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post inself)
On the subject of the morality of Taylor's actions throughout Gold Morning, I have several thoughts. Several people have already commented things I agree with regarding the morality of doing something, period, but more importantly than that--I don't think the argument is valid to begin with, if I'm being honest. Partially because any argument about finding a better solution is inherently Doylist in nature, asserting she should have or could have found something she didn't find in the story, but even more pressingly than that, Taylor didn't find a solution in Khepri to begin with, Khepri only allowed her to find the real solution, which was an entire process on its own.
Let's be clear about a few things here, too. Khepri wasn't her first choice, nor was it even the first drastic, out their solution they tried. The first thing they, as in the combined alliance of Those Who Aren't Dead Already, did was open the Birdcage. They let out some of the worst, most dangerous criminals in history and gave them anything they wanted as long as they helped take down Scion. They told String Theory to use the gun she once built to knock the moon out of orbit and scale
up. They gathered their heaviest hitters, made a plan, attacked from range at first to distract him, hit Scion with the biggest gun to ever gun--
Scion went 'How rude; why would you do that?', immediately arrived at their location afterwards, and promptly killed everyone. Round One: Everyone vs. Scion; everyone loses.
Round Two: Eidolon and Glaistig Uaine team up. The two strongest Parahumans in the entire world unite against Scion, and what's more, Eidolon realizes the thing he's been missing and learns how to refuel his power again. He builds himself back up, rising back to heights he hasn't touched in decades, and hits Scion with a forty-eight hit combo of the best tricks he's ever used. They hurt him, get him on the run, and even follow after him in a chase across dimensions--
Scion gets tired of it. Or more, it gets to the point where Scion decides it's more efficient to pay the cost to use his I Win Button rather than continue fighting conventionally, and does so. Eidolon promptly vanishes in a puff of logic (and gore) and Glaistig Uaine runs for her life. The net gain from this fight was realizing that Scion has 'Winning' as a power and can use it if he feels the need. The loss is, uh, Eidolon and most of the people on the oil rig, including a healthy chunk of their heaviest hitters. Taylor gets cut in half, as an aside, but she gets better.
Round Three: The Endbringers. On the sliding scale of Too Crazy vs. Not Crazy Enough, opening the Birdcage had pretty obvious been the latter, because it didn't work. Taylor brings up the idea of recruiting the even worser of the worst, the Endbringers, functionally the heaviest hitters remaining, and they manage to do so, more or less. Taylor and her group recruit the Simurgh--a lot of people forget this, apparently including Wildbow, but a separate group recruited Leviathan, who they don't meet until after he destroys the Elite, but they team up, put down some targets that are causing trouble, and, uh, a wild Scion suddenly appears. He wrecks their shit, fyi. They lose more major players in the process; Gavel dies, Crane dies, anyone who's power does literally anything to Scion dies, because as they quickly learn, he targets and murders the biggest threats on the battlefield first. This turns out to be an ongoing issue with making plans against him; anything that shows any sign of working promptly dies. The Simurgh shows up and hits him with a completely ineffectual air gun, probably for this exact reason, and he smacks her around a bit. He tortures King of Cups, who second triggers, and a pair of Teacher's students allow everyone to see and remember the trigger vision.
It's informative. Not super useful, sadly, because mostly it informed them of the Entity's process, namely that they used precognition to see and counter any potential threats, Scion specifically making himself functionally unbeatable unless he chooses to lose, and they're all basically fucked otherwise. Worsening matters, the portals stopped working, because the Irregulars decided to abandon the fight and fuck with Cauldron, which, hey--you could kill most of Cauldron to applause, but the only guy they actually took out was the one everyone needed, so thanks Irregulars. This leads into...
Round Four: Cauldron's obviously been keeping secrets and the Portal Network has gone down, and Taylor's come to terms with the fact that she's completely useless on the front lines here, so she tells Legend she's going to find Cauldron, figure things out, and hope they have some kind of plan. And she does, amidst the Irregulars and Vegas capes being traitorous fuckwads, and it turns out there
is a plan. It's to throw an army of Parahumans at Scion--an army that Scion murders casually off-screen later this arc, which is unideal, but, hey. There's a backup plan to try and help the scattered remnants of the devastated humanity, if they survive to do so, and a more immediate plan to to take one of the emergency vials they've kept squirreled away and hope it does something. Neither of these plans really work out, sadly, but Taylor asks about second triggers, which Cauldron theoretically has the ability to manufacture, if Contessa's around, which she currently isn't. They can scan for second triggers, too, which Taylor's already had one of, so it's not an option for her anyway. Then Scion shows up and they nearly die, discover Eden, stuff happens, etc.
