Characters / Worm - Skitter

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Taylor Hebert (Skitter/Weaver/Khepri)

Debut: Gestation 1.1

My taking hostages like this? It had been my idea, so help me. As horrible as it was, it had been necessary. The worst case scenario was some regular schmuck in the bank pulling some stunt and getting themselves or others hurt or killed. I couldn't let that happen, if I was in a position to help it. If it meant keeping them quiet and out of the way, I was willing to terrorize them.

The main protagonist of the novel, Taylor is a relatively-tall, rail-thin 15 year old girl from Brockton Bay with long, dark curly hair. She gained the ability to detect and control a wide variety of bugs and bug-like creatures (including insects, spiders, earthworms, and crustaceans) after being Stuffed into a Locker full of used tampons and pads. In something of a heroic equivalent of Revenge by Proxy against the bullies at her school (Winslow High), she sets out to become a superhero, but ends up joining the Undersiders instead. Following the end of the Slaughterhouse Nine arc and the death of Coil, she becomes the leader of the group.

Her costume consists of a black-and-grey bodysuit made out of spider silk with armor panels made out of shells and exoskeletons augmented with more silk. Her mask has sections of armor imitating mandibles covering her jaw and dull yellow lenses (taken from a pair of goggles) that incorporate lenses from a spare pair of glasses. Her mask leaves the back of her head uncovered and her hair free to fly behind her.

According to Scion, her power is the result of receiving the severely-weakened "administrator" shard, which grants her the power to control insects and eventually humans. She is shot and seemingly killed by Contessa at the end of Speck 30.7, but is later revealed to be alive in a sealed off Earth with her father, her powers surgically removed.

Classification: Master 5; Thinker 1; Promoted to Master 8 over time as the PRT begins to see the full potential of her insect control powers. This is still likely an underestimate, as when Director Tagg orders she be treated as two points higher in every category — 2 Mover, 2 Shaker, 2 Brute, 2 Breaker, 10 Master, 2 Tinker, 2 Blaster, 3 Thinker, 2 Striker, 2 Changer, 2 Trump and 2 Stranger — she still turns out to be more dangerous than they suspected. The Thinker 3 classification stays official.

According to Weld in Queen 18.3, Skitter is rated Thinker 1 "[b]ecause [her] bugs let [her] sense things to the point that [she] might be a short-range clairvoyant." In Cell 22.1 we learn from the Deputy Director that "She's on record as a master eight, thinker one. The thinker classification is key here: ex-Director Piggot noted Skitter can see through her bugs' eyes."

