1) Suggestion to reread the Gallant-Amy conversation in Interlude 3, now that you know what is going on under the surface. 2) Which S9 member (if any at all) do you find the most viscerally horrifying? For me it is Cherish without a doubt. The idea that she can twist my feelings and make me want to kill myself… *shudders*.

1) Yeah, I should do that.

2) Oh yeah, I agree. Cherish’s power is quite horrifying. It’s either her or Bonesaw.

Now that you know all the Nine’s powersets and have a general sense of their personalities, could you rank the living ones in terms of how difficult you think they’d be to beat in direct combat?

Ranking that is pretty difficult once the versatility of powers gets involved, especially without knowing who’s fighting them. Let’s take a stab at it, though:

  1. Crawler
  2. Siberian
  3. Shatterbird
  4. Cherish
  5. Burnscar
  6. Pinkie Pie
  7. Mannequin
  8. Bonesaw
  9. Jack Slash (but he’s not gonna die)

If you think about it, Bonesaw is a lot like Cupcakes!PinkiePie. Down to the dislike of swearing, even. So maybe you guessed yet another thing correctly.

Bonesaw makes your april fools joke even funnier to us rereaders, and now you know why.

What are your current thoughts on Pinkie Pie being an alternate-universe Slaughterhouse Nine member?

So how do you feel about your April Fool’s Day joke theory that Cupcakes is actually a pony version of canonical events in the Wormverse being proven right?

Ahaha!

I’m really glad it turned out this way. In part because I quite enjoy Cupcakes!Pinkie, and in part because this helps to prove me right about the main reason I chose Cupcakes for the April Fool’s liveblog: Its interpretation of Pinkie would fit into the Slaughterhouse Nine quite well.

Remember all of those discussions we had back in 6.x/7.1, about the idea of accidentally doing something horrible with a superpower, and about the idea of using a superpower to make someone fall in love with you? Now you know what Wildbow was setting up by introducing those two concepts back to back. So now for the question everyone wanted to ask you back then, but couldn’t: What do you think about the legal/ethical implications of *accidentally* making someone fall in love with you?

Well, legally… we’ve already seen how the legal system around here treats accidents sometimes. It’s not pretty, even if what happened to Paige wasn’t the norm.

Ethically… it’s not really that bad. Accidentally causing someone to feel a certain way is a very different thing than intentionally manipulating them. Exploiting that accident on purpose is not a great thing to do, though. It’s pretty clear that Amy had no intentions of doing so, though.

Worm had several initial drafts, where many character’s backstories were explored, along with tons of worldbuilding. One of them had Amy and Victoria as the main characters. This is something that had been planned for a while.

Ah, yes, Guts and Glory. Had that been released to the public before this reveal made it into Worm?

Hey remember in Victoria’s interlude when she tried to use her aura on Amy and Amy said she’d been exposed to it so much she’d become immune? *hint hint*

According to Wildbow, one of the reasons Amy had feelings for Victoria was because of Victoria’s aura being used on her repeatedly while she was emotionally vulnerable due to puberty.

Sharks: This actually has an ambiguous response by Wildbow. We don’t really know if it’s true or not

I vaguely alluded to this at the end of this post. It’s certainly a possibility, and not an unlikely one, but I honestly appreciate it being ambiguous how much of a hand the aura had in this.

Remember how in the interlude after the bank robbery Gallant talked to Panacea about how he thought she loved him? His power made him see emotions as a colored cloud around people, and whenever he saw her she had the love color around her. But really, it was only that color because he made Panacea think of Glory Girl.

Damn, quite the crafty foreshadowing right there.

Hack Job’s power being weaker than Hatchet Face’s seems to mostly mean that it has extremely reduced range.

Bonesaw mashing two capes together makes both powers less effective, so Hack Job had a much smaller power canceling field. That’s why Mark was able to keep firing blasts. HJ could theoretically have just teleported to Mark and grabbed him, but he’d have to be ordered to do that, because he was stupid even before his “death”.

Ahh, right, that works. When he was blocking Amy’s power, he was right up next to her, after all.