#Worm analysis

[estavionpira]

It's sososo good when Taylor asks Marissa how life in the Travellers is and she responds that she feels lonely. Taylor's whole reason for staying with the Undersiders was a desire for companionship and people who she feels like she belongs with, and that being contrasted by Marissa, who only stays with her group out of obligation to Noelle is so good. Likewise, Marissa being scared of Taylor after she gouges out Lung's eyes is such a good parallel. Marissa has an incredibly destructive power, but is scared of causing harm and limits it, while Taylor has a fairly weak power that she pulls out every trick possible to maximise the harm she can cause with it.

[artbyblastweave]

To be honest, while I know that you've discussed a Worm/Marvel "crossover" before, considering how unusually different both Ultimate Universes are from mainline Marvel, how would a crossover with Worm go for those?

(Side note: I'm mainly asking for the potential thought experiment of: what if Cauldron met the Maker and all of the immense bullshit that would result from that.)

I don't think I'm totally capable of answering the back half of this ask because I haven't read The Maker comprehensively- Aside from his pre-heel turn stint in Ultimate FF, It's basically only Secret Wars, a couple of the times Ewing used him, and the current New Ultimate Universe.

So what I find interesting about this prospect is that Worm and Ultimate Marvel are very aesthetically compatible, right, you aren't going to drop one character into the other's setting and have them constantly going "what the fuck is going on" the way you would if we subbed in 616 Marvel at it's most four-color. But the worldbuilding and themes are actually very divergent in ways that are interesting to look at. Namely-

Worm is a grim, grim setting, but it's also attempting to replicate the status quo at Marvel and DC where, despite occasional attempts at government sanction or integration, there's fundamentally a weirdly high cultural tolerance for independent vigilantism as long as the person doing it is wearing a costume. Their version of Registration- The Protectorate- is a very carrot heavy initiative, when we see Kid Win making the recruitment pitch to Chariot it's all about the support you get, the funding, the backup, the PR help. Individual street level heroes get nailed to the wall or hung out to dry all the time, but collectively, they're granted a lot of discretion in that they're allowed to exist at all. And the fundamental reason for this is that the government is scared of them. They might be able to smack down individual upstarts who try to go full warlord or revolutionary, but they don't control the overall distribution of powers and there are so many of these assholes, three-quarters of whom go career criminal due to some combination of trauma, material want, neuroticism or ideology. So any set of norms that gets as many of these people as possible to behave in a slightly-less-antisocial manner is something that they're going to roll with. Worm is a world held hostage by the typical superhero paradigm, buckling under its weight. Crucial to this dynamic is that powers aren't a man-made phenomenon, and they're barely a man-influenced phenomenon via Cauldron.

But with the Ultimate Universe, a major pillar of the deconstruction and the worldbuilding is that superheroes would not be allowed to operate in the typical wild west paradigm. There's a much stronger divide between sanctioned heroes (The Ultimates, The Fantastic Four), grey-zone heroes like the X-Men, and then the out-and-out outlaw street level heroes like Daredevil and Spider-Man. A major plot point is that Nick Fury and his spooks very predictably figure out who Spider-Man is almost immediately; he's only able to continue operating as a street-level hero in the usual manner due to Fury's implicit sanction, because Fury is trying to groom him to eventually join The Ultimates. Moreover, a lot of the rest of the street-level capes (as depicted in Millar's Ultimates) are cast as genuinely incompetent puds, only not cracked down on because there's no real reason to. (Note that I have a seething hatred for this particular beat in practice because it deprived us of an Ultimate Luke Cage worth having, but I get what Millar was gesturing at with it.) All of this, likewise, is downstream of the fact that powers are almost totally a man-made phenomenon, with almost all superhumans being downstream of Military-Industrial Complex attempts at reproducing Captain America; it's not an out-of-control supernatural phenomena that they're trying to get in on, It's a government-made phenomenon that leaks like a sieve and eventually spirals out of control. The Ultimate Universe is fundamentally about Hubris in a way that Worm isn't.

Both settings converge on a state of societal collapse due to the advent of superpowers; Ultimate Marvel was gesturing at an impending superhuman-driven World-War Three for a while before things spiraled into the comparably destructive nonsense of Ultimatum, The Maker, The (partial?) balkanization of the U.S. and the rest of the crisis cavalcade that led into the 2015 Secret Wars and the total destruction of that universe. Worm suffered the much more tightly-directed Apocalyptic Bad Time with which we're all familiar.

