Ah, thanks.
(Overwatch, of course, shows that there's some difference in the roster, leading to the question of how much.)
Well, this is November 2010. We're five months prior to canon. Challenger's alive too, there's plenty of time to get to the canon roster.
Thinking about this, I was at first surprised that there weren't more non-white Official Heroes who joined up for the perks -- but then I realized that there's probably only a relatively narrow range of people with just the right combination of traits to apply.
The really heroic look at the Heroes, look at the Empire 88, and decide that if they have to share a city with the latter, it's not going to be due to the sort of lack of trying practiced by the former. Independent heroes or Officially Villains, depending on what means they're willing to use in pursuit of good ends.
It's not necessarily this strictly ideological, but it's a pretty basic fact that the Protectorate and Wards do much thinner coverage of the poorer areas of the city. They center operations where the money is, and those areas are much whiter. A fair majority of people with any colour to 'em know that if they want to be protecting
their community via superheroism? They gotta do it alone, 'cause the Protectorate will just send them to keep the Boardwalk safe.
Not to say that there aren't a
lot of heroes who focus on 'fuck the Nazis', but you can do that with the Protectorate - the Protectorate doesn't
monofocus the Nazis but it does make pretty persistent efforts on them, it's just a very big problem. Those efforts may be unsatisfactory (regularly are) but it's not something they ignore.
(In my Wormverse there was a bit of a scandal over this last year - the guy that preceded Triumph in Wards leadership, Necromance, quit immediately on graduation and went independent under the name Santa Muerte instead of graduating into the Protectorate. Pr much explicitly because 'I'm Hispanic yo, I have literally never seen a Protectorate hero patrolling the area I live except to meet up with me')
Meanwhile, those interested in personal profit who really don't care about other people getting hurt are liable to decide that paperwork is boring and supervillainy can offer them even bigger and better (by whatever their standards are) perks. Villains.
Tbh supervillainy is mostly for people that either can't hold down a steady job, don't want a boss, or have particular ideological goals. If you want a chonky paycheck, you go corporate. Corporate has both sponsored hero teams and internal stuff - parahuman security, shadowrunners, and the various kinds of operations assistance you can squeeze out from Thinkers. The closest thing to a corporate-sponsored team in Brockton Bay is the capes hired by the Enforcers, but it's just good sense to hire parahuman security in a town where your facilities can get robbed by one of
many violent gangs.
Sometimes the Protectorate does things other than serve at the beck and call of the local wealthy, and even when they do, it might be a
different corporation they're shoeshining for. It's just good sense for corporations in town to have a baseline of their own capes rather than relying on the Protectorate for all of it. (Srsly tho look at the things called out as the Protectorate specifically doing - patrolling the Boardwalk, ride-alongs when armoured cars transfer large amounts of money. Defending the innocent is basically what they have to squeeze in edgewise in between their actual job. Wildbow was accidentally very accurate about law enforcement)
Of course, the ones that want to hurt people? They join the Enforcers. (Not to say that's exclusively the
reason everyone joins the Enforcers. But... well, it isn't a deal-breaker, or they wouldn't have joined) Or the actual police. The Protectorate have gross things like standards and rules that are actually upheld.
That leaves those who want to help others, but not too passionately, who are willing to make moral compromises, but not too much, while at the same time still hewing to pretty much the same view of morality the Protectorate has, greedy but not too greedy, risk averse but not too risk averse, etc. Or who just have some kind of overriding personal circumstances, I suppose. Official Heroes, buy their merch!
I would absolutely accuse the Protectorate as an organization of being a thrall of the wealthy, but I wouldn't be quite that harsh to the membership. Like, fundamentally, people join the Protectorate for the same reasons people join the military and police. They're good at violence, they want to do it in a morally/socially acceptable way (ideally they want to do actual good with that violence but that's not universal, though it is reasonably common), and they like food.
