- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
"So, like, Uber, what if the Simurgh attacks?"
"... We can reenact that one game?"
"... I was actually thinking 'what do we do to not die', but that's a great idea!"
*Begin planning session!*
Exploding Canon (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm bakuda self insert oni-lady
"... We can reenact that one game?"
"... I was actually thinking 'what do we do to not die', but that's a great idea!"
*Begin planning session!*
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
The Worm setting is a cartoonishly awful place, even once you factor in the decades of global recession that the Endbringers should be causing.
Cauldron is presented as having the capabilities to seize control of whatever scenario they want with trivial ease. Therefore, we must assume that large parts of the cartoonish awfulness are directly attributable to Cauldron, either through action or deliberate inaction - an assumption supported by the fact that Coil's entire plan is one of their little petri dishes.
Does this make any actual sense, considering what we know about their attitudes, ultimate goals, and demonstrated capabilities? Not really. There are, we can assume, less ridiculously evil solutions to occupy Germany's cape population than propping up a Fourth Reich (this time with superpowers) for them to focus their ire on. And, Cauldron being Cauldron, they could discern the general shape of this solution with a simple Q&A session.
That said, it makes more sense and has more support than the alternatives.
Cauldron's fucking dumb, basically.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Probably because your bros in a villain team might have your back against the Nine or any similar threat, while official PRT policy seems to be to write you off as an acceptable loss. Also because after even a brief villain career you can probably afford somewhat better gear than a crossbow and grappling hook if you choose to attend out of town Endbringer fights.
WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
"A million views."
"Holy shit."
"Do we do that again?"
"Power Rangers had games. We could do Zords."
"Which one is next?"
"Leviathan?"
"Did Pacific Rim get a game?"
Assembler
Rocking the life
The Madison attack was a spectacular example on the Simurgh's part of just what she can do and set up to fall down the line. Let's review:
- A Cauldron facility is about to make a major breakthrough in vial production in Madison on an unknown Earth. Matryoshka is one of their test subjects.
- Professor Haywire is living in Madison, Bet.
- The Travelers are gaming in Madison, Aleph.
- The Simurgh attacks Madison.
- The presence of Haywire allows Ziz to make portal tech dragging the Cauldron base and the Travelers into Bet.
- The Travelers start having hallucinations as the Simurgh wishes. Oliver, Luke, Marissa, and Jess all have visions about their own inadequacies, Cody is made to remember every time Krouse fucked him over, Noelle is placed into a bad state of mind in general, and Krouse is reminded of his relationship with Noelle.
- Krouse finds a case of six Cauldron vials, one less than the number of survivors of the Travelers.
- Krouse runs to the hospital to give Noelle a vial so she can heal.
- Noelle and Krouse make the collectively stupid decision to only give Noelle half a vial.
- Noelle gets the full strength of Division without Balance to help it acclimate. Her own eating disorder, her injuries, and her state of mind combine to make her into Echidna.
- The Travelers have to go on the run and become criminals because the quarantines imposed due to previous Simurgh attacks will never let them out legally.
- Noelle causes occasional bursts of chaos when she gets loose.
- Cody deliberately attacks Noelle, causing several clones to escape and cause disruption in Accord's city.
- Accord sells Cody to the Yangban.
- Coil hires the Travelers.
- Noelle becomes absolutely convinced Coil is their only chance for salvation.
- Taylor kills Coil.
- Noelle gets loose.
- The situation is declared an S-Class threat.
- Krouse elects to side with Echidna, breaking his promise to help Noelle.
- Noelle has repeated hallucinations and gives in to the Echidna personality.
- Echidna gets her hands on Eidolon and Alexandria. The resulting clones were named by Wildbow as Ignis Fatuus and Apocrypha, respectively.
- Apocrypha's mere existence exposes Alexandria and Rebecca Costa-Brown as being the same person, hurting Cauldron's plan for the PRT.
- Ignis Fatuus, like Eidolon, is a blind spot for Contessa, so she cannot stop him when he kills Myrddin and exposes the truth about Cauldron.
- In disgust, Weld and many other Case 53s leave the Protectorate to join the Irregulars.
- Faultline's Crew break Matryoshka out of Madison.
- Matryoshka joins the Irregulars.
