If U Get This, Answer W/ Three Random Facts About Urself And Send It To The Last Seven Blogs In Ur Notifs.

Is this trend especially prevalent on spacebattles? I don't use the site and lots of the wormfic I read on ao3 trends more "fuck em, they're nazis *punch punch punch*"

The Popular Fanon of the Unwritten Rules, and the Nazi Apologia it Perpetuates

I. Introduction

Fanon. Love it or hate it, there’s a lot of it. This isn’t something exclusive to the Worm fandom, either. Fanon has existed since the moment people started thinking about what they were reading, and spreading their own versions of it. Off the top of my head, The Divine Comedy incorporated some of the author’s “fanon” views on the Catholic Church.

In a more contemporary sense, a lot of fanon exists to either fill gaps in the original source, or to “fix” things that were deemed wrong. These two categories of fanon are more likely to be accepted by default, either due to a lack of canon to contradict it, or due to a general agreement that the way the source portrayed X was bad. There is a third type of fanon, however, which is the type I personally find rather distasteful: the fanon where something from the source is taken, and then misinterpreted so often that people start to assume it's canon. It’s worth mentioning that these three broad categories are not mutually exclusive, and in fact there’s often a degree of overlap between them.

This third category is what I’ll be focusing on, as a lot of misunderstandings of Worm’s setting come from things like this. Some of these fanons can be harmless, at least in isolation, while others erode the core themes that Worm set out to explore. And then, of course, there’s the fanon that ties directly into the spread of harmful ideas and ideology, subjective as that is.

I am, of course, talking about the Unwritten Rules and the fanon surrounding them.

Now, I should clarify that using the Unwritten Rules fanon in your fic doesn’t make you a Nazi apologist. Most fanon isn’t used with intent like that, and is instead just fic writers playing a game of telephone with stuff they saw in other fics, because they find it fun or convenient. The problem is that some of the things being telephoned down the fanon pipeline are steeped in racism and apologia, or can be used to facilitate them, and repetition of these fanons dulls the response to what, in other contexts, would (hopefully) be met with horror, or at least discomfort.

II. The Unwritten Rules

In brief, the Unwritten Rules are the idea that there’s a harsh divide between capes and their civilian identities, and that preserving that divide is important for maintaining the status quo. Assault gets home from a long day of work, takes off his mask, and then can go out to eat without worrying about a villain attacking him while he’s going through a drive through. Lung can take off his mask and put on a button-up shirt, and go shopping at the local grocer.

The Nazis can come home from a long day of lynching minorities, and go to the local pub for a pint without worrying about their crimes coming back to bite them.

If you haven’t already seen the ways this is fucked up, don’t worry, I’m not done yet.

In canon, as presented by Tattletale, the Unwritten Rules are something of a gentleman’s agreement to not cause too much trouble. Don’t kill, don’t rape, and don’t go on a bombing spree, and the heroes will go easier on you. “A game of cops and robbers.” There is some truth to what she’s saying, in that it’s easier for the PRT to keep the status quo stable if they can take people in without every fight leaving a trail of bodies in the streets. Villains also want to limit their destruction, because otherwise they can’t make as much money. It’s a mutual, unspoken agreement that society is good for both sides, and neither wants to see it torn down around them; don’t escalate and others won’t escalate in response. Hence Bakuda being attacked from all sides. Hence the Nine getting attacked by everyone every time they show up.

Hence the government unmasking Taylor in an attempt to capture her.

It’s not black and white, however, as immediately after Tattletale’s speech about how the unwritten rules work, the Undersiders and Wards fight. A no holds barred all out fight where Kid Win uses a gun rated for S-Class fights against the Undersiders. A fight where Taylor attempts to drown Clockblocker in bugs. A fight where Grue hits Vista so hard she falls unconscious. A fight where Amy attempts to kill Skitter, and threatens her with fates worse than death while captive.

Anyone who’s read superhero comics is familiar with the “face blindness” tropes, where heroes and villains alike can hang up their coats and relax between issues. The Unwritten Rules are a pretty direct implementation of this trope, and a way for the story to comment on and deconstruct it.

Anyway, now that I’ve done a bunch of discussion on something a lot of people broadly understand, let’s focus on how the exaggerated fanon surrounding the Unwritten Rules acts as a breeding ground for the normalization of Nazism as an ideology.

