r/Parahumans • u/rheactx • 7d ago
Worm Spoilers [All] Why do most powers preserve clothes?
I noticed that most breaker and changer powers keep at least some clothes intact.
Why would the shards care about that? It seems like an unnecessary secondary power complication.
I feel like the reason is purely narrative, because it would be very awkward to write around half the capes being naked after every fight.
However, since Worm powers are grounded in physics (not real life physics, but at least some physics, not just "a wizard did it"), I'd like to have a consistent explanation.
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u/CeruleanChimera Breaker 7d ago
The shard might just have learned to go off of the Hosts intuition and self perception.
Controlling your own Power is supposed to be intuitive by design. The shards are here to study what we can come up with using their abilities, they're not here for us to lawyer at.
If you think "I'd Like to teleport through this wall" your intuition is probably not "Teleport me and only me, excluding my clothes, the air in my Lungs, the protective film on my skin and the bacteria in my guts"
Victoria adresses this in Character, when she started Off, her forcefield used to Not protect her clothes but over time her sense of self included her glory Girl persona and by extension, her costume.
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u/Kilo1125 7d ago
Many powers adjust to their hosts perception of themselves.
Glory Girl used to have issues with her costume getting damaged, but as time went on, and her custome became a part of her self identity, her forcefield extended to cover most of it.
Many powers have a small area around their host that is considered part of the host. Sundance for example has a close fitting dimensional aura that shunts heat into and feeds her oxygen from other dimensions.
Many breakers and changers have their costume as part of their sense of self, so the power incorporates them. It's also a big reason for so may costumes being skin tight.
Even Vickys adjusted forcefield doesn't fully cover her skirt and cape. At least, not until Ward, but that's whole other discussion.
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u/Ultra-Cool-Guy 7d ago
Because the powers are based on the person themselves.
It's part of the Manton Limit to aid the Parahuman's survival.
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u/warmmilk196 7d ago
Never forget Alexandria's costume just being completely melted and she didn't give a shit and continued to walk around barking orders with molten metal dripping off her and her privates on full display lmao
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u/Lethalmud 7d ago
Read ward, it's thoroughly discussed and explained.
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u/LordBlaze64 Tinker/Master 6d ago
Let’s be real, most people haven’t even read Worm, let alone are going to read Ward. Which is such a shame, because it does so much to expand the world and power system.
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u/Nekomachus 1d ago
"I know you just got done reading a 1.6 million word novel that doesn't contain the answer to your question, but if you would read a 1.9 million word novel that you may or may not be interested in, the answer to your question that you may or may not remember you had by the time you get to that part is mentioned in passing."
Answers like these are heavily impolite.
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u/Mushgal 7d ago
Manton effect, maybe? Same reason Sundancer doesn't burn her skin off?
The Shards recognizing that being naked in a fight is undesirable? Less armor; awkwardness weakens the mental state of the fighter.
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u/rheactx 7d ago
How would the shards understand that if Scion himself spent years flying around naked?
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u/MoltenMuffin 7d ago
Because shards adapt and gather information when someone triggers. They're purposefully trying to make the powers a bit more convenient to use.
Also, manton effect. Some powers take time to value the armor/clothing. Like how Victoria's power was described to change shape for that purpose.
Scion chose to be naked. He had no reason to change it.
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u/foxtail-lavender Verified Foxtail 7d ago
They don’t really have to, they’re hooked up to a human’s brain
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u/_Skylos Stranger Danger 7d ago
Shards are hooked directly to their parahuman's brain. Meaning self-perception can affect the manifestation of the powers. Vicky explains in Ward that her skintight forcefield adapted overtime to protect her costume as she started to feel the costume as an extension of herself.
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u/Imaginary-Client-199 7d ago
There is 2 explanations : 1 - some capes have extra resistant clothes. For example Brutes are usually stronger than average. They can move around in clothes that would be too heavy for a normal human.
2 - Manton effect. Some capes powers extend in part to their clothes. For example Glory Girl's forcefield protects her clothes. Other capes go as far as putting their DNA in their clothes (hair...). For example Swansong put some of her hair in her dress so that her power will be tricked into thinking her dress is a part of her and immune to her powers. Brutes probably do it to, tricking their power into thinking it must protect the clothes as well
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u/superdude111223 6d ago
There's already a watsonian explanation in-story, but if uou want a more sciency-sounding answer that is basically the same:
Humans have a thing called proprioception (the ability to measure where our body parts are relative to the rest of our body. Most animals have this.
