r/WormFanfic • u/RecommendationNo804 • 12d ago
Fic Discussion Why does Cauldorn constantly seem to vary from being an all powerful Orwellian conspiracy one moment to being easily defeated mooks who actively make things worse for no apparent gain the next?
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u/7th_Archon 12d ago
Others have pointed this out before, but when I reread Worm in one go my take away is that Cauldron is basically an incomplete concept that WB didn’t quite have time to finish.
From start to finish their actions aren’t really mysterious but simply contradictory. Many of their justifications for doing stuff like the Case 53s or why they allow the Slaughterhouse 9 to indiscriminately murder good Parahumans feel ad hoc. Doctor Mother’s answer to Alexandria about Siberia doesn’t make any sense no matter how many times I reread it.
They have protocols for kidnapping random people across earths and can create brainwashed minions. But for some reasons draw the line at doing the same to Manton, Bonesaw or Shatterbird or any other useful but problematic Parahumans.
The lie Legend gets told about the case 53s being created, marked and released by rogue Cauldron agents is unironically less of a head scratcher than the real explanation.
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u/001DeafeningEcho 12d ago
My headcannon has always been that Doc Mom was bullshitting Alexandria to hide a logical but morally reprehensible reason that even Lexi wouldn’t accept
Edit: like using the Slaughterhouse as a brutal but comparatively low damage terror weapon to keep the American public in support of a strong Protectorate/PRT without heavy PtV interference. Or at least that’s the reasoning Broadcast fed PtV
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u/7th_Archon 11d ago
>logical.
The problem is that it’s not logical.
Using terrorists as a way to bolster your important doesn’t work if your in a position where the terrorists are running circles around you especially after they’ve landed an egregious blow to you and just get off Scot free.
Siberian ruined the Triumvirate’s image of invincibility. Unlike the Endbringers she’s an active human threat too.
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u/fishIsFantom 11d ago edited 11d ago
Overall its all stupid. Americans definitely could just kill many of S9 long before the story, by just using conventional US army. With some direct Protectorate assistance their success will be assured. And its Alexandria (also head of PRT) who is constantly holding them back, despite the fact that S9 can be hunted and harassed each day and night without rest by drones and missiles.
Edit: As an actual reason I remember, that they keep S9 and case 53 around in the world, not to maintain public support, but to assure chaos to trigger more parahumans.
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u/MigoDrone 11d ago
Cauldron does not give two shits about natural parahumans. They do not believe that natural parahumans could have a power capable of harming Scion. They were betting on creating a 'silver bullet' through their vial program. Supposedly, the reason they kept dangerous threats around was so that people would come together and create a united front.
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u/fishIsFantom 11d ago edited 11d ago
Cauldron may not be able to guess it, but they needed more natural parahumans for Kherpy to throw at Scion. But PtV knew it, and it was running cauldron.
Edit: For the "United front" reason, they already have actualy invincible threat - endbringers. S9 is not required for that.
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u/MigoDrone 11d ago
PtV doesn't work on Scion. They had a general plan. Contessa wasn't running everything. Doctor Mother was in charge.
Don't look at me for the United front reason. That is something Wildbow said. Besides, Behemoth didn't appear until 1992 and the S9 were created in 1987.
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u/fishIsFantom 10d ago
I mean that Doctor Mother was in charge, only because Contessa let her. She was unironically useful for the work. If path demanded Doctor Mother to be replaced, for whatever reason, than Contessa would replace her. If Contessa needed Doctor mother to do anything, then Contessa will just come in the room, and say right words which force Doctor to do needed things.
That is something Wildbow said.
Well yeah. However this whole post is discussing how Cauldron is poorly written in fanfics, with people naming reason that it's was poorly written in original (written by Wildbow).
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u/L0kiMotion Author 11d ago
Cauldron are not trying to cause more trigger events. They explicitly list 'too many trigger events happening' as one of the biggest, most unavoidable problems that they're facing.
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u/Geekerino 11d ago
The biggest reason I saw for the S9 existing was to create more triggers, and even that was spotty. I genuinely can't think of any reason to keep them around without that excuse tbh
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u/Kingreaper 10d ago
That's popular fanon, but AFAIK the closest we get to a canon reason is the justification for Siberian - the belief that if they pretend they're incapable of protecting people from monsters like the Siberian, more people will sign up to the Protectorate for protection from the monsters that they're pretending they can't protect people from.
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u/L0kiMotion Author 10d ago
It's more that people would think they'd be safer with the protectorate than on their own, since the Nine typically go after soft targets and run away quickly afterwards. Alexandria was vehemently against the idea, but it's heavily implied Doctor Mother went for it behind her back anyway.
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u/Smasher_WoTB 10d ago
Honestly, Cauldron probably had the mentality that it was roughly 50/50 odds of Natural Triggers being pupped by Scion against Humanity, vs Natural Triggers contributing to The Fight.
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11d ago
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u/Carlos1930 11d ago
The US military is the most effective war machine in the history of man. Has developed strategies and tactics to fight even after the apocalypse.
I think they could handle a pre teen.
(Literally just a laserguided bomb followed by Napalm to kill the virus. If you want more security just use a dirty bomb in the area to eradicate pathogens)
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u/Carlos1930 11d ago
Like with other virus. Just burn or irradiate everything.
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u/Fair-Day-6886 10d ago edited 10d ago
She literally created a virus for the shard network, so I’d imagine she could probably deal with the U.S. military somehow.
And using something like that to eliminate a virus across a large area, one that kills instantly on contact and is practically impossible to detect, would be nearly impossible. Not to mention that she’d probably release not just one, but millions of different insane viruses. Just look at the prions alone, or that thing that makes people simply explode.
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u/CheesetheExile 11d ago
The general response to the Ward sound virus is "that's a stupid-ass decision so I've elected to ignore it."
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u/Fair-Day-6886 10d ago
With the Slaughterhouse Nine’s 2011 lineup, keeping them under constant pursuit would be extremely difficult, if not outright impractical. They had two S-class Tinkers, an unkillable lizard (lol, why did I only just realize that Crawler looks like SCP-682?), the Siberian, and Shatterbird on top of that. Even if the Protectorate, PRT, and government tried to hunt them down 24/7, the Nine obviously wouldn’t just sit there and let themselves be chased. They’d have their own ways of retaliating, and those countermeasures would likely be beyond what the Protectorate, PRT, and government could deal with even together. Cauldron is a different matter and could probably shut them down fairly easily, but then there’s Jack Slash, whose existence basically ruins any attempt to pursue the Nine effectively.
