Easy watch for me. Thanks for the chapters so far OP, your other Monster stories are very good.
The Wild Hunt
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
A consistent theme with Piggot (and PRT for that matter), is the toxic as fuck view that the system does not fail only people fail the system. You can see this in the various post-incident debriefings which are "find someone to blame and be the scapegoat". A "blameless postmortem" is an incredibly important technique for understanding how a system fails.
I've been a IT corporate worker for nearly 2 decades, and close RL friends with a number of teachers and how we see Piggot handling various interactions with Wards (and most of her canon parahuman interactions tbh) is just fucking yikes.
IMO, people don't write Piggot (or Tagg) as their canon personas as it is the corporate equivalent of an insane saturday morning cartoon villain that is challenging to fit into a serious (or crack) fic without 10s of thousands of words of padding between appearances.
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Back in Monster, I wrote Battery as getting two weeks off when Assault died. I don't think I explicitly said 'and she got therapy', but I've certainly already written the PRT/P as a bit less of a heartless meatgrinder than canon/WoG presents them as being.
Oh, absolutely, I just tend to take the view that people are to a notable extent a product of the systems they exist in. So on my first read, I took Piggot's toxic behavior as representative of what PRT/P culture was like in general -and having Tagg show up and be much worse seemed to support this- where a good chunk of The Point was to illustrate to us why Villains are so common in Earth Bet and all. After all, if you have your primary law enforcement agency for dealing with superpowered people start from assigning blame and punishing whoever was 'at fault', then is it any surprise that people like Rachel get pigeonholed into surviving off superpowered crime, the authorities having written her off as a murderer who cannot be reformed? It's the same thing, just pointed outward instead of internally. ("Somebody died. You did it! Your fault! All blame goes to you! 'Mitigating circumstances'? Sounds like an excuse to me. 'It was an accident'? Sure, and I have beachfront property in Nevada to sell you.")
Which is to say I viewed Piggot pretty negatively, but placed the largest portion of the blame on the systems she exists in, that The Fix would be overhauling Bet America's culture, not firing Piggot and replacing her with someone else. (Because my assumption was that they'd have much the same thoughts, and if they were any better it would probably be only somewhat so)
Though of course at this point I now know this was accidental brilliance, where Wildbow does not in any way intend any such thing and genuinely wants us to view various highly toxic Heroes as, well, heroic, rather than their toxicity being toxic and this toxicity being a big part of what makes Earth Bet such an awful place.
sigh
tbh I think part of the problem is a lot of people kind of... low-key buying into the propaganda? There's a lot of alt-power Taylor fics out there where Taylor goes to the Wards, this leads to Sophia being outed, and Piggot sides with Taylor and Everything Is Better Forever because in this timeline Taylor became one of the superpowered police oppressors instead of being screwed by those assholes.
And so part and parcel of that is then writing Piggot as a force for justice whose support is a good thing...
... but then these writers aren't quite so horrifying as to actually legitimately think canon Piggot's horrendous actions are heroic good guy actions, so cramming Piggot into this role as a force for good inevitably means downplaying or straight-up removing some of her worst moments. ie not writing canon Piggot.
I suspect a lot of Wormfic dying as early as it does is the dissonance creeping in. They start from the premise that obviously things would be So Much Better if Taylor became a Hero, because of course Heroes are good guys and all, but in actually writing they become bothered by how that's really not true, and not just that Sophia and Armsmaster are jerks, but that the system is simply rotten. My impression is that most writers walking into this don't realize all this quite so explicitly, either; they just lose motivation without any ability to tell a hypothetical asker why the motivation vanished.
Whereas I've never seriously considered writing a fanfic where Taylor goes directly into the Wards. Part of this is just dreading the writing needs of attaching her to a bureaucracy, but mostly it's because I strongly feel that canon Taylor, if she'd ended up put pretty directly into the Wards (Rather than spending a while as a supervillain first), would've become a straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly reprehensible person, all while telling herself she's a good and heroic person making the world a better place by judgmentally assuming every non-Hero cape is a sinister villain who should be put down or jailed ASAP for the good of all. After all, she already has the judgmentalism down pat at the story's start, and it's only events nearly forcing her to get personal interaction with Villain kids and ending up labeled a Villain herself that gets her to consider that maybe the government-applied labels aren't always 100% correct. A Taylor who never had reality seriously challenge her biased, simplistic viewpoint would probably stick to it to the death, and the PRT/P is all about touting the heroicness of Heroes and the vile villainy of Villains.
