fadingMelody
(Verified Chaos Priestess) (Verified Shipper)
- Location
- Paradox Space
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hey, you should go answer the door. Y'know, since you just invited Murphy in.
Exploding Canon (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm bakuda self insert oni-lady
BrokenAscendent
Unum prae omnibus aliis
- Location
- Auld Lang Syne
Oh dear. Aster or Theo?
Pretty sure Theo was important.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Grey Boy. When Cauldron decided to let him run around inflicting endless suffering because Mah Triggers instead of shunting him to an uninhabited world, my reaction to any of their core members having something similar happen became 'well, it's a start'.
Horrible hate groups I can see, but it takes some special bullshit for the usual white power brigade in the U.S. to do anything remotely like subordinating themselves to what they at their kindest might refer to as Euroweenies. There's better native racist symbols to rally around that don't put you on international terror watch lists*.
*Which belatedly occurs as yet another reason why the whole BB Cauldron experiment was a bad joke to begin with.
I mean, if it was an actual person I might still feel bad out of the principle of it. But fictional character getting something semi-ironic who I dislike? Sure, why not?
For the record? This phrase pisses me off so much it's not even funny. I admit this is partly because of an asshole ex-boss who LOVED it. But it's also because it's SO FUCKING LAZY. "It is what it is, man! We can't change it! It just IS! Nothing to be done, so I won't even TRY!"
Pretty much everyone I've EVER heard use it has revealed themselves in short order to be FUCKING. USELESS.
"Hey, uh... you're fucked! But at least THIS TIME, it's not your fault!"
*puerile giggle*
I think I speak for everyone when I say: "I hope he's been gnawed to death by rats from the testicles out."
Hey! Don't text and fly, you unsafe jerk!
"-actually THANKED HER, because it's fucking NEBRASKA and everyone there secretly prays for sweet release of death."
(She left a note that reads:
"I totally killed myself with an animal attack, don't look for the murderer.
Signed,
PRT Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown
Alexandria
Nameless Suicidal Villain.
PS. Suicide. Animal attack. NOT having my head punched in by one of the Triumverate. I promise.")
Signed,
Alexandria
Nameless Suicidal Villain.
PS. Suicide. Animal attack. NOT having my head punched in by one of the Triumverate. I promise.")
So, either Aster is going to grow up without a big brother... or I bet Theo Triggered.
*curls lip* Ewwwwww....
Lookin' at YOU, <fill in ANY reality TV "star">
Maybe she shouldn't have had that Taco Bell....
HE DESERVES IT FOR THE NAME. POWERPOINT DESERVES A PAINFUL, AGONIZING DEATH.
Oh, SUUUUUURE. Just because she's surfin' the crimson tide, she's got impaired judgement! Alexandria, you're an asshole. ...hmm? Oh. You meant the concussion? Well. ...I'm sticking by my statement, but for DIFFERENT reasons, then! Go fuck yourself with a cactus.
*looks at Brockton Bay*
*reflects on that whole 'parahuman feudalism' bullshit*
*opens mouth*
*pauses*
*closes mouth*
No, I can't. I can't. I'll never stop screaming if I do.
I'm hoping that .5 plan started with "Shove myself face-first into a meat grinder.", honestly.
*glances over at Monster*
*glances at Mr. "Fuck Your Empty Coffee Pot" Johnson*
*achieves enlightenment*
Okay, I admit it: I laughed at this.
Wait, we've got a bomb... Oh, crap! Our BASE!
Mostly because the Siberian still has one of them! (Actually, I wonder if that's true.... I mean, canonically, Alexandria's basically unchanging, right? Does that apply to bits that've been removed from her, too? ...okay, so this is all really because I'm wondering if you could wield her ripped out eye like tiny little flail or something. Still!)
*puerile giggle* Well NOW.
Even now, he won't stop mentioning that one time with the Swedish bikini models....
Says the woman currently punching a creature she's already determined her PUNCHES DO NOTHING TO.
No more than any OTHER non-shithead human being on the planet, at least!
Uh-oh! Endbringer did it! (And do we see even a HINT of reconsidering her stance, given that Bakuda's the one who REVEALED this thing? Oh, hell no. Not from the mighty ALEXANDRIA!)
*puerile giggle* She likes 'em big, noisy, and fast!
*puerile giggle* He likes 'em small, efficient, and able to do LOTS of things!