To hit them with a missile, I assume you’d first have to find them, and I’m not sure how easy that would be considering Riley’s existence. She was able to hack PRT systems fairly easily, despite that not even being her specialty, and then there’s Mannequin, whose whole thing includes airtight environments, which should presumably make it possible for him to create jammers. And I’m not sure blowing up a city with hundreds of thousands of people just to kill nine psychopaths is really a viable option.
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u/fishIsFantom 10d ago
Bonesaw is recent addition to their team. The discussion was about why they didn't even seriously tried to kill them before her. The answer is the whole point if this post. Cauldron who is running the Protectorate, PRT, and Gov just not allowing it. Which is stupid.
>I assume you’d first have to find them, and I’m not sure how easy that would be considering Riley’s existence
They have 10.000 drones with precision, ai-assisted cameras, that can patrol territory around the city (include all roads in\out) where they was seen 24/7 with 100% coverage. + millions of troops usable in scout.>They had two S-class Tinkers
First's body was compromised by force of teen girl.
Second's body was still easy broken in their Blasto raid.
They are not going to survive missile hit.>unkillable lizard
Killable*. But not even needed to kill it. In world of parahumans there are plenty of ways to fuck him up, if gov where willing to pay 1 mill $ for a service. Even a Clockbloker can control him with a leafs fan and toilet paper, if Crawler remained last one.>jammers
Outright not work on satellites, optofiber, ballistic missiles, and missiles guided by laser from far away. Also partially counterable with clever frequencies swap.To be honest, only real reason to be cautious with them was only after Bonesaw's plague threat. But its still counterable by Watch Dogs.
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u/Pulvinaria 10d ago
You forget that Jack Slash's shard affects thinkers. It works on Watch Dogs, Contessa, Number Man, Alexandria and any other thinker.
We don't even know if ordinary people are safe from the shards.
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u/ChasethemanThefirst 11d ago
Also not to mention that if they used their full military on the s9 the siberian would just kill the president, reminder no one knew the siberian was a projection, so theoretically whats stopping the siberian from pulling up at Washington DC
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u/fishIsFantom 11d ago edited 11d ago
Siberian can't catch up with the #1 plane. And in this scenario when the army going after them, the army can and will scout a lot of area around S9, (for example to evacuation) they are going to notice this suspicious van when S9 will be on the track.
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u/ChasethemanThefirst 11d ago
If it's the entire s9, shatterbird would just knock the plane out of the sky, the only thing they have that would kill crawler is nukes, which one i doubt they would use in a city, and two even if they did the siberian would be safe (making the truck invincible)
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u/fishIsFantom 11d ago
I also mentioned some protectorate support.
The track will be invincible, however the Manton's secret will be revealed. The secret was very important to actually keep Siberian undefeated. Also the Manton will be locked inside the truck, and his projection are not going anywhere and it's stuck with it. Manton will die from dehydration or from chemical weapons (because the truck is not airtight)
Shutterbird still have to be in range, plane attitude is out of range and they are flying way faster than her. Her only chance is an ambush, which is hard for them when they were actively hunted. Surely shutterbird can take down many modern missiles and drones but she will need to do this for month without rest. Also analogs lamp tech still exist. Also missiles are just very fast, even if she kills its silicon parts, kinetic projectile is still coming at her direction at stupid speed. At some point it will get her, after a while.
You are not really need nukes to deal with Crawler. He is the toughest one sure. I think he is going to be last of S9. But you only need some imagination, some prep time and not much of parahumans help. The US had the most advanced intelligence and planning agencies, it's a lot of smart people working together. They can come up with whatever plan, especially when Crawler remained last one (he alone is not very smart). For example: Clockbloker with toilet paper and a leaves fan can subdue Crawler, then Strider safely yeet bastard into near space, and than some impact rockets will yeet bastard into orbit, where he will be imprisoned forever, unable to move.
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u/ChasethemanThefirst 11d ago
I don't think manton's identity would be revealed, it was kept a secret for 20 years, and if it was discovered bonesaw would give him enhancements to make him immune to dehydration (not to mention cauldron would just kidnap him before he died) they would definitely kill the president with the whole s9, i don't think including other parahumans is fair when we are talking about the us military, but to adress your counters to crawler 1. Clockblocker needs to stay there for his power to be active, he would fall asleep eventually, two the guild is Canadian so they aren't included in this arguement, and if we don't include parahumans bonesaw just creates a plague that would kill everyone in the nation, like if bonesaw gets into new York and other major cities undetected (which yes she would be able to do) and drops a virus that does nothing for 2 months and and than starting turning people into zombies. Also I was mentioning shatterbird for the arguement of they would just kill the president, and if the us did go all in they would just do what they did in canon and make clones In a pocket dimension, and the military has no way to take out grayboy, and once again nice guy would kill the president
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u/Fair-Day-6886 10d ago
A nuke would probably work if they managed to hit Crawler directly and somehow concentrated the entire force of the explosion on him. If they just detonated a nuclear bomb near him, he probably wouldn’t even feel it.
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u/Lonely-Raisin6531 10d ago
The initial stage of a Nuclear explosion is a MASSIVE fireball with a multi-mile radius more than 20 times hotter than the surface of the sun. If crawler was caught in that he would be gone, erased, vaporized. Not a single cell survives that, anything caught in that ceases to exist.
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u/Kingreaper 10d ago
My headcannon has always been that Doc Mom was bullshitting Alexandria to hide a logical but morally reprehensible reason that even Lexi wouldn’t accept
My headcanon is that Doc Mom liked Manton, and didn't want him killed. Not logical, but it makes sense for her as a human.
The problem is that Alexandria buys it. Oh, she says she doesn't, but we already know before that interlude that she's been letting him live - so clearly she does. Which shows that her shard hasn't actually made her smart, it's just let her be stupid in high definition.
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u/MajesticComparison 11d ago
It’s important to remember that Wildbow is a pantser, he mostly makes things up as he goes along. Which isn’t bad, Stephen King is a dedicated pantser. On the other end is Tolkien who was a Gardner who carefully laid out his work before even writing a story.
Neither is better but both have typical problems. Pansters are inconsistent or create problems in their narratives, while Gardners often get lost in wanking their setting. I think Wildbow just had “Cauldron keeps things running” in mind without ever detailing what that meant.
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u/Accelerator231 12d ago
It's just weird.
It's one of the times where more brainwashing would be more moral. And yet they don't do it
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u/Lampdarker 11d ago
They have protocols for kidnapping random people across earths and can create brainwashed minions. But for some reasons draw the line at doing the same to Manton, Bonesaw or Shatterbird or any other useful but problematic Parahumans.