As for a crossover premise, I'd have to say that post-gm Taylor getting marooned on 1610 and winding up in the orbit of 1610 Peter Parker specifically- as opposed to the MCU or 616 versions, with whom I've seen this done- is an underexamined hook. Ultimate Spidey represents a deft integration of Peter's best and worst personality traits. The early-run ditko-style dickishness is recontextualized as an anger about the state of the world, the crazy-making sense that bullies and dictators appear to have free run of the world and nobody but him is doing anything about it. Which, given the state of The Ultimate Universe, falls in the middle ground between typical teenaged myopia and a sober assessment of what he's up against.

Remind you of anyone?

[f1rewalk3r]

worm is, by and large, a story about playing with common superhero tropes.

the trope i find the most interesting, is that of identity. that of masks.

when a character takes an alias, fans often can run away with it. we can see this in breaking bad with the oft-memed “this is the moment walt became heisneberg.” or star wars, with anakin vs darth vader. fans tend to see this alias as an entirely separate character, as someone whose actions are divorced from the original identity due to the construction of that mask.

but this is not the case. heisenberg is walt. walt is walt. heisenberg is the mask he wears, that he is a ruthless cold manipulative killer.

but he’s not. he’s an amateur. every time mike analyzes him, telling him he’s a time bomb, an idiot, mike is right. the viewer, and fandom, are tricked by the heisenberg’s persona. we can see this mask slip often, if we’re paying attention. moments where his manipulation is called out, and we can see the pure panic on his face. that panic is heisenberg. that panic is walt

similarly, vader is anakin. i don’t care about canon or non canon sith-magic psuedoscience. darth vader is anakin, consumed by grief, lashing out at the world due to the consequences of his own actions. (ignoring the nuances of palpy’s manipulation. this isnt a star wars lore post.)

worm, though, takes “what if you were the mask. what if the mask was you” one step further.

alec is jean paul, who is regent, who is hijack, who is one of heartbreaker’s children, forever and always, until only through a caring and loving hand he is able to step beyond, step out of cover, if you will, and be more then the mask. more than the identity. more than the power or attitude that labels him as a lazy sociopath. it is perhaps through this sacrifice that we see him at his most human.

tattletale is a mask for lisa is a mask for sarah. she can see, fundamentally, through and beyond the walls and masks that other people wear. their secrets, what they hide from others, what they hide from themselves. thus, she has no reason to let her own walls down. why would she need to? and thus, sarah fades away, and so does lisa, until there is only tattletale, exchanging snide comments with antares, the person who might possibly be able to understand her the most.

colin becomes so fixated on his own advancement in the prt that armsmaster burns down around him, leading him to fully enclose himself off from the world. despite this, and despite the parallels he has with the man who made him this way, he finds himself with connections. a surrogate daughter, a robot wife. he is the mask, but the mask is defiance against alan, against sphere, against mannequin. the mask says, “you are wrong. your ideology is wrong, your worldview is wrong, and in the face of a fate and world that is cold and uncaring, the only thing to do is to defy it.”

the slaughterhouse nine proudly wear the mask that says “you are your actions. so why not make those actions the worst and most harmful they can be?” the masks remain there, enforced by their leader, by the prt, by their own refusal to be anything but the worst they can be. only riley rises beyond bonesaw. only she is gently coaxed out of the shell she wears.

taylor.

oh taylor. sweetheart, beloved.

taylor, perhaps most out of all, becomes skitter. she becomes skitter to avoid being taylor, and when the prt and media decide to out skitter as taylor, she becomes weaver to avoid being skitter.

these identities are not taylor to taylor, they exist to bury taylor, to hide her deep inside. but only when she starts to become khepri does she reflect and realize.

despite all the talk about passenger influence, conflict drive, etc.

it was always taylor. she isn’t queen administrator becomes she had the QA shard. she has the QA shard because she is Queen Administrator.

it wasn’t QA that gave her the propensity to violence that sundancer flinches at. it was taylor. it always was taylor.

this is perhaps Worm’s central takeaway about identity. it’s one many fans and fanfic authors get wrong. that skitter subsumes taylor, that taylor is gone beneath that mask. but she doesnt, and she’s not.

it was always her. all along.

[faultlinescrew]

Faultline is portrayed as a pretty decent person in the narrative and compared to some other worm characters, yeah she could be far worse.

But her primary motivation is money, and she will put getting the bag before anything else. Not giving a shit about working with nazis as long as she and her team gets paid is the most obvious example I can give here.

Only looking into cauldron because one of her employees are paying her to do so, and from what I've read on the wiki (bc lord knows I'm not reading ward, so ward-heads if I get this bit wrong do let me know) is laundering merc money in a post apocalypse, which, y'know, that tracks.

