Transcript
Speaker: Worm is a web serial by JC McCray, also known as Wildbo. You can read Worm in its original format by visiting parahumans .wordpress .com or donate to Wildbo's Patreon at patreon .com slash wildbo. This story isn't intended for young or sensitive readers. Readers who are on the lookout for trigger warnings are advised to give Worm a pass. For a complete list, check the description for all of Worm's trigger warnings.
Speaker: Good morning, Brockton Bay. I want to hit someone. Amen, brother. I love it. Welcome back. Welcome back, everyone. Another episode of our Brockton Bay book club, and we are finishing up arc five today.
Speaker: concluding this exciting chapter. We really had too much to say, so we had to split it up. Welcome back to everyone listening along with us. We're going to dive right into this. As always, we're going to get some just initial, immediate reactions. We're down one of our new readers in Taylor. Taylor is out today, but we do still have Kat.
Speaker: So Kat, hit us with those reactions. Immediately, overall, how are you feeling? This fight was brutal. Amen. It was graphic. And we met some new characters that we've touched on before, but really got to meet and I really like some of these new
Speaker: new people. I'm hoping to see more of some of them. So yeah. All right. All right. I couldn't agree more. This is going to be exciting to get into. I think we're going to stick with our format. I know these chapters sort of blend together, but let's sort of keep it a little chronological here. So Hannah, do you have some summaries for us? Yes, I do. So we're starting here with 5 .5, the second half of the arc with
Speaker: preparation for this kind of conglomerational group effort of the raid of the ABB warehouse. So we're kind of seeing a little mix of the groups here and interesting mashups.
Speaker: All right, yeah, this was kind of a fun intro to some new faces that we haven't seen before and some faces that we saw briefly at the beginning of the arc that we're now seeing again. So did any kind of anything stand out here? I think it's interesting just the work that the undersiders put into
Speaker: planning not just their own side of things, but also, sorry, not just planning with the group, but also planning their own side of things and making sure, hey, if X happens, we need to be prepared for Y, and this is how we're gonna code everything so we can talk to each other. I just think that's kind of cool to see Tattletale, of course, thinking through everything, right? As she does. Leading over from sort of the last chapter,
Speaker: Taylor's power is stronger today. Why? Who knows? Don't be alarmed. Maybe a conch on the head will do you some good. Or some real anger? Maybe a second wave of an event?
Speaker: I do like the sort of tie -in that Taylor has with how powerful her power is and her current emotional state. She's obviously coming right off of this brutal confrontation at the school, nothing went her way, she's angry, she's mad. And as a result of that, her power is just sort of manifesting a bit stronger with that. And I can't remember up until this point, I don't think we've seen a correlation between
Speaker: a capes power and like their emotions or their anger or frustration or anything like that. So it's kind of unique. I still think this is going to tie back to Danny somehow. I think there is something genetic emotionally that she's going to learn about when she finally reveals that she's a cape to her dad. I'm looking forward to it. And her dad finally reveals that he is in fact defiant.
Speaker: They both have secret identities they've been keeping from each other. It just goes, who? We'll see. Save it for the predictions at the end here. You never know. All right. What else we got? What's after this? What's our next little breakdown? Like I said, I know these chapters are going to kind of blend together as we get into the fight here.
Speaker: I'll kind of combine six, seven, and I guess six, seven, eight, and nine, I guess, which is the main fight section. We have 5 .6, attack, planning, the beginning of the raid. Surprise, Oni Lee and Lung are there. Huzzah, we love that. That's so fucking terrifying. The fight with Oni Lee is 5 .7.
Speaker: And we kind of get to see Oney Lee, a little bit more of his powers there. 5 .8, we have going into the warehouse, trying to get Nuder out and finding Lung. Delightful. 5 .9, we have the Empire 88 fight with Lung. Sundancer makes a little sun, and Kaiser stabs Lung.
Speaker: which is very exciting. But Lung, as we know, being the strong boy that he is, gets back up and Skidder is able to put him down and like put him down for good. And I guess I'll also just tie in 5 .10 there, which just the phrase, you carved out his eyes? And talking with Bitch, getting a little bit more information about Bitch
Speaker: uh, Taylor's kind of relationship thing happening there. Yeah, good stuff. Going all the way back, uh, just kicking this off bitch. You know, after we saw, you know, Taylor all the way back at the shop, like reaching out and being like, Hey, trying to make headway with bitch. She like in turn has a conversation. I think it's, is it here where she has a conversation with Lisa?
Speaker: Or is it, is it later? I forgot. I think that later about, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's later. Well, you know, it ties into this section where bitch actually reaches out to Taylor in this section and asks about what basically what happened when they have, you know, the bonding moment. That's kind of a good return after, you know, the one we had at the beginning of the chapter or the beginning of the arc.
Speaker: And then of course, you know, there's this like weird bonding moment between them. And then they go in and, you know, bitches got a flex on Kaiser, which is fantastic. And, you know, the first time we kind of see these, these dogs, I know we talked about last time that we've seen them before change, but I feel like every time we see the dogs change through bitches powers, like we are more exposed
Speaker: to what is going on and the different stages. And this time feels like start to finish, we finally got to see her put a hand on a dog, take them from small to big. Yeah, yeah. We kind of jumped over it in 5 .5. Who did Taylor have a conversation with? Or is that in 5 .6? Oh, with Nuder. In 5 .5 or 5 .6, I can't remember which part it was. I really liked her conversation with Nuder.
Speaker: I know it was like five, six. Yeah. They're talking about planning and just getting everything, you know, thinking through how they're going to do everything. I don't know. I just really liked that conversation. I thought you get kind of another character's insight into the world of superheroes and especially for a character like neuter who has
Speaker: had some negative effects of his powers, at least, you know, to his appearance. Um, I don't know. It's just, I just thought that was a really interesting conversation. I really enjoyed that. You've got, you know, not only do you have him because he is immensely interesting, uh, but also you've got like sun dancer and the travelers. Um, yeah, yeah. That's who it was. Awesome. Fair drama, sun dancer and the travelers. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a fun group because, yeah, you have neuter, sun dancer, Kaiser, and then and bitch, along with Taylor, of course. And so and Fenya and Menya. And they're just armed candy, as we shall soon see. As he calls them the girls. I'm like, oh, I cannot. I cannot with Kaiser. Kaiser, please calm down. Please, please.
Speaker: Yeah, something I really like seeing is the way that other groups operate and kind of having this little mash up here of a couple different groups being put together, seeing in the way that they kind of are forced to interact. I love the little
Speaker: where Kaiser is like, all right, we're doing this. And Bitch is like, well, we're not doing that. And Taylor's like, we're not splitting the party, can we please just focus? And Kaiser's already gone, he's already walking away. He's like, well, fuck you, I'm gonna go do my thing. Oh, oh, we can't forget. I'm gonna do what I want. Yeah, I'll go do what I want. We can't forget, also with this party, because they're so forgettable, but so important. We also have the two soldiers,
Speaker: Yes, like sniper soldiers that are just like... Can we just acknowledge the shot caller and the walker baller? Since you brought it up. We have to acknowledge that these are the true protagonists of the story.
Speaker: This is the soldiers. I mean, he's just talk about normal guys. I love their inclusion in the story because it's such, I mean, talk about overdone tropes of like,
Speaker: Oh, you know, the red shirts or the stormtroopers or, you know, whoever unnamed sniper number four is, who, you know, gets blasted the first time they go through the door immediately. And here we have two well -armed, well -equipped, you know, guys with no visible powers that we're aware of. I don't think that's a spoiler to say there's no, they don't have any powers, but holding their own in this fight the entire time, like what a fun,
Speaker: What a fun spin on that trope. And it's still fun to watch. And really being crucial to the fight too. Oh my gosh, yes. They saved Onili's life, or not Onili, they saved Nuder's life in a couple of different ways. Yeah, just incredible, just seeing them. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say, they are the reason that O 'Neillie bolted. Because of Taylor being able to sense where he was, be able to call it out, and them take the shot, bitch be able to sick her dogs on him. Because of them, they were an integral part of getting O 'Neillie to just have to run away because his shin was snapped at one point. Jesus. This guy gets dragged off a building.
Speaker: like three buildings. And then because of, um, because of, oh shoot, who is it who has, oh, labyrinth. Can't forget about labyrinth. We keep forgetting about groups, people in this group. So there's, there's, it's such a bigger group than I anticipated. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's labyrinth and neuter just to go through the groups. It's labyrinth and neuter from fault lines crew, skitter and bitch from the undersiders.
Speaker: Kaiser, Finnia and Minya from Empire 88 and Sundancer from The Travelers, right? Correct. And then soldiers from Coil. Yeah, don't forget about the soldiers. How many is that? Is that 12? Two, four, six, nine, 10, 10? I think it's 10.
Speaker: Did we count Kaiser and Fenya and Menya in that? I tried to. Anyways, the point being that we're all like English majors. We're not math people. So, okay. So we've got Kaiser, Fenya and Menya. That's three. Skitter and Bitch is five. Sundancer is six. Labyrinth and Nuder makes eight. The two soldiers makes 10.
Speaker: Okay, yeah, so 10. We're not missing anybody else that we're gonna remember. What about Brutus, Judas, and Angelica? I was about to say, we gotta count the dogs. Brutus, Judas, and Angelica, that would be 13. Lucky number 13 there. They always come in so handy. They are significant pieces of the fight. They are. Absolutely. You're not wrong. I mean, Kaiser's got his bitches. Kaiser's bitches and bitches bitches?
Speaker: Speaking of bitch and Kaiser though, I did really enjoy a bitches little power play where like Kaiser's like, all right, everybody here's what we're going to do. And then she just like gets up on the dog. We've, I think we already talked about it, but just again, it's just great. It's great moment. It's great. It's a good moment. Yeah.
Speaker: And before we pop off of the soldiers, I do just have to say, and this just is a testament to the way I love how Wild Bo writes characters because those guys feel so alive. Like think about the situation. Like we know Coyle funds his guys and he's loaded. So we imagine these guys are getting paid pretty well.
Speaker: But you've got to be like half nuts to walk into these types of fights just wearing body armor with guns. And then like at the end of the fight too, when Taylor's like, Hey, do you guys need some help? You know, you're busted up pretty good. We got some healers. They're like, nah, we're fine. We're going to hitchhike it back. You know, like it just, it's just, I don't like who, who are these guys? Who does that? It's just the absolute like, all right. All right. Damn. I guess. All right.
Speaker: That goes to show like, unless you're in a world where like magically everybody has like enough invulnerability to be impervious to bullets, which is not this world clearly, a well -placed sniper would destroy so many villains and heroes. That is true. I think that is a good point to make, absolutely. Where yeah, like these guys, they're clearly very well trained specifically for taking out superheroes.
Speaker: And I think that that is a good point to make that these guys, yeah, they're not just like, they're not just soldiers. They're specifically hired to kill superheroes. That does feel important, I'd agree, yeah. Speaking of people that we need to kill, Oney Lee. Oh my God. What a cool power. Cool indeed, but annoying as fuck. Oh, super annoying. He's a little bitch boy for sure.
Speaker: No, that fight is so fun to read. I enjoyed it. I remembered that part of this fight from the last time when I'd read it the first time, and reading it again was just so fun, the way he's just hopping around everywhere, and the fact that when he teleports the shadow, there's no visual cue that he's teleported until after the shadow disappears, which is just horrifying.
