I’m The Same As I Ever Was

edit: changed some phrasing and added more detail. no idea how long this thang is now

brian: i do legitimately believe he is both straight & cis bc if he wasn’t he would palpably b much stranger abt manhood & masculinity than he already is in-text .. he has considered kissing a man at least once but figured after hefty deliberation that sort of thing just wasn’t for him .. however i do think cherish should have called him gay not bc he rly is but bc it would have made him pause & afterwards fall into a period of rumination & actually i think this is how his summer of the forest could have happened

lisa: in love w taylor in every sense of the phrase but i wouldn’t say “attraction” itself is a factor there / that love isn’t predicated on romance or attraction or what one might typically attribute to love .. sexuality isn’t something she herself would rly care to put labels on nor something i think has much merit here but for shorthand i would just call her an arospec / acespec / etc lesbian .. cis but i think the only value gender has to her is wrt its social connotations (in business & persona) .. if she woke up one day in magical boy universe i think she would just adapt & adjust but she would grieve the loss of being able to go “look at this sweet face! would this girl lie to u :(” when that girl is in fact lying to u

rachel: butch lesbian & it is embedded into every aspect of her character & i will never ever ever ever listen to that foul man’s words he doesn’t know her he doesn’t even know her he is nothing he is nothing he is nothing he is nothing he isn’t real he can’t hurt me he isn’t real he isn’t real & canada is an elaborate ploy by the first pioneers of the parahumans wordpress to account for worm’s esoteric undetermined origins

aisha: bisexual (for realsies apparently) but i don’t think it rly comes into play much other than as cudgel for her jests & japes bc she will b hung up on her best friend from when she was 13 until the day after she dies .. whether or not she was srs when she rated cherie fuck in fuck marry kill is up to u tho i do think she has a tendency to either dramatise or just completely make things up when talking abt her own attraction / preferences for eeshy reasons (see: asking defiant is the robot pussy was rly that good) .. gender is whatever she feels like in the moment

i think when he was a small child he got little crushes on girl And boy movie characters and he was like [thinking 2 himself while staring at tv screen] if i were the princess marrying the prince my dress would be blue and silver with special bows :). but he doesn't remember that anymore. he dressed in boy's clothes but his older siblings still all picked up on his Effeminate Vibes + Mannerisms because mean heterosexual children are like sharks to blood in the water with that shit. cherie watching 9yo alec have a favorite boy band member like oh...jean-paul une petite fif :)? i think the heartbroken household effectively treated his bisexuality as like...a mildly embarrassing fetish to make fun of him w/ (i.e. torment him w/) but obviously sexual interactions w/ men weren't, like, Discouraged. by any means. he was extremely hypersexual as a coerced coping mechanism for The Horrors btwn roughly ages 10-13, and towards the end of his time there/after he ran away he just kinda. shut down and put his sexuality in a box and dissociated from it in the same way he's dissociated from all of his other emotions.

he has no confusion about understanding he's bisexual--he remembers what he was into--or that dressing the way he does is a Gay Person Thing To Do, but he considers himself to just Not Be Interested In That Now. no gender preference in the sense that if you held up pictures of attractive men and woman he would react with the same amount of "meh" to both. reengaging w/ his own sexuality would necessitate processing things he is not ready or able to process so he's like. yeah sex is cringe/funny and having crushes is dumb and gay. video game time.

boy who likes physical affection and Thinks he thinks he had some good times w/ the only physical attention he received as a child (sexual abuse) but does in fact unconsciously solely associate being attracted to someone or aroused with Really Bad/Embarrassing/Scary Things happening. boy who has miserable wet trauma nightmares once every 3 months goes "wow thats really annoying" and then obliviously trots off to eat his morning bowl of captain crunch. boy who acts extremely casual about going U know back in the day i used 2 have someone in my bed every night...but 100% fully assumed aisha was going to make horrendous meanspirited fun of him when they were discussing childhood celebrity crushes. i jest about them playing fmk w ppl the undersiders fought but also i do think he would refuse to play the game were the idea raised because the mere idea of attempting to seriously consider let alone admit whether or not he would fuck someone would be psychologically intolerable to him. he would call it stupid and boring and deflect. i do think he picks up a little crush on aisha over the course of their friendship but he is 100% utterly oblivious to it and literally all of the ridiculous over the top desperate shit we see him do is Solely because he's Desperate For A Friend. she has observed the crush but is not going to be the one to tell him about it.