Also, (not sure if this counts but I have to bring it up or I'll go mad) but she has a habit of picking up disenfranchised capes (case 53's, labyrinth, spitfire, ect) and giving them offers they can't refuse, so seeing as they do depend on her to pay them I do think there's a case to be made for her exploiting them to some degree.

Do I think that faultline thinks she's exploiting the rest of her crew? No not at all, (she probably doesn't consider herself morally bankrupt either).

She clearly cares for them but considers them as 'friends and employees', so as much as she likes the crew, they are assets to her mercenary business at the end of the day. And it shows in the way she treats them, pressing professionalism and training into the day to day.

Faultline is the owner of the Palaquin, owner of proxy businesses, the one handling all the jobs and money- shes their boss.

And if you go and throw out the power imbalance to found family all of them, well, I can't stop you, but I will probably click off of the fic.

[evilwizardcrab]

so one common analysis I've seen on worm is that getting powers ultimately drives you to recreate your trigger event and - as of arc 15 - that is absolutely 1000% true for taylor.

like, bugs are Gross and Weird, Controlling them is going to make you look Gross and Weird, Taylors bullies treated her as Gross and Weird.

but to seriously analyse this here, what is one thing bugs are heavily symbolically tied to? Filth. Dirt, disease, rot, uncleansliness, disgust. Beezlebub and the rotting pigs head in Lord of the flies. And the thing is, anyone who weilds bugs as their power is inherently going to carry those connotations with them. You can't have swarms of inscets hovering above your head and not looks at least partially like a walking corpse, can't command hoards of arachnids to create miles of silk and not appear like a harbinger of phobias and disgust. Taylor is the Swarm, something I've seen said before but just think about what that means about how she sees through the eyes of hovering pests, feels them wirth in the dirt and bite off flesh with their mandibles and feast on filth and crawl over everything and how she feels blind when separated from her bugs because she is the infestation she is the disgust, her powers made it insperable from her being.

And thats something that's openly acknowledged, both in universe and out. People freaking out at her powers, fandom calling her a little bug freak of a girl but when you think about it there's something so tragic about that. Like, even if she joined the wards and used her powers in a less ruthless way (which she wouldn't because why would she? the bugs are a part of her) she's still the bug girl, even if on an internal level she is one with the infestation. and she doesn't even notice, truly, how disturbing it is because its a part of her now and wether personally or socially, how powers have always made her a little bit of a freak, a little bit of am outcast. a worm, wirthing on the pavement that you try not to look at too heard because it grosses you out.

and thats not even getting into the Master element of her power, how a large part of her trigger was everyone ignoring her in the locker and now she has help! she will never be alone or helpless like that again! there will always be things there to look out for her! but also its not human and the consistent usage of said power leads to her more alone than she's ever been, in part because she no longer experiences reality like them.

or even on a simple level how just. how many bugs must she have felt crawl over her skin, how much rot and disgust pressed up to her, breathing and crawling with it while she was in that locker? and how many times now has she recreated that, hiding hundreds of incects under her clothes or masking her face with a Swarm of bugs. how many times have taylors powers inadvertently made her the same disgusting, isolated and ignored bug of a girl she was that day?

[ty-bayonet-betteridge]

when somebody you know takes their own life your mind wants it to have an explanation. you start overthinking and analyzing every time you did and didn't interact with them, what you said and did, how you could have changed it. how did i not realize they were genuinely insecure about something that i teased them about? if i had made it clear i loved them would they still have done it? if i had talked to them more, could i have saved them? what did they need that they werent getting? why didn't you give it to them? every single detail is included in this. you start to convince yourself of a reasoning behind it. a reasoning that almost always includes some variation of it being your fault.

anyway im feeling normal about lisa wilbourn today, how about you?

[yugonostalgia2019]

How do you make it through the Slaughterhouse Nine clone arc? It just feels like endless “who would win” mashing your dolls against each other hypotheticals? Nine cherishes could beat three teams working together, etc—feels like it’s impossible to care about any of the characters involved and what happens

Great question! See I also didn't appreciate the S9k arc until my 2nd read-through. It definitely suffers the most from the missing 2 Chicago Wards arcs that should've been written - the abrupt transition really throws off the otherwise very well paced book

However, the S9k arc is really important for *Taylor*

Remember that no one but Cauldron knows anything about GM - Taylor's acting hypothesis is that Jack will cause a 2nd trigger during his mayhem that ends the world. So this moment is EVERYTHING that Taylor has been working towards for over two years - the reason she left the Undersiders, the reason she works her Wards to the bone, the reason she's been on a one-girl crusade to make allies and break uncooperatives. So in a lot of ways, it's Taylor's time to shine. She took Dinah's 'prophesy' more seriously than anyone, Chevalier lets her take the lead, and we get to see her at her most badass.

