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

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

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.

Hence the "sort of."

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.

I am genuinely curious how many comics Daniels has actually read.

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

Desperate criminals, everyone!

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.

See, this is why superheroes are anti-troons.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

*Claps*

Right! Dumbest chapter in Dreadnought.

Begin!

The bar is called the Flying Dutchman, and it has no sign. It’s called the Dutchman because for a long time it moved from place to place, and the only way to find it was to know someone who knew where it’d be. Calamity explains that since then, they’ve worked something out with someone, so now it doesn’t have to move every night.

God, imagine how much they charged for drinks back when they were moving every night.

The details of the arrangement are something she says we’re not supposed to be curious about.

That sounds like everything in this fucking book, but this time, I can see why. It doesn't sound like it'd be very interesting:

"Hi, we're an unliscenced bar that would like to pay you ridiculous money under the table to use your space."

"Sure."

“You said your suit could change colors, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then change them to something that’s not an obvious Legion hand-me-down.” Calamity gestures up and down at my suit. “You go in there looking the way you do right now, and laughter is about the best thing you can hope for.” The Flying Dutchman, Calamity has explained, is a bar for graycapes, nonpartisans, and associated hangers-on. Occasionally, the lighter shades of blackcapes showed up, and plenty of baseline muscle looking to get hired on for “odd jobs” hung around the place too. Whitecapes aren’t exactly unwelcome, except they’re totally unwelcome.

This kind of illustrates my problem with treating "licsenced heroes" and all the other active super-people as like, two factions. Calamity is a fucking superhero. She fights crime. She certainly isn't signing up to help with a bank heist or running distraction for a job. The "baseline muscle" will probably wind up in her literal crosshairs at some point. I'm not sure how or why the vigilantes and "lighter shade of blackcape" would tolerate each other in their spaces.

“Hold on,” I say as I fumble my cell phone out of the little pouch on my belt line. A few moments later I’ve got it plugged into my suit and I’m booting up the color-changing app. To make it easy, I just select the whole garment and stab at one of the pre-selected colors, a dark green. A new blister pops up on my wrist, and I push it down. The gray camouflage melts and swirls and becomes a solid emerald across my entire body.

“Good enough,” says Calamity. “Come on.”

Like every other American ever born, Danny is also Irish.

The waitress blinks. “Oh. Who’s your friend?”

“A new girl. I’m showing her around.”

“I’m D—” Calamity kicks me in the shin. “Emerald.”

“Pleased to meet you, D-uh-Emerald,” says the waitress. “That’s a nice suit you’ve got there.”

“Thanks. I’m, uh, really into cosplay.”

Why the fuck would you even say that?

“Sure thing, kiddo.” She turns back to Calamity. “Anyhow, the usual?”

“Yeah, and for her, too.”

The usual turns out to be a pair of diet cokes with straws. We sit and sip our drinks.

I kind of respect Sarah's absolute commitment to corniness.

Calamity has obviously had practice slipping a straw under her bandanna without looking like a dork. “Putting our ear to the ground,” she says.

“Oh.”

It turns out putting one’s ear to the ground means sitting around doing not much, but trying to pay attention to everything. The murmur-burble of two dozen conversations at once, with music on top of that, basically makes eavesdropping impossible. A few people come by to chat briefly with Calamity, but nobody has anything important to say. It is supremely boring, and after a half hour of it, I start to get antsy.

You'd think it'd be pretty easy to make hanging out in a supervillain bar interesting, but if you don't know April Daniels.

Now... prepare yourself:

The main door to the bar is over Calamity’s shoulder. It opens, and a familiar figure shuffles through. “Crap.”

“Hey, caping ain’t all roof-running and firefights, you know.”

“No, I mean I see what we’re looking for.” I lean closer to her, drop my voice, and point. “That guy who just walked through the door is my dad.”

Imagine you're reading... let's say Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for maximum sneed. You've gotten up to the part where Harry is making his way through the titular structure, trying to find Ginny, eyes peeled (or not) for the basilisk. He turns a corner, and there's Vernon-fucking-Durlsey, still going on about the fucking cake from the beginning. The plot grinds to complete halt so Harry can whinge and moan about how he'll never be able to escape the trauma of living with the Dursleys, all while Ron and Lockhart just kind of mill about uncomfortably. Actually, you don't have to imagine that all, because it's happening for real right here in this fucking book!

“Does he know?”

“About my powers? No.”

“Fine. Don’t look at him, and don’t draw attention.” Her voice is level and smooth, but it’s got the same kind of solid control you imagine a surgeon might use during a tricky operation. “He doesn’t happen to have superpowers of his own, does he?”

For a wild moment, the world seems to shift under me as a whole new realm of horrifying possibilities play out in my mind, but no. No, Dad is not the kind of guy who would keep his powers quiet.

Of course not. Danny's father being a minor super or moonlighting as a henchman or something would be a baller twist, and Dreadnought is commited to avoiding being cool at all times.

Especially not these past few years, since he lost his good job and has gotten so much louder about being “strong” and how important it is for “a man to provide for his family.”

I love it when authors accidentally weave these little counter-narratives. Haha, what a fucking loser, worrying that he's failing his family Toxic masculinity, much?

(And here, my train of thought briefly segues into a bitter accounting of all the things he has provided for me. Shame. Fear. Hearing loss.)

For fuck's sake, why not just have Roger beat Danny if you want us to feel so goddamn bad for him? Again, it's really hard to buy that Roger's got such a hold on Danny when he's expressed nothing but withering contempt for the man. It's like being legit insulted by something Kev-Kev said, or a man wallowing in a kiddy-pool full of shit and cum. Why are you even putting stock in their words if they're so pathetic to you?

Doc Impossible said most people with superpowers—ahem, that is, “special abilities”—use them to make a lot of money. There’s no way Dad would still be slaving away in a crummy little retail tax preparation job if he could do that.

I mean, for all Danny knows, Roger only recently became a superhuman. Sort of like him.

“No, he’s baseline.”

“Do you have any notion why he would be here, then?”

Not at first, but just a moment of thinking about it suggests a really awful possibility. “Oh. Oh no.”

Better question, how the fuck did Roger even find this place? Is he secretly Tweelde-Dum in a Alice in Wonderland themed gang? Or was Calamity full of shit and the Flying Dutchmen is actually about as underground as the ISS? Even better question, why the fuck did April Daniels think we needed to see more of Roger Tozer, when we're already halfway through the book and barely started hunting down Not-Superman's murderer? Why even have an action-adventure plot if you're this disinterested in it?

“Care to share?”

“He’s looking for a cure,” I say. Calamity raises her eyebrows, inviting me to explain more. “For me being trans, I mean.”

“He may be a long time searching.” She slips the straw back under her bandanna and takes a sip.

“My luck isn’t that good. What if he finds a shapeshifter who can shift other people’s shapes?”

If such a superhuman does exist, they're probably already making coomers careful what they wish for.

“My, that is a nasty little mind you have,” Calamity says approvingly.

The first whispers of panic are beginning to float around in the back of my head. “What am I going to do?”

“First, calm yourself.” She puts her hand on my wrist. “I’ve not heard of anyone who can do that, and I doubt anyone else has, either. Even if they do exist, he ain’t gonna find them on his first night slumming. Second, they’d have to have tumbleweeds rolling between their ears to do something that would piss you off that much. Really, hun, you ain’t got much to worry about on this score right now.”

Another reason Calamity is the Best One: she's slightly less stupid than everyone else.

With an almost physical effort of will, I cram the panic back down. Calamity is right. He can’t take this from me. I disappointed myself when I thought I could stand up to him, but I’m still determined not to give up the mantle. I will stay a girl until the day I die, and there is nothing he can do about it.

