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

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

“Hold this,” I say to the uniform next to me, and push my coffee cup into his hands. The next instant I’m in the air and approaching the sound barrier.

Is this something people say? "Uniform" instead of "cop"? I could kind of see it when there's members of lots of different agencies around, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is some shade of "cop."

The top floor of Galatea Tower is a swanky restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows that shatter nice and dramatically when I punch through them. This used to be a nice place for overpriced dinners. Dim lighting, white tablecloths, real silver in the silverware. Now it features scorch marks on the carpet, dozens of screaming hostages, and a SWAT team having a firefight with a supervillain. Not really a place I’d recommend for the ambiance.

Danny is no Peter Parker for the quips, as you can see.

The main entrance to the dining room has been frozen over completely. A quick peek in the lattice tells me that the cops are trapped on the other side, several of them partially frozen into the wall, and they are frantically trying to chip their way out with utility knives. More cops in black tactical gear have burst in from a kitchen entrance, but are pinned down behind a pair of heavy, overturned tables. Their rifles bark and snap across the room, and everywhere hostages are pinning themselves to the ground, screaming.

And there in the center of the room is the bad guy, a man in his thirties who’s dressed like he was one of the guests. His tie is undone and his jacket hangs loose. His sleeves are charred and fraying near the cuffs, and there are scorch marks all around him. He’s got his hands spread out in front of him, blasting winds filled with ice and sleet to rebuild a crumbling ice bullet shield in front of him.

Ah, I see Bobby Drake's angry about his sexuality getting retconned. Just give him space.

Almost immediately I start taking hits from an assault rifle, cracking pops of pain across my chest and neck. Irritating, but not damaging.


“Check your fire, dumbass!” I shout, getting up into the air to draw any further fire up away from the hostages. This is what I don’t like about fighting near cops; even their “elite” officers probably haven’t been in a real battle before, and that means that some of them tend to ride the edge of panic every time things get really serious. The officer shooting at me finally lets up on the trigger, adjusts his aim, and starts blasting away at the ice wall the bad guy is putting up.

Superheroes and supervillains have been a thing for eighty years, possibly longer. You're really telling me nobody in the police-force--even the guys whose job is fighting supervillains--don't know how to backup a hero, especially when they're basically an extension of the state's monopoly on force themselves?

The vil looks at me, eyes wide, swings one arm over, and his hand glows hot yellow just before—


The SWAT team all run out of ammo at the same time.


There’s a moment of silence, and then the cops are all scrambling for pistols or spare magazines.


The vil throws a bolt of fire at some hostages, splashes a puddle of liquid flame all around them.

"The vil." God, Daniels' slang is shit.

They shriek and try to back away, but the flames have them penned in. The fire is closing in on them, and they reach out for me with pleading hands. I snap across the room, catch hold of two people’s wrists, and hoist them up out of the noose of fire, then shout to the others, “Grab my ankles!”

Their landing isn’t very pretty or comfortable, but I don’t have time to worry about the little things. Once this group of hostages is safe, I whirl on the bad guy, ready to fight.

In the time it’s taken me to rescue the hostages, he’s hit the cops’ position with heavy ice. I can hear one of them shouting into his radio for backup, and a few more are trying to chip away at the ice around them with knives. Some of them are entirely encased, and have maybe a few minutes to live.

Oh, my God, I love it. Of all the things to rip-off, Daniels chose fucking Batman and Robin.

“Wait!” says the vil as I close in on him. His eyes are wild and desperate. “Look, my name is John Crenshaw; I have a lot of really important friends. We don’t need to fight. You can understand, right? We’re better than these people! Just let me go. Nobody important has been hurt, right?”


He says this while standing a few yards from the charred remains of the waiter he killed.


“What the hell are you talking about?” I demand, pointing at the corpse.

I'm kind of amused we're doing an "eat the rich" thing when Danny's a well-paid state superhero.

His face twists with frustration. “I’m too important to go down for this! I was trying to get them to understand, but they’re too far gone. The cathedral has infected us. Even these people, who are supposed to be the cream—”

“Shut up.”

So, if any of you don't know, "the cathedral" is a term coined by blogger and writer Curtis Yavin, better known as "Molbug." The cathedral is basically his catchall description of the mainstream media and academia, positing that they are essentially the real political power in the western world, with liberal democracy basically being little more than a rubber-stamp for whatever wacky shit they come up with. For instance, TRA shit (at least beyond the basic courtesy of not bothering cross-dressers who're minding their own business) is wildly unpopular and clearly insane, yet pretty much every mainstream publication in America is pushing the most extreme versions of it, and it's been making legislative gains for years, despite the fact not even much of the Democratic Party's base really approves of say, male rapists in women's prisons, or mutilating kids for being fruity. Basically, policy is not made by popular public consensus, or even by politicians, but rather university professors and NGO staff who've realised the category of "female" doesn't make much sense when you try to include men, but think that's the category's problem. I'm simplifying, but that's the gist of it. Can't say it's not a compelling argument.

Yavin's part of this whole crowd of weird-but-interesting dudes that I can best (but inadequately) sum up as "Eliezer Yudkowsky, but kind of right-wing. Kind of." We'll be talking more about them--and why I think Daniels chose them to be the baddies--later, but for now, I have to wonder, if this book was written right now, would the baddies have been the fine folks at Blocked and Reported, or like, Bronze Age Pervert or something?

Danny proceeds to tackle Crenshaw out of the window, who manages to break his fall with his powers. I feel obligated to tell you all that Danny was planning on catching him, but would you be surprised if he wasn't?

During my first real battle, I was hesitant. I was reluctant to go full power on the bad guys. The idea of hurting people was repulsive to me. That is not a problem I have anymore. Sometime in the last half-year or so I became the kind of person who can snap bones and rip tendons and feel nothing but satisfaction. But people don’t like to think about that kind of thing, about how the person they depend on to fight their battles for them might actually like it, so I don’t talk about it too much. Which is fine. After being in the closet for seven years, keeping my mouth shut about how much I like fighting is easy.


“You’re just like them, you…you peasant!” says Crenshaw as he rolls over and gets his arms under him.

Good to know Danny's equally good at hiding both his fetishes.

He comes to his feet with a lot of wincing and straining, and then out of the goddamn blue throws a freaking lightning bolt at me. It hits like Zeus’ backhand. My whole nervous system lights up with agony, my muscles locked and straining. I’d be screaming but my lungs aren’t working, and my heart is trying to turn itself inside out. The pain passes, and I’m falling to my knees, then my stomach. Shit. Nobody told me he had electricity powers. Stupid, Danny. Real stupid.


Crenshaw laughs, relief mixed with triumph. “You don’t like that, do you, bitch?” he calls, and then he hits me with another bolt.


This time I do scream, long and loud as my back arches and my arms clench up. I’m not actually invincible, just really tough, and I’m not equally tough to all things. Electricity hits me almost as hard as a baseline human. My suit is doing its best to insulate me from the worst, but I still feel little electric knives sawing at all my nerves.

Do you think Utopia feels a bit put-out she could've killed D3 with an arc generator or something?

This is an embarrassing way to die, I think, just as the flash grenade lands between us.


A flutter of cloth, a whine of spooling cable. Someone grabs me by the cape and hauls me up and away just as the grenade goes off with a flat bang. We swing to the lip of a half-finished second floor. I land on the naked cement in a heap, and a pair of boots clops down next to me. The girl they belong to wears cargo pants crimped in at the knees with pads, and her torso is encased in black tactical gear under a long, brown riding coat. And, of course, she’s wearing a gray cowboy hat.


“All right, partner,” says Calamity. The cable she swung us up here on finishes rewinding back up into her left hand. There’s a hypertech rocket/grapnel at the end that disappears into her palm with a metallic click. “Tap out. I’ve got it from here.”

Hell yeah.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

OK, OK, we're dialing back our boy's invincibility a bit, getting in some serious threats, and I am a little amused at how quickly Danny's bloodlust fades when his target can meaningfully hit back, so, hey, improvement, and we've even got Calamity back! I also do not buy that SWAT wouldn't either have gitted gud or gotten clapped by now. Also, isn't SWAT really big on snipers in a case like this? If our master of both the elements and eight-page meandering historical screeds is made of normal human meats and he needs to concentrate, focus, and aim his powers, he should go down like as much of a chump as the Legion did.

We could have excused this with a two-line paragraph about how the actual good SWAT team that Danny had been working with the past few months had gotten retired for bullshit political reasons and the new one was clown-shoes, but the city's government felt it needed one because of the Legion situation, but no, we can't be making cops look good in times adjacent to CURRENT_YEAR, now, can we?

