#worm spoilers

One of my headcanons about the entities is that early on in their history, before they worked out the kinks, a really, reallycommon mode of failure for the cycle was the regulatory avatar “getting lost in character” and either forgetting about, disregarding, or actively sabotaging the cycle in favor of pursuing whatever their on-paper  cover-story “day job” was, Omni-man style. A similar mode of failure would have been shards going native en masse the way the wretch did after deciding they were more invested in their individual hosts than in the overall wellbeing of the cycle. 

In both cases the root issue would be the entity being psychologically incapable of predicting a deviation from the grand unified goal. In the first scenario, there’s a naïve belief that their own priorities will remain the same when filtered through a proxy personality, so they accidentally put on a mask lined with fishhooks. In the latter, there’s a failure to imagine that the glorious group consensus that got them off their homeworld could ever shatter in the face of new experiences, so the shards were put on inadequate leashes.

The corollary headcanon is that this isn’t something that happens anymore, due to natural selection; It’s the kind of error an entity would make early, and once, and then never do that or anything else ever again. Modern Day entities are descended from the ones smart enough to do more involved and competent PTV analysis before starting their cycles.

 But out in the distant reaches of space, you might occasionally find a post-apocalyptic world, blursed by the presence of mad idiot gods, peppered with 120th-generation parabeings who are armed with the dregs of the once-mighty power reserve.

So an interesting thing about Coil is that his vial-given power is something very, very much in line with the kind of power he’d have gotten if he was a natural trigger. 

Thomas Calvert shot his CO at Ellisburg because he was afraid that the CO was going to climb the ladder too slowly and get him eaten. He expresses uncertaintyin Piggot’s interlude about whether or not this fear was unfounded, but the crucial thing is that in the face of not knowing (thinker trigger!) he shot him just to be sure, and subsequently blew up his own life. This is the kind of thing that would realistically cause a person to ruminate endlessly on the road not taken, just how Lisa was ruminating endlessly in the wake of what happened to her brother. The question of whether he really made the best choice, whether what he did was really necessary,really worth the obvious tradeoffs.

Now, for a while, this made me think that cauldron vials were looking for things in their recipients lives that could have been a trigger event, had they been capable of connecting at the moment of truth. This is a theory that tracks for Alexandria and Eidolon, but falls through for, say, Battery. 

No, the broader and more inclusive model for the cauldron vials is that they work more like (don’t kill me) RWBY semblances, coalescing around the broad thesis of their hosts lives, finding some big sticking point in their mindset or approach to life and latching on like a remora. Battery’s focus on cause-and-effect. Sundancers fear of the spotlight despite how well she does in it. Trickster and his tendency to replace and shuffle others around for his own benefit. Echidna and her gamer-girlishness/slash/eating disorder. It’s the stuff going on in their lives- not necessarily a crisis point, but what they’re thinking about.

Thomas Calvert must have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how he shot that guy. Maybe guilt. Maybe just regret about the negative consequences.

This is, ultimately, the core of Thomas Calvert. The need to be sure.The need to act with as much information as possible, as securely as possible, in order to act with wild abandon once you’re sure you’ve secure enough to do so. It’s running through every facet of his life.  It’s not a coincidence that the man runs a company that builds Endbringer Shelters in his civilian identity, It’s not a coincidence that he gets along with notorious control freak Accord, it’s not a coincidence that Cauldron thought he’d be a good pick for an experiment to see if a cape could become the evenhanded tyrant of a whole city, and it’s definitely not a coincidence that one of his first big plays is kidnapping a human magic-8 ball that he can shake relentlessly for more confirmation whenever he’s feeling antsy about his prospects. 

It’s kind of a pity that the narrative never returned to Miss Militia’s perspective after her interlude, because she’s in a very interesting position. She parses her power through a lens of religiosity. She thinks her power is very literally a gift from God, or an angel, and part of her decision to do so is her terror at the idea that it was something evil or indifferent instead.

