Wormverse ideas, recs, and fic discussion thread 1

So, the Birdcage debate made me think of something: In canon, there's like 5 or 6 inmates who are innocent, as in new evidence came to light and their sentences got overturned. How well known is it that there are innocent people in the 'Cage that are never going to be released?
 
Not sure Cauldron Capes have an advantage there, really. Dragon CAN create non-degrading, human-maintainable Tinkertech; see the containment foam deployment mechanisms, and the foam itself. But note also that this makes her "the greatest Tinker in the world."

The containment foam dispensers aren't that special. The foam itself is, well, it's the end product. The original formulation happens in secure facilities in Austin, it gets contained and then shipped out to PRT offices. To get a proper scan, you'd need to actually go to Austin. You couldn't reverse engineer it from the stuff you get in the tanks/spray out onto hapless villains.
The special sauce is on the production side
 
I seem to recall a quote that Legend gave Amy an earful for the tongue-lashing she pulled on Taylor when she was chained up. Am I remembering a fanfiction?
 
CITATION!
Interlude 11h said:
Looking lost, Victoria stopped and spread her arms. "Who are you, Amy? I don't even recognize this person I'm looking at. You go berserk at the bank robbery over some secret I've totally not gotten on your case about. You apparently say something to Skitter that causes this huge commotion in the hospital after the Endbringer attack. You… I don't even know what to say about your reaction to Gallant's death, the way you distanced yourself from me at a time when I was hurting the most."
Panacea's role in events didn't get overlooked, if nothing else.
 
A few nice posts from sb:

What Taylor did to Triumph just to blackmail his dad to keep citizens from leaving a flooded, ruined city.

That was the point in Worm where she became one of the most unsympathetic and horrible protagonists I've ever read in fiction.
Okay, for some reason people have this weird idea going on in their head that Taylor did wrong things for the right reasons, but that's bullshit. To summarize what Polokun is talking about, the city most of Worm takes place in, Brockton Bay, is basically a flooded ruin because of a Kaiju attack. The mayor quite reasonably wants to evacuate the citizens of the city two other, non destroyed cities. Taylor objects to the people of her City actually having decent lives, and attacks the mayor's house and holds his son hostage, saying that she will murder the kid if he doesn't abandon his plans to have the city evacuated. He complies, and she starts power tripping and becomes a warlord in charge of the City ruins, preventing anyone from leaving.

Then she attacks Caravans trying to bring Aid to the people who she's trapped in the city, loots them and distributes it according to her whims. She convinces herself that she and her fellow Warlords that she is doing what is best for the city, even though she is preventing these people from leaving and rebuilding their lives. Also, while she at least puts on a facade of care by Distributing the supplies she stole, she completely ignores that her fellow Warlords don't give a damn and their sections of the ruins that they rule over are complete shitholes.

Protagonist centered morality at its finest. This bitch has so many fanboys who are early refuse to face the facts and realize that she is a terrible person. No, I don't give a shit about her backstory or how hard she had it. It is a merely a motive, not a justification. A sad backstory does not excuse what she has done. It never excuses anything.
 
He interprets:

"The mayor and several members of the city council will be traveling to Washington to discuss the state of Brockton Bay and the possibility of condemning the city."

As:

"There's totally going to be an evacuation and people are going to be carefully and gently given huge sums of money to move and remake their lives somewhere else, except that mean old Skitter stopped them."
 
From his perspective, is it so wrong?
It's all in the tone, in how he's saying things.

I'll preface by saying I'm tone deaf myself, and often get in trouble because of it, but:

What is he hoping to accomplish? Did he consider his audience, and how they'd react?

By acting in such a provocative and inflammatory manner, I doubt he convinced anybody.

And that's all without considering the fact that Weaver's career is longer than Skitter's: we don't have an exact tally of good things vs bad things she's done, but in the end she was a net good for the world.
 
It's all in the tone, in how he's saying things.

I'll preface by saying I'm tone deaf myself, and often get in trouble because of it, but:

What is he hoping to accomplish? Did he consider his audience, and how they'd react?

By acting in such a provocative and inflammatory manner, I doubt he convinced anybody.

And that's all without considering the fact that Weaver's career is longer than Skitter's: we don't have an exact tally of good things vs bad things she's done, but in the end she was a net good for the world.
It was a thread called 'supppsedly heroic actions you despised'

They were also referencing triumph
 
It is worth noting that, again, Taylor/Skitter has zero faith in authority figures to do aught but screw others over for their own selfish benefit. Refugees are not generally considered to have a good chance at rebuilding their lives in Earth-Bet, and the path of least resistance for "condemning a city" might well involve just sweeping it for survivors and dumping them in a refugee camp. In the city, ruined as it was, Taylor saw people having potential to rebuild their lives around the properties they already held. In a space large enough to house them. Now, maybe her judgment was wrong, but she definitely didn't believe that the Mayor and his cronies - who couldn't ever be bothered to do anything to help the people of the city who actually needed it (from her perspective, remember) - would actually get real and useful help for the citizens of the condemned city.

I won't say she did the right thing. I won't say she wasn't contributing to the problems more than helping fix them. But I will say that she did believe she was doing the right thing, and was at least 60% reasonable in doing so based on her history and experience with authority. (Her major flaws were short-sightedness and not recognizing how her own efforts to force a solution were contributing to the larger systemic problems.)
 
Advice for writing non-idiot ball holding PRT and Protectorate in an independent hero Taylor story where she is a small fish and they have other cases?
 
Advice for writing non-idiot ball holding PRT and Protectorate in an independent hero Taylor story where she is a small fish and they have other cases?
Drop their Canon plans and come up with reasonable alternatives. You can justify it with babble about alternative events or original characters having to be accounted for by PTV.
 
Advice for writing non-idiot ball holding PRT and Protectorate in an independent hero Taylor story where she is a small fish and they have other cases?

Less is more. The PRT are the cape cops, they handle crimes by capes, not crimes stopped by capes. Unless an independent is going out of their way to aggressively challenge criminal capes, they will mostly deal with Brockton Bay PD for turning in captured unpowered criminals, and may have informal agreements with the police about assistance. PRT will be less of presence in their life unless the PRT makes a request of them for assistance or they get into a vendetta with somebody's capes.
 
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