#worm meta
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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.
#apologies for the delay in responding#worm#wildbow#parahumans#worm meta#eidolon#thoughts#meta#miss militia
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when somebody you know takes their own life your mind wants it to have an explanation. you start overthinking and analyzing every time you did and didn't interact with them, what you said and did, how you could have changed it. how did i not realize they were genuinely insecure about something that i teased them about? if i had made it clear i loved them would they still have done it? if i had talked to them more, could i have saved them? what did they need that they werent getting? why didn't you give it to them? every single detail is included in this. you start to convince yourself of a reasoning behind it. a reasoning that almost always includes some variation of it being your fault.
anyway im feeling normal about lisa wilbourn today, how about you?
#wormblr#parahumans#lisa wilbourn#tattletale#worm spoilers#i know everyone and their mom already did the analysis on this one but shhhhh#just Thinking about her#worm analysis#worm meta#tw suicide#suicide tw#suicide cw#cw suicide
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I have some kind of Amy post kicking around my brain but I'm not sure I've got it yet. Just... Thinking about Amy as a villain, and the way she makes villainy seem so pathetic and uncomfortable. Like, I'm a villain enjoyer, I will happily turn a dastardly villain into a poor little meow meow, a 'god forbid women do anything', a girlboss. But Amy really makes that impossible. She's so cringing, so unhappy, so devoid of joy, so lacking in spine. Like Carol, she inhabits that space where a fictional character is almost too mundanely shitty to be a fun villain. Amy's thoughts and her actions are so divorced... She has these tight rules she keeps herself to and spends so much time ruminating on potential disasters... But then she just does the bad thing no hesitation. She makes wrong choice after wrong choice after wrong choice. And it's so frustrating! I want to put Amy in a box and shake her, but not in a blorbo way! I just want her gone!
Anyway, I really love Amy as a character.
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I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m not a professional critic or reviewer, and these are just my subjective opinions. There’s no need to get upset that someone on the internet has a different opinion than you.
Now, with that out of the way- I THINK WORM SUCKS
Okay just kidding. It’s good, I like it a lot… but for the most part, I like it despite its protagonist, rather than because of her. And not just because I think the story contorts itself around her in a frustrating way, although it very much does do that. It’s just that, at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s much about her that makes for an interesting viewpoint character.
At the end of the day, what actually motivates Taylor? She starts off wanting to ‘be a hero,’ but gives up on that pretty quickly, yet never really commits to ‘being a villain’ either. It’s not saving the world, either, that’s just basic self-preservation. Her real motivation is simple- protecting her friends, and having them continue to like her. She continues being a villain explicitly for the latter reason (once Coil is dead and Dinah is free there’s no real reason for her to remain a villain other than that), and does most of what she does in service of the former.
Self-preservation and the desire to protect one’s friends are fine primary motivations for a main character… in the right context. For the former, we need only look at Blake from Pact, whose life is in constant danger through pretty much the entire book, so he never gets the chance to develop any goals beyond ‘stay alive,’ and instrumental to that, ‘get stronger.’ That’s fine- it would be weird if Blake was really preoccupied with some other goal considering all that’s happening to him during the events of that story.
Likewise, in the latter case, you have Sylvester from Twig, whose desire to protect his friends is important because their lives are considered expendable, so wanting to protect them motivates him to act proactively and pursue other goals. He even extends his definition of ‘friends’ to basically all experiments, which eventually pushes him to take on the entire Academy and Crown, because he’s got a problem with what they do to his fellow experiments and him. That’s a great motivation for a character! (Twig is the best thing Wildbow has ever written and I hope it never gets a sequel.)
On the other hand, Taylor wanting to protect her friends is a much weaker motivation, because they are almost never in any danger that they didn’t put themselves in. I can’t really cheer for her beating up on Protectorate heroes to save her pals because they chose to take over an entire city. That’s on them. Of course, Taylor is incapable of not perceiving it as unjust persecution, because she has a literal victim complex, and rightfully so, she was a victim for a long time, but not for most of the events of the story itself.
So when it comes down to it, her motivation is basically ‘me and my friends should be able to do whatever we want, and get to kill anybody who tries to stop us.’ Which isn’t an especially compelling motivation from an outside perspective! If she was really driven to be the best parahuman criminal in the city, and supplanting Coil as a crime lord was her plan all along, that would at least be interesting, but she just kind of gets dragged along into everything, and then retroactively justifies it in her mind by deciding the people opposing her are ‘bullies.’
As a consequence of this, Taylor doesn’t really stand for anything, either. She does plenty, but in many ways she’s still basically a passive protagonist, going in whichever direction the flow of the narrative takes her. It just so happens that the narrative flows very quickly, so she never ends up spinning her wheels too long (badly mixing metaphors there, I know), but if things weren’t constantly happening for her to respond to, Taylor really wouldn’t end up doing much on her own.
So- we’ve established why I think Taylor makes for a weak protagonist. Let’s take a look at who I think would make for a compelling replacement.
