Latest Posts by khepris-worst-soldier - Page 5

i really like how worm commits to making superpowered characters weird. i think in most superhero media, superpowered characters are largely distinct, normal individuals with powers tacked on like tools they can use. but in worm, having a power kind of inherently puts you to the left of being entirely human. in worm, the lines between the power and the person are blurred, both literally in terms of how shards work & in terms of how powers present themselves. you can’t have a power without it altering your relationship to your mind and body.

and the “relationship to your body” bit applies to almost all capes, not just the ones who have been physically altered by their powers! whenever the experience of having a (not physically altering) power is described, it‘s phrased as being some sort of additional sense or sensation in a way that is still inextricably connected to the cape’s physical self. imp’s power isn’t just “okay, i’m invisible now,” it’s “i can physically feel my power rolling over my skin and jabbing out into the air to push memories of me away.” 

the other examples i specifically have in mind here are skitter and regent. skitter’s power isn’t just “move the bugs and make them bite people,” they’re effectively a part of her. like additional limbs. she keeps functioning in fights when her human body is knocked the fuck out on the ground because the rest of her body–a million other little bodies–is still there to work with. the fact that she has millions of extra eyeballs at any given moment means it’s not actually so bad when the two of them that happen to be physically connected to her human body are blinded, which results in my favorite Worm Out Of Context ever:

and regent has one of my favorite subtle, uncanny examples of a power that seems like it shouldn’t alter the power-haver’s connection to their own body, but does anyway. in alec’s interlude, while he’s puppeting sophia, there’s a point where the undersiders get far away enough from her that it makes it more difficult for him to control her. he starts struggling to coordinate her movements.

the uncanny part is that he starts struggling to control his own body’s movements, as well. he puts his alec-self’s earbuds in so that he doesn’t have to talk to anyone, because he knows that if he did speak, he’d start stuttering and slurring his words from loss of physical control. sure, his alec-self is the body he’ll end up in when he’s done using his power, and his sophia-self was taken by force, so there’s obviously a distinction between the two, but that doesn’t make his alec-self easier to control. his power implicitly calls the separation between himself and the people he’s puppeting into question. he doesn’t get to have a “main” body he can control without effort, he has to divide his attention between each body and put concentration into moving each of them. in that way, his own body is placed in the same category as the bodies he’s hijacked. it’s Weird!

staring into the distance. butch autistic doggirl. who has a girl who's obsessed with her collared. and wildbow thinks she's supposed to be straight. and he did all that on accident.

i cant stop thinking about brian at pride. he keeps getting hit on and he's going sorry im just here to support my sister and then aisha goes what IM here to support YOU and he has an internal panic attack until she cant hold her laughter in anymore

“young witch trying to solve the mystery of her neighbor’s missing cat in a small village in the Alps” continues to be hilarious don’t get me wrong but it’s kind of making me want to take a crack at treating the concept seriously. In this insular rural community, a cat goes missing. A young woman who takes her community’s professed ideals of helpfulness and harmony in witchcraft seriously volunteers to try to find him. Realizes the more she searches and the more she asks around that everyone in this idyllic village is quietly seething with resentment against their neighbors and against the world, that the insularity of her village is harboring a festering social rot that no one is allowed to address. No one can leave. The hills have fallen silent. Something is eating the cats and no one is allowed to address this. Ötzi is there

Constantly obsessing over the PRT threat ratings is the wormfic version of people who are way too into astrology.

"That was really Scorpio of you." Wrong. It was solidly Master 3 behavior. Stop being such a Breaker and assuming the worst of people.

1,680,000 words and Taylor never even considers dressing the bugs up in little outfits, let alone choreographing a song and dance number. Both of which well within her ability. That's what made her a villain protagonist.

A fun little bit of foreshadowing/character work is that New Wave’s capes all have kinda dorky names that are just normal English words. Except, for Panacea, which is hardly dorky, and is a word that originated in mythology, with all its associated meanings. Even in her name, Panacea stood apart from her family.

