I certainly didn’t appreciate it on the first read-through, but one of the biggest background characterizations of Alec is among first things we learned about him: that he painted the Undersider’s symbols onto the doors of their hideout.
The loft reads as almost ridiculous when you first read about it. Whatever you’re expecting the hideout of a bunch of hardened criminals to look like, your not expecting “the rich kid’s house with all the best video games.” It almost took me out of it; it felt like such a teen wish fulfillment of a supervillain base that I thought Wildbow must be pretty young—and didn’t really take in what it was telling the reader about the Undersider’s mindset. Because it is a teen wish fulfillment, filtered through the practicality of what cost, secrecy, and Brian would allow for. Its the derelict old building you dare your friends to go into to find some rumored amazing or horrible secret—but this building does have a secret, and its a pizza party with a sweet flatscreen setup.
For the most part, it is an especially cool hangout spot that would appeal to your average teen—and not necessarily your average villain. Taylor gets told to use the other’s civilian names while hanging out here. They wear street clothes instead of their costumes. Its built to be appealing to the non-cape side of your life, a welcome reprieve from that world. For the Undersiders who don’t have much of a real life outside of capedom, its something like a place to play make-believe. That’s part of why its so effective as an initial pitch to Taylor when she’s looking for friends and doesn’t want to be a villain, why its important for ingratiating her to the rest of them and making her backstabbing plan that much harder to follow through on. Its part of why getting her own lair, built for the specifications of Skitter the Warlord instead of Taylor the kid, represents such a big change in how Taylor sees herself and her goals. Its why there’s presumably dozens of Undersider fics of them just casually hanging out in the loft, away from any major cape shenanigans. Its why Rachel’s first full appearance is her coming up into the room and breaking the bubble—ruining Brian’s pitch of sweet teen digs by bringing the violence inherent to cape life into the supposedly separate space. Because the loft is supposed to be for the Undersiders to be themselves as civilians, instead of capes.
But at the same time, everyone’s personal room has their symbol painted on their door. And the first real thing we learn about Regent is that he’s the one who painted them.
Regent did not get to have a double life. His cape stuff and his family stuff were inherently intertwined, and it was all bad. He’s arguably the only undersider to have a secret identity in a traditional, important sense: not just “you have a civilian life, and everyone’s gonna respect that its separate and not go after anything related to it,” like @artbyblastweave outlined here, but “your specific other identity is important, in a sense outside of just being something to target” way. People finding out who Skitter is means they know there’s an identity there to exploit—her enemies can trace her to her school, she can’t continue to go back to her old house, etc. You’d be able to get the same advantage by finding out the civilian identity of pretty much any cape. But not with Alec. People finding out who Alec is means they go “oh fuck, its Heartbreaker’s kid—” the effect is much more like finding out Taylor is Skitter, rather than vice versa.
And that’s important, because the persona of Regent is, to a large extent, his chance to live out the life he wants. Brian and Lisa both have circumstances that don’t allow them a typical childhood, and so they construct spaces to go through the motions of one. To roughhouse and play video games with friends, to plan shopping trips and visits to Fugly Bobs. They’re looking for a respite from their normal state, and that respite to them looks like civilian life. Alec is looking for a respite from his awful childhood, and that respite has a lot of the same things, but it also has the symbols and aspects of his cape persona. He draws his crown on his door, he uses his powers casually on Brian—he’s using the space to let him be Regent, in the same way Brian is pitching it to Skitter as a place where she can just be Taylor, where Tattletale can just be Lisa. This is pretty huge for understanding Regent early-on: Taylor obviously has a pretty expansive double life, as does Brian, and Lisa clearly wants to get into some non-cape-related shenanigans. We’re introduced with a clear divide between cape and civilian identities being the norm. Rachel is presented as bucking a trend, her lack of second identity making her an outlier. But if you read into Regent’s decorating choices, you realize pretty early that you can’t separate his cape identity and his current civilian idenitiy, because their both effectively the same thing: a persona where he can be something other than a Vasil.
