I don't think Accord would go through the effort to make a plan for world peace just to not fully leverage his shard’s capabilities to make the plan seamless.
Realistically, however, if any of his plans started to succeed, and resulted in global stabilization or progression, he would disrupt the cycle and be turned into a Ziz bomb, which would be the worst-case scenario.
A Ziz bomb is an individual who has been exposed to the Simurgh’s scream resulting in them being mastered for an indeterminate amount of time.
This mastering codes specific conscious and subconscious behaviors into the victim which will result in an “explosion” where the victim will be the catalyst for some catastrophic event in the future.
The Simurgh uses these Ziz bombs to orchestrate specific events to occur.
Thus, victims of the Simurgh are quarantined for the rest of their life to protect the general public.
Also, just to fully bridge the gap - Ziz is one of the names for the Simurgh.
Leviathan and Behemoth are names rooted in Hebrew mythology, whereas Simurgh is a name rooted in Persian mythology. The Hebrew parallel would be Ziz.
People assume the large-scale plans use morally questionable methods because his shard *frequently* prompts him to violently murder the hell out of anybody who so much as mildly annoys him. He may claim that he's able to peacefully account for human nature and that none of his plans are totalitarian, but when we see him left to his own devices he often defaults to unnecessarily brutal actions anyways.
Edit: Aren't -> are
She doesn't think it's fine? She realizes it's "necessary" (in her opinion), but doesn't go "yes, this is fine, there's nothing totalitarian about this."
Her judgement on what is totalitarian is not impaired. If anything, she's *more likely* to call something totalitarian than not.
He's homicidal and obsessed with perfection yeah. And we have WoA about him carrying out petty grudges and ostracizing people over the smallest of faults. But that's *in person*, when he's directly affected.
I firmly believe that Accord's plan account for the fact that he can't expect everyone involved to act perfectly at all times. Especially with large scale plans, because he can't be everywhere to oversee things. He has to account for the innefficiencies if other people.
I can see that argument, but it unfortunately requires a starting premise where you skip ahead to the point he's already in charge of everything and able to make those kind of impersonal orders. We see time and time again that his grand 23 year plan is unable to actually account for the steps needed to build up the power base required to be in that stage without things going off script and him resorting to violence to set things 'right'.
That's why I'm skeptical his plans would be a net positive so long as he's the one trying to put them into action. Give a general framework to someone relatively benevolent who already has a massive amount of influence on national/global politics? Sure, though there will probably need to be adjustments made as unforeseen variables come into play. Accord himself? No.
Ah, but you forget that the plan where Accord acquires power to do things himself is actually *plan B*. Plan A was him trying to convince people in power to implement his plan.
Accord isn't an idiot. There's no way he presented a plan that involved regular murders and totalitarisme to the PRT and expected it to be approved.
Accord knows that in order for his plans to function in the long term, they have to be accepted by people. Sure, he can mold some people around him into loyal representative of his ideals of perfection but that takes time and even with their help his reach would be limited. He wouldn't be able to prevent people from starting uprisings. And even if he was able to put them down, the fact that they even started to rebel is a massive disruption, a huge inefficiency.
On a large scale it's much more efficient to account for the failings of regular people, and provide them with positive incentives so that they will maintain the system of their own free will because it benefits them.
You say that, but his interlude frames it as him genuinely being so shortsighted that he simply handed in the initial outline for the plan and immediately resorted to crime out of spite when his superiors didn't treat it as a world changing thing.
>Even when he’d handed over the binder with the sum total of his work, his employer had been more concerned with the fact that he’d shown up late to work for his job. His boss had barely looked at the binder before calling it impossible, then demanded Accord return to work. A mind like his, in an office handling economic oversight within the PRT, looking for the precogs and thinkers who were trying to manipulate the markets to their own ends.
>It was only one imbalance, one irregularity, but it had been an important one. It had nagged at him, demanded resolution. He *had* to prove it was possible.
>So he’d siphoned the very funds that his department was managing. It hadn’t been hard to redistribute some of the wealth that the villains and rogues were trying to manipulate. One ambiguous evil for the sake of an undeniable good. He covered his tracks flawlessly.
>In the process, he failed to account for the full breadth of his newest coworker’s talents. Thinker powers interfered with one another, and despite his ability to work with that particular drawback, even help them to work in concert, the clairvoyant had found him out. He’d been caught, jailed, and subsequently freed by the jailbreak specialist he’d contacted well in advance.
