#crunchbuttsteak

SURE WOULD. Luckily, you guys are all super sweet and derive no enjoyment whatsoever from antagonizing me!

Not just from having a skrungly bug girl as the protagonist, though that too, but like from the way the goddess is this massive eldritch entity that treats the various worlds as playthings and the whole “giving people magic to see what they do with it” feels so much like the entities.

It's been a while since I read Bioshifter, but yeah. There are definitely similarities between Taylor/Hannah and Entities/Goddess.

The similarities between Taylor and Hannah are either superficial (bug girls) or genre-typical. Bioshifter and Worm are both coming-of-age stories (Bioshifter more than Worm, I'd argue, but it's there in Worm) about high school girls who gain incredible powers and see the world end around them.

The Entities and Goddess (Bioshifter!Goddess, not Ward!Goddess) play similar roles, in that they're the source of the local power system and want to shape the world in a certain way. The two big differences are the degree to which they are people and their ultimate goal. The Entities see what people do with powers because they want mortals to come up with creative uses for those powers. The Goddess sees what people do with because she's bored. The Goddess has no need of mortal creativity, and I'm not sure the Entities understand the meaning of "boredom".

that is one of my FAVORITE things to imagine yes. To me this is less about ‘Skywalker bullshit’ (though there is some of that) and more about the training they (didn’t) receive.

The high-Midi-chlorians-actual-descendents-of-the-force thing makes it easier to tap into the force, makes it more possible to do so without accidentally exhausting yourself. But, in universe, under the right circumstances and with the properly channeled belief anyone can do anything. That’s why Palpatine had to make the galaxy want an empire, why his first strategy was misdirection and his top priority was crushing hope. Chirrut was supposedly force-null and he walked through an army. Han navigated that astroid field because he had to. The force is everywhere. 

In an amusing but possibly unintended turn of events, 6-12 weeks of training in a swamp with an elderly frog who only talks in riddles without ever being exposed to Jedi culture except as a myth is actually IDEAL if you’re looking to maximize a Jedi’s raw strength. Most Jedi training that we see in the prequels is explicitly designed to put the breaks on a force-users raw power (for honestly very valid reasons). Channeling all violence through a single weapon that will start screaming if you get too violent, training to use it defensively, is definitely the soft-ball alternative to just squashing people like meatballs. 

Meditating, wearing beige, the code, shunning attachments, all that stuff is built around making sure force users never run above first or second gear even in stressful situations (again valid, when you run your jedi in the red sometimes they become murder monsters). The downside of this is that when they’re forced to maintain that placid pace for years at a time (i.e: prolonged war), they’re much more likely to burn out.

When Yoda told Luke do or do not, told him a luminous being was he, told him size matters not, the amazing thing isn’t that Luke believed him. That was karking objectively provable. Yoda lifted a spaceship, so now Luke knows he can too if he just thinks he can. So he does. Vader and Palpatine conquered a galaxy. Luke believes he can stop worlds, crush armies, conquer planets and so he can. 

The incredible thing about Luke is what he doesn’t do despite being tapped into the Force utterly free of mental restraint. Luke’s op character trait is his compassion, not his strength.

I assume at some point Luke puts Leia through a similar 2 month meditation class where he convinces her that her only limitations are the ones she imposes on herself. She has a complete meltdown when she realizes that she actually could have boiled Tarkin alive with her mind and saved Alderann. This causes a volcano to go off, devastating the ecology of a small moon. On the flight home, both of them slightly charred, she tells Luke that she wanted to focus on politics and didn’t really want to be a Jedi anyway. Luke nods quickly, supporting her decision, and resolves to seek out some Jedi texts about how to teach people they can do anything but also...maybe...not...anything.

And thus the Jedi order is reborn.

- - -

In the time travel version of this, it means that Luke is assuming that all of the Jedi are restraining themselves like he is. And they are, but they also aren’t, because their breaks are subconscious, built in since childhood, and have a lot of failsafes so even if they turn darkside they still restrain themselves pretty good (a la Dooku). 

