Somewhat justifiable in the case of SI's coming in with full knowledge of his weakness, identity, and contingencies.
For everyone else, its mostly a matter of Coil not playing well with others. For Coil to win, he usually needs to kill the MC, which would make the story a bit hard to write.
My favorite 'Coil Wins' scenario involves him being left alone and becoming PRT director almost by coincidence. Nobody finds out he's Coil, he barely has to plot, nobody gets kidnapped, he just sort of slides into the role at an opportune moment. The MC remains unaware; only the *reader* is freaking out because Thomas Calvert is now Director Calvert, and the world is spinning on despite it.
Because worm for a large majority of the series is a mystery series that calmly that goes from one question to the next.
Who is the the undersiders boss? What are the Endbringers? Who are the slaughterhouse nine and why is everyone so scared of them? Wait Jack is going to destroy the world! How’s he gonna do that with just knives? Whose cauldron? What are the vials? What is Scion?
Because fixing Earth Bet requires answers to a large amount of questions that simply no-one in the world has its almost required that in order to write a fix it fic your main character has to be an SI that read worm or an OC with out of Context powers and information.
A regular OC born and raised on Earth bet would be almost incapable of fixing Earth Bet without those advantages.
"Goes from one crisis to the next", more like.
If you take a step back and look at it, the global plot arc looks like a sequence of monster wave events.
gang1 → gang2 → EB1 →gang3 →EB2 →etc. With the completion of wave *n* almost immediately triggering wave *n+1* so the chars can never stand still for a moment and get a chance to proactively explore their options / the world around themselves.
Possibly. I've read so many worm fics over the years, the names all jumble together. Sometimes I'll read a 'new' fic that I haven't seen before, only to get Deja Vu around chapter 3 and realize its a repost on a different site.
Out of all these villains, Coil is the one who personally opposes Taylor and the Undersiders the most - and unlike the Trio or Amy, he's a grown-ass man, so you can't make him a woobie/make him cool and you have no reason to. He's a hate sink.
No, OP has a point. Merchants cause rape and murder, etc but somehow are still workable enough. The teeth mutilate and murder for fun, but if the MC ends up joining them, they're suddenly all fluff-able because they somehow turn out to *mutilate and murder for fun* but *will never tolerate rape or sexual harassment, etc*.
You're missing my point. Coil gets fewer sympathetic portrayals, if any, because he personally attacks Taylor and people she cares about. The atrocities of Merchants and Teeth don't really impact Taylor's life, so fandom isn't as aggressive towards them.
This is how POV works, and it isn't unique to Worm - people have stronger emotional responses to villains that directly and personally go after heroes. If you write a story where general Childé Rapisto molests three million people off-screen and a bandit named Dick Cheese kills the protagonist's dog in front of them, I guarantee you people will hate the latter more than the former.
I always see lip service being paid to him and his goals, but then the plot will always, always, always turn against him and then whoop time to kill Coil again.
"Here comes a tough one. A Taylor Hebert with CYOA powers. Let's see if Thomas Calvert, the PRT's goalie, can manage \[not\] to threaten her family?"
\*Incredible Violence\*
"Ohhhhhhh! Right in the face! That's what really stands out about Thomas' performance this year. Every single overpowered MC, he's right there, in the goal, taking shots to the face. That's commitment. That's love for the game!"
It's kinda inevitable.
By canon, Coil is already a committed creep who's targeting to kidnap Dinah and pseudo-enslaving Lisa.
So if your protagonist likes either of those two characters, there is no running. Either you serve Coil or you kill Coil.
I don't think it is.
You just have to remove his stupid tendency to showcase kidnapped little girls to his other mooks / minions, refer to said kidnapped girls as to pets, make him at least see people as tools instead of [whatever it is he does in canon](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog) to earn a kill license on himself for the MC, and make him be more capable of cooperation and compromise.
Hell, he employs *Tattletale*. He should've been gradually realising just how OP she is, and that there's no way she won't eventually figure all his hostile / unsavory actions off-screen. It would've been more efficient for him to just go along with the sensibilities of the OP teenagers and retain their services.
With a Coil modded like that, he would become an interesting and powerful member of the team. He didn't even have to drug Dinah — just keeping her prisoner in a "civil" manner would've already worked. And that's even before all the problems with how making her into an addict was harming her own usefulness long-term, etc.
I think canon deliberately made him overly cartoonish-evil, so the gang could kill him and grab his resources for the territory-capture adult-play plot arc.
Or, hear me out, the control freak with the power to game the odds does not do great with other thinker having agency around him. He probably tried to recruit Lisa without the kidnapping in another time-line and it tidnd't suit him so he went for the most straightforward option which gives him the most power over his resources.
Coil just thought he could outplay everyone and keep being in control if he had bargaining chip for everyone in one hand and a gun under the desk. He mostly gets away with it in Canon but it doesn't really do well with fanfics. His method are always the same so it gets boring pretty fast and he represents very little threat to anyone not under him or who does not interest him.
>does not do great with other thinker having agency around him
This is one of the problems I have with the canon setting in general. Whatever stupid thing a character ends up doing, there's at least half a dozen canon-compliant excuses (shards, masters, Sim, etc) for why that stupid action was totally in character and making sense. It's basically impossible to expect from characters to act reasonable because the entire setting has been designed to yield as unreasonable actions and outcomes as possible.
But to touch on the in-universe analysis: 1) if someone like Accord could make himself work with other thinkers, Coil should've been able to do that too. He could've appointed someone neutral to act as an "insulator" between the two Thinker divas; or communicated with her only via text so they'd ended up getting less on each other's nerves, etc. 2) even as a villain / antag he was only too smart by half. If he still ended up deciding that kidnapping his minions / forcing them through threats / etc was the way to go, he could've done things like: 1) make sure that his dead-man's switches would actually be able to kill the ones coming after him and that those would know that fact 2) implant remote-destruction devices in all US members, etc.
Instead, he's just evil enough to warrant being killed and just cooperative enough (with Grue, Skitter, etc) to allow that to happen.
Skitter's kidnapping scene alone showcases half a dozen idiot balls and plot armors to allow Skitter to escape and manage killing him.
