Kind of building off of Silvia Norton's post from a while back but if I read another line in a wormfic where an authority figure or like, actual serious adult individual mentions the "unwritten rules" as a hard concept that everyone just *knows* I am going to bash my face into a wall.
It's literally just how Tattletale described the social contract of capes to Taylor, it stops being "unwritten" or just a polite fiction when people like Piggot or Coil or whomever actually treat them as something tangible.
"But ma'am/sir, wouldn't that be breaking the Unwritten Rules?" Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut-
Losing my mind
Just a little fandom rant-
For some reason a lot of wormfic seems to feature a trope or piece of fanon centered around a "Dragontech cell phone/computer/whatever" and it bugs me. Doesn't Dragon's power explicitly prevent mass production? And wouldn't her breaking into the tech sphere with Tinker-made cell phones have issues with NEPEA-5 or whatever? And being Tinker-tech, wouldn't it be impossible to be commercially viable due to maintenance? I know it's a convenient way to handwave the lack of visible tech companies or recognizable products, but it feels like a lazy workaround. Earth Bet can have a little Steve Wozniak, as a treat. Or a Bill Gates, or whomever. And like it's *always* Dragon, there's never another Tinker who specializes in telecommunications and commercial touchscreen devices.
Just a little irksome thing.
Is this trend especially prevalent on spacebattles? I don't use the site and lots of the wormfic I read on ao3 trends more "fuck em, they're nazis *punch punch punch*"
The Popular Fanon of the Unwritten Rules, and the Nazi Apologia it Perpetuates
Fanon. Love it or hate it, there’s a lot of it. This isn’t something exclusive to the Worm fandom, either. Fanon has existed since the moment people started thinking about what they were reading, and spreading their own versions of it. Off the top of my head, The Divine Comedy incorporated some of the author’s “fanon” views on the Catholic Church.
In a more contemporary sense, a lot of fanon exists to either fill gaps in the original source, or to “fix” things that were deemed wrong. These two categories of fanon are more likely to be accepted by default, either due to a lack of canon to contradict it, or due to a general agreement that the way the source portrayed X was bad. There is a third type of fanon, however, which is the type I personally find rather distasteful: the fanon where something from the source is taken, and then misinterpreted so often that people start to assume it's canon. It’s worth mentioning that these three broad categories are not mutually exclusive, and in fact there’s often a degree of overlap between them.
This third category is what I’ll be focusing on, as a lot of misunderstandings of Worm’s setting come from things like this. Some of these fanons can be harmless, at least in isolation, while others erode the core themes that Worm set out to explore. And then, of course, there’s the fanon that ties directly into the spread of harmful ideas and ideology, subjective as that is.
I am, of course, talking about the Unwritten Rules and the fanon surrounding them.
Now, I should clarify that using the Unwritten Rules fanon in your fic doesn’t make you a Nazi apologist. Most fanon isn’t used with intent like that, and is instead just fic writers playing a game of telephone with stuff they saw in other fics, because they find it fun or convenient. The problem is that some of the things being telephoned down the fanon pipeline are steeped in racism and apologia, or can be used to facilitate them, and repetition of these fanons dulls the response to what, in other contexts, would (hopefully) be met with horror, or at least discomfort.
In brief, the Unwritten Rules are the idea that there’s a harsh divide between capes and their civilian identities, and that preserving that divide is important for maintaining the status quo. Assault gets home from a long day of work, takes off his mask, and then can go out to eat without worrying about a villain attacking him while he’s going through a drive through. Lung can take off his mask and put on a button-up shirt, and go shopping at the local grocer.
The Nazis can come home from a long day of lynching minorities, and go to the local pub for a pint without worrying about their crimes coming back to bite them.
If you haven’t already seen the ways this is fucked up, don’t worry, I’m not done yet.