Sheesh, now that I’m thinking about it there’s a lot to be drawn from each of the undersider’s lairs. I already talked a bit about how Skitter having her new base be a proper “villain lair” instead of “hang spot” represented a shift in perspective, and how Rachel being unable to behave the way your “supposed” to in the loft shows that she both can’t live a double life and has no interest in doing so (unlike Alec, who is very clearly interested in making a “new” life for himself with the Undersiders as Regent). But how about how Brian won’t take a room in the loft and insists on sleeping in a separate apartment he’s planning on shairing with Aisha? He obviously wants to be able to draw an especially clear line between his cape and civilian life, and doesn’t want Aisha to get involved at all. How about how Lisa’s eventual separate Coil-provided villain lair is a disguised community center she was pretending to work in, showing both that she has some interest in a life outside of capedom and that she’s inherently drawn to working with/having control over civilian culture? She doesn’t just want to hold territory, she wants to be an institution—not just someone the other capes have to play ball with, but who the mayor and civilian agencies have to go through. She separates capedom and civilianhood to an extent, but not to the same extent as Brian, and her goals are much more “civilian-oriented” than most.
I forget the specifics of Alec’s eventual Coil-base, but I know that it was a group of buildings (a campus, maybe?) with few people in the surrounding area outside of puppets—presumably not so different from the compound he grew up. But I do remember that one of the last times we see it is near when Taylor says something about his connection to Heartbreaker, and him getting upset by it. I wonder if it changes in the intervening two years, especially with Imp’s influence. I’m kinda sad we never get a chance to see it.
So many. Gonna start high level on this one and narrow it down.
From the 1920s to… probably the mid-70s, there was this implicit bargain with secret identities; the logistics were simpler. You could keep a secret identity with relative ease, the most likely failure points were those closest to you, and that’s manageable. But! You would keep a secret identity in the first place because if they found you, your life was fucked. There is no game being played; there were no pretenses. If they catch you, they will kill you- but first they must catch you.
The implicit consequences for being unmasked, while rarely realized, were genuinely very, very bad! Batman was fighting mobsters who would very much kill him, if they figured it out! Spider-Man concealed his identity because his villains made a beeline for his loved ones any time they figured it out. Cape IDs were genuine secrets, and because this was pre-mass surveillance, pre-internet, pre-media fragmentation, in the era where it was still hypothetically possible for people to up and vanish in the night, or become nameless drifters with no footprint, when millions of people were being shuffled around the country by wars and great migrations and the G.I Bill and a rise in college attendance, it was fairly plausible that secret identities were, in the abstract, genuinely hard to figure out.
This isn’t true anymore. In the modern day, with smartphones, home video, TMZ and the churning cesspit of online forums, in a setting laden with psychics and supercomputers and amazing detectives, it’s harder and harder to justify the secret identities not being blown open. At Marvel, many writers have said “fuck it” and had the heroes go public. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and others have maintained them (mostly) because it’s just so core to the character dynamics that they can’t ditch them.
So what’s happened, quietly, is that writers and fans have started to pay mind to the realpolitik of blowing up a superheroes civilian life, at DC in particular, and why most rational actors won’t do that. The Central City Rogues, at times, have learned Flash’s secret identity, and vice versa, but The Rogues don’t act on it because they know they can’t survive a Flash with nothing to lose, and anyway, they actually do want him around to beat back the potentially city-leveling threats. Many of Batman’s rogues have figured out he’s Bruce Wayne, but sit on the information because they want the game to keep going, or because they recognize that Batman is a known variable and a good way to make sure none of the other villains get a leg up. The end of JMS’s Amazing Spider-Man featured Kingpin nearly killing Aunt May, and in retaliation Spider-Man makes a big show of taking off the kid gloves and just pulls Kingpin nearly apart in front of witnesses, as a show of the kind of force he could always have been potentially bringing to bear if he didn’t have a civilian life holding him back. This extends to Indie Media too; Invincible and Astro City both acknowledge that if you live near a hero, you’re likely gonna notice pretty quickly, but most people are smart enough or nice enough not to do anything destructive with that info. Incorruptable is about a supervillain who rationalizes his supervillainy under the logic that Not!Superman was never gonna let anything too bad happen to anyone, he always win when it counts, and when said hero turns evil he decides he has to step up to protect people because the safety net is out the door.
More and more often, the sanctity of the secret identity is something acknowledged as a pretense; something that society at large allows for, something there’s a gentleman’s agreement not to poke too hard at.
