#doctor mother

[cpericardium]

interdimensional agreement to put miles back where he belongs ❗

[victoriadallonfan]

Does anyone think about how fucking insane it is that Cauldron inner circle - at one point - was just a single grown-ass woman (Doctor Mother) and her peers (literal children). Alexandria - 15 Contessa - 14 to 15 Number Man - 12

[aruliart]

Various WIPs

Cauldron yearly office photo.

The scene in arc 4 where Taylor chokes out Leet and grue just casually swings by to give her pointers (rereading it I had such a vivid image of it in my head. Goofy)

Alexandria, Parian

[crowhoonter]

Cauldron's big whopping mistake

I'm just saying, Cauldron could have really done something brilliant with Eden. Not to say the vials weren't a smart thing, they definitely were, but where was the pizzaz? The showmanship? If I had stumbled into the unknowable vast corpse of an alien god, you know what I would've done? Make a fucking restaurant.

You see, they were blessed with the first truly new meat to have come to earth in a very long time. Alien meat and crystal body structures. Imagine the crazy dishes they could have made. Like fuck dude I'd eat an alien if someone gave me the chance. They could have even kept the whole giving people powers schtick with it.

Breaker biscuits with shard dust in the flour they used, Tinker Truffles, Master Muffins, Brute Borscht, Stranger Schnitzel, the possibilities were goddamn endless. Make it a restaurant at the end of the universe type deal where it isn't in the universe proper like the actual Cauldron compound so they still only get the super rich patrons.

Number Man could handle the finances (obviously) and I do believe he would also be a good greeter and waiter, polite but never too friendly. Contessa in the kitchen making the food, Doctor Mother is that lady who asks how everything is going and you don't really know what her actual job is at the restaurant but it is clear she does something important, Custodian would buss the dishes, and Slug would be there too.

They could have had the best gimmick of any cape organization, but no. They just had to make entity girl corpse water in nerdy little vials. For all of that power, all of that planning, Cauldron lacked the vision to properly do something with it.

[estavionpira]

Contessa playing minesweeper on the Cauldron Computer and rapidly changing the tab so it looks like she's managing a hit squad when Doctor Mother walks by.

[dryococelas01]

Customer: calls Dr Mother Dr. Mommy

Dr. Mother: immediately forcing the C53inator 3000 down their throat.

[heyitschartic]

Doctor Mother should be at the club

Oh you know she was going wild at the club. My head canon has always been that she was a business major in a sorority and that she got pulled in after a long night drinking. Her schwasted ass was having to explain how to kill a god to a nine year old after downing six fireballs and a Sex on the Beach.

[ewingstan]

Tell me what philosophical thought experiment I should get really opinionated about: Doctor Mother

SEND ME A WILDBOW CHARACTER YOU LOVE. I WILL TELL YOU WHICH PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT YOU SHOULD GET REALLY OPINIONATED ABOUT (SLASH DEVELOP A PSYCHOSEXUAL FIXATION ON)

Well lets see. Cauldron is an interesting spin on the "secret society that controls the world" trope. The formulation it's working from is "cabal of important world leaders and their unseen puppet-masters who all worship an evil god/are alien invaders/are otherwise jewish coded because really all these conspiracies are just The Protocols with a new coat of paint hastily slapped on." Cauldron doesn't fully depart from this space; antisemetic conspiracy theorists from Terrats to Icke have had too much influence on the popular conception of secret societies for any derivation not to share some of that DNA. But it departs from it in some important ways: first of all, its remarkably small. It has a wide number of important people indebt to them, sure—but the number of people who actually know whats going on is what, five? Secondly, its members have almost nothing in common; certainly nothing to fit them in as a stand-in for a religious/ethnic minority. Thirdly, there's no narrative of good vs evil, no righteous undercurrent opposing a purely malicious group: most of the case 53s want Dr. Mother and her crew dead, but they're hardly positioned as righteous warriors of the light or anything by the text, and Cauldron's ultimate goals fall far short of the evil-for-evil's sake New World Order shtick.

Finally, while Cauldron is an incredibly major player with a hand in every major event in the world of parahumans, they are not proper masterminds: they're hypercompetent in their specializations for getting things to go their way, but they often either don't know why they're doing what they're doing or can't predict the effects of their actions. Nothing in the story could happen without them acting behind the scenes, but they're less the authors of what happened and more the people knocking over dominoes and hoping the rube-goldberg machine spits out something akin to what they wanted to happen. They can give people faustian bargans, but as Battery's case shows they don't always have the power to ensure the bargains are met. They can create disasters for their own ends, but they unleash disasters on accident nearly as often.

