She's got her black-and-white morality thing, and I loathe that. She's judgmental about morality in a way few Worm characters are -we don't actually see Protectorate capes doing a lot of "You are a very bad criminal person and I am Judging you", for instance, even though they are law enforcement- which would irritate me on its own but in conjunction with her doing stuff like blithely covering for Victoria torturing a gang member to protect New Wave's reputation it makes her a colossal hypocrite of the sort I consider to be pretty much the most loathsome possible.
Reminds me a bit of Taylor, to be honest.
Panacea desperately
wants there to be clear black-and-white lines, because if that's the case then she can stay firmly in the Good Guy category and not worry about whether having a biological apocalypse at her fingertips and a villain for a dad means she's going to do something awful some day. Skitter, on the other hand, relies entirely on the primacy of shades of grey to justify her actions, even when they clearly don't. That whole "shades of grey" chat she has in the post-Leviathan medical tent is sort of undermined by the fact that she's not actually been engaging in shades of grey, she's just been a stupid teenager who did some dumb and horrible shit to no good outcome.
Later on, rather than Good/Evil, Taylor leans on Selfish/Selfless, so that when
she does something awful it's a terrible sacrifice and she's really selfless for doing it, but when
someone else does something awful to
her it's monstrously short-sighted and self-centered.
They both engage in willful ignorance in service to their worldview. That's... people, really, and early on Amy's is a more sympathetic worldview to me than Taylor's.
She's got an amazing power and refuses to use it in any manner except the one that puts the most social burden on her and then resents the entire rest of the world for said burden, and no I'm not complaining about her suffering burnout I know that's a thing and I understand it, I'm complaining about how she's adamant on only using her power in this one way that's making her miserable.
She's a teenage girl who's deeply insecure about the nature of her own capabilities, raised by people who rely on constant public goodwill to operate, in a setting where the two big representatives of biological alteration are
Nilbog and
Bonesaw. Hell, the only other candidate we're aware of is Blasto, and he thought it was a good idea to clone the Simurgh. I can forgive her for not wanting to dip into retroviruses and benign symbiotes and GM crops or whatever, if those are her potential rolemodels.
(if all she does is heal people, how the hell did Bonesaw just randomly know that she had ridiculously comprehensive biological manipulation capabilities?)
It is rather less forgiveable that those around her never raised this. As far as we can tell, no-one at New Wave ever makes a peep about a 17 year-old girl pulling down a more-than-full-time job while having basically no social life or friends or
anyone to talk to. It's not as though they don't understand the concept of burnout or mental illness; they seem largely at peace with her extremely depressed father's needs. Failing that, it beggars belief that no
doctors would have raised this topic with her, but honestly, the whole model for how Panacea is "used" suggests that Wildbow just doesn't understand how hospitals work. If nothing else, it beggars belief that Brockton Bay isn't Medical Tourism Central, considering how Panacea's work there is portrayed. The only other medical aspect of the city is the presence of MedHall (which exists solely to give Kaiser a Lex Luthor-style businessman alter ego that's never explored).
Panacea's undoing is a complete and total lack of any real support network; but it's a lack I have trouble believing, because she's presented as insanely valuable.
If they can give fucking
Sveta a therapist, you'd think they'd book in Amy Dallon, faith healer to the stars.
Then when the Nine come along, she wants to shut out the world and stop participating. It requires Bonesaw coercing her to get her into any kind of active mindset, and even then once she latches onto Taylor she stops thinking for herself -except insofar as she can fuck over the person currently fighting the Slaughterhouse Nine, because it's so important to prevent Evil Taylor from taking over the city after the Nine have left, never mind how unlikely it is for Taylor to survive the fight and never mind that Evil Taylor running the city with an iron fist is an improvement over the city being reduced to a bloody wasteland because the Nine got to run roughshod over the whole thing. And also never mind that her basis for assuming Taylor is lolevil is the Villain label, rather than her actual behavior.
What you're saying here doesn't really make any sense.
- Bonesaw showing up at Amy's house is, iirc, the first she hears of the Slaughterhouse Nine being in town. It's part of the whole raft of recruitment interludes that follow the whole "take control of Shadow Stalker, infiltrate the PRT, and apparently drive her to suicide" plan. She doesn't have an opportunity to display a passive or active mindset up until that point.
- As far as I can recall, her immediate decision upon learning they're trying to recruit her is "get away from my friends and family", both because she's done some horrible shit in the middle of a breakdown, and ignoring the problem until it fades away seems like an easier out that facing up to it, and because sticking around your family while the Slaughterhouse Nine seem to confirm all your worst fears about yourself is a gut instinct bad idea. Armsmaster has a similar reaction, he just channels it productively because he has a support network and isn't a burned out 17 year-old girl.