So, I assume there will be more to Team Neoreactionary later, but this seems just dumb. Like, it's not even a good stereotype of the group. First, the whole claim of the Cathedral is a condemnation of the priestly, guilded, and merchant classes of a society; sneering at 'peasants' is entirely off-brand for it. Second, the idea behind it is to prove itself out in outcomes and ideas that are chosen as the mainstream decays and crumbles, not tearing down the Cathedral in direct action. And finally, just showing up to rant at rich people and then explode things is entirely too comprehensible for a NRX maneuver. I assume we will be getting more information later, but my instinct is that someone who is talking about the Cathedral but also is demonstrating this kind of sensibility is some crazed Middle-Ages Protestant aristocrat LARPer.

And also, while it's clearly not either Danny's nor the author's focus, showing Danny taking the time to respond to imperiled hostages is good. Like, the scene and set-up is bad, I have little mental picture of what the scene is intended to be and how Multi-Element-Man and Keystone SWAT were constraining each other previously, but entry-level check-box for superheroics has been checked, so at least there's that.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

So, I assume there will be more to Team Neoreactionary later, but this seems just dumb. Like, it's not even a good stereotype of the group. First, the whole claim of the Cathedral is a condemnation of the priestly, guilded, and merchant classes of a society; sneering at 'peasants' is entirely off-brand for it. Second, the idea behind it is to prove itself out in outcomes and ideas that are chosen as the mainstream decays and crumbles, not tearing down the Cathedral in direct action. And finally, just showing up to rant at rich people and then explode things is entirely too comprehensible for a NRX maneuver. I assume we will be getting more information later, but my instinct is that someone who is talking about the Cathedral but also is demonstrating this kind of sensibility is some crazed Middle-Ages Protestant aristocrat LARPer.

I appreciate having someone who knows more about this crowd than I do.

 

[Kosher Dill]

“Hold this,” I say to the uniform next to me, and push my coffee cup into his hands.

Wait, Danny stopped and got a cup of coffee after doing an orbital reentry to rush to the scene? Is he in a hurry or not?

Sometime in the last half-year or so I became the kind of person who can snap bones and rip tendons and feel nothing but satisfaction.

Seriously, this is far beyond "antihero" territory. If this is foreshadowing an actual moral reckoning, that's one thing, but who are we kidding?

Do you think Utopia feels a bit put-out she could've killed D3 with an arc generator or something?

Seriously, imagine going to all the trouble of building a Reality Eraser Gun when a Tazer would have done.
While it's good that they're easing up on the invincibility, are we really supposed to believe Danny's been fighting supervillains all the time and never ran across someone with electric powers? I mean, it's the most common superpower among black people.

The cable she swung us up here on finishes rewinding back up into her left hand.

Yeah, the cyborg replacement for the hand she lost to Utopia. But Danny still likes Utopia better than Graywytch.

I am a little amused at how quickly Danny's bloodlust fades when his target can meaningfully hit back

We'll see about that, I bet as soon as the tide turns Danny will be breaking some bones and letting the good times roll.
Place your bets now on whether he makes Crenshaw cry.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Wait, Danny stopped and got a cup of coffee after doing an orbital reentry to rush to the scene? Is he in a hurry or not?

Yeah, but then the chief told her to stand down because their special super-SWAT unit turned up first, because "whitecapes" are the lamest heroes in the multiverse.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Calamity’s revolvers bark loud and low as she sprints along one side of the unfinished second floor.

...Unfinished second floor what? I hope to fuck this book didn't go to print like this.

Stupid, Danny, really stupid. I should have finished him off when I had the chance. A couple quick hits to his upper arms to break the bones, and he wouldn’t be able to even lift his hands, much less throw lightning at me. Maybe take out his legs too, just to be sure. I mean, yeah, sure, that all sounds really brutal…


And it is, I guess. But that’s how these things work. You can’t just handcuff a supervillain and expect him to go quietly. Unless I put him down hard, the moment my back is turned he’ll be barbecuing cops and making a break for freedom. Of course, now we’ve lost our easy chance to end this quick because I like to play with my food. Hey, it seemed like a fun idea at the time. It always seems like a fun idea at the time.

Okay, how did we go from "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!" to this mealy-mouthed bullshit?

“All right, we’ve pincered him,” says Calamity through my earbud radio. “Any ideas?”

I skid to a stop behind a cement column and tuck in behind it. “Yes! Switch up to hollow points and blow his goddamn knees off!”

“Not happening. Too much bacon around here. Can you find something to throw at him?”

Too much bacon? What, the cops? Is Calamity--the illegal vigilante who funds herself with re-appropriated drug money--really concerned about PR?

I heft a fifty-pound bag of cement, step out of cover, and fling it at him like the world’s heaviest Frisbee. As it goes, I reach out into the lattice for the strings of its momentum, catch and tweak them to guide the bag in for an accurate hit. Crenshaw sees it coming and hits it with a bolt of lighting. The bag bursts open just in time for him to get hit with fifty pounds of loose, powdered cement. Not the Mack truck knockout I was hoping for, but still enough to send him ass-over-end.


Calamity raises her left arm and shoots a grapnel that trails cable out of her prosthetic hand. The cable finds purchase across the open yard, and she flies out of cover as the cable whizzes back into her arm. She lands next to him in a roll, and as the limp cable whips back into her arm across the mud, she snatches it up and wraps it twice around Crenshaw’s throat.

I would joke and call Calamity's robot-arm her am-arm, but that thing actually seems pretty sick.

“Best be tapping out soon, partner!” she shouts as she jerks the cable tight.


Crenshaw struggles a little more, so she bangs his head against the ground once, twice, and finally he goes limp. Before he can come to, Calamity reaches into her tactical vest and pulls out a syringe. She jerks the safety cap off with her teeth, then plunges the thick needle through his jacket into the meat of his shoulder. That’s what she does instead of beating the bad guys into a hospital bed. If I could manage to get through a fight without shattering everything fragile I was carrying, I’d probably use those little tranquilizers too.

Luckily, tranquilizers work instantaneously, don't vary in dosage depending on weight and many other factors, and this guy isn't a superhuman with novel biology.

“Good work,” I say, setting down next to her.


“What the hell is wrong with you?” says Calamity as she gets to her feet and brushes off her hands.


“Oh great! We’re doing this again.” All that earlier relief from when she took charge has vanished. It seems like nothing is ever right between us these days. For a while there after the battle with Utopia, it seemed like we were going to be close. Very close. But then…I don’t know, then it kind of fell apart. I was off making my first rounds as Dreadnought, getting to know my new life, and she was trapped in Legion Tower or at home, going through a series of surgeries to get ready for her prosthetic arm. That’s when we started to lose contact and drift apart. She stopped answering my calls, and then I stopped calling. It wasn’t until a few months later when we ran into each other on a midnight roof that I even knew she was still caping.

Maybe she just realised she was too good for Danny.

What makes it worse is that sometime in the nine months since we fought Utopia, Calamity hit a growth spurt and is now a good two or three inches taller than me, and that’s flipped a switch in my brain for how I see her. She has gone from being kind of cute to urgently, painfully hot. The way she holds her shoulders, straight and high. The way her eyes are the color of liquid chocolate.

So... brown. Her eyes are deep brown, the most common eye-colour in the human race. Not saying there's anything wrong with that--I'm in the basic-bitch brown-eye club myself--but c'mon, Daniels. This is your hero's love interest (kill me) and you couldn't come up with something a bit more particular? Her cheekbones? The shade of her skin? Maybe her physical grace?

Sometimes she catches me staring, and I think sometimes I catch her staring, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

We all wish it was.

“You almost got yourself killed,” says Calamity.


“I almost die on a monthly basis, what makes tonight so special?”


“Dammit, Dreadnought; this ain’t funny!” Whoa, wait a minute, that’s real fear in her eyes. It doesn’t work this way.


“I’m sorry,” I say, trying not to sound insincere.


“I thought once you’d had a chance to grow into your powers you’d get over doing shit like this,” she says, which is the exact wrong thing to say.


“Oh, piss off!” I snap. “I don’t need you tell me what to do with my powers!”

"You've only been a superhero for way longer than me, and managed to survive without nearly the power I have under my belt!"

We’re saved from the fight getting worse by the arrival of Detective Phạm, who charges into the construction site at the head of a SWAT team. They all point guns at Calamity.


“Calamity, freeze! You’re under arrest!” shouts Detective Phạm.


“Funny. I don’t feel arrested.”


“Dreadnought, step away from the vigilante!”

"Superhero, step away from the other superhero!"

God I hate this system and how much it's become the default for capeshit.

“What’d she do to him?” asks Phạm as she slides her gun back into her shoulder holster. Crenshaw is completely out of it, flopping limply and drooling as the medics load his stretcher into the back of their truck.


“It’s a hypertech sedative,” I say. “Puts him down for eight hours with no side effects.”

Okay, I guess that covers my complaint, though, given Calamity's last hypertech guy got plugged by Utopia, I have to wonder where she's getting her shit these days. She doesn't seem like she'd be willing to accept gifts from Doc at the moment.

Phạm nods, then seems to remember something. “Danny, you shouldn’t be working with her.”


“Why not? I need all the help I can get.”


“She’s unlicensed and working off-contract. That makes her a criminal.”

Most lib-cuck sentiment in the universe.

