The Rifter Diaries

There's something deeply tragic about Taylor in the way that goes in with all these assumptions about what her universe is like (that she useally shares with the audience) and then has them torn away. Even one of her most brutal acts early on, taking out Lungs eyes on purpose, mirrors the type of brutal but exused violence that's core to a lot of hero narratives. It feels like there's the tragedy to pre Leviathan Taylor where she keeps thinking things are going to follow the tropes that they look like. She's not going to be able to just leave the undersiders and become a normal hero because there's actual consequences to temporarily being a villain. She doesn't get to have the very mentor shaped armsmaster as her mentor figure, because he's not a good person just because he's on a hero team. She's not able to have the morally simple conflicts most people expect from the genre, even taking down the ABB means playing nice with Nazis.

I think that it's after leviathan that she really switches from naively understanding the world as being more like a normal superhero setting then it is, to actually understanding what it's like to be a cape on earth Bet. And the world that she realizes she's in is one that's fundamentally like ours, one where superpowers don't change society's and humanity's problems. And it's almost tragic for her to learn that. Like, it's something she needed to learn, but it's not something she's happy to learn. Like, she's fundamentally never the same after losing that false perception of her setting.