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#-L

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Invoked. Taylor has Panacea tamper with her brain to try to remove the restrictions on her power, which cuts down her range and fine control, but allows her power to affect everything instead of being limited to bugs.
• Action Survivor: A major contributor to Skitter's badass reputation in the face of her weak-sounding power is her ability to think up ways to come out ahead against extremely powerful and dangerous foes. Trickster outright states that she seems to thrive the more impossible the fight is.
  • According to Dinah there are many variations to the end of the world but only one constant: Somehow Taylor is always there.
• A-Cup Angst: Taylor's not happy with her lack of boobs, curves, or any real femininity. This is among the reasons she keeps her hair long and doesn't keep it bound while in costume.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Has her arm and both legs removed facing Scion. She gets better, but then she loses her arm again.
  • Ends up having Lung burn off her arm in Venom 29.8 after getting it accidentally crushed by Garrote.
• Animal Eye Spy: Skitter can do this with the insects she controls, but it takes some time for her to get a handle on sight and sound.
• Anti-Villain: Between her heroic intentions, her heroic actions, and her unwillingness to cause permanent harm to people, Skitter clearly falls somewhere between Well Intentioned and In Name Only.
• Apologetic Attacker: She apologizes to Triumph several times for the severity of the beatdown she gave him.
• Arachnid Appearance and Attire: The armor panels of her costume are designed to evoke (and partly made out of) exoskeletons.
• Ascended Fangirl: During her first official meeting with the Undersiders, Taylor mentions offhandedly that she reads cape magazines religiously, and has done so for years, even before getting her powers.
• The Atoner:
  • This is mostly her character arc after she joins the Wards. While she has some difficulty changing her attitude and her methods, she claims to want to honestly change.
  • Beforehand, when she finds out that the bank job was a diversion to enable Coil to kidnap Dinah Alcott.
• Badass Cape: After getting part of her original costume burned during a fight with the Slaughterhouse Nine, Taylor fits a small cape over her shoulders and covers it with poisonous insects.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Taylor manages to be heroic and merciful despite the offensive use of her power creating the possibility of anaphylactic shock (bee stings), comas (black widow spiders), tissue necrosis (brown recluse spiders) or death (all of the above).
  • As of Chrysalis 20.1, Skitter now has the use of bullet ants, which are capable of causing 24 hours worth of pain.
  • This trope is directly referenced after she defects and becomes Weaver, specifically by Glenn, the Protectorate's PR guy. As a Ward, she's only allowed to use butterflies in public due to how horrific her powers appear to others.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: A bullied girl who more or less bullies Scion to death. She's dimly aware that she betrayed a fundamental part of herself, but due to her Passenger slowly overwriting her mind, doesn't really understand why she should care.
• Becoming the Mask: Taylor, as a villain. She was originally just pretending but over time becomes a villain in full due to feeling more appreciated by the Undersiders than anyone else in her life save for her dad.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Skitter controls all arthropods (Insects, arachnids, and crustaceans), including bees, and is more than happy to use them offensively.
• Benevolent Boss: When Skitter finds herself recruiting minions, she makes a point of being kind and generous to them, listening to their problems, and caring about their well-being. Between this and her demonstrated ability to solve said problems, she ends up with over sixty followers living in her territory by Part 16.
• Berserk Button: The people who consistently set her off are those with the power to help others in need but who choose not to. She lays into Charlotte (who she had just rescued from the Merchants) for standing by as she was shoved into the locker, and later gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Miss Militia for being complicit in the Protectorate's shady activities.
  "Just like everyone else, you left me in that locker. You didn't go get help. You didn't report the people who did it, not even anonymously. You felt bad? You wanted to help? Is that supposed to mean something to me? Is it supposed to be some consolation? You were too lazy or cowardly to step up and do anything about it, but hey, at least your heart was in the right fucking place, huh?"
• Beware the Nice Ones: Taylor really hates to hurt people and is by far the nicest of the Undersiders. She is also extremely vicious and quite terrifying when she fights. Look at what she did to Lung, the Merchants, Valefor, Tagg, and Alexandria.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Taylor's power lets her sense things through her bugs across a radius of three city blocks or more. As a result, she is able to track everything that is happening in her territory.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Her giant beetle mount, Atlas.
• Blessed with Suck: The Deadly Upgrade that lets her fight Scion on an even footing also kicks her passenger's conflict-generating function into overdrive, slowly overwriting her personality and turning her into a cold-hearted, calculating, and paranoid monster incapable of understanding peaceful interactions as it eats away at her brain, despite her best attempts to stop it.