In canon, as presented by Tattletale, the Unwritten Rules are something of a gentleman’s agreement to not cause too much trouble. Don’t kill, don’t rape, and don’t go on a bombing spree, and the heroes will go easier on you. “A game of cops and robbers.” There is some truth to what she’s saying, in that it’s easier for the PRT to keep the status quo stable if they can take people in without every fight leaving a trail of bodies in the streets. Villains also want to limit their destruction, because otherwise they can’t make as much money. It’s a mutual, unspoken agreement that society is good for both sides, and neither wants to see it torn down around them; don’t escalate and others won’t escalate in response. Hence Bakuda being attacked from all sides. Hence the Nine getting attacked by everyone every time they show up.
Hence the government unmasking Taylor in an attempt to capture her.
It’s not black and white, however, as immediately after Tattletale’s speech about how the unwritten rules work, the Undersiders and Wards fight. A no holds barred all out fight where Kid Win uses a gun rated for S-Class fights against the Undersiders. A fight where Taylor attempts to drown Clockblocker in bugs. A fight where Grue hits Vista so hard she falls unconscious. A fight where Amy attempts to kill Skitter, and threatens her with fates worse than death while captive.
Anyone who’s read superhero comics is familiar with the “face blindness” tropes, where heroes and villains alike can hang up their coats and relax between issues. The Unwritten Rules are a pretty direct implementation of this trope, and a way for the story to comment on and deconstruct it.
Anyway, now that I’ve done a bunch of discussion on something a lot of people broadly understand, let’s focus on how the exaggerated fanon surrounding the Unwritten Rules acts as a breeding ground for the normalization of Nazism as an ideology.
First, let’s consider how severe the problem is. Heroes playing along, refusing to arrest villains in their civilian identities, is much more common in fanwork than it is in canon, just to start. (In canon, Armsmaster was eager to learn the Undersiders’ civilian identities so as to better arrest them. In Pick A Card, Mouse Protector stops trying to arrest Taylor after she accidentally sees Taylor without her mask on.) In fanfic, The Rules also manifest with villains being unwilling to cross certain lines, even giving up their own teammates for breaking the rules in more extreme cases. At their silliest, the Unwritten Rules are treated as something all capes know and respect, like commandments carved on a pair of stones handed down to them by god (Cauldron).
Interestingly, it’s far more common in fanfic for the Nazis to “respect the Unwritten Rules” than it is for the ABB or the Merchants.
Frequently, I’ll see people and fics talking about how working with the Nazis is reasonable if it’s to protect the sanctity of Unwritten Rules. Kaiser and his lot are “civilized” for respecting the rules. The heroes are forced to play along and ignore the Nazis, because otherwise they’re breaking The Rules. Any hate crimes committed in costume don’t count, actually, and it’s not unreasonable for Assault and Victor to drink at the same bar. If you see Stormtiger washing his tights at the laundromat, you just look away because The Rules are more important.
First of all, this is insane, and not how law enforcement works. Second of all, this is insane, and not how the PRT operates even in canon. Third of all, the idea that the status quo the Unwritten Rules represent is more important than the ideology of Nazism is insidious and horrifying, as is the idea that following The Rules could be more important (to the fandom, or to the characters in the story,) than saving minorities from literal hate crimes.
Because that’s what it means when someone says the government should team up with the Nazis. They’re saying that the lives of minorities, people terrorized and killed by The Empire, are less important than the game of cops and robbers.
You might feel reminded, at this point, that the Unwritten Rules do serve a supposed purpose in canon, but fanon frequently treats them like a game, like cops and robbers, and not as a necessary evil. The juxtaposition between people dressing up in spandex and fighting/committing crime is lost when you treat the crimes themselves as a game you can put down and walk away from, when stealing money from a bank, selling drugs, and lynching minorities are all seen as (equally valid) parts of an elaborate performance.
Who’s the performance for, anyway? Who benefits from the Unwritten Rules? Not the heroes, who have their ability to serve and protect stymied if they actually follow these rules. Small-time villains benefit, in theory, but they can’t actually stop other people from breaking the rules against them. Small-time independents, similarly, don’t have the benefit of friends and allies to go on the warpath for them in the event that they get smothered in their sleep. Uber and Leet, for a canon example, were minor villains who needed to fold in under Coil for protection after they crossed too many lines.
