#concluding thoughts

Right now, initial feelings are really positive. I like this arc, I get why people are in on this in such a hardcore fashion, like it's making sense to me as I'm reading it. The characterization is really strong, the A to B plot is cool, and the first fight scene was a fucking banger to open up with.

And like, shit, I get why Taylor is throwing herself into cape life, right? Civilian life is already such fucking misery for her, utterly alone and the only person who's theoretically in her corner is sympathetic but just as helpless as she is. Yeah sure, mortal peril, but if she had nothing to do I feel like the bullying would've killed her eventually. Death versus Lung is at least marginally more noble than death by Emma. And isn't that fucking bleak.

Looking ahead a little bit towards Arc 2 and I'm immensely curious how long it'll take Taylor to do cape stuff again. I feel like I'd need a solid month to process the whole "near death experience" thing and then spend time sweating over whether I even put the mask on ever again. Meanwhile I wouldn't be surprised if Taylor went back out in like a week, because she's a hardcore maniac.

It's also very interesting looking at this and considering the exact sequence of events that went through these chapters. If the bullies didn't wreck Taylor's notebook, or if Taylor took a different message away from its destruction, there might be one or more dead Undersiders right now, and to a lesser extent Armsmaster wouldn't both get credit for a major capture and also owe this rookie hero a favor. Both of those things are going to matter a lot, and it's, I dunno, some people would call that contrived but real life is so full of weird coincidence and happenstance I can buy this no problem.

...Honestly now I get why so many AUs that diverge before this point still include the Lung fight and the Undersiders and Armsmaster meetings, like yeah at that point it's contrivance but I'm not going to sweat an author too hard because they don't want to figure out how fucking dramatic the butterfly effect (hah, butterfly) would be on the rest of the story. Like yeah it's contrived, but that's a lot of work they'd have to do otherwise.

That aside, I'm gonna get back on topic and meditate on my current gripes. 1.3 was a legitimate low point in this arc with the description of the Docks and its residents and their circumstances, and the total clusterfuck of the Azn Bad Boys, which. By the by this is the last time I'm going to say the full name of that gang, ABB is shorter and is less embarrassing for everybody involved. Wall-to-wall racism, classism, and an utter lack of sympathy for the lesser-thans. Like we're talking about crack whores in the year of our lord 2011, or, they were written about in 2011 and I'm hollering about it on the internet in 2024. When this kind of thing comes back up (when, not if, I'm not that optimistic) I just hope I can work around it, like eating everything but the bruise on an apple.

To close this out, I'm thinking about the people in Taylor's life. Emma, a former friend turned bully, and her cronies Madison and Sophia. Pretty shallow characterization at this point, just that they're cruel to the point of hospitalizing their victim. Danny Hebert is supportive, but has all the strength of a sponge when it comes to holding up against the pressures that weigh on Taylor, and he knows it but he's not doing anything differently. The Undersiders, criminals who mistake Taylor for a criminal, but identify her correctly as a comrade and potential friend, who realize she was fighting for them and went to fight for her. Armsmaster, who offers her very genuine and very sought-after praise as an authority figure, and then leans on that authority to get what he wants out of a freshly traumatized and exhausted teenager.

Is it any wonder that Taylor takes the path that she does? Would anyone have it in them to be surprised if they could see all of this from a bird's eye view?

I wonder if Armsmaster ever thinks back about this night, lying awake in bed. If he ever wonders what he could or should have done differently, or if he couldn't have done anything to divert course.

I was talking to my girlfriend about something related to this the other night, actually. If it's worse in a tragedy for there to have been a chance to avert it all, or if it's worse for the end to be inevitable. Looking at Taylor, looking at Brockton Bay, looking at Earth Bet? I dunno. If someone had acted early, with knowledge and intention sufficient to actually provide aid, maybe it would've been enough, but hell. Maybe not. I don’t know which possibility is more damning.

...I get melancholy when it's late, but I don't think it'd be right to delete all that; it's how I'm feeling about the novel, and that's what this blog is for, so even if it's a bit dramatic it'd be self-defeating to pretend I didn't say it.

This arc has everything. The greatest virtues and darkest failures of humanity, fighting to save the day and fighting to win and fighting to survive another minute longer, fear and hope and despair and rage.

