Dreadnought: The Quest for Cringe - White-Kettle-Shufflepunk reads a trans YA superhero novel

[IridiumDragon06]

You know, I don't hate the Legion's perspective here. In a better book with actual world-building and set-up, they could point to a formerly-functional country where someone (hell, ideally, one of the previous Dreadnoughts) decided to enforce the law on a government, the collective Hobbsean consensus dissolved, and the entire region turned into warlords and super-gangs fighting over the rubble and the only places with a suggestion of order are those where the threat of violence is omnipresent. And again, in a better book, we'd get a full synthesis of statements going on, where Calamity was portrayed as having a point about some things, being biased on others, and clearly wrong on yet others, and similarly with the Legion members for their own individual regions, and the subtext of "What happens when you get a bunch of people who are basically tiny nation-states in terms of personal offensive capacity, and those people lose any internal consensus on what proportional threat-response is, both among each other and their enemies?" You could get a really interesting perspective, with the Legion accusing people like Calamity of wanting to burn down the world order to become little vigilante-kings of the ash piles, and Calamity pointing out that the current world order already lets supervillains terrorize the populace and doesn't respond to the really bad shit the government does, so if the social contract is already gone, why should they die defending it?

But that's a story that it would be very hard to contrast against either Utopia or the incoming doom-asteroid unless the idea was to use either or both of those to force a compromise and synthesis of perspective.

I've also decided that Doc Impossible has jumped deep into mad science sociopathy and her entire persona as presented to Danny is solely to manipulate a lonely, needy, and desperately stupid kid with extremely dangerous superpowers, because the idea of an actual super-genius going from "Why fight supervillains? Why not do firefighting or exploration with your powers?" to "My life is constantly in danger because there's a threat out there that my science can't resolve that wants to kill me personally." in one conversation makes me unreasonably annoyed. Gee, it's almost like violent crime stops people from being able to live their lives in peace, and that we actually desperately need the people who risk their lives stopping that crime for the selfless good of others.

And dammit, now I want to watch Danny run into an All Capes Are Bastards protest.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Sidelining someone as strong as you, with as little experience as you have, was a damned dangerous mistake.

What??
Isn't sidelining someone who's Superman-strong but inexperienced exactly what you want to do until they're trained and hopefully have some degree of levelheadedness drilled into them?
I mean, Danny is perpetually on the verge of going supervillain, saying things like

But now, I’ve got these powers so nobody—” My father looms in my mind’s eye. “—can push me around anymore.

This disastrous outing with Utopia could easily have triggered his final meltdown into villainy. In fact, the only reason it didn't is because the invisible hand of narrative keeps shoving him onto the "hero' track.

Also:

“The key component of this weapon was material salvaged from the asteroid the Legion Pacifica stopped last year,” she says. “That asteroid was part of the Nemesis once, flung ahead of its master by the tides of gravity. This is what a single kilogram of that thing can do to the world, Danielle. Imagine what thirty million tons of it could unleash if it even passed by our moon.”

Who cares? The "key component of this weapon" is only dangerous because it was made into a weapon with all the other stolen hypertech Danny and Calamity were Scooby-Doo'ing around to trace in the first place. Without it, the rock is just a rock. I mean, the Reality Eraser Gun isn't hurting anyone now while it's not being fired, right?
In a more fun story, maybe you could have a plot where they need Superman Dreadnought to punch the asteroid into a black hole before the villains can capture it to outfit their entire evil army with reality eraser guns.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

All I know at this point is that I'd totally read some kind of generational saga or anthology about the first three Dreadnoughts. Just, you know, not written by Daniels.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

You know what we haven't had in like, fifteen pages? A scene where Danny is yelled at by his dad and takes it like a bitch, of course! At this point, I'm beginning to think it's part of Daniels' humiliation fetish. Naturally, however, it wouldn't be Dreadnought without some baffling creative choices. So, you'd think Danny's parents finding out that he has superpowers would be a dramatic highlight in the story. Perhaps Danny himself would tell him, showing his dad he can't push him around anymore, or maybe he'd have to save them when Utopia comes knocking.

Instead, they find out off-page, because fucking Graywytch told them. Danny doesn't even see or overhear the conversation, he just runs into her on her way out!

She’s fifty yards down the street from my house, almost to the corner of the intersection when I slam down from the sky. My feet crack the pavement as I land, and I’ve got murder on my face.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Putting an end to this tragic farce, young man.” If Graywytch is nervous about making me angry, she doesn’t show it. “You nearly got that girl killed tonight. This needs to end. There’s still time for you to do the right thing.”

To be fair, that was mostly Calamity's own fault. To be even fairer, from what we've seen so far, I bet Danny would've gotten her killed somewhere down the line.

“You told them?” The sheer gall of it rips my breath away. All this talk about how the Legion protects secret identities, and then poof, she takes mine away from me.

Frankly, the ethical thing would've been to tell them before the rest of them started trying to sell you on "probationary memberships." I'm still not sure why we bothered having the powers be secret from the Tozers when they already know Danny magically changed sex the day D3 kicked off. Part of me wonders if this story wouldn't have worked better if Dreadnought worked a bit like Captain Marvel. That is, the Captain Marvel who says "Shazam!" Have Danny be able to transform into an idealised, superpowered, female version of himself. Then you could still have the nonsense about keeping him being trans a secret from his dad. Also, maybe seeing what Roger's like when he doesn't think his son's been mutilated in the streets would help sell him being a lifelong abusive arsehole better.

“Talk to your parents, Daniel.” The moonlight and the street lamps doesn’t hit her the way it hits everything around us, but through some kind of magic, leaves her all in blackness except for her eyes. They are gray and very tired. “They want to help you. Goddess only knows why but they seem to think there’s still hope you’ll step back from your perversion. Talk to them, and when you’re ready, come to me and we can discuss how to remove your powers and return you to your proper self.”

So, as was brought up earlier, April Daniels in real life went from an r/atheist to a neopagan. From little I've read, Wicca and the like have been pretty thoroughly colonised by troons, but there is still a contigent of TERF "witches" out there. What I'm saying is, I bet Graywytch is based on a woman Daniels knows who thinks she's the real life Thessaly from Sandman, and I would love to have been a fly on the wall when they argued about Daniels participating in menstrual rituals or some such bullshit.

I find my voice again. I find it to be much louder than I intended. “You had no right—!”

She cuts across me. “Don’t you dare speak to me of rights. You are the purest distillation of an evil that has haunted half the human race since the priests killed the Goddess.”

I would go on a big long anthropological tirade about how Robert Graves and Margaret Murray were full of shit, but that's probably what Daniels wants. Instead, I feel like this is very illustrative of the issue TRAs face. The reason they're so insistent that TERFs (meaning any woman who disagrees with them) not only be ignored, but actively silenced, is because their argument (at least about trans stuff, I'm not a TERF, because a man calling themselves a 'radical feminist' is beyond cringe) is both simple and obvious: being a man or a woman is a simple matter of the body you're born with, and everything else is just social bullshit we pile on top of it. You don't stop being a man because you wear your hair long, and you don't stop being a woman because you don't like skirts. It's got both common sense and Occam's Razor on its side.

That's why TRAs don't want people engaging with the actual arguments and writings of their critics, and instead construct these ridiculous strawwoman characters and expect you to take their word from it. That's why they won't even tell you what J.K Rowling or Kathleen Stock even said. Because they're liars, and shit ones at that.

“What did I ever do to you?” I shout.

“It’s not about what you’ve done. It’s about what you’ll do. Dreadnought cannot be a transwoman, I won’t allow it. The damage you could do to women once the media gets wind of you would be incalculable. Already you’ve nearly killed one of us. How many more must suffer to satisfy your sickness?”

This is another case where Daniels can't get into the heads of people who disagree with him. Why would Graywytch used Current Year Approved Lingo like "transwoman" with no space or hyphen? That implies she thinks it's a valid category, which she clearly does not. She'd say something like TIM, or a slur like "tranny", or at least put scare quotes around the word. It's like Roger saying he "raised Danny as a boy." He wouldn't say that, because people like Roger tend to view being a boy or a girl as a simple fact of biology, not something you're "raised to be." When we look at a young Jazz Jenning, we don't see a "child being raised as a girl" we see a child being raised trans. Very different.

“Snitching goes both ways. When the Legion hears about--” And then my voice disappears. I don’t mean I stop talking—I can feel the vibrations in my throat and mouth. But my voice is gone. Once upon a time, Graywytch casting a spell on me would have been terrifying. Then I fought Utopia and learned what real fear is like. This is petty.

And then Graywytch closed off Danny's airways and he fucking died, the end. Idiot.

“Hears about what?” asks Graywytch with a smirk. “Do you think I would let you tell them? Do you think I would let them believe you even if you did? This is between you and me now. There will be no more muddying the waters. No more playing on unearned sympathy. You will never be one of us. Real women--”


As if moving off the topic of the Legion has freed my voice, I find that I can shout at her, “It’s not my fault I’m trans! You think I wanted to be born this way?”

Some women play Mozart for their unborn babies, Mrs Tozer browsed reddit.

“Not really,” says Graywytch. “I don’t blame you any more than I would blame an Ebola victim. Society has fed your generation so many toxic ideas about gender, it’s only natural some of you would crack. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t dangerous. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be expunged.

No lies detected. I mean, yeah, there are plenty of trans identified people out there who aren't active blights on society or malicious, but indulging their neuroses and delusions still does great harm to women, children, gays, men, and anyone else whose health and happiness is dependent on people not thinking a boy who likes to draw is actually a girl with a tumour between their legs. I mean, maybe "expunged" is a bit much, but still.

You reify the holocaust of gender, you invade my sex, and you poison my sisters by your simple presence. You cannot possibly understand what it means to be a woman, and you rape us all when you try. If you will not surrender the mantle, I will be forced to destroy you.”

Again, they have to put silly shit like this in TERFs' mouths because it's less convincing than "we shouldn't put people who are bigger, stronger, and have functional cocks in womens prison, or castrate little boys for being too faggy."

“You wanna try?” I stalk forward. “Any time, bitch!”

“The instant resort to violence.” Graywytch seems to collapse in on herself, and the night’s shadows street become somehow more solid and even alive. They rush to embrace her, and she’s gone. Her voice comes to me as if from a great distance. “How essentially male.”

Damn straight. Which is also an accurate description of what Danny is.

“Coward! You can’t turn back history! We’ll beat you!”

"We will redefine women as deficient males!"

Also, I notice April Daniels has forgotten he's writing a teenager and just made Danny talk like someone's Twitter.

For a moment, I think she’s gone. When her voice comes again, it is tight with fury. “Magic leaves no fingerprints, Daniel. You will surrender your powers, or by the end of the month you will die in agony and damn the mantle if it is lost. Nobody will believe you. Nobody will help you. Nobody can. Not your parents. Not the Legion. Not your fists. Your only hope is surrender. I will leave you to think on that.”

A sudden gust of wind whips up and pulls at my cape. Dust and dead leaves swirl, and then settle. I turn to take off, intending to fly straight back toward Legion Tower to settle accounts. I will break her.

So, this confused me for fucking ages. Maybe I just wasn't reading closely originally, but the first time, this read like an actual curse. I thought Graywytch is casting a spell so Danny will straight up die if he doesn't give up the Plot Inciting Orb before the month is through, like Sleeping Beauty being cursed to prick the spinning wheel on her sixteenth birthday. Rereading it, I think Graywytch is just making a regular death-threat, but with magic. That is, she'll come and shank Danny if he doesn't do what she says, not that it'll happen automatically. It certainly doesn't come up again in the book. Hell, in the sequel (which we will be covering, don't worry) Danny doesn't even say "Yeah, I guess she was full of shit." Again, this might just be me, but when you have a character who's based on fairy tale witches, maybe don't have them talk like they're laying down a doom on a character if that's not what they're doing.

