New Goddess Idea: She’s An Earth Goddess Of The New Age Who’s Domain Is Spinning And Weaving, But

Incredible beds

For your first part we hear from Crusader that she supposedly triggered after being trapped in a crashed truck for days slowly starving until she triggered to eat light and get the truck off

Thinking about Purity

I have two thoughts on Purity. Here they are:

One. Her trigger event consisted of her being trapped in a lethal environment with no resources, gradually going insane, and developing overwhelming firepower in order to fight off a horde of assailants who didn’t actually exist. I can’t imagine what that’s a metaphor for. Haven’t the foggiest.

Two.  Purity is interesting, from a worldbuilding perspective, because at the start of the story there’s an actual niche archetype from the comics that she’s fulfilling.

 “Hardcore street-level hero who actually turns out to be a racist lunatic that the actual heroes need to take down” isn’t quite a chestnut at the big two but it’s a story beat I’ve seen multiple times; Nightwing vs his building’s insane janitor in Dixon’s run, Captain America vs Jack Monroe and to a lesser extent USAgent, I feel like Batman’s deal with Lock-up from the animated series inches towards this, although that one wasn’t explicitly racialized. Punisher’s done this a couple times, It’s Peacemaker’s whole bit, there’s definitely a few more I’m forgetting.

So the subversive element here isn’t that she’s an openly racist superhero; it’d that she’s still allowed to be a racist superhero. It’s that a thematically appropriate hero like Legend hasn’t come to town specifically to drop the hammer on her for daring to be an openly racist superhero. 

 And to be charitable, what’s usually going on in those other stories is that the racist heroes are almost always explicitly bad knockoffs of the protagonist. They’re intended as a dark mirror, because the obvious failure mode of heroic vigilantism is that it’s extremely appealing to racists, glory hounds, egomaniacs and egomaniacal racist glory hounds, but the flip side of that is that people with those characteristics go down like chumps in a fight with a true-blue hero. They exist in the story as a one-off warning for the real heroes, who give them a chance and then chuck them in the bin when they show their true colors.

Worm, though, doesn’t have a just-so structure. The racist idiots who get superpowers and develop delusions of heroism don’t provide the courtesy of also being weak and incompetent enough that the “real” heroes can root them out with minimal fuss. Purity won the goddamn power lottery; she’s one of the most powerful capes in the Bay, with hit-and-run capabilities that all of the heroes working together are textually incapable of countering. (And this isn’t like The Boys where they’re all secretly in bed with each other- New Wave has serious beef with the Empire! They would absolutely pin her ass to the wall if the opportunity arose, but they can’t!)

So in a very real sense, The Protectorate is pussyfooting around her, letting her exist in the gray zone of self-deluded vigilantism, because…. well, the second she can’t sustain her self-deception anymore, the second someone really pushes, her go-to reaction is to commit a mass casualty event. She was always a time bomb, and so the strategy of just continuing to label her as a villain, while she continuously hopefully refreshes PHO to see if any helpful fans have updated her wiki page yet, is, you know, I get it. It’s not great but I get it. A hands on approach only works if you can actually lay hands on them.

But! As far as I can remember, she was functionally operating as an Independent Hero as the setting defines it! Everyone in power pretends she isn’t but she was still in that ballpark, hand in hand with how selectively racist she was being about it! She was a vigilante, she was out to target “criminals” and clean up the streets using her powers, she had a costume and a secret identity- actually one of the few capes we see in Brockton Bay with a full-time day job- and she was really really really racist.

So with Purity, Worm is being honest about the inability of a superhero community to clean house, to effectively police who gets to be a part of it, who gets to actively consider themselves a part of it. There was never going to be a righteous beat-down where she gets “kicked out” of the fraternity, no “you are not affiliated with me” moment that finally gets through, even though many heroes in the setting would dearly love to deliver such a thing. A certain level of power purchases the right to think of yourself in whatever terms you want, and the heroes just have to stand around looking uncomfortable and swearing up and down that, no, her vigilantism is different from good vigilantism, honest, completely different underlying models.

or read Twig

every post attempting to find 'plural' subtext in ward is just another grim reminder of how few wildbow fans have read pact

i actually do kinda like delivering groceries on the side because it gives me such a unique cross-section of the community. i never know whose groceries im shopping for until i finish the delivery and see them/their home and it's like it adds more detail to the picture of who they are. the baby supplies going to the apartment that i know for a fact is one bedroom (they'll be moving soon - i bet they're apartment hunting, i hope they find a place). the new cat litter box, bowl, and kitten food going to the house covered in "i <3 my dog" paraphernalia (a kitten definitely showed up on the porch recently and made itself at home). the fairly healthy boring grocery order that includes an incongruous tub of candy-filled ice cream going to the home of an elderly woman with toddler toys in the yard (it's clearly for her grandkids, whom she sees often).