A dozen 9/11s and Final Crises will happen while Danny's still debating whether he wants to use his Tit-Inciting-Orb for its actual purpose.

Seeing Dad here is unpleasant in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Running around in a costume with Calamity has been an escape. Since I went back to school, I can barely show my face at home. Every night is spent quietly poking around the Internet or doing homework for fear of waking the mountain again

Man, Danny's dad's right: he does suck.

“How in the hell would he even find this place?” wonders Calamity.

“He’s pretty smart. And, I guess, determined.”

...No he's not! You've spent a whole book hammering it in that he's a human cum-stain, you don't get to handwave a random accountant with no connection to the super-world managing to track down a secret super-bar!

“Uh oh,” says Calamity.

“What?”

“He’s barking up a mighty bad tree.” She nods at my father, who is talking to a man with biceps like my thighs and no neck whatsoever. “That’s Bosco. He’s nonpartisan, but he’s also a separatist.”

And he calls himself Bosco? So he's either a circus clown or a copse of trees in Italy. "Bosco" isn't the alias of a free-agent, that's the name of a street tough working for the Joker. And trust me, they don't choose to be called that.

“There are metahuman separatists?”

“All minorities have separatists, and he’s a real nasty one. Your father doesn’t want to be talkin’ to his sort.” Calamity puts her hand on my arm again when I’m halfway out of my chair. “Easy. Might be Bosco just tells him to—aw hell.”

This book is so below Magneto, he refused to even have a rip-off Danny could be aware of.

Bosco is leading Dad into a vacant lot behind two low brick buildings. The fence facing one road is made of panels and beams, and Bosco holds a loose board open for Dad. Only when my father is halfway across the lot and sees the chain-link fence on the other side does he realize he’s trapped. He turns around, a kind of confused smile on his face.

“It’s blocked,” he says.

“I know,” says Bosco, stepping closer.

Dad takes a half step back. “So, you can do it from here?”

“It don’t matter,” says Bosco. “I could kill you anywhere.”

Do it! Please! Not because Roger's a monster who deserves death, but so Danny can develop a personality trait besides "trans" and "half-arsed abuse victim"!

 

[IridiumDragon06]

But...how?

And again, the frustrating thing is how close we were to there being some actual world-building here. Like, in a world where Joe Random can be Dreadnought, or a supervillain that no one has heard of, then you can't get people just wandering into a bar like the Dutchman.

We also absolutely need a better exploration of the factions here. We've got separatist metas; presumably we've also got lesser teams of whitecapes, who don't have the oomph to deal with the problems the Great Value Justice League does, but do get their own advantages by both cozying up to the government and knocking heads of any cape that wants to cause problems or go it alone.

Hell, setting up an expectation with stupid-ass terms like whitecape and blackcape and then using them as a contrast to the varying personalities and morals of who wears them would be great. It'd be an excellent way to make a meta-point about division and factionalism, and then you can re-emphasize that point with Calamity being hesitant to go after Clown Bro pre-emptively because they'd fought on the same side before when a bunch of whitecapes raided the Dutchman, figuring to round up the usual suspects when a new supervillain was causing trouble in town, and bringing up that with Utopia still at large, everyone is expecting Danny's team to show up and start kicking people's shit in and so are really on edge.

And Roger...as you say, the frustrating thing is how well the author accidentally foreshadowed him being pre-involved in the seedier side of cape life. You don't just fall into accounting jobs; you need to train and study and get certified for them, and Roger is definitely not hitting any books, nor does he demonstrate any patience or ability to be methodical. Of course, this is just because the author 100% considers being an accountant emasculating and doesn't care any more than that in world, but again, that's why it's so frustrating.

In a better book, we'd have heard about the city's rogue's gallery of blackcapes, from the gleefully-theatrical to the cold and deadly, and made them a presence through events. We'd have Roger show up in the gang colors of one of the scarier-but-mysterious villains, and have things play out roughly the same, only for him to turn the tables and overpower Clown, reveal that Roger actually is the scary supervillain in question, berate a mortally-wounded Clown for wasting his time, and tell him that he loves his son and will do anything, anything in the world to get him back before executing him, have him mutter to himself about the next lead, then leave.

If Daniel's jiggly bits are going to be the focus of the plot, let's make them the actual plot. This whole book has the narrative depth of a puddle and the storytelling impact of a late-nite infomercial, but the relentless way the book makes itself stupider and worse to actively avoid any interesting conflict has gone from grating to surreal, at least to me. Not only do actions not have consequences and people don't believe in reasonable ways, people can now just appear in places they have no reason to be.

Also, as an aside; between the very-specific way that Roger's actions are being treated as a weird informed attribute and the way the narrative gangs up on him, and the other self-insert bits, does anyone want to take bets on the entire character and arc of Roger being a very personal "Fuck you, Dad." from the author, as opposed to general failure?

 

[Kosher Dill]

“My luck isn’t that good. What if he finds a shapeshifter who can shift other people’s shapes?”

What, like exactly what you told your dad happened to you? Is Roger digging into the supervillain scene looking for the guy who did this so he can undo it?
Danny's self-serving lie getting his dad killed would happen in a more interesting book.

"Bosco" isn't the alias of a free-agent, that's the name of a street tough working for the Joker.

I was thinking....

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

What, like exactly what you told your dad happened to you? Is Roger digging into the supervillain scene looking for the guy who did this so he can undo it?
Danny's self-serving lie getting his dad killed would happen in a more interesting book.

I love/hate it when you guys realise shit that didn't even occur to me.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Really, Roger is the most compelling character in this whole story. Imagine if they'd done something with his whole "provider insecurity" or whatever you want to call it. Loses his big accounting job, works at some strip-mall tax joint, and then maybe he gets a client who's one of those Z-list villains like Stilt-Man, looking for someone who'll help him launder the tiny sack of bills he finally managed to rob from a bank. Being desperate, Roger says yes and starts making money under the table helping super-bozos hide their earnings and keep the feds off their back when they want to buy houses or cars with their stolen cash. He finds this all humiliating but he does it anyway because he can't stand the thought of letting his family down.
Then his son comes home one day telling him a supervillain trooned him out. He looks through all the newsreels and whatnot and doesn't find any mention of someone with those kinds of powers. Finally in desperation he goes to all his "special" clients if they know someone, anyone, who can track down this mysterious villain so he can beg them to undo the change.
Most of the clients just laugh him off, but then one of the super-bozos gets hit right in the feels when he hears about "losing a son" because his son became a small-time superhero and never spoke to him again...
So he says "Look, there's this bar, go if you want but I can't help you if you screw up in there."

 

[LoverofPi]

Hence the "sort of."

Fair enough. I just know folks often wind up confused with only the show to go off of.

I am genuinely curious how many comics Daniels has actually read.

I would like to know that too, because Astro City also has a sex changed superhero who also changes sex through superpower magic from 2014, but it's infinitely better than this because that's not the focus of the story, just a little note at the end of a story about a supervillain taking of the mantle of his former nemesis after said nemesis lost his lift saving the supervillain. And the change is just a minor note at the end of things, just used the transformation aspect of the power to change from a man to a woman in one go. And then the story's done and you're onto entirely different characters.

I love it when authors accidentally weave these little counter-narratives. Haha, what a fucking loser, worrying that he's failing his family Toxic masculinity, much?

I'm still not convinced Roger's even abusive because of how little evidence there is of it and how unreliable Danny is as a narrator.

A dozen 9/11s and Final Crises will happen while Danny's still debating whether he wants to use his Tit-Inciting-Orb for its actual purpose.

It is kind of telling that it's not "I will not give up the mantle" in the hero sense of putting duty over convenience and continuing to act as a superhero but refusing to give up an object called a mantle because it makes Danny a girl. It's never been referred to heroically once by Danny as far as I can tell.

