My Correct Amy Opinions

The Power Cut contains more than your daily recommended dose of insightful character commentary

THE POWER CUT

A fanzine about THE POWER FANTASY

Issue #1: "The Balancing Act" coming February 14, 2025!

The Power Cut is a collection of meta essays, illustrations, and jokes. The Power Cut contains mature content and spoilers for The Power Fantasy #1-5. The Power Cut will be available free online. The Power Cut is so excited to meet you!

Contributors:

@artbyblastweave

@idonttakethislightly

@jkjones21

@khepris-worst-soldier

@meserach

@rei-ismyname

@tazmuth

@the-joju-experience

Cover art by @tazmuth

A fun little bit of foreshadowing/character work is that New Wave’s capes all have kinda dorky names that are just normal English words. Except, for Panacea, which is hardly dorky, and is a word that originated in mythology, with all its associated meanings. Even in her name, Panacea stood apart from her family.

And, of course, it represents the pressure placed on her. Lady Photon’s name isn’t a promise. Glory Girl’s name isn’t a promise. Flashbang’s name isn’t a promise. Panacea’s name is. And she ran herself into the ground trying to keep it.

America's modern psychic shields are Magnus's Numinous tech, which implies that they didn't have shielding prior to Magnus's rightward shift and his involvement with America. So when then, did Etienne not stop the New Mexico Festival Massacre, or at least warn Valentina? Was it a deliberate attempt to alienate her from America? Or was he even hoping that they would succeed? The balancing act would be easier with one less Superpower around, even if its Valentina, but I think they're were still too close at that point for Etienne to do that.

And more importantly, how did he explain this lapse to Valentina?

So far The Power Fantasy has largely been an excellent execution of exactly what you would have expected from the previews which does mute the effect a little.

Then Issue #4 dropped and it's as at least as heavily telegraphed as anything that came before but this time that doesn't stop it hitting as hard as possible at all.

It's one of the most horrible scenarios imaginable. Your powers go out of control when your emotions get too negative and when that happens millions die.

Nobody can ever be too honest when it would risk that happening. You can't trust anything someone says to you. You can't develop any type of meaningful relationship with someone. Your emotional, artistic and moral development is stunted because nobody can ever confront you with upsetting truths. You can't even blame anyone because it's completely correct for them to instrumentalise you and to turn every interaction they have with you into managing you.

10/10 I've been screaming internally whenever I think about Masumi since her issue dropped.

>be me, pizza guy in shittiest port town on Earth Bet

>terrible tips and get robbed for pizza so often I have honest to god decoy pizzas

>get called to deliver to this weird old warehouse like three times a week and have to roll the dice on how it's gonna go

>there's this whole Burger King Kid's Club worth of diverse teenagers that live there and I never know who I'm gonna get

>worst kid there is the one that answers the door 90% of the time. I hate this little fucking shit

>black haired boy. Dainty little prince pretty boy type. Always the one who calls the orders in, and always gives some stupid ass fake name like he's fucking Bart Simpson. "I.C. Weiner" and "I.P. Freely." That kind of shit.

>like half the time I think I'm delivering a depression-meal since he's dressed like he just woke up, and I'd feel bad except he makes some smartass remark every time, and since I see him every other goddamn day, it's almost always the same joke. Also tries to get free pizza by saying it's 30 minutes or free, except no one has done that program since like 1993, so he's pulling shit from tv. I don't need a fucking comedy routine from a kid in cookie monster pajama pants. Bad tipper. Whatever cash he has in his pocket.

>he's on the shitlist because, and I don't know how the fuck he does this, but every time the pizza is "late", this fucking kid trips me somehow. Or I drop my phone or the pizza bag or keys. Swear to god this kid has Home Alone tripwires or something.

>and every time it happens. Every fucking time. This little bastard says "have a nice trip."

>would say he's a cape, but every cape I've ever met has had some kind of presence, and I'm not giving that much credit to someone with a four-hair teenage mustache

>hate this smug little fucker and I'd have him blacklisted if this fucking building and its weird teenage polycule didn't make up like 50% of our orders for the neighborhood. 0/10, I hope you die

>be me, Brockton Bay pizza man. Deliver to welding building. Name on order is "Dick Hardly." Little prince opens the door. He has a sidekick. Black girl counterpart. They give me matching shit-eating grins. I hate my fucking job.

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.

Keep reading

I think it's pretty funny how The Power Fantasy has a scene highlighting how Haven has plenty of doors that close, but then later we see that Heavy's bedroom just has incredibly translucent partial curtains. "We're open about our weird sex stuff. We're secret about our secrets."

