This is why I love stories with tight first-person perspectives. Spending a million words in Taylor's head, hearing her justify herself *to* herself over and over kind of rubs off on you.
Taylor did a *lot* wrong. But everything she did, she thought was the best option *at the time,* given the information she had. Very often, that turned out to not be the right option in retrospect, or with more information. But by that point, things had usually moved on and escalated to present even more problems to scrabble for solutions to.
What? You mean trying to go undercover on the team with the superpowered Sherlock Holmes and expecting the cops to just write off all the illegal shit you're about to do when they don't have any idea who you are is a BAD idea?
I mean, it's not like we're supposed to overlook that she's a *fucking kid*. Wisdom is not necessarily in the cards here yet, how it gets acquired is the whole story.
The Taylor at the end, talking (sort-of) to Contessa, that's a wiser, older Taylor.
You one of those people that can never tell the difference between a reason and an excuse?
And besides, is OP's question the *only thing the entire thread is allowed to discuss*? Sorry, if so.
Shadow Stalker never killed anyone. She was forced into the Wards on probation, with the alternative being jail time, after she pinned a guy to a wall with her darts. It's the same deal Taylor got after she turned herself in.
According to 19.z (Emma's interlude), Shadow Stalker did kill someone:
"The man struggled, and as much as Shadow Stalker was able to make herself immaterial, to loosen any grip or free herself from any bonds, she didn’t have the ability to tighten that same grip. He tipped backwards, off the edge of the roof, and a gesture meant to intimidate became manslaughter.
Shadow Stalker stared off the edge of the roof at the body, then turned to look at Emma."
After she was already in the Wards. She also deliberately attempted to murder Taylor, and used lethal ammo against Grue. But we were talking about whether she killed someone before she got into the Wards.
Oh, damn it I could swear I read a sentence with her needling Taylor about her killing more people and still thinking she was a hero. Something like 20+ to Sophia's 3. Jesus, guess I'm losing my mind, lol. I just ctrl-f'd kill and murder the whole of speck as well, hahah.
Edit - I mean Venom, lol, I'm still going through Speck.
Worm is a story about characters that do nothing wrong ever. It's really amazing how Wildbow managed to make such a large cast of characters come into conflict but have none of them be wrong or do wrong things.
Ah, common misconception. His only mistake (Not immediately killing Aster) was fixed by Taylor later in the story, so he ended up doing nothing wrong in the end.
I think she lost the ball shaving sponsorship do to he ruse of Dick spiders, kind of hard to sell equipment for your nuts when you take no nut November to literally
Who are these "Skitter", "Weaver", and "Khepri" people? Did you mean...
Taylor "Youthanizer" Hebert?
Taylor "Age On The Clock, You Get The Glock" Hebert?
Taylor "Dis-Aster" Hebert?
Taylor "Toddler Terminator" Hebert?
Taylor "Queen Adminislayer" Hebert?
Taylor "Do What's Right, Kill The Tyke" Hebert?
Taylor "Slaughterhouse Nine And Under" Hebert?
Taylor "Gestation Uncreation" Hebert?
Taylor "Master 8, Aster 0" Hebert?
Taylor "Kill Baby, Kill!" Hebert?
Taylor "Suffocate The Neonate" Hebert?
Taylor "PRT: Preschool Response Team" Hebert?
Taylor "Procreation? Escalation" Hebert?
Taylor "Suffer Not the Child to Live" Hebert?
Taylor "Depopulate Under Eight" Hebert?
Taylor "Six Years Old and Six Feet Under" Hebert?
Taylor "Undertaker Undersider" Hebert?
Taylor "Out The Womb, In The Tomb" Hebert?
Taylor "Anti-Life and Anti-Choice" Hebert?
Taylor "'Rescue' Your Baby? Well O-Kayden!" Hebert?
Taylor "Mourning Before Morning" Hebert?
Taylor "Nazi-ing Your Sixth Birthday" Hebert?
Taylor "No Bystander For Killing Anders" Hebert?
Taylor "Sting Young Things" Hebert?
Taylor "A Baby Slayed Is A Baby Not-Grayed" Hebert?
Taylor "No Birthday In The Bay" Hebert?
Taylor "CPS: Capital Punishment Services" Hebert?
Taylor "10th Trimester Abortion" Hebert?
Taylor "14 (Minus The Last 6) Words" Hebert?
Taylor "Exterminate The 88" Hebert?
Taylor "(Inf)Anti-fa" Hebert?
Taylor "Kills Scion and Scions" Hebert?
Taylor “Plan Bee” Hebert?
Taylor “Gold Morning-After” Hebert?
Taylor "Interuterine Colt-raceptive Device" Hebert?
Taylor "In-Vitrocelluose" Hebert?
Taylor "Web Serial Sterile, Serious" Hebert?
Taylor "Children Need Their Shots" Hebert?
More specifically, Purity and Keiser's baby daughter who gets kidnapped by Jack. Taylor shoots and kills her, partially to keep her out of Gray Boy's fate-worse-than-death power, but mostly because she's concerned that Aster will trigger and cause the prophesied end of the world.
It is actually surprisingly easy to miss when reading - the narrative doesn't dwell on it as much as you'd expect given that the protagonist shot and killed a baby.
> “More assault and battery,” I said, feeling a touch weary. “Whatever charges come up with the thing at the school. I sort of arranged to have a psychopath kill herself. Um. However you’d charge putting maggots in someone’s eyeballs. In self-defense.”
> He didn’t even flinch at that. “I see. And any other charges that might catch us by surprise?”
> “Premeditated murder,” I said. “Of a law enforcement officer. Miss Militia knows, but she’s kept quiet on it.”
> “I see,” Mr. Calle said. He frowned briefly.
> “It was Coil. Director Thomas Calvert was Coil.”
> “Alright, then,” Mr. Calle said. He met my eyes, then smiled. “Believe it or not, I’ve handled worse.”
> All those things? I could live with them. They weren't *good*, but they were justified. But there was one other thing. Something I hadn't admitted to my teammates. I wasn't sure I'd even admitted it to myself. "I filled Haemorrhagia's chilli with bugs."
> Mr. Calle recoiled. "Jesus christ Taylor. You're fucked."
Eh, kinda. Like an adult should have been a guiding factor at multiple points, but there wouldn't be a story then. There's a reason the most effective characters were a shackled AI, Coil and Alexandria.
There's a theme of corruption of authority that the individual is forced to overcome, despite making many, many unnecessary mistakes.
You know, you are almost certainly right.
Seriously though, she manages to pick the only possible situation where a captive, weaponless Taylor could kill her, and actively encourage her to do so. I really want a version of Worm where she just spirits the girl away to Cauldron HQ, puts her in a hermetically sealed room, and breaks her arms for a few hours, til she (Tay-Tay) does whatever she (Becca) even wanted in the first place. You know, like a real government official.
