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

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Also, I guarantee you that the name Carapace came about because of free association from Iron Man. "Iron Man, Shell Head, Shell, Carapace! Done!"

If so, I kind of wish this book was called "Single Bound."

 

[Kosher Dill]

I'm astonished what a perfect distillation of AGP coomerism this book seems to be.
"What would you do if you got Superman's powers?"
"Lash out in rage, show off a bit, turn into a hawt chick and try to bed the hawt chicks from my bedroom wall posters"

The bit about him turning into a girl but also infertile because the powers give him his ideal is really something too. The AGP literally wants to be a sex machine wuth no icky inconveniences related to reproduction.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

The bit about him turning into a girl but also infertile because the powers give him his ideal is really something too. The AGP literally wants to be a sex machine wuth no icky inconveniences related to reproduction.

But they get to act all sad about it, not that it matters because they've got an affirming mad scientists who can just make them babies if they want them.

 

[LoverofPi]

But they get to act all sad about it, not that it matters because they've got an affirming mad scientists who can just make them babies if they want them.

You know, it's bizarre that the plot orb can make his testes into functional ovaries apart from eggs, but didn't see fit to give him a uterus. Really doesn't speak well to Danny's "idealized self image." That or the Orb knew it needed a host, but also knew better than to let Danny have any chance to fuck up a child of his/her/its own

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

You know, it's bizarre that the plot orb can make his testes into functional ovaries apart from eggs, but didn't see fit to give him a uterus. Really doesn't speak well to Danny's "idealized self image." That or the Orb knew it needed a host, but also knew better than to let Danny have any chance to fuck up a child of his/her/its own

Actually, that makes me wonder. Did Dreadnought 3 have kids? A spouse? Wouldn’t Danny meeting some of his loved ones be a potentially dramatic or moving scene?

 

[LoverofPi]

Actually, that makes me wonder. Did Dreadnought 3 have kids? A spouse? Wouldn’t Danny meeting some of his loved ones be a potentially dramatic or moving scene?

Well we already met his best friend or at least that's the vibe I got off Shell man, and Danny handled that with the tact of a burning sledgehammer. I suspect meeting D3's family would go even worse.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Well we already met his best friend or at least that's the vibe I got off Shell man, and Danny handled that with the tact of a burning sledgehammer. I suspect meeting D3's family would go even worse.

I would honestly hope D3 was a gay dude, because Danny would definitely try to do girl-talk with his widow.

 

[mindlessobserver]

This absolute trash is going to get a movie deal, isn't it

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

This absolute trash is going to get a movie deal, isn't it

It’s kind of the perfect trans movie. You get asspats for making it, but you don’t have to cast an actual trans actor. I kind of doubt it, though. The series seems pretty dead in the water. The third book was meant to come out like four years ago.

 

[Peru oso donas]

Another funny thing about the whole "gets turned into an extremely hot chick that is unrecognizable from a real woman, but has no womb" i noticed, if Daniel is a transbian, why does he give a shit about getting pregnant in the first place? If he wanted children he can always have his wife (assuming its a real woman and not a non magic troon) be the one getting knocked up, or adopt a child.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Honestly, I don’t think Danny was saddened by being barren, I think he was pissed that he was technically still male. Basically, he wanted a uterus for the same reason Kev does: so the TERFs have less ammunition/coom.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

For a moment, I’m frozen. How did…wait. I recognize her eyes now, and the way she holds her shoulders.

“Sarah?”

“No,” blurts Calamity. “Don’t rightly know who that is.”

“No, you’re totally Sarah. You just have a bandanna over your face and you’re talking funny.”

“All right, fine, shut up about it!” she whispers sharply. “You want the whole world to know?”

Wow, we whole bits in one book that are kind of funny on purpose. You're spoiling me, Daniels!

“I’m not Dreadnought,” I say quietly.


“I beg to differ,” she says, pointing up at the window and tracing my path of descent.


“Dreadnought was more than his mantle. Yeah, I got his powers when he died, but that doesn’t automatically make me Dreadnought too.”


Sarah, or Calamity I guess, hooks her thumbs through her gun belt. “Don’t see why not. Seems that’s how it’s been working since Eden.”

Eden? The Legion don't have a giant albino torso crucified under their base, do they?

“Do you really have to talk like that?”


“Sure do; gotta sell the persona. Elsewise, I’m just a freak with a gun, and then where would I be?”

I feel like with how bureaucratic superheroes are in this book, talking in a funny voice won't help much.

Wanna go caping?”

There’s a little fluttery sensation in my chest. I’ve been thinking about it, obviously. That rescue, man, that was amazing. Even after everything that happened today with David and Valkyrja, the high from saving those people is still with me as this quiet little trickle of joy in the background. So hells yeah, I want to go caping! But am I ready? Is it right? Is it a good idea? Maybe I got lucky. Maybe I’ll screw things up. Maybe I’ll find out I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I’ll get someone hurt. Or killed.

It's a superhero chapter, so suddenly Danny gives a shit about superhero stuff again.

“I’m not sure I’m supposed to,” I say at last. “I’m still using throwaway colors.”


Calamity’s eyes narrow over her bandanna. “Throwaway colors.”


“Yeah, like just a neutral outfit to say I’m not—”


“I know what they are. I am less certain as to why you’d fall for all that prissy whitecape crap.”

Okay, so nobody but the superheroes respect the throwaway colour nonsense. That makes sense, but why then do the superheroes still insist on it? Surely they've noticed the kids they stick in them still get jumped by supervillains looking for easy XP or whatever.

“Oh. You’re a…”


“You can say it,” she says encouragingly. “Ain’t a dirty word: graycape.”


“So, does that mean you, like—”


“Have exceptionally strong moral fiber? Yes, it does.”


I was going to say kill people, but somehow that seems impolite. “Then why not be a whitecape?”


“That’s a luxury for the rich and the powerful. People working my side of the street don’t have the option of avoiding difficult moral choices.” Calamity’s voice is sharp, almost aggressive. “Not a whole hell of a lot of us can fly, so we don’t get to be above it all, like the fancy folk up at the Legion.”

Are we really supposed to believe that "whitecapes"--who remember, are basically colourfully dressed, government approved super-soldiers--never kill people? Daniels, you do realise the main reason Batman doesn't kill is because covers with the Joker on them sell really well, right? Your guys don't have to worry about that, nobody's buying the Mistress Malice spin-off.