I'm still kind of beside myself at the failures of the Protectorate and PRT that get put on display in this event. Like they legitimately have time before the attack, something that is apparently unprecedented before Armsmaster and Dragon's project, and Legend burns a bunch of that time by being a massive downer instead of hurrying up with the strategy talk. They also just straight up don't explain anything to Skitter when she's taken into the hospital, which is how we end up with Stalker's identity revealed and Colin's breakdown, which. Jesus fucking Christ could these people be any more like cops than in the moment where they were pressing Skitter. Like yeah she's a villain and she fucked up truce conditions, but she's also a teenager who just recovered from a spinal injury and has been left totally alone and terrified up until she crossed that line. Obviously tensions are high, but shouldn't parahumans of all fucking people, and heroes of all fucking parahumans, be able to handle someone processing trauma with a bit more grace? Like I don't even hate the Protectorate, I think most of them are doing the best they can except for Shadow Stalker and Armsmaster. But their best has failed people, and keeps failing Taylor in particular. It's a system, and a pretty massive system at that for all it spans two pretty big countries and one heavily populated one, and we've seen the system's blind spots and shortfalls here.

Speaking of blind spots and shortfalls: hey Colin. I knew you were gonna do something fucking stupid this arc, I didn't know what exactly but you really blew my expectations out of the water. I'm very proud of you for getting Kaiser dead, okay, don't think for a second that I'd hold dead Nazis against you, but trying to get a teenager killed so you can solo Leviathan is a fucking insane thing to do. I don't care if the teenager made hornets sting your face, I don't care if the teenager told you she was going undercover with criminals and then just became a criminal. We don't feed teenagers to kaiju for personal glory. We also don't out teenagers' dirtiest secrets in front of people who might just kill them for it; you knew full well that Bitch and Regent had killed before and would kill again if provoked, and sure as shit Lisa says that they're gonna have to get Rachel to cool way the fuck down in order to make sure she doesn't murder Taylor for her almost-treachery. If Skitter got mauled to death by a giant dog, that would've been on your fucking head Colin.

Unfortunately I don't think he's gonna get more than a slap on the wrist for this, which is slightly steeper for him than for other people bc he's only got the one wrist, but maybe there's a chance he gets some fucking humility out of this entire ordeal.

I think the Leviathan fight is the best one out of the entire story so far, as I stew on it. Lung was cool, Wards was cool, Bakuda was tense and scary, Protectorate was... mixed, and Empire had some cool beats. Leviathan just. It had everything. The battlefield felt more real and more relevant to the fight than ever before, the stakes were felt, the casualties, Jesus fucking Christ the casualties. People dropping left and right, heroes and villains taking hits that they can't get up from, all in the desperate hope that they can buy that much time for everyone else to step up, that much time to save this fucking city. Skitter spends so much of the battle feeling utterly useless, even as she ends up being critical at multiple points for tracking Leviathan down, saving as many people from the shelter as she could with a borderline suicidal attack, even saving Clockblocker when nobody else was thinking to. For all she bemoans her weakness, her futile struggles, the powers she doesn't have and the people she can't rescue, she saved easily dozens of lives, and carried the fight that much further for others to keep it going.

Which is why I'm a little aghast at the idea that this could've been her swan song.

There's never going to be a better time for me to talk about this, so let's get to it. I learned that Wildbow claims to have used dice in order to dictate who lives and who dies in the Leviathan battle, including Taylor and the rest of the Undersiders, and I have two thoughts on that! One: I hope it's a fib, because the idea that there's any chance the deaths of major and supporting characters would be riding entirely on chance instead of the author's own will and ideas for the story feels utterly anathema to me. Two: if it is true, I'm really glad that he rolled exactly the way he did, because this seems like just about the best possible way for this story to remain intact.

Like let's look at this for a second, right? Let's look at major figures and see who dies. Every Undersider makes it out alive, that's our core cast right there, a lot of plot riding on them, a lot of future interactions (including the ones in 8.7 and 8.8) that would've been cut violently short and left dangling for the next million plus words. Armsmaster survives being disarmed, not out of the question since he got pretty swift treatment for that obviously, but that also means that he's alive to snitch Taylor out for her plan to betray the Undersiders, deepen the rift between them and force Taylor to double down on what it means to be a villain if she wants to have any semblance of the life she used to have before Leviathan came crashing down on the city. Glory Girl and Panacea survive in order to have their own fucked up misadventure later down the line, Flechette and Parian keep kicking and get to be characters later. Coil lives to keep being a major issue, Dinah survives alongside him and so does Noelle. Kaiser gets bisected, thank God, allegedly he was supposed to keep being a major antagonist in the future and this was cut short when the dice came up with a fatal end, but I don't know that he would've kept mattering. The ABB is cooked, done, out of the city entirely. Coil's consolidating power, pushing out every player who can't be incorporated into his little plans. The Empire is already unstable with the publishing of their identities, they can't put the genie back because any possible doubt that could've been cast on the reports was obliterated when Purity leveled multiple city blocks and talking about how she'd kill everyone in the city if she didn't get her baby back. The state of the city very likely means that Medhall is going to shit, so that's his legitimate power base crumbling, and as far as everyone is probably concerned it's open season on fascist capes. If Leviathan didn't do it, I'd give it a week before some anti-Nazi out of towner got him with a Tinkertech assassination device Shinzo Abe style. Kaiser's purpose as the one holding the reins on the Empire was fulfilled, it was entirely in keeping with the trajectory of the story to see him fall and have other threats rise in his place, that much more disorganized and chaotic and proving that the Empire isn't better than any of the other villain groups or gangs.

