sigmaleph | Entries tagged with worm

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.

"that guy that harassed Sabah in college" is sure an... interesting choice of protagonist for a Worm fanfic

why not just make an OC at that point, y'know

literally every time I look at the Janus playbook for Masks I can't help but think about how improbably good a fit it is for Skitter. it's weird

(apparently this random redditor agrees)

Your name is Francis Krouse, and you have a box.

The evil mastermind and apocalyptic monster known as the Simurgh has arranged the circumstances so that you end up with a briefcase full of vials that grant superpowers. You know this. You also know the following things:

1) The Simurgh can see the future, read your mind, influence your thoughts, and has a long track record of setting people up to do catastrophic damage to the world.

2) You are in an environment where she has had more than enough time to set up the situation as desired, including various superpowered adversaries and some really thorny problems you don't have a good solution to.

3) You are kind of an asshole, and if pushed will protect yourself and the people you care about at the cost of innocent lives.

You have concluded, based on the available evidence, that the Simurgh has set you up to take the vials, gain superpowers, and go do some superpowered catastrophic damage. You'd rather not do this, all things being equal, but see 3.

If you attempt to ignore the vials, you expect the Simurgh to have set things up so that the situation will get even more dire and you will be forced to take them.

If you attempt to destroy the vials, you expect the Simurgh to have set things up so something or someone immediately comes up to stop you, violently if required. And then force your hand some other way, as above.

If you just take the vials now, no further manipulations by the Simurgh would have been necessary so she doesn't need to have set up anything to worsen your situation. But you likely will do some catastrophic damage to the world.

The Simurgh has already left. She predicted your decision and set up circumstances accordingly, but she is no longer actively manipulating you or any bystanders and cannot react to your decision in the present.

What do you do?

A thing I am grappling with re: Worm's worldbuilding is that I am not sure what are the mechanics that make it so that most supervillains (that don't draw too much ire) have careers for extended periods.

It's implied that gangs try to break out their people out of prison whenever they are captured, and we see this happen with e.g. Lung. Obviously Lung/Oni Lee are not easy to capture in the first place, so their continued existence as threats makes sense. Similarly the Empire has the numbers to try to mount a rescue for anyone, and they're implied to have a high turnover anyway. But what about lesser villains?

Lisa more or less says outright that minor villains are let out of jail, or at least their escape attempts are unimpeded. I don't think you can take the "cops and robbers" framework as given, there's multiple steps of motivated reasoning in that conversation, but I wouldn't think she makes that out of whole cloth.

The practical question is, how often should you expect a villain who is not a major threat (say, doesn't have a murder to their name) to actually escape from the heroes, vs be captured and 'let go' one way or another, vs actually stay in prison for a while or get recruited for the Protectorate or otherwise end their villainous career?

(the practicality of the question is, of course, that I'm writing fanfic and I don't know what a realistic getaway rate is for Uber and Leet, because them consistently escaping from the heroes seems unlikely, but so does them getting broken out of jail, and yet they continue to exist)

I've been reading Rhythm of War (fourth book in the Stormlight Archive) and mostly so far my reaction is wow I wish I had re-read the previous three books at some point. I have totally forgotten about half the characters, the ones I remember I still couldn't tell you how their relationships with each other ended, and there's a dozen plot points I couldn't tell you how they were resolved. Some of it is coming back to me as I read but I think at some point once I'm done I should do a whole-series re-read to out, like, everything in context. Sanderson generally is an author who rewards playing close attention to detail and noticing things that don't make sense as clues to larger mysteries and I can't really do that if I'm forgetting half the hints to what should and should not make sense.

Probably part of the problem is that I don't really participate in the Cosmere fandom, which would serve for the purpose of regularly refreshing that stuff in my mind and talking about things other people have noticed that I might not have (well, I've been in an rpg campaign set in the Cosmere for a while, but not beyond that). And some of *that* is that I don't really know how to... do that? The only two fandoms I "participate in" in the relevant sense are Worm (where it mostly works out as "read a lot of fanfic and have many tumblr mutuals who are into it because that's how the social circles worked out") and ASoIaF (where I mostly just read analysis blogs).

Purposeful human interaction continues to be hard, I guess.

