Taylor and Brian’s relationship
I think Taylor’s relationship with Brian is a lot more interesting, important, and purposeful than I’ve seen a lot of people consider it to be. I’ve seen people describe their relationship as feeling empty, like Taylor just chose the nearest hot guy to her to date. To be clear, I think this is (partially) true, but I think that reading is textual and intentional.
Taylor is attracted to Brian kind of because he is the nearest boy to her, but also because he’s the face of her fantasy in the first several arcs of Worm. Taylor’s early time with the Undersiders (before the Dinah reveal) is characterized by escapism and living a fantasy. For the first time, Taylor has friends who respect and listen to her, she has power, and she has control over the direction of her life. To go along with this fantasy, she has Brian, a boy who trusts her and who she feels she can trust. Taylor’s initial attraction to Brian is because he slots right in to this dream of hers. But importantly, Taylor has two fantasies - having friends and control, and being a superhero. As she explicitly states at the end of Arc 6, one of these fantasies is what she wants, and the other is what she considers morally correct. Taylor’s relationship with her morality is a different post, but what’s notable here is at the end of Arc 6, Taylor actively decides to chose what she wants to do over what she thinks is right. She is under no (serious) outside pressure when she burns the letter to Miss Militia, she is just disregarding morality to follow her preferred fantasy, which explicitly includes a relationship to Brian.
But then, not one full arc later, and Taylor is smacked in the face by what it means to chose fantasy over morality, when it turns out that her dream boy is perfectly ok with child slavery. After this moment, Taylor does not express any explicit attraction-like feelings towards Brian until the end of Arc 13, six full arcs later. That’s because at this point, with her fantasy shattered by Dinah, Taylor has become utterly devoted to what she sees as the “moral” goal, rescuing Dinah at all costs. Taylor let her guard down, she let herself get what she wanted, she tried to begin a relationship with Brian, and she was punished for it, informed that her actions led to a child getting kidnapped and enslaved, and so she refuses to allow herself to have those things for herself again.
In Arc 15, Brian fully confesses his feelings to Taylor, they kiss, cuddle, and then an arc later, they sleep together. They sleep together after winning a crushing victory against Dragon, after successfully seizing control of the city, after Taylor seems to have Coil’s assurances that he’ll free Dinah. So Taylor once again lets her guard down, takes a night off, *indulges* in Brian… and boom, blown up, blinded, betrayed, shot, forced to take a man’s life, giant monster released to attack the city. And the Echidna fight is pretty important to Taylor’s arc. It’s in this fight that she is forced to start considering the world outside of Brockton Bay. Cauldron, the Triumvirate, other dimensions, the end of the world. Taylor really internalizes the fact that she is a big fish in a small pond, and she desperately wants to jump ponds. She just lost her last life’s mission, freeing Dinah, and Dinah informed her that she would be important, that she needed to start addressing things outside of Brockton Bat, outside of the Undersiders… outside of Brian.
Taylor and Brian only interact one time post-Echidna, pre-Behemoth. There, Brian asks Taylor if she can see them together, long term. Taylor briefly has a fantasy of them living together, married with kids, and she wants it, but she has long since learned not to give herself what she wants. After Taylor turns herself in, Brian reflects that he never made her happy, and he’s *kind of* right. Brian *did* make Taylor happy, but she can’t allow herself to be happy, because when she’s happy, she lets things slip and bad things happen. Their relationship fell through twice, and each failure prompted Taylor to begin a new goal, a new life’s mission - saving Dinah, stopping the end of the world. Their relationship was empty and hollow, because Taylor couldn’t allow herself for it to be anything but.
Obviously, this dynamic draws some immediate parallels to comphet, especially because Taylor has several close friendships(?) with other women, most of which were not empty or hollow by necessity. It does invite the question of why Taylor felt like she couldn’t devote her time and emotions towards Brian, but she could towards Rachel. I’d say the in-text reason is because Taylor views Rachel as more of a project or a test; she’s determined to make Rachel like her because she can’t stand failing or giving up or leaving behind another broken friendship, like she had with Emma. Of course, one could argue that Worm would have been improved if Taylor was explicitly attracted to women, and entered into a relationship with Rachel. I do think it might be. Still, I really don’t feel as though it would be necessary, especially considering the real-world parallels of Wildbow being aromantic (to my knowledge, he did not know it at the time). You can absolutely see Taylor’s aversion to devoting time and emotion to a romantic relationship rather than a friendship as aromantic coding, just as easily as you can see Taylor’s aversion to devoting time and emotion to a man rather than a woman as comphet.
Either way, I think Taylor’s relationship with Brian is super important to her character arc and the story as a whole. I think that a lot of the criticisms I’ve seen levied at it are intentional writing choices on Wildbow’s part, not just thrown in because he felt like the story needed a het relationship in there. Also I’m sorry in advance if it reads like I’m coming off as confrontational or like I’m calling people who have these criticisms stupid or anything like that, I’m not trying to and I think there are plenty of criticism-worthy aspects of Worm, especially when it comes to queer relationship stuff.
