#wormtime 2

[lakesbian]

attention everyone we have reached my personal favorite Line in worm

I stepped toward Sundancer and offered a hand to help her up.  She flinched away. Oh.  My hands were bloody.  I dropped the offered hand to my side. “Let’s go,” I suggested.

there are a lot of good Lines in worm, and while i will acknowledge that many of them are sort of objectively more powerful culminating moments than this one, this one is still My Personal Favorite. Oh. My hands were bloody.

it's been obvious through the early arcs that taylor has a lot of repressed anger: she beats the shit out of rachel, even after being bitten. she outright admits to the other undersiders that she hasn't taken subtle revenge on the trio at school because she's afraid she would take it too far/it would obviously be her. she is, initially, unnerved by violence: she's a bit scared by the gun present in the loft, it creeps her out that brian knows every way to break a person's body, she feels guilt about the idea of any civilians being hurt during the bank robbery. but she still beat up rachel, and she still shoves bugs up the wards' noses during the robbery, and she still gleefully rides rachel's dog and laughs and hollers from the joy and the adrenaline rush of victory afterwards.

the expression of this repressed anger thru violence escalates further when her concussion leads her to slapping emma in the mall. in the principal's office, when it's clear that nothing she or her dad says will garner help with the bullying, she shouts and slaps papers off the table and asks what would happen if she brought a knife to school. after she and her dad leave the meeting, she calls lisa:

“Hey.  How did it go?” I couldn’t find the words for a reply. “That bad?” “Yeah.” “What do you need?” “I want to hit someone.”

lisa invites her to a raid on the ABB so she can do that, and it's soo. Sooo Very. to watch how she cuts loose on it. she's so angry rachel notices it in how she's standing, and she's still confused about how rachel noticed. she's a confident leader when the fight goes crisis mode, she responds to rachel bucking against her orders by consistently shouting at rachel to "NOT fuck with me right now," she acts nigh-suicidally aggressive during her fight with lung, and she snarls "don't fucking underestimate me" when she takes him out using a caterpillar dipped in newter's blood.

all of this happens in relatively subtle increments. she doesn't notice how she progressively becomes comfortable expressing herself and taking charge instead of withdrawing or acting insecurely during the course of the mission. she doesn't notice that she's not horrified by dealing with newter's wound or seeing the sniper's broken leg. back in unmasked society, she was forced to consider how many of her aggressive actions were the result of the concussion loosening her impulse control--here, she repeatedly yells at bitch without a second thought. it's a place where her violence and anger isn't only acceptable but necessary. the circumstances normalize her outbursts and comfort with violence to her, leaving her blind to how alienated and dissociated and repressed and traumatized and furious and just Fucked Up she has to be to face down lung and then dig his eyes out.

when she says that she "doesn't believe in eye for an eye," in arc 4 alec asks her why the fuck she's a supervillain. his implicit assertion is clear: being a villain is, for him, about taking your revenge for being hurt out on whoever you can manage or justify, even if they're not the person who originally hurt you. and taylor thinks she's not doing that. but hey: she goes beyond just "hitting someone" and into literally taking lung's eyes as a culmination of the cathartic violence she's been engaging in as recompense for how she was mistreated earlier.

and the person who serves as a more "normal" reference point for how far taylor just escalated is sundancer: horrified by the idea of having to use her sun to hurt people, shocked by how casually violent taylor has been, flinching away from taylor when she turns to sundancer after committing that violence & tries to offer sundancer help.

because, oh. her hands are bloody. she hadn't even noticed how bloody they were getting, but they are.

deeply evocative one-line reminder of how taylor has changed in these first five arcs, without even noticing. and the best part is that, while the imagery of "oh. my hands were bloody" does convey that change in an incredibly brief and powerful way, the fact that taylor is saying it still means even she hasn't really realized. she thinks it's mainly just about the superficial, literal blood on her hands, and not the metaphorical blood on her hands that sundancer is disturbed by. it's good.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 5 #wormblr #parahumans

[beegswaz]

fish love me women fear me should note her hair isnt ACTUALLY see-through i just didnt want it obscuring the outfit

design notes under tha cut smth smth reblog this i beg of u

heres the screenshot of The design board, as u can See wormtimes design was inspo and Sorta what kicked this off..??