I think of Doc Impossible and Valkyrja. I think of Magma, and how he stood up for me at the meeting. Suddenly I’m feeling defensive, like Calamity is talking shit about my friends, even though I barely know them. “If you hate whitecapes so much, why are you coming to me? I’m not even any kind of cape yet, and even if I was, I like the Legion.”

Didn't you fucking hate all of them for not outright making Graywytch suck the girl-cock a couple of chapters ago?

“You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed how insufferable they are? The little tin gods who abandon us when they get bored?”


“They seem to want to help people to me,” I say. “They stopped that asteroid last year, and they went out of their way to protect my identity.”


She rocks back on her heels a little bit, looks at me across her nose. “Shoot, maybe you haven’t seen it. Might be they’re on their best behavior around you. They’d want you on their team for sure.”

This is the kind of thing you write when you're trying to reconstruct Alan Moore from a single beard hair.

You know, if Daniels didn't want Danny to do the sensible thing and just run off to the Legion, why not have him get tight with Calamity before meeting them, so he's more primed to distrust "whitecapes" to begin with? Yeah, him and Calamity doing capeshit together would cut into Danny wallowing in his own misery and doing homework, but... yes, yes it would.

“I don’t know about that.” Now all I can think about is Graywytch calling me a boy, and Carapace getting nervous about the idea of me being called Dreadnought, or how Chlorophyll was ready to throw me under the bus just as long as the team got what it wanted out of me. They all seemed awfully quick to want to avoid dealing with me, one way or the other. When I think about it that way, Calamity starts to make more sense.

This isn't inner-conflict, this is just bipolar writing.

“Why not? You’re the new Dreadnought, ain’t you?” she says. “Mightier than a battleship and faster than a jet, if I’ve heard correctly.”

Clearly not everyone can be Siegel and Shuster.

“They…well, I’m a minor. So I can’t join yet. And…”

“And what?” she presses.

“Some of them seem uncomfortable about me being transgender.” It comes out almost as a mutter, and I feel like such a tool. Almost as if, by not speaking up strongly I’m betraying myself, but by saying anything at all, I’m betraying them.

“There. You see?” Calamity nods sharply. “Whitecapes are happy to draw neat little lines that make neat little boxes and act like they’re Justice with her scales, but the moment someone doesn’t fit into their cute little grid, suddenly they don’t quite care about what’s fair or not, do they?”

Because if there's one thing American corporate media is against right now, it's transgender identity.

It's always hilarious when people act like being trans is such an affront to the Powers That Be. "Hmm, your son strayed slightly from rigidly defined gender norms? Better subject them to years of brutal medicalisation and make them a permanent ward of the pharmaceutical industry so they can kind of resemble the opposite sex." How punk.

“Some of them really stood up for me.”


“Did they kick the other ones off the team?”


“No, of course not.”


“Then they’re aiding and abetting your enemy.” She steps close, and for a brief moment drops the accent. “Don’t be so fast to hop in bed with them. Trust me.”

For all we know Graywytch's main job on the team is keeping the portal to Hell under the city from opening. This is a superhero team, not a fucking Discord server.

That seems a bit simple to me. I can’t imagine Doc Impossible or Valkyrja putting up with that kind of crap on a long-term basis, and though I don’t know Magma as well, he was on my side, too. Even knowing I’m trans, they still let me keep the provisional membership, and Doc Impossible gave me all these wonderful clothes.


But they’ve all been teammates for years, saved each other’s lives a million times, I bet. Calamity might be right. It might be really stupid of me to expect any of them would turn on their own if it came down to a choice between me and one of their team. I really don’t know them well. Can I afford that kind of risk?

The "risk" that someone in the same apartment complex of you doesn't think you're a woman.

(Yes, of course Graywytch turns out to be insane and evil, is that even a spoiler?)

“I dunno…” I say, which is the closest to a coherent thought on the subject I can muster up. It’s like I can see both sides of the argument with perfect clarity, but I can’t see what my own opinion should be.

Yeah, the kid who thought he was a girl because he liked to draw sees with perfect clarity.

She reaches out and pulls on my sleeve. “Come on, it’ll be fun. I won’t even make fun of you for wearing prissy throwaway colors. Not too loudly, anyway.”

The window to my room pours a little yellow square into the night. What do I have going for me here? Homework and sitting silently in my room all night so I won’t invite another screaming session. When I think of it that way, it’s not even really a decision.

Danny then proceeded to do AP calculus for seven hours.

The chapters lately have been really short and thin on content, so, let's do another:

It took a moment to get the hang of following Calamity from a few hundred feet up so I wouldn’t be spotted. She has an expensive-looking motorcycle, with an aggressive riding posture that’s got her leaning so far forward she’s almost on her stomach, and fat road-grabbing tires. “What’s a cowgirl without her horse?” she said to me as she straddled the machine’s enormous engine. To my dismay, she obeys all the traffic laws except for the one about being sixteen and having a license. Her helmet hides her age, and she doesn’t give cops reason to pull her over. It’s as good a way of traversing the city as any for a flightless cape.

Pretending to be a badass anti-authoritarian while stringently obeying traffic laws is a pretty good analogy for the whole trans movement.

Calamity pulls off the highway, and then it’s another tortuously slow crawl through surface streets until we’re at the edge of the really seedy part of McNeal Island, the middle of the three islands, two peninsulas, and curving line of mainland that make up New Port City. McNeal Island was a real solid working man’s neighborhood during the mid-20th century, but then the Mayo Cove shipyards went out of business, and the other industrial yards followed suit a decade later. After that, the whole island did a swan dive into urban rot. There have been some efforts to rejuvenate it, and I hear it’s better than what it was like in the eighties and early nineties. It’s still not a place I’d want to park a bike like Calamity’s, but she seems to know what she’s doing. She circles a block once before she pulls into a narrow alleyway between two decrepit brick buildings, kills the engine, and backs the bike into some deep shadows.

Okay, so, I did some quick googling about the place names here, and I'm a little confused. New Port City is fictional (and blandly named) but Mayo Cove and McNeal Island are real places in the Puget Sound. However, as far as I can tell, McNeal Island has never been a "working class neighborhood." For most of its history, it was a famous prison. Charles Manson and the Birdman of Alcatraz both did time there. I can't find any reference to Mayo Cove having shipyards at any point, so I have no clue what Daniels is going for.

