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This discussion of superhero logistics reminds me of an element of Worm's background worldbuilding that I've always found really interesting, which is that the heroes are running out of teleporters. They had a cloak-style mass teleporter, Strider, who was apparently indispensable for troop deployment at Endbringer fights, but he didn't get the hell out of dodge in time so by the Behemoth fight they mention having to seriously kludge other not-as-good powers to get everyone on-site on time. No one dies forever in comics so the question of "what are the risks of one guy's powers becoming indispensable to our organization" isn't as salient, but here goes Worm, gesturing at the idea that you might just get super fucking unlucky because you became organizationally dependent on a couple golden gooses who you inexplicably keep bringing to live fire situations. If they weren't hard to replace, they wouldn't exactly be superheroes, would they?

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i think one of the reasons i get mildly annoyed about worldbuilding threads that are 200 tweets of why you should care about where blue dye comes from in your world before saying someone is wearing blue is that so few of them go up to the second level of "and that should impact your characters somehow" - i don't care that blue dye comes from pressing berries that only grow in one kingdom a thousand miles away if people are casually wearing blue

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I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

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My superhero setting worldbuilding doc is up to three thousand words, and two thousand of that is tax policy, but it's necessary, you see, to explain the high crime rates that necessitate the men in tight spandex. How can we have superheroes without some foundational economic and criminal theory to back the premise up?

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One interesting thing about The Hulk's role in the Hickman Ultimate Universe is that he's close to an inversion of his character in the original Ultimate Universe.

In the original Ultimate Universe, the gag surrounding Hulk- and much of what went into The Ultimates should be understood through the lens of a gag- was that his uncontrollable rage and homicidal toxic masculinity made him a millstone around the necks of the rest of the roster, their first major deployment being to get him under control after he loses his shit and kills 800 people in New York while trying to kill and eat Freddie Prinze Jr- an embarrassment that gets hushed up after the fact. In the grand finale of the first volume they barely, barely manage to get him aimed at the invading aliens by telling him the aliens called him gay, and then he still nearly eats Hawkeye before the tranqs kick in. He's less a part of the team than a barely directable bomb, emblematic of the fact that the Ultimates, collectively, do not have their shit together-it's a rotten idea to the core.

In the New Ultimate Universe, he's the one member of the classic Avengers lineup who's thrown in with The Maker, again standing in opposition to the rest of the team, but for the complete opposite reason. He's very visibly a road-not-taken of the Ultimate Hulk- same color scheme- but he worked his shit out, he found a self-help book, he became less insecure, less self-absorbed, altogether more functional. And it turns out that a "functional" version of that hulk comes out the other side as an Adrian-Veidt style of holier-than-thou Compassionate-enough-to-Kill-thousands-for-the-greater-good kind of figure, who callously tests the mutagenic effects of gamma exposure on isolated indigenous populations on the side. Fucker built nukes for the army- were we expecting a saint?

Anyway, this sort of leads into a thought I've been having about the comic in general, which is that with superhero comics it can be genuinely really hard to judge the dividing line between something that's cleverly meta and something that doesn't have the strength to stand on its own as a narrative without being composed of one million billion deep cut references. All the best cape comics are about cape comics. The actual stated project of The New Ultimate Universe is to create something so inextricably embedded in batshit comics continuity that no MCU adaptation is at all plausible, so, uh, mission accomplished? I tried to explain this specific Hulk-inversion beat to a non-comics-reading friend the other day and by the time I'd gotten through all the requisite context I was giving real Charlie Kelly without even the dignity of a good conspiracy board as a visual aid.

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🔥the boys (tv)

🔥the birdcage (worm)

The Boys: I get the impression that the tide is beginning to turn against The Boys due to whatever went down in the most recent season, which I have not yet seen. But I'm holding the line that the first two seasons and change are really really good superhero fiction.

The Birdcage: I think the birdcage is best understood as part of an ongoing conversation about how superhumans, if real, would be resistant to basically every form of social sanction, under every possible form of government, that they personally did not agree to be subject to, because they're just that much more agentic than regular people. And a lot of superhero fiction either depicts capes as moral paragons who're never going to need to be subject to severe social sanction because they're too darn good, so just don't worry about it, or as total assholes where you don't need to worry about the incredibly extreme measures that have to be taken to get them to do stuff that they don't want to do- problems to be solved rather than moral objects. When I was younger and dumber I blew a shitload of time and gave countless discord mods headaches arguing about the moral implications of the birdcage from within the Watsonian frame that the story was a self-consistent reality that should be engaged with as presented. These days I've thrown up my hands, and landed somewhere on the spectrum that the point of the birdcage in the story is that even if you can imagine a way to do the birdcage non-horribly, it would not be done that way- that one of the ways in which superheroes would be bad is that it would result in stuff like the birdcage happening, that regardless of whether you can justify the use of the birdcage on sufficiently dangerous individuals it would overall be a ratchet towards cultural authoritarianism that can't really get walked back.

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I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.

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If I were president of Doctor Who, I'd make a Simpsons episode and I'm not joking

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Casually asks ‘who domesticated grain in your fantasy world?’ but while ripping her shirt off with a WWE stage and a roaring crowd just behind and slightly to the left. 

