Parahumans - Blog Posts

What if, after barely surviving Leviathan thanks to their power, they now know they will die whent the injuries are distributed back. Now they have to deal with their upcoming doom/race against time to find a healer.

Brute power where damage is distributed back through time. Almost a thinker power in some regards. Injuries spread our over longer periods to lessen the damage at the initial moment and after, but the cape always aware where they will be hurt and how badly. A cape heading into Leviathan painfully aware this may be the fight they die in.

Jack Slash goes full barber only to accidentally summon Barbatorem. The two have a standoff, it doesn't end well.

the only thing to complete jack slash's aesthetic would be scissors

Much like how old slasher flicks made it clear you could enjoy watching teens getting slashed by having them slut it up premaritally, Worm makes it clear you can enjoy watching the Travellers suffer by showing them play League of Legends

As many have said he's a nerdy awkward loser with a bit of a crush on Taylor and more enthusiasm than sense, or empathy, or intelligence.

Which describes most spacebattlers.

Like he has little in the way of chararization beyond being like that so he's easy to project on, and easy to write for (write what you know and all that).

In a cast of people who atleast have refernece to haveing deeper problems and personalities, his greatest struggle is that he's bad at social shit. So he makes for a good everyman protag to throw in the deep end.

Like, I am a spacebattler, I got my start in the worm fandom on spacebattles and its offshoots, but there's so much on those sites that just baffle me to no end.

we need to take greg veder away from spacebattles and anyone who writes fanfic

you're a loser, baby, a loser, goddamn baby

skitter

no doubles allowed in catgirl maid breakthrough

After a year (and much procrastinating) I have finally finished my cosplay of Taylor “Skitter” Hebert from Worm! Rather happy with how this turned out all in all. I wanted to get a picture of me shooting Aster but alas, there where no dolls lying around

“Taylor’s had plenty of friends, and believes in, and understands, trusting and relying on those friends–Aisha stood by her even in the depths of her madness as Khepri, Lisa and Rachel worked to help her and understand her as best they could even when communication was impossible for her, Parian and Foil willing came under her control when she needed them. Taylor firmly believes in the value and power of friendship, to the point where how she treated and parted with her friends was a deep regret she had. But that doesn’t really change her perspective on Unity, because that was forged in the flames of the apocalypse, wherein even the impending annihilation of Mankind across all Earths couldn’t make people get over themselves, work together, etc. A dozen different factions turned on each other in the midst of the end of the world, people kept secrets and lied to the very end, and perhaps most importantly–even those who did work together in the face of impossible odds couldn’t actually do anything. Many Parahumans did work together against Scion, for example, and broadly speaking, they spent a week dying without accomplishing anything of note. Making progress required dominating and destroying everything in her way, and the fact that her friendships endured even when the world didn’t and remained strong even when the world was ending is important, it’s true, it’s something she’s held close to her heart for twelve long years–but it doesn’t change that fact, either. And even then, well…when it came down to it, as Lisa complained, Taylor did things her way(….)

(…)Simply put, Taylor believes that friendship is an amazing, priceless thing. She believes that extending a hand of friendship, in the right place and the right time, can save someone and change their life and that it’s valuable beyond words, and that the bonds of that friendship can be unbreakable, that they can hold someone up even when all else seems lost, and survive when nothing else does. She believes in love and devotion and holding on. What she doesn’t believe is that people will put aside their differences and work together if the world started ending, or that it would necessarily matter even if they did. Sort of like how Taylor loved her father and believed he loved her and believed in the value of that love–but didn’t believe that going to her father would, say, resolve any of the problems that she was having with her bullies, which, to be fair, it didn’t. She believes in love and while she doubted her feelings for Brian, she wished she could have loved him and that that love would have be enough–but deep down, she knew it wasn’t. She believes in friendship and holds onto it forever, but couldn’t rely on that in the end, either. Because deep down she knows–or, at least, ‘knows’–that the way to effectuate change in the world is to dominate and destroy everything in her path, because that’s the only thing that ever did. TL;DR: Taylor was born to be a 90s Magical Girl, but was taught to be a 90s Supervillain.”

