Vista’s Is An Escher Staircase Keyring Trinket. It Very Much Wants Her To Have A Gun.

worm doodles

I'm 93% sure I made a post about this before, but Taylor using other people's powers better than they do is such a fun part of her character, especially since she seems to constantly be thinking "damn if only I got that actually useful power." Like, Lisa thinks Taylor would do better than her with her insight power, Taylor coordinates Cuff and Theo to make a lightning rod during Behemoth fight when neither of them had thought of that, Clockblocker with the string, ordering around like 10 people including fucking Eidolon to hold Behemoth still for Phir Se, she's always scheming and using people as chess pieces in such a way that they're not even mad because it's a learning experience. I think a large part of it is a want to be anyone but herself, which leads to her looking at other powers and considering their uses more than most people do because she just finds every reason to be jealous and justify her passive belief that she's inferior and weak. Also she's just so used to high stress fucked up situations that she performs well under pressure. She kinda acknowledges that in the chapter where she's like "what the hell why is Amy so stupid she should be using microbes to form defenses" because she realizes Amy has no experience in fighting, so she's never had a need to think about this. But Taylor is always fighting, even when she's finally safe she doesn't let herself relax, so she's used to this.

And as for wanting to escape her body and be someone else who's cooler and has a better power and isn't lame and worthless, if I recall correctly she comments more than once on how powerful Genesis is and how she would love her power, which honestly fits so well. She wants to have other people's powers because she doesn't like herself, and Genesis's power lets her create and customize new bodies that aren't her and can do whatever she wants. It's the perfect way for her escape being herself.

And then Khepri is thematically significant as always. She finally can use other people's powers, and damn she's good with them! She magnifies Sundancer's sun with Vista, she combines Ballistic and Foil, she uses every combination and interaction possible for an advantage. She can use other people's powers like she always wanted, and she stops being herself, just like she always wanted.

I think if Taylor ever got (normal, non-evil) cloned then one would kill the other within a day. Taylor would despise herself if she had to look at herself from outside her own head.

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.

“young witch trying to solve the mystery of her neighbor’s missing cat in a small village in the Alps” continues to be hilarious don’t get me wrong but it’s kind of making me want to take a crack at treating the concept seriously. In this insular rural community, a cat goes missing. A young woman who takes her community’s professed ideals of helpfulness and harmony in witchcraft seriously volunteers to try to find him. Realizes the more she searches and the more she asks around that everyone in this idyllic village is quietly seething with resentment against their neighbors and against the world, that the insularity of her village is harboring a festering social rot that no one is allowed to address. No one can leave. The hills have fallen silent. Something is eating the cats and no one is allowed to address this. Ötzi is there

Actually I DO think twelve year olds should get hrt. That’s the normal age to start puberty, so why does it have to be different for trans kids?

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.

>be me, pizza guy in shittiest port town on Earth Bet

>terrible tips and get robbed for pizza so often I have honest to god decoy pizzas

>get called to deliver to this weird old warehouse like three times a week and have to roll the dice on how it's gonna go

>there's this whole Burger King Kid's Club worth of diverse teenagers that live there and I never know who I'm gonna get

>worst kid there is the one that answers the door 90% of the time. I hate this little fucking shit

>black haired boy. Dainty little prince pretty boy type. Always the one who calls the orders in, and always gives some stupid ass fake name like he's fucking Bart Simpson. "I.C. Weiner" and "I.P. Freely." That kind of shit.

>like half the time I think I'm delivering a depression-meal since he's dressed like he just woke up, and I'd feel bad except he makes some smartass remark every time, and since I see him every other goddamn day, it's almost always the same joke. Also tries to get free pizza by saying it's 30 minutes or free, except no one has done that program since like 1993, so he's pulling shit from tv. I don't need a fucking comedy routine from a kid in cookie monster pajama pants. Bad tipper. Whatever cash he has in his pocket.

>he's on the shitlist because, and I don't know how the fuck he does this, but every time the pizza is "late", this fucking kid trips me somehow. Or I drop my phone or the pizza bag or keys. Swear to god this kid has Home Alone tripwires or something.

>and every time it happens. Every fucking time. This little bastard says "have a nice trip."

>would say he's a cape, but every cape I've ever met has had some kind of presence, and I'm not giving that much credit to someone with a four-hair teenage mustache

>hate this smug little fucker and I'd have him blacklisted if this fucking building and its weird teenage polycule didn't make up like 50% of our orders for the neighborhood. 0/10, I hope you die

>be me, Brockton Bay pizza man. Deliver to welding building. Name on order is "Dick Hardly." Little prince opens the door. He has a sidekick. Black girl counterpart. They give me matching shit-eating grins. I hate my fucking job.

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.

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?