This has been bubbling in my mind for a long time, so I thought I'll put it out there and wait for the reactions.
One of my least favorite parts of fanon is how Cauldron is portrayed as either incompetent nazis or psychopathic overlords. I'll try to not re-tread old battlegrounds, but there are two points I think should be borne in mind when discussing Cauldron's actions.
- Cauldron had extenuating circumstances for doing what they did.
Now, justifying a crime is a favorite pastime of lawyers. There are many legal and moral issues arising when you have to commit a crime to save a life, for example. We can exchange anecdotes and jurisprudence later, but the salient point, the rationale behind the very existence of extenuating circumstances, is that sometimes the consequences for not committing the crime are worse than the offense committed. There is, of course, a need for an actual trial to determine wether the circumstances were actually extenuating and that bit of legal wrangling is much too often used in the real world; yet, it can happen.
In Cauldron's case, which was at first simply DM and Fortuna, they were put into a truly no-win situation. The consequences of failure would be some
trillion counts of "duty to rescue," or whatever the equivalent is in your legal system. Any wrong move would trigger Scion too early, especially the careless dissemination of their information. Each missed opportunity could be punished by billions of dead down the line in some far-off world. And as their fight went on, failures kept accumulating, losses kept piling up. They knew for a fact a Path to defeat Scion existed, Fortuna caught a glimpse of it before Eden shut her down. But what were the requirements for this future to come into existence? What if they had already missed the opportunity?
All they could do was grit their teeth and keep trying to enhance the numbers. They ended up guilty of unforgivable crimes, but would it not have been even more unforgivable if they had missed the chance to kill Scion early because of their scruples?
In the end, what it boils down to is that Wildbow managed to create a true no-win situation, saddling Contessa with every trope pertaining to Cassandra truths and seer responsibility you'd care to name.
An obligatory Worm quote from Venom 29.8, where someone gets a mere glimpse of what it must have been like to be part of Cauldron :
"I feel like a traitor for saying it," Imp said, "But looking at this, hearing all we've heard, I'm sorta starting to agree with the Doctor. Abstract solutions are looking a hell of a lot better."
- While many crimes or faults can be put on their shoulders, I do not think it would be fair to call Cauldron&co "corrupt."
Here I'll be leading with the quote; it's Taylor's narration, Scourge 19.7:
I felt numb. She was everything I despised. Authority, the institution, the self-serving people in power, the untouchable. All around me, I could hear angry voices, each trying to drown the others out. Chevalier was among them, Miss Militia was quiet.
When I had finished Worm, I went back to that and it hit me how unreliable a narrator Taylor had been all that time. In the end, the Interludes were where the real substance was. Before it became Taylor's story, Worm was a setting. Taylor was a great narrator in that her ever-expanding influence and perspective allowed Wildbow to explore a staggering expanse of the world he thought up, but she came with her hang-ups and flaws.
Fanfiction likes to explore slices of life of characters, so you can easily find stories of Cauldron poker nights and office affairs. But really, canon Worm only shows an organization made up of workaholics chained to their work by something between duty, desperation and denial.
Setting aside Cauldron itself for now, what about their corrupted patsies the Triumvirate?
-Legend: canonically a caricatural hero. No drama here. A nice guy with a comfortable home life. Moving along.
-Eidolon: the guy that wants to be the Hero. Seriously, all he wants is to make a difference, to actually matter and do some good. You could say he is a glory-hound, but really he did not seem particularly interested in actual fame, at most he seeks personal validation. He wants to set things right, where in Worm everything goes wrong.
-Alexandria. Her comrades at the Protectorate thought she had a life, while her subordinates at the PRT thought that even she must be sleeping sometime. Instead, she was juggling two demanding jobs while doing Cauldron errands on the side, because nothing was more important than that. She did commit crimes. She was a hypocrite. But at the end of the day, she was a woman without a personal life of any significance, working 24/7 to try and save lives. What better definition of selflessness do you have?
Amusingly, Legend seems to be the one person here with an actual personal life, and who might have actually taken advantage of his salary and vacation days. Does that make him the most corrupt member of the Triumvirate?
Food for thought, people.