 Which is, in fact, what it was, but even beyond that everyone in arc 29 has it beamed into their heads that the appeal to religiosity was explicitly part of the con! The Entity’s avatar was designed as a nondenominational messianic archetype so that everyone would embrace him equally!

I dunno, it just seems like that would fuck her up interestingly. 

artbyblastweave:

So an interesting thing about Coil is that his vial-given power is something very, very much in line with the kind of power he’d have gotten if he was a natural trigger. 

Thomas Calvert shot his CO at Ellisburg because he was afraid that the CO was going to climb the ladder too slowly and get him eaten. He expresses uncertaintyin Piggot’s interlude about whether or not this fear was unfounded, but the crucial thing is that in the face of not knowing (thinker trigger!) he shot him just to be sure, and subsequently blew up his own life. This is the kind of thing that would realistically cause a person to ruminate endlessly on the road not taken, just how Lisa was ruminating endlessly in the wake of what happened to her brother. The question of whether he really made the best choice, whether what he did was really necessary,really worth the obvious tradeoffs.

Now, for a while, this made me think that cauldron vials were looking for things in their recipients lives that could have been a trigger event, had they been capable of connecting at the moment of truth. This is a theory that tracks for Alexandria and Eidolon, but falls through for, say, Battery. 

No, the broader and more inclusive model for the cauldron vials is that they work more like (don’t kill me) RWBY semblances, coalescing around the broad thesis of their hosts lives, finding some big sticking point in their mindset or approach to life and latching on like a remora. Battery’s focus on cause-and-effect. Sundancers fear of the spotlight despite how well she does in it. Trickster and his tendency to replace and shuffle others around for his own benefit. Echidna and her gamer-girlishness/slash/eating disorder. It’s the stuff going on in their lives- not necessarily a crisis point, but what they’re thinking about.

Thomas Calvert must have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how he shot that guy. Maybe guilt. Maybe just regret about the negative consequences.

This is, ultimately, the core of Thomas Calvert. The need to be sure.The need to act with as much information as possible, as securely as possible, in order to act with wild abandon once you’re sure you’ve secure enough to do so. It’s running through every facet of his life.  It’s not a coincidence that the man runs a company that builds Endbringer Shelters in his civilian identity, It’s not a coincidence that he gets along with notorious control freak Accord, it’s not a coincidence that Cauldron thought he’d be a good pick for an experiment to see if a cape could become the evenhanded tyrant of a whole city, and it’s definitely not a coincidence that one of his first big plays is kidnapping a human magic-8 ball that he can shake relentlessly for more confirmation whenever he’s feeling antsy about his prospects. 

Battery’s trigger event if she’d had one would have been being kidnapped as a child to blackmail her father, right? Kept in a small room, forced to ration water and pee in the corner? Sounds suspiciously like a mover/shaker trigger themed around rationing and self-control to me.

Of course, it’s difficult to disentangle any character from the major events that shaped their lives. That’s part of the genius of the trigger system.

Trickster is an odd one - his power is on the face of it Mover, but I don’t really see any Mover themes in his life. But then, it’s a very Stranger-y form of teleportation, isn’t it, with a bit of Shaker, and his problems were the sorts of social tensions I could see as Stranger. Maybe the Mover-ish aspect came from the vial, and we’ve got a teleportation shard trying to be Stranger-y? [Checking … yep, the vial he took was named Jaunt.]

Of course, he was in the process of trying to escape from the Simiurgh quarantine zone when he took the vial, wasn’t he, that’s kind of Mover/Shaker-y. But they all were, and the Travellers’ shards don’t really seem to have focused on the extremely traumatic trigger-worthy circumstances they drank their vials in (except perhaps for Noelle’s injuries, and even then only as a secondary aspect to her powers). Instead we get a focus on their deeper issues, as you say, on the sum total of their lives (albeit still in terms of trauma and conflict.)