Calamity is amazing. She runs full speed across the roof of one building, leaps like a gazelle over an alley and keeps going. Without breaking stride she hurdles air conditioner ducts, fire escapes, and skylights. Her feet are light and silent. She seems to barely touch the ground after she vaults off of one roof with her arms stretched out, flips her legs back over her head once, and touches down on the other side like a leaf skimming across the sidewalk.


“Why, exactly, are you not on every varsity team at school?” I ask her after about the tenth amazing, Olympics-class feat of gymnastics performed in the dark, on wet surfaces, over concrete.


“Nobody with anything useful to do has time for that,”

"Which is why we should let boys compete on girls' teams, boy-howdy."

Are you ready for the deepest cut in Dreadnought?

Don’t tell Uncle Sam, but I’m a super soldier.”


“What?”


“Yeah, my hand-eye coordination is inhuman, my flexibility is beyond human norms, and my muscle density is fantastic. I can bench press three times my body weight without straining too hard.” She shrugs. “I’ve never had a cold or a flu.”

All this time she’s been walking around at school like she’s nothing special, and at any moment could toss one of the varsity linebackers around like a bag of potatoes. Between me and Calamity, I’m starting to wonder how big a segment of the student body is secretly metahuman. Maybe we can form a club. “How did it happen?”

Is this meant to be a metaphor for how being genderspecial is ackshally super-common or something?

“Born with it. Hell, everyone on my Dad’s side of the family has it. Anyone who traces a direct line back to grandpa gets it.”


“And where did he get it?”


“Uncle Sam. Back during World War II, the government got to playing around with exotic chemistry. They were trying to create something that could call out Hitler’s Übermenschen. Uh, this was before Dreadnought showed up, obviously. Once they whipped up a batch of this super serum, they needed someone to try it out on, so they did whatever white men do when they have a dangerous, unpleasant job that wants doing—they looked around for some brown people and volunteered them. That was granddad. They told him it was a new kind of vaccine. The serum worked, and after the war when he had kids we found out it was heritable, too.”

Okay, so this is pretty blatantly lifting Isaiah Bradley from Marvel Comics. If you didn't know, Isaiah deal is, after the super-soldier serum that created Captain America was lost, they tried recreating it using black soldiers. Originally, the plan was for Isaiah to be the prototype super-soldier, but that was changed due to timeline issues or something. Either way, Isaiah was the only long term survivor of the program, and even he eventually succumbed to dementia and other health problems due to flaws in the serum. It was in part a kind of allegory for stuff like the Tuskegee Study, where a bunch of black dudes with syphilis were told they didn't have the disease to see how it progressed without treatment. You can guess how that turned out. I've read the original miniseries Isiah debuted in, and to my recollection it was pretty good, possibly because it was written in 2003 and not 2023.

Now, Dreadnought was published in 2017, three years before Isaiah appeared in The Falcon and Winter Soldier, so he was relatively obscure at the time. Given how... surface Daniels' appreciation of the superhero genre appears to be, it's kind of surprising he even knew about Isaiah. There are two equally depressing possibilities I see. One, he just googled "wokest Marvel shit I can rip off" or he's just such a bad writer that his fanboyism is mistakable for apathy.

Funnily enough, this does kind of make Calamity an analogue to the character Patriot from Young Avengers. Patriot was Isaiah's grandson and claimed to inherit his superpowers from him... except his father was actually born before Isaiah was even turned into a super-soldier, and he was actually abusing drugs made up of ground up mutants and shit. Bit tangential, but pretty funny in a trans novel.

“That’s…wow. How come nobody’s ever heard of this?” The government has done all sorts of sketchy things over the years, but human testing of a superweapon is screwed up even for the Pentagon.

I hate it when woke books pretend that the US government doing evil shit is still shocking to readers.

It’s all still top secret. There were some glitches; all the test subjects died within six months except granddad.

"They also looked a bit like Proud Family characters who disobeyed Willy Wonka, but that was pretty minor all things considered."

But that’s only for the people who were directly treated with the serum. If you get it through your parents, it only carries a fifty percent risk of leukemia within ten years of exposure. When I was born, I had three brothers. Now I have one.”


“Jesus Christ!”


“Ain’t nothing to worry your mind about.” She sets her arm on my shoulder. “I’ve been in remission for ten years, and I get a blood screen every other month.”

Not sure how that gels with Sarah never getting a cold or shit, but I don't know that much about blood cancer.

The complications I’ve been dealing with seem petty and insignificant all of the sudden. I want to say something profound and insightful. What I come out with is, “That sucks.”

Behold, the black person, still capable of shutting up trannies.

“Eh, you get used to it. You won’t be telling nobody about this, by the way.” She says this with the kind of vehemence that lets me know that superpowers or not, this isn’t a subject I want to make her angry about. “We know the serum’s effects are heritable. The Feds don’t, and we aim to keep it that way. They’ve done enough to my family already.”

Given your family's version of a bar mitzvah is chemo, I'm not sure how they haven't gleaned this from your medical records.

So we sit and we wait for something to happen. My first hour of real caping turns out to be a lot quieter than I thought it would be. We sit and we chat and get to know one another. It’s weird. We never hung out at school before, and in fact I was barely aware of her existence. But now, sitting on a roof at night in costume, we seem to know each other better than we ever did back in the real world. That’s what this feels like, like I’ve left my life behind. Here, it’s totally normal for a girl dressed like a cowboy to be parkouring all over the city, and for me to be floating along behind her. Here, it’s not any kind of problem for me to be a girl. Here, no one has ever called me a boy.

"Here, everyone is blind, deaf, and stupid."

Calamity tells me about the adventures she’s had caping around the city, and I tell her about how I transitioned. When I tell her about David, and how he suddenly became a jerk overnight, she surprises me by nodding along.


“He is not blessed with an overly positive reputation among the girls I know at school,” she says.


“What do you mean?”


The accent drops. “I mean he’s a frickin’ creeper! You never noticed?”

"Naturally, despite you being his best friend and never, ever objecting to his behavior, none of that reputation has spilled over to you, Charlotte Clymer."

“No?”

“Yeah. There ain’t a skinny girl in our year he hasn’t made a pass at. Ain’t nothing wrong with flirting, but he don’t even shower first. He does nothing to pretty himself up, and then he’s always sulky when someone brushes him off. Maybe that kind of thing is hard to see when you’re a boy—”

“I was never a boy,” I say, sharper than I intend to. “I mean, I was always a girl. But now people can see it.”

