Latest Posts by hello-apes-of-the-world - Page 4

Here’s a story about changelings: 

Mary was a beautiful baby, sweet and affectionate, but by the time she’s three she’s turned difficult and strange, with fey moods and a stubborn mouth that screams and bites but never says mama. But her mother’s well-used to hard work with little thanks, and when the village gossips wag their tongues she just shrugs, and pulls her difficult child away from their precious, perfect blossoms, before the bites draw blood. Mary’s mother doesn’t drown her in a bucket of saltwater, and she doesn’t take up the silver knife the wife of the village priest leaves out for her one Sunday brunch. 

She gives her daughter yarn, instead, and instead of a rowan stake through her inhuman heart she gives her a child’s first loom, oak and ash. She lets her vicious, uncooperative fairy daughter entertain herself with games of her own devising, in as much peace and comfort as either of them can manage.

Mary grows up strangely, as a strange child would, learning everything in all the wrong order, and biting a great deal more than she should. But she also learns to weave, and takes to it with a grand passion. Soon enough she knows more than her mother–which isn’t all that much–and is striking out into unknown territory, turning out odd new knots and weaves, patterns as complex as spiderwebs and spellrings. 

“Aren’t you clever,” her mother says, of her work, and leaves her to her wool and flax and whatnot. Mary’s not biting anymore, and she smiles more than she frowns, and that’s about as much, her mother figures, as anyone should hope for from their child. 

Mary still cries sometimes, when the other girls reject her for her strange graces, her odd slow way of talking, her restless reaching fluttering hands that have learned to spin but never to settle. The other girls call her freak, witchblood, hobgoblin.

“I don’t remember girls being quite so stupid when I was that age,” her mother says, brushing Mary’s hair smooth and steady like they’ve both learned to enjoy, smooth as a skein of silk. “Time was, you knew not to insult anyone you might need to flatter later. ‘Specially when you don’t know if they’re going to grow wings or horns or whatnot. Serve ‘em all right if you ever figure out curses.”

“I want to go back,” Mary says. “I want to go home, to where I came from, where there’s people like me. If I’m a fairy’s child I should be in fairyland, and no one would call me a freak.”

“Aye, well, I’d miss you though,” her mother says. “And I expect there’s stupid folk everywhere, even in fairyland. Cruel folk, too. You just have to make the best of things where you are, being my child instead.”

Mary learns to read well enough, in between the weaving, especially when her mother tracks down the traveling booktraders and comes home with slim, precious manuals on dyes and stains and mordants, on pigments and patterns, diagrams too arcane for her own eyes but which make her daughter’s eyes shine.

“We need an herb garden,” her daughter says, hands busy, flipping from page to page, pulling on her hair, twisting in her skirt, itching for a project. “Yarrow, and madder, and woad and weld…”

“Well, start digging,” her mother says. “Won’t do you a harm to get out of the house now’n then.”

Mary doesn’t like dirt but she’s learned determination well enough from her mother. She digs and digs, and plants what she’s given, and the first year doesn’t turn out so well but the second’s better, and by the third a cauldron’s always simmering something over the fire, and Mary’s taking in orders from girls five years older or more, turning out vivid bolts and spools and skeins of red and gold and blue, restless fingers dancing like they’ve summoned down the rainbow. Her mother figures she probably has.

“Just as well you never got the hang of curses,” she says, admiring her bright new skirts. “I like this sort of trick a lot better.”

Mary smiles, rocking back and forth on her heels, fingers already fluttering to find the next project.

She finally grows up tall and fair, if a bit stooped and squinty, and time and age seem to calm her unhappy mouth about as well as it does for human children. Word gets around she never lies or breaks a bargain, and if the first seems odd for a fairy’s child then the second one seems fit enough. The undyed stacks of taken orders grow taller, the dyed lots of filled orders grow brighter, the loom in the corner for Mary’s own creations grows stranger and more complex. Mary’s hands callus just like her mother’s, become as strong and tough and smooth as the oak and ash of her needles and frames, though they never fall still.

“Do you ever wonder what your real daughter would be like?” the priest’s wife asks, once.

