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My Life as a Teenage Juggernaut... (Worm AU x Marvel)

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I haven't read Tower of Babel. But the storyline's cropped up numerous times over the last 25 years. For animation, Justice League TAS, Beware The Batman, The Batman, and even Batman: The Brave and the Bold had storylines using the concept of villains steal Batman's plans to defeat the JLA (or is actually an evil Batman), and use said plans on the Justice League. It's cropped up multiple times in the comics too. Tower of Babel is just one example, but Maxwell Lord also did something similar. Interestingly, the plans on how to defeat each Justice League member remain pretty much the same. Animated shows may or may not change the plan for Martian Manhunter to something less immediately fatal, of course. The plans for Flash and Superman though are laughable. Remember, the plan for Superman isn't to make him unable to act because his senses are too strong, but because He is too strong to control his strength. But if Superman has turned evil, would he really care about controlling his strength enough to not kill? And so you keep Flash from slowing down. That will defeat Flash, eventually. But it'll take days to do so, and if Flash literally can't slow down, he's going to defeat you quite soundly anyway.

There was a Flash storyline in the mid 2000's where a woman sues Flash (Wally West, not Barry Allan) for injuries suffered during one of Flash's battles with his rogues. Initially, Wally is dismissive, till he sees how badly she's scarred from the battle. At which point Wally isn't seen for a week or so, but all crime in Central City just stops. Why? Because Flash is figuritively running himself into the ground by moving at his top speed (at the time mach 3 or 4) and not slowing down, stopping any and all crimes the second they start. And he keeps doing this until he quite literally collapses in exhaustion, as I understand it. That's just one of several storylines which made me realize that while the character is fun, his stories get boring because he's just too fast to be legitimately challenged. The final straw to me was when in one issue he literally runs across the street, grabs Mirror Master, and returns to his starting position in time for Mirror Master to be hit by the laser he had just fired at Flash. Flash ran across the street and back moving faster then the speed of light. If he can do that, how do you actually challenge him?
 
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jmcdavid said:
Loss of friction
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Fun fact, in the issue that Captain Cold first appears in, the cold gun was pretty much an accident. He was trying to make something different after reading a science magazine theorizing how to slow down the Flash using "cyclotron energy". He initially gets away by creating an ice patch under Flash, which Flash just runs in place on while Snart escapes. Round two involves cold induced illusions of various objects encircling and closing in on Flash after Snart experiments with putting liquid nitrogen in his accidental cold gun. Which almost works due to Flash starting to exhaust himself before realizing the bizarre threats that keep materializing are illusions.

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The "too powerful to realistically be challenged" thing is also why I don't read Superman comics, even though I like the character. Or Wonder Woman comics despite liking Wonder Woman. Actually, most DC heroes suffer from being too strong to be realistically challenged.
 
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FaerieKnight79 said:
The "too powerful to realistically be challenged" thing is also why I don't read Superman comics, even though I like the character. Or Wonder Woman comics despite liking Wonder Woman. Actually, most DC heroes suffer from being too strong to be realistically challenged.
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Those characters suffer from, in all honesty, poor writers (or directors!) picking trying their hand at it because "writing for Superman or the Flash should be easy...I've totally seen others do it" and then realizing that, no, writing a good story for a powerful character is actually harder than writing one for a weaker character.

It's how you end up with a lot of Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash etc. garbage comics and movies, as those writers fumble around and try to throw in gimmicks and choreograph stupid flashy fights. Meanwhile, for a lot of those characters that are 'nigh gods', it isn't so much the fight but everything around the battles that makes the actual story, especially their personal internal struggles. The actual punchy battles for the big DC characters should really be just a single point along the entire storyboard and not the focus.
 
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Stories for characters like the Flash and Superman should honestly revolve around their interpersonal relationships, characterization and personal struggles, with the fights being set dressing and for catharsis rather than because they're "challenging" them
 
Barghest Blue said:
Stories for characters like the Flash and Superman should honestly revolve around their interpersonal relationships, characterization and personal struggles, with the fights being set dressing and for catharsis rather than because they're "challenging" them
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Couple of things. One, you need to be wearing your industrial-strength suspenders of disbelief while reading comic books. Two, these stories are (modern day) mythology, akin to Greek myths, or such.