I don't necessarily mind writing a reprehensible person, of course, but that particular type of reprehensibility is... not my thing. Boring, for one. Banally normal, for two. And for three, I worry that if I wrote it that I'd get a terrifying large number of people going 'I love this heroic good guy Taylor fighting the good fight in good ways!'
Yup.
Too often I've seen people accept that Piggot just hate parahumans and is widely known to but don't see a problem with her being directly in charge of parahumans. It is like being baffled at why a notorious homophobe should probably not be the one organising security for a Pride parade.
Especially in a paramilitary organisation, this is how officers get fragged!
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I'm a bit late to the Watchdog discussion, but I've always kinda thought they spent all their time playing 20 questions on 'did an Ashbeast trigger somewhere in North America today?'.
Because you can't precog trigger events, right? You have to keep checking and rechecking that James Rinke didn't wake up on the Nilbog side of the bed today, and you have to check as often as possible.
The only reason Monster got a minute of their time at all is that they also check up on all the existing S class threats, and when three of them suddenly vanished and they asked why.
Because you can't precog trigger events, right? You have to keep checking and rechecking that James Rinke didn't wake up on the Nilbog side of the bed today, and you have to check as often as possible.
The only reason Monster got a minute of their time at all is that they also check up on all the existing S class threats, and when three of them suddenly vanished and they asked why.
Honestly in a organization like the Prot/PRT you'd expect that therapy would be mandatory, even if only for the capes. That that isn't the case should speak volumes over their priorities and overall competence. (Can't recall if the constantly swapping of therapists was fanon or canon so won't beat that particular dead horse.)
Canon, with a reasoning that shows that the ruling was made by someone who doesn't know how therapy works (in universe or not, it doesn't matter).
Said reasoning being that a therapist could abuse the trust they get to influence a ward into doing something bad. (With strong implications that is happened)
Which, huh, duh, you are supposed to trust your therapist, that's the whole point, the solution to that problem isn't to remove the ability to trust, it's to make sure your therapists are trustworthy.
Then again, this entire discussion already said several times that the PRT wasn't able to do even the bare minimum when it comes to vetting anyone.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I feel about the way that the Wards are portrayed as child soldiers. I much prefer if that's an institutional failure, rather than something that's just a personal moral deficiency on Piggot's part. Especially because we do see Wards getting sent to fight extremely deadly threats like Endbringers, Echidna, or the Slaughterhouse Nine, and not just the local Wards- they're actually getting called in from across the country, so it can't be just a Brockton Bay issue. Which would also be really strange if the use of parahuman child soldiers hasn't been normalized, because the PRT is supposedly obsessed with PR, and dead children make for extremely bad PR. The idea that Wards generally don't fight much, or at most are only involved in low threat engagements, would more or less make sense taken in isolation, but what we're actually shown in the text is the exact opposite. Not to mention that when we get to see Weld and Lily's perspective, they're surprised by how bad Brockton Bay is, but not that they're expected to be getting sent into combat.
It's also weird to me that Wildbow would walk back one of the more dystopian elements of the setting at the same time that the emphasis is increasingly shifting from "our world but with capes" to "society is actually on the verge of collapse."
Of course, the way that most fanfics tackle this somehow manages to be even worse, because the fandom seems to have largely settled on the position of "The PRT are big meanies with their dumb rules and regulations that prevent the Wards from being child soldiers 24/7, which is totally okay because they really want to be child soldiers."
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Gonna try to get to uploading stuff to Archive of Our Own today, partly because I finally had a 'series' name I actually like come to mind: Those Who Hunt Monsters. It has layers!
