Charm Learning Shard (Worm/Exalted) (COMPLETED)

Uncle Ruckus (No Relation) was the best.

 

The trick here is that ex-cons are just as susceptible of being the target of hate crimes as anyone else. Moreso, even.

All looking someone up on a police database and finding they have a record tells you is that they have a record. That same person being reported as being the victim of a crime is not then automatically false.

That being said: the newspaper services having a bias against a hate group is also quite legitimate. Whenever someone has a narrative, you can readily expect them to present facts in a manner that supports that narrative.

The E88 members think beating a black man to the point of hospitalization after catching him mugging someone is justified and legitimate. The newspapers want you to know that those skinheads committed a hate crime, and want that part to be what you care about because nobody cares what happens to criminals.

It's a bit like all those people who tried to argue that George Flloyd's murderer wasn't guilty of a crime because Flloyd was high.

Being high doesn't make that ex-cop who murdered him not a murderer.

The same applies here.

It also doesn't help that Taylor is being smeared by association by the same newspapers, on account of them having a narrative to uphold that doesn't allow for brutality by skinheads to be anything but hate crime. Even in the case of intercepting an active rape scene.

And ironically, while she could argue provocation as an active defense, what she did to those rapists was just a degree or two short of actual murder. We may like seeing obvious villains like rapists get what's coming to them in a story format, but the real world has limits on how criminals should be handled for very important reasons. Once she stopped the active threat, everything after that was a criminal act on her part.

 

Dave Chapelle. The Black Grand Wizard who was blind his whole life and didn't know he was black.

You might have been thinking of Uncle Cletus Ruckus, a recurring white supremacist character in Boondocks who was himself black.

 

Without wanting to start the kind of debate that would derail a great story:

False flag hate crimes absolutely do happen all the time. Jussie Smollett's hoax is a high profile example but it's only an outlier in the fact that the perpetrator was famous and went on to scream and shout about how terrible his supposed ordeal was and how it provess that white supremacists are behind every corner and so on.

So the case was actually investigated and found to be a staged hoax. But that isnt unusual, its just that usually people are completely happy to pretend that hate crime is rampant and any suggestions to the contrary, regardless of all of the evidence, makes you a terrible person or a "alt-right Nazi" or some such.

So I'm glad to see Taylor realising that the Anti-nazi propaganda is every bit as bullshit as the Nazi propaganda...

 

I think the part that bothers people is that while Taylor is seeing a lot of evidence of the Empire not being that bad she hasn't really seen evidence of the Empire being bad. The newspaper section had her seeing that most if not all of the people the empire attacked were likely criminals and the one instance that was supposed to show the empire does fucked up things turned out to be done by a black guy and just reported as an Empire hit.

While it is true that the news outlets in the Bay have a bias against the Empire the Empire is still a violent criminal white supremacist enterprise, but we have yet to see them actually do anything evil in story and they seem to behave like an overeager neighborhood watch that happens to say racist things. It's borderline white washing them, which is why I keep saying I hope this is set up to Taylor having a realization moment to how fucked up they are beyond not being PC.

 

Uncle Ruckus wasn't black. That's an easy mistake to make. He is white but suffers from re-vitiligo. He has no blood relation to his black parents because he was actually a white baby abandoned on their porch and adopted by them.

 

He later does a genetic scan and finds out he's 102% african (with 2% variance)

tbh, this E88 might buy his line about revitiligo tho, lmao

 

If Lung can make somebody a honorary Asian, I can imagine Uncle Ruckus becoming a honorary member of E88.

 

So she's genuinely being indoctrinated into supporting the white supremacists. Calling it now that the main character will never have a positive or friendly interaction with a non-white person.

 

Drugs are bad, mmkay

I thought it was gonna be a "she thought it was Armsy asking but it was Coil" tweeest too, but that's damn good point.

 

I'm getting deeply uncomfortable reading about how Taylor is sliding down the Nazi path. It is realistic in how those sort of groups work, they foster a sense of community, shared persecution, and start their recruits off small, a slur here, a little 'justified' self defense here, some 'acceptable' targets there, and soon enough you've smashing a childhood friend's head into the curb because they are the 'wrong' colour or have the 'wrong' sexuality. Basic indoctrination stuff used by cults and gangs and nations since time immemorial.

However just because it's realistic doesn't mean it isn't skeevy as hell to read about. It would be one thing if this was a deeply serious novel about the dangerous of radicalization but it isn't, it's a Worm fanfic, it can be about things, but that isn't what I'm here for.

Honestly the story needs Taylor to see the bad shit that the Empire does soon, or it's walking a dangerous line. Hell it doesn't even need to be hate crimes, just show them dealing meth or guns.

 

Wherever this story goes, I really hope it follows the authors vision and isn't railroaded into virtue signalling because some readers don't like having their nice, simple "White people evil oppressors, all minorities oppressed victims" narrative challenged.