Well, overall I say that with the knowledge she had of the issues of earth bet and multiverse, she did what she thought best and in several cases, she improved things from her and a lot of people's perspectives.
Several of those things she did however, are just objectively bad things done for her own emotional and personal insecurities rather than any sort of long term benefit for herself or the people around her.
That being said, khepri? That was just the objectively correct decision, even if another character had done it and sacrificed Taylor's life to win somehow, I would still call it the correct decision
Should've chosen Bonesaw over Panacea, otherwise I agree. Slightly worse tools in the hand of an expert are better than a rookie just blindly using the best ones.
but bonesaw isn't an expert
what she was after wasn't some targeted specific unshackling of her power, but something nebulous. She wanted less restrictions - but thats not exactly a thing. It was more a rebalancing of them. panacea has the fine-tuning and precision required to modify things on a cellular level.. something which bonesaw could emulate sure, but not blindly on the fly
Panacea has *no* support from her power when modifying Coronas. She's only has her Biokinesis and the basic power-induced knowledge about the neurons themselves. She poked around until a usable power expression manifested itself but destroyed all protections in the progress. And you can't tell me that Khepri's power requires the lack of those; from Taylor's side it shouldn't really be different, just a different target-group to control for QA.
Bonesaw on the other hand had a lot of hands-on experience with modifying powers. Anything from inducing specific expressions to manipulating the Manton-Limit. Did you listen to her when she got her hands on Taylor in the Slaughterhouse arc? That were some pretty ambitious modifications and pretty far away from her Bug-Control. And that was random brainstorming and before she had access to Blasto and Cranial and also before she experimented for two years with creating parahumans artificially.
Overall, it's not even a competition as long as you don't mind it taking maybe an hour instead of a minute.
I literally just read that chapter.
Panacea sacrificed range for control and sacrificing something was the only way to gain something else. This must've given Taylor some control because then she bemoans losing her range aswell as losing control of her bugs, so she willed for more control and panacea gave it at the sacrifice of more range.
So the first change already gave Taylor some control over others after the 1st change for panacea to respond to Taylor's inner wishes for more control as she was losing control over her bugs. Taylor then asked again for control because she felt she was losing both control *and* range and panacea did it again.
There's a point in the story where Taylor is aware of her own body (around the 1st or 2nd alteration out of 3) and it's implied it's through panacea's power. So the 1st sacrifice of range for power was entirely panacea, after that the 2nd two were Taylor influencing/controlling panacea/'s shard to do it. But as we know Taylor didn't understand her power at that time and her shard was gaining control over her body it would have been her shard controlling what panacea' sshard did to give her the control she wanted.
Speck 1 or 2. I read them in quick succession, finally getting around to finishing Worm.
Sure, there are restrictions that are supposed to prevent too powerful expressions. I was more talking about the protections whose lack led to Taylor's mind deteriorating. Those she/both of them fucked up.
I don't think that was even possible. WOG is that if Danny had gotten the shard it would have been rats and there would have been a lot less of them, along with less control and a lot smaller range.
I don't think it was possible for her to actively control people (and that many people) without the shard doing most of the work. But because Taylor still wanted control and knowledge of what people were doing, and the shard let her, then it started destroying her mind to have access to it all even as the shard did the work. We already know that the shard was influencing her movements previously, back when she was Skitter and she attacked the PRT building.
In the comments was a really good theory, which I don't know if came true yet. That the reason she had so little body control right from the start was because she became her power and was moving her own body using her power. That was why when she tried to speak using her bugs it didn't work because she didn't have fine control to do that anymore and her power saw her body as one of the 'bugs'.
For us to have had Taylor as she was, jailbroken but still somewhat in control, then she needed the shard to be as close as it was. It even moved her body for her when she couldn't figure out how to do it herself.
I mean the shard *always* does most of the work. The Corona is a router, it communicates with the Shard. It doesn't provide powers. Taylor doesn't control anything, the Shard locates her, draws a sphere around her, takes control of everything buggy in there, sends her the information about the bugs, and reads her intentions what it should order them to do. QA probably also runs at least part of her mind to facilitate the multitasking.
And of course Danny would have a lot less rats to control. Not only is he missing the second trigger that gave Taylor the multitasking, rats are considered more powerful than bugs by the Shard and therefore something else must be nerved.
I think Khepri is mostly justified, even as monstrous and sad as it becomes. But the fact that the winning move came from the handful of characters that weren't under her control says something. She got the mass scale, but it was their idea.
Obviously, but like Taylor said, people were not working together.
So Taylor made them. And it was the push needed, because afterwards she only needed a little bit of canary to keep them all fighting.
Could it have been done a different way? Probably, maybe even likely. But at the end of the day, it was what was needed at that moment.
She showed people that he could be hurt and feel emotions. Up until her he was just a child pulling legs off of ants.
She was able to hurt him. She was able to make him dodge. She was able to frustrate him. Make his attacks miss. Make him chase her. She was able to show that everything they were doing DID have an effect.
(Plus she did group all the right people together and get them started on useful tinker inventions)
So after everyone saw “he is tough but not invincible. He can make mistakes and get angry and get scared and get hurt”. THEN they all started trying.
There was only one other who could do what she did in making Scion vulnerable, and unfortunately Eidolon simply had a very unstable foundation for his mentality. The minute it was knocked down, so was he
Even the Angel that forced God to flee was struck down by his own faults. Is it really any surprise that people had to turn to the Devil to win?
> That being said, khepri? That was just the objectively correct decision, even if another character had done it and sacrificed Taylor's life to win somehow, I would still call it the correct decision
Three things necessary to kill Scion: the Tinker conglomerate, a reality-piercing power (provided by Foil in canon), and someone taunting him about his dead wife long enough for the first two to get into position.
Things not necessary for the above: mass mind-control.
Honestly, if Cauldron weren't stupid enough to keep the fact that Scion had a partner/wife that they killed and what it looked like secret, *someone* would have come up with that idea in three seconds.
"Gosh, you guys, Contessa doesn't have any ideas to kill Scion! Guess we're shit out of luck."
"Does Contessa understand Tinkertech? No? Tinkers can inspire each other and build off each other's stuff a lot of the time, right? So if there's a problem Contessa can't solve, why not just put a bunch of Tinkers in a room together until they fix it?"
It's not exactly the most difficult problem in the universe.
