#cash piggot imagine

[kaivenom]

How a movie night with each of Heartbreak High boys would look like ...

Masterlist

Spencer "Spider" White

His mother tries to get in everytime, its insufferable.

She says she Is checking if you are okay, because his son can be an asshole, but that makes you feel very angry.

Spider and you spent the night watching films wrapped one on the other until one gets asleep.

If he isn't touching you somehow, he dies, he starts pouting a little and getting close to you again.

Anthony "Ant" Vaughn

Since his family is religious, the movies are always on your house.

He tries to sneak thru your window, always (even when your parents told him thousands of times he is welcomed in the front door), but he wants to be romantic.

It doesn't matter what is the genre of the movie, i picture Ant getting asleep on your lap at some point.

Because he is tired of everything, because he feels safe with you or because the gummies he ussually eats.

Malakai Mitchell

He gets really excited everytime, maybe to much excited.

He makes a fortress with all the pillows and cushions of the house to make.

He fills It up with sweets and chocolate, puta his computer and is ready to watch a movie and have private time.

You are always amazed by how he manages to make the fortress stay still and be so big, because you two fit inside.

I picture him like the type he always stops the movie to comment something because he is very excited to share his thoughts with someone.

Douglas "Cash" Piggot

When you tell him Netflix and chill, It is Netflix and chill, dont try to change his mind.

Since he lives with with granny, he doesn't have a really good TV so you two improvise.

Talking the whitest sheet you could find, hang It on the ceiling somehow, putting some laps on you mobile, etc and you made a home cinema.

Ussually you burn the popcorn thanks to being distracted and granny gets angry because the House smell like smoke.

Dusty Reid

He tries to cook a whole dinner for you two, so sometimes you dont even see a movie, just cook and eat a lot with something playing on the background.

If you managed to sit and watch a movie, he tends to get a little theatrical when some scenes get in.

Sometimes you join him and you both end up doing a little representation of the movie.

Since Saint Bruno's policy doesn't accept girls and dorms for the night, movie nights don't happen many often, but they are ussually on your house.

[ghoultyrant]

Alt-power Taylor patterns

Have some random ‘rules’ (read: recurring, but not absolute, patterns) of how alt-power Taylors get written in Worm fanfic.

Rule#1: Thou Shalt Be Power

Alt-power Taylors are almost always more obviously powerful than canon Taylor. This isn’t exactly a feat in and of itself given what canon Taylor’s power is, but alt-power Taylor’s generally don’t simply settle for picking an interesting power that happens to be more powerful than canon Taylor’s and exploring that.

No, they also generally have...

Rule#2: The Judge Rules Favorably

Say you’ve got an alt-power that’s pretty much literally ‘Taylor’s powerset is X from Y other setting’. You know, like a lot of these fanfics go with.

Generally, any such power set is going to have edge cases and murky elements, if only in the context of how to translate it into a parahuman ability... and alt-power stories have a habit of picking whatever interpretation is most favorable to Taylor.

This is actually even more striking when it’s a ‘shardswap’, where Taylor has a canon cape’s power and the fanfic invariably chooses to rule edge cases favorably to Taylor... but the exact same power on the actual canon cape in some other fanfic by the exact same author gets ruled in a more limited manner. This kind of thing makes it pretty obvious the decision-making process wasn’t ‘it makes sense to this author for this power to operate this way’, but rather was ‘it’s an edge case I can rule favorably to Taylor! I’m doing that!’

These two points lead into...

Rule #3: Shock And Awe

Whatever Taylor’s power is, people are impressed by it. This is true even if they barely know anything about it -she’ll give a description that could mean just about anything, and they’ll nod along and say ‘that sounds broken’ or whatever. Villains treat her with respect, even if she hasn’t done anything yet. The PRT is willing to bend rules to get her on their side because she’s ‘so powerful’. Tattletale flees in terror of her because her canon ability to read the script means she knows the author intends Taylor to be broken, even if her power has no basis to feed her anything alarming enough to justify instantly fleeing.

Often, people being impressed by Taylor’s power will take up several chapters of the story, in place of any kind of plot advancement. It’s that important to the author.

Nonetheless...

