I've never made any connections between Worm and the Captain America mythos before. Spill some ink?

Okay, so from a purely aesthetic perspective, the gimme is Miss Militia. She's the most obvious "Captain Patriotic" in the roster, she has the power of GUN, she's the only one who actively buys into the mythology of America specifically. She's a Kurdish woman occupying an aesthetic niche generally held by a rugged squinty white guy. She's an output of the melting pot narrative. She's sort of a rendering of what a grounded superhero who somehow became very aesthetically into America might look like. Not in the craven marketing-driven way of Homelander or Comedian, not in the jingoistic maniac way of USAgent or Peacemaker. She buys it in the broadly left-liberal (USamerican connotation of that term) safe, friendly, reclamative way. Why, what a great rehabilitation of the archetype!

She's also deeply, deeply afraid of rocking the boat. She's got a deepseated childhood trauma related to the bad things that happen when she puts herself in a leadership role. She goes along to get along. When she's proactive, it's usually to point a gun at Tattletale to stop her from upsetting the status quo. She sits through a lot of situations where Steve Rogers, as commonly modeled, would probably plant himself like a tree by the river of truth and go, "Hey, this is fucked up." She more or less capitulates to Undersider domination of the city, in a way that predisposes us to think of her as a voice of reason after all these total nuts that Skitter's been up against- but would Taylor "to relinquish control is a form of ego death" Hebert really be willing to leave someone in charge of the local Protectorate branch who she thought couldn't be corralled? She looks like a beacon, but doesn't- indeed, probably can't- ever truly behave like one. I mean, you can debate the on-the-spot morality of any given one of her judgement calls, that's actually one of the less exhausting Worm Morality Debates to have- but in aggregate, a person in American flag garb who actually meaningfully criticizes the paramilitary organization they're part of is not gonna survive long in that role!

So again, she's the gimme from an aesthetic standpoint. But what I don't really see a lot of discussion of is how Cauldron plays into the riff.

Captain America is institutional, but in a comically morally uncomplicated way. The serum was originally mana from heaven, granted to a living saint, conveniently divorced from any nitty-gritty sausage-making process and even-more conveniently divorced from the horrible consequences of giving the, uh, the U.S government a replicable super soldier process. And in fairness to Captain America, this is 100 percent something the overall mythos eventually patched to my satisfaction; the sausage-making process eventually revealed as prototypical government fuckery driven by human experimentation on black servicemen, the overall Marvel Setting littered with failed attempts by the U.S. Government to recreate that golden goose so they can have their fun new jackboots. (In Ultimate Marvel, this is how almost all contemporary superhumans were created, and this is a state of affairs with a body count in the millions or billions.)

Cauldron draws you in with the same noble rhetoric about greater goods, the same one-off proprietary irreplicable formula- but you don't get the luxury afterwards of representing nothing but the dream. You aren't partnering up with a plucky crank scientist with a heart of gold. You're selling your soul to an organization with an agenda. The narrative makes no bones about the fact that everything you do is fundamentally tainted by the fact you opted into an end product created through torture, kidnapping and human experimentation. You don't get to pull a Kamen Rider by going rogue or opting out or making good use of the fruit of the poisoned tree; you are owned, and everything you do has this Damocles sword hanging over your head- when are the people who bankrolled this going to come to collect?

So that's the question of "who would willingly dress like that" covered, and the question of who creates a serum like that. What about the question of who takes a serum like that? I'd argue that Eidolon is the examination of that. Pre-Cauldron David reads to me like pre-serum Steve Rogers viewed through a significantly bleaker lens. They're both sickly kids desperate to serve, rocketed to the pinnacle of human capability by an experimental procedure. But for Steve Rogers, the crisis was that he had a specific vision of the world and was frustrated by his inability to carry it out. Before the serum he picked fights over what was right and wrong and got his ass handed to him; afterwards he picked those same fights and just started winning instead. The serum neatly solved a problem he had, and to the extent that his mindset is influenced by his pre-serum experiences, it's generally constructive; a desire to protect the weak, help the helpless, an appreciation for people who stand up for what's right even when they're clearly gonna get pancaked for their trouble. So ultimately there's no dark side, downside, or underlying neurosis ascribed to his initial impulse to take that serum.