The obvious answer to “who is this for” is that this is fiction, and the performance is for the readers’ benefit. The primary purpose of the Unwritten Rules as fanon is to give characters who might otherwise not get along a reason to interact and potentially get along. The Undersiders hanging out with the Wards out of costume, with nothing more than a few winks and nudges about cape life. Taylor going to Arcadia and hanging out with New Wave and the Wards, before going back to the Undersiders for crime. Heroes taking off the costumes to spend an evening at the Palanquin. This isn’t a problem, even if it’s not to my personal tastes. The problem comes when this is applied to the Nazis as well.
Giving the Nazis a pass, and having the protagonists casually hang out with them out of costume (it’s usually Rune or Purity for these scenes) is often used as a way to apologize for the Nazis. “She’s a relatable single mom,” people say about Purity, who never stopped being a Nazi. “She’s just a kid,” people say about Rune, ignoring the fact that she’s still a racist asshole. By having the protagonists interact favorably with the Nazis “out of costume”, authors are (often unintentionally) signaling that being a Nazi isn’t a big deal.
Or worse, that being a Nazi isn’t as bad as being Asian (when compared to the ABB), or being black (comparing Sophia’s actions as a high school bully to an organization who regularly lynches minorities).
There is actually an easy fix to this, if you as an author want to write using Unwritten Rules fanon: simply exclude the Nazis. People don’t want to hang out with them in civilian identities, because they’re still hateful bigots. The Nazis don’t get the same benefit of the doubt as someone like the Undersiders, because every single one of them has a list of hate crimes attached to them. You don’t need any justification beyond “they’re Nazis, and that’s a bad thing.”
The idea that you need to justify hating Nazis, an ideology foundationally built around hate, is in itself Nazi apologia. One cannot tolerate intolerance, otherwise the intolerance will obliterate the tolerance.
Within the fiction of Worm and its fanfics, the people who benefit most from the Unwritten Rules are the well-established crime organizations who can threaten people into respecting them. The Nazis, however, benefit ideologically from the Unwritten Rules just as much as they benefit logistically, for the same reason it’s a problem to have the heroes hang out with them out-of-costume. Saying “we can’t arrest them because they’re not in costume” legitimizes the crimes committed while in costume, and plays defense for the perpetrators, by creating a context in which those crimes are “fair play” that can’t be punished. It’s one line short of endorsing what the villains do.
The polite fiction of the Unwritten Rules is exactly that: fiction. The entire point of The Rules in canon is that everyone who can break them, does break them. Everyone. Heroes, villains, protagonists, antagonists... The Rules are worth less than the nonexistent paper they’re written on.
The fanon takes these rules literally, and as a result, tacitly endorses the Nazis.
If you’re not allowed to break The Rules, even in service of fighting literal neo-Nazis, then that’s legitimizing Nazism. There is no fence sitting with this. Either Nazis are bad and can’t exist in polite society, or the Nazis are socially accepted. If a bar doesn’t kick Nazis out, one way or another, that’s a Nazi Bar.
“What about Somer’s Rock and the villain truce?” you may ask. To which I can only respond:
I said polite society, and I don’t think a crime lord moot counts. In a room with Nazis, Coil (drugged a preteen to use as a magic eight-ball), Faultline (mercenary who attacked a mental health facility), the newly-formed Merchants (drug dealers), and the Undersiders (teenage bank robbers), nobody there counts as polite society. All of them are threats to the status quo by nature, even as they exist within the status quo, to varying degrees.
Obviously, even Coil isn’t as bad as the Nazis, and the Merchants’ drug dealing pales in comparison to even just the drug dealing the Nazis would be involved in; especially if you count Medhall. They all, regardless, are a threat to the status quo in their own way.
The Merchants ignore the status quo in favor of chasing highs. Coil wants to bend the status quo over his knee, snap it in two, and set up his own. Faultline wants money, and is willing to side with just about anyone for it. The Undersiders, Taylor especially, buck against authority and eventually attempt to take over the city in Coil’s absence; they don’t get the moral high ground here, much as I adore them.
