Marie Durocher My Beloved

Like you have a character who touches on:

The way that the physical form links to the mind and how embodiment is part of identity

Living with severe harm done to you by a sibling

Forging a future for yourself while struggling with the expectations of an abusive parent of who they made you to be

The strain of pushing yourself to constantly perform new stunts with your power in ways that don't necessarily align with its 'intention'

Dealing with a 'villainous' origin and the stigma of that in the world of capes

The difficulty of forming relationships when you're kind of an asshole

Chris has one of the most 'easy to make thematically relevant' powers in the therapy group to boot. And we can't say it's too high concept and convoluted to make legible to readers because let us consider some of the other fucking powers in Ward. 'Guy mutates based on emotional states he wants to evoke' is pretty straightforward compared to some!

But for reasons that remain beyond me Chris betrays the therapy group because...it was time for the scheduled shocking betrayal, and he did it because...reasons that don't quite follow from prior characterization but okay, well, surely Villain Chris will provide some kind of interesting - ah no never mind he's just apathetically Evil now in ways that occasionally show a glimmer of promise but ultimately conclude in "our viewpoint character doesn't care about the interiority of people who aren't her + Wildbow was in the weeds by that point".

And I could dissect this all more but the way Chris' potential is spilled like a soda behind sticky theatre seats feels like a symptom of the many ways Ward did that with everything. We got rid of Chris so we could, bless her, spend approximately one million years resolving Rain's issues as a central hinge of Ward's dissolving thematic tissue only to - and this part also gets me - not resolve Rain's issues or arc to the extent of concluding a major part of it offscreen.

Back when we had his interlude and found out what his actual deal was, I wrote about what the story was doing with Breakthrough, about how it was challenging Victoria by bringing the specific issues of the other members of the team ever closer to her Amy-related trauma, and asking her how close is too close, with Chris being both Birdcage-related and 'their power lets them manipulate other people's biology in horrifying ways'-related.

I also pointed out the structure of Ward (when it was good) was built around catastrophising about the members of Breakthrough, teasing us with bits of information about what happened to them and what they did, just enough to send everyone into a tailspin of speculation, often assuming the worst.

And then we find out. With every one of them, we see their perspective, we see what happened, what they did, what has been done to them, what they did to themselves, and then the story stops and asks Victoria, and us as the readers: 'Now what? Now that you have this information, what will you do? How will you treat these people? What are you willing to accept? What are you willing to forgive?' We can see that Victoria's boundaries on what she's willing to forgive have been pushed quite far already, when comparing who she is now to who she was when talking to Madison. She's accepted a member of the Fallen, a member of the Slaughterhouse 9, and, by and large, so have we. The reason we have is that the story didn't stop after this revelation, this moment of clarity. Their lives continue, and they continue to struggle with their trauma and we're along for the ride. We see what they're doing to get better, and we're rooting for them.

And I was excited to see the same pattern unfold for Chris, but then that didn't actually end up happening for him.

And I don't even think it's necessarily bad to portray someone falling off the wagon, as it were, to portray someone abandoning the recovery process. After all, setting up a therapy group is replete with competing access needs, and with Jessica Yamada dropping off the radar for a good bit, it would be weird for the group to stay together without a hitch.

The problem I have with Ward's treatment of Chris is that the text never really gets around to addressing why he fell out with the rest of the group, even though it's totally obvious.

Because it's Victoria from start to finish.

We learn that Chris was starting to open up to the rest of the group, and he proves throughout Ward, pre-split, that he genuinely cares about these people, so it's not like that was an act. Yet once Victoria joined, Chris clammed shut again, for reasons that are, honestly, very reasonable:

He's sitting on a terrible secret that he needs help with, and that cannot possibly trust these people to not freak out about, especially not when one, ah, very judgmental person shows up.

And the way Victoria ends up bullying Chris out of the group is very interesting, which is why it's a tragedy it doesn't get addressed in the text at all:

Victoria's pulling a Carol.

