#wormtime 2 arc 1

[lakesbian]

I was going to be a superhero. That was the goal I used to calm myself down at moments like these. It was what I used to make myself get out of bed on a school day. It was a crazy dream that made things tolerable. It was something to look forward to, something to work towards.

i'm reminded again of what i was talking about here--taylor's obsession with being a superhero serves as a fantasy that if she takes up an alternate identity and does it Right then she can be valued as that alternate identity even if she isn't valued as taylor. the usage of "crazy dream" specifically is interesting because it's like. worm is very into meta-commentary on superhero genre conventions. it's extremely conventional in cape media for teenagers with shit lives to escape awful, boring reality via assuming alternate identities as superheroes, and earth bet textually contains its own cape media: capes marketed on lunchboxes or as dolls, teen hero capes sold as a sort of teen celebrity, etc. it's an interesting divergence from most cases of teenage characters escaping from Shit Reality via magic or supernatural circumstances because those circumstances are usually thrust upon said teenagers unexpectedly--like, "surprise, magic is real, and also you're special and involved in it now!" but here, taylor knows that superpowers are real, and she's actively being fed the dream of escaping from her Shit Life via the PRT's ubiquitous societal presentation of capes as popular and morally stand-out figures. cape media about the dream of escaping from Shit Teenage Life via being a superhero literally exists within the universe of worm, and taylor wants to believe in that dream. so we're already being set up to see the conflict btwn her belief in that dream and her realization as to the realities of caping within worm's universe. and i think it's a really fun bit of genre subversion/commentary that how capes usually work in the genre as a whole are not how they actually work in worm, but it Is how the prt Wants characters to believe that it's how capes work.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers #this one isnt ordered the most coherently but im busy and tired so its what you get #we are now officially done with 1.1. onto 1.2 #parahumans

[lakesbian]

The only book in my bag that I hadn’t already read was called ‘Triumvirate’, a biography of the leading three members of the Protectorate. I was thinking I would spend as long as I could on Mr. Gladly’s assignment before reading, because I wasn’t enjoying the book. Biographies weren’t my thing, and they were especially not my thing when I was suspicious it was all made up.

obviously this is the part in a worm reread where one goes "teehee, Heehoo, so it was," but beyond that i think it's interesting that this bit establishes that taylor is already disillusioned with and distrustful of the narrative the PRT is presenting for itself, and it gets me thinking abt some of the early contradictions in taylor's behavior & thought processes we're going to see soon. her trauma has led her to deeply distrust systems of authority & society as a whole: the school system + A Lot of the children attending her school knew she was being bullied, and did absolutely nothing to intervene. this is reflected in her power--rather than being focused on control over just a few people or minions at once, it turns her into a walking panopticon, allowing her to survey (or attack!) entire swathes of a city at once. she feels that society itself is watching her and is either indifferent to or actively hostile to her, that attack could come from any direction at any time. and so she has the ability to watch everyone back, to avoid relying on any system of support by having her own thousand eyes (and as she learns how to innovate with her power later on, effectively her own thousand hands with which to control situations on a very broad level).

but despite this disillusionment with systems of authority (PRT/triumvirate included), despite her utter lack of trust in them and in people as a whole to do good, she still starts the book off by being Really Into the idea of being a hero, to the point where she places a nonzero amount of good faith in armsmaster under the very false expectation that he "owes her one" or would otherwise stick his neck out for her when all he's done is beef with her, a 15yo. (armsmaster why are you beefing with a 15yo.) and this fundamental bit of dissonance between her beliefs & her actions is because she'a internalized the idea that society is cruel and uncaring to her because there really is just something wrong with her, because she really is that ugly or disgusting or stupid or just Too Taylor for anyone to care about her. she distrusts systems of authority (& society as a whole) for not giving a shit about her, but she is not immune to the inevitable outcome of bullying wherein the bullied teenager believes that if they could Just Be Different, if they just Weren't Themselves, if they just weren't this terrible unlovable person, then maybe they wouldn't be treated this way. her initial obsession w/ being a hero is very much about that--she wants to believe that if she puts on this costume, if takes up this alternate identity and does it right, then the PRT will value her, then a system of authority & society as a whole will finally accept her and recognize her as something good and treat her fairly. which is a belief that we'll see ruthlessly shredded as she tries time and time again to place some last bit of trust in the PRT to not be Totally Ghoulishly Awful and the PRT breaks that trust every single time :)

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers #scarf don't look #parahumans

