K6BD ask

“Devil-skin warrior” is just a cheap tactic to make weak devils stronger.

Okay but you know what this gets me thinking of? All the nonconsensual devil-skin warrior relationships that were implied to happen (primarily for the devil to feed on the human, by the sound of it), and the concept of devil-skin mutual necrophilia. You know, a nearly-broken devil’s mask on a dead human.

You know exactly why. Because Allicio is Garnet in this analogy.

“So this is what the Demiurges think of devil-skin warriorism.”

Face ask

“Hm, okay. So maybe not quite as fashionminded as they like to think they are?” I got the opposite impression. More fashion-minded than they like to show outwardly.

Honestly, yeah, with how things developed later in the chapter, that tracks.

Worm asks

I think Wildbow made a little error, he accidentally left Über and Leet off the list of S-class threats.

w h o o p s

(real talk, though, Über’s power is hella underappreciated, mostly because Über himself is so lame… and because he teamed up with Leet)

“I’ll be angelic,” Tattletale said. It occurs to me that this line is much less reassuring coming from a character who has compared herself to the Simurgh before.

Oh my cod you’re right ahaha

No “hasta la Vista” jokes?

Hah. Maybe if she’d gotten killed by Hasta from Good Omens…

So you’ve already decided that Sleeper isn’t a fancy train car?

Now, now, I never said that. But let’s go further. Sleeper is an entire train. A very, very long one that abducts people who are running away from their problems into its sinister wasteland pocket dimension, where each car on the train is another dangerous pocket dimension, and they’ll only be released back to the real world if and when they’ve gone through enough “character growth” to change as people in the exact ways Sleeper wants them to.

I am unsure whether this counts as a spoiler or not, so I’ll leave it up to the screener. Queen 18.4 is the first chapter where we get canonical name for a Noelle produced evil clone, but it’s only in character tags and it will remain that way. An evil clone of Vista is called Scape.

Cool! Not as cool as DRACONIA BLAZE, THE SPINE SHREDDER, but cool.

And yeah, I have character tags blocked to prevent me from accidentally seeing names too early (as happened with Sundancer), but if it never comes up in the story proper and the fact that it doesn’t isn’t itself a spoiler (that part’s very contextual, and in this case I honestly didn’t expect them to get names at all), it makes sense to let it through. Of course it’s all up to Sharks in the end.

Your reaction to the death of the most badass Ward seems very underwhelming. Are you still processing it, does it not seem real because Noelle said it so laconic as an afterthought or do you suspect Noelle to be lying?

Honestly? I guess I just already made my peace with it, since at first I forgot that Noelle having taken Vista didn’t automatically mean she’d been eaten. Add the fact that I’ve had months to prepare for the fact that characters were going to start dropping again (at lower rates than I was expecting, by the looks of it), and it’s really just a matter of course. No shock value.

Also I’m getting used to it, and Vista was honestly never my favorite Ward. I liked her, she had some good scenes, but she’s not a character I’m really going to miss (like Amy). Kill Kid Win and we might have an issue, but for now I frankly just don’t care that much.

There is even more danger here. Image one of the capes (especially the Undersiders) getting swallowed and cloned, and the clones have no mutations in their face. The clones want to ruin their originals live as much as possible, so why should they be wearing masks?

I’m not sure they’d even get masks, judging by what all the Draconia Blazes were wearing. At this point there’s probably no secret identities to be had for anyone who gets cloned. Probably not much dignity either, which is a bit ironic given Noelle’s own “modesty”.

(In quotes, because Krouse would object to my use of the word. It fits well enough for my use here, though, regardless of its cause.)

I can’t remember or find it, but did you ever get informed precisely what the various classifications mean, or what the numbers indicate?

No, and I wouldn’t want to be.

It’s one of those things I’ve been slowly piecing together. I have a solid grasp on most of them, and the remaining two (Stranger and Breaker, the latter of which I have some reason to believe wasn’t quite fully explained when it got explained) I have some working idea of. Wildbow is a lot better at this part of integrating a class system into his story than Andrew Hussie ever was.

The numbers I know are power ratings, but I usually ignore those when I need to talk about hypothetical classifications. They’re too abstract and powers too contextual for much practical use, plus I do not have solid benchmarks to compare against like the PRT people have. 1 and 10 are useful enough, but still vague as hell.

To put it another way, ratings are only really useful as a narrative “oh shit” gauge, to compare the extent of one power usage over another within the same cape (Taylor’s Thinker 1 rating compared to her Master rating, the former of which actually seems too low), or for comparing two capes with pretty much the exact same power at different scales.

You missed another line: “Armsmaster escaped, you mean,” Tattletale said. “And it won’t be that easy.” [FYI I’m the same person who pointed it out last time]

Shit, another one? I blame WordPress’ new editor for me not noticing when these happen.

Anyway, thank you, will add it into the adjacent quote like I did with the other one. I can’t go back and add reactions to the lines I missed like this, but they should be part of the quote because I did read them and include them in the next bit I wrote, I just failed at copying them.

Tattletale’s expectation is that this individual has the potential to become an Endbringer.’ The actual exchange in 18.3 was Skitter saying that and Tt stressing that she wasn’t sure. Was she lying for some reason? Is it a continuity error? An honest mistake on Ms. Militia’s part?

I think that’s just Miss Militia trying to get to the point, and caring less about Tattletale’s uncertainty and more about conveying the potential threat level.

Besides, some of that uncertainty does come along in the word “potential”.

