After A Year (and Much Procrastinating) I Have Finally Finished My Cosplay Of Taylor “Skitter” Hebert

thanks for responding to my ask! i'd be interested in moodboards for Antigreen, i'd love to find out more about other inspirations for it. (also, is Calliope's last name an intentional reference to mondegreens?)

Alright fasten your iridescent seatbelts because I'm about to ~yap~ about Antigreen (AO3)

First up: what's in a title? Food (flavor) colouring, for one:

Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of matter, and there's six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top (formerly truth), and bottom (formerly beauty). They all carry colour charge, which can be red, green, or blue, or for antiquarks their opposites: antired (cyan), antigreen (magenta), antiblue (yellow). The core six in AG (Callie, Ettie, Sawyer, Annette, Erika, Michael) all get a color and a quark each. (Which is which is left as an exercise to the reader lol)

Magenta is most interesting to me because it's not a spectral color: it's the only one of the six that's not monochromatic, or 'real', it's an illusion we perceive when something has high amounts of both red and blue light.

The visible spectrum: you won't find pink here!

That's the kind of dichotomy I was going for with 'Antigreen': the word evokes both greenness (the Earth, growth, but also stagnation, a toxic color that often meant death ) and antigreenness (pink, irreality, something unnatural and alien). It's the perfect word to marry the two together; it represents CalliEttie themselves to me!

Pink/magenta also has a history of being used to represent the titular Colour Out of Space, one of Lovecraft's better short stories, about an unnatural alien hue that arrives on Earth. It's used this way in a few adaptations, below which is a gif from the 2019 film version:

(The Colour Out of Space, 2019, IMDB)

Pink is used for various eldritch stuff in other media too, once you notice it once you kinda start to see it everywhere, beware...

The 2019 Colour is good, but I honestly think Annihilation (2018) is a better expression of similar ideas. It concerns a group of women investigating a meteorite that's landed at a lighthouse and is slowly warping the surrounding area:

(Annihilation, 2018, IMDB)

Shit does indeed get warped as fuck; I recommend.

Annihilation has some really great examples of the Gothic sublime . Think glimpsing a tidal wave, staring up at a mountain, or being on the edge of a black hole. Something so great and terrible that it overwhelms the senses, the kind of awful beauty that brings tears to your eye, and can't be easily described in words.

That's what cosmic horror's all about! imo, anyway: Antigreen is about what happens when a(sapphic)n earthly and unearthly realm meet, and I've hopefully made Esther seem suitably sublime.

Anyway that's the inspo behind the title, and why Esther's strongly associated with the color pink (of my made-up/constructed color names, nemaphlox would be the applicable one I guess).

I'd leave it here for now, with plans to do another of these for Callie and Ettie, but I have to also answer your question: (remember that? It was so long ago and so many pixels above, sorry)

> Is Calliope's last name an intentional reference to mondegreens?

Yep, again, spot on! A mondegreen is the English term for misheard lyrics, and is autological: it describes itself. I swapped the last two letters, making Mondegrene, for a few reasons:

- obscures the origin to make a slightly more plausible surname

- enables various bad French calembours like mond de grené ("grainy world", fitting for a little speck like Calliope). Disclaimer: I rather suck at French

- also similar to French grenade (pomegranate), a fruit with very gay associations

Lastly (I promise!) I'll link the cover art I had made with the ambigram I designed. The swirls are intended to evoke tracks in particle-detecting cloud chambers!

Thanks for putting up with this~ I will do more of these if people enjoy them!

skitter

I haven't seen this one here so here you go people.

thinking about when that anon was on a foxgirl lisa campaign in everyones inbox a couple years ago

Supervicky

and Lisa Lane

I commissioned this piece a while back from sethkiel on Twitter. Rarely do more than lurk on tumblr, but I figured I may as well post it here for the smugpunch believers

Some bubbline I had drawn these days!

Thank you Fiona and Cake gives me more bubbline power!🙏

marcille really feels like a worm cape in a sense, her biggest trauma is related to death and losing her friends and family to different lifespans and so now in the dungeon she is bound to constantly see her friends die over and over, but its ok! her power allows her to keep bringing them back over and over! just so that they can keep on dying, over and over.

its ok, this is ok

A little comic about Beck and Madison. More info about them and the rest of my silly Fake Fighting Game Setting can be found here!

I certainly didn’t appreciate it on the first read-through, but one of the biggest background characterizations of Alec is among first things we learned about him: that he painted the Undersider’s symbols onto the doors of their hideout.

The loft reads as almost ridiculous when you first read about it. Whatever you’re expecting the hideout of a bunch of hardened criminals to look like, your not expecting “the rich kid’s house with all the best video games.” It almost took me out of it; it felt like such a teen wish fulfillment of a supervillain base that I thought Wildbow must be pretty young—and didn’t really take in what it was telling the reader about the Undersider’s mindset. Because it is a teen wish fulfillment, filtered through the practicality of what cost, secrecy, and Brian would allow for. Its the derelict old building you dare your friends to go into to find some rumored amazing or horrible secret—but this building does have a secret, and its a pizza party with a sweet flatscreen setup.