Ryuugi about Taylor Hebert from Worm

Someone said and I can't find the post, that they think about how the undersiders must see an insect and remember Taylor and be sad and that they might forget that now that Taylor is gone she can't protect them from those insects

I couldn't find the post but yeee

parahumans AITA posts must be fucking crazy

Supervicky

and Lisa Lane

I commissioned this piece a while back from sethkiel on Twitter. Rarely do more than lurk on tumblr, but I figured I may as well post it here for the smugpunch believers

I'm 26 arcs into Worm: The Stick Up Brian's Butt

So I’m listening to the We’ve Got Worm podcast and they keep talking about KingBob, the guy on reddit who really related to Alec and ended up understanding him (and by extension Aisha) far better than most of the other readers.

I haven’t really gone into this on this blog, I’ve been reading Worm for like six months now and I don’t update that often, but throughout this read I’ve been the KingBob to Brian. It’s gotten to the point where I actually took a few mental health breaks from reading Worm. I know a lot of people thought Brian was boring and dumb. I’m almost done with Worm now and I feel like the inclusion of Brian this story elevated it, for me, from a fun superhero story to something intensely personal, something that was almost a struggle to read. I know from spoilers that Brian’s part in this story is almost over. He isn’t my favorite character (Dragon) or even my favorite Undersider (Aisha) but I felt like I should write something before this is over. It wouldn’t be an honest blog otherwise, as infrequently as I post.

But Kuno, you say. You’re a 22-year-old white female engineering student. Why the hell is this the character you relate to?

For a collection of dumb reasons that add up to a large part of who I am. From the time I was eleven to the time I was about twenty-one, I had night terrors. Seven times a night sometimes, I dreamt vividly of the people I loved getting hurt, hurting me, getting killed, killing me. My students and pets melting in my hands. My mom and I clutching each other on the freeway as we’re stopped in traffic, a terrorist approaching our vehicle with a shotgun. We don’t make it. The dreams made life almost impossible. Seeing people during the day and being absolutely certain they would die before I saw them again. It didn’t matter how many times I saw them come back okay. They never would.

I’m afraid of everything. Every missed phone call is a sudden death. Every text message brings terrible news. Every possible situation brings danger, but if my friends go, I can’t let them go without me. Something could happen. They’d be safe as long as I could see them. If I was looking at them, everything would be okay. Some child psychologist I spoke to at a young age noted I was a “natural leader”. To this day, I lead because I am a control freak. I am afraid of what would happen if I let someone else be in control.

Interlude 15 fucked me up.

My fatal flaw extends from this. I’m terrified that people will see me as weak. I dated a boy on my robotics team when I was in high school. I treated him like shit in public because I didn’t want anyone to think I cared about him, even though he was my boyfriend. What would they think of me if they saw there was a person I treated as an equal? Horrible things. I became a better girlfriend to another boy, years later, because someone mentioned to me they thought I could be a good girlfriend, and that it was rough, calloused girls who were the weak ones. It was the perfect two sentences to convince me that for people to see me as strong, I had to be a good girlfriend.

In the We’ve Got Worm podcast, Scott and Matt always mention that each of the Undersiders brings the team down somehow, their inputs to every situation silly or stupid. I was confused. I always thought Grue’s avoidance of conflict, always taking the slow, deliberate path, was the right way to go. Then I realized that, to many, this behavior indicates brokenness. Maybe they’re right.

Yeah so I said I’d talk about the stick up Brian’s butt in arcs 25 and 26. I don’t think he has much to say for the rest of Worm so here we go. I’m building off a lot of what the WGW guys say, but I think I can take it a little farther.

So in arc 10 the WGW guys point out that Brian resists letting Taylor back on the team until the precise moment when it becomes apparent that everyone else wants her back, when he suddenly changes tactics to talking about how they “need her for offense”. They make the imo correct deduction that this is because he’s afraid of looking weak. Everyone knows Taylor likes him, so, logically, to be Stoic Leader Man he should want her to go away. He needs permission to want her back on the team. Once he has that permission, he is all for it.

I know that sounds convoluted but trust me as a person with exactly these issues this makes perfect sense.

Arc 11, Brian has still not decided to be Taylor’s friend again. This is because she’s on the team to be offense. Their friendship doesn’t help nobody’s offense. When Lisa calls him and tells him he needs to lay up on her, that to be her friend would be good, he goes directly to Taylor’s house and declares them… best friends. Because Lisa has given him permission to do so.