Calamity shrugs. “Fair enough,” she says, like I corrected her about my hair color. “But he couldn’t see you were a girl, either. So he didn’t treat you like one.”

Ah, so I guess David never interacted with or talked about girls to Danny, his best guy-friend in the whole world. That makes sense.

I repeat to her what he said as we last parted, and she sucks in a breath. “You’re kidding.”


“No.” It sucks, really, and I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it. With everything that’s been happening, it’s been easy to jump from distraction to distraction all day and ignore what happened between us. But now it’s kind of lying out there in the open, and I can’t seem to look away again.


My best friend in the world called me a tranny and said he hoped someone would rape me.

Christ, Daniel summarises his own book more than I do! And again, why would Danny even register as a troon to David?

This thing keeps happening, this thing where something amazing happens to me, and then before I can even really enjoy it, somebody comes along and kicks mud in my face. It starts slowly. A few words here, a sentence there. Calamity dips her head encouragingly, and I start to talk about it. Finally, I get to be who I want to be, and to stop pretending to be something I’m not. There’s nothing wrong with being a boy, but that’s not who I am, and I never have been.

Remember when Danny was going on about "rejecting manhood" and how men don't really have feelings like women do? Eventually, the conversation shifts to Danny's super-suit:

“So what exactly are those higher functions?”


“Other than changing color, I don’t know yet.”


“You mean there’s more than that?”


“Looks like it.” Several colored icons are popping up on my phone. I read off their labels. “Diagnostics, repair mode, color shifting, and something about radar and thermal masking modes.”


“How the hell—”


I shrug. “It’s hypertech. Doc Impossible made it for me. Oh hey, it’s got bluetooth.”


“White girls get all the cool toys.”

A reminder that Sarah has a custom motorbike and guns with specialised ammo.

“Yes, that’s why they gave this to me. Because I’m white.”


Calamity drops her eyebrows at me and I feel silly already. “Are you seriously whining about a little bit of teasing?”

“Good. Because that’d be fucking petty, and I’d hate to have to stop liking you.”

“So you like me.”

“I haven’t shot you yet, so it does stand to reason.” Something incredibly stupid is about to come out of my mouth, but I’m saved by Calamity straightening up and pointing across the street. “I’ll be damned. Someone’s robbing that liquor store.”

"When I do it, it's teasing, when you do it, it's petty."


Good to know we're not neglecting the other side of the woke catechism.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

Huh, I hadn't heard of Isaiah either; I wouldn't be surprised if the author independently re-derived the idea from Tuskegee. I mean, the thing that makes this book both as bad as it is and as worth of sporking as it is isn't that it's pure grey drivel, it's that there are occasional hints of ideas and suggestions of a better story, that all go away when the Woke-plot puts but a pinky toe forward.

I have many questions about Calamity. I mean, obviously the answer to all of them is "Because she is as much a slave to her role in the Plot as everyone else, and her role is to be the Black Friend", but, in no particular order; why the hell did she tell Danny about her family? Why the hell does she trust him at all at this point?

This would be infinitely stronger if she instead lead with the importance of secrecy and hiding your identity to protect your family, Danny coldly said that any supervillains that tried to get at him through his family would be barking up the wrong tree, and then just got a soft "I'm sorry." from Calamity. Save the details about her family until she's done multiple jobs with the new Dreadnought and gotten his measure; as-is, he could absolutely decide to respond to her light teasing by flying to her house, kidnapping her entire surviving family, and dropping them off on the Pentagon's front lawn, and she'd have nothing other than sass and more teasing to stop him.

On the other hand, there's also a whole lot of realism in having Calamity go from "Race is important! Race is crucial! My legacy and my family's legacy is predicated entirely upon their race!" to "Haha, you're white!" to "Why so serious about race, bro?" It annoys me that we will never get someone to respond to "...I’d hate to have to stop liking you.” with "Why the fuck do you think I give a shit about you liking me?", stay deadpan just long enough, and then "Relax, of course I like you! You totally weren't taking the lives of everyone you care about in your hands just then! Just teasing!"

I also note how adroitly the writing managed to dodge the sports issue. We couldn't have had Calamity say "Of course I can't try out for sports! I'm stronger than every other girl on the team by miles! It would be horribly unfair to them, because I'm so physically different from them!" And we couldn't just not bring up the issue at all, because sports and athleticism are a source of pride and respect and none of that can be left to the Daves and Graywyches of the world.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Huh, I hadn't heard of Isaiah either; I wouldn't be surprised if the author independently re-derived the idea from Tuskegee. I mean, the thing that makes this book both as bad as it is and as worth of sporking as it is isn't that it's pure grey drivel, it's that there are occasional hints of ideas and suggestions of a better story, that all go away when the Woke-plot puts but a pinky toe forward.

That's an interesting idea, and I kind of hope someone actually asks Daniels at some point.

I have many questions about Calamity. I mean, obviously the answer to all of them is "Because she is as much a slave to her role in the Plot as everyone else, and her role is to be the Black Friend", but, in no particular order; why the hell did she tell Danny about her family? Why the hell does she trust him at all at this point?

If I was charitable, you could say that maybe, Calamity having figured out Danny's secret identity with unsuprising ease, she felt the need to reciprocate with information about herself. Plus, teenagers are stupid, even if they aren't usually as dumb as the ones in Dreadnought.

 

[Kosher Dill]

If we're going to have a black cowboy character, I demand we at least get some "Blazing Saddles" ripoffs in here.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

If we're going to have a black cowboy character, I demand we at least get some "Blazing Saddles" ripoffs in here.

"How about a good old nigger workin' song?"

Cybersix | Deep in My Heart by Coral Egan | Official Opening Theme

Watch on Amazon Primehttps://amzn.to/2ToiOvQSubscribe for more Anime https://www.youtube.com/c/AnimeonTMSOfficialChannel?sub_confirmation=1Follow us https://...

www.youtube.com

Infinitely cooler tranny (sorta) superhero, by the way.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Christ, the chapters lately have been like, two or three chapters apiece, and usually one scene, if that.

Calamity draws an enormous revolver from her belt and a bolt of alarm snaps through me. I grab her by the shoulder. “You’re not going to shoot him, are you?”


“Well, yeah. That’s what guns are for.” She shakes me off.


“You can’t kill people! We’re the good guys!”


Calamity flicks the cylinder open and draws out one of the bullets nested inside. She holds it up from the shadows for me to get a good look at it; the tip is strange. It looks orange, and almost seems translucent.