Number one with a bullet, it’s your boy Theo. I’ve touched on this recently elsewhere, but I want to make a more comprehensive pitch for him now. You might say ‘but isn’t Theo also largely reactive and motivated by self-preservation?’ To a degree, yeah- most of what he does in the story is motivated by not wanting to get killed by Jack Slash. But even if you take Jack out of his story completely, he would still have a more interesting motivation than Taylor. The heroic scion (heh) of a villainous legacy trying to atone for his parents’ misdeeds is a way more interesting story than whatever she has going on. The thing with Jack is just a cherry on top.
(Atonement is a great character motivation in general, which is part of why Rain would have been a far superior protagonist for Ward than Victoria, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)
Obviously you’d have to rework the story somewhat significantly to make him work as the protagonist, but I think it’s doable. If you wanted to keep things as much the same as possible, you’d probably start with Theo already in the Chicago Wards, and tell the story of how he got there in recurring flashbacks. Taylor could also still be in the story, I actually kind of think she’d work better as a supporting character (as long as you got rid of some of the truly ridiculous shit she did like killing Alexandria). Seeing her training Theo from his perspective would be very interesting, since canon Worm skips pretty much all that stuff.
Next pick: Weld. You might think you’re detecting a theme here, but not so much, actually. Weld’s story is more about him becoming disillusioned with the Protectorate, and even with being a hero in general. But unlike Taylor, who gives up on being a hero roughly three chapters into Worm, that would be a slow arc, starting with him as a true believer, who over the course of the entire story loses his faith and quits to found his own team. It’s worth noting too that the Irregulars weren’t just an independent hero team, but mercenaries, which suggests Weld has soured on the ‘hero’ thing overall.
Plus, Weld has a very solid motivation- finding out who the hell turned him into a Case 53. That’s an actual goal he could pursue over the course of a story and get closure for! We could see his relationship with Sveta actually develop, watch him try to manage the internal tensions of the Irregulars, and go up against Cauldron, which Taylor only really interacts with incidentally until the very end of the story.
Third choice: Faultline. We know a lot less about her than any of the others I’ve named so far- her interlude is so unmemorable I actually forgot it existed before writing this. We never learn her actual name (I’d keep ‘Miss Fitts’ because I like the pun but modern wildbow is a joyless monster so he’d probably change it) or even her trigger event, but I still think she’d make a solid choice. Clearly Wildbow agrees because she was the protagonist in an earlier draft of the story.
Much like Weld, she has a strong motivation in wanting to track down Cauldron, and I think the cast of characters surrounding her is more interesting than the Irregulars, and arguably even the Undersiders themselves.
My next choice is gonna be controversial, but… Armsmaster. Yeah, he starts out as an antagonistic force in Worm, but only because Taylor perceives literally every authority figure in existence as her enemy. His actual story is really compelling, not least because I firmly believe he was framed for the armband thing. That interpretation isn’t canon, but the facts fit, and I think it makes Worm a hundred times more interesting, so I choose to believe it.
So you have a kind of autistic, extremely driven but also somewhat self-involved hero, who gets framed for something he didn’t do, loses everything, and has all the people whose respect he was hoping to earn turn on him. And he comes back from that! Tell me that isn’t a more interesting story than Taylor, who never meaningfully loses a fight or has anything taken from her.
Bonuses for him include: getting to see him fight Leviathan one on one from his perspective, getting a better look at the inner workings of the Protectorate and Guild, giving his relationship with Dragon more development, and seeing a Tinker actually do some tinkering, which is something we’ve basically been completely denied across two books.
And finally, we have the wildcard option: someone else entirely. There are vast swathes of Worm’s world left entirely unexplored, and I’m sure there are plenty of more interesting protagonists hiding somewhere in them. People with more interesting powers, histories, and motivations than the protagonist we actually got. Or Victoria. Goddamn do I wish we got someone other than Victoria for Ward. Rain was right fucking there, hoW DO YOU FUCK THAT UP AAAA
okay that’s it, post over, thanks for reading. bye
#worm#worm meta#worm crit#Ward#parahumans#wildbow#effortpost#seriously if you take nothing else from this post#read that thing I linked#it’s extremely convincing#worm spoilers#Ward spoilers#twig spoilers#pact spoilers#just to be safe I don’t really give details for any of them except Worm#also#Read Twig
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The more I think about it, the less I like the shard-inflicted conflict drive in parahumans lore. First off, though perhaps least imortantly, it's another reason people use to discount the importance of characters' personality traits and agency. In a fandom where Aura Theory was as popular as it was, we really don't need another reason for people to do that.
But I also feel like it undermines the way Wildbow was trying to deconstruct superheroes.
Alright, what am I talking about?
There are a few ways you can look at how Wildbow handles classic superhero tropes, even beyond the deconstruction/reconstruction dichotomy. For starters: One thing that strongly influenced Worm's worldbuilding was a desire to explain as many quirks of classic superhero settings as possible.
For instance, why does supertechnology so rarely trickle down from superheroes/villains to affect normal people? Wildbow posits that, however slick this supertechnology might look, on the inside it's a bodged-together mess that only keeps functioning if the tinker keeps actively bodging patches together, which nobody without a superhuman understanding of that technology can practically accomplish.
The conflict drive was probably designed to address one of the obvious questions raised by superhero worlds: Why does (almost) everyone with superpowers use them to either commit or fight crimes? Why don't more people just use them for normal work, or new kinds of "super-work," or just to mess around without any responsibilities? Because an alien in their head told them to.
