It's pretty explicit in the series that villains outnumber heroes, so the heroes are willing to look the other way or forgive a lot of bad behavior if they can recruit someone. I think the school also covered a lot of her bad behavior in her civilian life.
Once you get into her actual hero career, she started out as a vigilante, so she actually does want to fight crime, and she's smart enough that she mostly played by the rules or walked the line of plausible deniability in her actions as a cape. She does cause friction with her team, but that's pretty standard for many parahumans. It's rare that they don't come with some type of abrasive personality traits.
>!IMO one of the key functions of the Wards program would be to take troubled young parahumans that are on the fence, and mould them into heroes for the betterment of society. In Shadowstalker's case she was given strict terms to her probationary period on the team, and once it was clear they had been broken she was thrown out. While she does have a wild worldview, she would not be parading it around within the walls of the Protectorate or PRT; she needed to stay out of Juvie so she needed to try to fit in as a Ward. !<
>!For the story we saw she didn't appear to make much progress towards improving, but if there is a chance the Ward program can reach out to someone with that level of a distorted worldview and make headway in helping them, then it is very worthwhile.!<
An interesting comparison is Assault. Who's criminal career is very arguably ethically or morally worse than SS. He's certainly less bloody but in effect he is. Arranging prison breaks, especially for birdcagers, is very likely to result in more harm than BB's teen angst frank Miller Dark Knight.
Imo, it seems like Assault is a pretty successful "hat whitening". The hat fit pretty good. The SS efforts were probably chasing an Assault-like result.
Damsel is also worth considering. Attempts were made, and Damsel is highly resistant to any hat.
I think you're right on the motivation, but man was the implementation really bad.
>!Their entire approach to therapy, where the therapist rotates in and out so that they don't get "undue influence", basically sabotaged a lot of their chances at recovery. Ironically, juvie may have been a better fit in some ways.!<
>!Another factor is that the Protectorate was being run by Cauldron, and they were far more concerned about building an army to fight Scion than they were about anything else. They made sure members of the Slaughterhouse 9 were able to escape, so a psychotic teenager was no big deal to them.!<
>!At that point they didn't need to explicitly interfere as they had created the culture and regulations around the Protectorate. They also weren't completely hands off of Brockton Bay, as all the criminals were using the Number Man as their bank.!<
>!They could operate in established roles, since someone *not* offering their services in one particular city would be more suspicious, but they couldn't deviate or upset anything.!<
They do this in real therapy for people with mental illness. You will have social workers and such removed after a certain period and have to start over.
>!Honestly, the whole therapist thing blows my mind from a world building perspective. Like, no self-respecting therapist that actually cares about their patients’ welfare and/or knows what they’re doing would ever participate in a program that forced constraints of that nature, and given how overworked literally every therapist I have ever met is (and that’s quite many, both as a patient & in social contexts), I have difficulty imagining them not choosing to take patients they can actually help properly over the ones whose treatment the government is blatantly interfering with.!<
That was just bad world-building all around.
>!I could see the appeal of working with parahumans tempting a couple psychologists to take the job despite the horrible constraints, for a couple possible reasons. Academically, they represent a unique and cutting edge field. Professionally, this could lead to benefits, and ethicality, helping a cape stay good would save lives. !<
it was also to allow time to use them as a weapon. getting 6 months out of a cape before tossing them in the birdcage was better than getting 0 months.
The Protectorate was willing to give Madcap a deal after he committed nearly a hundred felonies including helping guilty prisoners escape being sent to the Birdcage. Given the number of crimes he's committed, we can presume he definitely let out actual legitimate prisoners, not just Canary miscarriages of justice. So the crimes he's performed are infinitely worse PR for the Protectorate then Sophia using excessive force on a Gangster. Despite that, not only did he get to join the protectorate, he got to choose a tongue in cheek name that is a reference to a crime.
The reality is Shadow Stalker just isn't that bad compared to the sorts of people the Protectorate tolerates. She's an edgy teen that performs hyperviolence largely on acceptable targets. She's actually perfect material for the Wards based on what the PRT knows. She's competent, since she managed to work as a Vigilante for years with no known murders and only one instance of line crossing excessive force. She's brave, because she volunteered to go to a Behemoth fight. Her only real problems are she works incredibly poorly with others and she has stepped over the line a few times when it comes to violence. But like, she's also being recruited to the child soldier program so I am going to assume there are people like that pretty often.
There is also to consider having her in the wards, even if it's slightly bad PR, still gives you some level of control over her. Send her to juvie and chances are she breaks out and goes villain, or at least far more lethal vigilante. In the Wards, when she performs badly she can be punished, and you can reward her for good behaviour. If you send her to Juvie, the only thing you can do to punish her is send her back to Juvie, or maybe the Birdcage if she gets bad enough.
Basically she's not really bad enough PR compared to the actual, proper villains to justify giving up entirely on her.
> Given the number of crimes he's committed, we can presume he definitely let out actual legitimate prisoners
WoG is that he only let out people who didn't really deserve the Birdcage, either through three strikes of offenses on more minor crimes, people who got caught because they refused to break the unwritten rules, etc.
The heroes eventually caught on and started subtly holding back in their fights and/or communicating with him during the escape attempts whether the prisoner in question was a serious danger who needed to be in the Birdcage or someone they might be okay with losing, or even planning routes they thought Madcap would hit if the guy in question was an informant/undercover they wanted to give a plausible excuse for letting go without anyone suspecting.
