#Slaughterhouse 9

[sillydog33]

14.8... when i catch you wildbow

[bodegadulac]

[goldenmotive]

Deleted Scene: Shatterbird recruits Burnscar to the Slaughterhouse 9

[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

[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

[lemurlord]

They call her Burnscar because she left a lit cigarette in the Mantonmobile one time.

[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 😇

[megamuscle885-blog]

CW: canon compliant gore, sexual assault.

Disclaimer: I do not condone violence, sexual or otherwise.

A little bit irrelevant to my review on Severed but has anyone else realized that if Skitter was ever inducted into the Slaughterhouse 9 and actually got over the hump of trying to mitigate her violent actions, and fit in with the group, she'd actually be the worst member of them all? Like "Oh thank god it's Bonesaw. Skitter's not around is she? Yeah great turn my insides into eels I've wondered what that's like just don't let her near me."

I applaud all writers who understand perfectly that Jack Slash is rapidly out of his depth when Skitter joins the team and eventually takes over because Queen Administrator insists to Broadcast.

They'll be doing their usual schtik of threatening/laying out the trials and then Skitter just pipes up, "I'm going to castrate you." and the rest of the S9 are really uncomfortable with it because, like America, their violence isn't sexual. Maybe that's just Wildbow being unwilling to poke that particular topic (more than in passing or flashback) but in my opinion, a group that usually sets up in a city and uses their abilities to guarantee that their power is overwhelming seems to only use their power over people for violent ends. This is America, we can kill our victims with increasingly violent and gory methods but we can't fuck them. Maybe the Siberian, but that's still a projection of a daughter piloted by her father and is still more motivated by violence than sexuality, irrespective of her nudity.

It's really up to the writers if they want to say that, yeah, the S9 also rape sometimes. That's the benefit of fanfiction, one doesn't have to answer to editors.

But I can't help but be amused by the idea that in an effort to lash out on some innocent cape, Skitter threatens "to cut off your cock and feed it to the Siberian." and William Manton is just standing there in his daughter's skin, looking to Jack and shaking her head fervently, silently screaming 'I don't want to taste cock please.' While Jack tries to contrive a way to let people get away from the S9 for a change since dick-spiders georg is discovering what kind of serial killer she is.

Putting the disclaimer at the top and bottom: I don't condone violence, sexual or otherwise.

[cpericardium]

manniquin

[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

[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

[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