Lisa's Interactions With Taylor Make A Lot More Sense If You Believe She's Never Had A Real Friend In

To add another dumb poll to my tumblr

I have decided to randomly generate worm ships. I rolled from a list of 114 worm characters, creating 36 ships and picking 12 of the funniest weirdest easiest to title most interesting. Most of them were not good, but that's the risk of random chance

I rejected any that wouldn't fit explicitly stated (to my knowledge) canon sexualities, and any that resulted in illegal pairings.

I gave each a silly little subtitle. Not a ship name.

I'm pretty sure I already know who's gonna win.

Also I rejected Lung x Marquis because that was a definite win. Best gay male ship in worm except for Kevin Norton x Scion. The random number generator also kept giving me Citrine, it thinks she's a casonova. I legit rolled Skitterxpanacea at one point.

Also I'm not separating tohu and bohu.

I somehow, in what was probably a moment of poor judgement, convinced my mother to read worm.

Highlights so far (shes on 7.10):

thinking Coil was spelt Coli and pronounced Coil-ee (she refuses to wear glasses)

not knowing the names of any characters

thinking Taylor is 'very practical' in reference to her cutting Lung's eyes out

just complete incomprehension at the incompetence of Taylor's teachers and the PRT

saying that she would have attacked the trio if she were Taylor

not catching any of the Wolfspider content (tbf, this is a bi woman who doesn't call herself queer because she has never been in a relationship with a woman, so her ability to detect queerness is hardly the best)

being very mad at me for not telling her why Emma is bullying Taylor

Anyway, shes only a chapter away from the Dinah reveal and a couple of chapters from Leviathan, so I'm quite excited.

really good observation from this liveblog actually why the fuck did cauldron decide to prioritize Interior Design for bonesaw's presence. britain just exploded what's wrong with you

I'm 93% sure I made a post about this before, but Taylor using other people's powers better than they do is such a fun part of her character, especially since she seems to constantly be thinking "damn if only I got that actually useful power." Like, Lisa thinks Taylor would do better than her with her insight power, Taylor coordinates Cuff and Theo to make a lightning rod during Behemoth fight when neither of them had thought of that, Clockblocker with the string, ordering around like 10 people including fucking Eidolon to hold Behemoth still for Phir Se, she's always scheming and using people as chess pieces in such a way that they're not even mad because it's a learning experience. I think a large part of it is a want to be anyone but herself, which leads to her looking at other powers and considering their uses more than most people do because she just finds every reason to be jealous and justify her passive belief that she's inferior and weak. Also she's just so used to high stress fucked up situations that she performs well under pressure. She kinda acknowledges that in the chapter where she's like "what the hell why is Amy so stupid she should be using microbes to form defenses" because she realizes Amy has no experience in fighting, so she's never had a need to think about this. But Taylor is always fighting, even when she's finally safe she doesn't let herself relax, so she's used to this.

And as for wanting to escape her body and be someone else who's cooler and has a better power and isn't lame and worthless, if I recall correctly she comments more than once on how powerful Genesis is and how she would love her power, which honestly fits so well. She wants to have other people's powers because she doesn't like herself, and Genesis's power lets her create and customize new bodies that aren't her and can do whatever she wants. It's the perfect way for her escape being herself.

And then Khepri is thematically significant as always. She finally can use other people's powers, and damn she's good with them! She magnifies Sundancer's sun with Vista, she combines Ballistic and Foil, she uses every combination and interaction possible for an advantage. She can use other people's powers like she always wanted, and she stops being herself, just like she always wanted.

So where does Magus's power come from, anyways? How come he and only he has managed to become a Superpower? It can't just be that he researched it or whatever, someone else would've come across the right tome.

He mentioned squinting in the right way when he looks at Valentina and Eliza, to see their power; I suspect that's it. He really is an atomic, it's just that his power is a minor vision thing that wouldn't mean shit if Valentina's entry into the one timeline hasn't gotten Angelic gunk all over everything. Now, he can see the secret workings of all Numinous whatever, enough to learn the secrets to end the world.

But it's not enough, not enough to keep him safe, not enough to guarantee someone else won't eventually figure out how to unlock that lock with spaghetti. So he makes his little pyramid scheme.

Reread 19.y, and noticed something I hadn't caught before:

Parents. Plural. He makes such hay over being someone who really knows her like other people don't, but he doesn't know her mom died. That's not an unreasonable or unconscionable thing, you're not rude for not knowing everything about your classmates' circumstances. But also, it was a detail that we see the trio implicitly reference, and that Emma will be explicit about without visible shock from other classmates. People who know about Taylor enough to torment her know about it—but its not something Greg knows. It highlights how he's being kinda ridiculous, thinking he has some special connection to her. Good little detail.

As a person that knows a lot more about capeshit than me, what’s the meta-textual significance of the Superpowers in The Power Fantasy abstaining from establishing secret identities?

