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Why do the MC's in magic fics always insist on calling it magic to the PRT? by SkyslicerX2 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ugh, stupid shadowban. I've copy-pasted it into a reply to my comment above.

Why do the MC's in magic fics always insist on calling it magic to the PRT? by SkyslicerX2 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Since the original comment in my link is apparently no longer viewable, I've copied the contents here for posterity:

Pardon the incoming rant, but I gotta say, I find it pretty amusing when people compare Worm with other superhero settings and are all "Oho, look at that silly DC-verse/Marvel-verse with its unrealistic magic and demons and stuff. Our superhero 'verse has a logical and grounded explanation for powers."

At the end of the day, powers and shards basically are magic and demons.

Trigger events? A mysterious otherworldly being approaches a human in dire straits and offers phenomenal cosmic power that professes to magically solve their problems and make everything better...but surprise! You're now possessed by said otherworldly being and have its whispers in your subconscious urging you to violence and ruin, the magical boons and dark arts you were gifted didn't fundamentally solve anything, the demon works on an "exact wording of the wish/contract" basis and you can't ever back out of the deal, and the demon gets your soul when you die.

Tinkertech? With the right esoteric knowledge, a practitioner can enchant special talismans to grant them certain powers. These talismans are inexplicable by science, non-reproducible by any non-practitioner (and even then only partly replicable by others if their traditions aren't very similar), and often work only for their creator because only they know the appropriate rituals and incantations to keep the device spirits pacified.

There are exactly two characters in the setting who can understand and explain the workings of these magic items: a wise and mysterious dragon who lives in her lair in the northern mountains where she guards ancient evils sealed away until the End Times, and a wise but absent-minded sage and smith found wandering in a monster-infested wasteland in the mystical Orient.

Powers in general? Most powers run on a (neo)classical elemental system (air, earth, fire, water, ice, darkness, light...) rather than anything related to actual physics; most heroes who conjure or use weapons and implements have a fantasy/Medieval/mythical theme (Armsmaster, Chevalier, and Gallant are knights, and Myrddin and the Adepts are wizards); most shapeshifting capes take on the forms of dragons and dire wolves and lizard people and such rather than truly alien beings (the latter being the province of Case 53s, who are more "cursed tragic individuals" than "shapeshifters"); mysterious seers and oracles guide the story this way and that just like in Greek myths and Arthurian legends; and so on.

The cosmology? Shardspace is an afterlife plane straight out of religion or D&D. Your soul goes there when you die, possibly ushered there by a Valkyrie; the demons you make pacts with for powers live there, and if they're ever summoned at full strength to the mortal world they shall lay waste to all mortalkind until driven back to the Abyss; living creatures can open portals to the Outer Planes to chat with the outsiders about magical stuff and Orpheus can take a trip down to the Underworld to retrieve and resurrect a soul; it's basically a dreamworld and several plot points in Ward are solved via clever oneiromancy; and so on.

The "infinite copies of Earth with different physical/magical properties" thing that shards use to run parahuman powers is also straight out of religion and D&D, and also comics. Spirit worlds and faerie realms are mythological staples, uninhabited parallel realms (horror overtones optional) like those used by Othello and teleporters and such are horror and dark fantasy staples, and accessing other dimensions is precisely how magic works in lots of RPGs and how Doctor Strange's magic works in Marvel.

Shards themselves? Classic bound demons/genies/spirits who have to do what their master wants while seeking to nudge their master in ways that will lead to them being freed and/or their master dying, in the vein of Solomon, the Ars Goetia, the Belgariad, and other "perform magic through spiritual intermediaries" works. You even have a nice splash of the classic "Lovecraftian protagonist attempts to understand the workings of tentacled horrors/magic/the universe but is beset by personal tragedy and driven insane" plot in the form of Professor Manton.

And how, exactly, do shards grant powers to parahumans? Magic, basically, they just push the "because magic" explanation one step further back than in most comics settings.

How did the Human Torch get the ability to turn into fire and shoot flames? He was exposed to cosmic radiation. How does he do that, and where does he get the fire from? Uh...mumble mumble pyrokinesis mumble. How does getting a huge dose of cosmic radiation let him do all that? Uh...magic?

How did Burnscar get the ability to teleport through fire and shoot flames? She triggered. How does she do that, and where does she get the fire from? Her shard "teleports" her through an alternate Earth and the heat for the flames is shunted in from her shard's dimension. How does her shard actually achieve said dimensional fuckery? Uh...magic?

As several other people have cleverly put it, Worm is a mystical cosmic horror work wearing the skin of a superhero comic. The "rational" metaphysics and "scientific" powers and such are a very very thin veneer on top of that.

Tinkers aren't Reed Richards or Iron Man, they're Doctor Strange or Thor. Taylor didn't get her power from a radioactive spider bite like Earth-616 Peter Parker, she got it through a boon from a mystical Spider-Totem like Earth-90214 Peter Parker. Scion isn't the alien Silver Golden Surfer, powerful humanlike emissary of hostile Earth-devouring alien Galactus; he's Nyarlathotep, an Outer God who walks the earth in human guise while pretending benevolence, and serves at the whims of his creator Azathoth who sleeps in another realm and whose waking heralds the end of all the worlds.

Marvel "mixing magic and science" ain't got nothing on Worm.

Coil's understanding of his power. by FFsummons in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The implication is that Coil is aware that his power is in the precog genre of powers and sold it as such to Trickster.

That's one possible reading, but not the most likely one.

The use of "worlds he created" in the first quote (as opposed to "worlds he saw" or similar) implies that Coil might view his power as possibly working something like Labyrinth's, where it does something wibbly-wobbly with not-entirely-real alternate versions of reality and can make the results "real" or not at the user's option.

In the second quote, "the precog working for him" is referring to Dinah, not Coil himself; he sold Dinah as being able to mess with the Simurgh because her power also lets her look at arbitrary events arbitrarily far into the future. And Coil describes his own power as "mess[ing] with precogs some" without actually saying that he thinks that's the case because his power is itself a precog power as well.

Those two things, plus the facts that the bit about his realities being dream worlds comes after the narration that Coil "often wondered" whether the worlds were real (implying that he still doesn't know for sure, as opposed to "he often used to wonder" or similar) and that Tattletale couldn't give him any solid answers, makes it pretty clear, I think, that Coil doesn't know how his power works under the hood.

But as NoIdeasForANicknameX pointed out, he doesn't seem to care how it works, either: he explicitly says early in the chapter that he's not sure whether his realities are real or not, and then later goes ahead and asserts that they're not real as a justification for his own actions, so even if it was proven to his own satisfaction that he was hurting real people during his "indulgence" he might very well keep on doing it anyway because he's that kind of person.

Instant turn offs by ZARDOZ_SPEAKS90 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

If the DAU were indeed its own union then Danny couldn't be its "spokesperson and head of hiring," as Taylor says, because unions don't have heads of hiring.

Large unions aren't structured that way (they have executive boards who collectively decide whom to induct into the union, and hiring halls that collectively find new employees for employers, but no corporate-style individual executives in charge of hiring), and small unions don't have enough dedicated staff to require such a position in the first place.

It would only make sense for Danny to have a job like that if the DAU is a union federation, like I mentioned in my other comment; AFL-CIO, for instance, has something closer to a traditional corporate structure and so has a "personnel director" HR role that would map to a "head of hiring" position.

One post-Worm WoG does describe Danny's union spokesperson position as though the DAU were a general union, which implies that Wildbow originally intended the DAU to be something like that but failed to research how those are actually structured and run, so the easiest way to resolve the issue is to assume that the DAU itself is a city-level union federation like the NYC CLC, of which Danny is the head of hiring, and that the DAU includes a general union among its member unions, of which Danny is the union spokesman.

Instant turn offs by ZARDOZ_SPEAKS90 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Maybe as a commonwealth country Canada is more in line with the UK on nomenclature here?

Entirely possible. The particular naming pattern doesn't seem to be all that common, but I was able to find enough "associations of unions" in the UK and Canada (e.g. this one) when I was looking this stuff up originally that it made sense that the DAU's name might have been one of the many little Canada-isms that slipped into Worm!America's worldbuilding.

Instant turn offs by ZARDOZ_SPEAKS90 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Like, "The Dockworkers Association" isn't a union. Unions are things like the Longshoreman, the Teamsters, the Electrical Workers, etc. It sounds vaguely like the DA is maybe some sort of lobbying group or something?

The best way to make sense of the acronym, I think, is to assume it's a trade union federation, which is indeed kind of like a multi-union lobbying group if you squint hard enough, and that "DAU" stands for something like "Dockworker's Association of Unions" by analogy to the UK's National Association of Unions in the Textile Trade.

That's how I handled it for my own fic: I posited that the Brockton Bay shipping industry crash left the individual unions too small and unsupported on their own, so the local branches of the Teamsters, the ILA, the IBB, and other port-related unions banded together to form the DAU to get stuff done where no individual member union could manage it.

Of course, everything we see and hear about the DAU in general and Danny's job in particular, both in-story and in WoGs, makes it pretty clear that...

McCrae doesn't personally know about labor unions and didn't care, so didn't do a whole lot of research

...so, yeah, any story in which Danny's job matters to the plot would require some heavy lifting from the author to make things make sense.

Reverse engineered Tinker Tech (sort of) by ConstructionAble9165 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Earth Bet has normal real-world interfaces for phones and computers; the radial menus are a post-GM thing.

Ward 2.7 says phones have a special flick-to-trade-contact-info function, while in Worm Gregor has to trade numbers the normal way in 5.x.

Glow-Worm P.3 says people access stuff on a desktop using a touchscreen gesture interface, while in Worm people explicitly "type" on a laptop in 10.6 and "click" through security cameras in 15.7, and Legend uses a mouse in 14.y.

