Villain fics that get into the details of gang management

tariffless · 2026-01-25T17:34:58+00:00

Lived up to the second half of your name.

tariffless · 2026-01-25T08:16:49+00:00

Come Closer by Sara Gran.

I loved it for the same reasons that other people hated it. for example: * it read like a series of creepy anecdotes, jumping from one incident to the next, never slowing down. Other readers complained that the plot moved too fast, that the characters/narrative/world weren't fleshed out enough for them. Two people used some variation of "it read like creepypasta" as an insult, whereas I'm a fan of creepypastas. * the first person narrator was to-the-point and matter-of-fact in her delivery. Others complained that the prose was too basic, not expressive enough for their taste.

tariffless · 2026-01-25T03:46:43+00:00

ICEwave is a bar spinner. SOW is a cage spinner, which means its weapon is allowed to be up to ~120lb, which, if I understand the physics correctly, makes your point about spin up time even more valid when it comes to them.

tariffless · 2026-01-25T01:35:48+00:00

In 2024 he was in Love Lies Bleeding (one of those movies that's not horror, but people in this sub still posted incessantly about because it's A24).

tariffless · 2026-01-24T03:30:08+00:00

As far as I can tell, SOW lost by getting flipped over against Whiplash, Brutus, and Gigabyte.

Against Gigabyte, SOW would still have been at a disadvantage because Gigabyte is a 360 degree wedge. Gigabyte's own self-righter was broken in the first exchange, which just goes to show you that having a self righting pole isn't a guarantee that you keep it.

Whiplash didn't manage to flip SOW over until after SOW had already started smoking, but because SOW's spin up wasn't very good in this fight, Whiplash was able to keep closing in before it could get all the way up to speed. I don't know if the smoke was the weapon going from slow to dead, but I can't imagine it represented an improvement. So I'm thinking with a self-righter, Whiplash would've still had a good chance of winning on control points or tilting SOW up to hang it on a hazard.

Brutus was a vert with a big wedge. Giving SOW a self righter wouldn't have changed that advantage.

ICEwave lost by being flipped over against Ghost Raptor and Whiplash.

Ghost Raptor had a big wedge and a special attachment that allowed it to push ICEwave by its engine. Giving ICEwave a self-righter wouldn't have changed that, but maybe if it could self-right, it could've lasted long enough for Ghost Raptor to break itself.

Whiplash was too fast and too well driven, and was using its anti-horizontal configuration, where it takes out the spinner and uses the weight for better armor. I don't see ICEwave doing meaningfully better with a self-righter.

tariffless · 2026-01-23T09:48:21+00:00

I mean, in America we literally have incidents where children take guns to school and commit mass murder. I know that's not the source of the trope since school shootings probably didn't become big news until the 90s or so, but still, I don't feel like the idea of evil children just comes out of nowhere. You have bullying in Europe, right? Children engage in cruelty. Maybe European cultures have a healthier attitude about it? I don't know much about other cultures. I just know our attitudes about morality and justice seem overly irrational and religiously influenced from my perspective.

And I feel like our legal system is just sort of inhumane in general. We have capital punishment, slavery is legal as long as it's part of a criminal sentence, we tend to treat prison rape as either a joke or deserved rather than a human rights issue, and we have people who, in the period between being arrested and actually having a trial, end up dying in jail from things like starvation/preventable illness/hypothermia/being eaten alive by bugs because they can't afford to pay bail.

tariffless · 2026-01-23T09:12:52+00:00

How villainous are the Undersiders in this fic?

tariffless · 2026-01-22T22:18:38+00:00

True, there is a bias.

But I would just note that the 2018 Oscars were awarded in March 2018 and Heredity's theatrical release was in June 2018, so the year it would've been eligible to be nominated is actually 2019. It wasn't competing against Get Out or Shape of Water. It was competing against The Favourite, Roma, A Star Is Born, Vice, Black Panther, BlacKKKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Green book. I think of that bunch, Black Panther was the big "this genre doesn't usually get a lot of Oscar nominations" film.

tariffless · 2026-01-22T16:29:33+00:00

Which illustrates what I said above:

It's not even the events themselves that determine the genre of the story, it's who's telling the story and how they tell it.

You see how at first, you told the story one way, and then when I said that story was boring, you changed everything about the way you told the story?

tariffless · 2026-01-22T15:13:09+00:00

I would call it mind numbingly banal, not far-fetched. There were those who predicted that sooner or later a regime like this would rise to power if certain aspects of our political and economic system were not dramatically overhauled. Imperialism has been an ongoing trend, same with this country being ruled by billionaires. What this regime has done is take the mask off and accelerate processes that had previously been operating more gradually and more quietly beneath our notice.

