#worm spoliers

[shsl-heck]

While I procrastinate working on an actual effort post about superhero fiction, I want to say that we here at Wormblr love to mock r/parahumans (frequently this is deserved), and will occasionally bring up SpaceBattles to dunk on, but TV Tropes also has some real gems we've been sleeping on. Compiled below are some of my favorites.

^^^ This one I love because it actually just does not fit at all. Gold Morning is pretty blatant abt hammering in the thematically appropriate call backs, and the story literally has Taylor get asked whether or not the ends justified the means, and her answer is no.

^^^ These are just alien thought processes to me. How you could find none of the undersiders sympathetic is buck wild to me since they are a group of horribly traumatized children. Also I will quibble here and say the rape allegation is presumably leveled at Alec, who 1. Never pretended it was justified, and 2. Was like 10 years old??? Literally a full ass child being groomed to commit heinous acts. It's weird to me to act like he is a monster under those circumstances.

^^^ I assume Brian is the guy being referenced here? Absolutely unhinged take.

^^^ And finally, someone who simply hates to see a girlboss winning (committing acts of terrible violence) 🙄

[shsl-heck]

We were robbed of a scene like this tbh

the funniest part of the endgame sequence of Worm is when the narrative completely forgets about the END OF THE WORLD for a hot second to describe in great detail how sexy and effeminate Marquis is. how even though she isn't usually interested in feminine men or older men Amy's dad is gnc af and just so incredibly fuckable. Taylor there's people that are dying

[mysteryfeesh]

Some fanart of @kenneduck’s SidLink comic! This was so fun to draw and I love the little changes that were made to Link’s design! If you aren’t already following along with the comic I highly recommend it, the art and writing are amazing!

[tiredqueermushroom]

There is something about the way in which the Prime Deities can construct and bend reality to their will but still are unable to conceive a reality in which they can both love and protect their siblings and their children.

[tiphyrow]

I’ve been hearing about the Magnus archives for years now and finally decided to try it out. I’m really enjoying it but I have like crazy serious vermiphobia and didn’t know those little beasts were so crucial to the plot. Hearing, reading or saying the word makes me itchy and I’ve literally had nightmares about the type of stuff that happens in the podcast since I was like a baby. Obviously this has been a problem but i really want to keep listening so I’ve started imagining Jane prentiss like this.

It’s working

[shsl-heck]

No exactly! I am the world's biggest Doctor Mother apologist. I've seen people who say that the difference between Cauldron and Taylor is that Taylor doesn't expect people to do anything she herself wouldn't be willing to do, and I fundamentally disagree. Doctor Mother and Contessa gave up the same things their test subjects did! DM was also plucked from her world! She was just a young woman who helped a little girl when no one else would, and her reward for that deed was to become the most powerful woman in the world to her own detriment. (I should write about the parallels between Kevin Norton and Doc Mom at some point).

After doormaker and the clairvoyant she could've gone back home, but she didn't. She gave up everything to try to save the world, even though she fully expected to fail. Maybe she didn't become physically monstrous but she certainly gave up her ability to ever live anything resembling a normal life.

Contessa was a literal child, and her power denied her any chance to ever grow up, so the things she sacrificed are kind of obvious. It's horrifying to stop and think about the situation these two were put in! Like we can go on and on about how stupid some of their decisions were, or about Cauldron being the embodiment of cold utilitarianism, but personally I find it hard to see them that way. To me the real way they parallel Taylor isn't how they do wrong things for the right reasons, but that they were handed the power to do something and couldn't have lived with themselves if they chose to just look away.

One thing that I don’t think gets talked about enough in Worm is the way that Cauldron is set up as this horrific inhuman force, and then how effectively its humanized.

Like, we start off hearing only whispers, a few interludes deal with the results of their experiments and the aftermath of combat with Contessa, and they seem just terrifying. When we finally meet Contessa and D.M. face to face, they’re ridiculously put together, at the head of some of the biggest movements and organizations in the world, and they’re almost sadistically efficient and uncaring.

But when we finally see everything unravel, and get a Contessa POV interlude, they start to make sense.