If such a superhuman does exist, they're probably already making coomers careful what they wish for.

Metas with flesh sculpting would be the most sought after plastic surgeons on earth and also make trans culture as it exists on real earth not a thing.

Do it! Please! Not because Roger's a monster who deserves death, but so Danny can develop a personality trait besides "trans" and "half-arsed abuse victim"!

I'm curious how Daniels coudl ruin the Spider-man origin, but even then that's far too bold for this beige as hell book.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

I'm still not convinced Roger's even abusive because of how little evidence there is of it and how unreliable Danny is as a narrator.

Roger kind of reminds me of a retarded version of Hades from, well, Hades. Except that game was willing to lend its abusive dad figure enough respect to actually take him seriously.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

You know, I think the concept of "power fantasy" has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the last couple of decades. Obviously, any story you're releasing for the enjoyment of others should be more than just your personal stomp-fic, but there's nothing wrong with crafting a scernario you think would be absolutely rad--like having superpowers, or being a wizard, or even fucking a broody vampire--and playing around with it. If you have any kind of healthy fantasy life, it will include drama and conflict. There's a reason why, say, the zombie apocalypse is such a popular what if scernario, despite practically every popular zombie story being about how living through a zombie apocalypse would suck. It's fun to imagine yourself dealing with tough situations, especially when you live a pretty safe, orderly life.

Yes.

Bosco says to my father “I could kill you anywhere” and the first thing that pops into my head is:

Yes.

Kill him. Please.

I’m a horrible person.

But so is he!

But he’s my father, I can’t let him die.

But he deserves it!

I’m a horrible person, and it’s the guilt that drives me onward.

This, on the other hand, is absolutely pathetic. Moral masturbation. We're meant marvel that Danny shows basic concern and compassion for his no-good, evil, worthless father, and sigh and shake our heads that he thinks he's a bad person because he... was seriously considering letting his own father be murdered by a racist superman while trying to find a cure for what he thinks is an unasked for transformation inflicted on his son. I mean, he yelled at Danny. Surely that's worth the death penalty, right? It's deeply sickly and gross, but most importantly, boring. This isn't a power fantasy, it's a matyr-simulator.

Troons make terrible fantasists for two big reasons. One, while most small children imagine being space-adventures or dinosaurs, a troon's idea of a wild day-dream is a fucking pap-smear. Two, your average troon would rather be a victim than a hero. I would legitimately respect this book a lot more if Danny just told his parents and the Legion to fuck off, and split his time between being a superhero and wild hedonism. It'd probably still have little interest to anyone with taste, but at least it'd be fun for its supposed target demographic.

Bosco starts laughing, and I start diving for speed. I jerk myself to a stop ten feet above them. They don’t see me, but I realize that once I’m down there, it’s almost certain Dad will recognize me. Even in the dark. Even with my cowl on. Even though he never liked to look at me once I became a girl. At that range, he’ll know who I am. Crap. I can’t let him die, but I can’t let him see me. As I’m frozen with indecision, Bosco seems to grow a few inches and stalks towards Dad. The moonlight now glints off his skin like it was polished steel and his footsteps sound heavier, sharper. The moonlight glints off his skin.

The very fact you're willing to risk your dad's life to preserve your glass-closet of a secret identity makes you a stupid arsehole, Danny. Also, Bosco is a super-supremacist who turns into living steel. I can't tell if Daniels is trying to reference the time Colossus worked for Magneto, or if he accidentally reverse-engineered him while trying to reference Magneto himself.

Calamity saves the day.

Something clatters on the ground between them, and a trilling instinct warns me to screw my eyes shut. An instant later, a bang like the end of the world washes over all three of us. I open my eyes to see Bosco and Dad both wobbling on their feet, stunned and frozen. I drop down, seize Bosco under the armpits, and pop back into the air. He’s much heavier than I expected. A few seconds later, and a few hundred feet up, he comes to his senses.

You'd think with Danny's peak-human hearing or whatever a flashbang would be worse for him.

“You’d attack one of your own?” Bosco says. His voice is wary, but sullen. Is this what a bully sounds like when he’s scared? He backs off, a good ten yards or so, arms loose and ready. “For a flat? What the hell is wrong you?”

“What the hell is a flat?” Being able to fly gives you all sorts of nifty choices for getting up off the ground so it’s not super obvious you’re worried about being unsteady, and I take advantage of that, pivoting up from my heels to rest gently on my feet.

“You must be new. Flats are them. The baseline.”

“That is the most boring slur I have ever heard.”

I'm going to pretend this is a reference to many superheroines having big breasts, because otherwise I have to live with the fact Daniels just stole "flatscan" from X-Men and cut it in half.

“Hey, lemme go!” Bosco shouts over the wind. “You ain’t supposed to be fighting in throwaways!”

“You’re not supposed to be setting up to murder people. Let’s go squeal on each other to the Legion and see whose ass they kick!”

I feel like people would definitely cheat the throwaway colour thing.

Bosco’s answer is a double-fisted hammer blow, right to the back of my head. It jolts me around a little, but I maintain my grip. “Hey, hey this ain’t funny!” he shouts. “I was just gonna rough him up, I swear!”

“Aw, come on, hit me like you mean it, you weenie,” I shout. Something wild has come to life inside my chest. Pure, savage joy pours through every part of me.

So naturally, you call this grown arse thug "a weenie." Is Danny meant to be eleven?

Standing up for myself has never been something I’ve been any good at. There was a time in middle school where I knew the names and habits of my bullies better than my teachers. No matter how much I wanted it, I just couldn’t get them to treat me with respect or even just leave me alone. Maybe it was the way I liked to carry my books—that hadn’t been beaten out of me yet—or the way I liked to cross my legs.

I wonder if Daniels realises that "man-spreading" is mostly a result of how male pevilises are set up and not us wallowing in our toxic masculinity.

Maybe it was just that I was a quiet, shy kid who thought all the boisterous exuberance of early testosterone exposure was somehow distasteful and uncomfortable. So I got bullied a lot. When I told my parents, Dad said I needed to handle it myself, that it was an important step in becoming a man. I didn’t have the courage to tell him I wanted nothing of the sort, and so for years I endured torment at school in silence, because I knew if I said anything about it at home again, I’d be blamed for it. There was nothing I could do, so I endured and learned which parts of school were safe to hang out in. The anger was there, but I packed it up and stored it away, deep inside me where it piled up into great heaping mountains that I pretended I didn’t have.

So, Danny was a relatively timid, "feminine" boy, who associated other male children and the idea of "being a man" with violence and suffering. You know, it's technically innacurate to call Danny an unreliable narrator--that requires deliberate intent on the part of the writer, not just incompetence--but Daniels is definitely an unreliable author.

But that feeling of helplessness is falling behind me as fast as the city lights. Bosco’s blows get weaker but faster as his panic begins to take hold. His terror makes me feel amazing. I begin to laugh. Every stupid half-formed fantasy of standing up to the bullies and beating them into a hospital bed comes back to me at once. Years of bottled rage are uncorked. Someone has to pay for what was done to me. Now, I’m strong enough to make him pay. For a heady moment I consider trying to get Bosco up into orbit for real.

But then he starts weeping, the bastard. His weeping ruins it, and probably saves me from doing something I’d regret for the rest of my life.

Congragulations, Danny, you didn't murder.

“Shut up!” I shout at him, and by some miracle he pulls it back to a wet sniffling. “You’re a bully and a coward. If I hear about you threatening baselines again, I will drop you off in
Antarctica and let you walk home. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah, please. Just lemme go.”

We’re over the water now, and I can’t resist. He makes a big splash.

Sadly, being made of metal, Bosco couldn't swim, and died.

