Severe Banana Puppy

Heaven is empty and all the angels are here.

[severebananapuppy]

feel free to ask me anything

[mysharona1987]

[severebananapuppy]

Praying for a speedy recovery for those Europeans, Asians, and Africans 🙏

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

But I’d also be trying to use microbes to form some kind of defense.  I’d be reaching out for algae or other plant life I could use to obscure my retreat.  Something to produce an opaque gas, to block line of sight or give me hiding places.  Amy had far, far more versatility than I did, and I had little doubt she’d be able to mimic my power with a little time for preparation.  With some forethought, preparation and strategic thinking, she was capable of holding her own, getting away.  She had so much potential.

When exactly did Taylor find out Amy could do that? Because I don't recall that ever actually appearing onscreen. It's something Lisa could have revealed, but I feel like maybe we needed to have that conversation happen onscreen?

Negative props, Wildbow. Negative props.

[severebananapuppy]

Amy truly had incredible amounts of Megumi.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Saint spoke, his tone dry, “Am I on trial, cyborg?”

What should be happening is you get tortured until you squeal, and then get unceremoniously shot and dumped onto the pacific ocean on another Earth.

Apparently, he lives through Golden Morning. Which is uh... a choice by the heroes.

[severebananapuppy]

On the one hand, he did murder an innocent woman during a period of time the world needed her the most.

On the other hand, it's an in-universe fact that killing Dragon resulted in:

"Report from Alcott: Chances of success today just jumped, tripled. More info to follow. Reason unknown."

And:

"Overall casualty estimate for the next three days increased, world-end chance decreased. Still searching for why."

Which I believe is due to Dragon being more likely to drop the ball on talking Scion down. I don't know if that holds water, though. Dragon's better than Saint in basically every area.

I don't really believe in torture, either as a means for extracting information or even purely for revenge. As far as I'm concerned, justice is delivered at the tip of a bullet, not the edge of a knife.

Personally, I wouldn't blame Defiant for killing Saint then and there, though. With the in-universe knowledge of the characters, I think it makes sense for them to hold off on killing him during Gold Morning, and after that he got amnesty and they couldn't kill him without being a hypocrite.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“I have two boys, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t… however old you are.  So you weren’t switched at birth.” The teenager took in a deep breath.  “I’m from Earth Bet.  My name is Taylor Hebert, and my mother was Annette Rose Hebert.  Anne-Rose.” Taylor watched with bated breath as Annette took that in.  The realization and connecting of the dots was quick enough.  Annette’s hand moved, and she lost her page. “Oh,” Annette said.  “Wow.  Wow.”

This is just fucking stupid. What the fuck are you expecting from this Taylor?

This is just stupid. But chucking Taylor into Earth-Aleph was just dumb. Wanting to leave Taylor's fate ambiguous was just dumb. I kind of wish he'd done it because then the internet lynch mob would have scared Wildbow off from Wormverse so hard he'd never have written Ward.

[severebananapuppy]

"Taylor smiled just a little.  “I think it’s allowed, to feel weird about this.  I just, um, forgive me for being selfish, but I kind of wanted to see your face.  Or her face.”"

Oh, I don't know, some closure? Annette's death was a major turning point in Taylor's life and one she never really got to deal with properly.

And, like, if you could talk to your deceased mother after a lifetime of shit, wouldn't you?

Lynch mobs? Jesus. That's fucking rabid. I take it back, you don't have a "possibly" parasocial relationship with Wildbow... or you have no idea how viscous the internet can get. I wouldn't wish that on a man who's worst crime is writing an occasionally disappointing webnovel.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

I gotta admit, the people who bend over backwards to defend Sophia or like... cut her slack they don't give Emma or Madison (and they do exist, most notably Pendragoon, my god does she love giving Sophia a pass) baffle the fuck out of me, and having read all of Sophia and Taylor's convo in 27.3, I don't see how anyone can look at her as anything other than delusional.

Racism in fandom is a thing, major problem, but sometimes I feel like some people (who pride themselves as being super pro-queer and super progressive and stuff) will just bend over backwards to defend a character just because they're black or just because their queer or whatever and that's... not as bad as the racism directed at a character for just being black, etc, but it sure ain't good.

[severebananapuppy]

I just like her. I don't really give a shit about Emma or Madison. I do find the amount of Sophia-specific bashfics mildly concerning, but I can't deny she kinda deserves them.

I just wish Sophia got, like, 1% of the woobieness Amy gets.