Yeah, that's always weird to see. Papering over Piggot's many canon moments of being awful but leaving in the 'hates parahumans' thing and acting like that's not a big problem in context is... confusing. Sure, maybe Fanon Non-Awful Piggot could be a decent leader of a regular police station or something, but fanfic isn't foisting her off into a context where this bias has less relevance!
Which actually reminds me that one of the big things I took as intentional 'this world is shitty' was the notion that the PRT is notably made of ex-military folks. This is all that 'militarization of the police' sort of stuff that people tend to bring up as This Is Very Concerning Of A Trend, where a law enforcement agency is literally behaving like a military organization to the point of prioritizing actual soldiers for recruitment, but I guess Wildbow doesn't actually intend that to be a concerning aspect of the PRT??
What we're actually told of Watchdog is that their primary duties are supposed to be fighting intel wars against parahumans exploiting the stock market and whatnot. I... mostly ignore this since canon has multiple people game the system without Watchdog doing a damn thing, while actual depictions and direct examples of Things Watchdog Has Done skew heavily toward things like 'Watchdog, I just found a horrible monster, please tell me whether I should be concerned enough to authorize things like missile strikes inside this city to kill it'.
I do kind of like your interpretation. Not enough to run with it in this series, but it might fit nicely to one of my other projects.
It is canonically mandatory. It's just apparently mandatory in the same sort of way that New York City still has a law on the books about walking in front of your car, ringing a bell, to avoid spooking the horses; ie a rule that isn't enforced all that much.
In practice it seems like the mandatory therapy mostly actually occurs in cases where the authorities are deeply worried this particular cape is an imminently murderous problem and they'd like that time bomb defused before the murders start actually happening.
I have no idea if that impression is what Wildbow intended to give the audience, but it's how I end up reading canon. (Ward, I should perhaps note, does absolutely nothing to deviate from this impression, even while it puts a lot more attention on therapy stuff)
I basically read Wildbow's claims that Brockton Bay Is An Exception as a poorly-thought-out attempt to justify why Taylor, when she becomes Weaver, spends so much time being frustrated by being made to do things she finds totally inane when she wants them to have her go out and fuck up bad guys. (There is a reason this is Monster!Taylor's preferred modus operandi)
I've commented before that Taylor going Weaver made it much harder for me to take the story seriously from then on forth because the world magically changed to be completely different from what it was shown to be up to that point, with the only consistently common ground being that both versions of the world agree on 'fuck Taylor', and this jarring change in how Wards ostensibly fit into the system is one of many such examples.
Sort of?
Young adult novels and adjacent spaces are often strange if taken literally, and their fans kind of insane if also taken literally, because young adults have a pretty widespread desire to be Taken Seriously And Treated Like An Adult and this drives a lot of the writing and reader response. A sixteen-year-old Wormfic writer wanting Vista to be taken seriously as the cool badass (12-year-old) she apparently is, identifying with Missy's frustration at being babied by everyone when she's already a competent Hero and would frankly probably like to be emancipated and not have to deal with her parents anymore, isn't really trying to argue that child soldiers are cool and fine and we should be very angry at the adults for not sending the child soldiers into combat more aggressively. They're externalizing their own frustration at being treated as a useless baby who doesn't know anything by idiots who don't actually know better on the current topic regardless of having been alive on planet Earth for some extra years.
Worm is fundamentally a young adult novel, and its readers largely respond to it appropriately. (Regardless of the given age and whatnot of a given reader; just because it's been a decade since one was last talked down to by an asshole because one was a teen at the time doesn't mean you're not still mad about that, nor does it necessarily mean this shit has stopped being done to you. A twenty-five-year-old can be talked down to by a thirty-year-old just as readily as a fifteen-year-old can be talked down to by a 20-year-old) Only rarely is Wormfic trying to engage with the characters and their world like Wards are basically superpowered child soldiers exploited by their government; instead they are written like Ward!Taylor and Sophia are regular real people who intern at the same job part-time in high school, where said job is some real-life office job or something.
I personally can't enjoy any of that as a story for several reasons, but I don't interpret such fanfics as meaningfully making the gross argument you're presenting them as making. It's too obvious that almost none of them are engaging with the setting with that degree of literalism.