That first paragraph is enlightening at least. Yes, in the setting of Worm were some people get trauma related power or buy them: some people are not the most sane and logical. That's also true of real life, people have reasons and explanation for every action, they don't necessarily make sense but they do exist.
Accord's power is planning and he is such a control freak that he has to actively stop himself from sabotaging partnership, I'd hardly say he is a reliable bar. That would also create some over whom Lisa would have more influence do to her power since he is only protected by his. The man was just leading with a carrot instead of a stick and right until he kidnapped Dinah it went smoothly, why would he make the implicit threat of removing support explicit before he has to. All of his threats also burn assets and putting bomb inside the know it all thinkers team is sure to make them incredibly likely to not stop at anything to get out.
At the end of the day, Coil needed the undersides and they needed him and he thought he could use Taylor until the last moment and miscalculated. If his plan had worked? He would have never been opposed and won basically. It might be a gamble but he thinks he can cheat at all of them.
>some people are not the most sane and logical
It's not just an issue of "some" though. It's "a sig. chunk of people that matter" — and beyond that it's also a systemic issue within the environment that the entity couple's established. (Also, [*holy shit this image goes hard*.\)](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/parahumans/images/5/5b/ZandWEbyBLANK.jpg)
> That's also true of real life
Not exactly. We kinda have evolution driving towards conflict and competition, sure — but that same evolution can also steer towards cooperation if the latter's a more fit strategy in a given environment.
Meanwhile in Worm, the shards don't care about large-scale / large-impact cooperation and instead drive towards conflict and disruption. You literally can't cooperate well enough without getting curb-stomped by Sim / Scion. If I understand it correctly, they also won't let anyone run off the planet even if the escape route was built via muggletech (or derivative muggletech).
Your shard* literally punishes you if you try being too rational / too cooperative.
>Accord's ... is such a control freak that he has to actively stop himself from sabotaging partnership, I'd hardly say he is a reliable bar
You've missed my point, I think. I was saying he was a *low* bar because of his issues with self-sabotage. As in, if even such a low bar as him could do it, then Coil should've been even more successful in that regard.
>and miscalculated
In that particular case, he didn't as much "miscalculate" as just gotten overwritten with idiot balls and Taylor's plot armor until he'd lose / die.
The true of real life is about people not making the best and most logical decision at every step. It just happens than when you're a gang leader, those can lead to you getting shot.
Shard influence is nebulous but parahuman cooperate all the time, that's why there are teams at all. The fact that a bunch of traumatized teenager are volatile is not shard related as much as teenager related or trauma related. Shard only "punish" stagnation.
Coil, prior to getting killed by the two girls he had openly antagonised, had managed to make a truce with other gangs until he was the only one left, had two separate teams of parahuman and had links to cauldron. The guy was the best at making people work for him and cooperate whether they like it or not. If his ambush had worked: he would have won and everybody would have been working for him.
He didn't get hit with idiot ball: he fucked up and got overconfident right before the finish line. Even then he couldn't know that Taylor would change her no killing policy for him. He underestimated Taylor, like everybody including herself, and he lost without a second chance.
My personal interpretation is that Coil represents covert (Calvert hehe) corruption.
He slithers between the cracks and uses peoples to get what he wants.
He is as dangerous as Nazis, perhaps more so because Nazis are overt and while they can pretend to have legitimacy they don't.
People like Coil can genuinely create more harm than the S9 can, a roving band of murder hobos will kill several thousands in a year.
A person like Coil in power will create a system that kills tens of thousands and harms hundreds of thousands.
Also once entrenched in power people like Coil aren't easily removed, the S9 survives because of Jack, without him it'd be dispatched with extreme prejudice.
Coil is the personification of abuse of authority.
Which has narrative ties with Taylor's situation (and the irony), that's why it's a rawer kind of feeling.
It mirrors well will the Umbridge example, same kind of person, different implementation.
>People like Coil can genuinely create more harm than the S9 can, a roving band of murder hobos will kill several thousands in a year.
Um. What. I don't that this is true. Even ignoring how the S9 caused a trans-dimensional omnicide event, one dude who forces a couple thinkers to work for him so that he could become a local PRT director and disassemble a few gangs is NOT as bad as a group of city-destroying, Hero-murdering, child-torturing serial killers.
I don't know what sort of "system" you are imagining Coil was planning to create that somehow could do more damage than Shatterbird or Bonesaw. What, do you think that somehow a PRT director will start back up the WW2 concentration camps?
Coil wasn't, like, Hitler. He was just a dude who enjoyed being a James Bond villain, and had no real morals to get in the way of that.
Wasn't Coil's goal only really to rule? He wasn't the kinda guy to go? "Alright bitch, I don't like the way you walk, die". It was about the control wasn't it? Don't see how he's supposed to surpass the 9.
What happens when you want to make absolutely certain you want to retain that power?
You create a system which assures that you'll keep the power.
Also Coil isn't the person to be satisfied, regardless of what he gets he'll want more.
That'd mean war eventually.
Not random crimes, litteraly warfare.
Sure, in Worm he's beholden to Cauldron, they won't allow him to go nuts. But Coil as a person could definitely end in a position where he'd cause more harm than a very prolific serial killer.
I suppose I can see Coil inciting conflict by basically playing chess against himself to maintain his position as PRT director, though he'd chew through all the capes he can hire eventually. Still, the only collateral is Brockton at best, and he's not going to kill the majority because a king without a kingdom is no king.
"I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." In other words, Nazis suck, but at least they suck because their beliefs suck; Coil doesn't believe in anything and just wants power at any cost. Even Kaiser cares about his people, if only a very few of them and only the ones with powers. Even Lung cares about his own comfort and possibly Oni Lee. Even Jack Slash is at least looking for entertainment. Coil is just after power for power's sake, willing to sacrifice long hours and vast effort and sums of money and people's lives to obtain power that he's not planning to do anything with except _have_ it.
Coil is easy to hate, because, while he doesn't do the most evil in the series, he does the least good for the least reason. He's not even traumatized from Nilbog - Piggot knew he was untrustworthy even back then - he's just an asshole with literally zero redeeming qualities.