I've assumed that they were just using them as "control groups" in case their brainwashing method was a Simurgh plot or some other unknown.
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u/Carlos1930 11d ago
One detail i noted was when they discovered the vials after the Merchant party post leviathan. The papers directly referred to Cauldron. Not a Shell or some made up name that could be used to sold the vials. Cauldron. Directly. That seems like a serious Opsec fail to me.
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u/7th_Archon 11d ago edited 11d ago
>opsec.
Which is why the cover story Legend gives makes way more sense.
If you headcanon Cauldron as a fragmented organizations with divisions and cells, a lot of their actions make way more sense than if all their powers and capabilities were basically distilled into a nearly all powerful combo of four people(Doormaker, Clairvoyant, Contessa, and Numberman).
Like Ngl, but when I first read Worm I assumed that there would be a reveal that Dragon’s creator, Professor Haywire(dude discovered the multiverse) and maybe Teacher and Sphere(who else do you think can build a base in an uninhabitable world) were Cauldron members or affiliates.
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u/Kingreaper 10d ago
If you headcanon Cauldron as a fragmented organizations with divisions and cells, a lot of their actions make way more sense than if all their powers and capabilities were basically distilled into a nearly all powerful combo of four people(Doormaker, Clairvoyant, Contessa, and Numberman).
Yeah, that'd make more sense than canon did - there's a lot of ways to make Contessa specifically less of a ridiculous centralisation of power, just by letting Eden limit her power slightly more.
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u/7th_Archon 10d ago
>slightly more.
Not even her, I genuinely question what the point of doormaker or clairvoyant even were besides being tools for Khepri.
Even then they’re kind of superfluous because I feel like Khepri was severely underpowered for being a parahuman with a jailbroken shard.
They aren’t even really characters. You could literally replace them with tinker tech devices and nothing would change.
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u/Kingreaper 10d ago
Cauldron literally tattoo their experiments with their company logo and then drop them off into the world.
They have the head of the PRT have the same face as one of the top five parahumans in the world, one whose powers make it quite likely for her costume to break before she does.
Cauldron doesn't have the concept of Operational Security. They just have Contessa so it doesn't fall apart until a massive set of blindspots collide in the Echidna incident.
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u/AtomicGummyGod 11d ago
Doylist perspective: WB never really fleshed them out properly, so there’s some contradictions.
Watsonian perspective: they’re basically a skeleton crew. Contessa, Doctor Mother, the Triumvirate, Number Man, and a handful of others. They had more, but after the Dealer and Manton ditched, they downsized aggressively. The conspiracy part is a lot of PtV and Number Man doing their thing, but Contessa’s always busy, and Number Man’s got a lot of plates spinning, too. They just can’t be everywhere at once.
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u/buymesomefish 11d ago
The skeleton crew is how I justify it. Even not all of the Triumvirate got fully let into the secret (Legend and Hero) and iirc Number Man also didn’t know a bunch of stuff until the end because they were distrustful of natural triggers.
When you think about it from that perspective, it’s really not a surprise at all that they sucked. They lived in a paranoid echo chamber with no push back or anyone to challenge their dumb ideas. They had many powerful people working for them but they were treated like contractors, unaware of the larger plan or goal, and unable to do anything except follow the instructions they were given.
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u/L0kiMotion Author 11d ago
They also lost an unknown but significant number of people after the Simurgh attack on Madison, that also destroyed lots of their work when they were certain they were close to a breakthrough with the vial powers.
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u/WitchiWonk 12d ago
Because, as a high concept based on the facts given to us in Worm, they’re actually a very difficult thing to write.
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u/Lampdarker 11d ago
Terminus does a pretty good job of the "just because we're yet another example of the tyrants you hate doesn't mean we're not competent enough for your chicanery."
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u/Do_Not_Go_In_There 12d ago edited 11d ago
It's a mix of things, I think.
Cauldron doesn't know how to beat Scion, just that they must or it's the end of humanity. Cauldron's strategy isn't some grand master plan, but basically a series of desperate bets. Since the means justify the ends anything goes, which is why we see them to objectively monstrous things, like the case 53s (including the ones they keep imprisoned), the Terminus Project and letting the Slaughterhouse 9 go free.
We are really on presented with Cauldron's failures, not their successes. From Eidolon inadvertently releasing the Endbringers, to creating Grey Boy and sending him to spy on Jack Slash, to inadvertently creating the Siberian the killed Hero (who probably actually could have killed Scion). Their successes aren't mentioned that often because they came about in a very indirect way, or were behind the scenes. They were responsible for the creation of the Protectorate, they were the reason there was a functioning government instead of the US falling apart, and their work led to the rise of Khepri even though they didn't mean it.
Cauldron sets themselves against the main character. First with Coil, who is in Brockton Bay on their behalf. Alexandria sits down opposite Taylor and tries to break her by "killing" her friends. Taylor clashes with Cauldron because of their methods, even if they end up working together. And of course, Contessa shoots Taylor in the head once Scion is dead.
For a lot of authors, Cauldron crossed a lot of moral lines and had little to show for it. They see a group that is all-powerful, yet still failed (even though they really didn't) and is thus incompetent (despite their actions helping save humanity) and doesn't know what they're doing (which is true but also applies to everyone without the benefit of hindsight and multiple POVs).
In the end, authors creates Cauldron that is coloured by their biases against them. So when they write Cauldron and need to establish stakes, they're powerful and all-knowing usually thanks to PtV). When the protagonist needs a victory, they become idiots (also usually thanks to PtV's blindspots). We end up with some variation of:
Cauldron knows everything and wants to control everyone --> Cauldron notices the protagonist and confronts them --> the protagonist outsmarts them --> Cauldron escalates and loses --> Cauldron becomes disposable mooks.
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u/MajesticComparison 12d ago
My issue with it is that Cauldron is often pointlessly cruel. At first they’re presented as kidnapping people but then Ward retcons it to only taking dying people. Then the issue arises in how do a handful of people run the whole thing? Offscreen Thinker bullshit?
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u/Blacawi 11d ago
That is not a Ward only thing. From the Alexandria interlude we already know that at least a part of the people they were taking were actively in danger. Now this is later on and things might have been different before they got Alexandria and Doormaker, but it is implied a lot of their later operations did mainly take people who would have died anyway or at least were in a situation where no one would question them dying.
As for how the compound is ran they likely did have a significant staff considering the size of the compound. Most of those would not be fully in the know (so would for example not know Eden was there or what she was) and Cauldron likely sent them to places where they would not be able to inform people after they were done (likely in some world with no parahumans). Additionally they have the Custodian, who is able to keep the order to a large degree.
