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Hereafter [Worm x Fate/Grand Order]

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Hunter1933 said:
What I'm annoyed by is the implication that Taylor has anything but excellent karma, saving the world and humanity across billions of realities.
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it's basically that good karma doesn't undo bad karma, of which she has a lot, also some of the actions that caused good, where bad actions nonetheless, killing coil would probably give bad karma for instance despite being objectively a good thing, to say nothing about what she did as khepri, did it save the world? yes, did it horrifically scar thousands of people, leading to many of their deaths by scions hand at her direction? also yes. the scale of her deeds mean that it's kinda hard to label it as only good or bad, it's both at the same time, and enough so that a karmic curse that hits you in regards to how much bad you've done? that's gonna have a very volatile reaction, especially if it ignores good karma and just focuses on bad karma like i suspect this one does.
 
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The-Chained-One said:
the scale of her it means that it's kinda hard to label it as only good or bad, it's both at the same time, and enough so that a karmic curse that hits you in regards to how much bad you've done? that's gonna have a very volatile reaction
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im kinda confused, a few thousand people suffer for what I think it was what 10 hours? no more than a day in return for the definitive result of saving all of humanity accrues countless worlds could be anything but a positive action.
The-Chained-One said:
leading to many of their deaths by scions hand at her direction
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also exactly how many people died at her command?
 
Hunter1933 said:
im kinda confused, a few thousand people suffer for what I think it was what 10 hours? no more than a day in return for the definitive result of saving all of humanity accrues countless worlds could be anything but a positive action.
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Because no matter how big the positive number is, if you don't add it to the negative number you're still going to only get the negative number.

Or in other words, if you took her every action she's ever done and only tallied the bad effects of them, that's her negative karma. It doesn't matter that the action overall was positive.
 
Hunter1933 said:
im kinda confused, a few thousand people suffer for what I think it was what 10 hours? no more than a day in return for the definitive result of saving all of humanity accrues countless worlds could be anything but a positive action.

also exactly how many people died at her command?
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again, the karma curse probably doesn't care about her positive karma, it only cares for the negative, it doesn't care that traumatising those thousands of people for some hours was to save humanity, just that she did that.

and we aren't told in exact numbers, but it's a lot, from her perspective she was basically bleeding capes in that whole fight.
 
It also gets complicated because of how again the barriers between Taylor and QA got broken down so that by the end it was QA who thinks she's Taylor that was in control so karma wise would Taylor actually benefit from the things like finishing Scion QA did?
 
Isiri Pudireach said:
On another note, anyone else thinking this arc will lead to Taylor's past being revealed?
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i think it's the setup for it, the chekovs gun so to speak, not neccesarily this arc, but the american singularity? babylonia? i can see it brought up there. maybe london with the actual meeting between the mc's and goetia, tho i imagine that's just gonna be more chekovs gunning, i could easily he's see him use some words that hints at him knowing, maybe even outright threaten her that he'll tell the others, and that'll make the eventual reveal all the more dramatic.
 
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Hunter1933 said:
also exactly how many people died at her command?
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During Gold Morning, while she was in command, it was something like 75 of the 5000 capes she was controlling died.

During the point she lost control a couple thousand or so died.

Then she regained control again and the losses dropped again

Ryuugi has a breakdown of what happened,
Ryuugi said:
To try to bring this back around to Worm--Worm is both really good and shockingly terrible about this in different ways, but it's good in the ways that matter most, if that makes sense. What I mean about that is, it's good at applying this to the main characters, both in the sense that actions have consequences and in showing what brought them to the choices they made. Part of that is simply the advantage of being a main character, of course, but Taylor tries to straddle the line between hero and villain and often stumbles, but you see why the entire time. To be clear, Taylor does some really, really heroic things, but also makes some awful, awful choices, caught up in larger things, especially when she's being used. Things like Triumph? That was bad, but you did see why she did it, with Coil setting her up.