Yeah, that's always weird to see. Papering over Piggot's many canon moments of being awful but leaving in the 'hates parahumans' thing and acting like that's not a big problem in context is... confusing. Sure, maybe Fanon Non-Awful Piggot could be a decent leader of a regular police station or something, but fanfic isn't foisting her off into a context where this bias has less relevance!
Which actually reminds me that one of the big things I took as intentional 'this world is shitty' was the notion that the PRT is notably made of ex-military folks. This is all that 'militarization of the police' sort of stuff that people tend to bring up as This Is Very Concerning Of A Trend, where a law enforcement agency is literally behaving like a military organization to the point of prioritizing actual soldiers for recruitment, but I guess Wildbow doesn't actually intend that to be a concerning aspect of the PRT??
What we're actually told of Watchdog is that their primary duties are supposed to be fighting intel wars against parahumans exploiting the stock market and whatnot. I... mostly ignore this since canon has multiple people game the system without Watchdog doing a damn thing, while actual depictions and direct examples of Things Watchdog Has Done skew heavily toward things like 'Watchdog, I just found a horrible monster, please tell me whether I should be concerned enough to authorize things like missile strikes inside this city to kill it'.
I do kind of like your interpretation. Not enough to run with it in this series, but it might fit nicely to one of my other projects.
It is canonically mandatory. It's just apparently mandatory in the same sort of way that New York City still has a law on the books about walking in front of your car, ringing a bell, to avoid spooking the horses; ie a rule that isn't enforced all that much.
In practice it seems like the mandatory therapy mostly actually occurs in cases where the authorities are deeply worried this particular cape is an imminently murderous problem and they'd like that time bomb defused before the murders start actually happening.
I have no idea if that impression is what Wildbow intended to give the audience, but it's how I end up reading canon. (Ward, I should perhaps note, does absolutely nothing to deviate from this impression, even while it puts a lot more attention on therapy stuff)
I basically read Wildbow's claims that Brockton Bay Is An Exception as a poorly-thought-out attempt to justify why Taylor, when she becomes Weaver, spends so much time being frustrated by being made to do things she finds totally inane when she wants them to have her go out and fuck up bad guys. (There is a reason this is Monster!Taylor's preferred modus operandi)
I've commented before that Taylor going Weaver made it much harder for me to take the story seriously from then on forth because the world magically changed to be completely different from what it was shown to be up to that point, with the only consistently common ground being that both versions of the world agree on 'fuck Taylor', and this jarring change in how Wards ostensibly fit into the system is one of many such examples.
Sort of?
Young adult novels and adjacent spaces are often strange if taken literally, and their fans kind of insane if also taken literally, because young adults have a pretty widespread desire to be Taken Seriously And Treated Like An Adult and this drives a lot of the writing and reader response. A sixteen-year-old Wormfic writer wanting Vista to be taken seriously as the cool badass (12-year-old) she apparently is, identifying with Missy's frustration at being babied by everyone when she's already a competent Hero and would frankly probably like to be emancipated and not have to deal with her parents anymore, isn't really trying to argue that child soldiers are cool and fine and we should be very angry at the adults for not sending the child soldiers into combat more aggressively. They're externalizing their own frustration at being treated as a useless baby who doesn't know anything by idiots who don't actually know better on the current topic regardless of having been alive on planet Earth for some extra years.
Worm is fundamentally a young adult novel, and its readers largely respond to it appropriately. (Regardless of the given age and whatnot of a given reader; just because it's been a decade since one was last talked down to by an asshole because one was a teen at the time doesn't mean you're not still mad about that, nor does it necessarily mean this shit has stopped being done to you. A twenty-five-year-old can be talked down to by a thirty-year-old just as readily as a fifteen-year-old can be talked down to by a 20-year-old) Only rarely is Wormfic trying to engage with the characters and their world like Wards are basically superpowered child soldiers exploited by their government; instead they are written like Ward!Taylor and Sophia are regular real people who intern at the same job part-time in high school, where said job is some real-life office job or something.