I hope you’re following because I’m aware this is stupid.

In arc 12, I’m gonna veer a little to the side. Let’s talk about Brian’s second trigger, just so that I can educate the public on exactly how this came around. Keep in mind that trigger events happen from a long period of a specific type of stress coming to a head. And that Brian’s previous trigger happened from feeling like he maybe couldn’t help Aisha for a long time, and then suddenly being hit with the fact that he definitely couldn’t help her.

Arc 1: The Undersiders save Taylor who was saving them from Lung Arc 2: Brian punches Rachel for attacking Taylor Arc 4: Taylor gets blown up by Bakuda, Brian sits in her hospital room and stares at this for presumably a while Arc 5: Taylor looks like she’s been hanged, having fought Lung again Arc 7: Taylor and Rachel are attacked by the ABB, Brian shows up late. Taylor is attacked later the same day by Sophia, Brian shows up pretty late. Taylor propositions the boy, he tells her he thinks of her like he thinks of his sister. I am 100% certain at this point, looking back, that this was an early indication that the second trigger process was starting towards a lack of ability to keep up with Taylor. He wasn’t just saying he thought of her like he would think of her if they were related, he thinks of her like Aisha specifically, the one his power is attached to. His little brain is drawing the equivalences already. Arc 8: Broken spine, betrayal, yadda yadda Arc 9: Sophia attempts murder because it’s Tuesday Arc 10: Brian pretends to not want Taylor to come back Arc 11: Brian does his now-classic “walks into room/why is Taylor injured/maybe she should not be doing this” routine Arc 12: Repeat of arc 11, except now he starts stumbling over her name. He tells her she should have let her people die. If there’s a point onscreen when he realizes there might be something going on, this is it.

Point is, this has been stewing in the background since as early as arc 1 and as late as arc 7 but probably actually started in arc 4. It wasn’t out of the blue, it was the logical culmination of the entire story’s events thus far from Brian’s perspective.

Arc 13: Yeah, you know what happens here. In the final chapter, he tells her he thinks about her too much, but even though he received a new set of superpowers and a vision from aliens telling him that he probably loves her, the vision is definitely wrong and he just feels like he can’t keep up with her.

She’s been attacked by everyone. Lung, Rachel, Bakuda, Sophia, Armsmaster, Leviathan, the Merchants, Mannequin. He doesn’t want her to keep fighting, he feels he needs to be the one to do it. At the same time, he knows he’s not powerful enough. No one power is enough to deal with all of these threats.

No single power.

But he doesn’t love her. That would mean he was weak.

He doesn’t even agree to have dinner with her in 15. He allows it to happen because Aisha set it up. She knows what’s going on, and she has given him permission to have this.

Aisha had to be the one to give him permission because his previous powerset was for her, and now it doesn’t work with her, either. At the same time as his second trigger was stewing under the surface for Taylor, he was losing his power’s connection to Aisha because their powers didn’t work together and he kept being forced to forget she exists. He had lived for her before, and being Super Big Brother was exactly what Brian wanted to be. Now, Aisha doesn’t want to be lived for. She wants to be her own person.

Brian spends the next several arcs simply living for Taylor.

I strongly suspect that the side effect of Brian’s power is that it makes him pathologically need to be 100% responsible for others. No matter how dumb everyone’s plans are, he always has to be there. No matter how stupid it is, Coil told him being a villain will allow him to get his sister back. No matter how dumb it is, he tells Taylor she has to sit out running from the Nine in arc 13 because she might be tired. He pays for it.

Brian’s powers will probably never actually allow him to get over Taylor Hebert. It’s like Taylor and bullies. No amount of therapy or time will get Brian’s shard to let the fuck go.

So when the girl whom you are physically incapable of not thinking about leaves and goes to prison and tells every single person on the planet exactly how weak you are, who goes to an even more dangerous situation where you cannot follow her, what can you do?

The only possible thing. Try your absolute damnedest to pretend you never knew her.

You walk out of that meeting with the most powerful people in the world because she is there. You go find yourself somebody else. Another girl. Taylor hated her little boobs? This girl has big boobs. Taylor can’t stay away from violence? Cozen seriously appears to have never even seen a corpse.

When Taylor comes back, Brian greets her with the new girl on his arm. He tries to shake her hand. Time has passed. There’s nothing between them any more.