- In a now non-canon scene, an Echidna clone of Tattletale named Witness joins the Irregulars.
- Matryoshka's vicious nature encourages many of the other Irregulars to act likewise.
- Cody's vindictive nature, exacerbated by the Simurgh, causes him to kill Accord, an associate of Cauldron, and wound Accord's new partner Tattletale.
- Matryoshka somehow finds a way to increase Mantellum's range, allowing him to hide all the Irregulars from Clairvoyant and Contessa of Cauldron.
- Many of the Irregulars launch an assault on Cauldron's base, with Matryoshka and Mantellum in the lead.
- Doctor Mother is killed by the Irregulars.
- Cauldron's base is destroyed by the Irregulars.
- The combat attracts the attention of Zion, who destroys Eden's body, depriving Cauldron of their main source of power.
Were I to SI into Worm, the first thing I would do would be to find a way to contact Accord and get in touch with Cauldron through him. Once there, I berate Doctor Mother for giving up on the possibility of psychological warfare from the very beginning, then lambast their moral choices, and finally agree to work with them to stop the apocalypse and give them my information on how triggers work if they give up their immoral methods,
let me use some of their resources for other purposes, and go to goddamn therapy, because for all their problems they are absolutely committed to the survival and welfare of all Earths. I then ask Contessa to convince New Wave to go to therapy, tip Panacea onto how she might be able to make ultra-effective vaccines (seriously, why has no one ever had Panacea make vaccines, it would certainly be more effective than the few hours she puts in at the hospital, especially since she cured Bonesaw's agnosia plague in seconds), and break Bonesaw away from Jack Slash so she can help Amy in this endeavor. Accord is recruited into Cauldron's inner circle and given therapy, while Blasto and Toybox are both hired to work with us. Crawler is forcibly evolved into a replica of Eden so he can be used against Scion, while Jack is convinced by Contessa that driving Scion to suicide would let him make a lasting mark on the world. Clever use of Crawler, Echidna, Jack, Flechette, Null, Bakuda, Oliver, Genesis, and others breaks Scion's will like Khepri did in canon and sets up his death in a way that allows Cauldron to harvest his body as well.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
Also being thrown against all the villains, being hugely outnumbered and being the 'first' line of defence against Endbringers and all A/S class threats. Considering the existence of Defiant, if you're useful, I doubt the PRT would actually give much of a shit about your well being.
Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
- Location
- _
You're overstating my case here: I'm not saying she's generally self-aware at all, and would agree that she usually very much isn't - my point is that this a rare moment of partial self-awareness.
This may be happening because we're apparently using different standards of self-awareness? And it kind of ties into what I mean when I say I feel like you have a tendency towards reductionism. You rightly observe that her observation of her own moral failings is inspired by the painful dissonance caused by not living up to her standards... but then you treat that interpretation as mutually exclusive with self-awareness? Which doesn't make any sense to me. I don't see why personal observations/insights have to come from a place of robust comprehension of oneself or 'larger ideas about who you are' to qualify as self-aware. Even chronically myopic people can have moments of partial, narrow clarity. Like, to try and borrow your analogy, which I would also argue is misleading because pain is by definition wholly involuntary and self-reflection is not, I don't see why observing and then describing/articulating that painpoint (i.e. the observation that she is not as moral as she wishes to be) to another person (which she did) wouldn't count as self-aware, regardless of whether or not she's perceiving the more basic cause of the dissonance.
I still really, really don't see why the middle ground of "Holding Taylor responsible for her actual actions of personally cracking Amy over the head with a baton, taking her hostage at knifepoint, and then effectively forcing her listen to Tattletale try and spill all her darkest secrets" isn't being acknowledged, or why the point of 'it was self-defense!' is being treated as particularly exculpatory in the context of a violent felony/hostage crisis they started, but in the interests of not proving myself a hypocrite, I'm going to back off here.
I'm not sure either she or Wildbow considered that possibility, in retrospect.
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Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Interestingly, this was actually the point I started calling bullshit on parts Worm while reading it for the first time.