And, of course, it represents the pressure placed on her. Lady Photon’s name isn’t a promise. Glory Girl’s name isn’t a promise. Flashbang’s name isn’t a promise. Panacea’s name is. And she ran herself into the ground trying to keep it.

I love when capes lie about their powers

rachel is on top of my favorite characters list now

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.

They're silly

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

Actually I DO think twelve year olds should get hrt. That’s the normal age to start puberty, so why does it have to be different for trans kids?

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.

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.

He looked at Weaver, where she sat at the far end of the bench. Her old teammate had insisted on coming with her, along with a small cluster of dogs. They’d fallen asleep within two minutes of takeoff. Weaver had been first, her head leaning against her friend’s shoulder. Her friend had been next to drift off, a dog in her lap, others lying underneath the bench.

Even after Taylor left, they didn't stop loving each other.

Anti-Propaganda is not allowed. Please only give reasons to vote for something and not give reasons to vote against something.

Lisa's interactions with Taylor make a lot more sense if you believe she's never had a real friend in her life, even before her power started to whisper things in her ear. Taylor's experience got messed with by the bullying, but Lisa is starting from the bottom and has to pull from her interactions with the Undersiders and it shows

How The Nocturnal Bottleneck and Nipples Make Us Human

Almost every post here considers what humans do have, really. It’s a little tiring; realistically every world has its harsh environments and vicious species and a sophont to match. We probably wouldn’t be unique for our adaptability or our persistence or even adrenaline

But our evolution is fucked up as hell, to put it lightly.

Mammals went through what’s been dubbed the nocturnal bottleneck essentially since the start of the mesozoic right up until the Cretaceous ended the archosaur’s exclusive hold over the daylight. We lost a lot of things from every mammal spending most of its time in either a cramped, suffocating burrow or scrounging around in the faint hours of nighttime. Our blood cells lost their nuclei to hold more oxygen while we spent time deep underground, we lost protections against ultraviolet rays in our skin and eyes, we can’t even repair our own DNA using the light of the sun. Most aliens probably wouldn’t have such traits unless their evolution followed a very similar path to ours. They’d be able to see ultraviolet and wouldn’t have to worry about sunburn and all the wonderful privileges essentially all fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles enjoy as we speak. 

There’s also what we gained from spending so much time in the dark.

Brown fat is only found in mammals, it’s a special type of fat which bear cells with several oil droplets and are utterly jammed with mitochondria. This lets it make heat, a lot of it, fast. We don’t even need to shiver to induce this heat generation from brown adipose tissue - factor in our downright hyperactive mitochondria, and we can warm up quickly. Sure, it doesn’t have too much use in adult humans, but it keeps our infants warm and still provides a little boost the whole run we have in this universe.

Unless aliens also went through a time where their small ancestors had to face cold nights, they’d have to produce heat the old fashioned way when chilled. Aliens might have to shiver the whole time they’re in a cold room while the human watches in confusion, quite literally unshaken, and wonders if the room is a lot colder than the thermostat set to 60 says. The aliens stare at their companion in confusion, it’s just a normal temperature to shiver at after all, how is the human sitting so still?

Our small ancestors spending all their time out foraging at night is also why we have such a good sense of touch, smell, and hearing. They were more important senses than vision (we’re lucky to have even redeveloped basic color vision, frankly) at the time and place and simply ended up continuing to serve us well. Birds and reptiles rarely have acute senses of smell and the latter especially are lucky to have acute hearing, and birds rarely have impeccable hearing themselves either. Our skin is free of scales and honed to sensitivity, and our external ears and complicated ear bones provide an immense range of hearing (from 20 all the way to 17,000 hertz!).