D.M. was just a random person with nowhere else to turn, trusting another random person from an alternate universe who always got it right, and might be just a bit wonked out from microdosing omniscience. Contessa is that random AU person who just got the power to win and is being dragged along by it despite her lack of understanding. When faced head on with the results of their actions, they aren’t cool or uncaring, they get emotional, they still feel justified but it shows that the cold demeanor was a means to an end, a step on the path to victory.

I especially like how this applies in terms of the vials.

We hear little about them, know they exist and that people actively seek them out but also see that they have potentially deadly or monstrous side effects. They can grant amazing power, and for most of the story you’re left wondering who Cauldron is, and how they managed to create powers in a bottle

…which we find out was done by them hacking apart a mostly dead god and just feeding it to people to see if that does something.

They went from “invincible masterminds of the PRT” to “well fuck, maybe eating god let you kill god?” in like two chapters

[bluejaysandworms]

No one understands Oobleck!Nightmare like I do

[false-anomaly]

ARGH I'm loosing it oh my god they love eachother so so much

"You are saying that we need Romana?"

"I don't think Gallifrey can go on without Romana. I don't think I can go on without Romana."

I KNOW THIS AUDIO IS A COUPLE YEARS OLD BUT I CAN'T GET OVER IT. THEY'RE SO IN LOVE. HELP?? SEND HELP!?!

[lesbiangummybearmafia]

The Gilded Age season 2, episode 1: You Don't Even Like Opera spoliers...

First I have say I'm so happy The Gilded Age is back! I've waiting since they showed us the teaser for season 2, thought I'd lose my mind. But finally...

I'm so glad to see Bertha there in all her glory. Reminding, re-reminding, annoying, giving a headache to especially Mrs. Astor and showing them all they need to be falling under her reign. I definitely think that lovely surprise at the end of her dinner helped greatly. Mrs. Astor was squirming like worm on hook. Which I personally couldn't been happier about. Because some time in first season I completely fell under Bertha's spell I'm good with that still. It's not just that she's attractive because well duh, but it's that she's cunning, brilliant, devilish, crazy intelligent, 6 steps at least a head of anyone else, always has plan, suffers no fools, old money/new money she'll can take you down faster then you snap your fingers. But I do think she's a loyal friend and a good person to those who prove to that her too. So I have very deep affection for her character.

My heart went out to Peggy and her Mom that they didn't get to her son in time. That whole arch just put me in tears time and again. To get that close to her son only to lose him like that was just cruel. I really want to see happiness for her character. I still will never be ok with what her father did but I understand a little more why he did it. Especially back then, they have soften his character which helps to see where he may have been coming from trying to protect his daughter. It would be nice to see Peggy as some point have a relationship with her father again. Her father know the pain he has caused to both his wife and daughter. It's easy to the guilt and pain he himself is feeling.

Same for Marian after what happened last season, I hated watching her fall in love for first time to that low life who didn't deserve her. I doubt it would happen but I think her and Bertha's son Larry would make a wonderful couple. He definitely likes her, we seen that last season. I just like to see happiness for her. I really think Aunt Agnes needs get over Marian teaching water painting to upper class girls at a private school one day a week. Give me a break, it's so not a big deal. Even for back than it's shouldn't be a big deal.

I have such a I like her/I dislike her relationship with Aunt Agnes. All last season I was like this omg one moment I wanted smack her upside the head and next I was nodding my head agreeing with her. I feel it may be another season of that with her.

Then there's Aunt Ada in middle trying to keep to peace or keep the house from burning down. Their like sisters that got custody of an adult teenager which it basically was back then when you had an adult young woman in your house. But I really love Aunt Ada. I know she's always keeping the peace but she did say in episode sometimes yelling could be a good thing so. But she has such a loving heart and she truly wants everyone to find happiness. I'd like to see her get happiness also. I could easily seen her be a wife and mom. So she deserves her own amount of happiness.