See, groups like the Empire 88 (or whatever Hookwolf's group was calling itself) are also securing and distributing resources to their people, providing them with protection against outside attackers, and establishing shelter against the elements. ABB would have been doing it too, if they had any capes left (you see, it is impossible for organized crime to exist without superpowered leaders, because they sucked up all the agency). The difference - aside from the racism and generally being awful people - is that both of those gangs need/would have needed funding and infrastructure to execute those goals while maintaining their authority. So they do things like robbing aid shipments, forcing people to perform labour, running "protection squads", and probably worse.
Taylor doesn't have to do any of these things, or even make a principled stand against them... because she's being bankrolled by a Bond villain. One who intends to rebuild the city anyway.
She just has a bottomless pit of magic money with little real moral stigma attached to it.
How convenient for her?
So in a display of cheap fakeoutery, the story forces her to wear a Villain Hat while letting her basically just play hero. And then it wags its finger at all the heroes for assuming she's a bad person just because she's wearing a Villain Hat. Like, no shit, she's a crimelord who through a series of contrivances doesn't ever, ever have to do the things that real crimelords actually have to do in order to succeed as crimelords. The moment Tattletale really starts gearing up her whole "pillars of the community" yakuza bullshit, Taylor's gone and off into the ranks of the suddenly tremendously obstructive Protectorate. As much as I talk her up/down, she never really stops being an undercover hero, because aside from her very first caper in a bank, the story never forces her to interact with the day-to-day mundane business of being a career criminal.
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- Location
- Texas
Shrug and fix them after it was all over?
I mean, black widow spiders aren't actually that deadly, and she's freakin' Panacea. With zero medical treatment, a healthy adult has less than a 10% chance of suffering serious medical complications from a black widow spider bite, and symptoms take twenty minutes to an hour to show up. The major treatment for bites is pain killers and wait.
Basically, in that whole crowd of people in the bank, if spiders started biting like sack of weasels, a small handful of people might really need medical attention soon, and they're in a decent sized city, with hospitals, perfectly capable of dealing with the problem via ordinary medical care. And if more was needed, Panacea is actually standing right there.
Spiders are scary, but in terms of actual threats in that particular hostage situation, "what if the spiders start biting people" ranks in urgency way below "what if the giant monster dogs start biting people" or "what if Tattletale, who is holding a gun, starts shooting people?" Or even, "what if Tattletale, who is holding a gun, starts biting people?"
- Location
- Wherever
I should perhaps clarify that I don't... really count Taylor's behavior, up until Golden Morning, starting from when she turns herself in the PRT for... no properly set up or explained reason in some bizarre bid to strongarm them into being More Good because somehow this course of action is supposed to be self-evidently and intuitively logical to the audience??
The act of turning herself in is in no way a logical continuation of the Taylor of even five seconds before she does it, and the story goes to great pains afterward to make it clear that any vaguely rational outside observer would view her as "cold", awful, etc etc which it supports primarily by suddenly having her massively out of character. (There's moments that feel genuine, like the "your room is bugged, but the bugs are outside, Directors", but they're very much exceptions)
If you're basing your interpretation of her off of later stuff? Yeah, I'm not going to argue that turning-herself-in Taylor isn't a hypocritical jackass, because she most certainly is.
But that part of the story is a giant mess that doesn't follow from the prior parts and feels too much to me like Wildbow finally gave up on waiting for a story-logical moment to make Taylor into a Ward and forced it to happen for no deeper reason than because he'd already planned for Taylor to become a Ward at some point, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
So I ignore it.
She doesn't analyze her options. She doesn't go "What are my options?... um. Uh-oh." She just... goes straight to "I can do nothing". (Which, honestly, is really weird when contrasted against the Bank scene? Sometimes I want to just write off everything starting from when the Nine show up, because honestly even the non-Jack members produce some narrative contortions) Passive, helpless.
My issue with her passive mindset -aside from it being something that personally grates on me, and also aside that I have trouble thinking of a male character Wildbow writes with the same mindset- is how it shapes my view of how she judges other people. Her judging people smacks of holier-than-thou nonsense where she can say "I would never do X unless forced to" less because she's that moral and more because really, if she had her way, she'd never do anything unless forced to. It's a very subtle, nasty sort of trick, where her position is "unassailable" not because she's actually morally superior but because she's leaving out a major difference in her operational procedure that makes the comparison entirely misleading and unfair.