The same is also true of her methods. Taylor is kind of memed as a constantly escalating whack job, which is something of a disservice, because despite her reputation in much of the fandom, very rarely were Taylor's decisions to escalate her first choice, as such, although there were times. Pretty much every time she had a choice of awful options, she tried other ways first, and while she frequently didn't make--let's say--moral decisions, she made understandable decisions. When they were fighting the Nine, in order to participate with the group effort to do so, they were told to give up their territory, which she couldn't do because she was determined to save Dinah, as an example, but she tried to reach out to the PRT and other capes multiple times regardless, with some of her bigger plans being only after everything else fell through.

The same happened with Scion. One of the saving graces of Khepri, in my eyes, was that they tried everything they could first. People sometimes decry Taylor's decision to go Khepri, which has always seemed silly, in a good way--because they tried to fight Scion and when it was everything they had vs. him, Scion won. Taylor had the crazy idea to recruit the Endbringers, and it still wasn't enough. Taylor left the battlefield to plumb Cauldron's secrets, looking for another way--there wasn't one. She looked into known methods, like Second Triggers; it wasn't an option. My complaint regarding Khepri is the build up around the method, which was pretty lackluster. The build up to the decision, though, was just fine.

The problem Worm has is that the story pretty frequently didn't give a shit about applying this to anyone else. Keep in mind, the ones that first pushed them towards sacrificing their territory were the neo-nazis who'd been attacking disaster relief convoys, which...I'm not opposed to the PRT pushing villains to reduce their influence, even if maybe it was a bad time, but what about reducing their influence? Coil was meant to be an isolated experiment, but Coil was relatively new, compared to the entrenched neo-nazis that the PRT had done seemingly little about. Hell, Purity murdered a reporter on TV and was freely operating even afterwards.

Similarly, look at Brockton Bay as a whole. One of the lower key notes that I often seen brushed over to instead use Uber and Leet as humorous side-characters is that they were awful people and livestreamed it, and were just operating freely while providing evidence of their crimes, like beating up prostitutes:

Leet and Über glared at him. Their entire schtick was a video game theme. With every escapade, they picked a different video game or series, designing their costumes and crimes around it. One day it would be Leet in a Mario costume throwing fireballs while Über was dressed up as Bowser, the two of them breaking into a mint to collect 'coins'. Then a week later, they would have a Grand Theft Auto theme, and they would be driving through the city in a souped up car, ripping off the ABB and beating up hookers.
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Similarly, while Taylor was frequently held accountable for things and was even locked up in prison when she turned good--Assault was breaking out Birdcage-bound criminals for years and when he turned, not only was he left relatively free, but he was given stipulations that allowed him to specifically antagonize and harass a hero. The PRT was established and puppeted by war criminals, basically none of whom are ever really held accountable for that, or at least because of that; keep in mind that when she died at Taylor's hand, Alexandria was still functionally running the PRT, training and also overruling her replacement as the mood took her, until she was ready to walk away.

Ward is arguably even worse about this, in that I think that--aside from the prison world horseshit and a few things in the ending arcs--it does a lot to establish the moral standings of the main cast and their accountability, its just that they're surrounded by such a ridiculous lack of the same it's honestly hilarious. There's a reason I dunk on the Wardens as often as I do--they're legitimately terrible sometimes, and I mean that beyond them being almost constantly useless. There was a scene where they threatened to take away the medical care of one of Victoria's teammates after she saved them from Teacher, twice, because they didn't like her methods. Like, I didn't like some of the methods, but are you fucking serious? And they gave pretty basic healthcare to begin with!

This is one of the reasons why I think fanfiction tends to be pretty harsh on people outside the main cast, because a lot of them, uh, suck and get away with it, while Taylor and Victoria get punished both when they do bad stuff and good stuff. Hell, I don't take that as far as a lot of people, but even in my case, one of the things I try to keep in mind, not just for this story but for writing for Worm in general, is that actions should have consequences, whether good or bad, even if just on how people perceive you. I wasn't one of the people who wanted or expected Taylor to return in Ward and when Wildbow said she wouldn't, I shrugged and accepted it, but the way she was functionally edited out of the story of Gold Morning and other people took credit for it instead still smarted. Especially because they were all useless people.