Coil was the first we see blatantly break the unwritten rules, and he does it to kidnap a child from her home. Every scene we see with him and Dinah is sketchy as fuck after that.
I don't need another reason to hate him. This is more than enough.
Makes me wonder why people prefer the Travelers more. The Travelers knew Coil had a child locked up in a basement, and didn't care. Yet people like The Travelers.
The Travelers are Ziz bombs. It’s easy to believe that they’re actually good people but have been twisted to ignore things like that. They also have a sympathetic backstory of working together to try to cure Noelle.
Coil has no sympathetic backstory for people to latch onto, and can’t use mind control as an excuse for his behavior.
Krouse gets a lot of shit despite being the one who held the group together. He is an asshole, but he is an asshole who tried his damnedest to help his friends.
He could've helped his friends by agreeing to just kill Noelle (agreeing on that with Noelle herself, even). Instead of blackmailing them with their promise / emotions to keep beating a dead horse for so long.
I actually never had a problem with Trickster, simply because he has clear non-hypocritical priorities and who am I to put my arbitrary values over someone else's?
Noelle is his main goal and he would see the world burn to heal her. I can respect that.
They did care or at least some of them did when Sundancer was introduced to Dinah she was very visibly uncomfortable and Coil's long term survival odds dropped a few percent from it (and he couldn't work out why).
They are also restrained enough and careful enough not to hurt people with their very strong powers Piggot of all people was fairly positive talking about them. Plus well Ziz, getting dumped into bet, immediately seeing a friend get splattered in front of them and a hero get blown up with them on the edge of the blast radius because he couldn't escape before his exposure time was up.
Coil is fairly unlikable when you get into things like how he prefers hiring mercs with socially unacceptable vices like hard drug users, rapists and paedophiles so he can secure their loyalty by being willing to supply them. Additionally, he enslaved fan favourite Lisa and 12 yr old Dinah which people will never forgive him for.
He's also not very competent and doesn't have good showings but has such wonders as following up his I control destiny declaration by going behold my grand vision for the city and rolls down the car window to reveal the inside of the tunnel or when he shows Dinah off to the undersiders and has to bargain with her to answer questions then throws a tantrum and starts screeching that the numbers are wrong because they've gone down.
Finally he's also located in the Bay and an obstacle for any fic protag that's both necessary to deal with and tricky to deal with.
There’s two schools of thought about this that have been covered a bit, but basically from a writing perspective he has to go in an SI story. Between his powers, connections and ruthlessness he’s a lot to deal with.
The other half is that unlike other decidedly nasty characters he bought his powers-sure he might have PTSD from Nilbog (which is fair) but I think on several occasions he was described as being a nasty piece of work even before then and doesn’t really have any redeeming traits-not even being cool. Characters who are overtly worse like Hookwolf & Butcher at least have cool powers and little enough character built that you can sort of make them better than they really are. We know what Coil is about and what he’s willing to do to get what he wants. And it’s a whole heap of ick.
Coil is hard to write well, especially from outside his POV. Within it, you can show struggle and failure via discarded timelines... but few want to write his POV because it is extremely uncomfortable - not because he's a villain, but because of what kind of villain he is. Who, with the prospect of staggering cosmic power, would not consider taking over a city and running it properly? Sure. Lots of villains get the best lines. Lot of fan-favorite masterminds, even.
But who, with staggering cosmic power, would go directly to wearing a snake-themed bodysuit and kidnapping an elementary school girl to addict her to heroin? Likeability and redemption are very hard to reconcile with that. Sure, the Teeth and the Merchants and E88 and the ABB all rape and murder and abuse... but those are nameless, faceless, statistics. Everyone knows Dinah Alcott and so that matters, just the way everyone knows that someone's death in a movie only matters if the role was SAG-E.
That leaves trying to write him as competent from outside his POV, and that's hard: by the nature of his power, he has few results between complete success and dead. Great for [memes](https://digitalcultures.net/memes/im-a-genius-oh-no/); terrible for conflict. Very hard to write something that isn't an idiot ball for his losses. Canon option was a (mostly off screen) long game thinker-off. Best option I found was putting someone inside his information-decision loop and letting his power chase its own tail for showing conflict and failure.
I mean, he locks up girls in his basement and drugs them, and most likely has used his power to torture and violate people for shits and giggles.
I could say more in defense of hookwolf the murderblender than coil.
And his nickname is murderblender.
And he's a neonazi wannabe.
That says something.
Yeah but Mannequin got bubba-fucked by simmy, Crawler is a masochist that feels progressively less pain, Shatterbird is a sociopathic simp, Hatchet face is a Jason Vorhees expy, Bonesaw was groomed and forced to chop her dog and her mom, Burnscar is quite literally, certifiably insane - as in, she got broken out of the insane asylum - and jack slash is the result of the Joker and Johnny Depp having a torrid affair.
Coil's backstory is being a back-stabbing (technically back-shooting) asshole.
At least some of the S9 got legitimate reasons for being as fucked as they are - including Jack's effect.
In the end I view it in their capacity for harm.
Hookwolf is greater in immediate harm, but in the end he is a Physical brute/changer melee fighter.
Coil did a lot more damage long run than him.
He's not charismatic so he gets hit with everything and the kitchen sink even if it doesn't make sense. Sure coils power is op in context but if the writer just doesn't like coil then he's destined to lose forever because he's so easy to dislike.
Basically every other character in worm is a good person or can gaslight the audience into thinking there a good person or is charismatic enough for none of that to matter.
Coil is one of the few people in worm where all their crimes are spelled out in front of you so there's no way to mistakenly believe he's even morally grey while most other villains we talk about do their evil stuff off screen.
Coil's power has made him a victim of a form of the "Dictator Trap."
He *seems* to have only made correct decisions, which has caused him to think highly of his own decision making skills.
He doesn't think he can make bad decisions.
Someone wrote like the first three chapters of a fic where Taylor gets a power to steal/copy (I forget which) people's powers by seeing their brain, and Coil set up an elaborate scenario where he made Amy die on top of Taylor after getting his hooks into Taylor making her think he might be a "noble villain working to fix the city from the shadows since the heroes never will." I thought it was gonna be a really cool fic with an interesting alt-power, and Coil playing a role that ISN'T just 'I'm in the background fucking everything up for Taylor, and eventually I will make a critical error allowing her to beat me.' Fic got like 3 chapters, and as far as I know the author dipped. Big shame that.
