Great chapter as always, I liked how you paralleled the Trump moment with the fascists in this Bet's Brockton Bay. The atmosphere was terrific, your BB is as run down and horrible as it can get without war or the S9.
One of the big reasons that the pace of Imago slowed down, sadly, is that the real world overtook some of my old plans for it. It now looks a little childishly naive that the me of 2014 thought you'd need a 10 year economic depression to get people into the mood to start voting for fascists.
I really liked the flags in the rain thing. It shows how cynical the whole mess really is.
That bit is actually straight out of Orange Order marches - as is the march. It's just good ol' fashioned Northern Irish sectarian aggravation imported to a US context; "Let's go march through their neighbourhood".
That was fantastically executed, showing just where the core of Patriots get their people from, and how things function like real gangs and movements do rather than superhero logic. And Purity works so well in that context, saying the right things and probably fully believing them to.
My use of Purity here is in fact born of certain discussions with
@Revlid on the topic of her. There's a pronounced tendency for elements of the fanbase to excuse her relative to the other E88 characters, to say that she's "not so bad" and act as if the fact that she's genuinely racist somehow excuses things.
The thing that I've done with her here, therefore, is to cut the personal violence from her, so she's not being compared to the likes of Hookwolf which lets the readership go "Oh, she's not a psychotic cage-fighting brute, just a regular racist". Now she gets to stand among the illustrious company of local demagogues and "concerned citizens" busy bubbling stirring the pot as she pours oil on the fire.
I see this chapter got even more openly political than usual for your stuff, which isn't surprising, considering. It's well-done.
I especially like the sense of empathy you have going in your works, even for people who in other stories would be portrayed as simple villains. It grounds the story in reality, gives it more depth and allows you to explore various issues from a more complex perspective than many stories display, so when you criticise something, it rings more true.
Not to mention that it's just more enjoyable to read a story where everyone is a person, no matter how flawed, not just a plot device.
Keep it up.
As I have said before, the superhero genre is always intensely political - especially when it doesn't think it's being political. Who you declare as your supervillains is a political statement; every time you decide that the status quo is what the heroes fight for is a political statement; every time you depict vigilantes as the good guys is a political statement.
And hey, left-wing superhero things written by angry British guys with interest in esoteric things is basically a genre in its own right.
With numbers so high? Probably not. More likely, numbers are just assigned to the new members in place of cape names. Since S9 virus is secret from the public, there isn't really a need to be fancy about monikers.
Names are important - both in superhero stuff and also in other genres.
Denying a name to someone is, therefore, quite a notable symbolic act.