Let's look at the other local deaths while we're at it. Aegis, Browbeat, and Gallant; three Wards who we knew for all of one arc, and who we got to learn a bit more about in the span of a single interlude, and who didn't seem to have a whole lot going on. For fuck's sake, Browbeat apparently rolled to survive the first time and got killed in a retcon bc it made Wildbow's life easier, so clearly him living or dying doesn't add up to much. Dauntless and Velocity, two Protectorate heroes where one of them didn't even have speaking lines and I legitimately can't remember whether Velocity says anything and don't want to comb through and check, which isn't a great sign for his relevance in the wider story. Manpower and Shielder, who we only first saw in Arc 7 and who also had no lines or interactions. Alabaster, Fenja, and Kaiser, the only known Brockton native villains who bit the bullet; Alabaster had no lines, Fenja maybe had a line or maybe it was Menja but they only really mattered during the Lung rematch back in Arc 5, and I'm not explaining Kaiser a second time because fuck him and because this is already getting pretty long.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm reading this over a decade after it came out and I'm looking at it as part 8 of a 30 part story, but while I'm certain a number of these deaths will have repercussions (New Wave is certainly reeling with their losses, and there's no way Glory Girl is handling Gallant's death well either, never mind his conversation with Panacea) none of them seem to have immediate repercussions for Taylor's story. The closest thing she might have had to a personal connection with any of them was a beef with Kaiser and his lot, and that doesn't really count because their conflicts with each other were entirely within the boundaries of "cape business." Kaiser getting snapped like a Slim Jim means that out of the major criminal powers of Brockton Bay, the only one Taylor still has to deal with is Coil, who she has a lot more personal connections with for good and for ill.

And then there's the idea that Taylor could have died here if the dice said she dies, she'd end up a decoy protagonist all along and we'd switch perspectives to Aegis, of all fucking people. I legitimately want to ignore this for the foreseeable future because I'm so so so glad it didn't shake out that way. All of these past chapters, all of these past arcs, and it wouldn't matter? Taylor just drowns in the middle of a destroyed street or gets crushed by Leviathan and that's all folks? Aegis would be the one to spearhead the defense on Gold fucking Morning? (Yeah I already know about Gold Morning, I've known the broad strokes of this story for years and didn't give a fuck bc I didn't think I'd get around to reading it, more fool me.) I can't buy that. I can barely even acknowledge that it's being sold to me. I legitimately prefer the version of reality where Wildbow is fibbing about the dice, that he used them as an aid to decide which minor characters bit it while still knowing the characters he already wanted to knock off or keep alive, or that he didn't use them at all, because that makes way more sense to me as an author than the idea that he left all of it up to chance. That he left the quality and content of his story, up to and including the narrator/protagonist, up to random chance. I have to believe that he's fudging the truth because the alternative is that he's a maniac.

Okay, that's my piece said, let's get to the rest of this.

We finally get a more thorough understanding of Lisa, and the end result isn't nearly what I was afraid of. Like yeah, she's been manipulating Taylor, feeding into some of her worse instincts, corrupting a potential hero into a committed villain, but I maintain, still, that Taylor would have fucking died if she'd tried to keep playing at indie hero when Bakuda's rampage started. Is it so dire a corruption arc if it means Taylor has like an iota more of self-respect than she did before? If making her a little more selfish, a little more hardened, is what it takes to get her somewhere approaching happiness, is it really that much better to keep her pure-hearted and utterly miserable? Ideally she could be both good and happy, but this isn't that kind of story, she's lucky to get one or the other and frequently has neither, and to commit wholly to being good and eschewing happiness entirely is an unreasonable fucking ask for anybody, much less a teenager.