It's like judging a soldier for the fact that they kill people and dodging around the question of what you would do if you were a soldier. You, as a corporate office drone, would never shoot anyone to death! Yeah, and?
That's why I bring up her passivity.
I'm not. I'm focusing on her wording, her phrasing, and how she insists on having confrontational and judgmental conversations with Taylor while doing this.
Hell, she could've just said "I can make more bugs for you, for less resources, faster, if I strip out those kinds of functions. Victory now is what matters." (Something to that effect) No need to actively snipe at Taylor and make it 100% explicit her goal is to fuck over Taylor down the line.
But no, it's just Too Important to her to make it 100% clear to Taylor that she hates her and is going to sabotage her even while helping her.
There is no need for Amy to handle things in this way. She does it anyway.
I feel like you're missing the thrust of what I'm saying.
You seem to be operating on the idea that Panacea's judgement implicitly incorporates information on the idea that it seems likely she knows about these other actions, and then further assuming -for no apparent reason- that this factors into her judgement of Taylor, which then gets summarized by saying "you're a Villain."
We get to see inside her head twice and see her from several different outside perspectives over the course of the story. There is nothing about the way she thinks or operates that supports this. She persistently and consistently gets stuck on this Villain label, and her own internal narrative about the danger of turning into a monster is that if she makes one mistake she fears she will forever more be(come) a monster. Her entire black-and-white morality all but precludes the idea of contextual, complicated judgments accounting for circumstantial information, motivation, etc etc.
In addition to the Watsonian perspective, the Doylist perspective is that this portion of the story revolves around people reacting to Taylor for no deeper reason than because "she's a Villain", with Taylor repeatedly going against the "current" to try to be nice to people who think she must needs be a monster just because of that label.
So from both a Watsonian and a Doylist perspective, it looks to me like Panacea's negative perspective on Taylor is irrespective of her actual actions, bar the highly personal Bank incident explicitly coloring her perception.
If you want to call that uncharitable? Sure, fine, whatever. I've said before I tend to accentuate the negative, and other people's reactions to me tend to agree with this idea.
But no, I'm not simply going "I dislike Amy, so I will assume for no particular reason she's evil and stuff."
In fact, again: on my first read-through, she grated on me, but by the time I got to the end I only vaguely remembered her Woobie history and nothing else and shrugged my lingering dislike of her off. "Bad first impression, I guess" I said to myself, my memory too fuzzy to remember why I had originally disliked her intensely.
It was only on my second read-through -the one where I was now biased to be sympathetic toward her because I remembered only the Woobie backstory- that I really went "Wait a second, she's horrifying."
Part of my point is my impression of those moments is that it just... happens. And then she moves on.
Like, yes, it could have been a moment where she questioned her basic assumptions. Wondered why it is the person she is disagrees so sharply with the person she wants to be and/or thinks of herself as. Poked at least a little at some of her standing assumptions, wondering if maybe some of them are contributors to the final product of who she is.
Instead she sort of goes: "I know I should be moral here, and I'm not being moral here. This moment of awareness of my own inadequacy makes me Sad." pause "I shall now proceed on my current course, unchanged in every regard by this moment."
She doesn't seem to ever have an inkling that she needs to change who she is if she wants to fix this up until she Body Horrors Victoria in her attempt to save her life.
That's part of why I used the metaphor I did: to me, Panacea is wandering through a bed of thorns, going "ow!" every time she steps on one and never going "Maybe I should put on some shoes. Or climb the trees. Or get out of this godforsaken forest." or even so much as going "man, I keep stepping on thorns. I wonder why that is?"
Because it's not terribly relevant to how Amy frames things, and my issues with her center around how she interprets the world and then interacts with it.
She never, ever brings up the point that Taylor is a violent criminal who was actively robbing a bank. This point apparently is entirely immaterial to how she views Taylor. Her entire lens is "You're the teammate of that girl who wronged me." I then back up and go "Tattletale had her reasons, and Taylor didn't even know what the plan was initially, let alone initiate it," and you then back up and go "But Taylor is an armed felon in the middle of robbing a bank"-
-but Amy doesn't go to either of those steps, because those facts apparently matter so little to her it doesn't even occur to her to bring them up.
She could be a completely reasonable person whose behavior is contextually appropriate, given the events she's interacting with and being affected by and the people involved in all and sundry.
