interdimensional agreement to put miles back where he belongs ❗

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

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.

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.

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)

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

Doc Milf: hey Contessa, could you beat Goku?

Contessa: ...my power is literally the ability to win.

Doc Milf: yeah, but he's Goku.

Contessa: and I'm 100% That Bitch Who'll Kill Him Dead, For Realsies.

Doc Milf: never say 'for realsies' again, or I'm just gonna let the golden asshole find us.

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.

I would have liked to see Victoria talk to Doctor Mother.

I think that would be an incredible and engaging discussion on Parahumans Sciences, Morality, and use of power.

And then Victoria brings in the giant hamster ball to put Doctor Mother inside of.

The Worm Arcana: III. The High Priestess- Dr. Mother

“She stands at the crix of the upright & reversed cards.  A perverted sort of creativity, nature, and fertility, in the creation of altered life."

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

Doctor Mother: What would you do in this situation?

Weaver: I’d handle it. RIP to you, but I’m different.

The Number Man: How would you handle it?

Weaver: By handling it.

The Number Man: But what would you do to stop it?

Weaver: Step in.

Tattletale: Watch out, don’t make her step in, you don’t wanna know what happens.

Canary: What would happen?

Tattletale: She would handle it.

i forgot doc mom had a slightly french accent and now every time i think about her i am going to sveerely exaggerate how french it is

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

One of the snips I’ve wanted to write for a long time but am far too lazy to do is a story where Doctor Mother managed to drink that vial. Based on her thoughts at the time, a friend genned a power where she can see “trails” of where people came from and can send them back to reset them. She gives all this hype and build up about what it will do to her, the mutations it’s likely to cause, and then all it does is turn her slightly grey or something and gives her a superstrong power.

Completely useless against Scion, but a super strong power. She revives Alexandria, sends Sveta away (annoying), and survives Gold Morning. The rest of the story is just her, Fortuna, and Lexi in a sitcom apartment getting up to shenanigans. Doc Mom starts going to Case 53 support groups because “she understands their struggle now.” Alexandria is just fucking around with Fortuna causing problems for Citrine. It all ends when Teacher tries to get involved and Fortuna kills him in three steps, something she could have done at any time.

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