But with David, it's not a tragic case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. He isn't a preternaturally-noble soul, out to represent the best elements of the American ideal- he kind of represents the inverse, a guy who's been failed at every level while utterly convinced that he's the problem. He's actively suicidal because he's a wheelchair-bound epileptic in an economically-depressed socially-backwards rural town in the 1980s, and he's spent his 18 years of life internalizing the idea that he's worse than useless unless he can somehow find a way provide value to something larger than himself. Doctor Mother finds him in the aftermath of a suicide attempt spurred by his rejection from the army- and he didn't even want to join the army specifically, necessarily, he just needed his situation to be literally anything else, and he took what he thought he could get. And then he finds himself in a position to become a superhero, so he does that, molds himself into that, subordinates himself to that, builds his entire sense of self and values around the value he can provide in that role. No grand design or sacred principles carried over through the metamorphosis. Just relief at finally, finally having something that looks like an answer to the question of what he's supposed to do.

And you know, you know that if Steve Rogers was facing down the barrel of being depowered, he'd smile and nod, he'd Cincinnatus that shit. It's happened before. But for David, the emotional trauma and self-worth issues that caused him to roll the dice on a Steve-Rogers treatment never really went away. When would it? He's been Providing Value as a ten-ton Hammer Against Evil for thirty years. No family, no social life. Certainly, no incentive on his handler's part to lance his Atlas complex. So he barrels towards atrocity in the name of remaining useful. Admittedly, this is where the comparison breaks down in a significant way; Captain America is much more of a symbol than he is an irreplicable powerhouse, so it's not catastrophic if he's taken off the board. Eidolon is so unbelievably powerful that his myopia and self-centeredness actually do align with a real problem everyone else is gonna have if he loses his powers. But in terms of the starting points- I think that Steve Rogers embodies the myth about why you'd want to join the army that badly. Eidolon is, I think, much more closely modelling why you'd actually want to join the army that badly.

miss militia is still a mystery for me. like yeah, guns that don't jam ig, and not sleeping (usually), and some versatility? isn't a non cape with a gun still about the same? we don't see her reproducing tinker guns or anything fancy like that, just regular manufactured guns. the wow factor is never being disarmed? trying to wrap my head around her becoming such a big wig in the prt, maybe it's more about the person, her efficiency and smarts, and not her potential. maybe the competition in the prt ranks is not that fierce with having fewer heroes than villains.

invite to any miss militia lawyers/enjoyers to enlighten me on her positive traits

Phoenix’s Parahumans Fanart Set from 2021

Might as well post everything for posterity’s sake.

Edit: bit late but i forgot something

since apparently this is what i’m known for: What Motorcycle I think each member of the PRT ENE would ride:

Armsmaster: Canonically rides a “souped up motorcycle.” obviously this means tinkertech in the parahumans world, but in the biker world this means egregious, stupid custom. so i’m giving him a fat tire Harley Davidson VROD. an ugly bike with an ego for a silly man with an ego

now what do you get when you cross the most reliable, unkillable dual sport of all time with a diesel engine? you get the Kawasaki KLR-650 HDT, the M1030-M1, a finicky monster used by the US military. perfect for the unkillable Miss Militia, a connoisseur of finicky military equipment. it can go anywhere and use anything for fuel, but it was literally designed to run on jet fuel.

Velocity’s a speedster right? so obviously he’s gonna get an ultra fast liter bike, super sport, 200hp, etc. WRONG. you fucking idiot. you fucking moron. personally i don’t subscribe to grimdumb f(c?)anon that he perceives real time when he’s speeding. that’s stupid cape design imo. he can go fast as his heart desires with his power. yknow what he can’t do with his power? rip up the fucking motorcross track, doing flips and jumps and shit. radical, man. so he gets a two-stoke ripper, the Yamaha YZ-250.