Rule #4: Titanic Whale, Itty-Bitty-Pond

No matter how powerful Taylor’s powers get emphasized as being, this just gets used to let Taylor bully everyone around her into doing what she wants. She isn’t forced onto the world stage by the sheer scale of her powers. She doesn’t get targeted for assassination by villains when she single-handedly steamrolls the entirety of Empire Eighty-Eight. No matter how much she bullies the local PRT, the Triumvirate won’t show up to convey the message that such behavior is Not Cool And We Do Have The Ability To Make You Stop.

Instead of being treated as a big fish in a small pond, her advantages over the locals just means she can get away with whatever.

Rule#5: Laser-Focused Karmic Revenge

Events will conspire to ensure that Taylor learns that Sophia is Shadow Stalker, promptly lets the PRT know that a Ward has participated in a cruel campaign of bullying, and they instantly side with her on little or no actual evidence and the hammer of justice comes down on Shadow Stalker in no time flat.

Curiously, Emma and Madison are rarely targeted by fanfic in an equivalent manner, even though Emma’s participation is an intensely personal betrayal and Madison’s motive seems to be an extremely shallow drive for popularity. It’s not like they’re particularly popular targets for reconciliation, either.

This does lead to the somewhat amusing point that where in canon Taylor gives Emma a giant speech about how unimportant Emma is to her that makes it blatantly obvious how massively important Emma is to her, fanfic Taylor usually actually has essentially moved on from the Emma end of things, pretty much completely forgetting she even exists once the Sophia part is handled.

Rule#6: Choo-Choo

No matter how divergent Taylor’s powers are, no matter how different her own behavior is from canon, no matter how many ripple effects are applied... Taylor will still generally interrupt Lung’s attack on the Undersiders, still end up on vaguely friendly terms with Tattletale (But usually not any of the other Undersiders), and still end up meeting Armsmaster in a manner vaguely equivalent to canon for the exclusive purpose of this alt-power Taylor getting to blatantly sidestep the canon situation that came about from canon Taylor’s interactions with Armsmaster. (ie the alt-power Taylor doesn’t let him take the credit for taking down Lung, or whatever, and often explicitly calls him out on his glory-hog nature with no consequences)

Less consistent, though still typical, is for the Undersiders to attack the bank and for Panacea to be there, even though Coil’s canon goal is a distraction, with the bank itself a means to an end. The lack of Skitter being involved in the planning process generally inexplicably results in an apparently-identical plan from the Undersiders, regardless of whether they have no replacement member or very different replacement members.

I imagine I’d have more examples of railroading stations of canon into the fanfic if it weren’t for the fact that alt-power Taylors have a habit of sputtering out before they can get much farther than this. Most of them don’t even make it to Bakuda!

Rule#7: Crunching The People Numbers

A curiously recurring trend with alt-power Taylors is for them to fundamentally approach human interaction in a deliberate, calculating manner. Alt-power Taylor is nice to people in an attempt to curry favor. She decides to share details of her powers that are good PR, and withhold details she suspects will cause the PRT to put additional limitations on her. (Even if the limitations she’s imagining are completely reasonable) She befriends people not because she finds them relatable, but because she finds them useful. She avoids making enemies with people because they’re important or powerful. (Exception: it’s not unusual for her to make enemies with Armsmaster... in which case events generally conspire to make it irrelevant because he gets his ‘just desserts’)

She also will routinely lie as convenient, distort the truth as convenient, and otherwise engage in deception because it’s expedient... and default to getting away with it. People usually won’t even find out, and when they do find out alt-power Taylor will generally provide an excuse -one that is not consistent with the internal narration she had when making the original decision to deceive, hence excuse- for why she did so, and this will be accepted as reasonable and people will go right on trusting her even though she lied to them.

This is particularly disconcerting given how often it gets combined with...

Rule#8: Love Is Life

Canon Taylor had a very poor relationship with her father. She couldn’t find it in herself to let him know about her powers. She couldn’t find it in herself to let him properly know about the ongoing bullying. She never revealed that Emma had stopped being a friend and was in fact heading the charge of bullying her. On his end, he outright tries locking her in when he’s trying to be nice and understanding, as perhaps his most blatantly dubious decision.

Fanfic Taylor is, quite inexplicably, often quick to reveal her powers to Danny -even, arguably especially when her powers are such she actually has good reason to be uncomfortable sharing with him- and in turn Danny is generally confused but supportive and kind. She reveals all kinds of worrying details about her powers, to which he endlessly tells her that she’ll always be his little girl and he loves her and is proud of her no matter what. He even goes to bat for her at the PRT quite frequently.

