Truly The Tragedy Of Taylor Is That She Was Just, The Best At Violence And Discovered This At A Time

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.

amusing myself greatly with the idea of vista undergoing the Situation of

the PRT in brockton bay just like. Entirely losing. to the undersiders. and having to hand over the entire city to them while the wards just stand around being useless and getting jaded

dating one of the undersiders, which is fine and good and how it is now but it's still like objectively a bit of a "oh man how did my life even get here" situation

dating the undersider whose older brother cold-clocked her in the face zero hesitation when she was 12

like thats funny. thats really funny

Zion Worm 🤝 The Queen Power Fantasy

Mysterious alien entities who decide the uk really just needs to fucking go

So far The Power Fantasy has largely been an excellent execution of exactly what you would have expected from the previews which does mute the effect a little.

Then Issue #4 dropped and it's as at least as heavily telegraphed as anything that came before but this time that doesn't stop it hitting as hard as possible at all.

It's one of the most horrible scenarios imaginable. Your powers go out of control when your emotions get too negative and when that happens millions die.

Nobody can ever be too honest when it would risk that happening. You can't trust anything someone says to you. You can't develop any type of meaningful relationship with someone. Your emotional, artistic and moral development is stunted because nobody can ever confront you with upsetting truths. You can't even blame anyone because it's completely correct for them to instrumentalise you and to turn every interaction they have with you into managing you.

10/10 I've been screaming internally whenever I think about Masumi since her issue dropped.

The interesting, underutilized thing about the intersection of superheroism and apocalyptic fiction- zombie fiction in particular- is that a core part of the appeal of the superheroic fantasy is that you're simply powerful enough that you don't have to make hard choices or do triage; you can just save everyone. Whereas zombie fiction is basically predicated on so much going wrong at once that saving yourself becomes a stretch goal. A total societal collapse highlights the ways in which the superheroic power fantasy was always kind of quietly dependent on the continued existence of modern society to function- the extent to which a superhero's basic identity is being outsourced to the continued existence of observers, to your continued success at the project of keeping those observers alive so they can continue to agree that you're a superhero. If everyone is going insane and eating each other and you're an indestructible guy who can bench press a car, suddenly that's all you are. Applicable to the scenario at hand, sure. You're in a better position to survive than most. But that's all that you are.

These images from J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars gestures in the same direction I was gesturing with that Aquaman post- there's a really interesting archetype in superpower fiction consisting of characters who "Step Outside" in the way described here. Superhumans who remove themselves from society- not in a "kneel before me" way, but simply out of recognizing that participating in society in a conventional manner offers them significantly less than it does an average person (though not nothing- insert that MP100 monologue about "can you make a soda can.") Libertarians who fuck off to the moon and carve a Gadsen snake visible from earth, that kind of guy.

Invincible featured the title character gradually sliding into something adjacent to this as he realized that he was just sort of going through the motions by attending college and so on, when his girlfriend can wish a house into existence and the Cecil throws money at him to do stuff he'd do for free. The entire main cast of The Power Fantasy is doing something like this- you're most likely in no danger if you see one of the Superpowers walking down the street but most of them probably haven't paid for a meal in years (unless they insist on paying, which wraps back around to having the same dynamic as not paying.) Superman yo-yos on the topic of how accountable he makes himself to human governments, but I strongly doubt he got a permit for that fuckoff-huge fortress in the arctic. And so on. Obviously not all superhumans can get away with this- Spider-Man is held back from becoming a full-time bank robber by way more than just his conscience. But whether they could get away with this is a great characterization question to ask of any superhuman, and it's a door you can't really close once it's open- any decision they do make from that point forward will be implicitly contrasted against their everpresent option to just Hit Da Bricks.

God's Favorite

Lucy wakes to the soft tapping of rain against her window, and she is God’s favorite. She knows this in the absent sound of her alarm, and she knows this in the yawning rumbles of thunder, and she knows this before she touches her phone alight to the notification screen.

8:43 am. Far from the 4:30 am alarm she’d needed to heed to make it to her flight. Her screen is awash with airline notifications.

She scrambles from bed. Her urgency is an apology. Lucy skips the shower and skips the hair washing and paints on deodorant before stowing it back in her carryon and calling her uber.

“Crazy weather,” her driver with the big mustache remarks. His windshield wipers swish through a river of rain.