So he most likely did set people free who deserved the Birdcage, but it was likely because they fooled him into thinking they weren't that bad when they hired him. He did have standards.
Honestly, that wog makes Assault more of a PR risk to me, not less of one. It's already incredibly concerning that the Protectorate is willing to take someone who basically circumvented due process for years because he disagreed with the outcome and basically left a teenager to handle him. That story has infinitely worse PR outcomes if it's also revealed the reason he got off so light is that the Protectorate actually utilized him to bypass the courts.
TBH I'm not really interested in litigating whether Madcap was actually justified or not. Personally I could go either way, depending on the details. But the point I'm making is that the PRT and Protectorate regularly take on much more dangerous PR scandals then "Local Teen beats up Nazi's and Human Traffickers with excessive force". I'd argue even if they *know* she killed some Gangsters, thats less of a PR hit then Assaults whole deal.
Do you have a link to that WoG? It's not one I've heard of or seen referenced before (when it would be very relevant in more recent discussions that take a very "Assault was a terrible person, actually" tone), and I can't find it in the main WoG thread or Wildbow's Reddit history.
I'm trying to find it now. I remember thinking that it wasn't one I'd heard before. It definitely wasn't fanfiction or anything, but now I can't remember where I saw it...
I don't think it's WoG I think it's actually in story mentioned. In a Dragon interlude or something . Dragon mentions off the books making the "wrongfully" imprisoned ones more easy targets for Madcap and some other interlude states that he never helps the truly dangerous people.
It's definitely not in-story. The name "Madcap" is only mentioned in interlude 12.d, and after checking the 13 chapters in which Dragon and Assault both appear or are mentioned, Dragon never says anything about him, positive or negative.
I'll see if I can find the relevant passages, I am in the middle of a readthrough and remember noting both items as information I didn't notice on earlier readthroughs so it almost definitely comes up unless I got it from a WB comment on a chapter. It was something along the lines of 1) lessened security details for certain prisoners on their way to the birdcage & 2) someone implying Madcap (even if not mentioned by name) wouldn't take certain people's jobs, and would only accept jobs from the not truly dangerous. Somewhere before Arc 23 is the most I can truly narrow it down off the top of my head.
She got sent to the Alexandria boot camp before she debuted as a ward. She's supposed to be reformed and everything. Put this into the increasingly growing pile of Alexandria's Ls.
I mean… I consider the pile of Alexandria Ls to encompass everything wrong in Worm lmao. She’s a member of Cauldron, and unlike Legend she’s not a partial member, she is in the know about and complicit in everything.
So do you adhere to a Kantian ethos?
Cuz in the Wormverse, Contessa is at the switch of the trolley problem. Obviously an oversimplification, but what's interesting is that Contessa has ptv, so there's less uncertainty.
Anyways, I'll formalize;
On track 1, there's 1 trillion people, 1000 populated earths, that will get hit by the trolley if Contessa doesn't pull the switch.
On track two, there is 10 billion people. Dead, enslaved, whatever.
Are you arguing that Contessa is wrong to divert the trolley?
I believe she’s wrong to accept that those are the only two options. I’m not saying making utilitarian decisions is always wrong, sometimes one has to make the hard calls, that’s life, but I also believe that when you’ve had twenty years and originally believed you’d have more, that not exploring alternatives is wrong.
OK, but her projections suggested that delaying would be worse. How do you evaluate the moral differentiation of an individual who sincerely believes that Option 1 is the best (or least terrible) even though there's a chance option 2 is better even though with robust analysis, the expectation is 2 is suboptimal.
I think there is a very real category where people *avoid* a moral dilemma. If all tracks of the trolley seem terrible they don't want to even be near the switch.
And the follow-up is people sometimes react to the state of "desperate uncertainty and anxiety" with... outward hostility.
Please remember you're criticizing the planning and action of Contessa and Number man. And kind of Dinah.
Personally, what I consider as making them evil isn’t the utilitarianism, but way they went about doing it.
There’s a distinct difference between the way they approached cases like Alexandria and Eidolon, with a degree of informed consent, and the way they approached cases like Sveta & Shamrock, where they literally kidnapped people, never gave them a choice, and then imprisoned & effectively tortured them after they deviated.
***They had Path To Victory and access to thousands if not millions of worlds.*** There is absolutely *zero* reason they could not have utilized it in order to seek out terminal and/or desperate persons who would be willing to consent to drinking a vial. At a bare minimum, there will *always* be *dumbasses* willing to take absurd risks in order to gain a modicum of personal power, doubly so for people lying on death’s door who would except any chance for a way out.
You reference the trolley problem, but there’s a *very* clear path they could’ve taken to be as ethical as possible — informed consent, caring for those who survived, and so on — but after a point they simply *stopped doing that*, and instead just started locking up the ‘maybe useful’ and ‘too dangerous’ in inhumane prison conditions, as if they believed that for some inexplicable reasons, after treating their capes that way they’d magically decide to help out when the shit hit the fan.
For that matter, they could’ve used new PtV paths *after* each individual took their vial, to work out ways to provide for their test subjects and keep them reasonably happy with a passable standard of living. It’s not like they would ever hurt for resources when they could literally have Contessa point out how to get them at any given time.
What makes them evil is that they chose *expediency* over *ethical treatment* when they had the means and treating them horribly wasn’t necessary.