[lakesbian]

was doing a bit of Thinkin about bakuda due to my worm reread liveblog. she is very much a stereotypical fiery asian woman with blue eyes--shitty mundanely racist caricature alongside savage-yet-honorable lung--but it feels like there's just enough meat there that it's easy to imagine what bakuda could be if worm was really really good instead of just really good. which is why i was sitting in the shower for 10 minutes rotating her in my mind.

this little background detail:

Armsmaster nodded, “Not surprising. She’s new. What we know about her is limited. She made her first appearance and demonstration of her powers by way of a drawn out terrorism campaign against Cornell University. Lung apparently recruited her and brought her to Brockton Bay after her plans were foiled by the New York Protectorate. This is… something of a concern.”

combined with what her powers imply about her could have some genuinely interesting implications. i'm getting into "imagine if this part of worm was better" mode here & not "analyzing what's actually explicitly in the text" mode because what's in the text is very shallow but you can dig something out of that.

she has a tinker power, and tinker powers are powers that result from traumatic rock-bottom events the person with the power saw coming from a mile away--the type of thing you desperately try to build yourself an out for, but find yourself inevitably, horrendously railroaded into anyway, to the point where it would take a miracle to escape from. and that's what the resultant power is--the type of miracle you were hoping for, coming far too late to solve your problem, and fantastically extreme in its ability to solve the sort of problem you were dealing with without actually solving any of your underlying behaviors which led you to that problem in the first place.

and what, precisely, is her tinker power? Exploding Shit Real Good. she very much comes off as the literal version of finding yourself in the midst of a shitty institution, one stacked against you, one expecting you to break yourself to succeed in it, and thinking "damn i kinda wish this entire building would explode rn." it's very easy to imagine her being the type of person some would call passionate and some would say needs to calm the fuck down, very intelligent but swamped by university's increasingly difficult barriers to success and fiscal safety, perhaps expected by society as a whole to serve as the model asian woman in a deeply racist environment--smart, hardworking, successful, and still subservient. you know, all the type of shit that would have someone going Damn I Wish This Building Would Explode And We All Die in their head every time they attend college. i've seen it put forward before that she triggered after just. abruptly failing/being locked out of something academic despite all her effort, and that's what i can envision for her: struggling to keep her head above water, knowing that she's failing to meet expectations, knowing that she's eventually not going to be able to scrape by, socially or academically. her head goes under, so to speak, everything she's been working towards is fucked despite all the effort she put in, and--having always been the type of person to explode when something that unfair or awful feeling happens--she triggers, and literally explodes. proving to the university that she's talented, she's good at something, she's got something to be proud about no matter what anyone says--and if the system won't let her have anything after all the time she spent breaking herself to fit into it, then fuck the system, she hopes it explodes.

so. thats my 2 cents on bakuda but if she was more interesting. hopefully that makes sense 👍

#parahumans #worm #wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #bakuda #i think she deserves to be allowed to be nomral person amounts of angry for understandable reasons #instead of just like. fiery asian girl trope #also can she have brown eyes. please #im not saying please im not asking. brown eyes

[lakesbian]

He was a little over six feet, though, which put him head and shoulders above most of the gang members.

i don't think i've ever seen anyone point out this particular height oddity in worm before--being 'a little over 6 feet' does not put you head and shoulders over the average height man, it puts you maybe like...half a head over them. it's kinda interesting that this one Overestimates how much 6 ft is because usually it seems like wildbow is Underestimating it (i.e. coil, neil, and brian all being in the high 6-7ft range). just something i thought was a little funny

it's also very funny how taylor just like. Wanders off into the bad part of town (tm) in expectations that she'll find some random evildoing to stop and is surprised later on when it turns out she was interfering in a gang war and not just saving innocent children. like, why would there be random children in the docks. 200 pages of Cape Planning and she has Not seriously thought about the actual mechanisms of this hero thing. local suburban white girl who understands nothing about the practical realities of crime about to become warlord of an entire city. that said:

I mean, for all I knew, he could have misled people about what his powers did, he could have a power he was keeping up his sleeve for an emergency, or he could even have a very subtle power that people couldn’t see at work.

already smart about thinking about powers :)

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers

[lakesbian]

ok interlude 1. everyone loves interlude 1. fun things happening in interlude 1 i.e. meeting danny hebert and meeting scion also.

you guys remember seeing that one tumblr post thats like. [in response to experiment where bees read a fake bee on a stick as a real bee] stupid bees. falling for a fake bee on a stick being a real bee. and then someone else is like. i bet eldritch beings are like that about us. stupid humans. falling for fake humans on a stick being real humans. you guys know that post? anyway that's what this interlude makes me think of.

