The Chicago Wards Would Be A Good Team; Shakers (and Those That Can Function As Shakers) Would Be Best

you know what. im going to follow my heart so we can move on with the wormread and just copy-paste what i said about danny in chapter 6.9 on discord with some minimal editing because it's not pretty but the general thesis is there and i don't feel like making it into proper paragraph form

okay so the thing thats fucking killing me abotu 6.9 is that danny is literally like. he tries to call taylor a nickname only her mom called her once he realizes he's fucked up bad and is trying to recover whichi s insane [because it's obviously going to be upsetting to her by reminding her of her mom being gone, and it also indicates that his fall-back for something going wrong w/ taylor is to try to appeal to her by poorly copying someone else's parenting style] and he also randomly tells her about how her mom wanted to move her a grade ahead but he wanted her to stay in school with emma to make her happy. and he's been Stewing On That despite knowing it's objectively not his fault (and i am reminded of how in his interlude he spends time Stewing about how he wishes annette were there to give advice) and he also cops up to the fact that that the whole thing about "being her parent and not her ally" (<- demented thing to say for obvious reasons) wherein he locks her in a room and demands emotional vulnerability from her even as she's becoming visibly upset & compares his actions to emma's was her grandmother's idea and then. here's the real kicker. once lisa shows up and prepares to take taylor away there are any number of actions a parent confident that they're doing the right thing for their child would normally do in response--not, like, Good actions, but things that a parent would be likely to pull. threatening to call the cops bc blah blah you're my daughter, wanting to speak to lisa's parents, any form of power move pulled over these two teenage girls but instead he speaks to lisa like she's an equal authority over taylor and seriously asks if she's "okay with this" (i should remind you of the concussion chapter where lisa is doing some insane power move shit over taylors dad covertly establishing herself as more competent at caring 4 her than him lmao) which is just like. it's so glaringly wildly obvious how this guy has Zero confidence in himself as a parent so he generally does nothing and then while he's doing nothing he oscillates btwn rationalizing it to himself as allowing her privacy/dignity, getting angry at himself/calling himself a coward, or getting mad at TAYLOR and blaming HER for not being the one to take initiation to be vulnerable with him and, like. he literally does make functional decisions prior to this for a bit! he's good and supportive at the meeting with the school board about the bullying!!! but it doesn't immediately solve literal years of distance between them that have led to taylor having to take decisionmaking for her wellbeing entirely into her own hands w/o being able to tell him about it [& having literally no route for human connection or support other than the undersiders] so he just completely crumbles on his own calls and seeks out/takes completely shit advice from taylor's grandma instead so i very much think what's insinuated here is like. especially given that he knows he has anger issues and never wants to Be Scary with them. he might have frequently leaned on annette for parenting decisions before she died and/or is really fucking haunted by the time(s) he didn't listen to her and it went wrong and now that she's gone he's just kinda floundering and trying to toss the baton for parental decisionmaking onto anyone else, including, at one point, the literal teenage girl who shows up to help taylor run away from his house. insane ! also. thinking about how taylor says her grandma (maternal) never liked her dad. that man would literally rather talk to the mother of his dead wife, who hates him, and take her advice than go 'yeah ithink im gonna keep using my own judgement for compassion towards my daughter' fucking worst anyones ever done it this guy has the spine of a twizzler it's great

...and then doing All That & severely triggering taylor's trauma from the bullying in the process completely shatters any trust he had built with her, catalyzing her realization that she wants to be able to have meaningful relationships with the undersiders & leading to her running away to leave with them! i don't think anyone can say for sure whether or not danny Not doing this would have led to taylor turning the undersiders in before realizing that she would regret it, but oh fucking boy does he make SURE she doesn't go thru with it. and it would be bad to call the cops on a bunch of systematically neglected traumatized teenagers regardless of how much crime they're doing so you know what maybe we should actually thank danny for his Shit Parenting stopping taylor from being a narc

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

They're silly

This discussion of superhero logistics reminds me of an element of Worm's background worldbuilding that I've always found really interesting, which is that the heroes are running out of teleporters. They had a cloak-style mass teleporter, Strider, who was apparently indispensable for troop deployment at Endbringer fights, but he didn't get the hell out of dodge in time so by the Behemoth fight they mention having to seriously kludge other not-as-good powers to get everyone on-site on time. No one dies forever in comics so the question of "what are the risks of one guy's powers becoming indispensable to our organization" isn't as salient, but here goes Worm, gesturing at the idea that you might just get super fucking unlucky because you became organizationally dependent on a couple golden gooses who you inexplicably keep bringing to live fire situations. If they weren't hard to replace, they wouldn't exactly be superheroes, would they?

she's so real for this tbh. sometimes, the best way to honor a friend's memory is to kill their fucking dad

Finally got my copy of The Power Fantasy #6

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

In relation to this, of the three great failures of his that Lux lists in issue 1 - the Signal, the Second Summer of Love, and Tokyo - all are extra-dimensional or extraterrestrial. The Signal is an alien gestalt, the Queen arrived “from outside existence” and while Tokyo is the fault of Masumi, an atomic, her power is to control and summon an extra-dimensional creature that exists independently of her.

All the great problems, thus far, have been caused by out of pocket bullshit

Uniquely for superhero deconstructions, The Power Fantasy is largely in conversation first-and-foremost with X-Men rather than bog-standard targets of critique such as Superman and Batman; this is apparent both in the centrality of a millions-strong demographic of post-atomic-bomb superhumans as well as the interpersonal and ideological conflict between Ray "Heavy" Harris (analogous to Magneto) and Etienne Lux (analogous to Professor X.)

One underdiscussed element of how The Power Fantasy approaches the X-Men canon is that in addition to the mutant analogues of The Atomics and The Nuclear Family, the setting's worldbuilding also incorporates religious cosmology and functional magic; three of the six Superpowers in the main cast derive their power from divine intervention or accrued wizardly power, rather than whatever capepunk-standard unified power schema governs the Atomics. This reflects a truth of the X-men canon largely suppressed within the Fox Film canon- namely the absurd amount of time that the X-Men spend having to sideline the mutant metaphor in order to slap down Dracula or space aliens or wizards or Literal Demons from Hell or some such similar out of pocket bullshit

these two are like sisters to me.

both issues are focused on young depressed artists whose entire being, their own nature and their powers, overshadows their art.

people loving Tara (wicdiv) as a god but hating her if she wants them to see beyond her godhood with her songs/poetry vs people fearing Masumi (tpf) as a kaiju-summoning destroyer and praising her creations no matter what even though, by Masumi's own admission, she know no one really cares about her paintings.

how both are so resigned to it.

do you see my vision.