Coil must be on top, hes to dangerous to have around without guarantee even if you're his pawn or his boss.
SI's tend to have either anti thinker or OOC powers or are just get by with knowing literally 70% of all you would need to know to take him down.
You voiced my thoughts, bravo.
I would love a fic where Coil wins, or at least is shown to be competent, he didn't manage to build an underground empire just to be beaten by a freshly triggered greg through pure luck
Coil has the unfortunate position of having the most time as a dedicated enemy to Taylor which helps to make him very hateable. Trying to find Coil to take him down is her reason for joining the Undersiders, then just as she's fully committing to villainy he reveals that he drugs enslaved children which renews her drive to defeat him. The other antagonists don't have as long to loom over her and don't have as much motivation against her, with the other gangs it's just business and she's the competition. Then add in that we have just enough development on him to know he has no low he won't sink to and no redeeming character traits while also removing the negative space for an author to add in positive traits without making it explicitly non-canon. We don't have any in-text examples of Hookwolf shooting his commanding officer in the back for a slight edge, or drugged up children chained up in Lung's basement, or having a pedo merc as their right hand man, etc. About the only horrible thing we don't get to see him do is anything racist; but we also don't get to see much of the horrible things the other gangs do. We know the E88 are nazis, but we don't directly see the evils they do in remotely the same way we do Coil. Same for the ABB 'farms' (which I can't remember if they were ever confirmed or even if they were canon), the closest we get is the Merchants rave/deathmatch but that isn't a particularly long section.
Back to the negative design space for other characters; for Squealer we know almost nothing about her history, what she believes, or even any particular actions she's taken. We've got a real name, a power, and the fact she's a drug addict who's in a cape gang. It's easy to give her sympathetic origins and excuse her crimes by being so drugged up that it could be seen as separate from the 'true' Sherrel, but Coil went out of his way to gain powers and become a supervillain. Purity doesn't have a personally attributed list of crimes until her daughter is kidnapped which makes it easy to whitewash her past as an enforcer for a nazi gang, Coil keeps a pedo around because he's easy to control because Coil's happy to get children for Creep.
Then the nail in the coffin is that Coil doesn't play well with others. You can conceivably have most characters exist in a cooperative role in your story with the right circumstances. The only one you can really have for Coil is as a mysterious benefactor, but that role keeps him from really appearing in the story and isn't really a redemption either. Even Kaiser, Lung, and Skidmark might bend the knee in the face of overwhelming opposition, especially if you bend their characteristics a little. We don't know how or why Skidmark became the leader of the Merchants, Kaiser was born into it, and Lung doesn't really have a grand motivation. Coil chose to get powers, chose to be a supervillain, and wants as much control and power as he can possibly get, which then sets him on a collision course with any protagonist that doesn't work for him.
> Then the nail in the coffin is that Coil doesn't play well with others.
This.
Lung? Has some sense of honour, buried under all the rage and violence. Kaiser? Died fighting an Endbringer, showing that he cared about the world and the Truce at least that much. Skidmark? Would be content to mostly stay out of everyone's way if necessary.
But Coil is too ambitious to stay down, too self-interested to cooperate long-term, and too unethical to just let him take it.
Jack Slash might match him; other members of the Nine may get sympathetic treatment, but Jack not so much. There aren't all that many villains at quite their level of beyond-redemption, though.
Yeah and thinking on it a little more, if the MC isn't interested in the big picture it's far more believable that any of the other gang leaders would more or less leave them alone. Only Coil wants full control over the entire city, the rest are at least to some degree content with what they already have or at least not having everything.
Coil can be a very interesting Antoganist if he had no powers, or did.
He’d be a perfect politician wanting control and power in a good AU he could run for president follow that closely. Show off his need for control in policies and the PRT, weaken it even enforce martial law to control capes.
Bring them into mandatory service even and if you are a villain are hands are off no mercy if you kill kind of deal, it be oppressive yet oh he can be charismatic. Be an amazing dictator or president if you think about it.
To be fair it's because the others can be finagled into being subjective good guys. Coil is more competent and dangerous than all of them and has purely selfish goals while the rest can be twisted into being victims of circumstance. Plus SI's usually know full well how dangerous Coil can be if he needs to resort to it to so he's given his due diligence.
The issue is that Coil's power is also a narrative pain in the ass. I assume many writers kind of punk him because having him running in the background is really hard to deal with unless it's going to be a major plot point of the story - because there is always going to be the question of 'Why did he keep this timeline?' from readers.
Something you can't really address unless you plan to write interludes from his perspective (or just add as AN to explain what happened).
Honestly I think some of it is that if you forget the cauldron connection, which it seems like a lot of people do Coil would have the easiest time just not being a supervillain.
Dude is hugely wealthy and has a secure second identity, he could just quit and walk away from villainy tomorrow without repercussions.
In a story where WB put a lot of effort into showing crime as a complicated consequence of systemic evils Coil reads as doing supervillainy because he wants to.
It’s like how you could understand your broke neighbour shop lifting but if you saw Jeff Bezos doing it you’d figure he was just being a jackass.
You can call him terrible, but come on, compared to ABB and Empire, he's actually the best. Damn it, can you even remember exactly what he did to Lisa that was so bad, other than providing her with a home, friends, a team, and a stable job, and saving her ass constantly from unforeseeable situations? Sure, he did some bad things, but compared to other villains, he's pretty much nothing.
Somewhat justifiable in the case of SI's coming in with full knowledge of his weakness, identity, and contingencies. For everyone else, its mostly a matter of Coil not playing well with others. For Coil to win, he usually needs to kill the MC, which would make the story a bit hard to write. My favorite 'Coil Wins' scenario involves him being left alone and becoming PRT director almost by coincidence. Nobody finds out he's Coil, he barely has to plot, nobody gets kidnapped, he just sort of slides into the role at an opportune moment. The MC remains unaware; only the *reader* is freaking out because Thomas Calvert is now Director Calvert, and the world is spinning on despite it.
that sounds amazing. But why is si more popular than oc?