“The golden man would reappear several more times in the coming months and years. At some point, he donned clothing. At first, a sheet worn over one shoulder and pinned at either side of the waist, then more conventional clothes. In 1999, he donned the white bodysuit he still wears today. For more than a decade, we have wondered, where did our golden man get these things? Who was he in contact with?

^ stupid humans. mistaking a fake human on a stick for a real human. i love the horror of this interlude in retrospect. people assuming he's miraculously curing cancer as the world's most heroic original parahuman when he's actually the nigh-incomprehensible alien that's the cause of the pandemic and was healing the cancerous person because they were a host for a parasitic part of the alien's own body that had been implanted in them.

“His pace increased, perhaps because he was still learning what he could do, perhaps because he was getting a greater sense of where he was needed. By the middle of the 1990s, he was traveling from crisis to crisis, flying faster than the speed of sound. In fifteen years, he has not rested.

this seeming to everyone else like him intentionally increasing the effectiveness of his heroics when he's just. life on a scale one cannot comprehend experiencing a mental health crisis It cannot comprehend. and oblivious to the fact that the coping mechanism he's trying is not fucking working.

“Just five years after Scion’s first appearance, the superheroes emerged from the cover of rumor and secrecy to show themselves to the public.  Though the villains followed soon after, it was the heroes who shattered any illusions of the parahumans being divine figures.  In 1989, attempting to quell a riot over a basketball game in Michigan, the superhero known to the public as Vikare stepped in, only to be clubbed over the head.  He died not long after of a brain embolism.  Later, he would be revealed to be Andrew Hawke. “The golden age of the parahumans was thus short lived.  They were not the deific figures they had appeared to be.  Parahumans were, after all, people with powers, and people are flawed at their core.  Government agencies took a firmer hand, and state-”

i love the implication that because scion was so obviously. Not Fucking Normal. people assumed the first parahumans to show themselves were also on some level deific or Above humanity. and eventually people did realize. oh these are just regular guys but with powers. leaving the mystery of why scion is Like That just kind of up in the air. you think that's ever uncomfortable for people? like it's normal, it's default, but if anyone ever thinks about it too hard while they're bored....it's weird, man.

anyway onto mr daniel hebert. i think it's really notable that his introduction is him watching tv about parahumans, then shutting it off and getting up to pace with this line being given:

It was three fifteen in the morning, and his daughter Taylor was not in her bedroom.

but then despite how this is Immediately preceded by a talk about how actually, capes are just normal guys, there's a conspicuously absent lack of danny...connecting that thought to taylor being out late. and, like, i explicitly do not think this is a flaw of danny at this point--there's no reason anyone would leap to assuming THEIR teenage family member that is just a normal person is secretly a cape bc they were out late once. but the juxtaposition btwn the tv program abt capes and his "huh. anyways" reaction is very much There and i think you can 100% view it as a start to a pattern of behavior he'll have where all common sense should lead him to taylor being a cape (just fucking. out adn about thriving post-leviathan randomly knowing shit about the s9 out there living an obvious double-life!) but he's just Completely Not Even Thinking About It. which is the same thing as the shit he does in this first interlude:

Danny thought about clearing his throat to let her know he was awake and available should she knock on his door, but decided against it. He was being cowardly, he thought, as if his clearing of his throat would give reality to his fears.

He was stopped by the smell of jam and toast. She had made a late night snack. It filled him with relief. He couldn’t imagine his daughter, after being mugged, tormented or humiliated, coming home to have toast with jam as a snack. Taylor was okay, or at least, okay enough to be left alone.

he keeps getting up in his own head where hes like. oh nooo i know shes being bullied but i cant do anything about it yelling at the school didnt work and i cant move her to arcadia. while being completely emotionally disengaged from taylor and also somehow managing to convince himself that they have some sort of trust/understanding from him Not Acknowledging It At All so its basically fine. he Genuinely believes that clearing his throat would magically inform her that hes awake and available if she wants to ask for help (as opposed to giving her a heart attack over being caught??) but can't even do that because he doesn't want to actually take the problems from like. a hypothetical he gets mad about in his head into a real life material thing hes supposed to support her thru. if he doesn't see it it can't hurt him. he's processing everything thru "well i guess shes okay enough to be left alone" while just wildly oblivious to the amount of pain shes in and he has genuinely convinced himself that he's doing the best thing of giving her the Dignity of suffering alone or whatever. convinced he's available to talk to and expecting her to come talk to him and increasingly mad she's not but not actually very obviously available to talk to. and it eventually boils over into taking away her autonomy to attempt Forcing her into talking! he has no conception of anything that isnt sitting there expecting her to do the work of emotional connection or going "you will emotionally connect with me. now. or else." this is just kind of a ramble because this will not be fun for me if i cleanly edit every single post into a masterpiece but im enjoying poasting my thoughts on a second go around hopefully theres something coherent i can crystallize

