so looking from the perspective of like, a random mid-level prt cape in brockton bay ~2011, right. you know marquis and heartbreaker were both villains active semi-locally in the 90s with powers related to manipulating human biology. heartbreaker is known to have a lot of kids and there's no way marquis wasn't sexually active. marquis has a royalty-themed name and dressing style. heartbreaker's power doesn't apply to himself.
and there are also these two teen capes in town, regent and panacea, both of mysterious origin (regent just showed up out of nowhere and panacea is an adoptee whose powers clearly didn't bud off the dallons'), both with powers related to manipulating human biology. regent has a royalty-themed name and dressing style. panacea's power famously doesn't work on herself.
...
like. regent was totally doing it on purpose right.
regent: knows and he's doing it on purpose. way cooler to let people think he's marquis's kid. won't admit it if you ask him directly though
panacea: someone makes the incorrect guess in front of her and she takes it as fact without asking the dallons. everything plays out exactly the same with her thinking she's doomed to be evil and hurting victoria but when she's like it's finally happened...i really am no better...i have to go face my true father... [starts trudging north] carol is like oh, marquis? and she's like who the fuck is marquis
marquis: some new inmate brings up his "son" and he bluescreens trying to figure out what they're talking about. when amy finally shows up he tentatively he/hims her
heartbreaker: hears that there's another awol heartbroken girl who's not cherie, does a headcount, and goes ah, jean-paul is un transvestite now? hm...freaque. and then goes back to making toddlers fight or whatever it is he does for fun
changers be like stand back! i am beginning to change. movers be like stand back! i am beginning to move. strangers be like stand back! i am beginning to strange. breakers be like stand back! i am beginning to break. strikers be like stand back! i am beginning to strike. blasters be like stand back! i am beginning to blast. strangers be like stand back! i am beginning to strange. tinkers be like stand back! i am beginning to tink. masters be like stand back! i am beginning to mast. strangers be like stand back! i am beginning to strange. shakers be like stand back! i am beginning to shake.
🎵 Cause the shakers gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
And the breakers gonna break, break, break, break, break 🎶
My beautiful girlfriend reminded me of her favorite part from Worm last night
I glanced down at Panacea. She wasn’t moving, aside from rocking a bit back and forth as she breathed, her head slumped, eyes on the ground. Was it me? Something grotesque? Horrible? Had I changed? No. I had taken stock of myself, I’d seen myself, and I was still the same, as far as I could tell. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, a working nose, ears and mouth. One missing hand, but that was to be expected. “Yeah, you asked Panacea. You asked me to play along and arrange stuff, when you went to go turn yourself in. Your handling of the school thing… well, I don’t want to get into a pattern and start cutting too deep. Let’s just say you make a decision by yourself, and then you use others to get help carrying it out. That’s not really you asking for help, is it?” I didn’t need this, not now. But I looked up, meeting Tattletale’s eyes. She was standing behind Lung, now. He was changing. Was he biding his time? “While I’m saying all this, kiddo, you gotta know I love you. I adore you, warts and all. You saved me, as much as I like to think I saved you. All this stuff I’m bitching about, it’s the same stuff that got us through some pretty hairy shit, and I love you for it as much as I groan about it. You’re brilliant and you’re reckless and you care too much about people in general when I really wish you’d leave things well enough alone and be selfish. But this?” This? “Shit,” Tattletale said. “You gotta forgive me, just this once." Then she leaned in, closed her eyes, and pressed her lips against mine. After what felt like an eternity, she finally pulled away. "That was a grown up kiss," she said, turning toward the exit. "We'll do the rest when you get back."
“but shrouded black figures are scary!” not when ur muslim. its the funniest fucking thing. this is labeled on pinterest under shit like “classic horror” “scary phone wallpaper”
but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)
or this pic of me
or this pic of me
like its so funny i can’t be scared of shrouded figures it just looks like me.
if i saw this i would just be like “Assalam alaikum sister, dope sword you got there”
I mean I think a part of the ‘scary background’ bit is the thing where the individual in question is staring directly at the viewer from a foggy pond in a dense forest. And also the literal burning halo
sounds like a normal Friday night. if a sister wants to go on a walk in the evening who am i to stop her. if she has a burning halo that’s the will of god.
quinn calle must've felt like the best fucking lawyer in the world after the shit with skitter
happy 3rd birthday to the 4 million word long short fun serial
How are u
i live in florida.