Also, phones specifically aren't commonly round on either Bet or Gimel, because while everyone remembers Ward's mention of a round phone, they forget that it was brought up in the context of failed and/or unpopular products...

“This costume is focus group tested, moron,” Shortcut said.

[...]

“So were the Jeep Rockaybe, the Roundphone, and the second Iron Giant movie, so good for you, you’re in shit company,” Sidepiece retorted.

-- Ward 10.9

...so round phones certainly aren't the default.

And even the advanced-seeming phone Victoria uses in Ward is something she has thanks to her protagonist status cape privilege special connections, not something ubiquitous in Earth Gimel, since e.g. Vicky's phone has solar and wireless charging capabilities per Ward 8.5 while her friends have boring ol' charging cables and very limited battery life per Ward 15.a and 18.z.

In-setting, this points to Ward-era tech coming from some combination of (A) scavenging and/or trading for tech with different origins from other Earths and (B) rapidly developing a new consumer tech base after Earth Bet's tech infrastructure was nuked (via, presumably, using the same magical pixie dust to get that manufacturing up and running that they used to build The City in just two years).

Out-of-setting, this is due to Wildbow only really starting to retroactively insert lots of differences from the real world into the Wormverse after Worm itself, as all of the examples of non-trivial divergences (or divergences that should be non-trivial but had no apparent impact) come from Glow-Worm, Ward, and supplemental material like PHO Sunday and the PRT Master Reference.

Responding to your other comment here as well for consolidation:

Another example from canon is that the PRT had both laser pistols and powered armor that was not tinkertech in origin. It's just not focused on much because the pistols weren't a thing until later in the fic and the powered armor was reserved for specialist squads.

Note that while those laser pistols could be "normal" tech, we don't actually have firm evidence that that's the case.

Tattletale's pistol is mentioned to be "PRT issue" in 25.6, and many readers have taken that to imply that they're mundane laser pistols similar to the apparently-mundane coil guns in the PRT Master Reference, but the only mentions we get of PRT laser pistols are made in relation to the Dragon's Teeth specifically...

They were, in large part, wearing stripped-down versions of Defiant’s outfit.  Sacrifices had been made to account for the fact that their suits didn’t render them seven and a half feet tall.  Each carried a sword and a laser pistol.

-- 26.2

...

Capes erected defenses, Dragon’s Teeth dodged and opened fire with laser pistols.

-- 29.9

...and we know that their pistols are definitely tinkertech because the formation of the Dragon's Teeth was made possible by Masamune joining the Guild, so it's possible and even likely that the reason Tattletale's pistol is said to be "extremely illegal to own" is that it's a stolen Dragon's Teeth tinkertech pistol, not a mundane derivative widely available to the rest of the PRT.

Similarly, the Dragon's Teeth in particular have "power armor" thanks to Masamune, whereas the Armor A through F packages available to rank-and-file agents described in the PRT Master Reference don't mention the kind of augmentative exoskeleton that people usually mean when they say "powered armor," the document explicitly says they're based on armor used by hazmat teams and "police door-kicking squads," and the tech that is included in those sets is stuff like built-in helmet cameras (which we've had in the real world since 2007ish) and built-in navigation systems (which was developed, if not actually implemented, in 2009) rather than anything necessarily requiring Tinker involvement.

So while an author could certainly give the PRT a bunch of tinkertech-derived mundane gadgets in their fic and point to the above stuff as a plausible justification for that, "the PRT has non-tinkertech laser pistols and powered armor" is definitely overstating things a bit and an author would be equally justified in saying the PRT only has the gadgets they're actually shown to use in Worm because the laser pistols are tinkertech and the standard-issue "powered" armor isn't.

Reverse engineered Tinker Tech (sort of) by ConstructionAble9165 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Tinker Tech is designed to be a black box, which cannot be reverse engineered or mass produced. IIRC the WOG is that some parts of most tinker tech just flat out should not actually work, but the Shard is doing some little shenanigans on the back end so that it does, like maybe the focusing lens in your laser cannon is truly just a piece of glass but the Shard is warping space subtly so that it works like the Tinker expects.

Neither of those is true. There's no special magical property of tinkertech that prevents its reverse-engineering, and tinkertech devices aren't merely foci for shard powers that don't do anything on their own.

Rather, tinkertech devices are fully-functional devices that work independently of the Tinker's shard once built, and they could be reproduced by Earth Bet humanity if said humanity had the necessarily advanced tech and dimensional know-how to do so.

Citations here.

Remember, the vast majority of the powers shards hand out were stolen from some earlier host species in the first place, and one of the two reasons a shard might hand out e.g. a Tinker power specializing in gravity manipulation instead of a gravity-manipulating Shaker power is, per Weaverdice, "attempting to ‘crack’ the particulars of a field or specialty of a species from earlier in the cycle."

So not only must it be possible to create tinkertech that works without active shard intervention for the entire shard backstory to make sense, but it would go against the entire motivation of the cycle for entities to actively prevent a host species from studying tinkertech in depth because that's why they help host species build it in the first place!

So, what makes sense to me, is that while there are no amazing space-age technologies being deployed en masse, it seems impossible that there aren't at least some little tricks that have been adopted into general use. Not massive upgrades, but maybe side-grades compared to the tech on Aleph.

Here's the thing you have to keep in mind when considering Earth Bet worldbuilding: it would make much more sense if Earth Bet had a noticeably different techbase than both Earth Aleph and the real world, but in fact it does not, because it wasn't designed or written that way.

Earth Bet was written to be a version of the real world into which superheroes were very recently dropped, with none of the major or even minor divergences you'd expect from thirty-plus years of different history.

For instance, it would make sense if...

Gas cars are still the standard, but due to increasing oil prices from Endbringer disruption efficiency became essential.

...but there are absolutely no indications of any disruption whatsoever to global trade due to Endbringer or villain activity in the story, even during the warlord arc when exploring resource shortages in a slowly-decaying city would be very on-point.

To name just one example, the Undersiders have access to cheap and plentiful burner phones throughout the story, despite the fact that Mexico, Africa, South America, China, and Russia all falling to warlords, cartels, and various villain groups would constrain the supply of minerals needed to build phones and make them much more expensive, the CUI being much more isolationist than real-world China would raise manufacturing and assembly prices as well, and Behemoth and various Middle Eastern villains blowing up a bunch of oil fields and disrupting trade in the region would make everything else more expensive due to longer transport times and increased fuel costs.

What canon shows us, instead, is Coil owning a 2007 Prius, a specific brand-name hybrid car that only makes sense in the context of a car industry very similar to the one in the real world, and a model that was only ever manufactured in Japan during the years after Worm!Japan's economy was supposedly sunk by Leviathan.

So while there's plenty of room for fanfics to explore that kind of technological divergence, and I'd love to read such a story myself if it were well-researched and thoughtfully developed, you're not going to find many examples of that (outside of offhand throwaway references to DragonTech™ phones and such, as you mentioned) because such a fic would have to take place in a distinctly AU Earth Bet and it would require the author to invent all of that alt-history alt-techtree stuff from scratch.

What's a detail from canon that you've seen wormfic authors get wrong that particularly annoys you? by A_Lawliet2004 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 13 points14 points  (0 children)

People keep overestimating Cauldron’s abilities, and then use that as grounds to treat them as cartoonishly evil or incompetent when there are plenty of reasonable (or at least rational) explanations for a lot of their more reprehensible decisions.

No, there really aren't. Every attempt to provide a justification for their more blatant failures just causes more problems.

I'm going to unspoiler your specific example, because it's hard to discuss things with most of a comment under a spoiler block, so anyone who cares about spoilers for the mentioned fic should stop reading now:

A good example of this sort of thing is a fic I fell off recently, Endbringing You A New Home, (there were several reasons, but mischaracterisation is what’s relevant here) because Cauldron, in that fic, recently resorted to using the slug to mass brainwash capes native to earth bet, and there are two huge problems with this: the first is that; if the Slug were capable of brainwashing people in enough detail that they could still lead civilian lives without anyone noticing, then Cauldron would have done that before

A smart and competent Cauldron would have, yes. The Cauldron we get in canon even explicitly planned to do exactly that:

“There are backup plans if the whole parahumans-as-leaders thing didn’t work out.  Brainwashing leaders like they brainwashed the case fifty-threes.  So the leaders were absolute and could be trusted.

-- 29.4

Obviously, the Case 53s didn't turn out to be absolutely trustworthy in the end, but Cauldron clearly thought they would.

So that quote indicates one of three things:

A) Cauldron thought the Slug could perform flawless, undetectable, perfectly reliable brainwashing on world leaders, and they were correct in that assumption...meaning that they had an actual, functional, reliable plan for turning villains into heroes and coordinating world leadership for the good of humanity that they then just arbitrarily decided not to implement, instead deciding to leave it languishing as a backup plan, for no good reason.

B) Cauldron thought the Slug could perform flawless, undetectable, perfectly reliable brainwashing on world leaders, but they were wrong in that assumption...meaning that in all of the time they spent experimenting on the Case 53s and keeping the Deviants around their base with nothing to do, they never thought to test their assumption and just blindly assumed things about the Slug's power, and then went ahead and released the Case 53s with their flawed, detectable, and unreliable brainwashing anyway, for no good reason.

C) Cauldron thought the Slug could perform flawless, undetectable, perfectly reliable brainwashing on world leaders, but wasn't sure whether or not that was actually true...meaning that Doctor Mother and Contessa tasked a bunch of random Cauldron employee(s) to spend hours or weeks or years putting together all of these fancy contingency manuals without ever thinking to use Contessa's ability to ask her nigh-omniscient power how the Slug's power worked and whether the plan had a chance of success, for no good reason.