Phạm and I head back to the main command post. She’s lodged her formal protest about my continued association with Calamity, but we both know that’s all it is: something done for form’s sake so everyone can say they were doing their job. Calamity isn’t the only vigilante in New Port, and if the cops seriously tried to crack down on unlicensed superheroes the crime rate would jump overnight. They say that’s because it would divert manpower away from regular police work; we say it’s because there are lots of crimes they just can’t handle. It’s no different than how things work in other big cities, except maybe a little more intense. New Port has always had more than its share of weirdos in tights and super-powered narcissists with god complexes.

I'm still not sure why Daniels invented a fictional city instead of just using Seattle or Vancouver.

There’s some paperwork the police want me to do, and I sit down to do it without grumbling, because that’s a fight I’ve lost enough times to not bother anymore. After it’s done, I briefly consider asking for permission to fly back down to Antarctica to catch the rest of the convention, but decide against it. The answer will be no. Every time I work with the cops, I have to stick around for the next forty-eight hours in case their investigators decide to ask me any questions. Even though I specifically arranged for this week off, and even though it was Graywytch who wasn’t answering her phone, I’m the one who threw the punches, so I’ve got to stick around.


Frustration knots in my chest. Two years until the next World Convention. Goddamnit, Graywytch. You’re going to pay for this.

This is like the tranny version of the "It was ME Barry" meme. Danny calls Doc to tell her she won't be heading back to the Convention.

“Hello…Danny? Danny?”


“Hi, Doc.”


“How was the fight?”


“It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m going to stay in New Port tonight. I’ve got to be available to the detectives.”


“Oookay. You’re going to miss the after-party.”


I laugh. “That’s fine. Cecilia would kill me if pictures of something like that got on to the web.”


“You’re probably right.”

...I would hope a bunch of superheroes wouldn't fuck or get an underage superheroine drunk.

Something in her tone makes me worried. Doc was in a really bad way after the battle with Utopia. She held it together just long enough for us to move into a condo on the outskirts of downtown, and then fell into a bottle for six months. A human woman would have died from all the alcohol she put into herself. The low point was probably the day I came home and found out she’d cut the word machine into her face with a razor. After what happened today with Magma and Chlorophyll, I’m becoming concerned about a relapse. “Doc, are you going to be okay?”


“I’m not a drunk. I’m just drunk at the moment. It’s fine.”

I honestly do feel bad for Doc. Yeah, she made a horrible, stupid mistake, but she clearly realises that, and most of the characters around her react like you would expect. It's not like Danny clearly being a little shit and nobody ever calling him out on it.

“I’m not a drunk. I’m just drunk at the moment. It’s fine.”

“Just promise me you’ll be sober when you fly up again. I don’t want to have to look for a new lawyer.” Making it a joke works sometimes, but not always.

“Of course!” blurts Doc, her voice frightened. “Of course. I would…you know I never want to hurt you, right?”

“I know, Doc,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s fine. Have fun.”

“Okay, Danny. I just want you to know, you know, right? That I wouldn’t betray you?”

“I know, Doc.” Shit, she’s really fallen down the hole. Magma, you asshole. You didn’t have to yell at her like that. And just when she’d started to get better too.

Case in point, him having the fucking temerity to call Magma an arsehole for still being bitter about the time Doc got all his friends killed or crippled.

She’s not a bad person, exactly, it’s just that sometimes she’ll be drunk for weeks on end and forget to pay the electricity bill, or something like that. It can be difficult to live with her, but if I didn’t, I’d be completely alone. I’m not sure I could deal with that right now.

You'd think the US government would be able to provide some foster-parents or whatever. I know Danny's not exactly a child, but he's still underage.

Doc’s condo is one of four on the top floor of a middle-quality condo tower. It seems like kind of a down-rent place for a pair of professional superheroes to live until you realize that she owns the other three units on the top floor and all the condos on the floor below us too. Buying up a whole lot of units is the only way to ensure the kind of security and privacy that a superhero, or even a former hero for that matter, needs.

Somewhere, a thousand YIMBYs are screaming.

As it turns out, Danny has a guest waiting for her:

“Oh good, you’re here.” The girl stands up to meet me. She’s Asian, and fairly tall. Her clothes are all wrinkled and dirty, and her hair is lank and messy.

“You have ten seconds to convince me not to call the police,” I say with all the ice I can muster. Most people flinch a little when I hit them with something like that, but this girl doesn’t even seem to notice. Cecilia warned me I might have to deal with stalkers, but until this moment I never really took her seriously.

“I’m sorry I broke in. My name is Karen,” she says. What I took to be a strange backpack unfurls a little. It’s not a backpack at all. She has wings. “Valkyrja was my mother, and I really need your help.”

Next time, we continue our series Everyone in the World has Bigger Problems than Danny.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Of course, now we’ve lost our easy chance to end this quick because I like to play with my food.

I have never, ever heard this line used by someone who's not a villain. You can't be a hero and go around singing the praises of ultraviolence and referring to your opponents as prey, unless you're in some caricatured edgelord '90s Image Comics rag.

If I could manage to get through a fight without shattering everything fragile I was carrying, I’d probably use those little tranquilizers too.

What, after you break every bone in their body? You're a saint, Danny.

She’s lodged her formal protest about my continued association with Calamity

To who? Danny's not a member of the Legion. You can't "talk to his manager" because he has none.
Are they going to complain to the city that they shouldn't pay Dreadnought's salary? I'm sure there are plenty of other organizations that would love to hire him.

Even though I specifically arranged for this week off, and even though it was Graywytch who wasn’t answering her phone, I’m the one who threw the punches

Gosh, if only there was someone who wanted to recruit new members for the Legion so they could have a little more time off once in a while!
Graywytch was probably out battling vampire lords in hell while you were getting fried by some deranged yuppie, you ingrate.

She’s not a bad person, exactly, it’s just that sometimes she’ll be drunk for weeks on end and forget to pay the electricity bill, or something like that. It can be difficult to live with her, but if I didn’t, I’d be completely alone.

Doc is a million times worse as a parent than the Tozers. Do they even show up again?

The low point was probably the day I came home and found out she’d cut the word machine into her face with a razor.

"We had to go down to Hypertech Depot and 3D-print a new biomimetic silicone face bezel after that one."

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Doc is a million times worse as a parent than the Tozers. Do they even show up again?

I'm trying to remember if they sue Danny for some asinine reason or if I'm getting confused with the Velveteen books.

 

[LoverofPi]

Is this something people say? "Uniform" instead of "cop"? I could kind of see it when there's members of lots of different agencies around, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is some shade of "cop."

I've only heard it used to distinguish between a plainclothes and uniformed officer. It's not used correctly here though.

...Unfinished second floor what? I hope to fuck this book didn't go to print like this.

Isn't this supposed to be a high end restaurant? Yet it's still in construction?

I'm still not sure why Daniels invented a fictional city instead of just using Seattle or Vancouver.

Make up your own city and be vague about it, people can't really say you get shit wrong even when you forget most of it.

Next time, we continue our series Everyone in the World has Bigger Problems than Danny.

Danny is exactly the sort of person to complain about not having anything to complain about.

Doc is a million times worse as a parent than the Tozers. Do they even show up again?

Yeah but Doc is neglectful and permissive. The Tozers had expectations and standards.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Isn't this supposed to be a high end restaurant? Yet it's still in construction?

I think the fight scene moved outside to a generic cityscape once they went out the window.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

A long few seconds pass.

“Okay,” I say. “What do you need?”

Karen sags with relief. “Really?”

“Sure. Valkyrja was nice to me.” I gesture at her wings. “And you’re obviously not lying about being family.”

Isn't that like assuming anyone with super-strength is related to you? Okay, the wings are probably way less common than that, but still, I'd do some more checking.

Karen fidgets with her fingers, doesn’t meet my gaze. “Um…do you have anything to eat?”

I nod. “Yeah, I’ll put a pizza in the oven.” I walk past her and into the kitchen. The stove is of course one of those ultramodern pieces with more buttons on it than Apollo 11, but it’s not hypertech, just overly fancy.

Anyone else getting sick of the word hypertech? Also, I'm really curious what the Apollo program was like given there's more than one superhuman around who's capable of flying through space unprotected. Yeah, Danny (and I assume the rest of the Dreadnoughts) can only manage about two hours without oxygen, but that would still be incredibly helpful for any space program.

“Thank you,” she says quietly. “I know it’s a lot to ask, especially when I just showed up here and—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been where you are.” It feels weird to say I was homeless. That only lasted for one night. Technically I still meet the definition since Doc is just letting me crash with her, but it seems dramatic to try and say I’m full-on homeless.

Then why bring it up?

Valkyrja never mentioned a daughter. Not that we talked very many times before she was killed, but it surprises me she had a daughter around my age walking around and never mentioned it. Or that someone living her lifestyle wouldn’t have a life insurance policy or something set up to take care of her kid when she was gone. Well, I’m sure Karen will explain. Valkyrja wasn’t the kind of person to hurt her own child.

