Dude, you misinterpreted the part about Allfather’s daugther pretty bad. Jack never said he killed her. He said Marquis never would have killed her. That’s all.

Ah, fair enough. That doesn’t change much about my opinion on the matter, really.

And hey. At least you didn’t end up having to yell at me for coming out of the scene thinking Jack was Amy’s brother! :p

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I think that Amelia is an extremely controversial fic. Like, y’know… not a badfic, just one of those fics that has a lot of supporters and a lot of detractors. The other major example of that I can think of is the Memorials series, where basically Bakuda kills Danny almost immediately after Taylor’s cape career starts, sending Taylor off the deep end and turning her into a “just quietly kill the bad guys” vigilante serial killer.

hooboy, someone mentioned Amelia. It’s not… a good story. It has a lot of really fucked up stuff that it tosses out as unremarkable, a rather surly author, and got kicked off its original website for underage sex. It’s long, the writing isn’t technically bad, and it’s finished, so it has supporters, but it’s not something that usually gets brought up in mixed company. I’d instead go for Heredity as a better, more in character, and less messed up longish Taylor/Amy story that’s in progress.

Yikes. Not reading that.

I thought Bonesaw and Vista getting shipped with Theo might seem like a red flag…

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Wildbow himself writes a few short summary snippet AUs of if Panacea teams up with the undersiders at some point during this arc.

Oh hell yes! If/when those aren’t spoilery, it’d be fun to read them.

Hm. Maybe I should do those alongside the other side bits and drafts, like Guts and Glory, between Worm and Ward?

I think I’ll leave it up to you guys and Sharks to decide when it’s appropriate for me to read these.

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I think Scott mostly just got lucky in guessing that Brian specifically would second trigger. He did have a few things to go on, though – like Aisha getting superpowers and joining the team, which would make it likelier for him to wind up in another traumatic situation related to protecting her. IIRC it wasn’t an especially serious prediction (although he did put it in his “predictions” section) and he was surprised when it actually came true.

Re Scott’s predictions: I think he first guessed the concept of “second trigger” was a Chekhov gun for one of the main characters, but probably not Taylor since “protagonist gets power-up” is too cliche. Then when Aisha joined the team he figured that there would be many opportunities for her to be in danger, recreating the circumstances of Brian’s first trigger (where he protected her). Plus his general protectiveness of her was reinforced many times in the narrative.

As for Sophia being a cape, I think it was less her fighting ability being a clue and more that it made narrative sense to him. He guessed early on that Emma’s turn against Taylor was cape-related (as a built-up mystery, it had to connect to the main story somehow) and once Sophia was given more of a spotlight he came up with that guess.

Ahh, the “wait seriously I was right??” kind of prediction! That’s one of the most fun types.

But yeah, I suppose these are pretty reasonable ways to reach those conclusions. This is the kind of logic my better predictions tend to work on, where narrative flow is at the center. I didn’t think of treating the concept as a Chekhov’s gun ahead of its firing, though, and had largely forgotten about it (though not to such an extent that it didn’t quickly come to mind) by the time it actually happened.

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Re the last Survival of the ForestF ask, I don’t think that’s actually a factor very often. When a species is threatened by overpopulation the usual evolutionary result is that they start eating each other’s babies.

Survival of the ForestF: The woodiest’s right.

Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Hell, that’s probably something Taylor should be familiar with – don’t spiders do this? Among other arthropods, I suppose.

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TAYLOR: Panacea you need to make a cure for Bonesaw’s plague!
AMY: No go away I’m busy being a lesbian
TAYLOR: But you’ve gotta!!!
AMY: Fine okay here’s a lesbian-themed plague cure

Ahahaha!

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I’m from Scotland and I don’t get the parahummus thing.

Just a really terrible and pointless pun on parahumans and hummus.

…I didn’t fuck up which country hummus is from, did I?

I did. It’s from the Levant.

Well, then. Why do I associate it with Scotland??

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considering that the cure is in every body fluid of taylor’s, she could have, say, coughed in people’s faces, but instead she decided to make out with two girls.

To be fair, I think Rachel would still have punched her. Maybe not as hard, though. :p

But hey… have I not been questioning Taylor’s sexuality from the start because of how she tended to describe girls? 😉

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“Weren’t there some flaws I found in the wording when they asked for those mortality rates? Something like that?” I believe you are thinking of that time just before we/they learned Leviathan was going to attack. Their survival chance dropped like a rock if they tried attacked Kaiser at the time Leviathan later attacked, and you theorised it was because the word choice in the question wasn’t identical.

Oh fuck, that’s a good point!

I still thinks wording matters, but we’ve since seen that Dinah does have conscious control over the interpretation, so it’s not quite as sensitive to literal wording as I thought back then. Though it can still be misinterpreted.

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“What about Bentley? Does him being stuck in hellhound form until you specifically revert it mean you can not be using your power on him at all times and thereby have it not kill the parasites?” 1) Panacea said that the thing she did to Bentley would likely be undone the moment he came within range of Bitch, 2) Bitch’s power is to make her dogs into hellhounds, why would parasite immunity be less part of that than nonliving zombie-flesh or big boney murder-tails?

1) Oh, right, forgot about that.

2) My logic was basically that I thought the parasites got killed during the transformation, and Bentley being locked in hellhound form would mean Rachel didn’t need to continually keep using her power on him to make sure he didn’t shrink, killing the parasites each time she did that. In retrospect, that’s silly considering how long they can go without her present before starting to shrink.

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[screenshots from the 1957 movie An Affair to Remember]

Terry McKay: What makes life so difficult?

Nickie Ferrante: People.

If this isn’t Worm, I don’t know what is.