• Boxing Lessons for Superman: Shortly after gaining her powers, Taylor set out to develop her strength and endurance, took a first-aid course, and researched spiders and insects.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Plays the key role in defeating Scion, at the cost of turning herself into a deranged Humanoid Abomination and ultimately losing her powers and, literally, one of her arms.
• Brought Down to Normal: In the final Interlude, it's revealed that Contessa destroyed her passenger via two well placed bullets to the skull, effectively removing her powers. Given that they'd gone into overdrive and were slowly killing her whilst overwriting her personality, though, it's hard to see the 'down' bit.
• Bully Magnet: Taylor's situation at the start of the serial. She was relentlessly bullied for several years by an Alpha Bitch posse led by Sophia Hess because Taylor, who did not wish to fight back against this, was designated as "prey" by Sophia, who follows a very animalistic version of The Social Darwinist philosophy. Not helping things is the fact that Emma Barnes, one of the bullies in question, was once Taylor's best friend. Because of various reasons (but that can all be placed under a very grim example of Adults Are Useless) Taylor was left to try to bear it alone... until the day she got a borderline Deadly Prank and this led to her Trigger Event.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: In 16.7, Taylor tries to make excuses for the villains taking over the town — of which Skitter is one.
• Can't Believe I Said That: In Tangle 6.2 and 6.3, when she's assembling furniture with Brian. An especially prominent example:
  Brian: Relax. You're allowed to breathe. [Taylor laughs nervously] You okay?
  Taylor: [thinking] What was I supposed to say? Admit I didn't know how to deal with being around a good looking guy?
  Taylor: [out loud] I get nervous when I'm close to people. I think, you know, maybe I have bad breath, or maybe I have B.O., and I wouldn't be able to tell, because it's mine, so I hold my breath like that to be safe. I dunno.
  Taylor: [thinking] Bravo, Taylor. Bravo. I imagined the slowest, most sarcastic of slow claps. Talking about bad breath and B.O. was totally the way to go. One of those brilliant moments that would have me cringing every time I remembered it in the next few years or decades, I was sure.
• Character Tics: Grue notes that she likes bending herself at weird angles in his Interlude.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Skitter is almost incapable of not helping people, given the opportunity. It's so bad that it keeps her from functioning as an actual hero, as she always tries to find the course of action that will save the most people, even if that requires extreme ruthlessness on her part.
• Clueless Dude Magnet: Brian, Greg, and Theo all develop crushes on her over time. She's completely oblivious to all of it.
• Combat Pragmatist: Deconstructed—the fact that she's so willing to go for the throat in fights (because, with her powers, she can't do much else and still be taken seriously) plays merry hell with her reputation, causing the good guys to prioritize her as a threat even over more ostensibly evil characters.
• Commonality Connection: One of the reasons she goes to such lengths to befriend Rachel is because they were both betrayed and abused by people they trusted and those in authority. (The other is that Rachel wouldn't have any friends otherwise.)
• Conflicting Loyalty: Taylor struggles to make a call between doing what's right or exposing the only people who have ever accepted or been nice to her.
• Consummate Liar: Taylor is nearly impossible to read, which translates well to lying. It's not an innate gift or a trained skill, but completely unintentional: her connection to her swarm at some point became so ingrained that she began offloading all her subconscious tells to the bugs she controls. If someone knows to watch the swarm instead of her they can get a better sense of her actual mood or reaction than if they looked at her, but otherwise she shows no signs of stress or emotion unless she wants to.
• Cool Mask: Skitter's mask has yellow bulbous eyes and hard mandibles like an insect's at her mouth.
• Creepy Good: With her power, she comes across like this no matter what good deeds she does.
• Crush Blush: Taylor suffers this quite badly in Tangle 6.3 when she's assembling furniture with Brian—at one point she even references the High-Pressure Emotion and Lustful Melt tropes in the narration.
• Dark Messiah: She has a grand vision for the world around her, and is willing to resort to downright villainous actions to achieve it. Eventually she saves the world and redeems everybody through less than perfectly clean means, and is later apparently killed and resurrected.
• Determinator: As is repeatedly demonstrated, beginning when she fights through the pain inflicted by one of Bakuda's Agony bombs to pull out her knife and chop off the toes with Bakuda's bomb-controlling devices. She later hypothesizes that this resulted in a long term benefit for her in the form of an insanely-high pain tolerance:
  I think it messed with my head, as far as my perception of pain. I found out what it's really like to feel pain, real ten-out-of-ten pain. A part of me knew it was too much to be true, and other stuff's affected me more because I knew it was tied with something real.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: With some help from Clockblocker, she delivers the decisive blow to Echidna. Murdering Alexandria gets comparable responses, given her reputation as Nigh-Invulnerable. She is also the one who kills Scion by becoming Khepri.
• Discard and Draw: Courtesy of Panacea's modifications, Taylor loses most of her range, but gains the ability to control people. Then the whole "range" thing becomes irrelevant when she starts thinking with portals...
• Disproportionate Retribution: In Colony 15.1, against Barker. She feels guilty afterwards, but sees it as necessary to maintain her image.
• The Dreaded:
  • After what she did to Lung, The Merchants, and Dragon, she is considered, quote, "one of the scariest motherfuckers in town." By the end of the story, this has been upgraded to 'one of the scariest motherfuckers in the multiverse'. After Scion's defeat the entire superhero community goes out of their way to forget her because they're so traumatized by what Khepri did.
  • It's eventually revealed in Ward that, since no-one knows what happened to her, the entire superhero community tries to avoid saying her name because they're scared of drawing her attention.
• Eating Lunch Alone: In the first chapter, we discover that for the past several weeks, Taylor has locked herself in an empty stall in the girls' bathroom to eat lunch where the bullies that have been after her won't find her. Unfortunately for Taylor, that chapter is the day the bullies find her.
• The Eeyore: Downplayed. It's heavily implied Taylor is clinically depressed, and she seems incapable of being content for more than a few hours at a time.
• Excuse Me While I Multitask: This is one of her Required Secondary Powers, allowing her to give specific orders to individual bugs in her swarm simultaneously. In Speck, she out-multitasks an almost-fully-unchained Dragon, who is literally an AI running on massively parallel hardware.
• Flash Step: Though she can't actually do this, she appears to be able to do it while in her swarm. Thanks to the swarm-sense, she automatically knows where everyone is around her, and she can move out of someone's reach by having her swarm suddenly gather around her, masking her movements and letting her "reappear" a short distance away. And the creepiestpart is that Taylor doesn't even realize she's doing this.
  One reached for me, for the me on the screen, and I could see how I moved out of the way without even glancing at him. The swarm concealed me at the same time, briefly obscuring the Skitter in the video from both the man on the ground and the security camera. When it parted, she had shifted two or three feet to the left. A simple step to one side in the half-second she couldn’t be seen, but it misled the eyes.
  