But I don't think this is necessary. Wildbow provides plenty of capes with motivations for fighting/doing crime that aren't narrowly applicable to that character's situation. Look at the Undersiders: Brian needs the money, Lisa was coerced, Taylor's going through a self-destructive spiral of trying to make a difference the only way she can, Rachel's psyche was so ruined by her trigger event that she couldn't pass a job interview if she tried, and Alec...well, okay, superpowered abusive dads are pretty specific.
Beyond that, he does a passable job (especially in Ward) of establishing systemic motivations for going into crime-fighting. (I mean, beyond systematic failures that encourage large numbers of individual motivations.) The most dramatic, I'd argue, is the implicit duty parahumans have to do something about S-class threats. Parahumans who fail to live up to that expectation, who settle for being rogues with normal jobs, are looked down upon. That's a pretty neat setting detail!
But it's weakened with the conflict drive being the apparently biggest reason so many capes get into conflict. And it doesn't just weaken those other explanations for the same idea, it weakens other aspects of Worm's deconstruction.
I'm going to steal a conclusion from Blastweave:
Worm says, needing superheroes would be terrible.
And I feel like that's very true. Earth Bet is a world that undeniably needs superheroes, needs larger-than-life people with the power to stop threats on an inhuman scale. Wildbow then frames that world in a way that makes it clear what the effects of that would be—both the direct effects of living in a world where Endbringers trash a city every three months, and the consequences of institutions constructed to address those threats.
Needing superheroes would be terrible. But what if we dropped the conflict drive?
The conflict drive is an external factor, stapled onto the superhero formula to make it work better. Its presence implies that it is necessary, that things wouldn't be this bad without such an alien space bat.
The conflict drive weakens anything you could say about superheroes by giving you an out to those conclusions. Oh, there's nothing inherent to the premise of superhumans regularly coming to blows that makes the setting more perilous for the average man, worsens standards of living, or encourages the growth of callous institutions; it's probably just the conflict-creating alien worm in every superhero's head.
The conflict drive doesn't add nothing to Worm, but I don't think it's a net good for the narrative. Imagine another version of Worm which emphasizes human reasons people turn to capedom while dropping the shardsy ones; what is lost?
...
Also, it gives the anti-parahuman bigotry subplot in Ward an unfortunate wrinkle, but "the bigots are actually right about one of the Bad Things they say" is far from the worst problem with that subplot.
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Reactions to different ways of “helping” Brockton Bay
I’m currently making my way through arc 15 of Worm, and I got to thinking about the Ward’s and Protectorate’s attitude towards the Warlord of the Boardwalk.
Because on the one hand, I get Taylor’s frustration with how all the heroes are acting distrustful and high-and-mighty when she’s been busy keeping the boardwalks livable. She’s supplying doctors and food rations without asking anything in return! She’s organizing people to set up shelters and tear down dangerous structures! She is demonstrating a concern for the people in her territory that goes above and beyond any possible selfish motivations, so being treated as just another villain is kind of ridiculous. Hell, arguably the only hero who has done as much to aid the disaster victims directly is Amy/Panacea, through the hospital visits (and that didn’t exactly end well). Any other hero lecturing Skitter would, from Taylor’s point of view, be a huge hypocrite.
But then, its not like the heroes are sitting around on their asses. We read how the Wards ran themselves ragged in the aftermath of the endbringer attack, and even with their exhaustion they resented being called in from patrols because it meant they weren’t busy helping. Yes, this was mostly just watching out for and stopping active crime, and yes, its appropriate to ask why this was the only post-disaster service being done by the heroes. But at the same time, the streets were full of neo-nazi gangs stealing food supplies! Crime was actively hampering the recovery effort, so focusing your effort on rooting it out when that’s the main thing you’re good at makes sense.
And you can see why the heroes wouldn’t be inclined to automatically trust Taylor despite all her work on the Boardwalk. If you’re worried about gang violence, then its a natural reaction to get worried when a villain starts recruiting people to her employ en masse, especially when you know that she’s engaged in a turf war with pretty much every faction in the city.
Plus, there’s the fact that for all the good Taylor does for her people, she’s basically turned her territory into a panopticon. Bugs are watching everyone, all the time, and will actively start biting people who aren’t busy working. You might argue that this is justified considering just how dire the city has gotten: things are so dangerous that having Bug Brother looking out for Merchants or Chosen is a comfort. And you can’t have freeloaders when supplies are so scarce, the recovery needs all hands on deck! But you could also argue that Skitter had basically set herself up as a dictatorial force promising security for the price of freedom.
All this to say, while the wards can seem incredibly naive from Taylor’s point of view, their attitude does make sense, however warped it happens to be.
