“Loser Baby Is A Horrible Song! Husk Is Just Victim Shaming And Calling Angel A Loser!”

Every bisexual F/M couples be like

you're a loser, baby, a loser, goddamn baby

I certainly didn’t appreciate it on the first read-through, but one of the biggest background characterizations of Alec is among first things we learned about him: that he painted the Undersider’s symbols onto the doors of their hideout.

The loft reads as almost ridiculous when you first read about it. Whatever you’re expecting the hideout of a bunch of hardened criminals to look like, your not expecting “the rich kid’s house with all the best video games.” It almost took me out of it; it felt like such a teen wish fulfillment of a supervillain base that I thought Wildbow must be pretty young—and didn’t really take in what it was telling the reader about the Undersider’s mindset. Because it is a teen wish fulfillment, filtered through the practicality of what cost, secrecy, and Brian would allow for. Its the derelict old building you dare your friends to go into to find some rumored amazing or horrible secret—but this building does have a secret, and its a pizza party with a sweet flatscreen setup.

For the most part, it is an especially cool hangout spot that would appeal to your average teen—and not necessarily your average villain. Taylor gets told to use the other’s civilian names while hanging out here. They wear street clothes instead of their costumes. Its built to be appealing to the non-cape side of your life, a welcome reprieve from that world. For the Undersiders who don’t have much of a real life outside of capedom, its something like a place to play make-believe. That’s part of why its so effective as an initial pitch to Taylor when she’s looking for friends and doesn’t want to be a villain, why its important for ingratiating her to the rest of them and making her backstabbing plan that much harder to follow through on. Its part of why getting her own lair, built for the specifications of Skitter the Warlord instead of Taylor the kid, represents such a big change in how Taylor sees herself and her goals. Its why there’s presumably dozens of Undersider fics of them just casually hanging out in the loft, away from any major cape shenanigans. Its why Rachel’s first full appearance is her coming up into the room and breaking the bubble—ruining Brian’s pitch of sweet teen digs by bringing the violence inherent to cape life into the supposedly separate space. Because the loft is supposed to be for the Undersiders to be themselves as civilians, instead of capes.

But at the same time, everyone’s personal room has their symbol painted on their door. And the first real thing we learn about Regent is that he’s the one who painted them.

Regent did not get to have a double life. His cape stuff and his family stuff were inherently intertwined, and it was all bad. He’s arguably the only undersider to have a secret identity in a traditional, important sense: not just “you have a civilian life, and everyone’s gonna respect that its separate and not go after anything related to it,” like @artbyblastweave​ outlined here, but “your specific other identity is important, in a sense outside of just being something to target” way. People finding out who Skitter is means they know there’s an identity there to exploit—her enemies can trace her to her school, she can’t continue to go back to her old house, etc. You’d be able to get the same advantage by finding out the civilian identity of pretty much any cape. But not with Alec. People finding out who Alec is means they go “oh fuck, its Heartbreaker’s kid—” the effect is much more like finding out Taylor is Skitter, rather than vice versa.

And that’s important, because the persona of Regent is, to a large extent, his chance to live out the life he wants. Brian and Lisa both have circumstances that don’t allow them a typical childhood, and so they construct spaces to go through the motions of one. To roughhouse and play video games with friends, to plan shopping trips and visits to Fugly Bobs. They’re looking for a respite from their normal state, and that respite to them looks like civilian life. Alec is looking for a respite from his awful childhood, and that respite has a lot of the same things, but it also has the symbols and aspects of his cape persona. He draws his crown on his door, he uses his powers casually on Brian—he’s using the space to let him be Regent, in the same way Brian is pitching it to Skitter as a place where she can just be Taylor, where Tattletale can just be Lisa. This is pretty huge for understanding Regent early-on: Taylor obviously has a pretty expansive double life, as does Brian, and Lisa clearly wants to get into some non-cape-related shenanigans. We’re introduced with a clear divide between cape and civilian identities being the norm. Rachel is presented as bucking a trend, her lack of second identity making her an outlier. But if you read into Regent’s decorating choices, you realize pretty early that you can’t separate his cape identity and his current civilian idenitiy, because their both effectively the same thing: a persona where he can be something other than a Vasil.