III. The Apologia

First, let’s consider how severe the problem is. Heroes playing along, refusing to arrest villains in their civilian identities, is much more common in fanwork than it is in canon, just to start. (In canon, Armsmaster was eager to learn the Undersiders’ civilian identities so as to better arrest them. In Pick A Card, Mouse Protector stops trying to arrest Taylor after she accidentally sees Taylor without her mask on.) In fanfic, The Rules also manifest with villains being unwilling to cross certain lines, even giving up their own teammates for breaking the rules in more extreme cases. At their silliest, the Unwritten Rules are treated as something all capes know and respect, like commandments carved on a pair of stones handed down to them by god (Cauldron).

Interestingly, it’s far more common in fanfic for the Nazis to “respect the Unwritten Rules” than it is for the ABB or the Merchants.

Frequently, I’ll see people and fics talking about how working with the Nazis is reasonable if it’s to protect the sanctity of Unwritten Rules. Kaiser and his lot are “civilized” for respecting the rules. The heroes are forced to play along and ignore the Nazis, because otherwise they’re breaking The Rules. Any hate crimes committed in costume don’t count, actually, and it’s not unreasonable for Assault and Victor to drink at the same bar. If you see Stormtiger washing his tights at the laundromat, you just look away because The Rules are more important.

First of all, this is insane, and not how law enforcement works. Second of all, this is insane, and not how the PRT operates even in canon. Third of all, the idea that the status quo the Unwritten Rules represent is more important than the ideology of Nazism is insidious and horrifying, as is the idea that following The Rules could be more important (to the fandom, or to the characters in the story,) than saving minorities from literal hate crimes.

Because that’s what it means when someone says the government should team up with the Nazis. They’re saying that the lives of minorities, people terrorized and killed by The Empire, are less important than the game of cops and robbers.

You might feel reminded, at this point, that the Unwritten Rules do serve a supposed purpose in canon, but fanon frequently treats them  like a game, like cops and robbers, and not as a necessary evil. The juxtaposition between people dressing up in spandex and fighting/committing crime is lost when you treat the crimes themselves as a game you can put down and walk away from, when stealing money from a bank, selling drugs, and lynching minorities are all seen as (equally valid) parts of an elaborate performance.

IV. A Doylist Perspective

Who’s the performance for, anyway? Who benefits from the Unwritten Rules? Not the heroes, who have their ability to serve and protect stymied if they actually follow these rules. Small-time villains benefit, in theory, but they can’t actually stop other people from breaking the rules against them. Small-time independents, similarly, don’t have the benefit of friends and allies to go on the warpath for them in the event that they get smothered in their sleep. Uber and Leet, for a canon example, were minor villains who needed to fold in under Coil for protection after they crossed too many lines.

The obvious answer to “who is this for” is that this is fiction, and the performance is for the readers’ benefit. The primary purpose of the Unwritten Rules as fanon is to give characters who might otherwise not get along a reason to interact and potentially get along. The Undersiders hanging out with the Wards out of costume, with nothing more than a few winks and nudges about cape life. Taylor going to Arcadia and hanging out with New Wave and the Wards, before going back to the Undersiders for crime. Heroes taking off the costumes to spend an evening at the Palanquin. This isn’t a problem, even if it’s not to my personal tastes. The problem comes when this is applied to the Nazis as well.

Giving the Nazis a pass, and having the protagonists casually hang out with them out of costume (it’s usually Rune or Purity for these scenes) is often used as a way to apologize for the Nazis. “She’s a relatable single mom,” people say about Purity, who never stopped being a Nazi. “She’s just a kid,” people say about Rune, ignoring the fact that she’s still a racist asshole. By having the protagonists interact favorably with the Nazis “out of costume”, authors are (often unintentionally) signaling that being a Nazi isn’t a big deal.

Or worse, that being a Nazi isn’t as bad as being Asian (when compared to the ABB), or being black (comparing Sophia’s actions as a high school bully to an organization who regularly lynches minorities).

There is actually an easy fix to this, if you as an author want to write using Unwritten Rules fanon: simply exclude the Nazis. People don’t want to hang out with them in civilian identities, because they’re still hateful bigots. The Nazis don’t get the same benefit of the doubt as someone like the Undersiders, because every single one of them has a list of hate crimes attached to them. You don’t need any justification beyond “they’re Nazis, and that’s a bad thing.”

The idea that you need to justify hating Nazis, an ideology foundationally built around hate, is in itself Nazi apologia. One cannot tolerate intolerance, otherwise the intolerance will obliterate the tolerance.