Mary’s mother snorts. “She wouldn’t be worth a damn at weaving,” she says. “Lord knows I never was. No, I’ll keep what I’ve been given and thank the givers kindly. It was a fair enough trade for me. Good day, ma’am.”

Mary brings her mother sweet chamomile tea, that night, and a warm shawl in all the colors of a garden, and a hairbrush. In the morning, the priest’s son comes round, with payment for his mother’s pretty new dress and a shy smile just for Mary. He thinks her hair is nice, and her hands are even nicer, vibrant in their strength and skill and endless motion.  

They all live happily ever after.

*

Here’s another story: 

Keep reading

To be fair considering there were presumably a couple hundred Jedi running around killing most of them is great. Plus the rest of them being forced into hiding and incredibly disorganized is also really good.

And finally a good number of escapees are either elders who are gonna die soon anyways or padawans who have little training and are unskilled

Anyway Order 66 wasn’t that effective huh

We’re lead to believe in the original trilogy that Obi-Wan and Yoda were like, the only two to make it out. But then you watch the shows, read books and comics, play Fallen Order, and you’re like. Now hang on just a minute. Because Ahsoka Tano and Kanan Jarrus make it, Cal Kestis and Cere Junda make it, Grogu survived as a BABY, all of the inquisitors technically, now Gungi, and according to wookieepedia my beloved

Master Kirak Infil'a

Master Coleman Kcaj

Master Obi-Wan Kenobi

Master Taron Malicos

Master Jocasta Nu

Master Oppo Rancisis

Master Luminara Unduli

Master Uvell

Master Quinlan Vos (presumed)

Master Yoda

Knight/Jedi Temple Guard the Grand Inquisitor

Knight Cere Junda

Padawan Ferren Barr

Padawan Caleb Dume

Padawan Gungi

Padawan Cal Kestis

Padawan Trilla Suduri

Unidentified Rodian Jedi youngling

Former Master Eeth Koth

Former Padawan Naq Med

Former Padawan Ahsoka Tano

Zubain Ankonori

Selrahc Eluos

Fifth Brother

Grogu

Khandra

Ka-Moon Kholi

Mususiel

Masana Tide

Nari

Nuhj

Seventh Sister

Kira Vantala (According to legend)

So that’s 33 confirmed individuals and god only knows how many else ???????

All I’m saying is Order 66 was not that effective

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with Tiny Frog Wizards is that I just couldn't get Paths of Power and Power Dice to pull their weight. They represented a soft violation of the game's basic mechanical conceit that casting spells and only casting spells has dice-rolling attached to it, and in playtesting they didn't prove to be terribly effective at encouraging specific flavours of foolishness – they were just a lot of mental overhead for not a lot of benefit.

The pages previewed above represent a first pass at reworking them into something a little more on point. Instead of big goofy statements about your tiny frog wizard's ethos of magic that hook into a metagame resource economy, you get a generic pool of material components, optionally supplemented with magic items that mess with the dice economy at the time of casting, and you don't need to do anything special if you decide you don't want to use them at all.

As always, comments, criticisms, and/or bizarre rants are welcome!

(Please disregard the fact the page numbering skips from 11 to 13 – page 12 is reserved for the other twelve example Functions I haven't come up with yet. In the meantime, if you want to give it a spin, just use a d4 rather than a d6 for the first digit of the Function roll.)

I feel old and I'm only 22

What was the point in animal planet airing those incredibly convincing fake documentaries about dragons and mermaids

i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”

No he made two other important things, Green Eyes animal sidekick Evan and her boytoy Blake the Branch boy

John charles "wildbow" mccrae, know as the creator of the character Green eyes, and absolutely nothing Else of note

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)

Minecraft should completely rework villages. They're not hominids anymore, they're animate bipedal constructs made from clay or bronze wandering the ancient overgrown ruins of their former farming hamlets. The villagers are gardening robots, still tilling their fields after untold centuries of disrepair.

I’m just saying this could’ve worked great in The Clone Wars since it did have that balance of kid show and showing pain of civilians in war.