shopping for someone else's groceries is a fairly intimate thing. i've bought condoms and pregnancy tests, allergy medicine and nyquil, baby benadryl and teething gel, a huge pile of veggies paired with an equally huge pile of junk food, tampons and shampoo and closet organizers and ant traps and deodorizing shoe inserts and a million other little things that tell a million different stories in their endless combinations. one time someone had me buy one single green bean. i messaged them to confirm that's actually what they wanted, and they said yes - neither of them liked green beans very much, but they had a baby they were introducing to solid foods, and they wanted to let him try one to see if he liked them. another time i had someone request 50 fresh roma tomatoes - not for a restaurant, but for a person in an apartment. the kitchen behind them smelled like basil and garlic when they opened the door. another time i brought groceries to three elderly blind women who share a house. that was one of the few times i have ever broken my rule and gone inside a place i've delivered to, because they asked if i could place the grocery bags in a specific location in the kitchen for them to work on unloading and there was no way i was going to refuse helping.

i gripe about the poor tippers, but people can also be incredibly kind. one time i took shelter from a sudden vicious hailstorm inside an older lady's home in a trailer park, while i was in the middle of delivering her groceries. we both huddled just inside the door, watching in shock as golf-ball-sized hail swept through for about five minutes and then disappeared. she handed me an extra $10 bill on my way out the door.

when covid was at its deadliest, people would leave extra (often lysol-scented) cash tips and thank-you notes for me taped to the door or partially under the mat. i especially loved the clearly kid-drawn thank you notes with marker renderings of blobby people in masks, or trees, or rainbows. in summer of 2020 i delivered to a nice older couple who lived outside of town in the hills, and they insisted i take a huge double handful of extra disposable gloves and masks to wear while shopping - those were hard to find in stores at the time, but they wanted me to have some of their supply and wouldn't take no for an answer.

anyway. all this to say people are mostly good, or at least trying to be, despite my complaints.

Everyone always says that Zack Valenti is in everything but people don’t mention how Julia Morizawa is also surprisingly everywhere(sorry if I messed up names)

She’s nice (but my grandma is nicer)

Times are troubling and hard right now-but never forget, your Beet loving Grandmother loves you very very much and wants you to be safe.

And for you to eat your vegetables.

Yeah I agree that the show takes supes in the military being actually scary compared to the comics we can also see the comic idea of supes being incompetent but toned down slightly, in the fight in Nicaragua we see Swatto get killed in five seconds and the twins and the mind guy huddled in cover not doing anything. Which I think kinda shows how yeah some supes would be great but they couldn’t really be mass incorporated due to the specifics of powers.

I don’t know what I’m really saying I’m just rambling great post

Also consider this a chaser for a longer post I’m gonna do on how The Boys got better in the adaptation, but one thing I think was a really smart change is how the show is handling the prospect of supes in the military.

 In the comic, The Supes are framed as Evil, but Incompetent. The fight over whether or not Vought is going to get Supes into the military was meant as a parallel to pork spending and the military Industrial complex run amok. Putting supes in the military was framed as bad, well, first because Vought is evil and shouldn’t get to make money, but on a practical level it’s treated as a silly idea.  The supes are framed as fundamentally incompetent soldiers. They’re too brash, too used to getting their way, incredibly difficult to create in consistent numbers, even harder to standardize once you’ve created them due to radically different levels of durability, and fundamentally pretty easy to kill in a combat scenario if you go in prepared and keep your shit together. Until Homelander starts getting Coupy, the actual stakes of the fight are largely over whether Vought is going to get to ream the American Taxpayers with the superhuman equivalent of jets that don’t work and see no action. But the superhumans themselves are, fundamentally, a complete joke in terms of combat ability, and their actual attempt at full-scale rebellion is suppressed almost immediately by the conventional military.

 And the issue is that this sort of created an “enemy-is-both-weak-and-strong” dynamic, where the story hates superheroes so goddamn much that they get  simultaneously framed as both this incredibly corrosive societal cancer AND a bunch of complete morons who can get wiped out in an afternoon by a small detatchment of well-trained, well-equipped soldiers. The actual stakes are…. kinda all over the place, as a result.

In the show,  The Supes are allowed to be both Evil AND competent. Homelander is actually smart instead of just mean and powerful, and It’s pretty clear that supes would be effective in the military, applied judiciously; Black Noir, Soldier Boy and even Homelander to an extent actually are capable of carrying out incredibly violent surgical strikes against whoever the hell they want. So instead, the threat is very clearly reframed as the military potentially having access to combat-viable superhumans who are capable of carrying out incredibly violent surgical strikes against whoever the hell they want. That gets to be a bad thing on its own merits instead of being bad because it’s a waste of money! And, furthermore, it’s also as if specific special-forces agents and black-ops murderers were given the same kind of inviolable, insufferable PR shielding that real world celebrities get for their bad behavior, except the “bad behavior” is, you know, the imperialist slaughter of hundreds or thousands! (In addition to, and not as a replacement for, regular celebrity bullshit!)