(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

I was looking at Coil's wiki article for unrelated reasons and found out that Wildbow has Word of God on how Coil's power works that I had previously missed.

Now, on the surface, Coil's power makes no sense. Wildbow likes to handwave everything with references to parallel universes, but the straightforward implication of Coil's power being actual parallel realities is that Coil can destroy universes. Which seems, y'know, overpowered.

My favourite headcanon for this was that Coil was wrong about a fundamental aspect of his power and while he thought he was choosing which reality was "real", he was doing no such thing and his power is just communicating with divergent versions of himself. It just so happens that the story we follow happens to take place following the one Coil that has always gotten the timeline he wanted, but there's plenty of other Coils who have eventually realised their power is a lot more limited than that. This is of course very silly but it amuses me.

The WoG answer on how Coil's power works, though, is IMO just as silly: according to Wildbow, what Coil does is a) simulate realities with perfect precognition until he chooses one and then b) his body goes on autopilot and takes exactly all the choices he simulated himself making.

This would make Coil the only precog who doesn't suffer interference from other precogs (not even the Simurgh is immune to that)

I like my version better.

Comments

[wingedcatgirl]

Not having followed Worm, our impression of Coil's power has always been "This seems like one of those abilities that's very cool to write a story or maybe even a video game around, but there's just no way to make it not be absolutely ridiculous when you think about it."

[contrarianarchon]

... huh, as someone who reads mostly worm fanfic and not canon I was used to it being the canon answer (Or I guess the closely related version where instead of putting him on autopilot you just feed him the information from the him in the false timeline so it feels like both are real and he makes the decisions that the real-timeline-prediction make) but also he gets disrupted a lot (he doesn't get access to knowledge of what the simulated-hims do in the "future", just experiences a drastic collapse of one of his timelines when someone above him on the precog hierarchy or a OCP disrupts the prediction; multiple stories have hinged on him overplaying his hand to try and kill an OCP that disrupts his power).

... also I low-key assumed that shards do any work trying to ensure compatibility between their respective precogs, but I guess they might not actually