“Krouse made his play because he'd lost all hope, and decided the only thing he could do was self-destruct spectacularly alongside the person he loved.” krouse analysis by ewingstan (my favorite one so much)

travellers modern au

Poster on my right shoulder with a cheap angel wing costume (the one from Oldboy (2003)): "You should write about how Krouse making an unsecured tophat that's constantly in danger of falling off a key part of his costume actually fits his themes really well. You've already written about how his ringmaster getup is part of cultivating a sense of mastery-within-instability; Krouse excels when thrown into a chaotic situation because he can use chaos better than others. Styling himself as a leader of a circus, master and causer of chaos who holds things together just enough to have them culminate in a grand spectacle, shows what type of reputation he cultivates. But that instability is a constant in his life, he seeks it out, it seeks him out, and despite the air he puts on of having everything under control it really is always in danger of falling apart. The tophat can fall off at any moment, the travellers can collapse at any time, the cultivated and uncultivated chaos surrounding their lives can suck them all into the undertow at any time. If you actually write an analysis post fleshing that out it would be an excellent use of your time."

Poster on my left shoulder, taking the form of Judge Holden as he was depicted in Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian: "You should write about how whenever his hat falls off Krouse just puts a rock or large piece of trash on his head and switches them. Fuckin. Eight times during the fight with the Wards Vista had to deal with the fact that she was nearly getting killed by a guy putting a brick on his head. Sometimes he'd throw his hat at you and then put a brick on his head and then swap them and bam you've gotten hit in the face with a brick."

Go forth. Put him in situations.

*insert unfunny iseaki joke here*

if your requests are open you should draw trickster. holding the door slightly open for someone. possibly cody

even if they were closed id open them for trickster holding the door slightly open

anyways I think Jess and Marissa were full on lesbians for each other, like not even in a secret way its just that we only see the Travelers from the perspective of Taylor (only sort of knows what a lesbian actually is) and Krouse (Has seen them making out but doesn't believe they're actually together because he doesn't think anyone could actually be attracted to a disabled person)

Uncle Sam - Trickster

man who may have made some little itsy bitsy mistakes...

The fact that a power like Coil's exists and plays such a large role in Worm, a story that is a tragedy, is really something. Kind of a variant of how Lisa's power is a particular coping mechanism for a tragedy - you didn't see the bad thing coming, now you have a superpower that helps you notice it. Except with Coil's power, it responds to the tragedy reader who goes "which choice was the one where they fucked it up? What was the point of no return? What was the biggest mistake, in a series of escalating mistakes?" Here, the story presents the ability to test your choices before you make them, and see which one fucks you over the most.

That Krouse works for this guy (sorry, this was a Travelers post all along) makes me want to have a nice appetizer of drywall. Krouse and the other Travelers, who are Fated By Big Monster Creature to make the wrong choices. We know that the fact that Coil had a precog was a big reason why they agreed to work for him, since precogs mess with the Simurgh's cause and effect. But Coil's power, in its own right, is pretty significant too.

To me, it's an extra tragic overlay over Coil's interlude. In it, Coil chooses to check up on the construction of the Travelers' base and Noelle's cage, and then overwrites that choice, since it doesn't end well. But Coil isn't the only person with a tragedy fork in the road: also in that interlude, Noelle asks Krouse to let her out of the new cage, and Krouse refuses.

There's arguments to be made about the extent to which that's really a choice. In the moment, of course, Krouse doesn't have any real choice but to say no, because Coil is, you know, right there. But I do think it's notable that he never does it. He never lets her out. And maybe that's a fork in the road, too.

"How much agency do the Travelers have" is, obviously, its own multi-paragraph essay, given the Simurgh and the PRT quarantine measures and Coil and every other force conspiring against these poor gamers. The fact that the Simurgh exists in a story about the things people do and the reasons why they do them absolutely rules. But one of the things I really love about Coil's interlude is the suggestion that maybe, possibly, at one point, there might have been a choice, and the other Travelers didn't take it. It's another little moment that complicates why Noelle wants to be "fixed" - is it her powers themselves, or is it the fact that those powers mean that nobody will let her see the sun, or both?

worm characters ranked

1. taylor “never done anything wrong” hebert

2. amy “never done anything right” dallon

3. trickster “actively refuses to do right” lastname

honorable mention; alec “kind of given up on morality” vasil

The travelers:

Luke (right) stealing Cody's (left) beanie

Jessie and Mars going on a picnic, way before Madison

Krouse and Noelle

Precognition in Worm is interesting to me for a singular reason. It can be wrong.