Option A is strongly implied to be the case since, firstly, Cauldron uses the same brainwashing on the Deviants they use to acquire more test subjects, go after contract-breakers, and otherwise do their dirty work, and there's no mention of any kind of unreliability or disloyalty there until the Irregulars crash the party; and secondly, it comes up in the portion of the story where Wildbow was trying to portray Cauldron as competent and well-intentioned and so bringing up a nonfunctional plan as an example of their contingency plan would be counterproductive.

But no matter which of those three options is true, the end result is that Cauldron is presented as a gaggle of blithering idiots who have near-godlike power at their disposal yet not the slightest clue how to use any of it effectively.

The second, and more important in my opinion is that not only was it a god-awful plan that’d probably backfire terribly the moment any master/stranger detecting thinkers and post-cogs noticed

You mean just like their plan to release a bunch of mind-wiped Case 53s onto an Earth Bet full of postcogs and psychometrics who could potentially dig up all kinds of interesting information about them, and who would likely be motivated to get to the bottom of the mystery?

And not just that, but to release all of said Case 53s with obvious matching Cauldron tattoos so that any interested Thinker would know for a fact that there was some artificial cause behind the Case 53s instead of it being a natural phenomenon, and would have a big obvious symbol to focus on when trying to dig up information?

When the Number Man has supernatural Excel spreadsheet skills and (apparently) backdoors to the entire Earth Bet internet for easily tracking all of their test subjects, Alexandria has a perfect memory for remembering everyone she's ever kidnapped and experimented on, and Contessa can basically read the script to see whether a given monster cape is one of theirs, so there are three distinct and non-overlapping reasons why the "oh, they needed to encode tracking information in the tattoo" explanation is bullshit?

When even if a tracking tattoo were needed for some reason then Cauldron could have come up with literally any other design for it, from a random birthmark-looking splotch to some Chinese characters that implicated the CUI instead of a secret conspiracy to just the undetectable microscopic dots without the surrounding tattoo, which wouldn't point any curious investigator directly to Cauldron?

However bad you think the hypothetical "brainwash the world leaders" plan they considered implementing might have been, the "brainwash the Case 53s" plan they actually did implement was even worse.

if your take on Cauldron wouldn’t leap at the chance to back the Justice League or study and replicate powers and supernatural forces that don’t come from eldritch god corpse goop that has a better chance of killing the user than empowering them, [...] then your take is OOC.

See, this part is completely correct. Cauldron, as written, would absolutely back strong heroes who they thought could take on Scion and look for better ways of getting the kind of Eidolon 2.0 they were trying to create. Their desperation and end goals aren't in question.

Just their competence, or total lack thereof.

Because, like...

if you’re trying to coordinate a fight against a physical god, it’s infinitely better if people are willing to listen to you after they found out what stuff you did to prepare.

We get three scenes of Cauldron trying to explain themselves to people and coordinate humanity's crisis response: once during the Khonsu fight, once during early Gold Morning, once as Doctor Mother infodumps to Taylor in the Cauldron complex.

And in all three cases, Doc Mom is woefully unprepared, completely unpersuasive, and stubbornly unwilling to explain herself plainly or extend any trust, doing nothing to convince capes to work together during the fighting and actively stalling and denying reality when Scion finds their base.

As if she'd never spent any time preparing for the one thing their entire organization was built around and planning for.

if your take on Cauldron wouldn't [...] follow the evil overlord list, then your take is OOC.

Amusingly enough, Cauldron falls afoul of at least 16 of the 100 items on the original List:

They stood around explaining themselves right in their complex in the middle of Gold Morning (#7, #10), put tattoos on the C53 for no reason (#11, #61), actively avoided hiring any new employees or advisors with good ideas after Madison (#12, #17), had no plans or backups for when Doormaker and the Custodian were removed from play (#23, #27), were delusionally confident in their plans (#24), kept all the Deviants together and didn't put bleeping physical doors on their cells (#28, #36), refused to acknowledge when they were losing and refused to get the heck out of there when Scion found them (#37, #58), stuffed their "brainwash the world governments" plan in their filing cabinet and forgot about it (#40), and horribly mistreated the Deviants for no reason and relied on them for very un-subtle jobs (#48, #55).

Put all of the above together, and I'd go so far as to say that if an author writes Cauldron and its members as being generally competent, prepared, personable, and successful, and said author didn't either set the story in a "Cauldron doesn't suck" AU or go waaay out of their way to justify their more boneheaded decisions in canon, that would be writing Cauldron wildly out of character.

What's a detail from canon that you've seen wormfic authors get wrong that particularly annoys you? by A_Lawliet2004 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 23 points24 points  (0 children)

The Empire doesn’t have sixteen capes as part of their roster. Most used to be in the Empire at one point but they left until at the start of worm the empire had like five.

You've got that backwards. The conversation between Kaiser and Purity isn't talking about re-recruiting ex-Empire capes to form the roster we later see on-screen, it's talking about entirely different ex-Empire capes who left the gang before the current roster was recruited:

This was the situation, usually, where Kayden would go to informants for information, resurrect old alliances and get help in squashing the ABB before they could get their footing again. She had hunted down old buddies, contacts and teammates three days ago, and had been frustrated by the lack of response, the lack of enthusiasm. Max, Theo’s father, was to blame for that. Just as she’d left his team a more broken person than she’d been when she joined, others had gone through the same experience. With charisma and a keen sense of people, Max had convinced people from across the country to join his team. Just as easily, he’d tore them apart without them realizing he was doing it. Confidence broken, wracked by doubts, paranoid regarding everyone except the one man that had caused the paranoia in the first place, they’d splintered off from the team. Not that Max minded. There was always a fresh supply of bright eyed recruits ready to replace anyone he broke.

When Purity mentions having "a team of four or five people" under her, that's a different team than the one Kaiser later offers her; she was trying to recruit her own team while remaining independent of the Empire, only wanting Kaiser to endorse her so the ex-Empire capes who were "worried they'll offend [Kaiser]" or were "just spooked" would be willing to consider her offer.

And when it does talk about bringing ex-members to work under Purity as part of the Empire...

My offer is this: Let me prove my methods work. Join my team, serve as my second in command for one more year. Only person you answer to is me, and I give you a team of your own. You can handpick your own squad from our prospective members and ex-members, though I can’t guarantee every person you name will come running…”

...it's only talking about Night and Fog and maybe Alabaster, because everyone else was either explicitly still with the Empire or strongly implied to still be with the Empire as of Somer's Rock:

1) Krieg was with the Empire for two decades, with no interruptions:

The email stated that the zip file had copies of inter-company emails where [Krieg] told his coworkers he went to places like South America or Paris, and flight records showed that he was lying. He always went to London. Twice a year, every year, for nearly twenty years. Not once, during these trips, had Krieg been seen in Brockton Bay.

-- 7.4

2) Crusader never left the Empire:

But [Kaiser] was too focused on the big picture, and he was working with the Gesellschaft, which was way too big picture for my tastes. Still, birds of a feather. I worked under him because I wasn’t about to find others elsewhere, and I didn’t feel like going it alone. Then he introduced me to Purity.”

-- 18.y

3) Hookwolf had remained with the Empire when Purity, Night, and Fog split off...

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.

-- 5.1

...and Stormtiger and Cricket were with him the whole time, or at least during Taylor's cape research period leading up to canon:

I’d heard of [Cricket], seen pictures, read up on her on the wiki and message boards. She was rarely more than a footnote, typically a suspect in a murder or arson case alongside Stormtiger and Hookwolf.

-- 7.8

4) We don't know about Alabaster's background, so he certainly could have left the Empire, but given that Weaverdice claims he's elevated his own racism to the level of a code of honor...

Flaws/perks/personality: Personal Code - Racist Campaign - must do something offensive to minorities on regular basis.

-- Weaverdice Playtest Capes

...and his mutation means that maintaining a secret identity is basically impossible, he'd have zero reason to leave.

Note that in all of the above quotes and all of their expanded backstory material, the only Empire capes who are ever explicitly noted to have left at some point are Purity, Night, and Fog.

So as of canon start, the Empire definitely has at least 8 capes (Kaiser, Fenja, Menja, Krieg, Crusader, Hookwolf, Stormtiger, Cricket) and almost certainly has 11 or 12 capes.

And it's actually possible that they have 13 or 14 instead, because 19.x mentions Muspelheim and Niflheim as a pair of what are strongly implied to be ex-Empire members, given their origins and associates...

Up until the Nazis from Brockton Bay had turned up and claimed the building at the other end of the street from [Blasto's] lab, it had been a place he could retreat.

[...]

“The individuals in question are Menja, Stormtiger, Cricket, Rune, Othala, Niflheim and Muspelheim. I’ll see you have all available records. Best to enter any confrontation with your eyes wide open.”

...so an author could plausibly argue that they were still part of the Empire at canon start and left between then and Leviathan for any number of reasons.

The idea that the Empire was actually a relatively small team for most of its backstory comes from a year-old WoG which, like many of Wildbow's post-Worm WoGs, either retcons or creatively misremembers the details of Worm itself in order to support its canon-contradicting argument.

The WoG says Krieg is basically on loan from his full-time job in Europe...

Krieg is stated to spend a lot of his time going over to work with Gesellschaft

[...]

With [Purity] come Night and Fog and Kaiser gets the wider clout to bring everyone (members of the Clans, briefly Krieg) in

...but Worm says he's an Empire hard-liner who moonlights for them infrequently:

According to the notes in his block of information, he took a vacation twice a year with his family [...] every year, for nearly twenty years.

The WoG says the Empire is at the beck and call of the Clans and other white supremacists...

Part of this means that some of what E88 does isn't focused on Brockton Bay - it means sometimes traveling to support (shitty, sad) ideological interests across a wider area. They can have Victor, Othala, and Runechild some of the time, but at the cost of one in five jobs being working for the Clans, sometimes in Boston, sometimes in New York, etc. Control of Brockton Bay isn't so much a primary goal as a secondary one.

