T-shirt That Says “I Got My Individuality And Free Will Violated By Khepri And All I Got Was This Stupid

For your first part we hear from Crusader that she supposedly triggered after being trapped in a crashed truck for days slowly starving until she triggered to eat light and get the truck off

Thinking about Purity

I have two thoughts on Purity. Here they are:

One. Her trigger event consisted of her being trapped in a lethal environment with no resources, gradually going insane, and developing overwhelming firepower in order to fight off a horde of assailants who didn’t actually exist. I can’t imagine what that’s a metaphor for. Haven’t the foggiest.

Two.  Purity is interesting, from a worldbuilding perspective, because at the start of the story there’s an actual niche archetype from the comics that she’s fulfilling.

 “Hardcore street-level hero who actually turns out to be a racist lunatic that the actual heroes need to take down” isn’t quite a chestnut at the big two but it’s a story beat I’ve seen multiple times; Nightwing vs his building’s insane janitor in Dixon’s run, Captain America vs Jack Monroe and to a lesser extent USAgent, I feel like Batman’s deal with Lock-up from the animated series inches towards this, although that one wasn’t explicitly racialized. Punisher’s done this a couple times, It’s Peacemaker’s whole bit, there’s definitely a few more I’m forgetting.

So the subversive element here isn’t that she’s an openly racist superhero; it’d that she’s still allowed to be a racist superhero. It’s that a thematically appropriate hero like Legend hasn’t come to town specifically to drop the hammer on her for daring to be an openly racist superhero. 

 And to be charitable, what’s usually going on in those other stories is that the racist heroes are almost always explicitly bad knockoffs of the protagonist. They’re intended as a dark mirror, because the obvious failure mode of heroic vigilantism is that it’s extremely appealing to racists, glory hounds, egomaniacs and egomaniacal racist glory hounds, but the flip side of that is that people with those characteristics go down like chumps in a fight with a true-blue hero. They exist in the story as a one-off warning for the real heroes, who give them a chance and then chuck them in the bin when they show their true colors.

Worm, though, doesn’t have a just-so structure. The racist idiots who get superpowers and develop delusions of heroism don’t provide the courtesy of also being weak and incompetent enough that the “real” heroes can root them out with minimal fuss. Purity won the goddamn power lottery; she’s one of the most powerful capes in the Bay, with hit-and-run capabilities that all of the heroes working together are textually incapable of countering. (And this isn’t like The Boys where they’re all secretly in bed with each other- New Wave has serious beef with the Empire! They would absolutely pin her ass to the wall if the opportunity arose, but they can’t!)

So in a very real sense, The Protectorate is pussyfooting around her, letting her exist in the gray zone of self-deluded vigilantism, because…. well, the second she can’t sustain her self-deception anymore, the second someone really pushes, her go-to reaction is to commit a mass casualty event. She was always a time bomb, and so the strategy of just continuing to label her as a villain, while she continuously hopefully refreshes PHO to see if any helpful fans have updated her wiki page yet, is, you know, I get it. It’s not great but I get it. A hands on approach only works if you can actually lay hands on them.

But! As far as I can remember, she was functionally operating as an Independent Hero as the setting defines it! Everyone in power pretends she isn’t but she was still in that ballpark, hand in hand with how selectively racist she was being about it! She was a vigilante, she was out to target “criminals” and clean up the streets using her powers, she had a costume and a secret identity- actually one of the few capes we see in Brockton Bay with a full-time day job- and she was really really really racist.

So with Purity, Worm is being honest about the inability of a superhero community to clean house, to effectively police who gets to be a part of it, who gets to actively consider themselves a part of it. There was never going to be a righteous beat-down where she gets “kicked out” of the fraternity, no “you are not affiliated with me” moment that finally gets through, even though many heroes in the setting would dearly love to deliver such a thing. A certain level of power purchases the right to think of yourself in whatever terms you want, and the heroes just have to stand around looking uncomfortable and swearing up and down that, no, her vigilantism is different from good vigilantism, honest, completely different underlying models.