Which...I guess kind of just plays into the idea of Karma, in a way?
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Ryuugi said:
First and foremost, because I feel the need to bring this up whenever someone talks about Gold Morning or it's morality or what have you--Taylor did pretty goddamn phenomenally during Gold Morning. Whatever else you think about the situation, this remains true. Humanity was already crumbing with Scion devastating the stragglers and alternate Earths the longer the fighting went on and the Parahuman population had already been reduced to a hundreth of what it was before, and was getting lower all the time. On the flight back from the Cauldron Base, Taylor watches Scion devastate one of their armies, and like Taylor mentions at one point, the heroes aren't really gaining anything from these exchanges. Nobody had a plan that had so much as a chance of working, because anything that seems to work, Scion adapts to and then kills, or else if it's something like Sting it just doesn't seem to work in the first place, prompting defenses and counterattacks*. The only thing that changes with each skirmish with Scion is that in the end, they're less than they were before, losing major heroes and players all the time, losing ground, losing tinker resources that can't be easily remade, etc., and the longer you wait, the less you have to work with, because you're on the clock here. A drive by from Scion to Teacher or the Birdcage or the CUI could have easily wiped out hundreds or thousands of potential fighters

When Taylor gained the ability to do something, acting fast was the correct choice. In the big picture, where all life on every Earth was on the line and at least millions were dying whenever Scion so much as drove by a planet, Scion needed to be put down then and there. It's the kind of situation that far exceeds the Godzilla Threshold, where it's not that you need to put him down quickly, you need to put him down now. The longer you wait, the more chances you give Scion to wipe out something critical.

And from the smaller picture, she also did phenomenally, is the thing. Less than a hundred people died under her command, despite the fact that she was actively losing her mind the whole time, and even accounting for the worst part of the fight, between when Doormaker went down and Taylor regained strategic control via Canary, two-thirds of the army walked away from a battle with Scion intact. Shit went remarkably well, miraculously well, especially given what Taylor had to juggle and figure out all the while, when even that army proved completely incapable of directly hurting Scion. She had to go through a whole mystery thriller while playing 4D Knife Monopoly across the Multiverse with a fucking God and she Sherlock Tzu'd that shit. God-killing game immaculate.

And from that perspective, anyone who complains about how things went, in story, is kind of a whiny fucking bitch. Things went spectacularly well. There were multiple, individual fights against Scion that went worse than this without accomplishing anything. The claptrap in Ward where the heroes take credit for what Taylor did and frame it as some victory of the human spirit and cooperation is kind of gross for how bullshit it is.

But being upset about how Taylor stopped Scion is like being upset when someone blows up a three hundred kilometer asteroid that's hurtling towards Earth because when they blew it up, one of the pieces of rubble hit your car.

My guy. Priorities.

Having said that, on the other side, there's a second truth that needs to be remembered, which is that from a personal perspective, Taylor was maybe kind of a little rough about things.

Like, let's get some stuff out of the way. When you say 'she didn't permanently consume the other humans'--let's put an asterisk on that, because it's more like she didn't consume most of them. Because there were for sure a couple groups of the Yangban that got sent to oppose their new Mad Goddess, to which Taylor naturally went 'Resisting arrest? That's a paddling.'

And by paddling, I mean that everyone who resisted got eaten alive in seconds by a biblical plague worth of bugs.

Now, to be fair, it wasn't a lot of people. Most of the group saw the first few guys die in a nightmarishly horrible way and decided to reconsider their course of action, during which time they got captured instead. But when you say she didn't permanently consume them--well, she permanently consumed some of them. And it's like, the CUI was deliberately fucking with refuges and making things worse for everyone else, so fuck them, and while the Yangban were victims of the CUI as much as anyone else, they were still the tool being used to do so, so like, okay. Fair enough.

And when you say 'she treated them with care'--that's sort of true? She treated them carefully, is perhaps a better way of saying it, doing her best to keep as many people alive as she could through some wild and wacky circumstances, and she did well. But like, you know. Treating them with care did not preclude sacrificing them or putting them in danger, it's just that she did those things with forethought and strategy, and responded quickly to changing circumstances. There were definitely times when, say, GU had a weird shield up and Taylor wanted GU, but when she had a gravity manipulator test it, they promptly imploded, so Taylor thought she needed someone who broke the rules, but wasn't willing to risk any of her own tools, so she used Scion instead; again, she was careful. And when she wanted to trap Scion in a reality while she dropped every bomb in two hundred Earths on him, but she needed someone who could both stall for time and someone who could push the button to trap him, she was careful and deliberate in deciding who was going to be torn limb from limb by Scion and who was going to be at ground zero of the biggest nuclear bombardment in the history of probably all the Earth.