I am open to being convinced about the existence of good worm fanfiction
but watch out
The first PRIDE was a riot
Stormé Delariverie, the first woman pictured is a mixed Black butch lesbian who was dressed in drag that night because she had just finished performing as a Drag King at the The Apollo and Radio City Hall. She's literally referred to as the "Rosa parks of the gay community." Not trans but certainly a gnc black lesbian.
Sylvia Rivera, who has admitted to throwing the 2nd Molotov was a Puerto Rican/venezuelan trans woman, she's pictured last holding the banner with the bob cut.
Rivera is standing beside the beautiful and always smiling Marsha P. Johnson. She was another Black trans woman who pioneered the movement. She was at so many protests and queer events that I couldn't pick a photo!!!
On August 5, 1961, four party-going sailors entered Black Nite, a popular St. Paul Avenue gay bar in Milwaukee, on a dare. They started a fight with the bouncer, only to be chased out of the bar by gender-nonconforming Black “queen” Josie Carter, who knocked one of the men unconscious with a bottle. It's the first recorded LGBT uprising.
One day in 1966, an officer placed his hand on a trans woman at Compton’s—she responded by throwing her cup of coffee in his face. A riot erupted as dozens of trans people, drag queens and gay men fought the police. They broke windows, destroyed a police car, and set a newsstand on fire. Drag queens hit police with heavy purses. In the end, however, police arrested the women.
The 'Flower Power' Protest. The Patch was an LGBTQ bar in Wilmington owned and managed by Lee Glaze. Glaze had a secret signal—he’d play “God Save the Queen” on the jukebox—to announce that police officers were entering the bar, allowing patrons time to comply with the discriminatory laws. On August 17, 1968, undercover cops left the bar and returned with several uniformed officers for backup, though it’s unclear what prompted this action. They fanned out and began to screen the crowd, looking for IDs that didn’t “match” the holder’s outward appearance.
He marched everyone to buy flowers and then they waited at the police station for the two to get out.
There are cis white people in these photos because the trans people were in jail. This is them standing in SOLIDARITY for their GNC community.
You DO owe Stonewall to POC and trans people and drag queens and drag kings and GNC people, whether you like it or not.
I hope nobody ever feels comfortable saying this ignorant ass shit to me again.
i really like how worm commits to making superpowered characters weird. i think in most superhero media, superpowered characters are largely distinct, normal individuals with powers tacked on like tools they can use. but in worm, having a power kind of inherently puts you to the left of being entirely human. in worm, the lines between the power and the person are blurred, both literally in terms of how shards work & in terms of how powers present themselves. you can’t have a power without it altering your relationship to your mind and body.
and the “relationship to your body” bit applies to almost all capes, not just the ones who have been physically altered by their powers! whenever the experience of having a (not physically altering) power is described, it‘s phrased as being some sort of additional sense or sensation in a way that is still inextricably connected to the cape’s physical self. imp’s power isn’t just “okay, i’m invisible now,” it’s “i can physically feel my power rolling over my skin and jabbing out into the air to push memories of me away.”
the other examples i specifically have in mind here are skitter and regent. skitter’s power isn’t just “move the bugs and make them bite people,” they’re effectively a part of her. like additional limbs. she keeps functioning in fights when her human body is knocked the fuck out on the ground because the rest of her body–a million other little bodies–is still there to work with. the fact that she has millions of extra eyeballs at any given moment means it’s not actually so bad when the two of them that happen to be physically connected to her human body are blinded, which results in my favorite Worm Out Of Context ever:
and regent has one of my favorite subtle, uncanny examples of a power that seems like it shouldn’t alter the power-haver’s connection to their own body, but does anyway. in alec’s interlude, while he’s puppeting sophia, there’s a point where the undersiders get far away enough from her that it makes it more difficult for him to control her. he starts struggling to coordinate her movements.
the uncanny part is that he starts struggling to control his own body’s movements, as well. he puts his alec-self’s earbuds in so that he doesn’t have to talk to anyone, because he knows that if he did speak, he’d start stuttering and slurring his words from loss of physical control. sure, his alec-self is the body he’ll end up in when he’s done using his power, and his sophia-self was taken by force, so there’s obviously a distinction between the two, but that doesn’t make his alec-self easier to control. his power implicitly calls the separation between himself and the people he’s puppeting into question. he doesn’t get to have a “main” body he can control without effort, he has to divide his attention between each body and put concentration into moving each of them. in that way, his own body is placed in the same category as the bodies he’s hijacked. it’s Weird!
part of the reason i love this approach to powers is that it’s a very literal & visceral depiction of the way trauma makes your relationship to your sense of self & body weird, but it’s also just really fun to read. incredibly creative and interesting! it genuinely makes almost every other approach to writing superpowers feel simplistic and uninteresting in comparison.