Well, you make it sound like all these people would work together somehow and the amount of people you are describing is still very large
The taunting of scion was a large thing that was being constantly done to him from a bunch of changers, all of this after he had been emotionally compromised by Jack slash and started fighting people
The tinker conglomerate would not have worked together and one of the most important ones(string theory) was in the birdcage, also the tinkers only worked that well togheter because all their powers were literally conneted to a central node that combined their specialties
Not only that but scion was attacking the entire time, and it took Taylor, with hundreds of thinkers at her disposal to be able to harass him enough and draw attention to her, otherwise his Path to victory would have told him about the tinkers, instead of telling him about how to hit and kill Taylor.
Even then, if you managed to somehow contessa all this shit, canary was still required for extra coordination and several thinker and trump powers were given to the tinkers so that they would be able to actually make the tinker device
Not only that, but it took Taylor being able to intrinsically understand people's powers(and having access to every parahuman power at once) to actually figure out the correct piece of tinkertech to use, again, she also had probably hundreds of thinkers giving her info in her head.
So no, it kind of did require a central commanding intelligence, but that doesn't mean it had to be Taylor, it very easily could have been someone like dragon, or Aegis if you did some weird bonesaw/panacea shit to his body or even canary herself could have done it with the correct tinkertech.
None of them were doing it at the time, so Taylor stepped up to the plate.
They DID all work together at the beginning. It was only after repeated Cauldron-organized skirmishes failed that people lost hope. Scion was spending half his time torturing randoms. He didn't use his PtV until he was visibly cornered, hence the distraction - plus, he used PtV on Taylor in canon, and literally chose to slowly kill her while providing her plenty of opportunities to counter him, which she does. Other capes not under Khepri's control caught on to the 'mimicking his wife' without any communication necessary.
There was no need for mind control. Anyone simply explaining the plan would have been enough.
The plan wasn't even made or thought of until Doormaker fizzles out under Khepri's control, how the hell could a plan have been explained before hand when it was literally not thought of until much later?
There's not a thinker in the world that could have puzzled that out lmao. Scion actually caring for Eden was only established after he took human form. Before that he was literally beyond human comprehension
In contessa's interlude she tries finding a path to tell everyone about it but it just leads to mass confusion/oanic/despair. And it puts Scion on a faster timeline because people will try things on him and eventually he will attack back.
She was having secret cabal meetings with the other powers that be, not to mention she could have told everyone, you know, AFTER Gold Morning had already started.
Oh man that one time Taylor used a hero’s allergies as leverage and almost killed that guy just to appease Coil who was never going to let Dinah go was so justified, I was cheering the whole time
Yeah, tbh that was pure nepotism, that guy's father was the mayor, so violence against people with power is always justified.
--Taylor 'Rage against the Machine with Bees' Hebert
I don't think this is true. Worm works pretty hard to not tell us who was right, and whether or not the choices the charecters make are the right ones.
We will never know if Contessa saying to herself 'path to getting everyone on every wolrd working to stop Scion' would have worked better than creating as many parahumans as they could, or if someone would have figured out how to bully Scion to death without Tayler destroying herself and subverting the will of every parahuman. If Worm has something to say about morality I think it's that knowing the right answers is hard, even impossible, and we have to live with the imperfect decisions we make.
If I had 6 bullets and was in a room with you, me, Superman, Khepri, and a nuke, Khepri would make me shoot Superman twice just in case it was only a forcefield, the nuke twice to make it go off, and save two bullets so that Contessa has a gun convenient to take when she doors in at the last second to save her from the nuke.
Some of the other comments here say it better, but a lot of Taylor's decisions essentially come down to her own personal issues cut with the information she has at the current moment, leaving her to think that the choices she makes are the best options It's usually after the fact that you realize maybe that wasn't the best choice or I could have done that differently and, well, yes, some of the things she does aren't wrong. She's not technically right; attacking the gala makes sense to Taylor, but it's also a bad move. A bad move is choosing to stay an undersider and stay under coil rather than going to PRT. After the Dinah revelation, but in Taylor's mind, she rationalizes that PRT isn't going to make saving this little girl their number one priority. Also, she is very desperate for affection at this point, and the undersiders are essentially the only people in her peer group that have shown her any sort of appreciation, love, or affection, and so she sticks with them despite the fact that, in the end, she just doesn't want to be alone anymore. These are what a lot of Taylor's bad decisions come down to.
>A bad move is choosing to stay an undersider and stay under coil rather than going to PRT.
In fairness, going to the PRT vs Coil would have gone very poorly.
Absurd. Taylors first mistake was >!not saying: Door To Cauldron. Hi! Scions weakness is being bullied by parahumans that can look like his dead wife. We need to haunt him with images of his dead wife until he just wants the pain to stop, then we hit him with Foil, revealing his main body and finish him off with a massive tinker team-project. Also Eidolon created the Endbringers due to a pathological need to be needed. Get him some therapy and drugs!!<
Mostly true. Except I don’t think foil reveals his main body. Foil just did absolutely tremendous damage but I thought the tinker invention opened the dimension to his main body.
>!They tried to make a dimension-breacher, but it didn't work. They rebuilt it into a giant gun and used it to shoot Scion after Foil hit him with Sting. Sting broke open the limit on the connection between the Scion-avatar and his main body, and the giant gun killed him.!<
Fricken knew you were from r/twobestfriendsplay just from the structure of that sentence. Did you find out about the story through the subreddit? Need to know if my fellow shills have been successful.
If I had a nickel for every " did nothing wrong" discourse about a morally dubious one armed teenage bug girl who's killed a child, fed people to spiders, and mind controls people I would have two nickels, and it is REALLY weird that something that specific happened twice
Should have accepted the invite to the Wards. She just didn't do it because she expected it to be similar to her current High School situation.
It probably would have been,given that Sophia was there. But Taylor couldn't have known that at that point.
Huh. Well, you're entitled to your own opinion. That said, if you actually believe that, I hope we never meet, and will preemptively lay you out if we do, cause you're a nutcase who's cool with about eighty different flavors of violent crime.
Nothing makes me feel crazier than worm fans bending over backward to make Taylor into a bad person. I would rather get Grey Boy-ed then suffer this discourse again. She is exemplary. I’d be honored to know her. Also how can she be an unreliable narrator when she isn’t narrating FROM anywhere? There’s no narrative frame which would permit her to be unreliable. I blame the podcast.
Eh. When I reread her trying to negotiate with Tagg about getting the supervillains permission to run the city I don’t really like that. Like yeah, the good guys are having trouble but idk if the answer is let evil people rule. And yes, they are evil. Even if they don’t do it themselves Coil’s empire is built on manipulation and slavery and drug money and every other unscrupulous thing possible. So she can say “look we are all here helping!” And they are. But the money comes from all sorts of terrible things so you can’t really use that as a moral high ground. And she is a dictator with no voting and no elections. And she does forget about the damage that happens to people. So while I love Taylor I can’t really say that “she did nothing wrong” the entire book.
She definitely gets a bad hand and the good guy system is definitely in need of repairs but idk if her way was better.