#worm#wildbow#parahumans#worm meta#wards#taylor herbert#skitter#protectorate#leo says#leo reads worm
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unhinged that gabriel had such a heartbreaking reaction to beelzebub giving him something because noone had given him anything before, because now it's got me thinking about angels existing in an environment and under a regime where you don't really have anything to call your own - all your own. so what potentially did crowley first give to aziraphale to call his own and what book do you think it was
#half arsed meta bc i dont necessarily subscribe to this in any seriousness#and crowley has done A Lot of non material things for aziraphale - given him gifts that arent necessarily objects#but this thought worm wouldn't leave#good omens
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In middle school, I read a short story for English class called Flowers for Algernon. Maybe you’ve read it, too. In the story, a disabled man named Charlie is given a medicine that cures his disability. Over the course of the story, he comes to realize that his “cure” is temporary and that he will “regress” into being disabled again. The story makes it clear that this is a tragedy. As a disabled teenager when I first read it, the story affected me deeply.
I’d like to talk about David and Noelle.
Content warnings for discussion of suicide, self-harm, ableism and eating disorders below the cut. Spoilers for Worm through arc 27.
When I was first reading arc 18, one of the things that stuck out to me is how much time the story spends on Eidolon. For me, it was the first time I paid much attention to him - prior to that, Eidolon was just an extremely powerful background character to me. But in arc 18, we learn that (1) Eidolon is losing his powers and (2) he believes that fighting Echidna will allow him to tap into some sort of reservoir to bring them back.
We find this out, of course, through Tattletale exposing him, which is always an extremely embarrassing event for Tattletale’s target. It makes it extremely clear that what Eidolon is doing is pathetic. He is going to kill a teenage girl so he can feel something.
Which would be messed up enough, right? We don’t need to make this even worse, right? Wrong. Because Wildblow has spent the last several thousand words building up the Case 53s as X-Men style metaphors for oppressed groups, and one of the forms of oppression that Wildblow generally writes well is ableism. I think you can consider most, if not all of the Case 53s as disabled in some way. I think the link is extremely clear with Noelle.
Noelle doesn’t get her powers from traditional Cauldron human experimentation - at least, not directly. Instead, she and Krouse are facing what is, to them, a no-win scenario. They’re quarantined with limited access to medical care. Breaching this quarantine would permanently render them criminals. If Noelle survives her surgery, which is a pretty big if, she’ll become disabled, in a way that both Krouse and Noelle agree is ugly and undesirable. She won’t be able to do “boyfriend-girlfriend stuff” because she won’t be “any good to look at, after.”
Krouse and Noelle are terrified of death, yes, but they’re also terrified of disability. They are desperate for control over Noelle’s body, control that, as of that moment, only the state has. (Remember the quarantine?) Krouse pressures Noelle into drinking the vial. Noelle is cured.
Noelle’s cure does not last. In attempting to assert control, her body becomes uncontrollable. Her body is her trauma and her eating disorder made literal. She still needs care.
Worm would be bad if this is why her life sucks. But Worm does something better, instead. Noelle goes through hell, not just due to the sheer difficulty of having her power, but because of the way her teammates and Coil treat her. They talk about Noelle like she’s already dead. They’re ashamed of bringing her the food she needs. When Krouse “includes” Noelle in a discussion in arc 12, it’s mostly perfunctory. They do not believe Noelle is human any longer. They lock her away.
Noelle doesn’t want to be put in a cage. Noelle doesn’t want to be dehumanized. In interlude 18, when we get insight into Noelle’s thoughts, we learn that what Noelle is angry about is the fact that Krouse locked her in a concrete bunker and placated her. When she tells people not to look at her, there’s a coda to that sentence that she doesn’t get to verbalize: don’t look at me like that.
This is the person who Eidolon is going to kill.
Via the Simurgh, this is a person Eidolon has unknowingly created.
A few thousand words of Worm go by. It’s Gold Morning. Eidolon is fighting Scion. Now, at the end of the book, we finally get substantial insight into David, the man behind the mask.
David takes a Cauldron vial to cure his disability. David sees this as the only way out, after an unsuccessful application to join the military, and then, an unsuccessful suicide attempt. David is bearing an immense amount of shame and internalized ableism. David is worried that father’s friends are watching him. (Don’t look at me.) David cleaves the world into two kinds of people: those who can have jobs, who are liked and respected because they are useful; and people like him, who are useless.
It’s a terrible way to think. Without that worldview, how could a person not take the vial? David wants to be used, because David wants to be useful. He never gets the independence he craves – not when he’s in that level of debt to Cauldron – but he gets to be useful, and that’s one of the best things you can be.
Like Noelle’s, like Charlie’s in Flowers, David’s cure doesn’t work. His abilities are wearing off. He is essentially told, when Doctor Mother administers his booster shots, that his medicine is too expensive.
Cauldron creates Noelle. David, as Cauldron’s soldier, has a role to play in her creation. David knows exactly what he is doing to Noelle. It happened to him. Worm fandom talks a lot about David being a father. He’s a father in more ways than one. (David’s father is always watching him.) (Don’t look at me.)
Cauldron never cures David’s ableism. In his world, you can be useful, or you can die. David asks Noelle if she wants to win. Noelle tells him no. You can have a job, or you can kill yourself. When David tries to kill Noelle to help himself, isn’t that a mercy?
Of course it isn’t. It goes without saying that all of this is extremely fucked up. When it comes to disability, “cure” is a complicated concept. I’m not going to get into all the ways it can be treated; this post is already a thousand words long. But I do think that Worm, through Noelle and David and the concept of the Cauldron vial, provides an extremely vivid picture of the problems with cure.
