#hive 5.1

[inchwormpodcast]

Jenny and Ted discuss Hive 5.1. Episode Notes: * Jenny is a predictive genius * No virtue signaling among villains * Even villains w

Jenny and Ted discuss Hive 5.1.

Episode Notes:

Jenny is a predictive genius

No virtue signaling among villains

Even villains want someone to look down on

The cost of doing business in this town is being willing to sit down with Nazis

Do the other villains at the table know that Grue is black?

The Undersiders: not so under anymore!

New ship just dropped: SmugLine

Tattletale reveals a perfectionist streak

Ted’s muppet theory

It's nice that Newter and Gregor the Snail got matching tattoos to let us know they're in love

Okay, maaaaaybe these villains don't want to kill 300 innocent people if they don't have to

Taylor deserves a cape name she loves

Apparently Jenny still doesn't know what this story is about

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Coil nodded, “Which is the real concern.  The ABB can’t sustain this.  Something will give, they will self destruct sooner or later, and they will likely cease to be an issue.  Had things played out differently, we could look at this as a good thing.  Our problem is that the actions of the ABB are drawing attention to our fair city.  Homeland security and military forces are establishing a temporary presence to assist in maintaining order.  Heroes are flocking to the city to support the Protectorate in regaining control of matters.  It is making business difficult.”

That said, for all that the Superhero genre has a tendency to treat cities unto islands themselves, and Worm is clearly no exception, the tendency is also clearly tempered.

The chapter makes the exposition work by using it to establish these villains, give them character (and Skidmark is practically a moment of comic relief) and show their personalities. From Kaisar focusing on the 'it's inconvenient' and Faultline considering the recklessness of it all to be the real sin.

Hands were shaken around the table. “Funny,” Tattletale murmured. I turned away from the scene to look at her, “What?” “Aside from Grue and maybe Faultline, everyone’s already plotting how they can use this situation to their advantage, or fuck over the others.” I turned back to the scene, the villains sitting around the table.  It dawned on me just how much sheer destructive potential was gathered in the room. This could get complicated.

I mean, I assume Tattletale had to expect that.

From what I understand of some of the later themes of Worm, the inability of groups to work together against common enemies without jockeying against each other for the aftermath is a common problem the story will be dealing with all the way to Golden Morning, and this is obviously the first introduction of that theme.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Kaiser came through the door with a girl on each arm, blondes with measurements like Playboy models.  Kaiser wore armor head to toe, elaborately worked and topped with a crown of blades.  The leader of Empire Eighty Eight.  The twins went by the names Fenja and Menja, and were decked out in Valkyrie-style armor featuring countless little steel wings, along with closed-face helms.  Had to admit, Kaiser liked his heavy hitters.  These two could grow to be three stories tall, and they were a hundred times more durable when they were. Purity entered a few steps behind him with several others following her.  She was dressed in a white costume without any markings or symbols on it, but the fabric glowed softly.  Her white hair and eyes glowed too, but it was more like they were made of heated magnesium than anything else.  I couldn’t look in her direction without getting spots in my eyes, and my mask had tinted lenses designed to reduce glare. The people that had come in with Purity were other members of Empire Eighty Eight.  Krieg, Night, Fog and Hookwolf.   It was interesting to see, because as far as I’d known, while every one of them had been a member of Empire Eighty Eight at some point in time, Purity had gone solo, while Night and Fog had splintered off to form their own duo in Boston not long after.  All reunited, apparently. That wasn’t even Kaiser’s entire team.  Aside from the rare exception like Lung reaching out to Bakuda when she’d been at Cornell, it seemed that most groups recruited new members from within their own city.  Kaiser was different.  He was one of the better known American villains with a white supremacist agenda, and people sharing his ideals were either recruited from other states or they came to him.  Most didn’t stay with him for too long, for whatever reason, but it still made him the Brockton Bay resident with the most raw parahuman muscle at his beck and call.

E88, I think, would absolutely be written differently if Wildbow was writing Worm today, but it is still done very interestingly, regardless.