But she isn't, and the fact that she could be makes me painfully aware of how horrible she's being.
She could be going "Yeah, what a laugh, questioning if I'm trustworthy coming from the lady who robbed a bank." She could be going "You are literally a criminal here." She could bring up any number of points, roll her eyes at the teenage villain who thinks they're, like, morally deep or something, and moved on with her life, satisfied she's not as retarded/evil as Skitter.
Nope, focus on the personal and retaliate with psychological torture on a basis that, out of all your possible options for justifying this shit, is pretty much literally the worst one after "for the evuls." Because she's so good, you see.
This? I 100% agree with this.
It's part of why I really, really wanted to see more territory management. Come on! Have Taylor actually confront how the common citizen sees her! Once Coil goes down, actually confront where her money is coming from.
And... no. Nope. She just... yeah. Gets bankrolled by a Bond villain who doesn't mind if she throws his money away on things that don't benefit his interests.
(Actually an argument can be made he betrayed her precisely because she was throwing his money away on, from his perspective, utter bullshit. Rachel is the only Undersider who seems to have been worse about failing to align with Coil's instructions/goals)
And then the Nine interrupt.
And then once that's done and we have to confront this whole issue -LOLNOPE TIME 2 TURN MYSELF IN. BECAUSE. REASONS.
In retrospect I'm realizing Taylor turning herself in lost me more for this kind of relatively subtle problem than for the part where Taylor's behavior doesn't even make sense.
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- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Jamie from Twig (early) and Ty from Pact. And to some extent Regent?
Amy is the only passive character who gets like, a lot of development and attention and still stays passive, that I can think of.
Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
I think this particular course of actions ends with Contessa talking to you, and you will understand that their previous course of actions are perfectly sensible and you won't force them to change anything that they don't want.
More realistic course of actions is to start to tell them stuff than only they know. After they belive that you have more-knowlege-than-you-should, move to things that they don't know but can varify (i.e. there bum/woman in England that has influence on Scion, Endbringers are golems, ect). After they confirm that you give good info, start give them stuff that was true before insertion, and try to provide outsider perspective.
Don't say anything about possible teen messiah or actively try to predict future.
That, i belive, more rational plan.
Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
- Location
- _
Assaulting the Mayor's home and torturing him (or was it his son? Same difference, really) is another highlight of 'unambiguously terrible criminal acts' on her part. You can argue the narrative tries to salvage and/or complicate it morally with the whole "It's to save the city from being condemned!" angle... but that just ties back into your earlier point about the narrative contorting itself to keep Brockton Bay relevant, because prior to the convenient inter-dimensional portal that shows up the very next arc to render it economically viable again, condemning the city and encouraging people to move out of the ruined crime-infested shithole was probably the outright better course of action for the country to take for its inhabitants.
I don't agree with that framing of it, but like I said. Backing off.
Yes? Again, I'm not seeing the contradiction here. Self-reflection doesn't have to be productive to still count as self-reflection - hell, most of the point of the exchange is that she recognizes the underlying conflict between her personality and her desires but can't see any way to fix it.
I mean, really. I'm not arguing that it's a particularly impressive moment of reflection, or that it produces some huge change. Just that it was a personal insight that indicates she isn't wholly unaware of the nature of her problems, even if she isn't self-aware or malleable enough to realize how to fix them.
I considered that, but this plan is contingent on Panacea both being alive and around to do healing after the spiders starting to bite hostages at random causes the whole stand-off to collapse into panic and complete chaos. That's... probably not the safest assumption.
Also worth noting that I think black widows may be one of those animals that are a lot more lethal if you assume they're being forced to inject as much venom as possible? Not sure about that one.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Hmmm. Not readily finding relevant info- I know that like most spiders, a lot of the time them biting is a 'dry' bite in which they don't even inject venom.
- Location
- Wherever
Oh wow did I end up missing a good chunk of conversation while I was writing my previous post.
