309 posts
Megamuscle885-blog - I May Be Dumb - Tumblr Blog
as the dorohedoro wormies we need to make some kind of Atlas Johnson crossover post
my apologies for not responding earlier, the depressions have eaten me for a few weeks now.
Wormblr, did you know that there is another perfect beetle boy for you to enjoy?
His name is Jonson (according to the wiki.) Check out his Jordans! Shocking!!!
good for her
I don’t have object permanence. I put a knife down and spent half an hour panicking because I thought I lost it. It was just on my desk. Not even hidden either like 5 centimetres away from my laptop. Hey you know this blogging thing is pretty fun. I just tell people things.
anyone think Taylor ever cleaned her teeth with her bugs once? maybe she saw a snippet of a documentary about those dentist fish that other fish patiently line up and cause zero trouble in the area, a neutral zone if you will, while they wait for the dentist fish to clean their mouths of parasites and dead flesh and then she decided to try it (because she was inspired by the fish all co-operating together) and almost choked but then she locked in and went "this is easy as fuck. triumph is such a pussy. alexandria was probably faking. this is so normal. I can have as many bugs as I want in my mouth and I'm not gagging" and the other chicago wards never mention it ever because they value their lives.
wormblr as a collective should show aisha amélie specifically the part where amélie is fucking with the grocer you know that sequence. decreasing the sizes of his shoes so he thinks his feet are growing. changing his speed-dial for his mom with the mental health hotline. swapping doorknobs, his toothpaste for foot cream, his lightbulbs to make the room seem dimmer, like his vision is dying. bits of metal in the cord for his lamp so it sparks when he plugs it in and makes him scream. all of these things for enrichment to inspire her to greater heights of gangstalking someone.
Coil really is the funniest character to me on this read-through. "Yeah I want to make sure you guys have no reason to distrust me so check out this child slave I kidnapped"
isnt it crazy how imp gets countered by like 2 capes and theyre both heartbroken? like regent can control her (although she can escape if he falls asleep) and cherish can sense her even when her stranger power is up. if i was more adept at vasilposting i would say that this was related to how she only really finds people she can relate with amongst the heartbroken and this is shown through them being able to break through her veil of being forgotten. but im not. so i wont.
A commission for the lovely panda, who got me to work on this Alexandria design!
when i saw the original tiktok they flashed in my mind
help me buy hrt?
haven't been able to afford hrt since january. i order online from overseas pharmacies which means prices fluctuate based on availability and shipping costs, so im not really sure how much i need but probably more than the 17 dollars and 53 cents currently in my bank account. if you can spare anything at all it'll be a huge help.
paypal.me/carrotmix
95.44509% chance she frew up
“Coil?” “What is it, pet?” “Forty-four point two zero three eight three percent chance I die in the next half-hour.”
— Interlude 11f
I've never made any connections between Worm and the Captain America mythos before. Spill some ink?
Okay, so from a purely aesthetic perspective, the gimme is Miss Militia. She's the most obvious "Captain Patriotic" in the roster, she has the power of GUN, she's the only one who actively buys into the mythology of America specifically. She's a Kurdish woman occupying an aesthetic niche generally held by a rugged squinty white guy. She's an output of the melting pot narrative. She's sort of a rendering of what a grounded superhero who somehow became very aesthetically into America might look like. Not in the craven marketing-driven way of Homelander or Comedian, not in the jingoistic maniac way of USAgent or Peacemaker. She buys it in the broadly left-liberal (USamerican connotation of that term) safe, friendly, reclamative way. Why, what a great rehabilitation of the archetype!
She's also deeply, deeply afraid of rocking the boat. She's got a deepseated childhood trauma related to the bad things that happen when she puts herself in a leadership role. She goes along to get along. When she's proactive, it's usually to point a gun at Tattletale to stop her from upsetting the status quo. She sits through a lot of situations where Steve Rogers, as commonly modeled, would probably plant himself like a tree by the river of truth and go, "Hey, this is fucked up." She more or less capitulates to Undersider domination of the city, in a way that predisposes us to think of her as a voice of reason after all these total nuts that Skitter's been up against- but would Taylor "to relinquish control is a form of ego death" Hebert really be willing to leave someone in charge of the local Protectorate branch who she thought couldn't be corralled? She looks like a beacon, but doesn't- indeed, probably can't- ever truly behave like one. I mean, you can debate the on-the-spot morality of any given one of her judgement calls, that's actually one of the less exhausting Worm Morality Debates to have- but in aggregate, a person in American flag garb who actually meaningfully criticizes the paramilitary organization they're part of is not gonna survive long in that role!
