This is a pretty old post by now, but I’ve been meaning to try putting together a couple fanmade Endbringers for this for a while. I might as well put it out there now. It’s going to be pretty long, because it’s all stream of consciousness stuff, so I’ll put it under a cut.
First off, I want to mention the places where I think I disagree with Blastweave on the specifics of Endbringer creation. Most importantly, I think Endbringers aren’t just made up of all the random little bits that Eidolon was thinking at any given time. I think their creation is actually quite simple, or at least it’s quite focused. I think an Endbringer is formed by taking a single overriding anxiety that is consuming David, and then building a creature that is tailor-made so that the experience of fighting it is a distilled actualization of that anxiety.
For example: the very first Endbringer was created from Eidolon’s fears about not being strong enough to stop Scion. He is the most powerful hero and yet he knows that in a fight, his power will be nothing in the face of the Entity. So the Endbringer-creating Shard looks at that and builds Behemoth, a creature that cannot be overpowered. You can throw explosions or heat rays or telekinesis or whatever else at him and he will throw it right back in your face. If you get close, you die. You might be powerful, but you are insignificant in the face of the first Endbringer. The experience of anyone fighting the Behemoth is going to be exactly the experience Eidolon is afraid of having with Scion. Every other cosmetic part of Behemoth’s is built to hammer that in, from the massive size to the one, ominous eye.
What kind of experience is fighting Leviathan? It’s overwhelming, with waves coming on each other's heels and killing off huge swaths of the defenders. It’s confusing and disorienting as Leviathan constantly moves and changes positions and gets somewhere too fast for the defenders to keep up. It’s a desperate grind knowing that for every moment you struggle to keep your footing, Leviathan gets closer and closer to sinking everything in the vicinity into the ocean. Leviathan is, most succinctly, Eidolon’s fear of not being fast enough, or, more generally, it’s his fear for the people he is unable to save. That’s what the entire experience of fighting Leviathan is like, just wave after wave of devastation you cannot quite prevent all of.
This explains why the Simurgh is kind of a unique case. For all she is a nightmare to fight, her whole focus is less on being in a fight and more about making everyone around her miserable and bending them towards making others miserable in the long term. If my understanding is right, this is because Eidolon’s fear that created her wasn’t about superpower fights at all, unlike her two older brothers. It was the moment he saw all the people, with and without powers, that were turning their efforts against humanity’s survival and realized that society was collapsing and would not survive even if Scion didn’t personally kill everyone. That other humans were almost as dangerous to humanity’s long-term survival as the Entities were, and that none of his power really gave him the ability to stop that. And so the experience of fighting the Simurgh is an unending scream, the inability to trust the people or the technology you bring into the fight, and the certain knowledge that no matter how you come out things are always going to get worse.
Unfortunately, the three (two-and-a-half, really) Endbringers after Behemoth’s death are harder for me to break down like this. For one thing, they weren’t created organically from Eidolon obsessing over a particular anxiety so much it spawned an unkillable kaiju to embody it. They were prompted by external factors (Behemoth’s death), so I imagine the anxieties they focused on building their fights around were less clear and singular than the original three. Also, I’m generally fuzzy on the particulars of fight scenes and by that point in Worm I was having trouble keeping new setting details and characters in my head, so I don’t really remember much about them beyond the power information you can find on their wikis. Presumably, they were created in reaction to Eidolon’s mindstate after the New Delhi fight, but I also don’t remember much about the particulars of that fight either, so I can’t really dive into that.
That said, my memory of the Echidna fight is clear enough, and we have all of the bullet points that Blastweave provides, so I think we can pull together a few clear, distinct anxieties that Eidolon would have been having that we can then design fights to embody them.
The other big point of disagreement I have is that I don’t believe that Endbringers actually do focus on folklore and religious iconography in their design. Behemoth, when he was formed, wasn’t created to be the biblical behemoth. The biblical behemoth is supposed to be some kind of massive grass-eating land animal, probably quadruped. It is usually assumed to look something like an elephant, a mammoth, a rhino, or a hippopotamus, just larger and more aggressive. Maybe a dinosaur if you’re feeling spicy. The only thing that connects it to the Endbringer is that it is massive, it’s completely untamable and impossible to hurt, and one passage said its “bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.” The Endbringer has almost nothing in common with the biblical creature, and only got that name because when people see fuckoff-huge unkillable kaiju they start naming them things from their religious folklore because that’s the only context they have for that sort of power.