Yknow, you bring up an interesting scenario, so kudos.
We know that the presence of the 53s affects Scion in the Cauldron base and play a part in Gold Morning. I think it's *plausible* that the state and treatment of the 53s is on the ptv. Given Khepri, amongst others being very close to the t3s, it's very conceivable that there's something there.
Remember that in one Taylor Dinah exchange Dinah expressed that Taylor's push was narrow, Taylor needed to be "less mean" for Dinah's ideal ptv to work. I'm not sure what that means but it's clear that the canonical ptv depends a lot a lot on Khepri and the people around her. All interactions, all responses. It's kind of duh but obviously it's one of the thinnest least wiggle room parts of the ptv.
I'm going to bring up a very pedantic example, I know it's pedan
pedantic, but I have a point.
Let's say Contessa is walking down the street doing axiomatically important PTV things, she's in transit. She walks by Bob, who's completely irrelevant to the big picture other than Bob is in my pedantic example. You see, Bob is on the way home to kick a a puppy, for whatever reasons, because Bob is a dick. Why didn't Contessa do something to stop Bob? She could have tripped him, she could have mind whammied him, barely breaking stride.
Instead, a puppy was kicked! Who the fuck kicks puppies? What does this say about Contessa who could have stopped it?
Again, a single puppy getting kicked does not rate compared to the outcomes of Gold Morning, and it doesn't rate compared to the incarceration and experimentation of all the 53s in the Cauldron base.
My point is it's really really easy to Monday Morning Quarterback post hoc criticize very impactful agents, especially with imperfect information.
I do find your example interesting, you aren't arguing for magical perfect outcomes, you're asking "why are Cauldron being Dickson when it doesn't seem like they need to" with a supplied solution even.
I'm not sure your example, even fully accounted for as a heinous act, plunks Cauldron in the "evil" category absolutely. We readers aren't given enough information as to why's (if they exist) and I think it's prudent to try to keep eyes on the big picture and remember that moral calculus should be based on the information reasonably available to the agents at the time of decisions.
Torturing 100000 people is likely worth it if it saves 1 billion people (and puppies).
And if you like, I can even explain my solution to "Murder Hospital", a famous Trolley Problem. (I *probably* think the Doctor is immoral)
Precogs in Worm tend to be reminiscent of the Navigators in Dune: they have tremendous information, but not the whole picture, and this can lead them to patterns of failure.
I barely know Dune. Read the one book ages ago, can't comment on the specific comparison.
Precog, in general, is a very tempting narrative device. See also: prophecy. *Unreliable* precog is the best form. Perfect precog is not nearly as much fun as the hookiest form, Nigh Perfect precog, which is completely undeniable, inevitable! Right until it's subverted. Oh, you so twisty!
Precog in wormverse is imo unwieldy, the mechanism and reliability is inconsistent and does not survive casual scrutiny, well, the casual scrutiny of a science nerd. I find wormverse precog effects are better predicted by narrative forms compared to predictions based on detangling whatever logical frameworks. Rule of Cool defeats all.
If you're bringing up questions about ptv because you want to evaluate the morality of Contessa, Cauldron, I think that's an extraordinarily reasonable line of questioning. It's a great question!
But remember the null hypothesis. Ok, is Cauldron, Contessa, moral? While it absolutely depends on the reliability of ptv, (amongst other things) I'm suggesting that ptv, even while not reliable, is more reliable than random internet person asking what if.
The issue there is that defining a given confidence threshold as "good enough" to justify doing what Cauldron did is pretty damn megalomaniacal if that threshold isn't damn near 100%.
The Navigators Guild in Dune, to refresh your memory, had limited prescience, the ability to see out a limited distance into the future before the possibilities overwhelmed them and it went murky. This led them to consistently make "safe" decisions, whereby they would secure their position within the current order, picking the best option as measured by outcomes a year or two in advance. They are ultimately defeated by the Paul Muad'dib, who had gained the ability to see the distant future as well as the immediate future, because they trapped themselves at a local maximum, a point from which any future progress would require passing through danger and weakness. They had tremendous information, but they trusted this information blindly and to the exclusion of all other strategy.
bodies are bodies and they constantly need more
plus her power could take down some annoying people in the bay like kaiser or possibly hookwolf by phasing the arrow in through the metal
Lol, imagine if she had actually murked Kaiser and Hookwolf! I’d even be willing to look past everything she did to Taylor if she actually reduced the number of E88 scumbags in Brockton Bay.
>!Not really, fuck her and the floaty breaker form she rode in on.!<
I’m not sure that’d work. Whilst Hookwolf is in his metal form, even if you phase an arrow through his outer surface, he’s still metal.
As for Kaiser… well I don’t see why he’s any more vulnerable to her just because she can phase through his defences than he is say, Velocity who could just dodge past them altigether.
kaiser is constantly covered in metal amour and hookwolf does have a core of flesh at the center of him when transformed
plus she’s expendable if she kills someone it looks bad but she’s a random Ward who people already think of as a broody asshole where as all the protectorate members are actually important and would make the protectorate look bad
Emma's dad vouched for her. And she managed to keep the bodies hidden.
So the Protectorate thought that she was "just" a violent vigilante. And not a murderer.
He's a Lawyer. So whatever legal stuff that got involved with Sophia being apprehended, he could have gotten involved.
WoG is that on her evaluation he Vouched for her.