Look familiar? The Worm banner image is basically NYC with the main difference being the top of the Citigroup Center has been flattened. If you look at the filename of the banner image it’s “cityscape2.jpg”, and there’s both a “cityscape1.jpg” and “cityscape.jpg” (the original) on the server, with the latter still having the slanted roof.

Neat! I assume the edit was to make it a little less obviously NYC to people for whom the skyline of NYC is iconic and recognizable. That slanted roof is very distinct, after all.

I would like to point out it was only six “active” S-Class threats.

Ah, there we go, Über and Leet might be considered inactive because people think they died at the debate.

I was reading the first Dresden Files book and apparently Jim Butcher also uses the “he/she’s/they’re good people” thing that Wildbow does. JB is from Missouri so it’s not just a Canadian thing, I guess.

Interesting. I wonder if they have some common literary influence, or maybe one of them influenced the other. (Would be Butcher -> Wildbow given the timeline.)

“Ouch. Just brutally call me out, why don’tcha?” – says the guy who’s been liveblogging Worm, for free, for *how* many years now? Sheesh, man, I’m forty years old with a career and two kids and I’ve never stuck out a hobby that long. Take some pride in it!

Oh, yeah, I wrote that with full awareness of the irony of doing so in the middle of my nearly-four-years-and-counting project. 😛

But relating to that line is why my (originally) first post on the blog included this paragraph:

I also want to preface this with a disclaimer: I’m not all that good at keeping my projects alive. It’s quite possible that this blog is going to go silent from time to time, or die completely. All we can do is see what happens.

These days, the liveblog is by far the most stable long-term project I have, and I have much clearer plans for the next decade or two of blogging than I have for the next two months of everything else in my life.

Fanart

John-I-Renicus:

Your name is TAYLOR HEBERT, and you have had to put up with your BULLIES for long enough. Today was just another BAD DAY. Unfortunately, the ADMINISTRATION at your school is about as useful as a pair of tits on a teapot, so you must resort to your various INTERESTS in order to get by. You have a particularly vested interest in INSECTS and various other ARTHROPOD FAUNA, in part because your PSYCHIC POWERS allow you to control them. This is the basis of your ALTER EGO, where you moonlight as a SUPERVILLAIN and WARLORD in your home city of BROCKTON BAY. Your supervillain name is SKITTER, and when you speak, it is most often t̶̛̄h̴́̕r̶̈́͑o̴͊̽ù̶̚g̸̐̚h̸̄͝ ̴͑̉t̸͊͌h̴͑̐e̵̅͌ ̵̆͋v̶͂͊ȏ̴̀ĩ̷͂c̴̛͑e̶͑̂ ̷̉̀ȏ̴͌f̷̣̆ ̵͊̚t̴́̓h̴͊͝e̴̐̌ ̶͗͆s̶͌̓w̸͂͠a̴̍̒r̸͌͘m̴̒́. Your fellow supervillains, the UNDERSIDERS, respect you. The HEROES of the city fear you. And you’ve had enough of that bitch Emma’s bullshit.

This is an excellent troll Taylor. Troylor. Trailer? Truck, honk honk, wait no she’s not a purpleblood…

Uh. Right, that’s what happens when my brain gets to play by its own rules. Back to the point.

Speaking of Taylor not being a purpleblood, I particularly appreciate that while she has Vriska’s horns, that doesn’t here force her to be a cerulean. She can be spider themed and still get to be a bronzeblood, which I think is an appropriate blood color for her for even more reasons than I realized before starting this sentence that I knew was coming. I just realized the connection through bronzebloods and specifically controlling animals (arthropods in this case), but I also find Taylor’s social class to be important to her character in a way that really doesn’t work with some of the higher blood colors I’ve seen applied to Taylor before.

A friend has several troll Taylors, and at least one of them is a fuschia. That really doesn’t feel right to me except as an allusion to her being “queen of the swarm”… of insects… and trolls are pseudo-insectoid… fuck, that does make some sense now. And I realize this ramble is in the middle of an Arc literally titled Queen in partial reference to Taylor.

Point is, I appreciate this lower-class trailer. She good.

Welcome to Brockton Bay – Part 2 by Grahamasaurus Rex
http://nospoiler.com/y/hqMFhQYnEHM

Oooh, another one of these! I won’t be doing more video reactions on these unless we get longer ones, but please do continue sending me these.

Let’s see what we’ve got this time…

• Oooh, right off the bat, really good looking fire effects, and I think that’s Siberian walking?
• Yup, definitely Siberian.
• Damn, this looks fantastic on every level.
• That close-up of her face right at the end, excellent.

(By the way, there obviously wouldn’t be naughty bits showing in a thing like this, especially on YouTube, but I’m still going to consider that a point of accuracy because there’s indirect evidence in the text that Siberian probably doesn’t have them. At least the lower ones, dunno about nipples.)

By glowspiders:

Hah!

What if he does this every time he wants to eat something less healthy? He can get the experience of eating something tasty, but dodge the unhealthy consequences. To everyone else he seems like he just has a habit of only eating healthy foods, right up until he asks his chef for the unhealthiest taste fest you’ve ever heard of. And then your timeline ends once he’s done eating.

By Lordoffire1010:

And she does go through flies like they’re candy… Heck, she even suggested literally feeding them to people…

It was right there in front of us this whole time! The ending of Worm is Taylor quitting superheroics and starring in the Muppet Show!

Now this is the deepest lore.