Under ableist logic, when you have a disability, a cure is something you’re expected to want. Without it, the story goes, you can’t be useful. You can’t do boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. The expectation is social, like the act of staring. Your desire for it should drive how you organize your life – it is control, like a quarantine. David is crushed by that expectation. He throws his lot in with Cauldron, the cure-makers. The expectation is passed along to Noelle, and even though David can recognize that inheritance, he cannot imagine any other way to respond to it other than attempted murder.
At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that Flowers for Algernon is a tragedy. The reason that story has stuck with me so long is that I keep going back and forth as to why. Is it a tragedy because Charlie goes back to being disabled? There’s a good chance that’s what the author intended. I don’t know. It would be a pretty shitty story if that were the case. Is it a tragedy because people only treat Charlie well when he’s “cured,” and when that stops, he’ll go back to abuse? Seems plausible. I don’t think there’s one right answer. Regardless, when you’re disabled, there’s an immense pressure to seek out a cure, and a cognizable loss when it is withheld. The fact that Worm captures that social pressure and social loss so well is extremely compelling for me, and I’m going to be thinking about these characters for a long time.
#worm#parahumans#wormblr#eidolon#noelle meinhardt#any errors or omissions in this post are due to me reading interlude 27 like 3 hours ago#shoutout to tumblr user artbyblastweave for writing excellent eidolon meta that inspired this one#i would also give a shoutout to my friend who convinced me to read worm but i already shout at her enough. enjoy. thanks for the worms
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it's interesting to me how the filming and presentation of the resurrections of qTubbo and qBad reflect their states upon return.
when Tubbo wakes up we are in his perspective, first person, similar to how we've always experienced Tubbo's pov. he remembers sunny, that he loves her, he remembers who he is, he remembers his friends. however ccTubbo's facecam is not visible, as it usually is. qTubbo's strange now. he's still tubbo, but different. aggressive, manic, manipulative, angry, insecure, and everything else, dialed up to an extreme degree. this is still Tubbo, his memory intact and his personality mostly unchanged, but he's wrong, not completely different from how he was before but noticeably changed.
When we first see Bad again, we are outside of his perspective, looking at him from a distance. We don't know much about his mental state at this time, but there is palpable fear from the Ghosties, his constant companions, upon seeing him. The outside perspective others him, makes him alien. This is not OUR Bad anymore, in the ways that really matter. This is something that looks like him, but we know nothing about him on the inside, reinforced by how we only see from the outside and not the inside.
i just thought that was really interesting, how the choices in filming and point of view almost contribute to the narrative and vibe of each, upping their effectiveness in eliciting desired reactions from the viewer.
#its so cool it's SO COOOOOLLL#owo#oddly posting#qsmp#qsmp meta#qsmp analysis#q!tubbo#q!badboyhalo#i've got worms in my brain and they're THEMES and CHARACTERS and CINEMATOGRAPHY and they're all PARTYING
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You're Shauna Shipman, and you are desperate to be haunted. You're begging for it, desperate for it, crying out for it in the cold and the quiet of the place you kept your best friend's body for months longer than you should have before you and your friends not just ate her but consumed her.
You're Shauna Shipman, and, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, you will look for Jackie Taylor for the rest of your life. Death already parted you. You can only wait for it to reunite you.
Tell me: how long does it take you to see her again? Does she stare at you from the trees, hunger gnawing at your belly, the only nourishment you've had in weeks from the meat you pick off the bones of people who were once important to you? Does she sit beside you on the plane back home? Does she visit you in the hospital? Is she by your side as you marry her high school sweetheart, the one you fucked, the one whose baby died just like she did, out there in that place?
Or does she evade you for twenty-five long, terrible years, refusing to see you while you live the life you think was meant for her? Is the first time she comes back to you that moment when you're doing something explicitly, horribly stupid? How long does it take for you to see her eyes when they're not staring back from a picture frame, to hear her voice that's not tainted by the tinny sounds of a home movie?
Tell me, Shauna Shipman: What will you do to be haunted by her again?
#yellowjackets#shauna shipman#jackieshauna#yellowjackets meta#thank you bookclub discord for your help to making my brain worms wiggle
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The scene at the start of All Hell Breaks Loose where Dean talks to Sam's corpse in that shack in the middle of nowhere is soul crushing to an incomprehensible level that the show hardly ever manages to reach again.
Firstly, what is revealed about Dean as he spills his heart open is devastating on a whole other level. Like there's grief and then there's this - it's like a piece of him has been torn out and he's left unable to literally function. It's not really a new idea in the series up to this point that Dean has centered his life around his family, in particular protecting Sam. As he starts off, he wishes so desperately that Sam didn't start asking questions about their family so Dean could preserve his innocence just a little bit longer. No doubt John put a lot of pressure on Dean to protect and look after Sam, but taking on this role was something that was all but written inside him, as he says, John didn't even have to tell him to do it, Sam was his responsibility. The tipping point in this scene is when Dean finally asks "what am I supposed to do" - how can he even begin to move beyond this? He doesn't care if the world ends anymore, doesn't care if Azazel wins and he never gets revenge. In asking this question Dean realises that he is incapable of letting go of Sam, of the responsibilities to his family he has built his life around like the grain of sand at the centre of the pearl, and of the crushing guilt that comes with 'failing' these responsibilities. The only way forwards is to force the laws of nature to bend for him and bring Sam back from the dead, no matter the cost.