Now I know, we all know there is no way that Bertha is going to allow Gladys to marry Oscar. But what I'm trying to figure out is this is that good or bad? Now I see Bertha wanting have what happened with Cora on Downton Abbey, with Gladys ends up marring a English Lord or Duke. Not Oscar Van Rhijn that's for sure. But what about for Gladys at first I was against the idea because shouldn't she find a man that actually want to be in love with her? With Oscar because he's gay that's never a true possibility. But after what Oscar said in episode it got me thinking. Because back then it wasn't like a wife square and equal partner in a marriage. Depending on husband it was expected for the wife to have the husband's opinions on things, to keep in line. Gladys being married to Oscar she would have freedom she most likely never have in any other marriage. But she would also never have romantic love, I definitely think she'd have love with Oscar. Now I'm a lesbian so it is different to say the least but some of my closest friendships have been with gay men. One I consider the brother I never had. So Gladys could have a very deep emotional relationship with Oscar that's love just not romantic. So I'm lost what to think, however Oscar would need to show that wanting to marry Gladys isn't just for his own selfish reasons.

Than the mess with the robber barons. Which I wonder is just ment to mirror so many CEOs, Executives, Studio heads and etc... that are fighting the unions in our own time? I don't know if labor unions started because of robber barons or not. However I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they did. At that meeting with George Russell and the other robber barons is having talking about workers wanting medical care, better housing, better pay, 8 hour work day. While they choke on their own wealth but don't want to give the very people that are making them that wealthy a better life should be definition of greed. Is this how America became the greedy horrible place we now live in? That's why I use the term robber barons instead of successful heads industrialists. One tell everyone plainly what exactly what they were. But in the show it hard to know where place my feelings. Because the show is based somewhat in reality but the Russell's are fictional. But say that George Russell had been a real robber barons of the time. A large part of me wants to hate his character, but the problem is I actually like his character quite a bit. I want to see him put in ethical workplace practices for his workers, I want you see him do the right thing for the people that work him. Now I'm somewhat fearful what the show will have them do. Most likely mirror history no doubt.

Because I'll attempt it I love seeing Bertha in all her gorgeous, insanely beautiful dresses. Their so many of her's I was drooling over in this episode along, (she has the best wardrobe of whole cast). But if we were talking realistically, where is all that money coming from to pay for those dresses and grows. Off the backs off works who live in poverty. Does now, just like then makes so much sense why all jobs and industries need labor unions. But perhaps ultimately that's a part of the show. Because those two very thoughts were fighting against themselves at the same time in US right then. I do like the idea of the Gilded Age making us really think about that.

I'm so looking forward to whole new season!

I'm 100% on Bertha Russell side. She's basically Regina Mills cousin to me, don't ever ask me explain that outside my own mind lol.

Oh yea can't wait to see all the gorgeous clothes.

[frescopino]

Yeah, sorry 'bout that but I gotta agree. Theo has, as far as I remember, never exhibited any Neo Nazi behavior aside from literally just being born.

Plus, still as far as I remember, he did think about the name. His relationship to Kaiser and Purity was made public when their identities were, he knew he had both the world and his own family's attention on him, the latter of which literally abandoned him to try and force him to trigger. The choice of a Jewish inspired name was a very deliberate stance on what he thought about his family.

The lie is "mass suicide is the way to save the world." That's a plot point in Ward. Suicide baiting is the way to save the world in Worm.

[shsl-heck]

One thing that's had me thinking about Amy lately, is the tension between disgust and desire. She is horrified by the immensity of her desire for Victoria, but the shame and guilt over it can only ever make it worse. Fear and arousal, disgust and desire, all of them bleed into each other (we see this constantly in both porn and horror). It's like she has this splinter at the core of her being and she either cant realize or wont accept that the more and more she digs for it to try to get it out, the deeper she's driving it into herself. She cannot remove this without help from someone else. (Coincidentally, not being able to recognize that her attempts to do/be what she's supposed to are only making things worse is also what leads to the Enwretchening)

I'm aware there's a reading of Worm in which Amy's attraction to Victoria is purely an expression of a kind of morality focused ocd, but I personally think that's less interesting. She definitely experiences some level of that (the urge to fuck up a baby she's healing followed by disgust with herself is like a perfect example of an intrusive thought associated with that brand of ocd), but I think this is a case of *and* rather than *or*. My reading of Amy is that of a deeply lonely and emotionally neglected child clinging to the one person in her life that gives her any form of affection, whose attachment only gets increasingly complicated as she starts to grow up and realizes she is attracted to women.