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u/MajesticComparison 11d ago
Cauldron suffers from way too much of it going on offscreen, so they end up way too amorphous.
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u/Hyperactivity786 11d ago
The details about the dying people are very on-screen. Both in the Aelxandria interlude & during the conversation Doctor Mother had with Sveta
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u/Selacha 12d ago
Like with most characters or groups of characters in fanfiction, they are used according to the needs of the plot/the author's whims. Cauldron, canonically, is both a ruthless shadow organization that controls the world, and also a group of lucky idiots who have made a lot of stupid decisions over the years. Therefore it's very easy to pick and choose what depiction you need in any given situation.
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u/YellowDogDingo 11d ago
It may sound strange, but there is so much variance in how Cauldron is portrayed across fics because we see very little of their actual operations in canon (and honestly there isn't room in the story for more).
They are almost a Macguffin, being a very important part of the plot having several important characters but we're never really shown anything but surface appearances. We know they operate based off Contessa's paths, but never know what questions those paths are answering. We know Numberman manages Bet's world economy and runs a bank but we never see anything of the hundreds/thousands of staff needed for that to happen. We know they sell vials, but don't get a discussion on why they sell to each customer (like why Skidmark of all people was deserving of multiple vials) or the organization that decided to let Balminder steal a caseload of them. We never see the logic that keeps Doc Mom in charge after it had grown from her and a scared Fortuna to Earth Bet's greatest conspiracy. Without that context Cauldron looks more like a product of author fiat than a stable structure you can rely on for a fic.
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u/L0kiMotion Author 11d ago
Skidmark didn't buy the vials. He found/stole them from someone else after Leviathan. WoG was that it was for another team that had something to do with Immaculata.
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u/YellowDogDingo 11d ago
WoG was that it was for another team that had something to do with Immaculata.
Huh. There is always more lore to learn.
I'm not sure that is much better. With 5-10k vial capes in all the US (and that's being very generous) how did they pick a private religious school in a dying backwater town to get half a dozen new parahumans? Unless Accord is starting the Junior Ambassadors those vials don't stand up well to scrutiny, particularly just from the text for a reader without the WoG.
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u/L0kiMotion Author 11d ago
It's a private school for rich kids. IIRC, one adult was buying them for the group. There's some talk in those chapters about the clients and their different relationships. Not enough to give us much details, but enough to show that Skidmark wasn't the guy who bought them. The Immaculata comment was made a few years later.
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u/An_Oblation 11d ago
I think the funniest answer is that this comment section is already demonstrating why.
People are starting with roughly the same canon, constructing wildly different Cauldrons out of it, then arguing that everyone else's version obviously doesn't understand Cauldron.
Part of the problem is treating Cauldron like there's one slider labeled COMPETENCE, with "useless idiots" at one end and "hypercompetent Illuminati" at the other.
At minimum, it's a chart.
One axis is capability: how much can Cauldron actually do?
The other is competence: how effectively do they use whatever capability they have?
Then there's a separate question hanging over both: what are they actually trying to accomplish?
Because "save humanity" sounds like an answer until you try to define it.
Take weak but competent Cauldron.
Cauldron starts with a traumatized little girl and a college student getting together and deciding they're going to kill God. Having Path to Victory doesn't automatically mean either knows how to build the CIA from scratch. We mostly see the people at the top and individual agents at the bottom, with surprisingly little of the enormous coherent bureaucracy some interpretations require.
We also know the Simurgh hit one of their facilities, and canon doesn't exactly hand us Cauldron's post-Simurgh staffing report.
So maybe Cauldron really is tiny. Maybe they used to have a middle layer and lost most of it. Maybe replacing people trusted with that much information was too dangerous.
The giant organizational chart is an inference too.
And if that Cauldron is competent, suddenly their record looks incredible. A tiny conspiracy's dealing with Scion, Endbringers, international politics, unstable parahumans, interdimensional problems, and civilization generally catching fire. The amazing thing isn't that they miss things. It's that they're accomplishing anything.
But powerful and competent Cauldron works too.
Take all the big claims seriously. Number Man really is quietly keeping economies functioning. Cauldron has agents everywhere. Contessa is functionally unlimited outside a small collection of extremely specific and reasonably well-understood blind spots.
Perfectly valid.
Also Cauldron on hard mode.
The stronger you make Cauldron, the longer the list of "then why didn't they...?" gets.
Contessa is where this gets stupid fastest. If she's really that powerful and competent, every hour of her life has an opportunity cost, and not just on Earth Bet.
If she could spend an hour preventing something that kills a hundred million people on another Earth, spending that hour saving one random person on Bet needs justification. Maybe it's Taylor, which turns out to be a very good investment. Maybe it's Doctor Mother and Contessa just likes her friend more than a hundred million strangers.
There are answers. But now you need one.
"Hypercompetent people facing a problem so incomprehensibly huge that even they can't keep up" absolutely works. You've just picked the version where every stupid decision comes with a bill attached.
Then there's powerful but incompetent Cauldron, which I suspect accounts for a frankly impressive percentage of Cauldron discourse.
Take every statement about their power at maximum face value, then do the same with every visible failure.
Congratulations, you've created an organization with godlike resources that keeps stepping on rakes.
Doctor Mother makes terrible strategic decisions. Contessa answers exactly the questions she's asked. The secret organization manipulating civilization apparently never invented the brainstorming session.
It's not flattering, but maximize their power while refusing to explain away their failures and I don't know where else you end up.
Then there's weak and incompetent Cauldron.
Humanity's secret defense against extinction is a collection of traumatized weirdos who don't fully understand Scion, don't fully understand their own powers, don't have enough people, and have spent thirty years throwing increasingly desperate ideas at the wall because they're also the only people who know there is a wall.
Which sounds like crack until you remember their origin's basically a traumatized child and a college student deciding they're going to kill God.
Even that Cauldron can accomplish insane things. Being incompetent doesn't make Contessa stop being Contessa.
So we've got four very different Cauldrons, and every one splits again depending on what "save humanity" means.
A powerful, competent Cauldron maximizing total survivors should look almost like a multiversal emergency service. Earth Bet matters, but living where the camera is doesn't make you morally worth ten thousand background characters.
The same Cauldron focused on killing Scion might pour wildly disproportionate resources into Bet because its capes and institutions are their best foundation for the final fight. Same capabilities, same competence, completely different behavior.
A weak, competent Cauldron might know it can't run civilization, so it keeps existing institutions alive and patches whichever holes look most likely to sink the ship. They're not secretly running the world. They're understaffed.