Leia is, again, less interested with the Jedi-specific aspects of the war (especially now that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about being one of the only people who can pick up that mantle) and more interested in the diplomatic side. Again, Palpatine can only succeed if the galaxy at large accepts this, and from where she’s standing they’re fucking moving in that direction. If being a Jedi is tapping into the mystical energy field that binds all living things together to channel it through one specific person in one specific place, then politics is manipulating that same power for a diffuse impact on as many people as possible. 

This status-quo lasts until a major clone wars battle where Luke’s like ‘wait- the entire other side is sub-sentient droids? No living beings, and no droids with complex personality matrices? And they’re currently, actively killing living, sentient humans? Well kriff, come on! This is a no-brainer!’

Luke takes a deep breath. The air- it doesn’t disappear or anything- but it- it stops moving. It’s hard to explain...but breathing has an odd...resistance. The hair on the back of every clone’s neck stands up. Several get vaguely sea sick. One pukes a little. Plo Koon stumbles back, head ringing and afraid.

Luke Skywalker stands up and clenches his fists. 10,000 droids crumple like flimsi in the hands of a child. The battlefield is eerily quiet for a moment, then that imperceptible hum (which no one noticed until it stopped) fades and the air returns to its normal density. A few of the shinies start whooping, then the whole battalion is cheering.

Luke massages his temples, smiling wryly at Master Koon. “I guess I can see how that would get exhausting if you were doing it everyday.”

That's too perfect... Presumably this is after Accord eats it at the Behemoth fight (Robert has some sense of self-preservation), but the whole production is so atrocious that it drives a grieving Citrine to try to take him out with a convoluted death trap to restore Accord's honor

Her schemes keep almost working, only to coincidentally fail due to interference of capes from the Elite - who are also trying to kill Robert in retribution for his special deep dive series on their leadership; "Behind the Bastard Son."

Hmm-

Okay, I don't actually read mainline cape comics, so this is from a butchered understanding of what they're like from childhood cartoons and hollywood and internet osmosis

But, like,

-The main protagonists are obviously the actual heroes. New Wave and Miss Militia and Armsmaster and Dauntless and the Wards as a group, probably. Maybe with Shadow Stalker as the requisite distrusted vigilante heroine.

-The sheer number of supervillains in the city comes down to needing to give everyone a nemises and a bit of a rogues gallery, ofc. This is never really examined, and despite the sheer number of disposable henchmen and high-tech mercs and neo-nazis per capita and everything the Bay's mostly portrayed as a pretty nice place, with most civilian life scenes being on the boardwalk or downtown, or in the very nice PRT bases

-Piggot's a stern but genuinely well-meaning authority figure who mostly exists for the protagonists to go behind the back of when they need to break the rules and save the day

-'The Empire' aren't explicitly nazis at all, just a general supervillain syndicate that happens to be led by a blonde german guy going by Kaiser with two valkyrie bodyguards

-The Undersiders (along with Uber and Leet, Chariot, the Travellers, possibly the Merchants) are the Wards designated foils, though they might all be independent villains or only sometimes working together. They are massively popular fan favorites, and never that evil, so they/Skitter in particular eventually get an incredibly successful series starring them and the whole Harley Quin vaguely-sauntering-towards-redemption treatment.

-Lisa's actually psychic.

-The ABB and Coil are basically the exact same, just with no thought of the actual money-generating crime they do or drugging 12 year olds or fate-worse-than-death-bomb-terrorism or anything. But, like, just the concepts but pg-13 are perfect 4-color villains anyway.

-The Slaughterhouse 9 (need a different name) and the Endbringers are actually the rogues gallery for the Triumvirate series, and only brush against Brockton Bay as a crossover event or a cameo-filled backdrop for a fight scene in their books, in either case no consequences from it that last past the end of the issue.

-Dragon's cover story of being an agoraphobe who interacts with the world through her mechs is just actually true.

-Cauldron isn't a thing, sometimes having superpowers just makes you a weird monster.

-Scion is an incredibly generic superman clone no one can think of anything interesting to do with so he just kind of shows up in big events, the whole 'spends 99% of his time flying in a random direction saving hikers from mudslides and getting cats out of trees' thing starts as a fan joke about why he hasn't solved the problem of the day on his own.