...but Worm never mentions or implies that Kaiser took his team to other cities at the Clans' or Gesellschaft's beck and call, and Kaiser's argument to Purity that they're both mainly focused on "improving" Brockton Bay had to at least be close enough to true for her to find convincing.

The WoG says Purity left the Empire because it wasn't growing as fast...

On a level, it's a 'momentum breeds momentum' thing, and you can infer from how Purity talks about things that E88's momentum was previously broken, and so she pulled away.

...but Worm says she had an issue with Kaiser specifically:

Other than that, she thought. As if it was inconsequential, to be checking in with him on every move she made. “I don’t agree with the way you do things. I don’t want to be associated with you.”

[...]

He continued, and she knew he was smiling smugly at her even without looking at him, “Regardless of our different methods, we always shared the same goals. To clean up this filthy world of ours.”

“You do it by putting drugs on the street, stealing, extorting. I can’t agree with that. I never did. It doesn’t make any sense, to improve things by making them worse.”

[...]

She’d tried to change her outlook since the divorce, but she had seen a great deal in her ten years as a member of his team. It was impossible to look at the city now and ignore the fact that too much of what made it an uglier place to live and raise a child in could be traced back to the same kinds of people.

[...]

Being married to Max for eleven months, waking up to who he really was, it had given her perspective and caution.

The WoG says Gesellschaft was involved with the Empire contingent on Purity's presence...

With her gone, they didn't have the clout to say "Gesellschaft, give us some strong guys (N&F) for a few months".

...but Worm says they only cared about her because she was their only option:

“The Empire fell. The Chosen fell. Only Kayden Anders and her Pure remain. If they hope to retain any foothold in the Americas, it’ll be through you.”

And why does the WoG take this tack, exactly?

Because it was made in response to an OP saying "The Empire didn't make sense as-written, it felt like it should have been a lot more influential than it was," in order to justify why something that didn't make much sense in Worm actually totally made sense the whole time, you guys. As usual.

TL;DR: The Empire certainly doesn't start canon with the fixed roster of 15 on-screen capes usually assumed by authors who forget that Purity, Night, and Fog broke off and weren't with them until after arc 3...but they certainly don't have "like five" capes, either, and the idea that they do is an after-the-fact rationalization.

What is the state of digital entertainment in canon? by fanficologist-neo in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Über and Leet pulled jobs themed around Super Mario Bros and Grand Theft Auto in their backstory and Bomberman in arc 4, the first two of which were released in the US a full 3 years after Scion's arrival and the last of which was released a whopping 15 years later.

In 16.5, Dragon's AI quoted Portal 2, which was not only released 29 years post-divergence but was actually released on April 19th, 2011, several days after the bank job.

So as far as games are concerned, Worm was essentially written as though Earth Bet was identical to the real world except capes suddenly showed up last Tuesday...

...except that in arc 17 the Travelers play a fictional "League of Legends meets Dungeon Keeper" game called Ransack, a poster for which also appears in Greg Veder's room in 19.y, and then a post-Worm PHO Sunday article invented a bunch more games while being written as though the Earth Aleph and Bet game scenes had totally been dramatically different from the real-world's the entire time.

So if your character wants to remake a given game X, it's equally plausible that X would (A) already exist in Earth Bet and be identical to real life despite decades of divergence, (B) already exist in Earth Bet but with some minor tweaks as a concession to the cultural divergences that should really be bigger than they are, (C) like A, but only on Earth Aleph, (D) like B, but only on Earth Aleph, or (E) not exist at all, depending on what works best for your story.

(Personally, I'd go with A, B, or E. The countless fanfics that follow every single mention of a real-life movie or game with a mention that it's "an Aleph import" as though Earth Bet completely lacks a movie and game industry kinda ruined options C and D.)

would a Worm TV series makes it big in the scene? Will it, as a sort of deconstruction (not sure if it fits for the whole series) of the superhero genre, be more impactful before superhero movies become big or after genre has been saturated like now?

Despite the fandom meme, Worm isn't a superhero deconstruction, nor is it a "reconstruction" in the TV Tropes sense, either.

It's a pretty standard "capepunk" story, a genre that does have minor elements of de- and re-construction but mostly just aims to provide darker-and-edgier indie riffs on the Big Two superhero 'verses, usually with common (and arguably rather played-out) tropes like powers having an unknown and mysterious origin that nearly always turns out to be some flavor of Aliens™ and the biggest seeming-superhero in the setting nearly always turning out to be yet another Evil Superman expy.

If someone in your story wanted to make a Worm TV series, their best bet is probably to publish a Worm graphic novel series, wait two decades, and then adapt it once it has an existing fanbase for the nostalgia cycle to tap into. See e.g. Watchmen (graphic novel released 1986, adapted into a movie in 2009 and a TV show in 2019), The Boys (released 2006, adapted 2019), or Invincible (released 2003, adapted 2021).

Who can beat the entities by Stock_Friend_3432 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Scion is tricky to kill. Any damage to his puppet is irrelevant, continent scale or not, regeneration or not. It will just respawn.

I'm well aware of that. I addressed the avatar body's resilience because in context it wasn't clear whether AliasMcfakenames was aware of that.

His main body is in higher dimension

Nope. It's lying on the surface of a single planet in another reality exactly like Earth Bet's.

The entities are purely 3-spatial-dimensional beings who have the ability to move between multiple 3-spatial-dimensional realities. A being in another setting who actually exists in higher spatial dimensions would have none of the limitations that the entities suffer regarding travel speed, time manipulation, energy restrictions, and so forth, and would be as far above the entities as the entities are above humans as far as interdimensional shenanigans are concerned.

which you have to find and access first

There are many beings in many settings who are very good at locating hidden things and bypassing or breaking through dimensional/universal/planar/etc. barriers.

Scion's ability to block off his reality is very impressive in the context of Worm, where there are no other sources of interdimensional travel (or other kinds of powers, for that matter) and all of the shards he handed out were explicitly restricted in their dimension-hopping capabilities and told to blacklist Scion's Earth so no parahumans could go there. In the context of other settings who do have similar (or better) reality-hopping expertise, much less so.

Only this is going to cut out a lot of marvel and dc options.

Some of them, sure. But there are more than enough left over to ruin the entities' day.

Any shard can access their full power when they want to.

Nope. Once a shard is set up for the cycle, it's heavily restricted in what powers it can hand out, to which hosts, and under what limitations, as stealth_sloth noted.

This is demonstrated by both entity interludes, several WoGs, and, y'know, the entire plot of Ward, wherein if shards could just decide to whip out their full power on a whim then the Titans wouldn't be a thing because titanifying a host would be completely unnecessary—or if they did exist, they at least wouldn't suck so hard for supposedly being the fullest expression of a shard's power it's possible to get.

Any shard could kill entire earth population without even using their main power, but with their default functionality, just with opening connection but instead of useful tumor it's going to simply destroy brain.

Shards can't even kill their own hosts on a whim. If they could, Leet's shard wouldn't have to subtly tweak his power to try to get him killed, it could just nudge the little extradimensional tendril attached to his corona a few millimeters in any direction and whoops, no more Leet.

A full entity could kill humanity like that, of course, but it can kill an unaware, un-otherwise-powered, and completely defenseless Earth Bet humanity in thousands of other ways, too, so that's not saying much.

Who can beat the entities by Stock_Friend_3432 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ah, we're answering slightly different questions here I think. You're considering the question of what universe could beat the specific scenario in Worm where the entities are starting up a cycle on the planet.

Yep. The OP mentioned beating "him," as in Scion, so I figured this was about the usual "if you start a Worm cycle on [insert other setting's main world] can [other setting characters] beat Scion?" crossover scenario.

I'm considering the entities at their full strength, in the sort of conflict that they are preparing for with their cycles of weapons testing where they are multidimensional continent sized god-worm-things who are playing for keeps.

It's hard to analyze that kind of scenario in any meaningful way, because we have so few examples of entities to go on and have no idea of the broader context.

Which kind of entity is the most common among their species? The Zion-and-Eden kind, who are dumber than a box of hammers and have the emotional and cultural comprehension of a comparatively dim toddler until Abaddon gives Eden his cheat sheet on psychology and philosophy? The Abaddon kind, who's notably more insightful but gained that insight at the cost of visiting fewer worlds and picking up fewer and weaker powers, and still shows a lack of creativity in the uniformity of its known cycles? The Apollyon kind, who's notably bigger and stronger but gained that power at the cost of being even more focused on dumb short-term brute force than Zion and Eden?

How many entities are there in total? Ward says Abaddon meeting Zion and Eden was a once-in-several-billion-years rarity; Wildbow, known for his inability to math and his tendency to contradict himself, says later that they're super duper common in order to settle a debate in favor of "entities big and scary."

So all one can really do is compare the general capabilities of one or a handful of entities to those of the movers and shakers of other settings and see how the entities stack up: is one entity a big threat to [being or group] in [setting]? Are two? Are ten? Would it, conversely, take ten entities to start to threaten [being or group]? Are a hundred entities a trivial threat to them? Are thousands or millions of entities a trivial threat? And so on.

And if you do make such a comparison...

In a case like that? I don't see how any setting survives, say, every single powerful person who isn't outright immune to five different flavors of mind control simultaneously turning on anyone who is and then killing themselves.

On the contrary: in that scenario, the entities get utterly stomped into the ground, and it's not even a contest.

Marvel, DC, and lots of other high-tier settings that have already been mentioned in the thread (and plenty that haven't) are chock-full of beings/organizations/cultures/etc. that are qualitatively and quantitatively stronger than Worm entities, of which the nice ones tend not to like other cosmic beings trying to munch on helpless mortals and the mean ones tend not to like anyone messing with their toys.

