Worm and Ward discussion and debate thread

[volantredx]

Fair enough, though not asking 'what the hell happened and what did you do' seems like a particularly egregious oversight. It's essentially a crime scene, but he doesn't ask Taylor for any details of what happens. He just hears that the Undersiders were there and never bothers. He knows she's a cape. Why does he not ask what she did against Lung? Knowing what the hell happened in the fight is kind of important, especially since, unless the PRT has really weird procedures, he has to file an incident report and explain himself.

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He sort of does:

Armsmaster turned to look at me. So I told him, walking him through the fight in general, the arrival of the teenage bad guys, and their general descriptions. Before I finished, he was pacing back and forth on the roof.

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So Taylor walks through the basics of the fight but seems to never mention the spider venom. Which makes sense, as far as she could tell it was totally useless on Lung. Still she told him what happened.

 

[kamenhero25]

So Taylor walks through the basics of the fight but seems to never mention the spider venom. Which makes sense, as far as she could tell it was totally useless on Lung. Still she told him what happened.

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If she explained the fight, then I'd assume she actually told him that she was biting him with every insect she could. So what, does he just not think venomous insects don't live in Brockton Bay?

 

[volantredx]

If she explained the fight, then I'd assume she actually told him that she was biting him with every insect she could.

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Why? Why would you assume that?

 

[kamenhero25]

Why? Why would you assume that?

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Because if she's explaining that she fought Lung, it would be logical for her to explain how she fought Lung.

 

[volantredx]

Because if she's explaining that she fought Lung, it would be logical for her to explain how she fought Lung.

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Or she could have said "I attack him with insects" and he figured she meant wasps and such, or she could have mentioned spiders and it didn't occur to him that she meant lethal spiders, seeing as it seems a bit unlikely that someone claiming to be a hero on their first night would use something that could kill a man.

 

[kamenhero25]

Or she could have said "I attack him with insects" and he figured she meant wasps and such, or she could have mentioned spiders and it didn't occur to him that she meant lethal spiders, seeing as it seems a bit unlikely that someone claiming to be a hero on their first night would use something that could kill a man.

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A massive amount of wasp venom is still lethal. Large amounts of any kind of venom, even from spiders that aren't normally lethal, is lethal. The specifics of what kind of insects are not necessary to realize that he has a fuck ton of toxic venom in his body.

And the first night is probably one of the most likely nights for someone to use lethal force, either from lack of understanding of the rules, not understanding their own powers and making mistakes, or simply being high on the thrill of having powers and not caring.

 

[volantredx]

And the first night is probably one of the most likely nights for someone to use lethal force, either from lack of understanding of the rules, not understanding their own powers and making mistakes, or simply being high on the thrill of having powers and not caring.

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On accident, not purposefully. I mean Taylor wasn't really using lethal force since we know Lung would have lived, but she was effectively using a lethal weapon on someone. Even a few bites by Black Widows can kill someone, and she had several. It's like shooting Wolverine, yeah he's not going to die, but you did bring a gun out with the intention to use it on someone.

 

[kamenhero25]

On accident, not purposefully. I mean Taylor wasn't really using lethal force since we know Lung would have lived, but she was effectively using a lethal weapon on someone. Even a few bites by Black Widows can kill someone, and she had several. It's like shooting Wolverine, yeah he's not going to die, but you did bring a gun out with the intention to use it on someone.

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But when fighting someone as absurdly powerful as Lung, use of as much force as you can muster makes sense. What's lethal to an ordinary human and what's lethal to the Rage Dragon are very different things. And Lung is a very well known and very dangerous parahuman. There's no reason why a new cape in Brockton wouldn't know who he is and what his powers do. So there's no reason not to use as much force as she can on him, even if for a normal human it might be lethal.

 

[volantredx]

But when fighting someone as absurdly powerful as Lung, use of as much force as you can muster makes sense. What's lethal to an ordinary human and what's lethal to the Rage Dragon are very different things. And Lung is a very well known and very dangerous parahuman. There's no reason why a new cape in Brockton wouldn't know who he is and what his powers do. So there's no reason not to use as much force as she can on him, even if for a normal human it might be lethal.