Like, let's not forget, heroing is dangerous work. It's expensive even if it weren't dangerous, costumes and supplies cost money and hospital stays cost all of your money. And it's time-consuming twice-over, both in the time you spend doing it, and the time you spend getting any good at it. Day jobs are also time-consuming. If you don't get paid
for your heroism, you're not doing very much heroism, because you're squeezing it in around capitalism's death grip on your life and the time you need to eat, sleep, and do the other bits of 'living' that keep your soul from disintegrating - social, family time, reading a book, etc.
The path of the independent hero is a really hard one. It's like art, it's this expensive hobby that you're trying to squeeze in around your survival needs and
praying your independent merch and donations get to the point where you can stop working your day job and ever have space to fit in a life.
It's not greed to go Protectorate. They do have a great paycheck but it's fundamentally a matter of taking a paycheck to do good. It's not necessarily perfect good, but you've gotta be pretty extreme to pick perfect good over 'getting to eat, support a family,
and live a life that isn't just devoted to heroing and survival'.
It's just that social stratification creates pretty extreme situations. Ones where the amount of good the Protectorate does
for the people you actually care about is basically zero, and turns that calculation into 'get paycheck
or do good'.
The divide isn't usually this harsh. But Brockton Bay is a very divided, very racialized, very dangerous city. This all sort of feeds in on itself.
The economic divides in BB are titanic. It's basically two cities stapled to one another, a wealthy east coast tech/tourism hub in the south, and a hollowed-out industry town without an industry anymore in the north. This very stark division of wealth factors into
everything about this hellhole.
The poor areas of town are too dangerous to patrol with the Wards, so that's basically a quarter to a third of their manpower/time pool unable to cover those areas. And you need to focus on the wealthy areas, so the Protectorate is booked up for a good fraction of the time covering the goddamn Boardwalk - and to be clear they fucking hate it, but you need Protectorate on hand to take over for Enforcer situations so they don't commit warcrimes, and the wealthy areas A: whine really loudly with a media-amplified screech when things go wrong, and B: pay the funding they need to operate at all. Which damages the organization and its ability to do
anything. They basically cover the poorer areas (where things are actually happening) as much as they can get away with, using the funding the richer areas provided to cover the people actually in need as much as they can without making the wealthy complain about a stubbed toe and withdraw that funding. But with a huge percentage of their personnel unavailable for the task, it ends up being much thinner than they like.
And it's incredibly racialized. There are huge racial tensions and has been an active Nazi insurgency since the 90s, plus various refugee inflows. The refugees have no money, they set up in the Docks where it's cheap. The work is real thin on the ground for minorities, the place has had Nazi flags flying for at least fifteen years, there are many racist business owners comfortable enough in their racism and its acceptability to just not hire brown people, so good luck getting work that'll pay for living in one of the non-hollowed-out areas of town. Oh and the Nazis are running freely through downtown like majestic Nazi gazelles, so maybe it'd be safer to live in the shitty area. This concentrates minorities into the poor side of town even more than already happens in the US.
So you end up with minorities mostly poor, mostly living in the poor areas, unable to get the media megaphones that draw the world's attention to every missing white girl and force the official heroes to focus most of their efforts where those megaphones are shrieking from, and mostly not really considering the Protectorate as something that actually helps people like them.
Which means most of the minorities in BB face that matter of, like, the Protectorate does good for people who are very far away and not very interesting to them, so the only real draw is the paycheck. (Which is sometimes sufficient draw. This f'rex is basically why Dauntless joined - he's got a kid, he cannot in good conscience do independent heroing and expose Addison to that kind of precarity or, for that matter, lack of actual parent ever around. Dauntless
is white, but he's low-income white, the guy literally lived in a trailer park. He knows full well he will never do any good for his neighbourhood or people like him, with the Protectorate. But he'll still do
some good, for someone. And without ruining his son's childhood)
End result does indeed seem likely to be a Protectorate/Wards roster with a noticeably low proportion of minorities. Probably especially noticeably low in Brockton Bay, since I expect the presence of the E88 probably drives the proportion of local minority capes above the national average.