Secondly, this is heart wrenching to me for Sam too. Here he is, 23 years old and lying dead on a dingy mattress in a shack in the middle of nowhere - the only escape from his dark destiny found in death. But the primary reason it seems that Dean makes this massive sacrifice to bring him back isn't because he's 23 and has so much of life he deserves to live, but because he is incapable of living under the weight of his guilt in failing him - that he is Dean's responsibility that he can't live with letting down. And this is not to say that Dean doesn't also bring him back because he loves and care for him as a person, but it's not like Dean was sitting there talking to Sam saying you didn't deserve this, we were so close to ending this, you deserved to go on to have a life that hasn't been built around and in grief and revenge, hell, you could've even gone back to university and had your happy ending. You know? It's like selling your soul for someone is a crazy batshit insane thing to do - the ultimate sacrifice. But same as with John, it seems that the reason behind it wasn't just pure love and desire for that person to live just because they didn't deserve to die. John needed Dean to be there to ensure Sam didn't go darkside - to kill him if he can't save him. In both cases it was out of love, but in this weird objectified way.
It's just so fascinating how this dynamic between the three Winchesters, love and sacrifice plays out in the early seasons. How supernatural finds selfishness at the centre of this seemingly sacrificial selfless act. The selfishness in martyrdom.
That's why this scene is just heart wrenching in my sad insane little head. Sam and Dean were crazy codependants before this but this scene marks a turn for the worst (in codependence) for them. This scene is like the solidification of Dean's belief that he is worthless and incapable of functioning without the responsibilities he holds to his family and solidifies that Sam is the little brother possession for Dean to protect and regulate until his time runs out and he's shipped off to hell - leaving him at the centre of his massacred family with all the fingers pointing in his direction. His mum was collateral damage to his anti-baptism by a demon, his Dad sold his soul for his brother's life to be the final yes or no in the decision of whether Sam deserves to live or not, and now his brother's gone and done the same for him. But hey, at least when Dean gets dragged down to hell it isn't with the weight of guilt that he failed his responsibilities.
(spoiler alert: he feels guilty for leaving Sam anyway and Sam spirals anyway).
#supernatural#spn#sam winchester#dean winchester#theyre just silly#silly little guys#i mean i could go on and on about the selling soul thing in s2/3 as an allegory for the cycles of emotional abuse#but that is a whole other can of worms for a different late night text post#also MERRY CHRISTMAS#yippee#i hope anyone who reads this and anyone who doesnt a very happy holiday#spn 2x22#all hell breaks loose#spn meta#i guess
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So one off-hand death that sticks with me in Worm, right, is Taylor's offhand mention that the original version of Breed was killed when someone shot the building he was in with an incendiary missile. Not even clear if they were trying to kill him specifically or if they were just lucky, but his bug minions stopped showing up after the strike so it's presumed to have gotten him.
Iconoclastic superhero fiction has a specific trope where capes have bridges dropped on them- anticlimactic, mundane, silly deaths, meant to highlight that for all their pomp and circumstance, they're just as killable as anyone else. Dollar Bill getting his cape caught in the revolving door in Watchmen, The "No Capes" montage in The Incredibles, almost every single killing in The Boys, or hell, Vikare getting brained in a sports riot in this very book. And on my first readthrough I sort of parsed Breeds death as "one of those," oh, you know, for all his horror-movie xenomorph monstrousness, all it took to kill him was a direct missile strike on the building he was in. Then I turned that last sentence over in my head a couple of times and noticed that by any reasonable standard having an airstrike called in on you is not an anticlimactic way to die. Like implicitly that missile strike is probably happening after several prolonged hours of urban combat against the Nine, mounting civilian casualties, etc. etc. Breed was contributing to the escalation of a situation where eventually the government just said "fuck it" and started bombing shit. And this is a genre where doing that typically doesn't work against someone like Breed, so it feels incongruous that for once it did. But it's also not nearly in the same ballpark as just randomly getting taken out by a sniper or something. It's part of the book striking a great balance between a respect for the power of superheroes and supervillains and an acknowledgement of the fact that they die just like everyone else.
(It's also a great subversion of that whole "never found the body" thing- like, Breed's body wasn't identifiable amongst the victims of the strike because of how badly burned everyone was, but he's also the kind of guy where you can infer he must be dead because the flow of Breed-shaped murders is cut off and that obviously wouldn't happen if he was in any shape to continue- there's no laying low for a comeback episode two seasons or 100 issues later. Until he's cloned back to life. But that's not precisely the same thing)
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hey what if i felt lost and helpless and had a bad upbringing and was never taught any way to cope with that except to hide my pain from the rest of the world and i got superpowers that let me make other people feel lost and hopeless but also if i used them a different way hid me from the world. also my name was brian laborn
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Ranking Every Wolfwood!!
happy wolfwood wednesday! i've ranked every wolfwood and it very quickly got out of hand and turned into more of a character analysis/meta. it was really fun and helped me better understand why i love this guy so much!
yes, really!
i hope you guys enjoy and that my autistic rambling makes sense!