You had like, two conversations with her, ever. Doc's given you all these speeches about how hard and dangerous the superhero life is, and you're wondering why Valkyrja wasn't busting out the baby pictures?

“Uh, shit, this is hard to explain. So. Crap. So, uh, this spring my wings grew in overnight.”


“That must have been an interesting morning.”


“Yeeeah. ‘Interesting.’ We didn’t know what was happening. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. We thought it was just a random mutation or something. Before I learned how to fly with them, we were considering amputating them. Then the dreams started, these really vivid dreams about places I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met. But then I’d see something on the news or in a book about them, and I’d realize they were true.”

So, remember when Val specified "this body" was born in 1971? Well...

Also, I'm kind of amused that apparently Valkyjra's been a series of white, blonde ladies for generations upon generations, but happened to have a kid with an Asian perform for the first time less than twenty years ago.

Karen stops. Opens her mouth again, closes it. Finally, she says in a shaking voice, “Do you have any liquor?”


“Ah, that seems like a bad idea.”


“But do you?”


“I mean, well, Doc does. But—”


“Please.” Her fingers gnarl into fists. “She’s loudest when I’m sober. This is Hell.”


It’s probably a bad idea, but I’m not stern enough to say no. Karen is desperate in a way I haven’t felt since I transitioned. Before I can think of a good reason to say no, I’m standing up to get her a drink. Doc doesn’t bother to hide her liquor or lock it up.

I bet April Daniels thinks the nuclear family is unhealthy.

“So the dreams got worse,” she says, voice rough. “And then I started having them when I was awake too. I started remembering what New Port looked like in the ’60s, or what New England was like before the Revolution. I can remember the smell of a log fort at the head of a fjord from eight hundred years ago. Eventually I figured out that these were coming from Valkyrja. My wings grew in the night she died. It didn’t make any sense.” She takes another long drink. Karen looks at me with hollow eyes and says, “And then I remembered giving myself up for adoption. Like, it was my memory. But it isn’t. I can recognize the baby. I can recognize myself in the memory. That’s how I found out who my birth mother was.”

So yeah, Karen here is basically Alia or Paul's twins from Dune, except instead of having all her ancestors' memories from before birth, she got to live a normal childhood, then suddenly be smothered by the collective memory of hundreds, if not thousands of women. Legitimately horrific. Also makes Danny's thing about actually being a girl because he liked to draw and didn't like getting the shit kicked out of him by bullies seem pretty minor, doesn't it?

I rise and put my hand on her shoulder. “Hey, hey. It’s all right, okay? I’ll help you,” I say. “Getting powers is…it’s weird. I’ll walk you through it.”

“You don’t understand!” says Karen, shrugging away from me. “I’ve got her memories. And her mother’s memories, and her mother’s memories. All of them. All the way back to the beginning. More of them every day.”

“And that’s…that’s bad?”

...D3 should've let his powers die with them. It would've been safer for everyone.

“Yes, it’s fucking bad!” shouts Karen. “Memory isn’t what we remember, it’s who we are. The way we think, what we want, our opinions. Everything. I’m sixteen. She was twelve hundred. I don’t—I can’t compete with that!” She begins to pace, hugging herself tight. “Her memories are changing me, making me think thoughts that aren’t mine. It’s getting harder and harder to remember what’s me and what’s her. Keeping track of myself is like squirting an eyedropper full of dye into a swimming pool. I see a dog and I remember a German Shepard I once had, but it’s not me, it’s my fucking great-grandmother who had a dog.”

Karen sinks back down onto the couch. Her wings fold protectively around her shoulders. “Valkyrja wants to come back from the dead, and she’ll kill me to do it.”

“She…” I have to fight not to stammer. “Valkyrja wouldn’t…” Karen sets her jaw, eyes daring me to finish that sentence. “Okay. Okay, that sucks. What can I do to help?”

Karen, honey, I think you're fucked.

Karen’s wings relax. “You’re stronger than the other Dreadnoughts. You can do things they couldn’t. You told me—” she flinches “—told her, I mean, that you could see…what did you call it, the lattice? And tug on it?”


“Yeah, the lattice. It’s sort of the backside of reality.”


Karen nods. “I want you to see if you can reach into my head and pull this…thing out.”

Of course she's fucking stronger than the other Dreadnoughts, because apparently April Daniels is secretly Kathleen Stock.

To cut a long story short, Danny sees some spooky-rooky shit in Karen's head, which she plucks out, seemingly destroying some of her ancestral memories, much to Karen's relief.

A memory comes back to me. Valkyrja approaching me on the roof of Legion Tower. She knew my father was—and this has taken me months to be able to say, even to myself—she knew he was abusing me.

It was hard to tell because your author was either too lazy or too chickenshit to write it.

The next morning, I’m yanked out of a nightmare by the pounding at my door. For a brief, horrible moment I forget I don’t live with my parents anymore, and I think my father has come to scream at me. But no, that part of my life is done. He can’t get to me anymore.

You know, I do think it's possible to be emotionally and verbally abusive without laying a hand on your kid, but Christ, this is some limp shit.

I float out of bed and open my door to find Karen standing there, barely holding back the panic.

“They’re back,” she says with a trembling voice. “All of the memories we killed, they’re back, and I think they’re even stronger now.”

Danny is about as helpful as Trans Lifeline.

“I’m going to die.”


“You’re not going to die.”


“I’m so fucking dead.”


“No, you’re not. Pass the syrup.”

Font of compassion, Danny.

We're going to see Charlie, Calamity's wizardly ex-boyfriend, but first, we're having breakfast, because why not.

“Tell me about you. What were you like before, you know, this?”

“Uh,” she says. Chews for a moment, swallows. “I play saxophone. I’m leader of the school’s jazz band. Or was, anyhow.”

“Cool. What else?”

“Um. I’m a big math nerd.”

“Really? I hate math.”

“It’s not so bad,” she says between bites. The edge of panic that’s been behind her voice all morning starts to fade. “The way they teach it is stupid and pointless.”

Of course Val's Asian daughter is a math nerd.

“Charlie likes to hang out at a used bookstore at the edge of town,” I say. “We can get there in a few minutes, if you’re okay with flying.”


“Yes, I can fly,” she says. She turns to me. “You’ve grown into your role, Danielle. I’m glad.”


The bottom falls out of my stomach; I can see Valkyrja behind her face. The twinkle in the eyes. The quiet, understanding smile. “Uh—”


Karen goes pale, claps her hands to her mouth. After a moment, she hisses, “Do you see what it’s like? She’s eating me!”

Christ, Val, that's just straight up possession right there. But remember, Graywytch was the evil magic user on the team.

Raven’s Used Books is staffed almost entirely by metahumans. They don’t advertise it, but they understand what it’s like to have powers and be gawked at because of it. Here, at least, I’m almost normal, and sometimes I need that more than I’d like to admit. Most people with superpowers don’t want to be superheroes or supervillains. Most of them just want normal lives, and while it’s hard to understand why anyone would trade what I do for stocking shelves, I am grateful that there’s a place where it’s not a big deal that I enter through the rooftop door.

It feels like there's a false binary in this story between "ordinary anonymity" and "frontline fighter." Really, there should be tons of rich and famous supers who do other things, like a less fucked version of The Boys.

“Hey, Dreadnought.” Charlie and I met before I became Dreadnought, but he’s hung out with enough capes that he knows to use my supranym in front of someone he doesn’t know. Yes, even if my identity is not a secret. It’s a subculture thing. “I was just getting settled. What’s up?”


“Charlie, this is Karen. Karen, this is Charlie. Karen is Valkyrja’s daughter.”


Charlie’s eyebrows jump up. “I wasn’t aware she had kids.”


“Yes. It turns out I’m half-Korean, half-Scandinavian death goddess. Honestly, I’m as surprised as you,” says Karen with an edge in her voice. And then a moment later, with sinking shoulders, “I’m sorry, I’m being a bitch right now.”

It'd be darkly funny if Val was actually super-racist and that's why this process feels so hostile to Karen.

“So like…all of her memories? There are some questions I’d have loved to ask her, but she wasn’t in a really great mood the last time we spoke.” Apparently Charlie once almost accidentally summoned a demon into Victory Park downtown. Valkyrja and Graywytch stopped things before they got out of hand, and he doesn’t like to talk about the incident much.


“I’d really rather not, if it’s all the same to you,” says Karen.

I'm kind of surprised Karen didn't go to Graywytch first given she knows where she lives and that she's an expert in magic. Or did Val never like her, either?

“Ah. Right. Sorry.” Charlie goes back over to his seat and closes the book he was reading. “Well, I am not super versed in mind-altering magic. That stuff is hard to find texts about since most of it gets into really forbidden territory. The Council of Avalon—that’s the international body governing magic and—”

“I know what the Council of Avalon is,” says Karen. Her arms are crossed over her chest, and her fingers tighten where they are squeezing her biceps. “My birth mother was—never mind. Can you help me or not?”