The Nazis, meanwhile, are pushing a fascist ideology that seeks the destruction of all they deem lesser, which includes (but is not limited to) Jews, people of color, the disabled, fat people, queer people, white people who disagree with them, and women who aren’t feminine in the right ways.
Fleur was killed in her home by an unpowered white supremacist who wanted to join the Empire. After he got out of jail, the Empire welcomed him with open arms. They didn’t explicitly break the Unwritten Rules, but they didn’t take any issue with the rules being broken.
The Unwritten Rules are the status quo, and if your status quo bends to accept Nazis, you have a broken status quo. If a bar doesn’t kick Nazis out, one way or another, that’s a Nazi Bar.
The other place people might point to with the Unwritten Rules is the Endbringer Truce. In canon, the Endbringer Truce is basically the heroes not arresting villains who show up to help. It’s an emergency situation, closer to a natural disaster than anything else. Even the Nine weren’t treated as seriously as an Endbringer. Any villains who show up are allowed to assist, provided they don’t take advantage of things to benefit themselves.
In fanon, people take this to mean that everyone shows up to the Endbringer fights, including having villains fly out to foreign fights, despite not even all the villains of Brockton Bay showing up to fight Leviathan. Oni Lee wasn’t present. The Merchants weren’t. Faultline and co. skipped town. Coil hunkered down and waited it out. Interestingly, the Empire showed up, likely due to the many losses of face they experienced leading up to it; they needed to boost their reputation to remain relevant and continue recruiting even with recent setbacks.
Bambina also showed up for the fight, but she was very explicitly doing it to bolster her own reputation. Overall, the average villain is more likely to use the truce to avoid the fighst, rather than risk their lives. Behemoth was another exception, with the Undersiders and Ambassadors being the odd ones out when it came to villains participating. The CUI sending some of their capes was also seen as incredibly unusual.
In fanon, it’s very common for the Protectorate to help Nazis get to international endbringer attacks. Interestingly, it’s only ever the Nazis who help. Lung stays home, Coil doesn’t care, the Undersiders wouldn’t volunteer for anything more than their home city being attacked (prior to Taylor, anyway), the Merchants (who are usually a gang much earlier in fanon) don’t do anything... so the Nazis are the only villains who tend to help. The Nazis are the ones that the heroes have to give “grudging respect” to. The Nazis are fighting the good fight, unlike the ABB (Asians) or the Merchants (drug dealers led by a black man).
I shouldn’t need to specify how this too is Nazi apologia.
Canon has a radically different take on where the Nazis fit into things - nobody works with them without qualms. During the villain truce against Bakuda, nobody was comfortable with the Nazis. Armsmaster lined up a bunch of Nazis to die against Leviathan, violating the Endbringer Truce, and the only reason anyone considers that a problem is because Taylor happened to be in the line of fire, and Tattletale threatened to make that clear. (Not that it was part of Armsmaster’s plan for Taylor to be there, of course.) Even when fighting the Nine, the heroes were unwilling to work with Hookwolf and his gang. They were willing to temporarily ignore him, but not work openly with him.
The idea that the Unwritten Rules are important enough to justify working with Nazis is Nazi apologia. Stating that the Nazis exist because they follow the Unwritten Rules is also Nazi apologia. “At least they’re civilized” is a blatant pro-Nazi phrase, a tacit denial of the inherently uncivil nature of racist violence, and is often used in the context of the Unwritten Rules.
The Unwritten Rules, as a piece of fanon, are entwined with just about all other fanon. They’re a cornerstone of Worm’s fanfic community, and they’re used to justify and normalize Nazi apologia at every turn, which is a key part of the fascist playbook. They need to convince people that it’s okay that they exist. If it’s okay that they exist, then maybe some of what they’re saying is also okay. If siding with Kaiser to enforce the Unwritten Rules is worth it, then maybe Kaiser and the Nazis aren’t that bad. Maybe the real villains were the minorities selling drugs and wearing red and green. Maybe the government should work more closely with the Nazis, because they have the numbers the government lacks...
