For Your First Part We Hear From Crusader That She Supposedly Triggered After Being Trapped In A Crashed

For your first part we hear from Crusader that she supposedly triggered after being trapped in a crashed truck for days slowly starving until she triggered to eat light and get the truck off

Thinking about Purity

I have two thoughts on Purity. Here they are:

One. Her trigger event consisted of her being trapped in a lethal environment with no resources, gradually going insane, and developing overwhelming firepower in order to fight off a horde of assailants who didn’t actually exist. I can’t imagine what that’s a metaphor for. Haven’t the foggiest.

Two. Purity is interesting, from a worldbuilding perspective, because at the start of the story there’s an actual niche archetype from the comics that she’s fulfilling.

“Hardcore street-level hero who actually turns out to be a racist lunatic that the actual heroes need to take down” isn’t quite a chestnut at the big two but it’s a story beat I’ve seen multiple times; Nightwing vs his building’s insane janitor in Dixon’s run, Captain America vs Jack Monroe and to a lesser extent USAgent, I feel like Batman’s deal with Lock-up from the animated series inches towards this, although that one wasn’t explicitly racialized. Punisher’s done this a couple times, It’s Peacemaker’s whole bit, there’s definitely a few more I’m forgetting.

So the subversive element here isn’t that she’s an openly racist superhero; it’d that she’s still allowed to be a racist superhero. It’s that a thematically appropriate hero like Legend hasn’t come to town specifically to drop the hammer on her for daring to be an openly racist superhero.

And to be charitable, what’s usually going on in those other stories is that the racist heroes are almost always explicitly bad knockoffs of the protagonist. They’re intended as a dark mirror, because the obvious failure mode of heroic vigilantism is that it’s extremely appealing to racists, glory hounds, egomaniacs and egomaniacal racist glory hounds, but the flip side of that is that people with those characteristics go down like chumps in a fight with a true-blue hero. They exist in the story as a one-off warning for the real heroes, who give them a chance and then chuck them in the bin when they show their true colors.

Worm, though, doesn’t have a just-so structure. The racist idiots who get superpowers and develop delusions of heroism don’t provide the courtesy of also being weak and incompetent enough that the “real” heroes can root them out with minimal fuss. Purity won the goddamn power lottery; she’s one of the most powerful capes in the Bay, with hit-and-run capabilities that all of the heroes working together are textually incapable of countering. (And this isn’t like The Boys where they’re all secretly in bed with each other- New Wave has serious beef with the Empire! They would absolutely pin her ass to the wall if the opportunity arose, but they can’t!)

So in a very real sense, The Protectorate is pussyfooting around her, letting her exist in the gray zone of self-deluded vigilantism, because…. well, the second she can’t sustain her self-deception anymore, the second someone really pushes, her go-to reaction is to commit a mass casualty event. She was always a time bomb, and so the strategy of just continuing to label her as a villain, while she continuously hopefully refreshes PHO to see if any helpful fans have updated her wiki page yet, is, you know, I get it. It’s not great but I get it. A hands on approach only works if you can actually lay hands on them.

But! As far as I can remember, she was functionally operating as an Independent Hero as the setting defines it! Everyone in power pretends she isn’t but she was still in that ballpark, hand in hand with how selectively racist she was being about it! She was a vigilante, she was out to target “criminals” and clean up the streets using her powers, she had a costume and a secret identity- actually one of the few capes we see in Brockton Bay with a full-time day job- and she was really really really racist.

So with Purity, Worm is being honest about the inability of a superhero community to clean house, to effectively police who gets to be a part of it, who gets to actively consider themselves a part of it. There was never going to be a righteous beat-down where she gets “kicked out” of the fraternity, no “you are not affiliated with me” moment that finally gets through, even though many heroes in the setting would dearly love to deliver such a thing. A certain level of power purchases the right to think of yourself in whatever terms you want, and the heroes just have to stand around looking uncomfortable and swearing up and down that, no, her vigilantism is different from good vigilantism, honest, completely different underlying models.