But like, let's not pretend. People were dying from having strokes from the sheer terror and stress of being under her control, of sometimes being sent to fist fight Scion. They were breaking and losing their minds under her control:

And Moord Nag promptly had a stroke. I watched as Scavenger dissipated into smoke.

Wha- what? Why?

I reached out to Moord Nag, and I could feel the damage being done. I moved her back just as I'd moved her forward, shifting more capes onto the battlefield to deliver some ranged fire.

Why? I was stunned, and putting my thoughts together in regards to this was like trying to swim in molasses.

Had to act, instead of thinking. Investigate.

I used my ability to read the physical states of the creatures I controlled, reading my swarm much as I'd check a spider's level of hunger, its health, fertility or the amount of venom available.

Almost across my entire swarm, people were threatening to lose their minds. Literally.

It was stress, a factor I hadn't taken into account. I controlled their bodies, but I didn't control their minds. They were bystanders, watching this all unfold, and even though I regulated their heartbeats, kept their breathing level, the mental stress accumulated.

There were exceptions in every category, but I could assess my gathered army with broad strokes of the brush. The thinkers were coping best, the tinkers nearly as well. The masters struggled the most, followed by the shakers and breakers. The rest fell in some middle ground. Moord Nag… my control over her had apparently tapped into some kind of trauma or phobia she had, so she'd been the first to reach some kind of fever pitch in terms of the buildup of stress-induced chemicals and reactions.

I was killing my own minions.

I moved quickly, scrambling to get measures in place before I lost any more.
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And she deployed countermeasures to keep them from going completely insane, namely with more mind control, so that was nice, I guess. And she saved countless lives in the end, to be sure. And she let them go, that much is true--Doormaker failing released most of them, but Taylor also released the people still under Khepri's control in the end.

But let's not pretend, either**.

*It's perhaps a sign of how screwed everyone was that one of the few people with any kind of plan for fighting Scion was Chevalier, who was going to merge his sword with some of the torn off limbs of Endbringers they'd collected, which is all well and good, but, uh, there's this interesting piece of trivia about the Endbringers and Scion and how they stack up, which is that they fucking don't. And one of the limbs was Behemoth's.

As Legend departed, Chevalier's eyes didn't leave the objects.

One of the Simurgh's severed wings. The largest wing, since regrown.

Behemoth's severed leg.

They warped space for optimal density, were unbreakable with conventional means. Scion had taken seconds to obliterate Behemoth.

Hopefully he could assign the same properties to his sword and armor.
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This does not sound like a plan, my boy, but legitimately, I think it made top three plans during Gold Morning. From least to greatest, Chevalier's super gear (gave Scion pause for a few seconds), Cauldron's army (took Scion a few seconds to minutes to exterminate off screen), and Khepri (who fucking won). The discrepancy in performance was marked.
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Tldr a karmic curse doesn't care that you killed Hitler, killed all the guards at Auschwitz, and singlehandedly stopped the Holocaust; you killed people, and killing is bad m'kay. So, for being a horrible murdering psychopath you now get to be crucified to a wall while all those poor Nazi assholes you killed get to take turns on you with the flamethrower because you deserve it. And you don't get to die until everybody's had a go.
That's how a karmic curse works.
 
Stahor said:
Arachne. The OG spider. If Medusa can be Servant, Arachne can be too.
Can also replace Crane in the shop :)
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Arachne is definitely a possibility as well, but just personally speaking i think Anansi or Grandmother would work better
Anansi because his entire schtick was basically the same as Taylor's- a frail, weak little creature who accomplished great deeds and defeated entities far outside his league by being clever and being willing to undertake bullshit plans that shouldn't have a chance at succeeding.