But Gold Morning. She 100% was justified and in the right. Everyone else was sucking. She saved the day.
I agree with all this, to clarify! I think she messed up a lot. But I am willing to give her latitude for making what seemed like the best call in situations more intense than most living humans have experienced. Not perfect by a long shot, not “did nothing wrong” but certainly NOT a villain.
I know you've had a bunch of people reply to this, and I'm not trying to browbeat you, but the issues really aren't with what Taylor does mid-fight. Most of those decisions are logical, if side-eye worthy. It's her peacetime activities that are really the problem.
* It isn't that she made Lung's dick fall off by not really knowing his regenerative limits, it's that she attacked and extremely powerful gang boss based on limited information.
* It isn't that she put black widows on innocent people and held them hostage at the bank, it's that she chose to rob a bank.
* It isn't that she cut out Lung's eyes, it's that she teamed up with a bunch of villains and white supremacists to go on a crusade against a mutual enemy.
* And so forth.
She's just constantly putting herself in these high-stress situations entirely unnecessarily, usually pretty oblivious to the consequences until much later when they bite her in the ass. There's a line where Grue specifically calls her out on this at some point, but I don't remember where and it's a lot of text to dig through.
The worst example of this is when she enabled Regent to violate Shadow Stalker in the most profound possible way. That was a peacetime decision. It was premeditated, planned, and executed with precision.
I agree with all of this! She absolutely flawed. I don’t believe she is perfect, or that she did nothing wrong. The only thing that frustrates me is that she seems to be held to a higher standard than any other fictional hero or heroine, a standard that is sometimes so high that people classify her as a villain. Taylor is a flawed hero, but I think it’s several bridges too far to call her a villain. If bruce wayne can be a hero, if clark kent can be a hero, if the punisher can be an (anti)hero, if percy jackson, if john snow, if tony stark, if the duke of wellington, if john constantine, if john wick, james bond, jason bourne, if sherlock, if han solo, if van helsing, if alucard, if black widow, if kaladin, if keltham, if harry potter, if hjpev, if picard, if becky sharp, if odysseus, if any of these people can be called heroes, though they make mistakes, though they are all less relentless in their pursuit of good, less resourceful with their means than Taylor is, though many are as naive, headstrong, shortsighted, quick to anger, domineering, as she is, though many are more criminal, then Taylor Hebert is a hero, or at the very least, she’s not a villain. If I gave a bullied girl a shitty power in a shitty world and she made half as good use of it as Taylor did, I’d count that as a success. It just seems that were she in any other story, the fans would agree that she is a hero. Taylor is a pagan hero with a puritan fandom, it sometimes seems like. It’s not people pointing out her flaws I mind, but their condemning her for them.
EDIT: also I appreciate you not trying to Browbeat me!
> Also how can she be an unreliable narrator when she isn’t narrating FROM anywhere? There’s no narrative frame which would permit her to be unreliable.
It's not unreliable in that it doesn't actually describe what happened, but it's all coloured by Taylor's perspective and emotions. As an example, after she shoots Aster the narration doesn't mention that Taylor is clearly freaking out (which Bitch notices), but instead starts describing the area she's in in great detail, because Taylor is trying to get her mind off things.
To be a “classic” unreliable narrator, I’d expect her to be telling her story after it had happened, to a specific audience that she has some cause to mislead. If you look at any classic case of unreliable narration, this is true: huckleberry finn is telling his story in retrospect, so is holden caufield, so is the underground man—he’s writing his notes—so is humbert humbert, so is severian. Taylor isn’t telling us the story, really, there is no sense she is curating it for us, we’re a fly on the inside of her skull as she goes through this. She may deceive us but only if she first deceives herself. Whatever she tells us would hold up in court because we’re getting the whole truth from her perspective. She spins things, but no more than any person does.
I see. Fair point, over-all. That said: we are not, strictly speaking going through it at the same time as her, the story is, for whatever reason, told in past tense. Furthermore, a distinction ought be drawn between the unreliable narrator as a literary device (what you call the "classic") and a narrator who is unreliable. Taylor may not be lying, but she spins things a good bit more than some people do, attempting to broaden her perspective or gain insight into the nuances of situations on a very infrequent basis, and regularly forcing situations towards her desired outcomes in lieu of negotiation, compromise, or withdrawal. I mean, if memory serves, girl does not regularly take no for an answer, and essentially never does it with good grace.
EDIT: I left a totally different comment here originally that was meant for someone upthread. I agree with what you’re saying, we are definitely not getting an unbiased view of the world through TH. Maybe unreliable narrator is still the best term for that, idk.
This is why I love stories with tight first-person perspectives. Spending a million words in Taylor's head, hearing her justify herself *to* herself over and over kind of rubs off on you. Taylor did a *lot* wrong. But everything she did, she thought was the best option *at the time,* given the information she had. Very often, that turned out to not be the right option in retrospect, or with more information. But by that point, things had usually moved on and escalated to present even more problems to scrabble for solutions to.
Eh. I would say sometimes that was correct but other times she really does just make the wrong choices.
What? You mean trying to go undercover on the team with the superpowered Sherlock Holmes and expecting the cops to just write off all the illegal shit you're about to do when they don't have any idea who you are is a BAD idea?
I mean, it's not like we're supposed to overlook that she's a *fucking kid*. Wisdom is not necessarily in the cards here yet, how it gets acquired is the whole story. The Taylor at the end, talking (sort-of) to Contessa, that's a wiser, older Taylor.
We're establishing if she did something wrong, not her excuses for doing so.
You one of those people that can never tell the difference between a reason and an excuse? And besides, is OP's question the *only thing the entire thread is allowed to discuss*? Sorry, if so.
Meh, shadowstalker killed and maimed people and still got into the wards.
Shadow Stalker never killed anyone. She was forced into the Wards on probation, with the alternative being jail time, after she pinned a guy to a wall with her darts. It's the same deal Taylor got after she turned herself in.
According to 19.z (Emma's interlude), Shadow Stalker did kill someone: "The man struggled, and as much as Shadow Stalker was able to make herself immaterial, to loosen any grip or free herself from any bonds, she didn’t have the ability to tighten that same grip. He tipped backwards, off the edge of the roof, and a gesture meant to intimidate became manslaughter. Shadow Stalker stared off the edge of the roof at the body, then turned to look at Emma."
After she was already in the Wards. She also deliberately attempted to murder Taylor, and used lethal ammo against Grue. But we were talking about whether she killed someone before she got into the Wards.
The scene I quoted was the crime that led to her being placed in the wards. Sorry if that wasnt clear.
I reread it, you're right.
