Taylor, above anything else, has the need to be important, or at the very least not be on the sidelines.
In 25.2, when the Simurgh attacks flight BA178, Taylor is despondent because she wasn't able to go to the fight and wasn't able to help. This despite the fact that the flight went well.
And then Scion shows up and she can't do anything to him. Once again, she is sidelined. And so she invents stuff to do, so that she can be doing something and be important. Recruiting the Endbringers, attacking the Yangban and the Elite, going after Cauldron and even getting Panaceaed are all part of her running around like a headless chicken, trying not to be idle.
That this leads to the death of a thousand refugees is simply evidence of this reading; that she is not trying to help for the sake of helping, but for the sake of this need. That it is so short, and Taylor angsts so little about it, shows how far Taylor has fallen into this tendency.
At the start of Worm, she believes that she will go to hell for holding the bank hostage. At the end, she barely feels bad about killing a thousand people.
Hmm, after rereading the bit where the Undersiders and the Guild sic Leviathan on a refugee camp and kill a thousand people, I think maybe Lisa and Colin deserve everything bad that happens to them forever
Okay, so there's an entire a chasm between Farcille and Wolfspider. Because yes, it makes sense to see Marcille as having a crush on Falin, and that reading of her character could even be more enjoyable than assuming otherwise. Its a coherent ship and an enjoyable one. But with Worm, not reading Taylor and Rachel as crushing on each other actively detracts from the story's comprehensibility.
these two are like sisters to me.
both issues are focused on young depressed artists whose entire being, their own nature and their powers, overshadows their art.
people loving Tara (wicdiv) as a god but hating her if she wants them to see beyond her godhood with her songs/poetry vs people fearing Masumi (tpf) as a kaiju-summoning destroyer and praising her creations no matter what even though, by Masumi's own admission, she know no one really cares about her paintings.
how both are so resigned to it.
do you see my vision.
Kid Ignition had five lines this issue and four of them were disparaging of his life and/or of Heavy.
Once Kid gets a taste of freedom I doubt he'd ever want to be bound again
I'm honestly less interested in, "Is Kid Ignition really as powerful as Heavy thinks?" and more in, "Is Kid Ignition really as loyal and obedient as Heavy thinks?" I guess an exact repeat of The Major would be poetically ironic or something. But from a character standpoint, I really just want to see Kid lashing out at his controlling, high-pressure parents like basically every teenager since the concept of teenagerhood was invented. Except, of course, he's not your average kid.
73, Charlotte?
Lets see, 73 is Great King Rat by Queen. Yet another song I got into 'cause of Eidolon.
Hmm. I'll be honest, I haven't though much about Charlotte. She doesn't take up a lot of space in my head, except for thinking about how she went from White Kid with Dreads to known businesswoman and community organizer. I'd like to think that she lost the mayoral election because she still has the dreads.
If I was gonna make a fic about her....hm, we only get a limited sense of how she feels working under Taylor, especially given her past view of her from the bullying campaign. You might be able to write a neat fic that shows her view of Taylor during their schooldays as a pitiful, kind of disgusting figure, and then transfer to her viewpoint during the warlord era where she sees Taylor as powerful and worthy of respect, but still fundamentally disgusting. Something that deals with her feeling under the heel of what she'd otherwise consider vermin. I don't think that's actually how she views Taylor, but it'd be a neat spin on her character.
Something I’ve only occasionally seen mentioned is how Cauldron capes still have a degree of irony between their power and their trauma
Take Coil. While moments away from being rescued from Nilbog’s monsters, he is faced with a split-second choice: to kill his superior officer or to not. He didn’t know which was the right call, whether it was possible for them both to survive or whether letting his superior live would have doomed them both. And so, he made his choice, and was left to deal with the consequences of it. And then he drinks a vial and is given the ability to delay the making of any such decisions, until the consequences were known.
Or Battery. She wants powers to take down Madcap, and gets powers that operate similarly to his but perform better. Except, of course, only for a handful of moments, leaving her ultimately worse off than him. She loses to him 7 times, and only wins on the 8th because Legend is there
Mostly a Worm (and The Power Fantasy) blog. Unironic Chicago Wards time jump defenderShe/her
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