“I’m loaded with jelly rounds. These things have no penetration whatsoever. It’ll be like hitting him with a baseball bat.”

I'm fairly sure those can still kill pretty easily. "Less than lethal" not "non-lethal"and all that. Don't get me wrong, I ain't exactly weeping if an armed robber gets topped on the job, but I dislike when fiction treats non-lethal weaponry like phasers set on stun.

Calamity waits until he’s near the mouth of an alley, and then steps out from behind the cab of a parked panel van. Her magnum barks twice.

I swear Gretchen used the exact same description for gunfire over in Manhunt. Always struck me as strange: what kind of dog or seal or whatever barks like a fucking gun going off? Because I kind of want one.

I wait until he’s about halfway down the alley, and then spear down from the air. I anchor myself in the lattice—

—when he hits me, it’s like he ran full tilt into a concrete post. My injured ribs give a faint cry of protest, but he gets the worst of it by far. I can feel his body bend around me, his flesh press and stretch, his bones flex. It is unspeakably gross, and for a terrified moment I’m scared he will burst upon me. He bounces off me and lands flat on his back. A heartbeat later, he heaves convulsively, bruised chest gasping for air, and he curls up in pain.

Is there a term for the over-explaining of standard Superman powers? Like, I get it, even if you're tough, you still need anchorage or you'll get bowled over, but I kind of assume being able to fly covers that pretty neatly.

“Hey man, are you okay?” I take a step forward.

The robber rolls over, swings his gun up, sprays me down with hot lead. The burping roar of his submachine gun is astonishingly loud in this narrow brick canyon. The alley’s gloom vanishes as a foot-long muzzle flash leaps out at me. A line of explosions ripples up my chest, neck, face. The shock of it drives me back a step. The noise, the thudding, stinging impacts, the unexpected heat and light, it’s all so much, so fast. I should be dead. A burst like that at this range should zip me open and leave me as a cooling bag of meat on the ground.

But I’ve got superpowers, so it just smarts like hell. There’s a moment of silence as we both try to process what just happened. I recover first.

Amerimutts, help me out again, how likely is it for a liquor store robber like this to be packing that kind of heat? Also, Danny's now the local Superman analogue, the toughest superhuman in the world, vital to world security, and bullets can sting him at all? Man, this world's superhumans are kind of mid.

“Dude! Not cool!”

This was funnier in Shazam. Also, we're 45% (two percent longer than expected) and only now has someone gotten a chance to shoot Danny. This is a superhero novel.

I can see the fear seize him. He’s older than I thought he was at first, and his face is rough and lined. Thick salt-and-pepper stubble covers his chin, and when his lips pull back in fear I can see crooked, rotting teeth. He’s holding one of his hands tight to his stomach, and I see three of his fingers are badly broken. For a moment I feel pity for him. Nobody ends up looking like this if they have an easy life.


But then I remember he just shot me about thirty times in the chest and face. That clerk he was holding at gunpoint doesn’t have bulletproof skin like I do. What would this guy have done if he thought the cash wasn’t coming fast enough?

Ah, copoganda April Daniels, cashiers are the petite-bourgeoisie, the lumpenprole are the backbone of the revolution.

Halfway through having his wrists zip-tied together, our thief starts blubbering. It’s weirdly uncomfortable to hear. Even though he was a terrifying threat to an innocent clerk, we outclass him so much it’s kind of pathetic. As we frog-march him half a block back to the liquor store, it’s hard not to feel a little bit like we’re bullying him. He sobs and sags, and we’re carrying him as much as he’s walking.

Calamity must see that on my face, because she says to me quietly. “I know it’s weird at first. Remember, this guy is violent felon. You don’t gotta to feel bad about playing dirty with his kind.” She gives him a shake. “Ain’t that right, Sweet Pea?”

Almost based Calamity. Danny and Sarah hand back the money to the cashier, and Danny stops him from kicking the robber while he's down because noble I guess.

“You did good, partner,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“I ain’t sure I’d be so eager to protect someone who shot me like that.”

The bottom falls out of my stomach. Of course I’d screw it up at the end. Of course. It would have been better to follow Calamity’s lead, but it’s too late now, so I shrug and say, “Well, I…maybe if I thought about it…” and then sort of trail off. Like he said: I don’t even have the sense God gave a tapeworm.

I like how we're meant to believe that Danny's dad completely eroded his self-esteem, but not once does he actually doubt he's a True, Honest Woman in every way.

Her bandanna makes her expression hard to read sometimes, but there’s a thoughtful look in her eyes. “You’re the real deal, aren’t you?”

He prevented a civilian from roughing up a restrained suspect before the cops arrived, stop talking about like he's Jesus. This is the sort of thing you say after a superhero risks their life or does something personally painful like spare someone who wronged them, not just insisting on basic decorum and procedure. A better moment for this would've probably been saving the plane, since Danny put himself in actual, physical danger in doing so. Why not have Danny matter-a-factly tell Sarah about

Um?” There’s this weird little flare of hope in my stomach. Maybe I did the right thing after all.

Calamity nods. “You’re gonna be a great Dreadnought someday.”

“Oh. No, I don’t think so.” I curl my knees up in front of me.

I mean, you could pick a better name.

“Why not?”

I think back to that meeting at Legion Tower, and how Carapace was so set against me taking Dreadnought’s name.

He was? I mostly remember him poorly trying to keep the meeting from erupting into a circus.

I could fight for it, make it a fait accompli, I know I could. But the mere thought of doing that fills me with shame. Dreadnought was a fearless champion. I’m a wimp, and an idiot. If I wasn’t, wouldn’t I be able to stand up for myself? If I deserved the name, I wouldn’t keep let Mom bribe me into helping her pretend everything is fine at home. I would have said something. I don’t deserve to be Dreadnought.

And yet you were perfectly able to rebuff David. And stand up to Graywytch, and have basically been defying your father every day for a week or something. This isn't "imposter syndrome", this is fishing for compliments.

Also, you'd think all this emphasis about D3 being this perfect hero would be set up for Danny learning about all the challenges and self-doubt he had to overcome. Or maybe Danny finding out--with him being an older dude and all--he had views he disagrees with. But nope. Again, we find out nothing about D3. The guy who fell out of the sky and changed Danny's life forever in chapter one might as well have been a cardboard cut-out of a superhero.