She keeps using social niceties and expectations to put Chris on the spot:

“You don’t have to tell us anything, but if you wanted to tell us stuff we’d like it?” Chris’s tone was sarcastic, almost mocking. ... “All I’m saying is that it seems kind of manipulative, the power-players in the group dish out their personal dirt, team mom Sveta plays nice and tries to rug-sweep-” ... “Why don’t we just drop it entirely?  You said what you needed to say, fine, whatever.  But it doesn’t need to be a conversation.  If it’s a conversation then that means it’s going somewhere.  And that somewhere is just more pressure and expectations that we talk about shit.”

Putting Chris in positions where he has to either reveal more about himself than he wants to or seem incredibly unreasonable, and because he's less socially adroit, even calling this out makes him look like the asshole to the rest of the group.

Not to mention that Victoria takes the first, convenient excuse she can find to go snoop on Chris' living situation, despite his explicit boundary not to do that, and when he calls her out on that, she downplays it, justifies it and makes it clear she'll be doing it again.

She doesn't think of this as being pushy and unreasonable, but when Kenzie almost gives Carol her address, she freaks the fuck out about it, because good god she doesn't want her mother showing up on her doorstep.

Because Chris isn't just the Amy to Victoria's... Victoria, Victoria is also the Carol to Chris' Amy, and this would be such an interesting thing to explore within Victoria as a character! The way she is manipulative and learned so many of her social skills from someone who never dealt with her own trauma and learned to abuse social norms to get her way. This is a fascinating character flaw for Victoria to have, especially with how unconscious she is of it! Being made to realise that Carol still has her hooks in her like that would be genuinely compelling character development on Victoria's part!

It does get explored a little when Damsel and Carol argue, Victoria sees a slightly-less-diplomatic version of her own perspective from the outside and is made quite uncomfortable by it. This would've been an excellent set-up, because this is very much what pushed Chris away from Breakthrough!

It just never really gets brought up or resolved. Chris never even gets that moment where he lets himself be vulnerable enough to call Victoria out for all of this, and the text seems to fall prey to Victoria's own aura enough it seemingly forgets about all the set-up it did for this character beat, so nothing comes of it.

I think you've come up with a version of how 'Chris leaves Breakthrough' could have gone which could have stayed interesting, and truthfully that departure mostly annoys me because I enjoyed his dynamic with the group and wanted more of it. Still, if we'd gotten follow up on anything like you outlined, that would have served the story and character arcs better.

Reviewing Chris, again, I also found myself hung up on the final imperative Chris has activate:

Imperative four: Take action, and whatever it is we do, it needs to be big.

That's such a compelling hook, isn't it! And one of the things I find interesting about it is that it dovetails with Victoria's trauma-driven 'need' to be an active agent making big moves, something Ward explicitly calls out about her. Chris' compulsion is more explicitly hardcoded than Victoria's in a literal sense, but in the Parahumans scope of powers and their effects as frequently metaphorical the distinction feels paper thin to me.

They both feel a drive to be agents, not subjects, for reasons that are very similar! Acting is how they differentiate themselves from the 'helpless' victim-selves they're trying to claw away from, which also plays into a lot of the ways they're very unpleasant to people they perceive as unacceptably 'passive'. If you're not acting, if you're not making big moves, you're 'letting' yourself be subject to other people's choices. Neither of them can stand that.

So coming back to Chris' fourth imperative: a person might note that nowhere in it is it specified 'and that big action must be villainous'. The nature of the action is undefined except in magnitude, which is a smart contingency if you're looking at an end of the world scenario where you have no idea what the possible future might look like.

In Lab Rat's original plan for Chris he likely assumed specifying wasn't necessary, because both the conditioning he subjected Chris to and the nature of Chris' powers don't lend themselves to anything but moves similar to what Lab Rat would have done. In Ward-that-is, what Chris actually does probably maps not that far off from what Lab Rat would have done with those resources.

But in a version of Ward where we really got to follow early Ward thematic promise through to the end, what a killer opportunity that open scope could have been. What kind of big moves could a version of Chris afforded more development in line with the reveal we got have made?

To wrap up an already long response to an excellent analysis: I think about the couple who took Chris 'home' sometimes. Two unnamed 'civilians' who, in the middle of the absolute disruption of their lives, took a child they didn't know in their car and drove in the wrong direction to try to see if he might have people he was trying to get back to. Two people who died following that same child into a clearly dangerous situation trying to keep him safe.

