I Made A Zine! An Inaccurate Recap Of "The Power Fantasy" Issue 1. It's The Dumbest, Messiest Thing I've

Lisa's interactions with Taylor make a lot more sense if you believe she's never had a real friend in her life, even before her power started to whisper things in her ear. Taylor's experience got messed with by the bullying, but Lisa is starting from the bottom and has to pull from her interactions with the Undersiders and it shows

I disagree strongly with the people people who say taylor getting stuck on earth Alph is a fate worse than death. Obviously it’s awful that she can’t see her friends again but the ending represents her entering a place of stability and healing, where she can finally begin to live a healthy life.

I think those people see Taylor’s awkward and I’ll fitting entrance to the civilian life and feel that she’s lost her place in the world, but I think that’s part of the healing process. She’s no longer trapped in the place that forced her to do the things she did to survive. She doesn’t fit in because she has been molded in a harsh environment, and now she finally has room to change.

My correct Amy opinions

Amy is characterised primarily by the belief that she is destined for evil. She believes this because of her 'evil pedigree', a belief caused by Carol's emotional neglect, her temptations, primarily her desire for her sister, her ability to fulfill her temptations, through her power, and her lack of enjoyment of doing good through healing.

She doesn't really desire to do good; her stated reason for continuing healing is that "people wouldn’t understand if she stopped" and she never wanted to be a hero. Healing is a crushing obligation. But she doesn't want to be evil or to hurt people, and so she tries delay and deny her own evilness. Her rules exist for the sole reason to help her resist temptation.

She doesn't seek help because she believes that it wouldn't help, because of her inherent evil.

She loves her sister, and doesn't want to disappoint her.

Amy's obviously a controversial figure, and there's a lot of room for interpretation, especially once you add Ward into the picture, but I think that the above should be an uncontroversial foundation for discussing Amy, and that you're probably wrong if you disagree

Kid Ignition had five lines this issue and four of them were disparaging of his life and/or of Heavy.

Once Kid gets a taste of freedom I doubt he'd ever want to be bound again

I'm honestly less interested in, "Is Kid Ignition really as powerful as Heavy thinks?" and more in, "Is Kid Ignition really as loyal and obedient as Heavy thinks?" I guess an exact repeat of The Major would be poetically ironic or something. But from a character standpoint, I really just want to see Kid lashing out at his controlling, high-pressure parents like basically every teenager since the concept of teenagerhood was invented. Except, of course, he's not your average kid.

This is fun, but I have a single addendum: instead of controlling a small number of bugs but getting detailed sensory data, Lisa should have no control over any bugs but get the sense data from all of them within a range similar, if only a bit smaller, to Taylor’s

I'm chewing enthusiastically on the possibilities of an AU featuring Taylor, Lisa, and Brian as cluster triggers. Setting aside the incredible AU gymnastics required to make something resembling their canon triggers occur in close proximity and rapid succession to each other, the possibilities of their versions of each other's powers have me frothing at the lips.

I think their versions of each other's powers should still be shaped towards their own traumas, so:

Taylor's version of Brian's power focuses more on the power copying than the darkness. I think when she makes contact with a parahuman, she picks up an extremely weak version of their power for a short time. Like, touching Sundancer would let her make a match flame. But when her bugs touch a parahuman, they also gain a weak version of the power, and she can use a large swarm of very weak powers to very great effect. I think her version of Lisa's power would give her insight specifically on power mechanics and interactions; she can extrapolate power function from seeing it in use or its consequences.

Brian's version of Taylor's power would, I think, be a very direct, more limited form. I think he can, with concentration, manifest bugs out of darkness that he can control to the same degree that Taylor controls her swarm. What he does not get, however, is her multitasking ability, and if he's not maintaining active concentration on a group of his shadow bugs, they dissolve. So manifesting and using more than a small number for a simple task is pretty incapacitating for him. His version of Lisa's power is all about his own presentation; he can intuit how people perceive him and what he would need to do to change their perception of him into something different.

Lisa's version of Taylor's power would be all about information gathering - she can manifest a very small number of bugs under her control, and her control doesn't have much finesse, but she can process their sensory input extremely well. Her version of Brian's power would let her tag people with clinging shadows via projectile - as long as the shadow lingers, she can sense exactly where they are relative to her in great detail.

And that's not even touching on what their cluster power balancing would be! Something fun and psychological that really plays up the opportunity for cluster bleed through and kiss-kill dynamics.

It'd also be a ton of fun to explore how that bleed through affects them all psychologically, especially if they come together at a point in time where Lisa and Brian are as new to and insecure in their powers as Taylor. I think there's room for delightfully frightening shades of codependence only previously visible to shrimp.

