So we know what your thoughts are on Jack Slash in Worm canon (very good thoughts, thank you for sharing them) but what do you think of Jack in Worm fanfic?
The thing about Jack in canon is that part of why he's so absurdly "successful" is that his floor for what he considers a "success" is incredibly low. He wants to cause as much chaos as he can, with his own survival being an instrumental end towards that first thing. (This is I think an underdiscussed element of his character- Bonesaw notes in her interlude that he's starting to visibly show his age, and that's probably not unrelated to his enthusiasm at the prospect of getting to end the world as the big finish.)
All of this means that Broadcast doesn't have to work all that hard to produce an outcome he's happy with. The 9 eat shit in Brockton Bay but Jack has a great time and lives to do it again. He ends the series locked in a time loop where he's perpetually getting eviscerated, but by the standards he's operating under he still basically eked out a win.
What this means is that in a counterfactual where Jack gives a single solitary shit about someone or something besides himself- whether that's actual moral principles or just quotidian self-interest stuff like "being able to afford gas"- a lot of avenues for stakes and drama return to the character. To say nothing of, like, interpersonal relationships. If you've got a goal more complicated than burning everything down and running away, the ability to subtly manipulate other parahumans is useful but not necessarily an instant-win button. The Black Knight- the alternate version of Jack shown in Eden's interlude- would probably unironically be a fascinating character to explore in a fic, because that's a Jack who's attached himself to a larger project (albeit one that values him mainly as an attack dog) and therefore a Jack who's on some level beholden to what other people think and a Jack who can't just murder his way out of every situation with Broadcast as a lubricant. Giving Jack's power to anyone who's slightly less of a deliberate cartoon shifts the genre towards that of comedy; and probably a comedy where the protagonist constantly faceplants, because by participating in a society (curious!) he's ceded his ability to redefine terms so that he's always winning.
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its true that romance amd friendship will not solve everything but. objectively speaking its very hard to get sad when you can say 'lets go get cake tomorrow okay' and someone will go get cake with you. like there is some good at least. you know
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"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).
Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.
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because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
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“Walrus on your doorstop” this “fairy’s more unrealistic” that my professor just uttered the sentence “there was one day I found a real octopus in my backyard” this man hasn’t left Utah his entire life. How was there an octopus in his backyard in Utah. He then said “I do not have time to elaborate we need to cover a lot today in class” GIRL WHAT DO YOU MEEAN
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