#don't worry about the emma barnes fic it's altpower schlock

[dw-flagler]

fuck. I was writing this emma barnes fic and I've come to a realization. For a period of exactly seven days in 2009, Emma Barnes is a completely different person from the one in canon. Like, I always knew that meeting Shadow Stalker the second time shaped her as a person, but it's genuinely shocking how utterly different the road of her life could have been.

Like, for my fic I had these two paths I was struggling to pick between, which I'm calling Wire and Cloth, as a joke about imprinting (see neither is good but one is distinctly better than the other), one where Emma ends up being kidnapped by the ABB and one where she ends up as shadow stalker's apprentice. But.

Look, here's a line from Interlude 19: "What got her, the nebulous idea that haunted her, was the impact those scenes had.  There were so many defining moments, so many crises, big and small, that shaped the people they touched.  The biggest and most critical moments were the sorts that wiped the slate clean, that ignored or invalidated the person who had existed before, only to create another."

Like, yeah, she's talking about triggers, but what's getting to me is how empathetic (in the literal "I can relate to your pain" sense) and compassionate she sounds. Like. Emma shuts herself in her room for a week because she's incapable of dealing with the horror of knowing that hundreds of little girls are going through what she did every minute of every day. She can't deal with it.

This emma, who only exists for a week, is haunting me. She's just--It's just weird!

And the Emma who exists for the rest of the story, for every section except for less than half of one chapter, you can see the remains! She's there! Emma recontextualizes her existential despair at the enormity of human suffering, something she only really understood in abstract until now, as Sophia's predator/prey philosophy, right? It's so easy for her, because it gives her a way to explain it. There's predators and there's prey. It already slots into her worldview. Like (and I'm really just harping on about victim blaming today aren't I?) those girls who suffered like Emma did, they suffered because they were weak! It's simple now. There's two kinds of people, the ones who are hurt and the ones who hurt, and all Emma has to do to make sure that she is never hurt again is to be the one who does the hurting.

But for seven days, there's that ghost. The kind Emma Barnes, who doesn't want anything like what happened to her happen to anyone else. It's not as narratively interesting, I get that. Who wants a worm character who's all peace and love? That doesn't make for a mentally disturbed teenage girl doing horribly violent acts, and that's what we in the worm fandom all want to see. But still she haunts me.