honestly the vibe i was Going with was LITERALLY just pirate, its was i Latched onto first and its what i was goin with. SECOND vibe was sea monster, as u can see by the leviathan image And the siren image (which the idea Was scrapped i just went with lavi)

nothing was colour picked it was All sorta done by eye, i had a hard time figuring out How the colours would sit with each other (i went through like Several. different blues for the jacket ALONE before i was.. tolerant of how it Looked with everything else)

ignore the uncoloured lineart on The tail. i just noticed that 😭😭

i genuinely think this is The best ive ever drawn anyone, and like. god this was So much fun to work on, i literally conceptualised this on the Spot and ran with it (which ISNT good art habits but whatEVER i just watch 7 different hermits FISH give me a BREAK)

applestrudas designs Of the magic mountain people also inspired me (as Seen with the bell earring) just A tad

heres the original concept + Sketch of the design

honest 2 god i started with The little details and the BOOTS. before actually sketching the rest Of the outfit. originally the sash Was gonna be a belt, but the dimensions of it ended up Looking weird enough for me to scrap it entirely. bonus doodle i was Gonna add to the main thing but forgot to. more Sea beast gem!!

ok time for The close-ups (not a lot, everything is Fairly visible)

the boots get A close-up bc SHUT UP I LIKE HOW I DREW THEM :(

tis all :p bye bye reblog my art or dont idrc anymore

#rad1oart #hermitcraft #hermitcraft fanart #hermitcraft s10 #hermitcraft season 10 #geminitay #geminitay fanart #thats right u get ALL of the main tags NO ONE is safe from my gem design. mwahaha.

[xxlovelynovaxx]

Okay this is so funny like:

Image txt: my absolute favorite type of blog on here is the sort where they're wildly disproportionately aggressive and demeaning on random peoples posts, often with a tinge of underlying bigotry (most commonly ableism), and then when you click on their bio it says "bad takes" in there. sorry you feel the need to preemptively self-deprecate but, like, you're not wrong

*goes to blog*

Image txt: iota / butch / he/she/they / adult / white & tme / liveblogging a worm analysis reread at #wormtime 2:)

My sibling in Cthulhu you also have "bad takes" in bio. "white and tme"

Oh look, a bad take:

Img txt: TUMBLR RECOMMENDING ME SOMEONE WHO BELEIVES IN TRANSMISANDRY HELLO... [throws up in a bush] #what is WRONG with men

Imagine calling people out for bigoted bad takes and then being transandromisic. Couldn't be me

#sorry for the img txt IDs rather than regular image ids #it's solely text in the images and brain is not working properly rn

[ikonist]

favorite albums of 2019

hi guys!! i was tagged by @carthe-garden to do this (thank you lovely!!!); not all of these were released in 2019, but these were the ones i listened the most this year.

in order:

LOVE PART 1 (colde)

Sinto Muito (DUDA BEAT)

BLUESMEN (baco exu do blues) *favorite of them all

Puberty 2 by mistki

MUGGLES’ MANSION (code kunst)

HIGHS TO LOWS (lolo zouaï)

TRADITION (monsune)

GINGER (BROCKHAMPTON)

MAP OF THE SOUL: PERSONA (BTS)

i tag: @snakescript @m8nstruck @northfox @wormtime @explicitcherry @cordillere @petrorhagia @wooseok @gaaura @libnani  if you want of course!! <3

#t: self #tag game #those album covers did NOT match

[lakesbian]

“Some history?” Sundancer murmured. “I made his crotch rot off.” She turned to stare at me. “Accidentally.” “How do you-” she started, then she stopped as Lung’s growl rose in volume enough to turn her head.

its so funny how taylor must look from sundancers perspective. Unreasonably Tall. causing omnipresent bugs. declares herself to be new to caping. tries to cheerfully small talk with her by asking overpersonal questions about her team and then reacting with genuine surprise when sundancer is like "uh, no, i don't have fun being a villain, it's violent and sucks." says she's going to Scout Out bomb traps with bugs and then somehow sets them off. the bombs. with the bugs. randomly incredibly confident in directing first aid for a severe knife wound. a 15 foot tall dragon man shows up, is pissed at her personally (yells "YOU"), and she confidently goes "yeah, me." and then says that she made dragon man's dick rot off. Accidentally. like what is sundancer supposed to extrapolate from this if not "this girl is some sort of freak who, in her brief amount of time being a villain, has discovered an intense affinity for grotesque violence, and is really confused that not everyone else feels the same"