What was the point in animal planet airing those incredibly convincing fake documentaries about dragons and mermaids

You’re right and I agree with you but I wanted to try and justify it so this is a quick and not super thought out explanation, it could be him being with Dragon and chasing the Nine are meant to be him at his peak while the Leviathan fight is his lowest point

it’s been pointed out how him being in Brockton was the worst possible option for him, stuck in a dead end position with enemies he’s not really suited to deal with, no one he’s really close to, all his shit with Dauntless and dealing with the recent ABB crisis and everything else, all just emphasizing his worst traits, the Leviathan fight is the bottom of a years long spiral with it being his seeming salvation, getting him respect and removing problems only for it to go wrong

meanwhile him hunting the S9 with Dragon is both him out of that situation but also putting his traits and abilities that got him to that point to full use, he finally has someone he’s close too, he’s making real progress using his abilities (both hunting the S9 and helping Dragon) he’s doing something that will earn him respect and glory but tempered by having Dragon there to reign him in and an actual focus on finishing the job

admittedly him and Dragon are still weirdly similar it is to his supposed trigger event but still this is all just random surface thoughts and probably wrong jut thought i’d try to justify it

i do feel like colins arc is a little weird. i don't have anything against transhumanism as a concept, past finding a lot of transhumanists as People really annoying, but I find it odd that mannequin comes to colin, goes "you and I are the same, and you should do the same thing I did and become less human", and then Colin does, and the story kind of treats it as a value neutral choice. in isolation, i would totally find replacing your body with robot parts to be value neutral, but we're not operating in isolation, we're working with a scenario where the bad guy told colin to do this thing, he does it, and it doesn't... mean anything. in fact, his identity as defiant is meant to be a better version of him, a humbler one, compared to colin as armsmaster. it's just very odd narratively -- it makes me wonder if wildbow is quietly a die-hard transhumanist and didn't want to introduce dissonance by condemning a transhumanist action even in a context where the narrative positions it as part of a corruption arc, or if he had enough transhumanist followers that he didn't want to tick off by doing that (im leaning towards the latter but i dont know when exactly yud recommended worm to his devotees within the storys publishing history)

in addition and separately to that, its super fucking weird that the PRT says that they can't account for colin because he escaped and there's this sense that he's gonna Do something and/or possibly leave the city without knowing about the s9s condition that no candidates can leave the city, only for him to.... literally never at any given point show up during the s9 arcs after his arc 11 interlude

@boarofthenorth100

Ah yes, the two half’s of tumblr, hilarious shitpost, and beautiful art

Enriched uranium sword with a lead sheathe that is rumored to slowly kill its owner in exchange for god killing power.

there’s something else that’s really interesting about Scion that’s revealed in this chapter though

and that is that Scions an asshole

now that feels obvious with him blowing up Britain but specifically because of how Jack convinces Scion to start killing he tells him to do what his ancestors did which for Entities is the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do

the whole point of Entities is to stop entropy since they realized the old way of just fighting an consuming was going to cause them to die out and yet Scion decides to revert to the old ways and kill everything and there by ruining the Simulation and stopping any progress on the entropy problem which is the exact opposite of what Entities want to do

this means to other Entities specifically Scions a huge self important asshole

Very confused by sting interlude 3; don’t really get what happened

If Yakko Wakko and Dot were SCP's theyd be classified as keter

Not because they're going to cause an end of the world scenario and end humanity itself

But simply because they're masters of escape and the foundation would just not be able to keep them in a place they didnt want to stay in.

Headcanon that Luke and Obi Wan got the money to pay Han Solo by selling the moisture farm at bargain-basement prices in Anchorhead without telling anyone that it was totally torched, and by the time anyone find out they were well off planet. Luke now has a reputation as one of Tattooine’s most famous con men despite the fact that it was Obi Wan who ran the con.