The next day, Grue is presented with the choice of pushing back against Taylor and standing with the new girl, whoever she is, or supporting Taylor. He chooses Taylor.

Of course he does. The situation calls for it. The situation has given him permission.

This fandom is full of cowards why isn't Dragon / Simurgh a mainstream ship. You're telling me we all saw two artificial intelligences activated by absent father figures, one programmed to do good that resents the fact that she can't choose to do good, and one made to cause discord and destabilize the world and no one thought they should smooch? No one had Simurgh turn to Dragon to help understand herself after Eidolon died? No one made Simurgh realize that she can have desires and feelings beyond destroying humanity? No one had Dragon realize the similarities and think about how she could easily have been an enemy of humanity like the Simurgh of her creator had willed it, so why shouldn't she help free a fellow AI chained by the desires of her creators? Absolutely shameful.

I think if Aisha triggered before Leviathan happened she would have been such a little shit of a hero, but like, she specifically chooses to be a hero to rebel against and fuck with Brian. Every time the Undersiders do a job she's there making stupid jokes and messing with them and being infuriating as she heroically saves the day (places kick me signs on them and then kicks them), and then she goes home and Brian gets back 3 minutes later and she has the smuggest smile and he's so so done with this and she's like "how was work" and he says good and they both 100% know who each other are but Brian's not gonna bring it up and they eat dinner while both lying their asses off about what they did that night and Aisha thinks it's hilarious that he won't ever call her out on this. She's still friends with Regent but it's like, a playful rivalry, he's the only one who makes jokes back and is actually happy to see her messing up their jobs. She recruits Taylor post-dick rotting and they become a vigilante duo just because the Undersiders wanted her and she figured it would annoy Brian and now she's absolute besties/maybe girlfriends idk with the creepy bug girl. Somehow, through all of this, she becomes one of the most famous and beloved heroes in the Bay and people finally pay attention to her and life is happy and good unless you're Brian who has mentally aged 30 years

alright this one is getting its own post instead of a reblog on a post that is Entirely Not About That. presenting the 'what if we put amy and alec in a room together' manifesto because the thing is that it is interesting but not in the way amy/alec shippers think

Amy shook her head, talking over her, “She’s always been emotional, passionate, unrestrained, and she’s channeling all this new emotion into hate, because it’s the closest equivalent.” “New emotion?” Regent asked.  “You mean you mindraped her.” Amy looked like she’d been slapped across the face.  I wasn’t surprised, but hearing it said out loud was unsettling.

“Nice,” Regent said.  “She could be a human-spider hybrid.  Add some insult to injury with the mindrape thing.” I could see Amy tense.

it is relevant to his character that he's the first person to cut through amy's euphemisms (and everyone else's avoidance of saying the unsettling part out loud) and outright say "you mindraped her." he calls the euphemistic language out and then intentionally repeats it a second time for no other reason than to bug her about it. it's vaguely reminiscent of something he says to sophia during his interlude:

“You and I are more alike than you’d suspect, I think,” he said. “We’re both arrogant assholes, yeah?  Difference is, I admit it, I don’t dress it up and tell myself that I’m a bitch and that that’s a good thing.”  He burned Emma’s face out of another photo.

he has a repeated habit of making people uncomfortable by calling something out for exactly what it is, whether it be "yeah sure cape groupies, my dad's girls, people i used my power on towards the end" or "you mean you mindraped her." he's desensitized enough to really all forms of violence to be unbothered by committing or witnessing them, but he seems to harbor a genuine pet peeve for people who obscure or unreasonably justify what they're actually doing. as uncomfortable as he can make taylor, it's often not that he's doing things worse than the other undersiders, but that he's the person most willing to openly admit what he's doing--or to pettily call out what someone else is doing.

i think it more or less boils down to the fact that he's never gotten to be the person on the peripherals of violence making up neat and tidy ways to talk about it: he spent his entire childhood being hurt in every way imaginable & being coerced into doing the same to others. i think it left him with a sort of genuine distaste for being expected to talk in circles around the viscerally awful things he had done to him or did to others, and subsequently, for people who have done similar things but can't fucking fess up to the reality of it. it's like he's been walking around his entire life just absolutely drenched in blood, witnessing so much else get covered in it, and he's starting to get legitimately bothered over people standing around twiddling their thumbs and pretending it's red paint. he knows it's blood. he's been tasting it since he was 6. he would really like if everyone else could also grow up and admit it's fucking blood.