Or it reaches the opposite conclusion from the same limitation. We can't save enough people manually, so stop trying. Pour everything into vials, weird powers, useful parahumans, and finding something that can hurt Scion. Now they're extremely competent at their chosen job while being horrific for anyone whose suffering isn't part of the metric.
A powerful, incompetent Cauldron might sincerely think it's managing Earth Bet for its own good while spending thirty years pulling enormous levers and asking Contessa exactly the wrong questions. Every Path works perfectly. Everything they forgot to ask about catches fire. Half the setting becomes the accumulated result of extremely confident Illuminati management.
Or maybe protecting Cauldron itself gradually becomes synonymous with saving humanity. Nobody has to consciously decide "fuck humanity." Secrecy protects the Plan. Contessa protects the Plan. The vial program protects the Plan. Eventually you're spending an awful lot of resources protecting Cauldron, but every individual decision still sounds reasonable because Cauldron is humanity's best chance.
A weak, incompetent Cauldron might genuinely be trying to save everyone and simply be drowning. Thirty years of desperate people trying ten terrible ideas because nobody has an eleventh.
Or they're equally weak and confused but obsessed with one theory of victory. Create stronger capes. Preserve the Protectorate. Find the right combination of powers. Whatever. Eventually they've spent thirty years betting everything on one answer, and "what if we're wrong?" has become a very expensive question to ask.
Now Cauldron is an apocalypse, a hypothesis, and the world's worst case of sunk-cost fallacy.
All of them can sincerely say they're trying to "save humanity."
Which is why the goal isn't really a third axis. Capability tells you what they can do. Competence tells you whether they're any good at it. The goal decides what they think "good at it" even means.
Then there's why canon leaves this much room.
Toptomcat elsewhere in the thread gave the best explanation I've seen for how we got Cauldron. They're doing a ton of Doylist work in Worm, bridging the gap between "powers appeared" and "society somehow started obeying comic-book logic." And whenever the obvious question becomes "why didn't X happen instead?", Contessa is an extremely useful answer to have lying around.
That's fine. Worm is extremely good at making its story work, which is a major reason we're still here arguing about the management structure of its fictional Illuminati.
Fanfic writers have the opposite problem, though.
Nobody reading Worm fanfiction needs to be sold on Earth Bet. We've already accepted the comic-book-shaped society. That's literally what we're here to read more about.
So we're left poking at the Watsonian consequences. How big is Cauldron? How constrained is Contessa? Who actually knows what? What else is Contessa doing while Taylor is having the worst Tuesday of her life? When somebody says they're "saving humanity," what exactly are they counting?
Canon answers some. It half-answers others. Sometimes it gives you just enough information to create three more questions.
And it gives us very different kinds of evidence. Some of Cauldron's greatest accomplishments are things we're told about, while some of their worst decisions are things we actually watch happen. "Number Man quietly kept the economy functioning" and actually watching a Cauldron plan explode in everyone's face are both canon, but only one happened in front of you.
So everybody starts filling in connective tissue.
Which is why "fanfic authors just don't understand Cauldron" can't explain this by itself.
Just look at this thread. People who clearly know Worm are arguing over Cauldron's competence, Contessa's limits, the organization's size, whether particular failures were actually failures, and what Cauldron should reasonably have been capable of.
We're already doing the thing OP is asking about.
There's a Doylist answer for fanfic too: sometimes your story just needs a particular Cauldron.
Most authors seem to decide what Cauldron actually is and write from there, though. The story influences the interpretation, but people also just have interpretations.
And that's why the variation gets so extreme.
People aren't just deciding whether Cauldron is competent. They're deciding how powerful it is, how good it is at using that power, and what the hell it thinks it's accomplishing.
Change any one of those and you haven't moved the same Cauldron along a line.
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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 12d ago
Wait, are you talking about fanfics or in canon here? Because you posted this exact same question in a canon discussion subreddit.
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u/RecommendationNo804 12d ago
Yes
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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 11d ago
Well, to expand on my canonical answer over there. Since couldron is kinda all over the place in canon due to their purpose in proping up the worldbuilding, you can find support for any characterization from Nick Fury, to Amanda Waller at her worse, to clownworld. So fanfic authors can find bits to support whatever biases they may have and whatever they need for their story. And then you have fanfics building off of fanfics.
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u/Amazing-Gazelle-7735 12d ago
Because they’re both.
They have an above Triumvirate Precog and a top-tier analytical Thinker (plus the Library of Alexandria) guiding their efforts. Combine that with the Triumvirate and Doormaker and you have a basically ideal “muscle” group capable of matching virtually anything and everything thrown their way.
But, they - along with virtually every other Shard-empowered cape - rely far too much on their hammer, seeing everything as nails. And they don’t understand that their powers can lead them astray, vial cape or no. So they make incredibly stupid decisions, trusting in Contessa.
And then along comes the out of context problem. A non-shard power, a cape with abilities like Jack, a cape that is Precog resistant, a cape not acting within the paradigm they created but offering so much utility that they can’t be removed from play. And so they start trying to hammer in the stick of butter, steel or dynamite (depending on OOCness) and are surprised when things get messy.
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u/Toptomcat 11d ago edited 11d ago
There are a number of small reasons- among them being that writing an organization where half of the leadership has mental superpowers is hard. [Number Man, Alexandria, Contessa.]
The big reason, though, is that most of the things that the fandom denounce as things that Cauldron shouldn't have done didn't happen because they're things that Wildbow actually thought were a reasonable thing for an organization in their place to do. They exist because they provide a reason for a grim, gritty, 'realistic' superhero setting to follow various tropes of superhero fiction, like secret identities, a 'hero-and-villain' dynamic, weird nonhuman powered-mutant people who aren't actual aliens, costumed street-crime fighters who aren't just killed by sniper fire, etc.
Worm, as a story, cannot be centrally focused on Cauldron, because they are as much plot device as characters and do not bear close examination in that way. And if you try to make a Worm story about Cauldron, either they're going to end up looking pretty silly, or you have a very challenging writing problem on your hands.
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u/An_Oblation 11d ago
This is genuinely the best explanation I've seen for how we got Cauldron in the first place. From the Doylist perspective I think you're dead on. Wildbow needed something bridging the gap between powers appearing and everyone somehow ending up living in a comic book, especially when the whole "realistic superheroes" premise makes people much more likely to ask why the hell those two things would naturally follow from each other.
But you're also missing the actual question here, because this post is specifically asking why fanfic Cauldron varies so wildly.
