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Arc 8: Extermination, Concluding Thoughts

What a fucking month this day has been

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.

Can't wait to see how Brockton Bay handles getting turned into fucking Waterworld, probably not well at all

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