Somewhat alarmingly, while fanfic Taylor often feels affection for fanfic Danny, the relationship seems to be fundamentally one-way: Danny does all the giving, and Taylor does all the taking. There may or may not be sentences that imply Taylor is eg using her newfound cash to shore up their own iffy income stream, but generally speaking no actual evidence of such manifests: the rotting step from canon won’t get replaced using Taylor’s cash. She won’t make a grocery trip to fill the pantry using her Ward/bounty/whatever funding.

Nor is she likely to really go to bat for him over the Union’s issues. It’s not unusual for her to rail at other people in the story over their failure to somehow ‘fix’ the city, but it’s much rarer for her to do anything concrete to help.

To be entirely fair, these fanfics usually treat the whole thing as substantially improving Danny’s own psychological health, but it’s generally unclear whether that’s really the intent (ie that Danny actually feels better as a result of his relationship improving with his daughter and so on) or if the fanfic is essentially just ignoring Danny’s canon issues and the appearance of improvement is due to audience assumptions rather than authorial intent.

Rule#9: Fanon Piggot Is Not Canon Piggot

I mostly only really see three versions of Piggot in fanfic:

A: Miss Piggy.

Piggot as the canon wards seem to see her: an unreasonable taskmaster who makes cruel and bad decisions for no particular reason, with the circumstances of the city failing to really justify this behavior. (In the story’s mind, anyway)

Inexplicably, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single fanfic using this version try to have her replaced with someone less reprehensible, even when it’s paired up with ‘karmic revenge’ on Armsmaster.

B: Mama Emily.

Alarmingly often, Piggot is turned into an endlessly supportive mother-figure for Taylor who is also weirdly understanding and supportive of the Wards in general. (With the exception of Shadow Stalker, who she almost always comes down on like a ton of bricks) We’ll pretty much never see a sign of the women who, in canon, was perfectly happy to basically sneer at the Undersiders over the possibility that a bombing run on Crawler might catch them too.

Even aside how out-of-character it is, one often ends up wondering where Emily even finds the time to do her actual job in between all her long personal talks with the Wards.

C: Piggot the Bigot.

Surprisingly, it’s actually fairly rare for Piggot’s canon issues with parahumans to be brought out, made explicit, and used as a basis for villain-izing Piggot. Nonetheless, it’s not at all unusual for Piggot to end up behaving as if she has a grudge with Taylor (And anyone else who ends up a secondary main character), an implacable enemy who can be counted on to get in the way at all times, to the point that Taylor is completely justified in ignoring orders and doing her own thing if she happens to be a Ward... or, on the flipside, is easily able to lure Wards away into her alternate team if the story is going the unusual route of an Indie Hero Taylor.

Of course, even when Piggot is written more or less in character, there’s still a habit in fanfic to write Piggot as handling pretty much everything personally, to the point she couldn’t possibly actually do her job as local PRT head. Mama Emily is worst about this, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a single fanfic that dealt with Piggot in reasonable detail without turning her into a micro-manager with no way to realistically have time for her actual duties. Even the Deputy series is a bit guilty of this, and it’s got probably the best Piggot depiction I’ve ever seen!

Rule#10: Panacea Is A Woobie

This tends to crop up fastest in cases where Taylor’s power eg involves the creation and control of organisms of some sort, with the story frequently endeavoring to arrange for Panacea and Taylor to meet ASAP, but it’s very much the default for Panacea to be treated as someone who deserves sympathy and support, and specifically to end up having Taylor befriend her -even if it’s not really in-character for the alt-power Taylor to do so.

By extension, Brandish is often treated as basically a villain, while Glory Girl varies whether she gets treated as a dumb brute contributing to Panacea’s situation or a sympathetic figure who happens to be ignorant and that’s a problem.

Notably, no matter how little synergy may exist between Taylor’s power and Panacea’s power in a given fanfic, there’s a tendency to find some excuse to have the two doing something ‘gamebreaking’ together.

---------------------------------

There’s a bunch of other patterns that recur a fair amount, but these ones stand out to me in part because they paint a trajectory, as opposed to just being an unrelated collection of trends.