I personally can't enjoy any of that as a story for several reasons, but I don't interpret such fanfics as meaningfully making the gross argument you're presenting them as making. It's too obvious that almost none of them are engaging with the setting with that degree of literalism.
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There is a big difference between the PRT and police that justifies a degree of militarization I think. The PRT does not simply arrest people in the usual manner of policing. The PRT fights battles, and expects that they are going to lose sometimes.
The police IRL don't really have to have think about questions like "how are we going to win the fights against these gangs?" in the same way that the PRT does.
The default for the police is the criminal surrendering to them, or maybe running away. Combat is a rare scenario for them, while being the default scenario for the PRT.
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I have tentatively tweaked P-Zero-Three, adding...
(Also extremely bizarrely asked him if he was going to repent? Why the hell would you ask that of Jack Slash?)
... this line to the bit where Paige is shown The Video. Because yes, that tidbit merits at least a little attention, even if the Monster Hunters aren't going to pay it a ton of mind because seriously what the hell? (Back in the day, I had readers going 'what the hell?' to that moment!) I don't think I'm going to do further editing of that bit -for one thing, the topic per se might come up organically in the following chapters- but we'll see.
I've also done the Archive of Our Own posting I said I would, and as a bonus finally got started on getting relevant omake and whatnot uploaded to it. (I'll probably be porting some of my quote-response things to there as well in some form; I've always felt it was a shame that the 'Imma stab you now' Jack Slash conversational bit isn't very findable and all, for example)
Yes, but in my first read of Worm, my interpretation of things was that we're meant to take that fact as itself substantially a product of hostile mismanagement by the authorities. Like, when we get the 'Rogue' term coming up, we get a mini-history lesson about how it was selected because at the time the assumption was that if you're not a Hero, then you're a bad guy. There's this overall vibe in Worm that parahumans trend heavily toward being combative jerks because the authorities start from the assumption that people are bad and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I basically imagine Bet America had a lot of moments go roughly thusly:
PRT Officer: Oh god, some lunatic just blew up downtown, and I've been assigned to deal with them. I'm going in with all my armor, and all my gear, and I am firing a warning shot at this nutjob to make it clear that if he fucks with me I'm putting him in the dirt.
Guy who triggered less than an hour ago, doesn't really understand what's going on, didn't use his power intentionally, and is really stressed because of course he is, trigger events require something horrible happened to you: Holy shit! That guy tried to shoot me! For no reason! What the hell?! I'm not gonna let this asshole murder me, I'm fighting back!
PRT Officer: Yep, the lunatic is attacking me immediately. Clearly he'd kill me as soon as look at me. I'm filing this guy under V for Villain. I hope they put a Kill Order on this psychjob.
And thus some random traumatized citizen is forever branded Criminal Scum not because they did anything wrong but because the PRT went in expecting trouble.
So sure, by the time Taylor's story starts gearing up in super SWAT gear, ready to shoot to kill, probably is frequently necessary even if you're not an asshole, but in my interpretation the authorities took actions that directly caused it to be necessary.
(Also extremely bizarrely asked him if he was going to repent? Why the hell would you ask that of Jack Slash?)
... this line to the bit where Paige is shown The Video. Because yes, that tidbit merits at least a little attention, even if the Monster Hunters aren't going to pay it a ton of mind because seriously what the hell? (Back in the day, I had readers going 'what the hell?' to that moment!) I don't think I'm going to do further editing of that bit -for one thing, the topic per se might come up organically in the following chapters- but we'll see.
I've also done the Archive of Our Own posting I said I would, and as a bonus finally got started on getting relevant omake and whatnot uploaded to it. (I'll probably be porting some of my quote-response things to there as well in some form; I've always felt it was a shame that the 'Imma stab you now' Jack Slash conversational bit isn't very findable and all, for example)
Yes, but in my first read of Worm, my interpretation of things was that we're meant to take that fact as itself substantially a product of hostile mismanagement by the authorities. Like, when we get the 'Rogue' term coming up, we get a mini-history lesson about how it was selected because at the time the assumption was that if you're not a Hero, then you're a bad guy. There's this overall vibe in Worm that parahumans trend heavily toward being combative jerks because the authorities start from the assumption that people are bad and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I basically imagine Bet America had a lot of moments go roughly thusly:
PRT Officer: Oh god, some lunatic just blew up downtown, and I've been assigned to deal with them. I'm going in with all my armor, and all my gear, and I am firing a warning shot at this nutjob to make it clear that if he fucks with me I'm putting him in the dirt.