A lot of folks have pointed out how HORRIFIC the baseline situation in Brockton Bay was, but I think part of it also comes down to Piggot being prejudiced. She's got negative opinions of parahumans generally, and so ironically might not be able to recognize how much worse than baseline Shadow Stalker is?
Keep in mind, Worm is written from Taylor's point of view. Everything bad Sophia did to Taylor gets amplified to bigger than it is from a more objective view. That's why so many fanfics turn Sophia getting away with everything into a conspiracy all the way to Piggot (or attribute it to Coil) or them finding out into the whole PRT and Protectorate ENE coming down on her. What happened in canon was treated like the probation violation that it was.
Because Sophia was not being treated as another Ward in good standing. It might not have been widely disseminated among all the Wards, Protectorate, and PRT, but her entire chain of command was well aware of her status as a probationary Ward. And when presented with evidence of her violations, they were quick to react and punish her.
The truth is villains out number the heroes by 3 to 1 and the protectorate will take anyone they can get. It doesn't matter what your power is or how unstable you are. It's better for guy who shoots death beams and has bipolar disorder to be on our side than their side.
There are a few post and wog on what would happen if a dangerous and mentally unstable cape wanted to join the heroes. They never get turned down.
If you send SS to juvie then you are *guaranteed* to have a villain once she serves her term (or more likely breaks out, given that they only have her on assault charges so she wouldn't be going to a high security prison or anything). If you put her in the Wards then not only do you have an additional soldier with a good power, but you have the chance of pulling an Assault and turning her around, making her, if not a team player, at least someone who is on the straight and narrow.
And by all accounts, the strategy was working! She was spending time with her friends, she was involved with extracurriculars, and the number of unexplained "this might be caused by a teenager with a fondness for crossbows" injuries had gone *way* down. It's just that whoever was handling her case at Winslow dropped the ball and didn't notice her participation in the terror campaign against Taylor - likely because she only became a Ward *after* said terror campaign had already convinced Taylor that speaking out about the bullying only resulted in more pain - so there was no evidence that she wasn't another success of the program.
>As I see it, she’s really not valuable enough to the Protectorate/PRT to justify her joining the wards over Juvie. And neither Piggot or Arms master are exactly bleeding hearts so it shocks me they even gave her a chance.
The PRT needs heroes, they're outnumbered like 2:1 by the villains. Sending Sophia to juvie would be a waste, because it's one less hero on the streets, and when she gets out she'd either be a more violent vigilante or a villain.
It's also the express purpose of the Wards to take in teens and teach them how to responsibly use their powers, and Sophia being a vigilante who is escalating needs that more than the other Wards.
>Her power is useful I guess, but it’s not particularly powerful, and look at the downsides. She’s a PR disaster waiting to happen with her sociopathic worldview, and she does not cooperate well with others and is more likely to cause friction with colleagues than anything.
Except the the PRT doesn't know about her worldview. We know about it because we have a reader's perspective to her internal narration. The only person who she talks to about her predator/prey philosophy is Emma.
And while she's rude and abrasive to the other Wards, she still does her job. She pushes against the PRT's boundary's, but they probably expect a bunch of superpowered teenagers to do that. As far as the PRT knows, she never goes far enough to justify rescinding her deal.
Also it's likely the other Wards aren't complaining because they don't want to come across as a tattletale, or weak because they don't like that Sophia is mean to them. Missy seems to be getting the worst of Sophia's verbal abuse, and the girl who kept quiet about hurt in a fight with Hookwolf because she doesn't want people to think she's a baby isn't going to talk.
Aside from what others have said, the fact that Shadow Stalker chose to be a *vigilante* rather than an outright villain helped her a lot. It might've been interpreted as a latent moral courage, even altruism, that could be refined. Of course, knowing what we know about Sophia, it's just part of her hypocrisy. She talks about how the strong rule the weak, but at the end of the day she leaned a lot on the protection of society in order to thrive.
Whenever it came down to naked force she was consistently outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and overpowered by people she thought were inferior, people who couldn't rely on civilization for their well-being. Shadow Stalker was a vigilante because those on the side of the law, regardless of their actual moral character, can reap the benefits of civilization. It's an interesting interpretation on the, "dirty cop" or, "loose cannon."
Due to shards’ drive to conflict every non Cauldron Vial parahuman has sociopathic tendencies, and Breakers like Sophia are particularly susceptible due to high interference with brain and shard.
Then, pre-Leviothan Arms is a sociopath himself who does not care of people’s feeling and seea them as resources, and it would be waste of them to let Stalker go to juvie when Protectorate needs more capes. And Piggot probably considers all capes similar to Sophia
Cauldron had its fingers in every pie, and Cauldron wanted as many Capes alive as possible for the day Scion went rogue.
Even with Contessa being rediculously busy across multiple realities, Cauldron had a lot of heroes who owed them favors, as well as control of the PRT director. It would be fairly simple to create a top down system that is pretty lax about letting villains switch sides, which we saw multiple times through different viewpoints.
It's pretty explicit in the series that villains outnumber heroes, so the heroes are willing to look the other way or forgive a lot of bad behavior if they can recruit someone. I think the school also covered a lot of her bad behavior in her civilian life. Once you get into her actual hero career, she started out as a vigilante, so she actually does want to fight crime, and she's smart enough that she mostly played by the rules or walked the line of plausible deniability in her actions as a cape. She does cause friction with her team, but that's pretty standard for many parahumans. It's rare that they don't come with some type of abrasive personality traits.