In summary? They're held to different standards of credibility/storytelling, than other fiction. And, they're not served well by writers that don't understand that the interaction with 'normal mortals' is where their 'meat' is.
 
The fact that DC comics has never really had hard and fast rules for what their big heroes can do doesn't help either. Just how strong is Superman? Eh, it varies. Sometimes he can rearrange solar systems, others he might struggle to lift a fully loaded airliner. How fast is the Flash? Eh, it varies based on what the writers feel would be "cool" at the time. He might be able to hit mach 1 or 2, or travel at a large fraction of the speed of light, or at the speed of light. Sometimes if he goes too fast he'll slip between dimensions or travel through time by accident. Other times going too fast might merge him with the "Speed Force" permanently. So how fast is "too fast"? It again varies. You get the idea.
 
jmcdavid said:
Yeah...speedsters only have two real weaknesses: Loss of friction and bad writing.
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I believe you may have meant traction.

Saul Erdel, in the Batman Elseworlds tale Batman: Holy Terror (set in a world whose development was derailed horrifically by Oliver Cromwell surviving his malaria attack and ruling another ten years) was a researcher into the anomalous. The ones who would be metahumans in the mainstream of DC died or faced inhumane study, Barry Allen being a prime example. While cells beside his contained folks who had hideous near-misses of his speed (a mind locked at insane speed with a body going at baseline, an elderly child doomed to die in a week or so as his aging was also insanely fast) Barry faced a hideous doom as Saul had devised a way to restore friction to Barry and cause him to burn to death when he ran to attack Erdel.
 
BlazeStryker said:
I believe you may have meant traction.

Saul Erdel, in the Batman Elseworlds tale Batman: Holy Terror (set in a world whose development was derailed horrifically by Oliver Cromwell surviving his malaria attack and ruling another ten years) was a researcher into the anomalous. The ones who would be metahumans in the mainstream of DC died or faced inhumane study, Barry Allen being a prime example. While cells beside his contained folks who had hideous near-misses of his speed (a mind locked at insane speed with a body going at baseline, an elderly child doomed to die in a week or so as his aging was also insanely fast) Barry faced a hideous doom as Saul had devised a way to restore friction to Barry and cause him to burn to death when he ran to attack Erdel.
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The resulting fireball should have also ended Saul. Along with any and everyone else in the area.
 
PhoebusArtemis said:
If you go by Taylor's thoughts in the epilogue, what Contessa did was disable her temporarily and have someone else turn off her powers (The Slug is the only one who could do that canonically, though Panacea might be able to as well given more time to learn how) and have her healed up by either Bonesaw or Panacea. Also, remember that it's established that messing with the connection between the shard and the parahuman in any way causes fluctuations and/or changes in the power, but does not negate the power completely - unless, of course, that is what the parahuman's power is designed to do.
Here are my thoughts on the matter:
Consider that it wouldn't fit with how Worm works: bad things happen, then even worse things. The characters do not get 'happy' or 'good' endings; they will inevitably mess up their own lives and die. Because that's somehow more real? than people living out their lives in peace.
Just saying that it's more likely that Taylor's epilogue represents her afterlife.


I won't say any more on this as it's off topic.
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Something that came to mind only this morning that is relevant: For all that we know the probable and even improbable results of shooting somebody in the head, recall that the first lobotomy was an accident. I forget whether it was a factory or mine, but a worker had the bridge to his frontal lobes destroyed by a rod that shot up into his head. It's still implausible, and poor writing, but events like that are why you can't absolutely rule out a lot of things authors contrive. That's the meaning behind "truth is stranger than fiction"; it's not that we can't think up even weirder stuff, it's that the reflex to call *bovine* in fiction runs into, "yeah, I know, but it actually happened."
 
