I'm giving up on trying to sell you things that you ain't buying

I can try!

I don’t mean this in a judgy way; vice doesn’t first and foremost make you a “bad person” in the way tumblr means it (a hateable person)—but it does kind of make you bad at being a person. vice is an entrenched habit which prevents you from realizing happiness and fulfillment, and cowardice absolutely does this.

it seems like people are starting to catch on to the fact that if your fears are preventing you from ever having joys, then you have given your fears too much power. Mr. Woodhouse from Emma is a great example of this kind of character. his fears have completely prevented him from living a full life and regularly prevent him from enjoying even the small pleasures he has left. and crucially, this isn’t just something he’s done to himself. his cowardice also causes suffering for those around him, both in small ways (subjecting Emma to painful social moments) and in large (almost costing Emma her happiness with Knightley). if your fears have enclosed you into a progressively smaller and smaller box in your quest to feel perfectly safe (even and especially from things that objectively are no threat to your safety), then I think you have a real responsibility to try to face your fears and heal whatever is making you believe that they were worth losing everything. you have this responsibility because you were born to be a full human being, not a caged animal.

but there’s also another sense in which cowardice is a vice. if you possess every other virtue, if your system of values is perfect and just, but you crumble when under pressure, then you do not fully possess those virtues and you’re not able to live up to your own values. all virtues depend on each other; everyone has areas that they’re more naturally gifted in or they’ve practiced more, but you cannot completely leave out one virtue without cancelling out the ones you do have. courage is especially universal, because it is all other virtues practiced under fire. if you cannot be kind or you cannot practice justice as soon as it is difficult, then you’re not very kind or just at all.

this isn’t to say that we can’t be understanding and compassionate towards someone who caves or freezes in a moment of fear, and it certainly isn’t to say that there can’t be mercy after the fact. but it is to say that we have to be able to recognize the entrenched habit of the person who consistently prioritizes their own comfort and their own safety over everything else—especially when the safety being prioritized is a “feeling” of safety not based in reality or a social safety related to reputation, instead of a real threat on their life. if your fears prevent you from living out your convictions, then your convictions are pretty worthless. if there’s nothing you love more than your own skin, then you can’t love anything very much.

So, apparently some of you aren't aware???

Wildbow comics is fucking old, but i might as well start easy and tell you the lore of pre Apollyon Wars Taylor.

(Actual first appareance of Taylor Hebert and the homage i did for badly drawn worm)

Around the 60s Wildbow comics finally won a whole shitshow of a lawsuit against DC comics, that at the time was suing whatever superman shaped characters they could find, and Wildbow had several superman ripoffs, so, in the meantime they tried to create new more original characters, one of them was Aegis, the human shield.

He was hip teenager that had to deal with both teenager problems and superhero problems yadda yadda, and one of those troubles was falling in love with the creepy supervillain.

Taylor Hebert was created as both a supervillain and a love interest of Aegis, as well as a clear parody of spiderman, having a similar background as bullied teens that got bug powers, but while Peter got bitten by a radioactive spider, Taylor got cursed by the Skittering Scarab medallion (wich was a blue beetle rip off instead).

This silver age Taylor didn't go by skitter (and she wouldn't be called that until the Apollyon Wars reboot) but instead she was bug girl, and she had more vaguely insect powers (stenght, agility, endurance etc)

The thing that made her different from others was that she was a sympathetic villain that never went to far. She was esentially a teenager lashing out, just in the more augmented reality of comics. And that made it very interesting to flirt with redemption, but there was one thing that prevented that from happening...

(Screenshot of 'Unbeatable Aegis' episode 8 season 2 'The Undersiders Unite')

The undersiders, led by the mysterious Coil was a group of supervillains Aegis had previously beaten, now joined together to finish him, and commits many crimes along the way. They were also surprisingly great friends.

Don't get me wrong, they betrayed each other a lot, but they always ended up forgiving each other, because they were the only people that truly got what was to be a supervillain with a gimmich that everybody laughed at. Specially Bug Girl, who finally got friends that accepted her in this sort of toxic found family.

It was a clear contrast with Charlie's (yeah, he became Carlos after the first reboot) own lonelyness, he constantly ruined relationships to keep his secret and it really made tempting for him to just... change sides.