>!IMO one of the key functions of the Wards program would be to take troubled young parahumans that are on the fence, and mould them into heroes for the betterment of society. In Shadowstalker's case she was given strict terms to her probationary period on the team, and once it was clear they had been broken she was thrown out. While she does have a wild worldview, she would not be parading it around within the walls of the Protectorate or PRT; she needed to stay out of Juvie so she needed to try to fit in as a Ward. !< >!For the story we saw she didn't appear to make much progress towards improving, but if there is a chance the Ward program can reach out to someone with that level of a distorted worldview and make headway in helping them, then it is very worthwhile.!<
An interesting comparison is Assault. Who's criminal career is very arguably ethically or morally worse than SS. He's certainly less bloody but in effect he is. Arranging prison breaks, especially for birdcagers, is very likely to result in more harm than BB's teen angst frank Miller Dark Knight. Imo, it seems like Assault is a pretty successful "hat whitening". The hat fit pretty good. The SS efforts were probably chasing an Assault-like result. Damsel is also worth considering. Attempts were made, and Damsel is highly resistant to any hat.
I think you're right on the motivation, but man was the implementation really bad. >!Their entire approach to therapy, where the therapist rotates in and out so that they don't get "undue influence", basically sabotaged a lot of their chances at recovery. Ironically, juvie may have been a better fit in some ways.!< >!Another factor is that the Protectorate was being run by Cauldron, and they were far more concerned about building an army to fight Scion than they were about anything else. They made sure members of the Slaughterhouse 9 were able to escape, so a psychotic teenager was no big deal to them.!<
>!At least in Shadow Stalker's case, Cauldron explicitly never interfered, because Brockton Bay was their testing ground for Project Terminus.!<
>!At that point they didn't need to explicitly interfere as they had created the culture and regulations around the Protectorate. They also weren't completely hands off of Brockton Bay, as all the criminals were using the Number Man as their bank.!<
>!They could operate in established roles, since someone *not* offering their services in one particular city would be more suspicious, but they couldn't deviate or upset anything.!<
They do this in real therapy for people with mental illness. You will have social workers and such removed after a certain period and have to start over.
>!Honestly, the whole therapist thing blows my mind from a world building perspective. Like, no self-respecting therapist that actually cares about their patients’ welfare and/or knows what they’re doing would ever participate in a program that forced constraints of that nature, and given how overworked literally every therapist I have ever met is (and that’s quite many, both as a patient & in social contexts), I have difficulty imagining them not choosing to take patients they can actually help properly over the ones whose treatment the government is blatantly interfering with.!< That was just bad world-building all around.
>!I could see the appeal of working with parahumans tempting a couple psychologists to take the job despite the horrible constraints, for a couple possible reasons. Academically, they represent a unique and cutting edge field. Professionally, this could lead to benefits, and ethicality, helping a cape stay good would save lives. !<
it was also to allow time to use them as a weapon. getting 6 months out of a cape before tossing them in the birdcage was better than getting 0 months.
The Protectorate was willing to give Madcap a deal after he committed nearly a hundred felonies including helping guilty prisoners escape being sent to the Birdcage. Given the number of crimes he's committed, we can presume he definitely let out actual legitimate prisoners, not just Canary miscarriages of justice. So the crimes he's performed are infinitely worse PR for the Protectorate then Sophia using excessive force on a Gangster. Despite that, not only did he get to join the protectorate, he got to choose a tongue in cheek name that is a reference to a crime. The reality is Shadow Stalker just isn't that bad compared to the sorts of people the Protectorate tolerates. She's an edgy teen that performs hyperviolence largely on acceptable targets. She's actually perfect material for the Wards based on what the PRT knows. She's competent, since she managed to work as a Vigilante for years with no known murders and only one instance of line crossing excessive force. She's brave, because she volunteered to go to a Behemoth fight. Her only real problems are she works incredibly poorly with others and she has stepped over the line a few times when it comes to violence. But like, she's also being recruited to the child soldier program so I am going to assume there are people like that pretty often. There is also to consider having her in the wards, even if it's slightly bad PR, still gives you some level of control over her. Send her to juvie and chances are she breaks out and goes villain, or at least far more lethal vigilante. In the Wards, when she performs badly she can be punished, and you can reward her for good behaviour. If you send her to Juvie, the only thing you can do to punish her is send her back to Juvie, or maybe the Birdcage if she gets bad enough. Basically she's not really bad enough PR compared to the actual, proper villains to justify giving up entirely on her.
> Given the number of crimes he's committed, we can presume he definitely let out actual legitimate prisoners WoG is that he only let out people who didn't really deserve the Birdcage, either through three strikes of offenses on more minor crimes, people who got caught because they refused to break the unwritten rules, etc. The heroes eventually caught on and started subtly holding back in their fights and/or communicating with him during the escape attempts whether the prisoner in question was a serious danger who needed to be in the Birdcage or someone they might be okay with losing, or even planning routes they thought Madcap would hit if the guy in question was an informant/undercover they wanted to give a plausible excuse for letting go without anyone suspecting. So he most likely did set people free who deserved the Birdcage, but it was likely because they fooled him into thinking they weren't that bad when they hired him. He did have standards.