Jack, on the other hand, is in it for the fun and chaos - he treats 8 out of each 9 clones as totally expendable - it's boring to have more than one crawler or more than one Winter - his ideal scenario is watching the fireworks as 8/9ths of them die, and taking one of each remainder and creating a much more tightly focused marauding band.

Meanwhile, we get to see Dragon unleash her full potential, after years of incremental freedom she can undercut the S9 at all fronts - the 8 cherishes are a great example - Jack wasn't counting on Dragon's progress so those 8 cherishes on the bus were intercepted long before they reached their destination and started wreaking havoc.

Plus, there was a lot of cool & tense shit that you just gotta enjoy, before the real tragedies begin

[estavionpira]

Massive agree on Gray Boy.

The chapters leading up to him getting properly introduced with the video were really good at building suspense, and the reveal doesn't diminish that at all.

He does a really good job at avoiding what a lot of the minor antagonists do where they feel more like a tactical challenge than an actual character - this is something I think the original S9 did excellently, and the S9K broadly failed at - but Gray Boy never felt like that.

Part of this is due to the way he's framed by the narrative, but he also gets more characterization in extremely limited screen time than any of the other clones, and, despite being clearly mindfucked by his shard, is still clearly together enough to feel like a human antagonist, with actual personality traits which guide his actions, which pretty much none of the other S9K have.

Cherish is, of course, hilarious. We stan our gaslighting gatekeeping girlfailure.

A tie between Gray Boy and Cherish.

Gray Boy because I think the narrative does a great job of selling and emphasizing how terrifying he was in a world where there are horrors of all sorts.

Cherish because she's funny and has the third most amount of characterizations as an actual member. I am eternally fascinated by the AU Wildbow created where she and Jack are the only members left alive, and have to stick together to survive.

Talk about toxic parental figures, their dynamic would be so darkly hilarious.

[estavionpira]

Thinking about how Bonesaw is the only member of the Slaughterhouse Nine who wears a costume that isn't either created with a power or just regular clothes, and how Riley is the only member of the S9 (minus Harbinger) to actually develop as a person beyond the Bonesaw persona. Jack, Burnscar, and Cherish all just wear regular clothes, costumeless, and they've all become their personas. Jacob is Jack Slash, there is no separation. And this continues with Shatterbird's glass dress, Mannequin's doll body, Crawler's adaptations, and Siberian's stripes, which are all either costumes created with their powers, or are powers that produce a costume-like effect. Costumes take a role in Worm as a separation between a person and their cape persona, and the Slaughterhouse Nine either forgoing costumes or having them either incidentally (Crawler, Siberian) or for practicality (Shatterbird, Mannequin) shows how there isn't a person beyond the persona they portray. And yet, Bonesaw bucks this trend. She wears a dress like Alice in Wonderland, which is clearly a projection of the Bonesaw persona, and yet the costume is unnecessary for her power to work. It's something that she puts on to distance herself from Riley, and it works, until she is separated from the Slaughterhouse for two years and can't show herself to the world for that time. She has to exist without anyone to play Bonesaw to, and during that time, she isn't wearing the Alice dress. The costume is off, and Riley is allowed to exist again.

[artbyblastweave]

Thinkin’ about The Siberian

I was sitting on a draft that said something to the effect of “Worm AU where Manton pulls an NBC Hannibal and moonlights as The Siberian on top of being a globally respected parahuman studies researcher. Is this anything.”

Then I thought about this a little more and realized that this might not be far off from what actually happened. There’s a throughline in Manton’s interests, in his trajectory through life, where he’s trying to figure out what you can use powers to get away with doing to people- about identifying constraints and overcoming them. 

He’s the guy who somehow credibly catalogued, and got his name associated with, the fact that powers generally can’t be used to pop people like balloons, and he did so reasonably early in the timeline, in the nineties at the latest. That’s.... an interesting direction to take your research! When people are just coming to terms with the fact that parahumans are real he’s out there taking careful note of whether they can manifest their powers inside people to instantly kill them. How did he test that? What capes did he collaborate with to test that? What did those conversations look like? Did the IRB at a minimum issue any revise-and-resubmits?

And then, of course, he gets picked up by Cauldron (also known as the infinite untraceable victim depot) to work on improving the vials- gaining a sufficiently in-depth understanding of what they are, how they’re made, and what they can do to people that when Cauldron told Legend that Manton had gone rogue and was the one creating C53s, he found this plausible. You’ve got the guy who’d later become the backbone of the Slaughterhouse 9 basically systemically cataloging every conceivable way a power could violate someone’s physiology- first from without, and then, at Cauldron, from within.