That felt like it should have been a critical hook, didn't it? When Chris was utterly helpless, on the verge of dying en route to Lab Rat's contingency and failing his imperatives right there, two people tried to help him get 'home' despite there being no conceivable material gain that outweighed the potential - and then realized - cost of doing so.

So how does that intersect with Chris' cynicism and reflexive clawing insistence on independence? How could that have integrated into paralleling the genuine care he showed for Breakthrough even when there wasn't anything in it for him? How might that have informed his stance on compassion and selflessness? We don't really know, because it just did not get followed up on, but there was such good stuff there.

ward goes 'what if the only way to contain these violent capes is bomb collars on their ankles', or 'what if all the prisons are full and bureaucracy is so strained that we Have to drop people in the exile world, oh no how sad, but surely we can't let these violent criminals run around being evil'.

pale goes 'what if evil ghettos filled with violent criminals were real and needed violent enforcement in turn' (undercity) and 'what if this one child was so dangerous we have to take away her prosthetic hands if she tries to flip someone off, no we can't free her because apparently she will instantly murder the protagonist's mom this is the only option'.

i think pale and ward are trying to like. Stress Test their systems by constantly looking at the edge cases of 'what would happen if the usual system doesn't work'. but in creating these outlandish scenarios in the first place and implying they're possible and Must be accounted for you're falling into the trap of like.

this almost copaganda-like philosophy of "you see there are violent and evil people out there so we Must be allowed to do these horrific things to protect people from them".

in worm and pact you have characters who do fucked up things but it feels like a lot of effort is put into understanding the people behind them and where they're coming from. rachel's dogs maul people but there's a whole Arc of taylor learning to vibe with her and befriend her and of rachel getting what she needs (a place alone with her dogs where she can let other people in at her own pace) and growing as a person. all from the angle of 'this is genuinely good for rachel and helpful'. we want her to succeed because we care about her.

in pact we see how sandra duchamp grew up, how she's just as much a victim of her family as she is someone who perpetuates that harm, and while she's an antagonist the story doesn't spoonfeed it to us--we're allowed to see her human and sympathetic moments and we're allowed to feel bad for her while also wanting her stopped.

it felt. i don't know. like the story in general respected these characters, respected the reader's ability to empathize with those characters while also knowing Murder Bad or whatever.

but then the major worm fandom interpretations shifted. you had reddit and other popular sources going on about how taylor was actually horrible and an unreliable narrator, and how the undersiders were actually ~super fucked up and evil criminals~. pact and twig were spared this for the most part by virtue of being less popular with those crowds.

and i'm not sure if the morality discourse got baked into wildbow's brain by osmosis or if he felt like he wouldn't be appeasing his fandom if he didn't address it or what.

but by ward suddenly that narrative empathy, for the most part, is missing. it becomes conditional -- the protagonist and others do not extend empathy towards others until they Properly Recognize What They've Done Wrong. any improvement, any attempt to do better isn't legitimate unless the Bad Deeds are addressed and atoned for by whatever inconsistent standards the narrative adheres to. what matters isn't riley being in a healthier place and making connections--ward thinks that we should be rooting for riley because she recognizes she messed up and is constantly making up for the atrocities she committed.

i think it's kind of reached its peak in post arc 13 pale though. every time empathy is extended it's near-always accompanied by a patronizing little reminder of "mmmm, well you did Bad Things too".

you aren't allowed to just say "well damn i sympathize with charles", for example, because the narrative constantly reminds you that actually he is Still Doing Bad and therefore you aren't allowed to feel for him. it doesn't help that the story continually one-ups itself on thinking of ways to make charles over the top evil either.

but either way it's just. bleak. in a story purportedly about community building it's shockingly uncaring. you can't just sympathize with a morally grey character or take them As They Are without the story casting judgment and constantly reminding you of their verdict. it's just exhausting and makes any positive message the story tries to send feel hollow

we see the girls address how charles suffered ego death as the Carmine Role took him over, and how he's now imprisoned in his own ritual.

their primary concern?

they don't like that it happened because they don't get closure. they don't like that they weren't able to hurt charles more, or that he didn't realize he was being awful. avery feels bad because she 'had to be mean'.

all of it is about how their own needs and sense of self-righteousness were denied, nothing about how they feel bad for charles.

no sympathy can be extended unless atonement and punishment happens.

i think this is like...the most hostile and uncaring a wildbow web serial has been to a tragic antagonist figure. and no matter how "understandable" it is the girls would have their sympathy exhausted, it's just not fun or satisfying to read. it's mean-spirited and derisive, and it has been ever since the musser arc finished, or even far before that.