For the most part, it is an especially cool hangout spot that would appeal to your average teen—and not necessarily your average villain. Taylor gets told to use the other’s civilian names while hanging out here. They wear street clothes instead of their costumes. Its built to be appealing to the non-cape side of your life, a welcome reprieve from that world. For the Undersiders who don’t have much of a real life outside of capedom, its something like a place to play make-believe. That’s part of why its so effective as an initial pitch to Taylor when she’s looking for friends and doesn’t want to be a villain, why its important for ingratiating her to the rest of them and making her backstabbing plan that much harder to follow through on. Its part of why getting her own lair, built for the specifications of Skitter the Warlord instead of Taylor the kid, represents such a big change in how Taylor sees herself and her goals. Its why there’s presumably dozens of Undersider fics of them just casually hanging out in the loft, away from any major cape shenanigans. Its why Rachel’s first full appearance is her coming up into the room and breaking the bubble—ruining Brian’s pitch of sweet teen digs by bringing the violence inherent to cape life into the supposedly separate space. Because the loft is supposed to be for the Undersiders to be themselves as civilians, instead of capes.

But at the same time, everyone’s personal room has their symbol painted on their door. And the first real thing we learn about Regent is that he’s the one who painted them.

Regent did not get to have a double life. His cape stuff and his family stuff were inherently intertwined, and it was all bad. He’s arguably the only undersider to have a secret identity in a traditional, important sense: not just “you have a civilian life, and everyone’s gonna respect that its separate and not go after anything related to it,” like @artbyblastweave​ outlined here, but “your specific other identity is important, in a sense outside of just being something to target” way. People finding out who Skitter is means they know there’s an identity there to exploit—her enemies can trace her to her school, she can’t continue to go back to her old house, etc. You’d be able to get the same advantage by finding out the civilian identity of pretty much any cape. But not with Alec. People finding out who Alec is means they go “oh fuck, its Heartbreaker’s kid—” the effect is much more like finding out Taylor is Skitter, rather than vice versa.

And that’s important, because the persona of Regent is, to a large extent, his chance to live out the life he wants. Brian and Lisa both have circumstances that don’t allow them a typical childhood, and so they construct spaces to go through the motions of one. To roughhouse and play video games with friends, to plan shopping trips and visits to Fugly Bobs. They’re looking for a respite from their normal state, and that respite to them looks like civilian life. Alec is looking for a respite from his awful childhood, and that respite has a lot of the same things, but it also has the symbols and aspects of his cape persona. He draws his crown on his door, he uses his powers casually on Brian—he’s using the space to let him be Regent, in the same way Brian is pitching it to Skitter as a place where she can just be Taylor, where Tattletale can just be Lisa. This is pretty huge for understanding Regent early-on: Taylor obviously has a pretty expansive double life, as does Brian, and Lisa clearly wants to get into some non-cape-related shenanigans. We’re introduced with a clear divide between cape and civilian identities being the norm. Rachel is presented as bucking a trend, her lack of second identity making her an outlier. But if you read into Regent’s decorating choices, you realize pretty early that you can’t separate his cape identity and his current civilian idenitiy, because their both effectively the same thing: a persona where he can be something other than a Vasil.

Sheesh, now that I’m thinking about it there’s a lot to be drawn from each of the undersider’s lairs. I already talked a bit about how Skitter having her new base be a proper “villain lair” instead of “hang spot” represented a shift in perspective, and how Rachel being unable to behave the way your “supposed” to in the loft shows that she both can’t live a double life and has no interest in doing so (unlike Alec, who is very clearly interested in making a “new” life for himself with the Undersiders as Regent). But how about how Brian won’t take a room in the loft and insists on sleeping in a separate apartment he’s planning on shairing with Aisha? He obviously wants to be able to draw an especially clear line between his cape and civilian life, and doesn’t want Aisha to get involved at all. How about how Lisa’s eventual separate Coil-provided villain lair is a disguised community center she was pretending to work in, showing both that she has some interest in a life outside of capedom and that she’s inherently drawn to working with/having control over civilian culture? She doesn’t just want to hold territory, she wants to be an institution—not just someone the other capes have to play ball with, but who the mayor and civilian agencies have to go through. She separates capedom and civilianhood to an extent, but not to the same extent as Brian, and her goals are much more “civilian-oriented” than most.

I forget the specifics of Alec’s eventual Coil-base, but I know that it was a group of buildings (a campus, maybe?) with few people in the surrounding area outside of puppets—presumably not so different from the compound he grew up. But I do remember that one of the last times we see it is near when Taylor says something about his connection to Heartbreaker, and him getting upset by it. I wonder if it changes in the intervening two years, especially with Imp’s influence. I’m kinda sad we never get a chance to see it.