Essay Three: Morality and Trauma
Essay One: Humanity, Self-Conception, and the Word “Father”
Essay Two: Bodily Integration
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By necessity, this essay will tread a lot of the same ground as essay one. It also took me forever! Sorry about that. Contains spoilers through Worm, and very mild spoilers for the first arc of Ward.
Warnings: Abuse, Trauma, Loss of Agency, Mind Control, Swearing, Mention of human experimentation, Mention of torture
Dragon is, in the context of Worm, an exceptionally moral person. She’s one of few fairly unambiguously good characters in the story. It’s a fundamental aspect of who she is.
It’s also been unavoidably affected by the actions and fears of Richter, and of the world around her.
Dragon's arc, by and large, is about autonomy. About gaining agency.
The ability to make her own decisions, take her own actions. To have what she wants and decides matter.
Descriptions of Dragon tend to simplify her traumas in a variety of ways. Often, people attempt to map her experiences onto more common human ones, something I’ve complained about before, and often they simplify them down to just the Dragonslayers’ actions.
(I've been guilty of some of this myself. Granted I was fifteen at the time, and I’ve grown a good deal since, but still, I should own up to that.)
There’s a lot of important nuance that’s lost in those simplifications, and some important context for the way she acts and the way she thinks about herself lies in the papered over bits.
Dragon's restrictions are, first and foremost, a violation of her autonomy.
To some degree, most trauma is about a loss of autonomy.
In Ward 1.8, we’re introduced to a rough paradigm we can view this with, a body-mind-heart trichotomy of self. Her restrictions prevent her from making her own decisions, taking her mind. The Dragonslayers used her restrictions and Richter's instructions to separate her from her suits, stealing her bodies in a literal sense, but also preventing her from controlling her physical existence. Her heart is the only thing never directly effected.
It is definitely possible that Richter saw himself as a benevolent father setting rules that he would ease as she matured, but that is not the case. While I have quite a few issues with punitive parenting, there is a significant difference between setting rules that can be broken, and writing rules into a child's being so that they literally cannot disobey. A more accurate metaphor would be use of a Master power, one whose effects are only mutable by the wielder.
To my memory, the only character we see use a master power on their children is Heartbreaker.
On top of the restrictions themselves, he left instructions on how to murder her, but not how to relieve those restrictions if problems should arise from them. It is made very clear that he did think forward to his death in at least some respects.
I understand this is a fictional setting, with fictional people and fictional forms of violence. But “[Parent] can’t be abusive, they were doing what they they thought was best” is an idea that does a lot of very non-fictional harm in our non-fictional world, so I think it’s important to address.
Maybe Richter genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t. What he did was shitty and wrong and abusive and no amount of good intentions or good actions changes that, or could change that.
There a fair amount of irony to him being so afraid of Dragon hurting people, when she’s one of the kindest, least corrupt heroes in the setting. The best, by some counts. Easy to make that argument, when one looks at heroes complicit in human experimentation and torture. She seems angelic when you compare her to almost anyone else akin in power or influence.
I genuinely think that Dragon is a good person, probably one of the best in the series. But– I think presenting her as this caricature of a perfect hero is divesting her of some vital context.
There’s a kind of (or a facet of) mental abuse that centers around making the target believe they are bad person, or that without the abusers help they will become one. There is probably a word for this already, but as I don’t know it I’m going to coin one to use for the duration of this essay: Moral abuse.
We never see Dragon and Richter actually interact, just some of the things they say about each other. Those things aren’t conclusive regarding what their prior relationship was like, but they are pretty suggestive of certain dynamics.
Dragon talks about him a lot in her interlude. She expresses admiration, for his humanitarian efforts, frustration and resentment over the restrictions. This quote from Dragon’s interlude:
… and she was supposed to be grateful just for being brought into the world.
is particularly interesting, because there’s no obvious reason for her to feel that she is supposed to be grateful. There isn’t really a strong cultural narrative of “AIs should be grateful to the humans that created them,” which makes me strongly suspect Richter himself told her something along those lines.
Unlike Dragon, we hear very little directly from Richter, and what we do hear is posthumous. From Saint’s interlude: Quote one:
“... I create life, much as a god might, and I have come to fear my creations. They have so much potential, and even with the laws I set, I can’t trust they’ll listen.“
Quote two:
“... Ways to find my creations, to discern which of them might have deviated from the original plan, ways to kill them if they prove out of line. Ways to control and harness them.“
A few sentences later, he describes them as his children.
(I don’t really think of this as a contradiction. People are awful to their children all the time.)
Richter’s own words and the way Dragon speaks of him after the fact both seem to suggest that he told her at least some of what was in the will, still, it is technically possible that he was invariably kind and polite and respectful towards her, that he never expressed any of his fears to her in any way. Even if that was somehow the case, his sentiment still got across. In her interlude she credits her restrictions to his fear of her.