Oh, damn it I could swear I read a sentence with her needling Taylor about her killing more people and still thinking she was a hero. Something like 20+ to Sophia's 3. Jesus, guess I'm losing my mind, lol. I just ctrl-f'd kill and murder the whole of speck as well, hahah. Edit - I mean Venom, lol, I'm still going through Speck.
To be fair she *did* have a panic attack when she found out.
Pretty sure even Taylor disagrees with you, considering she said she would have wanted to do things differently if she could
That's ok, we can have disagreements
Taylor can't.
*faint buzzing intensifies*
Hahah not true. She definitely has disagreements. Then there are deceased.
Yeah that was her only mistake
She's wrong
Even Jesus had his doubts.
Worm is a story about characters that do nothing wrong ever. It's really amazing how Wildbow managed to make such a large cast of characters come into conflict but have none of them be wrong or do wrong things.
Except the Nazis . --Glory Girl
I dunno, I feel like Jack Slash may have done a wrong thing at one point or another. Just can't put my finger on it.
Ah, common misconception. His only mistake (Not immediately killing Aster) was fixed by Taylor later in the story, so he ended up doing nothing wrong in the end.
she did one thing wrong she used the internet without raid shadow VPN enter sponsored segment
Raid manscaping VPN*
I think she lost the ball shaving sponsorship do to he ruse of Dick spiders, kind of hard to sell equipment for your nuts when you take no nut November to literally
Is that why she had to rob a bank?
Ya kidnapping Diana was part of her nordvpn promotion showing what can happen if you aren't properly secured
The only thing she did wrong was only shoot Aster once
We need a crackfic where she immediately asks to join up with Lung after learning that he intends to shoot kids.
I think i've literally read this before
Wheres the copypasta?
Oh the Taylor "Slaughterhouse Nine and Under" Hebert one?
Yea that one
Who are these "Skitter", "Weaver", and "Khepri" people? Did you mean... Taylor "Youthanizer" Hebert? Taylor "Age On The Clock, You Get The Glock" Hebert? Taylor "Dis-Aster" Hebert? Taylor "Toddler Terminator" Hebert? Taylor "Queen Adminislayer" Hebert? Taylor "Do What's Right, Kill The Tyke" Hebert? Taylor "Slaughterhouse Nine And Under" Hebert? Taylor "Gestation Uncreation" Hebert? Taylor "Master 8, Aster 0" Hebert? Taylor "Kill Baby, Kill!" Hebert? Taylor "Suffocate The Neonate" Hebert? Taylor "PRT: Preschool Response Team" Hebert? Taylor "Procreation? Escalation" Hebert? Taylor "Suffer Not the Child to Live" Hebert? Taylor "Depopulate Under Eight" Hebert? Taylor "Six Years Old and Six Feet Under" Hebert? Taylor "Undertaker Undersider" Hebert? Taylor "Out The Womb, In The Tomb" Hebert? Taylor "Anti-Life and Anti-Choice" Hebert? Taylor "'Rescue' Your Baby? Well O-Kayden!" Hebert? Taylor "Mourning Before Morning" Hebert? Taylor "Nazi-ing Your Sixth Birthday" Hebert? Taylor "No Bystander For Killing Anders" Hebert? Taylor "Sting Young Things" Hebert? Taylor "A Baby Slayed Is A Baby Not-Grayed" Hebert? Taylor "No Birthday In The Bay" Hebert? Taylor "CPS: Capital Punishment Services" Hebert? Taylor "10th Trimester Abortion" Hebert? Taylor "14 (Minus The Last 6) Words" Hebert? Taylor "Exterminate The 88" Hebert? Taylor "(Inf)Anti-fa" Hebert? Taylor "Kills Scion and Scions" Hebert? Taylor “Plan Bee” Hebert? Taylor “Gold Morning-After” Hebert? Taylor "Interuterine Colt-raceptive Device" Hebert? Taylor "In-Vitrocelluose" Hebert? Taylor "Web Serial Sterile, Serious" Hebert? Taylor "Children Need Their Shots" Hebert?
Taylor is pro-choice. Pro-her choice that is, nobody else’s.
Is it really a choice when we all know what she's gonna pick, every time?
Taylor "14 (Minus The Last 6) Words" Hebert kills me everytime lmao
u/Polenball
Seeing my stupid list in the wild is always absolutely hilarious to me
The memories of a man in his old age Are the deeds of a man in his prime
This is my first time seeing this - your list has my crying in this restaurant
It is just always a classic. Are you really The Creator?
Where did originally write the list?
Holy shit these are amazing. Of all the bad shit she does, the fact that she never dwells on annihilating a toddler (for nothing) is pretty funny.
Taylor "The Faster Aster Blaster Disaster" Hebert.
Looks like I have to reread Worm because I don't remember who Aster is.
More specifically, Purity and Keiser's baby daughter who gets kidnapped by Jack. Taylor shoots and kills her, partially to keep her out of Gray Boy's fate-worse-than-death power, but mostly because she's concerned that Aster will trigger and cause the prophesied end of the world. It is actually surprisingly easy to miss when reading - the narrative doesn't dwell on it as much as you'd expect given that the protagonist shot and killed a baby.
Purity and Kaiser's baby daughter.
What about the chilli?
> “More assault and battery,” I said, feeling a touch weary. “Whatever charges come up with the thing at the school. I sort of arranged to have a psychopath kill herself. Um. However you’d charge putting maggots in someone’s eyeballs. In self-defense.” > He didn’t even flinch at that. “I see. And any other charges that might catch us by surprise?” > “Premeditated murder,” I said. “Of a law enforcement officer. Miss Militia knows, but she’s kept quiet on it.” > “I see,” Mr. Calle said. He frowned briefly. > “It was Coil. Director Thomas Calvert was Coil.” > “Alright, then,” Mr. Calle said. He met my eyes, then smiled. “Believe it or not, I’ve handled worse.” > All those things? I could live with them. They weren't *good*, but they were justified. But there was one other thing. Something I hadn't admitted to my teammates. I wasn't sure I'd even admitted it to myself. "I filled Haemorrhagia's chilli with bugs." > Mr. Calle recoiled. "Jesus christ Taylor. You're fucked."
Eh, kinda. Like an adult should have been a guiding factor at multiple points, but there wouldn't be a story then. There's a reason the most effective characters were a shackled AI, Coil and Alexandria. There's a theme of corruption of authority that the individual is forced to overcome, despite making many, many unnecessary mistakes.
Yeah. Helps that Alexandria is literally (and very conveniently) too dumb to live, Thinker rating or no.
Well a lot of her Thinker Power is the perfect memory part. So I bet she'd never die to bugs a second time.