The Leviathan of biblical myth is a many-headed sea-serpent. It’s reptilian and associated with the sea, and is even said to be fast-moving, so that’s at least a closer match than Behemoth, but it’s not really supposed to be even remotely humanoid, and it is also supposed to be giant on the same order as the behemoth, neither of which match the Endbringer. It is also repeatedly described as a serpent, which doesn’t match Leviathan, and is said to have fearsome teeth, which are once again absent. Leviathan seems like another example where the name was given by people that saw it because there were a few elements that kind of fit, but the Endbringer was never created with the parallel in mind.
Tohu and Bohu aren’t even monsters in folklore, they’re Hebrew words describing the universe in the moments before creation, and only have the barest link at all to their physical shapes. Only two Endbringers do actually have religious iconography in their aesthetic and that’s the Simurgh and Khonsu. Khonsu, though, doesn’t seem to connect to any specific religious figure. Taylor calls him Buddah-like, but that just seems to be because he’s fat, humanlike, and has ornamentation that’s more indicative of Asian statuary than European figures. Neither his name nor his powers really seem to reference anything associated with specific Chinese or east-Asian deities - Khonsu is an Egyption god that is associated with time.
The Simurgh is the only odd one out. I think I could make a fairly good argument that that’s in service to her purpose. She’s trying to make a fight with her feel like society is turning on itself around you, so what better way to get that across aesthetically than by forcing you to see all the people you’re fighting with attempt to murder a cultural symbol of moral goodness and purity, forcing you to join in? Most of the other Endbringers are focused on getting much simpler ideas across, so they just go for aesthetics focused around various modes of intimidation.
Okay. So with all that in mind, I think we can begin by figuring out what overriding anxiety is on Eidolon’s mind in this scenario. I think the most defining parts of the Echidna fight were the recurring concept of friendly fire. Eidolon and those attacking Noelle directly had to be very careful how they targeted her to avoid killing her prisoners, and they ultimately failed. At the same time, they were constantly experiencing their friends attacking them, and they ultimately had to kill (what looked like) their comrades. Lots of weaponized friendly fire there. Additionally, the revelations the clones made turned people against each other, and at this point Cauldron is still waiting for the other shoe to drop there. It probably looks like the entire cape community is poised to turn on the Triumvirate. So that’s the core anxiety - betrayal and friendly fire, as well as the same kinds of themes of scrutiny and public perception.
So I think I kind of want to take some of of the scrutiny aspect from Blastweave’s second concept, but apply it in a more…Simurgh-y way, since like the Simurgh this is an anxiety more about other people and their wider actions than the particulars of capefights. Here’s my thought: the endbringer masters people who look at it, either directly or through images. So one of the major factors of the fight is that you’re constantly trying to hide information from yourself and from the people you’re fighting with, trying to keep each other blind to what exactly it is you’re fighting.
Where does the friendly fire part come in? Well, I don’t think the mastering that this endbringer does is like Ziz’s at all. That is very much personality-altering precision trauma. This endbringer’s master effect is much more like Goddess’s Alignment. You look at the endbringer and all at once your primary goal in life changes, but your personality is still the same. You’re still you in every way that matters. What is your new goal, you ask? This is the part I’m most proud of: if you fall under the endbringer’s power, your primary goal becomes very simple: get closer to the endbringer. That’s it. It doesn’t direct people to do anything else, it doesn’t control people in any more detail than that.
This leads to civilians rushing en masse to touch and climb onto the endbringer. If the fight isn’t well managed right from the get-go, the endbringer winds up with a living armor made of civilians. That sounds kind of gimicky, and absolutely the kind of thing capes in the wormverse would be willing to shoot through for the greater good, but that’s not the worst part. Those mastered by the Endbringer retain their personalities, and getting close to the endbringer becomes their most important goal in life, but it’s not a Heartbreaker-level overwhelming need to get close. It’s only as important as whatever the previous most important goal in their life had been. People still behave as people otherwise, and crowds still behave as crowds. Thoughtless or cruel people will push down people in their way if they need to, while considerate people will do the best they can to help their loved ones, their children, others around them get closer to the endbringer. Self-serving capes caught by the endbringer will cut their way through the crowd and any non-mastered defenders in their way to reach it, while mastered capes who are more selfless will fight against the defenders in an effort to protect the mastered crowd from being caught in attacks aimed at the endbringer. All will see the defenders’ attacks as a confusing and upsetting betrayal.
The endbringer itself does need some combat powers beyond just its master ability, but I’m having a little bit of difficulty figuring out what exactly they should be. I’m limited by the fact that I want it to specifically avoid killing its crowd of mastered meatshields directly. Part of the trauma of a fight with this endbringer should be that any of the mastered that died almost certainly died of friendly fire - anyone who survives a fight with this endbringer should be constantly wracked with guilt and a lingering feeling of “wait, are we the baddies?” that they know is unfounded. Maybe I’ll pull the gravity manipulation elements from Blastweave’s first endbringer, but have this use it in a relatively nonlethal way, using it to bound weightlessly across the battlefield while crushing the defenders. But again, it doesn’t crush its thralls. For the actual mechanics of its gravity manipulation, I’m thinking where it steps or touches it creates wells of increased gravity while it moves with reduced gravity, so it looks like it dances across the battlefield trailing a crowd of its mastered admirers, stopping occasionally to let more of its thralls to climb it.