“Yeah,” Lucy answers. She glances at her rumbling phone. She glances at the rumbling clouds. The road is clear. It shouldn’t be, not this route and not at this hour. A gas main broke somewhere up the highway that feeds this street. A freak accident. 2 injuries. It’s kept this road clear for just the locals since it happened. Lucy encounters no traffic enroute to the airport.

There are pockets of planes grounded across the runways, barely visible behind the sheets of downpour. They look like herding animals, herbivores, standing stock-still in brace against the weather. Lucy stares at them only a moment while the driver pulls her carryon out of the trunk. She grabs her jacket closed against the wind, and grabs her carryon handle, and thanks her driver. The rain does not reach her here, though the wind does.

Inside Lucy drags her bag past the help desks swarming with the orderly filings of people in disarray. Parents leaning too hard on help counters with kids pulling on bag handles. Hurried conversations and requests and arguments. The electronic boards are awash with deeply red DELAYED and CANCELED. The airport is choking. Lucy, who God loves, glides through security unimpeded.

At gate-side, Lucy finally looks to the large red board of DELAYED and CANCELED etchings to confirm what she knew without even checking her phone notifications. Gate A14. Her carryon wheels pitter and patter across tile as she walks, striding quickly, with apology.

When Gate A14 comes into view it is smothered with the weight of two or possibly three flights worth of people. There are people asleep clutching backpacks and curled on the floor. There is a four-year-old girl with her face buried in an iPad and a mother having a phone call whose clipped urgency infects Lucy. There is a man leaning over the counter to talk to the gate agent, and his hands pulse with each tensing of his fingers. “…to the hospital before she…” Lucy makes out, or thinks she makes out. She doesn’t hear the gate agent’s response, but she can read the defeated shake of her head.

Lucy’s carryon wheels clunk where the smooth tile of the terminal shifts to carpeting. She doesn’t think to grab a seat because there are no open seats. So she positions herself in a way to unmistakably say she is at the gate, threading between stagnant suitcases and kids splayed on the floor. Lucy approaches the rain-splattered windows, and like a conversation shy upon being overheard, the thunder recedes from her advance. The rain draws to a polite close. The clouds split along a seam and pull away, as if they were only ever a wave that had transiently crashed to shore. The sky is beautifully blue.

There is a stirring hopefulness in the air. Other passengers have pushed past Lucy to stand closer to the window and peer outside, as if their confirmation of the changing weather can convince the airline of what to do next.

The gate agent puts down the phone receiver of a one-sided call. She pulls the microphone close and with grainy clarity she announces, “Boarding for Flight A1874 to Detroit will begin in 10 minutes.”

On the walkway, through the gap between the throughway and plane, Lucy sees the puddles rising with steam. They throw the iridescent spectrum of a rainbow up into the sky.

In a backlog of hundreds of flights, Lucy’s is the first out across the runway. This is because God loves her. She only wishes It loved her in a way to fix her broken phone alarm.

…

In childhood Lucy had heard “God loves you” and “Jesus loves you” in the placative ways that Sunday School teaches its children. With jingles and crayon-drawings of sheep and shepherds and a decorated ornament, crafted each Christmas Eve.

Lucy had long since fallen out of it and had thought very little of her parents’ tepid god for the last 10 or 15 years.

It was last spring, 27-years-old, that Lucy had found her way out into the marsh. Mud sucking her boots and gnats plicking in swarm against her skin. Where she sat her tailbone in the muck and folded her arms over her knees and buried her face in her legs to cry. And cry. And cry. And there with the mugginess sopping her skin and the humidity coiling her hair, God decided It loved her.

It loved her with a parting of canopy for the robin-blue sky. It loved her with the chirp of cicadas. It loved her in the way a dog circles its owner and nudges a wet snout to palm, because It was here, and It would make her feel better.

Lucy’s seat is the window seat beside the man with the tensing fingers. He fiddles with a phone in his clutch until he locks it in airplane mode and stows it, to look at no more. Lucy wonders who this man knows in the hospital, and she wonders why God doesn’t love him more than It loves her.

…

In March, Marco breaks up with her over a plate of fish that is too dry. In the moment, Lucy wonders if it’s her fault, because of the fish. But that’s not it. The signs were there, in all the subtle and stuttering moments Marco had pulled away. Each little moment like a slightly missed step, on a staircase growing ricketier each month.