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I’m just saying this could’ve worked great in The Clone Wars since it did have that balance of kid show and showing pain of civilians in war.

Like I’m thinking specifically something like the Ryleth or Ondelon with War in Teo fronts where we see the civilians and can understand where they’re coming from while also having it be fucked up to stab this would be redemption in the back

Basically, we need a new clone wars aka a kids show that actually is able to get away with exploring things like this

There are, like, a lot of very good reasons this couldn’t be done in an animated children’s show, but a plot beat I’ve always wanted to see in an animated show is that you’ve got, like, the typical animated show set-up, plucky and idealistic rebels against a massive and nebulous evil allegorical empire, you’ve got all the archetypical characters who show up in shows like that, you’ve got obvious implications atrocities are being committed by the bad guys but you never hone in on it beyond the general signifiers like burning buildings in the background. (yes I am thinking about She-Ra here.)

You’ve got your peridot type or your Scorpia type or potentially your zuko-type. The clearly-antagonistic-but-obviously-engineered-to-be-likeable-enough-to-get-a-redemption-arc type of character. You have them slowly go through the motions of realizing the empire is bad, or realizing the power of friendship, or having a moment of connection with the protagonists and realizing that they aren’t Thriving ™ under the oppressive system.

So they do what these sorts of characters usually do and defect to the protagonists side, and the protagonists chalk up another win for team principle and compassion, and they accept the defector with open, if cautious, arms…

And then a supporting character pulls out a gun and shoots the would-be redemptee in the head, because their entire family was in one of the buildings that the redemptee set on fire in the background during a previous one-off episode.

And, to be clear, this wouldn’t just be a mean gag or a one-off commentary on audience sympathies or out-of-universe discourse on redemption arcs. Episodes going forward would deal with the fallout of such a nakedly ruthless act of retaliation.

It’s now next to impossible to deal with would-be defectors in good faith anymore because it’s been proven the heroes can’t stop acts of vengeance in their own homes, its not clear who among the heroes is even extending the olive branch in good faith to begin with or if it was always a trap. If things ever turn in the heroes favor, Bad guys are now escalating the stakes and fighting to the last man, because they know they aren’t gonna be forgiven if the nicest person in their ranks couldn’t be forgiven. There’s internal political tension about what to do with the assassin (nothing, they need the manpower) and how to go about disavowing the action when half the group doesn’t even want to disavow it- the redemptee might have been nice, but they also burned buildings full of innocent people, a lot of people are just glad they weren’t the ones who had to pull the trigger. Friendships end over this.

A lot of narratives about forgiveness in these kinds of shows are more about how it’s interpersonally healthy and beneficial to forgive and let people grow. I want to see a narrative about how that’s also, like, politically the only path forward if you don’t want to lock your society into an Orestian blood bath, which I have always found to be a much more compelling argument against revenge in general, just as, like, a rule utilitarianism thing. I want a bittersweet ending that’s essentially tracible back to that cathartic, unretractable decision to kill that one likable flunky.

Of course, it would be very difficult to set this up without telegraphing that this is the kind of show that does That Kind Of Thing, and the actual killing can’t really happen until season two at the earliest, so I’m having a hard time figuring out a way to execute this where it would maintain its punch.

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I mean in some of fan fictions due to both their parents being rich lawyers they’re already friends or in contact which i think is a fair interpretation so i could totally see it making them closer friends or bridging the gap to make them become friends or something along those lines

I could see it going two ways depending on how earlier it is in Victorias career if it’s earlier she might really care and get really close in which case Emma could be a good support and someone who actually will argue back and might help keep Victoria from doing the same violence she did in the original timeline

or two if it happens it’s not very special for Vic and she moves on and Emma stays terrified before maybe binding and becoming even closer with Taylor

also in either case Sophia might be punished a bit more without the really good lawyer of Emma’s dad and probably would be a bit more of a loner

In another universe, Emma is saved by Glory Girl instead of Shadow Stalker…

Discuss.

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