Grandmother Spider on the other hand...is Grandmother Spider. Creator goddess. Earth spirit. Guide. Mentor. Maternal figure. Always watching, forever patient, forever showing the way forward and teaching her children and grandchildren to be better. Really does feel like the kind of figure Taylor could use in her life (especially for what has been the stated purpose of this story)

Isiri Pudireach said:
On another note, anyone else thinking this arc will lead to Taylor's past being revealed?
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oh absolutely

Barghest Blue said:
Ryuugi has a breakdown of what happened,
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...huh
i'd never seen this before.
That is a fantastic breakdown. doesn't shy away from the bad (highlights it, in fact) but also shows that how and why of how Taylor works, and the undeniable truth that what her way did work
Thanks for bringing this up!
 
JadeDemilich said:
- a frail, weak little creature who accomplished great deeds and defeated entities far outside his league by being clever and being willing to undertake bullshit plans that shouldn't have a chance at succeeding.
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While not discounting Anansi - but as Divine Spirit he would need a FSN Face container.. Shinji-face?

But Arachne, in one version of the myth, was better weaver than Athena and was made to weave for eternity - as a spider. This is too something that would resonate with Taylor, i would say.
 
Stahor said:
While not discounting Anansi - but as Divine Spirit he would need a FSN Face container.. Shinji-face?
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It depends. All the Divine Spirits we saw taking a human host were Deities of some metaphisical weight and that also used the Seven Main Classes, but then we had others that loopholed the hell out of it using the Extra Classes that seems to let them 'act' and manifest without having to take a Grail War-connected Host.
 
To be honest, this last chapter felt kinda useless. The whole first half of the chapter was spent discussing Jalter, which we already knew about, and coming to the same conclusion as last chapter: let's do nothing and wait.
The second part at least had some Taylor and Marie interaction, though even this part was focused on something that could be easily understood from the precedent chapter, about Taylor's karmic debt being too high to send her to help Ritsuka.

It just feels like these last two chapters could have been just one chapter, and it's not the first time I feel like this about this story, which is a pity.

I really like this story, but having to wait for a chapter only to get a nothing-burger can get quite frustrating. I might honestly just wait until chapter 120 is out at this point...
 
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MWKillKenny84 said:
It depends. All the Divine Spirits we saw taking a human host were Deities of some metaphisical weight and that also used the Seven Main Classes, but then we had others that loopholed the hell out of it using the Extra Classes that seems to let them 'act' and manifest without having to take a Grail War-connected Host.
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Or they were the Gorgon family or a meso-american deity.
 
Formerly said:
Or they were the Gorgon family or a meso-american deity.
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Those too, even if as far as I remember from my old high school mythology lessons the Gorgon Sisters have been slotted all together in the Monster classification, as far as Mass Media are concerned (so they have Divinity so reduced that Divine Spirits' restrictions do not apply anymore).
 
Tezcatlipoca far as I recall cheated by creating his own custom human vessel, but there isn't anything preventing him from doing that again far as I'm aware, if that wasn't a Lostbelt only thing.
 
MWKillKenny84 said:
Those too, even if as far as I remember from my old high school mythology lessons the Gorgon Sisters have been slotted all together in the Monster classification, as far as Mass Media are concerned (so they have Divinity so reduced that Divine Spirits' restrictions do not apply anymore).
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Euryale and Stheno are officially stated as being so weak normally that summoning them as Servants actually makes them MORE powerful than they originally were.
The Void said:
Tezcatlipoca far as I recall cheated by creating his own custom human vessel, but there isn't anything preventing him from doing that again far as I'm aware, if that wasn't a Lostbelt only thing.
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Not a LB only thing, that's definitely part of his Authority. He can do so whenever he wants, in whatever timeline he wants.
 
Pinklestia said:
Since Taylor won't be a Servant, what class would QA in Taylor's body be?
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Isiri Pudireach said:
Either Foreigner or Alter Ego.
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If you were to assume QA could be a servant then considering the whole QA ended up in control of Taylor's body but thought she was actually Taylor thing Berserker or from what I've heard about it Pretender also work. There is also a hypothetical Beast possibility from before Taylor managed to talk her down from going through with her plan to stop things getting messed up again by controlling everyone.
 
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