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The beat that always stuck with me in regards to Uber and Leet was when Taylor mentions that they beat up sex workers on livestream while LARPing Grand Theft Auto. Uber and Leet get a lot of mentions before they actually show up, and the drumbeat is that they're pathetic, they're fodder, "as incompetent as supervillains can be while staying out of jail." Leet is the butt of a rom-com gag where Brian gives Taylor pointers on how to choke a man out more effectively. But they made money by beating up sex workers on livestream. That's a non-negligible number of potentially ruined lives! That's not softball fun-and-games! It's like textbook misogynistic violence against the marginalized! It's awful!

The narrative doesn't really dwell on this, because it's told almost exclusively from the perspective of people who have the firepower necessary to get away with treating Uber and Leet like jokes. But I think that it's a useful reminder that if you aren't one of the initiated, so to speak, then an encounter with the C-list, D-list, Z-list supervillain can be life-altering if not life-ending. The dumbest listicle-fodder DC or Marvel villain you've ever heard of has probably ruined at least one person's life over their handful of appearances, if not more. And it's an early indictment of the broad concept of the unwritten rules as advanced by Lisa, where she calls out Uber and Leet as the textbook example of villains kept in circulation because they're "amusing but harmless." This is within parameters? This doesn't merit heroes and villains putting aside their differences to clean house of problematic elements? Of course it doesn't. Both examples that Lisa gives of that dynamic in 3.6 involves a cape transgressing against another cape.

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Inside you there are two wolves

One of them is also a motorcycle.

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A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.

Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?

Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.

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(girl with adhd voice) yeah i just love in fiction when a character has a superpower thats also a disability. like a power that changes how they interact with the world in exciting ways but also has terrible drawbacks to their daily life. no real reason why

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similar vibe to people indignantly shouting racism about the way some gangs in early Worm are defined largely by ethnicity. literally just how it works in real life; gangs having pleasantly wacky themes like Pokemon Evil Teams is the genre fantasy

i have neither direct knowledge nor (even casual internet) research knowledge of gangs, so i can't really speak to that

opinion received, though

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-51793 This is honest to god one of the funniest things I think I have ever seen. The idea of giving a baby a theme party based on a local personal injury attorney is something i am so jealous of I dont know how to properly put it into words. Also the fact that the lawyer didn’t come to the party somehow makes it even funnier.

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I think she should be pardoned. And maybe given money.

😁

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What roles would you give to Barker, Biter, Aiden, Chariot, and Weld? And if Taylor is the Robin then who's the Tara?

So I was thinking back on Teen Titans and had the idea of a show like it but about The Undersiders

Picture this:

Taylor is the Robin: The group's emotionally stunted leader-not-leader of the group. She is the one everyone trust but are also always complaining of because she has bugs all around the loft

Lisa is the Cyborg: Cheeky, smart and confident. The brains of the group who likes to tug on people's nerves

Alec is the Beast Boy: Immature funny guy. The comic relief with the heart of gold (That's literal. He killed a guy with a golden heart and keeps it in his closet. His heart is a pit of darkness) and he's the one who tugs people's actual nerves

Brian is the Raven: Broody and moody (That's just his face, he's so normal guy that it goes all the way around) . The muscles of the group. Lives in a separate place but Noone has seen it and if they have, they are traumatized about IKEA furniture. You would think he's the one with the heart of gold but no. He has the heart of a chicken: He gets jumpscared by his own shadow

Rachel is the Starfire: Fish out of the water. She is the team's powerhouse. Taylor and her have an intense sexual tension. Nobody notices it. She's the one with the actual heart of gold. She has an entire language made of grunts

The episode structure would be simple:

-The Undersiders hang around at the loft

-Conflict arises

-Coil calls

-They go do a job

-While in the job, a hero or rival villain shows up and they have to beat them While solving their conflicts

-Episode ends with them having a stronger bond

Some aspects of the show would be:

-Parian is a secondary character who always ends up as an unwilling participant of the Undersiders antics

-Flechette appears In every episode Parian does and always throws around every type of logical gymnastics to get her crush out of trouble

-Aisha is always popping up in the background and there's a running gag of something eating Rachel's ham and Alec having an imaginary friend

-A lot episodes are about the Undersiders being broke and having to come up with ways of getting easy money

-Coil's phone call scenes are like the ones from Inspector Gadget's villain (can't remember his name) with him only appearing in lowlit rooms from the shoulders down with Dinah on her own seat at the corner doing homework (Telling Coil the results of Golf games)

-Coil is comically evil and the show keeps making him appear in weirder places than the last

-The Protectorate keeps popping up from absurd spots and ways

-The Wards have a vendetta against Rachel's dogs because they pee on their front door

-The Empire are not nazis because "Think of the kids!"

-Purity is a Karen

-Lung gets defeated within seconds of showing up on screen. Every time

-The Undersiders have 'Anti Bakuda earphones'. They are just fluffy earphones (Taylor's have antennas)

There are episodes focused on the Wards and their dinamic is something like this:

-Aegis is constantly taking damage

-Vista is never taken seriously

-Clockblocker pulls up stupid pranks

-Kid Win can't focus on one thing for shit

-Shadow Stalker is hated by everyone

-Gallant is the only sane person in the room. Always

-Armsmaster is the overstrict dad with the worshipped bike

-Dragon is the sweet mom

-People hate Piggott more than SS

-Victoria is always being reckless

-Amy is a shell of what used to be a person with hopes and dreams

I know all this sounds stupid and very much anti-Worm but I just had to get the out into the world