I Should Tell You Guys That I Woke Up In A Cold Sweat At 2:30 This Morning To Write Something Down In

Also Lynne Hammond (MAG 100 lady who just ignored a ghost to make sure her house wasn’t burning) the dream team to survive the change

joshua gillespie (MAG 02 Do Not Open coffin guy), karolina górka (MAG 71 Underground buried subway lady), sebastian skinner (MAG 87 The Uncanny Valley plumber who saw a fucked up mannequin clown factory) and robin lennox (MAG 100 I Guess You Had To Be There guy who was going to be late to dinner) have the same energy

Are we sure he doesn’t have mommy issues

Fell

i’ve been in love with this man from the second he crashed blake’s party and literally everything he does reinforces that love. he’s so funny and such a piece of shit and every time he shows up my depression goes away. i fucking adore his dynamic with blake and i hope to god he gets to kick conquest in the dick

(reminder: spoilers get you fed to the hyena)

I mea. i totally agree that just about everyone would actually be normal but i’m pretty fine with that

I mean if you do get bored even with the nano tea while there isn’t a ton to do you can still do shit to spice up your life and make new entertainment

"i'd be a scythe" "i'd be a tonist" "i'd be a nimbus agent" well I'D like to point out that most of us are lying to ourselves. most of us would be ordinary people. i probably would be, but i don't want to imagine living forever like that because that's boring and tiring and it's hard to imagine the nanite-filled version of myself who lives that life contented by it. i want to be a scythe, but that disqualifies me from the job. but even if it didn't, i'd never want to be a scythe if that were an actual possibility because i would be a different person without the layers of fucked up that are happening in my brain chemistry. i can't even say i'd be a tonist and take my nanites out because nanite-d me wouldn't be thinking as hard as real me about who i am and whether the nanites are changing me fundamentally. so yeah. i'd be boring in the aoas universe. calling it now.

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.

Well now I want to see someone experience “eldritch horror” where they just go “ooooooooh it all makes sense.” And that’s it, everyone else is freaking out and screaming but they’re just going huh yeah sure

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

Huh cool to know

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.

Incredible beds

10/10

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