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 5 #wormblr #parahumans

[lakesbian]

item one: during the fight with bakuda, bakuda detonates a bomb that melts a hostage of hers into Flesh Goop. alec says the guy being melted into Flesh Goop "...was pretty cool." he is clearly making this statement for the purposes of a. getting bakuda to preen and monologue (thus prolonging the time until she decides to explode the undersiders) and b. trying to get bakuda to let him near the Flesh Gooped body (presumably so he could grab the gun the hostage had been holding while still alive and ungooped). nonetheless, the statement is genuine, which is the only reason why it actually works for getting her to monologue

item two: after taylor knocks lung out a second time, she calls tattletale's phone to ask tattletale to confirm that lung will regenerate any missing body parts before she pries his eyeballs out. alec answers instead, and ignores taylor's code yellow to immediately say "You wouldn’t believe it. We found one of Bakuda’s workshops. The stuff she has here is crazy." when taylor says that she needs to talk to tattletale, he tells her that "She’s checking the place for booby traps. Distractions probably aren’t a good idea." this implies that lisa felt she needed to be so careful while checking for traps that she couldn't even risk keeping her phone on her and being startled by a ringtone or distracted by a call, hence why it was alec's job to hold her phone and act as her secretary.

item three: "crazy" is at least one or two steps up in magnitude from "pretty cool," as far as descriptions of how interesting something is go. it can thus be assumed that whatever was in the workshop was severely more alarming than watching a guy get melted into Flesh Goop

conclusion: i like to imagine that whatever they found in bakuda's workshop was absolutely batshit fucking nightmare-inducing insane and lisa was literally having a more stressful day than taylor doing 5000 calculations per second to keep everyone from blowing up forever while alec stood in a corner and did a very polite job of not touching anything

[lakesbian]

compilation of moments that make it really funny to me when people argue that taylor doesn't scan as genuinely attracted to men:

Without glancing my way, he placed his hand over top of mine to adjust the angle a fraction. The contact made me feel like someone had plucked a guitar string that ran from the top of my head down through the middle of my body. A deep thrum deep inside me that couldn’t be heard, only felt. I was very glad for the long sleeves of my top as goosebumps prickled my arms.

He moved in closer to get a better look as he put a nut on the bolt, and his arm pressed against my shoulder. Again, it prompted an almost elemental reaction from my body.

His arm wasn’t pressing against my shoulder, now, but the way he was crouching, his face was only a few inches from my own. Okay, that was worse. “Taylor, you think you can grab that smaller wrench without moving the leg?” I didn’t trust myself to respond without making a funny noise, so I just reached for the little wrench and handed it to him.

I did, dropping it into his cupped hand rather than placing it there, worried about what I might do or how I’d react if my hand touched his. I wasn’t going to survive the next three table legs like this, let alone the stools or the third piece of furniture we hadn’t even started.

she is literally so horny she needs to be anesthetized before she enters stage three advanced heart failure. by god is she obsessed with tits but you cannot possibly argue that worm isn't selling the idea that taylor is rabidly attracted to brian. she's like i can't let our hands touch i might actually die in real life. someone needs to take her out onto the balcony for a second and spritz her with water to cool her down. she's not going to fucking make it

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 6 #wormblr #parahumans

[lakesbian]

Grue approached me, “I ran out.  Got extras?” I handed him a fistful of the wrist ties.

Grue wrestled with a gang member with an injured leg, twisting the guy’s arms behind his back and then punching him in the kidney when his struggling made it too difficult to get the plastic handcuffs on.  The guy gave up the fight. “You got any plans for tomorrow?” I turned my attention away from the unconscious girl I was cuffing and looked at Grue. “Well?” he asked. “I’m planless.  No plan,” I fumbled my words.

“Want to come over to my place?  I’m supposed to have a group meeting to discuss progress and whatever for this online class I’m taking, but I’ve also got my sister’s caseworker stopping by to check out my apartment in the afternoon.  I was hoping to buy some furniture and get it put together by then, but I’m tight on time and it’ll be a hell of a lot easier with two people,” he told me, “…and that was a rambling explanation.” “I got the gist.  Yeah, I could do that.” I had seen him smile that boyish grin of his often enough that I could picture it behind his mask. “I’ll text you with the time and address?” “Alright.” He gave me a very ‘guy’ clap on the shoulder, then headed over to catch up to a guy that was trying to crawl away, a little ways down the street.

