“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.

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? 😉

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??

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!

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.

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.

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.

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…

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

FUCK. I just remembered, while making the post-chapter Patreon post, what quote the “not with a bang, but a (…)” bit comes from. Jack, you sneaky fucker.

So this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

…and while I knew the quote, I didn’t know where it was from or how it’s actually supposed to end. The last word was a blank for me – I think it’s through Cards Against Humanity I’ve picked it up, actually. Anyway, I just looked it up, and apparently this is how it originally ends. So it’s not quite as subtle as I thought if you know the whole original quote.

Still, though. Jack totally managed to sneak that reference to his departure meaning the end of the world past me for a few minutes. It’s a really neat way of saying it, too.