I'm always amused by how magic-users are always ruled by "councils." Here in Australia, "council" is what we usually call the local government. I just picture a bunch of wizards who're super-concerned about pool-fencing.

Also, I thought magic was this shadowy, mostly dead art. But it has an internationally recognised ruling body? Charlie agrees to help Karen, both because it's the right thing, and because it sounds like a super-interesting problem.

“Shit!” I haul myself to my feet and go to open Charlie’s window. “I’ve got a court date in less than an hour. Sorry, guys, I gotta bail.”

“What are you going to court for?” asks Karen. She looks a little dim around the edges, but seems to be weathering the all-nighter better than Charlie, whose eyes are open out of pure stubbornness.

I open the window and get ready to take off. “Nothing important, I’m just finalizing my divorce with my parents.”

Oh, this ought to be good.

 

[Kosher Dill]

“I’ve got her memories. And her mother’s memories, and her mother’s memories. All of them. All the way back to the beginning. More of them every day.”

But no fathers.
Being a woman is a real thing according to the laws of magic, so of course Graywytch is going to think Danny is just a crossplaying degenerate.

Karen's plight is horrific, but what is this doing in a Superman story? It's nonsense that Danny was even able to attempt psychic brain surgery, but now that it failed he's pretty much just the Super-Errand-Boy ferrying the side characters (who he just met) around to Hogwarts Avalon. This should be Graywytch's job.
I mean, you could even set this up as a genuine antagonism between Danny and Graywytch. Have Graywytch get her way and start recruiting new Legion members, and the first recruit is Karen as "Valkyrja II". First Danny is happy to see his dorm room fantasy woman reincarnated, but then Karen shows up in the middle of the night asking for help, etc etc. Danny swallows his pride and goes to Graywytch for help, but Graywytch says "No, the world needs Valkyrja back, Karen is a necessary sacrifice."
Meanwhile isn't there a giant asteroid still headed for Earth, and isn't punching giant asteroids out of the way a core Dreadnought skillset?

“Nothing important, I’m just finalizing my divorce with my parents.”

The troonish thirst for bureaucracy strikes again!
Nobody has cared for months that Danny dropped out of school and is living with an unstable drunk instead of his parents. Doing a super-teamup with Calamity got him more bureaucratic static than being a runaway dropout ever did.
We'll get that Roger crying scene yet.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

But no fathers.

Okay, now I'm wondering, if Val's bio-dad was a "trans-women" would troon metaphysics give her his memories, or would it still be strictly along the gestational line?

 

[LoverofPi]

Okay, now I'm wondering, if Val's bio-dad was a "trans-women" would troon metaphysics give her his memories, or would it still be strictly along the gestational line?

Given it didn't care that someone other than Val did the actual job of being Val's mother, I bet the magic only cares about the genetic line. I'm curious if the magic ensures Val always has daughters, or if one only has male offspring if the magic lies dormant until the next time a daughter is born to that family line.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

Wow, you're knocking these out!

So, the total fight scene wasn't the worst, but it wasn't good. We had at least a little back and forth, but I never got any idea why or even if Neoreactionary Avatar: the Last Elementbender actually needed to gesture to use his powers.

And actually, since I mention that, taking him straight to a Bronze-Age Pervert reference, by making him physically-intimidating and having him use martial arts manevers to conjure and use elements, would be at least some kind of signal. As it was, I had no idea why Danny thought that crippling him would stop him from doing his thing. And if the guy didn't need his somatic components, then slapping a metal bit onto him that is conductive and literally hooked directly into your nervous system seems like a really bad plan. If we'd gotten some hint that immobilization worked, then we could have shown Calamity's plan as a high-risk gambit, as she thought (or hoped) she could use the chokehold and drugs to knock him out before he got a hand to the rope and twiddled his fingers and sent that lightning straight into Calamity's arm (and nerves). Or we might have gotten Calamity doing that for a round so that Danny could grab something non-conductive and brain him with it.

Still, not the worst. And I hope we are going to keep Danny's checking-out of Calamity to understated and tasteful levels, or if we do have her shut him down with a "We're in different worlds now, so stop dreaming." (Again, don't expect, but hope.)

And I do actually like what's going on with Val Jr., in that it's an interesting expansion on what we've learned previously and introduces some genuine tension and stakes, even for a character we've just met. I don't like that Danny was even able to make the attempt, as stated above, unless that is meant to be a breadcrumb to "All superpowers are mono-source, which means that there is no reality and magic is neither more or less fucky-wucky than anything else, enjoy not having an epistemology, losers." down the line.

Another option might have been for Val Jr. to be breaking into the apartment not to talk to Danny, but Doc, because she's apparently managed to overcome the most comprehensive brainwashing that's known to exist (at the hands of Utopia). But I also agree that the logical solution here is for this to be a hard tie back to GrayWytch in a context where she and Danny have to meet and neither can come to blows (or pull more magic tricks), and let GrayWytch say that she won't help and why, and then have an outraged Val Jr. channel her mom again, pull out that truth-sense, and insist that she knows it's actually for dumb Legion bylaws reasons, with GrayWytch simply telling her to chill and that it will be moot in a month or two anyway (and that she almost-certainly won't remember or care about this specific conversation by then. Man, I really wish that we'd had more nuanced interactions with the Legion instead of, like, all of Danny's back-to-school bullshit.

There are so many obvious plot beats here that are getting completely ignored to explore the author's stupid-ass wish-fulfillment.

I also hope that we get something more interesting going on with Doc. As I understand it, Utopia is The Best at hypertech; her created AI appears to also casually be (or have been) the second-best. That means that there's no one who can actually verify or checksum her. What I'd expect is that Doc would immediately open up her mind and memories to audit from the greater hyper-programmer community, in the hopes that while Utopia might be better than any of them, she's not better than all of them, and as part of that, have to basically live a distant, monastic life because she literally can't be trusted to have secrets any more. Having her choose to be a barely-functional alcoholic is the opposite of that. It's obfuscating her behavior and making it harder for anyone to see if Utopia actually did have secret instructions and she's carrying them out embedded in seemingly-random accidents.

The problem is that people can be royally fucked in this world in ways that don't really exist in our world, but we made special rules for, e.g,, Typhoid Mary, and she didn't even kill any superhero teams. And the only real resolution to this is for Doc to come to terms to the fact that yes, she is a machine, no, she will never be human as other people understand it, and seek to change her nature. Which...actually, huh. I could see Doc's current plan as a runaway intrusive thought, in which she's basically trying to purge her mother by steeping herself in failure so deep that it's antithetical to any possible remaining copied-over engrams. But what if she's actually reverse-engineering her mother's tech, so that she can clone up a meat-body, slap her mind into it via the neuro-link, and thus get out of her old compromisable nature, even if that means leaving behind a lot of who she is (like her ability to make more hypertech)?

But that sounds way too aspirational and interesting for this book, so I'm guessing that there's no deeper point to Doc other than the authorial baseline of "What, of course you should expect to live with only-occasionally-functional drug-abusers who hate themselves and their bodies, because they affirm you! Being surrounded by people like that is what everyone (who's not being abused) does!"

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Iridium: Posts these long, thoughtful takes on the book.

Me: HAHAH, DANNY'S AN IDIOT.

 

[Kosher Dill]

As it was, I had no idea why Danny thought that crippling him would stop him from doing his thing.

Eh, I'm OK with it. It fits well enough with the superhero genre to informally say "Once you get beaten up a lot or sucker-punched, your powers fail you".
But yes, for all Dreadnought and Calamity know, Crenshaw could be like Blanka and his whole body could become electrified.

And I do actually like what's going on with Val Jr., in that it's an interesting expansion on what we've learned previously and introduces some genuine tension and stakes

The problem is that this new storyline is much more gripping and human than the actual main storyline about Nemesis. On the one hand we have people vaguely flipping out over a giant asteroid that nobody knows much about, and on the other hand we have an innocent girl being terrifyingly brain-parasitized by Danny's old celebrity crush.
Really, the Valkyrja storyline sounds like the sort of thing Graywytch gets up to when she's "not answering her phone".
"Where were you when the Penguin was robbing the bank??"
"By my mystic arts I travelled to Valhalla to personally honor-duel the Foremother Of Valkyries to lift Karen's possession. You're welcome."

I also hope that we get something more interesting going on with Doc.

Maybe Danny's stunning and brave abandonment of his family will teach Doc that she doesn't have to be just what her mother made her.
Narratively speaking, they've got to pick a lane for Doc if they want to go allegorical - is her situation an analogue of transgenderism, mental illness, trauma, parental rejection, or what?

Another option might have been for Val Jr. to be breaking into the apartment not to talk to Danny, but Doc, because she's apparently managed to overcome the most comprehensive brainwashing that's known to exist

Imagine risking your life to break into Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and just being told "Have you tried Everclear?"

Oh yeah, also:

Karen’s wings relax. “You’re stronger than the other Dreadnoughts. You can do things they couldn’t. You told me—” she flinches “—told her, I mean, that you could see…what did you call it, the lattice? And tug on it?”