>lie about running out of wrist ties for detaining people during the gang war the team of teenagers is participating in as an excuse to come talk to taylor >ask taylor on implicit date while punching someone in the kidneys >get nervous and start rambling while trying to justify the invitation >his date idea is taylor helping him put together furniture for his IKEA showroom ass apartment so he can convince his younger sister's caseworker that he is a very normal 40yo 17yo adult man and should be given custody of her immediately >literally just punched someone in the kidneys during a gang war >she says yes >freak out from the successful invitation, respond by awkwardly clapping her on the shoulder like she's a male friend and then hustling off to detain a crawling escapee from the gang war >all of the gang war detainees had to sit there and listen to that >he still genuinely has no idea that he's romantically attracted to her and is going to friendzone her on the date by going "uh, you could be like a sister to me, i think"

brian laborn, everyone. youve gotta love him

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 6 #wormblr #parahumans #HES INCREDIBLE. I FORGOT HE WAS THIS FUNNY #WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HIM #I REPEAT. HE HAS NO IDEA HE HAS A CRUSH ON HER

[lakesbian]

taylors autuism swag in arc 5. absolutely BOMBS that conversation with sundancer. sundancer, what do you mean you find being a villain violent and lonely? you dont find it cool fun and exciting to hang out with your team? removes someones eyeballs. somewhat confused when sundancer is disturbed by the eyeball removal. gets worried about sounding Lame and Sarcastic and Getting A Bad Grade At Conversation when she says no-problem to someone who just thanked her for saving his life. distributes illegally obtained cash like fucking party favors to a group someone on her team is beefing with with zero regard for villain politics. Unprompted asks if Labyrinth is autistic. The stone is being thrown from a glass house. Love her.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 5 #wormblr #parahumans

[lakesbian]

“Autistic?” I guessed. He shook his head, “No, though we thought that, at first.  Seems she was a normal kid until her powers showed up.  Since then, she’s been off in her own little world, more or less.  A little worse right now, I think, after seeing me hurt.”

it's so funny when characters in worm have conversations that are like "oh, is that person [insert neurodivergency or mental illness]?" / "oh, no, no, definitely not, they're just impacted by [power that is obvious metaphor for neurodivergency or mental illness in the 'powers as metaphor for neurodivergency or mental illness' book]."

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 5 #wormblr #parahumans

[lakesbian]

the thing about amy is that imo her dream life isn't a world where she can date victoria because they aren't sisters, but a world where she's actually the sister victoria thinks she is and new wave wants her to be. because that is a scenario where she'd Belong. and the happiest her life can get is when she gets to live out a facsimile of that fantasy of belonging. getting held up during a bank robbery blows, obviously, but 3.11 is--up until tattletale shows up--a good day for her, in terms of getting to feel like a real dallon.

she texts victoria for help, and victoria shows up guns-blazing, issues an awe-inspiring display of force for her, calls her "sis," and asks if she's okay. amy beams about that. victoria says that because taylor is holding a member of new wave hostage, the entire family & extended family will show up to help her--and amy isn't really a dallon in the same way victoria is, but it must be wonderful to feel included for a moment. to be united with victoria against a criminal instead of being an object of scrutiny. here, the criminal is bad and wrong, and victoria is good, and amy gets to be good with her.

victoria lords the protectorate's wealth over taylor by mentioning that they were at a country club eating mousse. (how desperate do someone's life circumstances have to be, compared to the dallons, for them to try robbing a bank?) amy follows suit, laughing and commenting "isn't the mousse good?" despite the knife to her neck. she calls taylor a terrorist. she threatens to hurt her, much like how victoria threatened to hurt the gang member she was brutalizing in her interlude. she threatens to make her fat, and while this isn't intentional writing because worm is deeply fatphobic, it's fascinating to watch amy threaten taylor with making her non-normative/traditionally unattractive right after calling her a terrorist and mocking her using the wealth she's associated with.

it must be a painful reminder that the fantasy isn't real, to hear victoria talking casually about taking amy on a double date with a boy, and to hear her telling tattletale that new wave has no secrets--but at least amy can imagine for a moment that she lives in a world where she and victoria are the ideal sisters victoria thinks they are, close enough to go on double dates and share every secret. it's not real, but it's the closest she can get.

and then tattletale reminds her that she doesn't belong, that what's wrong with her is--according to what she has implicitly learned from the dallons--inherited. that she's tied to the same kind of person she just called a terrorist. (in the dallon's world of perfect, all-american, all-white, upper-middle-class cop families, criminals aren't a result of varying circumstance, they're a kind of person, and a kind of person that is always evil. a kind of person amy is, according to the world of the dallons, tainted by.)

