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the skittterrrrr

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accidental wormpowers compilation

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when uve gone through the worst event of ur life and ur sister comes home with ur freak team mate

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The fact that a power like Coil's exists and plays such a large role in Worm, a story that is a tragedy, is really something. Kind of a variant of how Lisa's power is a particular coping mechanism for a tragedy - you didn't see the bad thing coming, now you have a superpower that helps you notice it. Except with Coil's power, it responds to the tragedy reader who goes "which choice was the one where they fucked it up? What was the point of no return? What was the biggest mistake, in a series of escalating mistakes?" Here, the story presents the ability to test your choices before you make them, and see which one fucks you over the most.

That Krouse works for this guy (sorry, this was a Travelers post all along) makes me want to have a nice appetizer of drywall. Krouse and the other Travelers, who are Fated By Big Monster Creature to make the wrong choices. We know that the fact that Coil had a precog was a big reason why they agreed to work for him, since precogs mess with the Simurgh's cause and effect. But Coil's power, in its own right, is pretty significant too.

To me, it's an extra tragic overlay over Coil's interlude. In it, Coil chooses to check up on the construction of the Travelers' base and Noelle's cage, and then overwrites that choice, since it doesn't end well. But Coil isn't the only person with a tragedy fork in the road: also in that interlude, Noelle asks Krouse to let her out of the new cage, and Krouse refuses.

There's arguments to be made about the extent to which that's really a choice. In the moment, of course, Krouse doesn't have any real choice but to say no, because Coil is, you know, right there. But I do think it's notable that he never does it. He never lets her out. And maybe that's a fork in the road, too.

"How much agency do the Travelers have" is, obviously, its own multi-paragraph essay, given the Simurgh and the PRT quarantine measures and Coil and every other force conspiring against these poor gamers. The fact that the Simurgh exists in a story about the things people do and the reasons why they do them absolutely rules. But one of the things I really love about Coil's interlude is the suggestion that maybe, possibly, at one point, there might have been a choice, and the other Travelers didn't take it. It's another little moment that complicates why Noelle wants to be "fixed" - is it her powers themselves, or is it the fact that those powers mean that nobody will let her see the sun, or both?

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a supervillain team can be comprised of a 17 year old boy larping as a 45 year old man, ethical manipulative girl best friend saul goodman, a guy named alec, a human girl with dog autism, a superorganism, and a 13 year old scenemo. this can happen

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Oh. Yes. Man I can't believe I didn't see something like this. Of course the lie about how triggers worked would get picked up and seen as just true by a lot of capes, especially ones not connected to the PRT. And of course it would lead to people reinterpreting their own trauma.

Now if I recall, this is slightly different from what Taylor thought the deal was: heroes got their powers in triumphant moments, villains from trauma. Maybe there's a few different theories floating about, maybe the story got changed by the time Worm started, maybe this drunk cape fanatic is misremembering things. But either way, the idea that really good powers are deserved in some way fits well into a worldview that sees the PRT as inherently just and good. And of course people who don't decide to be heroes could still end up seeing whatever gave them their powers as a good thing, as them doing good, and view their powers as proof of that. They're the elect, and must be on the right track. Amy was desperately holding onto that to believe she could be good, wheras May seems to be less concerned with being good and more concerned with being right, with her getting to take what she wants from others because she's better and she deserves it. Its like a less ridiculous version of Charlies whole deal in Fudge Revelations.

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Venn diagram between Epithet Erased and Worm Parahumans

Overlap is "In a world where people where superpowers warp society, the system has failed our young heroine. Despite having good intentions, she ultimately finds belonging in the company of supervillains"

Epithet side of the diagram has "haha funny soup man" and the Worm side says "The Horrors"

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Thinking again about how, in a very real way, the job of superheroes in the worm universe is just to die. They’re valued and, indeed, tolerated because of this unspoken assumption that they’re going to throw themselves into the meatgrinder and buy the normies a few more years unmurdered, be that by Endbringers, The Slaughterhouse 9 or other superpowered spree-shooters, or by supervillains who decide to go full feudal warlord or Nilbog-style God-king. It’s a situation where some of the most vulnerable people in earth bet society are being taken from a place of extreme trauma and then simultaneously venerated and marched to their deaths, with the brutality of what the government is pitting children against played down so that the public can sleep easy. 

The whole situation with the Wards always hit like the Hunger Games to me, where you’re sinking this huge budget into making larger-than-life idols of the kids, making sure everyone knows their names, and then memory-holing the ones who predictably die in short order so that the machine can keep running smoothly without public discontent. And, again, I gotta stress that it’s not nearly as inherently evil in my view- you’re sending those kids to deal with all-hands-on-deck situations that they specifically are genuinely needed for- but even if you accept that it’s necessary, the utilitarian calculus is made behind closed doors, and nobody ever reckons with it, nobody ever publicly faces down the tradeoff being made, nobody ever looks it in the eye and says, “yeah, we’re comfortable sacrificing the few for the many.” They dress it up in a costume and parade it around like a sports team and sweep the ugliness under the rug.

Thinking about Vista thinks about the subdued, greyed out memorial posters of Aegis and Gallant, wondering how long until it’s her. Thinking about Victoria, inculcated into heroism as a lifestyle, privately ideating on at least getting to die heroically instead of anticlimactically like her aunt. Thinking about that Short story Wildbow wrote about the child of a hero who’s less angry about the gangsters who killed his mother than he is about how quickly the local protectorate redid all the branding to de-emphasize her, because a brutal execution is bad publicity. Thinking about Bastion, whose bright idea to rehab his image in the face of racism allegations is to sacrifice himself. Thinking about how Yamada fights uphill to accomplish something useful with the half-assed, fig-leaf therapy process provided to the Wards, fundamentally unable to get around the core issue that her patients are child superheroes, having no real answer to Vista’s ultimately-correct core assertion that everyone she loves is probably going to die, and only being able to offer a mindset that’ll make that everyone-dying process suck less. It’s not the kind of superhero setting where death is cheap, but Jesus, human life sure is.

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all of Ward was a shardspace dream that Amy sent Vicky into because she's a horrible evil person. Fuck I need more buzzwords. Warrior Monk Fragile One drugs hair dye Wildbow Moment

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The biggest missed opportunity of the PHO format becoming the de-facto media board for wormfic is that it totally misses the mark for what a forum in the late 2000s early 2010s would look like due to canon Worm being a solely text medium.

You just know PHO would be a fucking eyesore of stacks of gaudy forum banners proclaiming that user's support for their local protectorate team, choppy 5 frame 80x80 pixel gifs from whatever anime survived Kyushu, ribbons declaring "This user ships villains," all stacked on top of forum signatures that are a mishmash of movie quotes, badass quotes superheroes have said*, and Scion-themed bible verses.

*mostly Alexandria or Legend. No Eidolon at all.

Those weird little dragons egg things people used to put in their forum signs that would like... hatch if enough people clicked on them? Those still happened, but it was a tinkertech virus event and ended up with sixty people being killed by computer dragons.

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Simurgh

Tried Burmese kanote style on the wings. Ngl, quite proud of it. Hope I can do regular art posting again. Cheers!

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worm thesis 1: being sixteen fucking sucks

worm thesis 2: banding together with other sixteen year olds who are experiencing the immutable volatile suck can make it possible to survive, but watch out

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@lakesbian

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@lakesbian