#worm crossovers

[artbyblastweave]

Hal Wilkerson seems like he’d be a fun guy to set loose in the parahumans setting

[artbyblastweave]

Taking the bait for Tick

Setting fusion in which the end of Watchmen loosely overlaps with the appearance of Scion and the rise of actual superpowered capes, who are using the Minutemen and Crimebusters as their cultural referents when they start to go out in costume. Vikare doesn't get beaten to death in this AU because people don't believe he has powers, or at least not specifically because of that; he gets beaten to death because people are sick of the masked vigilantes in general and haven’t twigged to the fact that this is a genuinely new paradigm. 

Scion ends the cold war (possibly intervening in the squid attack? Not sure of the exact timeline on this) frustrating Ozymandias and driving him to involvement with early Cauldron; his motivation is halfsies between recognition of the threat posed by Scion and irritation that an actual monstrous space-squid dropped out of the aether to obviate his meticulously crafted space-squid plan. He might be the recipient of a vial, or he might be kept on, very deliberately, as the token paragon human to act as a counterbalance to Average Jane Doctor Mother; this has mixed effects on the organization’s efficacy, because despite his gestures towards pragmatism (”I did it 35 minutes ago”) he did name and style himself after one of the most famously egotistical mythohistorical figures. Bit of an ego there.

In all derivative works that examine the future of the Watchmen setting, attempts at Heroism in general are framed as being essentially unsuppressable once the precedent has been set. Scion exacerbates this process, as a stateless, apolitical agent of heroic idealism replacing the nakedly political (but ironically much more human) Dr. Manhattan, and thus giving a northstar to people who otherwise would be understandably cynical about heroism as a concept.

 Night Owl and Silk Spectre, who canonically embarked on a renewed crimefighting career after Watchmen canon, are early beneficiaries of this, both becoming unusually old triggers due to their disproportionately high levels of experience, and beneficiaries of Cauldron’s eventual pro-cape cultural engineering, being lauded as prescient early adopters and fixtures of the third-wave cape scene. I don’t really have much in mind for this part, beyond the idea that Dan, based on his canon insecurities and disillusionment, probably becomes an overengineering Tinker- building tinkertech that gets the job done but is almost always just a flashier way of accomplishing a mundane goal if you stop and think about it for two seconds. Laurie I suspect would have some kind of trigger event tied up in her inability to let go of cape life, her sense of being a vessel for other’s ambitions and fantasies, her lack of meaningful options besides capehood (”I’m 35 years old and the only people I know are goddamn superheroes!”) but I don’t have a pat power in mind, or really the best grasp of her character beyond the surface stuff.

Lurking in the background of the setting is Rorschach, whose inability to reconcile his personal ethics with the utilitarian action everyone else committed to, and his ensuing suicidal state, causes him to undergo the mother of all breaker triggers at the moment of his canon annihilation. Post-Manhattaning Rorschach is a Breaker/Thinker/Master/Stranger who, upon scanning a target, gains knowledge of any information that might shatter that person’s worldview, and the ability to telepathically inflict that knowledge on his target if he gets close enough. Said ability to get close enough is provided by the fact that his breaker state- a blurry, spectral caricature of his pre-trigger costume- is both mostly intangible and imperceptible to anyone who doesn’t share a “headspace” with his current target (I.E. someone who’d be equally devastated to hear the Worldview-Shattering-Truth.) Rorschach’s targets either tend to quietly melt down and fall off the radar, or go out in a suicidal burst of self-destruction that accomplishes very little beyond getting the target killed; this is a process lubricated by Rorschach’s shard, which, due to Rorschach’s perma-breaker state, is able to play Rorschach like a fiddle, nudging him into targeting people who’ll go off the rails in a conflict-maximizing way.

Rorschach’s power resolves the tension of his trigger in the worst way possible; he’s free to follow his ideals in spreading horrific truths to as many people as he wants, but only in a way that inflicts the same moral paralysis or self-destruction he suffered from; to the extent that his information is actionable, it solely produces doomed, crazed crusaders who die before accomplishing much, essentially rendering his choice to share the information moot (and morally harmless.) To the extent that this thing would have a plot, I think it would involve 2011-era characters (probably a Watchdog cube jockey) investigating Case 86, The Rorschach Ghost, and invariably stumbling upon the information black hole surrounding the Ozymandias plot.

[artbyblastweave]

Please elaborate on Trip and Pick. Also, your post made me realize that I need a crossover between Locke & Key and John Dies at the End.

I only remember the broad impulse driving Trip, which would have involved the cast of JDATE waking up one fine morning in a version of their world that contains superheroes and moreover has retroactively contained superheroes for the last thirty years. It would have involved a quest to figure out who fucked with the timeline and why while also trying to deal with the retroactively-generated Undisclosed PRT Satellite office alongside all the usual nonsense. Had nothing for Pick beyond the idea that it would be interesting if a Post-GM Taylor, after settling down in in Lovecraft, MA, quickly becomes aware during the events of the comic/show/what-have-you that something is going on that's affecting her memory due to experience with Master-Stranger bullshit, and attempting to get to the bottom of the situation despite her inability to remember what's going on when she isn't actively looking at it. Also conceived of the Lovecraftian thing generating the stygian iron as a rouge shard attempting to brute-force a host connection with anyone who opens the door.