The Elseworlds story lines are often variations on the What If...? stories - here's why canon is the best route possible. Red Son, for example, where Batman becomes a murderous terrorist in order to stop (and failing to) whatever the hell they named Kal in that one. (To really drive the point home in Marvel, there was one What If...? story about what would have happened if Jean hadn't died and had kept the Phoenix power. (This was before Roger Stern and John Byrne wrote that story to specifically fuck with Claremont - source is that Roger told me and my first wife that one of the times we visiting him and Carmela.) The story ended with her arguing with the group after she went off again, and in horror at the killings she was doing, she ended up consuming the entire universe to try to kill herself.)

The Injustice (seemingly never ending) story line - you guys want Superman to start killing? Okay! Look how fucked the world is because of it!
 
Injustice: Gods Among Us was a decent game. I'm not very good at it, but it's decent. And it's setup for why Superman goes off the rails was very plausible. Why the rest of the Justice League, including Batman, then followed suit is beyond me though. I mean, when Harley Quin and Lex Luthor are the world's premiere good guy, and they are insane (still) or megalomaniac... The "magic" pills that make even a normal human physically strong and durable enough to go toe to toe with Superman or Wonder Woman and potentially win though...
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
The resulting fireball should have also ended Saul. Along with any and everyone else in the area.
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There are very good reasons for saying that The Flash (Barry Allan) is not doing his speed bit in normal space-time. If you look at the issue a bit sideways, he's in another dimension, which casts an image of him into space-time, and he can interact with normal space-time in a limited way (extracting air, and exhaling, into it, for example). So, no fusion caused by him moving around, no friction issues.

Interfering with the dimensional interface, either dumps him back in reality, with no speed effects, or isolates him, maybe a bit like the Phantom Zone (see 'Superman'). Most drastically, he'd be lost in the infinite dimensions, not just in Time. The Atom arguably is also using a dimensional trick, as are Growth supers.

You could make a good case Taylor in this story is using a dimensional trick, and her human body is 'elsewhere', though strongly connected to her Juggernaut manifestation. This would be the neatest/simplest way for a certain god to do this - getting him to admit this... not very likely.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
The "magic" pills that make even a normal human physically strong and durable enough to go toe to toe with Superman or Wonder Woman and potentially win though...
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These are what is known as a Game Mechanic. Because, let's face it, without some sort of equalizer in a closed arena fighting game with limited move sets any fight that puts DC's top 10% against anyone in the bottom 50% will end with just one attack being made.

It's kind of like in, as an example, Battletech all of the weapons have hilariously short ranges; as one game developer put it if the ranges were realistic then at 30 meters per one inch hex you would need maps the size of a parking lot to cover the ranges of even modern versions of the weapons.

As to the stories, and the problem with overpowered characters, I think they do best when remembering the name of the company is Detective Comics, and focus less on the fighting and more on the investigation and problem solving...
 
Wyrd said:
I forget whether it was a factory or mine, but a worker had the bridge to his frontal lobes destroyed by a rod that shot up into his head.
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More precisely:

Phineas Gage was a construction foreman, working on the excavation-by-blasting of a railroad cutting, and between the prompt trauma and the subsequent heroic medicine when he developed an abscess in the injured area, he lost basically his entire left temporal lobe.
 
A little late to the discussion and mostly skimmed it, but I'd like to point out that a lot of what tinkers do is probably handled by the shard telekineticly aligning things to make things work on a level humans can't precieve. Thinker shards that predict the future probably do something similar to make their predictions come true. Basically the technical term for what Thinkers pull off is labeled Shard Fuckery.
 
Thinkers are supposedly being given information by their shard, which gets it's information from impossibly accurate simulations. Especially true of precogs. The problem with this however has always been that if the entities can simulate reality so perfectly that they can account for everything and predict exactly what will happen... Why the hell are they even bothering with their insane quest for infinite food and infinite space on a single planet? Their simulations should be able to predict that this goal is not actually possible. Even more, they wouldn't need to actually run the moronic experiment to get the data from it. They could simulate the experiment, and get all the data that way.
 
