#empire 88

[clementinecoastline]

thank god we have the worm wiki to remind us that Nazis are bad

[kyliafanfiction]

Absolutely horrible (but in a possibly fun if done right) fic idea:

Instead of selling out Marquis identity to New Wave, the henchman in question sells him out to Empire 88 (I think there's a mention somewhere in the text of it being one of his goons who sold him out, could be wrong, but this is a fic, so it could just be a part of the AU).

Now, the text of Worm itself - I don't know if Ward sheds any light on this, or if there's a WoG, but you might, by now, know that I feel quite content to ignore those at my leisure anyway - leaves it ambiguous if Marquis actually killed Iron Rain or not. He could have been trying to subtly reach out to Amelia and lying, or it could have really happened.

Regardless, one assumes Allfather (who would have still been around at the time) isn't a fan of Marquis either way, or the lie wouldn't have been believable at all (if it was indeed a lie). Marquis is a tough customer, but given enough force brought to bear, it's plausible E88 could beat him, though perhaps with casualties.

Marquis is hardly going to just surrender to hand Amelia over to them, so assuming he doesn't successfully grab her and run away, he's probably fighting to the death. He dies, Empire 88 now has this little girl.

They could and certainly might just kill her, but it's possible that Allfather (or maybe Kaisar?) has a much crueler idea: Take little Amelia and indoctrinate her as a Nazi. Allfather's two kids had triggered, so E88 is well aware of second gen triggers and all, so she could also be a useful or powerful parahuman for the Empire later too.

If Iron Rain wasn't killed by Marquis, then it's just a great way to get one last dig in on Marquis - raise his daughter as a minion of his Empire. If Iron Rain was killed by Marquis, well, eye for an eye, a daughter for a daughter doesn't have to mean killing the daughter... can just mean having a new daughter.

Eventually Amy would be pretty successfully indoctrinated, one assumes, and by the time she's a teenager and triggers (could do some alternate power for Shaper, could just give her the same powers) she's a believer in E88's ideals. Ideally, since I'm a fan of Amy and would want to see a story where she eventually breaks away from them, she would eventually have cracks in her beliefs (including the whole 'shit, I'm gay' thing, with a different flavor of self-loathing) and the arc of the fic would involve her leaving E88 and unlearning her racist baggage.

Amy isn't blonde haired blued eyed/etc (not that that has stopped IRL brunettes/etc from being Nazis or Neo Nazis) so that's going to be an issue too but presumably not insurmountable. What her personality would be like - beyond racist - is hard to say. Probably still introverted, and I think we'd have a lot of the same second guessing herself that she has in canon pre-Birdcage, but beyond that, you could take it various ways. Maybe a certain degree of overcompensation because she feels a need to prove herself (I'd imagine whoever raises her in E88, she'd be getting a lot of pressure to be 'worthy' of being a member of E88)

Possible further plot thread ideas:

Sibling relationship (genuine, not one messed up with incest crushes) between Theo and Amy, if Kaisar takes Amy in himself.

Public rivalry with Glory Girl (or whatever Vicky's cape name is in this AU)

Due to comedy of errors type events, she ends up being kidnapped by the Undersiders briefly, or something like that. Being at the Bank (or a similar circumstance) during a robbery could be funny because E88 might not want to get involved publicly or risk outing Amy, and Amy has to keep her powers under wraps too, unmasked (whatever they are)

Various scenes of hating herself for being 'a disgusting dyke' when she notices a female cape being attractive mid-fight or something.

Tattletale exploiting the above (played mostly for laughs)

I do love shipping in my fics, so there are possible ship ideas this fic could have: Taylor/Amy is a classic, Vicky/Amy could be possible (depending on how it was done), but of course, any shipping would really need to wait until after she's made sufficient progress breaking away from E88.

[thatgraffic1]

It's so weird to me that in Worm the people hurt by Brockton Bay's gangs are never really addressed.

Like, where are all the Capes who triggered as a result of the Empire brutalizing them or someone they love, where are the Capes who triggered from Bakuda's forced conscription and gleeful murder of their loved ones, where are the Capes who triggered via the Merchants ridiculous policy of forced drugging?

Even outside of Capes, the effects of these gangs are just never addressed. We never hear about the people the Empire's hurt, or even see them hurting anybody. We never see Jihoo Park's family's reaction to his death, that he was killed so easily and without a single care (also, like, he's the only Korean character in Worm and he exists for 5 seconds). We never hear about the Merchants cruelty after Taylor's rescue of Charlotte (Charlotte doesn't even exhibit any trauma of her own, she really should have triggered from almost being fucking sold like a piece of meat).

None of the effects that the gang has on the city are ever shown. A huge mistake in my opinion.