“That was amazing, you know that, right?”

I shrug. “I guess. Is he really nonpartisan? If he’s going around trying to kill baselines, that seems pretty blackcapey to me.”

“He’s a thug for sure, but he’s too stupid and lazy to be a blackcape. He works in construction, I hear, and hauls things around.” She pauses for a moment. “Come to think of it, I don’t think he’s actually killed anyone. He just likes to make them scared when he beats them up.”

So, he's clearly assaulted people, which is a crime, and he has superpowers, but he's not a blackcape because... he hasn't declared his allegience to the United Alliace of Evil?

“And what, people just put up with someone like that?” I ask.

“What, exactly, do you expect anyone to do about him? As long as he restrains himself from making corpses, the cops ain’t interested in a tussle, and the Legion is far too high and mighty to worry about every rat in the gutter. You’re about the first person in this town who is able to fight him that has bothered to.”

A little nugget of outrage starts to burn in my gut. “It’s not like he waited to see if I could take it before he hit me at full strength. If I were anyone else, he’d have killed me.”

“Yes. And that’s why I’m glad you stopped him,” says Calamity. “Danny, I know I was pretty harsh on the Legion, but I see this kind of crap every other week. They don’t bother with small stuff like Bosco beating up a baseline every now and then.”

“They wouldn’t—I mean—they’ve got to have their reasons, don’t they? Maybe it’d cause too much chaos or something. They need to keep the peace, right?” Even to myself, that sounds lame.

Haven't the Legion saved the human race from extinction more than once? I feel like with that kind of track-record, we can forgive them not single-handedly ending all crime, everywhere.

“Ain’t no peace without justice, hun,” says Calamity. “I don’t care why they sit up there in their little tower and let bullies like Bosco run around free. I just care that they do.”

One of you in the thread raised the idea of mid-tier superhero teams. I get the impression those don't really exist here, because otherwise this would be like expecting the FBI to handle kids shoplifting and completely ignoring the existence of the local police department.

So we don’t find Utopia that weekend. Or the next night, or the next. Then we get walloped with homework, and we have to take the rest of the week off to catch up. Sarah says once she turns sixteen she’s going to test out and get her GED so she can start caping full time.

See, at least Sarah isn't so godlike she can basically do whatever she wants.

She never says so out loud, but I get the feeling her parents know what she’s doing. Testing out won’t be an option for me. I’m stuck here until I can turn eighteen and become a legal adult. There’s no way my parents would let me leave school.

Only a troon could write a book about someone with Superman powers and be so obbessed with their limiations.

Speaking of, here comes Dad. He lumbers into our kitchen, stepping over the broad, curling crack in the linoleum we’ve trimmed down but don’t have the money to fix. The house is starting to fall apart in a dozen tiny ways. Someday, we are assured, there will be a summer of do-it-yourself projects to mend the place up. Mom and I aren’t holding our breath, though.

So, not only is Roger a half-men because he lost his old, higher paying job, he's also a failure because he's either not handy enough or too busy to keep up the maintaince of their house. The house he's probably still paying the mortage on. If only he did what you're supposed to do when you fail to live up to societal expectations of manhood and pretend to be a lady so hard, society makes your fanfics real.

My gaze drops to my cereal, and I try to eat quickly without being obvious about it. Watching Dad closely is a habit that’s so natural I don’t even notice I’m doing it half the time. I don’t think he’s been sleeping well. His eyes have bags under them, and when the weekends come he doesn’t bother to shave. He’ll pad around the house for hours, sometimes all day, in nothing but his boxers, undershirt, and bathrobe. He never says anything about what happened with Bosco. As far as he wants to pretend, nothing happened. That’s fine; I don’t like thinking about it either. That whole episode is soaked in regret and guilt for me. Contempt, too. He talks a big game about being a strong man, and then he needed to get bailed out by a little girl.

He was a baseline human up against a monster made of living metal, and you've got the control panel for the universe lodged somewhere above your shy testicles.

Calamity had a quiet word with the bouncer at the Flying Dutchman, and Dad won’t be allowed in again, so at least I won’t need to tail him to keep him from going back.

Why was he allowed inside in the first place?

It really worries me that Dad is out searching for metahumans to “fix” me. Not that I’m scared he’ll find a fix. Calamity is right; once I explain I have the mantle, nobody would be stupid enough to try shapeshifting me against my will. My concern is that Dad’s already found one metahuman who was willing to smash his bones for fun, so who’s to say what else he’ll find as he staggers through the underworld, shrieking for help?

Not having Danny and Roger speak after the Bosco incident is a pretty big missed oppurtunity in my opinion. Yeah, Roger not recognising his own man-daughter might be stretching credibility, but that's just something you kind have to accept in most superhero stories. There's a bunch of ways Daniels could've played it. If he was still set on making Roger an irredeemable monster by Twitter standards, he could set up some false hope for Danny by having Roger react positively to his masked saviour, only to dash it when Danny tries to come out. One of the major problems with the Tozer homelife subplot is that there's no tension: Roger is painted (however sloppily) as pure evil, with no hope of redemption or change of heart. It's a forgone conclusion.

Or, he could've humanised Roger a bit. The way Danny's described Roger throughout the story, he's got a major fixation on the idea that a man needs to be strong and protect the herd and all that. Maybe seeing Danny display those qualities he values as a girl could make him understand that they're not exclusive to being a man, and that Danny can still be a respectable person and a hero. Like a tranny version of the Red Ranger's dad in the Power Rangers reboot.

“What’s this I hear about you quitting the football team?” he asks as he fills the coffee pot with water. His voice is mild, but I know not to let that fool me.

Swallowing my food is a good excuse for taking a moment to think of my reply. “I didn’t quit. Coach and I agreed that since I’m not a boy anymore—”

Boys sports are for boys. Girls sports are for girls, and boys who aren't good enough to win at boy sports.

“Danny, you are a boy,” snaps Dad. “You were born a boy, and I raised you as one.”

There’s like ten million things wrong with that sentence, but all I can think of to mutter by way of reply is, “Yeah. Well. Things change.”

Why the fuck would Roger even specify that he "raised Danny as a boy." That's the kind of thing people who already ascribe to trans ideology say. For most other people, "raising your son as a boy" is like saying you raised your son as a human child. It goes without saying, because being a boy just means being male kid, which is just a fact of chance and biology. TRAs really need to stop assuming we already buy into their word-games.

He puts the pot down. “Son, I know it’s scary right now—”

“I’m fine.” He didn’t call me “son” very often before my change, but now he can’t get enough of it,like if he denies I’m a girl enough, he can make it untrue.

Dad sighs, and pulls out a chair. He sits down next to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Son, you don’t know what you’re saying.” Ugh. The Concerned Father. I hate it when he does this. He’s not any less likely to erupt when he does this, but it gets under my skin so much that I’m more likely to say something that will set him off. “This is stress that nobody could be ready for, and you’re doing the best you can. I’m proud of you for holding up so well. But pretending like it’s fine, and like you could be happy this way, that’s not going to make it better. You’ve got to face your problems, not deny them.”

With every word, the resentment builds in me until I can barely keep my face clean of it. In a voice so steady it surprises me, I say something really stupid.

Again, Danny's never, ever mentioned that he identifies as trans to his dad. From Roger's vantage point, he's being perfectly kind and rational here. I'm sure if Daniels were in this thread, he'd say that was the point, that Roger isn't willing to entertain other perspectives. Well, if so, it definitely runs in the family. Part of me wonders if this is how Daniels' father tended to talk in real life, and shouty strawman Roger is his interplotation of the man.

“Dad, I’m transgender. I like being this way. I’m not going back, and you can’t make me.”