(Aegis the human shield issue 123, the night tattletale died)

There is a reason the night tattletale died is considered one of the two things that ended the WB silver age (The other being Vikare's death), because the wiplash is fucking real.

You just had a whole arc of Aegis beating coil, about Sarah (i still find very funny how Worm made it her real name instead of the post apollyon one) trying to get out of the whole criminal lifestyle and wanting to run away with Taylor (With all the Sapphic vibes that had), so having Coil's fuckass son come back and fuck it all up is so heartbreaking man.

Because it was all so preventable. If Taylor had trusted Charlie to help her, if Leroy (Silver age Hellhound) hadn't accidentaly ratted out Tattletale, if Sarah hadn't decided to trust herself and not her powers as a show of trust... she would be alive.

(The iconic Giant-Size Wards #1 with Chariot, Flechette, Weld, Aegis, Weaver and Tecton)

You know when a story is good but your fave gets dragged through the mud in it? Because like, the All New All Different Wards are great, when it came out it was a great step forward in representation and Tecton is just so fucking cool (The Irregular Cinematic Universe shouldn't have focused on him tho).

But Taylor doesn't do anything besides being Aegis' girlfriend in it? Like, you can't tell they didn't know what to do with her, hell Peter Ness didn't bother to make her gay (and he did make everyone he could very fucking gay).

You could make a good arc out of how she doesn't really fit in the group compared with the undersiders, but whem they meet it's like they don't know each other, it's so fucking infuriating.

(The both famous and infamous conclusion to the Deluge event)

So, at one point they introduce the travellers as this foil villain group. And one of them, echidna, makes a clone of tattletale to fuck with Taylor. And holy shit, that was so good, you finally adresses the elephant in the room, i wonder what developement will it lead-

She fucking dies in the next arc. Because Aegis has to suffer. Leviathan fucking kills her with no fanfare. Yeah, that leviathan (not really, it was like a dude, more like the villain from the protectorate movies).

You know that she was one of the reason's Gail Simone made the women in refrigerators blog right? It was that bad. Jean grey, Gwen Stacy, Barbara Gordon, Kyle's girlfriend and Taylor Hebert.

And in less than a year, Charlie started dating Shadow stalker because he is a SLUT and i hate him. And the worst part was that Taylor was so unpopular that she didn't get love from the writer's like for example Barbara becoming oracle.

(Taylor Hebert comes back as Kephri, Wards #411)

Most people already know it, but this whole thing was just the result of one editor insisting really hard into making an event that nobody wanted to do that pretty much ruined the Wildbow comics lore.

So, the magical amulet? Actually an artifact created by the Skittering Entity or some shit. Because actually all capes get their powers from the entities, isn't that neat? Isn't that cool? Scion is now even specialler now.

And you know, even with that, even with fucking soace magic alien resurecting Taylor... it could have been good man. You could have Taylor changed by the experience, trying to come with terms with her own death and place in the world, confront Aegis for moving on so fast... but instead we got a Madellyn Pryor level character assasination.

The omnicidal jealous ex, thats the bedt they could come up with, holy shit.

This whole retcon fucked up the lore so bad they rebooted the whole universe to run away from it.

(Fellow Fridged woman Glory Girl in Apollyon Wars #6)

So, even with the end of the world editorial needs to give Taylor Hebert one last fuck you. Do you know the amount of hatedom born from Taylor killing Glory girl? Do you know how many people, to this day, still refuse to read worm because she killed their blorbo in 1988???

And you know why? To make Scion sad, to show he had humanity unlike Apollyon and the other entities. People fucking clapped when Scion killed Taylor, nobody gave a fuck, or stopped to say "damn, so sad Taylor got possesed after death".

FLECHETTE, FUCKING FLECHETTE SAID "Take that you worm!" When i red it i was so fucking angry man. That book was just hype moments and aura wirh a side of mysoginy.

But in a cosmic sense I find hilarious that Gold morning and Worm is just reverse Apollyon Wars. You can tell McCrae also fucking hated it.

So yeah, thats how the story of Pre-Apollyon wars Taylor ends, dying alone how she was scared to.