victoria doesn't get out injury-free either, of course. aside from the unnerving reminder that her sister doesn't feel like she belongs--why might that be?--it's been impressed upon her that she has to be the dallon's perfect & untouchable golden girl, and she likes to pretend that she really is. but as tattletale says when she sees through victoria's disguise and takes her down, she's not invincible. her sister doesn't belong, and she's not invincible. that one is gonna stew in both of their minds for a while.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 3 #wormblr #parahumans #ameepy enjoyers i hope this is a satisfactory ameepy post for you.pleaes enjoy

[lakesbian]

it's so fucking funny that brian started getting into taylor because she was very practical about learning how to beat the shit out of people efficiently + professionally & now taylor is thinking about how brian's muscles are attractive specifically because they're the result of, and i quote, "...regular exercise with purpose and application." i don't even know how to describe the absurdity of this being their type in a funny way, i think they just might both be autistic? like, specifically in a new way that no one has ever been autistic before?

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 6

[lakesbian]

When I was done, I stood, sheathed my knife and backed away from Lung’s body. Shouldn’t I feel worse about this?  Shouldn’t I feel sick, or grossed out, or disturbed by the morality of it?  I didn’t even feel cold, the way Grue had described.  It just felt like something I had to do. I glanced at the two eyeballs clasped in my hand, then put them out of my mind.  I surveyed the room.  Priorities?

It's really, really, really, really, really genuinely incredible that she gets mad at Alec for purported "cold-blooded murder" later.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 5

[lakesbian]

okay so first thing i like about interlude 3. in the part of the arc prior to it, we see taylor being severely mistreated by an adult PRT member--which pushes her to rob the bank with Great Gusto, wherein she contributes to beating up a lot of largely faceless wards. the sole exception to the lack of characterization the kid cops heroes receive in the pre-interlude chapters is glory girl, who spends a decent portion of the bank robbery trying to lord herodom's perceived wealth and prestige over the undersiders:

“I helped Aegis out of a jam on my way in, so he’s keeping your little friends busy. You should also know that the Protectorate is on their way from a wine and dine with Brockton Bay’s finest at the Augustus Country Club. Can’t speak for them, but I know I’d be royally pissed if some little snots dragged me away from a chance to have the club’s chocolate mousse.”

& tattletale simultaneously reaffirms & puts down this image she wants to present by mockingly calling her "prom queen" &c. and then in interlude 3, when we finally see the personalities behind the masks for the wards, miss militia comes in and says it outright:

“She was kind enough to volunteer to come here and patch you guys up,” Miss Militia told the young heroes, “Can’t send you home with horrible injuries and hundreds of bug bites, can we? That would give away the show.”

the prestige, the purported invincibility and success of being a young hero--it's all a show covering for the fact that they're fundamentally overworked, systematically manipulated child soldiers, being regularly thrown into life-threatening situations & used as weapons to beat down on other systematically abused children (like the undersiders). which goes So well with how a critical turning point in the prior chapter is victoria presenting herself as invincible, only to be deeply wounded by tattletale correctly observing that she isn't.

and letting people see past the facade is something the PRT/herodom at large considers to be worth a chewing out--piggot is mad that glory girl was called because she caused property damage, and property damage is bad for PR. she's less concerned with aegis standing there with a punctured lung than she is the bad PR of kid win not filling out paperwork properly before using a new weapon. and yes, obviously, aegis can't die from a punctured lung or having his retina detached or his ribs snapped--but the image of a teenage boy standing there half torn to shreds while the director reams them all for not being the perfect child soldiers is viscerally grim. miss militia doesn't say "we can't send you home with horrible injuries because that would suck and be unhealthy for you," she says "we can't send you home with horrible injuries because that would give away the show." bleak!

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 3 #wormblr #parahumans

[lakesbian]

something about taylor carrying epipens around in costume is so funny to me. it's, like. carrying around bandaids and arm splints just in case you beat the shit out of someone a little TOO hard. advance preparation to medically care for the people she is planning to physically wound. deeply ominous freak behavior but can you blame her. she's got her knife to stab people with (bugs) and her gauze packs (epipens) for if/when people start bleeding out and dying after being stabbed. metaphorically speaking.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 4

[lakesbian]

“I knew he was the reason she had texted me for help, from the moment I saw her reaction.  Maybe I’d suspected there was something going on even before that, from the way her emails and texts had changed in tone.  It would explain that gut feeling I’d had that made me get over there as fast as I did.  I saw her shrink back, I felt her hold me tighter, and I went cold inside.

