Arc 2 is now fully edited, which actually
was mostly on the order of getting comma placement right.
I've occasionally wondered if Johnson's Interlude should've gone
before Taylor being jumped, but I don't feel like jumping through the hoops that would be involved in making that happen and I can't help but suspect that for people reading at
this point it wouldn't change much. I dunno, maybe I'll come back to this possibility later.
In fairness, the Fallen of Worm weren't the most developed and detailed faction.
Yes, which makes it
impressive that they can't be reconciled. I
should be going 'well, that's not what I would've expected, but it's plausible', since there
is so little to contradict.
Huh, that's exactly where I stalled out. Did you temporarily stall out during the Echidna arc too?
I didn't stall out, no, but it was a close thing, and if my circumstances had been a little different I probably would have.
Why didn't he suit up as soon as he got back, given that he was called home for a cape emergency?
Because 'let's discuss whether we're activating Ascalon now' is a possible cape emergency and doesn't require suiting up, for one.
Ah, so you haven't changed the Trigger. That's a pity; one of my favorite parts of Worm is how mindset/powers/trigger interlace.
Jabberwock's power implies a mentality of hide-from-everyone-kill-discoverers-pretend-to-be-normal-when-observed. Which is a Stranger creed even if ever heard one, albeit one that implies the Monster is her true identity and her human form is camouflage.
The Locker Incident, meanwhile, gives a lot of pressure to distract yourself or else explode. That's quite versatile - I can think of reasonable justifications for almost any rating, with Blaster and Capekiller as the major exceptions - but I feel a Stranger rating would be based on avoiding the insects' notice. If you gave her something like "it was a really bad week for the bullying, and I just needed some space to recover without being interrupted", I think it'd work better for this.
There's three angles I can respond to this from:
Angle the first is that Wildbow has, in WoG, laid out a lot of 'this is how trigger events tend to correlate to powers'... and what he's laid out tells us that the Locker fits
far better to Monster Taylor's power than canon Taylor's power. So I didn't feel like changing the trigger event made sense in this case.
Angle the second is that you're possibly talking about Ward's cape psychology stuff here. If you are, not only was this written well before Ward was first posting, but Ward's cape psychology stuff is
utter bullshit.
Angle the third is that you're just running a novel, unexplained model of power-to-psychology, in which case I probably disagree with your model, but without specifics I couldn't begin to guess why you are using the model you are using or what its details are.
Why is it safer to open the bottles at home? Wouldn't that make it easier to tamper with them?
See exactly what she averted, and extrapolate: this isn't the first time her bottles have been swapped, and pre-opening them gives her a way to notice when such a swap has occurred.
(At one point there was supposed to be an allusion to Taylor's bottles having been swapped with juice from something she's allergic to, but I couldn't figure out how to cram it in organically and then nobody asked so I never mentioned it in the thread)
I might've had an additional thought behind it when I wrote it, but it's been literally years so if so I've forgotten.
I don't think this contradicts the text of Worm directly, but I think it does contradict what Wildbow has said about Heartbreaker on Reddit. Specifically, that if he gets tired of someone he turns them into a suicide bomber. Just to be clear.
I've never heard of that WoG and would've ignored it as 'inane and pointless grimderp that makes no sense' even if I had.
Oh dear. Those seem to have been removed, and I am now horribly curious.
They're not. They're just hidden in the index post, which they always have been.
She's a camouflage Stranger. Why doesn't she have a massive hangup about revealing her true self's powers?
I don't follow this logic at all.
That's oddly specific. Especially given that Taylor knows how much better Arcadia is than Winslow.
... oddly specific for her to hypothesize an imaginary scenario involving one of her primary tormentors, the one who is the more
physical of the two, using a power that had reason to be on Taylor's mind anyway? (Because the trip to Arcadia was kicked off in no small part by reading about Vista's power) How does that track?
Also an odd tangent for this Taylor. She seems like she should've been too self-absorbed to notice how much good or bad the Protectorate is doing. (Also I don't know that she'd be interested in gay rights, given how little it seems to impact her or any of her friends.)
If you're going to have an issue with this, go take it up with Wildbow. That's ripped pretty much straight from canon, with the only meaningful deviation being that Monster Taylor is more openly and explicitly pessimistic about how much good the Protectorate is doing. Canon Taylor explicitly comments on gay rights being helped by Legend coming out
very early in canon.
Monster Taylor has additionally spent a while unable to sleep and routinely staying up late on the computer doing research relevant to caping, so regardless of whether she's 'self-absorbed' or not she's going to have gathered information and formed an opinion based on that information.
(Also there's later stuff in Monster that ambiguously contradicts your belief here)
What's your worry? Not having a firm grasp of the roles involved? Not knowing what format to use? Not having a good enough model of the PRT's institutional priorities?
Writing a believable bureaucracy with realistic internal politics and organic social dynamics interlaced with work dynamics, where most parties involved are acting in more or less good faith.
I'm pretty confident I could easily write a horribly corrupt bureaucracy, and I could probably pull off a 'work to rule strike only this is just how
everyone operates' bureaucracy more or less fine, but one where the people involved are decent human beings who have friends at the office and whatnot? That's not happening. I have no personal experience with such an environment, and I don't have the mentality to readily hypothesize a model. (The idea of making friends with people who you're working with is just
bizarre to me)
... it does occur to me I might be able to pull off writing the Vegas PRT office acceptably well, put like that. Hm. Gives some context on why I've considered the story heading to Vegas on and off for ages.
I read that as them being desperate rather than overconfident. They knew there'd be serious backlash, but they were worried that letting an official villain be the city's emergency-services-in-all-but-name would be worse.
That's... exactly what I'm saying in the part you're quoting. Them breaking the rules is a big deal, an indication of how important it is to them to bring down Skitter.