Then, when he pulls the trigger and gives himself powers, the resultant ability is essentially a distilled refutation of the Manton Effect- a minion that can obliterate anything, eat anything, delete any material from existence, viscerally dismember people in a unity of conventional and esoteric, power-enabled violence. And he’s insulated from the consequences of his actions on two levels- in terms of Siberian’s invulnerability, but also in the discrepancy between his form and that of his minion. He mixed the vial that gave him that power himself.

Essentially- I don’t think Siberian is something that just happened after a psychological break following a messy divorce. I think Manton basically pre-committed to becoming something like The Siberian, spent most of his career working towards some form of transcendence through superpowers, and the messy divorce was downstream of the cracks starting to show as he got closer and closer to what he’d been chasing.

Now to segue into a complication that’s more directly supported in the text- it’s Worm, it’s always complicated- Master powers spring from loneliness. My theory is that while Manton wanted apotheosis, and while he’d probably been gearing up for a rampage for a while, he genuinely didn’t want to do it alone; he wanted a sidekick. Hence why he bothered pursuing a family in the first place, hence why he fed his daughter a vial, hence why his own projection ended up looking like his daughter after he accidently made her explode or whatever with the bad vial- a monkey’s paw restoration, giving him back a facsimile of the person he wanted to take along for the ride, and making his capacity for violence inseparable from her presence.

This is why he joined up with the Nine rather than remaining a solo act; it’s why he engages in a bad imitation of the Parent/Child relationship with Bonesaw; and it’s why he seeks out Bitch as a candidate. His interest in her candidacy parses to me as genuine- Even moreso than Bonesaw, even moreso than Jack, Bitch has arrived at a no-frills fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want outlook that’s very appealing to Manton. He wants to have a murderer-daughter relationship!

But Rachel got where she is the hard way, by having a life that sucked a lot, by getting near-constantly kicked around! She has a clear reason to be so angry! Even if all my postulations about Manton having a long game are complete bullshit, there are several stages at which Manton had to actively opt in to the same lifestyle and reputation that Bitch was forced to adopt as a basic survival tactic. He didn’t have to start eating people! He’s a tourist! His “freedom” is inseparable from his distance, his disguise. Rachel’s “freedom” is just the freedom of having nothing left to lose.

All of this to say- In an interlude in which Bitch has an extended internal monologue about how people with families have the opportunities to be assholes and monsters to a captive audience, it is absolutely not a coincidence that she’s scouted by a would-be parental figure who proceeds to be an asshole and a monster in front of a captive audience, before trying to buy her affection with a puppy. In rejecting Manton, Rachel dodged an esoterically-packaged but ultimately very familiar bullet.

[yugonostalgia2019]

No no what makes is sooo good is like... yes the Shards are magic and can do crazy dimensional fuckery but like.... Behind the scenes, it’s supposed to be cheap and boring. They aren’t creating metal or fire and giving it to you, they’re just leeching it from an alternate Earth - they’re just as limited by Thermodynamics as humanity is, and their mysterious space magic is just... cheating, basically

It just reinforces the themes of the book in such a clever way 

parahumans redditors: well Worm is a deconstruction of capeshit and it briefly acknowledges that superpowers play merry hell with the laws of physics, so clearly this is a hard science fiction story and the entities are just faking all of their powers with sufficiently advanced smoke and mirrors

shard POV chapters: the entity reverses the polarity of the neutron flow as it drifts through the void. it casually uses its probabilistic precognition to solve the halting problem and then starts traveling twelve bazillion times faster than light while also exchanging texts with its booty call in the form of DBZ cosmic energy blasts. it physically staples all its favorite worldlines together as a form of topiary horticulture on the multiverse and then initializes Tron.exe in order to make cyberspace and the collective unconscious real.

[candy-heart-brew]

Thinking about the next Welcome Home update...

Thinking about how the few hints we've been given indicate that the next update will take place in the springtime when Julie has woken up from her winter hibernation.

Thinking about how the relationship between Frank and Eddie crossed the line from mutual unspoken attraction into something more meaningful at the Homewarming party and Julie probably has no idea.

Thinking about what might've transpired between those two while Julie was asleep. Thinking about how there was at least a good four months where it was just the two of them.

Thinking about how she's Frank's designated girlfriend in-universe. Thinking about how her whole purpose as a character is to be with and play off of Frank.

Thinking about how Eddie's breakdown at the party all stemmed from there being no mail for him to deliver, thus no purpose for him to fulfill. Thinking about how losing his sense of purpose let him see into the void.