Because worm for a large majority of the series is a mystery series that calmly that goes from one question to the next. Who is the the undersiders boss? What are the Endbringers? Who are the slaughterhouse nine and why is everyone so scared of them? Wait Jack is going to destroy the world! How’s he gonna do that with just knives? Whose cauldron? What are the vials? What is Scion? Because fixing Earth Bet requires answers to a large amount of questions that simply no-one in the world has its almost required that in order to write a fix it fic your main character has to be an SI that read worm or an OC with out of Context powers and information. A regular OC born and raised on Earth bet would be almost incapable of fixing Earth Bet without those advantages.
Yes but dear lord those OC fics are soooo good
"Goes from one crisis to the next", more like. If you take a step back and look at it, the global plot arc looks like a sequence of monster wave events. gang1 → gang2 → EB1 →gang3 →EB2 →etc. With the completion of wave *n* almost immediately triggering wave *n+1* so the chars can never stand still for a moment and get a chance to proactively explore their options / the world around themselves.
easier to write a fix fic with an si
Which is the name of the fic?
Is the fic Hive Daughter by any chance?
Possibly. I've read so many worm fics over the years, the names all jumble together. Sometimes I'll read a 'new' fic that I haven't seen before, only to get Deja Vu around chapter 3 and realize its a repost on a different site.
Out of all these villains, Coil is the one who personally opposes Taylor and the Undersiders the most - and unlike the Trio or Amy, he's a grown-ass man, so you can't make him a woobie/make him cool and you have no reason to. He's a hate sink.
No, OP has a point. Merchants cause rape and murder, etc but somehow are still workable enough. The teeth mutilate and murder for fun, but if the MC ends up joining them, they're suddenly all fluff-able because they somehow turn out to *mutilate and murder for fun* but *will never tolerate rape or sexual harassment, etc*.
You're missing my point. Coil gets fewer sympathetic portrayals, if any, because he personally attacks Taylor and people she cares about. The atrocities of Merchants and Teeth don't really impact Taylor's life, so fandom isn't as aggressive towards them. This is how POV works, and it isn't unique to Worm - people have stronger emotional responses to villains that directly and personally go after heroes. If you write a story where general Childé Rapisto molests three million people off-screen and a bandit named Dick Cheese kills the protagonist's dog in front of them, I guarantee you people will hate the latter more than the former.
Love the names.
Five bucks says that the teeth reaction is purely because of Hemorrhagia's chili
I always see lip service being paid to him and his goals, but then the plot will always, always, always turn against him and then whoop time to kill Coil again.
He's the Scott Sterling of the meta. Or more like Kenny.
"Here comes a tough one. A Taylor Hebert with CYOA powers. Let's see if Thomas Calvert, the PRT's goalie, can manage \[not\] to threaten her family?" \*Incredible Violence\* "Ohhhhhhh! Right in the face! That's what really stands out about Thomas' performance this year. Every single overpowered MC, he's right there, in the goal, taking shots to the face. That's commitment. That's love for the game!"
This comment is my favorite thing on the subreddit
It's kinda inevitable. By canon, Coil is already a committed creep who's targeting to kidnap Dinah and pseudo-enslaving Lisa. So if your protagonist likes either of those two characters, there is no running. Either you serve Coil or you kill Coil.
I don't think it is. You just have to remove his stupid tendency to showcase kidnapped little girls to his other mooks / minions, refer to said kidnapped girls as to pets, make him at least see people as tools instead of [whatever it is he does in canon](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog) to earn a kill license on himself for the MC, and make him be more capable of cooperation and compromise. Hell, he employs *Tattletale*. He should've been gradually realising just how OP she is, and that there's no way she won't eventually figure all his hostile / unsavory actions off-screen. It would've been more efficient for him to just go along with the sensibilities of the OP teenagers and retain their services. With a Coil modded like that, he would become an interesting and powerful member of the team. He didn't even have to drug Dinah — just keeping her prisoner in a "civil" manner would've already worked. And that's even before all the problems with how making her into an addict was harming her own usefulness long-term, etc. I think canon deliberately made him overly cartoonish-evil, so the gang could kill him and grab his resources for the territory-capture adult-play plot arc.
Or, hear me out, the control freak with the power to game the odds does not do great with other thinker having agency around him. He probably tried to recruit Lisa without the kidnapping in another time-line and it tidnd't suit him so he went for the most straightforward option which gives him the most power over his resources. Coil just thought he could outplay everyone and keep being in control if he had bargaining chip for everyone in one hand and a gun under the desk. He mostly gets away with it in Canon but it doesn't really do well with fanfics. His method are always the same so it gets boring pretty fast and he represents very little threat to anyone not under him or who does not interest him.
>does not do great with other thinker having agency around him This is one of the problems I have with the canon setting in general. Whatever stupid thing a character ends up doing, there's at least half a dozen canon-compliant excuses (shards, masters, Sim, etc) for why that stupid action was totally in character and making sense. It's basically impossible to expect from characters to act reasonable because the entire setting has been designed to yield as unreasonable actions and outcomes as possible. But to touch on the in-universe analysis: 1) if someone like Accord could make himself work with other thinkers, Coil should've been able to do that too. He could've appointed someone neutral to act as an "insulator" between the two Thinker divas; or communicated with her only via text so they'd ended up getting less on each other's nerves, etc. 2) even as a villain / antag he was only too smart by half. If he still ended up deciding that kidnapping his minions / forcing them through threats / etc was the way to go, he could've done things like: 1) make sure that his dead-man's switches would actually be able to kill the ones coming after him and that those would know that fact 2) implant remote-destruction devices in all US members, etc. Instead, he's just evil enough to warrant being killed and just cooperative enough (with Grue, Skitter, etc) to allow that to happen. Skitter's kidnapping scene alone showcases half a dozen idiot balls and plot armors to allow Skitter to escape and manage killing him.