Unrelated, but OBLIEQUE is a pretty good fic.
The Unwritten Rules as presented in fanon and viewed by the fandom are, to be frank, silly. Treating a Magic Circle like a set of hard and fast rules, sometimes going as far as to treat them with more sanctity than actual laws, is so ridiculous that it should defy suspension of disbelief, even without considering their treatment in canon. Bad actors, furthermore, can use (and have used) this exaggeration of a canon concept to enforce racist and pro-Nazi fanon, and now it’s ingrained. It’s automatic. “Why not side with the Nazis? It’s logical, because the people killing them are breaking the Unwritten Rules.” As if anyone needs any justification to not side with literal Nazis.
Finally, and most importantly: capitalizing “Unwritten Rules” is so fucking stupid, and the only reason I did that here was to highlight how ridiculous it is. If there’s one thing you take from this essay, please make it that.
So what, that's 32 pages about worm probably? Goddammit
my greatest fear--not actually my greatest fear i have a lot of very great fears--one of my bigger fears (like, top 20) is that behind the bastards will do an episode about the simurgh death cult and robert madison evans will explain to his audience of ten quadrillion listeners what worm is.
i got so scared when he explained who yudkowsky was back in the AI episodes i thought he was gonna bring up the hillary clinton thing
"You need someone to pretend to be a parent/guardian over the phone"
Oh boy, I'm so glad I can count on Taylor "I don't own a cell phone" Hebert for this critical task (help)
You are faced with some random problem and the only person who can help you is the main character from the last piece of media you consumed (you can also do favorite character if there are multiple main characters). You can stay in this universe or be in the universe of the character, whichever you prefer, but the problem remains the same and the only person who can directly help you is the main character. That character can call on the help of those they know in their media, but when it comes down to it, they are the only person really helping you. How do you react to this situation?
Spin to find out your problem:
Oh boy, something i have been dying to talk about while brainstorming wormfic ideas in my notes document for the last two months.
I really enjoy the idea presented here of the differentiation between a pure alternate power scenario, where the trigger happens off-screen and the story starts after the fact and a scenario where the divergence from canon directly results in an alt-power occurring to whoever the protagonist of choice is (almost always Taylor, let's be real).
In regard to tagging, I figure it's probably safe to tag "alt-power" if one appears at all despite the circumstances, though that might depend more on the premise of the fic, where the "what if" moment takes place.
Really can't wait to write a more worm-centric fic following my current crossover one, which does feature an alt-power but it's kind of weird and I've yapped about it so much to the people commenting on the fic.
If you're taking the name literally, alt-power fic includes every fic where a main character has a different power from canon, but when people talk (or complain) about alt-power as a genre, the stuff they're talking about is usually stuff that is not implied by that definition. So I'm curious - where do you all draw the line of what is and isn't an alt-power fic?
For me personally, I would call something alt-power if "what if the protagonist's power was this?" is the primary thing the fic is about, with all other changes that canon made either to enable or as a result of the different power. Therefore, I do not consider fics where the primary "what if" is about something other than the protagonist's power, even if a consequence of that change is that a character triggers with a different power. So I would consider fics like Camera Shy or Monster alt-power fics, but not, say, Here Comes The New Boss.
Anyway, mostly I was thinking about this because I was trying to decide if any of the fics that I'm writing/want to write count as alt-power fics, because some of them definitely contain some of the elements that people mention when they're talking about alt-power fics, like, say, taking place in Brockton Bay pre-Leviathan. But to use Broken Crown as an example, the change to Amy's power wasn't the thing that I set out to write about, it just seemed like a natural consequence of that thing (though I imagine some people would disqualify it from their own definition purely for not having Taylor as a protagonist)
I don't agree with it or anything, but I'm surprised Sophia/Taylor isn't up there considering how many fics are made of that pairing. I've not read any, but still, if we're talking fanfic then that one has more rep than half of these combined.
note that this poll is meant to represent romantic (though not necessarily sexual) ships, not your favorite QPR. If you like, say, Aisha/Alec or Lisa/Taylor as strictly platonic partners, but only in this scenario, then please don't pick it as your favorite ship!