He gets this confused look on his face, with an undercurrent of something that scares me, so I push on quickly to get it all out while I’ve still got my nerve.

“I’ve known I wanted to be a girl for years. This change is the best thing to ever happen to me. I won’t go back.”

He sits back in his chair, and looks at me like he’s never seen me before. The deep flush starts low on his neck and moves upward. His eyes go hard, and I brace up for another Vesuvian detonation of Mount Screamer.

His words are lost in the sheer noise of it. He gets up and paces around as he bellows, as if his rage is too wild to sit still. When he blew up after I went back to school, I thought we’d touched bottom, but I was wrong. He’s letting loose with everything now.

And naturally, because dialogue is hard, Daniels summarises the resulting tirade:

Freak. Tranny. Faggot.

Oh, Roger, you sweet, summer child: you assume Danny's a HSTS.

He goes down the list.

As does the author.

Worthless. Disgusting. Failure.

He's definitely one of those things.

There’s no end to it.

Much like this book.

Abomination. Sinful. Unnatural.

Has there been any indication at all that the Tozers (or just Roger) are religious?

Queer. Homo. Shemale.

Again, Danny is straight.

But he knows how to dig in under my guard.

But Daniels doesn't know how to write that.

This is my fault. I am so stupid. Why am I always so stupid? What is wrong with me? I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have let him believe the lie. Pathetic. I’m pathetic and stupid.

Yes.

He runs out of steam, the way he sometimes does, but his rage is still there, so he makes me an accomplice. “Well?” he demands. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I’m sorry,” I mutter.

“Speak up when you’re talking to me!” he snaps.

“I’m sorry!” I say. This is the only safe thing to say when he’s like this.

You are fucking indestructible.

“Get out,” he snarls. “Get out, you disgusting little freak.”

Every ounce of my self-control is needed not to use my powers to bolt up into the stratosphere.

Why not? Why is Danny still insisting on this weird half-charade? Is he like Mr. Mxyzptlk, if someone tricks him into saying his powerword, he's banished back to the mens' toilets for thirty days and nights?

With my eyes on the floor and my heart slamming in my chest, I leave my bowl where it is and walk-run out of the room and up the stairs. My hands shake as I throw some textbooks and paper in my backpack, and I seriously consider leaving through the window. But no, if he doesn’t hear me come down and leave through the front door he might come up to investigate. So I leave through the front door, as swiftly and silently as I can. It’s not safe to come back here for a few hours at least.

I should have let him die.

I’m so stupid.

I actually wish this was written by Gretch. If it was, Danny would've killed Roger, we'd be done with this plot cul-de-sac, and it'd probably be hilarious. Also, Danny would probably regrow his dick and realise it's a sacred tool to punish white, cis womanhood or something.

By the time I get to the library, the shaking and the fear has dribbled away. Now I’m feeling angry and mean.

The two genders of Daniel Tozer: snivelling coward and self-centred arsehole.

For a moment I was stunned. A boiling fury consumed me. Here I was, glowering in peace, and this…this insufferable jackass decided to insert himself into my life and pass judgment on all its events and my feelings. For a few seconds there, I seriously considered the merits of kicking him through the side of the train and down onto the streets below. But I didn’t, which I’m sure I’ll be glad of later. Right now though, I just want to find someone and make them pay. For something. For anything.

I could totally believe Danny killing a random man for trying to be kind. Danny meets Sarah at the library:

I’m supposed to be catching up on history. The third time in a row I get to the end of a page before realizing I haven’t remembered a word I read, I close my book. “Screw homework, let’s go find a mugger to beat up.”

Sarah looks up, lips pressed tight. “No. We’re not going caping while you’re angry.”

“Why the hell not?” I snap.

“Because when you go into it angry you make mistakes. And the kinds of mistakes you can make would be real bad.”

Is... is Sarah actually a good person?

“I can control myself.”

“I don’t think that you can,” says Sarah evenly. “And in any case, I’m not going anywhere with you while you’re being like this.”

“Being like what?”

“A bitch,” says Sarah. “Danny, what is up with you?”

Man, being brown ish (I'm legit unsure whether Sarah is black or hispanic) lets you talk back to troons. I'm jealous.

“I came out of the closet to Dad,” I say quietly. “About how I’m transgender, and I don’t want to go back to being a boy.”

“Oh,” Sarah says.

“And he called me—” My throat clenches up, and I wait for it to pass. “Why can’t he just be happy for me?”

Because your author enjoys your misery.

Sarah opens and closes her mouth several times, and then finally says, “That sucks. I’m sorry you have to put up with that.”

“Not your fault.”

“I know. Still. Do you want to talk about it?”

I sigh. “Not really. I’m sorry. I was an ass.”

“Plenty of bridges in this town, I’m sure we can let some water pass under one of them,” says Sarah, with hints of Calamity.

I might actually like Calamity this time around. Weird.

I open my textbook back up and try to pick up where I left off. What Doc Impossible said comes back to me. I’ve got to get better at dealing with my anger. I wish I could just flip a switch and make it go away. At least I have a friend like Sarah to set me straight. That’s nice, really. David was never one to talk about feelings. Said it was too girly.

Apparently you didn't talk about much of anything.

Girly suits me fine.

Men will rather secrete their testicles inside their adominable cavity than talk to their friends.

Right, one more chapter:

By the time I finish the final draft of an essay about Mistress Malice’s campaign for world domination (short version: with over a quarter million confirmed dead including thirty-nine heroes and a hundred and eighty-two fighter pilots, Mistress Malice remains the undisputed heavyweight champion of supervillains, even almost sixty years after her death), Sarah has become Calamity in everything but costume.

Didn't we already establish this? If you're going to give us classroom exposition, at least make it something new.

The Flying Dutchman seems to be a twenty-four-hour kind of place, and the door opens right up when we pound on it. Calamity hands over her guns to the bouncer, who smiles at me, but doesn’t card either one of us. Do metahuman bars just not bother with liquor licenses or something?

...No, I don't think the secret watering-hole for quasi-legal superhumans cares much about underage drinking. Would probably lockout the clone market, for starters. Danny and Calamity (see, I respect chosen names, when the name isn't shit) spot a suspicious looking customer:

“Not as of yet, but I’m possessed of a notion as to how we’re going to find out.” As the rear door snaps shut, Calamity gets out of her chair and crosses to the table the man left behind. There’s a crumpled napkin and a half-finished pint of beer. She pulls some tweezers and a plastic baggie out of her jacket, picks the napkin up with the tweezers and runs it around the glass’ rim before folding it into the baggie and sealing it.

“Um, ew.”

“Caping ain’t always glamorous, hun.”

Goddamn, Danny's a wimp.

“What are we going to do with that?”

“Us? Nothing. But my ex might be able to do a thing or two about this.”

“How?”

She shrugs. “He’s a wizard. He’s going to do wizardy things.”

Shit, we're going to visit Alan Moore? I have so many questions about Miracleman!

The wizard likes to hang out in a musty used bookstore out at the edge of town, on the second floor in a corner near the back. It’s dim here, and the fluorescents flicker. The books are all leather with fading gilt letters. He’s a black kid, skinny and crouched behind a stack of fat books—ratty, leather, with dimly gilded pages.

Lest this give you hope Calamity isn't destined to affirm Danny's amhole, Sarah's bi. Or probably "pan" given what kind of book this is.

“Hey Charlie, we got a job for you,” says Sarah. We can’t exactly walk right in the way we were dressed at the Dutchman, so we’re going as Sarah and Danny. There’s an almost sacrilegious feeling in the air. We’re doing cape work in street clothes. It’s just wrong. Caping is supposed to be the thing we do when I want to stop being in the real world for a while.

Which is a weird way to view it when "caping" has been an important part of your world for decades before your birth.