>Here he was, years later. Nobody he’d contacted had taken to his ideas, and government after government had failed to thoroughly read the documents he sent them. Nobody raised the subject of his work to the United Nations or any major political body. They were too interested in maintaining the status quo.
It's very hard for me to read this as anything other than delusions of grandeur while he repeatedly fails to do anything more meaningful than establishing himself as a moderately successful crime boss on a local scene.
I agree that Accord's plans to improve the world are good on a macro scale. My argument is that they're *only* good at that macro scale, and would not work if they don't start with a backing of immense resources and near-total control of major governments. Even Ward >!repeatedly ran into setbacks that needed to be smoothed over by Number Man and Dragon, both world class Thinkers in their own right.!<
His initial outlines probably looked perfectly palatable to the average law-abiding citizen, but the way he keeps defaulting to shady-at-best methods whenever he runs into roadblocks makes me think that he would, inevitably, resort to things like blackmail, extortion, and outright murder in order to ensure his success.
Okay, then we both agree with the original post. Accords plans for the world don't *require* incredible human right violations/drastic measures/unrealistic expectations.
What *Accord* would have to do, in order to gain the personal power to enact these plans by himself, would probably involve lots of murders and and other drastic actions.
But the plans to solve the world's problems do not.
I feel the need to point out that the only organization with the resources and level of influence required to enact his plans without necessarily using human rights violations to course correct whenever an unforeseen variable nudges things off course... also required an enormous number of those exact horrifying tactics to get to that position.
So sure, if you assume perfect starting conditions Accord's plans don't technically *require* those kinds of methods to work. Given those perfect starting conditions don't exist, any realistic attempts at enacting his plans *will* use them.
I mean, if you count the actions done before the organization starts to enact the plan, then yes. It's impossible to do ethically.
Even if something unrealistic like all governments suddenly deciding to cooperate to enact said plan... well a lot of countries have become more powerful by doing bad things, and even if they've improved over time they're still reaping the benefits of those actions generations later.
But we also know that he doesn’t particularly like that side of himself, he just can’t control it in person. He never plans to kill somebody, his shard just forces him to do it. Thats why I‘d assume that none of his **plans** involve killing, but that he’d still do it if he ever became dictator of super earth-bet.
It’s not just momentary thoughts/personal actions though. Take his introduction as an example: His meeting gets interrupted once so he demands someone be offered up as a living sacrifice and proceeds to sell that sacrifice into slavery halfway across the world. Nothing about that was just a bit of intrusive thoughts, that takes time and effort to arrange and follow through on.
Do you honestly think someone like that is going to be perfectly fine with letting people step outside of his grand vision for solving world hunger, or is he going to react to any setbacks with extreme prejudice?
I agree with you. My assumption isn't that his plan is evil, totalitarian, or enacted by killing. Other than his "I will kill you for breathing wrong" psychosis and desire to be in charge at any cost, Accord seemed like he is quite intelligent and wanted to help. His Shard is perfectly capable of sabotaging him enough that he would make problematic plans like that, but it didn't have to because humans kinda suck.
My assumption is that his plan requires world leaders to take non-selfish actions that benefit all people. Not that I think he wanted them to go overboard singing about world peace around a campfire, but merely profitable actions that are less profitable than more selfish actions.
As we see in the real world, the mentality that gets people to the top rarely results in someone who will accept 70% of the possible profits. They'd rather 100% of possible profits while stealing another 20% at the same time.
Further, Accord's Shard could occasionally put a finger on the scales to keep him from success. Accord's plan being implemented would seriously interfere with the Cycle, infuriating all the other Shards. Meanwhile, Accord's Shard could push him to write just enough of a pendantic intro to cause most others to lose interest, as well as more direct actions like tipping off the coworker's psychic Shard to out Accord as a villain.
Most plans don't include what to do when people reject participation in the plan.
Accord strikes me as a pastiche of that specific kind of internet person that loves to come up with simplistic solutions to complex problems that they insist will absolutely solve everything, but who react with anger and irrationality to reasonable questions, caveats, and hurdles they hadn't thought of.
"It's very simple. We'll just start teaching Linux Kernel design in kindergarten, and by the time the kids hit fifth grade they'll be writing their own custom drivers for any hardware they want to connect! It will make spyware impossible! What do you mean kids don't want to learn machine language?! That's ridiculous, you're a moron."
