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Transposition, or: Ship Happens [Worm/Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio | Arpeggio of Blue Steel]

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SirKaid said:
Seriously, Thinker powers always go to people with at least a little megalomania and never go to actually smart people. The Shards aren't interested in giving power to people who will use it responsibly.
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I saw this explained as powers of a certain type going to people who weren't able to solve a problem a certain way themselves. Brutes find themselves in a situation where they need physical force or resilience they don't have, Masters find themselves desiring a sense of control that they lack, etc.

Thinker powers, then, go to people who weren't smart or perceptive enough to figure out how to resolve whatever ended up pushing them over the edge. Faultline has good reason to look down on Tattletale, all things considered.
 
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Pretty much What TheUnicorn said, Lisa's whole thing is that she triggered because she blamed herself for not noticing the signs her brother was suicidal and that if she was more perceptive, Rex would still be alive. A very Thinker oriented trigger, based on a need to chase small details and reach the larger conclusion.

Moreover, she ran away from home because she realized that her parents cared so little about her and Rex, they had no issues using their daughter's guilt-induced powers for their personal profit.

As Tattletale, she's a complete bitch, but when the mask is off and she's Lisa? She's not just caring towards her friends and those around her, she's protective of them.
 
DarkHabit said:
Pretty much What TheUnicorn said, Lisa's whole thing is that she triggered because she blamed herself for not noticing the signs her brother was suicidal and that if she was more perceptive, Rex would still be alive. A very Thinker oriented trigger, based on a need to chase small details and reach the larger conclusion.

Moreover, she ran away from home because she realized that her parents cared so little about her and Rex, they had no issues using their daughter's guilt-induced powers for their personal profit.

As Tattletale, she's a complete bitch, but when the mask is off and she's Lisa? She's not just caring towards her friends and those around her, she's protective of them.
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That's a fairly succinct and accurate analysis of Tattletale as I have seen her, but I think you stopped short of full analysis: her power just give her the means to figure things out, it also feeds her need to -tell- the things she finds out. She's compelled (whether by shard conflict-drive, or her own pathological needs, take your pick, I'm not making that sort of judgement call) to -deliver- the conclusions she draws, and doesn't have enough self-introspection to realize that doing so in certain circumstances is detrimental to her chances of survival.

In that regard, she's -very much- a teenager. ^^
 
Vyrexuviel said:
She's compelled (whether by shard conflict-drive, or her own pathological needs, take your pick, I'm not making that sort of judgement call) to -deliver- the conclusions she draws, and doesn't have enough self-introspection to realize that doing so in certain circumstances is detrimental to her chances of survival.
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I don't think this is true. Excluding her dealing with Jack Slash (where despite what the fanon says she actually had a plan, and if it wasn't for one fact she missed actually a fairly good plan) when did she go around reveling information in a way that was "detrimental to her chances of survival"? She enjoys playing miss exposition, sure. But she's also quite capable of keeping things secret when there's a reason. If she wasn't than both Regent's and Taylor's reveals would have gone a lot differently than in canon.
 
TheUnicorn said:
I don't think this is true. Excluding her dealing with Jack Slash (where despite what the fanon says she actually had a plan, and if it wasn't for one fact she missed actually a fairly good plan) when did she go around reveling information in a way that was "detrimental to her chances of survival"? She enjoys playing miss exposition, sure. But she's also quite capable of keeping things secret when there's a reason. If she wasn't than both Regent's and Taylor's reveals would have gone a lot differently than in canon.
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She would have at the bank had Amy not gotten Vicky to back off, and trust me, that would have been deadly if instead of getting her to back down Panacea went on the attack
 
Rajvik_wolfboy said:
She would have at the bank had Amy not gotten Vicky to back off, and trust me, that would have been deadly if instead of getting her to back down Panacea went on the attack
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On the other hand, it's very possible that Vicky wouldn't have backed down if Lisa hadn't gone maximum bitch on Amy, so the whole thing was a case of either she refrain from being a bitch and definitely get punched in the face by GG or she goes maximum bitch and possibly get punched in the face by GG.
 
Arden said:
I see that as basically being the same thing in this case, so I don't think we have a conflict there.
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Well, it's possible for someone very intelligent and thoughtful to nevertheless end up in a situation where they feel as though they should have been able to do something about a problem if only they'd seen or understood more than they did.

Survivor's guilt, if nothing else.

It'd be a lot rarer, granted.
 