And this one's too easy, I'm not even going to make the joke.
See above.
That... sounds a LOT like you asked Contessa to choke you, Alexandria. You know, just a little. (To see how you liked it.)
FTFY. Because I REALLY doubt that was an accident.
o/" Allll by myyyyseeeeelllfffff.... o/"
<David Carradine joke here>
Have you considered tormenting the cage until it Triggers and using it against Scion? Oh, you have? ...that was the first thing you tried. ...have you tried anything ELSE? And now you're just staring blankly at me. ...never mind. You... you just have fun there.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hahahaha. Yeah, no. I'm pretty sure this is Ziz manipulating you into trying to do it more and causing even more chaos.
This is Alexandria you're talking about. All that would do is ruin a perfectly good meat grinder and make the cactus really gross.
The Stormbringer
Worm Fanfic & Crack Connoisseur
- Location
- Spaaaaace~!
More like Alexandria goofed for trying Contessa right next to an Endbringer.
- Location
- Wherever
So I've been informed Spoilers are excluded from word count. Let's confirm that.
A theme with canon is that the world is just set up to be fucked up from the word 'go'. You get superpowers by being traumatized, and so people with superpowers just ain't right in the head. That kind of thing.
I was very careful to in turn build on canon information about how triggers work and so on, with only a little bit of logical inferences (There is no canon information that being LGBT/whatever that whole thing gets called nowadays has a higher rate of "deviant triggers", but it seems logical to me that people whose psychology deviates from the norm would in turn have powers that deviate from the norm, given that powers are shaped by psychology), for Alexandria's logic there.
I doubt it's any kind of conscious canon on Wildbow's part that Alexandria does such a thing at all, let alone for the reasons laid out, but all the pieces are there in canon for it to make sense to someone whom has tossed aside all morals entirely.
That's a bit misleading there. "Inability to stamp out all Nazis everywhere" =/= "It is logical for neo-Nazis to leap hugely in prominence and influence just because superpowers are now a thing."
Grey Boy is sufficiently bullshit I can actually buy that Cauldron legitimately couldn't put a stop to him reliably, even with Contessa.
On the other hand, Contessa's actions relating to the Slaughterhouse Nine Thousand arc suggest that... no, that's not remotely why he was running around freely.
My admittedly limited experience with real American neo-Nazis indicate they tend to think less "We should ally with the German Nazis!" and more "That Hitler guy was onto something."
By which I mean it's honestly kind of weird to me how Empire Eighty Eight has a relationship to the German Nazi superpeople that places the Germans as... paternal or whatever. Americans don't really do that, generally speaking. They'd rather go "America Fuck Yeah!" and tell the rest of the world to screw off -or present themselves as a world leader that other people are learning from. (I actually spent a bit in reading canon under the impression that the American E88 organization had revitalized/founded the German equivalent, and only realized much later that this seemed to be contrary to Wildbow's thought process)
This just gets weirder with stuff like Night and Fog acting like a stereotypical 1950s American couple when Gesselschaft trained/broke them. I'm... not sure why a German training program of any sort would impose a distinctly American image onto some of its members, even assuming they knew how to make it happen flawlessly. I guess you can maybe justify it as "The German trainers were training them to function in America and somehow their most recent information on how an American couple acts wasn't any more recent than the 1950s"?
I spent a bit waffling on the exact phrase to use there. The main idea at work there is that Alexandria has had to work herself down from an incandescent rage at everyone else's incompetency like a billion times and has settled on "Don't get mad about the things you can't fix without creating worse problems, it's a waste of time."
I'm actually kind of curious as to what you're thinking here.
I actually think parahuman feudalism is onto something. Maybe not as an ideal model, but as a starting point for figuring out how to integrate parahumans into general society, it makes a kind of sense -feudalism is practically defined by inequality of power, and parahumans make that an ordinary everyday reality even if social influence is kept out of the thing. I really don't think modern culture would survive parahuman influence for long -it would be forced to undergo significant shifts.
On the other hand, some of what post-Golden Morning shows is suggestive of what Cauldron was thinking -or at least what Wildbow was thinking- when talking about "parahuman feudalism", and I can't find anything positive to say about the model it presents. It treats parahuman feudalism as just "The strong bullying the weak." Real-life feudalism involved the nobility/royalty covering a wide variety of intellectual jobs that the cultures lacked the resources to reasonably train a large number of people in the relevant skills, and instead shoved it all onto a small number of people who handled all of those duties.