Sheesh, now that I’m thinking about it there’s a lot to be drawn from each of the undersider’s lairs. I already talked a bit about how Skitter having her new base be a proper “villain lair” instead of “hang spot” represented a shift in perspective, and how Rachel being unable to behave the way your “supposed” to in the loft shows that she both can’t live a double life and has no interest in doing so (unlike Alec, who is very clearly interested in making a “new” life for himself with the Undersiders as Regent). But how about how Brian won’t take a room in the loft and insists on sleeping in a separate apartment he’s planning on shairing with Aisha? He obviously wants to be able to draw an especially clear line between his cape and civilian life, and doesn’t want Aisha to get involved at all. How about how Lisa’s eventual separate Coil-provided villain lair is a disguised community center she was pretending to work in, showing both that she has some interest in a life outside of capedom and that she’s inherently drawn to working with/having control over civilian culture? She doesn’t just want to hold territory, she wants to be an institution—not just someone the other capes have to play ball with, but who the mayor and civilian agencies have to go through. She separates capedom and civilianhood to an extent, but not to the same extent as Brian, and her goals are much more “civilian-oriented” than most.

I forget the specifics of Alec’s eventual Coil-base, but I know that it was a group of buildings (a campus, maybe?) with few people in the surrounding area outside of puppets—presumably not so different from the compound he grew up. But I do remember that one of the last times we see it is near when Taylor says something about his connection to Heartbreaker, and him getting upset by it. I wonder if it changes in the intervening two years, especially with Imp’s influence. I’m kinda sad we never get a chance to see it.

to whom it may concern: that sword of damocles hangs

alright this one is getting its own post instead of a reblog on a post that is Entirely Not About That. presenting the 'what if we put amy and alec in a room together' manifesto because the thing is that it is interesting but not in the way amy/alec shippers think

Amy shook her head, talking over her, “She’s always been emotional, passionate, unrestrained, and she’s channeling all this new emotion into hate, because it’s the closest equivalent.” “New emotion?” Regent asked.  “You mean you mindraped her.” Amy looked like she’d been slapped across the face.  I wasn’t surprised, but hearing it said out loud was unsettling.

“Nice,” Regent said.  “She could be a human-spider hybrid.  Add some insult to injury with the mindrape thing.” I could see Amy tense.

it is relevant to his character that he's the first person to cut through amy's euphemisms (and everyone else's avoidance of saying the unsettling part out loud) and outright say "you mindraped her." he calls the euphemistic language out and then intentionally repeats it a second time for no other reason than to bug her about it. it's vaguely reminiscent of something he says to sophia during his interlude:

“You and I are more alike than you’d suspect, I think,” he said. “We’re both arrogant assholes, yeah?  Difference is, I admit it, I don’t dress it up and tell myself that I’m a bitch and that that’s a good thing.”  He burned Emma’s face out of another photo.

he has a repeated habit of making people uncomfortable by calling something out for exactly what it is, whether it be "yeah sure cape groupies, my dad's girls, people i used my power on towards the end" or "you mean you mindraped her." he's desensitized enough to really all forms of violence to be unbothered by committing or witnessing them, but he seems to harbor a genuine pet peeve for people who obscure or unreasonably justify what they're actually doing. as uncomfortable as he can make taylor, it's often not that he's doing things worse than the other undersiders, but that he's the person most willing to openly admit what he's doing--or to pettily call out what someone else is doing.

i think it more or less boils down to the fact that he's never gotten to be the person on the peripherals of violence making up neat and tidy ways to talk about it: he spent his entire childhood being hurt in every way imaginable & being coerced into doing the same to others. i think it left him with a sort of genuine distaste for being expected to talk in circles around the viscerally awful things he had done to him or did to others, and subsequently, for people who have done similar things but can't fucking fess up to the reality of it. it's like he's been walking around his entire life just absolutely drenched in blood, witnessing so much else get covered in it, and he's starting to get legitimately bothered over people standing around twiddling their thumbs and pretending it's red paint. he knows it's blood. he's been tasting it since he was 6. he would really like if everyone else could also grow up and admit it's fucking blood.

it's always funny to me that amy/alec shipping is, like, a Thing--a niche thing, but a Thing, because i could not think of a rapist more hand-crafted to piss amy dallon off than alec vasil. he cannot go Three seconds in her presence without going "oh you raped her? you mean you raped her? with your mind? like she doesn't just have new feelings you specifically mean you mindraped her?"