Sophia's not my favourite character, mind, but I'd struggle to say any of them are my favourite.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“Is that so?  I’d like to think I’m much the same.  A people reader.  But my interest is in the design of people. What makes them tick?  What holds them together?  All too often, it’s one little thing.  In architecture they call it a keystone.  The one stone that keeps the entire arch from collapsing.  The weak point.  And I’m very, very good at finding those weak points.  Can you guess what I’m talking about here?  Why I’m in this apartment?”

My God Jacky Slasher loves the sound of his own voice, doesn't he.

Also, like - unrelated, but - would the existence of Jack Slash mean that m/m shippers would call it something other than Slashfic?

[severebananapuppy]

Jackfic

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“They say loneliness breeds the best masters, and it’s awfully lonely at the top,” Tattletale said.  “Nobody that can really put up a fight, no excuse to flex his abilities to their fullest, nothing that can really give the man any real stature, next to Legend, who had all the face time with the media.  No real role to play, compared to Alexandria, who was managing the PRT.  Odd man out.”

I feel like if Lonliness was Eidolon's issue, [High Priest] could have given him something else?

I know that Eden Shards are like... dead, and can't hate or like their hosts the way Zion Shards can (as I gather?) or at least not vial-produced Eden shards, but it really feels like, as I said earlier, that the Endbringers are some serious r/maliciouscompliance territory from [High Priest]

[severebananapuppy]

Sadly, the possibility of High Priest giving Eidolon a Simurgirlfriend is limited to fanfiction.

In fairness, it is just.. the plot... of Worm that Shards are limited to understanding life itself only in ways that generate the most conflict. See QAylor's perspective of everyone celebrating Scion's death.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“I’m not a public speaker, so I’ll make it short.  I’ve got a long history with the Protectorate, a hell of a lot more experience being angry with them.  I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for them, and that’s not a good thing, not entirely. 

This whole paragraph you give is fine, Taylor, but no, you DON'T have a long history with the Protectorate. it's been all of three months at most since the story started by now, at most!

It's been like, what, a million words? nearly that? But for you, it hasn't actually been long.

This is either 'Taylor is just talking out of her ass to make a point' or 'Wildbow sucks at time'.

[severebananapuppy]

Given what's happened to Taylor in those three months, they certainly felt very fucking long to her. So I'll go with 'Wildbow's a better writer than he gets credit for'.

Also, by my calculations (percentage through the story multiplied by it's overall word count) it's been 0.55 million words to this point. It probably felt really fucking long to Wildbow, too.

Personally, I'm always inclined to assume "a character is lying" over "the author is an idiot".

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“Trying to engineer a large-scale solution to help as many people as soon as possible.  The parasites will leave your body through your sweat, spit and urine, and enter the local water supply to override the others, and anyone you cure will cure others in a sort of reverse-epidemic.  I have to make sure this is engineered right, or nobody’s going to get cured.  If I screw it up, it could be worse than what Bonesaw did.”

And this is what will lead to Taylor kissing Rachel. :rofl:

I should go hunting up some good Taylor/Rachel fics, since I've pretty much exhausted the back catalog of Amy/Taylor ones at this point.

Anyone have any good Wolf Spider fic recs?

[severebananapuppy]

All part of Amy's master plan to get Taylor some Bitches.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“A lot more than I did.” “Probably.”

Not counting the S9 and Echidna clones (does that count as murder?), who has Taylor killed by now?

Alexandria (mercy kill, no one that stupid should have been kept alive anyway) Tagg (same) and Aster (also mercy kill, but not the same kind).

Did she kill those PRT goons joking about 'Grue is dead' too?

Did she kill anyone else? Am I forgetting anyone?

[severebananapuppy]

Nobody. Skitter is classified as a natural disaster and the deaths of her enemies are simply acts of god.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“Golem,” the last one said, his voice muffled by his helmet. I frowned behind my mask, perplexed.  “You named yourself after the little bastard from The Lord-”

Okay, so did D&D just not have as much influence on fantasy fiction on Earth-Bet? I don't.... I don't buy this, but it's shrug overall.

[severebananapuppy]

---

“Cuff,” said the girl in blue-black armor.

“Annex,” the cowled one told me.

“Golem,” the last one said, his voice muffled by his helmet.

I frowned behind my mask, perplexed. “You named yourself after the little bastard from The Lord-”

“No,” he said. I could hear him sigh from behind his helmet. “I’m thinking of changing it.”

If not from the trilogy, then… I fixed the pronunciation, compensating for how his muffled voice had modified it. Right. Golem, from the myth.

“I get it, nevermind. Listen, we’re going to move out, and you’re going to explain your powers en route. You know who I am?”