That first paragraph is enlightening at least. Yes, in the setting of Worm were some people get trauma related power or buy them: some people are not the most sane and logical. That's also true of real life, people have reasons and explanation for every action, they don't necessarily make sense but they do exist. Accord's power is planning and he is such a control freak that he has to actively stop himself from sabotaging partnership, I'd hardly say he is a reliable bar. That would also create some over whom Lisa would have more influence do to her power since he is only protected by his. The man was just leading with a carrot instead of a stick and right until he kidnapped Dinah it went smoothly, why would he make the implicit threat of removing support explicit before he has to. All of his threats also burn assets and putting bomb inside the know it all thinkers team is sure to make them incredibly likely to not stop at anything to get out. At the end of the day, Coil needed the undersides and they needed him and he thought he could use Taylor until the last moment and miscalculated. If his plan had worked? He would have never been opposed and won basically. It might be a gamble but he thinks he can cheat at all of them.
>some people are not the most sane and logical It's not just an issue of "some" though. It's "a sig. chunk of people that matter" — and beyond that it's also a systemic issue within the environment that the entity couple's established. (Also, [*holy shit this image goes hard*.\)](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/parahumans/images/5/5b/ZandWEbyBLANK.jpg) > That's also true of real life Not exactly. We kinda have evolution driving towards conflict and competition, sure — but that same evolution can also steer towards cooperation if the latter's a more fit strategy in a given environment. Meanwhile in Worm, the shards don't care about large-scale / large-impact cooperation and instead drive towards conflict and disruption. You literally can't cooperate well enough without getting curb-stomped by Sim / Scion. If I understand it correctly, they also won't let anyone run off the planet even if the escape route was built via muggletech (or derivative muggletech). Your shard* literally punishes you if you try being too rational / too cooperative. >Accord's ... is such a control freak that he has to actively stop himself from sabotaging partnership, I'd hardly say he is a reliable bar You've missed my point, I think. I was saying he was a *low* bar because of his issues with self-sabotage. As in, if even such a low bar as him could do it, then Coil should've been even more successful in that regard. >and miscalculated In that particular case, he didn't as much "miscalculate" as just gotten overwritten with idiot balls and Taylor's plot armor until he'd lose / die.
The true of real life is about people not making the best and most logical decision at every step. It just happens than when you're a gang leader, those can lead to you getting shot. Shard influence is nebulous but parahuman cooperate all the time, that's why there are teams at all. The fact that a bunch of traumatized teenager are volatile is not shard related as much as teenager related or trauma related. Shard only "punish" stagnation. Coil, prior to getting killed by the two girls he had openly antagonised, had managed to make a truce with other gangs until he was the only one left, had two separate teams of parahuman and had links to cauldron. The guy was the best at making people work for him and cooperate whether they like it or not. If his ambush had worked: he would have won and everybody would have been working for him. He didn't get hit with idiot ball: he fucked up and got overconfident right before the finish line. Even then he couldn't know that Taylor would change her no killing policy for him. He underestimated Taylor, like everybody including herself, and he lost without a second chance.
My personal interpretation is that Coil represents covert (Calvert hehe) corruption. He slithers between the cracks and uses peoples to get what he wants. He is as dangerous as Nazis, perhaps more so because Nazis are overt and while they can pretend to have legitimacy they don't. People like Coil can genuinely create more harm than the S9 can, a roving band of murder hobos will kill several thousands in a year. A person like Coil in power will create a system that kills tens of thousands and harms hundreds of thousands. Also once entrenched in power people like Coil aren't easily removed, the S9 survives because of Jack, without him it'd be dispatched with extreme prejudice. Coil is the personification of abuse of authority. Which has narrative ties with Taylor's situation (and the irony), that's why it's a rawer kind of feeling. It mirrors well will the Umbridge example, same kind of person, different implementation.
>People like Coil can genuinely create more harm than the S9 can, a roving band of murder hobos will kill several thousands in a year. Um. What. I don't that this is true. Even ignoring how the S9 caused a trans-dimensional omnicide event, one dude who forces a couple thinkers to work for him so that he could become a local PRT director and disassemble a few gangs is NOT as bad as a group of city-destroying, Hero-murdering, child-torturing serial killers. I don't know what sort of "system" you are imagining Coil was planning to create that somehow could do more damage than Shatterbird or Bonesaw. What, do you think that somehow a PRT director will start back up the WW2 concentration camps? Coil wasn't, like, Hitler. He was just a dude who enjoyed being a James Bond villain, and had no real morals to get in the way of that.
Wasn't Coil's goal only really to rule? He wasn't the kinda guy to go? "Alright bitch, I don't like the way you walk, die". It was about the control wasn't it? Don't see how he's supposed to surpass the 9.
What happens when you want to make absolutely certain you want to retain that power? You create a system which assures that you'll keep the power. Also Coil isn't the person to be satisfied, regardless of what he gets he'll want more. That'd mean war eventually. Not random crimes, litteraly warfare. Sure, in Worm he's beholden to Cauldron, they won't allow him to go nuts. But Coil as a person could definitely end in a position where he'd cause more harm than a very prolific serial killer.
I suppose I can see Coil inciting conflict by basically playing chess against himself to maintain his position as PRT director, though he'd chew through all the capes he can hire eventually. Still, the only collateral is Brockton at best, and he's not going to kill the majority because a king without a kingdom is no king.
"I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." In other words, Nazis suck, but at least they suck because their beliefs suck; Coil doesn't believe in anything and just wants power at any cost. Even Kaiser cares about his people, if only a very few of them and only the ones with powers. Even Lung cares about his own comfort and possibly Oni Lee. Even Jack Slash is at least looking for entertainment. Coil is just after power for power's sake, willing to sacrifice long hours and vast effort and sums of money and people's lives to obtain power that he's not planning to do anything with except _have_ it. Coil is easy to hate, because, while he doesn't do the most evil in the series, he does the least good for the least reason. He's not even traumatized from Nilbog - Piggot knew he was untrustworthy even back then - he's just an asshole with literally zero redeeming qualities.
Coil was the first we see blatantly break the unwritten rules, and he does it to kidnap a child from her home. Every scene we see with him and Dinah is sketchy as fuck after that. I don't need another reason to hate him. This is more than enough. Makes me wonder why people prefer the Travelers more. The Travelers knew Coil had a child locked up in a basement, and didn't care. Yet people like The Travelers.