Before Danny can pull a Dana Rivers, his parents call him inside. Because he's a complete wimp who cares nothing for your or mine's time, he obeys:

My feet touch the sidewalk again. It’s a long, slow walk to my house. When I pass into the light from the street lamp nearest our house, and they see me clearly, they draw back a little.


I pull back my mask and cowl. “Hi.”


“Get inside before somebody sees you,” snaps Dad. Good old Pop, always reliable.

I mean, yeah, that's how secret identities work.

“Have a seat,” commands Dad, pointing at the couch. That’s a thing he does when he wants to show how big and tough he is.


I look at the couch. Look at him. Sigh. “Earlier tonight I saw my best friend get her arm burned off with a laser cannon, so if it’s all the same to you, can this wait until tomorrow?”


“You won’t speak to me like that, son,” says Dad.


“I’m your daughter.” I’m just as surprised as he is that I’ve found a spine at last.

I actually really like narratives about timid or beaten down characters finding the strength to stand up for themselves. I think it especially works well with younger protagonists. But this doesn't feel earned at all. There's no sense of character progression leading to this moment, Danny just decides not to be afraid of his dad anymore because we're nearly 80% of the way through the book, and not even the most pozzed lit-agent will buy it if we don't include some superhero stuff. It's not even like Danny tried to stand up to Utopia, or even really beat herself up for not doing so.

Dad puts his hands on his hips, takes a deep breath and blows it out through his nose. It doesn’t scare me the way it used to. It feels weird.

I'm just wondering why it scared you to begin with.

“So, you stole Dreadnought’s powers when he died.”

“He gave them to me. He was dying, and he gave them to me so they wouldn’t be lost. That’s what changed my body. Not any supervillain.”

And I bet D3 is just thrilled with the decision, wherever he is.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” asks Mom. It takes me by surprise. She doesn’t normally talk during times like this.


“Because…” I trail off. It’s a harder question than I expected.

Because it was stupid and contrived, that's why.

I never really considered telling them, and I never stopped to ask myself why. After a few moments, I find an answer. It doesn’t feel like the whole answer, but it’s part of it, at least. “Because I was scared you’d try to take them away from me.” Like everything else I ever wanted to be.

Like what? Again, Danny never told his parents he was trans. Did they prevent him from seeing his female friends? Did they try to stop him from drawing? Not let him go to space-camp?

“You don’t need superpowers to impress me, son,” says Dad. There’s a look on his face that’s hard to process. Something like sympathy and concern, but that can’t be right. “You don’t need them to impress anybody. You’re just fine without them. It didn’t make sense, before. All those things you were saying, all that nonsense about being a girl, it was crazy. But now I get it. Daniel, pretending to be something you’re not just so you can hold on to some power that doesn’t even belong to you, that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for your soul.”

...Based Roger Tozer. Seeing how every time Danny's tried to articulate why he's supposed to be a girl, it's always boiled down to not being rowdy or tough enough, that feels pretty on-point.

“I’m not pretending, and it is my power. He gave it to me.”


“Graywytch said that without the powers, you’d go back to being the way you were,” Mom says.


Of course she did. “Nobody knows if that’s true or not,” I say.


“Have you tried?” asks Dad.


“Why would I want to risk it? I’m happy this way. I told you, I’m transgender, and this is the best transition I could ever hope for.”

I love how this is basically blackpilling the trans readership.

"Yeah, if I didn't have this Plot Inducing Orb that doesn't exist in real life, I'd probably look like a walking, talking fridge with greasy hair."

“No, Danny. No, that’s not true,” says Dad, shaking his head. “We raised you better than that. We kept you away from all that queer stuff, we made sure you weren’t neglected. You’re not transwhatever. No more lies, son. I know you’re scared, and you feel like you’re backed into a corner. It’s okay. Just tell us the truth. We’re your parents. We love you no matter what. You don’t need powers to feel special. You’ll always be special to us.”

It's weird that the only time Daniels can bring himself to actually write out Roger's Abusive Dad Speech, it's when he's being nice.

My eyes start to prickle. I clench my jaw. That bitch. That horrible bitch. I’ve been waiting years for him to say something like this. Seems like my whole life, all I ever wanted was for him to tell me it was okay to be who I am.

Now he is.

And it hurts like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

Danny's right, Roger is telling him it's alright to be who he really is: because by definition, his "true-self" isn't the smooth, flawless sex-object he turned himself into with fucking magic.

My vision is blurry. My throat is tight. Dad steps forward, arms wide for one of those stupid manly hugs he’s obsessed with.


“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”


Dad jerks to a halt, eyes wide. We’re all surprised. His face darkens and Mount Screamer gets ready to blow again. But now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. “I am not your son!” I shout. “I have never been your son! I am your daughter! And you have never once told me that you loved me!”

So, Roger's obsessed with physical affection, but has never said the words "I love you"? Daniels does realise he's not writing in the 1950s, right? Dads have been allowed to say that for a while now.

“Now wait just a goddamn minute!” he shouts. “We’re trying to help you, you ungrateful little faggot! We want you to be who you really are and not some—”

Ah, they turned Roger's tape over to side B.

“Don’t talk to me like you give a shit about who I am! I told you who I am, and you called me a liar!”

Because you are! You're such a liar, the fucking Plot Inciting Orb is neglecting your healing powers to lie for you!

I am shaking with rage, and my feet do not touch the ground anymore. “And you knew! You knew I didn’t want to be a man, that’s why you forced all that shit on me!

Because only boys like sports.

Well, I’m never going back! I’m a girl, and they’re my superpowers, and I’m not changing back, and there isn’t a goddamn thing you can do about it!”

Much as I don't agree with any of this, this book would be way more bearable if Danny had said this in chapter three.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little selfish?” asks Mom.

The world lurches out from underneath me. “What?”

I wish I could remember Mrs Tozer's first name.

“You’ve said what you want,” she says. Her arms are crossed, her shoulders pulled up, but she’s looking me dead in the eye. “We want our son.”


“Mom, no.” My feet touch ground again, but it doesn’t feel solid. Everything is sliding away, spiraling down into chaos.


“Yes, Danny. I thought we just had to make the best of it. But you’ve been lying to us this whole time, making this huge decision that affects all of us all on your own, and not even telling us what options we had. It’s got to stop.”


“It’s my decision!” This is insane. The world has gone mad. How can this be anything but my decision?


“You’re only fifteen,” she says. “You’re too young to make this kind of choice. You need to give Dreadnought’s mantle back to the Legion, and when you’re eighteen, if this is what you really want, we can talk about it.”

That seems perfectly reasonable. Admittedly, it depends on the Mantle being safe to transfer when the holder is still alive, and I imagine it can't just sit around in a drawer for three years without a host, but based on what little Mrs Tozer knows about the situation, that's a pretty okay idea to float.

“There’s nothing to talk about.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice down. “I’m a girl, and I always have been. The difference is now you can see it.”

Remember when Danny was talking about "rejecting manhood"?

“You don’t make the rules, young man!” barks Dad. “Your mother is right, you are being very selfish right now! As long as you’re going to act this way, you are not welcome in this house.”


Someone has sucked the air right out of me. I gawp at him for a moment. “You can’t do that! Mom, tell him! He can’t do that!”


Mom looks at Dad, and then back at me. She closes her eyes, and forces the words out. “I’m sorry, Danny, I really am.”

For all the word spilled on Roger, you can definitely tell Daniels hates his mother more.

“So what’s it going to be, huh, tough guy?” asks Dad. “You gonna keep throwing this fit?”

I clench my fists, painful tight. “I am never going back.”

“Fine then.” Dad walks over to the front door and rips it open. “Leave.”

From way at the back of my skull, I watch my body turn and leave the house I grew up in. The door slams behind me.

What, you're not even going through the roof? Shattering the table with your bare-hand? Fuck, Daniels, you are really bad at escapism.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

I for one didn't get any hints of magic pronouncement from Graywytch's statements, and they read like bog-standard death threats to me. And I am aggravated (but not surprised at this point) to know that nothing meaningful comes of this. I feel like this is yet more of the author's Extremely Online-ness coming through, and needing to broadcast "Oh no, you got death threats, you poor baby." and not really processing that statements like that hit different both when someone actually can get away with murder, and when you yourself can (if you get your hands on her) kill her in an instant and probably slap around half the Legion before being brought down, if you even can be brought down.

The Legion has two people who can verify the truth of statements; Danny flying over there and saying "Hey, there's a supervillain who's impersonating GrayWytch and trying to start shit between us, so I came here first thing, let's both report on where we've been and what we said and did for the last hour or so to Great Value Valkyrie." Because even if GrayWytch can directly hide from the nebulous truth-sense bit, Danny can say exactly what he said and heard and get that verified (and even consent to be drugged like he threatened that other guy with, to confirm that he's not hiding anything; I bet GreyWytch wouldn't do the same.)

GreyWytch's plan is dumb and bad. She has no assurance that Danny won't casually put his fist through her skull the next time they meet; she has, in fact, every reason to think that as a spiteful, deceptive TIM, he'd do exactly that.

The only thing I'm thinking is that GreyWytch has primed everyone at the tower to expect a rampaging Danny and the hope for this whole display was that Danny would rush in and get killed by the rest of the Legion, and based on how he was acting, that doesn't seem like that bad of a plan. But her role in the story is to Be Bad TERF, not anything plot-relevant or meaningful, I guess. And I'd actually like the idea of her in a better-written story, where there actually was a powerful superhero who also was a Twitter-poisoned asshole and her team just accepted it as the cost of doing business with her. But the problem is that the author is the Twitter-poisoned asshole, and the poison is seeped into the world itself.

And wow, that whole 'confrontation' with the parents was a giant wet fart of a scene, all around. We have no reason why Danny would want to be around his parents or value the facade of normality, and we've been told that not only does he have a place to go and people who care about him, he can just go back to sulking under the ocean, or just fly up into space and start chucking rocks at Nemesis until it deflects away. There are absolutely no stakes here; this is, as far as I can tell, just a way to get the Least Agentic Superman finally out of his parent's house.

And...hah. I think I got it; this is supposed to be tying into the whole "LGBT teens need to become runaways and flee for their lives from their cruel cishet parents" thing, isn't it? That's why this is so awkwardly written; Danny can't disregard being thrown out for the dozens of reason that he should be able to, and he can't seek it out himself, because that would be a blasphemy against one of the Holy Sufferings of the Chosen People.

 

[Kosher Dill]

You reify the holocaust of gender

So... Greywytch talks like more of a Tumblrite than the actual 15-year-old troon?

You are the purest distillation of an evil that has haunted half the human race since the priests killed the Goddess.”

And she believes the Goddess is dead?

The "womyn's spirituality menstrual moon goddess magick" superhero archetype has been done before, it wouldn't have killed Our Author to crib from some better examples seeing as he clearly abandoned shame long ago.

“Coward! You can’t turn back history! We’ll beat you!”

Can we go 5 minutes without Danny busting out a supervillain monologue?
"Next time, Gadget, next time..."

That bitch. That horrible bitch. I’ve been waiting years for him to say something like this.

And once again we're back on misogynistic slurs to tear down men! There's nothing more manly than being a supportive father in difficult times, but all it gets Roger is "That bitch".
The author's relationship with masculinity is the best part of the book, Freud would have a field day.