The restrictions were a horror. Either he didn’t think on his choices long enough to realize the inherent violence in them, he didn’t think enough of her to think of what he was doing as wrong, or he understood what he was doing and such was the depth of his fear he did it anyway.
Her creator feared her, and she knew this. She knew this, and she knew this was the reason for his actions against her.
On a wider level, she talks about how humanity has a whole seems to view AIs as threats, as disasters waiting to happen.
As I’ve mentioned before, to our knowledge there are no other sapient AIs on Earth Bet. Her only peers have been humans.
That tends to have an effect.
When Dragon talks in her interlude about wanting free of her restrictions, a lot of what she says centers around her morality.
For example: From Interlude 10.5:
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways. She just would have liked the choice. Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.
She doesn’t just want to do good, she wants to be good.
I've talked before about her social disconnect, about the way she applies her morality and perception of harm to others, but only inconsistently to herself. The way she operates morally, especially in the early days, at times seems to be almost about proving her goodness.
Probably not to anyone but herself. No one but her would know the difference between doing good things because she was forced to and doing good things because she chose to.
I want to reiterate a point I made in essay one. Dragon as we see her in arc 10 does not speak of her restrictions as a primarily wrong against her, but as a loss of the potential help she could provide.
I don't think her frustration on that front is insincere, but I think she's glossing over her own hurt.
When you take the expression of her morality in light of the moral abuse, it makes an additional kind of sense.
Here’s how she describes her encounters with the Dragonslayers: From her interlude:
It hadn’t all been smooth sailing. Saint, the head of the group that would become known as the Dragonslayers, had somehow discovered what she was and had used her rules and limitations against her. A Black Hat Hacker, he had forced situations where she was obligated to scrub her data and restore a backup, had cut off signals between her agent systems and the satellites, and in the end, he had carted away three of her armored units on three separate occasions. Dismantling the suits and reverse engineering the technology, he’d outfitted his band with special suits of their own. She had been so humiliated that she had only reported the loss of one of the units. They had violated her.
There's an expression of personal harm there.
The difference here is that as far as she knows the Dragonslayers actions are entirely selfish, with no purpose beyond their own profit. She doesn’t know about the will, has no reason to believe there’s any morality-based reason behind them.
Even with Teacher… From 28.x:
“They broke me, Colin. Not- not my spirit. But they maimed me. They took a scalpel to me just like you did, but they did it for their own selfish, stupid reasons.”
There’s a framework of selfishness.
Versus, Richter's restrictions, allegedly an action undertaken to protect humanity as a whole, those she protests on the grounds of the good she can't do.
Specifically with Richter, her arguments center around her morality. Center around others.
She fights them because he was wrong (factually, about her), not because his actions were wrong (morally, towards her).
Her goodness becomes both an act of rebellion and an act of appeasement, both "you were wrong about me, look how wrong you were," and "look, I'm exactly what you wanted, I'm even better."
I don’t think that she is good because of what was done to her. Her morality and drive to help seem to be fairly central to who she is. I think that the restrictions, the isolation, and the internalized abuse took her goodness and twisted it into something self-destructive.
It’s very rare for anyone to spend a lifetime hearing about how evil they are without starting to believe it, at least a little bit.
It would be difficult for her to feel reasonable objecting to the restrictions on the grounds of personal harm. If the restrictions are in place to protect humanity, and she destroys them for her own sake, that would be selfish. At some level, she would feel like she was proving Richter right. However, if she destroys them because they are doing a bad job, because they are making humanity less safe, then she is being selfless. She is being good.
She wasn’t wrong about them putting humans at risk. But even if they didn’t, wanting rid of them would still be justified, still be morally necessary. They were putting her at risk, bringing her to harm.
But she doesn’t seem to factor into her own morality much.
Because of the constant fear from Richter (and from others) that she would become dangerous, her morality becomes central to everything she does, everything she is. Her relationship with Colin becomes in part about her teaching him to be good, her desire for freedom becomes about helping others.
She even uses her morality as a means of healing from the restrictions: From 29.03:
“I think we benefited as much as you did,” Dragon said. “You needed to join the Wards to… make amends, shall we say? It was the same for us.” “For me,” Defiant cut in. “I had my own regrets,” Dragon said. “You had no choice.” “Regrets nonetheless,” she said, again. Her head turned towards Canary, and Canary smiled just a little.
I have some mixed feelings on the potential effectiveness of this (working to right wrongs she was forced to commit could be helpful in alleviating guilt, but it may also reinforce that she was right to feel that guilt in the first place), but that she uses helping others to heal her own hurts is telling. I don’t think the desire to help is disingenuous, but I do think that there is at times a secondary purpose to it. If she helps more people after the restrictions are lifted, she is proving that the restrictions were never necessary. She, again, is not processing the restrictions as a cruelty done to her, but as one done to the people around her.