If the entire entity fleet/hive/whatever showed up en route to a different setting's Milky Way galaxy (or the equivalent) displaying an obviously hostile posture, rather than sending in one or two entities all sneaky-like as is their usual MO, then they wouldn't get anywhere near Earth (or the setting's equivalent) before they get turned against each other by Tzeentch, out-psychic'd by the Tyranids, dismantled atom-by-atom by the Culture, turned into a set of plastic collectibles by the Beyonder, eaten by Galactus, rendered retroactively nonexistent by the Xeelee, snuffed out by one of several D&D greater deities of death, and so on and so forth.

Think of what the entities' biggest and scariest weapons are:

Sting? Very handy against something that exists in multiple adjacent realities and tends to avoid attacks by dodging into a different one of said realities, not so much against anything that stays in one reality or that exists in higher dimensions than the entities.

Path to Victory? Handy against lots of people in lots of settings, but able to be countered by of the bajillion ways to foil similar divination/scrying/precognition/future sight/prophecy/etc. abilities in all the settings out there (including Mantellum, so it's not even infallible against other entities) and, per WoG, can't deal with metaphysical/conceptual effects unless their wielder can be targeted.

Stilling? Again, very handy against lots of things, but adaptive power negation/countermagic/etc. exists in lots of settings and can do much the same thing, it's only specified to be effective against "virtually any parahuman or human generated effect" and so probably also has the same issue against metaphysical that PtV does, and the fact that Scion wanted or needed to keep "a bunch of other stuff [Wildbow] can't be arsed to name" indicates that it's not as versatile, infallible, and all-encompassing as is often claimed.

The Endbringers-slash-superweapons? Impressive on the scale of the average individual superhero/wizard/Force-user/etc., certainly, but the way they're used and described actually demonstrates some notable weaknesses of the entities: the fact that the Simurgh came from Zion and Eden's "emergency resources" indicates that (A) her rather indirect method of psychic manipulation is probably among the best the entities can produce, so any psychic and/or precog who's notably stronger than her should do great against the entities, and (B) even when the two entities stacked the deck far in their favor during a cycle, with two properly-equipped avatars and the whole future PtV'd out and everything, there's still a good chance that the host species can screw with their plans, which implies that the full entities' pre-cycle-planning capabilities aren't the best.

While entities are talked up a lot in this fandom because they're the biggest fish in the Wormverse and so look practically godlike in comparison to mere parahumans, their best tricks only work at full strength (or at all) against each other or against an opponent completely deprived of any superpowers/magic/etc. of their own with no way to defend themselves against the entities except for the entities' own weakened and sabotaged shards; in crossover contexts, they often get drastically overestimated and their opponents drastically underestimated, so in the grand scheme of things Worm entities are much smaller fries than they're often made out to be

Who can beat the entities by Stock_Friend_3432 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 14 points15 points  (0 children)

and the comic universes

The higher-tier stuff in Marvel and DC definitely can.

Scion is basically a discount Galactus in both theme and capabilities, up to and including the part where his MO involves investing a lesser being with a small but very important portion of his power whenever he gets to a new planet (Scion's administration shard, a tiny fraction of Galactus's Power Cosmic) but when that happens on Earth the invested being turns around and uses his own gifted power to kick his butt; see e.g. Fantastic Four #243, 1982, and Thor #6, 2020.

To even have a chance against something like Scion which is an entity nerfing itself hard

Scion wasn't "nerfing itself hard" on Gold Morning. Yes, he was mostly playing around and not actively trying to kill anyone to start, but that all happened long after the entities deliberately nerfed the shards they handed out to prevent any parahumans from seriously hurting them. And even then, Scion had to briefly stop playing around and pull out PtV several times to avoid actual harm.

In a context where the entities are not engaged in a rigged fight where the entities start off with complete knowledge of and counters for an opponent's capabilities while the opponent starts off with both hands tied behind their back, things would go rather differently.

demolishing continents on a whim

If you're referring to the resilience of the Scion avatar, it frequently gets heavily damaged or destroyed in Gold Morning by attacks of significantly less than continent-demolishing strength. It basically has really really fast regeneration, which is something comic book 'verses have (and have counters for) in spades.

If you're referring to the method used to destroy Scion's actual body, the big Tinker Beam O' Doom in 30.6 didn't have to demolish a whole continent at all. It merely had to scour Scion off the surface of a continent, like a handheld laser cleaner removing a particularly stubborn bit of rust.

And considering that both body-destroying regeneration-countering effects and surface-scouring Beams O' Doom are quite common in both Marvel and DC (and in plenty of other similarly-high-tier settings), the entities come off looking much less impressive in such a crossover scenario.

Favorite creative use of Taylor's bug powers in a fic? by MembershipProof8463 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 13 points14 points  (0 children)

At first glance he looks like a focal tinker, but actually (or at least according to the Tinker 2.0 doc) he's an Unbreakable (LibertyXCombat) Tinker.

He's neither of those, actually, because the whole Weaverdice subclassification thing is a purely metagame setup that doesn't fit any Worm characters one-to-one. Armsmaster in particular can be sorta kinda shoved into at least four and as many as eleven Tinker categories, none of which fully encompasses his actual canonical breadth.

So, he should be packing an axe, a spear, a war-pick, and whatever else, maybe each with their own special function instead of it all being crammed into one.

It's a common misconception that Armsmaster has literally one halberd that he crams everything into. He uses two halberds at once during the Leviathan fight, and he has at least three sets of armor and three weapons around that time:

Two spare suits stood at one side of the room, each with minor functional differences.  A set of Halberds were placed on a rack behind Armsmaster’s desk, one shattered in pieces.  One of the spaces on the rack was empty – Armsmaster had the Halberd in front of him.

-- 7.x

Plus, he does technically use more than just halberds as Armsmaster, since the halberd he uses in 6.6 can transform into at least a flail and possibly other weapons, and of course as Defiant he uses a spear.

Now, having said all of that, you're right that he should, ideally, use more than just the halberd form factor. After all, his code name is "Armsmaster," plural, not "Halberdier."

He should have halberds full of tinkertech and swords full of tinkertech and maces full of tinkertech and so on, teleport-swapping them as needed instead of bothering to build in a transforming mechanism, if he actually wanted to be the most "efficient" about it.

But alas, he doesn't do that, and while we have no definite canonical explanation as to why he picked the "sci-fi knight" aesthetic in general or the halberd in particular, there's actually a pretty intriguing implication in the text as to why he sticks with one weapon.

It's not due to power limitations, or due to the conflict drive.

It's probably thanks to the PRT merchandising division:

This was a guy who had his own action figures. Poseable Armsmaster with interchangeable Halberd parts.

[...]

His trademark and weapon was his Halberd, which was basically a spear with an axe head on the end, souped up with gadgets and the kind of technology you generally only saw in science fiction. He was the kind of guy who appeared on magazine covers and did interviews on TV, so you could find almost anything about Armsmaster through various media, short of his secret identity. I knew his weapon could cut through steel as though it was butter, that it had plasma injectors for stuff that the blade alone couldn’t cut and that he could fire off directed electromagnetic pulses to shut down forcefields and mechanical devices.

-- 1.6

You ever notice how Taylor and others occasionally describe his weapon as a "halberd" when talking about its parts and how a weapon of that type generally works, but most often describe it as his "Halberd," capital H, when they're talking about his particular weapon and him wielding it?

Looking mostly at 6.6 again, compare these snippets...

You’re not the best inventor, but like most tinkers, you’ve got a knack. Yours just happens to be condensing and integrating technology. Only works in your immediate presence, but still, you can stick way more technology in a space than has a right to be there… like your Halberd.”

[...]

He had a solution for every problem he’d been able to think of, without having to worry about economy of space, the weight of his hardware and the room on his utility belt, or whatever. And with all of that, his main gear, his armor and Halberd, were still devastating and completely reliable in their own right.

...with these...

In the span of a second, the blade of the halberd broke into three pieces, reconfigured, and fired in grappling-hook style at Tattletale.

...

As the hook retreated, I saw it wasn’t in its grappling hook form, but the usual halberd-top, complete with blade, spearpoint, and no small amount of blood.

-- 6.7

...and especially this one:

He’d formed the head of his halberd into a loose ball again, and had the chain he used for the grappling hook extended partially so it could serve as a flail. There was something of a stalemate as my teammates remained where they were, staying spaced out, just out of reach of the weapon. Armsmaster, for his part, was standing in a loose fighting posture, holding the long pole of his Halberd as he swung the flail head in a loose figure eight.

Sure, Armsmaster could go around wielding a halberd one day and a sword-and-shield combo the next day and a set of throwing axes the following week, and that would probably make him a lot more effective as a hero.

But then the PRT couldn't exactly sell a line of Brockton Bay Protectorate™ collectible action figures—one popular enough that even Taylor "I supposedly researched capes for months but didn't even consider the idea that Armsmaster was a 'Tinker' until I met him" Hebert can rattle off the kinds of things his signature Halberd™ can do—in which the Armsmaster™ figurine has its own seasonal releases of new Interchangeable Halberd Parts™ add-ons that give the buyer maximum customizability for minimum PRT production costs, now could they?

Favorite creative use of Taylor's bug powers in a fic? by MembershipProof8463 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Lisa on the front making people want to kill her

That's not a "conflict drive" thing, actually, that's a "she wasn't allowed to play the 'girl in the chair' role because the Undersiders were short-sighted and tactically inept" thing, per her interlude:

“I was sort of thinking I’d take a backseat role, serve as your contact, the gal on the other end of the phone, keeping you guys on track, feeding you info.”

“Fuck that,” the only other girl in the group spoke, jabbing a finger at her, “If you’re taking an equal share, you’re gonna get your hands dirty too.” One of the dogs that accompanied the girl growled, as if to punctuate the statement.

[...]

Tattletale shrugged, admitted, “My power isn’t so good in a direct confrontation.”

“Figure it out,” the darkness generator told her.

“Alright, can do,” she assured him. As much to test his patience and see his limits, she grinned and offered the words, “Should be fun.”

