#Worm analysis

[estavionpira]

One thing I really like about combat thinkers in Worm is how, because it usually keeps pretty realistic in terms of what normal people are capable of, when one of them shows up, them pulling ridiculous action movie shenanigans feels like just as much of a superpower as anything else. Number Man - particularly his clones during the S9K arc - really shines in this regard - in a book where what people are able to do stays fairly realistic outside of their explicit powers, having a guy show up with perfect accuracy at any range, who survives a 9-story fall with wacky physics bullshit, who takes out a gravity controller with the power of math, really sells the idea that this is a superpower, not just 'a guy who trained for a really long time'. Most of the stuff you see him doing wouldn't be that out of place during most action movies, but that isn't the kind of book Worm is! And so when one of them shows up pulling action movie nonsense, it feels just as disconnected from normal capabilities as flying or bug control.

[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?

[phthalosblues]

This train of thought is so narrow fandom wise but I can’t get it out of my head SO

What Fears would the Undersiders be avatars of because Phthalo can’t stop thinking about a worm/tma crossover!!

Lisa- starting off, lisa would obviously be the eye, BUT I think also a little bit of the web because of the way she has her thumb in every pie. Also I think it goes without saying that she would definitely kick ass as the archivist. Plot over within 5 business days.

Taylor- oh my dear sweet Taytay,, the corruption. I mean,, she literally controls bugs it’s practically handed to you. Maybe the web as well? Probably less than Lisa. Definitely a smidge of the lonely in the beginning but not to the point of avatarhood. Also, just like Lisa, if she was archivist no one. Would survive. She would’ve Gertrude’d that shit so fast..

Brian- the dark. Do I really need to elaborate? Moving on.

Aisha- ok this one took a bit of thought because my first instinct is the stranger, BUT her background and story would also make her super duper susceptible to the lonely and maybe even the vast almost? I think really she’d be lonely especially since she has the disappearing/being forgotten gimmick, which Martin pulled off as well.

Alec- ok I’m not an Alec connoisseur like some, but my gut wants to say the web or the spiral. I’m leaning towards web, power wise, but the way he effects people and especially considering the shadow stalker arc, I feel like the spiral would take him very easily, like scary easy. He’s also fairly good at lying/apathy just due to circumstance, so that would also align with the spiral and the web

Rachel- the hunt. I think that’s obvious. But I also almost want to say the slaughter as well, almost a crossing over grey area. The hunt is obviously going to be the strongest of the two considering. Dog powers. Also I think she would make the BEST Daisy.

If any interest comes of this I also want to do the s9 and maybe a few others, also I’m planning on maybe drawing them as avatars maybe

[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?

[wormspoodle]

he's brought a friend

[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.

[violetidol]

hi it’s me again. yes i’m still talking about nagisa why do you ask.

what’s got me thinking now is that he’s lived in tokyo for his entire life. someone already made a post about this (EDIT: FOUND IT!) but the fact he’s lived in tokyo all his life and is only now exploring the city in it’s full capacity, and meeting the people who live there, is so fascinating to me. he’s a stranger in his hometown! he barely knows the people who’ve lived there! he’s just met a girl who’s dad runs an izakaya that’s literally two minutes from his house, and that girl is around the same age as him! he barely remembers his neighbor!

i think it’s pretty easy to headcanon that he had depression for a pretty significant portion of his life, potentially even before his desires were stolen. it’s easy to mistake depression for always feeling “sad”, but it’s closer to always feeling apathetic. and while it’s easy to say it’s just normal teenage apathy, i really think he’s self-isolated more than he wants to admit. i think awakening his persona and stealing back his desires kickstarted something in him, and he’s able to start connecting with his city and the people in it!

�� but it hasn’t magically cured everything. in one of merope’s social events, i believe her second one (that i forgot to record because i have the memory of a fish), all of nagisa’s answers to her “where do you see yourself in the future” question are extremely wishy-washy. i had chosen “a reasonable amount of happiness”, and when meope pressed him, he says that even his explanation was vague. even with his desires back, he doesn’t know what to do with them. i think he still has depression, and while regaining his desires and having a very clear immediate goal (Steal The Treasure) is a massive boon, he’s kinda re-learning what he wants… or maybe even learning it for the first time. and he obviously doesn’t need to know everything right now, he’s still a student, but he finally has a push to start living and learning hanging on the edge of tomorrow

somewhat related, i think him having a good relationship with his parents and a comfortable life is genuinely fascinating, especially from a modern persona protagonist perspective. yes, his parents aren’t physically there, but they clearly take care of him, and they trust him enough to take care of himself. he isn’t starting from dead zero, he’s not a new kid, his life is established. i don’t have much else to say on that matter, i just think it’s an interesting facet.

