Agent RIVER stan account

Thinking a lot about the use of the color yellow/gold in Worm.

As a side effect of my tinkering with the breaker post, something interesting occurred to me surrounding Shadow Stalker and her power. On paper, her breaker state shores up her self-image as this untouchable Apex predator. As it is, though, she's massively vulnerable to electricity in her breaker state, and since every building in the city she operates in is wired to the gills, her power in practice often amounts to a really fancy method of using the front door like a normal person. Like an actual apex predator, she's repelled and constrained in her movements by the buildup of modernity.

Now, were she to fuck off to the middle of the woods, she actually would be untouchable, able to run circles around her pursuers, camouflage herself indefinitely, function as a bogeywoman. But when she actually does fuck off to the woods, at the very end of the book, it's taken as an indicator that she's failed in everything that matters to her personally. As much as she rails against society and its niceties, Sophia is very dependent on it to get what she wants; the whole terror campaign against Taylor is enabled by PRT shielding, administrative foot-dragging, and Emma's ability to play Winslow like a fiddle. And there's no way to validate your self image as a terrifying vigilante if you work somewhere where there's barely anyone to terrify.

What I thought was: some powers are dicks to their host, and some of them specifically require the user to have personal growth to use them effectively, and the best ones would be those.

And then the post gives an excellent counter example of a power that can't be used effectively because of a character flaw, and the user never thinks about using it to the full potential.

If I could also use second-generation and cauldron capes: I don't remember Golem having any touch or immobility related trauma.

And also Parian really confused me, because there's a line in Ward that it was always about skin, and her power is strongest with skin instead of cloth, but using the dead to power up is repulsive to everyone and not just her, and also her trigger was being ostracized. So I don't understand what skin has to do with her power and why it hurts her specifically.

She gets a power that lets her make loyal, supportive minions out of dead bodies, with a focus on removing skin (and with it markers of identity/attractive features), which is nonetheless vague and unintuitive enough that she always feels like she’s doing the wrong thing with her life. 

Genesis doesn’t want to produce minions that can do all those things; she wants to be able to do all those fantastic things, personally, with her own body, instead of living vicariously through avatars (as she did as part of a competitive gaming team.)

The whole situation with the Wards always hit like the Hunger Games to me, where you’re sinking this huge budget into making larger-than-life idols of the kids, making sure everyone knows their names, and then memory-holing the ones who predictably die in short order so that the machine can keep running smoothly without public discontent. And, again, I gotta stress that it’s not nearly as inherently evil in my view- you’re sending those kids to deal with all-hands-on-deck situations that they specifically are genuinely needed for- but even if you accept that it’s necessary, the utilitarian calculus is made behind closed doors, and nobody ever reckons with it, nobody ever publicly faces down the tradeoff being made, nobody ever looks it in the eye and says, “yeah, we’re comfortable sacrificing the few for the many.” They dress it up in a costume and parade it around like a sports team and sweep the ugliness under the rug.

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.

sorry ive definitely said this already and it might have even been about this line but every single time brian does something like this it makes me so

Seriously, there are a shitload of parallels, from powers, to personality, to life circumstances. 

They both are:

superpeople with a bug motif (duh)

fifteen-year-old scrawny, Gangly, Nerdy, glasses-wearing brunettes from blue-collar liberal backgrounds with grossly judgmental running commentary on everyone around them

 relentlessly bullied by their more popular peers, with their costumed identity acting as a release valve where they get to be powerful

Are mourning the death of a beloved, idealized parental figure that they posthumously outsource a lot of their moral reasoning to 

Are keeping their living parental figure in the dark about their costumed career to “protect” them (and because said parental figure finds their costumed alter ego objectionable

constantly mistaken for or smeared as malevolent criminals despite their good intentions

conducting themselves in a deeply creepy and borderline inhuman manner, (it’s pretty normalized now, but Spider-Man had extremely unsettling locomotion when he debuted! He was a creepy thing to see on a wall at night!)

motivated in large part by a single “come-to-jesus” moment where they realized the costs of using their powers self-indulgently (Uncle Ben and Dinah)

possessed by enormous Atlas complexes, routinely breaking their own backs to save people who hate and fear them

street-level “friendly neighborhood” heroes, focusing on protecting and servicing a specific locality 

fighters with a style built around predicative, extrasensory battlefield awareness, using wits, webs, and on-the-fly deduction of weaknesses to hit well above their weight.

Where it diverges:

For Taylor and Peter, the bullying is presented as the pre-power status quo. For Peter, this fades into the background as his costumed life picks up and as he segues into adult life; for Taylor, it irrevocably fucks up her headstate from the word go and colors how she engages with literally every situation she encounters. Spider-Man is hounded as a criminal because of bad luck and bad marketing; Skitter is hounded as a criminal because she’s actually a criminal,  with a lot of her genuinely well-intentioned actions parsing as warlordism and cult-of-personality-building to a reasonable outside observer (because, you know, they are.) Spider-Man hides his life from Aunt May out of a sort of groundless fear she’d stop loving him; Taylor hides her double life because her surviving parent has genuine and reasonable ideological objections to her lifestyle. And, because Worm lets the consequences of the superheroic lifestyle play out without reboots or resets, Taylor’s Atlas Complex takes all of two years to utterly destroy her as a person, which, lets face it, is what would very likely happen to Spidey if there weren’t a metanarrative mandate to keep him alive for further adventures.

Started this almost a year ago 😵‍💫

Tried to experiment with style, redrew Tattletale and Grue way too many times, got burned out, and abandoned the file for months.

Opened it again today for the first time in ages. Thought I'd share the progress while I'm here.

Amazing Worm artworks by Steph Li.