#graffic talks

[thatgraffic1]

Every now and again I look through the Worm wiki for any interesting tidbits of lore that Wildbow has established through random comments and such.

Two of the most interesting to me are Apollyon and Valhalla.

Apollyon is the hypothetical of if instead of encountering Abaddon, Eden and Zion instead encountered Apollyon, which consumes them and steals Earth for its own cycle. With weaker Endbringers that number in the hundreds and Parahuman powers being weaker but Parahumans also being far more numerous.

Valhalla is a much briefer concept, essentially that powers would begin as weak but would grow stronger through killing another Parahuman. Essentially making the way that Clustercapes can drain each other for greater power into standard style for all capes.

These concepts feel like they would mix together very interestingly for an AU, possibly being a good base for one in the same vein as DC’s new Absolute verse. Honestly it’s a surprise that I haven’t seen any fics that play with these concepts, especially when those that have done earths where Eden lived and Zion died are such an interesting treat.

[thatgraffic1]

I’ve been away from making fanart and art in general for a while now, but the recent amount of people going through my stuff again has made me realize how much I miss that feeling of people seeing new art from me and seeing how they enjoy it.

I’m gonna try to get back to drawing again. There’s a lot of reasons for why I’ve been gone, why it’s taken me so long to start again, and most of them lead back to a bad mental health spell I had at the start of last year. But I’m gonna try again. Somebody needs to give more love to Worm’s minor capes, after all.

[thatgraffic1]

Something about Worm that's fascinating to me is Wildbow's candid responses to questions on what would of happened if such and such event had gone differently, what could happen if such and such event did occur that didn't.

The alternate path of Leviathan attacking Florida (good on him) is so interesting because of the drastically different story it would have caused. A world where most of the Wards didn't die, or none died at all. Where New Wave was utterly destroyed. Where the Elite began muscling into Brockton Bay. Where the Undersiders became more of Coil's thugs, drifting apart in the process (also where Rachel gets a new friend in Trainwreck, who apparently had a similar mentality to her).

But the most interesting proposal about that alternate path to me, is the slight mention of Taylor WB gave. That this bug girl would, in that chaos, form a new team. One made of the disenfranchised, heroes who had left the Protectorate, mercenaries, people who had lost their teams (other villains, maybe?). Who would be on this team is an utter mystery, but I could maybe see Aegis and Battery on it, the both of them abandoning the Protectorate on learning about Coil's control of it.

It paints, to me, a version of Worm that was perhaps more hopeful, better for Taylor in the end.

A shame, then, that I've never seen anyone even come near exploring this idea in the fandom. Maybe one day, heh.

[thatgraffic1]

The Butcher is such a tragically underused character and concept in Worm that it hurts.

The sheer concept of a Parahuman that, regardless of their powers weakening, becomes more powerful with each death along with becoming more mentally unstable is utterly captivating. Even weakened, the Butcher is still an explosively teleporting Brute with danger sense and homing attacks that literally can't be put down.

So it's a shame we don't actually know all that much about the Butcher. How their gestalt consciousness functions. If they're actually a Cauldron cape, or if the Resurrective Brute that Doctor Mother mentions is just someone with similar powers to the Butcher. How the Butcher's shard even works - does it fuse with the shards of its new incarnations, forming a cluster of sorts, or make a sort of temporary connection?

There's just so much we don't know, including what all of their 15 powersets are. It's an utter shame.

Even them being a Brockton Bay native amounts to nothing because of their brief screentime. No one even talks about the Butcher despite the fact that, in their day, they would have been the resident powerhouse in the Bay like Lung was when the book takes place, even more so since killing them wouldn't remove their threat.

Honestly, I really wish we could have gotten to see Cherish as Butcher. Because her escaping from that pod would have been plausible, Bonesaw wouldn't have made it Brute-proof since Cherish had baseline strength. It really would have nailed in just how impossible it is to keep the Butcher down, even if Cherish died in the process.

One of Worm's most interesting concepts, gone to waste. Even in the fandom, outside of the oh-so painfully prevalent Taylor powerwank that largely removes the Butcher's most interesting quality.

