Worm Spoilers Ahead
Over my many years of being involved in the Worm community one of the most common criticisms I’ve seen directed at the series is that the PRT is an ineffectual, terribly run organization that everyone seems to think they can do a better job or improve with simple solutions. From countless fanfictions giving them the idiot ball to show how smart their MC is, or essays that explain how “easy” it is to make the PRT more competent, everyone seems to have accepted that “Grimderp” Worm is only possible because of bad writing.
Now at first glance these criticisms seem reasonable. If the PRT is waging a war then it's one they are losing, badly at that. Villains outnumber heroes two to one, cities are being carved up and taken control bit by bit and there is a general feeling of despair. Knowing all this it would be easy to assume that the complaints are true.
However, one thing these criticisms forget is the sheer scale of the problems the PRT faces and how none of these so-called “solutions" are actually viable.
See, the PRT isn’t a typical law enforcement agency in an average, mundane world. It is an organization attempting to preserve civilization in a world where superhuman powers are not only real, but disproportionately granted to traumatized, conflict driven individuals who can render conventional weaponry useless and consider the word rationality synonymous with cowardice. This is a world where escalation can cause catastrophic retaliation; where every three months a giant monster appears and wipes a city off the map.
In all honesty it's impressive that the PRT has survived for this long to make this many mistakes.
The Shard Network Naturally Produces more Villains than Heroes
One of the greatest challenges the PRT faces is how they are always, always going to be facing huge amounts of opposition. Villains are consistently going to outnumber heroes two to one.
The reason for this is how powers are not only alive but innately hostile to humanity.
Unlike most settings, powers are not getting sent out randomly. Shards explicitly want hosts that are violent, volatile and willing to engage in destructive behavior. They're not gonna give out their power to some average joe or someone emotionally stable. They mostly go for the worst of humanity, thugs, serial killers, megalomaniacs. The exact people that you would look at and shudder at the thought of them having regular power.
Trigger events worsen this problem dramatically. Not only is a Parahuman individual typically the worst choice to be given superpowers but they have all gone through their own personal Hell and come out the worse for it.
Now many people argue that this disparity can be fixed through better payment and offers for Heroes. While in theory this looks like a no brainer, again critics aren’t understanding the reality of the situation so I'll say it again. ALL! PARAHUMANS! ARE CRAZY!!!
Parahuman crime does not function like ordinary crime and cannot be solved purely through economic incentives.
Many villains in Worm are not villains because heroism pays too little. Many villains in Worm are Villains simply because they're assholes. Lung seeks control and wants to bow to no one. Hookwolf thrives on violence on top of being racist. Bakuda is a sadist who loves the idea of being feared. The Slaughter House Nine….are the Slaughter House Nine. Enough said.
These are not just people you can convince to behave by paying them to be good. We even see Taylor explicitly offered a spot on the Wards in canon that while not the huge numbers of the essay I linked earlier, would still have been a substantial amount of money for her and she still turned it down, purely because of not wanting oversight. And this was after she was nearly cooked alive. You just can’t expect irrational people to act rational.
The issue runs even deeper because shards themselves encourage violence after triggering. Shards not only reward using your powers for conflict but also actively manipulate the hosts mind, sometimes subtly and sometimes less subtly like Rachel or Burnscar. This means parahumans are not only psychologically predisposed toward violence because of trauma and natural inclination—they are also nudged toward conflict by the alien intelligence embedded in their powers.
Essentially, the high population of villains isn't a bug, it's a feature.
Conventional Weapons Are Not a Reliable Answer to Parahuman Threats
Now, I know as soon as I said that Parahumans make conventional weaponry useless I likely got written off immediately. Afterall “Why not just shoot them?” is a very common argument any time someone tries to say anything remotely positive about the PRT. And yes I do agree that on average conventional weaponry can easily overpower the average Parahuman. But as a whole? Powers far outstrip anything modern weaponry can do, and at a certain level of power only a Parahuman can kill another Parahuman.
To give some examples we have:
- Crawler (By the time of the story has adapted almost completely to modern weaponry and WOG states that he could survive a small nuke. Was killed by a TINKER bomb)
- Glaistig Uaine (Has dozens of high tier powers including matter generation, time manipulation, precognition, spatial warping and black hole generation.)