  And I couldn't remember doing it. I'd never consciously added the trick to my repertoire.
• Former Friend of Alpha Bitch: Said Alpha Bitch being Emma Barnes (see Characters.Worm Others).
• Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind: Taylor dresses in a black and grey costume made of Black Widow spider silk and armor plates with yellow lenses for eyes and later uses her bug control powers to use bugs as a mask. She was assumed to be a villain her first time out in costume, and many characters find her disturbing, intimidating, and an overall badass (though her actions while in costume certainly help those views along). Seeing things from her point of view, she's bluffing or has practical reasons for such a costume (Black Widow dragline silk is as strong as steel and much tougher). She's just an awkward and insecure teenage girl who's had a tough time.
• Friendless Background: The chief reason that Taylor stays with the Undersiders is that she had exactly one ally—her dad—for the year and a half before she met them.
• Friend to Bugs: While initially Taylor finds bugs as creepy as most 15-year-olds would, the intensity of her first months in costume working with bugs on a daily basis leaves her finding their presence comforting, instead, though she still has a more utilitarian view of them compared to many other examples of the trope. .
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Taylor begins the story as a 15-year-old girl who is viciously bullied and very insecure about herself. While she is still a good person at heart, she becomes a legitimately scary villain with a reputation for destruction following in her wake. Later in her career, she controls a massive group of parahumans with her mind, and can extend that control to anyone on any world at will, making her one of the scariest parahumans alive.
• Gibberish of Love: In Tangle 6.2 and 6.3, Taylor feels like she's suffering this quite badly.
• Good Costume Switch: Receives a new blue-grey costume when she sides with the new PRT in her new identity of Weaver.
• Good Is Not Soft: Skitter's generosity to people in her territory is seen as a sign of weakness until her fight with Mannequin demonstrates this trope. Of course, anyone paying attention to her exploits would have known she was no pushover after her second fight with Lung—the one where she cut out his eyes.
• Grew a Spine: Kicking truly massive amounts of ass in her role as Skitter does quite a lot for Taylor's ability to assert herself.
• Half the Woman She Used to Be: Taylor gets nearly cut in half by Scion in Extinction 27.5, and only survives thanks to Lab Rat's Emergency Transformation serum.
• The Heart: Of the Undersiders. Tattletale remarks on how quickly she grew close to the rest of her teammates by helping and supporting them any way she could. It is telling how Regent went out of his way to take revenge on someone who hurt her despite his apathy towards almost everything, and how close Bitch has become with her.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Although Taylor's power doesn't sound too impressive compared to most major capes, she keeps coming up with creative ways to apply her abilities, and by doing so has taken down opponents more powerful than herself, up to and including Alexandria.^spoiler In addition, on several occasions capes with superpower-sensing abilities look at Taylor and note that her power is among the strongest in existence.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Taylor is constantly emphasizing her failings and deprecating her successes. One running example is her insistence that she is not good at dealing with people in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Taylor tends to perceive herself as a hero with a bad reputation due to her association with villains. In Chrysalis 20.5, she discovers she was at least partly mistaken when a hundred students side with her over the Protectorate.
• Hive Mind: She becomes this as Khepri in the final climax. Able to psychically dominate anyone within 16 feet of her, she thralls an Omniscient Clairvoyant and someone who can instantly make portals to anywhere in the multiverse. Suddenly, nobody is more than 16 feet from her.
• Horrifying Hero: Skitter is scary as hell to fight even when she holds back. When she doesn't hold back she can slowly flay you alive with her bugs, have them burrow through your eyes, and even try to slip bugs inside the body to cause internal damage.
• How Do I Shot Web?: It takes time for Skitter to develop the ability to use the sight and hearing of her insects, or to control Atlas.
• Huge Schoolgirl: At fifteen, Taylor is already 5'8"—taller than most girls at her school, and over the course of the story she tops out at 5'10".
• Humanoid Abomination: As Khepri, she becomes an insane, gibbering, one-armed, girl-shaped passenger-breakthrough who psychically dominates almost every parahuman on several parallel Earths at once.
• Hypocrisy Nod: During a fight with Scion, Taylor tries to apply first aid to one of Bitch's dogs instead of another cape who's dying not far away. She looks at this situation and admits that, despite all her attempts to justify it, she's just being selfish, arrogant, and, above all, a hypocrite because she's more afraid of losing her team and herself in the process than an actual person dying.
• Indy Ploy: Skitter tries to have plans in advance, but, as both Tattletale and Grue point out, she is amazing at improvising when unexpected circumstances arise—both negative and positive. The fight against the ABB in the Hive arc illustrates this talent multiple ways; the clearest example being in 5.7 when she capitalizes on the accidental discovery that Oni Lee brings the bugs with him during his teleports to turn a dangerous situation around.
• Ironic Name: Her last name is Germanic and rougly translates to "illustrious army"; this is a rather ironic surname to have for someone who eventually gains psychic control over all insects, arthropods, crustaceans, and invertebrates within a radius of three city blocks.
• Jumped at the Call: The idea of being a superhero was what kept Taylor going for three months after her trigger event. In fact, all that stopped her from going out immediately was the limits of her power and her own cautious nature.
• Keeping Secrets Sucks: Taylor finds trying to hide her heroic intentions from the Undersiders (particularly Tattletale) a great source of stress.
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Invoked, Taylor keeps her hair long and unbound even while in costume because she considers it one of the few markers of femininity she has.
• Loss of Identity: After having her brain altered by Panacea, Taylor suffers rapid mental deterioration that erodes her faculties, her memories, and eventually her sense of self.