Speaker: It makes like a smokescreen as well. Like he teleported to the snipers, popped over a few times or popped a few clones. And then teleports away and it's like he was never there. And Nash is really cool. He leaves like the little ash cloud. Yeah, he leaves the ash cloud and they can't see it. It's a 10 foot cloud every time one of his clones dissipates. So if you have four, four clones that are surrounding, you know, our, our soldier boys,
Speaker: up on top of the roof. That's an equivalent of a 40 -foot cloud of smoke that they are now going to have to wait until it passes to be able to see enough to shoot through. That was such a smart move. I loved that. Something I really love is you don't necessarily... Well, of course, Oney Lee has very cool power, but the idea of utilizing your power in weird or new ways to be like, okay, so yeah, sure, I can blip in and out all over the place.
Speaker: But being able to use your doubles as a smokescreen like that is so cool and it's so unique. Because we've seen the teleporting power a bazillion times. We've seen the Nightcrawler, what was that other movie? Not Loop Jumper.
Speaker: kind of a cool power on its own, but then adding the like clone that kind of acts on its own for a few seconds before it dissipates. Ooh. Yeah. You get real fun with that. Yeah. It's a, it's a really neat, neat idea for a superpower and the way he uses it too, like he gets Taylor in a,
Speaker: I think she says like a messy chokehold. And then, I mean, he's about to kill her and he would have had someone else not stepped in. So the ability to not just teleport away from danger, but yeah, to use those clones in creative ways like that, where it's like, I'm gonna teleport behind you, hold you, teleport away, but my clone's gonna hold you for 10 seconds and that's enough time to kill you. Like that's just really, that's really neat and scary.
Speaker: I forget if that's the part where like they throws the knife and it sticks, it catches in her lens. Like she gets hit in the head with something. She thinks she didn't get hit. Like she got hit with like maybe the handle or something, but then she opens her eyes and like the tip of the knife is stuck in the lens of her mask. I think so. Cause I think, um, I think one of bitch's dogs jumps in and then he jumps away and throws the knife or something like that. Like that. Yeah.
Speaker: It kind of makes me wonder when you're controlling... I think about this with Taylor. She has a moment where she's considering that her bugs could just start. I think it's when she commands them to grab the money off the table in the warehouse. They'll just do the command. She doesn't have to think of like, okay, these bugs push this, these bugs collect it, these bugs do this. In the same way that... I wonder if his power, only his power is very much where
Speaker: he doesn't necessarily have to think about what the clones are doing. They're just going to continue the operation that they were last, I guess, doing. So in the sense of like grabbing somebody or holding a knife to their throat or something like that. Or if it's a very distinct and separate, you know, like could the clones react or would they, I don't know exactly. I'm just, I think it's interesting to think about how
Speaker: with powers like that, your brain has to adapt. And how does your power adapt to your brain? I mean, we've already kind of seen in regards to this, we, you know, only Lee is not, if we, we compare him to his power, he's not kind of like, he's not a direct confrontation person unless he is on the offensive.
Speaker: As soon as he, you know, push comes to shove, he is kind of a little bitch. And if we think about what could cause a trigger event to give somebody the ability to leave a part of themselves there, but disappear so that they can run away essentially, like, you know, not to make judgments about the man, but it's kind of a cowardly power, you know? You know, something that obviously
Speaker: would be important to get yourself out of danger, especially if imagine you got that as like a little kid and you needed to disappear from your abusive household or something. But like, well, how much, how much your power, it is how much your power is tied to like personality though. Cause that hasn't really been established as a thing.
Speaker: It's like Taylor's power is controlling tiny bugs. I'm not sure that I would connect that to her trigger event. We're talking about that during her trigger event. Yeah, with her trigger event. Yeah, there are bugs in the locker and she can kind of like, because it's collected all this disgustingness and the bugs have collected too. It makes me think, because something with this is that like, because we only know two peoples are potentially with Glory Girl, three people's trigger events.
Speaker: How much more insight are we going to get to people because we learn about their backstory, we learn about their trigger event and we go, oh my gosh, your power now makes perfect sense because this was your upbringing or this was your trigger event or whatever. Having read the book before, I do remember a couple of things.
Speaker: It's so interesting to me to think about what can spawn a power that exists the way it does, like with neuter, having poisoned skin basically.
Speaker: toxin and blue skin and no, no, I'm sorry blue hair, although it says he dies it and orange skin and blue eyes like that's so Weird like what determines that your power is gonna physically alter you not just mentally alter you yeah, and I'm sure we'll We'll come back to that for sure
Speaker: No, but yeah, it's, it's fun to think about, especially as we like, like Alan, I think that's a really fun sort of thought experiment with a lot of these characters too, in terms of trying to figure out why they got the, the power that they did. Speaking of powers that they got, uh, Taylor really, we, you know, we mentioned Taylor's in the zone today.
Speaker: doesn't know why I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she's getting super bullied at school. Oh, nothing at all. But she does a couple things. Not only, like you said, are they, her bugs kind of going off of just a general will that she has, not even like conscious thought, just like, man, I wish that money was there. Like, and then they just do it. But she, she, she takes her power and she makes them into the shape of people.
Speaker: Ooh. Yeah. She starts forming human shapes out of bugs. Um, and, and she's just, you know, like she mentions a few times, like her power feels like it's got a bigger range. She's having to, she's not having to actively think about it. She is in the bug zone. Um, and she's kinda in the bug zone. Uh, and because of the, you know, the situations that she's having to go through, she's developed sort of, you know, what we call like a new power. Um, it's not really,
Speaker: power so much as like, you know, when spider -man figures out how to use it, like turn his webs into like a hang glider, you're like, Oh, that's something that's going to be useful forever now. Um, and in this case, he's able to make bug people.
Speaker: And honestly, it felt very anime to me where it's like, just train harder and your power evolves a bit. She's been going out, she's been flexing her power, she's been doing work and she's getting rewarded for it. She gets more range, she gets more ideas. So it's fun to see how that kind of evolves a little bit. Something I like that we're getting to know about
Speaker: the capes in Brockton Bay is because we know what people can do, if you see a power but you don't necessarily see the cape behind it, you can make an educated guess about what cape it is. And I have to say, when there's a
Speaker: a part where I think it's just Taylor and Bitch, but they're running and all of a sudden like the ground is kind of disappearing. There's like, you know, basically everything is becoming really weird. I had this thought where I was like, what the fuck is Vista doing here?
Speaker: Like why is Vista all of a sudden in the middle of this thing? Because I was like, oh yeah, that's what Vista does. She shapes and restretches and kind of folds the environment around her to make it harder to go wherever you need to go. And I'm kind of in this moment where I'm like, okay, Vista, that's so random. I remember Vista being part of this fight, like that's, what the heck?
Speaker: all of a sudden, it's like, oh, it's labyrinth. And I was like, oh, shit. Like, that's so interesting. Like, okay, okay. And I love that, like, my brain is already making those connections of like, oh, yeah, it's got to be Vista because we know Vista. But like, I love that already because, you know, capes come and go. But like the ones that live in Brockton Bay, regardless of whether they're heroes or villains, like we're going to see them over and over and over again. And knowing what people can do and anticipating their
Speaker: how they can help in a fight or what they can do is really exciting. And even though I was wrong for a second there, because I thought it was Vista, it's exciting to think about how future fights like this, because we know Long is how he is, we're anticipating what he's going to do, or how Taylor is going to have to change up the way she fights him.
Speaker: because of what we already know about its power. And that just makes me so excited about all the upcoming big fights and seeing these mashups of powers and play off of each other and seeing, okay, so we've seen these two capes before, but let's see them fight in totally new ways now because they're up against different opponents, basically. I just, ugh, loved it.
Speaker: I think I mistake Vista for Labyrinth every single time I read. It's just, I like, yeah, it's just real bad. Labyrinth is nonverbal, right? I know, I know, but my like, I don't know what it is about this time, but this is the first time I've read this series and finally separated the two in my mind. You know, speaking of,
Speaker: Interesting powers in the way that people use them and learn how to use them. I do really like how You take someone like a neuter like we mentioned who is power is kind of a That's a bit of a weakness in a way Like who wants to be the guy who nobody can touch, you know
Speaker: But you take that power and the way he uses it to turning his bodily fluids into psychedelic medicine, which is just gross in a, in the best way. Um, I just, I kind of love that. And it's like, you just see him, he's kind of jumping around from person to person and just
Speaker: I just imagine sticking his finger in their mouth. Like I, I can't imagine anything but that of him just like, yeah, yeah. No, he's, he jumps on your face, sticks his finger in your mouth and then you have the best dream you've ever had in your life. You know, maybe you just give them a super wet Willy.
Speaker: Maybe it doesn't have to be the mouthpiece. Maybe it's any hole, you know? It's his skin though, right? So technically he wouldn't even wash it. He just wipes his finger under your nose, just like under your nose. He like flicks a booger at you. Oh, man. Hocks a loogie and all of a sudden you're like off in dreamland.
Speaker: No, there's like the definition of making the most out of a bad situation. Exactly. He was dealt as far as we know, a nice hand. Yeah. Until we get to the interlude, at least he's dealt the worst hand we've seen. And then, but still he's like, he's really positive. He's really optimistic. He's having a good time. Like he's just kind of enjoying life, which is very happy to go lucky. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of a fun comparison or contrast rather to a guy who's just having a good time. Yeah.
Speaker: And like, I think Taylor says, she makes a comment like, oh, underneath the like weird orange skin and the blue hair and the blue eyes and the tail, like he's a really good looking dude. And like, I always, I think about this with, because I'm a smart reader myself. So like, I'm always like, oh, we got some sexy scenes going on. But like, I mean, Taylor's in high school, so.
Speaker: And so is Nuder, keep that in mind. And so is Nuder, yeah, these are fucking children. But kind of that thought of like, she sees that there's a good looking guy even past the weird outward appearance there. But how do you have a relationship with anyone when your skin to skin contact causes them to crazily elucidate and go on a weird acid trip?
Speaker: It makes me wonder, especially with the interlude, which we'll talk about later, of course, is very much of the thought of how lonely it must be. We're having a power like that that completely transforms your life. Taylor can hide what she can do. It's very easy for her to hide it. But someone like Bregger or like Nuder, being able to hide that is impossible.
Speaker: And that's, that's what I like about that conversation with neuter too, is where he's like, you know, sometimes your powers, they just kind of mess you up, you know? And he says that like Taylor understands, like she too is messed up in some way. But I love later when she like checks in on herself, she's like, that'll do. Is there anything wrong with me? Just let me know. Am I broken? Am I broken in some way? And Tattletail says no, but we, I mean, Tattletail's not omniscient, right? So it's kind of this idea of like,
Speaker: I mean, trauma affects people if nothing else, and a known buyer, yeah. I was about to say, she tends to keep her cards pretty close to her chest and like, if there was something wrong with Taylor, like would she say? That would be true. Right, because she explains why she doesn't say what they would say to bitch or to Rachel. Exactly, yeah. Like why would they tell her? So it's kind of the same thing where it's like, oh, this is really interesting. And you start to wonder, again,
Speaker: this is kind of an english teacher thing but whenever you have a first person story you always have to ask is this narrator reliable. And we already kind of know that Taylor. Not that she's unreliable but she does things without realizing it like when she hit emma.
Speaker: She's like, I hit her. I didn't even know I did. And so it's just, it's just that whole conversation is so interesting to me, that part where you see, yeah, these, these people got the short end of the stick, you know? And that's just the way it is.
Speaker: I think it was in our first episode when I think Kat, I think it was you that mentioned the idea of Taylor being an unreliable narrator. And I have been reading with that mindset this entire time. And it really does sort of change the way you'll read these conversations and interactions in terms of just kind of keeping everything in that context and framework.
Speaker: which is absolutely true, which is just, it just makes for a lot of really fun sort of reading into these moments, these conversations. Well, let's jump over from Oni, Lee and Nuder to the villain of the hour.
