I will say that in retrospect Worm is actually kind of weirdly optimistic about the failure points of American law enforcement in some ways. In particular there was never really any critique of institutional racism, which even when I first read it felt like a bit of a glaring omission, especially given that most of the story took place in a city full of Nazis.
Though maybe it's for the best that Wildbow didn't try to tackle this kind of topic. This is someone who actually described a black character as "she looked like a panther, black-skinned, savage" in the text of Worm, so let's just say that I don't feel too charitable about his ability to handle these issues with anything remotely resembling the respect that they deserve.
... I don't specifically remember that line, but I'm not finding myself going 'that definitely wasn't in the text'. I suspect it's just one of those bits I've not had cause to reread for cite purposes... I mostly haven't ended up looking at chapters with Sophia in them, for one.
Anyway, as far as law enforcement stuff in Worm...
... this is honestly one of the most glaring examples of Wildbow's tendency for the natural read to go completely against what he intends to be true. Worm, taken as a standalone work, is in my top five list of Pop Culture Most Viciously Critical Of Law Enforcement And Adjacent Concepts. I basically only place the original Robocop movie and
Future Cop: LAPD as beating Worm out in this regard, and honestly in Robocop's case I place it ahead mostly because it was designed as a 'something like this looks plausible to actually happen in reality sometime soon' where Worm is very firmly 'real life will never look like this'. Superpowered law enforcement in Worm is explicitly premised fundamentally on a falsehood ("We're going to have normals in charge of the superheroes, so the supers can't just unilaterally decide things." Surprise! Alexandria's civilian identity is the head PRT person, and Alexandria made this organization from the ground up!), almost every member of the PRT or Protectorate we see in any detail is on a range from 'a biased jerk' to 'straight-up breaking laws and murdering people for their own benefit', we're constantly hearing about the PRT/P caring more about
looking good than they do about
being good, the list is unending, the picture clear: Bet America is a world where the only law enforcement agency we see at all (Regular cops are barely even referred to, and prior to Ward I don't think they were ever 'on-screen') is corrupt and quite clearly one of the main causes of things being so fucked-up.
But then you read WoGs and pay attention to Ward's signaling, and apparently Wildbow in some meaningful sense thinks he wrote
copaganda?
To this day, I still don't understand how a real person could possibly produce such an absurd,
obvious contradiction.
Most of my knowledge of Ward comes from Ryugii's rants, so take it with a grain of salt but here is how I came to this conclusion:
Basically, from what I know Simurgh's end goal was to remove Zion from the board and then use some convoluted schemes to force humans into living in a constant state of war while it waited for the next entity to come and eat them.
And well, by the end of worm, it did get Zion killed, its plan for humans is coming apace as it expected, and Contessa even gets taken out of the picture as a serious opponent by Teacher being given a diabolus ex machina on a silver platter being a great mastermind.
It takes a combination of the Eye going full power and the sleeper being a deus ex machina to beat the simurgh in Ward.
For me, that means that it only began losing at the end of Ward proper, and everything was going according to plan beforehand, making Worm a complete victory as far as its concerned.
... I'd forgotten that Sleeper perma-killing the Simurgh while still not explaining his power at all was a thing that happened. sigh
I still don't recall Ward laying things out that way, though. We got that the Fortuna Titan wants to blow up everything and try to continue the Cycle, while the Simurgh apparently wanted to do something else. The picture you're painting is certainly
a way to reconcile all the info we do get, but as far as I recall, the Simurgh died with her actual goals never properly explained, and I personally just took it as the Simurgh fighting the Fortuna Titan because this 'try to continue the Cycle' plan won't work. Ward was pretty explicit that the shards can't properly continue the cycle, that trying would annihilate all the Earths but wouldn't get the shards actually launched into space as an Entity traveling to a new destination, and would in fact probably just kill all the shards too. The overall picture painted was that most shards are just trying to execute their programming, achieve their purpose, etc, while having no idea how to actually make it
work with Scion and Eden dead and so many other shards dead/out of power/otherwise dysfunctional, and the Simurgh is the only one going 'wait, let's
not do the thing that
definitely won't work'.
(Which, mind, the Simurgh was absolutely indicated to be somehow sinister and bad anyway, never mind that her goal of 'let's not pointlessly destroy everything, mkay?' really places her as basically on humanity's side in context. sigh)
Sorry if I gave the impression I thought you were, I was thinking of the comments that said the team was incompetent for so and so reason and was pointing out (in a very clumsy manner) that even if it was the case, that was still more competent than how the PRT is in canon when taking that into account.
Ah, yeah, okay, I can see how you might've been trying to say that and just didn't present it clearly.
Textually in Ward Bonesaw is harmless and remains redeemed as a minor plot point, she is successfully living out her life in a hermit shack gardening with tinker plants on a deserted world. But the crux of the minor plot point is that Dr Yamada her therapist has lost any professional sense of objectivity so she basically collapses into paranoia about Bonesaw being incapable of staying harmless and not murdering a bunch of people then quits her job. So it both recognizes what a monster she was in Worm and plays the redemption thing 100% straight.
