Ever Think About How Scion’s Defeat Matched The Chicago Ward’s Modus Operandi During The Time Skip?

Glow-Worm P.4

I really digging the epistolary format of these. A surprising amount of characterisation can be crammed into a search term or a couple of comments. Rain's desperation jumps off the page.

Also of interest is the tidbit about cluster mechanics that wasn't picked up by the fandom; I don't think I've ever seen any fic ever have clustermates with a primary and secondary power of similar strength. This might be because Ward never expands on this idea elsewhere.

Also, we have the first mention of what will likely be a recurring bugbear for me; the classification system. In Worm, power classifications are a useless bureaucratic post-hoc kludge. There is one fight where Taylor is only given ratings instead of power descriptions and it leaves her entirely unprepared. And here we have a hero referring to a cape having a "mover power with the ability to run on walls". What does "mover power" add to "the ability to run on walls"?!?! Its fine here, because its possibly a hero, like Weaver, inflected by the PRT's bureaucratic ticks, but from what I know of Ward and of Weaverdice, it seems that Wildbow forgot that the classifications aren't useful and aren't an intrinsic part of the power system.

Internal Inconsistency Counter: 6 (nc)

Inconsistency with Worm Counter: 1 (nc)

Number of times I've complained about power classifications: 1 (+1)

its weird how on top of the official limits on the number of new doctors, we ALSO make becoming a doctor needlessly terrible. it could be like normal grad school! and they'd be just as qualified. we just torture them for no reason. if we removed both lmiiters we could have like double the doctors just as qualified

I did a painting party for my birthday and here’s what I made

Can Heavy yell louder than Masumi? Does it matter?

(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.

The Power Cut previews: The Superpowers

Essay and art previews for some of the essays from The Power Cut, an upcoming The Power Fantasy fanzine!

Credits:

Masumi: essay @jkjones21, art @tazmuth

Heavy: essay @idonttakethislightly, art @jkjones21

Etienne: essay @meserach, art @artbyblastweave

Magus: essay @rei-ismyname, art @jkjones21

Valentina: essay @khepris-worst-soldier, art @idonttakethislightly

Eliza: essay and art @idonttakethislightly

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.

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

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.

Bug Porn

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!

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.