I Really Like How Worm Commits To Making Superpowered Characters Weird. I Think In Most Superhero Media,

Something I haven’t really seen talked about is how the Undersiders mirror Taylor’s bullies.

Obviously, each member of the trio torments Taylor differently: Madison creates little annoyances and pranks, Sophia is animalistically violent (predator-prey) (obviously this is part of the bad racial politics of worm) and Emma engages in psychological warfare based upon specific knowledge of her victim.

Meanwhile, in the Undersiders, you have Regent, who causes little slip-ups in his opponents, Bitch, who is animalistically violent (dog) and Tattletale, who engages is psychological warfare based upon specific knowledge of her victims. And in Grue, you have a Mr Gladly; an authority figure who is meant to reign his charges in but whom fails utterly after making only token efforts.

And Taylor is completely fine with this! I don't think she even really notices, let alone cares, because, with the exception of Bitch (whom she establishes dominance over), this isn't turned against her. Taylor holds a knife to Amy's throat while Tattletale threatens to ruin her life, and she doesn't even have a second thought.

I love when capes lie about their powers

Vista’s is an Escher staircase keyring trinket. It very much wants her to have a gun.

Taylor and her eldritch buddy

I believe you but this is insane to me because it’s explicitly a small village, the sort of place that the left is meant to view as a socially conservative backwater. That it’s not being presented negatively, by default in fixing it, is honestly kinda worrying re the state of the left

It says something that every single attempt to "fix" the cute witch in the alps game concept makes something that is vastly, vastly worse than the original idea, and sometimes is more actually fascist.

Mostly it's that the thing the Disco Elysium writers were going for is much harder than it looks from the outside. But also other things.

Not gonna lie, really looking forward to next issue when we get to see Heavy and the Major square up for a continent destroying battle, only for Heavy to effortlessly yeets him into the sun.

Taylor the Survivor

This is a key moment for Taylor's character arc, helping her dad salvage what they can in the aftermath of the endbringer attack. The high school insecurities are just a memory and stepped fully into her role as a masked parahuman. She's growing into her potential, even as the line between Taylor and Skitter begin to merge in dangerous ways. Physically at ease and confident; I wanted to include the knife she wore but it didn't work with this pose.

That being said, I don't know why it struck such a visual chord with me. Emma seeing her old victim from the car was just a vivid scene to me, I knew I had to draw her.

Thinkin’ About Alexandria

An important thing to keep in mind about Alexandria, I think, is that she (and the rest of Cauldron’s inner circle) have been sticking like glue to an organizational schema she developed when she was fifteen, using power-assisted cognition but the life-skills, worldview and experience of a fifteen year old; I think this goes a long way towards explaining why her mindset was finding the most efficient way to martially oppose villains instead of, say, finding a way to financially disincentivize villainy through social safety nets. (alternatively, she wanted society to be a thunderdome of sorts to get everyone trained up for gold morning, but that’s got just as many holes that could be explained by being fifteen.)

Her power answered her fear that she’d die without getting to grow and change by arresting all her biological processes and permanently locking her into her late-teens-early-twenties; she has to pretend in order to seem as old as she actually is. Her cognition is completely offloaded to her power; her brain is vulnerable, but it isn’t clear if she’s actually doing any thinking with that thing. Unmovable, unbreakable, clad in fortress imagery, sticking like glue to a specific plan, and a specific value (they’ll be alive, that’s all that matters) derived from her own root fear of death, her preference for mutation over death by cancer, which she projects onto everyone else in the world and uses to justify everything she does to them. Incredible calculative power, incredible resources, incredible martial power, and a fighting style that, to my recollection, consists of hitting the other guy until they stop moving.