She has never been treated as part of the family, has always felt on some level that she's only playing at being a sister to Victoria, and she is dealing with that during a stage of her life that is turbulent at best for even people raised in a healthy functional environment. There is a broad cultural taboo around sex and desire, but there's a special sort of self-loathing and fear that you're somehow predatory for finding someone attractive that a lot of queer people experience due to the stigma surrounding their sexuality and/or gender. Homoeroticism and attraction is seen as disgusting and fundamentally wrong by society no matter what. It is especially disastrous for Amy because even though she's never been able to see herself as Victoria's sister, she knows she's supposed to, and that adds a whole new layer of guilt and shame to even a passing thought about Victoria being attractive.

Then she triggers. Suddenly she not only has to pretend to be Amy Dallon the well behaved unintrusive family member, she has to be Panacea, the girl who performs miracles. She doesn't even have a secret identity to fall back on for privacy because of New Wave's gimmick. Any resentment about her role, or desire to live a normal life become more proof that she is a sick, evil person; a parasite who has wormed her way into the Good and Heroic Dallon-Pelham family and is eating away at them from the inside-out.

Even as it forces her to repress more and more of herself, Panacea also offers Amy what is seemingly her only chance to be Good like her family. Healing people isn't just something she has to do in order to avoid being a terrible person, but also how she can atone for everything else that's Bad about her. Saving people is a way to try to purge herself of the desire for Victoria, and to prove that she can be a Dallon in more than name.

Like, as awful and lesbophobic as Wildbow's handling of Amy was, there is something deeply compelling and even relatable about her to me. She perfectly captures an emotional state that I've struggled (and failed) to explain as I wrote and rewrote this post. It's the hunger, the guilt, the shame, the fear, the loneliness that settles on your skin like frost as a child when you accept that there must be something wrong with you, because if there wasn't then you wouldn't have to try so hard to be good.

[lunapokema]

Potential Spoliers

For LoZ TotK

(Upfront, I am a Sidlink shipper. However, that actually has nothing to do with the following opinion.)

Say what you will about Yona, I think we are all overlooking the most glaringly obvious flaw with the character:

She's fucking ugly.

I mean, the design team at Nintendo really screwed the pooch on this one. If she had that demure beauty like Mipha I could've lived with this development, but noooo.

Her Lime green color scheme doesn't compliment Sidon's Red at all. You could have picked blue, purple, gold (< I know that's orange cut me some slack), one of the standard colors of the other Zora characters in BotW. But no.

Her horns look like Leucochloridium - the parasitic worm that invades a snail's eyestalks. Just with less pulsating.

And let's not forget that 500 years down the line, we are looking at a female Muzu - I hope you all realize this. She's the only other stingray based Zora, they have to be related.

In conclusion, Mipha is lovely and Yona is shit. Plus, the childhood best friend who just shows up out of nowhere and was never mentioned or alluded to before, even in DLC, is just really lazy writing.

[agendergorgon]

Pitch 1: an alternative idea for Jack to give on Scion. Maybe in this scenario Jack knows Cauldron is opposed to him but doesn't quite grasp how powerful this thing is. Idk. The result is some kind of mass stranger event that is letting everyone hear what they want to hear, things start going right for them and finally everyone else seems to get it. Finally, everyone was working together. It lasts a day or two at most before everyone's fantasies start to fray, people on the street who dreamed they stood up to their boss vs managers who want their subordinates to always say yes. Cauldron works to gather people together and uses capes like Mantellum to establish temporary refuge and a chance at conversation, determining that Scion's got some weird cape broadcasting the effect idk, its a guy they can track down and gank. Pitch 2: Capes in shardspace, in an imagined simulated world that's having to pull double duty dealing with the violent impulses of its inhabitants. The unwritten rules are actually a thing, there's a cops and robbers scene so pervasive that the Slaughterhouse 9 (possibly shy a few members since one can imagine Shatterbird and Burnscar's ideal might well be something different, possibly up a few members with a Worm era Damsel co-leading the team to the respect and fear of the rest of the cape world) are on par with silver age Joker and Jack Slash is out to commit boner themed crimes. Nobody's mother or brother is dead, but somehow Taylor crosses paths with Tattletale and the audience is able to think about the comradery she doesn't have in this world, how a world where she got to be a hero and be respected and listened to has robbed her of the people she spent the most time getting to understand and care for. (Tattletale is playing the part of Layla Miller in this, who is missing in the original post but in House of M served as a device to allow the heroes to wake up to the change in timeline)