Beyond that little ethical knot, Lisa just keeps being fun to watch do stuff. Seeing her at work in the flashback and in the Leviathan fight is pretty spectacular, and the fact that she responds to the Protectorate's ultimatum against Skitter by putting an even bigger and meaner ultimatum to their head is a masterstroke. I remembered that the Boardwalk sucks for all that it seems like a cool place to hang around, Jesus fucking Christ the whole deal of the enforcers gives me hives.

And then there's Coil. Fucking Coil. Rancid piece of shit wannabe Bond villain store-bought superpower creep-ass bastard. Him and Creep and Pitter can all drop down an elevator shaft in the next arc and I'd still have put up with them for too long, but I'm not lucky enough for that to happen so I'm just gonna have to keep putting up with this horseshit for now, lucky me. Coil cannot die fast enough for my satisfaction, because for that I'd need him to have died an arc ago.

I like the Brockton Wards, mostly. Vista is by far my favorite of the bunch because she's cooler than all of them and also a middle schooler, and honestly that's super fucked up. I like Clockblocker, Weld, Flechette, I got a little annoyed with Kid Win being so down on himself but he was basically fine, and Shadow Stalker.

I'm sure we're going to get more Shadow Stalker in the next arc or two, unless they just bury her in wet cement next chapter which I kind of doubt, but I want it now because I am desperate to find out what the fuck happened to make her the kind of person who legit buys into alpha/beta crap to the point of murdering people over it. Taylor hasn't killed anyone yet and this entire serial is about how she justifies ever-increasing acts of violence to respond to problems caused in no small part by her previous acts of violence; Vista getting first blood before her is a fucking tragedy and Shadow Stalker having multiple kills notched is a horror story. I need this to make sense, and also if we can avoid more weird racist connotations in making sense of this that would be great.

Didn't love the Travelers fight, like I mentioned. The investment wasn't really there for me, there weren't really any stakes to it so the whole thing was just kind of a space filler.

Shocked that the Slaughterhouse Nine are being signposted as early as this, too. Not that I'd put it past them to be in the Bay within a month of Leviathan, but I continue to be surprised at Worm's pacing. I don't think I'm gonna love that part of the story but if I can hold my nose through every interaction with Coil, I can probably handle the Nine.

Vista is. Okay for real though, what the fuck is happening with the Protectorate/PRT and throwing this middle schooler into constant life-or-death situations. She was at Leviathan, which, okay sure, pull out all the stops when the alternative is complete annihilation, make the birthday girl kill a man to put fifteen seconds on the game clock while we're at it. She was at the Empire's murderous tantrum alongside other Wards and New Wave, which I guess is because she's one of the only heroes whose powers can keep up with all the flyers in the Empire? Still wild choice there. She was instrumental in the disarmament of Bakuda's magnum opus mega-EMP along with Clockblocker, and I know he's the big name for the team but why didn't they just put Armsmaster on that to tinker the problem away? I feel like putting EOD duty on the teenaged public figures is an incorrect call someone made. I'd love to find out who, and maybe throw pieces of brickwork at them while they have to hold still. Can somebody stop throwing this girl into horrific combat scenarios as a government-employed child?

I'm going to keep pointing and laughing at Coil though, because the man is literally only succeeding at his infiltration of the PRT because they're letting him, and now he's only going to have a Ward as his own personal mole because they're letting him. Man wants to control an entire city and the whole thing would collapse if a single government organization stopped letting him take Ws he thought he earned.

I want to read those summaries of the studies done on that Dallon-Pelham clan though. Desperate to know if whatever insane WASP nuclear family nightmare goes on in those homes leaked into the research papers.

And then yeah, looking back at the ambush with Sophia. I was really glad to see the squad again, honestly, and it's great to see them working together, especially to take down a killer gunning for their own. A little funny that Sophia prides herself so highly for being a hunter of men and she fell for a classic ambush without even blinking.

Okay, from the top now

Brian Laborn is actively evading all of my attempts to understand him. I will discover what makes him tick no matter how long it takes, and I will know whether the furniture building was meant to be a date or not

Speaking of which, my God 6.3 was fucking awkward. Some of that I'm certain was intentional, and good job at that, but holy shit I was actually uncomfortable with the way Aisha is described on her first appearance. Like I guess that can be chalked up to Taylor being awkward and mean but I'm gonna be real, I'm eyeing Wildbow on this one, if there's ever a fucking Worm Revised Edition that had better be on the rewrite block

Uhhhhh, lessee, what n-ahh. The gallery job.

