I Did A Painting Party For My Birthday And Here’s What I Made

The Power Cut contains more than your daily recommended dose of insightful character commentary

THE POWER CUT

A fanzine about THE POWER FANTASY

Issue #1: "The Balancing Act" coming February 14, 2025!

The Power Cut is a collection of meta essays, illustrations, and jokes. The Power Cut contains mature content and spoilers for The Power Fantasy #1-5. The Power Cut will be available free online. The Power Cut is so excited to meet you!

Contributors:

@artbyblastweave

@idonttakethislightly

@jkjones21

@khepris-worst-soldier

@meserach

@rei-ismyname

@tazmuth

@the-joju-experience

Cover art by @tazmuth

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.

And heaven forbid he freeze the train

Clockblocker not on a train: A perfect hero; capable of locking down opponents without causing injury; requires tinkertech and a demonstration by Skitter to figure out how to use his power to do harm

Clockblocker on a train: A weapon of massive destruction, incapable of anything less than destroying the entire train, for the second he freezes anything it shoots towards the back of the train at at least 50km/h and up to 300km/h

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

Just found a new Worm animatic! I don't think the artist is on tumblr sadly

it is rlly funny that wildbow thinks so little about legend that he forgot he never gave him a name in worm so ward accidentally canonizes that his son’s name is also his name

73, Charlotte?

Lets see, 73 is Great King Rat by Queen. Yet another song I got into 'cause of Eidolon.

Hmm. I'll be honest, I haven't though much about Charlotte. She doesn't take up a lot of space in my head, except for thinking about how she went from White Kid with Dreads to known businesswoman and community organizer. I'd like to think that she lost the mayoral election because she still has the dreads.

If I was gonna make a fic about her....hm, we only get a limited sense of how she feels working under Taylor, especially given her past view of her from the bullying campaign. You might be able to write a neat fic that shows her view of Taylor during their schooldays as a pitiful, kind of disgusting figure, and then transfer to her viewpoint during the warlord era where she sees Taylor as powerful and worthy of respect, but still fundamentally disgusting. Something that deals with her feeling under the heel of what she'd otherwise consider vermin. I don't think that's actually how she views Taylor, but it'd be a neat spin on her character.

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.

its weird how on top of the official limits on the number of new doctors, we ALSO make becoming a doctor needlessly terrible. it could be like normal grad school! and they'd be just as qualified. we just torture them for no reason. if we removed both lmiiters we could have like double the doctors just as qualified