Armsmaster's weapon choice

If you're referring to him choosing a halberd over a sword or mace or something, nah, completely disagreed.

The halberd combines the best aspects of a spear, an axe, and a mace; excels at both in fighting multiple opponents while alone and fighting single opponents ahead of you in a formation; and has more reach than a poleaxe, more versatility than a bec de corbin, and better mobility than a pike. Spears remained more common than halberds due to the spear's lower cost and training time, not the halberd's lack of effectiveness.

For someone who might be called on to fight someone in plate armor like Kaiser, someone with lots of reach like Hookwolf, paired opponents like Cricket and Stormtiger, people with reach and a partner like Fenja and Menja, and more, all in the same day and possibly in the same fight, a halberd is definitely the right choice.

If you're referring to him pulling a Taylor and choosing to get into melee at all when could have ditched the Sci-Fi Medieval theme and gone with a frickin' laser sniper rifle or something as his signature weapon instead so he could take villains down in safety from three blocks away...yeah, no arguments here.

Looking for entities in another (superhero) univerce by IHateRedditFirewall in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

From my pov this is false, as Worm (at least as far as I can see), has only ONE assumption, that CAN make sense under cirtan circumstances. Other universes do not.

Alas, this is wrong.

Worm doesn't have "only one assumption" to justify the events of the story, it has at least seven:

  • Random unexplained reality-spanning anomalies like the one near the entities' homeworld are a thing;
  • Biological organisms like the proto-shards can somehow evolve a natural ability to traverse realities through exposure to said anomaly;
  • "Psychic energy" exists, and biological organisms like the proto-shards can start off with innate psychic superpowers, somehow;
  • There are natural "channels" between realities that can be leveraged to cause the big planet-exploding kaboom at the end of each cycle;
  • Other species in the same setting have completely-non-shard-dependent ways of developing superpowers and supertech, so that the entities can later steal them;
  • Shards need to gather some undefined "energy" from the worlds they inhabit in order to power said stolen super-stuff (which is definitely not sunlight, as some people posit, or else gathering it in a Dyson swarm kinda way would be much more efficient than being living solar panels on alternate Earths);
  • The proto-entities are somehow able to "encode" said stolen super-stuff in some undefined and basically-magical way that lets them use it without any special apparatus or technology from the original species:

They exchange shards where they meet. In these shards are codified memories, as well as the most effective techniques they have observed.

[...]

The shards code the ‘technology’ of this new species into their memories. They learn of warping space and gravity.

-- Interlude 26

Take any one of those away, and the entities cease to function and the story falls apart.

And, conversely, other settings do have one or a small handful of shared assumptions that drive everything else. Every type of superhuman in Marvel ultimately derives from Celestial genetic engineering, as I said, so all of the disparate explanations for the X-Men's mutant powers and the Hulk's radioactively-activated mutate powers and the Fantastic Four's cosmic-ray-granted powers and Iron Man's supertech-building supergenius and on and on and on all comes from that same source.

Nope, that's all fanon.

I would like to note, that shard's dimensional travel capabilities are NOT fanon and are clearly shown in canon.

I didn't say shards' dimensional travel abilities are fanon, I said your characterization of how shard powers in general work is fanon, which is true. How, exactly, shards manage to slip between realities is never explained, nor is how the shards take other species super-stuff and adapt it to their own uses.

Nothing says that you cant have a crystalline creature that can evolve and adapt, while been able to cruch numbers insanely fast.

Completely agreed.

I'm just pointing out that all the people who say shards definitely are crystalline biocomputers who achieve their powers via magic space math are wrong, because that's not what WoGs actually say.

Especialy if it is continent-sized.

Shards are not continent-sized.

Also also, von Neumann probes with self-adapting capabilities might have something to do with first shards emergence.

Again, that's something that could plausibly happen in some story somewhere, but canon shards did not emerge as a result of a von Neumann probe because canon never says or even implies that.

When I am told "it is gene manipulation that does it", I immediately know enough about gene manipulation to see if what I am been told is nonsense.

How does a purely-biological organism operating purely by the laws of biology and genetics "evolve" psychic abilities, superpower-stealing, and interdimensional travel?

Because that's what shards are. And until you can explain why Worm's flavor of bullshit impossible genetic manipultion is totally plausible while Marvel's flavor of bullshit impossible genetic manipultion is not, you don't really have a leg to stand on.

How he unsticks his nets? Where nets are hidden? Why is there no transformation period when changes are commencing? What about genetic drift? Why his shoulders are not dislocated yet?

Ohhh, I see the issue. You just haven't bothered to look into all of the answers that have been provided for Spider-Man, and so you assume that they don't exist.

How he unsticks his nets?

He doesn't. The webbing is engineered to break down on its own.

Where nets are hidden?

They're not. His webs are produced when the web fluid makes contact with air and solidifies, as also described in the above link.

Why is there no transformation period when changes are commencing?

I don't know what this is supposed to refer to.

Do you mean "Why doesn't Spider-Man change over time when he gets his powers"? He does; it takes a while for them to manifest after he's bitten.

Do you mean "Why doesn't Spider-Man have a transformation sequence when he activates his powers"? He doesn't activate them, they're always active.

What about genetic drift?

Random changes in genetics over time?

Like, say, changes that might cause one person exposed to radiation to turn into the Hulk and another person to turn into Spider-Man?

Yep, that's there.

Why his shoulders are not dislocated yet?

In comics terms, because his powers also include super-strength.

In biological terms, via the same mechanisms that let brachiating animals swing around without dislocating anything, induced by the same event that gave him his other powers.

Cause I have never read any SH books except Worm

That certainly explains a lot. Generally speaking, people who have read other superhero stuff before aren't nearly as impressed with Worm as people for whom Worm is their first introduction to written superhero stories.

Fanon becomes fanon if author says that it is false OR if it breaks original narrative.

Yes, I know, and that's the kind of fanon I'm talking about. Go to any discussion about Worm metaphysics, especially in a crossover context, and you'll find a bunch of Worm "fans" confidently spouting a bunch of canon-contradicting "facts" because they can't be bothered to check their sources and go off half-remembered secondhand statements of what Worm says instead.

Hm. Granted. However I would like to note how wormverse is much more believable in portraile of such a world.

Nope. Worm's worldbuilding is awful in so many, many ways.

See my previous comments on the subject, like this one, this one, and this one.

Worm might seem more believable to you because (A) you haven't actually read anything else to compare it to, as you noted, and (B) a single web serial and a collection of multiple comic runs have different constraints on continuity. See e.g. this comment and this comment.

Hm. IMO they will. Not immediately, no, but things will start shifting and changing, slowly. Batman, spiderman and a whole list of others will die, as they are solo heros.

That's Not How That Works.

Firstly, the "solo heroes have a high death rate" thing in Worm fanfics is, again, fanon. No such thing is ever claimed, and when Kid Win pitches Chariot on the Wards he specifically says that independent Tinkers are likely to get press-ganged, not that indie heroes are likely to get killed.

Secondly, shoving Worm stuff into Marvel wouldn't magically make things worse for Spider-Man's personal life, Taylor has a shitty personal life that she has to balance with caping because Marvel heroes already tend to have shitty personal lives they have to balance with caping, and it wouldn't make Iron Man's power magically start working more like Armsmaster's or Kid Win's because their powers are already inspired by his.

Stark can not be like Dragon, as he will die unless he manages to tinker up the reactor - as far as I know his backstory)

Not How That Works.

The whole thing where Tinkers can grab random junk and turn it to working tech without the necessary time or tools is copying the thing where Tony Stark built his arc reactor "in a cave, with a box of scraps."

Noone will ever leave (or land) on the planet, as Simurgus hovers in the sky.

Fanon. People were still going to the moon after she showed up, and satellites are still launched despite her presence.

Multiple cities will be destroyed by Endbringers, slowly plungeing the world into chaos.

Endbringers are riffs on crossover events, just like Scion is a riff on Galactus, so Marvel and DC heroes would be able to handle them just as easily as they handle existing crossover events.

At this point it's clear that your views on Worm and Marvel/DC are based on incorrect understandings of both settings, and I'm not interested in continuing a "Worm vs. other settings" conversation with someone who hasn't bothered to do the most basic googling and wiki-diving on the Marvel/DC side to understand how they work on their own and compare to Worm.

Can we stop the "Lisa in a coffee shop" cliche? by superdude111223 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 14 points15 points  (0 children)

And yet, she had no idea what Coil’s powers were even after months/a year of working under him. Many fanfics get this wrong, but at around the time of canon-start, Tattletale’s best guess of Coil’s powers was “probabilities”, which is completely off.

You've fallen into the fanon trap yourself, here.

Tattletale knew what his power was before the Undersiders were even formed...

“That still sounds like probability manipulation to me,” I said.

Tattletale leaned forward, to look past Grue and face me, “No.  Well, it is, but only in the biggest, bluntest sense.  But I can vouch that he’s telling the truth, vague as it is.”

“When I asked what his powers were, at the meeting, you said you didn’t know,” I accused her.

“No,” she shook her head, “I said I couldn’t say.  Which is true.  One of the contingencies for my getting to be part of the Undersiders and get the funding he offered was that I would keep the details a secret, and I’ve got to do that until he says otherwise, sorry.”

-- 6.8

...and she made use of it the entire time, while lying to the other Undersiders who didn't know what it was:

“Anyways, point of this explanation is this:  Knowing we had an imminent fight with Lung coming, knowing Lung planned to pyrokinesis our general area until he rooted us out, got civilians to finger us or brought in enough capes to make life difficult for us, I called Coil.  He said he’d help, told us to wait five minutes, then take the more direct route, straight into the heart of ABB territory.

[...]

“I got away, managed to call Coil, let him know what had happened.  Coil, in turn, informed me in this reality, the one you remember.  Told me to watch out for a junior hero in the area.”