The gang having more extensive linkages beyond just Brockton Bay, and presumably to the Gelleschaft (is that canon? WoG? Just a common fan thing?) to explain where some of the recruits he gets goes.

I do feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity to not have E88 be bigger than just Brockton Bay - the degree to which Kaiser is monofocused on the city is a bit weird, but it does also fit with classic superhero tropes, which have a tendency to treat cities as islands unto themselves half the time (Most of the the rest of the time it's worldwide stuff. There doesn't seem to be a lot in between for the average comic book superhero story, from what I can tell. Regional/multicity narratives seem uncommon.

Then again, they seem uncommon in general. If you're going to spend any serious time in a given city for the story... you're gonna keep spending time in that city, I guess.

White Supremacy is a coherent (for a given value of the word) ideology that can serve as a motivating and rallying factor across the board for people well beyond the local area.

Technically the ABB sorta have a similar operating ideology, but in practice, it's mostly just Lung's self-aggrandizement, and recruiting for that, especially on a broader scale beyond just your local city, has got to be hard.

Probably one of the reasons E88 is such a big deal is just that it has what most villain cape gangs don't have - something to pull people in beyond the opportunity to make money as a criminal and have some cape cover and stuff.

I'm sure there's tons of that too, people who just join up for the money and the chance to be a brute, but if you believe in the ideals of E88, you can tell yourself you' re making the city a better place and all that.

Kayden/Purity certainly told herself that, and is telling herself that, now that she's rejoined.

Because she isn't willing to really do what she needed to do to change, to separate out from E88 and her past and so on.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

The pub had a sign on it reading ‘Somer’s Rock’.  There were iron bars on the windows and the curtains were drawn, but it would have been more unusual if that wasn’t the case.  It was that kind of area.  The paint on the outside was peeling, and the rust from the bars had bled onto the gray-white paint below the windows. As we stepped inside, it became clear that Somer’s Rock was one book that should be judged by its cover.  It was dim, dingy and depressing.  The wood floor was stained the same dark gray as the counter of the bar, the curtains and tablecloths were dark green, and the only real color or brightness, if you could call it that, was the yellow light cast by ancient, burnt lightbulbs.

I've said it before, i'll say it again, Wildbow does have some good turns of phrase.

"Somer's Rock was one book that should be judged by it's cover".

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Tattletale nodded, “Faultline’s crew does anything short of murder.  You can say her personality sucks, you can say her powers suck, but I’ll admit she’s very good at finding hidden strengths in the people that work for her.  See those two guys?  When it came to powers, they got a bad roll of the dice.  Became freaks that couldn’t hope to pass in normal society, wound up homeless or living in the sewers.  There’s a story behind it, but they became a team, she made them effective, and they’ve only messed up one or two jobs so far.”

5.1 is a pretty textbook exposition chapter, get a round-up of all the other baddies we haven't met yet, get the shape of the villain scene for Brockton Bay - these are the guys that Skitter and Friends are going to be taking on, over time, one by one, or just about.

So as a chapter, it is a bit dry, but it's dry with purpose, and it's good to have a bit of a slower bit, and it's not so dry it feels too lecture-y.

Plus, the earlier bit where Coil walks in (is that a body double? I feel like I read that was a body double somewhere? Like, he has his two-timelines ability and all, but even if he's just staying home doing paperwork in one timeline, if he decides to collapse the paperwork timeline... that paperwork needs to get done again. That's actually got to be annoying as fuck, doing the paperwork twice.

And this is the man who wanted to have like three or four jobs by the end? Coil, PRT director, secret ruler of the city and he's a CEO of something, right? Man, Thomas Calvert things both big and incredibly small. If he wasn't, like Kaisar, so monofocused on one city he could still have a great deal of money and influence across more than that.

Of course, that may be while Cauldron was cool with him having a vial, knowing he'd just focus on one city. Does Cauldron manipulate things to tend to make more villains focused on one locale rather than trying to operate over a broader space?