Marco leaves and everything is so quiet, to the point that Lucy thinks her own sounds are pretty stupid, and pretty embarrassing while she’s coiled snail-like and snottily-sobbing into her pillowcase. She thinks absently of how she has to wash the pillowcase now, and that’s fine, because she was going to wash her linens this weekend anyway. She sobs so hard she’s almost screaming. Oh, and kitchen towels. She’ll wash the kitchen towels too.

She’s alive enough the next morning to throw all her linens and her kitchen towels on the floor of the laundry room. And maybe Marco breaking up with her is fine, because his birthday is December 25th and who wants a husband whose birthday is the same day as Christmas?

Her doorbell rings. And somehow it’s Marco again. She opens it to him, and he smells like a wildfire.

“Sorry, Lucy, this is awkward,” and Lucy believes he means it. He’s clutching a jacket around himself for what looks like security more than warmth. His apartment burned down last night. A resident fell asleep with a cigarette lit and dangling from her fingertips. Unit right below him. All his stuff burned, or filled with smoke, or is now logged up with water. He’s been sitting outside on the cobblestone for the last few hours, watching the blaze, on the phone with insurance. His landlord hasn’t responded to him yet. He’s cold, and he’s smokey, and can he shower here maybe? Can he stay for just a day or two, maybe? Sorry. This is awkward. He has no family on this coast. He really has nowhere else to go.

“Sure.” Lucy lets in Marco who smells like a wildfire. She adds the towels to her laundry list because they will smell like a wildfire too once Marco has used them. When he is clean, Lucy asks him nice questions. He asks her nice questions back. She helps him figure out something strange on the insurance form. He starts cooking dinner before Lucy realizes he’d entered the kitchen, because she was busy with the linens and the towels.

Marco takes the couch and clean linens. “Thanks, again, really. I can pay you a few days rent, when I get the insurance payout.” It’s no problem. Lucy goes to her room and shuts the door. It’s warmer here with Marco again. She wonders how long he’ll stay. She wonders if it will be for as long as she thinks the sound of him breathing in the other room is a comfort.

Something twists in Lucy’s chest. She wonders why God loves her more than It loves Marco. Lucy wonders why God didn’t love the woman with the lit cigarette who did not make it out of the building.

…

In June Lucy is desperately throwing together the haphazard makings of a financial report. She meant to stay up late to finish it, and get up early to make it beautiful, but she’s had a cold for a whole week now and the new bottle of decongestant she grabbed wasn’t “non-drowsy” like she thought.

Her heart is beating, and she nearly twists her ankle with a misstep in high heels, and she almost loses her grip on the shoddy makings of a too-light financial report still warm from the printer. She can spin it, maybe, that it’s intentionally light and she’d simply wanted the esteemed and respected input from the executives in the room before she produces the truly polished report this evening. And when the eyebrows are raised and she is told the report is due now, maybe they will refrain from firing her on the spot since she is still the only one who can produce the report they need.

She pulls open the meeting room door as if she is not out of breath, as if her nose isn’t red from a thousand tissues. She takes her seat so hastily that she does not notice, until she looks up properly, and sees the CEO’s seat is empty.

No one speaks. No one acknowledges her entrance. Lucy hugs the warm binder to her chest.

The door latch clicks open, but Lucy knows it will not be the CEO. She heard the click of heels before the doorknob turned.

It’s his assistant with the lovely auburn hair that curls around her shoulders. Her suit is red and her eyes are red and she stands just behind the CEO’s chair. Everyone notices her in the way they did not notice Lucy.

She speaks. The CEO’s wife and daughter were in a head-on collision with a drunk driver 42 minutes ago. They’re in critical condition, and the CEO has gone to be with them. He asks everyone’s forgiveness and grace in this time. The meeting is rescheduled for tomorrow, same time, and he humbly requests if everyone in attendance can adjust their calendar to accommodate this. This is a big ask, he knows. The board will have questions, he knows. But these are extenuating circumstances. The assistant will help with any necessary reworking of everyone’s calendars. And Lucy, can you please deliver the report tomorrow? The assistant has a sympathy card, which she lays on the table along with a black pen, and she asks if anyone would care to sign it.

Lucy signs it. The card paper is so cold, compared to the warmth of the half-finished report squeezed tight against her chest. The half-finished report should have cooled by now, but God must know she’s cold and ashen-faced, and God loves her so much.