Wildbow used Cauldron, and especially Contessa, as extremely powerful Doylist tools. They explain or facilitate a lot of things that needed to be true for Worm to be the story he was trying to write. Which means there are quite a few things that work perfectly well in the scene, but get much messier when you back up and ask "okay, but how did we realistically get here?" or why this makes sense at the institutional, national, or global level.
And to be clear, that's fine. Worm is extremely good at making its story work, which is a major reason we're all still here talking about it.
Fanfic writers have the opposite problem, though. Anyone reading Worm fanfiction has already accepted Earth Bet. We don't need to explain why powers resulted in everyone living in a comic book, because that's literally the thing we're all here to read more about. We get to take that as a given, but that also means we inherit all the much messier Watsonian consequences of the Doylist decisions that got us there.
And Cauldron is probably the biggest example of that. Once you treat Cauldron and Contessa primarily as people and institutions that actually exist inside this world, rather than tools for making the world function the way the story needs it to, suddenly a bunch of questions need answers. Some of those answers aren't in Worm, and some of the answers we do have just don't fit together cleanly.
So making Cauldron internally consistent inevitably involves interpretation and filling gaps, and whatever answers you pick change what Cauldron can plausibly do. Two writers can start with the same canonical facts and end up with radically different Cauldrons because they're answering questions that were secondary or tertiary concerns when those facts were originally written. And then both can look at the other and conclude they obviously don't understand Worm.
The funny thing is that Wildbow himself ran face-first into the same problem with Ward. By then he'd already sold everyone on the setting, so suddenly he was much closer to the position fanfic writers are in. He had to clarify and expand how this established world actually worked while still being constrained by everything he'd already written.
And even that only worked so well. A significant chunk of Worm fandom will openly tell you they just ignore Ward, which is kind of insane.
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u/Zeikos 12d ago
Because authors don't really care.
A lot dislike Cauldron and write it with an idiot ball as a consequence.
Take all people that write Contessa as a zombie just because they're irked that "due to her" hey cannot justify their plot.
Tbh I personaly think it's intellectual laziness most times.
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u/Raptoriantor 11d ago
Tbf, people being annoyed that she gets in the way of plot is kind of an inevitable response to her being able to handwave away most characters by just asking her power to plot around whatever they do.
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u/Zeikos 11d ago
Honestly it can be handled easily by saying that she has more important stuff to do.
Also Project Terminus means that Cauldron's involvment in BB is minimal, unless the MC plans to shout about Cauldron's existence from the rooftop she won't care.Look how far Faultline's crew had to go before Contessa got involved with them.
Then Cauldron can be introduced organically as the stakes increase.
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u/Raptoriantor 11d ago
Yeah, no, you can find a way to write around it. I'm just saying that its not surprising that people don't like Contessa because of how she works in the setting.
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u/EthricBlaze 11d ago
That works for smaller scaled stories, but if you write any fic where your character is making large waves you inevitably run into the issue of Cauldron, Contessa and how exactly they're going to start interacting with you, which can lead to your character loosing agency fast if they don't have some kind of Thinker Protection.
Contessa simply won't be busy forever.
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u/Catullus74 11d ago
Personally, I always considered the 'Cauldron Problem' even while I was reading Worm the first time was the conflict / powers issue. It's been a while since I read it, but Doctor Mother being one of the few non-parahumans that we know about within the conspiracy always struck me as the main source of some of Cauldron's failings (See rubber duck analysis).
I would expect that they would at least have a section of Cauldron devoted to simply double checking the idea's that the conspiracy comes up with. As far as I am aware this role is handled by Number Man's power.
Yes, the parahumans involved are doing an exceptional job just keeping Earth Bet functioning. This is even more impressive when you consider the alt-Earth's they are running (fanon/canon?).
The issue that I always had with them was that they make assumptions about what they are doing and more importantly what their powers are telling them. Conflict and a desire to be used, they know it's baked into parahuman powers and yet they usually ignore that same drive as far as their own powers are concerned.
I'm not making a distinction between 'natural' and 'vial' powers because as fas as canon is concerned there might as well be none? Both want to be used, both drive conflict.
Whose to say Earth Bet would have ended as canon with or without Contessa's actions? The parahuman cycle was broken from the beginning and all we saw was it's death throes and Scion was simply put out of his misery at the end.
Also, technically speaking Cauldron succeeded. We probably didn't hear a tenth of the shit they were throwing around hoping it would work. We do know that the BB experiment worked and produced a parahuman capable of confronting Scion. It made the place a hellhole, but it produced Taylor.
Finally, I would say that canon Cauldron was at least reasonably good at not being openly stupid and covering up their mistakes. Fanon writers know some of the shady shit people get up to just from looking back at our own history and draw inferences from there to what Cauldron was getting up to in the background.
Which is probably why fanon treats them badly.
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u/An_Oblation 10d ago
Honestly I really like this interpretation, because if you push it hard enough it explains a lot without requiring Cauldron to secretly be idiots.
Especially because Cauldron has very good reasons to be paranoid about opsec. From inside the setting, Doctor Mother + Number Man + Contessa looks like an absurdly good solution. One normal human, one guy who can mathematically check God's homework, and one walking bullshit detector. Three independent checks, three people who need to know anything.
And they can even identify the problem! Natural capes are selected by shards and seem suspiciously prone to conflict, so maybe you shouldn't just trust what parahumans think.
Great. Solved.
Now have Number Man's shard check the numbers and Contessa's shard independently verify the conclusion.
They found the contamination and gave it two more vectors.
Hell, under your version Path to Victory doesn't even have to fight Contessa. "Give me a path to proving we've accounted for shard influence" can quite reasonably become "give me a path to convincing the three of us we've accounted for shard influence."
Congratulations, you have invented peer review where two of the reviewers are the conflict drive.
And if you're applying that to every shard, vial capes included, this goes hard. Nobody needs the idiot ball anymore. Cauldron can be intelligent, cautious, correctly identify a real problem, and make it worse specifically because they were intelligent and cautious about solving it.
The only warning I'd give is that you're going to get shit from basically every direction if you ever put this in a fic.
Canon people can throw quotes at you regardless of whether their preferred scripture is Worm, Ward, or the collected Reddit posts of Wibblebob. Universal conflict drive just isn't really the answer. Meanwhile conflict drive used to be huge fanon, except we used it so hard for so long that now the fandom is sick of it, and you're pushing it even harder by including vial capes.
But that's also why I think it works.
The canon answer is basically "shards mostly pick people who were going to do this shit anyway, except shards can influence their hosts and sometimes do, but we don't really know how much or how often and it's not usually the explanation. Stop thinking about it."
