And Heaven Forbid He Freeze The Train

Ward, but it's Dot fighting Amy's Nine Evil Exes.

I love the Worm reboot; as a standalone work it’s simply brilliant, but as a reboot its overly reactive to fan criticism and fanon in a way that feels a bit mean.

Like, people didn’t like the Birdcage’s revolving door, so now it’s an inescapable super mega prison

Or how Wildbow didn’t like that people preferred Clockblocker over Golem (WB got so much hate mail after Taylor got with Golem) and so now people shipping Clockblocker with Taylor caused Clock’s career to nosedive

You think Scion is boring? Now he’s boring and evil. And everything with Amy and Vicky is obviously a reaction to a handful of (consensual) ship fics, most prominently Guts ‘n Glory, which were passed around back in the day.

What are your toughts about the 2011 edgy reboot of wildbow's characters?

First: I will let you know that i am a fan of Wilbow comics since i was 5 so i am kind of nostalgic for the 80s comics but with nearly 10 years since the end of the most important series from the reboot in 2013 with Worm i will ask you : What did you like and what did you dislike from the wildbow comics reboot? And from the pre-reboot comics?

Let me start:

From the reboots:

I loved: That they made Legend canonically gay (The tension he had with Hero in the old comics was CRAZY), that they transformed a recurrent background character with a funny hat into a plot point (Contessa) and Tattletale (They made a secondary villain into the best thing ever)

I hated: That they made Scion evil (Like really , he was boring but THIS) , Eidiolon beign the cause of the endbringers (Guy there were already a guy that did that , it was his whole thing . Why did you eliminate Fatuum and then made him into a clone) and the whole Amy with an incestous crush on Vicky (They ruined WBC's first family)

From the pre-reboot:

I loved: Taylor from teenage villain , to protectorate hero and her love triangle with golem and clockblocker , the Operation: NILBOG mini-series where we are told the origin story for Piggot and Coil and the whole Pact series (I'm a sucker for magic tales)

I hated: The revolving door prision birdcage , that they killed off hero to erase his relationship with legend and the weird clone saga.

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

This discussion of superhero logistics reminds me of an element of Worm's background worldbuilding that I've always found really interesting, which is that the heroes are running out of teleporters. They had a cloak-style mass teleporter, Strider, who was apparently indispensable for troop deployment at Endbringer fights, but he didn't get the hell out of dodge in time so by the Behemoth fight they mention having to seriously kludge other not-as-good powers to get everyone on-site on time. No one dies forever in comics so the question of "what are the risks of one guy's powers becoming indispensable to our organization" isn't as salient, but here goes Worm, gesturing at the idea that you might just get super fucking unlucky because you became organizationally dependent on a couple golden gooses who you inexplicably keep bringing to live fire situations. If they weren't hard to replace, they wouldn't exactly be superheroes, would they?

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.

the undersiders are so funny

These images from J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars gestures in the same direction I was gesturing with that Aquaman post- there's a really interesting archetype in superpower fiction consisting of characters who "Step Outside" in the way described here. Superhumans who remove themselves from society- not in a "kneel before me" way, but simply out of recognizing that participating in society in a conventional manner offers them significantly less than it does an average person (though not nothing- insert that MP100 monologue about "can you make a soda can.") Libertarians who fuck off to the moon and carve a Gadsen snake visible from earth, that kind of guy.

Invincible featured the title character gradually sliding into something adjacent to this as he realized that he was just sort of going through the motions by attending college and so on, when his girlfriend can wish a house into existence and the Cecil throws money at him to do stuff he'd do for free. The entire main cast of The Power Fantasy is doing something like this- you're most likely in no danger if you see one of the Superpowers walking down the street but most of them probably haven't paid for a meal in years (unless they insist on paying, which wraps back around to having the same dynamic as not paying.) Superman yo-yos on the topic of how accountable he makes himself to human governments, but I strongly doubt he got a permit for that fuckoff-huge fortress in the arctic. And so on. Obviously not all superhumans can get away with this- Spider-Man is held back from becoming a full-time bank robber by way more than just his conscience. But whether they could get away with this is a great characterization question to ask of any superhuman, and it's a door you can't really close once it's open- any decision they do make from that point forward will be implicitly contrasted against their everpresent option to just Hit Da Bricks.

Thinkin’ About Cauldron

I’m aware of the way it breaks some people’s suspension of disbelief, and I’m aware that it comes across as silly or incompetent to many, but it is deeply, deeply important to me on a thematic level that Cauldron is tiny. The tinyness is what makes them a functional foil to Taylor; you spend the whole book thinking that this is just an escalation of the problems Taylor has with Monolithic authority, and then the curtain is pulled back and you realize that the “Monolithic authority” is actually just six or seven people who are on a first name basis with each other, using their top-tier information-gathering and coordination-based powers as a force multiplier to get around their small numbers as they unilaterally seized control. (Hey, sorta like the Undersiders.)

And, furthermore, their tinyness is a stand-out example of the kind of coordination problems the book has been examining the whole time- Cauldron should be bigger, the inner circle should have more people in it, and the fact that they’ve expanded so slowly, from two to seven-ish full members, with so much of their inner circle not even having the full picture of the threat they’re up against, is deeply indicative of their wagon-circling Atlas Complex. It has to be them, they have to do it alone, or they are going to be found out and crushed. 

And to be fair, they aren’t actually wrong in their assessment that they’ll be found out and crushed if they aren’t extremely careful about who they bring into the loop; overlooking the remaining entity entirely, Legend’s concern that the governments would try and coopt the power-granting process is, like. Correct. That is a thing that would happen, given the number of wormverse groups already trying to do that in some form. Siberian bit them in the ass, The Dealer bit them in the ass, and a big part of Ward is the multi-directional slapfight over the remaining Cauldron infrastructure that starts up as soon as it isn’t in a position to defend itself anymore.

 There’s a real chicken-and-egg thing going on here, where it’s not clear if their paranoia is warranted given how other power players in the setting tend to behave, or if other power players in the setting behave the way they do downstream from Cauldron’s paranoia, manipulation and compartmentalization. A recurring theme with Worm is that keeping secrets and holding back resources is going to lead to terrible things happening even if keeping those secrets was a reasonable decision with the information you had available to you. You see this with Phir Se, with the Echidna fight, with the politicking over Khonsu. Cauldron is just, like, the epitome of that Morton’s Fork- be honest and open, and potentially lose everything, or, you know, be Cauldron, with all that entails.

Finally got my copy of The Power Fantasy #6

I should be excited to read Ward. There’s so much potential in a sequel to Worm. I care about the returning characters and I really, really, really liked what the epilogue of Worm set up. I’m maybe one of a handful of people that like Teacher (as of his epilogue). I love the idea of a work set in the portal ridden ruins of New York. The tension created by the amnesty and of the Wardens attempting to police this new world. And fundamentally, it’s incredibly interesting to move from a work where the world was slowly ending, to one where the world has ended, but which is no longer on the path to ending.

And yet, I’m aware that this potential is, at least partially, squandered. The evocative picture of New York replaced by the amorphous, placeless City. The problems of resource distribution mentioned and yet never fully integrated into the narrative. The apocalypse cult going through the apocalypse mostly unchanged.

Still I’ll read it. Who knows, maybe I’ll love it