This is where we get "holding court", for instance: nobles literally handled legal affairs in their courtyard. (Once a month is the figure I recall, but I'm not a feudal expert)
Not exactly surprising that there's some consistency to the two when they're both written by me, yeah. Not like I have any reason to imagine Alexandria as substantially different across the two stories.
I'm glad to hear that, as it's basically the only thing that I'd intended to get people to laugh in this chapter.
Nah, this was just plain ol' "So what's PtV say for you trying to kill me?", Contessa poking her power, and going "I would suffocate you."
Gotta be some way Alexandria already knows in canon that suffocation kills her. Contessa is the easiest explanation.
A theme with canon is that the world is just set up to be fucked up from the word 'go'. You get superpowers by being traumatized, and so people with superpowers just ain't right in the head. That kind of thing.
I was very careful to in turn build on canon information about how triggers work and so on, with only a little bit of logical inferences (There is no canon information that being LGBT/whatever that whole thing gets called nowadays has a higher rate of "deviant triggers", but it seems logical to me that people whose psychology deviates from the norm would in turn have powers that deviate from the norm, given that powers are shaped by psychology), for Alexandria's logic there.
I doubt it's any kind of conscious canon on Wildbow's part that Alexandria does such a thing at all, let alone for the reasons laid out, but all the pieces are there in canon for it to make sense to someone whom has tossed aside all morals entirely.
That's a bit misleading there. "Inability to stamp out all Nazis everywhere" =/= "It is logical for neo-Nazis to leap hugely in prominence and influence just because superpowers are now a thing."
Grey Boy is sufficiently bullshit I can actually buy that Cauldron legitimately couldn't put a stop to him reliably, even with Contessa.
On the other hand, Contessa's actions relating to the Slaughterhouse Nine Thousand arc suggest that... no, that's not remotely why he was running around freely.
My admittedly limited experience with real American neo-Nazis indicate they tend to think less "We should ally with the German Nazis!" and more "That Hitler guy was onto something."
By which I mean it's honestly kind of weird to me how Empire Eighty Eight has a relationship to the German Nazi superpeople that places the Germans as... paternal or whatever. Americans don't really do that, generally speaking. They'd rather go "America Fuck Yeah!" and tell the rest of the world to screw off -or present themselves as a world leader that other people are learning from. (I actually spent a bit in reading canon under the impression that the American E88 organization had revitalized/founded the German equivalent, and only realized much later that this seemed to be contrary to Wildbow's thought process)
This just gets weirder with stuff like Night and Fog acting like a stereotypical 1950s American couple when Gesselschaft trained/broke them. I'm... not sure why a German training program of any sort would impose a distinctly American image onto some of its members, even assuming they knew how to make it happen flawlessly. I guess you can maybe justify it as "The German trainers were training them to function in America and somehow their most recent information on how an American couple acts wasn't any more recent than the 1950s"?
I spent a bit waffling on the exact phrase to use there. The main idea at work there is that Alexandria has had to work herself down from an incandescent rage at everyone else's incompetency like a billion times and has settled on "Don't get mad about the things you can't fix without creating worse problems, it's a waste of time."
I'm actually kind of curious as to what you're thinking here.
I actually think parahuman feudalism is onto something. Maybe not as an ideal model, but as a starting point for figuring out how to integrate parahumans into general society, it makes a kind of sense -feudalism is practically defined by inequality of power, and parahumans make that an ordinary everyday reality even if social influence is kept out of the thing. I really don't think modern culture would survive parahuman influence for long -it would be forced to undergo significant shifts.
On the other hand, some of what post-Golden Morning shows is suggestive of what Cauldron was thinking -or at least what Wildbow was thinking- when talking about "parahuman feudalism", and I can't find anything positive to say about the model it presents. It treats parahuman feudalism as just "The strong bullying the weak." Real-life feudalism involved the nobility/royalty covering a wide variety of intellectual jobs that the cultures lacked the resources to reasonably train a large number of people in the relevant skills, and instead shoved it all onto a small number of people who handled all of those duties.
This is where we get "holding court", for instance: nobles literally handled legal affairs in their courtyard. (Once a month is the figure I recall, but I'm not a feudal expert)
Not exactly surprising that there's some consistency to the two when they're both written by me, yeah. Not like I have any reason to imagine Alexandria as substantially different across the two stories.