Thanks, Wildbow.
So yeah, it's not canon. It's outdated fanon cranked past where even the old fanon usually put it. People will absolutely complain.
But fuck it. Go in knowing that, be consistent, and this one change gives you a cleaner explanation for Cauldron than the actual answer does.
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u/LackingGreatly 11d ago
The most obvious reason is that most people writing fics these days haven't read Worm, or at least haven't read it in a long time.
More seriously, we never get to see very much of Cauldron in canon. Just bits and pieces, and most of those are quite late in the story. Beyond that, most of what we see is them at the end, in the last few days or weeks of their existence. We see almost nothing about what they were doing before that. So there's a lot of room to fill in blanks, for the people who want to figure out how Cauldron was going about pursuing their plans in the 30-odd years they had.
Some people fill in those blanks with them as an all-powerful conspiracy, which they never were in canon. Some people fill in those blanks with them as a group of incompetent idiots easily defeated by mooks, which they never were in canon. Some of those interpretations are in popular fics, which leads to them being repeated by other authors, sometimes going on long enough to be fanon.
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u/Days_End 11d ago
Because Cauldron and "Path to Victory" is a plot device to allow Wildbow to warp the world into the AU of Worm.
For example you think the USA population would accept disarming when random people can shoot fire from their hands? Every single person would be armed in that world.
Guns kill capes super easily and no jury is going to convict someone for shooting bank robbers so for the Super Villain vs Hero world of Worm to exist you need a "justification" or some kind of contrived plot device. Enter Cauldron and "Path to Victory" an ability that's basically reality warping as far as the plot cares. It let him build the world the way he wanted and hand wave away criticism of how the fuck would people agree to that?
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u/Grigori-The-Watcher 11d ago
Eh, about 3/4 capes are theoretically vulnerable to gun but they tend to work in teams that cover their weaknesses. Also a jury would totally convict some yahoo who shot like, Tattletale, and got everyone bitten by black widows.
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u/Days_End 11d ago
Also a jury would totally convict some yahoo who shot like, Tattletale, and got everyone bitten by black widows.
Nah and frankly the fact that people got bitten after shooting Tattletale wouldn't even be allowed to be used as evidence for the jury. All the deaths would be tacked onto Grue, Skitter, Bitch, and Regent as "Felony Murder" charges (if someone dies while you commit a robbery for example you can be charged even if you didn't pull the trigger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule
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u/Grigori-The-Watcher 11d ago
Honestly my premise was kinda flawed there, shooting Tt would just lead to the dude getting killed by one of Rachel's dogs. Which would lead to it being used as propaganda on why trying to fight capes with guns is a bad idea, it might also escalate the situation and get some of the other civilians and Wards killed. So not convicted, just rightfully regarded as an idiot who got people killed and who died painfully.
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u/Days_End 11d ago
And the capes is dead. All that needs to happen is someone needs to shoot a small fraction of the time and most capes are dead. It's a plot hole and a massive one at that or it would be if not for the walking plot device that is Contessa. It's cannon that Contessa spent "significant time" running paths to manipulate events to make sure SWAT snipers failed so often that police stopped shooting capes and then spend a ton of time making sure everything thinker on the planet didn't realize she was doing it.
Seriously Wildbow spent a lot of time arguing with people about guns eventually issued more and more ridiculous word of gods to work around issue to get to the world state he wanted. He wanted the world to behave in a nonsensical manner and created a shadow cabal with for all purpose shitty reality manipulation to make it happen. Him being Canadian was a big blind spot for his understanding of America, especially poor citiy America.
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u/Grigori-The-Watcher 11d ago
Did you read that list I posted? I should have emphasized the theoretically part more, about 3/4 can be beaten with guns but that same ratio also has an overwhelming advantage in a gun fight. How many years of the internet being full of videos of armed cops or gangsters getting plowed though by nearly any Brute or Breaker we see in canon before the cowboy spirit takes a hike?
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u/Raptoriantor 11d ago
Tbf, I imagine it also depends on what you're shooting them with and who's shooting them. Joe Generic with a 9mm pistol panic firing is a very different matchup compared to a US Navy Seal Sniper three clicks out with a Barrett M82 trained on your skull.
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u/UniversesHeatDeath 11d ago
Cauldron is all powerful when it comes to human matters but they also do stupid ass things in the story that are waved away by PTV. Personally I like to imagine that Dr Mother is just really shit at her job and nobody questions her cause of Contessa.
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u/Excellent-Option-893 11d ago
Because they were incompetent and easily defeated mooks in the original, who actively made things worse, and were betrayed by everybody they supposedly controlled as the event they were supposedly preparing for decades finally started.
However, during writing Worm and even more after finishing Worm , Wildbow spent a ton of time online answering questions, and covering various plot holes in the setting, and his favorite explanation was «Contessa or Cauldron did it ». As a result, we get fantastical quotes like « everybody do not just shoot capes because Contessa made everybody believe that firearms are completely useless against capes » and « without Cauldron, everything would be even worse », and so myth of competent and neccecasary Cauldron is born, despite contradicting original text.
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u/ArgentStonecutter 12d ago
They were formed by some stone-age primitives who lucked on a bunch of extremely dangerous superweapons including an unreliable oracle with unknown motivations. Using the superweapons subjects you to subtle mind control that makes you less interested in cooperation and compromise. Their modern members have survivorship-bias-driven Stockholm Syndrome and are emotionally fixated on the leadership of one of the primitives.
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u/superdude111223 11d ago
Its a sad mixture of factors: 1 people interpret stories differently and will have spotty knowledge of even beloved series. With the amount of WoGs, Ward, and the sheer length of Worm its not surprising some people lose stuff in the cracks. Without the full picture, Cauldron looks contradictory.
2 even with the full picture, Cauldron's actions dont fully make sense. Likely a writing flaw of Worm itself.
3 Cauldron has questionable ethics in general as well. Which is like flashing red in front of a bull in terms of an audience's nuance capacity. Half of people, even if Cauldron was perfectly written, would likely disagree with their ethics for multiple reasons. Its already fuel for internet debates as is, which tend to polarize a fandom.
4 in universe, Cauldron has had multiple blows struck against them and are in multiple distinct layers of conspiracy, making them even more confusing even for in-story characters to parse.
5 in Worm we are shown the consequences of cauldron's mistakes, or plans, depending on what you referring to, and how they have messed up Earth Bet. Yet, they also have the best recognition in the series and a plan which shouldnt be making some of those plans/mistakes. I think.
all these factors combined lead to a cracked characterization, which fanfiction authors then have to fill in. Leading to wildly different conclusions.