“So, uh, Sarah says you’re a wizard. Like figuratively? Or…?”

“What, you don’t believe in magic?”

Flashes of Graywytch flick through my mind. Surely they wouldn’t keep someone like that around if she couldn’t deliver the goods.

Yes, it's a superhero team, Danny. I like the assumption that Graywytch couldn't possibly be a good friend to the others when Danny's not around. Also, the Legion Pacifica are the biggest superhero team in the country, if not the world. Surely there's footage of her doing magic or something out there.

And Valkyrja is a straight up mythological being. So, yes, I do. But it’s one of those things that doesn’t sit easily. Technology can be explained. Even hypertech sorta makes sense most of the time. Magic is something else, though. Magic is things like witches spinning thread out of moonlight, and using that to weave a cord for binding lies.

A dying superhero shoved a glowing orb into you that made you grow tits, Danny.

It’s dangerous and unpredictable and not easy to replicate.

So, it's hypertech without the pretension?

Supposedly it’s more common in parts of Europe and a lot of India, but even there it’s a relic of the past.

Why. If it works, why the fuck would people have stopped using it? Given some stuff we learn in the sequel about how all this bullshit works, the idea that magic is an ancient but dying art doesn't even make sense. Hell, Valkyrja shouldn't exist at all, but we'll get to that. Also, why specifically Europe and India? Aside from Native Americans having magical traditions, I'm pretty sure the concept of sorcery exists in Asia and Africa as well.

“No, I believe in magic.” I’m not sure I believe someone at our school can work any magic, though.

As opposed to having Superman powers or Captain America leakumia. Danny shows off his Wish.com telekinesis with a marble, which pleases Charlie. Calamity wants him to do some scrying with the forensic sample she took.

Sarah pulls a tablet out of her bag and brings a map of New Port up on the screen. Charlie holds the bead over the map, and lets it hang from the cord like a pendulum. Slowly, the cord begins to drift towards the south half of the map, and then stops, hanging at an angle in mid air. Hairs stand up all the way down my back, tight and chilly. Yeah, yeah, I can fly and shit, but…well, magic is spooky. I don’t know how to explain it. It just is.

You'd think Danny would mention whether or not the Background Bullshit Field is doing anything funny right now. They get some information, Calamity and Charlie have some banter about her trying to nag him back into caping with her, and she and Danny agree to follow up the lead on Monday.

“So I’ve been thinking: if you’re gonna be caping in sight of the sun, you really oughtta pick some real colors.”

“Ah. Uh, hold on.” I press the third blister on my wrist, and my suit shifts back to green. “Better?”

“I’d prefer something in blue and white, but that’ll have to do.”

“Yeah, well…” I reach for my pockets but this suit doesn’t have any. It makes feeling awkward so much worse.

You know, Captain Marvel was the definition of mid, but what I'd give for that scene where she and the kid mess around with the colours of her suit right now.

Why is she hassling me to be Dreadnought?

Because she's seen the title of the book and wants to get this shit over with.

There are times when there’s nothing I want more in the world. But I’m also ashamed to even think about it. Dreadnought knew no fear, and I’m a coward.

You didn't know D3, Danny. Not even the author did, apparently.

hen I first got my powers I thought courage would come with them, but I can’t even stand up to Dad. How the hell am I supposed to save the world, too? It would be easier for both of us if she’d stop poking at it, if she’d realize I’m pathetic and weak, and let me do this my own way.

This writing would be too obvious in a book for six-year olds. The fucking Wizard of Oz had more sophisticated and subtle character arcs.

Next time, yet more sneering at other failed men.

 

[M3xus]

God, they make even magic sound lame.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

God, they make even magic sound lame.

I’m starting to assume this is the universe all the other capeshit universes banish boring people and things to.

 

[Higgs Bonbon]

Wow. Reading this crap makes me feel much more confident about my own writing abilities.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

- Given the powers of a demigod
- Still a perpetual victim

Only in trans literature.

I like to imagine this would be a book that was written by one of the bad guys in a different, better book/comic to demonstrate what a pitiful narcissist they are.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I drop down, seize Bosco under the armpits, and pop back into the air. He’s much heavier than I expected. A few seconds later, and a few hundred feet up, he comes to his senses.

Bosco’s answer is a double-fisted hammer blow, right to the back of my head. It jolts me around a little, but I maintain my grip.

Wait, what? So Deadname is holding Bosco under his arms, and yet Bosco can land a double-fisted hammer blow to the back of his head? How is that supposed to work?
And if he's so afraid of heights (or being dropped) that he's crying, why is he trying to knock out the guy holding him aloft?

Also, I swear every bit of "superheroics" in this book reads like a supervillain origin story.

His terror makes me feel amazing. I begin to laugh.

I mean... Jesus Christ.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

Caping is supposed to be the thing we do when I want to stop being in the real world for a while.

Jesus. "Supervillain origin" is exactly right. Danny thinks that being a superhero is like being in drag; it's not about actually doing anything meaningful or useful in the world, or taking up the great responsibility that your great power comes with. It's an explicit denial that the lives of, e.g., all those civilians on the plane matter. They're not real, which is to say, they are not in Danny's little pity-party of an existence.

Calamity, as before, comes the closest to having an actual moral center. I hope we get more of her being like this. And again, I'd really love to see her's and the Legion's perspective bounce off of each other, with her perspective of judging the Legion for not solving every problem, and the Legion judging vigilantes like her for sometimes getting it wrong and taking a potshot at a nuke-powered super whose retaliatory shot irradiates a neighborhood.

I'd also like to register a prediction; we're not going to see her get put into serious peril where she fears for her life and safety. The vibe I'm getting from Danny's own invulnerability and how the fight scene played out is entirely that the author doesn't want tension, and does want pure power-fantasy.

I am also wryly amused at the unexamined contempt that Danny has for his father for failing to live up to a masculine ideal. It's both remarkably stupid, given that superpowers obviously trump bone density and muscle mass variations across men and women, and still manages to go around and end up validating Roger's main point; men are men, women are women, and the two are different, and even with superpowers, no one respects men who act like women. It's remarkably on the nose, given how the TERF vs. trans rhetoric lines have been drawn.

Also, to check, the closest thing to a positive, heteronormative masculine ideal character we've seen so far has been the previous Dreadnought, right? This book does seem to have a distinct desire to sneer at failed men, as you say...but it also has a very superficial perspective on what failure means. Part of being a man is stoicism. It's the ability to get knocked down and pick yourself back up again, and not treat that failure as absolute and life-defining; that's how you grow and learn to overcome failures. And, in dubious credit to the author, thinking "Aha, you were embarrassed! In public! That's the worst thing ever!" is very adolescent-female.

But even if we assume that Danny isn't a stupidly-unreliable narrator, what we've gotten from this whole bit is that Roger is enough of a man to dip a toe into an unfamiliar and dangerous world, get his life endangered, and pick himself back and get ready to go back into that world, because he has to, for his son's sake.

There is a better book in which Danny grows up a bit, and we get a framing scene of him stopping off at Home Depot on the way from school, coming home with some drywall kit and basic tools and a DIY For Dummies book, starting the work by himself, and then having a conversation with his father about doing good and taking responsibility for things around you, and thus starting to earn his father's respect, as the father realizes that Danny's rejection of male biology is not a rejection of male virtue. But I bet we are not going to get that; the drywall comment was solely Danny berating his father for not doing everything around the house in addition to managing to retool and re-skill to keep the lights on, the fridge full, and the mortgage paid.