M-Z

• Made of Iron: Skitter demonstrates this on several occasions:
  • In the fight against Mannequin, she spends over two minutes sparring with one of the most nimble and deadly killers on the planet — and is still able to drop a One-Liner at the end of the fight.
  • After Flechette embeds a dart in her shoulder blade, Skitter arranges to have field medic Brooks use some spare dentist's tools to cut it out. While using her power to fly out bug clones to several of her subordinates so she can continue working — because hey, local anesthetic will do just fine, and she may as well not waste time.
  • In a period well under twenty-four hours, starting at the last mayoral debate, Skitter is caught in an explosion that blinds her, shot, trapped in a burning building, dropped out the window of said burning building, kicked in the chest, shot again, and then thrown into a fight with what is probably the fifth-most-dangerous creature on the planet having had no opportunity to rest in the meantime. Her reaction?
    Whatever warped disease Noelle had dumped into me to weaken me and leave me unable to fight back after I'd been vomited out was steadily wearing off. That was only a part of the overarching problems, though, and I still felt drained. My stamina was pretty rock bottom, and the recent fight hadn't helped. I was hungry, thirsty, and I wanted to crash for fifteen or thirty minutes.
    • In fact, this last example includes a built-in control case: as she walks away, Tattletale guides her to a hero who can sort-of heal her by sort-of transferring her wounds to him. When he does so, it results in him yelping "She's fucking blind!?", collapsing in a coughing fit from yelling, collapsing in another coughing fit from just speaking, and needing two people supporting him to move afterwards.
  • Not even getting split in half by Scion is enough to stop her completely.
  • And not too long after being healed from getting halved by Scion she has her hand and arm crushed. Her reaction: thinking "I just got a new one".
• Meaningful Name:
  • Downplayed; Her name "Taylor" is of English origin and means "one who tailors clothes". Through her control over spiders, she's able to make incredibly strong and dense armor out of spider-silk for her fellow Undersiders and Chicago Wards.
  • Played straighter with her last name "Hebert", which is a Germanic name roughly translating to "illustrious army". Her power gives her unlimited control over all arthropods within a few city blocks of her (giving her quite the effective army indeed), one of her primary character traits is her excellent leadership skills and skill in battle strategy & tactics, and she psychically commands a horde of enslaved parahumans as an organized army to finally wipe out Scion during Gold Morning after her shard is jailbroken.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Twice: first, when defecting from the Undersiders, to Weaver; second, after the mission against Jack Slash failed to prevent Scion's apocalypse, to Taylor.
  • And again, albeit by others, to Khepri after getting her shard jailbroken.
• The Minion Master: Taylor can exert complete mental control over most invertebrates (e.g. insects, arachnids, crustaceans) within range of her power. ^note "most", because so far we have not seen her control any mollusk, asteroid or flat worm. And it's not a case of "arthropods only" either because we did see her control round and segmented worms. Make of that what you wish, the comments section on the website is swamped with theories already.
• Misapplied Phlebotinum: One of Taylor's repeated sources of frustration is running into people like Panacea and Genesis with incredible powers whose full potential they never even touch.
• Missing Mom: Annette Rose Hebert died two and a half years before the story began, killed in a car crash while on the cell phone.
• The Mole: Taylor's reason for joining the Undersiders is originally to spy on them for Armsmaster. She decides not to betray the group after figuring out that the so-called heroes aren't much better.
• Moral Myopia: Her primary flaw. While she doesn't claim that what she does is inherently good, nor does she really act on her long list of grudges, she does tend to judge the motives of actions against herself and her friends much more harshly than her own. She's right as often as not, but it does drive her away from the superheroes when Armsmaster loses it.
• Mouth of Sauron: As Khepri in the final chapter, the safeguards between her and her passenger have been eroded to the point that it can speak through her.
• Multi-Armed Multitasking: Skitter can perform a truly absurd number of simultaneous tasks with her insects.
• Mundane Utility: Skitter is highly inventive when it comes to using powers for unexpected purposes — three obvious examples:
  • In Plague 12.1, using her power to help clear out a rat infestation in a set of neighboring houses.
  • In Monarch 16.4, using Shatterbird's power for transportation.
  • In Chrysalis 20.1, using her power to bring her toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush to hand during her morning ablutions.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Taylor is haunted by guilt and nightmares for what she has done as Skitter, particularly after she tries to defend her choices to Clockblocker.