Wyrd said:
Something that came to mind only this morning that is relevant: For all that we know the probable and even improbable results of shooting somebody in the head, recall that the first lobotomy was an accident. I forget whether it was a factory or mine, but a worker had the bridge to his frontal lobes destroyed by a rod that shot up into his head. It's still implausible, and poor writing, but events like that are why you can't absolutely rule out a lot of things authors contrive. That's the meaning behind "truth is stranger than fiction"; it's not that we can't think up even weirder stuff, it's that the reflex to call *bovine* in fiction runs into, "yeah, I know, but it actually happened."
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You're talking about Phineas Gage, a fascinating case study, but of only limited application in Taylor's case.


His damage was only to the left front lobe, not two seperate bits passing through the entire brain. That was enough though, to cause a huge personality change, enough that it took more than three years to relearn how to be a civil human being again.

en.m.wikipedia.org

Phineas Gage - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

Is correct, from what I remember from the mention of it in med school, although not as detailed. Note that there are some issues with knowing exactly how much damage he took, as the only way the doctor that worked on him could examine the damage was by physically sticking his finger in the hole; how much damage came from the rod and how much was the doctor's finger is impossible to tell.

I assume the majority was the rod; I hope the doctor in question was not a ham fisted idiot.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
which gets it's information from impossibly accurate simulations. Especially true of precogs.
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Not all of them use simulations, not even all the precogs

The reason they don't use their simulations and ability to just see things (in the present or future) for the answer is because it's not remotely energy efficient, so much so that even if they found the answer, the wouldn't be Abel to act on it

Simply put, it is easier for them to just do the experiment
 
Barghest Blue said:
Not all of them use simulations, not even all the precogs

The reason they don't use their simulations and ability to just see things (in the present or future) for the answer is because it's not remotely energy efficient, so much so that even if they found the answer, the wouldn't be Abel to act on it

Simply put, it is easier for them to just do the experiment
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Whether it is detailed simulation or actual precognition is a hotly debated element of the fandom. Canon says that they are literally looking at the future when designing a three hundred year Path to be followed on Earth, which was disrupted by damage to that Shard when exchanging Shards with Abbadon. That process of working up the full 300 year Path cost the equivalent of turning several stellar masses into pure energy to fuel, though a large percentage of that cost is likely an exponential increase in energy requirements the further out you look. Contessa can run Paths so readily because she's rarely looking more than a year ahead, thanks to constantly needing to recalculate around blindspots.

That there are blindspots, though, suggests calculation rather than true precognition, but it could simply mean that all futures where a blindspot would be described are restricted from the output Path as if they were part of the criteria determining what goal the Shard looks for. We simply can't say how a fictional ability in a fictional alternity that is only loosely described really works.
 
Wyrd said:
That there are blindspots, though, suggests calculation rather than true precognition, but it could simply mean that all futures where a blindspot would be described are restricted from the output Path as if they were part of the criteria determining what goal the Shard looks for. We simply can't say how a fictional ability in a fictional alternity that is only loosely described really works.
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The blind spots were a hasty cludge of a patch The Thinker applied as it was being shanked though, so are not an indicator of how the information is being generated.
 
It's common these days to do extensive modeling before running an experiment, in virtually all fields of science, with said experiment verifying the model or providing data as to how it is wrong. That the Entities do something similar is hardly surprising.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
The blind spots were a hasty cludge of a patch The Thinker applied as it was being shanked though, so are not an indicator of how the information is being generated.
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That is part of it, but, the Simurgh, for example, and Dinah, also have blindspots. Triggering causes issues, Endbringers and Eidolon can't be directly predicted (can PtV?), and OCPs are often quoted (though not canon?) as causing problems.

I might mention that this, while arguably interesting, isn't terribly On Topic. Can Taylor be predicted, as her Juggernaut manifestation would credibly be an OCP... Are there any other OCPs in this setting?
 
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