Speaker: As I think it's right, it's the next channel. She's got wings? She's a dragon. And I like how she's not like feathery wings, you know? She says not like a bat wings with fur, but like with scales and like a membrane in between. And I'm like, it's just a fucking dragon.
Speaker: What could it be? Wow. It's sort of a giant worm, but like not worm with an O, like a worm with a Y. You know, it's like the being of St. George or something. Hot take. The Alaskan bull worm. I got a, I got a hot take for you guys. All right. Let's go. Dragon mythology doesn't exist in this earth.
Speaker: That's why Taylor doesn't know what a dragon is. Except we've already had her describe his Oriental dragon tattoo. Yeah, and also... Oriental dragon, not European dragon. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. I can get with it. So you're saying Oriental dragon like Shang -Chi, Raya, the last... Long worm -like dragon, yeah, yeah. Right. But maybe, maybe no, maybe no.
Speaker: I like the thought as a hot take for now. You and I both know that's wrong. She wouldn't feel the need to differentiate Oriental dragon.
Speaker: No, I know, I know. I'm just Josh. Josh is a fun one. Good fun idea. That is a good thought, though. Wow, that would have made for some crazy movie rentals from Earth, Olaf, once they find out who the fuck are their dragons. Something I kind of want to touch on really quick before we jump into lung.
Speaker: is there's, so we have the big Onili fight. We have them in the warehouse trying to figure out Nuder and like pulling him out and you know, the whole like find gloves, find elastic, find anything so we don't have to touch his skin and all, you know, be on our asses. But there's kind of this like exchange between Taylor and Sundancer where Sundancer is like,
Speaker: questioning everything that Taylor is doing. Like, she's like, well, get gloves. Like, oh, why? Like, well, because we can't touch him. Like, okay, like, okay, well, let's find, you know, purses. Like, well, why? Like, because we don't have bandages. Like, the kind of this interesting, which I mean, we see more later with Sundancer, but like, a very young innocence
Speaker: with Sundancer or when a kid asks you, well, why? Okay, well, why and why and why? It's like, I'm trying to save - No wonder the travelers have problems. You're one of them, Sundancer. I think it's just shows that Taylor kind of has an instinct for this. She's very intelligent. Let's be honest here, her bugs by themselves, yes, there's a lot of poisonous bugs out there, venomous bugs.
Speaker: But by itself her power is not strong compared to the likes of lung and bitch and many others because they have such fire power like big
Speaker: Lots of damage can be done in one go. They don't have to think about their power, right? They don't have to think about what to do with it. Whereas she has to really think about what to do with her power and then also think about what to do in these situations. She's been preparing for being a superhero this whole time.
Speaker: And with that, she took the first aid class and she's been, and it's really like paying off for her. And you could tell like as much time as he spent alone kind of going through these scenarios probably in her head. I know I'm not the only one that kind of makes up disaster scenarios in my head while I'm driving home from work and kind of dissociate the whole time.
Speaker: And what would I do if I get into a car accident or if I see a car accident? All of that. I just feel like she's so intelligent. She handles all of these situations very well. And she has a handle on what to do next before anybody else in the room is even thinking that. Yeah.
Speaker: doesn't just play out with her birthday response, but it's also her strategy. We see all that with Oney Lee. She noticed the bugs were teleporting with him. And she's same thing with Lung as we get further in their fight and how she actually ends up taking them down. It's not her bugs that defeated Lung, it's her.
Speaker: intelligence that defeated lung. Very much so. Very cool. Very good thoughts. Also with that fight too, let's just talk about cocky ass Kaiser. Oh my God. It's so telling for the fight, just how everything's going to go down because Kaiser and lung have this, you know, walk in strut off against each other.
Speaker: Until long spot skitter and then he's like, I don't give a fuck about white boy.
Speaker: Oh, very much so. Yeah. It sets it up like this is going to be a great showdown, but it's not even close. And lung is just done having fun once once Taylor enters the room. And yeah, what a what a throw down. What a beat down. How does he end up? Does he just is it just him throwing him against the wall? Is that all he does? So I've got I've got kind of the play by play here. We've got lung kicking the ass.
Speaker: of the dogs, which, you know, leaves one of them with a missing eye, a one -eyed Brutus. Oh, no. I think Tony Lee did that. Tony Lee did that. Did Tony Lee do that? Yeah, Tony Lee jumped on Brutus and stabbed it in the eye. You're right, you're right. He kicks the ass of the dogs, which, by the way, have been running just absolutely rampant over, like, brute heroes. So, like, the fact that Lung just destroys them here
Speaker: is telling of like why you have to have a bunch of people go after him. Kaiser brings it down with the ceiling spear. You know, that's just, ooh. And then Kaiser, you know, blocks Long's flames only for Long to come out the other side and just, you know, throw him into the wall. And that's kind of what puts an end to it.
Speaker: for a second up until, you know, he's like spearing him from like 10 different ways. Uh, he just, but he can't stop long. And, uh, at one point long stabs, one of the two finia herminia, um,
Speaker: They're interchangeable, really. With his, what, foot -long nails? Fingernails, claws? He puts his hand into a freaking stabby stab. Spear. Spear -y. I don't know. I'm making the motion sitting here at my desk like a freaking idiot. He basically makes a karate chop motion with all your fingers together, your palms flat, and just uses it as a blade to just shrink right through her.
Speaker: Oh my god, it's fucking terrifying. And really, so we heard from Taylor that in her research, lung is stronger the longer he fights. We didn't see that in her fight with him because he got knocked out so quick.
Speaker: This is just such an, a powerful example of that, of like, okay, now I know what it means that he gets stronger the more he fights. Like that is really scary what that means in practice now. So it's kind of a cool, um, just kind of a cool illustration of the power. We didn't really get to see that before. So yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Got to take them out quick. Oh yeah. Gosh. Thankfully they have a heavy hitter on the team who finally decided to do something at the end. Oh my gosh. Sundancer. I didn't think I hated Sundancer this much while I was reading it, but just on this podcast, y 'all have brought it out of me. She's
Speaker: It's like being hesitant with, you know, how it's a miniature son. But, but still like, come on. Yeah.
Speaker: The real power is you just all get cancer. There's that famous clip from the Harley Quinn show where it's like, what'd you shoot me with? And the other guy's like, Oh no, Todd.
Speaker: It's the cancer ray. He's like, Holly Quinn, you gave me fucking cancer. Oh my God. That's kind of how it feels. Exactly. It melts the asphalt. We're not talking about the heat that's coming off of lung here. We're not talking about breathing fire. We're not talking about a ball of flame. We are talking about shit that is turning the asphalt to tar.
Speaker: Oh my god. Yeah, this isn't like I cast fireball into the room. Yeah, you know, this is I I melt the room Star like if anything it's more closer to a burning star of Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah, but then so I kind of get why she's hesitant because it is this feeling of like yeah, I
Speaker: Are you sure? This is like my big, this is like when you have a spell in D &D and you're like, look, this is my one five level spell. We don't use this unless we absolutely need to. And a lot of people are gonna get hurt. So like, if you want me to do this, sure, fine, here we go. But like, you better fucking run. Because if you do not wanna get caught in this, like you will get melted. Like obstacle on a hot day. Exactly.
Speaker: You know, to end it off, Taylor, of course, confronting the big bully that long is and kind of being a little like, I don't know, really confident in herself as compared to their, compared to their last run in, you know, uh, just don't, don't underestimate me. Gets the cockroach in the eye. Let's fucking go.
Speaker: That was good, man. Talk about people utilizing their powers in ways that is incredibly creative. That was so cool. I was reading it, and I was like, wait, what'd she do? Wait, what'd she do? Wait, wait, he's down? What happened? What'd she do? Because I was like, it's such a good thought. And I honestly, I don't think I would have had the four, and I consider my left. I'm a pretty smart cookie. But I do not foresee myself, should I have had Taylor's powers,
Speaker: foresee that as being an issue, being like, yeah, let me real quick just slurp up some of that toxin onto some of my, on a caterpillar and then have my cockroach carry around a caterpillar soaked in toxin to shut up or whatever it was. Like, geez Louise, that takes an immense amount of foresight. Well, I think it's not, it's not just foresight. I don't even know if it's, I don't think it's foresight. I think that it is,
Speaker: Taylor's, if we're gonna talk about, because we're gonna talk about brains and how they get rewired with powers in a second. I think Taylor thinks like an insect. And when we read her, we are getting a fraction of the amount of things that she is multitasking at the moment. I don't think this was a foresight on her behalf. I think this was one of 10 different things that were going on simultaneously.
Speaker: And we can't read 10 different things at once. So we get the Taylor version of it. No, I do like that. Yeah, I like that a lot. Interesting. Because nowhere in her running around and not trying to get killed, are we led into that? We're barely led into the fact that she's like gathering up all this money and stuff like that. And she is very much like she's multitasking. Hey, we got to do this. Hey, we got to manage that. Hey, we got to get neuter patched up.
Speaker: She's doing five things that we see and 10 things that we don't, kind of. And it's not even just, because it's not even just like the idea she has to dip the bug in neuter's.
Speaker: blood or whatever it was, toxin, whatever it is. But it's like to dip the bug, but also have the other bugs to fly that bug over. And it's like a whole operation of just bugs each with a different part, like a different role in the whole thing. As she's fighting herself, it's an insane amount of this almost limited
Speaker: omniscience she has, right? Where just her consciousness is present in her area in all of these bugs, which is, yeah, just such a fascinating concept, such a cool element of her power. Which brings us to, of course, our favorite reoccurring segment on this podcast. What the fuck, Taylor? What the fuck, Taylor? The eyes? Go for the eyes, boo.
Speaker: I thought she was going to do something else. Like that kind of that moment of realization of like, okay, well, he is going to grow shit back, I guess. So what are we going to go for? I thought she was going to go for the hands. Maybe like, honestly, that was, that was my first thought is the hands, but like the eyes. Oh my God. She said the second one was easier. Like Jesus.
Speaker: Taylor holds them in her hand is like, Ooh, look at those. And of course, you know what? I'll give it to Sundancer. Sundancer has the appropriate reaction. It's like, Oh my God. Yeah. And like she reaches like Taylor reaches over to like help Sundancer up and sends it. Sundancer gives it to somebody. I'm not taking your hand. And she looks down. She's like, Oh, I'm covered in blood. Oh, sorry. I juices. I wanted her to cut off the stick again though.
Speaker: Oh my God. No. Two orbs lay in her hand. No, stop it. Gross. I do love, I love before she does that though, her called a tattletale just to sort of get the confirmation. Yeah. She's, I mean, she's not a total monster, you know, she's got to make sure she's not just going to like this man's eyes out and be like, Oh, actually, no, just kidding that ma 'am dim forever. And that's never going back. Yeah.
Speaker: But also the trust, what I like about that conversation is the trust that she places in Tattletail. Despite Tattletail having shown lapses in her power, Taylor's still like 100%. I know you're not going to intentionally deceive me with anything, which is a really cool sort of subtle bonding moment that they have there.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so too. That's something we've talked about two episodes ago, of the fact that like, Tattletail has fucked up multiple times and has asked Taylor to not share it with the rest of the group. So like, if anybody knows that Tattletail can be wrong, it's Taylor. Taylor knows. And she still puts that amount of trust into Tattletail. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Oh, what fun. Do we want to move on to the end of the fight, post -fight, where we're all hanging around, divvying up some dollar bucks? Some Dalla Dalla bills, yeah. Which I love that everyone's just kind of surprised at her that like, wait, you stopped to collect the money? Number one, Hug Girl was the one that kicked Lung's ass. Yeah. Number two.