Like I’m thinking specifically something like the Ryleth or Ondelon with War in Teo fronts where we see the civilians and can understand where they’re coming from while also having it be fucked up to stab this would be redemption in the back

Basically, we need a new clone wars aka a kids show that actually is able to get away with exploring things like this

There are, like, a lot of very good reasons this couldn’t be done in an animated children’s show, but a plot beat I’ve always wanted to see in an animated show is that you’ve got, like, the typical animated show set-up, plucky and idealistic rebels against a massive and nebulous evil allegorical empire, you’ve got all the archetypical characters who show up in shows like that, you’ve got obvious implications atrocities are being committed by the bad guys but you never hone in on it beyond the general signifiers like burning buildings in the background. (yes I am thinking about She-Ra here.)

You’ve got your peridot type or your Scorpia type or potentially your zuko-type. The clearly-antagonistic-but-obviously-engineered-to-be-likeable-enough-to-get-a-redemption-arc type of character. You have them slowly go through the motions of realizing the empire is bad,  or realizing the power of friendship, or having a moment of connection with the protagonists and realizing that they aren’t Thriving ™ under the oppressive system.

 So they do what these sorts of characters usually do and defect to the protagonists side, and the protagonists chalk up another win for team principle and compassion, and they accept the defector with open, if cautious, arms…

And then a supporting character pulls out a gun and shoots the would-be redemptee in the head, because their entire family was in one of the buildings that the redemptee set on fire in the background during a previous one-off episode. 

And, to be clear, this wouldn’t just be a mean gag or a one-off commentary on audience sympathies or out-of-universe discourse on redemption arcs. Episodes going forward would deal with the fallout of such a nakedly ruthless act of retaliation.

 It’s now next to impossible to deal with would-be defectors in good faith anymore because it’s been proven the heroes can’t stop acts of vengeance in their own homes, its not clear who among the heroes is even extending the olive branch in good faith to begin with or if it was always a trap. If things ever turn in the heroes favor, Bad guys are now escalating the stakes and fighting to the last man, because they know they aren’t gonna be forgiven if the nicest person in their ranks couldn’t be forgiven. There’s internal political tension about what to do with the assassin (nothing, they need the manpower) and how to go about disavowing the action when half the group doesn’t even want to disavow it- the redemptee might have been nice, but they also burned buildings full of innocent people, a lot of people are just glad they weren’t the ones who had to pull the trigger. Friendships end over this.

A lot of narratives about forgiveness in these kinds of shows are more about how it’s interpersonally healthy and beneficial to forgive and let people grow. I want to see a narrative about how that’s also, like, politically the only path forward if you don’t want to lock your society into an Orestian blood bath, which I have always found to be a much more compelling argument against revenge in general, just as, like, a rule utilitarianism thing. I want a bittersweet ending that’s essentially tracible back to that cathartic, unretractable decision to kill that one likable flunky.

Of course, it would be very difficult to set this up without telegraphing that this is the kind of show that does That Kind Of Thing, and the actual killing can’t really happen until season two at the earliest, so I’m having a hard time figuring out a way to execute this where it would maintain its punch.

When the prophecy was given your first thought was to action you thought of ways to prevent it to remove the child to get rid of them. But then you looked at your a wife and you realized, you couldn’t no matter what you couldn’t break her heart like that. So you turned to the soothsayer, blind and deaf, yet knowing, seeing, and hearing and said.

“Thank you. You may go.”

Then you began preparing

you're far from the first king to receive the prophecy that your new born child would cause your death. Where your story diverges is when instead of tossing the kid to the wolves, you are driven to be a kind & nurturing father.

Elf pet guy?

is that what your parents told you when you woke up and your pet elf was gone

This is how the golden age of piracy ended.

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.

You’ve been sentenced to 400 years for multiple murders. It’s been 399 years and your jailers are starting to get nervous.

This is just Sharon and witch hunters that’s all this is just an otherverse skeptic

ghost hunting team that keep a nonbeliever named steve around as an emergency supernatural suppressant

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.