I'm torn on this one, honestly. The build-up was solid, the entrance was delightful, and in the moment-to-moment stuff the fights were fun, but... the Undersiders went in with like half the Protectorate's numbers, and then proceeded to fight a wholeass PRT squad and then every hero there, and beat almost all of them. The Wards didn't do jack shit before being taken out, Assault and Battery got one cool team move and then were dusted, Triumph got downed by a dog, Velocity... Velocity found out a critical flaw in what gets sacrificed in the name of full power efficiency.

Someone on Discord pointed out that Miss Militia using the machete against Regent was actually a good way to discourage him from making her arms move, which is honestly smarter than I initially gave her credit for, but she still wound up puking inside her own costume so it's not like she's coming away from this smelling like roses.

Armsmaster and Dauntless are the only heroes who come out of 6.5 to 6.7 not looking like complete chumps, and Dauntless doesn't have a whole lot of personality on display so he barely counts as a character.

Overall it feels like the Protectorate heroes lost a lot of their bite with this entire sequence. The Undersiders are getaway specialists, thieves who don't pick fights unless they're sure they can win, and they just challenged like one of the highest-rated heroes in the Protectorate and his entire squad and came out of it in one piece. I'll grant that between the ambush conditions and the functionally unmatched battlefield control provided by Grue and Skitter that they tilted multiple factors in their favor, but that still doesn't feel all the way sufficient.

It should've been a lot closer, I think, and in some places it was already pretty close.

I hate Coil's entire vibe so much, I hate hate hate this dude. Smug motherfucker with his choreographed limo rides and coin tricks and shit. I'm gonna have to put up with this for a while, I can fucking feel it, goddamn him.

Somewhat relatedly, Tattletale... I don't like her less but I'm keeping a closer eye on what she says and does. If she's actually vibing with Coil and not just working with him as a matter of opportunism then that. Doesn't reflect great on her.

Hebert family continuing to break my fucking heart. I swear to god these two are gonna take fucking forever to mend the rift between them, and it's gonna involve at least a half-dozen more near-death experiences, goddammit

Edit: fuck me forgot the interlude

Birdcage scares the shit out of me, I think what makes Dragon’s role as architect and warden even worse is that she clearly takes no joy from the act.

Bakuda died as she lived, with bombast and sudden, violent cruelty.

Man, remember when it was just Taylor and Rachel hanging out with like twenty dogs? I miss that. Can we go back to that. Please.

God it's so sad to see that Taylor is legitimately the first Undersider to make any inroads with Rachel and now that progress might have been well and truly fucked by her departure

It was cool to see Taylor developing more with her powers, figuring out new ways to use it. Also very cool of her to stab a fucking Nazi in the hand.

Another reminder that Taylor's bullies are all fucking maniacs, and also that Taylor's newfound confidence is seeing some unintended consequences.

Brian... okay. The kiss was really presumptive on Taylor's part, that sucks and that's not on him. But that man's got his wires crossed something fierce if his "sisterly affection" for Taylor reads as romantic attraction not just to Taylor's desperately lonely self (which, easy to fool I think) but also Lisa's interpersonal capabilities. Like, the social manipulation power thinks you're hot for her, my guy, what's that supposed to mean?

(Also what the hell would Aisha think if she heard the sister line, like for real)

Fuck the Empire, fuck Purity, fuck all of these Nazi rat bastards, I hope the Endbringer eats them all because apparently that's what we have to rely on for sticking it to them when the Protectorate can't send in one assist to put literally any of these guys away.

No significant gripes about the actual fights against the Empire, taking down Stormtiger and Cricket (plus fending off Hookwolf) was very cool, and the rooftop tangle with Rune and the alley fight with Night and Fog had some really neat and tense moments.

And then there's fucking Coil. I fucking hate this guy so much, he's so stupid and so cruel and for fucking what. Being the mayor of crime? And the mayor of heroes? And the boss of the actual mayor? What the fuck is even his problem, truly. Can't even doxx a bunch of Nazis without almost getting his subordinates killed, and when they confront him about it his defense is basically "i forgor," what the hell.

Dinah's scene is good in one specific and interesting way, providing both short-term information about Skitter's mounting dissatisfaction and the slightly longer-term information about the approaching Endbringer, but it just. Mm. Dinah's written weirdly, like that's not how twelve-year-olds talk. And I hate every word that Coil says to her.

Skitter's departure from the team is hard to read and hard to reread, honestly. She just. She finally had something going right in her life, for once, and she was willing to gamble everything on that continuing to go right. And she lost. And now she has to go back to them with the weight of that confrontation, that departure, hanging over every interaction, because she's doing what a hero would do.