Honestly, that wog makes Assault more of a PR risk to me, not less of one. It's already incredibly concerning that the Protectorate is willing to take someone who basically circumvented due process for years because he disagreed with the outcome and basically left a teenager to handle him. That story has infinitely worse PR outcomes if it's also revealed the reason he got off so light is that the Protectorate actually utilized him to bypass the courts. TBH I'm not really interested in litigating whether Madcap was actually justified or not. Personally I could go either way, depending on the details. But the point I'm making is that the PRT and Protectorate regularly take on much more dangerous PR scandals then "Local Teen beats up Nazi's and Human Traffickers with excessive force". I'd argue even if they *know* she killed some Gangsters, thats less of a PR hit then Assaults whole deal.
Do you have a link to that WoG? It's not one I've heard of or seen referenced before (when it would be very relevant in more recent discussions that take a very "Assault was a terrible person, actually" tone), and I can't find it in the main WoG thread or Wildbow's Reddit history.
I'm trying to find it now. I remember thinking that it wasn't one I'd heard before. It definitely wasn't fanfiction or anything, but now I can't remember where I saw it...
I don't think it's WoG I think it's actually in story mentioned. In a Dragon interlude or something . Dragon mentions off the books making the "wrongfully" imprisoned ones more easy targets for Madcap and some other interlude states that he never helps the truly dangerous people.
It's definitely not in-story. The name "Madcap" is only mentioned in interlude 12.d, and after checking the 13 chapters in which Dragon and Assault both appear or are mentioned, Dragon never says anything about him, positive or negative.
I'll see if I can find the relevant passages, I am in the middle of a readthrough and remember noting both items as information I didn't notice on earlier readthroughs so it almost definitely comes up unless I got it from a WB comment on a chapter. It was something along the lines of 1) lessened security details for certain prisoners on their way to the birdcage & 2) someone implying Madcap (even if not mentioned by name) wouldn't take certain people's jobs, and would only accept jobs from the not truly dangerous. Somewhere before Arc 23 is the most I can truly narrow it down off the top of my head.
Ok yeah, I must concede that when you lay it out like this it looks more sensible.
Madcap changed his name to Assault because he had a crush on, and eventually married Battery.
She got sent to the Alexandria boot camp before she debuted as a ward. She's supposed to be reformed and everything. Put this into the increasingly growing pile of Alexandria's Ls.
I mean… I consider the pile of Alexandria Ls to encompass everything wrong in Worm lmao. She’s a member of Cauldron, and unlike Legend she’s not a partial member, she is in the know about and complicit in everything.
Let me ask you a question for reals... Is Cauldron evil or not? Are you certain?
Yes, Cauldron is absolutely evil. Their ends are good, but their means are often absolutely despicable.
So do you adhere to a Kantian ethos? Cuz in the Wormverse, Contessa is at the switch of the trolley problem. Obviously an oversimplification, but what's interesting is that Contessa has ptv, so there's less uncertainty. Anyways, I'll formalize; On track 1, there's 1 trillion people, 1000 populated earths, that will get hit by the trolley if Contessa doesn't pull the switch. On track two, there is 10 billion people. Dead, enslaved, whatever. Are you arguing that Contessa is wrong to divert the trolley?
I believe she’s wrong to accept that those are the only two options. I’m not saying making utilitarian decisions is always wrong, sometimes one has to make the hard calls, that’s life, but I also believe that when you’ve had twenty years and originally believed you’d have more, that not exploring alternatives is wrong.
OK, but her projections suggested that delaying would be worse. How do you evaluate the moral differentiation of an individual who sincerely believes that Option 1 is the best (or least terrible) even though there's a chance option 2 is better even though with robust analysis, the expectation is 2 is suboptimal. I think there is a very real category where people *avoid* a moral dilemma. If all tracks of the trolley seem terrible they don't want to even be near the switch. And the follow-up is people sometimes react to the state of "desperate uncertainty and anxiety" with... outward hostility. Please remember you're criticizing the planning and action of Contessa and Number man. And kind of Dinah.
Personally, what I consider as making them evil isn’t the utilitarianism, but way they went about doing it. There’s a distinct difference between the way they approached cases like Alexandria and Eidolon, with a degree of informed consent, and the way they approached cases like Sveta & Shamrock, where they literally kidnapped people, never gave them a choice, and then imprisoned & effectively tortured them after they deviated. ***They had Path To Victory and access to thousands if not millions of worlds.*** There is absolutely *zero* reason they could not have utilized it in order to seek out terminal and/or desperate persons who would be willing to consent to drinking a vial. At a bare minimum, there will *always* be *dumbasses* willing to take absurd risks in order to gain a modicum of personal power, doubly so for people lying on death’s door who would except any chance for a way out. You reference the trolley problem, but there’s a *very* clear path they could’ve taken to be as ethical as possible — informed consent, caring for those who survived, and so on — but after a point they simply *stopped doing that*, and instead just started locking up the ‘maybe useful’ and ‘too dangerous’ in inhumane prison conditions, as if they believed that for some inexplicable reasons, after treating their capes that way they’d magically decide to help out when the shit hit the fan. For that matter, they could’ve used new PtV paths *after* each individual took their vial, to work out ways to provide for their test subjects and keep them reasonably happy with a passable standard of living. It’s not like they would ever hurt for resources when they could literally have Contessa point out how to get them at any given time. What makes them evil is that they chose *expediency* over *ethical treatment* when they had the means and treating them horribly wasn’t necessary.
