You’ve Made It Through A Difficult Year, And Picard Is Proud Of You For That!

“Who killed Palpatine?”

The X-Files is interesting in this context, since even though Mulder and Scully are our heroes and we love them, they are still FBI agents, actual official representatives of the greater American monoculture who are tasked with going to the backwaters and forgotten places and dealing with the strange and deviant for the good of the whole. To their credit, the people writing The X-Files recognized this, and there’s plenty of episodes where they depict their monsters-of-the-week with some sympathy, or handle Mulder and Scully’s incursions with a note of ambivalence.

Old tv shows where the hero visits the 'town of the week' and identifies then solves a unique problem before moving on are so weird to watch now. "Route 66" to "Touched by an Angel" and etc. Any town in North America that still actually has a unique local culture wouldn't be receptive to an outsider pushing their nose into the local affairs.

Who even still thinks of turning to a pack of kind-hearted outlaws when the bank comes to foreclose on their orphanage?

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

Wait, what happened to episode 26...OH I GET IT!

Transmediacrity Episode 27: We Haven't Killed The Abrahamic God Since The SNES

Jupiter's electromagnetic field contains THE POWER.

Esther is back from the battle of the Trinary Star System. Now the course of history can resume.

Topics include: the state of liberal propaganda on television; the GameGriper; shitting on the sidewalk to own the libs; my first move since I became a full grown idiot; Esther kept playing Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse and she’s here to say; which society sounds best; Dagda; SMT Scathach vs dope baedysuit queen; Dagda’s mom; there’s still the Abrahamic god; WHY DON’T THEY PUT PERSONA ON THE ~SWITCH~; Madiha beat Doom 2016 and she has Feelings; FPS raid boss; strafing enemies across the entire room; worth $60; overwhelmed by SNAPMAP; game development teams are a mini Ship of Theseus; Millennial John Carmack’s “Woke Doom”; Madiha is still reading HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; Somnium lore; eldritch horror; our listeners should really listen to Betterman Anime Club; Madiha deep Betterman lore cuts for 20 minutes; WE STAN MICATEAM; WE WILL SHILL YOUR GAME FOREVER; Girls Frontline is good; team 404 is good and strong and my friends; Esther played the Shin Megami Tensei mobile game; steampunk patrick klepeck; gun otaku girl; brand new assets; the comments on the demons; Madiha sends hatemail; if you have more sentience than Madiha, who is turing incomplete, send us that mail; Kizuna Ai poppin’ the biggest bottles.

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Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)

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Pour one out for all the stories you'll never find again, that you barely remember in totality, but that left an impression on you that you'll never forget.

The short stories from standardized tests that you only had a few minutes to read, but those minutes will last a lifetime.

The books on the library display shelf you used to occupy time until your mom could come pick you up from school.

The graphic novel you picked up when you were first getting into comics and could never find again.

The single lines or themes from stories you otherwise don't remember, save for the one thing that you saw and internalized as a new part of your personality.

Let's pour one out for the books that built us, even if we never could find them again, and couldn't of we wanted to.

Deathloop is a weird one because it takes place in "a possible future" of the Dishonored series. The game is set about 130 years after the first two games on an out-of-the-way island outpost that's been completely cut off from the rest of the world via time nonsense, and while there's enough incidental detail for a Dishonored fan to make the connection, Deathloop itself goes out of its way to avoid namedropping anything from the earlier games.

More games should do the Disco Elysium/Deathloop thing of pretending that they're in our world before gradually revealing that it's a constructed world that has fuck-all to do with our world

I’m actually almost through the campaign right now and...man, you weren’t kidding. As I always say, if a Wolfenstein game has a more nuanced portrayal of mass murder than your story does, you need to sit back and reassess a few things.

At least the guns look neat, tho.

There’s tomfoolery brewing in Squad 7! Bigoted tomfoolery! In this episode Madiha sticks up for the little girl, struggles to drive a tank, and goes looking for a bridge. Who wins, 5 scouts, or 1 speedy girl? Check out our Patreon!

There's another Worm connection in No Man's Land with Poison Ivy. As the rest of Batman's rogues' gallery carve up Gotham, she ends staking out a derelict city park and caring for a bunch of kids who were orphaned or otherwise abandoned after the earthquake. Rather than rousting her out, Batman agrees to leave her alone for the time being, provided she uses her powers to generate produce for the rest of the surviving citizens to eat. While Ivy was less than pleased about having to go along with this, she still held up her end of the deal.

In his own discussion of Ivy's history on Twitter, Exalted_Speed has argued that No Man's Land is really where the interpretation of Ivy as an antihero (ahem) took root. The connection with Worm is obvious; however, Taylor's tenure as urban warlord feels like a more refined version of that concept. As noted in the thread, the attempts to turn Poison Ivy into an antihero often stumble on both the sheer amount of carnage she's caused over the years and on with her original characterization of "vicious plant-themed Catwoman" which is still a major element in her modern portrayals. By contrast, it's much easier to offer apologetics of Taylor's conduct on the Boardwalk, since she was explicitly written to fit the role that Pamela Isely was awkwardly retrofitted to play.

Got a Worm meta question for you. I'm starting on the early parts of Taylor's warlord era - I'm about to leap into Arc 13 - and the general concept of a ravaged American city being divided up by various supervillain groups is reminding me a lot of that Batman story arc No Man's Land from the late 1990s. Unfortunately my comics knowledge is rudimentary at best, and I haven't been able to any discussion comparing the two stories, so I was wondering if I could pick your brain on the subject. Was it just convergent evolution, or was Wildbow engaging with the Batman story in some way?

I myself have only read about half of No Man's Land- and several years ago to boot- so I've got limited ability to do a direct compare and contrast. No Man's Land is absolutely the sort of status-quo-shattering, history-book-making upset that, within Marvel and DC, nonetheless always inexplicably heals and loses salience until you can barely tell that it's still in continuity. Worm is heavily informed by Wildbow's irritation with that sort of thing, so I think it's totally reasonable to view the warlord era through the lens of "What if No Mans Land had no editorial escape hatch." Alternatively, I think it kind of makes sense to view it through the lens that it's working backwards from the premise of No Man's Land- In what kind of setting would it be plausible for the Federal Government to write off a sufficiently-damaged American City? In what context would the legal infrastructure have been established for that, in what context would that even fall within the Overton Window? What muddies my opinion on this is that the general concept of a ravaged, atmospherically-apocalyptic American city torn up by superpowered gang warfare is something that's kind of just been in the water in superhero comics since the mid-eighties at least, and it was a relatively common thing to see during the Dark Age- they were choice prey for all those overpouched musclemen with their poorly rendered firearms. I'd be surprised if Wildbow wasn't at least aware of No Man's Land, but it's definitely not the only cape book from the late 90s or early oughts where you could pick up that idea from. Ultimately this leaves me unsure if No Man's Land is the specific referent or if it's just part-and-parcel with trying to do an involved, thoughtful take on what cape comics were like at the time.

Kuvira thinking about crushing you like a bug

The duality of cat.