Getting insights into Miss Militia and more of a look at the Protectorate was interesting, but mostly it's just pity for Hana and, yet again, concern about Armsmaster. Mfer can't stop coming off as concerning.

So, I was told by some friends that when the sirens start is a good time to consider the end of "Part One" of Worm. The Endbringer comes with a significant change in status quo, although I only know some of the details, so if I'm going to ruminate on the story so far, this is the time for it.

Let's do the broad strokes and then go chronological through the chapter details, I don't have any kind of structure or template for this stuff but that's as good a way as any right here

I know there's so much fucking ground left to cover, but at this point I think I'm confident enough to say that I like Worm. I don't know if I'd recommend it to a friend, exactly, because I think it's rude to trick someone into reading more than a million words and also because the list of content warnings I'd have to provide up front would run longer than my forearm (I knew what I was in for going in but I also made this choice mostly independently), but I feel like there's a difference between liking a work and recommending that work to others. I think Midsommar is one of the best horror movies I've ever seen, but it also removed all the oxygen from the living room where I watched it via sheer oppressive malice so I don't really tell people "oh you should watch Midsommar," y'know what I mean?

(I don't actually know if Worm is at any point going to fill me with the same kind of yawning dread that Midsommar inflicted, so this might not be an even parallel to draw, but I'm not going to completely dismiss the possibility)

More on topic though. No fight scenes this time, but that left more room for delicious and filling character interactions. I'm so on board with the Undersiders so quickly, I love them all, the things they're going to be made to suffer are going to agonize me for years to come I think.

It also left more room for Taylor's day at Winslow High, and... okay we'll get there. Let's do this chronologically.

The Hebert family feels like it's a broken heart in the shape of a house. I wish that they could reconcile with each other, but I don't know if they manage that, or if they even can manage it. I think Annette's death tore a wound between them that never fully healed, or maybe it was on the mend before Taylor started getting bullied and now that process has just stalled out

...Speaking of which

Winslow High is a fucking pit. Like Jesus fucking Christ that was so agonizing to read. Everyone at this school feels either useless or brimming with malice, and for the life of me I cannot puzzle out why. I mean, okay, I get the mechanisms at least, the main three girls are popular and Sophia is a Ward and with that together they can bend the students and faculty around like putty, people are often willing to go along with a heinous status quo if rocking the boat puts a target on their back, yadda yadda. But just. What the hell is going on with the main three girls? You could maybe read Sophia as some kind of sadist, but that doesn't explain why she's taking to this with such gusto, and I don't know if this kind of behavior wouldn't be caught out by the Protectorate if she's acting like this around other Wards. Madison I don't even know, so far I don't actually know if there's any meaningful depth there beyond acting as a complementary force to the other two.

Emma, though. Fucking Emma. I was just talking in an aside about how I distrust any argument that paints a mostly realistic teenager as some kind of soulless monster or evil mastermind, and I'm trying really hard to cleave to that, but I just don't get what drives Emma to behave like this, how she justifies it in her own head. She's torturing her best friend, she triggered her power's awakening for God's sake, and I just don't know what can happen in a week or month that could ever make this explicable or justifiable. Maybe I'll learn something that makes it all make sense but for now it's just some kind of incomprehensible monument of cruelty

That last twist of the knife with the line about crying to sleep at night is also just. God. Like, fucking credit to Wildbow, I feel some amount of stress writing about this all like the day after reading it, that was a really really well written sequence, I just also hated every word of it.

Let's change to a happier topic

Love the Undersiders, they're all great. I love that Brian works so hard to meet on a level playing field, to be open about expectations and show vulnerability to make Taylor feel more welcome, and I like how he seems to take pride in being The Normal & Responsible One even though I somehow doubt that's the case. I love Lisa being so friendly and so quick to assure Taylor about what's going on and what it all means for her, and I literally can't stop thinking about what she must be reading off of Taylor with her powers. Alec is a snarky little snot and I love that about him, I really want to see him open up further. And then Rachel... oh Rachel. You might end up being my favorite once we manage to move past the whole "siccing dogs on the new teammate" thing.

And now Taylor's a part of the crew, and she's immediately second-guessing this decision because she's realizing that it had deeper repercussions than she'd initially thought! Like she already felt betrayed by all of them over a slight from Rachel, even though her entire goal of joining them is as a means to take them down from the inside and hand them over to the Protectorate, and that irony is absolutely not lost on her! She's terrified of being found out as a rat but still lets herself be vulnerable around these people in a way she hasn't even allowed her dad to see, and before the Undersiders he was basically the only person she still trusted for anything.