Thinking about what could happen if Julie is no longer the most important person in Frank's life all of a sudden. If she wakes up to find that her relationship with him has fundamentally changed in the time she was gone. That someone has come between them, robbing her of her purpose as a character and rendering her irrelevant.

Thinking...i'm thinking....

[blazeys-planet]

Somethin about Devotion burgies

OKAY SO i've seen a lot of people talking about the headcanon that inspekta doesn't finish the devotion burgies right, i thought that was a really interesting observation and wanted to see more! since Inspektas desk changes every chapter i figure theres probably a timeline of things to get an idea of if he is actually finishing them or not so i went through each segment and heres what i found

SPOILERS INCOMING!

GROVE COVE/BEGINNING OF MILLDREAD: Burgie fully in-tact, food untouched save for some fries (same bestie)

END OF MILLDREAD/BEGINNING OF HOBBYHOO: Burger partially eaten, buns are gone and most of the fries are too. Only thing left is the meat and tomatoes.

BEGINNING OF BUZZHUZZ: All the food is gone, including the meat and Inspekta is doing his silly burger song, same place ya get the 'Being a god is uh tasty affair!' line from, so in my mind its implied hes actively eating in this scene before you interrupt him?

END OF BUZZHUZZ/BEGINNING OF SPIRE: 4 new burgies, only thing touched is the fries. also worth noting this is the first time the medical tape asset is used but thats not the point of this particular post.

OKAY So in my mind this particular sequence of events moreso implies Inspekta is in fact eating the burgies, just that hes doing so in parts and rather slowly. Delving back into headcanon territory for the moment, i also tend to do this as a neurodivergent person but usually for the sake of eating the best part last.

So if following that logic, uh, yea. I think you know where that train of thought is headed.

I mean, wouldn't a cut of flesh from your most loyal followers heart and made into a meal be a divine flavor to a god? much to think about.

[ty-bayonet-betteridge]

DISCLAIMER: THOUGH THIS POST INCLUDES SOME SPECULATION ON THE POST-WORM WORLD, OP HAS NOT READ WARD YET. DO NOT SPOIL ME OR I'LL EAT YOUR KNEES

Tattletale's story is so tragic because outwardly it LOOKS like a success story. Through her arc she gets brilliant insight after brilliant insight, helps bring down the man who was looming over her life, becomes internationally recognizable, plays a key role in reversing the end of the world, and when the dust settles ends up a wealthy and powerful criminal lord. She gets all the things that SHOULD define her ending as happy, but it's all hollow, because she doesn't ever get what she needed.

The other Undersiders got what they needed in the end. They all have their own tragedies, large and small, mostly large, but they have proper happy endings. Aisha finds her own identity, a way she can make a difference that she's happy with, separate from the people in her life but still carrying on their legacy - not only that, but she finds a family that properly celebrates her for her and that she can be a part of, with the Heartbroken. Alec DOES find someone who he can genuinely connect with, even if he dies before that connection is able to go anywhere. Brian sees Aisha healing and finding her own way in the world, and when he does die its the way he would have wanted - a brave fall in the middle of battle that makes him look larger than life. Lily and Sabah get eachother, and they get to distance themselves from the drama, and they get to make a difference for the people who were close to them. Taylor gets her father, and she gets Anne, and she knows that she isn't nothing anymore, that she has strengths, even if she doesn't know what that looks like in a non-superpowered context. Rachel gets a space where she can just exist, in the company of a few people she cares about and who put in the work to really get her. No more running or fighting for things larger than herself and her pack - just peace, or something that looks like it.

But Lisa? Despite it all, her emotional needs are left unfilled. She doesn't get to stop blaming herself - she's shouldering more guilt than ever, guilt over Taylor and Brian and Alec, over Gold Morning, on top of the guilt she never got away from over her brother. She doesn't find anyone she can be vulnerable too - she loses the person who she was closest to being able to rely on, and now has to pretend she's untouchable as this crime lord she's built herself into being. Even the one thing that she saw as her redeeming accomplishment - saving Taylor - even that comes apart in the end. And you see her in the Post-Worm world, and she's become this imposing information broker and gang leader, at the center of this web of power, and she acts like this is what she wanted, because she never learned another way to define success. The best models she got for what a happy ending "should" look like are her rich parents and Coil's plans to take over the city. So when she does get power, and money, and recognition, and influence, she acts like that's a good outcome, acts hard enough that she even convinces herself. But it's all so hollow, because she still hasn't realized that that isn't what she wanted, and she never will realize, because she hasn't trained herself to ask the hard questions, to really interrogate her own feelings. Her power actively disincentivizes it. So she'll keep being unhappy, and reaching for greater things, and wondering why she isn't satisfied with what she assumed was everything that success should look like.