Another group arrived, and it was like you could see a wave of distaste wash over the faces in the room.  I had seen references on the web and news articles about these guys, but they weren’t the sort you took pictures of.  Skidmark, Moist, Squealer.  Two guys and a girl, the lot of them proving that capes weren’t necessarily attractive, successful or immune to the influences of substance abuse.  Hardcore addicts and dealers who happened to have superpowers. Skidmark wore a mask that covered the top half of his face.  The lower half was dark skinned, with badly chapped lips and teeth that looked more like shelled pistachio nuts than anything else.  He stepped up to the table and reached for a chair.  Before he could move it, though, Kaiser kicked the chair out of reach, sending it toppling onto its side, sliding across the floor. “The fuck?” Skidmark snarled. “You can sit in a booth,” Kaiser spoke.  Even though his voice was completely calm, like he was talking to a stranger about the weather, it felt threatening. “This is because I’m black, hunh?  That’s what you’re all about, yeah?” Still calm, Kaiser replied, “You can sit in a booth because you and your team are pathetic, deranged losers that aren’t worth talking to.  The people at this table?  I don’t like them, but I’ll listen to them.  That isn’t the case with you.”

Ah yes, the most pathetic villains canon ever gave us. Though wtf is this Moist guy? He's never been mentioned anywhere in fic or on reddit. I know about Mush and Trainwreck being Merchants, but who is this guy?

Though is this Skidmark being more presentable than usual, or does his usual reputation for being super filthy and whatnot just standard flanderization? Is it based on much more than this?

Also, really, Skidmark. Really? That the best name he could come up with?

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

It had been a week since the incident with Bakuda.  Lisa and Brian had stopped by several times as I spent my days in bed, giving me updates on the situation as it unfolded.  At one point they had even brought Alec and Bitch, and I’d been very relieved my dad hadn’t been home at the time.  Alec and Bitch weren’t the polite houseguests that Lisa and Brian were, and I suspected their presence and personalities would have raised more questions with my dad than they put to rest.

Given how much Time compression Worm can have, from what I gather, I'm almost surprised the plot could stay on hold for a week while Taylor rests up. Though I suppose it had to happen.

Will Worm ever go so far as to have one day take more than one Arc to resolve? Or will one day = one Arc be the most we're likely to hit?

Also, I really have to admit I was really under the impression that Bakuda's bombing campaign took longer, and that the Somer's Rock meeting happened much sooner after. I'm surprised Kaisar waited a week, but I suppose E88 has to get their pieces into place too.

Apparently someone at the PHQ had named my costumed self ‘Skitter’.  Lung had overheard something about it, and it had now spread through the city in the aftermath of his escape, which implied he was probably looking for me.  As a newspaper article raised our possible involvement in the bombings that had taken place, as adversaries of Bakuda, my new name had come up yet again, so it looked like it was maybe catching on.  I didn’t love it, but I didn’t love any of the names I’d come up with, so I could cope.

So this is where Taylor hears and at least grudgingly accepts Skitter.

I have to wonder what she imagined. Did she imagine Weaver and decide she just didn't like it? Hive doesn't seem too bad, if also a bit villainy, I suppose. Arachne - I guess focuses on Spiders too much? It's not a deity name though, if I remember the relevant myths properly.

Like, we don't actually know what names she considered, I don't disagree that heroic bug-themed cape names are a little thin on the ground, but other fics have proposed various ones. What made Taylor reject those? I think that's something it would have actually been good charcter work to see, see why she rejected various options.

[thegreatandpowerfulversy]

Got to 5.1 and this is a lot of new capes to keep track of all getting introduced. Really not a good idea to drop this many new names and descriptions on the reader all at once, they're not all going to stick well.

And then there's the more pressing issue of all these people, the Undersiders included, having a peaceful meeting with the fucking EEE. What's that saying again? If a Nazi sits down at a table with ten people, and nobody gets up, you have a table with eleven Nazis? I know this place is meant to be a neutral zone between all capes, but this is still really not a good look. Yes, even if it's to take down Bakuda and the ABB.

We band together with those we can tolerate for guaranteed victory, and we ignore those we cannot cooperate with.

Really, Coil? Everyone here besides Faultline? You can tolerate and cooperate with Nazis? Really?