I do think we are dealing with selection bias due to Charles going after forsworn who are predators like Seth and Abyss Guy, utterly mind broken like Helen and Griffin, and… Miller and Yiyun as the odd ones out (both of whom decide to leave for different reasons).

I don’t recall LVA really distrusting him because of him being a felon, beyond that his crimes included creating monsters to murder people. Once they caught him for his crimes of murdering 1000’s of people, their response was to hand him off to someone who would give him a cozy apartment that would keep him safe and well treated.

It’s only when he kept murdering people and spitting in their faces that LVA realized that they needed to step up in countering him, because the dude was creating literal armies of monsters to go around killing people (and he’s very clear about this leading to innocent people dying as a result).

I don’t think Pale is about promoting punitive justice, it think it’s more about doing the best you can with people and supporting them, but that actions carry consequences. You can’t just murder thousands of people and expect other people to not react negatively, after all.

This isn’t to say that LVA are moral pinnacles of course: this recent arc has several people calling them out for making mistakes and endangering people. But they are only in this position in the first place because the corrupt system kept empowering 12 different flavors of human rights violators that kept coming after them.

There can't be selection bias when we see the entire population!

I'm not however convinced that Pale's treatment of the foresworn is pro-punitive justice. There's a streak of punitive justice in Wildbow's writing from Worm to Pale and everything in between but I don't see it on display in this aspect of the story specifically.

In 18.5 the girls also make it clear they wouldn't get in the way of Charles helping the forsworn and I don't think anything indicates that even seeing the harm some of them have caused that they'd think the should have tried to stop Charles unforswearing them.

Saying that the current harm they are causing is a consequence of them being unforsworn is I suppose true in a causal sense but doesn't go back far enough. It's ultimately a consequence of them being forsworn in the first place.

Charles created the Hungry Choir after being foresworn and a judge of justice in it's bloodiest form twisted it to kill thousands. It wasn't being unforsworn that set Charles on the path to hurt so many people but being forsworn.

None of the forsworn are shown causing large scale harm prior to being forsworn and the reasons they were forsworn are often reasons that even someone who approves of punitive justice would recognize as bad reasons to punish someone. Even setting aside the Allaire forsworn - Seth and Charles were forsworn by Alexander manufacturing a pretext, Yiyun for trying to protect her daughter and even Helen was effectively forced to take the action that forswore her by her family.

I find it a stretch to interpret showing people who were subjected to horrific punishments for tenuous reasons lashing out to take revenge/change the system and hurting people as saying that punitive justice is good. It's not presenting the forswearing as good and justified and the unforswearing as wrong but showing all the death and pain currently happening as being rooted in the injustice of forswearing.

I'm not actually a fan of how hard Pale goes in on the idea that harming someone can lead to them harming more people in turn and thus perpetuate the suffering with the forsworn. However, while it's unnuanced to say the least it's not pro-punitive justice.

I definitely agree that more focus on combatting forswearing would have been great and maybe we'll get something before the end but I'm not holding my breath.

I don't really have an issue with how the specific forsworn are portrayed. I've said before that I think any real criticism of punitive justice must be willing to apply it to people who have committed terrible crimes and are unrepentant so I think it's necessary for many of the forsworn to be like that.

What I would say is an issue is those are really the only type of forsworn that gets focus in Pale. Yiyun as you said fades from the story and while the Allaire forsworn are numerically the largest group they don't have a narrative presence.

Pale would be stronger if it added a dozen unforsworn who took Charles deal and fucked off. Show some of them as people just trying to put their lives back together. Maybe have one of them join up with Kennet. In addition to adding more forsworn who aren't doing terrible things it would also make Charles more compelling by showing he was telling the truth that he wasn't pressing the forsworn to work with him.

For most stories I might be willing to accept that this would be hard to fit in limited word count but Pale doesn't get to use that excuse for obvious reasons.