There’s Something Else That’s Really Interesting About Scion That’s Revealed In This Chapter Though

i have ideas on what an unalive thing could be

1. someone/something’s that’s mentally dead, an office worker stuck in a rut, a mind controlled person, the classic “their soul/passion/whatever was stolen”, someone broken by trauma or something similar where they now just follow orders

2. people stuck in time loops or self-fulfilling prophecies, sure they aren’t actually dead but they’re either guaranteed to die in a specific way or are in a cycle they can’t escape and may as well be dead (note for time loops i specifically mean ones that cause themselves, inescapable unchangeable time loops)

3. A whalefall (or whalefall type things)it’s a living thing, an entire ecosystem but in its core it’s a dead whale

"unalive" should just mean the opposite of undead. if undead means a dead thing thats alive, unalive shuld mean an alive things thats dead. no i dont have any examples. ☝️yet

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

things i’ll not call you a whore for:

sexual activity

how you dress

things i’ll call you a whore for:

stealing my food 

stealing my lemons

my cat likes you more than me

Headcanon that Luke and Obi Wan got the money to pay Han Solo by selling the moisture farm at bargain-basement prices in Anchorhead without telling anyone that it was totally torched, and by the time anyone find out they were well off planet. Luke now has a reputation as one of Tattooine’s most famous con men despite the fact that it was Obi Wan who ran the con.

For your first part we hear from Crusader that she supposedly triggered after being trapped in a crashed truck for days slowly starving until she triggered to eat light and get the truck off

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.

Not a meme, but if you’re feeling down, here’s my dog who tolerates this ninja turtles costume for 5 minutes every Halloween while my wife laughs her ass off.

this exact idea is really well done and mentioned in the short stories “The Road Not Taken.” and even more so in “Herbrig-Haro” both by Garry turtle dove they’re both really good check them out you can find them online and they’re pretty quick read

Faster-than-light space travel as a concept is fun to me because everything we’ve observed in the stars is how the universe was a long-ass time ago, so in a sci-fi setting where FTL tech was just invented, there could be all sorts of crazy developments that could be found by traveling through hyperspace or whatever. Try to visit a star system, whoops it isn’t there anymore. Try to go close-ish to a nebula, whoops there’s a bunch more stars here now and this trip is more dangerous than we estimated. Or better yet, a planet with intelligent life on it, the light caused by which won’t reach earth by normal means for about another million years. Thought you’d be going to an ocean planet, turns out it’s got small continents and terrestrial life now. Huge amounts of space travel would be based in predicting what the star systems you see will probably be like in such and such many years, and hoping you predicted correctly when you finally make the jump. Actually, with an FTL engine, one could theoretically take advantage of the speed of light to travel a certain number of light years away from our solar system and study it from afar, as a way of observing the history of our planetary system from before humankind even existed! How wild is that?

to be fair a lot of it is new user who just finished Worm wanting to express their thoughts or having just made a realization and wanting to say it which I’d say is actually nice if a bit stupid

I love r/parahumans so much. "let's get something straight jack slash is NOT that clever" WE KNOW. let's get something straight the sky IS blue circles ARE round. are we going to learn our ABCs next