Image ID: A reply to this post from tumblr user @st-just that reads “Would actually be pretty interested in hearing you complain about Miss Militia/Dragon//Armsmaster!” End ID.
I shouldn’t have mentioned all three of them in the same post, this might get long. Whew. Well, getting started with what should be the shortest since I assume everyone hates Armsmaster.
Actually, I’m not sure if that’s a safe assumption? Not sure what the popular opinion on any of these guys are, come to think of it. But he’s an arrogant asshole who’s only conception of his own worth is his work and how people perceive his work. This doesn’t actually get better once he becomes Defiant, it’s just that the scope of his work changes. It’s ironic that he changed to that name because he’s defying fuck all. He’s got a major case of cop brain and doesn’t stop to think about civilians unless forced to be by his girlfriend, who he definitely also wants to be his mom.
He has no life, and his ego is easily threatened by the existence of competent teenagers. He’s a control freak with a complete and utter inability to actually control anything. He calls Tattletale a master manipulator to Legend partially as a panicked defensive thing, but I’m pretty sure on some level he genuinely believes that. At the very least, he buys way too much into her posturing as a super smart master mind because he has the emotional intelligence of a rock. He has an actual lie detector and he can’t figure out that most of the time, her strategy is limited to “fuck around and find out.” It ~works~, but only because most capes are incredibly insecure and wear their hearts on their sleeve.
He’s definitely taking a look at Batman, thematically, complete with an inability to communicate any emotion or vulnerability. He’s the type of autistic guy that insists on saying he’s got Aspergers to distinguish himself from ~those~ autistic people. He’s condescending as hell and fundamentally incurious.
Also, I don’t know how much of a thing this is, but he’s not a fucking father figure to Taylor or anyone. He’s definitely not a mentor. Taylor has an actual dad and a complicated relationship with him. I’m not saying having a dad means you ~can’t~ have a parent-child relationship with someone else, but their actual dynamic is significantly funnier. Enemies, complete with a barely provoked actual murder attempt and life ruining, to emotionally stilted coworkers. He made her a “I’m sorry for trying to kill you” jetpack.
There’s more to say, but I’ve got two more to get to. Let’s go with Miss Militia next. Apparently she gets flanderized to being a ra ra patriot or mischaracterized as a mom, both of which are hilarious to me for different reasons. Miss Militia has as many parenting chops as Armsmaster has emotional intelligence. She definitely wouldn’t be a mom to Taylor, good fucking gd, that’s just misogyny. She barely even mentors the Wards. She cares about keeping things orderly and only tries to deal with situations once they’ve boiled over.
She’s not unlike Basira from the Magnus Archives, in the sense that although she doesn’t ~not~ have blood on her hands, her biggest sin is in standing by bastards and laundering their reputation. She’s professional. She’s clean and ~orderly.~ She stands next to Armsmaster and she stands next to Alexandria without any shame at all. She personally benefited from American imperialism, so she doesn’t care fuck all about all the people who don’t.
The kill order thing with the Undersiders was absolutely fucking insane, and she has almost as much of a grudge against Tattletale as Armsmaster. Maybe more so. She’s unnecessarily brutal when the Undersiders come to her with a truce after Noelle got loose, completely willing to jump to absolutely insane conclusions because of her biases. She’d rather deal with fucking ~Coil~ than the Undersiders because she prefers his affect, and I absolutely refuse to believe that she didn’t see right through his lie about Dinah “choosing” to go with him. She plays right into his hands. She’s completely willing alienate the Undersiders ~and the Travelers~, forcing them out into the cold when the Slaughterhouse Nine attack despite the fact that the Undersiders fought Leviathan and as far as Miss Militia knows, ~Coil didn’t.~ He never remotely risked his own skin for the city, and she should know this. The Undersiders and the Travelers should have significantly more clout, but she personally dislikes them because they’re disruptive to the order. That’s all she cares about.
She’s also completely unappreciative of how many of the S9 that the Undersiders either killed or helped kill. Brian killed Burnscar, Tattletale got Cherish fate worse than death’d (~and~ the Undersiders captured her), and although Alec mind controlling Shatterbird was gross, it’s definitely better than her going on to glass-nuke other cities. If it weren’t for Tattletale figuring out the Siberian’s secret, Armsmaster and Dragon wouldn’t have been able to finish her off. Did the Undersiders ever even get the bounties from that? They should’ve. I’m not saying she needed to lick their boots, but a “hey, thanks for taking care of the mass murderers and not letting your teammates join them” might’ve been nice!
Okay, that’s enough on MM. I need to keep myself from going on too much. Dragon. Fucking. Dragon.
I’m willing to give Dragon ~some~ slack because she physically couldn’t disobey orders for a while there. I assume she didn’t come up with the idea for the Birdcage, for example. But there’s a fuck ton of shit she could’ve sabotaged or at least objected to. She didn’t need to track down Taylor’s identity immediately, and she ~definitely~ didn’t need to think to herself, wow, it’s so sad she fell into a bad crowd. That bad crowd didn’t chose to be bad out of no where, and she’s ~Dragon~. She could’ve figured out what was going on with the other Undersiders if she’d tried. I’m not saying she should’ve, but giving Taylor grace and not the others was insane. The others were just as doomed as she was.
Also, once she broke out of the programming that kept her from disobeying orders, did she stop operating the Birdcage? Did she let out the people she ~knew~ were innocent or at least didn’t need to be there for the safety of the public like Canary? I mean, I don’t think anyone deserves that, but I understand the logic for ~some~ of them. Did she ever go against the PRT in any meaningful way? She could’ve made so many significant changes, and she didn’t. She’s a coward and a liberal.
Not to mention, she’s attracted to Armsmaster, which is just embarrassing for her. Literally, she thinks she can fix him. She has to coach him through the basics of interacting with civilians and pretending to care about them. I’m not sure which is more pathetic, that she tries or that it ~remotely~ works. He’s still a bastard and a hypocrite after she’s through with him, especially in Ward, but at least he remembers to say please and thank you now, so that’s something. And she’s into this?
She’s less bad on a personal level but she’s complicit in so much more.