Huh Cool To Know

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Thinking about Purity

I have two thoughts on Purity. Here they are:

One. Her trigger event consisted of her being trapped in a lethal environment with no resources, gradually going insane, and developing overwhelming firepower in order to fight off a horde of assailants who didn’t actually exist. I can’t imagine what that’s a metaphor for. Haven’t the foggiest.

Two.  Purity is interesting, from a worldbuilding perspective, because at the start of the story there’s an actual niche archetype from the comics that she’s fulfilling.

 “Hardcore street-level hero who actually turns out to be a racist lunatic that the actual heroes need to take down” isn’t quite a chestnut at the big two but it’s a story beat I’ve seen multiple times; Nightwing vs his building’s insane janitor in Dixon’s run, Captain America vs Jack Monroe and to a lesser extent USAgent, I feel like Batman’s deal with Lock-up from the animated series inches towards this, although that one wasn’t explicitly racialized. Punisher’s done this a couple times, It’s Peacemaker’s whole bit, there’s definitely a few more I’m forgetting.

So the subversive element here isn’t that she’s an openly racist superhero; it’d that she’s still allowed to be a racist superhero. It’s that a thematically appropriate hero like Legend hasn’t come to town specifically to drop the hammer on her for daring to be an openly racist superhero. 

 And to be charitable, what’s usually going on in those other stories is that the racist heroes are almost always explicitly bad knockoffs of the protagonist. They’re intended as a dark mirror, because the obvious failure mode of heroic vigilantism is that it’s extremely appealing to racists, glory hounds, egomaniacs and egomaniacal racist glory hounds, but the flip side of that is that people with those characteristics go down like chumps in a fight with a true-blue hero. They exist in the story as a one-off warning for the real heroes, who give them a chance and then chuck them in the bin when they show their true colors.

Worm, though, doesn’t have a just-so structure. The racist idiots who get superpowers and develop delusions of heroism don’t provide the courtesy of also being weak and incompetent enough that the “real” heroes can root them out with minimal fuss. Purity won the goddamn power lottery; she’s one of the most powerful capes in the Bay, with hit-and-run capabilities that all of the heroes working together are textually incapable of countering. (And this isn’t like The Boys where they’re all secretly in bed with each other- New Wave has serious beef with the Empire! They would absolutely pin her ass to the wall if the opportunity arose, but they can’t!)

So in a very real sense, The Protectorate is pussyfooting around her, letting her exist in the gray zone of self-deluded vigilantism, because…. well, the second she can’t sustain her self-deception anymore, the second someone really pushes, her go-to reaction is to commit a mass casualty event. She was always a time bomb, and so the strategy of just continuing to label her as a villain, while she continuously hopefully refreshes PHO to see if any helpful fans have updated her wiki page yet, is, you know, I get it. It’s not great but I get it. A hands on approach only works if you can actually lay hands on them.

But! As far as I can remember, she was functionally operating as an Independent Hero as the setting defines it! Everyone in power pretends she isn’t but she was still in that ballpark, hand in hand with how selectively racist she was being about it! She was a vigilante, she was out to target “criminals” and clean up the streets using her powers, she had a costume and a secret identity- actually one of the few capes we see in Brockton Bay with a full-time day job- and she was really really really racist.

So with Purity, Worm is being honest about the inability of a superhero community to clean house, to effectively police who gets to be a part of it, who gets to actively consider themselves a part of it. There was never going to be a righteous beat-down where she gets “kicked out” of the fraternity, no “you are not affiliated with me” moment that finally gets through, even though many heroes in the setting would dearly love to deliver such a thing. A certain level of power purchases the right to think of yourself in whatever terms you want, and the heroes just have to stand around looking uncomfortable and swearing up and down that, no, her vigilantism is different from good vigilantism, honest, completely different underlying models.