Yamada's freakout is never detailed as more than 'for some reason she hit Bonesaw at some point, and so now Yamada thinks she's a complete failure as a therapist for reasons the narrative can't be bothered to communicate at all'. I
wish your interpretation was suggested by the text, just because that would mean there
is any explanation for Yamada's freakout.
It's pretty clear that Bonesaw is intended to be redeemed after Contessa talks to her. From the video store kid she warns to leave town on the eve of Jack waking up to the extremely heavy implication that she's fucked up as a direct result of how early her powers manifested to the Yamada fake out I just mentioned in Ward. We the audience are supposed to see her arc and say she has been redeemed. Much like with Cauldron's being effective and good, your milage may vary.
I think a slight misunderstanding is occurring here.
I absolutely agree it's pretty obvious we're supposed to think Bonesaw is
good now. (Which I've actually complained about/criticized before)
But I don't think it tracks to call it
redemption, certainly not in Worm. (In Ward, we get told one of the things she's doing is undoing her horrid 'art projects', which is more meaningfully redemption behavior, but I'll come back to that in a second) Bonesaw doesn't look back at what a monster she's been, regret it, and decide to make up for it. She gets hit with 'breadth and depth', has her attempts at making clones show that shards interfacing with kids results in the shard having undue influence on the human's personality, and consequently goes 'I don't know how much of me is actually me'. In conjunction with the social isolation, the introspection, and more specifically getting a couple years where she's not constantly playing to a crowd that will kill her if she isn't sufficiently monstrous, she ends up losing faith in the notion that she actually meaningfully cares about her 'art' and so on, and then is just... aimless.
Notably, this aimlessness carries into Ward. Bonesaw's garden is... I think possibly literally the only thing she does in Ward that we know is a thing she did for her own reasons? (I suppose the stupid nightmare suicide pact virus
could be counted as a second thing, but that's a tangent) The majority of what she does -especially the majority of the things I would meaningfully describe as 'redemptive actions'- are very explicitly imposed on her by the Wardens, where she's responsible for maintaining the tinkertech in the Damsel clones and undoing her 'art projects' and helping Amy with other things because the Wardens made such assistance mandatory Or Else. (We never do hear what the Or Else was, I think, but frankly in context I have difficulty believing it wasn't 'we execute you') Notably, Bonesaw's internal experience is largely not touched on; it's
possible that this is like Dragon's chains, where broadly she's compelled to do what she planned to do anyway, but it's also possible Bonesaw wouldn't bother if she wasn't being forced at metaphorical gunpoint. (And I'd personally argue that the overall presentation is that Bonesaw's default really does seem to be 'be a gardener by myself' rather than 'make up for all the horrors I inflicted on the world')
Now, given Wildbow's track record, I won't be surprised if there's some explicit claim from him that Yes Bonesaw's Arc Is A Redemption Arc or something, but as far as a natural reading of the text goes? You... kind of need to be
wanting or
expecting redemption of Bonesaw for 'Bonesaw was redeemed' to be a natural read of what was actually shown.
FWIW the bit with Vicky braining Amy for going to therapy was a hallucination caused by the Mama Mathers Titan during the Smurgh fight not Smurgh herself.
I'm genuinely not sure what you're referring to here.
What I'm talking about is a scene that gets played twice -which gets used throughout the Simurgh fight as a (terrible) device for representing the Simurgh fucking with heads- where in one version Victoria drops a big chunk of concrete on Amy and the clear implication is she murders Amy, and in the other version she doesn't do that. And then Ward goes on to blatantly avoid answering whether Amy is still alive or not, even though the topic
should come up organically at various points.
Maybe you're referring to this bit (And severely downplaying 'Victoria fucking murders Amy in one version', because 'braining' suggests just giving Amy a concussion), but the presentation firmly points to it being Simurgh fuckery.
Mind, this is Wildbow, so if you proceed to dig up some statement from Wildbow where he
does say that exactly the moment I'm referring to is supposed to be Mama Mathers Titan fuckery rather than Simurgh fuckery, I'll be
extremely exasperated but not meaningfully
surprised.
(Also, 'a
different headfucking super-intelligence did a mechanically-incoherent thing for equally inscrutable reasons' would mean the scene is still being PtV-style 'pain-in-the-ass to criticize, but still nonsensical bad writing'...)
Like I said from what I remember she's kind of not either helpful or a villian, she's just a hermit gardner who is essentially only in the story for a couple pages to demonstrate Yamada's loss of faith.
Bonesaw is lurking at the edges of Ward's plot almost the entire time, mattering to it without being seen much for very large stretches, with tinkering on Ashley's arms, being the cause of Yamada freaking out and behaving weirdly, interacting with Amy, and probably a half dozen other tidbits I don't remember off the top of my head...
... and then in Ward's endgame, she engineers Victoria's idiotic nightmare suicide pact virus thing that's how humanity 'beats' the shards and get them to stop trying to blow everything up. She's the single most important character for preventing humanity's extinction. (Which, mind, is
really jarring after the plot has kept her at the edges for so long. She really should've either been more central to the plot overall, or she shouldn't have been the excuse for the stupid nightmare suicide pact to happen)
