“Come on, Taylor,” Grue said.  He tried to pull me to my feet, and I didn’t move.  “We can deal with all that later.  Right now, we’ve just got to get away.  We survive.”

Man, the Nine just keep fucking over Skitter’s territory. Shatterbird, Mannequin, now Burnscar…

“Survive,” I muttered.

I’d been prepared to die against Mannequin if it meant removing one monster from the world.

Honestly, I can’t blame her for that part. I was more disturbed that she briefly seemed to have lost the will to live because the Nine had compromised her mission to save Dinah.

It was a pretty good indication of how much I valued my life at these days.  I’d cut ties with my dad, dropped out of school, helped get Lung arrested and started chain of events that had led to the ABB terrorizing tens of thousands of people.

Which it seems I wasn’t quite off the mark about.

Taylor is so deep down the rabbit hole of negativity that she’s very close to being straight up suicidal.

I’ve never seen Taylor as a protagonist meant to be emulated. She has some very good qualities that it doesn’t hurt to mimic, of course, but overall she strikes me as a cautionary tale, especially in later Arcs. A tale about what happens if you don’t focus on yourself from time to time, don’t allow yourself to be happy or value your accomplishments.

Taylor is miserable, and I think a large portion of the story so far has been meant to show how she ended up like that, so we might avoid making the same mistakes.

I’d served as a distraction so a power-hungry supervillain could kidnap a girl and keep her drugged up in some underground cell for months.  I’d stood by to let a man die.  I’d become a full-fledged villain.  Pledged to protect people and then let them die horribly.  Not once, not twice, but three times.

You did the best you could.