This is like, either the best or worst decision of Taylor's life, I dunno which. I'd like to think best. I'd really like it to be best.

And I think I already said this but I could gorge myself on just reading about the Undersiders fighting and growing and bonding together for the entire length of this story, and I want it so bad, and I'm not getting it until I dig up the appropriate fanfiction to that end so I'm just gonna have to cope with that

Basically fell in love with Victoria the moment I met her, I wish her the best and hope she learns to cut down on the accidental spine-breaking (if she breaks a spine on purpose they probably deserved it)

Amy... at this point I mostly just feel bad for Amy. She's gonna do bad things and a lot of it's gonna be her own damn fault but somehow I doubt she was born a monster.

New Wave in general I get weird vibes from. Like the Protectorate are cops, yeah, and cops suck no matter the uniform, but New Wave does it with nobody watching over their shoulders to check their work except for each other, and we see in their first on-page appearance how that's kinda fucked up!

...Like the guy was a Nazi so fuck him, but I don't have full faith it'll be a Nazi every time, y'know? God knows there's every chance Glory Girl or Brandish or whoever else decides to play this kind of hardball with someone a lot less guilty and a lot more sympathetic

And then speaking of the repercussions of Taylor's actions, again I'm looking at the threat of destabilization and gang warfare facing the Docks and wondering how much of the story's escalating danger is going to be a natural response to her deeds. Somehow I don't think Leviathan's attack is going to be Taylor's fault, or that she called up the Slaughterhouse 9, but she keeps making calls that are good but have unintended and dangerous consequences.

Call me crazy but I don't think I'm gonna like what those consequences look like when she acts to save the world. I'd rather she be happy than the world's greatest hero, but she wasn't even happy before she became a cape, so. Maybe she gets a legacy in the doing.

Let's see, where to even begin

I like that Taylor's gotten a lot more confident about school. Even if she figures that Emma will inflict some kind of retribution, the fact that she's willing to take that risk for the sake of getting to laugh in her fucking face makes me glad. John Dillinger school of therapy is a fucking go.

I continue to absolutely adore the Undersiders, it's really fun to see them get to interact with each other in a more normal context, walking around the market and shopping and talking about whatever. I could read nothing but Undersiders slice-of-life for like a month straight and never get sick of it

The conversations about triggers and powers and stuff were also interesting tbh, a healthy dose of exposition and fleshing out the way the world works

Alec has grown on me a lot with this arc, between his clear anger at the shit that Taylor's had to put up with and his critical part in the fight against Bakuda

Which. You know what let's go there actually. Bakuda is so fucking terrifying as an antagonist that I kinda hope Lung pulls her back just so she can be less of a goddamn menace. The combination of ruthless forethought and sadistic unpredictability makes for a combination that rapidly outpaced Lung and the Wards as far as "oh shit this is for real," at some point I completely forgot about the Bomberman costume and - oh I wonder if that's why people don't talk about the Bomberman costume that much, the whole thing just accelerates so far past where that can still be talked about without losing focus

It was kinda sweet seeing Brian and Lisa help Taylor out in the aftermath of the fight, getting her home and helping her feel better (and lying to her dad for her). It'd be nice if Taylor decided that this could mean her cape and civilian lives could be more connected but I kind of doubt that's the case, unfortunately

Dog interlude might be best interlude, because Dog, and also Rachel proving that she rules

I kinda wanna get into a long ramble about all of my current character takes and opinions but I kinda want to get further into the story, see if there's a natural point where I can take a break and make that a separate post. If there isn't a natural one maybe I just do it every, I dunno, six arcs. Chunk it into fifths.

Okay, lemme go back through my posts for this arc, that interruption in the middle of the blogging put a fucking hole in my recollection

Somer's Rock was a neat sequence, as much as I hated having to put up with the fucking Nazis seeing the disparate factions of the city come together in service to the city's stability, and then of course it's immediately undercut by the fact that the bulk of those factions are immediately planning to use this alliance to seize greater power for themselves. Way to show that the system works and then immediately show that the system is ripe for exploitation and abuse.

I think at this point I've settled on the idea that the Merchants are, at this point, bit players who haven't warranted much attention until this alliance business. Maybe they'll matter more down the road, maybe they won't, but they're little fish in a medium pond and the Undersiders have sharper teeth than they do at this point, which is saying something. Still stupid as fuck that the leadership are all getting high on their own supply, but I guess when you're the cape you get to call the shots.

