#Slaughterhouse 9

[sillydog33]

14.8... when i catch you wildbow

[goldenmotive]

Deleted Scene: Shatterbird recruits Burnscar to the Slaughterhouse 9

[bodegadulac]

[estavionpira]

team of hydrokinetics call that the waterhouse nine

team of artillerists call that the mortarhouse nine

team of construction workers call that the mortarhouse nine

team of dwarves call that the shorterhouse nine

team led by cody call that the slaughter krouse nine

[victoriadallonfan]

It’s fascinating to me that so many people can’t handle the fact that Jack Slash is written in a way where he can’t lose (to Parahumans).

Because this isn’t revealed out of nowhere.

Number Man literally spells it out for us in his interlude:

- Interlude 21

Like, even the weakest of media literacy can understand this. It’s not exactly abstract. Jack doesn’t lose to Parahumans because his power cheats. We even see an alternate Jack Slash as a hero, where Chevalier mentions he can never lose so long as he fights Parahumans.

And his eventual defeat is caused by them taking advantage of this perceived invincibility, using a normal human to sneak past his awareness to trip him up.

This is all very simple.

And yet.

Like clockwork, there are people in the fandom obsessed with the idea of “beating Jack Slash” or offended that the character written to never lose to Parahumans, can’t be beaten by their super special plan/OC.

They make it personal, like it’s an affront that a character has narrative reason for existence and that by denying them (the user) the ability to beat Jack Slash, it’s an insult to them.

Why?

What does it matter?

What does one gain from this? I can understand if one just want to discuss things for fun, but they don’t treat this like fun. They treat it like they need to WIN

So odd

[artbyblastweave]

So one off-hand death that sticks with me in Worm, right, is Taylor's offhand mention that the original version of Breed was killed when someone shot the building he was in with an incendiary missile. Not even clear if they were trying to kill him specifically or if they were just lucky, but his bug minions stopped showing up after the strike so it's presumed to have gotten him.

Iconoclastic superhero fiction has a specific trope where capes have bridges dropped on them- anticlimactic, mundane, silly deaths, meant to highlight that for all their pomp and circumstance, they're just as killable as anyone else. Dollar Bill getting his cape caught in the revolving door in Watchmen, The "No Capes" montage in The Incredibles, almost every single killing in The Boys, or hell, Vikare getting brained in a sports riot in this very book. And on my first readthrough I sort of parsed Breeds death as "one of those," oh, you know, for all his horror-movie xenomorph monstrousness, all it took to kill him was a direct missile strike on the building he was in. Then I turned that last sentence over in my head a couple of times and noticed that by any reasonable standard having an airstrike called in on you is not an anticlimactic way to die. Like implicitly that missile strike is probably happening after several prolonged hours of urban combat against the Nine, mounting civilian casualties, etc. etc. Breed was contributing to the escalation of a situation where eventually the government just said "fuck it" and started bombing shit. And this is a genre where doing that typically doesn't work against someone like Breed, so it feels incongruous that for once it did. But it's also not nearly in the same ballpark as just randomly getting taken out by a sniper or something. It's part of the book striking a great balance between a respect for the power of superheroes and supervillains and an acknowledgement of the fact that they die just like everyone else.

(It's also a great subversion of that whole "never found the body" thing- like, Breed's body wasn't identifiable amongst the victims of the strike because of how badly burned everyone was, but he's also the kind of guy where you can infer he must be dead because the flow of Breed-shaped murders is cut off and that obviously wouldn't happen if he was in any shape to continue- there's no laying low for a comeback episode two seasons or 100 issues later. Until he's cloned back to life. But that's not precisely the same thing)

[phthalosblues]

slaughterhouse girlies <333

[dryococelas01]

AU where instead of fire making burnscar more reckless it just makes her more libertarian

Standing in the inferno screaming about big government and age of consent laws

They actually put her in the asylum because she couldn't stop talking about atlas shrugged. Was kinda an accident that she was a parahuman.

[fran-valz]

I like your funny words slasher man

[megamuscle885-blog]

Severed - Worm Fanfiction Review

CW: Suicide and canon typical gore.

I don't think I've so eagerly anticipated an imaginary and, likely unwritten at the time of this post, scene in fanfiction than @heyitschartic's Severed. I've been following this series since it was posted three years ago. I'll avoid spoilers and the scene I'm imagining in question will be under the cut, but the basic premise is that Jack Slash chooses Skitter as his nominee during the Slaughterhouse 9 arc, rather than Oni Lee, who was disappointing, and Golem, who he later contrived the entire S9k arc for.

I will say that this work is a beautiful plunge into What Ifs which look all the more horrifying if you compare them against canon. You get flashback snippets of the S9 arc retold from a few perspectives before being thrust into post-GM, maybe pre-Ward? era with modern Skitter. I can certainly say that Severed blows all other S9!Taylors out of the water, Taylor is authentic in ways I haven't seen with anyone else. 10/10, each chapter is at it's absolute peak and it has 11 chapters as of this post. Each gut-punch has me anticipating the next chapter, only for the next chapter to explain why Taylor's friends and enemies hate her so much. I gasped when Tattletale said that to her. I strongly recommend Severed to anyone and everyone who hasn't already read it yet. Here's the link:

Oh wait does this count as the first of my Worm fanfic reviews--

So, I've read chapter 11 and I've been having Taylor and her clone rotating in my head endlessly, but the scene I'm anticipating is the one hinted at in Chapter where Defiant wants Taylor to go under the knife with Bonesaw again so Riley can fix all of Taylor's everything that is physically wrong with her, because her body is practically bio-tinkertech, even after they ripped almost everything else out.