Battery, on the other hand, is a girlboss who needs to get stress relief via a supersport liter bike. she’s dealing with assault all day, can you blame her? so she’s getting the Honda CBR1000RR-Fireblade. liquid cooled, 999cc, inline four, with a top speed of 190mph it really doesn’t get much faster than this, folks.

now if you take the dual sport Kawasaki, give it the suspension of the Yamaha motorcross, but the tires and street performance of the supersport, you get the Supermotard class of bikes. the crackhead hooligans of the bike community, these are the bikes that are doing wheelies in residential areas, jumping over that grassy hill near your office building, and squealing around corners as the back end slips out. can you tell i have a favorite type of bike. now, who’s our resident crackhead of the protectorate? why, Assault, of course! So he’s getting the king of supermotos (and the bike i will probably be purchasing in may), a Suzuki DRZ-400SM

loud, annoying, and entitled Triumph gets the Harley Davidson Softtail, the bike of choice for obnoxious wannabe hell’s angels, the bike of choice for your balding 50yr old dad, or for the kid who wants so badly to be relevant and accepted amongst the boomers he calls friends. idk where Triumph fits into this its kinda just a vibe yk he’s a nepo baby, he gets a harley

and finally. the perfect bike for those with mobility issues/those concerned about safety due to preexisting medical conditions, Director Piggot gets a Harley Davidson Trike and she fucking slays on it, understand? girl power.

i forgot dauntless because he’s boring so he gets a boring adventure bike for boring losers. BMW F650GS. fuck you dauntless you dont even get a fun big BMW you get the heavy underpowered one. go to hell 🖕

Miss Militia wore her outfit in her red white and blue, form-fitting and color-swapped version of military fatigues, a flag scarf covering her lower face, and something between a hood and a scarf covering her head. 

BREAKING 14.4

The top two characters will be eligible to proceed into the bracket!

Propaganda under the cut.

Skitter:

Do you know what you have to do to hurt someone in a fight if your whole power is “controls bugs?” It’s never pleasant. And this is a girl with an almost pathological drive to fight people theoretically much stronger than her. Much maggots-in-eyes and spiders-on-dicks ensue. Committed to being a hero initially, ends up becoming warlord of a whole city while defending it from super-poweeed spree killers, monstrous kaiju, and timeline-severing mobsters. Saves humanity through mass mind-control.

Shes so fucking morally ambiguous I don't even know where to start. She wanted to be a hero and then over the course of 1.7 million words she tricked me into thinking she was rational and ethically sound when she cut out someone's eyes, held someone's dying son hostage in front of them as leverage (she was killing the son), put maggots in someone else's eyes to eat them slowly, shot a fucking toddler with no hesitation, and she's such an amazing unreliable narrator that you root for her. She's genuinely so good at convincing herself that she's morally sound that she convinces the reader of it as well most of the time, but despite the atrocities (and there's a fucking ton of atrocities) she's genuinely a girl who wants to do good and help the world. She fights serial killers, provides food and water and shelter for people who need it, gets her back broken trying to save people, and is generally willing to do whatever it takes to help no matter what that entails. She's a girlboss who is terrifying and determined enough to kill god, she's willing to do anything for the greater good, she has a fucking orphanage as the bottom floor of her supervillain lair. She's so so complicated and such a twist of good and brutality and I cannot stress enough how compelling and morally ambiguous and girlboss she is. I have never seen a character who fits the title "morally ambiguous girlboss" more in my entire life and frankly I doubt I will, no one does it like her.

