This exchange has always interested me, because it strikes me as one of the very rare occasions of something approaching genuine self-awareness on her part. She's not unaware that her moral compass is faulty (even if she feels compelled to view it through the whole irrational father complex), and that seems to be genuinely distressing her, which is really neat to me. She knows that she should be a good person who genuinely enjoys doing good for doing goodness' sake, in the same way that she knows she should be healing, but while she can make herself go out and heal people, she can't force herself to be the sort of person who can do so gladly - no matter how much she wishes she were. I've felt that sort of desire before myself, in other contexts.
To me that exchange feels like a logical extension of the duty complex -she feels bad about not being the kind of person she 'should' be, more than anything else.
It doesn't really look like self-awareness to me.
Where it's implied she hasn't done anything with it because of her age and the legalities involved, which does go a pretty long way, honestly, as explanations go. But even setting her ability to make things or work in a formal capacity aside, the comprehension aspect of her power alone means that she should be able to sit down with a neurologist for an hour and give him enough dirt to completely revolutionize multiple fields of medicine. Or, if that's too close to something like actual work, just start a blog, and let anybody who with actual credentials who wants to follow up on her tips do so. There's a certain extent to which you can handwave that too, arguing that her comprehension is innate and that she lacks the vocabulary to readily explain things to people, but not only is that not really borne out by the text, it's an obstacle that could be easily overcome with time and training if she just hit the textbooks... which she never gives any indication of doing either. It's enough to make me suspect that Wildbow either didn't fully consider the all the batshit implications of her power or just didn't really want to bother dealing with them.
Yeah, Amy breaks down completely if you try to think out the proper implications of her power.
If the story had just said "she doesn't know what's happening except in broad strokes, and she only provides direction to her power while it handles the details" she'd basically hold up... but it insists on having her having detailed, precise, superinformation. And oh
god is that a bad idea if Wildbow wants the setting to not be undergoing a medical revolution.
I have an unfinished SI story, where the SI solved the ostensible problem, but the day isn't saved yet, because his team still needs to get out. He's keenly aware of how much risk they're in, how much responsibility.
Aaand I can't get into the headspace of me from 11-years ago to finish it. I know what was supposed to happen, but I'm not sure I can match tone.
Yyyyeah. I think that's one of the bigger reasons a lot of SIs fall apart. You change faster than your SI changes.
I'm basically leaning, for Exploding Canon, more on the experiences Bakuda has had since arrival to help guidepost my characterization, since yeah I'm having a hard time remembering the
exact mentality I had when I first started writing.
Well that's encouraging, I suppose. I dunno, maybe I'll go back to Worm sometime.
Those are, unfortunately, out of context quotes. Taylor kills a baby as a mercy killing, and yeah it's in front of the baby's brother, but everyone is in broad agreement that the necessity of it is the Nine's fault.
If you don't feel Taylor is a villain by arc 21, you probably never will.
(
I felt she worked as a villain starting shortly after Leviathan and really wish we'd seen more of the territory stuff, regardless of the fact that it was driven by guilt over Dinah, but I can totally understand why someone would feel otherwise)
*reads the OP alerts.
Of all the Author teasing I've had to deal with, this is the most aggravating. I mean seriously. after multiple 1K+ posts you expect one of em to be an update right? It's like I'm 5 again, my parents waking me up at 6:30 on a weekend telling me we're going to disneyland. And then we go on a 3 hour car ride and then we come to this fucking donut place and they go like "Oh, you thought we was going today? no i meant 6 months from now."
Gonna be doing an update after this post. A short one, unfortunately, but it's happening.
Sooooo how can't Bakuda hear the Simurgh then If she doesn't have the helmet?
There's hints as to why in the text.
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.
I don't really want this to turn into a giant argument, so I'm just going to leave it at: I disagree with about 99% of everything you say about Taylor.
I honestly have no idea where you pull these ideas from, beyond stereotyping Taylor on the basis of her being a teenager.
That said? I do think your interpretation is probably dead-on for how the
PRT interprets her, in-universe.
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.
Yeah, definitely agree with that.
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.
Bonesaw shows up. Amy cries and begs her to leave her and her family alone. Bonesaw coerces her into actually defending herself. Amy then tries to disengage the situation so she doesn't have to do anything more.
She absolutely has a passive mindset. She starts from, essentially, an assumption that she's helpless and Bonesaw has all the power, even while Bonesaw is actively pushing for her to defend herself. This is extremely evident at every step of the entire scene, and the fact that she didn't know the Nine were there prior to the scene isn't at all relevant.
Armsmaster, by contrast, is trying to
interrogate Mannequin, not to mention when
he leaves it's apparently with intent to go tinker and come back later. (Ultimately as Defiant) He starts from the assumption that -even completely unarmed, seriously injured, etc- he can try to do
something. (If anything, his mistake is having too much confidence in his badassery)
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.
I understand where you're coming from but it has the issue that my point is that Amy is putting more time and mental effort into
sabotaging Taylor than she is into
fighting the goddamn Nine.
This takes a reasonable-sounding decision and makes it petty, spiteful, asshole idiocy.
If she were throwing her full weight behind Taylor for fighting the Nine -and incidentally happening to find the time to cripple the long-term utility of the tools she's giving Taylor- then I would agree with you that this is an intelligent and reasonable decision, and thought I would identify with Taylor's frustration, I wouldn't be mad at Amy, myself.
That's not what she's doing. At all.
Taylor's actual behaviour, judged independently from the villain label, has been awful.
Amy in no way does anything to suggest she knows or cares about Taylor's actual behavior past the bank scene, and repeatedly and explicitly fixates on the fact that Taylor is "a Villain". You are defending her behavior on a basis unrelated to her actual behavior.
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.
I have no idea what kind of reading you're taking from that scene that you think Amy's behavior is reasonable there, but it's very clear to me that she is
deliberately and
intentionally psychologically torturing Taylor, hanging Ominous Future consequences hung over her to terrify her. She even directly conflates this with what Tattletale did to her, and makes it explicitly clear that she's punishing Taylor for Tattletale having done much the same to her -which is particularly ominous when you consider that Tattletale's actions led into Glory Girl being hurt. It's not a giant leap for Taylor to be fearing she'll end up with
equivalent harm done to her. She was already scared and confused because nobody was explaining anything to her, but it's
Amy who paints things such that Taylor has
specific reason to believe bad things are going to happen to her.
If she was doing this to
Tattletale, I would be wincing at how it's a bad idea but I'd understand where Amy is coming from. Eye for an eye and all. But she's doing it to Taylor, who was only relevant by virtue of
A: being on the same team as Tattletale
and B: her bugs ending up taking advantage of the gunshot
and quite frankly if Amy feels justified in holding someone responsible for their
teammate's entirely autonomous behavior, her belief system -in a non-hypocritical context- would involve her accepting blame for Victoria's own tendency to cause too much harm. (Which she actually has
far more responsibility for than Taylor has for Tattletale's behavior!)
Amy is being completely horrible to exactly the wrong person in a wholly hypocritical manner in circumstances that
contradict the Hippocratic oath. Deliberately, consciously, planned, taking
glee in it.
I roll my eyes at Amy wondering whether she's "doomed" to "become her father" later on because: yeah Amy, you're
already a heinous person. No 'becoming' about it.
so far as Dinah's oracular career is concerned.