okay so just to set down the WoGs about this so we all know where i'm coming from

i think the biggest lie here aside from the obviously false constant reiteration he's doing that he Had No Idea Who The Man Was, No Sir is that he went cold inside...or rather i think 'i went cold inside' is a perfectly true statement, but he wants it to be taken as "i went emotionally dead inside and beat the man up like a cool and tough manly older brother and saved the day" when the reality is that he was frozen/chilled with fear from coming face-to-face w/ his abuser, and he hated himself for feeling so weak and incapable of moving/acting to protect his sister. his desire to be big + scary mixed w/ both his desire to run away/hide himself and aisha from their abuser and his mental conflation of "being able to care for people" and "being masculine/not being weak," and it resulted in the ability to generate darkness. darkness to scare people, darkness to hide him, darkness that makes him look bigger if he generates it around himself. all, of course, while he remains fundamentally vulnerable at the center.

like.

you know? You Fucking Know? brian laborn, man. & he explicitly details how this mindset was beaten into him as a child, while completely oblivious to the fact that there's anything wrong with it:

“Well my father is a hard man. Not the kind of man that’s meant to raise a son alone. I wouldn’t say he was abusive, but there’s never been any warmth to him, no charming anecdotes, no fatherly wisdom, no throwing baseballs in the backyard. The extent of our bonding was in the gym, him holding the punching bag in position while shouting at me that I was doing something wrong, staying grimly quiet if my form, my timing, the raw power of my hits were all flawless. Or we’d be in the ring, with boxing helmets and gloves on, a thirty five year old man in peak physical condition barely holding back against his fifteen year old son. He just expected me to keep up or take the hits, and I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

he has to be strong and masculine, because he's been taught that if he isn't, he will be demeaned and hurt.

so, my theory on the matter is that after he triggered from beating himself up over freezing, the little moment of him being distracted/staggered from coming out of the vision was enough for him to yell at himself in his head and kick himself into "fight" gear.

“So even if I was only fifteen, I was tall for my age, I was fit, and I knew how to throw a punch. I didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound. I put my sister down and beat my mother’s boyfriend within an inch of his life, my mother screaming and wailing the entire time. When I was done, I picked my sister up and returned to the cab. We went to my father’s that night, and we went to the police station in the morning.”

i think the emphasis he puts on Not Saying A Word And Not Making A Sound is an indicator that that's another part of the memory he really wants to revise, just like how his constant reiteration that he didn't know the man is exactly what indicates that not only did he know the man, knowing the man was very significant and scary to him. i would put, like, 20 bucks down that he's insisting that he was dead silent precisely because he was choking back tears. as 4 the last bit of his big fucking lie....

“When you throw a punch barehanded, it doesn’t leave your hands pristine. A few good swings, you connect solidly with someone’s face, someone’s teeth, and it tears the fuck out of your knuckles. It was at my father’s place that night, washing and cleaning my hands, when I saw it. It wasn’t just blood leaking out of my torn up knuckles, but there was the darkness too, like wisps of really black smoke. You hear about the trigger event, you might think it’s all about rage or fear. But I’m a testament that it can be just the opposite. I didn’t feel a fucking thing.”

i think the fixation on the violence of the thing is in part a desperate desire to prove that he's strong enough--an indicator that he's still the same scared little boy he was 3 years ago, the boy with no route out of being beaten up by his father but violence, the boy being taught that knowing how to hurt people is what keeps you safe. he's trying to turn that into something good, by hurting the "right" people, by hurting people for aisha, but he's still fundamentally under the dysfunctional impression that being a strong, masculine man who can hurt people without flinching is good and impressive and a way to keep himself and his loved ones safe. i think it's also in part that this was the first time he ever really, seriously, intentionally hurt someone, and he's still got the vivid traumatic memories of the wounds to his knuckles to prove it. i do buy that he didn't notice the darkness until he was washing his hands--incredibly vivid and compelling symbolism, and one of the top all time worm things i wish people would redraw.

i also think it's really, really funny how he's insisting that he "didn't feel a fucking thing" RIGHT after a conversation between everyone about how trigger events are the worst day of your life. it's so comically teenage-edgelordy and fake as a trigger event story! and he is telling it because he wants taylor to think he's cool! and it works! she buys that shit! so so funny that he's telling this entire ass huge fucking lie right in front of lisa too. everyone on this team is always fucking lying in front of lisa like ooh good thing no one knows i'm lying. she is basically the bravest and nicest girl on the planet ever for not tattling on him.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 4 #wormblr #parahumans #brian time brian time everyone join me for brian time