…

In July, Lucy is a perfectionist. Her mother swears she wasn’t always like this. Her high school best friend is surprised, when in town for a weekend and meeting up for coffee, by the way Lucy triple-confirms the time, and the place, and the way she wears two watches. Why two watches? he asks. Because the alarm on one watch might fail. What about your phone? The watches are the backup, if the phone dies.

There’s something off-putting in the way she talks, and the way she asks questions of him, and the way she exclaims in joy at every piece of good news he shares. Josiah glances behind himself, more and more, and it’s because Lucy stares back there like she knows someone else at the next table.

It’s all weird, and Josiah can’t help but pull away. But Lucy pulls away first, retroactively. She can always pull away retroactively, and declare to her four walls of her room how much she didn’t need that friend, like she doesn’t need Marco, or anyone else who God may drop at her doorstep like the dead bird bounty of a cat, happy to share with the person It loves.

Lucy finishes her reports early. She wiles away the sun at her office even in the summer finishing reports far before anyone could need them. She double-checks, every time. She triple-checks. Her boss pulls her into a meeting room and with hands folded on the desk, he asks if maybe she needs to take some time off. And instantly she declares to the four walls that no-one at the company is doing this to her. “I wasn’t implying that…” but she’s not looking at him when he answers.

In July Lucy returns to the marsh. She returns with stones she’s horded up and gathered in the trunk of her car. She walks through the boot-suckling mud and she weighs stones in her arms while she hurls them, and throws, and screams, and hopes one of them might strike God in Its snout.

“I HATE YOU!” she screams. She throws all her weight into a stone whose sharp edge nicks bark. She hurls one through the bushes and another into the leafy canopy above. She is sopping wet and the cicadas chirp at her. “I HATE YOU!! GO AWAY!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!” She chucks a stone which lands in the sucking muck, capsizing like a ship beneath the algae.

She throws, and her gravity heaves forward, and her boots stay stuck in the mud. So she topples elbow-deep in the mud, spattered, soaking into her chin and her shirt and her jeans and her hair. She parts her lips and tastes the earthy wetness on her skin, coppery blood, split lip. The stones are all under her. She laughs. Lucy tilts her head to the sky screaming with laughter. Joyous to tears, with the wetness drawing rivulets down the mud on her cheeks. She laughs because sopping-in-mud-and-muck is NOT the state of something God loves. This wouldn’t happen to something God loves.

Lucy goes home. Lucy showers. Lucy does her laundry. And It crawls back into bed with her. Perhaps like a scolded animal, but perhaps It did not even know It was being scolded. Lucy cannot tell.

The wine stains came out of her linens today because God loves her.

i hope someone in this setting has time powers so 1970s magus can come and break 1999 magus' fucking jaw

An alternative way Gillen has described TPF is “as if your idiot clique of friends had to stay civil or the whole world would end”, and yeah it’s hard to imagine, with ours and Tonya’s front row seat, the civility lasting much longer at all

What I like about Tonya in The Power Fantasy is that she's the journalist viewpoint character, right? The character who's asking questions and poking at the same kinds of things that the audience would be poking at. And over the course of the story she's developing the shell shock that any quote-unquote "normal" person from our world or one similar would have, if they got plunged into the deep end. But the thing is that this isn't some mysterious new paradigm shift she's investigating, she isn't new to this and it isn't new to her, she was doing a piece on one of the leading public figures of the last fifty years when she got caught up in this. What's new to her is that she's spent somewhere around a week in proximity to these six people when they're going through a fairly-eventful-but-still-within-parameters week of their own lives- not quite business as usual, but close- and she's getting a front row seat to how the six most famous people on earth are perpetually six seconds away from fucking up and destroying the whole planet, and how much everyone attendant to this messy friend group needs to constantly bust their asses to prevent that from happening. That's the big reveal of the setting, from her perspective, that's what's inculcating her issue-5 certainty that the world is going to end. It's neat.

Hated it at the time, but I can't understate how much I've come to like the reveal that Brian died on the oil rig. The protagonist's love interest-turned-ex died off-screen due to her decision making, and while she's recovering from getting literally blown in half by the same thing that killed him everyone decides that they're just Not Gonna Tell Her What Happened to her romantic lead, they're gonna tell her almost literally that he fucked off to a farm upstate. And she believes it, and hinges her last scraps of psychological stability on it during the endgame, and then either dies or escapes the narrative still believing it, possibly forcing herself to believe it. I think there are very few works playing in the same space as Worm that would have the balls to treat the quote-unquote "lead pairing" this way.