Other less popular taylor ships (like Taylor/Alec) are not included in this poll, I will be posting a second poll with Taylor-specific ships later
make sure to tell me what you think and why you think it!
I think there's an unknown number of people in the worm fandom who either A. Haven't read Worm or B. Took it entirely to heart at the beginning when Taylor said "I'm going to be a hero" and they never realized she's an unreliable narrator.
Listening to some podcasts it's wild to me to hear people bearing down some of Taylor's actions like she wasn't doing those things to ACTUAL DESPICABLE PEOPLE.
I just hate the purity culture of it all, like, are yall really criticizing someone for not going easy on NAZIS, SLAVE OWNERS, ABUSERS etc??? Boohoo, poor them
"Aw, Taylor rotted Lung's junk off / took his eyes out" GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE, it's ON TEXT that this asshole enslaving a bunch of vulnerable people and putting them to absurd hardships.
"Aw, she cut Bakuda's toes" Toes she was using to MELT FUCKING PEOPLE.
"Aw, she bullied Panacea and Glory Girl" ............. please --'
"Aw, she punched Emma in the mall, not very hero of her" She should've done worse to this bitch who caused her fucking trigger
FUCK YALL, honestly
Victims are ALWAYS blamed for reacting, for doing something
Taylor isn't any less of a hero for not taking it easy on DESPICABLE PEOPLE.
She's only less of a hero when going hard on a bunch of people who didn't deserve it, but people bitch and moan way more about her actions towards WORSE VILLAINS than innocents. Seriously, annoying as SHIT
Arc 2 is now being uploaded! Updates are going to be every Tuesday and Friday between 12-3pm EST. Happy Valentine's Day!
So! The first arc of my Worm/KotOR2 fanfic has been completed. I am going to be taking a brief hiatus to work on more chapters for the fic and organize a healthier upload schedule.
When I release the next chapter, I’ll reblog this post to let anyone interested know.
To those who have already read my fic: thank you so much!
To those who may do after reading this post: your support is greatly appreciated!
It has been a privilege to write this fic so far and I am blown away by the attention it has gotten!
EDIT: i meant first arc oh my gosh its not even close to done, did not mean “final arc”
String Theory tried to blow up the moon for fun and Bakuda triggered from a bad grade and a bruised ego, and then tried to blow up a school. I... don't know what else there is to say.
I need to do another dumb poll.
I had fun with those.
Um...
How about...
It's 420am I should probably just sleep...
Now I would like to note:
This isn't which ship you like the most. This is which would have the messiest divorce. The sort the whole cape community is talking about.
Everyone's going "did you hear what happened down in ___"
Oh gosh, I've been emailing with one of my professors for the past week, just like about books and writing and stuff and she was recommending some Brandon Sanderson to me so I recommended "Worm by John C. McCrae" to her and she said she'd put it on her reading list. What have I done, this is a whole professor, 20 years of teaching experience type of lady.
So! The first arc of my Worm/KotOR2 fanfic has been completed. I am going to be taking a brief hiatus to work on more chapters for the fic and organize a healthier upload schedule.
When I release the next chapter, I’ll reblog this post to let anyone interested know.
To those who have already read my fic: thank you so much!
To those who may do after reading this post: your support is greatly appreciated!
It has been a privilege to write this fic so far and I am blown away by the attention it has gotten!
EDIT: i meant first arc oh my gosh its not even close to done, did not mean “final arc”
This sounds amazing! I wasn't sure if you had me for a while there, but as it kept ramping up I was absolutely drawn in by the imagery. Unfortunately my current fic is consuming my soul but I'd absolutely read this if it was realized. Super cool concept.