GreyWytch's plan is dumb and bad.

Well that's the thing, we don't know. For all the reader knows, Greywytch might be able to back up all her big talk, and has absolutely nothing to fear from any Dreadnought. But I guess it doesn't matter if this never comes up again (!!)

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

And she believes the Goddess is dead?

I think the idea is that everyone used to worship a singular, female godhead, and then the icky male sky-worshipers replaced Her with the God we know again. This of course completely contradicts everything we know about historical religions across the world, but yeah, it's based on real bullshit.

And once again we're back on misogynistic slurs to tear down men! There's nothing more manly than being a supportive father in difficult times, but all it gets Roger is "That bitch".

I'm not entirely sure if that's aimed at Roger or Graywytch for outing Danny. Either way, it's stupid.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Now what I want to know is if the real-life inspiration for Greywytch (as there surely must have been) really told our author "How typically masculine" when he got really het up on rageahol.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Now what I want to know is if the real-life inspiration for Greywytch (as there surely must have been) really told our author "How typically masculine" when he got really het up on rageahol.

If she did, closest thing you can get to a based neo-pagan.

 

[LoverofPi]

I actually really like narratives about timid or beaten down characters finding the strength to stand up for themselves. I think it especially works well with younger protagonists. But this doesn't feel earned at all. There's no sense of character progression leading to this moment, Danny just decides not to be afraid of his dad anymore because we're nearly 80% of the way through the book, and not even the most pozzed lit-agent will buy it if we don't include some superhero stuff. It's not even like Danny tried to stand up to Utopia, or even really beat herself up for not doing so.

I'm shocked we're that far of the way through. Nothing has happened. Do we go right from this scene to the final showdown with the supervillain?

Damn straight. Which is also an accurate description of what Danny is.

Not to defend Danny or anything, but Greywitch is being a hypocrite here, as she resorted to threats of vague violence first.

Again, they have to put silly shit like this in TERFs' mouths because it's less convincing than "we shouldn't put people who are bigger, stronger, and have functional cocks in womens prison, or castrate little boys for being too faggy."

Having looked at a synopsis of the sequel, I wonder if the absurdity of her plot there was a response to people commenting that she seemed downright reasonable in this one.

Like what? Again, Danny never told his parents he was trans. Did they prevent him from seeing his female friends? Did they try to stop him from drawing? Not let him go to space-camp?

For some reason I'm reminded of the crazy evangelicals who insist that everyone believes in their god and anyone who says otherwise is lying. That it's supposed to be such a self evident truth. And I think I said this in the last parent chunk, but Danny's mad his parents didn't know about something he was actively trying to hide from them.

It's weird that the only time Daniels can bring himself to actually write out Roger's Abusive Dad Speech, it's when he's being nice.

I wonder if that's because of the nonsense where "depiction equates approval" that was going around some time ago.

Ah, they turned Roger's tape over to side B.

Assuming you haven't been cutting anything out, does this mark the only time in the book we get to see Roger act pissed rather than be told about it vaguely?

That seems perfectly reasonable. Admittedly, it depends on the Mantle being safe to transfer when the holder is still alive, and I imagine it can't just sit around in a drawer for three years without a host, but based on what little Mrs Tozer knows about the situation, that's a pretty okay idea to float.

I mean, as far as she's aware, the powers did just that between previous dreadnoughts,

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Assuming you haven't been cutting anything out, does this mark the only time in the book we get to see Roger act pissed rather than be told about it vaguely?

Pretty much.

Not to defend Danny or anything, but Greywitch is being a hypocrite here, as she resorted to threats of vague violence first.

April Daniels: Just like real TERFs, amirite, fellas? Oh, I mean girls, tee-hee!

I'm shocked we're that far of the way through. Nothing has happened. Do we go right from this scene to the final showdown with the supervillain?

Almost! But first, more Danny feeling sorry for himself. Admittedly, he has a little more justification than usual, but still.

The nightmares came thick and deep last night. In them, I’m a monster, but I don’t know what I look like because I can’t see myself in the mirror. Everywhere around me, people are getting hurt and killed, and it’s all my fault. No one will tell me why.

"Because everyone who tries is blocked by Shinigami Eyes."

The dream’s details burn off like morning fog, leaving me with a disquieted feeling. The forest on the flanks of Mount Rainier smells of pine and mud. Birds chirp and sing. A bug I don’t recognize is exploring the surface of my kneecap. Everything that happened last night comes back to me in a rush, and I consider rolling over and trying to go back to sleep. The pile of pine needles I’ve assembled isn’t all that comfortable, but there doesn’t seem to be any point in going anywhere. My stomach gurgles, giving me a good reason to get up.


Check inventory. I have one cell phone, one hypertech supersuit, and…uh, that’s it. No money. No ID. No schoolbooks. No computer. No place to stay. No food to eat. My parents really kicked me out of the house with nothing but the clothes on my back. Even sitting here, living it, it still doesn’t feel quite real.

Yeah, Danny's sleeping rough in the woods. I kind of feel like this was put here as a nod to how many homeless runaway youth identify as LGBT+. I always assumed that was because of parental intolerance--and I'm sure there are still many parents like that out there--but these days I wonder how much of that could be blamed on co-morbid mental-health shit or being groomed to go find their glitter-family.

I should have let him die. I regret he’s still alive, and I’m ashamed I regret that, but I’m also frustrated that I’m ashamed because it’s not like I don’t have reasons. This sucks.

Again, I almost wish Gretchen had written this book sometimes. At least then Danny would be hilariously, obviously evil instead of just passive-aggressive.

Sleeping in pine needles has left me covered in patches of sap, which have helpfully picked up all the dirt they touched. A ways off, I can hear the rushing of a stream. I push myself to my feet and get some altitude, skimming treetops until I reach the water. Up close it turns out to be less a stream and more a small river. After rubbing the patches of sap off with handfuls of dirt, I take my phone out and set it on a rock. The water is grippingly cold, but it doesn’t bother me. Extremes of temperature are more interesting than uncomfortable to me now. I’m spin drying above the river, whirling so fast the world smears into green and brown blurs, when it occurs to me I should be more upset. Like, I’m out here in the woods because I’m homeless, right?

Yeah, though with all your powers (and the various options available to you) your situation doesn't really resemble that of any real homeless person. In other words, you're trans-homeless. "Unhoused" perhaps?

And yeah, I am bothered. I’m more than bothered. I’m pissed and scared and I feel lost. But I’m not shattered. Last night, I expected to wake up broken, nothing more than a torn up, chewed out, smaller half of what used to be a person. But I feel whole. Really, completely whole. Strip away everything: my house, my stuff, my family. Strip away the Legion, and Calamity, and my secret identity. Everything. What’s left? What’s left are the things I can count on. I have my body, my powers, and my freedom. Maybe that will be enough. It will have to be.

And like the other kind of trans, we're fetishising the shittiest aspects of it because none of this is actually real.

For the first time in my life, I am completely in charge of myself.

I don't like this queer-reimagining of Pippi Longstocking. Wait, the last Pippi Longstocking story ended with her and her pals taking pills that were supposed to keep them from growing up. Astrid Lindgren, no!

With that realization comes a misty relief that settles in the bottom of my chest. It’s over. All that shit with Mom and Dad, it’s done. My whole life has been leading up to this moment, and now there’s nothing else they can do to me. No more lies, no more pretending, no more shouting.

Because Daniels was too much of a wimp to show Roger actually being abusive.

My phone is complaining of a low battery when I check to see if I can get a signal up here. Damn. I shut it down. Should have turned it off last night. Oh well. Take it as a lesson.

I press the blister for the throwaway camo, and the emerald of my suit shifts and flows into the fuzzy grays and blacks. It’s best at night, but I’m going back into the city and every bit helps. If you asked me what I was preparing for, why I was concerned about being spotted, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer. It just feels like the right thing to do. The smart thing. I’ve got to be smart now, and cautious, all the time. There’s nothing to fall back on anymore.

Haven't we established by now that wearing "throwaway colours" basically telegraphs to anyone who knows anything about the scene you're whitecape adjacent?

I need a plan. First, food. My body is astounding and superhuman in all sorts of ways, but I still need to eat as much as anyone else. Once I’ve had a meal, I can see about getting my phone charged. There are some calls I need to make once I’m back in range of a cell tower. I think I can trust Valkyrja to help me, but I don’t want to go back to Legion Tower. Graywytch is there, and I’m not ready to face her again yet.

At least we have an actual reason Danny isn't just taking up in one of their condos now.

About thirty miles out of town I start overflying the first suburbs of New Port. Our city is enormous, but compact, and even this close there are long stretches of forest dropped right in between, for example, a high school and a strip mall. A diner seems to call my name, but I have no idea how I’m going to pay for food. I’m not too proud to panhandle, but dressed the way I am, I don’t think I’d have any luck.

I guess if Danny's phone battery is low, it might be hard for him to do the dance of his people: set up a GoFundMe. Also, if I had superpowers and a costume, I'd just busk.

The diner passes beneath me and away and I fly on, trying to come up with something. Three or four miles later, it hits me that I’ve got this backwards. I shouldn’t be trying to get food and then call Valkyrja. I should call Valkyrja and she can bring me food. I feel like an idiot for taking this long to figure that out, but at least I got there before I did something stupid.

We could've avoided so much dumb shit.

This far into suburbia, I’m bound to be near a cell tower. I turn my phone back on, hoping I can get one quick call out before it dies. Immediately I get text message notifications. I come to a stop in mid air and scroll through them. One from Doctor Impossible and one from Valkyrja.


Doc Impossible: danny, please come to tower. calamity is awake but wont talk to us. shes asking for you


Valkyrja: How do you fare, young champion? I have returned from my journey, and would welcome a visit from you, should you care to give me the pleasure of your company.

“We have gone backwards,” I mutter to myself as I pull up Valkyrja’s number for a voice call.

Okay, that I get, I respect anyone who uses proper punctuation in texts. However, neither Val or Doc answer their phones.

I tap out quick texts to both of them saying my parents kicked me out, that I have no food or money, and I’ll be waiting for them on the roof of the main library downtown. When I try to mention that Graywytch is a doxxing asshole, the keyboard on my phone stops recognizing my inputs.

Waves. Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but isn't doxxing like, posting your personal information publicly and not... telling someone's parents?

Also, Danny's shockingly chill about Graywytch threatening to kill him in a month and not being able to tell anyone her plan.

At first I don’t recognize the sound over the noise of the city. Engines running, tires hissing, and the faint suggestion of human voices wafting up from the ground level. But then it comes again. Deeper. Louder. I stand up and cock my head, trying to figure out which direction it’s coming from. Again the noise floats over the city, and I think I hear the sound of human voices hitch for a moment as people start to notice.

Explosions.

Big ones.

That's right everyone, we've reached the climax! You know what that means? A lot of bad-to-mid action stuff I can skin over! Let's see if I can polish this sucker off.

So, there's a ruckus in a train-yard. Danny finds a cop:

He looks at me with his lips pressed tight for a moment. I don’t budge, so he finally says, “It was five guys in big suits, hypertech stuff.” He says this and my blood freezes in place. Utopia has started whatever she’s planning. We were supposed to have another week. “They knew we were running a few carloads of old bills out to the treasury incinerator to get taken out of circulation. That’s supposed to be secret, but they were waiting inside some boxcars for us. We stopped to refuel and that’s when they hit us, made off with about a half billion dollars. Now, if we’re done with show and tell, could you maybe go see if my people are dead or not?”