V. Why the Watsonian Matters Too

Within the fiction of Worm and its fanfics, the people who benefit most from the Unwritten Rules are the well-established crime organizations who can threaten people into respecting them. The Nazis, however, benefit ideologically from the Unwritten Rules just as much as they benefit logistically, for the same reason it’s a problem to have the heroes hang out with them out-of-costume. Saying “we can’t arrest them because they’re not in costume” legitimizes the crimes committed while in costume, and plays defense for the perpetrators, by creating a context in which those crimes are “fair play” that can’t be punished. It’s one line short of endorsing what the villains do.

The polite fiction of the Unwritten Rules is exactly that: fiction. The entire point of The Rules in canon is that everyone who can break them, does break them. Everyone. Heroes, villains, protagonists, antagonists... The Rules are worth less than the nonexistent paper they’re written on.

The fanon takes these rules literally, and as a result, tacitly endorses the Nazis.

If you’re not allowed to break The Rules, even in service of fighting literal neo-Nazis, then that’s legitimizing Nazism. There is no fence sitting with this. Either Nazis are bad and can’t exist in polite society, or the Nazis are socially accepted. If a bar doesn’t kick Nazis out, one way or another, that’s a Nazi Bar.

“What about Somer’s Rock and the villain truce?” you may ask. To which I can only respond:

I said polite society, and I don’t think a crime lord moot counts. In a room with Nazis, Coil (drugged a preteen to use as a magic eight-ball), Faultline (mercenary who attacked a mental health facility), the newly-formed Merchants (drug dealers), and the Undersiders (teenage bank robbers), nobody there counts as polite society. All of them are threats to the status quo by nature, even as they exist within the status quo, to varying degrees.

Obviously, even Coil isn’t as bad as the Nazis, and the Merchants’ drug dealing pales in comparison to even just the drug dealing the Nazis would be involved in; especially if you count Medhall. They all, regardless, are a threat to the status quo in their own way.

The Merchants ignore the status quo in favor of chasing highs. Coil wants to bend the status quo over his knee, snap it in two, and set up his own. Faultline wants money, and is willing to side with just about anyone for it. The Undersiders, Taylor especially, buck against authority and eventually attempt to take over the city in Coil’s absence; they don’t get the moral high ground here, much as I adore them.

The Nazis, meanwhile, are pushing a fascist ideology that seeks the destruction of all they deem lesser, which includes (but is not limited to) Jews, people of color, the disabled, fat people, queer people, white people who disagree with them, and women who aren’t feminine in the right ways.

Fleur was killed in her home by an unpowered white supremacist who wanted to join the Empire. After he got out of jail, the Empire welcomed him with open arms. They didn’t explicitly break the Unwritten Rules, but they didn’t take any issue with the rules being broken.

The Unwritten Rules are the status quo, and if your status quo bends to accept Nazis, you have a broken status quo. If a bar doesn’t kick Nazis out, one way or another, that’s a Nazi Bar.

VI. The Endbringer Truce

The other place people might point to with the Unwritten Rules is the Endbringer Truce. In canon, the Endbringer Truce is basically the heroes not arresting villains who show up to help. It’s an emergency situation, closer to a natural disaster than anything else. Even the Nine weren’t treated as seriously as an Endbringer. Any villains who show up are allowed to assist, provided they don’t take advantage of things to benefit themselves.

In fanon, people take this to mean that everyone shows up to the Endbringer fights, including having villains fly out to foreign fights, despite not even all the villains of Brockton Bay showing up to fight Leviathan. Oni Lee wasn’t present. The Merchants weren’t. Faultline and co. skipped town. Coil hunkered down and waited it out. Interestingly, the Empire showed up, likely due to the many losses of face they experienced leading up to it; they needed to boost their reputation to remain relevant and continue recruiting even with recent setbacks.

Bambina also showed up for the fight, but she was very explicitly doing it to bolster her own reputation. Overall, the average villain is more likely to use the truce to avoid the fighst, rather than risk their lives. Behemoth was another exception, with the Undersiders and Ambassadors being the odd ones out when it came to villains participating. The CUI sending some of their capes was also seen as incredibly unusual.

