Have a present thing throughout the rest of the comic being small panels showcasing various bug perspectives/her sense with bugs, then the water hits and it’s just her water obscured view with nothing else
Imagining a nice segment of the comic adaptation of the Leviathan fight as seen entirely through Taylor's water obscured lenses as carnage ensues
You’re right and I agree with you but I wanted to try and justify it so this is a quick and not super thought out explanation, it could be him being with Dragon and chasing the Nine are meant to be him at his peak while the Leviathan fight is his lowest point
it’s been pointed out how him being in Brockton was the worst possible option for him, stuck in a dead end position with enemies he’s not really suited to deal with, no one he’s really close to, all his shit with Dauntless and dealing with the recent ABB crisis and everything else, all just emphasizing his worst traits, the Leviathan fight is the bottom of a years long spiral with it being his seeming salvation, getting him respect and removing problems only for it to go wrong
meanwhile him hunting the S9 with Dragon is both him out of that situation but also putting his traits and abilities that got him to that point to full use, he finally has someone he’s close too, he’s making real progress using his abilities (both hunting the S9 and helping Dragon) he’s doing something that will earn him respect and glory but tempered by having Dragon there to reign him in and an actual focus on finishing the job
admittedly him and Dragon are still weirdly similar it is to his supposed trigger event but still this is all just random surface thoughts and probably wrong jut thought i’d try to justify it
i do feel like colins arc is a little weird. i don't have anything against transhumanism as a concept, past finding a lot of transhumanists as People really annoying, but I find it odd that mannequin comes to colin, goes "you and I are the same, and you should do the same thing I did and become less human", and then Colin does, and the story kind of treats it as a value neutral choice. in isolation, i would totally find replacing your body with robot parts to be value neutral, but we're not operating in isolation, we're working with a scenario where the bad guy told colin to do this thing, he does it, and it doesn't... mean anything. in fact, his identity as defiant is meant to be a better version of him, a humbler one, compared to colin as armsmaster. it's just very odd narratively -- it makes me wonder if wildbow is quietly a die-hard transhumanist and didn't want to introduce dissonance by condemning a transhumanist action even in a context where the narrative positions it as part of a corruption arc, or if he had enough transhumanist followers that he didn't want to tick off by doing that (im leaning towards the latter but i dont know when exactly yud recommended worm to his devotees within the storys publishing history)
in addition and separately to that, its super fucking weird that the PRT says that they can't account for colin because he escaped and there's this sense that he's gonna Do something and/or possibly leave the city without knowing about the s9s condition that no candidates can leave the city, only for him to.... literally never at any given point show up during the s9 arcs after his arc 11 interlude
i’ve never seen it but supposedly the show Static Shock has something similar to this with one character having super intelligence and making machines but then one episode has him lose his powers and his equipment stops working despite the fact that in most pieces of media this wouldn’t happen
“Even my most loyal. Bitch of a thing to do. Not the actual procedure of sticking the things inside their heads. After the first twenty, I could do the surgeries with my eyes closed. Literally. I actually did a few that way.”
i'm sure there's at least some of it out there that i'm not aware of, but worm is genuinely the only superpowered media i can think of off the top of my head where technology-based superpowers feel this meaningful. tinkers in worm aren't just people toting around sci-fi weapons that feel ubiquitous in the setting, they're the only people who have those weapons, and they have them because they're breaking the rules for how technology should work on a very fundamental and unnerving level. i would like to hear someone with more complete knowledge of the genre at large talk about this (@artbyblastweave ?) because something about how tinkers are written in worm feels special to me. like, from my not-very-into-cape-media PoV it feels like in most other works people w/ the tech-based powers aren't explicitly doing anything special--it's typically presented as if what they're doing is fully plausible within the normal bounds of the universe in question, and their reliance on it might even make them less interesting or more vulnerable than people with "real" superpowers. batman, iron man, etc. and worm sidesteps this entirely by not only giving tinkers extremely inventive, iconic, and powerful toolkits, but by constantly casually reinforcing that what they're able to do is just as unnatural as someone shapeshifting or shooting lasers. bakuda doing brain surgery with her eyes closed! riley making functioning blood replacement out of shit she scrounged up in her kitchen! it doesn't matter if you take the tech away, because their schtick as a cape isn't having the money to put together a purportedly-regular power suit or bag of gadgets, it's having the ability to build a bomb with a couple of nails and the lint in their pocket in the 5 minutes someones back was turned. i simply cannot go back to media where people with gadget-based cape identities don't textually have inhuman capabilities with technology after reading worm, because worm just Does It Better
Now i’m not smart but i think there’s definitely also something to be said about Doctor Mother and her relationship with Fortuna