And the really frustrating thing is that we have one of the ur-stories retold in easily-digestible form, as one of the most famous superhero origins ever; boy grows into becoming youth, youth is delighted and giddy with newfound power, youth starts taking careless, unthinking actions, those actions cause harm, youth realizes that they are responsible for that harm and need to rectify it, youth becomes young man. My narrative instincts want this to be one chapter in a giant multi-book saga in which Danny's actions catch up to him and he actually does realize who he is and what he's doing, and set himself on the road to to better. But I know this is not that story.

 

[LoverofPi]

The very fact you're willing to risk your dad's life to preserve your glass-closet of a secret identity makes you a stupid arsehole, Danny. Also, Bosco is a super-supremacist who turns into living steel. I can't tell if Daniels is trying to reference the time Colossus worked for Magneto, or if he accidentally reverse-engineered him while trying to reference Magneto himself.

I'm going to guess it's Acolyte Colossus with some of the details fudged rather than an accident. The book hasn't shown much if anything in the way of original ideas.

I'm going to pretend this is a reference to many superheroines having big breasts, because otherwise I have to live with the fact Daniels just stole "flatscan" from X-Men and cut it in half.

No, that's absolutely what happened. And it's even stupider here than when used in X-men.

I feel like people would definitely cheat the throwaway colour thing.

"I was just about to assault and maybe murder a dude for looking at me funny, but you're... breaking etiquette!"

So naturally, you call this grown arse thug "a weenie." Is Danny meant to be eleven?

As someone else just asked, how the hell does this dude due a hammer blow (Bottom of the fist) to the back of Danny's head when Danny is holding him? Even if Danny has this guy tossed over his shoulder, that does not work.

You know, Captain Marvel was the definition of mid, but what I'd give for that scene where she and the kid mess around with the colours of her suit right now.

The writing and editing of that movie was all over the place, but that scene was pretty good. Also the Stan Lee Cameo makes no sense. Unless he's a reality hopper of some sort.

Wait, what? So Deadname is holding Bosco under his arms, and yet Bosco can land a double-fisted hammer blow to the back of his head? How is that supposed to work?

Yeah, Bosco would need extra long arms and extra joints to make it work in that, and basically any position where he's being held by someone. I guess if Danny's holding him by the chest and almost directly above himself, but that's just stupid.

Also, I swear every bit of "superheroics" in this book reads like a supervillain origin story.

Yeah, Danny's a supervillain people are trying to keep from going nova, not a hero ready to bloom at this point.


Yet more dialogue of Roger being reasonable, and narration of him being abusive and hateful. Given Danny's perseuction complex, I could see this as his father going "Danny, I have been running myself ragged for weeks, almost got myself killed looking for a cure you didn't even want and NOW you tell me?"
If Daniels could actually commit to putting hateful shit into Roger's mouth directly, I might believe it. As is, I'm getting serious untrustworthy narrator vibes from this, which definitely stems from the unreliable author writing this.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

The writing and editing of that movie was all over the place, but that scene was pretty good. Also the Stan Lee Cameo makes no sense. Unless he's a reality hopper of some sort.

To be fair, in the MCU it's pretty much been confirmed Stan Lee is an agent of the Watchers, so probably.

Wait, what? So Deadname is holding Bosco under his arms, and yet Bosco can land a double-fisted hammer blow to the back of his head? How is that supposed to work?
And if he's so afraid of heights (or being dropped) that he's crying, why is he trying to knock out the guy holding him aloft?

Danny dropped him then picked him up again, my apologies for not making this clear. I do try to avoid leaving out stuff that's important. The book's shit enough without me being dishonest or sloppy in my coverage.

His name is Gerald and he just wanted to be special

Hi Gerald!

Huddled on the couch across from me, clutching the mug of water Calamity brought him, he doesn’t seem like the type to go in for being a supervillain’s henchman. He’s got a round face and a scrawny neck. His hair is short and bristly, and his fingertips are ragged where he’s chewed the nails too close. Regret is stamped all over his face, and if he didn’t have what we needed I’d be out the door right now because I hate doing this to him. There’s something about him that’s tugging at me. Something familiar.

Wait for it.

Gerald looks down at his hands for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is so soft I barely hear him. “She said she could give me superpowers.”

Calamity is leaning against the arm of the couch furthest from him, ankle over ankle, hand clasped on her wrist. She rolls her eyes. “Groupie.”

It occurs to me--and this is something that the smarter capeshit universes take into account--there have to be like, superpower equivelants Dr Sidhbh Gallagher out there: quacks and butchers who promise powers to desperate people. Might even be worse, because those guys can at least point to actual cases of normal people becoming superhuman. Of course, the fact that no doctor on Earth has ever succesfully changed a patient's sex doesn't stop some from claiming it anyway.

Gerald scowls. “I know I’m not the brightest stick in the pile—” Calamity snorts. “Crap. Sharpest stick, brightest bulb. The point is, I know I’m not that smart, and my health has never been very good. I didn’t graduate college but I’ve got so much student debt I can’t go back to school. That’s how it goes for people like me, okay?” He crosses his arms over his stomach and seems to sink in on himself. Gerald seems to be in his thirties, and he’s getting interrogated by girls half his age, either one of whom could take him apart without much effort. That must sting. “My whole life I’ve been middle of the pack or falling behind. Utopia said she could change that. If I had powers, I could get a good job, or sponsorship from a cape team somewhere. I could be somebody. You don’t know what it’s like living the way I do, how nobody sees you and nobody cares.”

Something clicks, and I realize what it is about Gerald that seems so familiar. He’s the man I was scared I would grow into. “Yes, I do.” I say.

There's something genuinely gross about this whole sequence. It's pretty obvious that Danny--and by extension Daniels--less think they were "always girls inside" so much as they were trying to flee a deep sense of inadequcy. This is Daniels looking down on someone in the same boat as him, because they picked a different delusion to try and solve their problems.

“No, you don’t!” he spits. “Look at you. You’re stronger than you have any right to be, and you say you can fly? You don’t know anything about me.” His shoulders slump. “The world has been handed to you, and I’m stuck in the gutter.”

“Returning to the subject at hand,” says Calamity with a significant glance at me. “What is it Utopia had you doing?”

I'm sure we're meant to think "if only he knew" here, but Gerald's right. A superhero literally fell from the sky and handed Danny the solutions to all his supposed problems, and the only reason he still has any is either because he's a massive wimp, like with his dad, or because his demands are incredibly unreasonable, like expecting a superhero team to chuck out their teammate for not thinking he's a girl.

“Returning to the subject at hand,” says Calamity with a significant glance at me. “What is it Utopia had you doing?”

“I can’t say.”

“Now that is a point worth contesting,” says Calamity. She uncrosses her legs and brushes her jacket back. Grenades, knives, and an enormous black revolver leer out at him.

Gerald goes pale—well, paler—but he clenches his fists on his knees and holds firm. “You can’t possibly understand how important this is. I’m not going to let you bully me.”

“Oh sure, because you’re the victim here.” Calamity leans over and smacks him upside the head, hard.

Okay, establishing Gerald as a dark mirror of Danny, then having him call an actual woman interrogating his bullshit a bully is a joke I couldn't have thought of in a million years.

“Hey, easy,” I say, raising my hand to stop her.

“Oh fer Christ’s sake, you’re not buying this sob story, are you?”

“I think he’s telling the truth,” I say, and Gerald unclenches for a moment until I continue, “but that doesn’t mean we’re leaving without what we came for. You need to tell us what she had you doing.”

“No,” says Gerald. “I don’t care what you do to me, I’m not screwing this up.” The way he’s standing up to us is kind of impressive, in its own way.

Of course it's this guy that manages to impress Danny.

“You can talk to me, or we can go to the Legion Pacifica.” This is mostly a bluff. There’s no way I’m going to tell them I’ve been caping unless I absolutely have to. It’s not worth the risk.

This guy's boss killed the last you, and owns a gun that can put a cap in reality's ass. Danny's like that chatbot that would rather let a nuke go off than say "nigger."