In fanon, it’s very common for the Protectorate to help Nazis get to international endbringer attacks. Interestingly, it’s only ever the Nazis who help. Lung stays home, Coil doesn’t care, the Undersiders wouldn’t volunteer for anything more than their home city being attacked (prior to Taylor, anyway), the Merchants (who are usually a gang much earlier in fanon) don’t do anything... so the Nazis are the only villains who tend to help. The Nazis are the ones that the heroes have to give “grudging respect” to. The Nazis are fighting the good fight, unlike the ABB (Asians) or the Merchants (drug dealers led by a black man).

I shouldn’t need to specify how this too is Nazi apologia.

Canon has a radically different take on where the Nazis fit into things - nobody works with them without qualms. During the villain truce against Bakuda, nobody was comfortable with the Nazis. Armsmaster lined up a bunch of Nazis to die against Leviathan, violating the Endbringer Truce, and the only reason anyone considers that a problem is because Taylor happened to be in the line of fire, and Tattletale threatened to make that clear. (Not that it was part of Armsmaster’s plan for Taylor to be there, of course.) Even when fighting the Nine, the heroes were unwilling to work with Hookwolf and his gang. They were willing to temporarily ignore him, but not work openly with him.

VII. Final Thoughts

The idea that the Unwritten Rules are important enough to justify working with Nazis is Nazi apologia. Stating that the Nazis exist because they follow the Unwritten Rules is also Nazi apologia. “At least they’re civilized” is a blatant pro-Nazi phrase, a tacit denial of the inherently uncivil nature of racist violence, and is often used in the context of the Unwritten Rules.

The Unwritten Rules, as a piece of fanon, are entwined with just about all other fanon. They’re a cornerstone of Worm’s fanfic community, and they’re used to justify and normalize Nazi apologia at every turn, which is a key part of the fascist playbook. They need to convince people that it’s okay that they exist. If it’s okay that they exist, then maybe some of what they’re saying is also okay. If siding with Kaiser to enforce the Unwritten Rules is worth it, then maybe Kaiser and the Nazis aren’t that bad. Maybe the real villains were the minorities selling drugs and wearing red and green. Maybe the government should work more closely with the Nazis, because they have the numbers the government lacks...

Unrelated, but OBLIEQUE is a pretty good fic.

The Unwritten Rules as presented in fanon and viewed by the fandom are, to be frank, silly. Treating a Magic Circle like a set of hard and fast rules, sometimes going as far as to treat them with more sanctity than actual laws, is so ridiculous that it should defy suspension of disbelief, even without considering their treatment in canon. Bad actors, furthermore, can use (and have used) this exaggeration of a canon concept to enforce racist and pro-Nazi fanon, and now it’s ingrained. It’s automatic. “Why not side with the Nazis? It’s logical, because the people killing them are breaking the Unwritten Rules.” As if anyone needs any justification to not side with literal Nazis.

Finally, and most importantly: capitalizing “Unwritten Rules” is so fucking stupid, and the only reason I did that here was to highlight how ridiculous it is. If there’s one thing you take from this essay, please make it that.

You are sat at a bar, and approached by a character I would chew my leg off to spend a night with.

(Put who you got in the tags)

Take 2, please reblog for spread

It’s by pages guys

YouTube

Benevolence

I just think these covers are really neat and I'm kinda obsessed with listening to them. The chaos language is super pretty to listen to in the games, but *wow* does Lizz Robinett ascend that feeling~

Worm (2011) but theyre all muppets

So when Sabah joins the Undersiders shes literally just drawing on angry eyebrows with a felt marker

"yeah this fic is pretty alright, probably going to bookmark it once I get to the most recent chapter- why does the author now say 'orphan_account'?"

damn :(

Having seen Iron Pineapples review of Nightreign. Game looks cool, not 40$ cool. But I look forward to Elden Ring mods adding in the new content back into the game I actually wanna play.

(I expect to have a similar opinion about Dusk Bloods.)

I really really don't like "give us an interesting fact(s) about yourself!! :D" icebreakers in any situation. I am boring, my interests are not marketable, why should I need to share info about myself for this college class?? It's already online, I dont intend to talk to any of these people.

Its all so dumb...

i had a dungeon master once who was really into LoL and tried to convince people to play all the time

he was an asshole for other reasons but that was always a red flag to me, promoting league aggressively, lol

If you didn't know about League of Legends and had to design an Arcane MOBA, you would not end up with League of Legends and I think that's a good thing

Watching some of the X-Files that came on late-night TV, this show is so fucking good what the hell. Like the writing, the acting, the storytelling; it's all so good. Maybe I'm just elevating the past, but it really feels like a whole different world of TV.