---

I'm pretty sure it's a joke about how Theo fucked up the pronunciation so badly it came out as Gollum. Cropped out a lot of the context there, didn't you?

And the average person might have thought of Dungeons and Dragons, but since this is meant to be a quick joke, Wildbow had Taylor instantly think of the Jewish myth so readers can google "Golem myth" and instantly understand the narrative significance between Theo picking a Jewish name to oppose his Neo-Nazi family.

It's also possible nobody in this scene has played Dungeons and Dragons because A) it's 2013 and the internet ain't great and B) they have better things to do with their lives, like survive the motherfuckers that keep trying to kill them, and practice in their spare time to survive the motherfuckers that keep trying to kill them.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

She hadn’t left Newfoundland unscathed, I was almost certain.  Brain problems, body problems… I couldn’t be sure.  Probably both.  She had no doubt integrated herself with technology to cope, enhance and expand her capabilities. Except that her technology was failing.  The way she’d collapsed at the school, the speech problems she’d suffered, the slow recovery, now this…  It was the only theory that made sense.

Taylor's real superpower is Protagonist Smart™, eh?

No, but more seriously, she is really good at putting details together. She'd have made a good detective. A good PI.

Hey, there's an AU fic idea! :rofl:

[severebananapuppy]

It borders on telepathy sometimes.

Taylor: "I shouldn't join the Wards, I'm sick of this teenage high school drama like being bullied by Sophia, I'd hate for that to continue in my cape life."

Readers: "Wow, Taylor, I'm sure it can't be that bad- SHADOW STALKER'S WHO???"

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“I’m not… being good or bad was never a thing for me.  Not really.  It was all about the actions I was taking and why, instead.  I became a warlord and I took care of people.  I helped seize the city from Coil and we started implementing changes.  Again and again, I’ve escalated in terms of the kind of power I wield.”

You know, there's a lot of people who hate various fanon details that make it into fics, like the idea that Coil/Calvert is the CEO of 'Fortress Construction' but it is established in 8.x that "He owned the company that had built the underground shelters in Brockton Bay and neighboring cities." (Direct quote)

Maybe he isn't CEO that company, and it's canon name is never given, but the idea of it being called Fortress Construction is hardly unreasonable, for one, and for another, that name is a common touchstone now - if a reader who has read a lot of wormfic sees the name 'Fortress Construction', even if Calvert's name doesn't come in context, the reader probably knows to expect to start looking for everyone's least favorite snakey bastard.

And here, we have Taylor specifically calling herself out for Escalating over and over again, and then the hardline jackass purists get pissy when people call Taylor 'the Queen of Escalation'

The hardline jackass purists who act like they're the Church of Wildbow and so above everyone else love to toss around the 'so many fic writers and readers don't read Worm ever' argument but like...

Sometimes I don't think they read Worm either. They're so allergic to their abstract notion of 'fanon' that they will start dismissing and ignoring the actual canon details those things are often rooted in.

[severebananapuppy]

I'm not one of those people, but I do think calling her the Queen of Escalation is a little overblown. It's more like she's the Queen of Adaptation. She doesn't start the fights, but she does everything she can to finish them.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Because she fits in the same category as Eidolon, I thought.  Too dangerous to allow her to make contact with the man.

Again, Jack isn't actually that good at manipulating people?!

This -

Wildbow never shows us a Jack that's actually skilled at manipulation - the man can't even successfully manipulate Nilbog.

And yet we're supposed to think Cauldron is stupid enough to -

Oh. Wait.

Fuck.

I remember reading somewhere that at some point Cauldron figured out Jack was gonna set Scion off and decided to risk starting his rampage now, rather than 14 years from now when EB attacks would have killed a lot more capes. Dunno if that's canon, but that would explain why Contessa isn't out there fighting Jack, since we know full well there's no chance he'd make her evil.

[severebananapuppy]

Cauldron used Contessa to break the fourth wall and read Wildbow's WOGs on how Jack's secondary power is so strong it would brainwash your death note Shard into brainwashing you into killing you.

Same guy who got folded by Grey Boy thanks to Tecton, the Siberian, Theo, and Dinah, by the way.

[kyliafanfiction]

One of the things that I find most remarkable about the Worm Fandom is like, how many people who are both pro and anti Wildbow really seem to think that Worm is like, intended to be seen as a 'realistic' take on superheroes in real life.

Or that it's 'more realistic' than DC or Marvel or whatever.