Shit, we're trapped in that live service Avengers game. Still, beats having to fly through rings.

“Right.” My voice doesn’t shake with the terror that’s coursing through me, which is a small blessing. “Back soon.”


I don’t find anybody else. Either they’re smashed flat under hundreds of tons of steel, or they’re making a trip the long way around to re-group with their boss. I make a low, slow pass by him to shout the info down, and then I light out for the edge of the rail yard. This can’t be all that Utopia was planning. This is bigger than a robbery. It has to be. Dreadnought dead and Calamity maimed, just for some money? I won’t believe that’s true. I’ve got to warn people.

One, people kill folks all the time over money. Two, Utopia already told you why she's doing this. Three, it's astounding to me that, in over twenty-four hours, it hasn't struck Danny that Utopia said she killed Dreadnoughts plural.

“Are you having trouble getting through to the Legion, too?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from someone else.

“They’re not answering our calls,” he says. That’s unheard of. The Legion is always ready to defend New Port; everybody knows that.

Except for when that factory exploded yesterday and they weren't even awake when Danny got to the tower. Some of you might wonder if this ties into Graywitch being on the night-shift, but no, nothing in the book indicates that she's in cahoots with Utopia. We'll have to wait till next book for that kind of stupid.

“Mine, too. There are some guards from the Treasury Department back there in the rail yard,” I say, sounding much more confident than I feel. “They need an ambulance, and they also said that five guys with hypertech made off with a half billion dollars. Your men shouldn’t approach them.”

“This is our town, kid. We don’t let people bust it up.” The gathered cops give a murmur of agreement. Brave, but, wow. Just…just amazingly stupid. Have they not seen what those guys did to the rail yard that’s like right over there?

You know, even when I had a sympathetic ear turned towards trans stuff, I rarely if ever heard anyone big up Dreadnought, at least not the way Manhunt has taken the woke lit world by storm. I wonder if part of that is Daniels choosing to portray cops as brave-if-foolhardy public-servants and not ravening monsters stalking the streets for trans POC to gun down. To be clear, I'm not offended by that, but I could it rankling a lot of the target audience.

They’ll be in my way,” I say evenly.

Staring down a cop turns out to be a lot harder than I thought it would, but after a long moment the lieutenant nods and gives a few terse orders into his radio. Nothing iron clad, no call to retreat or anything, but he tells them they should give the capes room to work. I notice he doesn’t use the word that’s hanging in the air.

“Get everyone to the shelters, and keep trying to get through to the Legion.” I turn and step away to get space to take off. “Tell them Dreadnought wants backup downtown.”

I cannot express how little impact this has.

Next chapter is like, a page and a half.

When the guard said they had hypertech suits, I thought he meant, like, armor and maybe fancy guns. These things are walking tanks. If I stood next to one, I might be chest high to its kneecap. The roughly humanoid machines are piled with thick slabs of armor, but they are not ponderous. They bound forward like grasshoppers on screaming jets of fire. They bristle with weapons. Cannons, machine guns, racks of missiles and rockets, and the short, stubby housings of high-powered lasers. None of them are alike, differing in shape, size, and armament. Each is a different color: green, blue, yellow, and red. Two of them have hands ending in stubby-fingered claws, and between them they carry an entire boxcar. It is dented and smudged with soot, but it’s holding up well enough for them to leap forward fifty feet at a time on pillars of smoke and flame. The other two are out-riding, leaping ahead and behind, to the left and the right, switching up and keeping vigilant at all quarters. Some of Utopia’s thefts suddenly make sense. She was stocking up to build herself an army.

How did the cops know these were suits and not robots?

And they fight, and they fight, and they fight, and they fight....

“Why don’t you give up?” I ask him, from what I hope is a safe distance in the air. “It took all four of your buddies just to slow me down, you don’t think you’re really going to win here, do you?”


“Get out of here! This has nothing to do with you!” the pilot shouts. I swear I know this voice from somewhere. “Just let me have this!”


“Wait, Gerald? Seriously?” Wow. Um. Okay. Sure. The mecha—or really, Gerald—flares his attitude jets and lunges at me.

Oh, hi Gerald.

While he pulls himself from the trench we dug, I fly over to a nearby parking lot to get a weapon. Because I’m a fangirl and fangirls read too much, I know that you don’t want to hit people with cars like they’re baseball bats. A modern car is mostly made out of plastic crumple zones; it’s not going to hit the kinds of things a superhero fights very hard. But if you rip out the engine block, which is a few hundred pounds of solid metal, then you have something to work with.

I mean, surely the literal tons of metal and shit would still be helpful?

With a few sharp tugs I’m able to liberate an engine from the front of an SUV. I charge the purple mecha and smash its beam sabers aside with my big hunk of metal, then slam it down on the mecha’s shoulder. Once, twice, three times, and it gives way just about the same time as the engine disintegrates in my hands. He slashes at me with his good arm and starts screaming about how he’s going to kill me for trying to mess up his ‘big chance.’ I get my arms around its good arm and set my feet against the shoulder socket. With a great twisting tug, I rip the arm off, hydraulics bursting in a spray of soupy blue fluid. Gerald screams again, and before he gets a chance to think of something clever I’ve anchored myself to the mecha’s chest and I’m pounding at the release catches for the cockpit hatch. A few sharp blows and the hatch’s locks are done; I rip it and reach out to grab him by the front—


Holy shit, what the hell is that?

This is like the SRS Horrorshow thread for capeshit.

Gerald is glaring up at me with all the hate he can muster, and I can’t tell where he ends and the machine starts. Segmented metal tubes plug straight into his skin, all red and swollen where he is joined with the machine. His arms are gone, and in their place thick bundles of cables run into a pair of cavities that used to be his armpits. It’s hard to see from this angle, but I’m pretty sure his legs are gone, too. He’s nothing but a torso encased in a metal cradle that’s been slotted into the center of this thing.

Now, too be fair to Gerald, he'd asked around r/supertranstion and they all said these kind of complications were very rare.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” he mutters.

So I punch him, and man it feels good. He cries out and snorts blood from a freshly broken nose.

“What’s she planning?” I snap.

I honestly don't mind superheroes killing in the heat of battle, or even the odd execution after, but roughing up a prone enemy when they don't even have arms or legs feels real ugly. It doesn't help this whole bit has very "trans talking about detrans the way they tell you everyone talks about them" vibes.

“Go to hell.” I think it would be easier to accept if he was just angry and frustrated at being beaten. But his head is hanging, and his voice drips with self-pity. Because he’s the victim here, don’t you know?

Also, I've had to read Danny's shit for way too long now.

There is a pair of yellow handles on the cradle near each of his shoulders. The more I look at it, the more I think what’s left of his body is just plugged in there like a socket. With a sharp heave, I pull him straight up and out of the cockpit. The whole metal casing surrounding his body comes out cleanly, cables separating along magnetically sealed break links.

As it turns out, all of his nerve endings were still connected to the mecha. Whoops. He doesn’t stop screaming until we’re almost up on the roof of a thirty-story building. I toss him down on the gravel next to the building’s air conditioner. He lands face first and begins to sob.

I will admit, this is still quite novel to me. Usually it's the trans adult telling the kid to shut up and stop whining about their forever-pain.

For the briefest moment, I feel pity and remorse. Another explosion echoes in the distance, and I remember what Calamity said. You don’t have to feel bad about playing dirty with his kind. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I’m starting to understand why she would say it.

“I don’t even want to think about how many people you’ve killed today, but whatever Utopia promised you isn’t going to happen,” I say. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about her plan, or I’m going to leave you up here and forget about you.”

“No!” he snarls, face down, glaring at me from the corner of his eye. “She said she was going to give me a real body, one like hers!

--Said Marci Bowers to Jazz Jennings.

“Dude, look at you! You can’t even wipe your own ass anymore! You are already so fucked we don’t even have words for how badly you’re screwed. How often do you think the maintenance guys have a reason to come out here?” I ask him. “Once a day? Twice a week?”

Don't worry, we can build him new limbs out of tissues harvested from Nepalese women! Gerald breaks and tells Danny that they were all going to escape in a submarine. Given what Utopia's done to him, I'd be skeptical she had any plans of extracting them when she had what she wanted, but it's enough for Danny.

I turn back to him. “Thanks, Gerald. When this is done, I’ll tell them to come find you.” Shooting down between the skyscrapers, towards the sound of gunfire, I mutter to myself, “Eventually.”

This was better when Mr. Incredible did it.

I'm skipping the chapter where Danny fights the other cyborgs and talks to a cop. If that feels like a rip-off on my part, think of it this way: we're getting to the sequel faster. Now, it's off to the Tower! When Danny arrives, all the lights are out, but the automated defenses open fire on him. No, it's not Graywytch, and the Legion isn't just sick of his shit. When he gets inside, Danny is guided by Doc Impossible over the intercom to Sarah's sick-room, telling her the Legion is under attack, and that she's got "her" contained.

“Won’t be long until what?” I ask as I get to the door the scarlet blinkers are leading me to. It whooshes open, and Calamity shoots me directly between the eyes.

Well, I'm happy April Daniels is choosing to indulge in my fantasy for a change. Calamity of course apologises, because she thought Danny was a rogue robot. Like Doc Impossible:

“Thanks. What things?”


“There, that.” She gestures with her gun, to something near the foot of the bed. It’s Doctor Impossible, sprawled out like a corpse, except—a jolt goes through me, all the way down to my fingertips. It’s Doc Impossible except her head is missing from the lower jaw on up, and there are fiber-optic wires and smashed circuitry where there should be blood and skull. Her body lies in a puddle of its own white circulatory fluid. “That thing came in, pointed a gun at me, and then, bang, ate its own bullet.

Ah, the tranny-finisher move.

Explosive tipped, by the looks of it. Didn’t think I’d get lucky twice, thus the hollowpoint hello. Did you know she was a robot?”


“Why would a robot be a nicotine addict?” I look at the ceiling. “Doc, what’s going on?”


Her voice floats down from nowhere. She’s quiet, and sounds dazed, like the effort to guide me here was one last grasp at lucidity and now she’s sliding, sliding down into the black. “I thought I’d removed all the back doors, but now I wonder if that was only a memory I was meant to have.”

That's right kids, Doc's an artificial intelligence. I'm guessing that's why she's so gung-ho about affirming Danny, because if a black woman digital-entity embodied in a feminine body can use female pronouns for convenience, why can't a boy in an airbrushed porn-star's body with the gonad-arrangement of a bottlenose dolphin be a woman?

“Utopia is my mother. She built me, six years ago. I promise, I didn’t know she was my mother until last night.

I'm kind of curious why Daniels chose to have Doc only be six years old. Not because she behaves as a grown woman--she's a robot, who cares--but we soon find out Utopia's been around for decades, and clearly has always had tech ahead of the curve. Even if she had to invent until the internet was invented IRL for whatever reason, Doc could be over twenty by this point. I only point this out because, given how official the Legion is, wouldn't a new member seemingly appearing out of the ether with no documentation of their previous existence be an issue?

I told you I was running from someone, right? That’s who, but I didn’t realize she’d taken a new name and face until you told me she knew who you were yesterday. How could she know? Even if she saw you, and I don’t think she did because she’d have killed you on the spot, but even if she did, how does that get her a name? She learned it from me. She must have let me go, and kept a back door into my programming so she could slip into my mind any time she chose. She could wear me like a glove, if she wanted.”

By the way, nobody else on the team--except probably D3, because of his super-senses--knew Doc was an AI. In other words, not being frank about her biological status has brought them to ruination. Funny, that.