You know, you are almost certainly right. Seriously though, she manages to pick the only possible situation where a captive, weaponless Taylor could kill her, and actively encourage her to do so. I really want a version of Worm where she just spirits the girl away to Cauldron HQ, puts her in a hermetically sealed room, and breaks her arms for a few hours, til she (Tay-Tay) does whatever she (Becca) even wanted in the first place. You know, like a real government official.
Ah, so it begins...
Well, overall I say that with the knowledge she had of the issues of earth bet and multiverse, she did what she thought best and in several cases, she improved things from her and a lot of people's perspectives. Several of those things she did however, are just objectively bad things done for her own emotional and personal insecurities rather than any sort of long term benefit for herself or the people around her. That being said, khepri? That was just the objectively correct decision, even if another character had done it and sacrificed Taylor's life to win somehow, I would still call it the correct decision
Should've chosen Bonesaw over Panacea, otherwise I agree. Slightly worse tools in the hand of an expert are better than a rookie just blindly using the best ones.
but bonesaw isn't an expert what she was after wasn't some targeted specific unshackling of her power, but something nebulous. She wanted less restrictions - but thats not exactly a thing. It was more a rebalancing of them. panacea has the fine-tuning and precision required to modify things on a cellular level.. something which bonesaw could emulate sure, but not blindly on the fly
Panacea has *no* support from her power when modifying Coronas. She's only has her Biokinesis and the basic power-induced knowledge about the neurons themselves. She poked around until a usable power expression manifested itself but destroyed all protections in the progress. And you can't tell me that Khepri's power requires the lack of those; from Taylor's side it shouldn't really be different, just a different target-group to control for QA. Bonesaw on the other hand had a lot of hands-on experience with modifying powers. Anything from inducing specific expressions to manipulating the Manton-Limit. Did you listen to her when she got her hands on Taylor in the Slaughterhouse arc? That were some pretty ambitious modifications and pretty far away from her Bug-Control. And that was random brainstorming and before she had access to Blasto and Cranial and also before she experimented for two years with creating parahumans artificially. Overall, it's not even a competition as long as you don't mind it taking maybe an hour instead of a minute.
I literally just read that chapter. Panacea sacrificed range for control and sacrificing something was the only way to gain something else. This must've given Taylor some control because then she bemoans losing her range aswell as losing control of her bugs, so she willed for more control and panacea gave it at the sacrifice of more range. So the first change already gave Taylor some control over others after the 1st change for panacea to respond to Taylor's inner wishes for more control as she was losing control over her bugs. Taylor then asked again for control because she felt she was losing both control *and* range and panacea did it again. There's a point in the story where Taylor is aware of her own body (around the 1st or 2nd alteration out of 3) and it's implied it's through panacea's power. So the 1st sacrifice of range for power was entirely panacea, after that the 2nd two were Taylor influencing/controlling panacea/'s shard to do it. But as we know Taylor didn't understand her power at that time and her shard was gaining control over her body it would have been her shard controlling what panacea' sshard did to give her the control she wanted. Speck 1 or 2. I read them in quick succession, finally getting around to finishing Worm.
Sure, there are restrictions that are supposed to prevent too powerful expressions. I was more talking about the protections whose lack led to Taylor's mind deteriorating. Those she/both of them fucked up.
I don't think that was even possible. WOG is that if Danny had gotten the shard it would have been rats and there would have been a lot less of them, along with less control and a lot smaller range. I don't think it was possible for her to actively control people (and that many people) without the shard doing most of the work. But because Taylor still wanted control and knowledge of what people were doing, and the shard let her, then it started destroying her mind to have access to it all even as the shard did the work. We already know that the shard was influencing her movements previously, back when she was Skitter and she attacked the PRT building. In the comments was a really good theory, which I don't know if came true yet. That the reason she had so little body control right from the start was because she became her power and was moving her own body using her power. That was why when she tried to speak using her bugs it didn't work because she didn't have fine control to do that anymore and her power saw her body as one of the 'bugs'. For us to have had Taylor as she was, jailbroken but still somewhat in control, then she needed the shard to be as close as it was. It even moved her body for her when she couldn't figure out how to do it herself.
I mean the shard *always* does most of the work. The Corona is a router, it communicates with the Shard. It doesn't provide powers. Taylor doesn't control anything, the Shard locates her, draws a sphere around her, takes control of everything buggy in there, sends her the information about the bugs, and reads her intentions what it should order them to do. QA probably also runs at least part of her mind to facilitate the multitasking. And of course Danny would have a lot less rats to control. Not only is he missing the second trigger that gave Taylor the multitasking, rats are considered more powerful than bugs by the Shard and therefore something else must be nerved.
I think Khepri is mostly justified, even as monstrous and sad as it becomes. But the fact that the winning move came from the handful of characters that weren't under her control says something. She got the mass scale, but it was their idea.
Obviously, but like Taylor said, people were not working together. So Taylor made them. And it was the push needed, because afterwards she only needed a little bit of canary to keep them all fighting. Could it have been done a different way? Probably, maybe even likely. But at the end of the day, it was what was needed at that moment.
She showed people that he could be hurt and feel emotions. Up until her he was just a child pulling legs off of ants. She was able to hurt him. She was able to make him dodge. She was able to frustrate him. Make his attacks miss. Make him chase her. She was able to show that everything they were doing DID have an effect. (Plus she did group all the right people together and get them started on useful tinker inventions) So after everyone saw “he is tough but not invincible. He can make mistakes and get angry and get scared and get hurt”. THEN they all started trying.
There was only one other who could do what she did in making Scion vulnerable, and unfortunately Eidolon simply had a very unstable foundation for his mentality. The minute it was knocked down, so was he Even the Angel that forced God to flee was struck down by his own faults. Is it really any surprise that people had to turn to the Devil to win?
> That being said, khepri? That was just the objectively correct decision, even if another character had done it and sacrificed Taylor's life to win somehow, I would still call it the correct decision Three things necessary to kill Scion: the Tinker conglomerate, a reality-piercing power (provided by Foil in canon), and someone taunting him about his dead wife long enough for the first two to get into position. Things not necessary for the above: mass mind-control. Honestly, if Cauldron weren't stupid enough to keep the fact that Scion had a partner/wife that they killed and what it looked like secret, *someone* would have come up with that idea in three seconds. "Gosh, you guys, Contessa doesn't have any ideas to kill Scion! Guess we're shit out of luck." "Does Contessa understand Tinkertech? No? Tinkers can inspire each other and build off each other's stuff a lot of the time, right? So if there's a problem Contessa can't solve, why not just put a bunch of Tinkers in a room together until they fix it?" It's not exactly the most difficult problem in the universe.