T-shirt that says “I got my individuality and free will violated by Khepri and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”

I mean Twig has this in spades especially later on if you want to read it

A story structure Wildbow hasn’t yet attempted- which I would be very very interested to see him tackle- is the “Walking the Earth,” journey-focused Odyssey-type thing, where the protagonist and their gradually swelling band of hanger-on true companions travel from wacky side-adventure to whacky side-adventure in pursuit of some larger goal. 

The parts of his writing I’ve read tend to be very sedentary, tied to a central location in some way, treating that location almost as a character in its own right (in the case of pale, he does so literally.) The beats on the heroes journey either come to the protagonists doorstep, or the protagonists go on Sorties to other plot relevant locations before eventually returning to home base. I’d love to see him handle a protagonist that’s genuinely, perpetually on the move, defined by their fleeting connections to lots of places, and the lessons learned in each.

i think the world doesn’t know what it really means to live in a theocratic dictatorship. Let me tell you about our experiences living in the islamic regime of iran.

1. Your parents were born to muslim parents so they’re automatically muslim. You’re automatically a muslim too. You didn’t choose your religion and you can’t opt out of it or you will be executed.

2. The compulsory hijab law makes you a criminal if you choose not to wear hijab even tho you didn’t choose to be a muslim and you don’t consider yourself a muslim but the regime has forced you into that role whether you like it or not. And when you ‘break that law’, they can do with you as they please.

3. little girls as young as 7 yrs old are forced to wear hijab at school even tho the islam itself says the age is 9. and all the schools are gender segregated so imagine how they force you to get used to hijab even when you’re just surrounded by other girls. And all day long at school they tell you horrible stories about what will happen to you in hell if someone sees even a strand of your hair.

4. the regime modifies all the textbooks, story books, cartoons and movies to represent the ideal woman with full on hijab. The iranian media is ordered to photoshop every photo of a woman that may be showing a little skin. And if they’re iranian, no hair is supposed to be seen or that will be photoshopped away. Women are mostly excluded from billboards and tv commercials.

5. imagine going to work or meeting up with a friend when suddenly the morality police kidnap you in broad daylight and force you into a van to take you to a station where they will treat you like a criminal and if you don’t agree to get humiliated and do as they say, they will put you in prison. And in case of Mahsa Amini and so many more before her, they will beat you to death. My sister was barely 18 when she got kidnapped and they didn’t let her call home and she’d been so fucking scared and we had no idea where she was. Imagine all the psychological trauma.

6. If you’re in a car and not wearing hijab they will fine you and seize your car. So when u get into a taxi the driver will ask you to keep your hijab on otherwise they’ll get fined. And if you refuse they’ll ask you to get off the car.

7. And its not just about hijab. In Ramadan, they get even more vicious. If they catch you eating or even drinking water on the street they will give you lashes as punishment and even imprison you for breaking the law. If you work in a state-owned company it’s even worse. They will close the cafeteria and take away the water dispensers. All restaurants are banned from delivering food before iftar. It’s a fucking mess. Everyone has to pretend they’re fasting or they’ll be severely punished.

So if you see Islam has become for many iranians a symbol of oppression and torture and discrimination, that’s why. The regime uses islam as a weapon to silence and punish anyone who opposes them. You can love islam all you want from the safety of your home in a free country and talk about how kind and benevolent the religion is, but in iran, it’s a whole different story.

Our economy is fucked. All govt officials are corrupt as fuck. Most websites are banned in iran. Even tumblr is banned. The world has cut the iranian ppl from many services. We don’t have intl credit cards like visa card. Amazon doesn’t do delivery to iran. We cant get netflix, spotify or even a gamepass subscription. we don’t get any Apple services here. iran isn’t listed as a country you could choose when signing up for a lot of services. and when we decide to leave iran and escape this hellhole, every country out there will make it sooo much harder for us to get a visa just bc we had the misfortune to be born in iran at the wrong time.

This is the story of iran for the past 44 years. Held hostage by a corrupt regime that uses religion to suppress and torture the people and being abandoned by the rest of the world bc our lives don’t matter.

Please be our voice. Once they shut down the internet completely and silence our voice, they will start slaughtering us to stifle the protests just like they did in 2019. Please help us. We want this fucking regime gone.

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?