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Except she explicitly states that this was all an accident. She wasn't planning on fighting Lung and only did to prevent him from hurting people. So to AM her using venomous spiders is like her taking a gun and just lucking into shooting someone that wears a bulletproof vest.

 

[kamenhero25]

Except she explicitly states that this was all an accident. She wasn't planning on fighting Lung and only did to prevent him from hurting people. So to AM her using venomous spiders is like her taking a gun and just lucking into shooting someone that wears a bulletproof vest.

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Her powers let her gather whatever insects are in her radius. When she finds out something that changes the situation, she grabs everything she can and jumps in. That means everything from houseflies to black widows (which are known to be native to Brockton for some reason) would come to her call. She didn't bring a weapon with her. She grabbed the nearest one when she realized that she was about to fight someone that could end her.

 

[volantredx]

Her powers let her gather whatever insects are in her radius. When she finds out something that changes the situation, she grabs everything she can and jumps in. That means everything from houseflies to black widows (which are known to be native to Brockton for some reason) would come to her call. She didn't bring a weapon with her. She grabbed the nearest one when she realized that she was about to fight someone that could end her.

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But AM doesn't know that. Thus he likely assumes that she was bringing things like bees to the fight.

 

[kamenhero25]

But AM doesn't know that. Thus he likely assumes that she was bringing things like bees to the fight.

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But hundreds of bee stings are still lethal and Armsmaster would know this. It's common knowledge that hundreds of bee stings are fatal. So she'd still have told him that she used potentially lethal levels of toxins on Lung.

 

[volantredx]

But hundreds of bee stings are still lethal and Armsmaster would know this. It's common knowledge that hundreds of bee stings are fatal. So she'd still have told him that she used potentially lethal levels of toxins on Lung.

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And we have no evidence that AM didn't treat him for bee venom. It's just a very different treatment than Brown Recluse venom.

 

[kamenhero25]

And we have no evidence that AM didn't treat him for bee venom. It's just a very different treatment than Brown Recluse venom.

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We have no evidence that he did treated him for anything. From the text, all Armsmaster does is tranq him and go home.

 

[volantredx]

What are we even arguing about any more?

 

[kamenhero25]

I... don't actually know. Something about how responsible Armsmaster is for Lung almost dying Taylor's first night I think.

 

[volantredx]

I thought it was that Armsmaster should have known that Taylor would have used lethal doses of poison on Lung and the tranq would stop his regen?

 

[kamenhero25]

I was arguing that Armsmaster was being horribly irresponsible in how he handled it because of his handling of the tranqs and questioning Taylor.

 

[doomlord9]

That and they're completely wrong about the person. Contessa is little more than a shard driven by the tattered fragments of what may have once been Fortuna. Having triggered at such a young age with a completely non-adjusted shard means that her entire development from that age is completely dependent on the Shard's input.

This is important because there have been cases where people have been locked up in a dark basement and never spoken to, only given food in silence, until they were found when they were over the age of 20. The person involved obviously could not speak but after brain scans were taken they found that her brain outright did not have the structures needed to understand or perform vocal communication, her brain having slowly removed those parts as they were obviously unneeded as they matured. Now that they were fully grown, any and all vocal communication is beyond them as those parts cannot be restored.

Contessa is similar in that her brain has physically developed under the influence of a shard with almost no adjustments made to make it more compatible towards humans, meaning everything that is not involuntary like heartbeat, breathing, disgestion, ect, has been re-routed through the connection towards her shard because that's what she used it for 24/7. Without PtV leading her quite literally every step of the way, seriously walking became a problem when she got within Mantallum's range, she is effectively non-functional as a human being. Little bits of Fortuna remain to give it a better semblance of a person, but Contessa is pretty much the PtV shard driving the mostly empty husk that used to be Fortuna.

Really the her actions at the end are little more than a petty grudge, since the day was saved not because of her influence but in spite of it. Taylor had to actively work around her in order to win and having the goal of a person's entire life be completely invalidated would make anyone a little pissy and willing to take some petty revenge. And it was revenge, she could have not only done it in a better way but afterwards she could have at least given Taylor her arm back rather than leave her crippled and brain damaged on a world with no identity and her emotionally damaged father as her only support.