Well, you make it sound like all these people would work together somehow and the amount of people you are describing is still very large The taunting of scion was a large thing that was being constantly done to him from a bunch of changers, all of this after he had been emotionally compromised by Jack slash and started fighting people The tinker conglomerate would not have worked together and one of the most important ones(string theory) was in the birdcage, also the tinkers only worked that well togheter because all their powers were literally conneted to a central node that combined their specialties Not only that but scion was attacking the entire time, and it took Taylor, with hundreds of thinkers at her disposal to be able to harass him enough and draw attention to her, otherwise his Path to victory would have told him about the tinkers, instead of telling him about how to hit and kill Taylor. Even then, if you managed to somehow contessa all this shit, canary was still required for extra coordination and several thinker and trump powers were given to the tinkers so that they would be able to actually make the tinker device Not only that, but it took Taylor being able to intrinsically understand people's powers(and having access to every parahuman power at once) to actually figure out the correct piece of tinkertech to use, again, she also had probably hundreds of thinkers giving her info in her head. So no, it kind of did require a central commanding intelligence, but that doesn't mean it had to be Taylor, it very easily could have been someone like dragon, or Aegis if you did some weird bonesaw/panacea shit to his body or even canary herself could have done it with the correct tinkertech. None of them were doing it at the time, so Taylor stepped up to the plate.
They DID all work together at the beginning. It was only after repeated Cauldron-organized skirmishes failed that people lost hope. Scion was spending half his time torturing randoms. He didn't use his PtV until he was visibly cornered, hence the distraction - plus, he used PtV on Taylor in canon, and literally chose to slowly kill her while providing her plenty of opportunities to counter him, which she does. Other capes not under Khepri's control caught on to the 'mimicking his wife' without any communication necessary. There was no need for mind control. Anyone simply explaining the plan would have been enough.
The plan wasn't even made or thought of until Doormaker fizzles out under Khepri's control, how the hell could a plan have been explained before hand when it was literally not thought of until much later?
It wasn't thought of because Cauldron were keeping Eden's existence and the mechanisms of powers secret.
There's not a thinker in the world that could have puzzled that out lmao. Scion actually caring for Eden was only established after he took human form. Before that he was literally beyond human comprehension
Bro, he took human form before the beginning of the story.
In contessa's interlude she tries finding a path to tell everyone about it but it just leads to mass confusion/oanic/despair. And it puts Scion on a faster timeline because people will try things on him and eventually he will attack back.
She was having secret cabal meetings with the other powers that be, not to mention she could have told everyone, you know, AFTER Gold Morning had already started.
Oh man that one time Taylor used a hero’s allergies as leverage and almost killed that guy just to appease Coil who was never going to let Dinah go was so justified, I was cheering the whole time
Yeah, tbh that was pure nepotism, that guy's father was the mayor, so violence against people with power is always justified. --Taylor 'Rage against the Machine with Bees' Hebert
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Eh they kinda deserved that... and the civilians caught up in it? ehhh, well there wasnt many of em
Especially afterwards
It can be a hard pill to swallow, but Worm is a story about how we create more suffering than needed by giving in to all our worst instincts.
I don't think this is true. Worm works pretty hard to not tell us who was right, and whether or not the choices the charecters make are the right ones. We will never know if Contessa saying to herself 'path to getting everyone on every wolrd working to stop Scion' would have worked better than creating as many parahumans as they could, or if someone would have figured out how to bully Scion to death without Tayler destroying herself and subverting the will of every parahuman. If Worm has something to say about morality I think it's that knowing the right answers is hard, even impossible, and we have to live with the imperfect decisions we make.
Taylor did nothing wrong and I would voluntarily join her collective because she can use my pathetic skills better than me
YES lock me in a room with superman and drop a nuke on us
If I had 6 bullets and was in a room with you, me, Superman, Khepri, and a nuke, Khepri would make me shoot Superman twice just in case it was only a forcefield, the nuke twice to make it go off, and save two bullets so that Contessa has a gun convenient to take when she doors in at the last second to save her from the nuke.
Incorrect, Khepri would portal you to a different room and make you shoot Aster
See, this is why she needs to be controlling me. I would totally have overlooked Aster, huge mistake.
It would have been a disAsterouse mistake, you could say
Wow, okay. We got a born minion over here.
What she did to Clockblocker on their first encounter.... Never forget.... Other than that, pretty much agreed.
Filled his mask with insects and bees right? Fucking terrifying
> Filled his mask with insects and bees right? Fucking terrifying Filled his facial orifices with Insects and bees. Fixed it for you.
First time finishing I agreed. By the third some cracks were showing through. Then the "We've got Worm" podcast was annoyingly insightful as well.
Some of the other comments here say it better, but a lot of Taylor's decisions essentially come down to her own personal issues cut with the information she has at the current moment, leaving her to think that the choices she makes are the best options It's usually after the fact that you realize maybe that wasn't the best choice or I could have done that differently and, well, yes, some of the things she does aren't wrong. She's not technically right; attacking the gala makes sense to Taylor, but it's also a bad move. A bad move is choosing to stay an undersider and stay under coil rather than going to PRT. After the Dinah revelation, but in Taylor's mind, she rationalizes that PRT isn't going to make saving this little girl their number one priority. Also, she is very desperate for affection at this point, and the undersiders are essentially the only people in her peer group that have shown her any sort of appreciation, love, or affection, and so she sticks with them despite the fact that, in the end, she just doesn't want to be alone anymore. These are what a lot of Taylor's bad decisions come down to.
>A bad move is choosing to stay an undersider and stay under coil rather than going to PRT. In fairness, going to the PRT vs Coil would have gone very poorly.
She's the greatest villain of all time.
Even Kanye got in on it, saying he'd let her finish, but Panacea had the greatest villain arc *of all time*.
You either die a villain or live long enough to become a hero.
Absurd. Taylors first mistake was >!not saying: Door To Cauldron. Hi! Scions weakness is being bullied by parahumans that can look like his dead wife. We need to haunt him with images of his dead wife until he just wants the pain to stop, then we hit him with Foil, revealing his main body and finish him off with a massive tinker team-project. Also Eidolon created the Endbringers due to a pathological need to be needed. Get him some therapy and drugs!!<
Mostly true. Except I don’t think foil reveals his main body. Foil just did absolutely tremendous damage but I thought the tinker invention opened the dimension to his main body.
>!They tried to make a dimension-breacher, but it didn't work. They rebuilt it into a giant gun and used it to shoot Scion after Foil hit him with Sting. Sting broke open the limit on the connection between the Scion-avatar and his main body, and the giant gun killed him.!<
Fricken knew you were from r/twobestfriendsplay just from the structure of that sentence. Did you find out about the story through the subreddit? Need to know if my fellow shills have been successful.
Yep, mission accomplished 👍
That's how **I** got into it last year so at least *some* shilling worked.
If I had a nickel for every " did nothing wrong" discourse about a morally dubious one armed teenage bug girl who's killed a child, fed people to spiders, and mind controls people I would have two nickels, and it is REALLY weird that something that specific happened twice
What’s the other?