Actually, wouldn't it be wild if it turned out Graywytch and D3 were lovers, or even married in their secret identities, and that's part of why Graywytch's so aggro at Dan?

I don’t deserve any of this. I may be a horrible person, but I’m not going to slander the dead by pretending to be something I’m not.

God, imagine if right now Danny's body reconfigured into boymode and this turned into a detrans book. You wouldn't have been able to open Twitter without your phone bleeding.

Still, this rings incredibly hollow. Except for these designated pity-party paragraphs, Danny's come across as completely assured about his self-image and always prioritised what he wants.

“Dreadnought meant so much to so many people. Also, you know, I’m pretty stupid sometimes, and I’m always finding ways to screw up. If people found what a loser I really am… It just seems like I should have a different name. If I even keep doing this.”

Calamity is quiet for a moment. She sucks in a breath as if she’s about to speak, and then hesitates. The rain starts to patter down on us, and she pulls her jacket closed tighter. Something I’ve said seems to have unsettled or confused her. “For what it’s worth,” she says finally. “I think you deserve to call yourself whatever you want.”

Honestly, if this was a good book, I could see Danny deciding to go with a different name and aesthetic altogether, not because he's a smol bean who's unworthy of the name Dreadnought, but simply because he wants to do good in his own way. That's the frustrating thing about this book, you can sort of see the good (or at least not wretchedly stupid) version of this story second star to the right.

“We should get home and get some shuteye. Tomorrow, we’re going to take the training wheels off,” says Calamity. Her eyes are alight with excitement. “Might be you’ll feel a lot better about calling yourself Dreadnought after you help me take down Utopia.”

But first, more school shit!

Another note shows up in class calling me to the office. I walk through the empty halls of school with a cold runnel of dread pouring down my spine. Maybe Dad changed his mind. But stalling won’t make it better, so I walk onwards. When I get to the office, my parents aren’t there. A slender man in a nice suit is standing in front of the receptionist’s desk. He turns to see me, and I get a strange sensation of déjà vu, like I’ve met him before.

“Hello, Danny,” he says. It’s Chlorophyll, but he’s not green. Or, no, he…what?

Except this time, the streams cross!

“Uh, hi.”


“Come with me,” he says. When he moves, it’s like the pigment on his skin is a half second behind. As we leave the office, I notice no one else in the room was doing anything. They were only standing or sitting, staring at nothing.


“Are they going to be okay?” I ask as we walk down the hall.


“Of course,” he says with a smile. “Although they might start sneezing a lot later today.”

So, the Legion is willing to essentially drug a bunch of people and abduct Danny from school, but they haven't called his parents? Even though one of them is pretty sure a potent superhuman is stuck in an abusive household? These all seem like bigger issues than them not firing a longtime member to mollify a teenager.

We walk quickly out of the school and into the parking lot. My head is swiveling to make sure nobody sees us, but Chlorophyll moves with supreme confidence. We get to his car, a nice blue sedan with tinted windows. He bee-beeps the locks open and we settle into the front seats. This car reeks of money. Soft dark leather, real hardwood trim, everything. Being on an established superteam is a lucrative gig.

Honestly, it would kind of be funny if being government funded superheroes meant they got treated like DMV workers or something.

“So what’s this about?” I ask, voice flat.

Chlorophyll looks embarrassed for a moment, and then says “First, I wanted to apologize.”

Which instantly puts me on guard. In my experience, apologies are weapons. “I’m listening.”

“When I said it didn’t matter if you were Dreadnought or not, so long as we had your powers, that was out of line. The mantle comes with the title, and you deserved more respect than that. I’m sorry.”

Again, there are better names.

“So uh…is that it? I’ve got to get back to class.”


“No. I also came to ask you to reconsider joining the Legion. We really could use someone like you.”


I look away from him. Being pressured is always uncomfortable for me. It means I have to stand up for myself or let myself get pushed into something, and both of those options feel horrible. It’s always a no-win scenario.

Yeah, you get to be a rich, beloved superhero, but you have to share a building with someone who doesn't exist to validate you 24/7. Real Catch-22 there.

“Danny, this is a huge opportunity for you. You’d be coming in at the top of your field. You want to talk funding? We have expense accounts bigger than most people’s yearly pay, and that’s on top of our stipends. And it’s good work, too. Important work. We save lives. You could be doing something great, be someone that nobody else could hope to be. It’s an amazing life, and I think you’d be good at it.”


“And what if I want to be an accountant?”


Chlorophyll laughs, and I stare at him until he stops. “You’re serious.”

"Are all your family superheroes?"

"Er — yes, I think so. I think Mum's got a second cousin who's an accountant, but we never talk about him."

"Seems like a pretty petty reason to disown a person, mate."

Ron wordlessly handed Harry his phone, open to Twitter. The account's avi was of a greasy-haired man cocking his head like he was trying to break his own neck, while persing his lips like a duck. Harry understood completely.

“Not really, but still. What if I don’t want to be a superhero? I finally have a body I can stand living in. Maybe I just want to spend some time catching up on what I’ve missed.”

Oh, God, Dreadnought "little" arc, please no.

“Ah,” he says delicately. “Well, there have certainly been plenty of women who have become capes. I don’t see how doing one precludes the other.”

One of these days I'm going to see Wonder Woman "affirm" a youth transitoner and it will break my capeshit loving heart.

He shrugs. “You won’t be forever. You’re what, fifteen? Eighteen will come up faster than you think.”

“So? I still can’t join right now.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t make any choices,” Chlorophyll says. He reaches into his jacket, pulls out an envelope, and holds it out to me. “This is a statement of intent. If you sign this, when you come of age you’ll automatically be inducted into the Legion.”

“I’m not ready to make up my mind.”

He holds it out for me. “You can still change it later, but this sets you up for not having any hassles down the road no matter what you choose.”

A smarter book would draw a parallel between this and army recruiters going after teens, but that's an issue that's actually rooted in material reality, so fuck that noise.

This doesn’t feel right. There’s got to be a hook in there somewhere. “What about Graywytch?”


Chlorophyll smiles a funny kind of smile, as if suddenly uncomfortable. “What about her?”


After taking a deep breath, I manage to say it straight out: “If you want me, then you need to kick her off the team.”


“I…that’s not really how things work.”


“Okay,” I say, not taking the envelope. “Then I guess I’m not joining.”

"Danny, if Graywytch leaves the Tower for more than three days and three nights, demons will blot out--"

"Don't care."