This leads into Round Five and the point of all this: Khepri. Taylor asks someone to give her brain surgery and see what happens, because they're that deep in the hole and Taylor's pretty damn sure that she's useless in a fight as is, so hey, let's roll the dice. It affects her power, sacrificing her range and control of bugs, but giving her a short range of control of humans, including Parahumans, whatever their form. She weighs her options and soon realizes that her power works through Doormaker's portals, and decides to leverage that to assume Direct Control, and leaves to do so.
And what happens then is why I say the argument on morality is flawed to begin with, because Khepri herself is not the solution, she is just able to
find the solution. See, Taylor tries at first, and let's be fair, she does a good job, but Everyone vs. Scion, Electric Boogaloo, only goes better than the first round because less people die. Again, being fair, a
lot less people die--the casualties under Taylor's control are pretty miraculous, really. I counted them once, and I think less than fifty die under her command? I'd have to find that old post to be sure, and I don't feel like it right now, but Taylor does a great job on that front--but fundamentally speaking, Scion's practically unaffected. They don't hurt him, they
can't hurt him, because no matter what they do, they're taking at best person-sized chunks out of a continent. Like, Scion isn't casually murderizing everyone anymore, which is great, but nothing they do is really hurting him, either. Taylor steals and throws the combined Nuclear arsenals of two hundred Earths at him while locking him in a dimension and he shrugs it off. She builds a gun to hopefully break into his well, trying to do
some damage, and it fails outright. Fighting him is a losing battle no matter how coordinated they are.
The idea that Taylor doing this might have created a hole in their defenses or opened up a critical weak point is ridiculous and irrelevant, because beating him in a battle of force or attrition is completely impossible to begin with, and that's the only plan the defense had. Scion can tear through any defense, work around or ignore any attack, and he has winning as a power if he feels like using it. Taylor at one point hits him with
every ranged attacker she has, minus Foil, and Scion moved slight, and that's it. They cannot fight him, they cannot resist him, they cannot survive him, unless he allows it, because that's how he built the system.
But.
Taylor's four-dimension perspective during the fight--granted by Clairvoyant, her natural senses through her bugs and minions, and countless Thinkers--allows her to make some important observations, many discovered entirely on
accident, and several miracles then allowed her to find a solution.
First and foremost--I'd like to remind everyone that realizing Foil could hurt Scion was an
accident. Because Foil can hurt Scion--or more accurately, open Scion up to a followup that could hurt him--because for that very reason, Scion set his Path to Victory to activate any time she attacks him. This had happened earlier, in a prior fight, where Foil had attacked him, Scion had promptly destroyed the projectile, and immediately attacked Foil right back, which she only survived because Parian picked her up and threw her like a baseball far enough that Taylor wasn't sure she'd survive the fall. She doesn't
look like a weak-point, essentially, because Scion will immediately counter anything she does and if she's in range, kill her, and even if she's not, he hits to devastating effect. But something happens, you see; Taylor attacks him with every ranged Cape she has and he avoids every single hit and counters in a way she can't avoid, killing thirty capes; used it again and he found her; Foil tries to use it later and he blasts her hand. But later, Taylor chooses to remove several people she knows from her control, entirely for emotional reasons, including Foil. After she does, in a moment of desperation, she tries to hit him with everything again, expecting it to fail...and it works.
Taylor knows she didn't add anything to her arsenal--but she'd taken something away and it was Foil.
Another thing she learns is Scion's weakness to emotional attacks. Lisa and Panacea make a fake Entity that gives him hope for a moment, crafting it out of Bastard and Rachel's power, and Scion gets excited for a moment, until he realizes it's a ruse. This sets him up for followup attacks to that weakness, which Taylor also figures out how to exploit by monitoring his reactions to powers--Changers, which she'd originally deemed useless against him, for example. But here's the thing; the fandom likes to portray this as an off-switch for Scion, something that immediately shuts him down--in reality, the fake Entity made Scion so mad he murdered an Endbringer immediately afterwards, and crippled three more to the point they can no longer fight, something the entirety of Parahuman society had literally never done prior to that point; Behemoth at his most damaged was still fine. He then followed after into New York, and according to Ward, where fifty-ish capes died under Taylor's direct control, approximately a third of the army dies between when Doormaker shuts down and Taylor regains effective control via Canary. It pisses him off and no one has a real way to survive that directly.