So, you know, conclusion number one that I’m drawing from all of this is that Alexandria is Taylor with all the world’s resources at her back and no one to ever tell her no. Conclusion two is that Alexandria is subtly in the same kind of power-induced arrested development as Contessa; she’s got the brains and the brawn to think up and execute bad plans perfectly, she faces no criticism or scrutiny, she (usually) faces no consequences. She’s not “stand-on-a-beach-for-three-days-in-a-stupor” levels of brainscorched by her power but there’s a real degree to which I read the training wheels as never having come off with her. I get a vibe of R/Iamverysmart permeating Cauldron’s set-up and self-assuredness, and this is part of why.

Conclusion three (the big obvious one) is that she’s a metaphor for institutional inertia. When she dies and the Protectorate uses her as a scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with them it’s very obviously self-serving but it’s also not, like. Incorrect. She’s a synecdoche for everything wrong with the system. Rigid, inflexible, callous, arguably necessary but nearly impossible to remove or change or challenge.

And then she gets replaced by a guy whose whole schtick is that he can mix and match the best properties of wildly different component elements on the fly to create the best possible response to any problem.

I love the way taylor makes decisions like a cornered animal I love her desperation I love the way she has been slowly whittled down to a viciousness that she can never escape I love her analytic mind I love her willingness to escalate I love the way she will do what no one else will for better or for worse

You could make a pretty good Worm game with the bones of Tactical Breach Wizards

In issue #1 of The Power Fantasy, we get at least a glimpse of most of the Superpowers' living or working spaces- the exception is Etienne. For four of them- Valentina, Eliza, Masumi, Magus- the color palettes of their spaces are very similar to how they usually dress, and I also think their spaces are on-point symbolism for who they are. Let's look at the places we see, one by one.

Valentina lives in a small, cozy house on a scrapped-together space station- she loves the small details of human culture, but will always have to take an outsider role. The interior is designed with warm neutrals, similar to the golden yellows she often wears.

Eliza's space is cloaked in shadow, with candelabras and high windows that barely illuminate anything- she's eerie and mysterious, with religious motifs. It's high-contrast black and red, like the colors of her dramatic, costume-like outfits.

Masumi works in a huge warehouse- suited to the large-scale ambitions of her art, but also an industrial space that feels sterile and empty. The pastel paints she uses are all over her outfit, and when she dresses up for her gallery opening, it's in similar pastels.

And Magus works in a dimly-lit pyramid full of strange technomagic- the angles of the walls feel alien and menacing, as do the unfamiliar gadgets. His space includes Pyramid members, not just himself, so its design reflects the messaging he sends them about uncanny power. He dresses in eerie greens that make him almost blend into his environment.

Later we see Valentina's 1962 apartment and Magus's 1978 flat, which tell us more about how those two have changed or stayed the same. But I want to talk about how issue #1 dedicates one page each to those four characters and their spaces- a very obvious parallelism that leaves out Etienne and Heavy.

Etienne's traveling, so of course he can't be depicted within that pattern. He also comments to Tonya that he likes travel, and in issue #3 he implies that he flies transatlantic pretty regularly, so it's possible that he feels just as comfortable traveling the world than staying home.

But Heavy… he's at home, taking Etienne's psychic call just like everyone else. But he's outside the pattern because his relationship to his space is different.

Haven is beautiful. It's all pastels, it's full of flourishing houseplants, it's built with swooping curves rather than workaday right angles. There's enough charming little details that if I tried to make a comprehensive list you'd get bored reading it. The oveall aesthetic effect is peaceful, luxurious, idealistic, and gentle.

Basically, Heavy is completely at odds with the city he built. It's his place, for his people… but notice how the forty-something guy in pajamas stands out among all the beautiful young people with impeccable fashion sense. Four of the Superpowers seem to have designed their signature space to represent the way they live their lives. So why does Heavy live in a space that doesn't look or feel anything like him?

I see a couple possible takes on that. You could think of the discrepancy as straightforward hypocrisy- he founded his city on ideals he consistently fails to live up to. But… well, I have an alternate take that's kind of personal. I'm saving the details for another post, but basically: I think Heavy knows that Haven is the opposite of the face he presents to the world, and that's exactly the point.