  • Later, when she's in a meeting with Cauldron and most of the surviving major heroes and villains, as well as trying to recruit Shadow Stalker and being told they were the same, Taylor comes to the conclusion that she regrets everything she did, including killing Aster in order to stop The End of the World as We Know It, believing ultimately that it wasn't worth it.
• Necessarily Evil: Taylor is not the only example of this in the series but is certainly the most clear cut. Initially purely a mole among her villainous friends, she comes to view villainy as the best way to achieve her entirely selfless goals.
• Nerves of Steel: When you list the actual situations she has been in, Taylor has amazing self-control. Not everybody would be nearly so calm about taking on the Slaughterhouse Nine or chasing a freaking Endbringer.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: Taylor has one of the strongest moral codes in the entire story, and just wants to help people. However, due to her attire, allies, powers, and vicious combat style, people often think otherwise.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When Taylor is talking to Shadow Stalker in the immediate aftermath of Scion beginning his rampage, Shadow Stalker characterizes Taylor as being a copy of herself. Taylor thinks about this for a while, before denying it, and though her narration paints this as a reasoned assessment instead of a "desperately-trying-to-reject-an-unpleasant-truth" kind of denial, her narration is not always 100% reliable.
• Obviously Evil: Taylor falls victim to this while attempting to be a hero. She doesn't realize in time that having bug powers and wearing a distinctly evil looking costume is not sending the intended message of hero.
• Official Couple: Taylor and Brian as of Interlude 15 (Donation Bonus #2). But they've broken up by the Cockroaches arc.
• Organic Technology: Atlas is much like a scaled-up version of a Hercules beetle, but it doesn't have any of the instincts that natural animals have.
• Pest Controller: Her ability in a nutshell. Taylor can control all types of insects and most small invertebrates.
• Poor Communication Kills: In 19.2, Skitter explicitly recalls and sets out to defy this trope when talking to Weld and Miss Militia about Calvert.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Taylor will sometimes instinctively start drawing insects to herself, particularly when she's feeling threatened, but she usually has enough self-control to countermand the orders when needed (although she didn't when she was half-unconscious from being caught in one of Bakuda's explosions). Later on, while in prison after surrendering to the PRT, she encounters a problem where the power is effectively "on" all the time and she's constantly aware of every insect within her range, and has to consciously resist controlling them due to prison rules against power use. When, over time, the things her power will do without any conscious instruction grow more and more sophisticated, Taylor begins to worry that her 'passenger' is beginning to take control of her actions.
  • In Speck, she loses her ability to speak, read, and understand virtually any form of language because of the modifications Panacea made to her power. In Speck 30.7, its implied that her shard has either influenced her to the point where she can no longer think like a human, or that it has taken her over entirely. Also, she can't turn off her control power,; any human within 16 feet of her will automatically be overwritten.
• Replacement Goldfish: Taylor becomes one for Lisa, who had failed to prevent her brother's suicide.
• Required Secondary Powers: Taylor's ability to control potentially billions of insects individually makes her the best multitasker on the planet.
• Samaritan Syndrome: Skitter won't stop pushing herself when there's things she believes need doing, much to Grue's dismay.
• She Who Fights Monsters: Two examples, even barring her Slowly Slipping Into Evil:
  • In order to stop The End of the World as We Know It, Taylor hardens herself and loses herself, becoming The Unfettered in her pursuit of killing Jack Slash before he can end the world—and fails.
  • Then, in order to keep humanity from being wiped out, she gets her shard's restrictions removed and effectively becomes a Humanoid Abomination.
• Shrinking Violet: Taylor began the story as one because of the bullying campaign, but her exploits as Skitter lead her to grow a spine.
• Shrouded in Myth: Taylor gets it literally from the first night she dons a costume. Admittedly she brings some of her wildly inaccurate reputation on herself and eventually starts doing it on purpose to inflate her credibility. Her recklessly heroic nature doesn't help either.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: It comes and goes, but she gradually does end up Becoming the Mask. Shown well with her role in the bank robbery in Agitation 3.7.
  My taking hostages like this? It had been my idea, so help me. As horrible as it was, it had been necessary. The worst case scenario was some regular schmuck in the bank pulling some stunt and getting themselves or others hurt or killed. I couldn’t let that happen, if I was in a position to help it. If it meant keeping them quiet and out of the way, I was willing to terrorize them.
  