Speaker: Saved neuter. Number three. Like everybody owes her here. Yeah, everybody. Sundancer wouldn't get off her ass if Taylor didn't push her. The snipers kind of worked in tandem with Taylor to get Oney lead a fuck off. Like every Kaiser owes her. In the end though, Sundancer, we even see like lung is even more powerful than we thought he was because
Speaker: We see her like summon the sun, the power of the sun in her hand, essentially. And then Lung just goes, no. And just flicks it away and he controls it now. It's like, wait, what? Like that works like that? It's wild. Number one, we haven't even seen his final form. And number two, I think she could have tried harder.
Speaker: Well, I think that's interesting because Long has the ability for pyrokinesis. Am I saying that correctly? So it's interesting because we talk about later in the interlude about the Manton effect a little bit. So if you're a pyrokinetic, you can control a different person's
Speaker: That is so interesting that you could potentially control the power of somebody else, which we actually, now that I'm saying it out loud and thinking about it, we see that happen with Panacea at the bank heist.
Speaker: But because she has access to the bug, she can therefore fuck with Taylor because of her power. So that's super interesting. That is so, I love it. God damn.
Speaker: Well, though, you're just you're just oh my gosh, my brain is like constantly surprised and excited and just incredibly jealous of the things that you make. I'm very, very jelly.
Speaker: But speaking of, uh, everyone owing Taylor a favor, I love her little, her little like nod to either Fenya or Menya, whichever one is, is standing there. Okay. Um, maybe tell your boss that I saved his life and he should probably, uh, tell Hook Wolf to, uh, back off, you know, take a, take a chill. Exactly. And they're just like, just subtle nod like, okay.
Speaker: We gotcha. Which, which leads more into the, uh, the bitch Taylor dynamic growing even stronger at this chapter. Cause you've got what I would like to title, uh, the fake out kiss moment. So they're talking and, uh, you know, bitch and her walking back, having this conversation and talking about the dogs, talking about everything. And, you know, they're kind of having this semi argument and like,
Speaker: She's like, you're cold. Quit being like a, quit being a dick and like take him a jacket. And she like pulls her clothes. So they're like almost, you know, they're like right up close. And she's like, what the fuck is about to happen? And then she throws her jacket on her and the fans, the shipping went wild. The ship was set to sail on its maiden voyage. I love it.
Speaker: And then of course she's like, you know, nevermind. Yeah. Such a weird interaction. I mean, I, I, I'm, I love bitch. I, bitch is fantastic and Taylor's delightful, but them two together is such an interesting dynamic. And I love you expected, but it's the pair you want. No, it's not the pair I want. No, I've shipped them.
Speaker: Yes, that I agree with because it would be in the minority on the internet. Let me tell you. Okay. No, I ship Lisa and Taylor way more than I ship Rachel and Taylor. Let's be honest, but huddle bug, huddle bug. He's not exhibited one gay vibe this whole time. She's given by vibes. No, not even a little.
Speaker: As a bisexual, I got no vibes from Taylor as being anything but straight. Did your BIDAR not go off? I love it. No, I agree with Kat on that one, though. I'm getting no BIDAR sense tingling with that one. But I just would like... Jacob, if you could just say what you just said a second ago, could you just repeat that for our listeners?
Speaker: Did I say that Hot Brian is distractingly hot? Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. No, you're not wrong. Hot Brian is hot. Hot Brian is distractingly hot, and I'm okay with that. No, but with the Rachel and Taylor kind of weird, very weird interaction, especially since we're getting to the end of this chapter here, especially back at the loft.
Speaker: They know they're starting to be friends, but they're too awkward about it. It's almost like the way that two people that have a crush on each other act, but not in a romantic way. Yeah. Taylor wants to figure out.
Speaker: Wants to figure out Bitch. Bitch doesn't care, but clearly has accepted Taylor into the fold, whatever that is. The pack, if you will. The pack. She knows she's part of the pack and sees all these attempts from Taylor, but Bitch doesn't understand Taylor. But Taylor really is trying to figure out how to work with Bitch. And it's a puzzle.
Speaker: It's a puzzle and she's trying to figure it out. I actually don't think that bitch doesn't care. I think we just learned from Lisa and Taylor's conversation that bitch does not have the same communication style. Just the same understanding of intonation and body language as
Speaker: because she's got that dog, like that. It's not that bitch doesn't care, it's that she doesn't want to show if she cares yet. What does caring look like for a dog? Like in her case, it's you take care of your pack. And sometimes that means putting people in their place. Like her, it's a very rough form of love.
Speaker: Exactly. Which I did have to find. I did have to find that paragraph just for Alan's sake. When Bitch reached for my face, I startled. She put one hand on the side of my face and for a fraction of a second, I thought something incredibly awkward was about to happen. Tell me it ain't there. Tell me it ain't there. Oh my gosh.
Speaker: I was so confused at first when she was like, she turned my neck till it was almost completely horizontal. And I'm like, is bitch trying to break her neck right now? Just snap it right off. Along with what the fuck Taylor, do we need like a horny bonk Taylor?
Speaker: Also a slight note, she turns her head so she can see the finger mark that's around Taylor's neck to which Taylor realizes, oh shoot, I have a handprint shaped bruise around my entire body. I am never going to be able to hide that.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, you walked up to a dragon and said, Hey, come at me. Come at me. Okay. A non -descript reptile with wings. We'll go with that. That brings fire and has scales. Gotcha. Gotcha.
Speaker: It's hard sometimes when you're reading a story to visualize scale, like, oh, and he stood 15 feet tall. I'm like, okay, wait, my ceiling's eight feet, so like seven feet above that. I love that so much. Literally, that is how I think about space.
Speaker: But then to see the image of like, well, I can visualize a handprint around me, like just sort of gives more weight to that. Just how big he was. It was crazy. It gives me like weird, like nervous shivers. Like, oh God, that is huge. Like, oh man. And the fact that's interesting, he didn't squeeze hard. He totally could have crushed her and he didn't.
Speaker: And I realized that it's kind of, you know, it's one of those things where the book that we're reading, we're reading it slower than it's happening because you're having to describe, you know, what's happening, what Lung's doing, what Taylor's doing in response. But like, he could have squished her like a little bug and he didn't. And she was able to like get out of it, but oh, Lord. Yeah. It's something I think,
Speaker: you know, it gives the undersiders, at least most of the undersiders, kind of an advantage compared to a lot of these people is while the undersiders do have to posture a bit, they don't as a kind of as a collective and some of their members don't have the ego that everybody else does. They're not bombastic villains that you would like
Speaker: See on television, for instance, you know, Kaiser has swag, you know, lung is just also, you know, he's a, he's a monster. You know, these are, these are front page villains. The undersiders are kind of, I don't, I don't want to say that they, you know, they aren't cool, but
Speaker: They're kind of beat here. No, I would argue that it's not that they're beat here. They're just not villainous. Like they don't have a gang. They don't have the PR team.
Speaker: They don't have a negative reason to be a villain. Their reasoning is money. They're like, hey, we can make money doing this. We have the powers, we have the ability, let's do it. Versus Kaiser is like, I hate everyone who is white. He's also like, I am a legitimate business owner. And he's like, I can use my powers for Nazism.
Speaker: I'm not talking about their motivations, but that they just, they don't have the ego or the aesthetic. Yeah, that's definitely true. Of like a big villain. I was gonna say a big time villain, if you will. Like they definitely have your neighborhood villain vibe to them. Them and Uber and Leet, perfect match ups.
Speaker: Uber and leet are not, Uber and leet actually have a better shtick going. Like their outfits, iconic. It's because everyone loves a good theme. They've got a good theme. They've got a good, like I said, they've got the ego. They're memorable villains. There you go. And the undersiders are low key villains.
Speaker: They are, they aren't trying to draw attention, nor do they really want it. So they're cozy gaming villains. Yeah. They're closer to like fault lines crew. Yeah. Literally robbed a bank just to get attention though. Yeah. Uh, they were also, they were also hired to do that. Yeah, but like suggested the idea though.
Speaker: Yeah. Like I think the idea of like, well, we, if we're going to be, you know, we're playing with the big boys now and if we want to play with the big boys, we're going to need a reputation that, that is going to proceed us. I do think Lisa is the, the person in that group that is the ego. Cause although grew is clearly like the leader, he is probably the least maybe next to Taylor in terms of like,
Speaker: Once again, I'm just gonna keep using the word ego. Regent definitely has ego, but it's not for like a team dynamic. Yeah, it's that teenage boy ego, not like the group ego. Bitch doesn't really. Taylor certainly doesn't. Who is it? It's Lisa. Lisa is the PR team for a small coffee shop that doesn't wanna serve anybody that isn't on their block. It's like, no, you need to get a TikTok.
Speaker: That just seems like a lot, and we're just a small business and she's like, you need to rob a bank. We're just trying to rob those in our community. All right, well, should we shift a little bit? Because I feel like we really do need to talk about
Speaker: this last how powers affect your brain or do we want to move on? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we definitely should. We got to hit it up and then we got to talk about the inner loop. But we got we have to talk about Lisa and Taylor's conversation. Yeah, let's go. I. I probably. Could read this book about eight times and. Still never fully understand
Speaker: the way that powers and brains work. But I think that Taylor and Lisa's conversation about it, specifically about Rachel, is so, it's what I love about the interpersonal dynamics of this book. Like these little, these one -off little conversations that give us such a good insight into the people, their powers. It's such a good, and just,
Speaker: Because powers are so intertwined with mental state and trauma, as we have just now shown and kind of hinted at before, his ability to talk about just thinking, thoughts, how different people perceive things, trauma, therapy talk,
Speaker: All of these things, you know, kind of emotion. What's the word? Emotional intelligence. Yes. Yes. Yes. My favorite thing among many favorite things about while though is he writes.
Speaker: emotional intelligence into his stories and even books that I love and enjoy the characters don't have that. I have yet to read a good book where characters are making emotionally healthy, positive decisions to try and better themselves because most of the books you get
Speaker: are people who are shitty and they just get shittier even if they're in therapy. And his book is here are people trying to get better, moving forward. And for a lot of people, I know that's not melodrama, which is like what I see in most fantasy novels, especially YA fantasy. And it drives me up a wall because my autism is like, why don't those two people talk? That seems really dumb that they don't sit down and have a conversation. Well, guess what?
Speaker: bitch and Taylor just sat down and had that conversation. And from that conversation, she turns around and has another five minute conversation with Lisa. And by the end of those two conversations, she has finally
Speaker: figured out, oh my God, here's how I need to work with Bitch from now on. Yes. And I love, because I think back and I know I wasn't here talking about it, but the very first chapter of this arc where Brian grabs Rachel and he throws her up against the wall and they have this very much of a physical power struggle moment. Knowing what we know now, it makes so much more sense of like being able to
Speaker: connect with bitch on that level because that is the aggression, that's where she's gonna understand because of like the, I'll call it dog brain, but like because of the dog brain, the pack mentality of like how she can or can't read body language and tonal intonations, like it makes, it makes it so much better because we know now and like,
Speaker: Brian and Lisa have had a chance to like, they know bitch. They've interacted with her. Brian has learned this is how he has to, you know, talk to Rachel for it to get through to her. And now that we finally are in on it, all of what bitch does makes so much sense. Like I think about it a lot of the whole smiling thing about like when you smile at her, she sees bare teeth. She doesn't see it as a, ah, it's a warm,
Speaker: you know it's an encouraging facial expression but she sees it as the dog you know dog brain of like oh they're burying their teeth at me are they are they challenging me right now like let's fucking go and not understanding the tonal shifts in in a conversation or your voice just oh it's so good it's so good yeah and it just
Speaker: It humanizes a bitch in a weird way because she has, she has felt like this almost inhuman character where you're like, look, I get that you have issues, but come on, what is wrong with you? And so in this weird way, explaining that she has a dog brain for lack of a better term, which I do kind of like that, but for lack of a better term, she has dog brain. And so it's like, oh, now in a weird way, she feels more human.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely. It's really cool because it comes off the tail. I just thought about this. It comes off the tail of the interlude from the previous chapter, which is Brutus' perspective. Oh yeah, yeah. And the whole point of that is to show how the world is viewed through a dog's eyes. And then this chapter has been kind of hammering in that bitch sees things differently. And finally at the end is, bitch sees things like how a dog does. You could take the Brutus chapter and flip it
Speaker: It's just bitch walking around. It's like poetry. They rhyme. Oh my God. To quote the great George Lucas.
