We'll start with Damian

Ianthe

taylor hebert

Favorite thing about him: it's hard to pin down one thing specifically. on a superficial level, the thing that initially drew me to his character is that (and this is apparently controversial) i think he's fucking hilarious. that one time he was bored and wanted to go annoy jon so he disguised himself as his schoolbus driver and then posed as a geology

teacher to teach these stupid youths Rock Facts. for no reason. on a deeper level i am really interested in themes of nature vs nurture and massive haunting legacies. damian's a kid that was told from the day he was born that he will grow up to save or destroy the world, and his whole story is about being caught between two legacies (al ghul and wayne)

when this is written badly it's a question of good legacy vs bad legacy but when it's written well, both are actually different faces of the same horrible fate (repeating the cycle.) i just think it's neat.

Least favorite thing about him: the fact that in his introduction comic, morrison retconned talia to be a rapist and now everyone thinks that's canon (it's not.) also in general the way some writers and fans tend to frame damian as the One True Son of batman when that's kind of just. missing the whole point of his story.

like his beef with tim is built around the simple fact that bruce already had a family he loved before he even knew damian existed while damian idolized the concept of his father/batman as a way to survive.

Favorite line: i think it's a threeway tie between "Can't you love me for what I am, now what you want me to be?"
"And you were easier to look up to when you weren't around."
"Forgive me, father, for I have sinned." (important to note that he said this right after brutally murdering a man)

brOTP: most of my favorite relationships for damian are brotps. Maya Ducard is my favorite of his various big sisters but Rose Wilson and Stephanie Brown are close behind. annoying older teenage girls who decided he was their horrid little brother.

also bruce and damian's dynamic is one of my favorite batfamily dynamics but it's also. lmao. less brotp and more a shakesperian tragedy but with extra autism

OTP: i don't have a lot of canon ships with him. i like him with Jon but it's not really a big ship for me per se. it is also the only pairing that i've read shipfic for that i actually enjoyed and didn't find wildly ooc. flatline and damian's relationship similarly is endearing to me even though some of the writing behind it is annoying

nOTP:* i don't really have any hard ones. i don't care for batcest with damian or otherwise. oh yeah actually why did dceased pair him up with cassie sandsmark. tom taylor what was up with that.

strongly held opinion: i have sooooo many. people are so wrong about him to varying degrees on every single platform, including this one and including within dc comics itself. let me choose one........

i think the one that kind of bothers me most in fandom and in comics itself is the sort of implication that damian just needs to learn how to be a "normal kid" in order to be happy. sand out those character flaws, have a normal middle/high school experience, just be cute and do child things (coming from the place of little to no understanding of what kids

are like)

both on the level of damian fans who want him to have cute family moments and people who hate him and wish he were more "normal" and less the product of his upbringing. it just feels very.......... shallow.

he does romanticize the idea of having a normal life/being someone else but he's still an extremely traumatized kid. that's not something anyone can "fix" with a pat on the head.

Random Headcanon: i realized i skipped this but

anyone who thinks damian's favorite kind of music or fiction would be like, classical/something high class fundamentally misunderstands him. he listens to cavetown. vocaloid jpop. he watches my little pony in secret. he tried reading shounen or horror manga and found them horrifically dull and instead settled on extremely slice of life shoujo.

the latter end of that is partially canon but i've seen fandom be like "nooo he'd have good taste" and they'd be wrong. he doesn't like shounen/action/horror because he engages with stories as an escape from reality and himself and he's already a deeply tragic shounen protagonist.

for this reason his favorite video games are stardew valley, animal crossing, harvest moon and of course, pikmin.

song i associate with him:Adam Raised a Cain

i'll get to the other two in abit

OKAY

ianthe time

👀

Favorite thing about her: the answer's kind of two fold? i always liked ianthe but she only solidifed herself as one of my top three favorite characters in nona the ninth. i do really enjoy how funny and ridiculously petty she is but i think the thing that made me love her was actually how unbelievably stubborn she is.

she got herself into a position that's supposed to be everything she wanted and she gets put in the most emotionally barren and lonely places imaginable. she's clingy and desperate in ways she can't actually let anyone catch onto so she just tries to pretend at being dispassionate and smug. and this doesn't detract from how genuinely loathsome she is either

sneering imperialist who has convinced herself she's above it all and then cries herself to sleep about how lonely she is

Least favorite thing about her: i like her for everything wrong with her so none tbh. i think sometimes fandom shuts their eyes and pretends she's worse than she is? which i don't care for. but i get why. she's pretty gross what with the sister complex and the cannibalism and bone and flesh sex

since you asked me about Spike, Faith!

Favorite quote: “I had my speech all planned out—I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn’t need any of your keys, and I didn’t need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you—and none of you noticed—nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being so good at my job."

brOTP: i don't really have one ig. palamedes maybe, their little rivalry is fun and interesting to me, but even that i could see as shippy. i guess babs is more of a brotp and as awful as they are, there are little moments that endear me to their weird dynamic.

OTP: my favorite ships for ianthe are in roughly an order of preference kiriona/ianthe, coronabeth/ianthe and harrow/ianthe. but like i said, i'm also fond of her with palamedes or even john in the single most mutually toxic way possible. obviously none of the above pairings are like, good, but it's ianthe.

nOTP: i can't really imagine being outraged about any ship involving ianthe. it's ianthe.