Though fortunately Cauldron is the only topic I'd meant to actually address that I missed:
Yeah, I write Cauldron as pretty, um, lolevil. And that's because... well. Canon doesn't make a lot of sense otherwise? Not that it makes that much sense as-is, but the world makes some sense if Cauldron is actively propping up bizarre things like Gesellschaft for some inscrutable PtV reason, whereas if they object to Gesellschaft existing... I mean. This doesn't even require Contessa's personal intervention. Number Man explicitly is able to do Shenanigans to make people's money vanish, make creditors/government officials suddenly have reason to look more closely at and find irregularities in your funds, and otherwise screw with people fairly trivially. If he wanted to bankrupt Gesellschaft, he could, apparently effortlessly.
So you basically have to assume large criminal organizations reliant on significant funding for their operation have to be, at minimum, tolerated by Cauldron, and more likely are actively desired. Like, okay, sure, Number Man is relatively hobbled at doing something about Lung, whose might is primarily rooted in his power. But Gesselschaft's thing of triggering and shaping people kind of requires funding. Food, electricity, a building to keep these people in, paying employees....
That said, having Number Man propping up Gesselschaft is kind of a backhanded way of pointing out how ridiculous it is that Gesselschaft even exists in the first place. I'm reframing canon's bizarre circumstances and shifting them into something somewhat more plausible/palatable.
I have no recollection of Ty and therefore am willing to take your word for it.
Regent? Hm. I don't disagree, but I can't bring myself to agree. Not sure why.
I don't feel like Jamie is passive, in the early parts I'm reading through? He's less active, I guess you could say? But he actually looks to me more like... okay, I have a sibling, and they tended to follow me around all over the place when we were kids. We'd watch what I wanted to watch, play what I wanted to play, go where I wanted to go.
Our father thought this meant my sibling was my lackey.
I was very clear my sibling was not, as "following me around" was literally the last place I wanted them, and I made it quite explicit to them, repeatedly, and they never budged.
When left to their own devices, this sibling was perfectly capable of self-direction. They mostly didn't bother because I was interesting, and would do interesting things, and why put forth the effort to think of something interesting to do when they could just follow me until I became boring?
Jamie makes me think of my sibling: he's willing to let others take the lead much of the time, but it's not so much that he's actually passive as that he doesn't see much point unless he has some specific reason to push his course of action. (Where, say, Sy clearly prefers to have things done his way for no deeper reason than because it is his idea)
That's... kind of most venomous animals? Most of them only dump a fraction of their stored venom into a bite, ever, and indeed 2/3rds (on average) of defensive bites from venomous animals are actually completely dry of venom. Venom is just too expensive to throw away even on self-defense!
On the other hand I'm not sure if any science has been done on what happens if you dump all of a black widow's venom sac into someone vs just some of it.
But this is also just a major fridge logic moment all-around for me... why did Taylor use actual black widows? If she never intends to do it, this is just a bad idea.
Ugh, now one of the good scenes from canon is going to bother me every time I think about it.
Though fortunately Cauldron is the only topic I'd meant to actually address that I missed:
Yeah, I write Cauldron as pretty, um, lolevil. And that's because... well. Canon doesn't make a lot of sense otherwise? Not that it makes that much sense as-is, but the world makes some sense if Cauldron is actively propping up bizarre things like Gesellschaft for some inscrutable PtV reason, whereas if they object to Gesellschaft existing... I mean. This doesn't even require Contessa's personal intervention. Number Man explicitly is able to do Shenanigans to make people's money vanish, make creditors/government officials suddenly have reason to look more closely at and find irregularities in your funds, and otherwise screw with people fairly trivially. If he wanted to bankrupt Gesellschaft, he could, apparently effortlessly.
So you basically have to assume large criminal organizations reliant on significant funding for their operation have to be, at minimum, tolerated by Cauldron, and more likely are actively desired. Like, okay, sure, Number Man is relatively hobbled at doing something about Lung, whose might is primarily rooted in his power. But Gesselschaft's thing of triggering and shaping people kind of requires funding. Food, electricity, a building to keep these people in, paying employees....
That said, having Number Man propping up Gesselschaft is kind of a backhanded way of pointing out how ridiculous it is that Gesselschaft even exists in the first place. I'm reframing canon's bizarre circumstances and shifting them into something somewhat more plausible/palatable.
I have no recollection of Ty and therefore am willing to take your word for it.
Regent? Hm. I don't disagree, but I can't bring myself to agree. Not sure why.
