#shadow stalker

New chapter of my Worm Sports AU! Chapter 3 has quite possibly my favorite line I've ever written:

New Worm fic posted now! Check it out on Ao3 or SpaceBattles.

Summary:

In a world where parahumans are athletes instead of superheroes, Sophia tries out for Thomas Calvert's new team and joins the Undersiders.

She doesn't understand what Calvert sees in Brian, Rachel, Lisa, Aisha, and Alec, though, but she's not going to let them stop her from becoming a great P-Sports athlete.

Worm Spoilers...

It bothers me how underutilized Shadow Stalker is, because she would make for such a good foil to Taylor.

The most obvious way is that the ways in which Taylor simultaneously fits into her philosophy of strength (through her willingness to use violence and blunt social force as her main tools for resolving her issues, her lack of fear towards pain and injury, etc.) while directly rejecting Sophia's projected end state (fuck you got mine).

But there's other things as well. We're never told in detail Sophia's trigger event, but I understood it as her mom's boyfriend physically abusing her and using social norms to dissuade Sophia from stopping him and discredit her accusations. Sophia's mom then becomes an authority figure that tacitly approved her abuse because doing otherwise was uncomfortable, and her older brother would have been a bystander who enabled her abuse via lack of intervention. This matches pretty well with Taylor's own grievances with society, and creates contrast in the way they responded to their trigger events, with Sophia electing to recreate the same scenario with herself and Emma as the abusers.

And it's also interesting because while Sophia is obviously written to make her easily hateable, I don't think the narrative does that great of a job showing her flaws as a hero. Obviously her actions in her civilian guise are crimes, and she's abrasive, unpleasant, and even outright violent to the other Wards, but I can't fault her for fighting a bunch of violent gang members actively in the process of attacking an innocent woman, or letting them woman kick them when they're down. I think Sophia in this specific case shows empathy for the victim and is making a genuine effort to allow the victim to reclaim a sense of power.

Of course, there's room for criticism in that Shadow Stalker waited until the attack happened before swooping in, so that she would have an excuse to engage in violence herself, but that's also a way in which she's using a system of social norms to enable the use of violence, which makes for an interesting contrast with Taylor post-Arc 8, and her essentially supplanting the city government and becoming a warlord.

For the intended viewing experience watch the music video for' Once in a Lifetime' by The Talking heads. Link below so you can't not do it .

Sophia is a mean girl, but she's not popular. Emma is a popular girl and Sophia hangs out with Emma..... Without Emma, Sophia would have no friends at Winslow.

I mean, not even getting into the amount of E88 kids there Sophia is just hard to like, deliberately so (Absolutely deep in her 'Not like other girls' phase).....She's antisocial and probably considered to be one of the weird kids by most of the school.

Which means that a lot of other Winslow kids look at Emma's friendship with Sophia as "Oh Emma got rid of the Hebert girl and found another charity case to work on"

Some of these are purely speculation, based on me knowing people with similar history to her and thinking what would be an interesting to have as tidbits. I think its fun to think about a character you like and flesh out details of them.

That being said:

Before she did track she went through a few other hobbies in an attempt by her mother to keep her busy and curb some of her excess energy. She played soccer and was an aggressive defender. Tried softball but didn't have the patience. Ended up doing Ballet for a little while, and she liked that for the repetition and how hard it was. Stephen pulled her out of every extracurricular to isolate her. Track was the result by the end of it because it matched with her cape activity the best. Plus, beating someone in a literal race got her competitive spirit burning.

Her power was probably more tuned to act like a haunting spirit than the stalking aggression she uses it for. When Missy got under her skin and her control slipped, we saw how it is when shes aggravated; making her look more corpse like, akin to a ghost. She's had it for years, and I think her current use is a result of finely tuned control and a splash of her power accommodating her.

Additionally to this, some people like to credit Sophia's aggression purely to her power. I think this is untrue, or at least partially. From Wildbows comments on her origin story and clearly how the point in which they claim is the reasoning is from Taylor, a biased source on the subject, I think the real answer is she was always a little testy, a child screaming for attention who never got it and took that wailing to become her entire personality.

Aisha harasses Sophia after Golden Morning because she finds it funny, send tweet

Post-Worm speculation about Sophia is an entire other post. I have a few fic concepts I like to spin on about the subject, somewhat because I think there's some neat ideas to explore, partially because its interesting to me how she just ups and vanishes like Taylor did. But I want to say she hates the Gold Morning pins and badges people have, and refuses to ever get one and treats anyone who does have one harshly.

I think she's lonely. I think she latched onto Emma not because of a crush, or some mutual feelings the two of them had. I think Sophia sees herself as someone different than others, and wanted to find someone who could get it. That's where her vision of 'survivors' comes from—she wants to know there are people like here out there. That will claw and fight and bleed for themselves. Emma was someone her age that fought back. That tried to be like her and failed, and Sophia stuck around because she didn't want to admit to herself that Emma wasn't like her. Her first impressions are hard to shake.

Scars are probably a complicated subject for her. On one hand, they're a showcase that someone fought and survived, that they made it out of something so bad their body left a permanent mark on them. On the other hand they're a sign that they got injured in the first place, a weakness to be hit at all. I think she has scars on her hands, little knicks and cuts from learning the crossbow and knives down the line. She doesn't like to think about them.