#this is a bit rough aroud the edges cuz its 5am but

[lakesbian]

i think one thing that's important to note abt alec's supervillainy--in addition to the fact that he's doing it for fun because "fun" is the most positive emotion he can generally hope for out of life--is that he was raised in a cult which superheroes, time and time again, failed to do any damage to, let alone rescue children from. his childhood was centered around The Family, father specifically, as end-all-be-all, the thing you're supposed to live and die for. being pushed into various crimes, things that were, as he put it "dangerous or hard on my conscience," was (among other things) coaching to see the outside world as an enemy. the moral of his childhood was that he is terrible, he does terrible things, he does not have a choice not to be terrible because he is a vasil, and if normal society caught him he would be harshly punished like any other vasil.

(i think this is specifically the crux of the "dangerous things" he vaguely mentions being forced to do--increasingly escalating crimes which are dangerous to him & frame him as an enemy of the outside world that must successfully harm + evade it to be allowed to return to the safety of the home. some 'no going home until you've successfully robbed this drug den belonging to a rival team or beat the fuck out of this hero' type shit.)

subsequently: if you're alec, and you're 13, and you just ran away from your batshit sexmurder cult, is it going to occur to you to walk up to the nearest hero and go "excuse me i am a homeless child with the world's most abusive father actively hunting me down may i have some help," or are you going to think of the one million murder and rape and kidnapping and burglary charges you probably have against you and assume that being a villain is quite literally your only option for escape and survival? superpowered teens don't get community service for their crimes, they get groomed into being another cog in a a regimented and deeply traumatizing system of policing. why would he want to reach out to the heroes his primary experience w/ is knowing how they failed to help him + knowing they would likely want to prosecute him? the idea of approaching any form of legal system for aid would have sounded utterly ridiculous to him for a number of reasons at this point in his life--of course he fucked off to rob a few gas stations so he would have money to eat and find a place to stay instead. and then of course that spiraled into being an undersider and having vague dreams of being more famous and successful than his father, because it's the next best thing to getting to punch him in the dick.

anyway, all of that is to say: being regent is the only life he has. the only option he feels he has. skitter could go home and become taylor again, even if being taylor sucks, and grue could go home and become brian again, even if being brian sucks, but alec and regent are more or less the same person and also the only person he is allowed to be. he refuses to be jean-paul, so he's alec and regent instead. he refuses to be a heartbroken, so the undersiders is the closest thing to a family he has. (interesting sidenote on that--whereas taylor slips further and further into referring to the undersiders only by cape name, in his interlude he largely refers to them by civilian name, even when referencing them using their powers/being on the job.) his costume demonstrates his desire to fade into the background, to make people underestimate him so that he can be regent in peace (flowy, nonthreatening over-shirt concealing the armor underneath, ostentatious scepter as a hidden taser), but the main reason it's not scary is that it's not an act he's putting on--it's just him.

it's just him, who does what he has to do to get the job done and no more or no less, him who hates waiting around for stake-outs and likes affectionately calling his friends "dork," him who wants to take the money from the robbery home and buy a pizza and a fancy couch to eat the pizza on and a movie to watch while he eats the pizza because he's tired of not being allowed to have nice things. it's a playful persona only in the sense that he is a person who thinks playful, flamboyant personas are fun: he makes his voice artificially deep so he can imitate grue while joking to skitter. he waves an arm around and narrates his silly imaginary dramatic soap-opera scenario to his team while they walk to a meeting. he interrupts a kidnapping to scare the piss out of his team leader with a play-pretend joke.

he's a criminal for a living, too--it's the only life he has--it's just that he'd really like if his life could be fun and pretty and not too difficult and unabashedly him, for once. and the way his costume scans more as playing dress-up than as trying to intimidate anyone reflects this perfectly.

anyway. in another life he's a theater kid.

Something else about Alec—when we first see him on the field, he’s remarkably less intimidating than the other Undersiders, with a costume much less fear-inspiring and more straight-up gimmicky. I’ve talked about the Undersider’s costumes before, but one of the subtler differences between Worm and more “traditional” superhero media is how the villains’ costumes and personas often don’t have the same level of camp to them that comic villains do. There’s much more focus on practicality, where the only thing that matters aesthetically about a costume is that it communicates “don’t fuck with me.” Every hero in worm has a detailed, practical-yet-aesthetically-pleasing costume, but you run into villain capes with no costume or only the bare bones of one all the time. Rachel’s dressed like a horror movie slasher, Brian doesn’t bother with more ornamentation than an intimidating helmet. Lisa looks the part of your Saturday-morning villain, but she’s more invested in doing that than most because her cops-and-robbers theory—plus, when she’s in action she’s nearly always the scariest person in the room. And Lung, the first supervillain we meet, doesn’t have a costume at all, just a commanding presence. In contrast, the next set of villains Taylor meets, Uber and Leet, are established as losers no one takes seriously partially through having costumes that are just gimmicky. Early worm establishes that the successful villains in this setting are focused on being scary before anything else. Considering the extend Taylor internalizes the “be feared or die” strategy as the story goes on, it’s important for Worm to set that dynamic up quickly at the beginning, even if later characters break this rule*.

But early Regent doesn’t care about being scary. He struts into the battlefield like he’s Gorgeous George**, complete with a costume that wouldn’t look out of place in professional wrestling. He spends less time trying to act intimidating when fighting people and more time trying to get people to forget he’s there until he can steal their cool canon. He’s not trying to scare heroes or rival villains off like the others are, and that’s largely because he didn’t create the Regent persona to scare away people and make crime easier—he made the Regent persona to have a life away from his horrible family. It’s an early indication that Alec’s motivation for being here are not the same as everyone else’s—the other Undersiders are criminals for a living, and are using their personas as tools for their job. Alec is in this to have a good time in a way he didn’t get to in his old life, and is using his Regent persona as a form of play.

*for the later successful villains who DO care a lot about aesthetics, such as Accord or Trickster, their motivation for bucking the trend tend to says a lot about them. But that’s a different post.

**now I have the image stuck in my head of Alec coming to an important villain meeting in an evening gown, puppeting his henchmen to spread a carpet of rose petals ahead of him. Fuck he’d love doing that. The real tragedy of the Behemoth fight is that it robbed us of Aisha and Alec forming the best tag-team heel duo the wrestling world has ever seen.