I was there when she killed third Dreadnought last month, but the second Dreadnought was killed by a kaiju, not a person. Which means she as much as told me who she is.


Not a supervillain, but the supervillain.


“Oh shit.”


“What?” asks Sarah.


“Utopia is—”


“Mistress Malice, yes,” says Doc Impossible.

Oh, my God. Oh, my--I don't care. This reveal has zero-impact. Seriously, the supervillain we spent barely any time on is actually another supervillain we only heard about in an historical exposition dump at the beginning at the book. I'm supposed to be... shocked?

I'm a little suprised I'm using Chamber of Secrets as a comparison again, but here we are. If you're reading that book for the first time, especially if you're a kid, I think the reveal that Tom Riddle grew up to be Lord Voldemort is fairly impactful. In that story, we were introduced to Tom Riddle as a seemingly earnest, good-hearted boy. Like Harry, he was an orphan who saw Hogwarts as a home, which played into the theme of the two of them being rather similar in many ways. We also realise that he deliberately framed Hagrid, basically ruining a very likeable character's life. It ups the stakes because we know what Lord Voldemort's capable of, he's already tried to kill Harry twice, once in the climax of book one, and his actions cast an indelible shadow on the setting and narrative.

Dreadnought's reveal meanwhile is like, if in the first book, Voldemort revealed to Harry that he was also Geralt Gwindlewald! Nobody would give a shit because they only know Grindlewald as a piece of historical trivia mentioned on the back of a trading card. Yeah, Mistress Malice killed two of Danny's predecessors, but there's no indication there was any actual connection between her and them. They're just a long-standing dynasty of superheroes she's happened to fight and win twice.

I guess you could argue the real emotional crux is meant to be Utopia being Doc's creator, but again, Utopia's in this book less than Danny's stupid parents, and Doc basically just pops up occasionally to remind Danny's he's hecken valid. She's no Hagrid, is what I'm trying to say.

“She built me as a culmination of her project to create a true artificial intelligence, to prove consciousness can exist on a synthetic substrate,” says Doc. “I was step one of her plan.”

“What’s she doing?”

“If what I think I know isn’t some kind of double-bluff, I think she’s trying to upload herself. I have always had a fascination with neural-electrical links, which is strange now that I think about it because I’ve never had neurons. She must have been nudging me, all the time, always there, she was—”

I mean, that makes sense, but plenty of people don't have vaginas but are very interested in recreating them.

“The plan, Doctor,” says Sarah.

“Oh. Right. Once she proved consciousness could exist in a digital environment, she’d want to migrate her own mind into such an environment. But that’s not easy to do, there’s a lot of theory of mind questions that need to be solved; if she just made a software copy of her brain, the program might think it was her, but would it be? My mother is the world’s biggest narcissist, so there’s no way she’d let a digital copy of herself have all the fun. She needed a way to be sure it was her inside the machine, not a knock-off. The neural prosthetics I was developing can be re-purposed to convert her brain into a computer one neuron at a time.

And then all the nerds over on Spacebattles will argue about continuity of consciousness for pages and pages, distracting everyone long enough to pull off the heist of the century!

Once her brain is fully digitized, her mind will be software. The connections were there, I just…didn’t see them. God, I’m so stupid.”


Sarah and I trade glances. She looks as lost as I feel. “That’s it? She just wants to be a computer program?”


“No,” says Doc Impossible. “She wants to rule the world. This is a means to an end. As self-aware, self-editing malignant stream of code injected into the Internet, she could take control of everything from online banking to nuclear launch codes. She could store a thousand copies of herself in darknet servers all over the world, and become impossible to kill.”

This is all another attempt to DDOS the Farms, isn't it?

Also, yes, good readers, Age of Ultron had come out two years earlier when this was published. So, when Doc realised she was compromised, she basically copied herself and ran MalwareBytes to tidy herself up a bit. This is the version we're talking too now. She couldn't however delete the version in her actual body, though, because someone needed to tend to Sarah while she was being debugged. Naturally, this lead to nothing but good things, and we've got them on tape!

In the video, Doc Impossible is speaking to the gathered Legion. They lean in, interested in what she has to say. She sets the small device down in the center of the table and steps back. Valkyrja is looking up at her and asking a question when it happens. Little jets of gas spurt from the device, a cloud like a greasy heat smudge fills the air.


“Mother used my body to ambush them. She puppeted me. I don’t know where she got the nerve gas.”


Valkyrja’s mouth is hanging open, cheek muscles bunching and spasming as she flops out of her chair and begins to jerk. Carapace leaps up from his seat, but Doc Impossible points what looks like a car key fob at him, and his armor falls right off in pieces. Almost instantly, he’s crumpled to the ground and choking on his own vomit. Magma is on his feet, staggering towards Doc with his hands out, but trips over his own feet and goes down. He doesn’t get back up. Chlorophyll isn’t fazed by the gas. He grows thorns like claws all over his fists and charges with a shout of rage, but Impossible pulls a gun and shoots him just above his left eye. His head bursts open like bloody cabbage. His leg jumps once, twice, as he lays there at the edge of death. Graywytch’s robes have come alive with burning sigils. Her bird is twitching on the ground next to her, and she’s slashed her arm open with a ceremonial dagger, the blood spattered around her at every point of the compass. The thing wearing Doc Impossible’s body raises its gun and fires at her again and again. The bullets slam into air and burst into shrapnel. Graywytch’s lips curl back and she spits words at Doc’s body. Utopia lowers the gun, says something in reply, and leaves.

The world's greatest heroes, everyone: going down like punks. Except for Graywytch, but she's too good for this book.

“Carapace and Valkyrja are confirmed KIA. Magma probably is, too. Chlorophyll is immune to poison, but likely won’t survive much longer without medical aid. Graywytch is in a protective circle, but if she were able to leave her zone of safety she would have done so by now.”

Seems like a shit protective circle. Also, you telling me the superhero witch doesn't know any combat magic? Or did she not prepare any prismatic spray or magic missiles last long rest?

There’s a hole in the bottom of me, a hole everything is draining out of, leaving me cold and empty. Too late. Too slow. Too weak. I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t strong enough. It’s over. Mistress Malice, Utopia, whatever she wants to call herself—it doesn’t matter. Soon she’ll be able to call herself Empress, if she wants. They’re all dead, and I’m alone. The creeping, bubbling shame of it takes hold as I realize I’m scared, not for the world, but for me. She’s going to kill me. What’s one more Dreadnought but just another notch in her belt?


Sarah perks up. “Wait, what kind of reactor is it?”


Doc Impossible sounds nonplussed. “Supercritical light water fission, why?”


“Then it’s got to have a coolant loop, right? I can’t imagine you could fit even that in the secured zone.”


“No, but the coolant has its own…wait, the security for that hadn’t been upgraded on schedule. It’s on a different system, but main security has a placeholder dummy script in its place. We had to hack it that way to keep the alarms from going off all the time, and then just never got around to actually fixing it. She probably doesn’t even know the hole is there.”

Sarah throws off her blankets and swings her legs over the side of the bed.

“Wait, you’re not healthy enough to be moving around,” says Doc.

“I ain’t dead yet,” snarls Calamity. “Point me to some explosives, I mean to return a favor.”

Calamity is also too good for this book.

“Hey Doc, I’ve got a question,” I say.


“Go ahead.” Her voice has a slight crackle as it comes over the radio link.


“Why does an android need to smoke?”


“Addiction.ini,” says Doc Impossible.


“What?”


“I thought…I thought maybe an addiction would make me more human,” she says. “Like I could be what I wanted to be. Not what she made me. But I was wrong.”

Judith Butlerian Jihad when?

Utopia is there, chestplate open, firing her glittering beam straight through my chest.


There’s no pain, not at first. No, it’s more like a sense of wrongness. There’s something missing, or maybe something where it doesn’t belong. There’s a detonation from far behind me where the inversion beam is carving a tunnel through the building. Hot wind presses my cape to my back and makes dust devils out of rubble.

When I look down at my chest, I see a neat little hole about the size of a golf ball. It’s charred around the edges, and I think it goes all the way through. I open my mouth to scream, and the wound whistles as my scorched, punctured lung begins to leak. The scream dies as a horrified gasp.

Then the pain comes. It comes in crashing tsunami waves, endless and heavy, drowning all thought, obliterating all sense. Something jolts my knees, and I realize I’m falling around the time the floor smacks me in the face. I writhe and gasp.

“Very good, Danielle,” says Utopia. “You almost made it.”

She shoots me again.

The end! I want to thank you all for reading along with me...

...Okay, I'll finish.

I’m unraveling.


The lattice is a hard white net against absolute black. The strings of reality are infinitely thin and infinitely bright. Everything is a knot or a twist in the lattice. Every bird in the sky, every song on the radio, it’s all in the lattice. I’m not different. My body is a pattern of twists and ties and wraps and bindings. But now there are two holes punched straight through. And at the edges, the lines have snapped. They drift and wave in a current that isn’t there, and as they shift, they unkink, untie, unknit themselves. My pattern is growing loose, a cascade of reactions spreading out from the wound. This line is slack so that knot comes undone. These twists are slashed, so those tangles start to slide apart. And every shift, every unraveling, is agony.


“Danielle, can you hear me?” someone asks from far away. A moan is the best reply I can manage. “Please try. I may have overdone it.”

No, no, Utopia, if anything you've under-performed. He can still narrate!

“I was serious when I said I try to avoid unneeded killings.” Utopia really seems to believe that.


“You tried to shoot Calamity. You tried to shoot her in her bed.”


Utopia is quiet for a moment. “Yes. Well. Your presence here shows it would have been better for me if I had.” The lights in the core begin to blink, and holographic screens project images of her brain. The nanomachines are swarming inside her skull, mapping all the connections.

Sometimes the whole brain-uploading thing feels like an agender version of the whole trans thing. Like thinking an identical twin you've brainwashed into thinking it's you actually is. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun sci-fi idea, but you know how gung-ho a lot of these people are about it in real life.

“You’re Mistress Malice.” I try to get my arm under me and push myself to my feet. If I can get to my feet, I might be able to…I don’t know. Something. I’ve got to do something before I die. She killed Valkyrja, and Magma, and all the others. She has to be punished for that. I can’t let her win. My shoulder erupts with pinching, tearing, slicing pain when I put weight on it. It feels like there’s a colony of carnivorous termites carving their way into my joints, chewing on the sinews. I cry out, a feeble squeak. Strongest girl in the world, yep. That’s me.

“‘Mistress?’” She looks over at me and smiles. “No. I never called myself that. Blame the newspapers. I was only Malice. But that was another life.”

...Why? Spoilers for a few paragraphs down, but Utopia thinks she's doing the right thing. This is like MCU Thanos or the High Evolutionary calling themselves General Genocide and Black Mengele.

“Danielle?” She sounds so far away. “Danielle, listen to the sound of my voice. Stay with me. Please. If you die—well, it would be a waste. It would make the next phase of this needlessly difficult.”


In the blackness of the lattice, I see the damage accelerate. It won’t be long now. My pattern begins to slump apart, to fray and snap under the strain. I’m not just dying, I’m breaking up.


No.


No, I don’t think I’m going to accept this.


I’m not going to die on my first day of freedom.


There. That thread is linked to the others around it. I can see the other half of it, see where it tore apart and began to unravel. A strange focus comes over me, and I just…grab them. I grab the threads and I yank them together—


—a spurt of blood—


—a flash of new pain—


—and the snapped thread leaps back together, like magnets.