It also fits in with Taylor's general catch phrase of 'Finally everyone was working together' as a reflection on the disparate criteria required for any large human undertaking. You need not just the plan, and the resources, and the people, but the will and consent of those people.
This is generally good point but Taylor, teenage warlord of Brockton Bay, who's idea of merciful punishment was torturing criminals with bullet ants, is not actually an unbiased authority about what is and isn't totalitarian.
Accord doesn't really make sense. I don't think the implications of his power were fully thought through, or maybe the limitations of his power weren't articulated clearly enough. And that more than any arguments anyone might come up with to counter the particular details of what you're saying is why I don't think you'll convince people with this, because this bit of fanon that you're trying to refute serves to plug what amounts to a sort of plot hole.
It's not his power. It's the *combination* of his failure at getting people to implement his plans with *what we know about* his power. That's why in this thread, you have people making statements like these:
> his plans require picosecond perfect actions and timing from literally everyone involved in order to succeed, and because the other people are human, they inevitably fail.
> plans don't include what to do when people reject participation in the plan
>His Shard is perfectly capable of sabotaging him enough that he would make problematic plans like that, but it didn't have to because humans kinda suck.[...]Further, Accord's Shard could occasionally put a finger on the scales to keep him from success.
>the large-scale plans use morally questionable methods
I’d imagine that his plans require picosecond perfect actions and timing from literally everyone involved in order to succeed, and because the other people are human, they inevitably fail.
No, that’s not really how his power works. He’s not like other thinkers like tt or contessa where knowledge just kinda pops into his head, he still has to calculate everything himself. He‘s just reaaally good at it.
I know, and due to the murderous OCD that his power gave him, his plans would likely end up requiring absolute perfection from everyone involved. Since 99.99% of people can’t achieve absolute perfection in their assignments, the plan would wind up suffering cascading failures due to human error.
No, that’s just incorrect. Multiple people read his plans and say they are reasonable and would probably work. He is easily capable of accounting for human error
I don't think Accord would go through the effort to make a plan for world peace just to not fully leverage his shard’s capabilities to make the plan seamless. Realistically, however, if any of his plans started to succeed, and resulted in global stabilization or progression, he would disrupt the cycle and be turned into a Ziz bomb, which would be the worst-case scenario.
Well, that is close to how he died so that sounds about right.
Oh dang, you're actually right... New headcanon unlocked!
what is a Ziz bomb?
A Ziz bomb is an individual who has been exposed to the Simurgh’s scream resulting in them being mastered for an indeterminate amount of time. This mastering codes specific conscious and subconscious behaviors into the victim which will result in an “explosion” where the victim will be the catalyst for some catastrophic event in the future. The Simurgh uses these Ziz bombs to orchestrate specific events to occur. Thus, victims of the Simurgh are quarantined for the rest of their life to protect the general public.
Also, just to fully bridge the gap - Ziz is one of the names for the Simurgh. Leviathan and Behemoth are names rooted in Hebrew mythology, whereas Simurgh is a name rooted in Persian mythology. The Hebrew parallel would be Ziz.
People assume the large-scale plans use morally questionable methods because his shard *frequently* prompts him to violently murder the hell out of anybody who so much as mildly annoys him. He may claim that he's able to peacefully account for human nature and that none of his plans are totalitarian, but when we see him left to his own devices he often defaults to unnecessarily brutal actions anyways. Edit: Aren't -> are
His plan not being totalitarian is not his observation, it's Taylor's.
The same Taylor who thinks conquering cities is fine so long as she's the one doing it?
The same Taylor who bristles at any authority, no matter how small, other than her own.
Gee I wonder why people might be skeptical of her judgment over whether a plan to enact her vision of a city's development is totalitarian or not.
Yeah, she does have a strong bias, one towards interpreting it as totalitarian.
She doesn't think it's fine? She realizes it's "necessary" (in her opinion), but doesn't go "yes, this is fine, there's nothing totalitarian about this." Her judgement on what is totalitarian is not impaired. If anything, she's *more likely* to call something totalitarian than not.
He's homicidal and obsessed with perfection yeah. And we have WoA about him carrying out petty grudges and ostracizing people over the smallest of faults. But that's *in person*, when he's directly affected. I firmly believe that Accord's plan account for the fact that he can't expect everyone involved to act perfectly at all times. Especially with large scale plans, because he can't be everywhere to oversee things. He has to account for the innefficiencies if other people.