[f1rewalk3r]

not to e88 post unironically but. thinking about crusader. dude who definitely wears forest camo around even when he’s not deer hunting. preferred beer is budweiser. (NOT BUD LIGHT! that’s pussy libtard shit.) he would wear a maga hat. he would definitely watch nascar.

dude who doesn’t like to think about the european trad nazi branch of his neo nazi gang. not because he’s antifacist but because he’s just too stupid.

not defending or glorifying him. dude’s evil for sure. just. funny character to think about imo. redneck supervillian. who comes up with that shit

[baroquespiral]

Brockton Bay Antifa

Today in missed storytelling opportunities - why the hell does Worm not have an Empire 88 arc? Not only were they hyped but it felt like it was being very carefully set up, in ways that would be unnecessary for a purely affective bait and switch.  It fills out a naturally escalating sequence of challenges from ABB-E88-Travellers-S9, not that most people appreciate shonen power crawls as personally as I do.  Not just generic and tonal “expectations” were being set, but the sort of structural/thematic ones usually placed a layer deeper than the ones you deliberately fuck with (such that a reader can on second or third read notice them and go, so that was the plan all along!).  Consider the following timeline, call it Worm Prime: >You Are Here: Buzz 7.12, Taylor has just figured out that Coil kidnapped Dinah and is considering quitting the Undersiders  >in the course of their argument, Bitch and Grue call her on her hypocrisy in pretending like there is ethical caping in late capitalism: specifically, that she was fine working within a structure that lets Empire 88 run a chunk of the city as a fascist ethnostate >(somewhere in the course of this, we learn a bit about what Empire 88 actually do - more on that later) >even though they were originally against it, the ensuing moral game of chicken goads the Undersiders into agreeing to take down Empire 88 >however, because Dinah’s odds were so shit, and because they don’t trust Coil any more, they decide to come up with their own plan entirely distinct from either iteration of Coil’s  >Taylor agrees to stay with the Undersiders long enough to pull off this one plan >Coil agrees to this (they tell him to avoid risk of his interference) when he sees their original plan is good and Dinah gives it a better probability rating >the Chekov’s gun about why Dinah predicted Coil’s intervention as lowering their chances still gets fired eventually, as their plan goes wrong on a fluke anyway and they have to get Coil to intervene to save themselves one time even though he makes things even more messy from there, in some fun rapidly escalating Xanatos speed chess bullshit >the arc ends with Taylor making her decision about the Undersiders and trying to change the world that she makes after the Leviathan fight, but this time built up to thematically over the course of the whole arc.  This thematically as well as structurally leads naturally into the Coil arc, which pits the Undersiders against another guy with a plan to change the world, and a more sympathetic team.  Which leaves the Undersiders ultimately unrivalled in Brockton Bay in time to face their first larger-than-Brockton Bay threat, the Slaughterhouse Nine, etc... The fact that I don’t really know (or care) where to put Leviathan in this will probably strike some as sufficient explanation for why it doesn’t play out like this - that it’s supposed to be “unpredictable”, either for entertainment or “realism” reasons.  While I don’t buy one of three Biblically symbolic “Endbringers” whose existence is predetermined directly by the cosmic backstory explaining the whole setting as an avatar of the modernist radical contingency of the Event, any more than I buy the ensuing Hobbesian survival horror cliché that doesn’t resemble any real world disaster recovery I’ve ever heard of; in either case, the contingent was timed to interrupt something, and cut short some logical developments, over others, and that’s still worth thinking about. Despite being one of the better researched and more plausible depictions of neo-Nazis in pop culture, Empire 88 is weirdly depoliticized.  The text goes out of its way to never look sympathetic to them - they’re all personally among the worst people in the setting, just all around sadists who are cruel to animals and threaten teenagers in parks and kill indiscriminately in the wake of Leviathan, as if that’s why they’re racist - and the thuggish ones get a lot more screen time than the “respectable” ones - but for all the shock beats they’re given you never even hear about anything actually racist they do.  A sizeable part of the city is their “territory”.  What does that entail?  Does the city make any accommodations for PoC fleeing that area (whose borders, as established in Buzz, are deliberately pushed and made unclear)?  Are there pogroms?  Lynchings?  We know from comments that Wildbow is smart enough to recognize rape as a not-apolitical form of realist grit; we also know that he thinks there are apolitical forms of realist grit, and the political ones should be avoided at least by people without the relevant “experience” (I disagree, but can’t blame him.  Of course, he didn’t have to make a neo-Nazi gang in the first place, or build them directly into the story’s thematic structure as the avatar of the political itself. Not that I want to make this into Woke Wolfenstein or some kind of heavy-handed progressive power fantasy.  Ideally this arc would have been written in 2012 like the original and dodged the bullet of EiffelArt avatars fingering themselves to it 24/7.  Actually, one thematic that would be interesting to weave into this would be the thing I saw one commenter mention about how E88 has more “heroic” coded powers than most of the villain teams (and “heroic” coded powers are mainly “military industrial complex” coded powers...), which would tie well into why Taylor doesn’t feel like she can be a hero or a villain, how the logic that “hero = system” is inherently fascistic, and the Undersiders or at least Taylor and E88 are caught in opposite instantiations of that dialectic (villains who overidentify with the system vs villains who oppose it in good faith, neither capable of identifying with the designation)... This might involve spending some time on their motives, maybe even an Interlude - and I understand the cynical pop-psych reasoning why dehumanization-depoliticization is a better pair than vice versa, but one thing we’ve seen in the last couple years is that this leaves you vulnerable to tactics as crude as a name change. If both this and my Star Wars headcanon read like progressive fix-it fics, I want to clarify that this really isn’t my intention.  While including neo-Nazis and depoliticizing them is kind of asking for it, I really don’t want to force my politics into everything I read.  These started as just attempts to fill plot holes or pacing whiplash, and yet they seem to make things more political of their own accord.  Why is that?   As someone who aestheticizes my own politics way too much not to feel conflicted about Benjamin’s famous motto, one of mine (which works pretty well as a summation of the project of rationalfic) used to be “Make Fiction More Like Reality/Make Reality More Like Fiction”.  If anything it’s the dialectical intimation of the possibility of the latter that’s missing in Worm.

[empire-games]