I Sure Love Having Reckless Unearned Confidence In The Place Of Actual Skill

fuck my wormpolls are queued out to april

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!

#principals matter

Bouba/Kiki context

Note that this is Taylor as Skitter, not as Weaver or Khepri, since those are different cape identities. I will post polls about her as Weaver and Khepri later

One person I have blocked and muted because they made a fic with AI and then doubled down on doing it in the comments when people called them out for it. Another person was just consistently mean and awful to the author in the comments under a fic I liked so that was another mute/block. Beyond that maybe a couple writers muted because they wrote a bunch of tiny fics exclusively featuring a ship I'm not at all interested in?

It's easier to be less stressed/irritated at things when you just... curate your online experience.

Bonus points: Why? I'm curious

Back at it again with another Parahumans fandom question.

Just thinking about something for a fic I'm writing that sort of applies to the setting at large, did Columbine happen on Earth Bet? Because from what I can tell it didn't. The Columbine shooting was the catalyst in the US to get increased surveillance and security in the school system which led to all the security cameras in the hallways and on campus in schools of all levels.

The reason I think this didn't happen on Earth Bet because if schools like Winslow were using security cameras then the extensive bullying campaign Taylor was on the receiving end of would have stopped way sooner. But even if it hadn't, she was shoved into her locker, objectively, and hallways in schools are generally where cameras are most frequently, so if there was a camera in that hallway then it could've been easily determined who put Taylor into the hospital. I guess the fact that that doesn't happen means that either 1. School shootings such as Columbine never got national attention like in our timeline or 2. Winslow is so corrupt and underfunded that it can't meet DOE security standards in a public high school.

I know there's some fanon about how corrupt and evil Principal Blackwell is, but security cameras provide a certain objectivity to events that theoretically should have been easy to obtain during the investigation as to what happened? I dunno, thoughts just spiraling.

Heard a weird beeping coming from the outside world, so I peak past my window and what do I see? A golf cart driving by, a guy driving it, and a little baby in the guys lap just going absolutely ham on the horn.

Cute

I must hate myself something fierce because I thought it would be smart to eat ice cream. I'm lactose intolerant and I would like to write my fanfiction now please and thank you. I swear I do this type of shit every day and I never learn.

"Maybe it'll work out this time" no, shut up phoseo, it won't

I see a lot of that attitude in comments on wormfics. Tons of "if i had that kind of power, I would absolutely murder and harm everyone who upset me", people gots issues and seem to misunderstand that 'protagonist who murders people wantonly' is pretty boring outside of crackfics.

I was looking at old Ward comments about how people wanted Victoria to stop feeling so bad about hurting people and to start killing villains.

It reminded me of that one Batman post about how him saying he’s not comfortable with committing murder shouldn’t be controversial lol

I feel like a lot of this is also people from the worm fandom thinking that Taylor had no issues killing people, when that is literally the furthest thing from the truth. It actually took a lot for Taylor to personally kill someone (though she did have Sundancer murder several dozen people, it’s easier because she wasn’t pulling the trigger), and it clearly took extraordinary circumstances to get that far in the first place.

The S9000 involved a lot of depersonalization of the clones and the stakes to be world ending for her to causally kill them.

I’m out of the loop by the way why does everyone hate greg? Is it just that he’s kind of annoying?