I apologise for all the big quote blocks lately, but a lot of this stuff needs to be seen in context. Danny has just been shot with the same weapon D3 was--and appears to have an identical wound, no less--but is managing to consciously repair his atomic structure, while holding a conversation, while dealing with a literal hole in his chest. D3 clearly couldn't do that, and Danny hasn't even been Dreadnought for a month. Is this what 21st century Star Wars fans feel like?

“It hurts,” I say. “I’m scared.”


Two lies, both true.


“Hold on, Danielle,” says Utopia. She taps some commands into the computer. “Listen to my voice. If you can stay with me for a little while longer, I can save you.”


“How does…” I swallow back some nausea. “How does taking over the Internet help me with the holes in my body?”

She'll have Keffals order you some bootleg medical supplies.

Utopia looks up. “Oh, is that what my daughter thinks I’m doing? She lacks vision. I suppose I only have myself to blame for that. No, once I’ve uploaded myself, then I will then upload everyone else.” She gestures at the computer core, a giant construct of gleaming steel and faceted crystal. “This is all hypertech now, but I’ve been developing methods to deploy this process with baseline technology. Nobody will be left behind. By necessity, the mass production process will be more destructive than the one I’m using here, but by the end of the year, even the most non-compliant subjects will be brought to heel. We’re all going to leave our bodies behind and live in a simulated environment of my own design. Virtual reality of the purest sort, indistinguishable from the physical world except there will be no crime. No hunger. No death.”


“A utopia.” I clench as a particularly nasty spasm takes me, and then relax, gasping and full of cold, spiky aches.

I'm almost shocked Danny doesn't take Utopia up on that. I'm sure a lot of troons would dig a world where they can actually treat their bodies like avatars in an Oblivion porn-mod and block anyone who disagrees with for real. Also, not shocked a trans author tries to think of a supervillain scheme and comes up with "The Matrix."

She smiles. “Precisely. And it will save us from Nemesis, too. Nemesis is dangerous because of the quantum instabilities it causes. Those instabilities are triggered by observer effects. No observers, no effects. In the world I’m building, humanity will only be able to observe what I allow them to, only think what I give them permission to think.
Until I am God, nobody is safe.”

“Doc was right. You are a narcissist.” Pull another thread. My left pinky cracks and I hiss.

The irony is breathtaking. Also, probably goes without saying, but in quantum physics, an "observer" doesn't have to be, like, a thing with eyes.

“It’s not ego if you can back it up, dear. In a few minutes, I’m going to be deity, and you will be my first priestess. Even if I have to edit your personality to fit.”

Simulation theory would be kind of an interesting rationale for superhero silliness.

“Yeah, no, I don’t think I’m really down for that,” I say. Something is wet and salty on my upper lip. I wipe my nose and my hand comes away smeared scarlet with blood. Eh. Whatever. Finish the rest later. I get to my feet. My gut and chest are tight and painful, but it’s the dull throbbing of a wound beginning to heal. “But tell you what, I’ll fight ya for it.”

Danny put more passion into his speech when she was telling his dad to shove off.

Utopia turns to look at me. She takes a step back and her chest plate snaps open. The world goes to streaks around me and then she’s stumbling back against the railing, my fist
inches deep in her chest, gripped around the glowing azure speck hanging between her lungs. It’s heavier in my hand than I expected.

We lock eyes. Utopia’s face twists with the kind of fury that kills people.

With a sharp tug, I rip the weapon straight out of her chest. A tangle of tubes and wires comes with it, wet and snapping. Her back arches; she goes up on her toes with a rattling gasp of pain. The fragment of exotic matter flares in my hand, painful hot, and I toss it away. I hit her, once, twice. Dents in her metal. Cracks in her plastic. She crumples, and I tear the wire crown from her head, rip its cable from the computer. Utopia’s eyes are glassy, her jaw is slack, and she’s twitching randomly. I smash her arms. I break her legs.

And then…

…and then it’s over.

He's right. No, really, that's it. Utopia's defeated.

The holographic screen is flashing big red PROGRAM ERROR warnings. Sparks jump from the ripped cable. Utopia, Malice, whatever you want to call her, seems to reboot and tries to sit up. With my boot on her neck I helpfully direct her face back to the floor.

I’ve won. My body begins to unclench, and little jags of pain run through me. Wounds and injuries hurrying to make their report. But I’ve won. The relief is overwhelming.

I tap my earbud radio. “All right, Doc. I saved the world. Can I get some food now?”

Seriously. Let's wrap this shit up.

Doc Impossible retakes control of Legion Tower’s systems and flushes the nerve gas from the briefing room. Her robots go in and spray everything down with a decontamination agent, and then the paramedics pour in to see if they can save anyone.

Valkyrja is dead. So is Carapace. Magma is alive, barely, and eight paramedics strain themselves to heave him up onto a creaking gurney and rush him out of the building. He’ll be flown to Hawaii and dunked in a volcano to recuperate. Doc tells me he’ll be up and about in a month or so.

Okay, that is an incredibly metal image, but remember this for next time.

His sister Aloe is on her way to take custody of him, which might get a little interesting when she arrives, what with being a supervillain on parole and everything.

Aloe? Seriously? I'd say they arrested her for having a shit super-name, but if that was a crime, Carapace would've been serving a life-sentence.

Graywytch came out of the whole business without much worse than a slash on her arm, a slash she gave herself to power a spell. She disappears into her condo on one of the lower levels without so much as a thank you. Bitch.

Wouldn't it have been an interesting winkle if Graywytch had helped defeat Utopia, even if she was still a bitch to Danny? Also, you'd think he'd mention the whole death-threat and geas thing.

The Navy is sweeping Puget Sound, but I don’t think they’ll find anything. I doubt there was ever a real escape plan in place. When the mecha got to the shore and realized they’d been set up, whatever they would have done about it would have still played into Utopia’s desire to use them as a sideshow. All those lives tossed away, just to distract any capes she didn’t take care of on her own. Whatever excuses she makes for herself, even if she believes them, Utopia is no different from Malice. I’m looking forward to testifying at her trial.

So, what was Mistress Malice's plan back in the 50s? Did she already know about Nemesis? Was she always a well-intentioned heel, or did she have a Come to Jesus moment in the decades between?

The police insist on coming inside and taking a statement from me while I stuff bulging mouthfuls of pizza and salad in my face. I’m not bothering with single slices and starving myself right now. If this body is my physical ideal, then it’s my ideal, and right now that means I’m going to eat as much as I want. Who cares if I stop looking like a supermodel? I just saved the whole goddamn world.

Thankfully for us, we don't have to deal with a Lizzo-shaped Danny next book.

Doc holds up a phone. “Also, you parents have been calling non-stop. Do you wanna talk to them?”


Again, I hear the door slamming behind me. Time to slam one right back. “Fuck no.”


Doc nods and takes the phone off hold, turning on her heel to head back down the hall. “No, she can’t come to the phone right now. Yeah, superhero stuff. I know, I know, kids these days. Anyhow, have you considered getting a lawyer? Restraining orders can be so embarrassing…”

You'd think having a scene between Danny and his parents after he saves the world from being sucked into Runescape would be interesting. I don't, but that's because this is written by the guy who wrote Dreadnought. Press-time:

“My name is Danielle Tozer. I’m Dreadnought.” Pause while the photographers strobe their flashes and the reporters shout more questions. I lift one hand for silence, willing it not to tremble. The reporters quiet and the camera flashes drop off in frequency. I look down at the notecards in my hands and see how they’re jittering. Stop that, I think, and they do. “I have a statement to make about today’s attack, and then I’ll answer a few questions. Mistress Malice didn’t die in 1961; she went underground. Earlier this month, she re-emerged calling herself Utopia, and murdered the previous Dreadnought.

I see Danny won't be answering any of my questions.

While I was fighting her troops downtown, she ambushed the Legion. Carapace and Valkyrja are—” My voice hitches. The cameras strobe in ecstasy. A deep breath steadies me, and I can continue. “They’re dead. Magma and Chlorophyll have both been seriously wounded. Doctor Impossible is resigning from the Legion Pacifica for personal reasons. According to the Legion’s bylaws, further decisions about the team’s status will have to be deferred until a quorum can be assembled.”


“I want people to know that even with the Legion out of action for the time being, they still have someone looking out for them. I’ve lived in New Port all my life, and I’m not going anywhere.”

I'd be kind of interested to know if the Dreadnoughts have been historically associated with the city, or if that was just D3, but then, I still don't know that guy's first name.

The clapping dies off and they push the microphones in closer.


“I’m transgender, and a lesbian, and I’m not ashamed of that.”

Wow, a "trans-woman" who's exclusively into chicks, what a revelation.

More camera flashes. More shouted questions. A few reporters rush off to get a head start on writing, as if they suddenly know all they need to about me. Idiots. The headlines, some of them at least, are going to be gross. Too many people are going to react like Graywytch. And if I ever wanted to reconcile with my family, that chance has been likely just been sunk. But it doesn’t matter. Saying it out loud gives it power and my nervousness fades away. I feel good. Whatever happens now, I can deal with it.

Because I’m Dreadnought.

And I think maybe I could be a good person.

No, you're really not.


Annnnd that's the book! If you're hungry for more cringe, don't worry, I'll be back very soon with the sequel, Sovereign. Three words. Trannies. Versus. Roco.

 

[Kosher Dill]

There’s a hole in the bottom of me, a hole everything is draining out of, leaving me cold and empty.

"Am hole."

so there’s no way she’d let a digital copy of herself have all the fun. She needed a way to be sure it was her inside the machine, not a knock-off.

She could store a thousand copies of herself in darknet servers all over the world, and become impossible to kill.”

Well, which is it?

This whole business with torturing Gerald and sending him to Crybaby Corner again almost approaches the level of black comedy, but for now it remains just disturbing. Was it really necessary? Did this have to be another torture scene, this time on a helpless invalid?
I hope in the sequel Gerald gets new biotech limbs grown for him and on his very first day out from the cloning lab Danny rips them off again and makes him cry.

She killed Valkyrja, and Magma, and all the others. She has to be punished for that. I can’t let her win.

But at least Danny graduates from villain to anti-hero by the end! Hurrah, I guess.

Utopia’s eyes are glassy, her jaw is slack, and she’s twitching randomly. I smash her arms. I break her legs.

And then…

…and then it’s over.

Utopia is no different from Malice. I’m looking forward to testifying at her trial.

Wait, what? Utopia survived getting pulverized and having her inner workings ripped out by Not-Superman? Did Danny pull his punches and merely turn her into a quadriplegic like Gerald?


Anyway, that was certainly... something. Thanks for suffering through this book for our entertainment

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Well, which is it?

Didn't even catch that. Though, I suppose the crux is making sure she's not just stuck in her head, and all those copies are hardwired to obey her.

I hope in the sequel Gerald gets new biotech limbs grown for him and on his very first day out from the cloning lab Danny rips them off again and makes him cry.

God, I wish. See, Gerald is actually a dickhead for throwing in his lot with a murderous supervillain, yet somehow Danny sucks so hard I'm inclined to sympathise with him.

Wait, what? Utopia survived getting pulverized and having her inner workings ripped out by Not-Superman? Did Danny pull his punches and merely turn her into a quadriplegic like Gerald?

I'm reminded of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1653898669626728449

A lot of badly written or lazy superhero media operates on the idea that you can only kill someone if you explicitly mean too. If you don't you can brutalise people as much as you want. Hell, I'm pretty sure Batman thinks only guns can kill people.

Anyway, that was certainly... something. Thanks for suffering through this book for our entertainment

Don't thank me so soon. We are far from done. Well, we're halfway done, though, hypothetically Daniels might get off his bum and release that third book.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

Woohoo! One book done!