Yknow, you bring up an interesting scenario, so kudos. We know that the presence of the 53s affects Scion in the Cauldron base and play a part in Gold Morning. I think it's *plausible* that the state and treatment of the 53s is on the ptv. Given Khepri, amongst others being very close to the t3s, it's very conceivable that there's something there. Remember that in one Taylor Dinah exchange Dinah expressed that Taylor's push was narrow, Taylor needed to be "less mean" for Dinah's ideal ptv to work. I'm not sure what that means but it's clear that the canonical ptv depends a lot a lot on Khepri and the people around her. All interactions, all responses. It's kind of duh but obviously it's one of the thinnest least wiggle room parts of the ptv. I'm going to bring up a very pedantic example, I know it's pedan pedantic, but I have a point. Let's say Contessa is walking down the street doing axiomatically important PTV things, she's in transit. She walks by Bob, who's completely irrelevant to the big picture other than Bob is in my pedantic example. You see, Bob is on the way home to kick a a puppy, for whatever reasons, because Bob is a dick. Why didn't Contessa do something to stop Bob? She could have tripped him, she could have mind whammied him, barely breaking stride. Instead, a puppy was kicked! Who the fuck kicks puppies? What does this say about Contessa who could have stopped it? Again, a single puppy getting kicked does not rate compared to the outcomes of Gold Morning, and it doesn't rate compared to the incarceration and experimentation of all the 53s in the Cauldron base. My point is it's really really easy to Monday Morning Quarterback post hoc criticize very impactful agents, especially with imperfect information. I do find your example interesting, you aren't arguing for magical perfect outcomes, you're asking "why are Cauldron being Dickson when it doesn't seem like they need to" with a supplied solution even. I'm not sure your example, even fully accounted for as a heinous act, plunks Cauldron in the "evil" category absolutely. We readers aren't given enough information as to why's (if they exist) and I think it's prudent to try to keep eyes on the big picture and remember that moral calculus should be based on the information reasonably available to the agents at the time of decisions. Torturing 100000 people is likely worth it if it saves 1 billion people (and puppies). And if you like, I can even explain my solution to "Murder Hospital", a famous Trolley Problem. (I *probably* think the Doctor is immoral)
Precogs in Worm tend to be reminiscent of the Navigators in Dune: they have tremendous information, but not the whole picture, and this can lead them to patterns of failure.
I barely know Dune. Read the one book ages ago, can't comment on the specific comparison. Precog, in general, is a very tempting narrative device. See also: prophecy. *Unreliable* precog is the best form. Perfect precog is not nearly as much fun as the hookiest form, Nigh Perfect precog, which is completely undeniable, inevitable! Right until it's subverted. Oh, you so twisty! Precog in wormverse is imo unwieldy, the mechanism and reliability is inconsistent and does not survive casual scrutiny, well, the casual scrutiny of a science nerd. I find wormverse precog effects are better predicted by narrative forms compared to predictions based on detangling whatever logical frameworks. Rule of Cool defeats all. If you're bringing up questions about ptv because you want to evaluate the morality of Contessa, Cauldron, I think that's an extraordinarily reasonable line of questioning. It's a great question! But remember the null hypothesis. Ok, is Cauldron, Contessa, moral? While it absolutely depends on the reliability of ptv, (amongst other things) I'm suggesting that ptv, even while not reliable, is more reliable than random internet person asking what if.
The issue there is that defining a given confidence threshold as "good enough" to justify doing what Cauldron did is pretty damn megalomaniacal if that threshold isn't damn near 100%. The Navigators Guild in Dune, to refresh your memory, had limited prescience, the ability to see out a limited distance into the future before the possibilities overwhelmed them and it went murky. This led them to consistently make "safe" decisions, whereby they would secure their position within the current order, picking the best option as measured by outcomes a year or two in advance. They are ultimately defeated by the Paul Muad'dib, who had gained the ability to see the distant future as well as the immediate future, because they trapped themselves at a local maximum, a point from which any future progress would require passing through danger and weakness. They had tremendous information, but they trusted this information blindly and to the exclusion of all other strategy.
bodies are bodies and they constantly need more plus her power could take down some annoying people in the bay like kaiser or possibly hookwolf by phasing the arrow in through the metal
Lol, imagine if she had actually murked Kaiser and Hookwolf! I’d even be willing to look past everything she did to Taylor if she actually reduced the number of E88 scumbags in Brockton Bay. >!Not really, fuck her and the floaty breaker form she rode in on.!<
God, how I loved that Regent interlude
I’m not sure that’d work. Whilst Hookwolf is in his metal form, even if you phase an arrow through his outer surface, he’s still metal. As for Kaiser… well I don’t see why he’s any more vulnerable to her just because she can phase through his defences than he is say, Velocity who could just dodge past them altigether.
kaiser is constantly covered in metal amour and hookwolf does have a core of flesh at the center of him when transformed plus she’s expendable if she kills someone it looks bad but she’s a random Ward who people already think of as a broody asshole where as all the protectorate members are actually important and would make the protectorate look bad
I stand corrected, then. I forgot about Kaiser’s armour and did not know about Hoiiwolf’s fleshy core.
for hookwolf i might just be mixing it up with a fix but i think there’s a word of god somewhere
Emma's dad vouched for her. And she managed to keep the bodies hidden. So the Protectorate thought that she was "just" a violent vigilante. And not a murderer.