Now Dr. Mother on the other hand comes much closer to the description of 'a psychopathic, power-hungry womanchild who are basically responsible for all the human suffering in the story so that when the world ended, they'd get to rule the ashes' in that she was the one giving orders to Contessa and having them fulfilled basically without a single thought of 'how' or 'why' by Contessa, pretty much the definition of a megalomaniac using their child-soldier weapon.

Really her actions just scream delusions of grandeur. If we had a window into her thoughts right after the Eden scene they would probably be along the lines of 'Hell yeah! Got a naive kid who has the power of 'I Win' doing everything I say! Man I could totally build that awesome secret base and do that shadow government thing where I rule in secret! Oh wait...fuck, gotta take care of that other damned alien or there won't be anyone left to rule over. Shit, how can I do this?'

Not exactly that but I seriously doubt her thoughts were anywhere near altruistic.

Her first orders should have been 'Path to finding the best people to figure out how to defeat a seemingly unbeatable foe' rather than deciding to do everything herself with her background of...well we don't even know but I doubt it's a doctorate in 'leading secret organizations' given the sheer stupidity of how they went about it.

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Doctor Mother was a fucking twenty-something art student from the 1970's what the hell do you expect her to do? And Contessa was the one who suggested building the base (or at least told her to buy the land so they could stop people stumbling upon Eden's corpse through the portals, fucking hell just look at that scene where they give the formula to the guy and it fails, Doctor Mother is completely unsure about this and waits until Contessa nods her head and she gives it to the guy (who then dies) she relies on the superpowered kid who is supernaturally competent because she doesn't know what to do.

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Like I said, I would expect her to decide that she was completely in over her head and let the supernaturally competent kid find and convince people who know what the hell they are doing to become a think-tank for saving the world from an effectively unbeatable enemy. Letting dozens of highly trained professionals of multiple different fields brainstorm different methods of attacking Zion and prepping for the more viable ones, also under the eye of well trained professionals so prevent the creation of a disorganized mob that will destroy you rather than the enemy, would have been a much better use of their time and effort.

Although it's not something they could have planned for, the fact that Dinah was not hired to give their plan a once-over is the height of stupidity. Instead they just took her prophecy of the End starting in two years and decided to go with it, rather than hiring her to give them the chances of success for their plan and then putting other plans through her power to see if they had any better or worse chances, yet another failure of critical thinking on the part of Cauldron by having only a single plan and never considering others.

In my hypothetical Cauldron run by a think-tank, they would have snagged Dinah the instant it became apparent she could bypass the Entity block by observing the aftermath rather than Zion himself, which is far more than enough to figure out which plans are completely unworkable and which ones have a chance at all of doing something, and holy shit, the plans involving psychological warfare have a success rate over 15% where the rest barely reach 5%. Thank you for your time Dinah, here's 50 million dollars, 2 metric tons of candy, and the exact thing that you always wanted that will convince you to keep this quiet and be favorable towards working for us again later. We'll get back to you in a few weeks with more diverse plans along these lines for you to give a once-over.

The fact that Dr. Mother damn well knows she is not cut out for that responsibility and took it anyway shows massive stupidity and arrogance. The fact that they only had a few people in their inner circle when Contessa could perfectly check if people who weren't Eidolon were trustworthy makes it even more obvious.

 

[Dr. Mercurious]

doomlord, have seven billion likes; sorry QQ will only let me give one. THIS, right HERE, is Why Cauldron Sucks.

 

[Valette-Serafina]

I have always thought Brian was a fucking idiot. Who the hell thinks becoming a criminal is the best way to gain custody of a family member?

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Well, it was? Seriously, what other option did he have?

What if he ever got caught? Bye-bye, Aisha. Not only that, but he accepted a job from a "mysterious" boss. How did that NOT set off alarm bells?

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Fighting the court case required money. Winning that court case required a certain standard of living.
Brian did not have: Abundant qualifications, Wealth, A suitable home, or a trusted family friend with all of those things, or a legal way to get those things. Unless you think he could maybe have earned enough to pay for an apartment, a lawyer, and food by waiting tables.

Coil offered: Money in significant quantities, A cover identity, and his own support.
Coil also happened to be very influential. Going independent after he set his sights on Grue? Not safe. Obviously not safe.

You are really using that excuse? Because that's all it is, an excuse and not a really good one either. You know who else suffered traumatic events at a young age? The Wards. Teenagers who decided to do the right thing despite their trauma.