Yeah like. Okay so looking at Boston, as a city that is very nearby and fairly similar in profile to Brockton Bay. It's majority-minority. Non-Hispanic whites were only 47% of the population in 2010. Given that we know Brockton Bay has had some refugee diaspora, it's probably even browner than that. So this is a city that's half-white at most.
Triggers are more frequent in populations more subject to trauma, so the
cape population should be substantially browner by ratio than the general population even in
normal cities in the Americas. This was straight-up explicitly stated, even if Wildbow never bothered to actually back up that statement with actual characters.
And as you note, this is a city with Nazis and extreme racial tensions, including what is basically the IJA as a street gang. Which means an even
higher proportion should be nonwhite.
The Protectorate has seven capes.
One of them is non-white, and Miss Militia is a terrifying bundle of indoctrinated refugee trauma.
The Wards have another seven. Two of those aren't white, and one of them is there under duress and would really rather not be. Aegis is literally the only non-white cape there without the reasons being an
explicit clusterfuck, and that's because we know literally nothing about Aegis or his reasons for anything.
(Also, yeah, the canon-based Worm baseline is, uh.
"So here are our four main black characters! The two nice ones are criminals, thieves robbing people for the money, from a broken, drug-riddled home. The heroic one makes up for it by being a violent thug who was made a cop instead of being sent to prison and, dissatisfied with the amount of police brutality she's allowed to engage in, tortures people for fun in her time off. And then rounding out the quartet, there's our filthy, foul-mouthed, rotten-toothed drug-addicted gang leader who forces drugs on children and runs the least prestigious gang in the city! And over here we have our openly Neo-Nazi gang, which is the most powerful cape organization in the city -- yes, even more than the heroes -- and is run by the city's wealthy, cultured elite... Oh, no, the only other major organizations in the city are a Bond villain out for his own power, and also hinted to be a pedophile, and a Japanese man who can turn into a dragon and runs The Asian Gang, notorious for forcing women into sex slavery. No, there aren't any minority self-defense parahuman-backed groups in Nazitown USA, why do you ask? I guess there's maybe this one minor non-cisgender mercenary villain? But, you know, the Nazis pretty much consistently win or hold their own against everyone except the Bond villain. Who is also white, male, and probably likes little girls, yes."
Well it sure is something.
Point of order, Coil is in fact black. You would never know this from reading Worm, he had to WoG it.
But yeah. And the ratio is just... well, almost every single Important shard that was key to resolving things and saving the world was held by a white girl. Taylor, Amy, Lisa, Dinah, Glaistig Uaine, the only exception is Lily. The vast majority of capes seen onscreen are white, with the exceptions being Grue & Imp, Lily & Parian, the noted Wards/Protectorate, people whose entire thing is their race (ABB represent), and Skidmark. Not the shortest list, but in a cast of this size it's pitiful.
I mean character description is so shallow it is
entirely possible some characters are some variety of non-white. (Kid Win, Velocity, Assault, Armsmaster, and maybe Dauntless are never described in enough detail to impute a race on them, for example. Technically Battery isn't described in that much detail either, but she's a cop's daughter that got a random house inheritance worth 3/4 of a million dollars as money she could spend without getting caught by her family, that's basically 'tell me you're white without saying the word') But that would require you to accept that
Robin Swoyer is a name someone with a hint of melanin in ten generations would have.
And you don't even really see it in the random lists of non-characters. The Leviathan monument basically had this incredibly long list of names taken out of Jane's Whitest Namebook.
Though you can make the Leviathan monument make sense! After all, a significant proportion of those capes were probably locals. Who showed up to a battle to fight on the same side of it as the Empire 88. BB's brown and queer probably just looked at Kaiser sitting in the meetup like he's an actual person and turned right 'round the other way to leave town entirely and let Leviathan have the shithole.
One thing I've liked in the Worm fic by you I've read (though admittedly there's not been much of it) is a more realistic-seeming distribution of parahumans. Because, yeah, even in a city in a setting like modern America that doesn't have a major Neo-Nazi infestation, it is probably not going to be those riding high on the status quo who get powers most frequently.)