Speaker: Well, to kind of say what you were saying, Nick, like Taylor even says that she's, you know, when she's talking to Tattletale, like the whole like, oh, so she's not a sociopath. Like, so Rachel isn't a sociopath. It's like, no, she's not, you know, she's just got dog brain.
Speaker: It really does humanize. It takes her from kind of this very brutish, kind of almost dumb character where you're just like, oh, she's just all brute force and stupidity to no, she she is that dog brain, which like while we have seen a lot of the negative side of that of like her being incredibly aggressive and not understanding like tonal donations, we also see that weird loyalty side pop in with her trying to like
Speaker: you know, give Taylor her jacket and, you know, examining her neck. It's very much of like a dog sniffing another dog like, yo, you good? Like checking them out. I mean, like, okay, you're good. You're good. All right. Okay. And seeing that a little bit of sense of loyalty. And like, if Rachel sees Taylor as part of the pack, you know, the pack of the undersiders,
Speaker: How is that going to shift the way that they fight together, the way that they cohabit the loft space together? It's so good. It's so good. I feel like that's going to be one of our t -shirt, when we got our merch eventually. I'm not a sociopath. I just have dog brain. I love it. I'm writing it down right now. Excellent.
Speaker: All right, any final thoughts on this before we hit the interlude? Well, we got a hit. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I thought we were finishing up. You can cut that out then. We can't just don't forget Mark the time, Michael, but I was going to mention the favorite superpower.
Speaker: Oh yeah. We got to get that. Yeah. Yeah. Or actually Michael, can you mark the time? I'm going to need you to cut out Nick's section where he explained why to mark the time. No worries. Okay. All right. Let's, let's get back into it now. Michael, if you don't mind marking the time so that way we can cut out when Alan is explaining why I need to mark the time or you need to mark the time. I don't need to mark the time. Michael, you need to.
Speaker: Oh my god. Let's get to the interlude. The interlude real quick and finally talk about this where we have Gregor the snail who we did not get to see fighting in this in this section but it is his perspective as we're heading back to kind of get a little bit more of a insight into their team.
Speaker: into the club. I know we were just talking about this whole time about how neuter is like cursed with these bad looks and all of that stuff. But my God, we were not prepared for it. He brings in the bitches. Good Lord. Yeah. All right. At least he gets you high. Gregor, when, when your body is a drug in the most literal sense, heard a few songs like that. Sounds like a Kesha song.
Speaker: I was literally thinking the Kesha song, yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to lie, like, Nuder seems really nice. He's really cool. Bless him. But, you know, one of those jaded personality things, like, he just kind of gives off a little bit of date rapist vibes with the drug thing. I would never say that he gives that vibe off on purpose.
Speaker: Of course, but scenario -wise, it's just like that's a dangerous situation. Okay. He's 16. We have to keep that in mind. He's 16 years old. And they wanted it. They knew that they were taking that judge. No, no, no, no. Okay, okay. So 100 % serious. They literally knew exactly what they were about to take. Yes. They willingly put it in their mouths. So you can't... Yes.
Speaker: Call it date rape when it's conscious. Also, very realistically, we're there hanging out, listening to him tell stories because they were waiting for him to give them a spoonful of sugar. He licks it, right? He licks the spoon or something like that. He puts water in it and then he puts his tongue in the water.
Speaker: Which once again, I love Nuder. I think he's really cool. It's just like one of those things where like him being 16, I think makes it kind of worse. Cause like less impulse control and like, it's just sounds like a bad setup. Like I was just like, oh, this is, I don't know. I also kind of to Hannah's point about like the loneliness that he could feel.
Speaker: I think that's important to keep in mind too because this might be the closest that he gets to physical contact with people. Yes. That's very true. It's very came by this, you know, like he, because he's right. Yeah. He, he said before, like,
Speaker: Like Taylor was saying, when she was trying to take care of him, like, if I touch him, I could be gone, like actually dead. And just that idea of like, hey, if somebody touches me, they could die, kind of, who's the ex -minute, they can't die. He even says that like - He would never wake up from their - Well, no, no, he said they just - He said he can't overdose people, he's tried and a dead wife. Oh yes, he can't kill them, but they would be, they'd be out for a long time to the point where,
Speaker: bad, you know, like they might starve. They might like, you know. It happens to your brain when you're on that much, you know. Yeah, exactly. And he says it's not addictive, but of course it's, you know, there's a psychological effects, you know, who knows. So I imagine like, yes, yes, I can, I can see where you're coming from, Alan, but I would disagree. I think he gives off like class clown vibes in the sense that he wants to make people happy.
Speaker: But he knows that he's never really going to be friends with anyone. Yes, yes. I literally I it reminds me very much of like this. I'm sure nobody's surprised that I'm on a very odd side of TikTok, but like the the character of like the kind of tortured, funny villain vibes of like I'm a little bit of a bad boy and everyone knows that I'm like kind of this player vibe, but it's all to hide how lonely I feel.
Speaker: And I get that so strongly off of him. He's kind of, he's got the smirk and he's like really charismatic as we see his conversation with Taylor earlier in the arc. And it's just like, he's clearly like, he's got the moves, he's got the charisma, he's got the smile, and he's got girls all around him, but not in a way that he probably wants. And it feels like, and even with Gregor asking him, like, are you happy?
Speaker: you know, just this kind of like, oh, yeah, man, I've got I've got everything I could possibly want and kind of this like, look at him like, do you really like, it's so tragic. And the the what you said, Nick of like, this is the closest he's going to get because he can't have, you know, a physical contact with anybody of like, the closest he's going to get is like,
Speaker: these groupie girls that come to the club so they can get high for an hour and you know okay so they have to listen to him talk about his you know villainous tales or whatever but then like yeah it's cool it's all worth it because then I can get whatever drugs I you know the drugs that I want and pass out for an hour in a booth somewhere like
Speaker: Yeah. And you get the sense that like Gregor Gregor, who's older gets that, but he's like, he's so young and he's like, no, this is cool, man. Like, sure. I can't, I can't do anything with him, but he's figured that out yet. Gregor. That's why I think Gregor asked that. And that question is so like, are you really happy, neuter? And he's like, yeah, of course. Why wouldn't I be? And he's just like, right. All right. You know, Gregor another two years or so. Yeah, you'll get, you'll get tired of this.
Speaker: Well, I mean, I think with any teenager, introspection isn't really a thing. So like... Oh, of course. Or not very often, nothing. But like, in that sense of like, he's not necessarily aware of how lonely he is because he has all of the things that a teenager would want, you know? And with time, you know, and some introspection, kind of that loneliness could potentially become more apparent.
Speaker: I think when I said it was talking about like the vibes he give off, there was a bad characterization on my part. He personally does not give up those vibes. The situation they are in is a scenario, a recipe for disaster.
Speaker: Any parent looking in on that situation, like has a mini panic attack of like, oh my gosh, Mary, what are you doing here? Get out of here. Go home, do your homework. I'm just looking like, oh, a powered individual under age, giving out drugs to all these women. Other underage women. Yeah, in the club, in the VIP lounge, and they're like, you know, drugged out of their mind, laying around. I'm just like, this is,
Speaker: a bad scenario waiting to happen. That's true. I get that. Yeah, that's, that's true. But on the flip side, you know, like you said, Gregor is this older, uh, guy who's, you know, like, Hey, Nuder, are you really happy? And I don't know if Nuder knows that he's unhappy. He doesn't know that he isn't.
Speaker: Also, not to downplay Gregor's situation, but the man is living my dream introverted life where if I had a million dollars, I would just be like, let me hire this random person to go down to the store and get me a coffee because I don't want to leave my house right now. Oh my gosh, I love it. When COVID hit, it was the best thing in the world for me. Every service catered to my needs.
Speaker: Yeah, this was, again, kind of remembering when this was written. This was kind of just pre the Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub boom. Yeah. You had to get something to do with it. That's true. Gregor's doing really well for himself now with his, you know, he got his groceries dropped off. For less than $400. For less than $400. Yeah, for real. I'm just on a mask. Nobody thinks twice about it. He's like, I got COVID and they're like, oh. In post pandemic world, he doesn't even have to open the door.
Speaker: Yeah, for real. I imagine Gregor is living his best life right now in 2023. Well, there was one other big bit of world building that we got from this interlude. And that was Gregor's conversation with Faultline, who just real quick, so far got to be like the coolest gang leader, right? I think it has to go to Faultline. She's so cool. Once again, I stand.
Speaker: Fault Line has the practical yet stylish down so well. I already geeked out last time about Fault Line having literally riot gear and a battle skirt. And then we go in, I'm trying to find the description, but like pops in and I just have, dang, she got it going on.
Speaker: I got big when she's like, she's doing her little test. The first scene in Edge of Tomorrow, if you guys have seen Edge of Tomorrow, where we see Emily Blunt's character for the first time is like kicking ass against all the robots in there. Like that's how I imagine fault line looking when Gregor walks in. Oh, here we go. White dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, black slacks tucked into shiny black riding boats with steel toes.
Speaker: Yeah, mommy. Woo. We are suspenders away from being dangerous. The steel -toed riding boots for me. I know, right? Yeah. She knows style, that's for sure. I mean, when you're the leader of a villain group, you kind of have to have, you kind of have to have
Speaker: you know, style like she does. Like that's just... Oh yeah. But I love their conversation about the Manton effect and sort of trying to figure out ways around it. We got some clarity on kind of how it works a little bit, or at least, you know, how they think it works. And then her experiments to try to navigate it were pretty interesting. Again, just another fun ways of expanding the world that we didn't really need or ask for, but we got and were happy for. Yeah.
Speaker: And to add to all of the mysteries that we have to solve, we now have the mysterious organization. Yes, the upside down Omega symbol. The stylized U is how they describe the symbol. And yeah, the two bits of world building there with the character named Shamrock.
Speaker: who apparently has some kind of luck based power, which that alone is just always a fun power to imagine. I love that power. And then the other one, how they talk about the dealer and how somebody said you could buy superpowers, which is really interesting because so far in the world, we only know people getting their powers through
Speaker: We don't really know where, but they have to have a traumatic event and then they get powers, right? So this idea that, oh, you can buy powers and drink them. Hmm. Interesting. Maybe we don't know if that's true or not yet. Uh, you know, it hasn't been confirmed, but that's the theory. Uh, one more thing too, about that conversation. There's also the talk of second trigger events.
Speaker: Yes. Oh yeah. They do mention that. Yep. Yep. As an idea of how maybe you can get past the man to defect. Right. So basically, which is again, I just love Gregor. He's a great character and I just love him being like, maybe I can help my boss. What's the best way to help her? What if I try to killer or act like I'm going to just climb on top of her real quick killer. Oh yeah. That was funny. Didn't work. Didn't work now.
Speaker: And she was like, what were you hoping would happen? He's like, I don't know, maybe cut off my arm. I'm sure it'd be fine. She's like, if I had, if I did figure out how to bypass the mountain effect, do you think you'd still be standing? Yeah. Man, anything, anything for my best bud. My best bud for one.
Speaker: Let's quickly do Favorite Powers because we got a diverse selection here. What's everyone got? Nooter is my pick for this one. I love it. I'm such a fan. And the look too. I'm here for it.