Every individual power has so much thought put into it. And so do the things around the powers. Like, look at the word “parahuman”.
The generic term for people with superpowers is “metahuman”. You see it in DC, you see it in Marvel, you see it in a bunch of off-brand superhero universes. The prefix “meta-” can be translated a few different ways; “more comprehensive,” “beyond,” “transcending”. Metahumans are humans-plus, humans who have developed farther, humans with something extra. Something that makes them superhuman.
Earth Bet doesn’t use “metahuman”. It calls people with superpowers “parahuman”. The prefix “meta-” can also be translated a few different ways; “alongside of,” “resembling,” “apart from”. Parahumans are almost-human, things standing alongside humanity, with something different. Something that makes them inhuman.
(Which is a consistent theme in Wildbow’s serials, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Most people are going to look at “parahuman” and read it as this setting’s word for “metahuman”. Which, you know, it is. But the etymology matters! Even if you don’t know Greek, the prefixes have different associations. “Meta-” makes you think of metamorphosis, metaphysics, metacognit…okay, those first two are the only common ones. But “para-” makes you think of parallel, paranormal, parasite.
So much thought went into Earth Bet and its inhabitants. A lot of those details are easy to miss or ignore on first pass, but they’re still there. There’s a reason we’re still rotating it in our heads a decade later.
reasons to vote for sy "sylvester" twig parahumans:
• hes a funny little guy
• it would be funny if he won the poll
• if he does not win the poll i will get So Sad and i will Cry and can you really bear that weight on your conscience i dont think so
• if he won he would never ever ever stop being an obnoxious little shit about it (this is a positive)
reasons NOT to vote for sy parahumans:
• you have a heart full of hatred & malice
• The Cursed Amulet That Makes You Vote The Wrong Things In Polls
• skill issue
uhrm actshually 🤓 theo's mom had a body-size changing power, and influenced his power. i think there's a wildbow comment out there somewhere that her, theo, and fenja and menja are all part of the same "cape family"
oh interesting. well ill use amy as my example instead. by all accounts a pure shaper bud but wildly different power expression to marquis
not the point but if victoria's shard had influence from so many of the other capes she was around at the time, including dean who didn't even live with her or anything, how did amy end up exclusively budding from her dad who she hadn't been near in years
Best Assassin Tournament: Finale
BABY BRAWL
VOTE SY
i really like how worm commits to making superpowered characters weird. i think in most superhero media, superpowered characters are largely distinct, normal individuals with powers tacked on like tools they can use. but in worm, having a power kind of inherently puts you to the left of being entirely human. in worm, the lines between the power and the person are blurred, both literally in terms of how shards work & in terms of how powers present themselves. you can’t have a power without it altering your relationship to your mind and body.
and the “relationship to your body” bit applies to almost all capes, not just the ones who have been physically altered by their powers! whenever the experience of having a (not physically altering) power is described, it‘s phrased as being some sort of additional sense or sensation in a way that is still inextricably connected to the cape’s physical self. imp’s power isn’t just “okay, i’m invisible now,” it’s “i can physically feel my power rolling over my skin and jabbing out into the air to push memories of me away.”
the other examples i specifically have in mind here are skitter and regent. skitter’s power isn’t just “move the bugs and make them bite people,” they’re effectively a part of her. like additional limbs. she keeps functioning in fights when her human body is knocked the fuck out on the ground because the rest of her body–a million other little bodies–is still there to work with. the fact that she has millions of extra eyeballs at any given moment means it’s not actually so bad when the two of them that happen to be physically connected to her human body are blinded, which results in my favorite Worm Out Of Context ever:
and regent has one of my favorite subtle, uncanny examples of a power that seems like it shouldn’t alter the power-haver’s connection to their own body, but does anyway. in alec’s interlude, while he’s puppeting sophia, there’s a point where the undersiders get far away enough from her that it makes it more difficult for him to control her. he starts struggling to coordinate her movements.