It's really good to see a story that takes a more nuanced, realistic approach to this (well, as realistic as a story about modern day American Nazis in a world with superpowers really can be).

 

I agree, the Empire isn't being played to their full potential here.
They have a whole international backer organization to infiltrate and loot!
Taylor clearly needs to dig herself deeper into the fold of the E88 so that she can go on a field trip to Europe and see all the wonderful sights there in the company of even more parahumans.
On the other hand, staying in the bay area means she can pilfer Victor and Uber for an autotranslate charm, since learning German would be a hassle and not directly be getting more charms.
Unless Taylor just decides to taunt an Endbringer into attacking early; but those fights just end too quickly to be properly useful. If only there was a way to make them less willing to retreat.

Spoiler: Metacommentary

This is pure comedy all the way through and it's kind of funny in its own special twisted right that people are taking the Neonazis in the story as some kind of real world hazard.
It's also kind of sad that people are taking nazism seriously though.

Also now that I think about it, Armsmaster would totally be up for a week long tinkering session and arrange for plenty of immersive meet and greets with his colleagues if Taylor ever decided to part with just a little orichalcum. (Since it's Armsmaster being given only a little might just inspire him to perform better.)

I've loved this story as soon as I started reading it, right from the beginning all the way through as the Taylor-Train rampaged around with absolutely no brakes in sight.
Danny boy, you are a treasure.

 

The issue is that the Empire are being protrayed as effectively heroic, they ahve not commited one evil act in the entire fic, its an organizaiton that has bloodings as an initiation, they run dog fighting rings, fighting pits with unwilling participants, public executions as a rally opener and actively kidnap and sell independents to the European branch as seen with Night and Fog. But every last incident involving them so far, including past incidents she went out of her way to investigate shows them as just a "misunderstood group of well meaning Americans that happen to not be PC".

This is not "virtue signaling" or "white people evil oppressors" reactionary commentary, this is legit concern that a group who's core tactics involve regular hate crimes and nazi ideology is being presented as basically 4-chan shitters in a neighborhood watch and all their biases are being shown as correct. With the accusations of hate crimes being, so far, all sensationalized by the news and just violent vigilantism.

The reaction would be the same if Taylor was infiltrating the ABB and they were portrayed as honorable yakuza despite the fuckers being directly involved in human trafficking, or if she was infiltrating the merchants and they were portrayed "just randos wanting to have some harmless fun" despite the bloodsports and the forced addiction.

 

Just a quick reminder that if you do have a recent example of racial profiling, don't mention it here because it violates rule 8.

 

I think it was the former. I know the character was an actual KKK member, who was revealed as black during a meeting (he was born blind, and apparently was never told he was black).

 

That was great! Almost as good as the gay KKK skit with the pink robes

 

Taylor seems entirely clear that the Empire is bad, its just that the individual members in the gang aren't portrayed as caricatures of "evil white supremacists" but rather as people who happen to subscribe to an ideology that is extremely unpopular. The fact that the gang does incredibly immoral and illegal things isn't glossed over at all.

Either way, I'm less interested in metacommentary and more enjoying the story and the fact that author is brave enough to represent these things more fairly than is usually allowed by people who think that any depiction outside their own media-fed worldview must be censored and attacked.

 

This was much more true, and I was much more on board with your perspective here, before this most recent chapter in which the evidence from Taylors research seems to suggest (more on that in a second) that the E88 actually doesn't commit hate crimes after all -- just vigilante justice -- and that the one example of an inexcusable hate crime that Taylor thought she'd found turned out in the end to have been committed by a black person. Which the media had reported as a hate crime with eye-witnesses anyway, just to further an apprently false narrative about the E88 committing hate crimes.

That goes a little beyond just not portraying the E88 members as caricatures of white supremacists. And, rather than "glossing over" that they do immoral and illegal things, it seems to actively suggest that they don't actually do hate crimes because those are all either media fabrications or exaggerations of their (supposedly justified) vigilante actions.

I can't speak for everyone here, but that's what I'm worried about. Until this chapter, I was with you. It's the newspaper research segment in particular that's making me question whether this is really just a story that's not afraid to take a more human perspective.


Now, in my first paragraph, I promised "more on that in a second," and here it is. This is the line of thinking that's giving me hope for this story:

This makes a lot of sense to me, and if the author is setting things up so that the reality is different from what Taylor is concluding here and she's just being misled by her biases (which is totally in line with canon -- witness the warping of Taylor's ethics during her time with the Undersiders), then I totally respect that. She's making the same mistakes that real people who are actually radicalized by these groups make, and I'm hopefully looking forward to a time when the harsh realities are made clear to her.