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Joining an organisation that employs child soldiers is not a clear-cut, sparkly white ethical choice. And that is what the Wards are, no ifs nor buts.

Brian's sob story doesn't exclude him from being a fucking idiot. Or we might as well give other villians a free pass on their actions as well.

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Y'know how Worm makes a point about people having reasons for what they do? Even if they're bad reasons?
Y'think you might have missed it?

'Cause, see, you can't lump all villains together. Hookwolf is not Bitch, and neither of them are Tattletale. Very different reasons, limits, and goals.

Brian wanted to keep his sister safe. He did not have many options. He took the one that he thought was best. It did not work out as well as he'd hoped.

 

[Prince Charon]

Yeah. Dinah's seeming perfection makes most of the story pointless. The problem with predestination in fiction, at least in my opinion, is that once you know where you're going, the journey there is far less interesting. You have no investment in a story that you know how it ends. Which is a pity because having her more flawed and making mistakes, mistakes that could be very costly for the protagonists we're rooting for, would have been far more interesting.

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Saw this, and something occurred to me: It would actually be very easy to make Dinah fallible, because she explicitly sees probabilities, rated by percentage. All Wildbow had to do was keep it at that, and not have her make any absolute statements, just things like '97.34523497047568% probability that everybody is dead in two years if Jack Slash isn't killed soon enough.'

 

[RFMM]

Is it just me or Wildbow ytied to flip Cauldron's narrative purpose from evil mastermind organization to group doing 'what is necessary' ?

 

[doomlord9]

I don't agree with that. It wasn't designed to fail, it was set up even though it will fail in the long run. Contessa had nothing to do with it, the PRT were Alexandria's brain child.

You don't need the path to do shit like this and organizations get shitty people in them all the time without it.

The way you say it is as if the assholes were assholes because they had no agency when they were assholes just fine without plot device contessa.

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The PtV is so that it would fail correctly. Keep the obvious corruption to a minimum, reduce panic, and slow the decay of society from a screaming tailspin into a gentle slide of what they wanted.

I can't understand what is so hard to understand about this. Does Cauldron have a hand in something or is remotely involved? If so, it has PtV influence. Contessa IS Cauldron and PtV is literally operating 24/7, large and small. Just because it seems cheap and removes agency does not mean they don't exploit it mercilessly at every chance.

Did Contessa manage every last detail down to hiring, positions, raises, promotions, ect? No, there is no need. Put this person here, do this to make that person say this at that time, make that person have the flu at this time, and everything just falls into place exactly as she wants it to, all this in between the rest of her paths. That is what PtV is, the least effort needed to fill per request to the letter with whatever it is she has access to.

Unless she somehow died very early on, there is outright, flat out, no questions asked a miniscule amount of personal agency in Worm, even without adding in The Simurgh which just reduces it from tiny to microscopic. If you don't like it.....well, they care as much about that as they did about using precog of that magnitude in the first place.

One more thing to rage about. But don't worry, they planned for that too.

 

[OverReactionGuy]

I personally think Contessa had more important things to do than to set up this organization like you seem to believe it was set up. Also, on the personal agency thing? I think there is a lot more than you seem to think.

Ziz doesn't run plans all the time or shit like that when it's not her part of the cycle of Endbringer attacks and the majority of her plans are contained afterwards or shot dead. Also, Contessa's PTV has holes in it so it's not all that. Especially when one of the holes interacts with it and changes things. I.E. Endbringer attack every three months, Zion flying by, Eidolon being his middle aged crisis self all the time, the slaughter house nine with their gary sue leader Jack motherfucking slash.

Things like that.

Anyway, just got up not too long ago so I'll continue this debate later if I don't forget about it. Until then, have at it with 1986ctcel

 

[vyor]

The PtV is so that it would fail correctly. Keep the obvious corruption to a minimum, reduce panic, and slow the decay of society from a screaming tailspin into a gentle slide of what they wanted.

I can't understand what is so hard to understand about this. Does Cauldron have a hand in something or is remotely involved? If so, it has PtV influence. Contessa IS Cauldron and PtV is literally operating 24/7, large and small. Just because it seems cheap and removes agency does not mean they don't exploit it mercilessly at every chance.