And that makes sense with what his situation was when he got powers. He didn't really want strangers to come and help him. Heroes have tried and failed and that only makes his living situation worse and his dad more quick to anger. He wants the people he's familiar with, the people that are constantly around him to step in and help. But they don't, so his power forces them to, so long as he knows them and knows them well.

i've mentioned this at least once or twice before yeah but never in a lengthier essay. 100% indicative of where his trauma is stemming from that his power works on people better the longer he's been around them and has a "holding capacity" of, like, 4 people tops before he starts getting too distracted to puppet everyone. shows a focus on specifically needing to control a smaller group of people he's familiar with vs. taylor's power giving her control over lots of faceless/omnipresent organisms in a way that indicates she's more viewing Society As A Whole as something that's out to get her. <- this is one of the points ive brought up before.

brian says that the undersiders are the closest thing she can have to friends. alec says that they're the closest thing she has to a family. (which is an entire can of worms in itself wrt alec's relation to the undersiders.) and both of those things are true, but there's also something so tragic in their assumption that their tenuous connection w/ rachel where she can only just barely tolerate them is the best she can ever have. they're the only people she can even remotely trust to have her back or treat her somewhat fairly instead of fucking her over, but they're still fundamentally considering her beyond close connection, less of a friend or someone to attempt befriending and more of someone to keep on a leash. of course taylor is the only one to actually get close to her--taylor is the only one who tries to engage with her, as a person, on rachel's own terms, instead of begrudgingly tolerating her. rachel :(

& alec is the other team member who's in the Extra Lonely Isolation Club...he gets silly with the team sometimes, he has his little teenage banter w/ brian, he and lisa are clearly very familiar with each other in the way ppl who've been living together for a year and a half are. it's really good for him. it's the first time in his entire life he's gotten to have a consistent home with his own belongings, and he's getting to have it because he's part of the undersiders. the undersiders are literally the first people in his entire life that approach counting as a friendship. he gets SO FUCKING MAD!!! when he leaps to assuming that rachel stole the money from them. he gets So Mad he immediately goes "i vote we kill her" and then goes on a seething rant about how he wouldn't have thought she'd do that since the undersiders are the closest she has to family, but apparently she would. and the projection is so obvious! he's not wrong about applying the sentiment to rachel, but there's a reason he goes farther than brian's "closest she has to friends" and into the more intimate territory of "closest she has to family"--the two-way street there means that the undersiders are the closest he has to family, and the idea of being betrayed by one of them hurts enough to trigger the aggression he always displays when he's feeling vulnerable.

i digress. it's inaccurate to read aisha killing heartbreaker as narrativizing her life to cope/resolving alec's missing plot thread where he was going to finally put down his evil father and resolve his siblings being trapped, because we know why aisha did it, and the reasoning is not at all that. like it's an interesting sentiment but it's not really true of aisha as a person and it's not true of why alec would have killed his father (or wanted to). i'll stick the essay under a cut because it's long

HE IS NOT HAVING A GOOD DAY MAN JUST WHEN HIS LIFE WAS STARTING TO GO PRETTY COOL A GIANT FIRE AND LIGHTNING MONSTER THAT'S REALLY GOOD AT KILLING PEOPLE FOR EXAMPLE PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT EVEN SHOWED UP. this is why he makes jokes about the undersiders dying like 3 times in a row his brain does not know how to compute "these people i actually like might die badly and i can't stop thinking about it (<- this is called 'anxiety')" without expressing it thru shit jokes. the first time he's got plausible deniability the second time eeeh the third time you can tell he's Fixating.

This comes in the context of Brian starting to explain his new power:

This is so much to me. It's a moment where (like confessing to being afraid) Brian does reach out, and in this case extremely concretely: his power is now one that lets him directly connect to another cape's power. In the world of Worm, connecting to another cape's power is in some ways arguably connecting directly to their most vulnerable trauma, right? It's as much felt as intellectually understood.

And Taylor flinches from it! It's not even an immediate rejection - Taylor sits there watching the tendril 'taking its time' before she 'abruptly' stands up fast enough to make Brian (admittedly on edge) jump up in alarm. Then they stare at each other until Brian relaxes, however long that takes, which I imagine we can infer to be 'more than a second'. In classic Taylor Hebert omission style we don't even see what her internal decision making was, we only see her verbal explanation after the fact.

This is also before he actually tells her what the new power does, which both contributes to her flinching and makes it more obviously about vulnerability in a broad sense. It makes sense she wouldn't want someone using a power she doesn't understand yet on her. But there was a moment where she was sitting there watching him reach out, and then there was a moment where she rejected it, and then Brian stares at a shuttered window and she curls up into the bony pillbug fetal position. Which could signify anything as far as Taylor's lack of reflecting is concerned about that as opposed to worrying Lisa is giving Taylor a bad grade in 'being a supportive friend' by suggesting Brian's sister comfort him before Brian's coworker-crush-workplace situation.