Glimpsing the future as a Parahuman isn't an actual vision of what is to come. It's a simulation of what can happen. Which is why Precogs can mess with each other's visions, rendering them entirely inaccurate.

As such, even the Simurgh isn't 100% accurate. Her plans work along assumptions of how people will act by viewing their entire self and twisting their thoughts with her scream. But it some deviates from their typical actions, if they grow as a person or have second thoughts then they break from her plans and stop being a Simurgh bomb.

The Travelers are a perfect example of this. Especially since the only character who actually shows this in story is Cody.

Krouse, for example, is a selfish, pragmatic person. He will do what's necessary for himself and what he cares for. And if something requires a selfless act, like giving Noelle mercy when there's no saving her, when her personality is visibly dying in the face of what she's becoming, he'll betray everyone and everything to suit his interests.

And Cody is someone driven by revenge and pettiness. Always wanting to fuck with Krouse for replacing him, even if it's a drastically stupid idea like making Noelle clone him. So when he goes against the pursuit of revenge and spares Lisa's life rather than killing her like he was going to, choosing to go on living and find the girl he likes in the Yangban, he changes his character and breaks from the Simurgh's plot.

Precogs in Worm are powerful, but they're aren't always right.

She punched the insufferable tophat off my head but underneath was a smaller, more insufferable tophat

Krouse/Noelle

This one has been languishing in my inbox for a while, but I do want to get to it.

I think these two are fundamentally teenagers, and this is the core part of their tragedy. If they'd been two years older when they got together, this would've gone so much better.

Krouse is a very talented guy. He is mostly talented at video games, but he is really very good. He is very good without even having to work that hard at it, and this is a fact that has gone a little bit to his head. It leads to him being something of an arrogant prick, which can irritate his friends, and especially irritates his not-friends, but the frustrating part is that he often is good enough to back up the arrogance.

He becomes the Travellers' leader by virtue of being decisive. By this I mean that he makes decisions, he cuts the knot, he makes the call. These decisions are very rarely good, but when everyone else is still reeling and too stunned to come up with anything, doing something is better than doing nothing, and Krouse is always there, making decisions.

The problem is that Krouse was only ever good at making decisions for himself. Even in their pro-gamer days, Krouse excelled in going off on his own to make key plays, rather than working directly with the team. He's, uh, not that good at keeping them in mind, let's say.

For her part, Noelle is the star. She is the strategist, the leader, the one who puts their plans together and adjusts them on the fly. Krouse may be talented, but Noelle is good. She's good because she gets it, and then works to refine that understanding into excellence. She does know how to work with a team, not just in the game, but also to manage the team outside of it.

She also has an eating disorder, but this notably doesn't lead to an insecurity that affects her abilities here, and she does a pretty good job of establishing her boundaries, at least initially. She is not looking for a relationship, and that's fine. She does not feel the need to talk about her eating disorder with anyone other than her closest friend, and she's good at sticking to that, too.

You can almost see her going by a checklist of how to set boundaries, in a very teenager kind of way, because it doesn't come with the skills to respond when someone ignores them.

And Krouse sure does love ignoring boundaries. I don't even think he does it on purpose, but a part of him takes 'you can't do that' as a challenge, and when Noelle rejects Cody, he sees that as a way to prove himself better than him.

Similarly, he doesn't accept when Noelle tries to break up with him, because it doesn't make sense to him. He, too, is following a very teenager script for doing a relationship, because when your partner is obviously distressed, you shouldn't abandon them! But he lacks the understanding, or the respect, for what his partner is saying, and so tries to force her into being stronger than she is to break up with him.

And so she doesn't. Even though it's bad for her, and a lot of Krouse's interest and attention is making her spiral and messing with her process of dealing with her eating disorder, because she hasn't told him about that. And she does like him, and wants him as her boyfriend, but she doesn't quite grasp that him not respecting her boundaries is a red flag.

And then their world goes to shit, Noelle becomes her own worst nightmare, spitting out twisted and hateful versions of themselves after they come into contact with her, and Krouse gets the ability to always be somewhere he shouldn't be, but never quite able to be where he needs to be to help the one person he cares about.

Wildbow has said that he didn't really know how to write romances at the time of writing Worm, and I understand what he means. Krouse and Noelle aren't a teenage romance that would show up in a romance novel.

But they are a very strong example of a teenage romance as a tragedy, because if either of these people had had just a bit more experience in relationships, they would've been able to navigate their problems so much better, and Krouse might not have ruined everything.

D: I’m neutral on it

She was pretty sure Krouse was a lesbian