[wisteria-lodge]

theory about why draco & lucius malfoy are generally considered very attractive, EVEN THOUGH they're never actually described that way:

(and it isn't just because of the actors who play them. This post got me thinking about the language JKR uses to describe conventional attractiveness, and I'm having fun unpacking it further)

It's because JKR uses "sleek hair" and "shiny hair" as a synecdoche for "attractive/good looking (femme)."

Hermione's hair is "no longer bushy but sleek and shiny" at the Yule Ball, and again "sleek and shiny" at Bill's wedding when Ron and Viktor remark on her attractiveness. Cho is "a very pretty girl with long, shiny black hair" and Harry watches "her shiny black hair rippling in the slight breeze." Ron (under the influence of love potion) says “Have you seen [Romilda Vane's] hair, it’s all black and shiny and silky?" Fleur throws her "sheet of silvery hair" around. Bellatrix used to be beautiful ("She retained vestiges of great good looks, but something — perhaps Azkaban — had taken most of her beauty") and you can tell because her hair used to be "sleek, thick, and shining" even though it is now "unkempt and straggly." The dandyish young Slughorn's hair is "shiny" and flamboyant Lockhart's hair is "sleek."

So when we get descriptions of Lucius Malfoy that stress his "sleek blond hair" or that his "his usually sleek hair was disheveled" and then DRACO, "whose sleek blond hair and pointed chin were just like his father’s" has "sleek blond hair all over his now brilliantly pink face" a "sleek blond head," and then of course a description of Pansy "strok[ing] the sleek blond hair off Malfoy’s forehead, smirking as she did so, as though anyone would have loved to have been in her place."

I mean. Our brains put two-and-two together. The Malfoys are attractive/good looking (femme.)

Like, absolutely an accident, but very funny.

("sleek and shiny" is also how harry consistently describes broomsticks he likes, which absolutely tracks)

[flying-fangirls]

As a music, religion, and literature nerd, the Dies Irae has been one of my favorite go-to pieces of trivia for a long time, which means that this line:

Has been driving me batshit BONKERS since part 42! And also as a semi-professional media analysis yapper, I figured I might as well dive into the exact reasons I jumped up and audibly gasped upon first hearing this line and have subsequently lost my mind since then. So!

Here is why I think that the Dies Irae is the perfect analogy for John and Arthur:

Religion

Let's start with the most straightforward meaning: "Dies Irae" is a Latin term, and it translates to the "Day of Wrath." Or otherwise known as the Judgement Day, the foretold second coming in Catholic canon, when Christ will "come again in glory to judge the living and the dead." It's at this Last Judgement where God will wield perfect justice to send the worthy to everlasting peace and the unworthy to everlasting punishment. (everyone say "thank you" to excessive childhood Catholic lessons for burning this into my brain)

There's a kind of irony to the fact that Arthur so vehemently rejects Christianity and religion as a whole, and that John spends much of his arc trying to distance himself from the role/identity of a god, yet both are given this incredibly religious title, effectively restricting them from ever forgetting the presence/influence of religion in their lives.

This title has a couple layers though, because we have to consider why it's the Day of Wrath specifically that represents Arthur and John. Now, I don't think I have to tell you that those two are bursting with anger 80% of the time. But I am going to tell you that those two are not just angry, but moreso "divine fury" incarnate.

The Day of Wrath, the Final Judgment, is the final and eternal judgment of God on all: "For now before the Judge severe / all hidden things must plain appear; / no crime can pass unpunished here." (Dies Irae, Dies Illa). The final Judge, the all-powerful God, can see the objective morality of every single person, and is thus the sole, rightful determiner of fate.

This assumption of their right to perfectly and single-handedly decide others' worthiness shows up over and over, not just John and Arthur's actions, but also in how they describe these judgments.

When Arthur kills the widow on the island, it's not because she was dangerous, but because she was a cultist who "deserved" to be punished.

When John and Arthur need to get rid of Mr. Scratch's stone, John says they should give it to "criminals" who are "deserving of this curse." Even though, just moments before, Arthur refused to give the stone to Oscar because to do so would be to cursing him to a fate of eternal suffering.

And I can't go into every single detail about the entire Larson plotline because this post would double in size, but it obviously needs to be included here. Possibly the strongest tie between this arc and the idea of the Dies Irae is Arthur's conviction through it all. Arthur vows that he is going to kill Larson in divine retribution not because he wants to, but because he has to. He even goes so far as to admit that killing Larson will be a mistake, a cruel and overly-bloodthirsty action that goes against his compassion. But killing Larson isn't a choice to Arthur, it is the unavoidable punishment for Larson's sins and Arthur is simply the enactor of justice. Just like the Final Judgment, there is no sympathy, no hesitancy— the judgment is absolute, divinely ordained, and cannot be stopped no matter how undeniably horrific it is.