Word of Wildbow is that Victoria is publicly dating Dean Stansfield, not Gallant, yet Tattletale talks about her dating him in his cape identity while they're planning for the bank job, and Taylor mentions magazines saying the same thing. You could argue that Tattletale figured it out (and has zero compulsions about revealing a fact that can unmask a Ward!) and that the bit with the magazines is post-Leviathan and so after Dean got posthumously unmasked and people could put the information together, but it's much cleaner to just... ignore that bit of Word of God, unless it's actually spelled out in canon later

I don't know why I care, it might theoretically come up in a fic but probably not

Early chapters imply a far more active independent hero and villain scene in Brockton Bay than we ever meet. We know Browbeat was one until shortly before the bank job, and Circus and Trainwreck at least claimed to be, unclear when Coil scooped them up. A random Empire mook talks about some guy called Stain when talking about minor players, might actually be Skidmark? (he also mentions Squealer in the same list, rather than associating her with the Merchants)

Miss Militia has had powers for 26 years by story start (powers had been a thing for 29). She does not have any kind of defensive powers, she's neither tougher than a regular human nor harder to hit. If she hadn't triggered as a child, she'd be a glaring exception to the 'capes don't grow old' rule, and she managed that with the power of 'having a gun'.

I had somehow totally forgotten Kaiser dies during the Leviathan fight. My brain did not supply an alternate point for him to die at, just, saw him die and was like 'what, doesn't he last much longer?'.

The pretty boys – Leonardo Decaprio, Marcus Firth, Justin Beiber, Johnny Depp – had never done it for me.

(Worm, 2.6)

Our-universe Justin Bieber was born after 1982, which raises the fascinating possibilities of a) Earth Bet has a different celebrity also named Justin Bieber or b) Justin Bieber is an unavoidable multiversal constant

edit: I managed to type out that name three times without successfully noticing it's misspelled in the source I'm quoting. So many missed possible implications!

hmmm, practical guide re-read to spend the months until book VI starts, or worm re-read as fanfiction research. difficult decisions...

me: hm, i am kinda having more trouble finding decent worm fic to read lately. maybe i've scraped the bottom of the Ao3 barrel and need to look in like, spacebattles or some stuff, that sounds bothersome

the other version of me, which exists for the purpose of this dialogue: you could do that, yes. however, what if i told you there's a post-canon, *not* altpower!taylor, long-running, well-written fic by an author you already like?

me: that sounds amazing, where exactly did you learn of this fic, other me?

other me: here's the best part: you've already started reading it!

me:... you want me to get back to Ward, don't you?

other me: just do it and stop whining, you baby

me: ugh. fiiiine

hmmm. i was fairly confident that Professor Haywire was canonically an Aleph native (explaining why the main universe in the serial is Earth B and not Earth A), but the not only can't I find a reference to that in the wiki, but apparently WoG is that part of Haywire's power is that three versions of him existed in different universes and had some sort of telepathic connection. so presumably there's at least three universes where there was a native Professor Haywire, powers and all, and it's never specified which they are. and priors definitely favour Bet as one of them, given it's the universe with the most capes.

I mean I stand by my inference based on the information available in canon but since I have not been able to find whatever other hint I thought there was and it's entirely possible it never existed, I was more confident than warranted.

Edit: while I'm talking about WoG stuff, apparently wildbow has stated that Wards mostly have half-day classes and their parents do not necessarily know they are Wards. this works under cover of doing some kind of internship stuff with local government or businesses. this is not public knowledge, i think (in the link WB talks about how tattletale did not expect as many wards at the bank as there were, because she did not know that most of them weren't even in school)

I have not yet read a fic with a Wards PoV that gets this 'right'. Not that I blame them, WoG is not canon and nobody has the time to keep up with every last thing wildbow has ever said, just find it curious which things happen to percolate through to the official fanon and which don't.

somehow it became fanon that Amy keeps it a secret from everyone that her powers extend beyond healing, because she's afraid of what people will think of her or that she'll get slapped with a class-S designation. Amy threatens random criminals with it at the drop of a hat, so she can't be that worried about the secret getting out.

Some versions even include her keeping it a secret from Victoria specifically, even though the first time it's brought up it's by Vicky herself.

newest curious trend i've noticed in Worm fic: altpower!taylor crossovers where she 'triggers' at the locker but actually she's not really a parahuman but rather [a Guardian from the game Destiny / fused with a magical demon from an obscure anime / Sauron, apparently?]

you don't have to include a PHO chapter in your story. I swear nobody is going to be standing around confused, asking if this is really set in the parahumans verse or if they have mistakenly started reading about some other superhero/villain named Taylor because of the absence of a segment from the point of view of someone logged in to a message board