Candesce said:
Well, it's possible for someone very intelligent and thoughtful to nevertheless end up in a situation where they feel as though they should have been able to do something about a problem if only they'd seen or understood more than they did.

Survivor's guilt, if nothing else.
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True enough. Still, powers have this tendency to give you what you need to solve your immediate stressor (or what you would have needed to resolve it) while doing nothing about the issues that originally caused it. I think it would be less likely for someone already very intelligent to trigger with a Thinker power because they consider that their area of strength, not their area of weakness and deficit. It's how I think someone like Bakuda ended up a Tinker rather than a Thinker, despite her trigger resolving around failing a test.
 
Candesce said:
Well, it's possible for someone very intelligent and thoughtful to nevertheless end up in a situation where they feel as though they should have been able to do something about a problem if only they'd seen or understood more than they did.
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It's worth remembering that the shards are intelligent actors. If a person was well equipped to handle the stressors that getting a power of a certain type would give them then the shard might just choose to give them a different kind of power so as to keep the host stressed out and dangerous.

They might not too - maybe the shard thinks it'll get more useful data if the host is calm and capable of acting as the core to a team? - but the things researchers have discovered aren't laws so much as observed trends.
 
TheUnicorn said:
I don't think this is true. Excluding her dealing with Jack Slash (where despite what the fanon says she actually had a plan, and if it wasn't for one fact she missed actually a fairly good plan) when did she go around reveling information in a way that was "detrimental to her chances of survival"? She enjoys playing miss exposition, sure. But she's also quite capable of keeping things secret when there's a reason. If she wasn't than both Regent's and Taylor's reveals would have gone a lot differently than in canon.
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There was the Echidna incident, where Tattletale decided to poke the triumvirate repeatedly despite the S-class truce being in effect, and her attempts damaged (or at least threatened to damage) not just the heroes' ability to work with the Undersiders, but even their ability to work with each other. Yeah, learning more about Cauldron is great and all, but not when doing so is actively sabotaging team cohesion in the middle of a crisis; that's how you get Miss Militia to shove a gun in your mouth--and for her to be completely justified in doing so.
 
SirKaid said:
If a person was well equipped to handle the stressors that getting a power of a certain type would give them then the shard might just choose to give them a different kind of power so as to keep the host stressed out and dangerous.
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Exactly. Powers tend to come to you in direct relation to the type of stress you are least emotionally capable of dealing with. Someone with insecurities about their intellectual abilities or perceptiveness would probably be more likely to become a Thinker than an academic who is used to struggling with difficult concepts and (by necessity) also acclimated to failing at comprehending them in time.
 
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Rajvik_wolfboy said:
She would have at the bank had Amy not gotten Vicky to back off, and trust me, that would have been deadly if instead of getting her to back down Panacea went on the attack
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Which is again Lisa making a logical and resonable (although short term) plan to help them escape a trap, and that one actually worked. That's not demonstrating any sort of pathological need to reveal information, or revealing information in a way that's "detrimental to her chances of survival". At worst that's a demonstration of short term tactics, over long term strategy, and even that requires you to assume she knows stuff about Panacea's capabilities we have no reason to believe Lisa knew at the time.

Arden said:
Well, I see that as basically being the same thing in this case, so I don't think we have a conflict there.
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I think they're very different because, at least IMO stupid people very rarely assume that the reason they had problems is because they weren't smart enough, while smart people often do. That means that it would actually be more likely a smart person would trigger with Thinker powers than a stupid one.

Vicjer said:
that's how you get Miss Militia to shove a gun in your mouth--and for her to be completely justified in doing so.
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Not how I remember the scene.
 
Vicjer said:
There was the Echidna incident, where Tattletale decided to poke the triumvirate repeatedly despite the S-class truce being in effect, and her attempts damaged (or at least threatened to damage) not just the heroes' ability to work with the Undersiders, but even their ability to work with each other. Yeah, learning more about Cauldron is great and all, but not when doing so is actively sabotaging team cohesion in the middle of a crisis; that's how you get Miss Militia to shove a gun in your mouth--and for her to be completely justified in doing so.
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Honestly, most of Tattletale's special brand of stupid seems to show up in situations where she's in significant danger and has absolutely no way to affect the situation... other than repeatedly poking the blatant buttons she can see thanks to her power.

Sure we can look in from outside and say 'yeah... should really have just stayed quiet' and in some cases even be right, but I suspect that a lot of us would try to be clever in such situations where our only options are to poke at people's nerves and mental issues and hope we throw them off or wait for outside intervention.
 
