Everyone Involved On This Has Done Such A Stellar Job And It Was Such A Joy To Be A Part Of. If You Care

As we head into issue 6, wherein “Magnus and Heavy’s 18-years-in-the-making plans for world-domination are revealed” I think it’s worthwhile to remember that some of the most dangerous times in the Cold War was when one side erroneously believed that nuclear war was something they could win, or would soon be able to win (see, eg the Star Wars Defence system). Nuclear peace was enforced by MAD, and so too is the continuing peace between the Superpowers, but MAD breaks down the instant one side thinks they can win, that action stops being lose-lose.

Heavy thought conflict between him and The Major would be lose-lose; an instant after he learned otherwise The Major was a ball of meat.

In issue 6 Heavy and Magnus will think they can win. How many will die proving them wrong?

They're silly

I made a zine! An Inaccurate Recap of "The Power Fantasy" Issue 1. It's the dumbest, messiest thing I've drawn in a looooong time, and I laughed the entire time I was drawing it. Under the cut: spoilers for the entirety of TPF #1, swear words, and some incredibly cartoonish violence.

...it's not actually as inaccurate as I thought it was going to be? I want to clarify that Heavy is saying the same thing as the other four, but means it in the opposite way. I'm not doing another draft though, because any possible improvements to this would really only be making it worse.

Oh, and here's the whole thing laid out in zine format. Feel free to print, cut out along the border, and assemble- here's a decent diagram of how to fold a zine.

I really love how Taylor can either hold a grudge forever or have it disappear alarmingly fast, and it all depends on if she acts on her anger at first. Like she forgives and is willing to work with Sophia after the bullying, Lung after he tried to kill her, Rachel after she tried to fuck her over, Defiant after the everything. Like most people wouldn't forgive all those acts and trust those people afterwards, but she hardly even considers otherwise because she believes that people should work together against unbeatable foes despite their differences and when she fights alongside someone she kind of just forgets the things they've done.

When she acts on something though, when she acts immediately in an irreversible way the people she lashes out against are immediately marked as 100% irredeemable evil bastards in her mind. Alexandria, she doesn't regret the murder in the slightest despite the fact that it had consequences and Alexandria isn't a being of pure evil. Since she killed her she has to convince herself that it was right and just and that she doesn't regret it, which erases any nuance Alexandria had in her mind that would lead to her forgiving her. She does this again a buncha times throughout the book. Against the C53s in the Cauldron raid she thinks about how everyone in the crowd could be innocent, forced to go along with the mob out of fear that they'll be next and with no chance or choice of getting away and being peaceful. But then she dangles a disintegration knife into all their faces to kill Mantellum and suddenly they're all monsters who delighted in torturing innocents and all voluntary members of the mob and none of them deserved any mercy because they're Evil Bad People, so she'll never lose sleep or forgive them.

Aisha points something like this out in 29.5 actually, she says her and Alec had an argument over it because Alec was annoyed at how quickly and easily Taylor stopped being mad at her bullies and didn't want revenge. I think Alec equated Sophia to Heartbreaker in his mind because they caused both their respective triggers, and he can't fathom the idea of someone not wanting to slowly torture and kill their Heartbreaker to make them feel an ounce of the pain he felt, and honestly Alec is the normal one here I think? I think most parahumans would get revenge on the people who caused their triggers in a heartbeat if given an opportunity, and honestly poor Alec imagine trying to understand and make sense of your dulled emotions and Taylor Hebert is there as the worst example ever with her weirdo decisions. Aisha defended Taylor and her choice to not get revenge but she still got revenge for Alec because she hold grudges for herself and other people.

Letting go of hatred to someone isn't something other people can really do like Taylor. Going back to Aisha, she fucking despised Bonesaw during Gold Morning and hated how she got a redemption, but Taylor was fully willing to work with someone who sawed her skull open for the greater good when it would be completely fair for her to never want to get help from her. Idk what my point is here I just think it's really neat that unless someone is her enemy right then and there or unless she already killed that person and sorted them into the Bad Person Category, Taylor is willing to forgive anything and everything to make sure everyone works together.

Number one takeaway I had from worm was... damn these bitches gay

If Lung didn't kill Bakuda in the birdcage, I could see Amy and Bakuda making each other worse, somehow.

I could write an Amy×Bakuda piece. I really could.

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.

Vista’s is an Escher staircase keyring trinket. It very much wants her to have a gun.

Taylor and her eldritch buddy

I disagree strongly with the people people who say taylor getting stuck on earth Alph is a fate worse than death. Obviously it’s awful that she can’t see her friends again but the ending represents her entering a place of stability and healing, where she can finally begin to live a healthy life.

I think those people see Taylor’s awkward and I’ll fitting entrance to the civilian life and feel that she’s lost her place in the world, but I think that’s part of the healing process. She’s no longer trapped in the place that forced her to do the things she did to survive. She doesn’t fit in because she has been molded in a harsh environment, and now she finally has room to change.

the undersiders are so funny