Principally it's to signal that the characters, while informed by the traditional superhero paradigm, exist largely outside of it.

Contemporary superhero fiction has a complicated relationship with the concept of The Secret Identity. When you come at the premise fresh without years of ossified genre convention, you get hit with the double whammy that a civilian identity is increasingly difficult to keep secret and that even if you buy into the idea of doing vigilante shit in secret to avoid going to jail, it's still going to take some extra work to get to the finish line of grown men calling themselves "Batman" or "Ant Man" and expecting to be taken seriously.

So, retellings will often go out of their way justify how these characters could develop these public identities semi-organically. "Superman" is usually not Clark Kent's idea in modern retellings- the media names him that, Lois names him that, and he runs with it. The Batman has the fantastic recurring gag that Bruce appears to actually self-identify as the comically overwrought "Vengeance," but the bat motif led to everyone just calling him Batman instead. The X-Men have advanced the idea, in a couple different forms, that "Mutant names" are a sub-cultural thing brushing up against a cult thing, a ceremonial way of setting yourself above and apart from baseline humanity. And you've got military callsigns, obviously. I think that's where "Ant-Man" and "Hawkeye" come from in the MCU.

In The Power Fantasy, none of the superpowers have a dual identity because they've all got extremely specific political (or artistic) projects that don't mesh well with that. To a degree I think this is playing in the same space as X-Men, where a lot of the cast have shifted over the years from being public ciphers to being public activists whose real names are on the news alongside their code names when they blow something up. But even if they don't have dual identities, the superpowers do have identities, personas, nicknames; there's a mix of deliberate image-building and outside-designation-by-society occurring. "Heavy" Harris is a thing an activist or cult leader who controls gravity could plausibly come to be called in the course of Moving and Shaking. Masumi is mentioned, in passing, to also go by the name of "Deconstructa," which reads like either a pretentious artist thing or a common-parlance nickname she picked up after the Kaiju thing. Eliza Hellbound is clearly not that woman's real name, but also, it is- and it's descriptive, and she's certainly powerful enough that that's what she gets to be called if she wants. "Jacky Magus" is really really really obviously not what's on that guys birth certificate, but it's also the only name he has that actually matters. Ettiene gets a whole monologue about the necessity of constructing himself as a figurehead that human governments can work with. He wears bright yellow, he gives interviews, and I will eat my hat if his actual last name is Lux. These people are similar to traditional superheroes in that they are constructing larger-than-life identities, they're playing a game, they're selling the world on specific narratives about themselves. But the truth that they're covering for is never that they've got some kind of secret civilian life waiting for them when they clock out. By choice or otherwise, all six of them are simply well past that.

An alternative way Gillen has described TPF is “as if your idiot clique of friends had to stay civil or the whole world would end”, and yeah it’s hard to imagine, with ours and Tonya’s front row seat, the civility lasting much longer at all

What I like about Tonya in The Power Fantasy is that she's the journalist viewpoint character, right? The character who's asking questions and poking at the same kinds of things that the audience would be poking at. And over the course of the story she's developing the shell shock that any quote-unquote "normal" person from our world or one similar would have, if they got plunged into the deep end. But the thing is that this isn't some mysterious new paradigm shift she's investigating, she isn't new to this and it isn't new to her, she was doing a piece on one of the leading public figures of the last fifty years when she got caught up in this. What's new to her is that she's spent somewhere around a week in proximity to these six people when they're going through a fairly-eventful-but-still-within-parameters week of their own lives- not quite business as usual, but close- and she's getting a front row seat to how the six most famous people on earth are perpetually six seconds away from fucking up and destroying the whole planet, and how much everyone attendant to this messy friend group needs to constantly bust their asses to prevent that from happening. That's the big reveal of the setting, from her perspective, that's what's inculcating her issue-5 certainty that the world is going to end. It's neat.

god i love imp (big spoilers)

you know, the more i think about worm, the more i realize that aside from skitter, imp is one of the best fleshed out characters. and the amazing thing is how her characterization is all in the background where people don’t notice it. just like imp herself.

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Bug Porn

Regent *exasperated*: Will Taylor please stop with the bug porn!

Taylor *from behind a bug filled aquarium*: It's not bug porn! They're mating because I need more!

Regent: That's exactly what a bug porn lover would say!

Aisha: Hey, we don't kinkshame in this house

Taylor: Not a kink

Lisa: Yeah, leave TayTay alone. Autistic have hobbies too.

Taylor: Not a Hobby

Regent: She needs to be stopped

Taylor: This energy isn't good for them! It took me forever to convince this many to mate!

Brian: Convince them?

Regent: Are you saying you respectfully asked the spiders to have sex?

Aisha: I too love consent

Taylor *groaning and hissing, too frustrated to properly communicate*

Rachel *aggressively body tackling everyone away*: She wants to be left alone!