Another thing Taylor gets is the Gun. The intended purpose for it failed, so she put the Tinkers on autopilot to make something useful out of it--and they made a really big gun. Taylor had no idea this would be useful later, vital even, but hey, it was. And realistically, you also needed Khepri, or something like her, to get you into a position like this, because the biggest issue about gathering information on Scion is that anything that works at all, he immediately kills. To gather information without taking even more losses--and after five days or so, the Parahuman population was down to five thousand, two hundred and twelve parahumans, plus a small handful Taylor hadn't taken--you need some nigh-omniscient portal-making commander, because you cannot survive direct confrontation with Scion unless he lets you go or ignores you. And as a final aside--Glaistig Uaine was ready to interfere to keep Scion alive, all throughout this.
So the solution to Scion, it turns out, is to have someone who can play 5D Chess while simultaneously winning a game of Miracle Bingo. Because Taylor does a good job, a great job, a
phenomenal job as the commander of an army fighting a guy they can't hurt who can wipe they out at will and instantly win at anything he chooses, which is to say only a small number of people dies during a relatively prolonged battle. But even doing all that, the key to winning turns out to be figuring out that Foil is the key, while using her as little as possible because Scion will kill her and/or you if you do; realizing that his vulnerability is attacking him emotionally and coordinating well enough to, uh, survive while doing so; figuring out that certain Changers are a key element in this and bringing them into play in the right time and place, with the understanding that these guys literally can't do a thing to Scion except emotionally and probably know that; have a weapon on hand that can destroy a continent because Foil's Sting doesn't actually do anything to Scion himself, per se, it just opens the portal to his real body so you can follow up with something if you have it on hand, which is something literally no one knew until it happened with only occurred because of the prior points; see all this and keep your army alive and be able to bring the right pieces into play at the right times, ideally through stuff like portals; and also, make sure Glaistig Uaine doesn't fuck it up at the last second. And if you're missing
any of these things? Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
And Taylor managed
that while going increasingly insane, picking up on the right pieces of evidence, formulating a plan, coordinating the right people, and adjusting to unknowns and changing circumstances on the fly--but at no point did Taylor smirk and go 'All according to keikau!' Taylor was not a brilliant mastermind throughout Gold Morning, she was constantly scrambling to get by and survive. Scion has her in his clutches at one point, even, and is planning to kill her friends to torment her, and it's only the emotional decision she made to remove Foil from her control that allows her to survive there at all, but all through out the fight, Scion
looms, he is steps behind her as she runs, he crushes her attempts on by one, he's furious and getting closer at every moment.
Under those circumstances, Taylor did a better job than anyone's ever done at anything, even putting aside the amount of luck it took. Keeping as many people as she did alive, juggling and responding to circumstances, gathering information, etc.; she did great, and it's silly to say something like 'she should have done better' or 'she should have found another way.' It's a miracle she found the solution she did, and she only found it about two-thirds through an ongoing battle with a god. The longer Scion was active, the more people died, and they already down to five thousand Parahumans by the time she started this plan, with Taylor watching a video of Scion killing an army and crippling Khonsu on the fight over, having recently fought through Cauldron's base, having had her arm crushed by Sveta, and then having Lung burn it off. And she did this while going crazy. In need everyone to remember that the immediate after math to killing Scion wasn't applause, it was
silence, as everyone filed slowly back in, waiting and struggling to believe they really, actually won.
A big theme of this story is cribbed from Persona 3, in a way, more specifically the Kirijou Group's motto that 'Two in Harmony Surpasses One in Perfection.' But I think in this particular case, it's important to remember is another saying; done is better than perfect. It was day five of the Apocalypse and Parahumans had been cut down from a population measures in hundreds of thousands to thousands, with Mankind having been culled to a similar extent, which was on-going with every moment that passed. Literally no one had a plan that they had any idea would work and based on what Taylor found, they were three to five major revelations away from one, and the only way to find or test those methods involved fighting Scion and being anally devastated in the process. Taylor made those discoveries and closed the knowledge gap to formulate a workable plan and then executed it in, what, an hour or so? Less?
She did a ridiculously good job and the complaint that she didn't do better is ridiculous. Short of praying to Jesus and having him come down to do it instead, Taylor already did orders of magnitude better than anyone could reasonably expect from someone in ideal conditions, and she did it while going crazy an hour after having her arm burned off. Could the story have been written differently so that there was a better way or that she found a better solution? Sure, but it wasn't, and by that logic, it could have been written so that she could just make Scion's head explode, too. Under the circumstances that actually existed, she did incredibly.
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