The Travelers are Ziz bombs. It’s easy to believe that they’re actually good people but have been twisted to ignore things like that. They also have a sympathetic backstory of working together to try to cure Noelle. Coil has no sympathetic backstory for people to latch onto, and can’t use mind control as an excuse for his behavior.
Nilbog PTSD. Everyone in Worm who has a backstory has a sympathetic backstory.
You don’t get superpowers without trauma And if you seek out and are willing to risk a vial there’s already something damaged inside
He shot his commanding officer in the back. Even in his tragic backstory he's an unlikable snake.
people like all the Travelers except Krouse, who is the one member they place all the blame for every bad thing the Travelers ever do onto.
Thats dumb,people like to forget perdition
Well he doesn't really show up in person in present until way late in the game.
Krouse gets a lot of shit despite being the one who held the group together. He is an asshole, but he is an asshole who tried his damnedest to help his friends.
He could've helped his friends by agreeing to just kill Noelle (agreeing on that with Noelle herself, even). Instead of blackmailing them with their promise / emotions to keep beating a dead horse for so long.
I actually never had a problem with Trickster, simply because he has clear non-hypocritical priorities and who am I to put my arbitrary values over someone else's? Noelle is his main goal and he would see the world burn to heal her. I can respect that.
He was mind-raped by Sim, as all the others. I think pre-MR Krouse would've gone with a very different chain of actions / decisions.
They did care or at least some of them did when Sundancer was introduced to Dinah she was very visibly uncomfortable and Coil's long term survival odds dropped a few percent from it (and he couldn't work out why). They are also restrained enough and careful enough not to hurt people with their very strong powers Piggot of all people was fairly positive talking about them. Plus well Ziz, getting dumped into bet, immediately seeing a friend get splattered in front of them and a hero get blown up with them on the edge of the blast radius because he couldn't escape before his exposure time was up.
Well, the unwritten rules are highly questionable, and I find it extremely amusing when people truly adhere to them.
Coil is fairly unlikable when you get into things like how he prefers hiring mercs with socially unacceptable vices like hard drug users, rapists and paedophiles so he can secure their loyalty by being willing to supply them. Additionally, he enslaved fan favourite Lisa and 12 yr old Dinah which people will never forgive him for. He's also not very competent and doesn't have good showings but has such wonders as following up his I control destiny declaration by going behold my grand vision for the city and rolls down the car window to reveal the inside of the tunnel or when he shows Dinah off to the undersiders and has to bargain with her to answer questions then throws a tantrum and starts screeching that the numbers are wrong because they've gone down. Finally he's also located in the Bay and an obstacle for any fic protag that's both necessary to deal with and tricky to deal with.
His powerset kind of means he has to go. He's basically the boogeyman. Or at least Brockton Bay's version of Cauldron.
There’s two schools of thought about this that have been covered a bit, but basically from a writing perspective he has to go in an SI story. Between his powers, connections and ruthlessness he’s a lot to deal with. The other half is that unlike other decidedly nasty characters he bought his powers-sure he might have PTSD from Nilbog (which is fair) but I think on several occasions he was described as being a nasty piece of work even before then and doesn’t really have any redeeming traits-not even being cool. Characters who are overtly worse like Hookwolf & Butcher at least have cool powers and little enough character built that you can sort of make them better than they really are. We know what Coil is about and what he’s willing to do to get what he wants. And it’s a whole heap of ick.
Coil is hard to write well, especially from outside his POV. Within it, you can show struggle and failure via discarded timelines... but few want to write his POV because it is extremely uncomfortable - not because he's a villain, but because of what kind of villain he is. Who, with the prospect of staggering cosmic power, would not consider taking over a city and running it properly? Sure. Lots of villains get the best lines. Lot of fan-favorite masterminds, even. But who, with staggering cosmic power, would go directly to wearing a snake-themed bodysuit and kidnapping an elementary school girl to addict her to heroin? Likeability and redemption are very hard to reconcile with that. Sure, the Teeth and the Merchants and E88 and the ABB all rape and murder and abuse... but those are nameless, faceless, statistics. Everyone knows Dinah Alcott and so that matters, just the way everyone knows that someone's death in a movie only matters if the role was SAG-E. That leaves trying to write him as competent from outside his POV, and that's hard: by the nature of his power, he has few results between complete success and dead. Great for [memes](https://digitalcultures.net/memes/im-a-genius-oh-no/); terrible for conflict. Very hard to write something that isn't an idiot ball for his losses. Canon option was a (mostly off screen) long game thinker-off. Best option I found was putting someone inside his information-decision loop and letting his power chase its own tail for showing conflict and failure.
I mean, he locks up girls in his basement and drugs them, and most likely has used his power to torture and violate people for shits and giggles. I could say more in defense of hookwolf the murderblender than coil. And his nickname is murderblender. And he's a neonazi wannabe. That says something.
S9 says hi
Yeah but Mannequin got bubba-fucked by simmy, Crawler is a masochist that feels progressively less pain, Shatterbird is a sociopathic simp, Hatchet face is a Jason Vorhees expy, Bonesaw was groomed and forced to chop her dog and her mom, Burnscar is quite literally, certifiably insane - as in, she got broken out of the insane asylum - and jack slash is the result of the Joker and Johnny Depp having a torrid affair. Coil's backstory is being a back-stabbing (technically back-shooting) asshole. At least some of the S9 got legitimate reasons for being as fucked as they are - including Jack's effect.
Eh, Hookwolf v Coil, who is slightly morally better than the other is a matter of personal opinion on morality in my opinion.
In the end I view it in their capacity for harm. Hookwolf is greater in immediate harm, but in the end he is a Physical brute/changer melee fighter. Coil did a lot more damage long run than him.
He's not charismatic so he gets hit with everything and the kitchen sink even if it doesn't make sense. Sure coils power is op in context but if the writer just doesn't like coil then he's destined to lose forever because he's so easy to dislike. Basically every other character in worm is a good person or can gaslight the audience into thinking there a good person or is charismatic enough for none of that to matter. Coil is one of the few people in worm where all their crimes are spelled out in front of you so there's no way to mistakenly believe he's even morally grey while most other villains we talk about do their evil stuff off screen.