I can see that argument, but it unfortunately requires a starting premise where you skip ahead to the point he's already in charge of everything and able to make those kind of impersonal orders. We see time and time again that his grand 23 year plan is unable to actually account for the steps needed to build up the power base required to be in that stage without things going off script and him resorting to violence to set things 'right'. That's why I'm skeptical his plans would be a net positive so long as he's the one trying to put them into action. Give a general framework to someone relatively benevolent who already has a massive amount of influence on national/global politics? Sure, though there will probably need to be adjustments made as unforeseen variables come into play. Accord himself? No.
Ah, but you forget that the plan where Accord acquires power to do things himself is actually *plan B*. Plan A was him trying to convince people in power to implement his plan. Accord isn't an idiot. There's no way he presented a plan that involved regular murders and totalitarisme to the PRT and expected it to be approved. Accord knows that in order for his plans to function in the long term, they have to be accepted by people. Sure, he can mold some people around him into loyal representative of his ideals of perfection but that takes time and even with their help his reach would be limited. He wouldn't be able to prevent people from starting uprisings. And even if he was able to put them down, the fact that they even started to rebel is a massive disruption, a huge inefficiency. On a large scale it's much more efficient to account for the failings of regular people, and provide them with positive incentives so that they will maintain the system of their own free will because it benefits them.
You say that, but his interlude frames it as him genuinely being so shortsighted that he simply handed in the initial outline for the plan and immediately resorted to crime out of spite when his superiors didn't treat it as a world changing thing. >Even when he’d handed over the binder with the sum total of his work, his employer had been more concerned with the fact that he’d shown up late to work for his job. His boss had barely looked at the binder before calling it impossible, then demanded Accord return to work. A mind like his, in an office handling economic oversight within the PRT, looking for the precogs and thinkers who were trying to manipulate the markets to their own ends. >It was only one imbalance, one irregularity, but it had been an important one. It had nagged at him, demanded resolution. He *had* to prove it was possible. >So he’d siphoned the very funds that his department was managing. It hadn’t been hard to redistribute some of the wealth that the villains and rogues were trying to manipulate. One ambiguous evil for the sake of an undeniable good. He covered his tracks flawlessly. >In the process, he failed to account for the full breadth of his newest coworker’s talents. Thinker powers interfered with one another, and despite his ability to work with that particular drawback, even help them to work in concert, the clairvoyant had found him out. He’d been caught, jailed, and subsequently freed by the jailbreak specialist he’d contacted well in advance. >Here he was, years later. Nobody he’d contacted had taken to his ideas, and government after government had failed to thoroughly read the documents he sent them. Nobody raised the subject of his work to the United Nations or any major political body. They were too interested in maintaining the status quo. It's very hard for me to read this as anything other than delusions of grandeur while he repeatedly fails to do anything more meaningful than establishing himself as a moderately successful crime boss on a local scene.
Cauldron pays attention. Things in Ward use Accord's plans. And it's not perfect, but the stuff that follows his plans works better than the rest...
I agree that Accord's plans to improve the world are good on a macro scale. My argument is that they're *only* good at that macro scale, and would not work if they don't start with a backing of immense resources and near-total control of major governments. Even Ward >!repeatedly ran into setbacks that needed to be smoothed over by Number Man and Dragon, both world class Thinkers in their own right.!< His initial outlines probably looked perfectly palatable to the average law-abiding citizen, but the way he keeps defaulting to shady-at-best methods whenever he runs into roadblocks makes me think that he would, inevitably, resort to things like blackmail, extortion, and outright murder in order to ensure his success.
Okay, then we both agree with the original post. Accords plans for the world don't *require* incredible human right violations/drastic measures/unrealistic expectations. What *Accord* would have to do, in order to gain the personal power to enact these plans by himself, would probably involve lots of murders and and other drastic actions. But the plans to solve the world's problems do not.
I feel the need to point out that the only organization with the resources and level of influence required to enact his plans without necessarily using human rights violations to course correct whenever an unforeseen variable nudges things off course... also required an enormous number of those exact horrifying tactics to get to that position. So sure, if you assume perfect starting conditions Accord's plans don't technically *require* those kinds of methods to work. Given those perfect starting conditions don't exist, any realistic attempts at enacting his plans *will* use them.
I mean, if you count the actions done before the organization starts to enact the plan, then yes. It's impossible to do ethically. Even if something unrealistic like all governments suddenly deciding to cooperate to enact said plan... well a lot of countries have become more powerful by doing bad things, and even if they've improved over time they're still reaping the benefits of those actions generations later.