Doctor Mother represents this tendency more than any other member of Cauldron, lacking Contessa and Number Man's predictive abilities yet directing them and the Triumvirate to enact worldwide change. The least powerful member in literal terms, but for all that no other character is so directly behind the world events of earth Bet. She's almost more responsible for Earth Bet's divergences from the real world than Scion; everything comes back to her in some way. Doctor Mother moves, and the world moves with her.

All that to say, Doctor Mother stands stans want to fuck The Unmoved Mover from Aristotle's Metaphysics!

(Other answers here)

[spindle-girl]

Something something Doctor Mother being the only person in a crowd of bystanders to try and stop a young girl from doing something dangerous. Even when the girl ignored her DM refused to leave the girl alone and followed, being the only one to help her kill the monster. How she believed the girl when she was told of the situation despite how insane it was. How she helped despite also being told how dangerous it was.

And how later, when another young woman puts herself in harms way to stop another monster, Contessa is given the same opprotunity as Doctor Mother. Another young woman who's power is messed up so that she can't find the path out. But this time Contessa can.

[rebel-sqrrl]

Doctor Mother: Contessa, how many of the Harbinger clones do you think you can recruit?

Contessa: how do I recruit the Harbingers?

PtV: kill numbers 2 and 5

Contessa: ...

Contessa: how do I recruit a consecutively numbered set of Harbingers?

PtV: kill numbers 6, 7, and 8

Contessa: best I can do is five ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[cpericardium]

How would you rank the members of Cauldron in terms of hypothetical parenting skills?

there is a fic about this very thing if you would like to see

I considered just copy pasting "distant and emotionally neglectful" for all of them but,

Doctor Mother: She raised Fortuna all right didn't she. Didn't she

Alexandria: Places high expectations on the kid and they definitely feel it. Also overengineers many trials by fire to fuel the kid's personal growth, but other people (e.g. faculty, bosses, daycare employees) are not allowed to administer those trials unless given explicit instructions

Eidolon: Somewhat protective and not bad in the beginning, gets increasingly insecure about his parenting skills over time and buries himself in hero work. Child most likely drinks a vial to get attention and becomes his arch nemesis

Contessa: She tries her best -> child eats ice-cream for dinner -> police can't find enough evidence to make the charges stick -> the case goes cold -> she tries her best ->

Number Man: Reads parenting books in secret and attempts to follow them to the letter. Gets flummoxed and disgruntled when the child doesn't behave in exactly the way they're supposed to. Starts reading classified cia manuals on enhanced interrogation techniques instead

Custodian: Enjoy your surveillance state kiddo

Slug: Most likely to raise a child who isn't damaged by their childhood

William Manton: We saw how this turned out

I just realised I didn't even rank them. From best parent to worst

Slug

Custodian

Number Man

William Manton

Eidolon

Doctor Mother

Contessa

Alexandria

[victoriadallonfan]

Doctor Mother in Worm: Lex Luthor expy dedicating her life to fighting the gold Superman expy, isn't even considered worth his time as she dies.

Teacher in Ward: Lex Luthor expy who doesn't care at all about the gold Supergirl expy, gets hunted down beyond time and space for his troubles

I think the lesson here is that if you go down the mad scientist route, gold flying bricks will just ruin your life.

[toastedicarus]

I think doc mom is nonbinary but is too dedicated to cauldrons branding to change names so it's basically this tweet

[trans-queen-administrator]

Doctor Mother not having powers is interesting and cool and I love the idea of the most powerful woman in the multiverse being a normal human with no superpowers, but honestly it's kind of heartbreaking to me that she held off on drinking a vial. Because she had to have wanted powers at some point, but what did it matter if she got them? She administered and watched the process of thousands of vials, and none of them produced anyone who would do more than annoy Scion. Her closest and oldest companion (because are her and Contessa even friends?) has all the power in the world and it's never enough. So what's the fucking point of drinking a vial? She knows more than anyone that whatever power she gets will never be enough, she'll be nothing more than a speck to Scion. So she holds off on drinking a vial, what's the point of her drinking one anyway? The idea of drinking that vial became a source of hope to her in a decades long fight where they have no chance of winning. If she doesn't have powers, then theoretically when she finally gets them they may be able to do the job, there's still the chance of finding the miracle silver bullet even if she knows that she'll end up like everyone else that can never do enough.

[estavionpira]

the doctor motherrrr

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🥼🧪

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[il3x]

love me a character who grabs their own conscience by the throat and drags it down the path of atrocities