So again, she's the gimme from an aesthetic standpoint. But what I don't really see a lot of discussion of is how Cauldron plays into the riff.
Captain America is institutional, but in a comically morally uncomplicated way. The serum was originally mana from heaven, granted to a living saint, conveniently divorced from any nitty-gritty sausage-making process and even-more conveniently divorced from the horrible consequences of giving the, uh, the U.S government a replicable super soldier process. And in fairness to Captain America, this is 100 percent something the overall mythos eventually patched to my satisfaction; the sausage-making process eventually revealed as prototypical government fuckery driven by human experimentation on black servicemen, the overall Marvel Setting littered with failed attempts by the U.S. Government to recreate that golden goose so they can have their fun new jackboots. (In Ultimate Marvel, this is how almost all contemporary superhumans were created, and this is a state of affairs with a body count in the millions or billions.)
Cauldron draws you in with the same noble rhetoric about greater goods, the same one-off proprietary irreplicable formula- but you don't get the luxury afterwards of representing nothing but the dream. You aren't partnering up with a plucky crank scientist with a heart of gold. You're selling your soul to an organization with an agenda. The narrative makes no bones about the fact that everything you do is fundamentally tainted by the fact you opted into an end product created through torture, kidnapping and human experimentation. You don't get to pull a Kamen Rider by going rogue or opting out or making good use of the fruit of the poisoned tree; you are owned, and everything you do has this Damocles sword hanging over your head- when are the people who bankrolled this going to come to collect?
So that's the question of "who would willingly dress like that" covered, and the question of who creates a serum like that. What about the question of who takes a serum like that? I'd argue that Eidolon is the examination of that. Pre-Cauldron David reads to me like pre-serum Steve Rogers viewed through a significantly bleaker lens. They're both sickly kids desperate to serve, rocketed to the pinnacle of human capability by an experimental procedure. But for Steve Rogers, the crisis was that he had a specific vision of the world and was frustrated by his inability to carry it out. Before the serum he picked fights over what was right and wrong and got his ass handed to him; afterwards he picked those same fights and just started winning instead. The serum neatly solved a problem he had, and to the extent that his mindset is influenced by his pre-serum experiences, it's generally constructive; a desire to protect the weak, help the helpless, an appreciation for people who stand up for what's right even when they're clearly gonna get pancaked for their trouble. So ultimately there's no dark side, downside, or underlying neurosis ascribed to his initial impulse to take that serum.
But with David, it's not a tragic case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. He isn't a preternaturally-noble soul, out to represent the best elements of the American ideal- he kind of represents the inverse, a guy who's been failed at every level while utterly convinced that he's the problem. He's actively suicidal because he's a wheelchair-bound epileptic in an economically-depressed socially-backwards rural town in the 1980s, and he's spent his 18 years of life internalizing the idea that he's worse than useless unless he can somehow find a way provide value to something larger than himself. Doctor Mother finds him in the aftermath of a suicide attempt spurred by his rejection from the army- and he didn't even want to join the army specifically, necessarily, he just needed his situation to be literally anything else, and he took what he thought he could get. And then he finds himself in a position to become a superhero, so he does that, molds himself into that, subordinates himself to that, builds his entire sense of self and values around the value he can provide in that role. No grand design or sacred principles carried over through the metamorphosis. Just relief at finally, finally having something that looks like an answer to the question of what he's supposed to do.
And you know, you know that if Steve Rogers was facing down the barrel of being depowered, he'd smile and nod, he'd Cincinnatus that shit. It's happened before. But for David, the emotional trauma and self-worth issues that caused him to roll the dice on a Steve-Rogers treatment never really went away. When would it? He's been Providing Value as a ten-ton Hammer Against Evil for thirty years. No family, no social life. Certainly, no incentive on his handler's part to lance his Atlas complex. So he barrels towards atrocity in the name of remaining useful. Admittedly, this is where the comparison breaks down in a significant way; Captain America is much more of a symbol than he is an irreplicable powerhouse, so it's not catastrophic if he's taken off the board. Eidolon is so unbelievably powerful that his myopia and self-centeredness actually do align with a real problem everyone else is gonna have if he loses his powers. But in terms of the starting points- I think that Steve Rogers embodies the myth about why you'd want to join the army that badly. Eidolon is, I think, much more closely modelling why you'd actually want to join the army that badly.
there is an IMAGE in my HEAD and i cannot DRAW IT. hatred and rage.
Coil really is the funniest character to me on this read-through. "Yeah I want to make sure you guys have no reason to distrust me so check out this child slave I kidnapped"
TW: Suicide mention. Worm Spoilers.
Reprising my Neil Cicierega post from before about how "Mullet with Butterfly Wings" is a skitter/scurry/chitter song.