[thatgraffic1]

My biggest pet peeve in Post-GM fics is when they have cults to Khepri. This due to one simple thing that all of these cults have; they're too damn organized.

Look into the history of any religion and you'll see it took them decades to solidify together into a central, unified belief. Making a holy book everyone will approve of? That also takes decades. Central features we now consider commonplace, such as the Catholic belief in Saints? That took decades as well - also it began due to the Roman oppression of Christians, starting as the Cult of Martyrs. Look it up if you ever have a chance, it's pretty interesting.

The exception to this is irl cults, like the Manson family or the Peoples Temple, but that's for a very simple reason. They're centralized around a singular authoritative figure for all of their existence that define every last feature of their belief structure which most religions lack - a feature shared by the Fallen and their leading families that the different sects are named for. Something that none of the Khepri cults in fics, which I've seen, ever have.

Obviously they don't need to follow how irl religious movements work, but doing so could add further dimensions to the fic's cult.

Simply having a central figure, or group, using Khepri as a figure to create a power structure with them at the head would be interesting (maybe even using one of the alternate spellings of Khepri as a cape name). Or having multiple capes, or even non-parahumans, with differing beliefs on Khepri (considering a true transcendent deity, a figure of true parahuman power worth aspiring towards, a monstrous example of the terrible power parahumans have over the normal people, the woman who sacrificed herself to save everything and is worth respecting, etc) could add so much to the concept.

I find the concept of cults to Khepri genuinely interesting and plausible (we've worshiped weirder things irl). I just wish I could enjoy them with my inner history nerd getting weirded out by the way they're written.

[thatgraffic1]

A Brockton Bay without Coil is an interesting scenario to me, because it would so severely shift the power balance that the city would be utterly unrecognizable when compared to canon.

Because unlike how fanfic commonly depicts Coil, he is a known factor. His powers aren't. But Coil and his mercenaries are one of BB's 3 powerful gangs.

Take him out of the picture (let's say the asshole has a brain aneurysm) and the entire structure of the criminal world in Brockton would be radically different from canon.

For example, there's no Undersiders. Rachel would likely remain a solo villain, extremely distrustful of anyone and everyone, though she could end up in a team, maybe with Trainwreck since Wildbow does say that they'd have gotten along. Alec would've just kept drifting along, piecing together his own personal morality based on not wanting to be his dad. Brian'd still be an enforcer for whoever would hire him, trying in vain to save up enough to get custody of Aisha, though I could see him making a small team of his own. And Lisa probably keeps pickpocketing until somebody realizes her potential, hero or villain.

So many factors of canon would be completely non-existent without Coil (no Dinah kidnapping, no Trainwreck infiltrating the Merchants, no Chariot in the Wards, probably no Leviathan attack, so on) that the creation of an interesting AU just from that is a gold mine for a fic.

[thatgraffic1]

I think Taylor should genuinely be considered a Tinker 1.

Her ability to use the byproducts of her bugs to make stuff goes beyond typical talent. Like, as someone who has tried to crochet and stuff in an art class making things from threads is extremely hard. And Taylor managed to make an entire outfit from silk sourced straight from spiders on her own with no prior experience? As well as make functional armor from the shells of normal bugs?

If that isn't Tinker bullshit I don't know what is.

[thatgraffic1]

If there's one thing I wish we got more of in Worm (among everything else: Circus, The Butcher, Sophia have any characterization beyond "grrrr, predator-prey," etc) it has to be the concept of powers backfiring.

We get it in like Regent feeling tremendous pain when overusing his power and being unable to use it for a time (something that isn't even really mentioned past Leviathan despite him using the full extent of his powers) and Thinkers having atrocious headaches, which only comes up with Lisa and Dinah, and Taylor doesn't have it despite the absolute power of her Thinker ability.

This concept of overusing powers resulting in horrible pain is something that later Worm is kinda missing. It plays into both the fact that these powers aren't natural for humans and it would add drama to fight scenes.

How much more can someone use their powers before it backfires on them, what are their backfires like, do they work through the pain and leave themselves in a worse condition after?

Obviously, these would have changed a number of fight scenes and potentially alter their outcomes. But it would have added another dimension to these fights alongside Taylor's already interesting tactics.