Did Contessa manage every last detail down to hiring, positions, raises, promotions, ect? No, there is no need. Put this person here, do this to make that person say this at that time, make that person have the flu at this time, and everything just falls into place exactly as she wants it to, all this in between the rest of her paths. That is what PtV is, the least effort needed to fill per request to the letter with whatever it is she has access to.

Unless she somehow died very early on, there is outright, flat out, no questions asked a miniscule amount of personal agency in Worm, even without adding in The Simurgh which just reduces it from tiny to microscopic. If you don't like it.....well, they care as much about that as they did about using precog of that magnitude in the first place.

One more thing to rage about. But don't worry, they planned for that too.

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Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Just... Have you actually read Alexandria's interlude? Like, at all?

 

[alethiophile]

The PtV is so that it would fail correctly. Keep the obvious corruption to a minimum, reduce panic, and slow the decay of society from a screaming tailspin into a gentle slide of what they wanted.

I can't understand what is so hard to understand about this. Does Cauldron have a hand in something or is remotely involved? If so, it has PtV influence. Contessa IS Cauldron and PtV is literally operating 24/7, large and small. Just because it seems cheap and removes agency does not mean they don't exploit it mercilessly at every chance.

Did Contessa manage every last detail down to hiring, positions, raises, promotions, ect? No, there is no need. Put this person here, do this to make that person say this at that time, make that person have the flu at this time, and everything just falls into place exactly as she wants it to, all this in between the rest of her paths. That is what PtV is, the least effort needed to fill per request to the letter with whatever it is she has access to.

Unless she somehow died very early on, there is outright, flat out, no questions asked a miniscule amount of personal agency in Worm, even without adding in The Simurgh which just reduces it from tiny to microscopic. If you don't like it.....well, they care as much about that as they did about using precog of that magnitude in the first place.

One more thing to rage about. But don't worry, they planned for that too.

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Pretty sure this isn't how it works.

Cauldron's big, overarching, long-term goal is to take down Scion. They don't have a PtV for that. Thus, for instance, Contessa wasn't micromanaging Taylor's life in order to make her into a Scion-killing weapon, because they had no idea what could kill Scion and what couldn't. Their plan to take down Scion — of which the PRT, the Birdcage, the Case 53s and so on were all just aspects — was to make as many capes as they could and desperately hope that one of them would be a golden BB, just like Contessa was in the first place. And it worked, though at the last possible moment. But this was a general plan of action, not something of which they micromanaged all the details at once.

They had other goals, of course. One of the big ones was in managing the societal consequences of powers appearing, and later of the Endbringers. It was in pursuit of this that they established the Protectorate and played games with parahuman feudalism. But they weren't micromanaging every aspect of that, either; a social arrangement that requires Contessa messing with it every second is one that's not useful for their purposes.

Cauldron's general modus operandi is of having multiple plans at once, generally conceived and framed by normal human intellectual methods on the part of the core conspiracy, which are then implemented by their contacts and patsies in normal human (or normal parahuman) ways. Contessa has the role of a special ops unit, troubleshooter and cleaner; she isn't running the whole show with PtV, because PtV is useless against their main enemy.

 

[Enohthree]

The PtV is so that it would fail correctly. Keep the obvious corruption to a minimum, reduce panic, and slow the decay of society from a screaming tailspin into a gentle slide of what they wanted.

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This is wrong.
They didn't want the end of society at all, they just recognized the fact that it was ending despite their best efforts thanks to PtV blindspots and escalating Endbringer attacks. You're for some reason attributing a failing of their desires as a goal they were striving for.
Also Parahuman Feudalism was an experiment they were trying with Coil at the time. So you're bringing forth the idea that the national organization they founded was designed to fail because they were assuming the success of an experiment that didn't have any of its players let alone start until long long after it was created.

 

[ayleid]

This has been bubbling in my mind for a long time, so I thought I'll put it out there and wait for the reactions.
One of my least favorite parts of fanon is how Cauldron is portrayed as either incompetent nazis or psychopathic overlords. I'll try to not re-tread old battlegrounds, but there are two points I think should be borne in mind when discussing Cauldron's actions.

• Cauldron had extenuating circumstances for doing what they did.