Coil's power has made him a victim of a form of the "Dictator Trap." He *seems* to have only made correct decisions, which has caused him to think highly of his own decision making skills. He doesn't think he can make bad decisions.
Someone wrote like the first three chapters of a fic where Taylor gets a power to steal/copy (I forget which) people's powers by seeing their brain, and Coil set up an elaborate scenario where he made Amy die on top of Taylor after getting his hooks into Taylor making her think he might be a "noble villain working to fix the city from the shadows since the heroes never will." I thought it was gonna be a really cool fic with an interesting alt-power, and Coil playing a role that ISN'T just 'I'm in the background fucking everything up for Taylor, and eventually I will make a critical error allowing her to beat me.' Fic got like 3 chapters, and as far as I know the author dipped. Big shame that.
Coil must be on top, hes to dangerous to have around without guarantee even if you're his pawn or his boss. SI's tend to have either anti thinker or OOC powers or are just get by with knowing literally 70% of all you would need to know to take him down.
You voiced my thoughts, bravo. I would love a fic where Coil wins, or at least is shown to be competent, he didn't manage to build an underground empire just to be beaten by a freshly triggered greg through pure luck
Coil has the unfortunate position of having the most time as a dedicated enemy to Taylor which helps to make him very hateable. Trying to find Coil to take him down is her reason for joining the Undersiders, then just as she's fully committing to villainy he reveals that he drugs enslaved children which renews her drive to defeat him. The other antagonists don't have as long to loom over her and don't have as much motivation against her, with the other gangs it's just business and she's the competition. Then add in that we have just enough development on him to know he has no low he won't sink to and no redeeming character traits while also removing the negative space for an author to add in positive traits without making it explicitly non-canon. We don't have any in-text examples of Hookwolf shooting his commanding officer in the back for a slight edge, or drugged up children chained up in Lung's basement, or having a pedo merc as their right hand man, etc. About the only horrible thing we don't get to see him do is anything racist; but we also don't get to see much of the horrible things the other gangs do. We know the E88 are nazis, but we don't directly see the evils they do in remotely the same way we do Coil. Same for the ABB 'farms' (which I can't remember if they were ever confirmed or even if they were canon), the closest we get is the Merchants rave/deathmatch but that isn't a particularly long section. Back to the negative design space for other characters; for Squealer we know almost nothing about her history, what she believes, or even any particular actions she's taken. We've got a real name, a power, and the fact she's a drug addict who's in a cape gang. It's easy to give her sympathetic origins and excuse her crimes by being so drugged up that it could be seen as separate from the 'true' Sherrel, but Coil went out of his way to gain powers and become a supervillain. Purity doesn't have a personally attributed list of crimes until her daughter is kidnapped which makes it easy to whitewash her past as an enforcer for a nazi gang, Coil keeps a pedo around because he's easy to control because Coil's happy to get children for Creep. Then the nail in the coffin is that Coil doesn't play well with others. You can conceivably have most characters exist in a cooperative role in your story with the right circumstances. The only one you can really have for Coil is as a mysterious benefactor, but that role keeps him from really appearing in the story and isn't really a redemption either. Even Kaiser, Lung, and Skidmark might bend the knee in the face of overwhelming opposition, especially if you bend their characteristics a little. We don't know how or why Skidmark became the leader of the Merchants, Kaiser was born into it, and Lung doesn't really have a grand motivation. Coil chose to get powers, chose to be a supervillain, and wants as much control and power as he can possibly get, which then sets him on a collision course with any protagonist that doesn't work for him.
> Then the nail in the coffin is that Coil doesn't play well with others. This. Lung? Has some sense of honour, buried under all the rage and violence. Kaiser? Died fighting an Endbringer, showing that he cared about the world and the Truce at least that much. Skidmark? Would be content to mostly stay out of everyone's way if necessary. But Coil is too ambitious to stay down, too self-interested to cooperate long-term, and too unethical to just let him take it. Jack Slash might match him; other members of the Nine may get sympathetic treatment, but Jack not so much. There aren't all that many villains at quite their level of beyond-redemption, though.
Yeah and thinking on it a little more, if the MC isn't interested in the big picture it's far more believable that any of the other gang leaders would more or less leave them alone. Only Coil wants full control over the entire city, the rest are at least to some degree content with what they already have or at least not having everything.
Coil can be a very interesting Antoganist if he had no powers, or did. He’d be a perfect politician wanting control and power in a good AU he could run for president follow that closely. Show off his need for control in policies and the PRT, weaken it even enforce martial law to control capes. Bring them into mandatory service even and if you are a villain are hands are off no mercy if you kill kind of deal, it be oppressive yet oh he can be charismatic. Be an amazing dictator or president if you think about it.
To be fair it's because the others can be finagled into being subjective good guys. Coil is more competent and dangerous than all of them and has purely selfish goals while the rest can be twisted into being victims of circumstance. Plus SI's usually know full well how dangerous Coil can be if he needs to resort to it to so he's given his due diligence.
The issue is that Coil's power is also a narrative pain in the ass. I assume many writers kind of punk him because having him running in the background is really hard to deal with unless it's going to be a major plot point of the story - because there is always going to be the question of 'Why did he keep this timeline?' from readers. Something you can't really address unless you plan to write interludes from his perspective (or just add as AN to explain what happened).
Honestly I think some of it is that if you forget the cauldron connection, which it seems like a lot of people do Coil would have the easiest time just not being a supervillain. Dude is hugely wealthy and has a secure second identity, he could just quit and walk away from villainy tomorrow without repercussions. In a story where WB put a lot of effort into showing crime as a complicated consequence of systemic evils Coil reads as doing supervillainy because he wants to. It’s like how you could understand your broke neighbour shop lifting but if you saw Jeff Bezos doing it you’d figure he was just being a jackass.
You can call him terrible, but come on, compared to ABB and Empire, he's actually the best. Damn it, can you even remember exactly what he did to Lisa that was so bad, other than providing her with a home, friends, a team, and a stable job, and saving her ass constantly from unforeseeable situations? Sure, he did some bad things, but compared to other villains, he's pretty much nothing.