Apparently cluster focused fic ideas just what my brain is on right now, so fuck it, here's a half formed premise. Let's start with two changes to canon. First, New Wave doesn't get Marquis. Second, when Anette dies, Danny triggers with some kind of power that interferes with his emotional regulation - let's say a Breaker state where he becomes a swarm of insects but his conscious decisionmaking basically turns off while he's in it - he acts on whatever his conscience or unconscious intentions were at the time he went Breaker. And let's say there's a lingering impairment after he changes back proportionate to the time spent transformed.
With a power like that, it's very easy for him to get on the bad side of the heroes, and with that plus his anger, easy for him to start taking it out on them. So let's say he throws in with Marquis. Taylor doesn't know what Danny's been up to, but he's getting more and more angry and id driven, both for mundane grief reasons and because he's not taking enough time to rest relative to how often he's using his power.
After maybe a year of this, it comes to a head. One day, while Danny and Taylor are out for a fun day together on the Boardwalk, they bump into New Wave doing some PR demo, introducing Shielder or something, with a still-unpowered Victoria cheering the loudest to cover up how much the shame of getting passed by her little cousin is eating her alive. And the sight of this happy family that he's come to blame for the destruction of his own happy family life makes Danny snap. Second trigger, seeing red. He wants to annihilate them. He goes Breaker, and now his swarm is massive, composed of giant, monstrous, and lethal bugs, but his control is even worse. Massive collateral damage. He has just presence of mind to have some of his bugs shove Taylor somewhere she'll be safe from the crossfire - which just so happens to be into a dumpster.
And he goes scorched earth on the boardwalk, especially on the New Wave capes who have been knocked flat by the trigger vision and cannot defend themselves.
By extreme misfortune, Marquis is also in the crowd, in civvies. He wanted to do some quiet recon on his longtime enemies' newest addition, and thought he'd take Amy with him both as a teaching moment and for a fun outing. He goes out like a light when Danny's second trigger goes off, and he gets trampled by the crowd trying to flee and gets caught in the bug apocalypse crossfire.
So we have:
Taylor, alone and trapped in filth, who has spent a year watching her dad pull away and become angrier and angrier, who's still had Emma turn on her as in canon, and has just seen her dad turn into a biblical plague and, as far as she can tell, literally thrown her away.
Victoria, seeing her family at the mercy of a murderous supervillain, utterly powerless to defend them and with years of feeling impotent and like a disappointment to her family having just been brought to an indignant fever pitch by being the literal only person in her family not to have powers.
Amy, whose father has almost certainly kept her fairly isolated for her own (and his) protection, watching the only person she feels she has in the world, who always seemed invincible, bleeding out in front of her.
Boom, cluster trigger.
The trigger event knocks Danny out of his Breaker state, and they're able to contain him before he does much more damage. Most of New Wave survives (maybe he gets Carol? Maybe Eric?) and he goes to the Birdcage. Amy saves Marquis. Through cluster bleed through, she finds Taylor in the aftermath - and thank God for that, because who knows how long it would've taken for someone to find her otherwise. Once Marquis understands who her father is and what's happened to her, her connection to Amy, he takes her in.
And that sets the stage for the story. Amy and Victoria, villain and hero, the embodiments of an old and deep rivalry, and Taylor, the daughter of the man who nearly killed them all, caught between her desire to do good and her family connections to villainy. Tie them all together with cluster bleed through, kiss/kill dynamics, some power mediation, add in social dynamics and pressures, interactions in their civilian lives - it's a stew of rich possibilities.
And that's not even touching their powers!
Fight scenes are such a joy to write, especially when working from a single perspective. The complex series of actions and reactions is hard to get *just* right, but when it's all said and done I feel like there's a movie in my mind. Feels fantastic.
So this is my new fanfic. It’s a post-Gold Morning crossover between Worm and Knights of the Old Republic II which features a Taylor Hebert with serious amnesia following the incident and her joining the Ebon Hawk’s crew at the start of the KotOR II story. Currently, only the prologue has been published, but I’m working on finishing the first arc in the next few days.