1. trimax wolfwood. yeah he’s perfect. nothing else to say. god bless
while i can’t fit everything i love about him into one post, just know that i’ve written almost 30,000 words in wolfwood (and vash) character studies. so when i say “i like trimax wolfwood” that really means “i am fucking obsessed with trimax wolfwood”.
he’s the perfect mix of silly and heartbreaking, funny and serious, annoying like an older brother, deeply kind, so so painfully human; and a PERFECT foil to vash. simply phenomenal writing.
my only complaint would be that his tits are not on display like they are in the 1998 anime. but i can appreciate the subtly, so this doesn’t detract from his otherwise flawless score.
2. 98 wolfwood. omg hiiiii hehe twirling my hair ohh he’s so handsome what an absolutely beautiful design for him. his nose, his spider-esque shape, his TITS…… they even kept his little whiskers!
on top of an amazing design, he’s a very good balance of silly, irritable, playfully annoying, and serious! he fits pre-trimax wolfwood to a T!
but, as trimax progressed…
he’s cool. too cool. he has too much pull. wolfwood should NOT have swag. genuinely it is imperative to his character that he is, and i say this as lovingly as possible, a fucking loser with no friends.
wolfwood is a deeply traumatized man. he isn’t nearly as charming as we, the audience, thinks he is. no one laughs at his jokes, his insults are crude and immature, he embarrasses himself in front of literal children…
god, he is so painfully awkward. and who wouldn’t be in his situation? to have your childhood stolen and forced to grow up as a weapon? not allowed to interact casually with anyone else during the most important developmental stage of your life?
he's just not suave like tri98 wolfwood is. so, while 98 wolfwood is an excellent character, he doesn’t entirely read “wolfwood” to me. similar to how 98 vash is good on his own, but he’s just not “vash”. this is, of course, the result of making an anime out of a manga that wasn’t even 30% finished at the time. while i don’t understand the reasoning behind this, i know that nightow desperately needed the funds the anime brought in, as well as the motivation to keep making trimax, so i have to simply make peace with the dated characterizations tri98 has.
but don’t get me started on the milly situation. really a godawful writing decision, idk who approved that mess.
3. tristamp wolfwood. he is so bullyable. he’s like a sopping wet cat. absolute fucking dweeb.
i debated this for a long time—whether i should rank tristamp wolfwood above tri98 wolfwood. and i asked myself, do i love tri98 wolfwood because he’s a good character and is similar to trimax wolfwood? does he even remind me of trimax wolfwood at all? well, not really, he’s very clearly based on pre-trimax, just like tri98 vash is.
ultimately i decided i do genuinely just prefer tri98 wolfwood, but i felt the need to defend tristamp wolfwood because i see a lot of fair criticisms but also really dumb discourse throughout the fandom about him. so here’s my attempt at trying to address these:
so, there are some things i really enjoy about him and some things i really dislike; and, unlike vash, most of these criticisms are not a result of time/pacing issues. they’re easily fixable.
like, for the love of god he NEEDS to get sillier. they got the loser part down, but he’s a bit too overtly sad in tristamp. i think he will be more like his trimax self in season 2, but wolfwood’s humor is in-part a coping mechanism and important to his character. he’s an older brother! he’s fucking annoying! he thinks he's funny when he isn't! we do get a little bit of this with him and meryl, when he's tormenting her at the campfire, and that’s what i want to see more of. even if he’s playing it up, he should be working on getting their guards down, convincing them he isn't going to betray them.
since tristamp takes place in a weird prequel sort of canon, i get that he would look/act younger than he is in trimax. i think he was modeled after the teenage wolfwood we see in the flashback scenes of him training for the eye of michael, where he’s noticeably less outgoing and more reserved.
however, this doesn’t change the fact that he WAS silly as a kid in trimax, before his “teenage angst phase” (hate to call it that when it’s more like a “realizing he’s going to die by the gun and not being able to do anything about it” phase). but he’s still a lot quieter and reserved in tristamp as a kid, so i think we really need to find a good balance here in the trigun adaptations.
another example of an easily fixable issue—i really hate how they did the “vash sees how kind wolfwood is” scene, in which wolfwood gives money/snacks to children. in tristamp, wolfwood already knows the kid is zazie, which tells us absolutely nothing about his character. this scene is almost entirely worthless, only good for reminding vash that he should eat, which gives tristamp its own not-as-good hospital yuri scene.
and, so, about the elephant in the room… i don’t think he was whitewashed. let me try to explain my thought process.
tristamp, as far as i can tell, doesn’t seem to be taking any inspiration from tri98, whose wolfwood is very explicitly a brown man. trimax wolfwood i feel is a bit more ambiguous in his skin tone, which alternates between dark screentones and completely uncolored pretty much at solid 50/50 odds. just fairly inconsistent overall, even on the official manga covers.
but this doesn’t mean wolfwood is white in tristamp, and it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his aquiline nose. the notorious scenes of him in the suns, looking white as a fucking sheet, shows us how a 3D environment can diminish a character’s silhouette and distinctive features.
