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The key thing about Blasto is that he is not a good person. In this interlude, we see him at his most sympathetic and additionally we see his most noble moment. At this time, he’s lost basically all his power, and is just some chill stoner guy getting paid to work in Accords basement. And he is very chill, especially compared to Accord, which makes him more human and relatable. It’s easy to forget that for the last few years, this guy has been a crime boss controlling a significant portion of the city.

It’s hard to reconcile his calm, chill attitude to life with the fucked up stuff he must have been doing to control territory like that. What you have to realise is that Blasto doesn’t care. He’s a parahuman chauvinist: he has the power, and he genuinely just doesn’t seem to care about any people who don’t have the power.

Contrast to Accord: Accord genuinely cares deeply about helping the average person, but has such a cripplingly powerful egomania and rage that he kills people for no good reason at all. Blasto on the other hand, has a mild narcissism/desire to inflate his ego. It’s just that he’s so apathetic to the wellbeing of everyone else that that narcissism is the driving force behind all his actions. And the result is the same. People die for no good reason at all.

Most of his actions as a crime lord have to be pieced together from out of story information. What we know for a fact is that he released the Woad giant during the Boston games, to make a point and to stake his claim. From his status as an active cape and thorn in Accords side, we can generally assume his modus operandi. He creates monsters and releases them, to remind people that he has the power and he isn’t afraid to use it. He uses terror and intimidation as a weapon: after all what else could the Woad giant be for? And the reason that he can be so chill while intentionally terrorising the civilians is because once again, Blasto just does not care. He has the power and uses it, and there is absolutely not moral conflict for him. And that’s more or less the average supervillain. Shit’s fucked.

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Just heard the guys at God Awful Movies talk about how quaint it was that Fight Club was about, quote, "having an unfulfilling job".

And in the novel his job is a recall coordinator, i.e. if a car at his company is involved in a deadly accident the narrator's job is to determine if it's worth the cost of a recall or if it would be cheaper to instead pay out a few settlements to people killed or injured by the flaw in the car.

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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 involve a cape transgressing against another cape.

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Mover who specifically triggers from barely missing a bus.

Everyone loves situations where a seemingly minor issue carries tremendous subjective weight leading to a trigger. I'm seeing this as an escalating series of events where a shut-in tries to reconnect to the world and continuously gets rebuffed through events out of anyone's control. Their phone just won't connect to their aunt, Eidolon blows up the building where a book club is supposed to happen, the gym stops allowing people in because it's closing soon, the Greyhound bus leaves fifteen minutes early when they need it to just go to their parents' home and see if they're willing to see them.

The power that comes to mind is the ability to 'latch on' to something moving and always stay a few feet behind it, but the parahuman can never actually catch the thing they're attached to, and the power gives broad immunity to obstacles to symbolize their inability to interact with the world in their trigger. The obstacles just 'slide,' off them, they have selective zero friction towards objects between them and what they've latched onto.

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One guard lies. One guard tells the truth. One guard thinks he's telling the truth but operates from deeply unsound epistemological principles that were inculcated by his elders to steer him to specific predefined conclusions, he's not lying but nothing he says is as actionable as he thinks it is. One guard is honest but he's got that thing where he keeps confusing your left and right with his left and right, and even when it's just him he's always got to stop and think for a second to remember which is which, and long story short he's never once said the correct door on the first try. One guard says whatever the first guard to speak says because he's afraid of being left out. One guard claims the opposite of whoever was first to speak because he's a contrarian. One guard does that fuckass postmodern "what is truth" song and dance because he doesn't actually know which door is the correct one, he lost the briefing packet and for obvious reasons he can't pick a door to check in person. Defeats the whole point if you can come back

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forbidden knowledge

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Research Assistant (Field Forme)

She prefers fieldwork for its various perks, such as

draw a plant

see a cool bug ?

pack a cute lunch

academy paid for the utility hatchet

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big bunny boy Salem (HE/HIM) 🏳️‍⚧️🐇🍰

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my wife insisted that clifford should play basketball and that blue should wear her oversized jerseys

+ bonus blue

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careers in science & academia are so Cassandra-coded. you possess a Great and Burdensome Knowledge (at heavy cost*), which is both its own reward and its own punishment. and no one fucking listens to you

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Murderbot is such a neurodivergent power fantasy. It can

- store unlimited media and watch it privately

- turn down sensory organs that are bothering it

- look at stuff without its eyes

- cross reference its data storage when it doesn't know what to say

- program "human-like behavior"

- super duper kill the shit out of anyone that fucks with it

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too many stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for pretending to be something you aren't and losing yourself in the process. not enough stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for choosing to openly embrace yourself even if it's strange to other people

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i love sluts i love perverts i love dykes i love faggots i love aromantics i love freaks i love librarians i love ibuprofen

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unfortunately once you start noticing the tendency of some sci-fi to flatten every character into ‘ambiguously atheist’, the implication that the only future is one where no one has any religious beliefs is going to piss you off for the rest of time

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