arrive at each of the events on the timeline and not know what would happen or even if the world would survive. But with TPF's actual nonlinear structure, we know the world persists at least until 1999, and also that it faces these very specific crises.
I feel like that shifts the whole tone of these events. I know they're going to be awful, but I'm also really curious what happens, and the knowledge that "the world and all the main characters survive" puts a little distance between me and the nerve-wracking suspense of not knowing what happens. Someone on Discord described it as "anti-immersive"- not the exact word I'd choose, as I do feel immersed in the story in a lot of ways. But I see what they mean, in that I can look at past events with mixed eagerness and dread, rather than just dread like the characters must feel.
In the original tweet it’s not even her cat; it’s her neighbour’s cat.
this isn't "fixing" it this would be just as insufferable
I believe you but this is insane to me because it’s explicitly a small village, the sort of place that the left is meant to view as a socially conservative backwater. That it’s not being presented negatively, by default in fixing it, is honestly kinda worrying re the state of the left
It says something that every single attempt to "fix" the cute witch in the alps game concept makes something that is vastly, vastly worse than the original idea, and sometimes is more actually fascist.
Mostly it's that the thing the Disco Elysium writers were going for is much harder than it looks from the outside. But also other things.
Worm doodle dump
Save me spring break…
I was about to make a post about the general stress of living in the world of the Power Fantasy caused indoor smoking to have a longer life, but it turns out bans on indoor smoking only really started after the turn of the millennium. They’re younger than me
So where does Magus's power come from, anyways? How come he and only he has managed to become a Superpower? It can't just be that he researched it or whatever, someone else would've come across the right tome.
He mentioned squinting in the right way when he looks at Valentina and Eliza, to see their power; I suspect that's it. He really is an atomic, it's just that his power is a minor vision thing that wouldn't mean shit if Valentina's entry into the one timeline hasn't gotten Angelic gunk all over everything. Now, he can see the secret workings of all Numinous whatever, enough to learn the secrets to end the world.
But it's not enough, not enough to keep him safe, not enough to guarantee someone else won't eventually figure out how to unlock that lock with spaghetti. So he makes his little pyramid scheme.
The interesting thing about Masumi is that for all that her condition is tragic, the story doesn't pull punches on the fact that she's also kind of a self-centered dick.
Shea a person with a continuous need for praise and positive emotions or millions, possibly everyone, dies.
And she chooses to go into art. She goes into a field with tons of competition and purely subjective results and is thereby bringing everyone else on earth, Including 4 of the most powerful people on earth, along for the stroke-my-ego ride.
And no one can tell her no, can tell her to back off, because that conversation might put her over the edge and turn her into a giant monster. She has a girlfriend who cannot break up with her because that would kill her.
It's a tragic situation to be in, it's sucky to know that everyone around you is taking reactions out of fear, but she very clearly isn't helping, and years of being treated that way have not helped.
Kid Ignition had five lines this issue and four of them were disparaging of his life and/or of Heavy.
Once Kid gets a taste of freedom I doubt he'd ever want to be bound again
I'm honestly less interested in, "Is Kid Ignition really as powerful as Heavy thinks?" and more in, "Is Kid Ignition really as loyal and obedient as Heavy thinks?" I guess an exact repeat of The Major would be poetically ironic or something. But from a character standpoint, I really just want to see Kid lashing out at his controlling, high-pressure parents like basically every teenager since the concept of teenagerhood was invented. Except, of course, he's not your average kid.
behold! low effort comic recreation of one of my fav parts of the gala fight! didn't feel like coloring, shading ect, but i still like it.
someone: this beauty standard was constructed with specific political purpose, and effectively dismantling the power structure that justifies itself through it requires us to give up using aspects of the body as a metaphor for morality or social worth
the notes:
it’s just a personal preference, it’s not that deep, go outside, touch grass, get married, work a hard job, have kids, stop thinking
so you’re saying I have to fuck people with [trait]? you’re going to show up at my apartment and force me to fuck strangers? your analysis of beauty standards is literally rape. OP wants to fuck me specifically, a random hostile stranger in their notes. they’re turned on because their body disgusts me! (no I have never seen them but I vividly imagine their body as disgusting because why else would they make a post like this)
did you know that another society/culture/time period had a different set of beauty standards? I bet OP didn’t even realize this
actually beauty standards are evolutionary instinct and you’re anti-science. you want us to ignore biology?
I actually WANT to fuck people with [currently devalued trait]
we should remind people that [currently devalued trait] was valued in a different society with another brutal hierarchy based on bodily ideals as proof that [currently devalued trait] is good actually. this definitely does not replicate the exact politics OP is challenging
once I met someone with a stigmatized bodily trait and they were a bad person. I’m sharing this anecdote absent any context so others can draw their own conclusions. if you go to my blog every single post is me sharing totally real stories of people with this trait doing mean things. I’m not saying certain bodily traits create inferior morals, I’m just compulsively curating an entire blog to imply it over and over and over
I used to think [stigmatized trait] was disgusting but I’m trying to unlearn it right now. I assume anyone with that trait would feel me saying this publicly is an act of kindness I’m bestowing upon them rather than a casual cruelty just like all the other comments about how disgusting the trait is
To a certain degree, I think it must have been even more traumatic for Mars to return to Aleph than it would have been if she had to stay on Bet.