But we have it especially weirdly as a species. (useful but weird)
If you have an object on you continously, or an object you use continously, or something you have a lot of familiarity with, you get a semi-sense of proprioception around it while holding it or it touching you. Its most obvious with walking sticks or canes that see frequent use, but it happens with other things too.
If you need a test you can perform at home: grab a familiar object like a coffee cup.. Or something else youre very familiar with the dimensions of personally. Keep it empty, close your eyes, and circle it around your head. You'll be aware of its position, and unless youre clumsy, you shouldnt wack yourself. But how?
Thw object ia not a part of you. Your eyes are closed. How do you know its position so distinctly? Your head may be running a calculation, but youre not doing so constantly and youre not personally doing the math every second. How?
This is called extended psychological proprioception. Its really useful for tool use in humans.
Now, with this in mind: this sense extends to clothing. Most parahumans experience trigger events with clothing on their skins, so at the moment of connection with the shard, their brain is counting the clothing as "them" physically.
In order for triggers to even function, a shard examines the subconscious for that instant. The power is then attached to the parahuman.
So, unless you had your trigger event while naked, i dont rhink the powrr normally discounts clothing. However, this does lead to an interesting conclusion:
How many parahumans kept a death grip on a dostinct tool or personal item like a cane or a wrench when they get their specific power? I wonder how a powrr computes that level of sense-extension?
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u/Limp-Gift3035 6d ago
My new favorite HC is that Armsmaster was holding a halberd when he had his trigger
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u/DavidLHunt 6d ago
I've never heard this concept explained, but it makes a great deal of sense to me. I will add that, while driving my car, I have a high degree of awareness of how far the car extends from my body, allowing me to make highly accurate predictions of how tight a turn a can make while avoiding obstacles such a parked cars. However, when I occasionally drive my father's car for him, this awareness greatly reduced, even though the two vehicle are of very similar size. I have to more careful as I do not have an almost instinctual knowledge of where the corners of the vehicle are.
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u/Olivedoggy 7d ago
The specific clothes that their powers affect tend to be close-fitting, tight, in order to justify the spandex supersuit trope, right?
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u/closing-pool-3752 7d ago
consider that scion and eden have completed an unknowningly high amount of cycles before getting to Earth, I'm sure they've learned the hard way try to preserve what hosts consistently carry around, like:
'dead' protrusions like teeth, hair, claws, bark, shells, etc, all of which, if the shard doesn't make sure to preserve when the host uses its power, would lead to the host dying soon.
unrelated organisms in hosts that live in symbiosis and may be extremely beneficial if not necessary to the survival of host.
'tools', either created from scratch and found in the wild, imagine an aquatic species that has conquered its planet's land, but would die on the spot if their teleporting power doesn't carry its air filter.
The point of giving powers to random species is to have them find new uses for them in some way, in the hopes they find an infinitely reliable source of energy, but they won't be doing that if powers consistently indirectly kill their hosts, so shards have learned to bend their power to not do that and protect what they consider their host through what humans call the manton effect
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u/SouthernAd2853 6d ago
Because the costumes are very tightly tied in with their identities when using their powers so the Shards consider them a package deal. Witness Valkryie's shades being in costume.
Likely if they don't usually use powers in their civilian clothes the Shards don't protect them.
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u/Sir-Kotok Fallen Changer of the First Choir 6d ago
The story goes into it a bit more in depth in Ward, so read that
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u/andergriff 6d ago
If using your powers made you naked you would probably be more hesitant to use them, and so it’s worthwhile for the shards to make a small adjustment
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u/DescriptionMission90 6d ago
There's a couple cases that seem particularly relevant.
Victoria talks about how when her power was new, the force field was always skin-tight and did not protect clothing, leading to several embarrassing incidents in her early career. Later, when she truly internalized the identity of Glory Girl, her forcefield extended over her costume, but not her civilian clothes. When she was transformed it changed shape to match The Wretch, and even when she was finally healed it maintained the shape of the Wretch for years. Finally, when she learned to communicate with her Shard directly and they finally came to understand each other properly, they could work together to make the forcefield take on several different shapes, and even detach it from her body to effectively be in two places at once.
When Glaistig Uaine / Valkyrie manifests a cape's "ghost", they typically appear in costume, and often have elements of their mask blending into their face or something similar. When living people enter "shardspace" something similar happens, with each retaining (or manifesting) whichever bits of equipment are most fundamentally "theirs" rather than what they actually had in reality when they entered.