So Danny is the only Dreadnought who could see the lattice? Then what he told Magma about D3 knowing Doc was an android, that was a lie, or at least a mistake.

EDIT: looking back, I also noticed that Doc was drunk right before Danny flew out using her orbital calculations. He's lucky he didn't crash into a GPS satellite or something.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

So Danny is the only Dreadnought who could see the lattice? Then what he told Magma about D3 knowing Doc was an android, that was a lie, or at least a mistake.

Nah, they could all see the lattice, Danny's just the only one who's bothered doing anything with that besides being Wish.com Superman. It's honestly even dumber.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Today on Sovereign, Danny is taking the elder Tozers to court.

So there’s this thing called an emancipated minor, and I really want to be one. It’s not technically a divorce, but it’s basically a divorce. My parents go one way. I go the other (at Mach 3). You see, my father is a world-class shithead. He thinks that because he never laid a hand on me, what he was doing wasn’t abuse.

So, we've gone from Roger having spanked Danny at some nebulous point to straight up never touching him. Again, I don't think a parent has to be physically violent to be abusive, but Daniels seems to go out of his way to minimise Roger's actions, then expect us to be horrified by them.

Like it’s normal for a kid to invent reasons to stay away from home.

Because as we all know, teenagers love heading home the minute school ends.

Or to be scared to speak up for herself and to think she’s a failure before she’s even really started life.

That just sounds like any kid who owns a smartphone and isn't a sociopath.

Like it’s okay to be surprised to learn that other families don’t treat lies and denial like currency.

Again, teenagers, famously honest.

Like it’s not a problem that his daughter used to have daydreams about him dying suddenly, peacefully in his sleep.

So you were goth?

He was a looming ogre who never found a topic he wasn’t willing to scream at me about, and until this past year I didn’t even know how bad it was because I didn’t know what it was like to live in a house without shouting, without the fear that at any moment he could explode into the room, red-faced and flinging spittle.

Maybe I would find this more affecting if Daniels had actually written out some of these screaming tirades instead of giving us the Cliff Notes version, while devoting way more page-space to Roger acting like a good dad.

And Mom just let it happen. For fifteen years, she betrayed me to him over and over again. I’ve never bought that bullshit about a mother’s love being stronger than anything, not for an instant. It’s not a delusion I could afford.

Except for the times where you thought she was seeing the light. I still maintain that Daniels hates Danny's mum way more than Roger. Roger is basically just a strawman, his evil treated as a fact of the universe. Janet (oh, her name's Janet) meanwhile feels more like a real woman, and the narration about her feels a lot bitterer.

When you get right down to it, this family needs a divorce. We’ve needed one for years, and if she won’t do it, then I will. They want to stay together, they’re welcome to try, but I’m done being an accessory for her martyrdom act, both the justification for and the instrument of her poisonous denial about the man that she married.

Danny is such a child. That in itself isn't a problem: he's sixteen years old. What is a problem is that Daniels clearly has no more insight as a grown ass man-lady.

New Port Superior Courthouse is a deco-brutalist monstrosity squatting like a calcified turd downtown. You’ve got City Hall—soaring Greek columns in white limestone—on one side of the block. On the other side, you’ve got the stern gothic lines of the police station, Atlas straining with the globe on his shoulders above the main entrance. Then between them, you’ve got the courthouse, which looks like a Soviet machine gun bunker tried to dress up for company. Naked brown cement with holes in it every two yards and parallel seams of overflow from where the molds were set up. Every window is tall and narrow, with iron shutters like they’re expecting a riot at any moment.

That's... not a bad description actually. At the very least, it's more flavorful and mood setting than most descriptions of New Port. I wonder if Daniels is an architecture nerd.

I take a cab to my court appointment. The case is being handled as Jane Doe v. Jane and John Doe so it doesn’t get in all the papers, and it would kind of give things away if I showed up in my cape and bodyglove. Instead, I’m wearing a baggy sweatshirt with my hood up and a brunette wig. I’ve got sunglasses too, but honestly at that point I might as well get Kinetiq to follow me around projecting a neon sign above my head that says DO NOT PAY ATTENTION TO THIS OSTENTATIOUSLY ANONYMOUS YOUNG WOMAN, so they stay folded up in my pocket.

Why Kinetiq? Does she have light powers? That might've been good to mention when you introduced her. I figured she controlled momentum or something.

There’s a bit of a media scrum on the front steps when I get there, but I don’t think anything of it at first. Every time a metahuman gets arraigned, the media is there to cover it. Not because people with superpowers getting arrested is super rare or anything, but more because there’s always the chance he’ll turn out to be a really nasty supervillain later, and none of the news stations want to be left out on having B-roll footage of his First! Public! Appearance! when it’s time to interrupt The Simpsons with breaking news or whatever.

I’m about halfway up the stairs when someone shouts out a sentence that turns my blood to icy slush. “There she is!” and here comes the stampede.

So, did D3 ever cameo on The Simpsons? Are Stretch-Dude and Clobber-Girl canon? Is Homer still Pie-Man? Or, dare I ask, is The Simpsons somehow still good?

“Dreadnought, do you have anything to say about your father’s allegations that Doctor Impossible is manipulating you to gain access to your municipal hero funding?”

The gears in my head seize up. My mouth sort of flaps up and down while I try to deal with the world crumbling beneath my feet.

“What?”

Diane from Action News Team Five shoves her mic in front of my mouth and says, “Your father is alleging that you are not psychologically competent to be living without your family and that Doctor Impossible is taking advantage of you to further fund her own operations. How do you respond to these allegations?”

It kind of amuses me we're going with a clearly bullshit allegation against Doc, instead of her being an unstable elective drunk who got her whole team killed or maimed last year.

“I SAID GET OUT OF MY WAY!” As the echo off the front of the courthouse slaps the air, the press scrum seems to remember that I can pulp them anytime I please. The ones in front of me take a shaken step back, and that’s all the opening I need to power up the steps. I’m ten steps up and twenty feet inside the building before the first camera hits the ground.


My heart is slamming in my temples as I skid to a stop. Instant regret stabs me. You can fly, idiot! My cheeks are scalding as I watch the two or three news crews who didn’t go tumbling immediately start narrating back to the station what’s happened. Shit, I hope none of them are hurt. Cecilia is going to kill—


Wait, why am I learning this from them and not her?

Because fiction has yet to adapt to mobile phones.

Cecilia is already at the plaintiff’s table, and she rises when she sees me. The long flight up from Antarctica last night would probably require a day of rest for anyone else, but like so many other people who keep it quiet, Cecilia is metahuman. She doesn’t get tired. Ever.

It must be interesting, being a metahuman with a minor but very useful power. Also, really poor sentence construction. "Like so many other people who keep it quiet, Cecilia is a metahuman." That implies there are some people who keep quit about being metahumans, without being metahuman.

“Sorry I’m late, but what the hell is going on?” I whisper when I get close. “Why are there reporters everywhere?”


“I don’t know,” says Cecilia. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour, but my phone is dead.”


“You couldn’t borrow someone else’s?” I ask, more waspish than I really mean to be.

You'd think a high-powered super-agent would... keep track of that kind of thing.

“Your number kept kicking back as disconnected,” says Cecilia. “When I tried texting you my phone bricked, so I thought it was a software issue, but the payphone kept dropping the call. I take it Doctor Impossible wasn’t able to get through to you?” Doc hadn’t been there when I went home to change into my civvies. I shake my head. “Well, that’s unfortunate. She said she’d be looking into what was causing the problem. I’m sorry you walked into this blind. Are you okay?”

Oh my God, is Graywytch doing this? If so, I forgot how much of a hack Daniels can be.

I’ve fought the worst of the worst. Heavyweights like Utopia, Acid Andy, and Mr. Armageddon.

Imagine being a feared, horrible supervillain called... Acid Andy. It sounds like what Andy Griffith would call his self-insert in a Just Super! book that the child in me now wishes he'd written.

Watch, I bet none of you reading are Australian enough to get that.

I’ve fought metahumans, hypertech, wizards, and kaiju.

You know, "kaiju" is a perfectly fine word, but something about this sentence just feels... awful. Like the worst kind of tv-tropes writing. Is it just me?

I’m not saying this to puff myself up, but let’s be clear: I don’t back down from fights. Ever. I don’t care who you are or what you can do. I don’t care how much I’m outnumbered or how badly I’m hurt. You bring the fight to me, and I’ll bring it right back to you twice as hard, and I will make you regret the day you thought you were hard enough to take on Dreadnought. I’m not just undefeated in personal combat; I am undefeatable. Nobody wins against me. Nobody.