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers #scarf don't look #parahumans

[lakesbian]

Armsmaster nodded, “Not surprising.  She’s new.  What we know about her is limited.  She made her first appearance and demonstration of her powers by way of a drawn out terrorism campaign against Cornell University.  Lung apparently recruited her and brought her to Brockton Bay after her plans were foiled by the New York Protectorate.  This is… something of a concern.” “What are her powers?” “Are you aware of the Tinker classification?”

ahem. okay. i can be normal enough about alec for long enough to liveblog. just the two notes here that

i really like the specificity of Against Cornell University. this obviously isn't something you pick up on a first read but it adds so much more character to her & background credence to the idea that villains aren't just generic people doing generic terror campaigns they're people with real lives and specific breaking points and personal tragedies going on beneath the surface. like ohhhh the Evils Horrors Of The American Schooling System got you huh

good worldbuilding and [gripping people by the shoulders] GOOD FOR WORM FANFIC WRITERS TO REMEMBER that power classifications are niche military terminology used specifically by the PRT to communicate the appropriate necessary response to particular powered threats in brief enough phrasing that you could shout it out during a fight and your fellow officer would understand what it meant + have time to react to it Before they were killed badly. niche enough that armsmaster has reason to ask a newer cape if they even know what the fuck a tinker is.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1

[lakesbian]

“Hear me out.  What you’ve done tonight is spectacular.  You played a part in getting a major villain into custody.  You just need to consider the consequences.” “Consequences,” I muttered, even as the word spectacular rang in my ears.

neglected isolated teenager receiving an ounce of validation ^ surely her susceptibility to this will not result in anything interesting happening when another teenage girl with obscene levels of immediate knowledge about her starts manipulating her into a validating social connection. sometimes i remember that while from taylor's perspective her friendship with lisa grows over time lisa's fate re: caring about her That Much was sealed from the moment she first saw her and recognized the familiar misery in her and i'm like. Ough i need to lay down. Ough. I need to lay down.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers

[lakesbian]

I tugged the little canister of pepper spray free from my armor. It was a black tube, three inches long, not much thicker around than a pen, with a trigger and a safety switch.

[through tears] its. its a surprise tool that will help us later

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers #scarf don't look

[lakesbian]

After a few moments, he went on to explain, “They’re slippery. On those few occasions we do manage to get in a toe to toe fight with them, they either win, or they get away more or less unscathed, or both. We know so little about them. Grue and Hellhound were working on their own before they joined the group, so there’s some information there, but the other two? They’re nonentities. If the girl Tattletale has some way of detecting or tracking us, it would go a long way towards explaining why they’re doing as well as they are.”

neat little misleading bit of phrasing with "working on their own" wrt rachel as if she wasn't a severely neglected child who experienced an Unforeseen Incident during her trigger and has been maligned + tormented by the PRT ever since to the point where she has no feasible way to live within normal society. which is of course a 1 to 1 comparison with marginalized kids and teenagers in real life who do something completely sympathetic and understandable in origin due to their shitty position w/in society & are demonized + haunted by the police system for it.

interesting that alec is a nonentity. i do not remember how much the PRT knows about him in early worm to be frank with you all so i'm going to keep an eye for any more hints on that. you would think he wouldn't be that difficult to trace/after a year and a half of working against him they would be able to figure out where the hell he came from but I Guess Not

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers

[lakesbian]

Withdrawing his hand, the man in black jerked his thumb over one shoulder, “When we got word Lung was aiming to come after us tonight, we were pretty freaked. We were arguing strategy for the better part of the day. We eventually decided, fuck it, we’d meet him halfway. Wing it. Not my usual way of doing things, but yeah.”

okay. okay i AM going to stick to Saying Things instead of just "heehehoohhoo brian" but god i would kill to see that argument. you just KNOW from the "not my usual way of doing things" that brian thinks this plan fucking SUCKS and he HATES winging it and he wanted to pick something more Responsible and Measured but got severely outvoted. it's also so funny how brian is trying to carry on a normal conversation (tm) with taylor and she's just like. Standing there. Wobbling. it takes so long for him to think to introduce himself too. obviously large part of why taylor doesn't respond is that she's just Fucking Bewildered and doesn't know what she would say about this sudden turn of events, but it is also extremely that she's so unused to being talked to like an actual human person/approached by someone w/ 0 negative conception of her that, without a script to follow, she just defaults back on silence. so used to being hurt for whatever action she takes that in any risky scenario where saying the wrong thing is a possibility she just shuts down.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1