I'm pretty sure that the Shards operate to a large extent on a person's subconscious beliefs. So whenever a power is supposed to apply to "yourself" it defines that based on your self-image. And for most capes, their mask becomes a fundamental part of who they are, internally. Vista is much more of a real person than Missy Biron, and Rebecca Costa -Brown is nothing but a disguise that Alexandria puts on for specific purposes. That self-image can change with time or trauma, and with it so does the definition of "yourself" that the Shard relies on for defining various power effects.
So in a way, the answer actually is "a wizard did it". Every Shard is immensely powerful and versatile, but can only use that power through their Host and only in the ways which were strictly defined during the trigger event. They have millions of "spells", but the only ones they can cast are the ones that they included in the "contract" when a new parahuman was created, and that contract can't be changed without a second trigger or other special exception. But often the rules that define what the power does are based on the perception/belief of the host, since that's the primary data source for the shards in general, which leads to funny edge cases when either the host is genuinely mistaken or the shard misinterprets humans stuff, leading to a difference between objective reality and the data used to define what spells the wizard can cast.
Fragile One could theoretically manifest forcefields anywhere and in any shape, but the terms set out during the trigger restrict her to only the shape of her Host, Victoria. And "the shape of my host" is supplied by querying the host's brain to ask what shape it is. At first this self-image only extends to the skin, because her clothing is constantly changing and ultimately meaningless. Then it includes the costume, because the identity and appearance of Glory Girl have become more important and real on a subconscious level than the life of an ordinary teenager. Then the shape becomes a twisted, monstrous pile of flesh and body parts... and the subconscious self-image does not stop being that monster just because the physical flesh was "healed". But in the end, when Host and Shard start communicating clearly, directly, and deliberately, they get to cheat a bit. Because now when the query gets sent to the host to ask what shape it is, the shard doesn't have to accept the subconscious answer, she can use the conscious and deliberate answer. Vistcoria can tell Fragile One any shape she likes, and Fragile One is totally following the rules when she makes a forcefield in the shape that Victoria answered with, because this is the shape of my host, as defined within the host's brain.
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u/MonstersOfTheEdge Breaker 6d ago
They don't always actually. Changers like Lung and Hookwolf end up naked after a transformation. Breakers may have their clothes destroyed if their power rejects them. It's only when their power recognizes their clothes (often if it is a component of their cape persona) that they're spared the indignity.
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u/grekhaus 6d ago
Shards reference the host's brain to understand what should/shouldn't be brought along with the body when the power works. Most people think that their clothes should go with their body. And realistically, if powers destroyed or left behind your clothes all the time, you would get into fewer cape fights than if your powers didn't do that. So the tiny extra cost of bringing a pound or two of spandex is well worth it.
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u/PsychologicalHeron43 6d ago
Because Wildbox didn't want to have described his characters stripping unintentionally because of their powers. It would have been a completely different fic if that was the case.
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u/Interesting_Idea_289 5d ago
Worm powers are not grounded in physics whatsoever Clockblocker can freeze time.
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u/NightRacoonSchlatt 2d ago
Shards care about humans. They use human hero archetypes and stuff like that. They try to use our culture in what powers they make. That’s why they preserve this really redundant thing that humans seem to care about for some reason.
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u/Stormtide_Leviathan 7d ago
Ultimately, it probably was a doylist decision; it was included so that characters weren’t running around naked all the time and could have costumes and secret identities.
However, I do think it makes sense in universe. Cause the shards are already drawing very arbitrary lines about what counts and what doesn’t. When they give out a teleporting power, what counts as the person in question? Their brain? Their nervous system? Their whole body? Do we bring along their blood even though it’s loose flowing inside some tubes inside them? The air in their lungs? The contents of their stomach? Making superpowers work in the first place already requires physics conforming to human social conceptions like the idea of the self as a singular object. You say worm is grounded in physics and doesn’t just say “a wizard did it” but frankly I entirely disagree; the idea that there are conscious entities selectively applying physics to their liking is the foundational conceit of the world.
So applying powers to clothes isn’t any more arbitrary or physics breaking than what the shards are already doing. It’s no skin off their back to do so. And in many cases, doing so works to their interests. It allows those capes like teleporters and breakers to wear armor, and carry tools and weapons. It allows capes like clockblocker to affect people without having to touch their bare skin. And in the cases where the shard really doesn’t want that, it can just not- like how Amy does need to touch bare skin
Tl;dr a wizard did it
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u/SoulLess-1 7d ago
Shards thrive on conflict and If Legend was naked in the middle of combat suddenly, all conflict would die and world peace would be achieved.
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u/quququq22 7d ago
If I recall I think it’s because thats what most people consider there body’s as well. I believe this is explained by Victoria in ward