Hi krix! Love following your read through, such fun. What do you hope happens next? I’m leaving the question purposefully vague to hear whatever comes to mind.

Well, the exact future is very uncertain at the moment, but Taylor has set herself a long-term goal and may have come up with a plan for how to accomplish it, so I’m interested in seeing exactly what she has in mind.

I hope what she has in mind does involve the Undersiders. Especially Lisa… you may have noticed me describing her as my favorite character a couple times over the last few chapters, so of course I want the plot to continue involving her.

Relatedly, I’m interested in the restoration of Brockton Bay. I guess that doesn’t really fall under “happening next”, but it’s something I do want to see gradually happening over the course of future Arcs, even if just in the background.

As for the more immediate “next”, Interlude 8 (*grumble grumble*), I have no clue what I want to happen. I do have a feeling we might be checking in with the heroes – Legend, maybe, or perhaps Weld? (I want to get to know Weld… primarily because I lowkey ship him with Taylor, based only on the smile he gave her in 8.1.) A look into how New Wave are handling their losses would also be nice.

Heck, if I remember correctly, Wildbow was /planning/ on Taylor dying and gave her a low chance of survival. However, not only did she beat the odds, but /the character he was planning on replacing her with/ died instead.

IIRC the plan was actually for Taylor to die and Aegis to be the new protagonist. Whoops!

To add on the “death by dice roll” reveal… characters actually had modifiers on it depending on their place in the fight and their powers. Taylor had very low odds. Wildbow expected her to die. He had the story planned for her dying. And then she didn’t. Near-Invincible Alexandria almost died. No-weakpoint Aegis died. Squishy bug girl survived.

Ahaha! That’s RNG for ya!

I was rather surprised when Aegis died, but man, I can’t help but imagine Wildbow’s reaction. Especially if he rolled Aegis before Taylor and had to worry about both of them dying. Though given what I’ve been told before about Wildbow going through several protagonists before settling on Taylor, I’m sure he’d think of something.

I suppose this means that Wildbow had to go through a similar process as the one Taylor did in 8.8. “Well then, Taylor survived and Aegis didn’t. What do I do with her character now?”

…hm, I wonder, would following Aegis mean leaving the wreck of Brockton Bay behind? I mean, would they still go through with the rearrangements of the Wards in the wake of an Endbringer attack?

If so, it seems like Wildbow intended to get rid of both the current protag and the specific setting, and got stuck with both… for now, at least. Not gonna lie, I hope it stays that way, especially now that Taylor seems to have come up with a long-term objective.

In any case, I respect that Wildbow didn’t take his artistic license to ignore the dice when they fell in ways that didn’t match his plans.

So, they waited almost a week after the battle before putting up that monument. I think you can take it as pretty much a given that they double checked everything pretty carefully. The armbands are good, but no one thinks they’re prefect.

Yeah, that’s fair.

Note how out of 8 Undersiders we lost 2, or exactly 25%, to Leviaphan

Cod dammit!

Wildbow bested me again…