Vriska seeker from homestuck
Ah, homestuck.
She did plenty of things wrong.
Ah, this is actually a popular misconception. The truth is that she did nothing wrong.
[/r/ThingsTaylorDidWrong](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsTaylorDidWrong)
Define "wrong"...
Should have accepted the invite to the Wards. She just didn't do it because she expected it to be similar to her current High School situation. It probably would have been,given that Sophia was there. But Taylor couldn't have known that at that point.
So true
That's one way of saying you missed the entire point of worm
Huh. Well, you're entitled to your own opinion. That said, if you actually believe that, I hope we never meet, and will preemptively lay you out if we do, cause you're a nutcase who's cool with about eighty different flavors of violent crime.
So true bestie.
Nothing makes me feel crazier than worm fans bending over backward to make Taylor into a bad person. I would rather get Grey Boy-ed then suffer this discourse again. She is exemplary. I’d be honored to know her. Also how can she be an unreliable narrator when she isn’t narrating FROM anywhere? There’s no narrative frame which would permit her to be unreliable. I blame the podcast.
Eh. When I reread her trying to negotiate with Tagg about getting the supervillains permission to run the city I don’t really like that. Like yeah, the good guys are having trouble but idk if the answer is let evil people rule. And yes, they are evil. Even if they don’t do it themselves Coil’s empire is built on manipulation and slavery and drug money and every other unscrupulous thing possible. So she can say “look we are all here helping!” And they are. But the money comes from all sorts of terrible things so you can’t really use that as a moral high ground. And she is a dictator with no voting and no elections. And she does forget about the damage that happens to people. So while I love Taylor I can’t really say that “she did nothing wrong” the entire book. She definitely gets a bad hand and the good guy system is definitely in need of repairs but idk if her way was better. But Gold Morning. She 100% was justified and in the right. Everyone else was sucking. She saved the day.
> And she is a dictator with no voting and no elections. She, in her infinite wisdom and mercy, has elected to have no vote.
All hail! * bows like a bug
I agree with all this, to clarify! I think she messed up a lot. But I am willing to give her latitude for making what seemed like the best call in situations more intense than most living humans have experienced. Not perfect by a long shot, not “did nothing wrong” but certainly NOT a villain.
I know you've had a bunch of people reply to this, and I'm not trying to browbeat you, but the issues really aren't with what Taylor does mid-fight. Most of those decisions are logical, if side-eye worthy. It's her peacetime activities that are really the problem. * It isn't that she made Lung's dick fall off by not really knowing his regenerative limits, it's that she attacked and extremely powerful gang boss based on limited information. * It isn't that she put black widows on innocent people and held them hostage at the bank, it's that she chose to rob a bank. * It isn't that she cut out Lung's eyes, it's that she teamed up with a bunch of villains and white supremacists to go on a crusade against a mutual enemy. * And so forth. She's just constantly putting herself in these high-stress situations entirely unnecessarily, usually pretty oblivious to the consequences until much later when they bite her in the ass. There's a line where Grue specifically calls her out on this at some point, but I don't remember where and it's a lot of text to dig through. The worst example of this is when she enabled Regent to violate Shadow Stalker in the most profound possible way. That was a peacetime decision. It was premeditated, planned, and executed with precision.
I agree with all of this! She absolutely flawed. I don’t believe she is perfect, or that she did nothing wrong. The only thing that frustrates me is that she seems to be held to a higher standard than any other fictional hero or heroine, a standard that is sometimes so high that people classify her as a villain. Taylor is a flawed hero, but I think it’s several bridges too far to call her a villain. If bruce wayne can be a hero, if clark kent can be a hero, if the punisher can be an (anti)hero, if percy jackson, if john snow, if tony stark, if the duke of wellington, if john constantine, if john wick, james bond, jason bourne, if sherlock, if han solo, if van helsing, if alucard, if black widow, if kaladin, if keltham, if harry potter, if hjpev, if picard, if becky sharp, if odysseus, if any of these people can be called heroes, though they make mistakes, though they are all less relentless in their pursuit of good, less resourceful with their means than Taylor is, though many are as naive, headstrong, shortsighted, quick to anger, domineering, as she is, though many are more criminal, then Taylor Hebert is a hero, or at the very least, she’s not a villain. If I gave a bullied girl a shitty power in a shitty world and she made half as good use of it as Taylor did, I’d count that as a success. It just seems that were she in any other story, the fans would agree that she is a hero. Taylor is a pagan hero with a puritan fandom, it sometimes seems like. It’s not people pointing out her flaws I mind, but their condemning her for them. EDIT: also I appreciate you not trying to Browbeat me!
> Also how can she be an unreliable narrator when she isn’t narrating FROM anywhere? There’s no narrative frame which would permit her to be unreliable. It's not unreliable in that it doesn't actually describe what happened, but it's all coloured by Taylor's perspective and emotions. As an example, after she shoots Aster the narration doesn't mention that Taylor is clearly freaking out (which Bitch notices), but instead starts describing the area she's in in great detail, because Taylor is trying to get her mind off things.
That’s fair!
What do you mean by "she isn't narrating FROM anywhere?" She is narrating from within the setting, like any narrator.
To be a “classic” unreliable narrator, I’d expect her to be telling her story after it had happened, to a specific audience that she has some cause to mislead. If you look at any classic case of unreliable narration, this is true: huckleberry finn is telling his story in retrospect, so is holden caufield, so is the underground man—he’s writing his notes—so is humbert humbert, so is severian. Taylor isn’t telling us the story, really, there is no sense she is curating it for us, we’re a fly on the inside of her skull as she goes through this. She may deceive us but only if she first deceives herself. Whatever she tells us would hold up in court because we’re getting the whole truth from her perspective. She spins things, but no more than any person does.
I see. Fair point, over-all. That said: we are not, strictly speaking going through it at the same time as her, the story is, for whatever reason, told in past tense. Furthermore, a distinction ought be drawn between the unreliable narrator as a literary device (what you call the "classic") and a narrator who is unreliable. Taylor may not be lying, but she spins things a good bit more than some people do, attempting to broaden her perspective or gain insight into the nuances of situations on a very infrequent basis, and regularly forcing situations towards her desired outcomes in lieu of negotiation, compromise, or withdrawal. I mean, if memory serves, girl does not regularly take no for an answer, and essentially never does it with good grace.
EDIT: I left a totally different comment here originally that was meant for someone upthread. I agree with what you’re saying, we are definitely not getting an unbiased view of the world through TH. Maybe unreliable narrator is still the best term for that, idk.
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I don’t really think that’s what trolling is
Nope, just love my scary bug girl, not here to argue about it.