The Undersiders Are So Funny

They're silly

Thinkin’ about The Siberian

I was sitting on a draft that said something to the effect of “Worm AU where Manton pulls an NBC Hannibal and moonlights as The Siberian on top of being a globally respected parahuman studies researcher. Is this anything.”

Then I thought about this a little more and realized that this might not be far off from what actually happened. There’s a throughline in Manton’s interests, in his trajectory through life, where he’s trying to figure out what you can use powers to get away with doing to people- about identifying constraints and overcoming them. 

He’s the guy who somehow credibly catalogued, and got his name associated with, the fact that powers generally can’t be used to pop people like balloons, and he did so reasonably early in the timeline, in the nineties at the latest. That’s…. an interesting direction to take your research! When people are just coming to terms with the fact that parahumans are real he’s out there taking careful note of whether they can manifest their powers inside people to instantly kill them. How did he test that? What capes did he collaborate with to test that? What did those conversations look like? Did the IRB at a minimum issue any revise-and-resubmits?

And then, of course, he gets picked up by Cauldron (also known as the infinite untraceable victim depot) to work on improving the vials- gaining a sufficiently in-depth understanding of what they are, how they’re made, and what they can do to people that when Cauldron told Legend that Manton had gone rogue and was the one creating C53s, he found this plausible. You’ve got the guy who’d later become the backbone of the Slaughterhouse 9 basically systemically cataloging every conceivable way a power could violate someone’s physiology- first from without, and then, at Cauldron, from within.

Then, when he pulls the trigger and gives himself powers, the resultant ability is essentially a distilled refutation of the Manton Effect- a minion that can obliterate anything, eat anything, delete any material from existence, viscerally dismember people in a unity of conventional and esoteric, power-enabled violence. And he’s insulated from the consequences of his actions on two levels- in terms of Siberian’s invulnerability, but also in the discrepancy between his form and that of his minion. He mixed the vial that gave him that power himself.

Essentially- I don’t think Siberian is something that just happened after a psychological break following a messy divorce. I think Manton basically pre-committed to becoming something like The Siberian, spent most of his career working towards some form of transcendence through superpowers, and the messy divorce was downstream of the cracks starting to show as he got closer and closer to what he’d been chasing.

Now to segue into a complication that’s more directly supported in the text- it’s Worm, it’s always complicated- Master powers spring from loneliness. My theory is that while Manton wanted apotheosis, and while he’d probably been gearing up for a rampage for a while, he genuinely didn’t want to do it alone; he wanted a sidekick. Hence why he bothered pursuing a family in the first place, hence why he fed his daughter a vial, hence why his own projection ended up looking like his daughter after he accidently made her explode or whatever with the bad vial- a monkey’s paw restoration, giving him back a facsimile of the person he wanted to take along for the ride, and making his capacity for violence inseparable from her presence.

This is why he joined up with the Nine rather than remaining a solo act; it’s why he engages in a bad imitation of the Parent/Child relationship with Bonesaw; and it’s why he seeks out Bitch as a candidate. His interest in her candidacy parses to me as genuine- Even moreso than Bonesaw, even moreso than Jack, Bitch has arrived at a no-frills fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want outlook that’s very appealing to Manton. He wants to have a murderer-daughter relationship!

But Rachel got where she is the hard way, by having a life that sucked a lot, by getting near-constantly kicked around! She has a clear reason to be so angry! Even if all my postulations about Manton having a long game are complete bullshit, there are several stages at which Manton had to actively opt in to the same lifestyle and reputation that Bitch was forced to adopt as a basic survival tactic. He didn’t have to start eating people! He’s a tourist! His “freedom” is inseparable from his distance, his disguise. Rachel’s “freedom” is just the freedom of having nothing left to lose.

All of this to say- In an interlude in which Bitch has an extended internal monologue about how people with families have the opportunities to be assholes and monsters to a captive audience, it is absolutely not a coincidence that she’s scouted by a would-be parental figure who proceeds to be an asshole and a monster in front of a captive audience, before trying to buy her affection with a puppy. In rejecting Manton, Rachel dodged an esoterically-packaged but ultimately very familiar bullet.

Constantly obsessing over the PRT threat ratings is the wormfic version of people who are way too into astrology.

"That was really Scorpio of you." Wrong. It was solidly Master 3 behavior. Stop being such a Breaker and assuming the worst of people.

I really love how Taylor can either hold a grudge forever or have it disappear alarmingly fast, and it all depends on if she acts on her anger at first. Like she forgives and is willing to work with Sophia after the bullying, Lung after he tried to kill her, Rachel after she tried to fuck her over, Defiant after the everything. Like most people wouldn't forgive all those acts and trust those people afterwards, but she hardly even considers otherwise because she believes that people should work together against unbeatable foes despite their differences and when she fights alongside someone she kind of just forgets the things they've done.

