Khepris-worst-soldier - Khepri's Worst Soldier

really good observation from this liveblog actually why the fuck did cauldron decide to prioritize Interior Design for bonesaw's presence. britain just exploded what's wrong with you

Have we talked about how Taylor has common themes with each teammate when she meets them and they foreshadow something about her final form as Khepri? (Also ship names being based on bug things makes me feel wickedly gleeful)

• Taylor + Lisa = SmugBug = uncanny insights, could be mistaken for precognition ; reckless self endangerment

• Taylor + Rachel = WolfSpider = sudden not-necessarily-proportional violence ; brain no longer maps to human interaction

• Taylor + Grue = Dark&Creepy = obfuscation, macho power displays ; power theft

• Taylor + Regent = QueenBee = false sense of emotional detachment ; controlling people but not their minds

• Taylor + Imp = Fly On The Wall = unobtrusively spies on others ; forgetting

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.

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.

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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.

if worm happens after wildbow develops ward/weaverdice power sensibilities she never meets the undersiders. lung doesn't hear her stepping onto the gravel roof because his trigger only has like light thinker notes tbh. and he's already a brute/changer, blaster with mover notes, that's already a lot, we should trim down, we should trim this down. Really drive at the cocaine elements of his trigger

Its just a background detail at the moment, but it’s interesting how the superpowers have undergone a quasi-evolutionary process, in that a new superpower can only emerge and remain around if they are more-or-less immune to the various powers of the existing superpowers, or have some other reason for the existing superpowers not to kill them.

Anyone without psychic shielding would be instantly neutered by Lux (see The Devil). Anyone one not physically resilient enough to survive a first strike from Heavy and whom Heavy dislikes enough to kill will likely be killed by Heavy. Etc

The Major only survived as long as he did because Magnus didn’t tell Heavy about how weak he was because letting America believe that it was still powerful was worth the concessions they were asking for until, suddenly, they no longer were.

Lux, Masumi, and possibly Magnus, are only alive, despite physical squishiness, because they have (in Masumi’s case, unintentionally) created dead-man’s switches.

And so by 1999 all you’re left with are Superpowers that have psychic shielding and which are either incredibly physically resilient or have truly terrifying dead-man’s switches

Not gonna lie, really looking forward to next issue when we get to see Heavy and the Major square up for a continent destroying battle, only for Heavy to effortlessly yeets him into the sun.

New York, in the process of being rebuilt.  Dust and ominous clouds were being held at bay by a thin forcefield, and the city stood in the center of a brilliant sunlight.  Where glass had broken and where oils had risen to the tops of city streets, things almost glittered.  A shining city.

Does Ward ever explain why they went from rebuilding New York on Earth-Bet to living in 'The City' on Earth Gimmel? Or does it just do that and leave us to wonder as to the answers?

My god, did Wildbow even re-read the epilogues before he wrote Ward? Like, I knew he didn't re-read Worm as a whole, because his characterizations of Amy in Ward are like, frozen in Arc 14 for most of the text but did he not even make the effort to at least re-read the last couple of chapters?

What the fuckberries? How is this the first I'm hearing, in all the complaints I've seen about Ward, and 'The City', that they were GODDAMN REBUILDING NEW YORK CITY after Golden Morning?

Zion Worm 🤝 The Queen Power Fantasy

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