I'm speaking wholly from half-remembered bits and bobs, and am not entirely certain about its canonicity to the original story, but are not all shards from both space whales essentially pre-programed to act as conflict engines, regardless of the issues that has on the longevity of their hosts?

I always got the impression that TT is both a teenager pretending to be older than she actually is, and inevitably self-sabotaging, in part because impulse control is not in her lexicon, and in part because her power is constantly howling like a baboon that got its testicles tangled in a grain thresher to live up to her chosen moniker.

There's a reason that, as we mature, tattling is considered to be an immature expression of wanting attention; the fact that Tattles' entire powerset is built around inferring knowledge from cold reading could have easily been used to make her an amazing asset for forensics, search and rescue, stock market manipulation, or any of a thousand things that require keeping her mouth shut were it not for a giant space whale thinking that direct conflict is the only way to improve.

Now, I'm probably talking out of my arse because I got about two chapters into Worm when it was originally written and then proceeded to call Wildblow a hack that can't write meaningful character growth or development without handing the 'Fucking Idiot' ball to everyone 4 or 5 times over; something like 90% of Worm's conflict could've been resolved without escalation and death and insanity if the Adults A: sat down like adults and talked things through and B: if they listened when someone younger than them says 'hey, this is going on'

The remaining 10% is Path to Victory intentionally self-sabotaging everything because it's still a shard.
 
FreakOTU said:
I'm speaking wholly from half-remembered bits and bobs, and am not entirely certain about its canonicity to the original story, but are not all shards from both space whales essentially pre-programed to act as conflict engines, regardless of the issues that has on the longevity of their hosts?
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Pretty much. Some more so and some less so. (Jack, as an example apparently had a pretty non-aggressive shard according to Zion, IIRC.)

Though they (generally. Preferably to me) work with what's already there. Pushing on existing "faults" in their human host rather than inventing some issue whole cloth.
 
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I don't know if this is fanon, but I think TTs trigger involved her picking up that something was going on with her brother, but she didn't tell anyone. Would make sense that she would be pathologically incapable of keeping her mouth shut ever after, now that she has a power that lets her notice and understand the hidden meaning of practically anything.
 
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DarkHabit said:
As Tattletale, she's a complete bitch, but when the mask is off and she's Lisa? She's not just caring towards her friends and those around her, she's protective of them.
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This seems like it would be a fascinating derail, except for the part where I'm personally very much uninterested in discussing whether or not Tattletale is a nice person. It has nothing to do with why or how she triggered, that much is for sure.

TheUnicorn said:
I think they're very different because, at least IMO stupid people very rarely assume that the reason they had problems is because they weren't smart enough, while smart people often do. That means that it would actually be more likely a smart person would trigger with Thinker powers than a stupid one.
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Correction, and modification to both of your proposed analyses.

Thinker powers go to people who perceive themselves as people who could have solved a (trigger-worthy) problem if only they were smarter. That is to say, the textbook case of a Thinker trigger would be people who perceive themselves as smart, and think that if only they were just a little bit smarter, everything would be better.

They don't actually need to be smart, and likely, most of them are not actually smart.
 
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eschwartz said:
Thinker powers go to people who perceive themselves as people who could have solved a problem if only they were smarter. That is to say, the textbook case of a Thinker trigger would be people who perceive themselves as smart, and think that if only they were just a little bit smarter, everything would be better.
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More importantly, though, they experience significant emotional trauma from their failure. A lot of people in primarily intellectual occupations tell themselves they really aren't clever enough (or as clever as they wish they were) on a regular basis, but they also rarely fail hard enough that it would emotionally break them to the point of causing a trigger event. Since they are more aware of their own limitations to start with, they tend to have more emotional resilience towards having them demonstrated to themselves.
 
Arden said:
More importantly, though, they experience significant emotional trauma from their failure. A lot of people in primarily intellectual occupations tell themselves they really aren't clever enough (or as clever as they wish they were) on a regular basis, but they also rarely fail hard enough that it would emotionally break them to the point of causing a trigger event. Since they are more aware of their own limitations to start with, they tend to have more emotional resilience towards having them demonstrated to themselves.
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Sure.

Code: 
s/solved a problem/solved a (trigger-worthy) problem/
 
Twei said:
.

Wants to be taken seriously, willing to go through anything to arrive at her objectives. More force of nature than person. Powerful, most likely more powerful than she's shown. Relentless matches up with who she wants to be. No. What she is. Doesn't consider herself human. Believes that she is not human.
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man your just wanking her like really, force of nature, that was really cringy to even read
 
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