Amusing Myself Greatly With The Idea Of Vista Undergoing The Situation Of

New York, in the process of being rebuilt.  Dust and ominous clouds were being held at bay by a thin forcefield, and the city stood in the center of a brilliant sunlight.  Where glass had broken and where oils had risen to the tops of city streets, things almost glittered.  A shining city.

Does Ward ever explain why they went from rebuilding New York on Earth-Bet to living in 'The City' on Earth Gimmel? Or does it just do that and leave us to wonder as to the answers?

My god, did Wildbow even re-read the epilogues before he wrote Ward? Like, I knew he didn't re-read Worm as a whole, because his characterizations of Amy in Ward are like, frozen in Arc 14 for most of the text but did he not even make the effort to at least re-read the last couple of chapters?

What the fuckberries? How is this the first I'm hearing, in all the complaints I've seen about Ward, and 'The City', that they were GODDAMN REBUILDING NEW YORK CITY after Golden Morning?

And heaven forbid he freeze the train

Clockblocker not on a train: A perfect hero; capable of locking down opponents without causing injury; requires tinkertech and a demonstration by Skitter to figure out how to use his power to do harm

Clockblocker on a train: A weapon of massive destruction, incapable of anything less than destroying the entire train, for the second he freezes anything it shoots towards the back of the train at at least 50km/h and up to 300km/h

if worm happens after wildbow develops ward/weaverdice power sensibilities she never meets the undersiders. lung doesn't hear her stepping onto the gravel roof because his trigger only has like light thinker notes tbh. and he's already a brute/changer, blaster with mover notes, that's already a lot, we should trim down, we should trim this down. Really drive at the cocaine elements of his trigger

I did a painting party for my birthday and here’s what I made

Have we talked about how Taylor has common themes with each teammate when she meets them and they foreshadow something about her final form as Khepri? (Also ship names being based on bug things makes me feel wickedly gleeful)

• Taylor + Lisa = SmugBug = uncanny insights, could be mistaken for precognition ; reckless self endangerment

• Taylor + Rachel = WolfSpider = sudden not-necessarily-proportional violence ; brain no longer maps to human interaction

• Taylor + Grue = Dark&Creepy = obfuscation, macho power displays ; power theft

• Taylor + Regent = QueenBee = false sense of emotional detachment ; controlling people but not their minds

• Taylor + Imp = Fly On The Wall = unobtrusively spies on others ; forgetting

Zion Worm 🤝 The Queen Power Fantasy

Mysterious alien entities who decide the uk really just needs to fucking go

To a certain degree, I think it must have been even more traumatic for Mars to return to Aleph than it would have been if she had to stay on Bet.

She spent months watching her best friend slowly - and then very rapidly - turning into a horrific monster and suffering the whole time. She survived the horrors of Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine. She had to kill said best friend in the end after she turned into a mountain of mutated, agonized, homicidal flesh. Her power is considered one of the strongest and potentially deadliest on Earth Bet.

And then immediately after incinerating her bestie, who was screaming for her up to the end, and watching bestie's boyfriend get sent to life in interdimensional super prison, she just goes back home where things are... not like that. Aleph is pretty closed off from Scion and all the other cape fuckery. There's capes but they're nothing like her and they sure as hell aren't anything like the ones she fought on Bet. There's no Endbringers on Aleph except for when the Simurgh pops in. Other than the Khepri draft on Gold Morning (which must have been absolutely horrifying for her oh my god), there's probably a good chance that she never has to deal with any cape-related situations again in her life.

She just has to sit there with the power of the literal sun and all the blood on her hands and there's only three people in the entire world who will ever understand what happened to her. How is she supposed to function. What the fuck.