Once that's settled, we come back around to Taylor's civilian life, and god. Fucking. Damn Emma Barnes. What is up with this girl where she feels as diabolical as the fucking villains? Her dad can't be the only thing, obviously it's not great that he's threatening a criminal trial in order to keep his daughter from consequences but if he was a catalyst for her change it would've been well before high school. I guess Sophia is the only variable that we know about, but Sophia doesn't seem to give that much of a shit compared to Emma, so what gives?

The entire meeting with the school is fucking agonizing. The system is failing Taylor Hebert at every step, if anyone with authority did anything to back her up she could've been so much happier, but of course that didn't happen. Like, no fucking wonder she found her solace outside the system; there's no place for her inside of it.

Maintaining that Mr. Gladly ought to die screaming, hope that manifests

I like most of the team-up that we get to see, obviously Kaiser and the fucking Nazi twins are lousy to deal with but at least two of them got their fucking asses whooped by Lung, so silver lining

I like Newter, little nervous about the drugging people thing but as long as we're keeping things consensual (outside of fights, I mean) then no complaints. Kicked fucking ass during the fight, too, that was rad. Labyrinth is hard to judge given that she wasn't super present, but her power's neat and I'm glad they got her out of the asylum. Sundancer has a fucking sickass power and I'm sad that she's having a bad time with her team, be nice if she could just ditch them or something if they're such a bad time. Coil's mercs are fucking hardcore, where did he even find a guy who could still perform marksmanship with a busted leg?

The raid on the warehouse was cool, another great display of Skitter's power and versatility

Oni Lee is a terrifying son of a bitch, that fight was tense right up until Skitter figured out how to crack his power and coordinate the others to take him down. She's a natural leader when she's given the opportunity, it's a shame she's been so isolated for so long.

For all that Taylor has gripes about the extra effort to save Newter being a waste of time, she didn't know about his disease immunity and she probably wouldn't have felt good about herself if she'd skimped out on the extra sanitation.

Also, interesting to see that Taylor has a reason, however small, for being so weird about drugs and drug users. I just thought that was her being judgmental, and... okay it's still partly her being judgmental, but there's more going on.

And then there's Lung. Holy fucking shit, Lung, you only had fifty guys under your command before Bakuda went on her recruitment drive and you only bothered to take the Docks? Dude you could be putting up numbers across the entire city if you wanted to, so what's going on that you don't want to? Is it contentment? Can you be content when you've apparently conquered multiple other gangs?

Setting that all aside, this motherfucker puts on a hell of a show when he's fighting. Lung gets the absolute shit kicked out of him, gets impaled repeatedly, gets cooked to shit by the power of the Sun in the palm of your hand, and it takes Newter's hallucinogen to actually topple him. He straight up has them all dead to rights before Taylor snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, that was going to end so fucking poorly otherwise.

The eye thing is. Okay so I still don't know if that's Taylor's inclination, Lung's luck, or both. I don't know if Lung is gonna get to stick around for long after a defeat this thorough but maybe they'll keep gouging them out when he's in the Birdcage, I dunno. Meanwhile I suspect that Taylor is only going to move onward and upward when it comes to inflicting bodily harm on people, but if eyes continue to feature... I dunno, it'll be telling at least.

And then more hangtime with Rachel! Learning more about her, how she thinks and operates. God willing between the fight and these revelations Taylor figures out how to smooth out their interactions and actually be, like, friends. The thing with the jacket was cute.

And then with the interlude there's two big highlights. First and foremost is obviously Gregor the Snail, which. I like his vibe. I like his vibe a lot. He seems like a very cool dude to hang out with, and I feel bad that he has to put up with so much shit as a "monster cape." Fucking shit luck on that one, hope his life gets easier at some point.

Second is what I'm guessing is Cauldron. Not only bottling up powers but selling them, or else distributing them to their own ends, and using human experimentation to refine the process without much care for what happens to the victims. Not comforted at all by the fact that they apparently can just give people retrograde amnesia, that's a fucking alarming power for a parahuman to have and I shudder at the abuses they could get away with as long as that's in their toolkit.

...Man. Buying yourself a superpower. That's fucked, is what it is. All the benefits and you don't have to suffer immense trauma.

Hoh boy, okay, no use speculating on that much longer. Arc 6 next, and once again utterly goddamn flummoxed at what's supposed to come next. Coil maybe? He's been properly introduced and I know he's going to matter more down the road, so maybe this is the point where he starts gaining further prominence? That can't be the entire arc though, there's gotta be more going on than that, but fuck me if I can predict what it is.