the uncanny part is that he starts struggling to control his own body’s movements, as well. he puts his alec-self’s earbuds in so that he doesn’t have to talk to anyone, because he knows that if he did speak, he’d start stuttering and slurring his words from loss of physical control. sure, his alec-self is the body he’ll end up in when he’s done using his power, and his sophia-self was taken by force, so there’s obviously a distinction between the two, but that doesn’t make his alec-self easier to control. his power implicitly calls the separation between himself and the people he’s puppeting into question. he doesn’t get to have a “main” body he can control without effort, he has to divide his attention between each body and put concentration into moving each of them. in that way, his own body is placed in the same category as the bodies he’s hijacked. it’s Weird!
part of the reason i love this approach to powers is that it’s a very literal & visceral depiction of the way trauma makes your relationship to your sense of self & body weird, but it’s also just really fun to read. incredibly creative and interesting! it genuinely makes almost every other approach to writing superpowers feel simplistic and uninteresting in comparison.
genuinely obsessed w/ taylor hebert. like. Incredible character design. despite it all, worm is still The Best Superpowered Media. the way the bug powers are entirely integral to her identity the way she is Literally a bug girl the way she’s always putting the para in parahuman. obsessed w/ the fact that she’s a crawling worm you can’t root out and a biting swarm that blots out the sun and a cockroach that loses its head and keeps fucking going. obsessed with the bit during gold morning where she’s floating dead in the water and then lab rat’s tech lets her grow literal bug legs & mandibles so she can skitter back up the oil rig and think about how much she wants to hurt an entity which can snuff billions of people like ants beneath its heel. character who is a bug both in the sense that she’s infinitesimally small and that it is impossible to really get rid of her. you can shoot her and leave her in a burning building for dead, you can snap her spine, you can blind her, you can tear her intestines out, and she still just Keeps Fucking Crawling so she can reach your mouth and suffocate you. literally the most david vs goliath character of all time except it’s cockroach vs goliath. you can nuke the planet and she’ll hide in the nooks and crannies of the barren wasteland promising that she’s going to get back at you for what you’ve done, and she always makes good on that promise. she’s the queen of the hive she’s the monarch she’s the administrator she’s The Worm That Turns she is THEE top weirdgirl character Ever
genuinely why is the bit where she turns into a literal bug during gold morning not more popular to draw. it fucks so hard. everyone else is absolutely hopeless and she’s standing there on her three legs with her two claws and gaping mandibles, staring at the sky, putting together swarm clones and spools of thread and thinking “how can i hurt him for this.” and she figures it out. she Always figures it out. she literally never gives a fucking inch. dying in the water, out of bugs, squashed, and does she give up? no. she starts putting together swarm clones out of fucking Krill to try to do Something. she is an absolutely glorious ruthless little cockroach. all hail queen administrator, monarch of all that is crawling and venomous and spiteful
THIS IS TRUE. the bugs aren’t just drones she’s controlling, they’re like a billion extra body parts. she’s like a superorganism. sure, she dies if she takes too much damage, but her body is more than just her human body. she expresses emotions with bugs. her bugs are her billion limbs and eyes and mouths. she says that suffocating alexandria with her bugs is as visceral as if she had choked her with her own two hands. just damaging the human part of her body doesn’t stop the rest of it from functioning, and that’s how she keeps going, keeps herself alive, keeps making herself useful despite horrific injuries. when her human eyes are blinded, she has a million other pairs to see with. she is the swarm and the swarm is her. every day she wakes up and puts the para in parahuman.
All the discussion about Victoria making confident judgments about people based on their powers and getting it wrong a significant amount of times is especially funny in light of the “Is Victoria a cop” discourse. She’s not just a cop, she also wants to be a criminal profiler (with the success rate to match).
considering how love lost's backstory interlude showed her as a cop deciding a suspect must be guilty based on Vibes, mentally dubbing the girl a "monster", lying and falsifying evidence to tease out a confession, and turning out to be right, i'm afraid the real-world ineffectiveness of criminal profiling may be beyond the scope of ward's understanding of the world