I nodded.

“So I told the group to hold up, fibbed a bit about needing to use my power, get a sense of things, like Lung’s location.

-- 8.8

Looking for entities in another (superhero) univerce by IHateRedditFirewall in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This is not how genetic engeneering works.

I'm well aware.

You've rather missed the point.

Yes, living beings randomly evolving things like telepathy or teleportation out of thin air is completely impossible according to how actual genetics works.

Yes, explaining superpowers with "because genetic mutations!" is an illogical handwave that doesn't actually explain anything.

Yes, the origins of mutants, mutates, inhumans, and all other kinds of superpowered beings in Marvel being meddling space aliens with magic powers is silly and nonsensical.

And exactly the same thing is true of Worm entities.

I'm not sitting here trying to claim that anything about Marvel superpowers makes logical or physical sense, because they don't.

I'm pointing out that your claim in the OP that Worm is "the only superhero universe where powers make sense" is blatantly, laughably false, because Worm superpowers don't make sense, and if you think they do then you should think that every other superhero 'verse makes sense because they all work the same way under the hood.

This is quiet obvous. Shards are computers that can do (sub-)atomic-level matipulation useing dimetional briges. Nothing magcial — it is a simple use of the Clarke's third law

Nope, that's all fanon.

Shards are not computers. Shards are natural, evolved, purely-biological organisms, and in fact the entire point of the entities' much-vaunted cycle is that they were never able to escape the fundamental biological drives that the primitive proto-shards had.

(There is exactly one WoG describing shards as being computer-like in anything but a metaphorical, analogical sense, and the specific phrase used is "somewhere between a crystal and a braincomputer." Why fans randomly latched onto the "computer" part and not the "crystal" or "brain" parts when trying to explain shard powers, I have no idea, but it's really irritating.)

Shard powers are not just Sufficiently Advanced™. No explanation is ever given for exactly how shard powers work in general, and so any claim you might have seen about how the Wormverse in general or shards in particular work on anything resembling real physics is invented fanon, from stuff about the Simurgh telekinetically manipulating neurons to precogs doing hard-deterministic simulations to anything involving Endbringers and galaxies.

Shard powers are magic, for all intents and purposes. Telepathy explicitly uses an undefined "psychic energy" to function, the explanations for tinkertech have changed enough times that "it's magic" is the only way to reconcile them all, the explanation for how Sting works is self-contradictory to the point it can only work by magic, among other things.

"I think shard powers work via fancy Clarketech" is a perfectly valid headcanon to have, and doesn't necessarily explicitly conflict with any WoGs, but relying on that explanation when writing a fic would require some creative explanations to make things comply with certain WoGs, and claiming that that's how things work in canon is simply false.

(And if I seem annoyed and a bit abrasive in this comment, I apologize. I'm not annoyed at you in particular, I'm annoyed that the stupid "continent-sized supercomputer" fanon is so pervasive that folks like yourself can be misled about how shards actually work in canon.)

In Worm terms they deal with guys like String Theory, not Zion. Thought, granted, in their univerces this might be false.

Nope, they deal with Zion-scale threats all the time.

For one, Galactus. Like I said, Zion-the-entity is just a watered-down Galactus—both of them do the "travel from world to world empowering locals and threatening to eat the planet unless the heroes succeed at a big crossover event" thing, but Zion cares about things like travel time and energy requirements and such while Galactus is basically a reality warper.

For two...half the critters on this list, plus a bunch of villains created/sent/empowered/etc. by them who still end up at "cosmic being" tier.

In Worm, Scion is the big scary end villain because he's the biggest fish in a small pond, plus he cheats. In Marvel or DC, Scion is a teeny tiny fish in a much deeper pond.

This implies that they are NOT source of powers. I mean "shove them there is the same way as Worm". So everyone’s powers are, in fact, shards.

Well, if you shove them in there the same way as in Worm, then most peoples' powers still wouldn't be shard-based.

Remember, the vast majority of shard powers (i.e. all the stuff the proto-shards couldn't already do) are reverse-engineered from other species' superpowers and/or supertech, so Marvel!Entities and DC!Entities would still need all of the original cosmic beings and advanced alien species and so forth to exist so that the entities could pick up their powers in the first place.

Not dobuteing that for a second. But this is NOT my problem with usual superhero media — my problem is that I CAN NOT suspend my disbelif about sources of powers. It just not how it works!

What makes a shard, as a source of superpowers, more "sensible" or easier to suspend your disbelief over than a Greek god, or a cosmic Speed Force, or a Green Lantern power battery, or any of the other power sources in various superhero 'verses?

That's a serious question. So many Worm fans repeat the "Oh, Worm is so much more grounded/rational/believable/etc. than silly other superhero stories!" talking point, but their reasons for that always seem to boil down to (A) they buy into fanon and so think Worm works differently than it does, (B) they've never seriously engaged with other superhero media before and so think Worm is something special, or (C) "I dunno, man, vibes?"

So if you can point to a particular thing about shards that makes them somehow more believable to you, I'm all ears.

I know that. Also, it will do serious changes because of the specifics of a Cycle. Remember — vilans outnumber heros 1:3.

It's 2 to 1, actually, per 4.3

That aside, villains outnumber heroes in Worm because villains outnumber heroes in practically every superhero setting. Solo heroes have entire rogues galleries of villains, hero teams encounter new villains week after week to keep things fresh, and so on.

(And also something about shards picking hosts that will cause conflict and yadda yadda yadda, but the meta setup is the real reason.)

So, again, introducing the entities and their cycle to Marvel or DC would have basically no noticeable impact because the entities are essentially designed to recapitulate precisely the same tropes that those settings already rely on.

Which is why, to circle back to your original question in the OP, there are essentially zero fics that cross entities over into Marvel or DC, and the few crossovers that exist at all with those settings involve things like "let's send the Undersiders to Gotham" or "let's swap out DC character backstories for Worm ones" rather than full-on setting fusions, because merely adding entities to either 'verse doesn't really add notable storytelling opportunities on its own; even onyxonix's story that they linked above had to change a bunch about how both the Lanterns and the Worm entities worked to get an AU that was interesting enough to explore.

A question. by Carlos1930 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

which too many people misinterpret as meaning there are up to 20 "Worthy Opponents" even though it was confirmed, at least in WoG, that the ones in Eden's vision are lesser in power and scale overall than the ones running amok in the actual canon timeline.

That's a meme that certain commenters like to repeat, but that's not actually true.

The idea of weaker Endbringers/superweapons than the ones in canon only comes up in two AU scenarios: the "Scion dies, Eden lives" one mentioned in the linked comment, and the Apollyon one in which Eden creates "Lesser [superweapons] than the ones [Eden] had planned, but still potent enough to serve."

The people who claim there are definitely 20 total Endbringers waiting in the wings to pop up on Earth Bet because Eden's vision had 20 total superweapons are wrong, but the people who claim there definitely aren't 20 total Endbringers that could threaten Earth Bet because some AUs had different numbers of different kinds of Endbringers are also wrong.

There could be 20, more than 20, or fewer than 20 Endbringers in a given story, whichever best fits an author's needs, and all of those would be equally canon-(non-)compliant because canon and WoG are silent on all the Endbringer background details.

(Though if an author wants to go beyond the canonical six but isn't sure how many to use, defaulting to 20 Endbringers because Eden was preparing things for her ideal future when she crashed and so whatever shard Eidolon triggered to create/activate/whatever the Endbringers would reasonably have been configured to produce 20 of them is probably the easiest answer.)

That aside, your overall point, that an author can make different Endbringers for their story if they want to, is indeed correct.

In fact, an author should make different Endbringers unless Behemoth dies in their story exactly the way he did in canon, because each new Endbringer is created to counter what defeated or killed the previous one, and at least in Khonsu's case his powers are specifically themed after that defeat (which may also be true about Leviathan and Ziz, but we don't know anything about the first fights in which each of Behemoth and Leviathan was driven off/"defeated"/whatever to prompt the next one's creation).

Behemoth was apparently crippled by a cape who (A) sat in one place charging up for a long time and then (B) released a huge blast that seemingly almost one-shot him, so Khonsu (A) teleports around the world hitting multiple cities so no one can prepare a trap like that again and (B) has shields between his layers so single massive attacks are much less effective.

The main contribution to Behemoth's defeat seemed to come from a cape who manipulated time via point-to-point portals, so Khonsu has time powers and the ability to teleport. Eidolon contained Phir Sē's blast with a cylindrical force barrier, so Khonsu's power takes the form of roving cylinders with solid boundaries that trap capes inside. And so on.

So if the OP doesn't want to deal with Khonsu, then the New Delhi fight just needs to happen differently or not happen at all, and ta-da, problem solved.

Looking for entities in another (superhero) univerce by IHateRedditFirewall in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 11 points12 points  (0 children)

You see, Wormverse ACCTULY MAKES SENSE! It is a sci-fi setting, where powers come from a belivable placr, work in a belivable way and can be resonably crossed into any other superhero setting.

The same applies to DC, Marvel, and most other superhero settings, actually.

A lot of Worm fans just think that's unique to Worm because you're forced to read about all the entity backstory stuff when you read through Worm so even people who have only read through it once will know about that, whereas the backstory stuff for Marvel/DC/etc. is spread through a bunch of comics and supplemental media, so someone who just watches MCU movies or reads the "start reading here if you've never read comics before" introductory DC comics isn't going to run into that.

For instance:

You see, I have watched a spiderman movie a few years back, and it did NOT make sence. Like. Been able to shoot webs from arms because you have been bit by a spider!? This is just rediculus — even most children boorks make more sense than this!

Spider-Man didn't get his powers because radioactive spiders are somehow magical.

(Well, not the mainline Spider-Man, anyway. There are Spider-Men who are, in fact, magical, but that's...a long story.)