She spent months watching her best friend slowly - and then very rapidly - turning into a horrific monster and suffering the whole time. She survived the horrors of Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine. She had to kill said best friend in the end after she turned into a mountain of mutated, agonized, homicidal flesh. Her power is considered one of the strongest and potentially deadliest on Earth Bet.
And then immediately after incinerating her bestie, who was screaming for her up to the end, and watching bestie's boyfriend get sent to life in interdimensional super prison, she just goes back home where things are... not like that. Aleph is pretty closed off from Scion and all the other cape fuckery. There's capes but they're nothing like her and they sure as hell aren't anything like the ones she fought on Bet. There's no Endbringers on Aleph except for when the Simurgh pops in. Other than the Khepri draft on Gold Morning (which must have been absolutely horrifying for her oh my god), there's probably a good chance that she never has to deal with any cape-related situations again in her life.
She just has to sit there with the power of the literal sun and all the blood on her hands and there's only three people in the entire world who will ever understand what happened to her. How is she supposed to function. What the fuck.
Jack Slash works as well as he does basically entirely on the basis of how visibly the author Does Not Like Him. There's a version of Jack Slash written by some other guy who actually unironically thinks his character archetype is hot shit, and that version sucks and the version of the story that he's in also probably sucks. This version also sucks but you can feel everyone else in the story rolling their eyes in unison at the fact that they've gotta put up with his bullshit, everyone going, "alright, can we please stop with the Dark Knight pastiche and go back to playing realpolitik with well-realized individuals who aren't homicidal cartoon characters that we're forced to take seriously purely by virtue of their inexplicable six-digit grimdark looneytunes bodycount"
(This is for @jkjones21, in a way- he asked me to write about a certain page of The Power Fantasy and I'm taking it in a completely different direction than he suggested to me. He did have a good observation about the power lines and cicada as iconic anime/manga motifs, but I don't actually have anything to add to what he said.)
Okay, so from a certain perspective, you could say these two images are proof that Heavy can yell louder than Masumi, because of the way font size works in comics. I think that's an overly reductive point of view, but I want to start with it because it's a simpler version of what I actually feel like is going on, so here goes.
In the third panel of the first image, we see Masumi from so far away that she's barely visible, and her dialogue font is small to show that we can barely hear her. Then in the fourth panel, we see her closer up, and the big font size (coupled with her angry posture) make it clear that she's actually yelling at the top of her lungs, she was just too far away to clearly hear before.
By comparison, in the third panel of the second image, we see Haven (an entire city) from far enough away that Heavy isn't even visible from where he's standing on one of its balconies- but despite the distance, his dialogue font is still really big. If you can clearly hear Heavy yelling from far away, but Masumi's voice gets muted with distance, he's louder, right?
Except nothing in comics is real. You're not visually representing a world that consistently exists, you're representing a story that shifts in emotional meaning. The aesthetic effect of Masumi's voice there (at least, its effect on me) is that for all her emotional ferocity, she's just a small angry blip in an overall peaceful world. In the context of the story, her taking the human-scale perspective of "How could you murder hundreds of people?" is immature compared to Etienne's cynical pragmatism. And the visuals back this up by deflating her anger through making her look small.
And then Heavy... I don't want to say "he's louder because you're supposed to take his anger more seriously," because that's not quite true. This is an out-of-context excerpt as of today (five more days until issue #6!!!!) but I get the sense it's being played for comedy. Heavy's louder than a person that far away has any right to be, because the force of his anger is hyperbolic.
...it's not really about who's literally more loud. It's not even about who's more angry (not that you can measure anger on a scale, even.) It's about how the reader is supposed to interpret each character's anger- and the weird thing is, Masumi's small-font anger and Heavy's large-font anger are both coded as ineffectual. She's not as loud as she seems to think she is, and he's so loud it becomes melodramatic and funny. They've both got very real things to yell about, and I'm sure they take themselves seriously... but the narrative is undercutting both of them, for effect. (Again though- I'm interpreting the second image out of context! Or I guess you could say, the second image's caption is offering a different context from when I'll actually see the whole issue.)
Oh, and my headcanon? Heavy can yell louder in terms of literal decibels, but Masumi has an ear-piercing scream that's like a zillion times more alarming.
Regent *exasperated*: Will Taylor please stop with the bug porn!
Taylor *from behind a bug filled aquarium*: It's not bug porn! They're mating because I need more!
Regent: That's exactly what a bug porn lover would say!
Aisha: Hey, we don't kinkshame in this house
Taylor: Not a kink
Lisa: Yeah, leave TayTay alone. Autistic have hobbies too.
Taylor: Not a Hobby
Regent: She needs to be stopped
Taylor: This energy isn't good for them! It took me forever to convince this many to mate!
Brian: Convince them?
Regent: Are you saying you respectfully asked the spiders to have sex?
Aisha: I too love consent
Taylor *groaning and hissing, too frustrated to properly communicate*
Rachel *aggressively body tackling everyone away*: She wants to be left alone!
these two are like sisters to me.
both issues are focused on young depressed artists whose entire being, their own nature and their powers, overshadows their art.
people loving Tara (wicdiv) as a god but hating her if she wants them to see beyond her godhood with her songs/poetry vs people fearing Masumi (tpf) as a kaiju-summoning destroyer and praising her creations no matter what even though, by Masumi's own admission, she know no one really cares about her paintings.
how both are so resigned to it.
do you see my vision.