Guy who triggered less than an hour ago, doesn't really understand what's going on, didn't use his power intentionally, and is really stressed because of course he is, trigger events require something horrible happened to you: Holy shit! That guy tried to shoot me! For no reason! What the hell?! I'm not gonna let this asshole murder me, I'm fighting back!
PRT Officer: Yep, the lunatic is attacking me immediately. Clearly he'd kill me as soon as look at me. I'm filing this guy under V for Villain. I hope they put a Kill Order on this psychjob.
And thus some random traumatized citizen is forever branded Criminal Scum not because they did anything wrong but because the PRT went in expecting trouble.
So sure, by the time Taylor's story starts gearing up in super SWAT gear, ready to shoot to kill, probably is frequently necessary even if you're not an asshole, but in my interpretation the authorities took actions that directly caused it to be necessary.
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Really? Rain Man came out in the 80s, and you can say what you want about Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of an "autistic savant" but it was definitely in the culture. An educated adult not knowing the word "autism" in 2011 reads as very strange.
One possible exception here is Carol Dallon, whose paranoia and difficult personality often get dialed up to 11 as part of the Woobiecea package.
Given fanfic's tendency to be lighter and softer than the source material, though, your definitely right about most characters being presented as more reasonable and well-meaning than their canon counterparts.
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I heard of Rain Man several times throughout the 90s, but I only became aware of it ostensibly being a depiction of an autistic man once I was introduced to the concept of autism in general. People not moving in autism-specific circles described the movie as depicting an idiot savant. (It's taken a really, really long time for mainstream conceptualizations of autism to not default to amazingly ugly framing) I was still seeing/hearing this usage up until 2005 or so. It wasn't until 2011 or so that I first saw someone refer to it as a depiction of autism without this being someone with a direct, personal experience with autism.
This is also frankly a really strange benchmark for 'mainstream knownness'. 'There's a movie that depicts it that a lot of people have heard of' can describe literally dozens of different topics that nonetheless spent decades after said movie 'not known to the mainstream'. LGBT-etc stuff, for example, has movies from approaching a century ago that very directly and explicitly are depicting the topic anywhere from 'in passing' to 'kind of in your face', but I have never seen a single person suggest that LGBT-etc stuff was 'mainstream knowledge' until sometime in the last 15 years.
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Man, guess I lived in some weird, enlightened bubble of unusually well-informed people. Learn something new every day.
TheLurker
Random Omnipotent Lazy-As-Fuck Being
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- The space beyond the stars
We had to have an autism presentation in middle school in like… 2012? They put us in a small room and turned it into sensory hell with flashing colored lights and noise and beachballs being thrown everywhere to try and simulate what "everyday life was like". It was the first time the vast majority of the class had ever heard of it.
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I want to add that I also found it strange that a character in 2011 didn't know what autism was.
I'm not saying it's unjustified, but it's the kind of anachronism that a lot of stories set in the past tend to avoid so as to avoid confusing their audience.
I'm not saying it's unjustified, but it's the kind of anachronism that a lot of stories set in the past tend to avoid so as to avoid confusing their audience.
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Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Huh. That's interesting, as sensory hell isn't something I ever experienced as an Asperger's individual. Wasn't fond of loud noises or big crowds, mainly cause of the former, but otherwise social environments weren't distressing to me sensory wise.
TheLurker
Random Omnipotent Lazy-As-Fuck Being
- Location
- The space beyond the stars
It was apparently meant to be a representation of the high end of the spectrum but I get the distinct impression the group organizing the programs wasn't exactly very well informed or high quality themselves. Autism/Aspergers haven't exactly benefited from a wealth of quality organizations representing them. I mean hell Autism Speaks was probably the one that had the most public outreach and that was a nightmare.