I can only imagine Taylor reiterating that she refuses to be put under for the procedure, and using every moment to vent her anger and frustration on a Riley that is likely seeing marked improvement in her therapy (maybe). But Taylor keeps hitting her with blow after blow. "They'll never let you work on anyone else ever again, so you had better not kill me." and "Nobody will ever let you willingly touch them, I'm the only one who you can use your tinker abilities on, and that can change if I don't need you anymore." "If you ever find someone you can trick into letting you touch them, hold them, or even work on them, I'll kill them. It'd be better than the fate worse than death that letting you touch someone inflicts, and I should know, I'm living through it."

Maybe Chartic has something else planned, but I would like to see this Bonesaw cry. An unshakable, unmoved Taylor just heaps on the abuse through her own tears of pain, holding Riley hostage even as she roots through her guts to put her back together. It's very Taylor to fight through pain to force people to help her. The last time they saw each-other, Riley was doing well. I don't think she'll be doing very well after they meet again.

Maybe an overseeing team of surgeons and Capes become increasingly uncomfortable as Riley is tormented. They find themselves defending Bonesaw of all people, from one of her former victims too.

I'm sorry if this is unsolicited Chartic, but I can't wait to see their reunion, whatever form it takes. Severed's way of making Taylor suffer the consequences of her own actions, while invoking sympathy simultaneously with disgust at Taylor's betrayals; the depths she's sunken to, and then to finally wrap it up with shame and admonishment of her friends, turned victims, is masterful. How dare either they or I judge her for what she had to do to survive. Each chapter reveals that it got worse and worse. At some point, I suspect that (one of) the reasons that Taylor is being given such little leeway by the rest of the cast and remains constantly under the threat of harsh re-imprisonment or execution by vengeful kill-teams is because she somehow became the worst member of the Slaughterhouse Nine or even surpassed them in notoriety.

Tattletale telling Skitter to kill herself was such an insane scene that I stood up and covered my mouth. I was in disbelief. But knowing now that Skitter had betrayed the Undersiders to a slaughter by Mannequin (after having sacrificed her own father and, essentially, her own pre-cape life and innocence with him. The Taylor that she did not want to be, embracing the Skitter she chose to become) and then at some point caused the remainder of the Livsey family to kill themselves the same way Reggie did, with gunshot wounds, really clarifies that Taylor did something unforgivable. She exploited her friendship with Lisa to injure her in a way that can never be repaired. Lisa in canon never really had much to do with her parents ever again, but she probably didn't want them dead for neglecting Reggie.

I may edit this later, or reblog it, as new thoughts on the work come to me.

[sillydog33]

Stopped reading worm for like a month bc of school but im backkk! god told me to draw patrick bateman bonesaw so i did 😇

[cpericardium]

manniquin

[evilwizardcrab]

I love the slaughterhouse 9 because every member of their team feels like it could be a tweens 2015 creepypasta oc-do-not-steal

[estavionpira]

Jack Slash: So, Ned, here's the plan. You and I are going to be-

Crawler: in the slaughtered house. straight up 'crawling it'

Jack Slash: no

Crawler: and by 'it'

Jack Slash: I'll have the Siberian fight you if you shut up

Crawler: heh. lets jusr say.

Jack Slash: please

Crawler: my adaptations

[ozzni]

Mannequin had no reason to make his body humanoid. What purpose does it serve for him to only have two arms and two legs? Why only one joint per limb? Yes he had chains he could use, yes he let the joints have full range of motion, but why did he need a head? As far as I can remember, the only thing he did with his head was release gas in a laughter-like motion, and mock his victims. If he really needed that head-like object to mock with, he could have just put that head on a new limb and used it as a sort of blunt weapon at the same time! Also, Mannequin is in close proximity to Crawler basically 24/7, you can't tell me he never got any ideas from looking at how Crawler's power solved problems by changing his basic shape! He could do so much more if he had more limbs, with more joints! Hell, go the tentacle route and make it a giant, ever mobile bar of joints! Be upredictable, let only the greatest of Thinkers and Tinkers know where you're going to move! Yeah I get that he's creepy and very effective, but he could be more effective if he realized that he didn't need to be humanoid! You can still do the finger wag thing with tentacles you idiot!

[artbyblastweave]

So after following you for awhile, I finally caved and read Worm, and I wanted to ask; are there any members of the Slaughterhouse 9 that you feel like didn't get explored much in canon that you have deeper thoughts about? I was really captivated by Burnscar's interlude, for example, but basically none of the personality or themes established there showed up on page again, and then she died unceremoniously. Or with Siberian, I really felt like the Manton thing was supposed to be a big impactful reveal just from the name recognition alone, but then there was barely any exploration of who he was or how he got his powers or why he turned out the way he did, and it just kinda fell flat (felt similarly about the Eidolon/Endbringer reveal too). Or Breed, who we know nothing about as a person, but he takes Taylor's issue with being immediately classed as a villain because of the nature of her powers and turns it up to 11!

So yeah, I guess, do you think there was any fertile ground there that went underutilized, and do you have any ideas about what could've been done with it?

Well, yes and no. I think the thing about the Slaughterhouse 9 is that all of them contain incredibly deep unplumbed depths, but that's a consequence of them being significantly deeper than usual for the kinds of villains that they are and the role they play in the story, which is also kind of true of basically every single bit character besides them as well, everybody's got a ton going on and this is already a really, really long book. I think that for the most part these guys are in the book to the exact degree that they ought to be, whatever unplumbed depths are on display I sort of take as an added bonus. With the exception of Shatterbird, who took a really nasty characterization hit from the Witness Interlude being cut. And from being a regent puppet with no input or voice for four arcs and change. Yeah, walking all of this back, give me more Shatterbird