I don't feel like Jamie is passive, in the early parts I'm reading through? He's less active, I guess you could say? But he actually looks to me more like... okay, I have a sibling, and they tended to follow me around all over the place when we were kids. We'd watch what I wanted to watch, play what I wanted to play, go where I wanted to go.
Our father thought this meant my sibling was my lackey.
I was very clear my sibling was not, as "following me around" was literally the last place I wanted them, and I made it quite explicit to them, repeatedly, and they never budged.
When left to their own devices, this sibling was perfectly capable of self-direction. They mostly didn't bother because I was interesting, and would do interesting things, and why put forth the effort to think of something interesting to do when they could just follow me until I became boring?
Jamie makes me think of my sibling: he's willing to let others take the lead much of the time, but it's not so much that he's actually passive as that he doesn't see much point unless he has some specific reason to push his course of action. (Where, say, Sy clearly prefers to have things done his way for no deeper reason than because it is his idea)
That's... kind of most venomous animals? Most of them only dump a fraction of their stored venom into a bite, ever, and indeed 2/3rds (on average) of defensive bites from venomous animals are actually completely dry of venom. Venom is just too expensive to throw away even on self-defense!
On the other hand I'm not sure if any science has been done on what happens if you dump all of a black widow's venom sac into someone vs just some of it.
But this is also just a major fridge logic moment all-around for me... why did Taylor use actual black widows? If she never intends to do it, this is just a bad idea.
Ugh, now one of the good scenes from canon is going to bother me every time I think about it.
- Location
- New Yor\k
I can see a few reasonable explanations here. Taylor is pretty confident in her insect control, so it never really occurs to her that she might lose control of them. To be fair, she's mostly right - Panacea's biological control making her capable of messing with psychic bugs is some industrial level bullshit which nobody at that point in canon saw coming. So, in that light, why not bring actual widows to make the false threat more believable, as well as providing some extra firepower in case things do go south?
Alternatively, she had a bunch of widows left over after finishing her costume and wanted to make use of them somehow. Y'know, like those fifty-ton cans of food you get from Costco, except spiders.
Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
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The whole point was to scare and intimidate people so that they wouldn't try to be heroes and get anybody hurt, and black widows are widely and instantly recognizable as 'one of the worst things you can get bitten by,' regardless of whether that reputation is deserved. And her control has, up until this point, never not been perfect. So I'm not seeing the issue? She had no way of knowing her control would be disrupted, and if she's operating on the assumption that her control will be perfect, she can bring as many ridiculously venomous bugs as she wants without any risk of the bluff going bad.
Ah, just imped. Oh, well. Posting anyway.
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- Over the hill and far away
The real reason Black Widows don't always kill people, or even usually kill people, is because they don't necessarily inject their venom when they bite people, because, well, we're not their prey. However, if you keep agitating them, they well. And then.... then, you're in trouble and need to seek medical attention, depending on the dose. Well. Honestly, if a black widow bites you, seek medical attention immediately, regardless.
Black Widow venom's a neurotoxin, which is why it's a big concern. It'll shut down your ability to do much of anything, depending on the location and amount of venom you get stuck in you.
Also, the way the venom affects you? It makes you die of pain. Like, seriously- in addition to messing with your muscles, it overstimulates your ability to feel pain. Latrotoxins are a hell of a messed up nerve agent.
Which is... kinda horrible? And something Amy should know really well?
So basically, she's doing the equivalent of saying "I see you have us at gunpoint! But I shall pull all the triggers before you can! Behold my clever master plan!"
I think that there are two big differences here. Alexandria enjoys being a thug. And in real life, when your excuse for doing bad things is self-serving, that's usually a sign that your judgment is compromised.
In real life, when the bad things you are doing are in service of a plan that probably isn't going to work, that also is usually a sign that your judgment is compromised. The fact that Alexandria is wrong matters--it's evidence that her plan wasn't really thought through, and that her plan therefore is an excuse, not the real reason.
Taylor's actually is doing "bad things" for the greater good. Cauldron uses the greater good as an excuse.
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- Wherever
I can see a few reasonable explanations here. Taylor is pretty confident in her insect control, so it never really occurs to her that she might lose control of them. To be fair, she's mostly right - Panacea's biological control making her capable of messing with psychic bugs is some industrial level bullshit which nobody at that point in canon saw coming. So, in that light, why not bring actual widows to make the false threat more believable, as well as providing some extra firepower in case things do go south?