Now, justifying a crime is a favorite pastime of lawyers. There are many legal and moral issues arising when you have to commit a crime to save a life, for example. We can exchange anecdotes and jurisprudence later, but the salient point, the rationale behind the very existence of extenuating circumstances, is that sometimes the consequences for not committing the crime are worse than the offense committed. There is, of course, a need for an actual trial to determine wether the circumstances were actually extenuating and that bit of legal wrangling is much too often used in the real world; yet, it can happen.
In Cauldron's case, which was at first simply DM and Fortuna, they were put into a truly no-win situation. The consequences of failure would be some trillion counts of "duty to rescue," or whatever the equivalent is in your legal system. Any wrong move would trigger Scion too early, especially the careless dissemination of their information. Each missed opportunity could be punished by billions of dead down the line in some far-off world. And as their fight went on, failures kept accumulating, losses kept piling up. They knew for a fact a Path to defeat Scion existed, Fortuna caught a glimpse of it before Eden shut her down. But what were the requirements for this future to come into existence? What if they had already missed the opportunity?
All they could do was grit their teeth and keep trying to enhance the numbers. They ended up guilty of unforgivable crimes, but would it not have been even more unforgivable if they had missed the chance to kill Scion early because of their scruples?
In the end, what it boils down to is that Wildbow managed to create a true no-win situation, saddling Contessa with every trope pertaining to Cassandra truths and seer responsibility you'd care to name.
An obligatory Worm quote from Venom 29.8, where someone gets a mere glimpse of what it must have been like to be part of Cauldron :

"I feel like a traitor for saying it," Imp said, "But looking at this, hearing all we've heard, I'm sorta starting to agree with the Doctor. Abstract solutions are looking a hell of a lot better."

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• While many crimes or faults can be put on their shoulders, I do not think it would be fair to call Cauldron&co "corrupt."

Here I'll be leading with the quote; it's Taylor's narration, Scourge 19.7:

I felt numb. She was everything I despised. Authority, the institution, the self-serving people in power, the untouchable. All around me, I could hear angry voices, each trying to drown the others out. Chevalier was among them, Miss Militia was quiet.

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When I had finished Worm, I went back to that and it hit me how unreliable a narrator Taylor had been all that time. In the end, the Interludes were where the real substance was. Before it became Taylor's story, Worm was a setting. Taylor was a great narrator in that her ever-expanding influence and perspective allowed Wildbow to explore a staggering expanse of the world he thought up, but she came with her hang-ups and flaws.
Fanfiction likes to explore slices of life of characters, so you can easily find stories of Cauldron poker nights and office affairs. But really, canon Worm only shows an organization made up of workaholics chained to their work by something between duty, desperation and denial.
Setting aside Cauldron itself for now, what about their corrupted patsies the Triumvirate?
-Legend: canonically a caricatural hero. No drama here. A nice guy with a comfortable home life. Moving along.
-Eidolon: the guy that wants to be the Hero. Seriously, all he wants is to make a difference, to actually matter and do some good. You could say he is a glory-hound, but really he did not seem particularly interested in actual fame, at most he seeks personal validation. He wants to set things right, where in Worm everything goes wrong.
-Alexandria. Her comrades at the Protectorate thought she had a life, while her subordinates at the PRT thought that even she must be sleeping sometime. Instead, she was juggling two demanding jobs while doing Cauldron errands on the side, because nothing was more important than that. She did commit crimes. She was a hypocrite. But at the end of the day, she was a woman without a personal life of any significance, working 24/7 to try and save lives. What better definition of selflessness do you have?
Amusingly, Legend seems to be the one person here with an actual personal life, and who might have actually taken advantage of his salary and vacation days. Does that make him the most corrupt member of the Triumvirate?

Food for thought, people.

 

[Enohthree]

Amusingly, Legend seems to be the one person here with an actual personal life, and who might have actually taken advantage of his salary and vacation days. Does that make him the most corrupt member of the Triumvirate?

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Turns out that Legend didn't actually know Scion was going to end the world until much later in canon, after years of working for cauldron.

If someone was kept in the dark that much, both about the stakes and the bad things they had to do, can you really call him corrupt for not worrying as much about things? If he actually harried himself as much as the others despite not knowing any of that, something would clearly be off.