she went from aspiring hero > supervillain > warlord (still a supervillain) > hero > mind-controlling every cape in the multiverse to kill god. and she did kill god. so. girlboss. but on her first night out she used her bugs to bite a man's dick off. that man? trying to kill kids. those kids? teenage supervillains. she initially joined their teen supervillain group to betray them to the heroes, then joins for real. their boss kidnapped a preteen girl and got said girl addicted to drugs. he used a heist taylor was in as a distraction to kidnap the girl. taylor becomes a warlord and does all sorts of awful things to the other gangs in the city (including putting maggots in a guys eyes, and carving another man's eyes out (bug dick guy) (everything grew back)). the reason she did this? so she could kill her boss and free the preteen girl. She's taken over the city at this point, she's a warlord running a supervillain gang. what's she doing with this power? improving the city's infrastructure. she runs her territory like a panopticon, if anybody who can work isn't working they get the bugs. she's also running an orphanage out of her home. she decides to step down as warlord and join the heroes. while she's in custody, what does she do? that's right. kill superman via dry land drowning in bugs. now she's a superhero. she does stakeouts and pursues gangs to force their younger/more sympathetic members into superheroism. why? to fight the end of the world. the end of the world comes, god is killing every earth in the multiverse and things aren't looking good. what does taylor do? she asks a bio-kinetic who got sent to supervillain alcatraz for sister rape to give her on-the-spot brain surgery. this brain surgery lets her control any person within like 18 feet of her. she uses a portal guy to manage to ensnare every cape in the multiverse and unite them in her fight against god. One cape has a stress induced aneurysm. how do they ultimately defeat god? she makes large-scale replicas of his dead wife everywhere, making him so sad he becomes killable. girlboss. (sorry this was so long! i started and then just kept going. worm is 1.68 million words long and a lot happens in it)

Holy Shit. Holy SHIT dude. She rotted a man's dick off with spider venom. and then she did it again (it grew back). and then she cut his eyes out. this is the first guy she meets. she mutilates *so many* people. one time she withheld a life-saving epinephrine shot from a dying man (he was allergic to bees. she controls bees.) as extortion material. she shoots a baby (it was a mercy). She cut a girl in half (which was actually pretty high up there on the "most heroic things she did" list). She was Seinfeldian rivals with the most dangerous serial killer in existence, until she trapped him in Hell Forever. He's like still there by the end of the second book. she kills God by bullying him to death. All* of this was probably the best thing she could have done in the situation. the tagline of the book is "doing the wrong things for the right reasons." The worst thing she ever really did was to pretend she was straight though.

Did she kill an orphan? Yes. Did she put maggots into a man’s eyes? Yes. Did she do all of this while having intense homoerotic tension? Yes, and that is why she is a girlboss. She also killed Jesus

Tattletale

She has a power and her power is being an asshole. Her supervillain name is Tattletale because she will not shut up about things you didn’t want the world to know. I mean yes she does try to save people but she’s mostly saving them because less people means less lives to ruin!

Miss Militia was submitted without propaganda.

Bonesaw was submitted without propaganda.

Random Headcanon that came to me as I was writing.

Miss Militia has watched more TV and movies than you can believe.

She's a Noctis Cape, doesn't need to sleep and Hana canonically loves America, enough to convert to Christianity. So now I'm just imagining her as a teenager, even before she joined the original Wards and whilst she was still learning English staying up at night and absorbing as much American media and culture as she possibly could and having an awkward phase where she tried to emulate different characters.

Grue: We didn't hurt you, so you don't hurt us. Right?

Armsmaster: ...that's right.

Regent: That's a weird fucking tone man!

Miss Militia: That's just the way he sounds. He has an asshole voice. Armsmaster, tell him he's okay.

Armsmaster: ...Everything is great.

Miss Militia: Dude!

Quick sketches of PRT BB

Hello Worm/Ward fandom.

Have a messy Miss Militia 😗✌🏻

worm au where nothing changes except miss militia changed her last name to montana

hannah militia got a tumblr in her ward years after mouse protector told her to.  99% of the time she just posts patriotic bs and argues with teenagers about how The US Is Good, Actually (much like ashley she is the unintentional author of several earth bet copypastas) but the remaining 1% is her reblogging mousegirl posts, the weirder and more unintentionally discourse-causing the better. a single tear rolls down her cheek as she puts the mousegirl bartender rant on her dash. it’s what mouse protector would have wanted.

IIRC the guns are weightless for her? And from some experience at the range, that's a big fucking deal.

if that's true that's another point for MM, being able to maneuver a piece of steel into your face as easily as a cardboard tube would be pretty useful, but gotta verify that

I should draw Miss Militia at some point soon.

Really in the mood to draw an absolutely ripped, badass lady.