I’m thinking this Endbringer is named Hamelin, after the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or the Nataraja after a specific form of Shiva as the Lord of the Dance. He is relatively small but kind of spindly, with what appear to be intricately carved stone steps and handles all up and down the body and limbs. He has an extra pair of arms coming from halfway down the torso and no head, just blocky shoulders that appear to be covered in carved faces in many different smiling and laughing forms. If a battle goes on too long, he will literally just leap the fuck away all the way into orbit, taking whatever thralls are climbing on him at the time with him. The master effect immediately drops from all its remaining victims after he leaves. Obviously, no one during the fight can be allowed to look at him, but pictures don’t retain the master effect once the battle is over, so people do know what he looks like.
The second one is a little harder. While the Echidna fight is obviously going to be on Eidolon’s mind right after it, I don’t think that that singular fight is going to be so all-consuming in his thoughts that both endbringers are going to be directly pulled from that. There’s another emotion/experience I think Eidolon would be going through in this hypothetical that I think would be equally as formative here. I can’t really put it to words, but when Scion killed Behemoth in canon, that was after a long, excruciating battle where they really did as much as they possibly could. Scion killing Behemoth was certainly unexpected, but I think the intense escalation of the battle was enough that it would overcome a lot of the “why now??” emotions that Scion killing Behemoth would cause. Not that it would eliminate that entirely, because obviously Cauldron has still got to be freaking out trying to figure out what has changed for the big gold guy, but the New Delhi fight was such a slog that I can’t imagine that relief isn’t the overriding emotion there.
But if Scion just fucking murderized the guy out of nowhere, that sense of “what the fuck?????” rockets way up the chart in terms of what’s going through his head. Specifically, it’s got to be this intense sense of, like, missing a step. They've been fighting Behemoth for years, they’ve been trying to figure out shit about Scion for decades, and suddenly, out of nowhere while they were off doing what seemed to be more important shit at the time, Scion just casually offed the big dude for no apparent reason. And this has to also massively increase Eidolon’s power insecurities as well - like, is this even the right avenue to pursue at all? What the fuck is going on.
So that’s the headspace I think that the endbringer is going to try to emulate. The question is how. One part of me wants this to be a Stranger-focused endbringer, which sounds fun but I don’t even know how it would work. The other part suggests that a Stranger effect would be really hard to make work on that scale while maintaining even the fiction that there is the possibility of a fight, which seems important to the creation of endbringers. On the other hand, I don’t have any other better ideas, so I’ll go with a Stranger-adjacent endbringer
I want to focus a little bit more on the “what the fuck” emotion we’re trying to convey than the general idea of hiding that Strangers often have, and it’s got to be a very specific level of “what the fuck” that’s focused on being far more powerless than you thought you were, slightly questioning the entire course of your life, and a feeling of absolute certainty that you’re missing something important and whatever it is is going to get you killed.
Based on that, here’s my thought: the endbringer makes you forget how to use your powers. I’m not sure exactly how it delivers that effect, but I don’t think it’s an all-or-nothing effect. It’s scalable. The first “level” of exposure to whatever the delivery method is, you begin forgetting little tricks you developed over time. This is where you can take the most exposure, as I think it’s the “safe” range of what combatants can expect to take. Once you get set all the way back to the intrinsic knowledge your power gave you to begin with, you start forgetting you even have a power to begin with - you still have the ability to use it, but you can’t even remember it existed until moments ago. You can keep using it, keep fighting, but you get more and more confused about what you’re doing. At the highest levels of exposure, you forget that powers exist in general, and even what the endbringer in front of you is. And I’m thinking this is permanent. The effect doesn’t get undone when the fight is over. If you got maximally exposed, you’re wandering around with only patchy memories of your life, as the exposure starts eating away at mundane memories as well. Civilians (non-capes, that is) have less of a “buffer” of power knowledge, so they tend to lose important memories much, much faster.
The question here is…what is the method of exposure? It’s not sight, because Hamelin is taking that. Simurgh is taking sound. Behemoth’s aura is an absolute range where just being there exposes you to the effect. So I want something different than all of those. I’m thinking clouds. Fume clouds that the endbringer produces that spread the effect on inhalation or skin exposure, to a lesser degree. I think they’re also thick and obscuring, so the endbringer constantly gets lost in the clouds and has to be chased after. The clouds thing makes me think air manipulation, but that actually limits a lot of what I think the battles with this endbringer should be like. She should be hiding in the clouds, not blowing them away from her.
