May 16
Lung is such a funny guy because he can be easily defeated despite stomping Levithan into retreating...granted you can say it was for other reasons but still.
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Lung is such a funny guy because he can be easily defeated despite stomping Levithan into retreating...granted you can say it was for other reasons but still.
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I just finished Worm for the first time. This is how I see all the scenes where Lung is just paling around with Taylor, Tattletale, Canary, and Imp (and Shadow Stalker ig)
So I was rereading the Lung interlude, and it really is astounding the extent to which the behavior and mindset on display in the interlude matches perfectly to the largely unremarked-upon idiosyncrasies he displays earlier in the book when he's less of a character and more of an obstacle (the disconnect between his ambition and his overwhelming firepower, his extremely specific vulnerability to drugs, his weird pan-asian gangbuilding project, a couple other beats that jumped out at me that I now forget.)
This, coupled with the fact that the Lung interlude is kind of a very tertiary addition to the flow of the action in the main story, is the kind of thing where I find myself wondering whether this is a situation where Wildbow had an entire Lung Dossier sitting somewhere on a hard drive and was just waiting for the slightest excuse to deploy that information in an interlude, or a situation where he decided to go back and retroactively flesh out a tertiary antagonist, or what.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Brockton Bay only had 10 POC capes??? And only three of them are superheroes???
Realized this while writing another fic, and @shoot-i-messed-up pitched Color Conscience, a fic where the POC capes of Brockton Bay make a secret alliance to take down the Empire.
Summary:
Brockton Bay has one of the highest cape populations in the United States, but it also has one of the highest Nazi populations. Over 80% of its capes are white, and that means the Empire gets away with a lot more than it should.
An alliance is built between Brockton Bay’s capes of color to deal with the Empire once and for all.
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Summary:
Taylor, raised by Brockton Bay supervillains Lung and River Rat, always assumed one of her dads was her biological father. But when she's captured by the Protectorate after an Undersiders mission gone wrong, she learns the truth about her parents and is caught between escaping the Wards to go back home or staying to get to know Robin.
Or, a short fic where Taylor is the daughter of Annette and Velocity and is raised by Lung and Danny.
Thinkin’ about Lung
One detail about Worm that I really like is that on her first night out, Taylor takes out Lung with a method I’ve seen a couple readers call bullshit on, namely just fucking swarming him and poisoning the living shit out of him with spider venom, and I’ve seen first-time readers say that feels too pat, too contrived, too young-adult, that the protagonist just happened to be able to bypass a high-tier regenerator on her first night out.
And then later, in the rematch, it becomes stunningly clear that it only worked the first time because she caught him off guard, when he’s going at full tilt it’s a no-show until Taylor takes what she knows kinda-sorta worked last time and has to cobble together an entirely new delivery mechanism to get around the fact he’s gone full dragon, at which point Taylor’s Arc 1 victory starts to retroactively feel more earned, more characteristic of how she fights in general, but, you know, still weird that he’s arbitrarily vulnerable to poison, still basically a random kryptonite factor thrown in to give the YA protagonist a fighting chance.
And then you get to Lungs interlude, and you find out his trigger event was that an unassuming woman he attacked turned out to be an incredibly dangerous parahuman who smashed his face in with a brick of cocaine.
And then suddenly, his perpetually bloodshot eyes, his arbitrary but persistent vulnerability to toxins, in the background the pieces slide together and you realize that this is was, in fact, an arbitrary kryptonite factor thrown in to fuck with Lung, a way to drag him back to the trauma of how he was cut down the first time, a way to pull the rug out from under him if he gets too cocky and overextends himself, a creeping insecurity on the back of his mind about whether he’s truly powerful enough, something feeding his pathological caution, a way to recreate the trauma of his trigger event whenever he picks a fight that looks like a gimme, a way to reinforce his changer trauma of not actually being all that, of just being a punk that rose above his station. Taylor won handily not because the powers that be wanted the protagonist to win, but because they wanted Lung to fail, and fail in this specific way.
And crucially, this isn’t something the narrative spells out- the parallels between his fight with Taylor and his fight with Contessa are something present but not something shouted from the rooftops. The fact that he came out of his trigger with a tendency towards inaction and patience is emphasized, the whole interlude is about how that patience factors into his decision making in various situations over the years, but the drug thing is much more of a loose connection the reader is asked to make themselves. I think that’s neat.
I was rereading Lung’s interlude, and there’s this point at the very end where he has a stunning moment of clarity that his not-quite-friendship with Marquis is the closest he’s come to a functional human connection since his teen gang got wiped out, and he very briefly considers telling Marquis that Teacher is planning to stab him in the back by deliberately suppressing their ability to release the critical information Panacea figured out about the entities.
Then, instead, he defers to a generic complement, selling Marquis up the river in favor of a long-game that’ll put him in a better position to get out of The Birdcage by working with Teacher.
This is presented as a pivotal moment, both for Lung and the World; because it happens in a donation interlude in the most secluded location on the planet, it has next to no bearing on the main plot beyond acting as foreshadowing. But it’s also a really, really interesting potential Point of Divergence for an AU, because if Lung had thrown in with his Boyfriend only human connection instead of throwing in with Teacher, Dragon would have learned the specifics of the end of the world two years in advance. Lot of butterflies from that.
And, on that note, I kinda want to start compiling more of Worm’s innocuous Points of Divergence; easy-to-miss things that would create huge AUs if the outcome had changed. Anyone got any ideas for more of these?