compare this to scenes of wolfwood in a dim environment, or to the 2D scenes of child wolfwood and livio that i can't include bc i'm only allowed 10 pics. he looks MUCH better, much darker than vash, and as they both should appear in such lighting. it just doesn't add up—he should be much darker in strong light if they followed the same color values:
SO, even though i feel like all of this is more of a technical issue rather than malicious whitewashing, that doesn’t mean i think it’s acceptable. it looks fucking awful, and the lighting system needs major improvement to work with darker skin tones.
and, like, at the end of the day, wolfwood isn’t canonically latino, and he doesn't really have a consistent skin tone either. it’s a great headcanon, one i partially share, but it’s not canon. the only ethnicity that could technically be considered somewhat canon is japanese, as wolfwood was based off a japanese singer named tortoise matsumoto. you can see this resemblance best in early trigun!
and i really need to defend his nose!!! a lot of people say he lost his nose but he didn’t!! i promise it’s there!!! another victim of his 3D model, you can only see his nose from the side or in the 2D frame after he gets his shit wrecked. see how clearly he has a very well-defined nose when he’s hand-drawn? this is what i mean when i say a 3D environment can drastically alter a character’s important features, as much as i otherwise adore the animation for this show.
also, if you think nightow would let studio orange get away with not including his nose, you got another thing coming.
in conclusion, while i think tristamp wolfwood is a great start, he’s just not quite there yet. but i have immense faith that the next time we see him, he’ll look and act a lot more like he does in trimax!
i know this is true, because there are already some shots in tristamp where i’m just like. oh yeah. there he is. that’s wolfwood. there's the guy i love so much
...
well, that was long! this was really fun to write and i
oh jesus christ what the hell is that thing
4. badlands rumble wolfwood. ah, now here’s a great example of overt whitewashing. no lighting excuses this time, just blatant colorism.
even if he wasn’t ghostly white, there's just something about his design that makes me viscerally uncomfortable and i can’t pinpoint what it is exactly. he’s just so… angular. he has no scruff, no kitty cat mouth, his eyes are very oddly shaped, almost no eyebrows... i just really hate looking at him!
his ONLY saving grace is how mentally ill he acts in this movie. and his tits. otherwise i don’t really have much to say about him!
ok, now we’re done! and here’s a handy wolfwood chart i made to summarize everything.
really hope this was fun to read and if people liked this i'd be glad to write a vash version or other characters!! happy woowoo wednesday :)
#trigun#trimax#tristamp#tri98#wolfwood#vashwood#a little bit. enough for me to tag hehe#meta#trigun meta#character analysis#also i don't mean to imply ethnicity = skin color but latino wolfwood is by far the most common headcanon i've seen. which i really like!#but it can very quickly diverge into the latino lover trope and i've seen that A Lot in this fandom#and i don't really want to get into fanon wolfwood here bc that's an entire other can of worms
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“Actually you hate women” is such a funny response to my critique of Taylor as a protagonist. There are plenty of stories I absolutely adore that have female protagonists. The difference is that those characters have strong motivations driving them. Baru Cormorant does plenty of evil shit too, but she has a very specific goal in mind that she pursues ruthlessly, and I find that much more compelling than Taylor just kind of going where the plot takes her.
#see also: harrowhark#it’s so funny to be like ‘wormblr is my book club’#and then when someone else in the book club disagrees with you#*immeditely* jump to personal attacks#that shit wouldn’t fly in an actual book club!#worm meta#these people spend all their time complaining about victoria#just absolutely shitting on everything about Ward#and then lose their minds when anyone has anything negative to say about Worm
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I get why people ship Taylor with, like, half of the female supporting cast. I get why there are jokes about the lesbian chemistry between Worm's straight girls. But can we please try to leave Lisa out of it?
I mean, yeah, I see what y'all see with Lisa and Taylor, and I kinda see what y'all see with Lisa and Vicky. But there aren't a lot of aromantic or asexual characters around, and Lisa is definitely one of them. Even if you don't want to count her power excuse...
She’d come to terms with the fact that her lack of interest in the romance or the physical stuff wasn’t because of one excuse or the other. She was pretty sure it wasn’t because her power preferred her this way. It was just her.
Ward, Interlude 10.x
Lisa's one of the mere handful of aro/ace characters I came across before finally realizing I was (I had my own set of excuses). Even now, I haven't encountered many aro/ace characters in media, and way fewer if you discount the ones I heard about specifically because they are aro/ace.
Imagine if there was a running gag in the fandom about shipping Flechette and Weld, or Tristan and Moonsong, or Avery Kelly and Jude Garrick. Wouldn't that be weird? Wouldn't it feel off? It would to me, at least. And it's the same for aromantic characters.
It's not a big deal, just...a little irritation, every time I see a Tumblr post or whatever jokingly shipping Tattletale with someone. There are just a lot of posts like that.
Also: There are better lesbian ships in the fandom. Look at Taylor's friendship with Rachel. Hell, look at Victoria's friendship with Ashley. They even have a kid that they substitute-parent together! How do people look at Victoria and Lisa and think "girlfriends" instead of "grumpy moms who have to get along because their kids are friends"?
#aromantic#asexual#aroace#tattletale#lisa wilbourn#worm meta#ward meta#meta#worm#ward#parahumans#wildbow#the aroace queen of brockton bay
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