Chlorophyll presses his lips together for a long moment. “Danny, we need Dreadnought. The world needs Dreadnought. If someone like Mistress Malice ever shows up again, we’re the ones who have to deal with it. If people were dying, could you really just step away from that?”


“No! I wouldn’t just—I’d want to help.” Wouldn’t I? Or maybe I’d just be too scared.

Personally, I'd have gone with "Danny, you're asking us to fire a skilled superhero for not thinking you're a girl, get your head out of your arse."

“I know Graywytch is being difficult,” he says quietly. “I don’t agree with what she thinks, but sometimes we’ve got to put aside our personal issues. Lives are at stake here, Danny. I know you want to do the right thing.”


I sink deeper into the leather seat. Maybe I’m being really selfish.

Yes.

“What if I’m not good enough to be a cape?” I ask quietly. “What if I’m a coward?”

He swallows, won’t meet my eyes. “Then, maybe you should…we need someone to be Dreadnought, so—”

“No!” I shout, suddenly livid. “I’m not giving up the mantle! I’m not going to die for you just because you asked nicely!”

For a moment I was trying to remember when it was even suggested Danny had to die to pass on the Mantle, then I realised this was just him talking bollocks about how he'll totes def commit suicide if he has to go back to being a mere boy attracted to girls like that loser David. And yes, in the space of one paragraph, Danny admits he might be too shit to be a superhero, and then insists he should keep the superpowers passed onto him by the world's greatest superhero, with the clear expectation he use them to be a superhero, because they give him tits.

“Danny, wait!” he says, but I’m already out the door. I slam it behind me, and it pops back open, latches blown to hell, hinges bent out of true. Screw him. Screw the Legion. I owe Dreadnought, but his friends? His friends are assholes.

See, the great thing about D3 being dead and nobody talking about his actual character is that Danny can pretend he just wanted him to Live His Best Life without strings attached.

Calamity and I both get swamped with homework, so our campaign to find and capture Utopia has to be put on hold until the weekend.

And then Utopia destroyed the city and was declared Empress of North America. Danny was allowed into heaven, but only so he could watch D3 go balls deep inside Graywytch between him kicking his arse.

Reading about Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet is an intensely surreal kind of frustration when you know you should be tracking down a supervillain instead.

Is there a joke here I'm missing? I am kind of surprised we don't get an aside about the Trail of Tears.

It gives me more time to practice with my powers, at least. I buy a little bouncy ball out of a vending machine at the drug store next to school and spend about an hour each night bouncing it around my room and watching the patterns of its momentum and impacts in the lattice. A few times I try to grab the strings of their momentum, the way I did with the airliner, but I can’t quite get it to work. Maybe they’re too small, or moving too fast, or maybe it was just a fluke and I won’t be able to do it again.

I'm kind of curious why the first Dreadnought ended up just being a Superman style flying brick when the Plot Inciting Orb is this obtuse. Shouldn't he have been some kind of budget Jean Grey?

Finally, we both get ahead enough in our work that we’re able to spend a few hours caping. Calamity taps on my window at the agreed hour, and I’m already wearing the suit. She beckons me to follow her. After days of rain, the weather is clear tonight, leaving the sky black and the ground dark. We slip a ways down the alley and find a dumpster to hide behind before we talk.

Maybe I haven't spent enough time in cities, but wouldn't it be darker if it was overcast? Or is this like, streetlights reflecting off clouds?

“I’ve been doing some bookwork.” Calamity clicks on a small flashlight with a red filter and holds out a sheaf of papers. “This here is all that’s publicly known about Utopia.”


It’s a detailed dossier on Utopia. Every known sighting, every known associate, even a section on estimated capabilities and rumors. It’s not a long article. “Where did you get this?”


“There’s a wiki for everything if you know the right passwords.

Calamity lurks on the Farms. It's okay, Sarah, we'll welcome you with open arms, even if hanging out with Danny is technically ween shit.

“There’s a wiki for everything if you know the right passwords. Anyhow, the main thing to know is that as far as anyone can tell she’s only been active since 2011, and for most of that time, she mainly provided hypertech support to larger jobs organized by more established villains. That’s the rumor, anyway. She’s all but anonymous most of the time.” As Calamity narrates, I skim through the important parts of the printout. There’s a photo of her, surprisingly large in resolution. Utopia is not a tall woman, maybe five and a half feet if she stands up real straight. Her body is made of plastic and steel. Her torso is wrapped in a faceted corset that rises to meet two thick slabs of flat armor over her chest. Her legs aren’t quite human, not like they’ve got a second joint or anything, but their proportions are all wrong, longer than they should be and bulging around the calves. Her fiber-optic is short and dark in a pageboy cut, and arms that are obviously robotic but designed to look mostly human.

Utopia's design doesn't sound too bad, but a trans author trying to write an uncanny valley villain is hilarious. Utopia seems to be a pretty lowkey kind of villain, mostly providing technical support to other supervillains on their jobs, because apparently super-crime is the only goddamn industry that hasn't outsourced that to India. However, she did raid a NASA lab some time ago:

“What was the lab researching?”

“They were mighty curious about some chunks of that asteroid Northern Union stopped last year.” Northern Union is the international team that covers North America, and the Legion Pacifica provided a lot of the NU’s muscle before Dreadnought died. For all intents and purposes, sometimes the Legion was Northern Union. “She made off with all the samples, but nobody really understands why she’d want ’em.”

If there are all these government sponsored super-teams out there, why couldn't Danny just join one of them? Yeah, the Legion would be bummed, but I can't imagine Uncle Sam caring who Danny worked with day-to-day so long as she was doing Dreadnought things. Admittedly, I bet Danny wouldn't be satisfied unless Graywytch (and probably any other chick that didn't sleep with him) was blacklisted from all superhero organisations. Hell, he'd probably demand the supervillains do so as well before fighting them. Also, "before Dreadnought died" is a weird thing to say when he hasn't been dead for a fortnight yet.

“Do you know what she was doing on the day she killed Dreadnought?” I ask. The memories come back sharp and hard. The guilt follows.

“I am not possessed of any firm notions, no,” says Calamity. “The news says the place she hit was a software development shop. Their website says they do medical grade software, but nobody answered the phone when I called. Probably still closed for repairs.”

“If Utopia does hypertech, why is she bothering with a baseline shop?”

Didn't we have a whole couple of paragraphs about how hypertech is unreliable?