Random headcanon: ianthe and coronabeth used to be able to swap clothes imitate the other twin to walk a day in their shoes. this stopped as soon as ianthe's body started to show the toll of her necromancy and as coronabeth kept growing, and it's something that ianthe resents because it felt like coronabeth was drifting away from her w every difference

Strongly Held Opinion: as a person, she's not really any less morally dubious than harrow or gideon for their part in propagating john's imperialism. she's a smug asshole who looks down on everywhere that isn't the third (and probably the third) and she's got less moral scruples than those two but past killing babs she's not wrong that she barely had a

choice except to continue.

if anything i'd actually say she has more limits than those two, on account of not wanting the nine houses to die.

song i associate with them:Laplace’s Angel (Hurt People? Hurt People!) - Will W...

crow47

finally got it done o7

now taylor and faith

TAYLOR HERBET

favorite thing about them: i like the way she insists that all of her thoughts and feelings are completely and totally rational and fair. she's someone who operates on 90% lies she tells herself to feel better. also the way she's like. 1 to 100. "i need to make sure lung doesn't get up and run away better cut his eyes out of his skull"

all the while she self conceptualizes as like. just your everyday girl. your normal girl even. she's normal. just a normal little nerd with glasses and parents and everything.

least favorite thing about them: while the image of taylor herbet going on a rant in her own brain about how you will become a Druggie if you smoke a single weed and Turn Into The Devil is extremely funny in a vacuum, as is the no homoing, it gets a bit grating when it leaks into the work as wildbow decides it's time for His Hot Takes

favorite line: "Oh. There's blood on my hands."

shoutout also to taylor going "You were right, Armsmaster, this was over the moment it began" and goes skitter mode all over his cringe batman ass.

brOTP: not me trying to find a single taylor relationship i would consider wholly platonic and bro-like

i'm just going to say undersiders as a group dynamic. her shitty crime found family that sucks.

OTP: her and lisa, followed shortly by rachel. the mindgames inherent to her and lisa - how lisa repeated the cycle by luring taylor into the world of being a supervillain but also saved her while doing it... how it was lisa's words and influence that lead taylor into making the sacrifices she made and into finally leaving her behind. chef's kiss.

nOTP: a lot of taylor ships feel a bit random to me at this point. like taylor/victoria. taylor/amy i could actually get theoretically, but it also feels a little random. we'll see where i land. i guess in terms of just glancing at the ao3 tag, taylor/sophia sure is a thing.

random headcanon: ...headcanons are kind of hard for stories like worm where so much of it is actually expanded upon. taylor used to like playing age of empires and various early 2000s strategy games on her dad's computer, and she was pretty good at them

strongly held opinion: i guess the fact that i would say she's kind of a judgemental hypocrite would count? these are qualities i like in her but

song:Phoebe Bridgers - I Know the End (Lyric Video)

moonlanding:

aaaand FAITH

favorite thing about them: i have a huge soft spots for characters that deal with the idea of being the unchosen one. faith was a vampire slayer in a show called buffy the vampire slayer and that's basically the thing that doomed her.

being the slayer for buffy was her having a normal and (on the surface) happy life and then suddenly being thrown into this whole ordeal. for faith she had a miserable life for reasons beyond her own control. and according to the prequel novel, if she weren't the slayer, her and many other girls would have died and the state wouldn't have given a shit

so being the slayer for faith was about being given back control and power. which is all well and good until that control starts to be taken away and she goes back to being another troubled homeless kid with anger issues

she's.......... soooooooo much to me.

least favorite thing about them: i don't necessarily think it's out of character for faith, and i think faith's own relationship to consent is an interesting storytelling device that gives some insight into why she thinks the way she does but

whedon really loves to throw sexual assault/rape around sooo much.

favorite line: there's her whole unhinged evil monologue when she has buffy pinned against a wall and goes on rambling about how she wanted a dog so she could have something to love and she wanted people to look at her like they look at buffy and then there's the line in her first episode iirc where she just completely without prompting says

"MY DEAD MOTHER HIT HARDER THAN THAT!"

she's so unwell

brOTP: angel. redemption bros. in an ideal world faith would have become a permanent cast member of ats but alas we live in the bad place.

OTP: i like buffy/faith and willow/faith in pretty much equal measure, just in different ways. buffy and faith are just textually canon, whether whedon realizes it or not (multiple directors and writers have said they intended it, eliza dushku said she played faith as bi, etc). but faith and willow is just really fun to me. the way that willow looks down

on faith and is able to call her out so scathingly when they're both kids because she actually has a very similar inferiority complex only to end up making the exact same mistakes........... ruining all her friendships speedrun........... season 7 would have been immensely improved if you just got rid of kennedy and had willow's grief rebound be a semi toxic

situationship with faith

nOTP: faith/men in general ig? i can see her sleeping with spike but that'd go absolutely nowhere.

she's just such a lesbian with a boatload of internalized issues to me.

and she canonically never found any relationship or hookup with any of the men she slept with to be fulfilling in the slightest

random headcanon: faith had to cook dinner for herself a lot growing up for when her mother was too drunk/high/depressed to cook. this involved a lot of cooking mashed potatoes and cheap frozen meals that she had to buy from the store herself.

she's still not good at cooking, mind, because she sucks at following instructions and nobody taught her, but she tells it often like it's a cool and fun and unique story and not deeply sad. it's all part of her mystifying her loneliness into being an aloof and cool lone wolf who doesn't need friends cuz she's hot and cool

strongly held opinion: a lot of people like to throw blame around for what happened to faith (the show most clearly blames wesley) and the thing is!!! it's giles!!!! blame giles!!!!!! he's not faith's watcher, but he was still getting funding from the watcher's council, and he never tried to move her out of the hotel or took any responsibility for her

safety even though it's his JOB.

on the flipside people love to blame buffy which is baffling because buffy tried so hard to help, she's just bad at it because she kind of sucks at giving faith what she wanted from her because that would mean fully accepting that she and faith aren't different.

but she tried her absolute hardest even when faith started actively trying to push her away

song i associate with them:Talk Shop

oh shit i forgot the mayor for brotp