If we look at the Catholic Catechism, principle 2302 states that it is sinful to kill out of desire, but that it is "praiseworthy to impose restitution" and use violence to "maintain justic." So even if Arthur has intent to kill, his actions count as divinely sanctioned. He is acting as the hand of God's punishment.

Over the course of Season 3 and 4, Arthur's fiery rage dies down to a more gentle simmer, but his conviction only seems to grow, and John follows suit. Despite previously reprimanding Arthur for his unquestioning wrath, John eventually becomes just as convinced that Larson "deserves" to face a wrathful reckoning. The "fact" that Larson is wholly unforgivable and is fated to receive eternal punishment becomes more indisputable in their minds, and they both stop questioning the morality of their intentions, entirely convinced of their judgment.

Throughout the story, Arthur and John insist upon the importance of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, and say that these are the values that guide their every action. Yet, time and time again, they approach certain people with nothing but wrath and resentment. It's a sharp contrast to the benevolent figures they make themselves out to be, and Arthur and John are often blind to the contradiction because, in their eyes, they are still following those values in every action. And in the moments when they do recognize their horrific words or actions, they still cannot let their judgment go, convinced that it is their "duty" either way.

In Part 35, Arthur says "Just because you can't make the hard decision, doesn't mean it's wrong." This is exactly how John and Arthur view themselves. They know that some of their actions are harsh and violent and painful, but they are don't view that violence as wrong, because they are enacting that violence in justice. They move through life with carefully-selected destruction, culling the world of those they view as unforgivable sinners, and punishing them with divine righteousness. Arthur and John carry righteous fury in their every step, bringing the Day of Wrath down upon the world around them.

Now, there's already a ton of meaning just in this religious allusion alone. However, there's another application of the Dies Irae in modern culture, which brings us to the second side of this title:

Music

Back in the 13th century (sounds like a familiar setting...), friar Thomas of Celano wrote a poem for and about the Dies Irae. The poem was recited at Requiem Mass (church services to honor the dead), and it ended up being set to a Gregorian chant tune.

Over time, this melody has been used by a variety of composers, but the one we're focused on is Hector Berlioz. In 1837, Berlioz used the Dies Irae melody as part of his narrative symphony, Grand Messe de morts, in order to communicate that the main character had died. Then a lot of other composers saw that and said "Hey that's a cool idea!", and started also using this melody to represent death in their music. Nowadays, it's a fairly staple part of modern film and musical storytelling. If you've listened to literally any major soundtrack, then there's a good chance you've heard this motif (or a variation of it) used before. It's often subtle, sometimes loud and obvious, but no matter what, it reveals the inevitable presence of death. (essentially, the Dies Irae=death)

Now, obviously there's something tragically ironic about Arthur being likened to a musical motif when he tries so hard to distance himself from it, and there's something tragically ironic about John being associated with such a dark piece of music when he shows so much fascination and joy toward the art. Again, though, we've got some layers here. Yorick doesn't just compare Arthur and John to the Dies Irae, he literally defines them as the Dies Irae, a full embodiment of it.

Even before the story started, Arthur lost both of his parents, his friend and wife, his daughter, and his best friend.

John, when he was part of the King in Yellow, knew only how to harm and attack. In the Dark World, he falls back on this fearful lashing out with violence, harming even more people.

And throughout the story, John and Arthur seem to bring devastation to everyone else around them: Lilly the buopoth, Oscar, Noel, Collins, Daniel, Larson and Yellow.

The arrival of Dies Irae musical motif in a film always indicates that death is approaching or that is has already struck— a host carrying its blight to spread onto others. Just like the musical motif, the arrival of Arthur and John foretells the near-arrival of death. They play a duet together— John and Arthur, and death— always singing and dancing around and with each other.

These two never succumb to death, always finding a way to slip through its fingers and survive every situation. But they cannot escape death's presence because they are death's partner— singing the melody to death's subtle harmony. They cannot escape death because they are its host— destined to carry and spread devastation to death's victims. From the moment you meet John and Arthur, you know that death is inevitably approaching just a step behind, waiting to strike you down.

Whether it's the religious or musical side, we can see that John and Arthur are the literal embodiment of these allusions. They carry these powers and ideas in their every action and word, in their every step, in their very breath and blood.

Arthur and John. The hands of God's justice. The enactors of divine fury.

Arthur and John. The hosts of blight and destruction. The partner of death's song.

The man himself. The voice inside his head.

The Day of Wrath. The Dies Irae.