Wait Why Did Brian Get A Shadow Power. Why Is He A Shaker. It Doesn't Even Remotely Relate To His Trigger

Wait why did Brian get a shadow power. Why is he a shaker. It doesn't even remotely relate to his trigger event. Girl what problem did your power solve.

do you think anyone ever made an extremely tasteless line of slaughterhouse nine themed drinks

There are so many strange things happening in my life right now that it feels like I’m in some other Universe.

#lisa kind of has to be the unaffected one trying to reverse engineer the problem in the b plot because anything else will cause#big damn problems emotionally and also make it implausible to hold onto secrets we're saving for the season finale wise.#though i guess alec getting lisas powers and lisa having to distract him with funny protectorate drama as self preservation isnt nothing

still re undersiders body swap cartoon episode just in a new post because the thread was getting long. this may be overestimating alec's ability to be a good boy but i genuinely do think alec is Invested Enough In Being A Good Boy that this would not be a big problem. it would only be a medium problem. because, like, the danger of alec suddenly having vast quantities of information about his friends psyches is that he does what lisa notes him to be prone to and underestimates the seriousness of something and lets it slip. but that danger is minimized when he's also receiving a live feed of information about precisely how serious [insert emotional thing here] is to [insert undersider here]. i think he would do what he often does when he realizes he's in over his head wrt handling a problem involving Feelings and just kind of like. sit very quietly and very still at the back of the team. while staring into the middle distance and occasionally making a strange poorly contained facial expression. and also one (1) time he would notice far too much about taylors feelings about brian or rachels muscles or whatever and then try to make a joke about it and receive a live feed of information about how he just made her feel embarrassed and bad and also like he's trying to bully her and how she's worried that he's learning lots of things about her psyche and is judging everything and so on. to which he would respond by getting defensively upset about being perceived as that mean and do a terrible job of backpedaling out without actually undergoing the vulnerability of apologizing or admitting that being perceived that way upsets him. and then he would go back to sitting and staring into space very quietly

Worm milks an enormous amount of emotional and thematic mileage out of not being remotely parodic.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about; I recently started watching The Venture Brothers, and in the fourth episode there’s that sequence where The Monarchs henchmen and Baron Underbeit’s henchmen are shooting the shit over beers while trying to breach the Venture compound, talking about their various traumatic backstories and the roads they walked to become henchmen. The scene is extremely funny, because it’s a bunch of guys in ridiculous costumes killing time while trying to organize an assassination, but it’s also kidding-on-the-square; once it milks some black humor out of the mere idea of expendable minions having rich inner lives and incentives driving their behavior, the show actually does evolve into more nuanced examination of the expendable henchman dynamic.

Worm, though, does something different. The book takes the idea of “henchmen” extremely seriously from the start, subtly treating it as foundational to the game from day one and inescapably tying it into the books themes of selfishness, desperation and coordination problems. As early as the second or third chapter, Taylor is casually identifying the collapse of Brockton Bay’s blue collar sector as the reason the city is so attractive to supervillains; because they know the city is full of disenfranchised workers who are desperate enough to take jobs as goons. Her father, a Union Man to his core, brings up the idea of his dockworkers defecting to hench for Uber and Leet as something laughable- but there’s a very real desperation underpinning that framing. He’s desperate to find something to talk to her about, desperate enough that he’s willing to try and laugh off a real societal problem that he feels like he’s personally failing to address, so the beat isn’t really comedic.

In fact, there are almost no comedic beats about where Henchmen come from; the question of where villains find goons is spun around from a hundred different angles; it’s always some combination of desperation, coercion, career militarism (from coils people) or, in Skitters case, forged-in-fire loyalty used as a characterization tool for the protagonist. There are a few characters who behave as though henchmen exist solely to enable their superhuman setpiece violence, and every time the narrative treats that attitude with disdain and revulsion. Worm doesn’t go out of its way to emphasize the absurdity of henchmen; instead, it views them through the lens of community organization, organizational cohesion and movement building. In arc 11, Lisa puts serious thought into the ideal squad dynamics for the minion-backed sortie to merchant territory, and that’s just business. In a show like The Venture Brothers, these same ideas would be expressed through a gag where a mastermind gripes about the surprising difficulty of managing the petty office politics of the death squads.

I could eat twice my age in eggs every day easily. So long as I don't have to cook them myself I'm good.

@rabbit-factory getting more data because it really is an amazing question to ask

This conversation happened at 6am btw

Answer in the tags ↓