But wait. Doctor Impossible and Carapace use baseline tech in their project. Doc said they were trying to make the technology generalizable. “Maybe she’s trying to look for a way to bridge the gap between her hypertech and baseline tech, for some reason,” I say.

Thank you.

The shattered windows are gaping holes in the building’s side. The shredded ribbons of the blinds wave gently in the night breeze. Calamity is rigid under my hands. I’m carrying her by her armpits, and since we left the ground she hasn’t stopped praying under her breath. We glide into the building and I gently set her down before touching down next to her.


“There,” I say. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”


“Maybe we can find another way down.” Sarah is not doing the old-timey voice right now.


Shattered glass cracks under our feet. Calamity clicks her flashlight on again and plays the red beam across the room. There’s burnt-out office furniture and smashed computers everywhere. Everything within six feet of the windows is still damp from the rain.

I'm kind of shocked there aren't still police hanging around given this was one of the last known locations of the lady-bot who killed D3. Danny decides to check the Background Bullshit Field.

“The lattice…it’s been torn.”


“What in hell is that supposed to mean?” asks Calamity, tension unwinding from her shoulders.


“I mean…I can sort of see the back side of reality, like it’s a net of light, and everything is just a tangle in the lattice. It’s where I get my powers. I’ve never seen the end of a thread before but now…” But now there’s a big tear, right across the floor. The ends seem frayed, and they leak sparks of heat and potential. They wiggle and squirm. Nausea beings to swell in my stomach, horror like cold grease settling in every tissue of my body. If I step a few feet to the side, I can get a different angle on it, and I see that it’s a laser-straight line starting near the middle of the building and shooting out the window, where it eventually fades away in the distance. Another rent in the lattice sweeps across the room, chest high, a broad slash in the fabric of the world. “Before he died, Dreadnought said Utopia had some kind of new weapon. I think…I think it’s a gun that unmakes reality.”


“Oh. Well. That’s new.”

Ah, so Utopia tested it on the worldbuilding first, got it.

We need to tell the Legion about this.”


“Screw the Legion.” Calamity takes off her hat and stows it in an aerodynamic storage container bolted to the back of her bike. “Utopia is ours.”

I mean, Danny has all the powers and abilities of the last guy Utopia killed, and you're good at parkour and have bullets specifically designed not to kill people, how can you lose?

“Calamity, this is serious.” I need to make her understand. This is way bigger than we thought it would be. “That gun of hers is a crime against reality. They’re looking for her too, and if they find her they need to know what they’re going up against.”


“I thought they didn’t want you to be caping in throwaway colors,” she says.


“Yeah, well. Crap.” I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe I should tell them anyhow, and—no. No that’s a bad idea. Saving the jetliner is one thing, but Magma specifically told me not to do any kind of investigation. If they knew I was caping behind their backs, they wouldn’t trust me anymore. They’d know that I’m not good enough for my powers. That I don’t deserve them. Graywytch would turn them all against me.

Let's see, the fate of the fabric of reality, or your reputation with a group you've already decided are a bunch of arseholes.

Sometimes I think this book is even more of a window into the general trans psyche than Manhunt.

“They know to be careful. She killed Dreadnought so they won’t take any chances.” She puts her helmet on and straddles her bike. “We’ll run it from our end, and they’ll take it from theirs.”

Ah, I feel like that might be easier for them if they knew she had a gun that can shoot the universe.

She’s right, of course. I can’t tell the Legion what we found. Valkyrja might think I’m ready, but that doesn’t change the fact they were pretty firm about me not doing any caping in throwaway colors. In my head, I can see it clearly: Doc Impossible and Valkyrja and Magma looking down at me, disappointed, but nodding as if it finally makes sense. As if they’ve realized what kind of a person I really am. I won’t tell them. I can’t.

Does Daniels realise he's essentially writing Titan from Megamind?

Calamity reaches over and touches my shoulder lightly. “Come on, we still have a couple hours before we need to call it a night.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a bar I know.”

Hoo boy.

Next time, true believers, the dumbest thing in Dreadnought.

 

[M3xus]

I'm actually looking forward to The Dumbest Thing.

Sad thing is I almost like Calamity, but I've got a sneaking suspicion she's going to be the Validating Lesbian Love Interest. I'd read a book featuring her.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Sad thing is I almost like Calamity, but I've got a sneaking suspicion she's going to be the Validating Lesbian Love Interest. I'd read a book featuring her.

I'm inclined to be relatively well disposed towards her as well. Maybe it's because, unlike Danny, she's had a legit challenging life, maybe it's because when she's around, we're fighting crime instead of crying about Roger, or maybe it's because she's the only one of Daniels' heroes who doesn't come across like a default City of Heroes character.

 

[LoverofPi]

"How about a good old nigger workin' song?"

Cybersix | Deep in My Heart by Coral Egan | Official Opening Theme

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Infinitely cooler tranny (sorta) superhero, by the way.

Cybersix is definitely a woman, disguising herself as a man out of convenience. Spoilers for the comics- she gets pregnant. Shame more of that hasn't been translated/ so little of the show exists.

I swear Gretchen used the exact same description for gunfire over in Manhunt. Always struck me as strange: what kind of dog or seal or whatever barks like a fucking gun going off? Because I kind of want one.

I feel like it's stolen from old noir pulp novels.

Is there a term for the over-explaining of standard Superman powers? Like, I get it, even if you're tough, you still need anchorage or you'll get bowled over, but I kind of assume being able to fly covers that pretty neatly.

This reminds me of a point- the actual description of the powers thus far reminds me of Astro City, specifically how Samaritan's powers are described and portrayed.

Amerimutts, help me out again, how likely is it for a liquor store robber like this to be packing that kind of heat? Also, Danny's now the local Superman analogue, the toughest superhuman in the world, vital to world security, and bullets can sting him at all? Man, this world's superhumans are kind of mid.

Very unlikely. Cheapo revolver, or semi-auto, sure, but submachine guns sell for more money than a convenience store has on hand.

For a moment I was trying to remember when it was even suggested Danny had to die to pass on the Mantle, then I realised this was just him talking bollocks about how he'll totes def commit suicide if he has to go back to being a mere boy attracted to girls like that loser David.

It briefly came up as a question when they were talking about him giving it up, since no one knows how the mantle passing actually works. It's Danny making an assumption as an excuse to be selfish.
Actually, that applies to most things. "X is a Y Danny is using as an excuse to be selfish" is a lot of the book thus far.