- She only cripples Taylor's capabilities insofar as she refuses to give her a long-term weapon for a short-term problem. She massively expands her arsenal, but refuses to make that arsenal a sustainable one. This is an intelligent decision. The only way it can backfire is if the Slaughterhouse Nine stick around for weeks to follow, in which case they're facing an unprecedented disaster and are probably all dead anyway.
- Taylor's actual behaviour, judged independently from the villain label, has been awful. Her first meeting with Panacea was threatening random civilians with deadly insects, while her friend threatened to expose all her psychological laundry. Her second meeting was healing Skitter immediately before she broke the truce rules of an Endbringer attack and got away with it (which she'll have heard about, as a faux-Ward, regardless of whether she knows about the Armsmaster incident), in between which she engaged in what can only be called a terrorist attack. The last thing Taylor did before the Nine attack was kidnap a Ward, subject her to an invasive Master effect, directly assault the PRT HQ to steal private information on heroes, and apparently drive the aforementioned Ward - someone Amy knows, regardless of whether she likes her - to attempted suicide.
Oh and she retaliates against Taylor post-Leviathan for what Tattletale did, because of course she believes the individual who didn't even do it ought to be punished for a course of action done by someone defending themselves from an individual Amy knows is prone to going overboard with the people she fights. (Yes yes, the Undersiders are stealing from the bank and that's why they're in a fight with Glory Girl in the first place. That doesn't mean they deserve whatever harm she is likely to inflict on them, which given what we see of her interrogation of an E88 thug seems alarmingly likely to be "whoops I accidentally killed them") The fact that this 'retaliation' directly lead into Taylor "violating the Endbringer Truce" isn't even necessary for this to be godawful, but honestly the only part of that outcome that's unlikely is where Taylor happens to run across the one person she can't possibly risk a mutual unmasking with. Otherwise the entire thing is firmly Panacea's fault, and it's utter nonsense (In the sense of "what a goddamn bitch", not in the sense of "Goddammit Wildbow") she did it at all.
I can't help but be somewhat puzzled by this, since Panacea's "retaliation" consists of refusing to tell Taylor whether or not Tattletale is dead; which has no impact on her decision to bug out and go rushing through the medical tent. She clearly
enjoys not telling her why three Protectorate members are coming to see her, which has the actual impact, but that's not her call. She's been told by the PRT to keep Taylor in the dark, which is a baffling decision, but it's not hers. She was bitchy and vindictive, but engaged in no material retaliation, and being rude to someone who's been nothing but awful to you is certainly not something that she could have expected would lead to Taylor rushing into a restricted hospital area, considering a) she's in handcuffs, b) Taylor herself admits it was pretty stupid of her not to realize why she was in handcuffs.
Taylor accuses Panacea of seeing everything in black and white, but again; her resume at that point is "robbed a bank" and "attacked a charity gala". She's not exactly shown off any hidden depths.
Even little things she does manage to get me, like how she "apologizes" to Taylor when she explains she's making death plagues while talking to Jack and so Jack and Taylor should be dead many times over. Like, okay, you're fine with fucking over Taylor for no actual reason, repeatedly, but you feel the need to pretend to apologize for theoretically incidentally killing her in the process of dealing with Jack? What is this shit, and why should I believe it's a genuine apology as opposed to some subtle way of being mean?
The other parts I can understand, even if I don't agree, but this is just a
bizarrely willful interpretation. Panacea asks Jack why he isn't dead, considering she's been making death-plagues to kill him and Bonesaw, and when Taylor goes "what about me", Panacea says "I didn't know you were there. You should be dead too. Sorry." That reads as dialogue in a tense situation, not a "pretend" apology. This comes just paragraphs after she admitted that Skitter and Tattletale were among the only people to actually pay attention to her; "some subtle way of being mean" is a tremendously counter-intuitive reading.
Honestly, as tired as I am of Panacea as a character, and as much as I have trouble connecting with fandom beanbags, and as much as I feel she's one of a long list of amazing wow so powerful and important setting entities that have been clumped into Brockton Bay for no good reason and with no particular impact on the setting, I think you're viewing Panacea too much through the lens of Taylor's mask. She treats Taylor like a self-serving bitch in the early story, because the sum total of her interactions with her - prior to a mental breakdown provoked by a cascade of implausible events in the middle of what amounts to the apocalypse - have cast Taylor as a self-serving bitch.
Even accepting your read of her as amoral and acting solely on the expectations of society, rather than a moral person who's under too much external and internal pressure to properly function and no real support network to ease the strain... Your judgement of her is
bafflingly harsh. And I say this as someone who rags on Worm for more-or-less everything.