[estavionpira]

Having just finished Watchmen, I think it's interesting to note how Scion serves as an inverted Doctor Manhattan figure. Manhattan's arc involves him attempting to remain connected to his humanity despite his powers making that pretty much impossible, until his connections with other people are manipulated to make him abandon humanity altogether by the end of the story.

Meanwhile, Scion starts out completely detached to humanity before bootstrapping together a human avatar just similar enough to feel aimlessness over the cycle being broken, continuing with him connecting with Kevin Norton, who gives him a purpose to work towards then leaves him, mirroring Eden leaving him purposeless after her death (I read Scion killing Behemoth, but then not killing any of the other Endbringers despite being directed to, as not him just following Kevin's directions, but rather a result of Scion being genuinely upset over Kevin leaving him with Lisette, in a sort of pre-Gold Morning - killing Behemoth was the equivalent of an emotional outburst - and the first time he really let his emotions get in the way of the smooth operation of the cycle.) Then, by the end of the book, his dissatisfaction and aimlessness are manipulated to make him throw a temper tantrum, at the most human he's ever been.

At the same time, both of them are responsible in one way or another for their setting's respective Greater-Good-Moral-Blackhole Conspiracy, with Scion's upcoming apocalypse being the root cause for Cauldron's existence and Ozymandias' Squid Plan being the result of the massively heightened nuclear tensions that sprung from Doctor Manhattan's existence as a US agent causing the USA to massively overextend themselves, develop an culture of invincibility and completely ignore detente with the Soviet Union, which made nuclear conflict practically unavoidable - even if Manhattan hadn't gone to Mars, it's made a point that he couldn't stop all the missiles in a full exchange; him staying might have delayed nuclear war, but it would have come nonetheless.

Even just on a visual level, they both have statuesque bodies that are entirely a nonhuman color (blue and gold), but while Manhattan started off wearing full outfits and slowly lost clothing as he grew distant, culminating in him being totally naked, Scion showed up naked and acquired clothing along with his first human connection.

[artbyblastweave]

Hey I was wondering since you are very familiar with superhero comics/media and I am not: I remember reading on TVTropes about how there was some comic arc where Superman is basically forced to kill the Joker/does it under extremely understandable circumstances, but then immediately jumps off the slippery slope and becomes a horrible mass murderer. SO, I was wondering if Amy in Worm is a commentary/take on this, on what kind of warped understanding of morality taught by someone's family environment would one have to have to actually believe breaking one's principles once while being forced to by a serial killer would make you into an irredeemable villain forever, and what kind of trauma and warped understanding would you have to have for that to actually be TRUE and for you to actually do horrible things afterward. Emphasizing that that kind of moral arc is not how normal humans work and there would have to be very unusual circumstances for it to happen. But since I don't know about superhero comics I can't really elaborate on this, so I wonder what you think of the idea.