Okay, so there's an entire a chasm between Farcille and Wolfspider. Because yes, it makes sense to see Marcille as having a crush on Falin, and that reading of her character could even be more enjoyable than assuming otherwise. Its a coherent ship and an enjoyable one. But with Worm, not reading Taylor and Rachel as crushing on each other actively detracts from the story's comprehensibility.

i really like how worm commits to making superpowered characters weird. i think in most superhero media, superpowered characters are largely distinct, normal individuals with powers tacked on like tools they can use. but in worm, having a power kind of inherently puts you to the left of being entirely human. in worm, the lines between the power and the person are blurred, both literally in terms of how shards work & in terms of how powers present themselves. you can’t have a power without it altering your relationship to your mind and body.

and the “relationship to your body” bit applies to almost all capes, not just the ones who have been physically altered by their powers! whenever the experience of having a (not physically altering) power is described, it‘s phrased as being some sort of additional sense or sensation in a way that is still inextricably connected to the cape’s physical self. imp’s power isn’t just “okay, i’m invisible now,” it’s “i can physically feel my power rolling over my skin and jabbing out into the air to push memories of me away.” 

the other examples i specifically have in mind here are skitter and regent. skitter’s power isn’t just “move the bugs and make them bite people,” they’re effectively a part of her. like additional limbs. she keeps functioning in fights when her human body is knocked the fuck out on the ground because the rest of her body–a million other little bodies–is still there to work with. the fact that she has millions of extra eyeballs at any given moment means it’s not actually so bad when the two of them that happen to be physically connected to her human body are blinded, which results in my favorite Worm Out Of Context ever:

and regent has one of my favorite subtle, uncanny examples of a power that seems like it shouldn’t alter the power-haver’s connection to their own body, but does anyway. in alec’s interlude, while he’s puppeting sophia, there’s a point where the undersiders get far away enough from her that it makes it more difficult for him to control her. he starts struggling to coordinate her movements.

the uncanny part is that he starts struggling to control his own body’s movements, as well. he puts his alec-self’s earbuds in so that he doesn’t have to talk to anyone, because he knows that if he did speak, he’d start stuttering and slurring his words from loss of physical control. sure, his alec-self is the body he’ll end up in when he’s done using his power, and his sophia-self was taken by force, so there’s obviously a distinction between the two, but that doesn’t make his alec-self easier to control. his power implicitly calls the separation between himself and the people he’s puppeting into question. he doesn’t get to have a “main” body he can control without effort, he has to divide his attention between each body and put concentration into moving each of them. in that way, his own body is placed in the same category as the bodies he’s hijacked. it’s Weird!

Random Analysis of a Very Specific Bit in Late Worm

Part of the reason I want to write a fic focused on Cuff and Taylor is there seems to be some implication that Cuff is one of the closer members of the Chicago Wards to Weaver. Not enough to be considered a friend (I don’t think even Golem qualifies), but she does get picked for the Cauldron investigation strike team over most of the other members. A team Taylor seems to hold in fairly high regard (granted, Shadow Stalker and Lung make the list so again not a measure of friendship)

And one thing Arc 29 in particular does is have Cuff always seem to know how to get Taylor to listen to her and do what she wants.

Compare this to Arc 25 with Tecton spending basically half the chapter trying to convince Taylor and only getting a compromise. Though looking at the two conversations, there is a pretty distinct difference to their approach.

Tecton phrases a lot of the conversation under the idea of “we are x, so you should do this”. Sort of holding some level of authority in the fact they’ve been a team for so long. And, big shocker, Taylor isn’t exactly one for other people holding authority over her. She doesn’t really care for what she “owes” others based on their perceived relationship.

However, one thing about Taylor, at least to be gleaned from the earlier examples from Cuff, is that she does care to a degree about how she is perceived. This can be backed up in her conversation with Glenn in Arc 23

Bringing it back to the main topic, Cuff is, in essence, guilt tripping. The weaponized niceness bit (still one of my favorite Cuff moments ever), as well as the prisoner part, is basically making Taylor think “I’d be kind of an asshole if I didn’t do this”. There are some labels she’s fine with having, like “creepy”, but when it gets into some weirder territory as Cuff points out, she backs off.

I find it interesting that it’s specifically Cuff given these scenes with Taylor, especially this late into the story. It seems to establish at the very least that Cuff knows what makes Taylor tick, better than most of the other Wards.