...Also, if Utopia's plan was for mass-forced-uploads, why the hell was she stealing money?

Also also, I do think that the book is legitimately finding reasons for Danny to mutilate people at this point. Gerald could have just been a sick running joke, but how the hell was Unity's dismemberment meant to be anything useful or meaningful? Hell, given that she's been several steps ahead of everyone, was this whole thing an elaborate exit for her remaining meat bits so that people will assume that she's no longer a threat? How do we know she didn't actually digitize herself instantly and the whole bits there were theater? She did say she wanted Dreadnought alive for something, after all.

The whole ending feels rushed and sloppy, and at no point can I remember going "Oh, that's clever, now I see why Utopia did that specific thing earlier." Both her actions and the nature of her powers seems to wander, and don't point to a coherent idea of who she is and what she is doing. A good story will make you feel like there's loads going on beyond the perspectives you see written about that supports the story you do see, but to do that, you need to have an idea about how a world can work, and you need to care enough to hold to those ideas even when they are not the fastest way to get to the next scene you want to write.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

I forgot to mention in the last book post, Danny having a chapter as Wish.com "Wolf-Boy" from Irredeemable amuses me.

 

[Kosher Dill]

...Also, if Utopia's plan was for mass-forced-uploads, why the hell was she stealing money?

I assume to build all the "Matrix machines" to upload everyone. And buy some new weapons, since her minions have a tendency to get... disarmed.

but how the hell was Unity's dismemberment meant to be anything useful or meaningful?

I mean, I could see the reasoning for destroying her - her cyborg body probably is full of secret weapons and doesn't necessarily have to be intact to function. But maiming her and (apparently) dragging her back to stand trial?
I'm aware that "special super-prison for supervillains" is part of the genre, but this is ridiculous.
For all they know, Utopia's last action might be "self-destruct".

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Luckily for us, Utopia seems to exist "off-page" about as much as D3.

 

[M3xus]

Even for a YA book that was terrible. I was shocked when you mentioned we were 80% through and nothing's happened beyond Calamity almost getting iced.

Can't wait to see what further depths of stupidity book 2 brings.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Good news everyone, another dying superhero dropped out of the sky in front of me, so I have a digital copy of Sovereign for us to enjoy together. Watch this space.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

I feel like we need theme music for this phase of the review. What's something almost as stupid as Dreadnought, but also much better?


Hmm...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIYFboJ5XIQ&ab_channel=PowerRangersOfficial

That'll do. Welcome, Transhuman Earth Guardians, to Sovereign.

I remember liking this book a lot more than the first one. I'm guessing this is because more than like, three things happened, but we'll see how much of that was me straining to like it for woke reasons.

The book begins with a dedication:

For the girls who are free.

"We'll get you yet."

Also, "girls" and not "women." I find this telling.

Our story proper opens with Danny watching a TV interview she did earlier while on a plane:

Cut to the curtains opening and Dreadnought steps out. Her blue bodyglove is snug and high-necked, with a white mantle and cape that brushes the back of her knees. Her blond hair has grown out, cut in a more feminine style than the butchy haircut she made her debut with, but still short enough not to be a problem in a fight.

Okay, so the Plot Inciting Orb could radically alter Danny's biology to suit his ideal self-image... but not give him a womb, or grow out his hair. At this point I'm shocked the "magical transition" wasn't limited to the Orb forcibly making Danny assume Tony Reed's patented Angle whenever on camera.

My lawyer and publicist, a dark-haired woman named Cecilia who’s wearing a skirt suit and tie, pauses the video. “Good. That was good. They like that sort of thing.”

The book may say she's a dark-haired lady named Cecilia, but I know who I'm picturing:

I'd go bald too, honey.

“That’s why I did it,” I say, trying to keep the boredom out of my voice. Outside the window, the Southern Ocean foams against the first rocks of Antarctica. We’re almost there, finally. Since I learned to fly, riding in airplanes—even hypertech jets like this one—only slows me down. When I really want to move fast, I just go up into orbit and come back down wherever I please.

Given how fucking buggy hypertech is made out to be, I'd just take the normal plane.

“Pay attention, Danny, this is important,” says Cecilia. It’s been important the last three times we did it too. After that disastrous interview with Rolling Stone, we’ve had to get serious about my media strategy.


God, I have a media strategy.


This is not what I thought being a superhero would be like.

Given how fucking pozzed every mainstream culture publication is, I kind of want to know how Danny managed to fuck up an interview with Rolling Stone. Did he read out some of his sissyfication fanfic?

“So how have things been since that all happened?” he asks in a caring voice, the signal that the interview has moved into the Serious Topics phase. He’s referring to the Third Battle of New Port, nine months ago. The day Dreadnought made her debut. The day the Legion Pacifica was destroyed and a fifteen-year-old girl shouldered the responsibility of protecting an area of four hundred thousand square miles with seventeen million people. Alone.

No, we don't get any clue as to what the first two Battles of New Port were about.

“They’ve been all right, they’ve been all right,” says Dreadnought.


“Are you still in school?”

“No. I was for a while, though. The ROTC guys wouldn’t leave me the hell alone.” The audience laughs. Dreadnought looks like she’s going to say something more, but then realizes this was the line of conversation that spiraled so horribly out of control when she was talking to Rolling Stone. She was quoted saying some pretty venomous things about the Pentagon’s hypocrisy—how they were dragging their feet about accommodating transgender soldiers in the military, but were willing to cut her an exception so they could get her while she was young and put Dreadnought back under Uncle Sam’s thumb, the way no Dreadnought had been since the early ’60s.

A reminder that D3 worked for the Legion Pacifica, whose pay and budget were explicitly paid by the federal government. Also, doesn't fucking type nne diabetes disqualify you from frontline military service in the States? Why the fuck shouldn't needing a constant supply of exogenous hormones bar you?

When the story ran, the thrust of the article was “Dreadnought hates the army!” rather than the basic biographical piece she thought she was being interviewed for.


For a moment it looked like the controversy would derail my federal caping license, which would mean I’d never be able to work outside of my home district in the Pacific Northwest. One particularly noxious anti-transgender member of the House of Representatives even suggested stripping my parents of their federally-provided witness protection detail if I kept making such “anti-American” statements.

Imagine being a superhero and not saving people people you aren't licensed and bonded. If April Daniels wrote The Incredibles, Bob would've just sucked off his boss right there in his office. Also, I'm shocked Danny hasn't directed internet goons to do all the shit they say Kiwis do to his parents.

“Right, okay,” the host says. “So you’re still not a member of the Legion, right?”


A flash of something passes across Dreadnought’s face, there and gone. Cecilia pauses the video. “You slipped.”


“It’s a sore topic,” I say.


“That makes it more important to be able to hide your feelings.”


She’s right, of course. But it still sucks.


The video starts rolling again. “Well, the Legion is basically defunct,” Dreadnought is saying. “And anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to join until I was eighteen anyhow.”


“How’s it gone, protecting New Port without them?”

So, obviously the municipal or state government has given Danny leave to be a superhero, but she still can't join an actual super-team? What even is this world?

Dreadnought pauses before answering. What does one say to that? That she’s fought twelve major battles in nine months, and as a result she gets tense whenever her phone rings? That the nightmares wake her at least once a week? That she’s had to learn basic lessons the hard way every time, and other people have paid with their lives? That she’s done it all alone? That she’s been without her family, without anyone to talk to, because Calamity changed after she was wounded, and because Doc Impossible was always drunk? That even though she’s got a place to stay, she hasn’t decorated, and it still feels like she’s homeless? That sometimes when she’s alone she starts sobbing, and she doesn’t know why?

Doc Impossible is a robot. She clearly programmed herself to be capable of getting drunk. And she goes through the motions of alcoholism even with Danny now basically being completely reliant on her for guidance.


Sounds like a normal glitter family to me.

Or should she talk about the other side of it? About how much she loves the power, about the intoxicating thrill of her own strength? Can she explain how much better food tastes when she buys it with money earned in blood, her blood? Should she tell them about the feral joy of living at the edge of death? About how battle makes her feel dangerous and savage and complete? Should she let them know that sometimes she’s disappointed when a fight ends too quickly? Can she explain how the lattice gets more beautiful every time she looks at it? Would any of them understand if she told them that sometimes she flies for hours, in any direction, just watching all the little people with their little lives, and how she can’t tell if what she feels for them is envy or pity? How can she explain that for the first time in her life, she is free, free, FREE, and she’s never going back, and she’ll kill anyone who tries to take it away from her?

Man, I really hope this doesn't end with Danny being dissolved and his essence being disseminated across the multiverse. Jon Kent has suffered enough without his dad developing AGP.

Is she brave enough to say that for the first time since puberty started, she doesn’t daydream about being dead? That she’s wonderfully, terribly, gloriously alive? That the world is so beautiful it hurts?

You ever feel like these books are in part instruction manuals for what teenagers should tell their doctors?

The conversation goes off on a tangent about what it’s like to run face-first into a bug at four hundred miles an hour, and then circles back around to weightier topics. The Biannual World Conference is happening this year, the closest thing to a meeting of all the world’s capes as possible. Not every cape attends. Not every team sends representatives. But officially, everyone is invited. Dreadnought has been getting emails and phone calls from other capes ahead of the conference, welcoming her to the fold—as if she hasn’t been slugging it out with blackcapes on an almost weekly basis—and despite her occasional annoyance at the tone of some of the welcomes, her enthusiasm for attending the conference is palpable. Which is why, of course, Cecilia made sure that it came up in the conversation. Dreadnought’s eyes light up, and her shoulders loosen.

Honestly, the idea of superheroes throwing a trade expo is kind of wonderful. Don't worry, Daniels doesn't do anything interesting with it, so I reckon it's up for grabs.

We come over a ridge of stony hills, and there in the distance are the convention grounds. The world’s only luxury hotel south of the Antarctic Circle. It’s used once every two years. My knees are bouncing. My seat is suddenly uncomfortable. I want to head over to the jet’s door, get out, and fly there myself, because holy crap, I’m going to the world convention! All the people I’m going to meet, all the things I’m going to see—the next two days are going to be amazing.

I refer you to my previous statement. Also, you'd think the heroes would prefer nice weather.

Oh, Doc Impossible's on the plane too.

“Come on, Doc, hurry up!”


“Uh, maybe you two ought to go on ahead without me,” she says, not meeting my eyes.


“Why?”


“I don’t think I’m going to be really popular this year. It’ll go better for you if we don’t show up together.”


Nine months ago, Doc’s mother, Mistress Malice—now working under the name Utopia—hacked her brain and used her body to ambush the Legion Pacifica. Valkyrja and Carapace died. Magma was forced into retirement because of his injuries.

Yeah, despite being dropped into a fucking volcano to magically regenerate from his injuries, Magma's medically retired. We later see he walks with a cane. Between this and the Plot Inciting Orb, it seems like supernatural sources of power are really fucking shit at their job in this universe.

Chlorophyll suffered brain damage, and when he was stable, his sister showed up to take custody of him. Nobody’s heard from them since. The thing is, everyone thought Malice had been dead for fifty years. Doc Impossible was scared that if anyone found out she was an android built by a supervillain, they’d throw her in prison, or worse. So she kept her mouth shut, and the Legion died.

I float back to her and take her by the arm. “It wasn’t your fault, Doc. It was hers.”

Doc Impossible sighs. “Let’s say I believe that; other people won’t, or won’t care.”