I'm glad to hear that, as it's basically the only thing that I'd intended to get people to laugh in this chapter.
Nah, this was just plain ol' "So what's PtV say for you trying to kill me?", Contessa poking her power, and going "I would suffocate you."
Gotta be some way Alexandria already knows in canon that suffocation kills her. Contessa is the easiest explanation.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
My alerts tell me this is a whopping fifteen words. No story post, much rage.
99% confident it's a memetic joke about powerpoint being an atrocity.
- Location
- Hyperborea
I still got an alert, if that's what you were testing.
Mandabar
Waifu of choice is Rem. Give that girl some hugs!
- Location
- Florida, USA [Yes. Florida *FacePalm*]
I think your best bet is to make a post short. Then edit in the rest that you wanted if you want to avoid alerts.Ghoul King said:
Edits don't trip alerts I believe. Like adding in quotes or mentions. Or so I believe anyways.
Edit: This is an edited in mention @Ghoul King
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- Location
- Wherever
Yeah, edits don't trigger alerts, but I prefer keeping in quotes alerting people and so on.
I could see myself Spoilering 95% of a post and then immediately editing the Spoilers out.
I just hope the Threadmark-alerting feature gets implemented soon. Then I can just shift to that and tell people complaining about post length "Just watch for Threadmark alerts."
Mandabar
Waifu of choice is Rem. Give that girl some hugs!
- Location
- Florida, USA [Yes. Florida *FacePalm*]
Neat, didn't even know that might be a thing. OP alerts are usually enough but a threadmark version would be awesome for those threads that I don't read for anything but the story. The new OP only email one was great for those slow but have to read update stories too.Ghoul King said:
*I* didn't get any sort of word count alert, but I'm 99% certain it was because I got a reply alert instead.
Ding! Got it in one!
Quotes don't count. So maybe make one post with all the quotes, then edit in all your responses? (have the final version ready in notepad so you can paste it in quickly)
Honestly, I don't mind alerts... though it's typically on quests and a long non-story post from the QM usually still means important relevant information.
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FinalPyre
Ennui Engine
If that's the case, then the easiest way might be to put the whole comment in a quote, then edit and remove it after. No idea if that would also stop it from parsing people who are quotes-in-quotes and sending them alerts, though.
Edit: I also by and large don't really care about the alerts. Sometimes I like to read what authors have to say to comments anyway.
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- Location
- Over the hill and far away
daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn, well played, Simmie.
Bailey Matutine
(Verified Pooka)
- Location
- Pelican Town
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Proper use of the phrase is to follow it up with the second line, "and if it wasn't, it wouldn't be" and then proceed to do what you can to fix things. You accept that the situation exists and it is too late to prevent it, but you do not use it as an excuse to do nothing.
- Location
- Over the hill and far away
Actual parahuman feudalism gives you Halkegania or Valdemar, depending how you do it, if you want stability. But that relies on the parahumans having something vital to the society, that can't be easily replicated with technology.
In Valdemar, that's a literal divine mandate and stamp of "Yer a paladin!" - even as they undergo an industrial revolution, that badge of trustworthiness and loyalty, along with handy truth spells for handling criminals, is hard to replace.
In Halkegania, the magic is mostly going to wind up sidetracked, or get folded into the progression of magitech as their society grows. One of the (background) themes in FoZ, though, is the commoners sort of coming into their own, as well as the fact that despite their claims to the contrary, their nobles don't actually have a divine mandate. Some countries have non-mages buying titles, and the protagonist is an empowered soldier using modern weapons stolen from Earth to beat up mages (FoZ is weird, and the translations suck. The world is fun, but, unless you like to suffer, give the current translations a miss)
So wrapping back to Worm, then:
In Worm? Most of the powers are utterly useless to society as a whole, replicable by technology, or both.
Think about it; an Alexandria package brings nothing to a discussion of the efficacy of wastewater treatment.
The occasional thinkers are handy, but, we don't have society lead by Stephen Hawking yet. Tinkers are the same way, and maybe even worse. A thinker can lay out the steps in their thinking and plans, and a lot of them seem to have a built-in 'explain things to the plebes' secondary power. Tinkers, on the other hand, tend to go "And then I attached the duct tape to [physics breaking black box] and now I have a power snail!"