it's always funny to me that amy/alec shipping is, like, a Thing--a niche thing, but a Thing, because i could not think of a rapist more hand-crafted to piss amy dallon off than alec vasil. he cannot go Three seconds in her presence without going "oh you raped her? you mean you raped her? with your mind? like she doesn't just have new feelings you specifically mean you mindraped her?"

she, on some level, views herself as someone who did harm because she's irrevocably, ontologically evil, and is sort of desperately obsessed with minimalizing or half-justifying her actions to herself so that she can avoid recognizing that she feels like she can't be better. she's clinging to the idea that she can be "redeemed" if she does something of equal measure in the opposite direction (e.g 'spending the rest of her life healing people' as she mentions), but because she can't even directly acknowledge how bad her actions actually were without crumbling under the weight of the idea that she's doomed to be that bad, she's fundamentally incapable of looking directly at what she did at this point in the story.

alec, on the other hand, is really fucking upfront and fairly objective about his actions--he never ties them into some Inarguable Truth About His Soul, and he's pretty honest about whether or not he thinks they're justifiable. in 14.1, he has this dialogue with cherie:

“When daddy had you practicing your powers, you ‘hijacked’ a few people at a time, used their bodies to get high with no consequences for you, you threw orgies for yourself…” “Again.  I was a kid.”

but despite the fact that sophia is, on some level, justified in his mind by his "eye for an eye, this is a favor for taylor" rhetoric--he's fine with admitting that he's also just doing it because, yeah, he's an arrogant asshole and he feels like it. some of it was because he was a kid being groomed, and some of it was because He Felt Like It.*

*sure, he only Felt Like It because he has a comically large cocktail of unpacked psychological issues--but he doesn't know that, he just knows he felt like it.

in other words, he doesn't subscribe to the idea that any of his actions are, like, Ontologically Predetermined By His Inner Being or even necessarily all related. he's like the fuckin' "might do it again, prolly not" dude from the sex offender shuffle. okay, sorry for saying that in my seriouspost. but his philosophies would clash hilariously badly with amy--he insists on accepting his own & others actions for exactly what they are, he's generally very invested in not being his father (being asked if he intends to turn out like his dad is one of the only times something briefly upsets him), and he's actually doing pretty okay at that. he's like...shockingly well-adjusted given the circumstances. his entire arc is more or less a slow upward climb.

i think having to be around someone who both believes and would outright admit "yeah i raped people, no i dunno if i feel that bad, no i'm not raking myself over the coals for it, yeah some of it was because i was a kid, yeah some of the other stuff wasn't, no i'm not Predestined To Suck," would like. clash with her beliefs abt 'ontologically evil' being a real thing, abt punishment as justice, etc. in a way that would really bother her. she spends a lot of her time in her head trying to twist things around until they feel salvageable to her, but alec is 0 amount concerned with rationalizing to make him feel alright--he just does things, some bad, most shitty attempts to be better.

it's, funnily enough, far more functional for improving than what amy has going on--he operates on material actions as opposed to her Self-Flagellating Thought Labyrinths, and the fact that he's busier moving on from things he can't materially change than he is kicking himself in the face means he can actually achieve some form of progress towards more functional approaches wrt human interaction. i think if amy had an extended conversation w/ him about the subject, she'd both be disgusted with him for not thinking thoughtcrime is real and deeply resentful that this fellow ontologically evil villain is doing better at moving forwards as a person than her despite not 24/7 flagellating himself + yearning for "redemption" like she is. it'd throw a disturbingly large wrench in her worldview, and she would not be happy about it.

oh, and alec would think she's weird and mopey and dumb and annoying and "why do it if you can't even admit it." and he would probably tell her as much. which is the point where i unlock the door to the room so alec can sprint out to escape amy's attempt to put tastebuds on his asshole.

So this is a thing that me and @penelopetheverytrans collaborated on, I did the doodles for the sprites and she put the video together. I hope y’all like it, makes me laugh :)

thinking about when that anon was on a foxgirl lisa campaign in everyones inbox a couple years ago