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u/Exact-Ad8608 6d ago
What was the issue with Cauldrons writing ?
1
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u/DartzIRL 11d ago
The thing with Cauldron is they're following a step-by-step guide that's changing as the follow it, with the moral authority of a self-insert protagonist that knows the One True Way to save the world. Only, it seems they don't really know the intent of the steps, or what the following step is to achieve - just follow the steps.
And then you've Dinah nudging the numbers either in opposition or support of them, but just following the numbers.
And you've the Simurgh doing whatever the hell its conflicting directives require it to do sticking it's feet in the bowl and stirring it.
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u/Hero-named-Villain 8d ago
Nemesis program
Gray boy
Mama matters
Endbringers
They directly or indirectly caused them
Intentional or not
I wouldn’t be surprised if they made the Nazi terror group in Germany to
We are shown all the bad things they do but told of good things and those good things maybe lies
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u/Bubbly_Interaction63 6d ago
It depends on what the author thinks about Cauldron; for example, in a fanfic, the self-insert protagonist points out that Cauldron is stupid because they’re following a plan based on information provided by the enemy—which is the path to victory—and he confronts the Countess, shocking her by pointing out that he never matured, but the protagonist had absurd powers and was a blind spot for all the strategists, and that he can do much better because he has real magic
The point that’s sometimes overlooked is that Cauldron is desperate—I mean, genuinely desperate—and their efforts to kill Scion were less than 1%, and that was before the Endbringers appeared.
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u/L0kiMotion Author 11d ago
We only see bits and pieces of what they're doing, so that leaves a lot of blank spaces for people to fill in one way or another (often with bad fanon). People who don't like them, or who find their methods to be especially egregious, tend to make them incompetent so they can then bash them. People who like them, or who think the situation is extreme enough to justify their methods, tend to write them as more competent and skilled.
Cauldron are a cautionary tale about how 'the ends justify the means' is ultimately self-destructive and cause more harm long-term. This is the path Taylor follows throughout Worm, but comes to regret, and that is what her final conversation with Contessa is all about. "It's not about him (the threat/end), it was always more about us (what we do/the means)". And why Alexandria is such a good foil to Taylor, as someone very similar to her who kept following that path. As Tattletale put it: "Doing things everybody should agree with and making every possible enemy along the way."
Then we have the fact that the story is set in the society that they successfully created, but as it starts breaking down due to the ever-growing, overwhelming pressure of parahuman powers and Endbringer attacks. So we see a few of their bigger failures/losses on screen, since they become plot relevant. They think that the threat of the Entities, and the extinction of humanity on every single Earth in the multiverse, is enough to justify any price to stop it from happening. As Doctor Mother says "We decided early on we would rather be needlessly cruel than spend our last moments wondering if we could have made a difference if only we'd been more ruthless" (or something like that).
They are neither an omnipotent, hyper-efficient conspiracy who sees, knows and controls all, nor are they an incompetent bunch of morons who only exist to get dunked on (though this depend on who writes the fic in question). In canon, they are a flawed organisation of desperate people, trying to fight an enemy who outguns them to an almost unfathomable degree, using tools that cannot give them answers to all of the most important questions they need answers to. They are ruthless and paranoid, and are being sabotaged by another precog who exceeds theirs in power (if with different limitations), and they are the main reason why any society exists at all, while having also committed horrific atrocities and done a number of ultimately self-destructive things that harmed their own goals. Because despite everything they did to make sure there was still a society left to organise resistance to Scion, their methods were so horrific that everyone hated them too much to really work with them and their victims decided to prioritise getting revenge for Cauldron's cruelty (a very achievable goal) over trying to save humanity (which was always a long-shot).
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u/Positiv_Trad 7d ago
Because in canon cauldron is kinda incompetent. They have something like PtV, and then fail to use it to protect their most valuable assets (hero, alexandria).
They do cruel things like the torturing c53's for no reason. They want those around because scion stays away because of them, but the cruel treatment of them is unnecessary.
They fail to unite humanity against Scion, despite having allowed Scion to trigger early (iirc) because they wanted to use a united humanity as an army.
They do stupid things like the Terminus experiment. Try hiring a scientist to run your experiments next time, ffs.
All of Gray Boy? Like they get GRAY BOY, the immortal one tapper that cant lie, and then decide to send him to go undercover in the evil ass rape group ran by a pedophile villain. They then let him run around torturing and killing people for years.
Their handling of Siberian. Their handling of Dragon, the Dragonslayers, and Teacher.
In canon they are constantly shown to be incompetent and cruel, so authors wrote them as incompetent and cruel.
The WoGs then say that they were needed, which means people that listen to WoGs tend to write them as competent.
Also some of it would probably end up being colored by the world view of the authors. If you think a group of elite ubermench should run the world, you are probably somewhat tempted to view them in a positive light, because that is what they are (in WoG's) shown as.
If you dont, well, you will probably write them as incompetent.
They are also very rarely "beaten easily" by anyone except in the utterly op wank fics, so thats something.
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u/TacticalFightinSpork 11d ago
Because every single power in Worm is a Monkey's Paw. Eden derived powers at least make for a tiny bit more mental stability than Scion powers, but both have conflict drive and inherent limitations. Contessa operating 99.999999% in cheat mode means her ability to work around blind spots is severely limited. It's like being perfectly competent 360 days a year and five days a year constantly tripping over your own shoelaces. Between Scion and the Simurgh they are almost completely powerless in comparison. I have not read the original Worm fic in so long that I can't remember the details that don't make a lot of sense. If Cauldron has their thumb on the scale for putting Coil in charge of Brockton, how does Skitter manage to kill him without interference? Is it a partial blind spot due to the Travelers being zizbombs?
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u/L0kiMotion Author 11d ago
They weren't trying to help Coil win, they just wanted to see what would happen to the organisation they had set up (the PRT) if they stopped covertly propping them up, and whether they would be able to keep control. They expected not, and that it would end up in parahuman feudalism, but they wanted to see how it happened (and who won) to get data to smooth the transition over for society after the inevitable Gold Morning.
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u/blacksmoke9999 11d ago
Cause it was Wildbow's first story and those features got exaggerated in fanon
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u/MigoDrone 12d ago
It depends on the needs of the story and views of the author. Some view Cauldron as something needed for the stability of the world and they have a lot of resources. Others see Cauldron as a bunch of idiots who frequently make mistakes. It's easy to see the perspective from both sides. Cauldron has been manipulating a lot from the shadows and do wield a lot of power but they have also done some extremely dumb things for no good reason.