[lakesbian]

With a cell phone, I could have alerted the real heroes about the fact that Lung was planning to take a score of his flunkies to go and shoot kids.

points at real heroes. already insecurely viewing herself as a failure at/faux version of her desired role

As the thousands of insects and arachnids swarmed over and around the group, I could almost see the outlines of each person, just by sensing the shapes of the surfaces the bugs were crawling on, or the areas the vermin wasn’t occupying.

huh. i didn't remember that the ability to fully sense through her bugs started Quite this early

I directed the swarm to gather, so those who weren’t already biting and stinging were in the midst of the gang. If he wanted to turn his flames on the swarm, he would have to set his own people on fire.

i did remember that her machiavellian battle strategy swag started this early though <3 a weird and intelligent teenage girl with repressed anger issues is like. The Top Ever Choice. for a character w/ bug powers who is going to become exponentially and horrifically creative w/ said bug powers

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1

[lakesbian]

I felt a sadistic glee as I organized the attack on Lung.

Rationale aside, I did feel a stab of guilt about taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. I quieted that moment’s remorse by reminding myself that Lung had spread tragedy, addiction and death to innumerable families. He had been planning to kill kids.

remember everyone. there's a type of thing called "a bad person" and when someone is a bad person it's okay to enjoy hurting them. This philosophy absolutely cannot lead to anything bad or any retroactive justification of actions taken as a result of repressed anger issues. It is not fundamentally indistinguishable from what taylor will be alarmed by a certain boy w/ similar repressed anger issues to her suggesting later. She's fine. Don't worry about it.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1

[lakesbian]

He was fireproof? Or skilled enough at using fire to superheat the air around him without burning himself?

Surely he was burning up all of the oxygen in his vicinity. Didn’t he need to breathe? What the hell was the fuel source for his fire?

oh REALLY good that these are questions raised as early as 1.4. not just the author lampshading the implausibilities of the setting, but questions with Real Actual Answers That We Will Find Out Later. people in-universe are constantly going "huh. thats weird. wonder how the fuck that works out" but they certainly do not have time to stop and conduct a scientific study

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers

[lakesbian]

I couldn’t see well, but a dark shape stood out against his green t-shirt. Chances were it was a gun handle. My pulse sped up a bit as I saw the gun, which was silly. Lung was more dangerous than fifty people with guns.

this is just a little note but i really really like this as a subtle bit of worldbuilding that makes everything feel more grounded. like, the danger of guns isn't devalued within the setting--it's not "she doesn't have to worry about a gun, she's a Cape in a Cape Fight!" it's "the gun is scary, and taylor is right to be instinctively anxious, it's just that capes are even scarier." and the fact that she reacts more to the gun than to lung (despite objectively knowing that lung is more dangerous) does a good job of selling that Rationally understanding that other capes exist and are dangerous doesn't mean she actually has the full comprehension that comes from having truly fought with one.

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1

[lakesbian]

These were black widows. One of the more dangerous spiders you could find in the States. Their bite could be lethal, though it usually wasn’t, and they tended to bite with little provocation. Even under my complete control, they spooked me.

it will be less than 4-5 arcs before she's going "gee, alec, what do you mean it 'sounds creepy' to have tens of thousands of black widow spiders in your house and home?" and after that we'll get to watch her escalate to "I have bugs in my jeans. I can end this." and after That we'll get to watch her escalate to "wheres my security blanket of highly venomous insects :(." she moves impressively fast with the bug-freak-ification thing. i'm not even going to make a point about her increasingly rapid dissociation & comfort sought in an ugly and poisonous shield which mirrors her own perception of herself while firmly locking the world out i just think it's hilarious how quickly she forgets that it's normal to be afraid of black widows

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1 #worm spoilers

[lakesbian]

Danny thought about clearing his throat to let her know he was awake and available should she knock on his door, but decided against it.

EXTRAORDINARILY FUNNY SUMMARY OF WHY HE SUCKS AS A PARENT. HE THOUGHT ABOUT BLINKING TO HER IN MORSE CODE TO LET HER KNOW HE WAS AVAILABLE IF SHE NEEDED HELP BUT DECIDED AGAINST IT

#wormtime 2 #wormtime 2 arc 1