So the specific arc you're talking about was Injustice: Gods Among Us, and the tie-in comics produced as a backstory for that video game- which came out in 2013 onward, so the times don't line up for Amy to be a commentary on that arc specifically. In particular, Superman has basically the exact opposite issue that Amy does; he killed Joker because he murdered an entire city, and he justifies his subsequent slide towards tyranny on the grounds that he wasn't being proactive enough to stop things like that beforehand. Kind of a common refrain in "Superman loses it" stories- refer in particular to the "I did love being a hero. But if this is where it leads, I'm done with it" scene from the Justice Lords arc of the old Justice League cartoon. (Batman is occasionally painted as having a "murder-is-like-potato-chips" problem, refraining from killing because he wouldn't be able to stop. Depends on the writer, though.) What Amy absolutely is commenting on is what I think was a very pervasive idea in cape comics in the years when Worm was being formulated- the idea of the hero/villain binary as a real and meaningful thing, two meaningful categories of people which you can switch between as a discreet and meaningful action. Black Knight, Hawkeye, Rogue- all superheroes who started as supervillains, two distinct statuses which they held. Characters like Deadpool and Harley Quinn start as villains and drift towards a third-position antiheroic middle-ground that's treated as noteworthy for not really falling into either camp- in turn sort of generating what basically amounts to a third cluster, a coherent trinary. (A lot of 90s anti-heroes reifying the binary in how they're marketed as violating it.) Not actually many heroes I can think of who've gone full villain and had that stick, but definitely heroes who've flipped for a time in a meaningful way- Hal Jordan becoming Parallax sticks in my head. And at least since the 80s you've had writers making post-modern gags about powered people who opt out entirely and have day jobs using their powers for something mundane. (The X-Men are all over the place in here.) And subdued but gradually swelling in popularity is where Worm lands- the idea that what you're actually looking at here is a mob of agents, with their own granular agendas, alliances, outlooks, lines in the sand, and relationship to the law-as-written- that when a hero starts acting villainous or a villain does something heroic, when they approach a fifty-fifty split without actually changing their label, it's an indictment of the idea you can actually broadly group them so neatly in the first place. And there's a lot of clunky dialogue in parts of Worm where characters are treating the hero/villain binary as a real tangible thing- "hero behavior, villain behavior-" in a way that seems hilariously naïve and awkward from where I'm sitting in 2023, and indeed was probably kind of a no-duh moment even in 2011. Anti-heroes had been around for a while. But I do think that those sequences were written in conversation with an assumption about the genre that wasn't totally dead in the water at the time, an assumption that Amy holds as a way of showing how treating the categories as innate will drive you nuts when they fail to model reality. I genuinely believe that the MCU and DCEU have killed this binary dead in the general consciousness, though. These days a "superhero" is whoever the protagonist of the movie is, and the idea that that can encompass a whole range of moralities is pretty strongly cemented. A supervillain is whoever fights the star of the movie once and then dies. It's whoever is creating a problem right that second, not a social role you hold for a prolonged period. In this way and some others, Worm hasn't been commenting on the dominant paradigm of superheroism in some time- it's becoming kind of a period piece.

[whereserpentswalk]

Something I love about Worm is how well it subverts (or just avoids) the rugged individualism that a lot of superhero stories fall into. Even the most powerful beings (with the obvious exeption of truly inhuman entities like Zion or the enbringers) are beholden to society and its systems.

It's why the protectorate worked so well as a deconstruction of superheroes. It's not that any of them are too powerful and at risk of snapping like how most dark takes of superheroes are, it's that all of them are still fundamentally in a position of enforcing society's will. Someone like Miss Milita or Arms Master isn't that powerful from their shard abilities alone (at least in the broader context of the universe), but they wield massive amounts of power as given to them by society to enforce its laws through violence. And as we've seen from people like Miss Milita, they don't have the same power to go against society. Having superpowers doesn't allow you to escape the power that society has over people. Like, any member of the Wards could easily kill any prt director (prt directors who are secretly parahumans aside), but every prt director wields power over Wards, because of the societal power they have.

I think the best example of this Weaver as a probationary member of the Wards, vs Shadow Stalker as a probationary member of the Wards. Weaver is forced to move to a different city, given extremely strict rules to follow, and before the deal is made for her to join the Wards, she's in real danger of being put in the birdcage. Meanwhile, Shadow Stalker is never really restricted on her ability to commit the same type of violence she was committing as a vigilante, to the point where joining the Wards was basically a promotion for her. This is because the crimes that Shadow Stalker committed were fundamentally in service to the system, while Weaver/Skitter's crimes were all things that subverted the system's power. The reason why Skitter was treated as a more serious threat than any other teenage villain once she started holding territory, was that her crimes were a threat to the state's power.

The thing that makes the protectorate morally corrupt isn't that any of them have personally chosen evil. It's the much more subtle and realistic way all of them are fundamentally working to uphold society, and at higher levels they're complicacy in cauldron's crimes. Someone like Alexandria isn't someone actively trying to hurt people, she's someone whose decided that she's going to violently enforce everything wrong with society, up to protecting the practice of human experimentation, because she's so intwined in those systems.

It allows for plotlines that are so much more interesting than what most superhero stories are capable of, because when you break out of the mold of rugged individualism, you can have stories that are more complex than bad person wants to do bad and good person has to punch them. Like, Worm's awareness of systems power over people allows for such unique storylines. From large scale things like the effort to expose cauldron or the undersiders conquest of Brokton Bay, to small scale things like Foil leaving the Wards to be with Perian. Hell, even just the fact that Worm can have a character like Perian who is relatively low powered and rarely fights, but whose story is still relevant, and who still has an effect on the plot, is an example of what breaking from rugged individualism has done for Worm.

Also, it should be noted that the one time a character dose become the type of rugged individual whose will alone is what matters, with everyone else becoming irrelevant, it's when Taylor becomes Khepri, and it's shown to be fundamentally horrifying. Khepri is the one human in the plot of Worm who is above all societal systems, at it makes her something both extremely disturbing, and extremely tragic.

[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....

[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)

[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.