@the-joju-experience Asked Me About Issue 1, Page 1 Of The Power Fantasy, Mentioning "the Scale Of The

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

She’s up to Miss Militia’s interlude:

Deadpan: “the Endbringers. They seem bad”

Also deadpan: “What do I think about Dinah?” I’ve only known her for 5 seconds”

I somehow, in what was probably a moment of poor judgement, convinced my mother to read worm.

Highlights so far (shes on 7.10):

thinking Coil was spelt Coli and pronounced Coil-ee (she refuses to wear glasses)

not knowing the names of any characters

thinking Taylor is 'very practical' in reference to her cutting Lung's eyes out

just complete incomprehension at the incompetence of Taylor's teachers and the PRT

saying that she would have attacked the trio if she were Taylor

not catching any of the Wolfspider content (tbf, this is a bi woman who doesn't call herself queer because she has never been in a relationship with a woman, so her ability to detect queerness is hardly the best)

being very mad at me for not telling her why Emma is bullying Taylor

Anyway, shes only a chapter away from the Dinah reveal and a couple of chapters from Leviathan, so I'm quite excited.

she's so real for this tbh. sometimes, the best way to honor a friend's memory is to kill their fucking dad

Vista’s is an Escher staircase keyring trinket. It very much wants her to have a gun.

Taylor and her eldritch buddy

I think if Taylor ever got (normal, non-evil) cloned then one would kill the other within a day. Taylor would despise herself if she had to look at herself from outside her own head.

So where does Magus's power come from, anyways? How come he and only he has managed to become a Superpower? It can't just be that he researched it or whatever, someone else would've come across the right tome.

He mentioned squinting in the right way when he looks at Valentina and Eliza, to see their power; I suspect that's it. He really is an atomic, it's just that his power is a minor vision thing that wouldn't mean shit if Valentina's entry into the one timeline hasn't gotten Angelic gunk all over everything. Now, he can see the secret workings of all Numinous whatever, enough to learn the secrets to end the world.

But it's not enough, not enough to keep him safe, not enough to guarantee someone else won't eventually figure out how to unlock that lock with spaghetti. So he makes his little pyramid scheme.

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.

Thinkin’ About Cauldron

I’m aware of the way it breaks some people’s suspension of disbelief, and I’m aware that it comes across as silly or incompetent to many, but it is deeply, deeply important to me on a thematic level that Cauldron is tiny. The tinyness is what makes them a functional foil to Taylor; you spend the whole book thinking that this is just an escalation of the problems Taylor has with Monolithic authority, and then the curtain is pulled back and you realize that the “Monolithic authority” is actually just six or seven people who are on a first name basis with each other, using their top-tier information-gathering and coordination-based powers as a force multiplier to get around their small numbers as they unilaterally seized control. (Hey, sorta like the Undersiders.)

And, furthermore, their tinyness is a stand-out example of the kind of coordination problems the book has been examining the whole time- Cauldron should be bigger, the inner circle should have more people in it, and the fact that they’ve expanded so slowly, from two to seven-ish full members, with so much of their inner circle not even having the full picture of the threat they’re up against, is deeply indicative of their wagon-circling Atlas Complex. It has to be them, they have to do it alone, or they are going to be found out and crushed. 

And to be fair, they aren’t actually wrong in their assessment that they’ll be found out and crushed if they aren’t extremely careful about who they bring into the loop; overlooking the remaining entity entirely, Legend’s concern that the governments would try and coopt the power-granting process is, like. Correct. That is a thing that would happen, given the number of wormverse groups already trying to do that in some form. Siberian bit them in the ass, The Dealer bit them in the ass, and a big part of Ward is the multi-directional slapfight over the remaining Cauldron infrastructure that starts up as soon as it isn’t in a position to defend itself anymore.

 There’s a real chicken-and-egg thing going on here, where it’s not clear if their paranoia is warranted given how other power players in the setting tend to behave, or if other power players in the setting behave the way they do downstream from Cauldron’s paranoia, manipulation and compartmentalization. A recurring theme with Worm is that keeping secrets and holding back resources is going to lead to terrible things happening even if keeping those secrets was a reasonable decision with the information you had available to you. You see this with Phir Se, with the Echidna fight, with the politicking over Khonsu. Cauldron is just, like, the epitome of that Morton’s Fork- be honest and open, and potentially lose everything, or, you know, be Cauldron, with all that entails.

Thinkin’ About Alexandria

An important thing to keep in mind about Alexandria, I think, is that she (and the rest of Cauldron’s inner circle) have been sticking like glue to an organizational schema she developed when she was fifteen, using power-assisted cognition but the life-skills, worldview and experience of a fifteen year old; I think this goes a long way towards explaining why her mindset was finding the most efficient way to martially oppose villains instead of, say, finding a way to financially disincentivize villainy through social safety nets. (alternatively, she wanted society to be a thunderdome of sorts to get everyone trained up for gold morning, but that’s got just as many holes that could be explained by being fifteen.)

Her power answered her fear that she’d die without getting to grow and change by arresting all her biological processes and permanently locking her into her late-teens-early-twenties; she has to pretend in order to seem as old as she actually is. Her cognition is completely offloaded to her power; her brain is vulnerable, but it isn’t clear if she’s actually doing any thinking with that thing. Unmovable, unbreakable, clad in fortress imagery, sticking like glue to a specific plan, and a specific value (they’ll be alive, that’s all that matters) derived from her own root fear of death, her preference for mutation over death by cancer, which she projects onto everyone else in the world and uses to justify everything she does to them. Incredible calculative power, incredible resources, incredible martial power, and a fighting style that, to my recollection, consists of hitting the other guy until they stop moving.

So, you know, conclusion number one that I’m drawing from all of this is that Alexandria is Taylor with all the world’s resources at her back and no one to ever tell her no. Conclusion two is that Alexandria is subtly in the same kind of power-induced arrested development as Contessa; she’s got the brains and the brawn to think up and execute bad plans perfectly, she faces no criticism or scrutiny, she (usually) faces no consequences. She’s not “stand-on-a-beach-for-three-days-in-a-stupor” levels of brainscorched by her power but there’s a real degree to which I read the training wheels as never having come off with her. I get a vibe of R/Iamverysmart permeating Cauldron’s set-up and self-assuredness, and this is part of why.

Conclusion three (the big obvious one) is that she’s a metaphor for institutional inertia. When she dies and the Protectorate uses her as a scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with them it’s very obviously self-serving but it’s also not, like. Incorrect. She’s a synecdoche for everything wrong with the system. Rigid, inflexible, callous, arguably necessary but nearly impossible to remove or change or challenge.

And then she gets replaced by a guy whose whole schtick is that he can mix and match the best properties of wildly different component elements on the fly to create the best possible response to any problem.

it is rlly funny that wildbow thinks so little about legend that he forgot he never gave him a name in worm so ward accidentally canonizes that his son’s name is also his name