as you said an 8 year old killed god, is completely separate from her family and life has one connection whose first thought is, we need to kill god
Doctor Mother was her one guiding light her one connection and all the sudden she’s just gone, the woman who more or less instructed Fortunas every action just dead
now as i said i’m not smart but i’m sure there’s something here
Fortuna my beloved... she's such a compelling character I wish we had more of her. She was like 8 when she killed a god and learned the world was going to end. 8 years old when she got the power to do anything she wants, except it's never enough to solve the one problem she cares about. 8 years old when she left behind everything she knew for a battle that seemed completely hopeless, and in the end she hardly mattered despite all the parts of herself she threw away for the cause. Some (bad) fics portray her as a complete dumbass, someone who can't even walk without her power, and frankly I want to throw rocks at them because no! That's not her! She's still a person without her power, but I don't think she knows who that person is. It's something we see so often through worm, a character spends so much time with the mask on that they hardly exist when it's off, and using her power is the mask for her. She doesn't know what she would enjoy for recreation, what music she'd like, she doesn't know what it's like to have a friend that she talks to with the mask off because the mask is glued to her face by this point, and it's heartbreaking. After Scion dies, she's left to realize that she doesn't need her mask anymore, but there's barely anything left underneath. She's done so much horrible shit and stopped caring about herself or others in the name of the goal she set to save the world, and now when she tries to figure out who she is there's nothing of Fortuna left, only Contessa.
And all of this lines up with Taylor, they're so so similar in every way, which is what makes the final conversation in 30.7 so heartbreaking. Fortuna wants to know if it was worth it, if there's anything left of Taylor in there, because she's wondering the same questions about herself and desperately wants answers. Because what do you do when all your life was for nothing? When you've thrown away your humanity to be a speck in the grand scheme of things? How do you move on and find yourself without letting the guilt tear you apart once you let yourself feel something again?
there’s something else that’s really interesting about Scion that’s revealed in this chapter though
and that is that Scions an asshole
now that feels obvious with him blowing up Britain but specifically because of how Jack convinces Scion to start killing he tells him to do what his ancestors did which for Entities is the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do
the whole point of Entities is to stop entropy since they realized the old way of just fighting an consuming was going to cause them to die out and yet Scion decides to revert to the old ways and kill everything and there by ruining the Simulation and stopping any progress on the entropy problem which is the exact opposite of what Entities want to do
this means to other Entities specifically Scions a huge self important asshole
Very confused by sting interlude 3; don’t really get what happened
to be fair a lot of it is new user who just finished Worm wanting to express their thoughts or having just made a realization and wanting to say it which I’d say is actually nice if a bit stupid
I love r/parahumans so much. "let's get something straight jack slash is NOT that clever" WE KNOW. let's get something straight the sky IS blue circles ARE round. are we going to learn our ABCs next
Worm (2011) but theyre all muppets
So when Sabah joins the Undersiders shes literally just drawing on angry eyebrows with a felt marker
I definitely feel like worm, and the fanfics, are at their best when it's "worm the dark superhero story" and not "worm the superhero sci fi story".
Just sort of weakens the setting and world? And I hate how much of a sword of damocles Scion is for so many fics because if you don't change enough about the setting to where Gold Morning doesn't happen, then the plot might have to go there and that doesn't feel like it works for every fic. I admire a fic who states outright in the tags or authors notes that "Hey, Scion just fucked off to be depressed about his alien girlfriend, this story won't have a gold morning" because it lessens that narrative weight that works for canon worm, but not the plot of every fanfic.
Some of my favorite wormfics (Shamus, Postdiluvian Road) are concentrated cape stories about what being a small-time player in the world actually looks like.
Canon Worm is great for what it is, and it also has a narrow focus and pathway of escalation that I love, but I don't think the majority of fics need to follow in the footsteps of.
Haven't read Ward but every mention of stuff from Ward that I see in the wiki (Firmament, Shardspace, Titans, etc) makes me groan.
huge worm spoilers below the cut
honestly, despite the fact that it was baked into the story from the very beginning, i genuinely feel like worm and fanfiction thereof is served well by kind of ignoring the whole source behind the powers.
like obviously the Entities’ goals drive a lot of the conflict (both a storytelling term and literal fights) but frankly i feel like worm is best when it’s about the people living in a world that just kinda fuckin sucks.
‘what if everything was worse and also people had superpowers and do very human things with them’ is way better than the whole interdimensional space whales that have inserted a thing into a bunch of peoples brains that gives them superpowers but also makes them want to fight so that they can explode everything
and don’t get me started on everything in fucking ward