So now we get to Worm, which codifies this at a high level. No network of individually-developed working relationships where tons and tons of people independently decide to pretend not to know who the hero really is; it’s an actual cultural thing, an unwritten rule that you do not go after people in their civvie lives, you do not try and figure their IDs out, and you absolutely do not get caught if you do try. There is a powerful AI that helps enforce this, a powerful government apparatus that helps enforce this, a well-developed set of nettiquite enforcing this, an underground conspiracy that’ll absolutely drop the hammer on anyone trying to systemically challenge this.
But what really makes Worm Unique in this regard is that this also applies to the villains.
Villains, don’t have secret identities in most superhero universes; when they get caught the first time, their IDs are out, they’re introduced by both their real names and villain names on the news, and it’s noteworthy when a long-haul villain like The Joker manages to completely avoid having their real name publicized. The best they get, day to day, is not being recognized out of costume, but that’s thin. In Worm, villain identities are subject to a level of respect alien to other settings, and it’s for purely pragmatic reasons; the book shows us again and again how utterly fucked you are if you back a villain into a corner and give them no way out. E88 getting doxxed leads to dozens of city blocks being leveled with untold casualties; Skitter goes full populist warlord when she’s outed and kills some high-profile PRT jackboots; Bakuda’s madness is driven at least in part by her very real need to establish herself as someone who is not to be fucked with because she has no civilian life to return to and nothing to her name except what she can quickly cement in her new and only identity; Shatterbird committed to being a mass murderer because her civillian life was annihilated during her “trigger” and she saw no viable path to deescalate.
Cape comics are focused on the heroes, and so they spend a lot of time focused on the carrots and the sticks the heroes can bring to bear, how the heroes can protect their own status quo, how the villains are reacting to what the heroes might do if placed up against the wall. Worm is concerned with the carrots and sticks held by the black hats. In another setting, the silliness of a guy who dresses up to rob banks would be highlighted as an act of small-mindedness, it’d be a bit about how dumb villains are to waste their time like this. But in Worm, costumed villainy is simultaneously a gesture of courtesy, and a veiled threat, because this is not the worst they could be behaving.
Twitter: what level of enshittification are you on? Tumblr: I dunno, 4, maybe 5? We took away the ability to easily go directly to an individual post off the dashboard and we’re still trying to Pivot to Streaming Twitter: you are like little baby. watch this Twitter: [BANS READING POSTS]
Broke: Only free users see ads Woke: Both free and paid users see ads Bespoke: Only paid users see ads
European: Americans will be like I’m going to watch a whore movie and eat a hamburger slathered in lard
Americans: it’s true I do do this.
American: British people will be like alright I’m off to eat some wheezy bangers (beans and bread out of a can)
Brit: I’ve seen this reblogged by several people I normally trust so: How mocking British cuisine and dialect has a long classist history and how it became frighteningly normalized on an American (uniquely cruel, uniquely ignorant) internet: a thread. 1/?
Culture is so obsessed with the idea of lone geniuses that it doesn’t really appreciate that most of the progress of science (and likely every other discipline) occurs collaboratively, in babysteps, and usually through a lot very tedious, utterly unsexy, work.
This is what’s so faulty with our short sighted coverage of scientific discoveries. You hear politicians question why we spend money on science studying insect wings and then decades later that research gets used by NASA for the most efficient way to fold/unfold solar panels on spacecraft. All of science is connected and useful because it enhances our understanding of the universe
When lasers were discovered they were called “a solution without a problem”, noone had any idea what to use them for. Since then they’re revolutionised communications and SO many parts of technology. CDs, DVDs, printing, fast internet, laser etching for making computer chips, laser eye surgery, spectroscopy, LIDAR measurements of weather patterns, barcode scanners, cooling atomic clocks, nuclear fusion, microscopy, LED technology and materials research. I’m probably not even scratching the surface here.
Fund theory and fundamental science research.
It’s actually kind of heartening, lasers; because before they were invented, their only real antecedents in science fiction were things like rayguns and heatrays and what not. But it actually turns out that their usefulness as a weapon is extremely limited, whereas their usefulness for just about everything else is incredible. It’s one of the occasions where we flipped the “Dual Use” coin and it landed very solidly on the good side.
“Hail Gurthang! No lord or loyalty dost thou know, save the hand that wieldeth thee. From no blood wilt thou shrink. Wilt thou therefore take Túrin Turambar, wilt thou slay me swiftly?¨ And from the blade rang a cold voice in answer: ¨Yea, I will drink thy blood gladly, that so I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly. I will slay thee swiftly.”