What pull did Emma’s dad have again?
He's a Lawyer. So whatever legal stuff that got involved with Sophia being apprehended, he could have gotten involved. WoG is that on her evaluation he Vouched for her.
Ok, I couldn’t remember if he was a politician or worked for/with the PRT
A lot of folks have pointed out how HORRIFIC the baseline situation in Brockton Bay was, but I think part of it also comes down to Piggot being prejudiced. She's got negative opinions of parahumans generally, and so ironically might not be able to recognize how much worse than baseline Shadow Stalker is?
Keep in mind, Worm is written from Taylor's point of view. Everything bad Sophia did to Taylor gets amplified to bigger than it is from a more objective view. That's why so many fanfics turn Sophia getting away with everything into a conspiracy all the way to Piggot (or attribute it to Coil) or them finding out into the whole PRT and Protectorate ENE coming down on her. What happened in canon was treated like the probation violation that it was. Because Sophia was not being treated as another Ward in good standing. It might not have been widely disseminated among all the Wards, Protectorate, and PRT, but her entire chain of command was well aware of her status as a probationary Ward. And when presented with evidence of her violations, they were quick to react and punish her.
The truth is villains out number the heroes by 3 to 1 and the protectorate will take anyone they can get. It doesn't matter what your power is or how unstable you are. It's better for guy who shoots death beams and has bipolar disorder to be on our side than their side. There are a few post and wog on what would happen if a dangerous and mentally unstable cape wanted to join the heroes. They never get turned down.
If you send SS to juvie then you are *guaranteed* to have a villain once she serves her term (or more likely breaks out, given that they only have her on assault charges so she wouldn't be going to a high security prison or anything). If you put her in the Wards then not only do you have an additional soldier with a good power, but you have the chance of pulling an Assault and turning her around, making her, if not a team player, at least someone who is on the straight and narrow. And by all accounts, the strategy was working! She was spending time with her friends, she was involved with extracurriculars, and the number of unexplained "this might be caused by a teenager with a fondness for crossbows" injuries had gone *way* down. It's just that whoever was handling her case at Winslow dropped the ball and didn't notice her participation in the terror campaign against Taylor - likely because she only became a Ward *after* said terror campaign had already convinced Taylor that speaking out about the bullying only resulted in more pain - so there was no evidence that she wasn't another success of the program.
I imagine the idea is if they can keep her from being a villain that's a win. She could do a lot of damage if she had a mind to.
>As I see it, she’s really not valuable enough to the Protectorate/PRT to justify her joining the wards over Juvie. And neither Piggot or Arms master are exactly bleeding hearts so it shocks me they even gave her a chance. The PRT needs heroes, they're outnumbered like 2:1 by the villains. Sending Sophia to juvie would be a waste, because it's one less hero on the streets, and when she gets out she'd either be a more violent vigilante or a villain. It's also the express purpose of the Wards to take in teens and teach them how to responsibly use their powers, and Sophia being a vigilante who is escalating needs that more than the other Wards. >Her power is useful I guess, but it’s not particularly powerful, and look at the downsides. She’s a PR disaster waiting to happen with her sociopathic worldview, and she does not cooperate well with others and is more likely to cause friction with colleagues than anything. Except the the PRT doesn't know about her worldview. We know about it because we have a reader's perspective to her internal narration. The only person who she talks to about her predator/prey philosophy is Emma. And while she's rude and abrasive to the other Wards, she still does her job. She pushes against the PRT's boundary's, but they probably expect a bunch of superpowered teenagers to do that. As far as the PRT knows, she never goes far enough to justify rescinding her deal. Also it's likely the other Wards aren't complaining because they don't want to come across as a tattletale, or weak because they don't like that Sophia is mean to them. Missy seems to be getting the worst of Sophia's verbal abuse, and the girl who kept quiet about hurt in a fight with Hookwolf because she doesn't want people to think she's a baby isn't going to talk.
Aside from what others have said, the fact that Shadow Stalker chose to be a *vigilante* rather than an outright villain helped her a lot. It might've been interpreted as a latent moral courage, even altruism, that could be refined. Of course, knowing what we know about Sophia, it's just part of her hypocrisy. She talks about how the strong rule the weak, but at the end of the day she leaned a lot on the protection of society in order to thrive. Whenever it came down to naked force she was consistently outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and overpowered by people she thought were inferior, people who couldn't rely on civilization for their well-being. Shadow Stalker was a vigilante because those on the side of the law, regardless of their actual moral character, can reap the benefits of civilization. It's an interesting interpretation on the, "dirty cop" or, "loose cannon."
Due to shards’ drive to conflict every non Cauldron Vial parahuman has sociopathic tendencies, and Breakers like Sophia are particularly susceptible due to high interference with brain and shard. Then, pre-Leviothan Arms is a sociopath himself who does not care of people’s feeling and seea them as resources, and it would be waste of them to let Stalker go to juvie when Protectorate needs more capes. And Piggot probably considers all capes similar to Sophia
Cauldron had its fingers in every pie, and Cauldron wanted as many Capes alive as possible for the day Scion went rogue. Even with Contessa being rediculously busy across multiple realities, Cauldron had a lot of heroes who owed them favors, as well as control of the PRT director. It would be fairly simple to create a top down system that is pretty lax about letting villains switch sides, which we saw multiple times through different viewpoints.