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That's not what 'anachronism' means. Having Julius Caesar use his cell phone to dial his homies back in Rome and complain about how his daughter is into some new internet thing he doesn't understand is an anachronism. (Multiple of them, actually) Having people have period-appropriate knowledge is the opposite of an anachronism.
And anyway, nobody knows everything, even Things Everybody Knows are not known by everybody, and Peg is meant to be something like 24~ years old, completed her high school education but did not go to college, and spent most of her adult life as the Villain Black Bishop. She's not meant to be someone moving in the relevant circles; even if I were writing this part as magically set in 2025, I might still have her unaware of what autism is. (I'd probably not have her going 'that doesn't even sound like a word' in that scenario, mind)
... what lunatics thought it would be good for autism awareness to light buildings blue on April Fools day? (I've heard of Autism Speaks before and cringed at them, but somehow their Wikipedia article is even more awful than what I've previously heard of them)
As far as the sensory aspect goes, my own experience would probably be more accurately captured by setting a bunch of students down with a test, and then without explanation or warning have gunshot-loud sounds occur at random stretches intermittently, and when students freak out, have the presiding teacher act like they didn't hear anything and have no idea why the students aren't remaining perfectly focused on their tests.
(This comes with the caveat that I'm not completely convinced this would work with real people. Once, someone blew their nose in a library with such tremendous force that my first thought was literally that I was hearing a gunshot: absolutely no one else in the building reacted at all, not even a brief glance toward the sound. I have no idea how one could have such a complete non-response to something like that short of being literally deaf such that you genuinely don't hear it at all, but apparently that's Normal??)
That's one of the depressing part of Worm and one of the reasons I think no one remembers that the official goal of the PRT is not to stop vilains but to integrate parahumans.
Yes, you read that right, officially the PRT is supposed to be all for Rogues and parahumans not being heros or vilains (whether Cauldron wants it or not is another problem, but the PRT is also Alexandria's brainchild so technically it should be her goal, maybe?).
Except, well, there is no way to be a parahuman and have a business in this world, between the stupid laws and the pressures, from the gangs or the PRT itself, parahumans very quickly ends up in situations were they can't get educated, or don't have time to have a job and be a parahuman, and they better not give a pip they have powers if they want to live normally.
From what little I know of them... you know how some people represent the youth guard in worm as a group of *protect the children* horrible karens who arent' doing it to help the wards in any way but to *feel good about themselves*? (And I'm not talking about the versions that want to stop the wards from being child soldiers there, I am talking about those that don't care if the wards are child soldiers or not as long as they can spin it for good PR. The ones were people have read how Wildbow described them and pointed out that the wards are forced to have better notes and constantly improve them when they're under the PRT, they're not allowed to simply stay at the same level, they're not allowed to have a bad day or year, hell, they not allowed to be happy with being good enough to finish whatever diploma they want to get, they. have. to. *improve*, otherwise, it's penalty time for you. And that's just one problem, there are more.)
One of the first mention of Autism speaks I heard was comparing them to that... and telling they were worse, far worse.
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My understanding was that Cauldron wanted their Army and basically only cared about Earth Bet in terms of recruiting for the Protectorate and their other backed cape organizations. Remember their leaders are a couple of iron age peasants from other Earths who have no reason to care about civilization on Earth Bet in particular except as a test case for how to handle parahumans in general.
That's why they did stuff like leave the Slaughterhouse alone to scare people into the Protectorate, and probably why they stigmatized and suppressed Rogues. It makes little sense to make Parahumans only able to use their powers for fighting, if their main priority was integrating them into society.
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Hm? I thought it was only Contessa from an alternative earth and everyone else is a Bet native in Cauldron?
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I assumed Doctor Mother also wasn't from Earth Bet, but after looking it up it seems like she came from an unknown modern tech Earth. Conceivably Earth Bet but there isn't any particular reason to assume so. Even if she were from Bet she would be from somewhere around the Ivory Coast and have little reason to care about the US in particular.
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