she, on some level, views herself as someone who did harm because she's irrevocably, ontologically evil, and is sort of desperately obsessed with minimalizing or half-justifying her actions to herself so that she can avoid recognizing that she feels like she can't be better. she's clinging to the idea that she can be "redeemed" if she does something of equal measure in the opposite direction (e.g 'spending the rest of her life healing people' as she mentions), but because she can't even directly acknowledge how bad her actions actually were without crumbling under the weight of the idea that she's doomed to be that bad, she's fundamentally incapable of looking directly at what she did at this point in the story.

alec, on the other hand, is really fucking upfront and fairly objective about his actions--he never ties them into some Inarguable Truth About His Soul, and he's pretty honest about whether or not he thinks they're justifiable. in 14.1, he has this dialogue with cherie:

“When daddy had you practicing your powers, you ‘hijacked’ a few people at a time, used their bodies to get high with no consequences for you, you threw orgies for yourself…” “Again.  I was a kid.”

but despite the fact that sophia is, on some level, justified in his mind by his "eye for an eye, this is a favor for taylor" rhetoric--he's fine with admitting that he's also just doing it because, yeah, he's an arrogant asshole and he feels like it. some of it was because he was a kid being groomed, and some of it was because He Felt Like It.*

*sure, he only Felt Like It because he has a comically large cocktail of unpacked psychological issues--but he doesn't know that, he just knows he felt like it.

in other words, he doesn't subscribe to the idea that any of his actions are, like, Ontologically Predetermined By His Inner Being or even necessarily all related. he's like the fuckin' "might do it again, prolly not" dude from the sex offender shuffle. okay, sorry for saying that in my seriouspost. but his philosophies would clash hilariously badly with amy--he insists on accepting his own & others actions for exactly what they are, he's generally very invested in not being his father (being asked if he intends to turn out like his dad is one of the only times something briefly upsets him), and he's actually doing pretty okay at that. he's like...shockingly well-adjusted given the circumstances. his entire arc is more or less a slow upward climb.

i think having to be around someone who both believes and would outright admit "yeah i raped people, no i dunno if i feel that bad, no i'm not raking myself over the coals for it, yeah some of it was because i was a kid, yeah some of the other stuff wasn't, no i'm not Predestined To Suck," would like. clash with her beliefs abt 'ontologically evil' being a real thing, abt punishment as justice, etc. in a way that would really bother her. she spends a lot of her time in her head trying to twist things around until they feel salvageable to her, but alec is 0 amount concerned with rationalizing to make him feel alright--he just does things, some bad, most shitty attempts to be better.

it's, funnily enough, far more functional for improving than what amy has going on--he operates on material actions as opposed to her Self-Flagellating Thought Labyrinths, and the fact that he's busier moving on from things he can't materially change than he is kicking himself in the face means he can actually achieve some form of progress towards more functional approaches wrt human interaction. i think if amy had an extended conversation w/ him about the subject, she'd both be disgusted with him for not thinking thoughtcrime is real and deeply resentful that this fellow ontologically evil villain is doing better at moving forwards as a person than her despite not 24/7 flagellating himself + yearning for "redemption" like she is. it'd throw a disturbingly large wrench in her worldview, and she would not be happy about it.

oh, and alec would think she's weird and mopey and dumb and annoying and "why do it if you can't even admit it." and he would probably tell her as much. which is the point where i unlock the door to the room so alec can sprint out to escape amy's attempt to put tastebuds on his asshole.

goodbye and thank u for the food!!

Much like how old slasher flicks made it clear you could enjoy watching teens getting slashed by having them slut it up premaritally, Worm makes it clear you can enjoy watching the Travellers suffer by showing them play League of Legends

skitter

This fandom is full of cowards why isn't Dragon / Simurgh a mainstream ship. You're telling me we all saw two artificial intelligences activated by absent father figures, one programmed to do good that resents the fact that she can't choose to do good, and one made to cause discord and destabilize the world and no one thought they should smooch? No one had Simurgh turn to Dragon to help understand herself after Eidolon died? No one made Simurgh realize that she can have desires and feelings beyond destroying humanity? No one had Dragon realize the similarities and think about how she could easily have been an enemy of humanity like the Simurgh of her creator had willed it, so why shouldn't she help free a fellow AI chained by the desires of her creators? Absolutely shameful.