I mean, Crenshaw had your number pretty good before Calamity rode in. And if

That's sort of a recurring problem in this series. Dreadnought is hyped up to be this Superman level, top-tier superhero, but in practice, Danny seems to be more like Spider-Man or Static-Shock, a fairly powerful street-level hero, but not so much that most credible superhumans can't give him some trouble. That'd be fine, if Danny was meant to be analogous to that sort of character, or this was a relatively low-powered setting, but no, they treat him like Superman in something like Man of Steel or All-Star Superman, where he's basically a god. It'd be one thing if that was mostly the previous Dreadnoughts, and Danny came off as underpowered in comparison because he's so young and green, but we're explicitly told he's better at using his powers than all of them, because trans-girl magic or some bullshit.

And right now, all of that matters about as much as a dog’s wet fart.


I have never been this freaked out in battle before. On a regular basis, people try to murder me, and I laugh it off. But now, I’m that scared little girl again, and there’s nothing I can do. This hearing was hard enough when it was secret. With the circus waiting outside, I might last half an hour before I need to go to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall. The next few hours are going to be miserable. My shoulders pull themselves in tight. I take the wig off my head and shove it under the table. I don’t feel much like Dreadnought right now.

"Trauma" is basically original sin for people like Daniels: something that can never be washed away, and your only hope of redemption is constant adherence to the true faith.

When I was growing up, weird kids like me were told that the words of others only had as much power as we gave them. Admittedly, when I was being bullied, that could sometimes feel rather hollow, but looking back, it was a hell of lot healthier than what books like these tell kids today. That the cruel things people say have absolute power you, and forever reduce you and your potential as a human. Yeah, occasionally Daniels will have Danny go "Oh, Roger's nothing after a real baddie like Utopia" but it's pretty clear he's the most powerful being in his universe.

The door opens, and I jump. My parents enter the courtroom. As with all the other hearings, I only see them out of the corner of my eye, my gaze locked forward. Cecilia straightens up next to me, and I glance over at her.


“They’ve got a lawyer,” she says, and now I do look. Shit, they’ve got a lawyer. He’s middle-aged, sort of a ridiculously handsome dude with silver temples and a thousand-dollar suit. They wouldn’t cast this guy as a lawyer on TV because he looks too much like what he is. And then, by accident, I look at my parents.

You know that bit in To Kill a Mockingbird where Scout is shocked to see her father laughing and joking with the prosecutor, and realises for the first time that Atticus's opponents in the court-room aren't her dad's enemies, but usually just decent men doing their jobs? Yeah, that kind of nuance was declared chud shit a while back.

I almost don’t recognize them. In the last nine months, my mother has gained all the weight my father has lost.

Should've expected Daniels to slip in a fat crack about his self-insert's mum.

Their eyes fasten onto me. My father’s eyes have the familiar cold anger that only people who’ve lived with him can recognize.

Most of this man's actual dialogue has been about how he'll move Heaven and Earth to help his son, and how he doesn't need superpowers for him to love him.

Then the judge turns to my parents’ lawyer and says, “Mr. Trauth, I’m surprised to see you in here. It is rare that a firm takes a pro bono case on behalf of the respondents in this sort of situation.”


Trauth even sounds too much like a lawyer when he says, “My firm believes in taking the side of the case that, in our estimation, most benefits the child, even if that is at the respondents’ table.”


Go fuck yourself is on the tip of my tongue, but Cecilia lays a hand on my wrist and I let the moment pass.

Yeah, fuck this guy! Doesn't he know Danny is better off with the drunk robot who sometimes breaks down and cuts up her own face?

The judge nods and laces his fingers in front of him. “And tell me, did you have anything to do with our little media powwow this morning?”


“Of course not, Your Honor,” says Trauth. “We were just as surprised to learn that Ms. Tozer had been identified in the press as you are.”


Cecilia stands. “If I may, Your Honor?”


“You may.”


She looks at Trauth. “Do you really expect us to believe that you swooped in to represent her parents, reversed their decision not to appeal the prior motion, submitted a new petition on their behalf earlier this morning, and this all just happened to take place around the time every news outfit in the city learned who Jane Doe was?”

So, Danny's parents are no, good, very bad people... who had to be convinced by an evil lawyer to not contest Danny divorcing them? Is that really more likely than just them being... attached to their kid?

“My clients are in the Federal Witness Protection Program, and have only flown into town from their safehouse for this hearing; of course I wouldn’t compromise their safety by publicizing the event.” Trauth says. He doesn’t seem flapped. “If you wish to allege misconduct on the part of my office, I hope you’ve got more than vague implications to back it up.”

Look, Danny may have completely upended and ruined his parents lives, forcing them to live hidden and possibly hunted until they die, but like... they didn't castrate Danny when held his books wrong.

Cecilia’s phone is still on the table. It’s still bricked. My eyes are stuck on it. How’d it die? Why didn’t I get anyone’s calls? Shit, at the very least I should have gotten a notification that Doc’s tilt-engine had landed at her aerodrome on the outskirts of town—I usually get automatic text alerts whenever her jet arrives or departs, and only now do I realize that I never received them. Professor Gothic’s words come back to me: You’ve got enemies you won’t recognize until they attack.

One missed call is unfortunate. Two is a coincidence. Three is enemy action.

The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that this is asymmetric warfare. The enemy—whoever they are—knows it’s a fast trip to the hospital to bring the fight to me in person, so they’re trying to hit me here. But who would want to, and how would they do it? More to the point, how would they even know about—

Graywytch.

A good way of telling that an author's world is very small is if the ones they write are as well.

She knows who my parents are. She knew I hadn’t told them about being Dreadnought’s successor—it wouldn’t be too much of a leap for her to guess we weren’t a happy home. Hell, after she outed me, she might have gone invisible and stayed to watch the fireworks for all I know. She could know I was petitioning to get emancipated and set this up—and I mean all of it, the reporters, Trauth, everything—to screw with me. But why?

Danny has forgotten his arch-enemy's one and only character trait and function in the story purely to dispense exposition:

The answer comes to me immediately: she’s a TERF—a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, though I hesitate to use the word feminist in there. The difference between an actual feminist and a TERF is sort of like the difference between your average white dude and the KKK.

That only makes sense is the average white dude thinks anyone who can rap or isn't there for their children is black.

She thinks I’m some sort of monster just because I’m trans, and in her mind, spite is its own reward.

That's nonsense of course: Danny's a monster for several other reasons!

Danny storms out and books it to Legion Tower:

Graywytch is eating a late breakfast when her front door explodes inward. She jerks back in her chair in surprise when I kick the table against the wall. When I dart in to catch her by the front of her shirt—and God, it is so weird to see her in a baggy t-shirt and sweats instead of that charcoal robe she always wears—she snaps into shadows and slips through my fingers. She reforms a few yards away, a glinting silver athame in her hand. She points it at me and snarls, “Get out of my house.”


“You’re going after my family now?” I shout at her.


Graywytch shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, and for half an instant I falter. But you know, she sure doesn’t seem surprised.

It's almost as though she's magic. Also, is it "going after" your family by telling them not to emancipate you?

“Bullshit! You’re paying for their lawyer, aren’t you?”

“No.” She smirks. “Maybe you’re not as popular as you think you are.”

“It’s none of your business, Myra!” I stalk across the room, and she backs up just as quickly. “My family is off-limits. You’re butting out of this fight, do you hear me?” I’ve got her backed up against a wall, but she drops into a pool of shadow at her feet—just sinks right down into the ground and disappears.

“You’re trespassing, young man.” Graywytch’s voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. “And I tire of you. Leave, before you get hurt.”

"TERFs are bigots who think trans-women are male perverts who want to invade womens' spaces, and I'll prove this by having my trans main character break into one of their homes and start accusing her of fucking with his cell-phone and tricking his parents into thinking they still love him."

“You’re trespassing, young man.” Graywytch’s voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. “And I tire of you. Leave, before you get hurt.”

“Fucking try it, bitch.” My eyes are unfocused. The lattice gleams in the dark. She’s not here. No heartbeat, no heat.

"And threatening her."

“Did you really think you could do as you please and nobody would speak up? Nobody would do anything?” Graywytch asks. Not even the vibrations of her voice show up in the lattice. “You don’t deserve the mantle. You don’t deserve to be Dreadnought. Your parents know it, and so do I. Give up this farce. You will never be a woman, no matter how many lies you tell.”

No lies detected.

Shit, what was the plan here? Stupid, Danny. My fists tighten. If she’d just show herself—but of course she won’t. I should have taken her out straight away. Come through the door and punched her through the goddamn wall. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

“You’re a coward,” I say.

You regret not ambushing and killing her because of a hunch, and she's the coward?

“No. Only a woman,” says Graywytch. I swear, there’s got to be something in the lattice when she speaks. For an instant I think I see it, some shimmering…then it’s gone. “A woman who has been surviving in a world of violent men since long before you were born. I use the tools that are available to me. Now leave, before we both become embarrassed for you.”

Before you ask, no, we learn nothing about Graywytch's backstory. I'm guessing Daniels thinks trying to humanise your villains or explore their motivations is chud-shit. Also, kind of hard to disagree with her about Dan being a violent male when he's been fantasising about and reveling in brutal violence the whole book.