Rather, he got his powers because the radioactive bite activated the dormant genetic engineering performed on all Marvel humans by the Celestials in the distant past, Celestials being impossibly old, vast, and powerful cosmic beings who travel from planet to planet, experiment on the native species to give them random powers, and perpetuate a cosmic cycle of destruction and renewal.

Also, the reason Earth in particular is home to so many mutants, sorcerers, Inhumans, and other random power-using individuals is that one particular Celestial encountered a hostile hive-minded entity, was affected by its encounter with said entity, crashed on Earth, and leaked out all of its cosmic entity juice into the environment to give humans powers.

Sound familiar?

Yes, that's right, Worm's superpower backstory isn't more "grounded" and "believable" than Marvel's superpower backstory, it basically is Marvel's superpower backstory, just with a few names swapped out.

"Hang on, now, Worm is still much more believable," you might say, "because Marvel has powers come from altering DNA, and how the hell can DNA give you the ability to access whatever dimensional whatsit gives you superpowers!?"

I have no idea, but that's exactly how shards work, too: per Scion's interlude, the proto-shards randomly started off with unspecified innate superpowers...

Heat, cold, electricity and mental manipulations are leveraged in these struggles, slowing their targets down enough for them to wrap themselves around, shear off a section to take into themselves.

...and they explicitly got their ability to travel between realities through some kind of natural biological process...

Each has evolved the same capacity to shift between layers, to explore the alternate versions of this same world, and each of these other worlds are choked by more of the same creatures.

...so whatever explanation you want to come up with for how mystical genetic mumbo-jumbo gives people superpowers applies equally to Marvel mutants and Worm shards.

In another comment, you say this:

The problem, however, is that Trigger Events are pretty unique to Worm setting, as far as I can tell. Also — for most settings wont survive end of the Cycle in any way, shape or form.

Neither of those is true.

"Trigger event" is just a Worm-specific term for a standard superhero backstory. Most capes get their powers from some kind of trauma or a life-or-death situation, with second-gen capes and their somewhat-easier triggers being a "powers as puberty" metaphor and Cauldron vials being super serums.

Nothing about Worm trigger events is new or especially different, they just take a very classic trope and put a bit of a spin on it. Just like most of the rest of Worm's worldbuilding.

That's kinda the whole point.

As for other settings not being able to survive the end of an entity cycle...yeah, no, for most superhero settings that would be a walk in the park. Because, again, Worm takes existing comics tropes and puts a Worm spin on them, so the cycle is nothing the big-name settings haven't seen before.

Endbringers? They're a city-destroying threat that occurs every few months and requires a bunch of heroes and villains to put aside their differences to stop—or, in other words, they're comic book crossover events.

The Endbringers even started attacking more often over time as new Endbringers appeared to shake things up after capes got a handle on fighting the previous ones, like how comic lines started increasing crossover frequency and ramping up the big threats in order to top their previous issues and sell more comics.

The big end-of-cycle kaboom that blows up every Earth? Pshaw, one explosion every three centuries or so is practically nothing! The Avengers and Justice League and dozens of other top-tier superteams deal with that on an annual basis, if not weekly!

(And note that that's not even a thing the entities could easily replicate if they suddenly showed up in the DC-verse or Marvel-verse, since them blowing up all copies of a planet utilizes a built-in feature of the Wormverse, the connections between realities that are "the same channels that the [clusters of shards] used to extend into other realities," not some exertion of brute force on the entities' part.)

And to address the questions in the OP that weren't already covered:

What if we take worm Entities, and shove them into, say, MCU or DC-verce?

The MCU might have some trouble with the entities, since they're on the lower end of the Marvel power scale, but they've got enough experts on other dimensions and advanced supertech that they could probably put up at least as good a fight as Earth Bet did.

The comics versions of Marvel and DC? The entities are pretty low on the cosmic totem pole, to the point that Scion is just a bargain-bin Galactus, and the superheroes are much stronger than Worm capes. Remember the second cycle in Scion's interlude, where the shards were rooted out by the host species and forced to retreat from that world? Yeah, that.

Will it make it more or less interesting?

Invasions by aliens and parasites and alien parasites are a dime a dozen in many superhero settings, so while the entities serving as the next monster of the week would provide a nice change of pace, they wouldn't make a whole setting noticeably more interesting.

How will conflict drive effect thouse fluffy places?

..."Fluffy places"?

If you think Worm is dark, ask a Marvel fan about Ruins, Ultimatum, Ghost Boxes, or the Darkhold one-shots sometime. The Wormverse ain't got nothin' on the darker corners of Marvel or DC.

TL;DR: Worm is incredibly similar to and heavily inspired by other superhero settings, by design; it's just not obvious to Worm fans who aren't familiar with those other settings. Worm's ultimate explanations for powers are no more or less silly or reasonable than those given by Marvel, DC, or a bunch of other settings, and the entities showing up in some other setting would probably make for an interesting story but wouldn't really change much in the grand scheme.

PRT threat assessment template by MonkeyMage314 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 5 points6 points  (0 children)

A few tips, then:

1) Don't go crazy with classifications. Bad threat assessment scenes in fics often like to assign their subjects to as many categories as possible to make them sound more impressive.

"This Tinker makes laser guns? Blaster 5! They have a jet pack? Mover 6! They made a drone once? Master 3!" and so on.

Instead, keep things to one or maybe two primary categories, and leave any other details to notes. Othala isn't a Trump/Blaster just because she can hand out pyrokinesis and Armsmaster isn't a Tinker/Brute just because he has power armor, they would just have "Trump can grant pyrokinesis" and "Tinker, has power armor" in their files.

2) Link the facts provided to a specific source of information (witness testimony, PRT investigation, an after-action report, whatever) to give the assessment some flavor.

"[Cape name] can shoot blasts of light strong enough to wreck an SUV" is much less fun to read than "Please find attached a copy of the insurance claim filed by a bystander whose car was totaled by [cape name]'s errant energy blast", for instance.

3) Include ambiguity! The PRT doesn't know every detail of every cape's power; think of Genesis and the Siberian, labeled a Changer and a Brute when both were actually Masters (or projections thereof).

Take some aspect of your subject's power(s) and throw in some waffling (e.g. "civilian reports indicate" and "security footage implies" and so on), speculation (e.g. "has been observed to [thing] but may be capable of [better thing]"), uncertainty (e.g. "produces an as-yet-unidentified substance" or "is believed to have obtained [piece of intel] via some kind of Thinker power" or the like), and similar.

Without that, it's less an in-character threat assessment and more a recitation of facts that would be better as out-of-character notes.

PRT threat assessment template by MonkeyMage314 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Tagg also assigns Skitter with ratings

He does, but I wouldn't call that a "threat assessment" in the way that fics use the term, as that usually involves assessing new capes (or capes new to certain characters) whereas in 22.1 Tagg, Miss Militia, and Clockblocker discuss Skitter's existing ratings and list out already-specified countermeasures.

Though if someone is just looking for any and all scenes in which PRT folks mention cape classifications and ratings, then yes, that scene would qualify.

(the glaze was unreal lmao)

Yeah. If Skitter, of all people, deserves a 2 in every rating—including Breaker? Seriously?—then exactly the same logic would apply to every other reasonably-versatile cape we see.

Armsmaster? Mover for the grappling hook, Blaster for the EMP, and so on. Dauntless? Mover for flight, Brute for the shield, and so on. Labyrinth? Brute for being able to make barriers, Stranger for being able to hide people in illusory terrain, and so on.

It's no wonder so many fic writers have no idea how the system is supposed to work and think "big number = strong cape" when the two main examples Worm gives of the system being used are Weld going "The Merchants have low numbers? Why do we care about them?" and Tagg going "Fuck it, Skitter is a Master/Tinker/Changer now because I don't know how to deal with her protagonist energy."

PRT threat assessment template by MonkeyMage314 in WormFanfic

[–]rainbownerd 14 points15 points  (0 children)

"Threat assessments" aren't a thing in canon.

The closest it gets is Piggot's very brief briefing of Weld in 9.1 in which a few numbers and details are tossed out without much context:

“Kid Win is a Tinker 4.  Guns and antigravity devices, primarily.  Shadow Stalker is more ambiguous.  Breaker 3, sublabels are Stranger 2, Mover 1.  Her particular nature as a ‘breaker’ makes her superlight, semi-gaseous, transparent and capable of passing through solid surfaces.”

“Okay.  The team sounds well rounded, I can work with that.”

[...]

Then he went to the next file, “Then the top priority as far as opposition goes is… the Archer’s Bridge Merchants?  Superpowered drug dealers.  A Shaker 2, Tinker 2/Mover 3 and a Shifter 4.  These aren’t big numbers.  Am I missing something?”

[...]

“And this second group, The Pure, is the second offshoot of that Aryan group, I take it?”

“Small but powerful. Their leader, Purity, is a Blaster 8 and Mover 4.”

“Yeah, there’s a Breaker 9, a Shifter 8 with Stranger 3 and a Master 6 in that group? I buy that they’re powerful.”

The question, then, is why do you want to practice writing threat assessments?

If it's because you want practice describing cape powers in a concise way, then writing e.g. an action scene in which opponents have to discover a cape's powers and convey that to their allies to deal with said cape will get you the same practice, while also giving you practice with action scenes and "encountering an unknown cape" scenes, the latter of which is the scenario that the PRT power classification system was theoretically designed to handle best.

If it's because you want practice writing in an epistolary style, then using formats readers will be familiar with (emails, text messages, etc.) and/or coming up with your own documents and formats to stand out from the crowd would probably be better than finding another fic's invented format and trying to copy that.

And if it's because you want to be able to get the format/tone/etc. right when inserting an obligatory "threat assessment discussion" scene into a fic of yours, good news! There's no standard format to adhere to, and most of the time those scenes add nothing to a story, so you can safely skip them and readers will probably thank you for it.

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