If, however, it turns out that within the fiction, Taylor's newspaper-based conclusions essentially align with the facts and that the neo-nazis of Brockton Bay are the essentially noble kind that would never beat up black people unless the black youths in question invade "their" neighborhoods with violent, criminal intent, well... I'll be disappointed and saddened by that authorial choice.

Does that make more sense of my position?

 

Fair enough, not the place for this kind of debate.

Keep writing the story the way you want to, author, we're all enjoying it!

 

Sure, agreed.

Less sure on this point. I'm on board for a story about Taylor in the E88, possibly even a story about Taylor getting slowly radicalized by the E88 (which is seeming more and more likely). If it becomes clear that this is, in fact, a Nazi story about Taylor in the E88, the author will have lost me.

 

Vigilante justice is still blatantly illegal (maybe not in Worm, but it's Worm, so the moral standards have degraded anyway), and vigilante justice conveniently only aimed at black people is also heavily indicative of those crimes being hate crimes first and foremost, with a flimsy excuse of vigilante justice (still illegal) as a given reason.
Taylor did straight up mutilate some black guys with vastly excessive force as well (which isn't exactly okay even in Worm), as part of the E88, so yeah, "E88 evil" seems pretty clear to me.
Taylor not finding those crimes objectionable (sans the one) says a lot more about Taylor being high on power (again, she's Exalted, that's how they roll) than it does about the E88 being anything even closely resembling good.

 

Second that.

 

I feel like she has likely been radicalized since she triggered (whether with Shard mentality, [Exalted] God mentality, or Exalted mentality makes little difference to the fact it is an alien/sociopathic mentality), but I can see what you are going for as well. Her history with how the right side of the law allowed for her life to be turned into hell definitely isn't helping matters (even if it is nowhere close to how she thinks everything happened)

The key question would be if she found white racists, would she treat them the same (personally, I think she would based on her losing it once she saw what the guys were doing)? Would the answer change depending on whether she was geared up as Low Key with E88 watching? That is the big one for me as of this moment.

 

Basically how i feel about this yeah, up until the newspaper segment I found it mostly amusing or interesting, but that segment making it canon that Empire hatecrimes are mostly the amount of vigilante violence you would expect of a regular OC vigilante cape and a media fabrication is worrisome to me.

 

To be fair, if you were a power-hungry Kaiser, would you assign your young new recruit of unknown temperament to all the nasty sides of the business? Whereas a carefully-curated, self-deprecating group of unserious part time Nazi's who totally only beat up criminals and stuff is the perfect onboarding experience, complete with an age-adjacent female peer! Get your newbies feeling like they belong, and thoroughly associated with the E88 in the public eye, before you start asking them to do things they might find... uncomfortable. And at that point, well, are they going to betray all their new friends? They've come this far, right?

I doubt it's a coincidence her only regular "coworker" is Rune, who probably has no major (and dirtier) responsibilities.

Like, if Krieg's retinue joke about asian girlfriends I'll eat my hat. Hookwolf's, maybe, but they'd likely come with a side of "grisly" crime scenes at grocery stores and the occasional impaled Ward, so probably not the best introductionary experience.

(Personally, though, the way she framed one of Lung's girls (whose only sin was being a dubiously consenting concubine) as robbing him pretty much cinched the idea that Taylor doesn't really give a damn about other people anymore. She'll use you and discard you regardless of your color. That makes it a lot more ambiguous whether she's drinking the koolaid or, well, simply doesn't give a shit.)

 

Well, there is the thing with Hookwolf literally breaking her limbs multiple times a week. We know Taylor doesn't really give a shit, but Kaiser has no reason to assume that and so it doesn't quite fit with a carefully curated experience.

 

Fair, but he did so in an effect to get her to pay attention-- if she'd responded like a normal human being it would have happened like once and then she'd have taken things seriously. If she couldn't handle a single broken limb, she wouldn't be much use to the Empire anyway.

To be clear, also, I'm not suggesting her cohort is fake, per se. Just that it is not representative of the Empire as a whole. It would make sense to me that the E88 have many cells of varying "intensity", allowing them to maximize their numbers by placing new recruits - parahuman or otherwise - in groups whose behaviors and actions they are most likely to accept. In the case of unknown quantities, this also allows observation that can be followed by reassignment to more appropriate groups. With higher-value recruits like capes, they can use these transitions to ensure proper indoctrination/radicalization/whatever.

In addition to reducing the chance people recoil and run off, this helps insulate the E88 from infiltration.

 

Yeah, that is a fairly standard real life tactic, commonly referred to as a "radicalization pipeline". You keep the layers of the ideology a bit separate, and keep people on one's they're comfortable with until you let them brush against the next one deeper and see how they react. Slowly but surely you build an extremist from an otherwise ordinary person.

...ya know, its kinda hard to theorize about this story without at least brushing rule 8, isn't it?