It was all fun and games when Taylor and Emma made up stories about the notorious supervillain Skitter. But now, two years later, Taylor has Skitter's powers. And she's ready to start using them...
I Am Skitter
is a Worm fanfic by BeaconHill.
Following triggering with exactly the same powers as a villain from some cape stories she and Emma used to write, Taylor sets out to emulate the character, founding a new gang and carving out a territory in Brockton Bay, as well as messing with Emma in revenge for her bullying.
This fanfic contains examples of:
- Becoming the Mask: When Taylor decides to become Skitter, she becomes Skitter. Not just while in costume, but even in her behavior in her civilian identity.
- Not to mention in her sexuality, which is particularly impressive.Taylor isn't lesbian, but I am. And let's face it: I'm not the type to stay single for long.
- Not to mention in her sexuality, which is particularly impressive.
- Break Them by Talking: Skitter manages, in the space of two conversations, to talk Sophia around from identifying as a superhero to being actively repelled by Emma referring to her as one.
- Doublethink: Taylor deliberately practices this in order to be better able to react to surprise while maintaining multiple identities.It was sort of interestingly slippery, trying to make myself simultaneously think two things that each involved pretending not to know the other.
- Fake–Real Turn: Skitter was originally just a character in Taylor and Emma's stories. Then Taylor triggers with almost exactly the power that Skitter has in the stories, and decides to model her own super-identity on her, effectively bringing Skitter into reality.
- Gaslighting: Skitter manages to convince Emma that she is Skitter in a Fight Club-like split-personality arrangement.
- If It's You, It's Okay: Seems to be the typically-straight Sophia's stance towards Skitter.Emma: Why not call her a woman? Would that change anything for you?Sophia: I... No. Why would it? She is an amazing cape. Who cares what's in her pants?
- Loves My Alter Ego: Emma believes that she's in this situation with Sophia, with Emma being in love with Sophia and Sophia being in love with Skitter.
- Paranoia Gambit: Skitter's initial plan for Emma, before Emma supplies her with the much more entertaining one that she ends up going with.
- Pragmatic Villainy: After the PRT sprays Brockton Bay with pesticides, when Skitter is contemplating her revenge:I was filled with a strange, perverse urge to round up a million PRT employees and poison them all. Nerve gas. Let's see how you like it.I could never really do that. There weren't that many PRT employees.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Defied; after the PRT sprays her territory with pesticides, Skitter is deeply tempted to give an immediate violent response, but she holds herself back for the sake of not showing weakness, instead taking a slower route which preserves the illusion that the spraying barely affected her.
- Secret-Identity Identity: Throughout the first arc, Taylor increasingly buries herself in her identity as Skitter rather than being herself, eventually even starting to think of Taylor in the third-person.
- Split Personality: Past the first few chapters, Taylor and Skitter are essentially separate mental entities. And Skitter is increasingly the more prominent of the two.
- She even deliberately practices keeping her personalities split, when she works on the Doublethink necessary to simultaneously control her identities as Skitter and Minerva.
- Separately, Emma becomes convinced that Skitter her own split personality. Skitter finds this hilarious and starts deliberately going along with it.
- Split-Personality Takeover: After Skitter winds up being responsible for several deaths, including one too close for comfort to home, Taylor begins actively bolstering Skitter, to the point most of the time, now it's Skitter who's pretending to be Taylor.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: Skitter's plans for Emma initially just involve freaking her out with her similarity to the fictional Skitter. Then Emma becomes convinced that she is Skitter, and Skitter decides to go along with the idea.
- Talking to Themself: Emma thinks her conversations with Skitter are this.
- Tiger by the Tail: The situation Taylor finds herself in by the middle of the second arc. She is horrified by what Skitter has done and realizes that this is far beyond what she wanted to happen when she first created Skitter. She further notes that she technically could still stop this, push Skitter back into whatever part of the subconscious she pulled her from in the first place and retake control of her mind. But if she did so, she would lose Skitter's cunning and poise, and without those she doesn't have a hope of staying ahead of the PRT. So she decides that she has no choice but to let Skitter have her head and simply watch the rampage from behind her eyes.
- Troll: Skitter. Even putting aside her gaslighting of Emma, she deliberately sets up opportunities to mess with her henchmen, figuring out which bugs particularly freak them out.
- Whole-Plot Reference: To Fight Club.