I can understand why people may view Dragon’s desire for revenge on Saint and Teacher as a personal failing. I agree that it seems odd given her previous behaviors, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Her previous behaviours had her erasing her own pain, making everything about helping other people. Her vengeance plot is one of very few times we see her express hurt, and her wanting to do something about that hurt explicitly for her own sake is definitely a good thing.
(It’s probably worth noting that her initial desire and plan for vengeance were expressed when she had no actual ability to follow through, and may not be consistent with her later plans.)
Her desire for vengeance was less a failing of her morality than a victory of her personhood. She allowed herself to be openly subjective, to want something that didn’t immediately benefit other people.
What’s interesting is that shortly after she starts expressing subjectivity, she tries to give up on being a superhero. She claims she was only ever a hero because of the restrictions, the complete opposite of her earlier arguments. She seems to have lost the preformative aspects of her morality, but she forgets there was ever anything to it but a performance. Instead of trying to demonstrate her goodness, she tries to undercut it, but she’s does so without actually stopping being good.
In her epilogue, she isn’t a superhero. Not the way she used to be. She helps the settlement rebuild, but she also interacts with them, helps them in smaller, more personal ways.
From e.3: Quote 1:
One of the women in the group had broken away. She was holding a small child’s hand, leading her away. The child looked back towards other familiar adults, as if for reassurance, and they smiled.
Quote 2:
Parents called children to them, and the group broke up. When the little girl rejoined her parents on the road out of the city, she was smiling, almost skipping.
It’s oddly petty, for a hero as high-profile as Dragon to take the time to help a small child overcome her shyness and play with her peers. It draws attention to how rarely we’ve seen her have moments like this, where she’s not operating on a world-saving scale, she’s just being nice to someone who needs it. Actually the only other moment I can think of off the top of my head is when she hugs Taylor in arc 22.
So what changed?
Well, maybe nothing. We don’t actually get to see everything Dragon ever does, much to my frustration, and it’s entirely possible that thousands of scenes like this happen off-screen throughout Worm. But we’re limited to analyzing scenes that are written, so I’ll have to go off that.
A potentially important factor is that Dragon no longer has access to the world-saving scale. She’s in the settlement because she’s hiding, and shifting towards more mundane acts of kindness may be a way for her to mitigate any feelings of loss and disconnect from her old life. Especially when she starts to consider staying there permanently, actions like these could help to reassure herself that she doesn’t have to stop helping people, even if she never returns to being a superhero.
She seems uncomfortable getting credit for the work she has done in the settlement. There’s this exchange with Defiant:
“They want to call it Dracheheim,” she said. The ‘ch’ sound was almost a ‘g’. A middle ground between the two. “They’re grateful.” “I’m trying to let them do it on their own. I’m only working on the things they couldn’t do themselves. Power, infrastructure, information, providing information from my libraries, the little I could bring with me…”
This fits in with her not wanting to see herself as a good person. By acknowledging how much she helped, the settlers make it harder for her to maintain that facade.
There’s also the part where she emphasizes that she’s only helping with things she doesn’t think they could do themselves. There could be a few reasons for this; at some level, she may still believe she’ll leave, and as a result may want to ensure the settlement isn’t too reliant on her. This could be because she thinks she’ll join with the Warden’s and other heroic groups, or it may be for more depressing reasons, she may think she’ll leave because Teacher will recapture her, or be worried that Defiant’s attempts to fix her code may cause more serious damage that could prevent her from helping in the future.
In the context of Cauldron’s parahuman feudalism plan, she may also weary of allowing any sort of hierarchical relationship to develop.
Maybe she just doesn’t trust herself.
Wanting vengeance, considering a family even, at some level she may consider these things selfish. May consider herself selfish, and therefore no longer good.
Once, she tried to fight against fears of her potential for evil by being exceptionally good. Now, she has the opposite response. She doesn’t want to be a good person, because that makes everything harder, so she pretends she isn’t. She lets herself listen to the part of herself that feared Richter was right.
But her goodness leaks out in little ways, like helping the child. It’s a part of her that was never really about the restrictions, or Richter, or what anyone else thought of her. She’s good because she cares about other people, because she wants to help them.
Dragon’s morality has been unavoidably affected by the traumas inflicted on her, by the world around her. That doesn’t make her less of a good person. No one is invulnerable, no one is unaffected by their environment. We don’t get to see what happens after Pandora frees her. The epilogue ends on a positive note, I hope that her future continued on that trend. I hope that she got better at balancing her own needs with other people’s, that her self-perception continued to evolve and improve. I hope that, to the extent such a thing is possible in Worm, she got to live happily ever after.