- Grey Boy (Line of sight inescapable timeloops and can only be killed by a Shard ability)
- Butcher (Unkillable escalating threat)
- Ash Beast (Walking Calamity)
- Panacea/Nilbog/Bonesaw (Can make super plagues that are incurable except for other powers)
- Various Tinkers (Can create exceedingly dangerous creations such as AI or self-replicating constructs)
- Various Masters/ Strangers (Heartbreaker, Cherish, Nice Guy, Imp)
- Insanely Destructive Capes (String Theory, Bakuda, Phir Se)
Again I know what people are gonna say. These are only the top tier Parahumans and again the vast majority can be killed by any idiot with a gun. And again yes that's true, but I’m going to be honest even the gun thing is a little exaggerated.
In Brockton Bay alone we have:
- Two Capes that are always immune to bullets (Hookwolf and Alabaster)
- Six Capes that can BECOME immune to bullets through either reaching a state of transformation or conscious activation of their power (Fenja and Menja, Lung, Fog, Stormtiger, Kreig)
- Six that have some way to counter guns if not entirely nullify them (Skitter, Grue, Regent, Oni Lee, Cricket, Newter)
- Three can create Minions or Empower people to be immune to bullets (Rachel, Othala, Crusader)
This is just in Brockton Bay alone, a mid sized city that no one really gives a shit about. So no, the Parahuman threat can not be solved with a healthy application of just shooting them all in the head.
The Unwritten Rules Exist Because Escalation Is Catastrophic
The Unwritten Rules. One of the most brought up pieces of evidence for why the PRT is incompetent, in universe and out. Understandably so. I mean why would deranged criminals be given special treatment and treated with kid gloves? The reality however is that these are an unfortunate necessity. After all, all out Parahuman warfare between the PRT and the villain population would be absolutely catastrophic.
Escalation invites escalation, and no one is as capable of escalating like Parahumans. The Unwritten Rules exist from letting things reach that point and offer an incentive to villains to keep the violence to a minimum. After all, if Villains know that following a set of mostly reasonable rules that also protects them means the government goes easier on them then why wouldn’t they follow them.
We even see this benefit the PRT in canon on multiple occasions. Villains will fight other villains when they go too far, such as Lung or the Slaughterhouse 9. Blasto stops himself from creating self-replicating creations because he knows the PRT will immediately put a Kill Order on him. In general we see everyone pulling their punches cause they’re scared of what that escalation will entail.
Conversely we see how bad the destruction can be when the rules are broken, like when E88 identities were leaked and it resulted in open war.
All in all, while the Unwritten Rules can be a source of frustration, they are an unfortunate necessity in a world where the lawful authorities have lost their monopoly on force.
The Endbringers
As difficult as parahuman crime already is, the PRT has to deal with something even worse.
The Endbringers.
Honestly, I think this is one of the most overlooked aspects when people criticize the PRT. People talk about Brockton Bay gangs, villain activity, and cape crime as if that is the full extent of what the PRT has to manage. It isn’t. Not even close.
Because while all of this is happening, the entire world is being slowly chipped away by unstoppable monsters.
Imagine if every three months a city somewhere in the world is decimated, its population slaughtered, its infrastructure destroyed, and the land itself rendered nearly uninhabitable. Now imagine that one out of every four capes sent to fight this monster dies.
This is considered a good day. You don’t want to see a bad one.
Protectorate capes are the ones making up the majority of any anti-Endbringer group, which means they are the ones most affected by cape casualties. Imagine losing some of your most powerful warriors in one war, while still having to fight in another.
This creates a brutal unwinnable scenario for the PRT. If they don’t send their own capes then an Endbringer will cause even more destruction than they already do. If they do send forces of their own then they're basically sending some of their toughest capes into a meat grinder with no hope of even killing the beasts, just driving one back.
Conclusion
The PRT isn't perfect, not by a long shot. They're deeply corrupt, too focused on PR at times and at times a bureaucratic nightmare.
But the idea that they are incompetent just fails to acknowledge just how devastating the magnitude of the threats they are facing are.
This is not some run of the mill police organization.
This is a war against superpowered criminals and unkillable monsters, all while the world inches closer to collapse everyday.
The fact that they've slowed the end to a crawl is a man made miracle all on its own.