Speaker: Kizer for me, Kizer's, just the abilities, just like have blades, blades just growing, big blades, big old blades just growing out of everywhere. Disavow everything he says in this arc. His powers are cool.
Speaker: There's a reason he's leader of Empire 88. His power is very cool. He's just standing there, hands behind his back, and there are just blades coming at it everywhere. That's what I love, too. That's the difference, too, with him. I think that's why I think it's so cool. He's not even my favorite power in this one, really, I think. But just the fact that unlike metalbending, you imagine a character who's a metalbender from Avatar of the Last Airbender,
Speaker: or any kind of elemental bender. They're moving their arms, right? They're waving their hands. Kaiser just walking and standing arms folded and stuff happening around him is so cool. I hate that I'm gushing over literally one of the worst people in the story. The power is so cool.
Speaker: Oh man. I actually forgot that Lung was in this arc. And again, I've forgotten most of the middle of this book. I just remember like highlights. So for me, Lung is actually one of my favorites in this only because again, I just keep coming back to this idea.
Speaker: He gets stronger the longer he fights. Obviously, he's trained for weak. It's the Hulk effect in a way. Although even the Hulk gets weak after fighting for too long. No, that's the whole point of the Hulk. The longer he goes.
Speaker: Yeah, the longer he goes, the angrier you get. The angrier he gets, the harder he fights. Which is why you've got to beat him early. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. So just, I don't know, there's so many cool powers here. Oni Lee, his power is really cool.
Speaker: Lungs power just the idea of like yes the stronger the longer he goes on the stronger he gets the amount of time the guy my guy gets up from getting like stabbed through the heart or blasted with a son of light or
Speaker: who knows what else shot from the sniper. And he just keeps on trucking, dragon boy. We saw him the first time and we were like, dang, he's getting metal skin and he's breathing fire, that's wild. And now it's like, oh, wings are coming out of his back. His neck is so long, he can just kind of like whip it around behind him. Every time we've seen him, he's gotten wilder.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll let go. I'll let go. That sentiment, Lung was fun to read about. Just fun seeing him grow. Part of you doesn't want him to lose because you want to see him get stronger. You just want to see him, like, how big does he get, you know? So... Yeah, yeah. We'll see. I like Sundancer. I think that she... I like that she can kind of embody the power of the sun and kind of make her own little sun.
Speaker: It was cool. It was neat. Yeah, she does have a pretty neat power. I'm excited to see more of the travelers. They're fun. Yeah, me too. And lastly, to wrap it up, we got to do a quick bit of predictions. Kat, what do you got for us? What do you think is going to happen here? Obviously, as we went into that interlude, we got a little bit more backstory on the tattoo.
Speaker: I think that's going to start playing a much bigger role for our undersiders at least. I think there's going to be some investigative stuff. I don't think that the ABB situation is going to last much longer. Mainly because for as a story point, like eventually they got to go. They can't be the big bad of the whole book.
Speaker: I don't have a lot of predictions for this round. Sounds good. We'll see how those evolve. All right. Well, that was our conclusion for Arc 5. Next episode, I think the plan is the full Arc 6 plus the interlude. So we're going to go ahead and read through all of that and continue where we left off here. Thanks to everyone for participating. Lovely group.
Speaker: And thanks to everyone for listening. We've really enjoyed doing this. We're definitely going to keep going. Stick around. It's going to be a lot of fun and please reach out. Let us know your thoughts, ideas. What did we miss? Do we forget any powers? Did we forget somebody in that group? We counted 10. Did we miss somebody? I'm sure we did. Yeah, let us know. And Michael, why not lay us out there?
Speaker: And welcome back to Dissecting Worm. And looking at worm, arc by arc, chapter by chapter, and attempting this task of adapting it and writing a little script, which has been a whole lot of fun. And we're into the second half of arc five through basically the fight in arc five and the interlude is kind of what we're looking at today.
Speaker: Once again, just the two of us, myself, Jacob and Alan, with Michael on behind the scenes, as always. So Alan, welcome back. No problem. The way you said that was like myself, also Jacob and Alan. I'll clean that up a bit. I started counting on my fingers like, wait a minute, how many people? I know, I realized we're not, I don't introduce anyone on these things. So we got to work on that a little bit.
Speaker: but we're back here. And looking at this arc, the second half of this arc feels pretty straightforward, but we do have sort of a unique opportunity here because in the last arc, we kind of chose to delay the confrontation with Bakuta. I think I'm pronouncing that right now. I'm sticking with Bakuta. Bakuta, okay. Kind of delayed that. Incorrect, incorrect. Dang it.
Speaker: Thank you, Michael, as always, correcting us on our every turn. Anyway, we delayed the confrontation with Bakura and Uber and lead and kind of shuffled that around a bit.
Speaker: And we talked about moving that probably to this scene here. So we kind of have to work that in.
Speaker: because other than that, and a few other things that I'm sure we'll get into, really the fight sort of, sort of writes itself. I don't think there's much here that really warrants too much of any sort of change or concern in terms of, you know, who fights and what happens and things like that. Are we tracking away on the same page here? Yeah, yeah. No, I think a lot of this is just visuals, you know, pointing out some stuff that maybe isn't
Speaker: that is thought in Taylor's head would of course, it's the usual, it's the usual. And I think the biggest thing that we'll be discussing here is kind of style. That seems to be the theme for this entire arc and the interludes, which is of course what we always end up doing. Every time. Well, let's get into it. So before we kind of address Bakuta,
Speaker: What about the arc stands out? Or what about the fight scene? Does this fight have a name, by the way? Is this like the warehouse fight? Does it have an official name? I think of it as the warehouse fight. Honestly, I think of it as the Kaiser -Lung fight. Yeah, pretty much. Lung 2. Either way, whatever we end up calling it. Does anything stand out in terms of approaching this fight from the beginning? How do we want to look at this stylistically, as you said?
Speaker: Um, yeah, there's a couple of things like, I love the walking up. I don't even know where to start actually from like a visual standpoint. Cause I like them walking up. Um, and you know, of course, bitch and Taylor talking back and forth and, uh, and her and Lisa's well, having a little chitchat, even if it's over the phone or, you know, um,
Speaker: But a thing that's actually going to be a recurring problem, I think with this chapter is it's got some odd pacing at the beginning and at the end. Agreed. And I haven't thought it fully out yet in terms of like beat by beat, how the fight works, but I think that's fine. But I'm wondering if there's going to be also like,
Speaker: does this feel right for lung to come back a second or a third time as he does? How do you feel about the pacing in this chapters?
Speaker: I agree. It's a little janky and I think we can clean it up a bit because remember this is the first time we've kind of split up the arcs and I do think that flowing this fight out of the previous chapters and her confrontation at the school and things like that, we can kind of probably make that work. I think as an episode it works to have some
Speaker: some less intense, or it's still intense, less action -heavy moments at the front and then build into a fight scene at the end, I think would work. But I do think we probably have to clean up probably those transitions a bit. In terms of seeing Lung again, I actually am in favor of it. And if anything, I would almost want him to come back again within, like,
Speaker: wherever we choose to end cap season one here. I think when we come back and sort of look at everything, I like the idea of Long and the ABB sort of being the season one antagonists, if you will. Yeah, not to fall into the common criticism we see for like, say, the prequel series for Star Wars, how a lot of people say, oh, a big mistake was killing off Darth Maul so quickly.
Speaker: rather than giving a sort of lower tier antagonist that can carry the protagonist through three films. And of course, they recognize that mistake because Maul did come back in animated form for a number of years. So I think it's helpful for Taylor to have sort of a rival, if you will, that can sort of
Speaker: parallel her growth and chart her growth within the mindset and framework of a first season. But again, I probably want to come back to that because we haven't read the next few arcs, which would certainly still be within the season. Yeah. So there's probably ways to play around that. But I'm not opposed to the idea of seeing Lung again. But I do agree that I think it might make more sense to make this more baccala -focused, especially since we removed her
Speaker: from the previous episode. I actually think, because I look at least one arc ahead just when plotting some of these out. Not like reading them, but just going over chapter summaries. And arc six kicks off with dealing with the remnants of the ABB. And I can't remember, but I believe that's where they deal with Bakura.
Speaker: to capture Bakita. So that's, I think that's an excellent time to go deal with that. Okay. Uh, and, and there are, there, there's some stuff we can do later cause we're leading up to for us, what we consider the end of season one of the television show being this big incident. I think, uh,
Speaker: So in stories where you have like the big bad and you're, you're fighting him and you're fighting him and you're kinda either winning or just barely, it's a tough battle every time. And maybe like you get stronger and they get stronger, but then right at the end, you got to fight them. And the big, big bad comes out and just throws them like a ragdoll.
Speaker: to show you like, oh shoot, you thought that was tough? Well, you're gonna hate what we have behind door number two. I think that would be the time to show off all the way in arc eight. Okay, what's coming? I think that's a great place to show that off potentially. Yeah, I do like that actually. Yeah, definitely gonna make a note on that to revisit.
Speaker: Yeah. No, actually I think that would work pretty well. So that'd be fun to play around with. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's a possibility. I like, I like the idea of if we're going to keep long around, that's a great, long as a great like metric with working to work by like how powerful powers are. Um, yep.
Speaker: You know, it's good to kind of show off how tail, the strong Taylor is in this case to show how strong Kaiser is. Um, like the real reason Kaiser doesn't win this fight is that Kaiser's just too egotistical. Yeah, exactly. That's it. That's yeah. Yeah. He gets his hits in. Yeah. He does really well. And if he just not quit playing with his food, I think he would have taken a long out a lot quicker.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting. So, so we've got to, you know, we've got to talk about like, okay, so, you know, keeping up with the ABB, which I think is great. Um, but in the following, uh, the following arcs, we're going to have some weird transitions to other focuses, one for kind of each arc. Um, and I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker: Without, you know, without going into spoilers, which we don't even need to for this. It's, it's hard given that each of the next two arcs kind of has a main villain. Yeah. And I do, I do know kind of what you're referring to ABB. Right. And this is it fits well. Cause it fits, it's, it's taking care of all the subplots. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's, and that's the thing, right? Like this is where our, our job,
Speaker: The hobby job gets difficult in terms of trying to compress this story because there's so much just fantastic stuff in this book that we want to put to screen, but we just don't have the time and space for it. So we're going to have to get creative with what we choose to show, what we choose to condense or move and things like that. So we'll see. I think there might be some room to play around with some of this.
Speaker: And I think for the following arcs from now on, we might not do it for the podcast, but I think for television show, I think each one of these episodes, or each one of these arcs is going to end up being two episodes a piece. Oh, yeah, it's gonna be, I would think I was looking at that too. Definitely,
Speaker: I mean, definitely one or two of them. We're going to have to we're going to have to split. But again, we'll kind of see what happens when we get there. But I mean, we're already on, you know, roughly six episodes through five arcs. So we're not even at the at the busy parts yet. So no, I think I think we're looking at a pretty solid maybe 10 to 12 episode season, depending on how we want to break it down.
Speaker: I do like the progression and the writing, which makes for good television. You have one episode is generally kind of powerless, lots of talking, and then one episode of fighting. And that kind of feels like how these go. Yeah, at least for now.
Speaker: And I think that paces pretty well. I mean, I think we're going to come back to a lot of really common comparisons that I think we're going to make and a lot of fans would make too, to other shows that do things similarly. And the one that I've come back to a lot when reading these chapters is Invincible, because Invincible has a really similar sort of plot progression where
Speaker: Every episode starts with like conversation and characters and dialogue and then ends with a fight like I think every episode of invincible is like that exact same format or you know, some some sort of confrontation and that sort of parallels worm in a lot of ways, but it does
Speaker: There are moments in Invisible as much as I love that show and how well it accomplishes everything. There are moments where the pacing does feel just slightly off that I think we can learn from in terms of where it's best to take a breath and where it's best to let things play out. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see. We're definitely gonna have to reevaluate the whole season once we've kind of hit that point.