Milo Songetay

Are there any blue roses? Like real ones. Or do they just take the white, green, or red ones then paint them as blue?

no, blue roses don't occur in nature- but they're easy to make artificially. just place a cut white rose into blue-dyed water and wait a bit, and eventually the rose will be blue. also why did you ask me this

Ah yes, the two half’s of tumblr, hilarious shitpost, and beautiful art

Enriched uranium sword with a lead sheathe that is rumored to slowly kill its owner in exchange for god killing power.

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.

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.

WAIT what series is this cause I remember seeing this as a kid and i NEED to know what it is

Hank and his goofy kids

im currently completely losing it about the great stalacpipe organ. are you fucking kidding me they made an organ out of a CAVE???? IT TAKES UP THREE ACRES??? i legit am about to lose it

I want to see an episode of a show maybe superheroes maybe magic or something where there’s a two part episode where on of the characters acts insane the the next they just screaming in joy and it revealed they’ve been stuck in a time loop and went insane And this should be a major status quo change with this character needing rehab and the person responsible which means this would probably work best with the time looper being previously introduced. I don’t know the point of these episodes, maybe show how secretly evil this world is or something I just think this would be cool to see the effects of a time loop or a less graphic episode where one character does all the time loop stud of knowing what your going to say and do and using the other characters to break free

Does anyone remember that chart that showed all of the word counts of all the chapters Wildbow has written

Yeah I agree that the show takes supes in the military being actually scary compared to the comics we can also see the comic idea of supes being incompetent but toned down slightly, in the fight in Nicaragua we see Swatto get killed in five seconds and the twins and the mind guy huddled in cover not doing anything. Which I think kinda shows how yeah some supes would be great but they couldn’t really be mass incorporated due to the specifics of powers.

I don’t know what I’m really saying I’m just rambling great post

Also consider this a chaser for a longer post I’m gonna do on how The Boys got better in the adaptation, but one thing I think was a really smart change is how the show is handling the prospect of supes in the military.

 In the comic, The Supes are framed as Evil, but Incompetent. The fight over whether or not Vought is going to get Supes into the military was meant as a parallel to pork spending and the military Industrial complex run amok. Putting supes in the military was framed as bad, well, first because Vought is evil and shouldn’t get to make money, but on a practical level it’s treated as a silly idea.  The supes are framed as fundamentally incompetent soldiers. They’re too brash, too used to getting their way, incredibly difficult to create in consistent numbers, even harder to standardize once you’ve created them due to radically different levels of durability, and fundamentally pretty easy to kill in a combat scenario if you go in prepared and keep your shit together. Until Homelander starts getting Coupy, the actual stakes of the fight are largely over whether Vought is going to get to ream the American Taxpayers with the superhuman equivalent of jets that don’t work and see no action. But the superhumans themselves are, fundamentally, a complete joke in terms of combat ability, and their actual attempt at full-scale rebellion is suppressed almost immediately by the conventional military.

 And the issue is that this sort of created an “enemy-is-both-weak-and-strong” dynamic, where the story hates superheroes so goddamn much that they get  simultaneously framed as both this incredibly corrosive societal cancer AND a bunch of complete morons who can get wiped out in an afternoon by a small detatchment of well-trained, well-equipped soldiers. The actual stakes are…. kinda all over the place, as a result.

In the show,  The Supes are allowed to be both Evil AND competent. Homelander is actually smart instead of just mean and powerful, and It’s pretty clear that supes would be effective in the military, applied judiciously; Black Noir, Soldier Boy and even Homelander to an extent actually are capable of carrying out incredibly violent surgical strikes against whoever the hell they want. So instead, the threat is very clearly reframed as the military potentially having access to combat-viable superhumans who are capable of carrying out incredibly violent surgical strikes against whoever the hell they want. That gets to be a bad thing on its own merits instead of being bad because it’s a waste of money! And, furthermore, it’s also as if specific special-forces agents and black-ops murderers were given the same kind of inviolable, insufferable PR shielding that real world celebrities get for their bad behavior, except the “bad behavior” is, you know, the imperialist slaughter of hundreds or thousands! (In addition to, and not as a replacement for, regular celebrity bullshit!)