I am a white girl so I do have my biases, but yeah I try to remember other colours exist and really should be here in way larger amounts than Wildbow wrote.
(Though I will say, I do see at least some degree of good reason for the Official Heroes to not come down harder on the Empire 88. Namely, they're responsible for protecting the whole city, and that's a lot of targets for reprisals. Going all-out on the Nazis would likely lead to the Nazis going all-out back, and there isn't enough force available to stamp them out quickly enough to prevent them from doing a lot of damage -- and that's if it's only the E88 fighting, when other villain groups, here and elsewhere, might be more comfortable letting the Nazis fester in Brockton Bay than with a Protectorate willing to make that much of an effort to eradicate a gang.
Of course, the caveats are firstly that that's now, and it would have been much easier to stop the E88 from getting so powerful in the first place back when it was just getting started, and secondly that "The E88 might attack people if we try to destroy them" is very cold comfort to the people the E88 is already regularly attacking. Which is quite a few because, you know, Nazis. Basically declared enemies of everyone who isn't a Nazi. It's a long list, and the people on it in Brockton Bay are in fact among those the Heroes are supposed to be defending.)
Well, honestly the reason they don't come down harder on the E88 is much more basic than that.
The E88 has more firepower than they do. I mean, if you band together Protectorate, Wards, and New Wave, then you've got more capes than the E88, but half of those are
actual children. And getting New Wave requires specifically-coordinated operations. E88 probably has more boots on the ground than they do too. PRT combat squads aren't gonna be that many people, and the police aren't exactly any use in an operation
against the Nazis and are mostly already there, white hoods donned (hell, there are probably big steaming hunks of the PRT personnel pool that have sympathies in that direction, even if it's not as bad as the cops).
And on an even more basic level, this is an insurgency. The big set-piece battle between good and evil never happens, you've got sporadic bouts of street violence between patrollers when they actually
find the E88 doing something morally objectionable. They can't just walk up to Medhall and make Kaiser say hello to their little friend, they don't know he's there. They
did basically do that the moment they got a hold of that information - within less than a day of the E88's identities getting released you had mass-scale cape conflict involving approximately everyone vs the Empire, attempted arrests at every point they could manage. (The protagonists promptly complained about it because going to white nationalists' homes to arrest them and get vulnerable children out of their clutches is apparently a bridge too far)
This doesn't mean action doesn't happen! It's not happening
enough, the E88 isn't gone, but that's more the limits of ability than the limits of willingness. Remember, the E88 has a rotating roster. They
regularly lose people, and some of those to the Protectorate. (The arrests are rarely successful, because then the Nazis get into the hands of standard law enforcement to ship them to prison and are
mysteriously rescued by their fellow Nazis with alarming frequency. But the Protectorate is absolutely allowed to shoot lethally under certain circumstances - usually the prevention of imminent loss of life - and their Brockton Bay membership leap on those circumstances with great vigor. The Protectorate finds Nazis
very scary and fears for their lives whenever feasible. You'd think they were regular cops with black teenagers)
But those people they lose get refilled from across the entire USA because Brockton Bay is where white supremacists go on pilgrimage, so the E88 continues to maintain a steady roster.
To be absolutely clear, the ability to kill the Empire in full does exist. The Brockton Bay Protectorate can't do it, but the Protectorate as a whole absolutely can. They basically airdrop the Triumvirate whenever there's a sufficient situation to justify it. In fact Protectorate force concentration is probably a large part of what beat back the various villains that basically ran BB in the 90s - they pretty much had to be dropped in from out of town because BB didn't
have a Protectorate branch except in the wake of that campaign.
They just left when they considered the job done, concentrating the hammers on something higher-priority. Why American law enforcement considered the job done while there was still a violent white supremacist group intact, and possibly completely unharmed from the national Protectorate's presence in town beating back the villains to a manageable size, will be left as an exercise for the reader.