Crocodile Chop is a Gold Morning song. The lyrics are all very slurred and drunken. She's lurching around. Amy's hands on her as she "Wake(s) up!". "Why'd you leave the keys on the table?" Who's just leaving Amy alone with Taylor. They had to know she was going to do something drastic. Lisa should've, and that's the tragedy isn't it? "Here you go and create another fable." The myth, making Taylor into a weapon. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into it, but this is supposed to be a fun little post anyway, it's not too serious.
Except "I don't think you trust in my self-righteous suicide." is just a dead on, straight between the eyes, punch to the forehead shining example of Taylor Hebert's character in this moment.
The scream for Fathers feels a little bit like Taylor's frustrations with Danny, and maybe a little bit of QA (who is currently in the driver's seat) might be feeling a little forsaken by her father Scion herself in this moment? "Father into your hands I commend my spirit." and the whole section there, is SOAD directly lifting words from Jesus' crucifixion. This one's not a particularly deep take from me, but you can see Jesus' crucifixion as a kind of self-righteous suicide, huh? And Taylor is also putting herself on the line, as usual, and sacrificing any other kind of future she may have had for herself in favor of the greater good, and the unity of humanity. It's a consistent, doomed worldview she's held ever since "Cut Ties, I'm Sorry." entered the picture. She put the Undersiders aside. She spent more time with the Chicago Wards than them, and her time with them wasn't even worth mentioning in the text. She sets them aside too. She trains Golem because they have a shared enemy, but there's nothing else there. There can be nothing else there when she has to go die on the cross, unknowingly, but still. The Simurgh, Contessa and Dinah all conspiring to put her in the right place at the right time.
My read of SOAD's lyrics seem focused on the 'right to die', about how nobody truly deserves to die, but we all will die, but there are some people who are condemned regardless of their circumstances for the method of their death. Serj Tankian brings up his potential for dying in a drug overdose as his example of someone dying in a shameful way, and therefore 'deserving' to die. (This is just me paraphrasing the wikipedia entry I'm not uncovering new ground here lol). There's also the very literal Angel-like being hovering over the battlefield to consider.
Choosing how you go out is more than some people get. Except Taylor doesn't get to choose how she goes out in the end, does she? Taylor doesn't really have a choice here. The Simurgh chooses. Dinah chooses. Contessa chooses. That little static burst as the song fades out to "Transmission" (a little bit where a numbers radio is played interspersed with the introductory rift from David Bowie's Space Oddity) sounds like her turning her head to see Contessa sitting there with her gun in her hand.
All of this is set to Elton John's Crocodile Rock, which I haven't really listened to enough to have thoughts on it. I don't really have any deep takes on his side of the mashup, other than the fact that the piano and Serj's "Die" is pitch shifted to Elton's "laa, la-la-la-la-laa" making it very unsettling.
I've been listening to too much of Neil's music while driving to work and it's starting to mix together with all of the other brain worms, creating intricate mental AMVs, and it shows.
Worm Political compass
help me buy hrt?
haven't been able to afford hrt since january. i order online from overseas pharmacies which means prices fluctuate based on availability and shipping costs, so im not really sure how much i need but probably more than the 17 dollars and 53 cents currently in my bank account. if you can spare anything at all it'll be a huge help.
paypal.me/carrotmix
“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
"@megamuscle885-blog already seen these particular posts but the thought of me is very appreciated"
AAAGH LOOK AGAIN! I think everyone on Wormblr deserves to see and remember Imp as much as possible. Canonically photographs of her disappear and fade out her image, but would in-universe fanart disappear? Paintings? Could artistic expression be enough to create enough degrees of separation from her actual image that her power can't wipe her away? You know what my next question is, of course.
Regent, with his canon artistic skills, should've drawn or painted something of her everyone could remember her by.
melancholic imp : (
she so .
@lakesbian
melancholic imp : (
she so .
I am exhausted, I am exhausted— Pillar of white in a blackout of knives. @notevenalittle1294 Parian 10G Drawing challenge
@lakesbian
"Maybe in a kinder world I'd know you better"
How i wish they had an arc we're they'd improve their relationship!! Please after interlude 10. I was hoping for them to slowly build friendship but noooo! And the thing is TAYLOR WILL NEVER FIND OUT HOW REGENT WAS THE REASON WHO GOT THE EVIDENCE ON SOPHIA AND GOT INTO JUVENILE!! she thinks it was tattletale's DOING! (btw. I love you lisa!)
please this art is just my wishful thinking on how i wish we no Taylor got to know more of Alec. Cause in some different way i think they would be trusted friends. I miss you my boi!!!!