  As I saw the effect I’d had on these people, that justification felt really thin.
  
  I was going to hell for this.
• So What Do We Do Now?: In the final chapter, it turns out that Contessa DePowered and placed Taylor on another Earth with her father. She's not sure if it was a reward for stopping Scion or Cruel Mercy for destroying Cauldron.
  My life is over, for all intents and purposes. No matter how hard I try from here on out, I'll never do anything one ten-thousandth as important as what I was doing before.
• Spider-Man Send-Up: Taylor is an Ordinary High-School Student who escapes from bullying in school with her Secret Identity as the bug-themed super Skitter. She is very clever and capable of figuring out ways to work around seemingly impossible problems, and develops a bad reputation due to joining the villains to spy on them for the heroes and ending up just sticking with being a villain and doing increasingly morally questionable things while justifying it for the greater good, though she also tries to save everyone in her territory of the city she lives in and develops a huge guilt complex and desire to make up for it when her actions inadvertently lead to one person's kidnapping.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: In Interlude 14, no-one notices Skitter's arrival until she is already standing behind Yan. (Skitter mentions in an earlier chapter that her soft-soled shoes make it easy for her to sneak up on people.)
• The Stoic: As messy as Taylor's emotions may get, she has an incredible poker face. Part of this ties into her thinker powers - she's unloading some of her emotions into her insects to appear calmer than she is, though the bugs get agitated instead. Alexandria not knowing about this is why her cold reading attempts went so disastrously
• Super-Intelligence: As a number of readers have pointed out, the amount of information Taylor deals with when she controls her insects is well beyond what an unaided human mind can process.
  • After her power is jailbroken this is massively scaled up. In the final battle she's very effectively controlling billions of insects, and hundreds of other parahumans with vastly diverse powers, including many precogs and a clairvoyant that lets her see everything happening on every possible Earth, and using interdimensional portals to keep them all technically within 16 feet of her the entire time. "Super" seems an understatement.
• Super-Senses: She can see and feel through the insects under her control, which, given enough bugs, can border on short-range omniscience.
• Supervillain Lair: When the Undersiders spread out to claim territory around the city, Skitter sets up her home base to include a room with walls of terrariums (set up with lights and lids controlled by a hidden switch she can activate with a beetle) and a Cool Chair for her to do a Slouch of Villainy in.
• The Swarm: Skitter frequently uses her ability to command truly massive numbers of insects to make these.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Over the course of the few months since she gained her powers, she continuously comes up with new ways to use her power, such as by coating insects with petroleum jelly and then capsaicin to be able to use them like pepper spray.
• Technical Pacifist: While Taylor is unquestionably a brutal and terrifying combatant, on her own, she opts to terrify, injure, or contain — not torture, cripple, or kill. That said, the exact definition of "cripple" depends on how strong a Healing Factor a given opponent has....
• Think Nothing of It: Skitter often has this reaction to being praised or thanked. A particularly keen example comes when she brings Dinah home.
• Toxic Friend Influence: As much as she cares about them (and they care about her), the Undersiders are ultimately one to her, encouraging her Slowly Slipping Into Evil as a Well-Intentioned Extremist pseudo-warlord who does whatever she claims is the right thing, no matter what anyone else says^note though granted, it's heavily debated both in and out-of-universe if the Undersiders are "just" straightforward Anti Villains or misunderstood Anti Heroes. Also, she eventually becomes one to the Chicago Wards after joining them.
• Underestimating Badassery: invoked To the point where the phrase "Meh, I could take her" is a minor meme in the fandom.