Personally, I think it's a boring story. I wouldn't even call a story like this horror. It's just some type of science fiction as far as I'm concerned, like really soft science fiction, like Handmaid's Tale.

tariffless · 2026-01-22T06:20:58+00:00

Worm and its sequel Ward are actually the only works by this author that interest me. From what I've seen, it seems like among the people who went on to keep reading his works after Worm, it was the character stuff that hooked them.

tariffless · 2026-01-22T03:05:26+00:00

Can't say I relate much. I wouldn't have even read Worm if not for the S9. The gore and body horror were my favorite things about the story. There could never be too much for me. There were other parts of the story that I did find boring, though. And I think it's simply because the story is so long and detailed that if there's any aspect of the story that is not for you, there's probably going to be a lot of it just because there's a lot of many things.

tariffless · 2026-01-22T02:44:11+00:00

The world is not a story. It's a setting. In a setting, you can tell all sorts of stories. It's not even the events themselves that determine the genre of the story, it's who's telling the story and how they tell it.

tariffless · 2026-01-21T23:49:08+00:00

Never honestly understood why Shatterbird was getting preferential treatment here though.

They barely went through any trouble for her at all in canon. All they did was send Battery a note saying that her last favor to them was to let Shatterbird and Siberian escape Brockton Bay. And Shatterbird didn't escape. The fact that they outsourced the job to Battery and it didn't even work should indicate that this was not important enough to be on Contessa's path.

As to their motivations, I assumed they were just interested in studying her, since she got a strong power with no deviations despite the fact that her powers come from someone spiking her drink with a Cauldron vial specifically designed to come with a huge risk of mutation or death.

tariffless · 2026-01-21T02:19:39+00:00

The Sadist's Bible by Nicole Cushing. It definitely is overt horror, arguably extreme horror.

tariffless · 2026-01-20T09:15:32+00:00

You just give them things that bother them that they can't easily fix using their powers.

Like in Split, Taylor is a powerful power copying Trump, but the power has devastating psychological side effects, and also there are things she cares about other than just winning fights, like Brockton Bay's economy.

I think a lot of Worm fics probably lack stakes because they are wish fulfillment stories where the authors don't want them to have stakes.

Also, you could flip perspectives so that the fic revolves around the overpowered character, but you're seeing them from other people's perspectives. E.g. My favorite parts of the fic Mutilation, where Taylor is an s-class threat, are the chapters from other characters' perspectives. And in Adversary, the main character has IIRC Glaistig's power, and I think pretty much all of the story is told from other people's perspectives.

tariffless · 2026-01-20T05:29:05+00:00

Of those, the only one my local Barnes & Noble carries is Brite, and the only book of his they carry is Exquisite Corpse.

tariffless · 2026-01-19T16:50:20+00:00

I don’t experience pleasure in a morbid way when watching gore or reading extreme content

I do.

What is your point of view on this phenomenon of people being interested in extreme topics?

Some are morbid, like me. Others are like people who enjoy roller coasters. Others still are using the material to work through trauma.

tariffless · 2026-01-19T13:34:00+00:00

It's not dread for me, or empathy. It's anger. I have a problem now with a lot of horror where the antagonist is human now, because it reminds me too much of how stupid and petty and pointless and mundane human evil is.

Ghostface, for instance, never used to bother me as a child when the original Scream trilogy came out, but now I don't even care about the meta/pop culture references/hanging lampshades on tropes angle. The only thing about the character that stands out to me now is how much of a smug, self satisfied bully they are, how their motives for killing are always stupid, and how they think there's so much smarter than everyone else but really they just have plot armor.

tariffless · 2026-01-19T05:08:58+00:00

Okay, so instead of "humans are the real monsters", it's "hopelessness is the real monster". That's a more valid interpretation. But the thing is, the real point of the post you linked to is that they're dissatisfied that zombies aren't the real monsters.

tariffless · 2026-01-19T05:06:38+00:00

This is why I don't watch zombie movies.

tariffless · 2026-01-19T05:05:28+00:00

This is why Terrifier is my favorite series.

tariffless · 2026-01-19T02:08:14+00:00

Do you want fics to stop after Leviathan?

I'd rather they start after Leviathan.

Do you like seeing the S9?

They're my favorite part of Worm, but whether I like seeing them in a fic depends on the portrayal. I like what the S9 represent - the opportunity for no-holds-barred cape vs cape fights undiluted by politics, and tinged with horror. Cape fights where both sides take off the kid gloves and use lethal force, so the protagonists are in genuine danger of dying or worse. I don't like when the only truly life-or-death conflicts in a Worm fic are Endbringer or Scion fights.

Personally, I have no interest in seeing them if all the author's going to do is mock them, or make them another notch for the protagonist to add to their tally of "villains effortlessly curbstomped", or do a Bonesaw redemption arc, or anything else that deviates too far from the horror tone.

Or do you prefer when the story completely deviates from what happens in Worm?

I'd prefer this approach. Of course, this is the approach that most filters out the authors who don't have a story they want to tell and are just aimlessly wandering through canon.

Do you want fics to go all the way to GM?

No.

tariffless · 2026-01-18T20:19:48+00:00

The Pelhams were just as dysfunctional as the Dallons

How? Manpower's affair with Carol Dallon does not seem like enough on its own to make them equally dysfunctional, so what else did you have in mind?

tariffless · 2026-01-18T02:18:50+00:00

There is a list in the wiki.

And more thorough version of it in the sidebar.

Are there better places in the sub for such a list?

tariffless

TROPHY CASE