Aliens might not be able to pin down the chirp of a cricket or the light click of a lock being picked. The human might be the only one on board a ship that can pick out the finer sounds of the engine’s constant thrum and know the critical difference between when everything is fine and when something is wrong. The human could probably pick out the sounds of an approaching enemy’s careless footsteps - they’re only as light enough for *them* to stop hearing them, after all - and be the one to see the horrified expression (well, more on that later) on their face when we get the drop on them in spite of their perceived stealth. 

But perhaps the most versatile, convoluted, amazing, and utterly unique trait we have is right on your face this instant. Lips.

Lips in most animals are a simple seal to hold in the mouth’s moisture and protect the teeth, even if they’re supple they’re NEVER muscular except in mammals, and we have only one thing to thank for it; milk and nipples. Lips evolved exclusively to allow babies to suckle, it required a vacuum to be created in the mouth, and with no other animal having anything like a nipple it never happened in other animals. Many animals make milk, to be frank, but no other animal has nipples.

Your cheeks and lips are a marvel among tetrapods, no other animal can suck like mammals can. Aliens wouldn’t have straws or even be able to sip from the edge of a glass, they’d have to have a proboscis or simply tilt the whole thing back. Aliens likely won’t have woodwind instruments or balloons you can blow into. We take so much about our lips for granted. Hell, our muscular faces are vital for expressions, we’re probably absolute facial contortionists among a cast of creatures with mandibles and beaks and expressionless scaly maws. Aliens might find us ridiculously easy to read, if anything, compared to their own kind (all the better to deceive them) - or perhaps they’d find us hard to decipher anyways, with our lack of color-changing skin or erectable crests of bright feathers. Baring teeth might not be seen as a sign of aggression in most of the universe, smiling would be all too distinctly human. 

Perhaps with how infectious we are sometimes, that’s what we’d contribute to the universe; others might have to make do with opening their mouths just enough to show their teeth or splaying their innumerable mouthparts with just the right curve, but perhaps we’d teach the galaxy to smile, one ally at a time. 

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Stupid thought I kind of believe: no one can agree on what "neoliberalism" means, but extensionally it's "whatever we've been doing, economically, for the past few decades."

Therefore, a major component of neoliberalism must be degrowth. It might be neoliberalism's fatal flaw!

Reread 19.y, and noticed something I hadn't caught before:

Parents. Plural. He makes such hay over being someone who really knows her like other people don't, but he doesn't know her mom died. That's not an unreasonable or unconscionable thing, you're not rude for not knowing everything about your classmates' circumstances. But also, it was a detail that we see the trio implicitly reference, and that Emma will be explicit about without visible shock from other classmates. People who know about Taylor enough to torment her know about it—but its not something Greg knows. It highlights how he's being kinda ridiculous, thinking he has some special connection to her. Good little detail.

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

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

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

Truly the tragedy of Taylor is that she was just, the best at violence and discovered this at a time in her life when she had nothing else. Is it any surprise that she ended up as a creature of nought but violence when people only cared about her in relation to her capacity for violence?

list of times taylor hebert used other peoples powers better than them:

when she told genesis to create a body that looked like crawler with the s9 riding on his back

when she used clockblockers power to bisect echidna. this literally fundamentally changed the way clock used his own power

when she made doormaker open and close portals overlapping each other so that the portals were effectively moving (granted this was only possible with the help of taylors multitasking power)

help me add more things to the list

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

nobody move. i've just successfully articulated the sentiment that taylor's power turns her into a panopticon because she was living in one & explained her trigger in a way i feel satisfied with for the first time in my life

the concept of the panopticon is not just about surveillance, but about creating an environment where people cannot be sure whether or not they are being surveilled, and thus must constantly act under the assumption that they are. which is exactly what happened to taylor--we see from when we first meet her in the school that she's anticipating attack from every possible direction to avoid it, and the one time she lets her guard down a fraction and assumes she's found a safe spot to hide from abuse, she's targeted with the juice spills. and this is after her trigger event, but it's clear she behaves this way because it was beaten into her over the entire course of the bullying. it's what she describes when she recounts the trigger:

“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But I made a friend, one of the girls who had sometimes joined in on the taunting came to me and apologized.  ...  Her approaching me and befriending me was one of the big reasons I could think the harassment was ending.  I never really let my guard down around her, but she was pretty cool about it. “And for most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break, nothing.  They were leaving me alone.  I was able to relax.” I sighed, “That ended the day I came back from the winter break. I knew, instinctually, that they were playing me, that they were waiting before they pulled their next stunt, so it had more impact. I didn’t think they’d be so patient about it. I went to my locker, and well, they’d obviously raided the bins from the girls bathrooms or something, because they’d piled used pads and tampons into my locker. Almost filled it.”

the precise moment when she stopped consciously anticipating and preparing to react to abuse--when she relaxed, when she stopped acting as if the lack of danger didn't mean that she couldn't still be hurt at any time--is when she was brutally reminded that she's never safe. she's still in the panopticon. she isn't literally being watched every second, she isn't literally in lifelong danger of having her vulnerabilities exploited, but it feels like she is. she can never ever be sure she's safe.

so she triggers, and she gets a power that turns her into a panopticon, and lets her watch everyone right back. it lets her regain control by turning her into a source of danger that could attack anywhere, from any direction, any time, fully unexpected.

& the reason her power enables her to watch Everyone--not just a single person, or a few people--but Everyone, is that the other major aspect of her trigger is the trauma of facts like this:

“It was pretty obvious that they had done it before the school closed for Christmas, by the smell alone. I bent over to throw up, right there in a crowded hallway, everyone watching. Before I could recover or stop losing my breakfast, someone grabbed me by the hair, hard enough it hurt, and shoved me into the locker.”

"All I could think was that someone had been willing to get their hands that dirty to fuck with me, but of all the students that had seen me get shoved in the locker, nobody was getting a janitor or teacher to let me out."

for months, for years, she was in a community where everyone regularly witnessed her humiliation and abuse, and everyone, dozens and dozens of kids and teachers, either contributed to it or was knowingly, silently complacent. this is what sticks with her: the idea that she is so universally reviled, so deserving of revile, that any crowd of witnesses would, without hesitation, consign her to the filth of the locker.

what else is she supposed to conclude, but that everyone she interacts with is a threat? that she can't drop her guard ever again, because no one will be coming to help her if she does? of course she has to become the panopticon. of course she has to watch everyone, all of the time, if she wants to stop it from happening again. of course she has to live among the teeming lowly and crawling things she has been taught via one firm shove that she is worth less than, and of course she has to use them to watch everyone back. and it would be inaccurate to say that doing this--monitoring everything with her bugs--makes her feel safe. all it does is allow her to remain in a constant state of paranoia and traumatized hyper-vigilance more efficiently.

Actually maybe Wildbow’s tendency to issue poorly thought out proclamations about his stories to win arguments with his fans is a good thing, as it forcibly introduces otherwise naive readers to the idea of the death of the author

The thing with the epilogue, is that in 30.7 when Contessa asks whether Taylor was a monster, a bully, or whether she “was really a hero” I took it to mean that her decision on whether to save Taylor or not was based, at least partially, on the answer to that question. If this is accepted, then the answer to whether the epilogue is real is also the answer to whether she was ultimately a monster or a hero and vice versa.

whats the general consensus on wormblr about what happened to taylor? i dont see people talk about the final chapter very much, but when they do it seems they usually take the text at face value, that taylor is powerless and on earth aleph (my preferred interpretation). but elsewhere on the internet people discuss the wog more, and a lot more people seem to believe she died or is in a coma or something other than stuck on aleph.

This moment in particular is super special to me, out of all of worm. Is the starkest window into her inner world, this is probably the first and only time where she actually expresses out loud to another person the fact that she actually took some pride in being a bad ass supervillain, where she actually gloated about being "bad". She was aware of how deranged she was and she actually liked it a little.

This is a taylor we almost never get to see