And, of course, I think that would all almost inevitably lead to what would be simultaneously the most emotionally horny and emotionally repressed threesome known to man. None of them would be able to look each other in the eyes for weeks - except for Lisa, who Won the threesome, something that is not only possible but extremely Normal and Healthy, thank you very much.

Can Heavy yell louder than Masumi? Does it matter?

(This is for @jkjones21, in a way- he asked me to write about a certain page of The Power Fantasy and I'm taking it in a completely different direction than he suggested to me. He did have a good observation about the power lines and cicada as iconic anime/manga motifs, but I don't actually have anything to add to what he said.)

Okay, so from a certain perspective, you could say these two images are proof that Heavy can yell louder than Masumi, because of the way font size works in comics. I think that's an overly reductive point of view, but I want to start with it because it's a simpler version of what I actually feel like is going on, so here goes.

In the third panel of the first image, we see Masumi from so far away that she's barely visible, and her dialogue font is small to show that we can barely hear her. Then in the fourth panel, we see her closer up, and the big font size (coupled with her angry posture) make it clear that she's actually yelling at the top of her lungs, she was just too far away to clearly hear before.

By comparison, in the third panel of the second image, we see Haven (an entire city) from far enough away that Heavy isn't even visible from where he's standing on one of its balconies- but despite the distance, his dialogue font is still really big. If you can clearly hear Heavy yelling from far away, but Masumi's voice gets muted with distance, he's louder, right?

Except nothing in comics is real. You're not visually representing a world that consistently exists, you're representing a story that shifts in emotional meaning. The aesthetic effect of Masumi's voice there (at least, its effect on me) is that for all her emotional ferocity, she's just a small angry blip in an overall peaceful world. In the context of the story, her taking the human-scale perspective of "How could you murder hundreds of people?" is immature compared to Etienne's cynical pragmatism. And the visuals back this up by deflating her anger through making her look small.

And then Heavy... I don't want to say "he's louder because you're supposed to take his anger more seriously," because that's not quite true. This is an out-of-context excerpt as of today (five more days until issue #6!!!!) but I get the sense it's being played for comedy. Heavy's louder than a person that far away has any right to be, because the force of his anger is hyperbolic.

...it's not really about who's literally more loud. It's not even about who's more angry (not that you can measure anger on a scale, even.) It's about how the reader is supposed to interpret each character's anger- and the weird thing is, Masumi's small-font anger and Heavy's large-font anger are both coded as ineffectual. She's not as loud as she seems to think she is, and he's so loud it becomes melodramatic and funny. They've both got very real things to yell about, and I'm sure they take themselves seriously... but the narrative is undercutting both of them, for effect. (Again though- I'm interpreting the second image out of context! Or I guess you could say, the second image's caption is offering a different context from when I'll actually see the whole issue.)

Oh, and my headcanon? Heavy can yell louder in terms of literal decibels, but Masumi has an ear-piercing scream that's like a zillion times more alarming.

i cant stop thinking about brian at pride. he keeps getting hit on and he's going sorry im just here to support my sister and then aisha goes what IM here to support YOU and he has an internal panic attack until she cant hold her laughter in anymore

I was about to make a post about the general stress of living in the world of the Power Fantasy caused indoor smoking to have a longer life, but it turns out bans on indoor smoking only really started after the turn of the millennium. They’re younger than me

Deception also plays a large part of this. The Major survived a decade as America’s super powered hatchet man off of a bluff. Lux’s dead-man’s switch is possibly a bluff. Heavy can pull himself back together from more or less anything, but it’s not as perfect a process as he pretends it is. For all we know America succeeded in killing him, just with a delay

Its just a background detail at the moment, but it’s interesting how the superpowers have undergone a quasi-evolutionary process, in that a new superpower can only emerge and remain around if they are more-or-less immune to the various powers of the existing superpowers, or have some other reason for the existing superpowers not to kill them.

Anyone without psychic shielding would be instantly neutered by Lux (see The Devil). Anyone one not physically resilient enough to survive a first strike from Heavy and whom Heavy dislikes enough to kill will likely be killed by Heavy. Etc

The Major only survived as long as he did because Magnus didn’t tell Heavy about how weak he was because letting America believe that it was still powerful was worth the concessions they were asking for until, suddenly, they no longer were.

Lux, Masumi, and possibly Magnus, are only alive, despite physical squishiness, because they have (in Masumi’s case, unintentionally) created dead-man’s switches.

And so by 1999 all you’re left with are Superpowers that have psychic shielding and which are either incredibly physically resilient or have truly terrifying dead-man’s switches

Finally finished worm!!!😭😭😭 So i drew some fanarts!! I may or may not make an short animation!!

When we realized they're just kids...