So for those of you who don't read twenty-year-old marvel comics a lot, the 2005 Marvel Crisis Crossover was called House of M. The basic premise of this was that this was smack dab in the middle of the Scarlet-Witch-is-Having-a-Normal-one arc that was very, very loosely adapted into Wandavision; in her initial breakdown, she'd killed several of the Avengers, wound up in the protective custody of Magneto, and the recently reformed team was debating whether or not they were going to have to kill her before she deleted reality on accident or some such thing. But when they're on their way to Magneto's stronghold to have a "talk" with her, the world is enveloped in white, and Wolverine (the initial POV character) wakes up in a world where Mutants are 98% of the human population and have been for decades, and Magneto and his family (the titular House of M) are leaders of the global political order, and Wolverine is one of the only people in this realigned world who remembers that it was ever different.

Wolverine initially is operating under the assumption that Magneto cajoled Wanda into rewriting reality in his family's favor, but after rounding up and waking up several of his allies, he realizes that what actually happened is that Wanda rewrote reality so that everyone she knew would get everything they wanted- Magneto being in charge with a 98 percent global mutation rate is just the inevitable byproduct of that. The resulting world is an amalgamation that has to accommodate the conscious or subconscious "perfect life" of every superhero on earth, in a way that acts as a fascinating characterization tool, often with a monkey's-paw angle. Spider-Man is a beloved celebrity wrestler, and Uncle Ben and Gwen are both alive, but he attained that status by pretending to be a Mutant and he lives in constant fear of being exposed. Mystique, Rogue, Nightcrawler and several of their associates are the tight-knit family unit they were always kept from being.... as the elite jackboot of Magneto's regime. Luke Cage and Hawkeye lead the human resistance, standing in perpetual principled opposition to the powers that be, but with no real hope of accomplishing anything. Captain America didn't lose years of his life to the ice, but he had to live through a global authoritarian takeover he ultimately couldn't do anything about. Wolverine gets to remember his entire life, but that includes remembering that his current ideal circumstances were manufactured to keep him placated. And on and on and on. Lot of really interesting character takes packed up in there, paired with the equally interesting project of packing as many of them as possible into the same timeline without contradicting each other- after all, from the word go you have to contort everyone's happiness around the basic conceit that Magneto rules the world.

Anyway. House of M AU for Worm. Discuss.

[coffeetummy]

BG3 Spoliers ~~ Act 1 specifically

Can't get over the fact that when you get the chance to try out the worm remover chair in the githyanki creche, Gale will encourage you to try it. THEN! THEN as the chair is fucking killing you, he has the audacity to say "oh no you should get out of there!! You're gonna die" BESTIE I KNOW I WAS FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE!

Any way I like to think this is something my Tav would lord over him from time to time, because I will never forget it. It's so funny.

[deadinsideart]

Art Dump!! I made fake screenshots from the fanfic and I will make more because it's fun to imagine it being animated. I always wanted to draw them doing that hug scene..

And I used the idea's doodle I did some time ago and forgot how the actual goon outfits looked even when staring directly at a reference image. So, let's just assume Snatcher modded it to fit how he'd have it ig????

And Professor Wormton! I laughed so hard when I did the googly eyes!

Below is Snatcher in a different shade of purple bc I color picked it wrong but still love it and a sprite for the potion Snatcher gave Layton.

I wanted it to look like a flair in AHiT and I think I nailed it pretty well.

[bornetoblood]

Archivist 😡