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The Tallowman

@thetallowman

There Must Be More Than Ruin

Worm fic idea

Jack Slash and the rest of the S9 arrive in Brockton Bay at the start of canon. Not to cause strife, but to bring a lawsuit against the PRT for tracking them and invading their privacy.

Carol Dallon ends up as their attorney. She is as displeased by this as you would imagine.

How does this happen?

Idk? The endbringer truce probably

On one hand, real-person fanfic is unethical for some pretty well-discussed reasons.

On the other hand, it's broadly accepted that supervillains are different enough from normal celebrities that those rules don't apply.

On the first hand, RPF about the Slaughterhouse Nine in specific is unethical for a completely separate list of reasons, mostly centered around the risk of the Nine targeting someone over it.

On the second hand, it would be really funny.

anyway the devil you know is like the opening theme for the grainy low budget pilot season of the short-lived cult classic tv show Pact: Devils and Details that got cancelled by the CW halfway through its intended run after seemingly killing off the main character to a monster of the week minor demon in the season 2 finale

NOT THE CW

It could be worse. You don't want to see Earth Bet's animated Maggie Holt movies. Does your Earth have a company called Illumination Entertainment?

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Anonymous asked:

the catch is pact is really fucking mean to addicts and fat people

ah nodding sagely. just like worm.

yeah it's probably going to be hard to bait me into this one folks. i have sort of notoriously high standards for storytelling, like to the point where one of my friends repeatedly uses me as a Media Litmus Test where if i give something a 10/10 then they can just start unreservedly recommending it to anyone. worm has many, many, many flaws re political stances on marginalized demographics but it does have--and this is crucial--a lot of genuinely meaningful and interesting things to say delivered through a plot that, with the exception of the timeskip, is imo more or less flawlessly coherent for how long it is. slogging through [checks notes] 1 million words of writing that is Similarly Bad about marginalized demographics and also has subpar narrative design may actually turn me into the fucking joker. that said i am not actually put off by the constant blake Ls if you mean it in a 'some people find it depressing' way vs a 'it's poor writing' way because i love horror and when bad things happen

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stillons

i know wildbow fics mostly live on different sites (and also only like 10% of worm readers read pact and also that if some of the most active worm fic writers on ao3 wrote that pact fics there'd be a lot of shitty hentaibrain porn) but what the fuck is this??

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if you mean all the OCs - so last I checked like ~60% of Pact fics on AO3 are actually the records/transcripts of what started as people doing a bit of responding IC to pactverse posts on the r/parahumans subreddit and ended up spiraling off into its own whole rp community.

Who would be the A) worst B) hottest C) funniest male Parahumans character to retroactively turn into a woman. my answer is Jack Slash for all three

Taking this just to derail original question and say Lung is a man but the dragon he turns into has Scaly reptile tits. He had no comment or opinion on this. They get bigger as the fight goes on.

We know this isn't true because Taylor never noticed or commented on them. (Or caused them to rot and fall off.)

Building up grassroots support for a third-way policy platform I’m tentatively calling Omelassian Techno-utilitarianism- a system under which we use data-driven metrics to identify the person in the country with the lowest quality of life, at which point we direct the full might of the government towards making that person’s quality of life as horrible as possible, thereby dramatically raising the median quality of life of all other citizens

the difference between yugioh and magic the gathering (as someone who plays neither) is that a yugioh card says like "if you own a Blorbionicus the King of Red Eyes in your pendulum summon zone (but NOT your left pendulum summon zone) you can special summon (NOT ritual or zexal or pendulum summon) sixteen cards named Blorbimini (excluding Maid Blorbimini) to any zone EXCEPT the super double defense zone" and no one can explain this to me but meanwhile a magic the gathering card says "flying. after the end of your turn draw a card" and people are like oh those fools bc the action only goes on the stack after the end of your turn and because of the use of 'your' instead of 'the owner's' and because mercury is in gatorade, technically it only resolves during the opponents third upkeep when explicitly you cant draw cards or else a sniper will shoot you

my honest to God answer in my defense is that I am fascinated to an unhealthy degree with glitches, system failures, weird rules interactions, etc and so spend unreasonable amounts of time in threads dedicated to discussing weird rules in games i don't play. did you know in the tabletop rpg pathfinder no one can see the moon

@loth-catgirl it's honestly fairly simple. perception checks gain bonuses based off the size of the thing you're trying to see, but gain penalties based on how far away it is. the math lines up such that the very large size of the moon in No way compensates for the negative-over-a-hundred-million penalty imposed by the moon being really far away. this also goes for the sun (larger, but even further away) and, obviously, all stars. no one has ever seen any celestial body

trying and failing to come up with a power more pathetic and useless than that of dean

like he can manipulate people's emotions, which would be useful if he didn't have to do it via glowing blasts of energy. and they're not, like, able to actually do damage either. his power would get him so so cancelled if it got leaked but otherwise it's completely useless

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i love how many worm powers are all-or-nothing in the sense of “you physically cannot find a way to use it without fasttracking yourself to forever jail.” it’s a really interesting facet of worm’s worldbuilding where parahumans have to be very intentional about trying to keep within societal rules and avoid leaking how much damage they could do if they went off the rails, but more importantly, it’s just really fucking funny. the scene where crucible is like “oh yeah i can literally just fucking incinerate anyone i put in my forcefield. i don’t usually tell people about that part though.” is peak comedy to me

I saw Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves the other night, and God I loved it!

It's funny, it's sincere, it's got great action! It feels like a real DND game, with the characters clocking up and improvising and having the silliest bits of dialogue.

The pudgy dragon was probably one of my favourite moments, along with the bard distraction, and every time he just... clobbers someone with his lute.

My family hasn't played DND, they know little about it, but they all loved it too!

(I still think the tiefling didn't really look like a tiefling, but that's really just a nitpick.)

why has there been like a 20 year terror campaign by DC comics and corporate affiliates to subject us all to countless dark and serious takes on The Joker. hes an evil clown with rave hair just make him silly like god intended for the world when he put two rave hair clowns on noahs ark

It’s funny now how incomplete our opinions on Worm as a text were considering how much fucking time we’ve spent thinking about it for obvious reasons. What we ~do~ have well thought out opinions about is so revealing too. I can talk about the Dallons for hours, bully Coil for his nonsensical plans, complain about Miss Militia, Dragon, and Armsmaster, and discourse half heartedly about Cauldron. Ask me about the ABB, and I’m like, oh, right, they existed. Faultline’s group was fine except for the fact Faultline was there.

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.

Not to actually go to bat for Armsmaster, but the fandom significantly exaggerates his "lack of social skills." He may not be especially talented in the area, but it's not like he was incapable of conversation before Dragon signed on as his partner/parole officer.