“Chlorophyll’s got pollens and flowers that can make you talk,” says Calamity. He does? That’s news to me. I just thought the Legion would, I dunno, be better at this than we are. “So you can spill now and keep your little scraps of dignity, or you can tell him every secret you’ve ever had. And THEN they’ll hand you over to the cops.”

This is a weird thing to be suprised by given he abducted Danny from school using his funky pollen powers.

A plaintive whining noise starts to leak out of Gerald, and he begins to rock back and forth on the couch. Welp. There goes my sympathy, torn away like a fart in a hurricane.

Like father like son, eh, Danny? Gerald admits he drove the truck on a few robberies. He's also an idiot who didn't turn his phone's GPS off, so Calamity--being an actual superhero with brains--is able to use that to figure out where they hit.

“We need more than that, Gerald,” I say. “We need to know what she’s planning and when it’s going to happen.”

“No! If you stop her, she won’t be able to hold up her end of the deal!”

Calamity sighs. “You are aware she’s a murderer, right?”

“I’m…I’m sure she—”

“‘Has her reasons,’ yeah, sure.” Calamity leans in close. “What makes you think she wasn’t planning to kill you?”

His eyes open up round. “…oh.”

“Yeah.”

Yeah, I can buy Danny and this man being kindred spirits.

“She said she could get me my powers at the end of next week. That’s all I know, honest.”

Gerald later died when his entire body became a fistula.

We spent too long with Gerald. I end up tickling the sound barrier to get back home before my curfew kicks in.

The Power Pack were edgier than Danny, and they were like, eight-to-twelve years old.

A few minutes later I wander downstairs. Mom is in the dining room, papers from her latest freelance gig spread out in front of her. A mug of tea steams by her elbow, and when she looks up it takes her a moment to come back from far away.

It's a minor thing, but it'd have been a nice bit of non-intrusive detail if Danny mentioned what his mother did. Is she a finance person like her husband? Does she do college-prep? Write commisioned porn on Deviantart?

“I don’t remember getting you that shirt,” she says. I’m wearing one of the outfits Doc Impossible made for me.

“A friend gave it to me.”

Mom looks surprised. “Oh, who? David?”

“Uh, no. We don’t really talk since, well, he doesn’t like that I’m transgender.”

“Oh.” Her face clouds. “I’m…I’m sorry to hear that.”

I mean, technically David was fucking stoked you were transgender. It's kind of hard for Danny to be a stand-in for "trans kids" when his situation is nothing like theirs. No fifteen year old boy who decides they're a girl suddenly has to deal with their heterosexual mates wanting to bone them. Also, Danny's bones aren't soft at all!

Halfway through the crackers, and not nearly far enough along through my homework, Mom speaks, her voice quiet, almost musing. “I used to wonder what you’d be like if you were a girl.”

I kind of imagine every mother who has only sons ponders that at some point. Most of them treat it as an amusing or slightly wistful thought-experiment. Some of them are Jeanette Jennings.

I look up. “Really?”

“Yes.” She seems surprised to hear herself talking about it. “When you were little, you once asked me if you could be a princess.”

“I don’t remember that.” Except now I’m starting to think I do.

I think Blanchard talked about TIMs retconning their childhoods to include dysphoria.

“You did. You never went through a cooties phase, either. You got along so nicely with girls from your class.”

Cooties is actually a pretty culturally limited phenomenon from what I've read. You tend to see it in anglophone cultures and not say, France.

That, I do remember. I also remember how I slowly began to drift away from them. Or did they push me out? It’s not clear. There are so many things that happened in middle school that I can’t remember anymore. I’ve buried them so deep, I don’t think I’ll ever find them again. Not that I really want to, of course.

Convinent. Personally, I'd speculate it has something to do with your best friend being a total fucking creep and you apparently never noticing or say anything.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from far away.

Tell you what? "Son, when you were little you did some cross-gender play and got along okay with girl-children, both of which were considered perfectly common and healthy before the pharmacutecal industry decided there weren't enough children being drugged and cut."

“Because,” says Mom. “Because you seemed like a happy little boy. It never crossed my mind that you could be anything else.”

“I was too scared to say anything.” My pencil feels clumsy in my hand. My throat is tight. So much time lost, so much of my childhood gone, because nobody ever asked the right questions.

I think at this point Danny is just angry his mother wasn't a literal mind-reader, which might be a slightly more reasonable expectation in his world, but only so much.

Mom nods like it makes sense, like any of this makes sense, and dives back into her reading. Or, no. Tries to. A few minutes later she looks up. “Danny, are you really happy like this?”

The answer comes immediately. “Yes.”

“You’re not going to consent to hormone shots.” It’s not a question.

It's also not how actual humans talk outside a doctor's office. Is Danny's mother part medical-liability waiver?

“No.” We both know that’s the end of the line. I’m fifteen, which is old enough to put up a fight. My situation is too strange, too exotic, for the doctors to have any firm ethical guidelines. I doubt any of them would risk doing something that could get them sued once I turn eighteen.

Hasn't stopped them so far.

And that’s before we get to the part where I’m an invincible superhuman.

She stares into her mug of tea. “I feel like I’ve lost my son.”

“Mom, you never had a son.”

Isn't this called gaslighting?

Mom seems to crumple. “We tried so hard, Danny. Is it something I did wrong?”

“Jesus, no! Mom, it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not a bad thing.”

"I mean, in my case it's not because a superhero turned me into a really good knock-off of an actual woman, if I was an actual youth-transtioner, hoo-boy would things suck."

“Are you sure? I just…it’s going to be so hard for you. I think of what…trans?…transgendered people go through, and I don’t want that for you. I’m scared of what will happen to you, Danny.”

“Mom, that stuff doesn’t matter,” I say. She doesn’t look like she believes me. I need a way to make her understand. “If it happens or not, whatever it is I’ll live with it. What about the stuff that was happening to me when I was trying to be a boy?”

Now, the compassionate thing for Danny to do here would be to reveal his superpowers to his mother, reassuring her that it's essentially impossible for anyone to hurt him for being trans. Or to remind her they live in East Coast America, and he's not a Brazilian prositute, but either works.

“It was torture! You know what I was doing when Dreadnought—when that supervillain attacked me?” I don’t believe it. It’s like she’s willfully misunderstanding it. They never take my word for it, why can’t they take my word for it?

Not something you get to ask while literally lying to your mother. And they can't take your word for it because you never told them.

“I was painting my toenails behind the mall because that’s the only way I could keep sane. Does that seem normal to you, Mom? Does that seem healthy?”

I'm pretty sure they only declare boys insane for painting their nails in certain Middle-Eastern territories.

“I was going to die.” The pencil snaps between my fingers, one end cartwheeling off across the table and onto the floor. “And I am a girl. Even if you don’t see it.”

I will never get over someone who was a teenage boy less than a month ago telling off his mother for not noticing he was always a girl.

The chair scrapes the floor as I stand up. My homework crinkles as I slam my books closed, scoop them up in my arms and head up to my room.

Do I want her to call out after me? I don’t know.

She doesn’t.

Lord knows I wouldn't after that nonsense.

 

[LoverofPi]

I might respond more later, but holy fuck Danny is a shit.

 

[M3xus]

Seriously, mentally castigating his mother for not being a mind-reader is something I'd expect a narcissist to do. Which tracks, because troons are all narcissists.

 

[Peru oso donas]

I feel like all of this talk about throwaway colors and shit is just some convoluted set up to have Daniel wear a tranny flag inspired suit like the cover shows.
Edit: just made a quick look and the cover doesn't show Daniel with a trans colored suit, guess i mixed it up with the pinkish background, but my guess still stands.