But we also know that he doesn’t particularly like that side of himself, he just can’t control it in person. He never plans to kill somebody, his shard just forces him to do it. Thats why I‘d assume that none of his **plans** involve killing, but that he’d still do it if he ever became dictator of super earth-bet.
It’s not just momentary thoughts/personal actions though. Take his introduction as an example: His meeting gets interrupted once so he demands someone be offered up as a living sacrifice and proceeds to sell that sacrifice into slavery halfway across the world. Nothing about that was just a bit of intrusive thoughts, that takes time and effort to arrange and follow through on. Do you honestly think someone like that is going to be perfectly fine with letting people step outside of his grand vision for solving world hunger, or is he going to react to any setbacks with extreme prejudice?
I agree with you. My assumption isn't that his plan is evil, totalitarian, or enacted by killing. Other than his "I will kill you for breathing wrong" psychosis and desire to be in charge at any cost, Accord seemed like he is quite intelligent and wanted to help. His Shard is perfectly capable of sabotaging him enough that he would make problematic plans like that, but it didn't have to because humans kinda suck. My assumption is that his plan requires world leaders to take non-selfish actions that benefit all people. Not that I think he wanted them to go overboard singing about world peace around a campfire, but merely profitable actions that are less profitable than more selfish actions. As we see in the real world, the mentality that gets people to the top rarely results in someone who will accept 70% of the possible profits. They'd rather 100% of possible profits while stealing another 20% at the same time. Further, Accord's Shard could occasionally put a finger on the scales to keep him from success. Accord's plan being implemented would seriously interfere with the Cycle, infuriating all the other Shards. Meanwhile, Accord's Shard could push him to write just enough of a pendantic intro to cause most others to lose interest, as well as more direct actions like tipping off the coworker's psychic Shard to out Accord as a villain.
Most plans don't include what to do when people reject participation in the plan. Accord strikes me as a pastiche of that specific kind of internet person that loves to come up with simplistic solutions to complex problems that they insist will absolutely solve everything, but who react with anger and irrationality to reasonable questions, caveats, and hurdles they hadn't thought of. "It's very simple. We'll just start teaching Linux Kernel design in kindergarten, and by the time the kids hit fifth grade they'll be writing their own custom drivers for any hardware they want to connect! It will make spyware impossible! What do you mean kids don't want to learn machine language?! That's ridiculous, you're a moron." It also fits in with Taylor's general catch phrase of 'Finally everyone was working together' as a reflection on the disparate criteria required for any large human undertaking. You need not just the plan, and the resources, and the people, but the will and consent of those people.
This is generally good point but Taylor, teenage warlord of Brockton Bay, who's idea of merciful punishment was torturing criminals with bullet ants, is not actually an unbiased authority about what is and isn't totalitarian.
Accord doesn't really make sense. I don't think the implications of his power were fully thought through, or maybe the limitations of his power weren't articulated clearly enough. And that more than any arguments anyone might come up with to counter the particular details of what you're saying is why I don't think you'll convince people with this, because this bit of fanon that you're trying to refute serves to plug what amounts to a sort of plot hole.
What about his power doesn’t make sense?
It's not his power. It's the *combination* of his failure at getting people to implement his plans with *what we know about* his power. That's why in this thread, you have people making statements like these: > his plans require picosecond perfect actions and timing from literally everyone involved in order to succeed, and because the other people are human, they inevitably fail. > plans don't include what to do when people reject participation in the plan >His Shard is perfectly capable of sabotaging him enough that he would make problematic plans like that, but it didn't have to because humans kinda suck.[...]Further, Accord's Shard could occasionally put a finger on the scales to keep him from success. >the large-scale plans use morally questionable methods
I’d imagine that his plans require picosecond perfect actions and timing from literally everyone involved in order to succeed, and because the other people are human, they inevitably fail.
No, that’s not really how his power works. He’s not like other thinkers like tt or contessa where knowledge just kinda pops into his head, he still has to calculate everything himself. He‘s just reaaally good at it.
I know, and due to the murderous OCD that his power gave him, his plans would likely end up requiring absolute perfection from everyone involved. Since 99.99% of people can’t achieve absolute perfection in their assignments, the plan would wind up suffering cascading failures due to human error.
No, that’s just incorrect. Multiple people read his plans and say they are reasonable and would probably work. He is easily capable of accounting for human error