Teleporters and other individual Shaker powers are very handy, yes, but we'd tend to handle them by hiring them in appropriate offices, not putting them in positions of leadership. Instead they'd get lucrative deals related to their power, like someone who makes tunnels getting hired by a cabling or drilling company. Teleporters getting hired for smuggling or executive transport or the like.
TL;DR version- Parahuman powers don't advance society, so there's no inherent need to build society around them. Parahuman 'feudalism' would likely be done in much the same way as sports star, pop star, or lottery winner 'feudalism'. They'd exert the disproportionate social power as any wealthy, moderately famous person, but not so much as to radically destabilize democracy. Even if one in a thousand people becomes parahuman, they're barely even a voting block worth courting (edit: Though they'd easily be a good source of bribes or 'campaign donations').
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Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
- Location
- _
My understanding has always been that Worm's conception of 'Parahuman Feudalism' is essentially what it depicts as going on in much of Africa, South America, and most specifically Brockton Bay. That is to say, acknowledging that the destabilization and breakdown of society on Bet is basically inevitable, and that it's equally inevitable that some percentage of Parahumans - who frequently have a monopoly on force even before you start talking about the god-like outliers like Nilbog and Panacea - will seek and be able to obtain power over the mundane populace, in the same way that Moord Nag and the Undersiders did. It's not so much a matter of how they integrate into society as much as it is positing that they'll eventually rise to the top of it once the infrastructure reining in their excesses breaks down.
- Location
- Over the hill and far away
Yeah, the bit I bolded is the premise that WB starts from and, really, it's a very very silly premise. It's one of the things you learn in logic classes- with a false premise, you can 'prove' anything.
I basically take issue with the notion that somehow, a person being able to punch really hard needs to destabilize society for some reason. Or that the odd person being able so secrete hallucinogens is somehow going to be more trouble to the nations of the world than, say, the global heroin trade. Like I said, even if one in a thousand people gets powers? The powers seen in worm are lost in the sea of things we can already do. Okay, flying women. Aside from a mild increase in upskirt sightings, they aren't going to affect my morning commute at all. And so on and so forth. When you think about it, there simply aren't a lot of powers in Worm that would affect modern western society in a way that's indistinguishable from, say, Steve Jobs or Jersey Shore.
Even functioning precog is, from the outside, almost indistinguishable from blind luck or a con artist, depending on how it works. Put Dinah in a room and ask her about Schroedinger's cat, and then try to prove she didn't simply have a means of seeing inside the box to collapse the quantum state. And even then, at this point, the precogs are reduced to laboratory curiosities, Vegas high-rollers, or street-corner nutters.
WB starts with the circular logic inherent to a lot of comic book worlds. Society has broken down, so, superheroes and supervillains arise, cause social breakdown, new world order needed to cope with social breakdown, causes rise of more superheroes and villains, etc. etc. etc.
Well, let's see. Do you get an alert from this? Also, @Quantumsheep, did you get an alert from the tag?
To be fair, Leviathan and Behemoth punch really fuckin hard, even ignoring the Simurgh. The argument is that Worm-as-a-whole - with Endbringers, and with people chosen to receive powers on the basis of how much they'll contribute to global chaos - makes breakdown inevitable, not that the existence of capes (let alone only street-level capes) does it.
(P.S. You won't get an alert regardless, since your quote was added in an edit. No relevant data.)
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Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
- Location
- _
Erm. Setting aside the Endbringers and Scion's inevitable rampage for a moment, which were the primary acting and theoretical forces behind Bet's breakdown, and not really something you can just brush aside... Ok. We see a very tiny percentage of all Worm's total parahumans in canon, right? A minuscule amount. Of that population, just off the top of my head, there are no less than five parahumans theoretically capable of causing extinction level events all on their lonesome.* Honorable mentions also go to Bakuda, who built a WMD capable of EMPing a fifth of America out of spare parts in some warehouse in about a week, Shatterbird, who could do something quite similar on a city-wide scale, just as often as she liked, Ash Beast, a perpetual unstoppable walking explosion, the Three Blasphemies, a trio of immortal terrorist killing machines with a taste for politicians in already volatile areas, and, finally, whatever the fuck is going on with Sleeper.
Yes, the majority of Worm parahumans aren't that big a deal. But the paradigm-shifting outliers absolutely do exist, and they are doozies.
*Nilbog, Bonesaw, Panacea, Noelle, String Theory.
I did.