I mean, I'm glad Doc realises it was in fact shitty and irresponsible of her to keep the fact she was hackable by a supervillain secret from her friends and co-workers.

Chapter 2:

Even the walk through the hotel to our room has me so excited my feet barely touch the ground. My head is constantly on a swivel. There’s Gravestone, with his high-collared cape of shadows! And there’s the Crimson Rose with her enchanted rapier! And they’re just like, chilling out, waiting around for more jets to come in. Okay, sure, there’s a lot of people out of costume too—hangers-on, con volunteers, capes wearing civvies—but I see more superheroes just in the ten-minute walk to the rooms than I have in the nine months since I started this gig. It takes a concerted effort not to dig into my bags for my little notebook and start demanding autographs right here and now.

It still amazes me Daniels thinks trans shit is more interesting than capeshit.

“This is so cool!” And the convention site is pretty amazing too. Everything here is elegant, restrained. Polished stone floors and subtle design touches on the walls. It feels like we’re wasting money just walking through the place.

What kind of designs? What kind of subtle touches?

The first World Conference happened in 1969. Eight years before, Mistress Malice’s campaign for world domination had ushered in a new era. Now capes were more than colorful criminals and the heroes who fought them or obedient instruments of existing state power. In the new age, superheroes were—or could be, at least—major powers on the international stage in their own right. As this new understanding took hold, some in the cape community called for greater cooperation and coordination across national lines.


The first World Conference was attended by only twenty-three capes. The political tensions of the Cold War meant they had to meet on neutral ground, and since none of the non-aligned countries wanted to host, that meant they had to meet in Antarctica. Almost a half-century of growth and development later, the World Conference has become one of the most important trade shows on the planet. So that’s the history of it, the why, the what, and the how. But knowing that doesn’t prepare me for what it actually is.

I feel like pointing out there were plenty of summits and shit between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that took place in their own countries, but whatever. Still, there's a reason the UN is in New York and not international waters.

Everything a superhero could possibly want to buy is spread out beneath me. Rows and rows of booths and pavilions stretch across the floor, draped with glowing holograms and shifting signs beckoning capes to try their wares.


Bystander insurance. Hypertech components. Mystical ingredients. Training DVDs and seminar packages. An entire row dedicated to earbud radios. A row of government booths offering liaison contracts and operating licenses for capes who want to take their work to the international scene. Weapons, handcuffs, and a dozen kinds of grappling hooks.

"Become a glowie today!"

There’s an entire block of costume fitters, tailors, and designers. Some have fancy hypertech fitting booths, with lasers to take a person’s exact dimensions for a truly skintight fit. There’s a booth wreathed in shadows and fog, where a gnarled old witch sits behind trays of enchanted jewelry to accent and supplement a mystically inclined superhero’s arsenal. And there are plain old tailors with pins crimped between their teeth, holding measuring tapes up to capes who stand on stools in front of mirrors.

Edna Mode however was banned for making a comment about mens and womens measurements that was deemed biological essentialism.

“Why don’t they have this every year?” I ask. The thought that I’ll have go two years without seeing this again is suddenly loathsome.


“There’s not enough of a market to support an annual event,” says Doc, popping a small lollipop into her mouth. She’s trying to quit smoking, which she could do with a few seconds of concentration if she were willing to edit her own configuration files, but she’s not. She says it doesn’t count unless she does it the human way. “What do you want to see first?”

I feel like I could make a comparison between this behavior and those period icey-pole things they sell to TIMs.

We do a whirlwind tour of the convention floor, trying to get a feel for where we want to return for some serious shopping. One of the vendors is selling a set of matched revolvers with built-in laser sights that would be perfect for Calamity, and a pang goes through me. I invited her to come, but she brushed me off. This is nothing but a whitecape circle jerk, she said, and waved me away with her prosthetic hand. Ever since she lost her arm, she’s been different. Distant. Harder. Less willing to trust. Being wounded meant more than becoming one-handed for her, but she’s vague about the specifics. When I asked, all she would say is that even hypertech can’t fix everything.

I buy the guns and have them sent to my room.

I'm honestly surprised they couldn't just grow Calamity a new arm. Eh, maybe her power of heightened white-blood cell counts was an issue.

We’re at an intersection, looking at the schedule of panels to see if there are any talks we want to attend. The panels here have titles like Whitecapes Who Aren’t White: Modern Challenges for Superheroes of Color

Is there a chapter about why so many blackfellas have lightning powers?

and Passing The Torch: When Capes Get Old.

Do I make a joke about how Miles Morales is better in most spin-off media than the actual comics, or something bitter about aging up Jon Kent again?

I’m trying to decide between #CapesLikeUs: Do Superheroes Belong on Social Media? and Are Graycapes a Menace, an Asset, or Both? when Doc tugs at my cape and points.

To answer the first question, only when they're doing viral marketing for The Boys, otherwise you get cringe like Injustice. Also, cape-publishers must overcharge like academic presses if Danny can't buy both.

Red Steel is about six-and-a-half feet tall. His black hair has been shot through with silver, and he’s got wrinkles like oak bark, but he still carries himself with the confidence of a man a quarter of his age. He’s wearing the classic Cossack pants and silk shirt he made his debut in, but the red in his shirt isn’t the scarlet of socialism triumphant. It’s the dark rust of a dream denied. Since the fall of Communism, he’s made his way as a high-end mercenary, living off the worst parts of the capitalism he spent his life fighting.


“Holy shit,” I mutter.


“So you are the new Dreadnought,” he says. His voice is deep and carries just a touch of his Russian accent.

You might remember Red Steel being the first super-being D1 faced off against, and also as the guy who teamed up with D2 to take down Mistress Malice back in the 50s. He's had a frenemy kind of deal with the Dreadnought dynasty ever since. It's a neat concept, though, like everything else in Dreadnought, fairly thinly sketched. He's quite friendly to Danny, though he makes it clear that, sooner or later, they will throwdown. That's just how it is.

“Hi, Magma!” I call as I pop up into the air and fly over. Magma is leaning on a cane, and his cheeks seem sunken under his wiry brush of a beard. The nerve gas Malice hit him with last year didn’t do him any good, and he’s had to retire. He went off on a soul-searching trip after he finally got out of the hospital, and from what I’ve heard, it’s kind of amazing he made it down here. “How have you been?”

He wasn't in a hospital, he was dumped into a fucking volcano! Did April Daniels forget that? How do you forget dropping a character into the Earth's fiery fistula? My best guess is that he realised having an experienced adult Legion member who wasn't a drunk robot would interfere with the plot.

“I’m getting along, I’m getting along,” he says. “How’s caping suiting you?”

“It’s amazing. I feel good.”

“Excellent,” says Magma, smiling. “I figured you’d do well. Here, let me introduce you to—” He turns and beckons to someone over the crowd. He starts forward, cane and step, cane and step. “Aloe, Aloe come over here. I want to introduce you to Dreadnought.”

Magma brings me to a table, and as we get close a devastatingly beautiful woman stands and makes her way over to us. She’s green. Every part of her—skin, hair, lips, eyes, everything but her clothes and her teeth. All shades of green. I know who she is immediately, and it takes effort not to tense up. I’ve read her dossier too. She’s a nasty piece of work.

This is Aloe. She's just Poison Ivy with a shittier name, and Chlorophyll's brother. She's also dating Magma. As for Chlorophyll...

Through a brief gap in the crowd, I glimpse a man as green as his sister get up from a table and come over to us. Chlorophyll looks much the same as the last time I saw him. The scar on his forehead and the bald spot in his hair don’t even stand out that much. But his body language is all wrong. The Chlorophyll I knew was all languid grace and open gazes. This man has his shoulders drawn in tight, and he clutches a coloring book in one hand, a box of crayons in the other.


“Scott, hon, this is Dreadnought.”


“Hi,” says Chlorophyll. “Have we met?”


It feels like I’m listening to someone else answer with my voice. “Yes, briefly.”


“Oh.” Sorrow, frustration, rage. It all flits across his face between one moment and the next, there and gone. “Sorry, I don’t remember you. I don’t remember lots of things from before. Before I got hurt, I mean.”

Yeah, brain damage means you can't take Robert Downy Junior's advice.

Utopia shot Chlorophyll in the head while she wore Doc Impossible’s body like a puppet. To be honest, I didn’t like him when we first met. I thought he was too keen to use me and not interested enough in standing up for me. But right here, right now, I wish Utopia was on the loose again, just so I’d have an excuse to beat the shit out of her one more time.

“Do you want to see my coloring?” he asks me.

“Sure,” I say.

He opens the coloring book and shows me his work. “The doctors say this is good for me.”

“It’s very nice.” It looks like a five-year-old did it.

Kevin Gibes is jealous.

Doc makes her way through the crowd, and it all goes straight to Hell.


Chlorophyll looks up, and the crayons slip out of his hand and spill across the ground.


“It’s her.” He starts to shake. “She’s the one who hurt me.”


“Oh shit,” says Doc, going pale.


Magma’s face darkens. “What the hell are you doing here?”


“Don’t let her hurt me again!” says Chlorophyll.


Aloe steps between them, her back to her brother, arms spread to defend him. “Get away from us!”


I am such an idiot.

Yeah, your author wrote this scene, yet probably doesn't get why some rape shelters don't want to let dudes in dresses in.

“You shouldn’t even be here!” Magma says.


“Hey, wait, Doc has every right to be here,” I say, catching up.


“Danny, don’t,” says Doc with a warning look. “Magma, I’m sorry. Really.”


“Apologies don’t mean much for things like this,” says Magma. “He wakes up screaming half the nights, did you know that?”

To be fair, I've doing that took ever since I took this task upon myself.

I hit him in the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him a little. “What the hell was that about? She didn’t do anything wrong!”

“She lied, Danny,” says Magma. “She lied to us about who she was, about what she was, and she didn’t tell us Malice was still alive. If she had, maybe—things might have worked out differently.”

My chest feels all clenched up. This is all wrong. It’s not supposed to go this way. “She was scared.”

“We trusted her!” he snaps. “All that time we trusted her, all that time we let her be one of us. She stopped wanting to do fieldwork, and we let her stay on. She stopped wanting to leave the tower, and we let her stay on. We never asked why. We never told her she wasn’t pulling her weight, because we trusted her. Because we thought we understood what she was going through, we thought we understood why. She lied to us, Danny! For years. To our faces.”

She was also literally a threat to national security.

The hard, hot nugget of defiance in my chest that tells me I can never back down again flares up. I square my shoulders and look Magma dead in the eye. “Dreadnought knew.”


“What?” Magma seems caught off guard.


“Dreadnought, the last one. He knew.”


He shakes his head. “How do you know that?”


“I can see things, like the underside of reality, all the strings holding it together,” I say. “When I look at you in the lattice, I see your bones, and where your nerves are all clotted up with damage. When I look at her, it’s obvious she’s an android. I only met her a few times before she told me, and I never had a reason to check her out in the lattice, but Dreadnought lived in the same building as she did for, what, five years? There’s no way he didn’t realize what she was. He kept her secret because he knew it wasn’t his secret to tell.”

This is of course meant to be a parallel for like, trans people going "stealth" but that only really works if Doc Impossible looked like this:

And everyone was too polite to mention it.

“You’re right. It isn’t. Death isn’t fair. I’m not going to tell you who to work with, Danielle. And if you still want to talk, I am always here to listen. But me and her? We’re finished, and I need you to respect that.” Magma turns to head back to Aloe and Chlorophyll. She’s hugging her brother tight as he shakes, whispering into his ear as he presses his face into the crook of her neck.

More than reasonable, frankly.