And like, maybe he's said that, I've hardly read every WoG, but that feels unlikely based on what I have seen, and just... reading Worm itself. Worm is a take on superheroes, and it's more cohesive than DC or Marvel tends to be because it's one guy writing one story and controlling the whole world of the story, but like, Worm isn't more realistic, and Wildbow didn't set that out as an expectation, as far as I can tell.

Worm has a lot going on, but I feel like some of is was just the equivalent of Ron Pearlman coming in at the end of the twilight zone episode and saying 'hey, wasn't that fucked up?'

But even more so, you run into a lot of people on the Anti-Wildbow side of the fandom who feel like they're 'owning' Wildbow when they make big statements about how much more 'effective' optimism or kindness or hope are than despair/cynicism. Or the people who treat Worm as like, a puzzle they've solved with just the right altpower. Or like, they act like when they find some 'horrible' inconsistency in Worm that they've 'proven' it's unrealistic. And thus they've 'beaten' Wildbow by proving that, which... again, I don't think was ever his goal?

Like, I'm happy to say I find the CUI to be nonsensical, and the Geselleschaft doesn't feel very realistic, and a lot of Wildbow's worldbuilding wears thin and shallow the further he gets from the Bay and from the subjects the story focused on most, but like... that's just how anything works? No worldbuilding can actually stand up to the scrutiny of hundreds or thousands of pedantic nerds staring at it long enough. Even Tolkein's can't. And I don't feel like I've 'owned' Wildbow when I make those point in a discusson.

The pro-Wildbow side of the fandom can have some really noxious people, but the anti-Wildbow side of the fandom has people who really want to tilt at windmills that just aren't there.

[youpeoplesuck247]

Wildbow for a fact at least initially conceived of Parahumans as a deconstruction of basic superhero tropes. He’s very frank about it in his oldest/recycled worldbuilding notes and comments accompanying the pre-publication draft chapters that he’s posted. He wanted to have a grounded or at least explicated reasoning for why people with superpowers were seemingly compelled to only use them for highly visible violent crime or vigilantism, as well as why the mechanics of the world supported their constant fights.

Admittedly this became a lot less of a focus as the final shape of the story that would be Worm starting coming over the horizon. A lot of over-explained SciFi nonsense got dropped (at one point he planned to include a power-mutated slime colony or something in Alaska that people all over the world harvested because its run-off produced an unnaturally-malleable and tough natural fiber that people made supersuits out, hence explaining the presence of comic-accurately body-hugging and indestructible costumes. In actual finished canon everyone just were improvised body armor if they’re not Tattletale & blessed with a body that can inherently pull off a spandex catsuit).

However, that central question/conceit about why supers play cops-and-robbers never went away as a thematic driver for the plot and setting; it’s the entire reason why Cauldron exists, why all powers have a shared original in Traumatic Awakening, why so much world-building hints or leans on the assumption that Capes are psychologically bent to want to use their powers just for fighting each other.

This combined with Wildbow’s notorious cynicism and need to rationalize it with his own irl experience (iirc he worked as the receptionist of a social worker while or just before publishing Worms first chapters and claims he based the mood of Brockton Bay, Taylor’s bullying experience, and a number of minor villains and adults causing problems for Taylor on people and events he encountered on the job, anytime someone complained that any of the above lacked verisimilitude).

Taken altogether, people picked up the initial vibe of Materially-Explained Superhero-verse mixed with the crapsack world we actually got delivered, and assumed the whole thing was meant to be a meta-takedown instead of we took a soft-turn into John McCrae asking himself “what if Superheroes but everyone turns out to be just kind of an asshole like I always assume in my daily life?”

[severebananapuppy]

I'd say Worm's more of a reconstruction of the concept of superheroes.

Why are there superpowers? Entities gave them out so humans could use them to fight other humans.

Why are the humans fighting instead of using them to uplift the world? Conflict drive.

Why is there a conflict drive? Produces data which can be used to solve entropy through innovation.

Why don't Entities do it? They're stupid.

Why are there clearly defined heroes and villains in flashy costumes instead of, say, paramilitary squads with parahumans attached? Cauldron.

Why don't people get shot more? Cauldron.

Like Mass Effect, it's essentially a one big lie. Everything that breaks the laws of physics can be blamed on element zero. Everything in Worm that deviates from baseline reality can be blamed on the Entities.

Compared to Marvel and their like six hundred different ways of gaining superpowers, it's more believable, though not exactly more realistic. Compared to DC and the bullshit Batman pulls, it's 100% more realistic.

[severebananapuppy]

Hmm. 23/11/25 to 1/7/26, so I successfully went 7 months and 8 days without using Tumblr.

Well, it's something.