They're silly

you know what. im going to follow my heart so we can move on with the wormread and just copy-paste what i said about danny in chapter 6.9 on discord with some minimal editing because it's not pretty but the general thesis is there and i don't feel like making it into proper paragraph form

okay so the thing thats fucking killing me abotu 6.9 is that danny is literally like. he tries to call taylor a nickname only her mom called her once he realizes he's fucked up bad and is trying to recover whichi s insane [because it's obviously going to be upsetting to her by reminding her of her mom being gone, and it also indicates that his fall-back for something going wrong w/ taylor is to try to appeal to her by poorly copying someone else's parenting style] and he also randomly tells her about how her mom wanted to move her a grade ahead but he wanted her to stay in school with emma to make her happy. and he's been Stewing On That despite knowing it's objectively not his fault (and i am reminded of how in his interlude he spends time Stewing about how he wishes annette were there to give advice) and he also cops up to the fact that that the whole thing about "being her parent and not her ally" (<- demented thing to say for obvious reasons) wherein he locks her in a room and demands emotional vulnerability from her even as she's becoming visibly upset & compares his actions to emma's was her grandmother's idea and then. here's the real kicker. once lisa shows up and prepares to take taylor away there are any number of actions a parent confident that they're doing the right thing for their child would normally do in response--not, like, Good actions, but things that a parent would be likely to pull. threatening to call the cops bc blah blah you're my daughter, wanting to speak to lisa's parents, any form of power move pulled over these two teenage girls but instead he speaks to lisa like she's an equal authority over taylor and seriously asks if she's "okay with this" (i should remind you of the concussion chapter where lisa is doing some insane power move shit over taylors dad covertly establishing herself as more competent at caring 4 her than him lmao) which is just like. it's so glaringly wildly obvious how this guy has Zero confidence in himself as a parent so he generally does nothing and then while he's doing nothing he oscillates btwn rationalizing it to himself as allowing her privacy/dignity, getting angry at himself/calling himself a coward, or getting mad at TAYLOR and blaming HER for not being the one to take initiation to be vulnerable with him and, like. he literally does make functional decisions prior to this for a bit! he's good and supportive at the meeting with the school board about the bullying!!! but it doesn't immediately solve literal years of distance between them that have led to taylor having to take decisionmaking for her wellbeing entirely into her own hands w/o being able to tell him about it [& having literally no route for human connection or support other than the undersiders] so he just completely crumbles on his own calls and seeks out/takes completely shit advice from taylor's grandma instead so i very much think what's insinuated here is like. especially given that he knows he has anger issues and never wants to Be Scary with them. he might have frequently leaned on annette for parenting decisions before she died and/or is really fucking haunted by the time(s) he didn't listen to her and it went wrong and now that she's gone he's just kinda floundering and trying to toss the baton for parental decisionmaking onto anyone else, including, at one point, the literal teenage girl who shows up to help taylor run away from his house. insane ! also. thinking about how taylor says her grandma (maternal) never liked her dad. that man would literally rather talk to the mother of his dead wife, who hates him, and take her advice than go 'yeah ithink im gonna keep using my own judgement for compassion towards my daughter' fucking worst anyones ever done it this guy has the spine of a twizzler it's great

...and then doing All That & severely triggering taylor's trauma from the bullying in the process completely shatters any trust he had built with her, catalyzing her realization that she wants to be able to have meaningful relationships with the undersiders & leading to her running away to leave with them! i don't think anyone can say for sure whether or not danny Not doing this would have led to taylor turning the undersiders in before realizing that she would regret it, but oh fucking boy does he make SURE she doesn't go thru with it. and it would be bad to call the cops on a bunch of systematically neglected traumatized teenagers regardless of how much crime they're doing so you know what maybe we should actually thank danny for his Shit Parenting stopping taylor from being a narc

The interesting, underutilized thing about the intersection of superheroism and apocalyptic fiction- zombie fiction in particular- is that a core part of the appeal of the superheroic fantasy is that you're simply powerful enough that you don't have to make hard choices or do triage; you can just save everyone. Whereas zombie fiction is basically predicated on so much going wrong at once that saving yourself becomes a stretch goal. A total societal collapse highlights the ways in which the superheroic power fantasy was always kind of quietly dependent on the continued existence of modern society to function- the extent to which a superhero's basic identity is being outsourced to the continued existence of observers, to your continued success at the project of keeping those observers alive so they can continue to agree that you're a superhero. If everyone is going insane and eating each other and you're an indestructible guy who can bench press a car, suddenly that's all you are. Applicable to the scenario at hand, sure. You're in a better position to survive than most. But that's all that you are.