Speaker: It also came to my mind how much I really enjoy having the interludes as openers and post -credits sequences for every episode. I feel like this is just, they're really good and I really like the world opening up through these cold opens. I agree.
Speaker: It's been really growing on me. Since you mentioned that, I think our first episode you said that, I've kind of been reading all the interludes that way as we've been reading it. And it does, it works so well. And since we're kind of on the topic, let's talk about it. So we got the interlude for this arc is from Gregor the Snail's perspective, which great character, fun character. And we get to see a bit of
Speaker: a bit of a fault lines crew. And I think this works as a pretty cold open. I think you could open pretty easily with this. And I think you could open with this, which is one way to approach it. I think you can also open the next episode with this.
Speaker: Right. And we see that a lot too, right? Because what would work better? Because if you... Either one of two things, right? So either open with it, and we get introduced to Fault Line and Neuter, who we then see later on in the episode. Or you see Neuter mostly in the episode, and then the following episode come back to them a little bit. And honestly, both work pretty well. It's sort of just more kind of what style do you want to approach with? And also,
Speaker: do we wanna maintain a consistency with that for all of our interludes, right? Do we want all of our interludes to be like cold open introductions or cold open post character introduction? Yeah, so something that we talked about adding, one of the first times we've added something rather than taken away is adding in an interlude aware
Speaker: Bakura breaks long out, right? We still haven't found a place yet. Um, but I think either at the end of the last episode or the beginning of this one.
Speaker: And I could go for either one, because the end of last episode, and we potentially don't even have to show lung getting broken out, because that might be a nice surprise, but I feel like that would maybe become a little bit too far out of nowhere for just lung to show up. I agree. I think you have to show it to some extent. I think we can leave some mystery there,
Speaker: But I agree. I think if you're going to show lung in the fight, which I think we have to, I think you have to keep lung in this fight, then I think you have to show them getting broken out in one way or the other. And I remember too, when we were talking about this, now that you've kind of mentioning it, because
Speaker: Because on the one hand, it'd be really cool to end the previous episode with all of the bombs going off, right? And a lot of confusion. And then there's that cliffhanger of what's going on. And then maybe the cold open of this episode is the breakout. So you see all of that.
Speaker: However, we were also talking about cold opening this episode with Bitches Interlude and her breaking up the dog fighting ring and then seeing the bombs go off. Yeah, we were doing that for the, remember we broke this into two parts. So you do that and then lead into the villain meeting. Oh, you're so right. Yeah, you're absolutely right. This one would be Taylor's in the van rolling up to the fight at the warehouse.
Speaker: Yeah. Yep. So you've got to prep that. So the prep could be, which, which I think putting along at the beginning of that for the opener would feel too close to it. Yeah. I think doing that at the end where Taylor walks out says, I want to hit someone. Yeah. Credits roll lung comes out and is like, I've got a bone to pick. Yeah.
Speaker: And then you know what's about to go down. Okay. Yeah. No, that actually works. My mind's working here. No, I actually like that a lot. Yeah. Which leads me to... Okay. So Oni Lee is there and Lung just happens to be there. What if when Oni Lee bounces, they start to explore the warehouse and then Lung being told by Oni Lee,
Speaker: that skitter is there. Lung shows up because of that. Oh, I kind of do like that. You could even do like a little calm before the storm where they beat Onili, Onili takes off and you can give them a moment where they think they're starting to settle down a bit, right? Like they think they've won and they're kind of investigating everything and then, and lung returns.
Speaker: Yeah. I like the idea of like only Lee gets a cell phone knocked out of his hand before he can teleport. Like that's the shot in the arm from the sniper drops the cell phone and he just takes off. And somebody picks up the cell phone and as the viewer, you get the whole like kind of just over the shoulder and all it says is like, she's here.
Speaker: or targets here or something like that. So you don't exactly know, but maybe you do or like the bug is here and maybe an on my way or just, you know, no response. Yeah. Somebody picks up the phone finally while they're like, Oh, thank God. And then, you know, fucking the door gets kicked open and they're like, shit.
Speaker: We're definitely not doing this, but I was thinking like, just building off, no response on the phone, but yeah, just skitters here or a bug is here. All you see is just a little scene, the little check mark, the scene check mark on the text.
Speaker: I don't know if that gets too cheesy or not. That's funny. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. We couldn't do that because like timing wise, it wouldn't make any sense. I hope they could make any sense. That'd be funny. I like it.
Speaker: Yeah, I know. We didn't really talk about this either, but I guess we'll probably mention it at some point. My mind says we're setting this in just like whatever modern day it is when it comes out, but we also could date it. We could just set it in 2010, 2011 when a story takes place, which by the time any worm show ever came to fruition a decade from now, that would be far enough back to be like a semi -period piece.
Speaker: But, uh, but I don't think we would need to do that. I think you could also just set it in whatever modern time the show comes out in and nothing really changes. Yeah. I think you're fine to set it in modern times. Yeah. Like honestly, the biggest problem is always cell phones. And with the exception of Taylor for reasons, everybody else has a cell phone, like, which actually now that I think about that in terms of most media, that, that is, that is like,
Speaker: probably the most critical thing you can have is do cell phones exist? Because if they do, in whatever form, most of the weird like writing problem solving communication stuff, so much of it is done via cell phone, like you either have it or you don't. Yeah, right.
Speaker: And that's like an interesting line you could draw for like modern movies of like, Oh, that's fun. Is it a cell phone movie or a non cell phone movie? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's fun. Now I'm not going to be able to watch movies without thinking about that. So thank you. You're very welcome. Always glad. Uh, yeah. Cause there's a few things as we're going, talking about information, there's a few things that happen in here that, uh, we were talking about the interlude and where to place it. I think at the beginning of this,
Speaker: is a great spot to talk about because we know the fight's going to happen. So we could even have some mention of like, Hey, don't party too hard. You know, Gregor's walking through the club. Hey, don't party too hard. Don't forget. We've got that thing tomorrow. You know, that could be part of the reason that a fault lines really messing with her powers is like, yeah, like if I can get this down, I will make short work of who long go for him.
Speaker: And yeah, especially it'd be a good point in that conversation to be like, yeah, lung got broken out. So now he's on the table. So if we see him, I'm going to try and have those powers to, you know, just cut them in half and end this. Yeah. But it also solves a couple problems. One of which is like, how do you show off neuter's poison? Agreed. Cause he talks about it. And I think, and Taylor's
Speaker: discusses it a little bit, but I think just having show off like, yeah, here's what it does ahead of time is really great, especially considering you start with that and you kind of end with that. Yeah. That's a great way of, of, you know, solving some of those exposition problems we talked about where you can really just let it speak for itself. You know, he gives a one off line about,
Speaker: You can't overdose or something funny, right? And then, and then that's it. And then that explains it. And then you see the effects as the, you know, as the girls get knocked out. And then after that, once you're in the fight, everything makes sense. Yeah. I'm also, I'm just going to go ahead and write that down into a part two with Gregor interlude. I do like that one in the book. I also like that because the other thing the interlude does of course, is it does,
Speaker: introduce us to sort of, you know, a major plot point for future seasons. So, uh, so it's, it's nice to start of begin those conversations so that when we get to them later, they're not out of the blue. And I think even within the story of worm, I think that that in allude does an excellent job of setting that up. So,
Speaker: putting that too at the beginning rather than at the end is nice because it mentions it, it puts it in the audience's mind, but it's not the last thing you would dwell on, which I think is good for this episode. I don't think I'd want to end on that. So I think it, I think that works pretty well. I'm pretty sure we also run into a couple other people who have the, the, the, the symbol.
Speaker: Yeah. Um, as time goes, you know, it's going to be very small cause that's not the focus here, but I'm pretty sure we run into a few more through the next couple of arcs and then you kind of ignore everything at arcade because of course naturally, but then we kick off arc nine and we'll get into like arc nine kicks off with, uh, with that symbol again. Okay. So yeah, it really would be like a season two plot point.
Speaker: Very much so. I mean, it takes sort of a backseat because of everything else that happens. Yeah. Other stuff. That's a little bit far ahead. We need to.
Speaker: reign it back in, but yeah, you know, it's just, it's a little tease, just another mystery, which comes right on the back of figuring out the whole boss mystery. Cause that gets wrapped up, right? That does get wrapped up soon. Very soon. So that mystery will be out of the way just in time for this mystery to kind of be the underlying, Ooh, what's this? Yep. That's true. That's going to work. I like it.
Speaker: I like it. Um, uh, speaking of showing off powers, because that is mainly what my notes are about. There's a whole thing like, uh, we see bitches dogs, you know, growing. Um, and there's a question that I think Taylor thinks, but I think it'd be better if she asked Lisa or somebody, which is basically where does the mass come from? Hmm.
Speaker: Cause the mass is coming from somewhere. And I think that's a great, a great mystery to this that you can, you can kind of talk about powers like, yeah, like this, these superpowers aren't magic. This is a system. This is a very well thought out system. These things aren't just happening. Right. So with that in mind, there's an explanation
Speaker: or every power, where does the mass come from? This is another one of those I love wild though, because his explanation, which of course I'm not gonna talk about,
Speaker: helps you figure out other stupid heroes like Beast Boy from Teen Titans. Yeah, right. Oh, I know. I love how so much of the fan discussion around Worm is always like, oh, so how do you think this other really common hero that everybody loves fits into Worm's universe? Like what classification would they be? Because Worm does such a good job at just breaking down the idea and concept of powers.
Speaker: so well that you, like you said, you can just apply it to other characters and it makes sense. So yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. Yeah. So, you know, you've got that, you've got neuter's powers. Yeah. And then, and then we get into an interesting power, my style power, as we talk about. Labyrinth is just going to be some Dr. Strains shit, right?
Speaker: Yeah, it's gotta be, it's gonna look very, you know, mirror dimension or whatever it is that he does. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll save that for the big budget VFX team. She's gonna grab a couple interns off who worked on the Doctor Strange movie and just be like, Hey, you get over here. Exactly.
Speaker: But man, it's gotta look good, but it can. And I like that we have those types of visuals like Inception and Doctor Strange and these movies that have done sort of these warping things. It doesn't look bad. You can make it look pretty good and pretty convincing. Oh yeah. And I was gonna say not just that, but the fact that it's not even, it devolves into an other worldliness. And I think you could get away with
Speaker: not having it be perfect just because of how odd the experience of like them essentially getting transported onto a chessboard kind of looks. You can play around with your special effects with that and not take that to look fantastic while still getting the idea crossed.
Speaker: You're kind of touching on, I think a theme that this goes beyond kind of what we're doing here in terms of just structuring and writing the script here. This would go into more storyboarding and all of that kind of stuff. But the powers in worm should not feel comfortable, right? So there should be this uneasiness to everything that I think is gonna be a lot of fun
Speaker: for, you know, directors and, and, and photography directors and things like that to really play with. Cause it's, it's when you're talking about style, right? So it's, it's such, that's what makes worm special visually is this
Speaker: sort of just blanket uneasiness and eeriness that plagues everything. I mean, Taylor's power in and of itself is creepy and terrifying. Like it's going to be just, I mean, arachnophobes are just going to have a nightmare of a time trying to get through the show if it's done well. So, absolutely. I think if labyrinths
Speaker: makes you kind of feel weird and uneasy and Vista doesn't feel right, things like that. We were talking about it in our book club portion, right? Aegis is gonna look brutal after that fight, just flying around like half a limb and holes everywhere. Everything's just gonna feel off, which I think is intentional, should be intentional. So yeah, we can make that work for sure.