  • At first glance Skitter looks like a skinny girl in a creepy costume with a weak power of controlling bugs. Lung, Armsmaster, and Mannequin really should have taken her seriously, and the Merchants didn't know what hit them.
  • Even those people who realize just how dangerous a skinny girl in a creepy costume with the power of controlling bugs can be are prone to seeing her through the lens of her viciousness in a fight and completely miss her ability to analyze a situation on the fly.
    Weld: The family's testimony suggests [Trickster breaking the "don't go after a cape's family" rule] wasn't deliberate. Skitter informed Trickster partway through [that Rory Christner was Triumph].
    Clockblocker: But we can assume she found out beforehand. Unless you're going to suggest she figured it out on her own?
    Weld: No. It makes sense. I suspect Tattletale could find out something like that.
• The Unmasking: As of the Chrysalis arc, Skitter's identity as Taylor Hebert is known to the world at large.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • When she's within range of Imp's power, though the readers can usually figure out what's going on. The worst-case was the first time the two were out in costume together, before the readers knew who Imp was and what her power is.
  • While trapped in Bonesaw's agnosia fog.
  • All of Speck, as the upgrade tears her mind apart.
• Utility Belt: Taylor's utility compartment, where she stashes necessary items and weapons in the armor panel that covers her back. In 18.3, Miss Militia takes a look at the contents, during which we see:
  • A handgun (Trickster's spare).
  • A piece of spider silk.
  • Pepper spray.
  • A change purse, containing cotton swabs (to muffle the noise), needles, smelling salts, and change.
  • A collapsible baton.
• Villain Protagonist: She slowly becomes this over the course of the first half of the story as she becomes more and more of a crime lord. Somewhat downplayed in that she and the other Undersiders are Anti Villains, but the fact still ultimately remains that they are not on the "side of the angels".
• Voice of the Legion: Skitter learns to do something like this using massed swarms of different kinds of bugs. It gets to the point where she doesn't even notice she's doing it... around the same time she becomes completely okay with having her bugs crawling all over her body.
• Was It Really Worth It?: Contessa asks her this in the final chapter when they meet in a remote dimension after Taylor kills Scion, two and a half years after the beginning of the story.
  "I... know I'm supposed to say yes. But no. Some-somewhere along the way, it became no."
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Upon getting her shard jailbroken in the Speck arc, Taylor slowly starts losing control of her mind. Up until Speck 30.6 when Scion is defeated, she manages to avoid going completely insane only via Heroic Willpower.
• The Worm That Walks:
  • Taylor makes herself look like this by surrounding herself with insects when she is caught in a fight without her costume on. This not only disguises her but also intimidates her opponents with a giant, creepy-looking humanoid insect swarm. She eventually transitions to using this in-costume as well to obscure her movements, give her easily accessible bugs, and generally unnerve her opponents.
  • On other occasions, Skitter creates humanoid figures out of bugs, either as decoys or full-fledged assailants.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • In her fights with the 13 year old Vista Taylor has shown a willingness to have her bugs sting her the same as the other Wards.
  • In Sting 26.6 she shoots Aster Anders, a toddler — both as a Mercy Kill and because there was a chance that she would cause the end of the world. She ends up regretting doing it later.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Not only does Brockton Bay get destroyed by Scion, but at the end of the story she and her father are placed on another Earth, which is soon after sealed off from the rest of the multiverse.
• You Fight Like a Cow: Taylor admits that she really isn't any good at superhero banter.
• Zerg Rush: Taylor's simplest strategy in battle is to cover an enemy with thousands of her less dangerous/useful biting insects, which brings most non-capes and even some capes to their knees. The fact that she can gather a swarm of millions of insects makes this possible. Against tougher opponents she has to get creative.

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