Graywytch’s condo is luxurious. All that work she refuses to do pays pretty well, even if she doesn’t pick up the phone. Dark wood furniture, soft track lighting, and a million-dollar view over downtown New Port. Above her fireplace—and it’s a real fireplace, somehow, even though we’re in the middle of a skyscraper—there is a cracked stone tablet. Circular, with worn grooves in the pattern of a Celtic knot. I cross her main room and pull the disk down off the mantle.

“Put that back,” says Graywytch.

The stone snaps in my fingers like a stale cookie. There is a hiss of outrage, so I smash the two halves together into gravel.

“This is me asking nicely. Next time, I’ll be angry,” I say. “You’re going to pull that lawyer off the case, and you’re going to do it today. I promise, you don’t want me to come back here.”

...Imagine what this would look like if Danny was still a broad-shouldered, obviously male football player.

Graywytch doesn’t have an answer for that. I walk over to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown and kick a hole in one. The entire pane shatters and slumps outward, held fast to the building by the tough safety film. Graywytch’s condo is still empty when I turn to take one last look at it before stepping into the air, but I think she’s gotten the message.

Repulsive little thug.

On the way out of the courtroom, I make the mistake of eye contact with my father. His eyes are depthless pits of rage. His lips are pressed tight under his brushy mustache, and every part of his body language gives off the warning signs I spent my childhood learning to avoid. The soft, vulnerable parts inside of me shrivel up and go cold. Cecilia’s hand on my shoulder brings me back to the present, and I manage to keep my face blank as our eyes meet.


My mother pushes past him as we leave. Her face pleads as much as her voice. “Danny, please, won’t you even talk to us?”


Like magic, Cecilia is there between us, gently but firmly pushing her back. “Ma’am, the conditions of your restraining order enjoin you from speaking to my client.”

A restraining order? On the basis of what? Being mean? Fuck, Tony Reed must be live-tweeting the shit out of this case.

“Who are you to keep me from my child?” My mother’s voice shakes; her fists are like claws.


“You picked your side, Janet!” I shout as I try to get my feet to move toward the door.


“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” says my father, his voice dangerously controlled.

Christ, Daniels, for the love of God, just have him shout on page. Do I have to teach you to write propaganda?

Doc is waiting for Danny back at home.

“Um, hi, Doc. How was your flight?”

“Danielle, I still have access to Legion Tower’s security net,” she says.

“Oh?” I try to sound light and unconcerned as I shut the glass door behind me.

“What do you mean, ‘oh’? Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”

I turn back to face her. My toes are clenching inside my shoes, but I won’t back down. Never again. “She brought the media into my emancipation hearing, and she’s paying for a lawyer for my parents. She crossed a line.”

“So did you! You can’t do this, Danny.” The TV blinks on, showing footage of me smashing my way into the Legion briefing room. A few moments later, I’m kicking in Graywytch’s door. “I’ve wiped the footage remotely, but if something like this got out, you’d be done. The government would drop you faster than a rabid weasel.”

Oh, so that's why Danny lives with Doc: she covers up his crimes.

“I could find another job,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. “This isn’t even any of your business.”


“It is, actually,” says Doc. “We’re in this together. Why do you think I built all that fancy gear for you? You don’t think I drop a quarter million dollars in hypertech on all my roommates, do you? We were supposed to be partners.”


“Well, not about this, we aren’t!” I snap.

Yeah, this is someone who's ready to be a legal adult.

“Did you hurt her?”


That brings me up short. “Wha—no! How can you ask me that?”


She softens her voice. “Because people who make you angry keep winding up in the hospital.”


“Blackcapes who are hurting people, yeah!”


“What about Acid Andy?” asks Doc.


I roll my eyes and walk past her through the living room. “This again?”


“He was surrendering, Danny.” She rises from her chair and begins following me.


“Acid Andy is a psychopath,” I say, heading down the hall to my room. “He’s done fake surrenders before; I had to be sure.” As I try to shut my door behind me, she catches it, pushes it back open.


“Yes, and now he’s a quadriplegic,” she says. “This isn’t the first time you’ve gotten close to the line, but it’s the worst, and you have to stop.”

Jesus Christ. Also, hey, an actual, acknowledged flaw in Danny's character besides "she's too much of an uwu softgirl to stand up to her father."

She tries again. “I’m sorry. But I’m really scared right now. For you, for me, for all of us.”


“What the hell are you talking about?”


“Do you know how to make someone become a dangerously violent person?” Doc stops pacing. “It’s basically a recipe. You hold them down and treat them like shit. Destroy their self-esteem, strip away all their pride, all their self-respect. Then you give them a chance to solve a problem with violence, and when they do, you immediately reward them.” Doc takes a breath. “Does that sound like anyone you know?”

Except for any of the actual antagonists, they're just evil because trans people living their best lives upset them for some mysterious reason.

My gut turns to lead. I bite the words out by syllables: “I am not a blackcape.”


“Not today. But if you don’t take what I’m saying seriously, you’ll be one sooner than you think. What happened in court must have been terrible, and you’re right that this is exactly Graywytch’s style. But it’s no excuse. What you did today can never happen again. You need to learn to handle your shit, kiddo.”

"Graywytch's style"? Did she get into a lot of feuds with trans teenagers when you worked together, Doc? Or is Myra some kind of laywer witch who fights demons with legal proceedings?

The hard ball of resentment in my gut explodes. “I have been handling myself, and I’ve been doing it without you!”

Doc’s jaw clenches, but not like she’s angry. “I’m sorry for how I’ve been, but—”

“I don’t need you to take care of me. If I need help finding the bottom of a bottle, I’ll give you a call.”

Doc rocks back on her heels like she’s been slapped. Her mouth hangs open, but nothing comes out. For an instant I feel bad, but I grind that down and turn to leave. I slam into the sound barrier just a few seconds after leaving the balcony. To Hell with the city’s noise ordinance.

Our heroine everyone.

 

[Kosher Dill]

There’s a bit of a media scrum on the front steps when I get there, but I don’t think anything of it at first. Every time a metahuman gets arraigned, the media is there to cover it.

What? Why? He just said he's there as "Jane Doe". He should have suspected trickery right off the bat - nobody would have known there's a metahuman coming in, unless they only use "John/Jane Doe" in metahuman cases.

I take the wig off my head and shove it under the table. I don’t feel much like Dreadnought right now.

"And so I go back to looking like the Dreadnought everyone sees on TV."

Does the expensive lawyer (who buys his suits at Brooks Brothers rather than Macy's!) actually do anything evil, or is his crime simply giving the Tozers their day in court?

Your father is alleging that you are not psychologically competent to be living without your family and that Doctor Impossible is taking advantage of you to further fund her own operations.

I mean, is any of this even a lie? Doc is unemployed and I'm sure there's plenty of footage of Danny going "RIP AND TEAR" on people by now.

I’ve fought the worst of the worst. Heavyweights like Utopia, Acid Andy, and Mr. Armageddon.

Well thank God he wasn't Lightning Andy.
Does Utopia qualify as a "heavyweight" for having a really nice gun and a canister of nerve gas?
Acid Andy obviously wasn't that tough seeing as crippling him was a strategic decision and not a last-ditch outburst.
And a B-lister was handling Mr. Armageddon on xir own, to the point that they were mad Dreadnought came in and bogarted the credit.

Anyway, it's good that they're going somewhere with this "addiction to violence" thing, but they let it fester way too long and went way too hard on it. If they wanted to keep Danny's cape gray rather than the darkest, most stygian black, they should have had him punch a captured villain for mouthing off to him or something, not continue breaking limbs while he begs for mercy.

As for the Graywytch scene: we're told to hate her, but how can you not sympathize with the lady who's just sitting there in bunny slippers with a plate of toaster waffles when a psycho Kool-Aid-Mans through the wall and starts making threats? We even learn her real name for the first time during this scene - does anyone else in the Legion have a name?

I should have taken her out straight away.

For the crimes of hiring lawyers and talking to paparazzi, the sentence is death. "I AM THE LAW!"
Also, I just want to point out that while Danny constantly complains that Graywytch never does anything, he just admitted that even with his super-senses he can't detect a single thing she does.

Finally:

“Do you know how to make someone become a dangerously violent person?” Doc stops pacing. “It’s basically a recipe. You hold them down and treat them like shit. Destroy their self-esteem, strip away all their pride, all their self-respect. Then you give them a chance to solve a problem with violence, and when they do, you immediately reward them.”

This is probably the most disturbing part of the whole thing, because it's apologetics for unhinged troon violence in real life. "They MADE you into this, it's society's fault!"
You're supposed to be nodding your head as you read this, but Danny didn't grow up in some sort of death camp. Being raised by the Tozers is not his supervillain origin story, like Magneto growing up in Auschwitz, and he doesn't get to say "Society made me". Besides which, it's clear that for all the supposed offenses Roger committed off-camera, the only one that really matters is not ordering him bathtub estrogen from Nekofuta Labs the first time he picked up a pink crayon.