You know what’s mentioned in those bullet points? The Gimel portal. That gives me a perfect thought. Her other power is portals, but ideally not interdimensional ones. The portals are created within the clouds and come out in other parts of the clouds, so it’s almost impossible to see that you’ve moved through one. She uses smaller portals on or around her body for combat, catching blaster attacks and brute charges and redirecting them back onto the attackers (pulling on some of the friendly fire themes from Hamelin). When she leaves the battle, the clouds she emits (they’re not actually clouds, they’re power constructs somewhere between real clouds and Grue’s darkness) lift, leaving a fragmented funhouse of a reality twisted up upon itself with hundreds or thousands of portals in a small area. Just for fun, I think when she leaves, there’s some suggestion that she isn’t actually portalling to anywhere - if the fragmented space from the portals were mapped, there would be a portion of the planet that is completely cut off and no longer physically accessible, and it is those pockets that she sits in for the time between battles. Presumably, there are also sometimes people caught in those cut-off spaces with her, likely driven completely insensate from prolonged exposure to her smoke.
Her name, I think, is obvious: she’s Lethe, the river the dead drink from to forget their past lives in greek mythology and its associated goddess of forgetting and oblivion. As for appearances, that’s a little bit more difficult. There’s nothing inherent in her powers that have clear requirements, but I’m thinking relatively small, given she needs to hide in clouds of smoke. On one level, it seems like she should be gray-ish to hide better, but I think the “what the fuck” feeling is intensified if she’s actually somewhat bright in order to highlight how opaque the smoke has to be to have hidden her when she does appear. In terms of aesthetics, I’m thinking she looks like she’s made of wood twisted around crumpled and tightly compacted metal. The “wood” parts are brownish green while the metal parts are various shades of blue and silver. Obviously, neither of these parts are actually wood or crumpled metal, she’s all Endbringer-stuff under the surface. She’s relatively small, smaller than Leviathan, but a bit bigger than Tohu would be, and also probably bigger than Hamelin. In terms of body plan, I think it’s a long torso that splits into legs, but there are no arms (she doesn’t need them to open up portals around herself or produce and manipulate her clouds. She does have something resembling a face, but the only obvious features are vine-like hair that merges into her neck in an alien manner and cloudy, vacant eyes that are constantly leaking some thick, dark substance that is either sap or tar. Along where her shoulders should be, her signature opaque gray smoke streams out of branches and twisted piping.
So there we go:
Hamelin: a four-armed headless figure a bit larger than Tohu that is covered in handholds meant to be climbed and has a plethora of cheerful faces around his shoulders. He cannot be looked at directly or through images in combat, because it will realign your priorities to climbing onto him and acting as his meat armor. He dances around leaving crushing- or reduced- gravity zones around the battlefield where he touches, and trails a crowd of his thralls who don’t understand why the defenders are fighting back and will get agitated and defensive in trying to stop them. Doing any damage to him at all will inevitably involve shooting through mastered civilians, although at least you don’t have to look while you do it.
And
Lethe, an armless figure with vine-like hair and weeping eyes that appears to be made of a confusing combination of crushed machinery and entangled wood and constantly emits opaque smoke out of her shoulders. She gets easily lost in clouds of this smoke and creates nearly invisible portals within the clouds, turning them into twisted mazes of folded space. At close range, a limited number of relatively small portals orbit around her catching attacks and redirecting them into the defenders. Inhaling the smoke makes you slowly forget how to use your powers, about the existence of powers in general, and eventually large chunks of your life. Skin exposure has a similar but reduced effect.
![[Cueball holds a cellphone. Black Hat is sitting at a desk with a laptop.] Cueball: Another huge study found no evidence that cell phones cause cancer. What was the W.H.O. thinking? Black Hat: I think they just got it backward. [Black Hat turns towards Cueball in an unframed panel, holding the laptop with one hand by the upper edge of the screen. Cueball is not visible.] Cueball: Huh? Black Hat: Well, take a look. [There is a plot of total cancer incidence and cell phone users. Cancer rises from 1970 to 1990, then stays relatively steady. Cell phone use rises from roughly 1984, and steeply after 1990, to the present.] Cueball: You're not... There are so many problems with that. Black Hat: Just to be safe, until I see more data I'm going to assume cancer causes cell phones.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/2384df5daa67f66194cea7f9194db03d/5dc9c5bf1199f3a6-cc/s1280x1920/dd5438ac7bc3c9576fc401a5ee007b0b06d96a5e.png)
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