So the division betweencivilian and Superhero identity has been a thing since the genre was just getting started with Superman. Do you have any thoughts on how Worm handles secret identities?
So many. Gonna start high level on this one and narrow it down.
From the 1920s to... probably the mid-70s, there was this implicit bargain with secret identities; the logistics were simpler. You could keep a secret identity with relative ease, the most likely failure points were those closest to you, and that’s manageable. But! You would keep a secret identity in the first place because if they found you, your life was fucked. There is no game being played; there were no pretenses. If they catch you, they will kill you- but first they must catch you.
The implicit consequences for being unmasked, while rarely realized, were genuinely very, very bad! Batman was fighting mobsters who would very much kill him, if they figured it out! Spider-Man concealed his identity because his villains made a beeline for his loved ones any time they figured it out. Cape IDs were genuine secrets, and because this was pre-mass surveillance, pre-internet, pre-media fragmentation, in the era where it was still hypothetically possible for people to up and vanish in the night, or become nameless drifters with no footprint, when millions of people were being shuffled around the country by wars and great migrations and the G.I Bill and a rise in college attendance, it was fairly plausible that secret identities were, in the abstract, genuinely hard to figure out.
This isn’t true anymore. In the modern day, with smartphones, home video, TMZ and the churning cesspit of online forums, in a setting laden with psychics and supercomputers and amazing detectives, it’s harder and harder to justify the secret identities not being blown open. At Marvel, many writers have said “fuck it” and had the heroes go public. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and others have maintained them (mostly) because it’s just so core to the character dynamics that they can’t ditch them.
So what’s happened, quietly, is that writers and fans have started to pay mind to the realpolitik of blowing up a superheroes civilian life, at DC in particular, and why most rational actors won’t do that. The Central City Rogues, at times, have learned Flash’s secret identity, and vice versa, but The Rogues don’t act on it because they know they can’t survive a Flash with nothing to lose, and anyway, they actually do want him around to beat back the potentially city-leveling threats. Many of Batman’s rogues have figured out he’s Bruce Wayne, but sit on the information because they want the game to keep going, or because they recognize that Batman is a known variable and a good way to make sure none of the other villains get a leg up. The end of JMS’s Amazing Spider-Man featured Kingpin nearly killing Aunt May, and in retaliation Spider-Man makes a big show of taking off the kid gloves and just pulls Kingpin nearly apart in front of witnesses, as a show of the kind of force he could always have been potentially bringing to bear if he didn’t have a civilian life holding him back. This extends to Indie Media too; Invincible and Astro City both acknowledge that if you live near a hero, you’re likely gonna notice pretty quickly, but most people are smart enough or nice enough not to do anything destructive with that info. Incorruptable is about a supervillain who rationalizes his supervillainy under the logic that Not!Superman was never gonna let anything too bad happen to anyone, he always win when it counts, and when said hero turns evil he decides he has to step up to protect people because the safety net is out the door.
More and more often, the sanctity of the secret identity is something acknowledged as a pretense; something that society at large allows for, something there’s a gentleman’s agreement not to poke too hard at.
So now we get to Worm, which codifies this at a high level. No network of individually-developed working relationships where tons and tons of people independently decide to pretend not to know who the hero really is; it’s an actual cultural thing, an unwritten rule that you do not go after people in their civvie lives, you do not try and figure their IDs out, and you absolutely do not get caught if you do try. There is a powerful AI that helps enforce this, a powerful government apparatus that helps enforce this, a well-developed set of nettiquite enforcing this, an underground conspiracy that’ll absolutely drop the hammer on anyone trying to systemically challenge this.
But what really makes Worm Unique in this regard is that this also applies to the villains.
Villains, don’t have secret identities in most superhero universes; when they get caught the first time, their IDs are out, they’re introduced by both their real names and villain names on the news, and it’s noteworthy when a long-haul villain like The Joker manages to completely avoid having their real name publicized. The best they get, day to day, is not being recognized out of costume, but that’s thin. In Worm, villain identities are subject to a level of respect alien to other settings, and it’s for purely pragmatic reasons; the book shows us again and again how utterly fucked you are if you back a villain into a corner and give them no way out. E88 getting doxxed leads to dozens of city blocks being leveled with untold casualties; Skitter goes full populist warlord when she’s outed and kills some high-profile PRT jackboots; Bakuda’s madness is driven at least in part by her very real need to establish herself as someone who is not to be fucked with because she has no civilian life to return to and nothing to her name except what she can quickly cement in her new and only identity; Shatterbird committed to being a mass murderer because her civillian life was annihilated during her “trigger” and she saw no viable path to deescalate.
Cape comics are focused on the heroes, and so they spend a lot of time focused on the carrots and the sticks the heroes can bring to bear, how the heroes can protect their own status quo, how the villains are reacting to what the heroes might do if placed up against the wall. Worm is concerned with the carrots and sticks held by the black hats. In another setting, the silliness of a guy who dresses up to rob banks would be highlighted as an act of small-mindedness, it’d be a bit about how dumb villains are to waste their time like this. But in Worm, costumed villainy is simultaneously a gesture of courtesy, and a veiled threat, because this is not the worst they could be behaving.
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