When she acts on something though, when she acts immediately in an irreversible way the people she lashes out against are immediately marked as 100% irredeemable evil bastards in her mind. Alexandria, she doesn't regret the murder in the slightest despite the fact that it had consequences and Alexandria isn't a being of pure evil. Since she killed her she has to convince herself that it was right and just and that she doesn't regret it, which erases any nuance Alexandria had in her mind that would lead to her forgiving her. She does this again a buncha times throughout the book. Against the C53s in the Cauldron raid she thinks about how everyone in the crowd could be innocent, forced to go along with the mob out of fear that they'll be next and with no chance or choice of getting away and being peaceful. But then she dangles a disintegration knife into all their faces to kill Mantellum and suddenly they're all monsters who delighted in torturing innocents and all voluntary members of the mob and none of them deserved any mercy because they're Evil Bad People, so she'll never lose sleep or forgive them.

Aisha points something like this out in 29.5 actually, she says her and Alec had an argument over it because Alec was annoyed at how quickly and easily Taylor stopped being mad at her bullies and didn't want revenge. I think Alec equated Sophia to Heartbreaker in his mind because they caused both their respective triggers, and he can't fathom the idea of someone not wanting to slowly torture and kill their Heartbreaker to make them feel an ounce of the pain he felt, and honestly Alec is the normal one here I think? I think most parahumans would get revenge on the people who caused their triggers in a heartbeat if given an opportunity, and honestly poor Alec imagine trying to understand and make sense of your dulled emotions and Taylor Hebert is there as the worst example ever with her weirdo decisions. Aisha defended Taylor and her choice to not get revenge but she still got revenge for Alec because she hold grudges for herself and other people.

Letting go of hatred to someone isn't something other people can really do like Taylor. Going back to Aisha, she fucking despised Bonesaw during Gold Morning and hated how she got a redemption, but Taylor was fully willing to work with someone who sawed her skull open for the greater good when it would be completely fair for her to never want to get help from her. Idk what my point is here I just think it's really neat that unless someone is her enemy right then and there or unless she already killed that person and sorted them into the Bad Person Category, Taylor is willing to forgive anything and everything to make sure everyone works together.

I made a zine! An Inaccurate Recap of "The Power Fantasy" Issue 1. It's the dumbest, messiest thing I've drawn in a looooong time, and I laughed the entire time I was drawing it. Under the cut: spoilers for the entirety of TPF #1, swear words, and some incredibly cartoonish violence.

...it's not actually as inaccurate as I thought it was going to be? I want to clarify that Heavy is saying the same thing as the other four, but means it in the opposite way. I'm not doing another draft though, because any possible improvements to this would really only be making it worse.

Oh, and here's the whole thing laid out in zine format. Feel free to print, cut out along the border, and assemble- here's a decent diagram of how to fold a zine.

1,680,000 words and Taylor never even considers dressing the bugs up in little outfits, let alone choreographing a song and dance number. Both of which well within her ability. That's what made her a villain protagonist.

To a certain degree, I think it must have been even more traumatic for Mars to return to Aleph than it would have been if she had to stay on Bet.

She spent months watching her best friend slowly - and then very rapidly - turning into a horrific monster and suffering the whole time. She survived the horrors of Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine. She had to kill said best friend in the end after she turned into a mountain of mutated, agonized, homicidal flesh. Her power is considered one of the strongest and potentially deadliest on Earth Bet.

And then immediately after incinerating her bestie, who was screaming for her up to the end, and watching bestie's boyfriend get sent to life in interdimensional super prison, she just goes back home where things are... not like that. Aleph is pretty closed off from Scion and all the other cape fuckery. There's capes but they're nothing like her and they sure as hell aren't anything like the ones she fought on Bet. There's no Endbringers on Aleph except for when the Simurgh pops in. Other than the Khepri draft on Gold Morning (which must have been absolutely horrifying for her oh my god), there's probably a good chance that she never has to deal with any cape-related situations again in her life.

She just has to sit there with the power of the literal sun and all the blood on her hands and there's only three people in the entire world who will ever understand what happened to her. How is she supposed to function. What the fuck.

I have to wonder what happened to Labrador when Newfoundland was destroyed. Is it still a province despite having less people than any of the Canadian territories? Was it turned into a territory? Did the Québécois irredentists win and annex it? I want to know

ok Taylor there's about a billion other ways you could have disseminated that cure to her. you could have had a bug coat itself in your sweat and then fly into her mouth when she was talking or something and you wouldn't have had to risk getting close enough for her to seriously injure or murder you. you just wanted an excuse to kiss the hot feral doggirl you've been engaging in toxic yuri with for the last 20 chapters

Number one takeaway I had from worm was... damn these bitches gay