Alternatively, she had a bunch of widows left over after finishing her costume and wanted to make use of them somehow. Y'know, like those fifty-ton cans of food you get from Costco, except spiders.
What I mean is that, yes, she should bring some black widows to sell the illusion, but she doesn't need to actually dump actual black widows on every hostage. She can just dump other black spiders on most of them, ones that are considerably less dangerous to humans. (Or even non-spiders, if she doesn't think anyone will see them!)
It suddenly makes me a lot more sympathetic to people who want to view Taylor as an Awful Person. If this isn't a subconscious indicator of Taylor's desire to 'Go Carrie' or the like, it's definitely at least sloppy, the kind of sloppy that's going into "criminal negligence" when you're not actively committing a crime.
The only way to really defend Taylor here is to go "
Wildboooooow!"Which... I was comfortably believing the Nine were the earliest the story was having serious problems, and now I have to shift my post to a lot earlier.
I think that could be debated, though I'll comment that if she doesn't actually enjoy it she definitely is willing to deliberately act in a way that looks like she does.
Her whole hyper-acting/hyper-intelligence thing is... really annoying, in terms of trying to analyze the text in a meaningful way.
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- Over the hill and far away
Easiest solution would probably to have all her widows dump their venom into an orange or a banana or something beforehand. It does take them time to produce more. (and then make sure nothing eats that banana because hooooooo BOY)
But the flip side is, her control is absolute and she's never lost it for the past... four months at that point, I guess? I'm not sure when the bank job was, exactly, in relation to when she got her powers. And the bugs continue to follow her last orders when she's unconscious, which is how she didn't have to worry about them all dying when she made the costume. So unless she could imagine that someone in the bank would have master-disrupting abilities, I can see her thinking she would be fine even if she got tazed unconscious by Armsmaster or something.
Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
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Well, tbf, it's more "Ah ha! I see you've rigged us all to explode! But little did you know that in doing so, you've merely given me the opportunity to defuse all your bombs and incapacitate you in a single stroke!" The issue being that, in retrospect, it's not clear how she knew that said defusing attempt wouldn't just set all of the bombs off. If we're reading charitably, I think I'm inclined to say that she must have known somehow, even if only just because Wildbow inadvertently handed her a copy of the script, because electing to risk everybody's lives on an impulsive/wildly dangerous gamble is like that definitely very out of character for her.
Eh? I'm having difficulty seeing why this is consequential (especially compared to the whole 'Amy Dallon: Amateur Hostage Negotiator' thing, which in retrospect is increasingly yeah, geez). Like, Taylor didn't need to bring all black widows, sure, but she also had no reason to believe bringing any amount of them could possibly result in any unintended harm, so bringing a crapload to better sell the bluff intended to preserve the hostage's safety doesn't strike me as irresponsible.
I don't believe she'd worked that out by that point, actually. Her costume seems to have been something that she only worked on while she was awake.
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- Location
- Over the hill and far away
Even when you figure she does brains, I just can't buy that she knows enough about Taylor's brain's connection to the spider to know that she can use sympathetic magic like that. Or, y'know, voodoo. Because sheezus, did she ever have a copy of the script there.
Yeah, honestly I'd use the widows, because what if someone moves around, and the hostages can see each other, so they'd know if there were substitutions. But, as mentioned, discharge the venom beforehand.
It's the difference between holding someone up with an airsoft gun versus a super soaker- one's clearly wrong, the other, you have to risk dying to confirm your theory.
We can still see she's irresponsible, but, yeah.
And, you are correct. I thought she had them just do simple tasks when she was asleep rather than the actual assembly, but that could definitely be read that she sent them all back to their holes when she went to bed.
Of course, then you have to figure out where the hell she was putting all these thousands of tiny black widow condos....
Dammit, WB...
Quantumsheep
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Wherever they'd survive and be relatively out of the way? I mean, how true 'You are always within six feet of a spider' is is up for debate, but the myth exists for a reason. She had a lot of range, especially considering she wasn't limited to just within 2-3 blocks of her house, and it's not like suburban neighborhoods are short on habitable zones for spiders. And, hell, she found them in the first place, so it's not as if they're not already local.
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