Speaker: I think we're probably going towards the same direction here. If we want to give Bakuta more screen time in this fight, then unfortunately, I think O 'Neill Lee would take a bit of a backseat, not removed completely, because I think he would definitely would still benefit from having him in here.
Speaker: But I'm wondering if we were to like restructure from the book perspective, that confrontation with Onili and focus most of that around Bakuta, if that would play out, how would we want that to play out? I think, I mean, I think they show up
Speaker: You've got the people with the bombs strapped to them. Nuder still is knocking them out. That's a great, you know, they don't want to do this. He doesn't want to do it. So he takes, you know, knocks them out. That's pretty easy. Um, I think just having, uh, a lot of bodies and like maybe Bakura
Speaker: not upfront grandstanding, but like maybe speaking on a comm system so that the sniper can't get a read, but the sniper, you know, the, the issue here would be of tension where the sniper is just okay with shooting people and Taylor and probably a sun dancer are like not okay with just people getting shot. Maybe even neuter cause he seems like, you know, probably be,
Speaker: a little, you know, oh, we're just shooting people wholesale. That's iffy. Right. And maybe saying something like, yeah, we don't want like a bunch of civilians on our hands. We just want to shoot this one person. So like, wait till I give the signal. Right. Maybe Taylor has a stand up, you know, standout moment where she walks forward and is like, Hey, I'm here. Like, I, and maybe, maybe even uses some, you know, some thought.
Speaker: to go to Bakuta out into the open. You know, Bakuta steps out and Taylor has to remind also the sniper like, Hey, you kill her. She's, you know, she's gonna, she, everybody blows up. We can't stop her heart. Right. And I don't, I don't feel like you get to show off the snipers as much, which I think is a shame because
Speaker: Oh, I think you could still, yeah, I know. I don't think they get the, they can't get the attention they deserve, but I think you could still have them. And I think they could, you know, give them the shot on Oney Lee, right? Like you said, make him drop the cell phone or whatever want him to do. I think that's a great way of, of keeping them in without, without distracting and or pulling away from anybody else's moment. Yeah. I just, I, it's granted, you know, given that Oney Lee is this really kind of fun fight, uh,
Speaker: the more practical fight, if you will. But Bakuta just isn't, Bakuta's a hostage negotiation situation. And I don't feel like that's what's going on here at this sequence of events. So like, I don't know. I like the idea of showing off more characters, but also it's nicer to keep a through line of, oh yeah,
Speaker: Well, the tricky part is go. Yeah. Go ahead. Finish, finish the thought. I was going to say we already cut back. It'll kind out once we'd just be showing her in the interlude. Yeah. So the only tricky time. So exactly. Okay. Cutting her out.
Speaker: And the hard part that I come back to is, and maybe we just sort of rewrite things down the line, but obviously as spoiler free as possible, but Bakuta and her bombs have a role to play, pretty serious roles to play later on. So I think it's important that if we don't want to severely change other parts in the story, that we do establish her power and what her bombs are capable of.
Speaker: So, you know, maybe we were rework that back into the last episode in some way, maybe incorporate that into the breakout, you know, there's a ways we can do it. But if we, if we don't do that, then I would want to do something here or maybe she's not present, but her bombs are, you know, maybe, maybe there's other ways around that we can kind of work that in. But, um, just for the sake of, of making
Speaker: life easier down the road. I think we've got to, we've got to have, have her in some fashion here. Um, yeah, especially putting the bombs on the people. Yeah. Like, I don't know how you would even detect it. Cause she shoved most of them up people's nostrils. Right. Uh, but maybe she gets a text from Lisa and she's like, oh my God, like all the people are like a ring to blow. Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be a phone call like, Hey,
Speaker: If you run into Bakita, if we kill her, well, they already know that. It's tricky. It's tricky. It's, you know, what do we, what do we choose to keep? What do we choose to cut? See, like I'd, I'd almost be, I don't want to cut only Lee because I really like the visual dynamic of his fight. So here's the, here's the thing we got to remember. Yeah.
Speaker: We will be hunting down the last of the ABB in the next arc. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. That is where we deal with Baca. You know what? Let's put a pin in that. I like that. We'll come back on the next. Put it off till tomorrow, baby. Never do today what you can put off tomorrow. Exactly. You're not wrong. I totally forgot. You're right. Okay. Okay. We got it. I'm satisfied. So most of this fight,
Speaker: I feel like is pretty straightforward. I think you keep almost everything here. Uh, you know, you've got the sun dancer kind of being a little bitch about things. Um, but it's understandable cause she makes a giant sun. You have Kaiser kind of be addicted to that one guy who like stabs him in the feet and like falls down and stabs in the hands. That's pretty brutal. Um, but you know, and then just him and him and lung going back and forth. Uh,
Speaker: And then finally the moment I think is like skitter taking him down. I think we really, really need to ham up the fact that lung is just going through these people. Uh, you know, whips, you know, uh, it gets, it steals the fire from Sundancer kicks the Kaiser, you know, at the fucking door stabs Fenya or Menya. I forget which one. Um,
Speaker: Jessica or Nessa, for some reason I know their name. That's impressive. Oh man. No idea. There's some weird things. I think it's maybe because I looked up the like family tree for empire 88 and I know how everybody's related. Oh, that's funny. Um, but yeah, so like they, uh, you know, one of them dies and, and you got nobody
Speaker: except for skitter left. And flies the thing, he drops down, Taylor says, don't underestimate me and we're done. There's still a lot left going on in this chapter. It feels a bit anticlimactic. In terms of how it ends with post fight, you mean? Yeah, like, so there's,
Speaker: What felt like a little bit of time in the writing between long, kind of doing the beating up people section to the talking with Taylor section slash like getting ahold of Taylor. Oh yeah. I think we just need to truncate that.
Speaker: He kicks everybody's asses, immediately grabs Taylor by the neck, bug immediately flies in his eye. Like that needs to happen so quickly together. Otherwise you've kind of got this weird standoff moment. Yeah. Taylor just, you know, Taylor can't do anything. Taylor's getting hunted down, grabbed, and then held there. It's like, we just need to get rid of
Speaker: what feels like time there and make them quickly just so we can have the moment and it not feel weird to just have it hanging around. We need to get him down as quickly as possible after those events have happened so that we can have this breath of air, literally for Taylor as she gets dropped and for everybody
Speaker: go their separate ways. Yeah. And do you have anything about the fight that you want to add? Cause otherwise I think the rest of this is talking about how to end the episode. Yeah. No, I think, I think we can jump past the fight. I think I agree. Nothing. I really want to change nothing. I think that needs to be changed. So I think we can sort of move past that.
Speaker: give Taylor her what the fuck Taylor moment, carve out those eyes and move on. So I agree. I think the biggest issue here is gonna be where do we want to credits roll? What do we want the credits to roll on? What's our little teaser tag bit to end the episode on? Yeah, so here's what I have a problem with.
Speaker: that we've got to deal with. And I'm sure we can talk about it later, of course, but we have the conversation, we started with Bitch and Taylor, kind of the bonding moment going there and they kind of have a bonding moment leaving. And then they get back and Taylor and Lisa have a conversation about powers. And I think we,
Speaker: open with that for the next episode. And we leave it with bitch throwing her jacket over Taylor and them like having sort of the way we came in, you know, them bonding on the way out, that being a good moment. And then we open the next episode on maybe even not having Taylor ask
Speaker: We can have the whole conversation between her and bitch, or we could just have her talk to Lisa about like what, you know, the bonding moments that she's had and Lisa kind of explained to her. I'm kind of looking ahead because we have a moment where we talk about bitches powers.
Speaker: I like, I'm pretty sure there's an interlude or something in there. Yeah. And I like, that would kind of be the time to throw it in of like, Hey, what's bitches origin story. And we've sort of hinted at it, but like having the little 20 second moment to be like, yeah, here's what happened. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. That might happen soon. I was going to say this is part of the struggle of trying not to read ahead as we do these arcs at the time is I remember big picture moments. I remember certain conversations, uh, major plot points, things like that, but individual interludes and, and you know, character arcs, things like that do elude me. So we'll, we'll definitely, my biggest problem is I remember all of it.
Speaker: I don't remember when. Yeah. No, I like, I like the ending though. I liked your idea for the ending. Give them that moment, give them that little bit of victory, right? And sort of.
Speaker: They walk off with the money. They made some new friends. Has a bonding moment. She throws the jacket over her. And it doesn't have to be anything more than, I still love the fake out kiss. You can't tell me you don't love the fake out kiss. I love it. Part of building a fandom is building ships. You know what I'm saying? It does not set sail unless you got ships.
Speaker: I think it's not wrong. I don't even know the name of it off the top of my head, but the shipping between Taylor and Bitch, especially in this episode, given the bonding, the beginning and the ending, and she throws the jacket over. You think it's a kiss maybe, but it isn't. She's just looking at the bruise. And then she's like, we'll get you back and we'll take a look at that.
Speaker: Okay, man, not that not that we're going to have any sort of say in casting or anything, but whoever plays a bitch has to be just such a fantastic actress, has to just nail the subtleties of that character. So might be might be one of the hardest
Speaker: like acting that somebody's going to have to do for this entire show. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be everybody else is people. Yeah. What do you play? Like, Oh, this is like kind of a smarmy know it all. Brian's very, you know, this stoic, but you know, cool. You know, plays a cool guy. Alec is, you know, he's a teenager, but bitch, bitch isn't
Speaker: But she got dog brain. She's got dog brain. You got to play like, it's so wooden, right? Like no emotion, just not reacting to anything. But she is reacting. It's just in her own way. And that's got to be evident.
Speaker: Yeah, that's going to be a language. A lot of, I imagine a lot of her eyes going, you know, you did do the up down, but it's like an angry up down over people constantly because she's looking for your stance and what you're doing. So like every time she looks at you, it's just a lot of her going all over your, your body with her eyes and then making a reaction off of that. Like acting for whoever plays bitch is going to be an interesting, uh,
Speaker: An interesting choice. I'd love to see somebody portray that. I know. It would be a lot of fun. Right. Well, I don't have too much more to say. Did we miss anything? I think we said everything. No, I think we said it. We only have one interlude here and I feel like we figured out where to put it. Not much to change with that. I don't think there's an end credit scene unless we come up with in retrospect, like, ah, yes, we want one of these random
Speaker: you know, ones that is kind of set outside of time. Yeah. We can throw back here. Yeah. Otherwise I think we're free and clear. All right. Well with that, then we'll go ahead and call, we'll call it here for the evening. Uh, thanks for joining me, Alan. And thanks for everyone else. Always, always a pleasure.
Speaker: Thanks to everyone for listening. This has been a lot of fun. We're gonna continue next episode with Arc Six and its entirety. So stick around for that. It's gonna be a fun one. I did some little chapter skimmings as well just to acquaint myself and I'm remembering bits and pieces. So I'm gonna be excited to get back in and kind of dive back into where Taylor goes from here and where we go from here in terms of fleshing out this series. This theoretical,
Speaker: show that's going to span, I don't know, 10 seasons. We'll find out. Anyway, as always in a movie. Oh, there we go. 10 seasons in a movie. Stick around, reach out to us. Let us know what we missed. Did we forget anything? Do you agree? Do we need to cut Bakura? Do we need to keep her? What do we need to do? What are we forgetting here? Let us know. And we'll see you next time.
Speaker: Read along with us at parahumans .wordpress .com. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you love? What did you hate? Anything you think we missed, et cetera, as long as it's kind. If you'd like to get in touch, you can find us on Twitter, threads, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, at Brockton Bay, BC, or click the link in the description.
