Look I tried my best to just say what I thought about the topic without letting my anger about this topic seep into my writing. I'm sorry I failed. I assure you I am interested in a debate, but I have a problem with this topic of how to phrase my thoughts on it in way that isn't angry/hostile.
I understand. Lord knows I've made that mistake myself more times that I frankly have any excuse for.
I am open to discussion on this topic and plenty of people have changed my opinions on it before and probably will again.
Ok, I'll throw in my two cents. Obviously this is 90% the two of us comparing personal interpretations, so while I disagree I still think your views are, mostly, valid.
From my point of view the Slaughterhouse Nine represent a metaphor for a Channer cult
I don't think 'channer cult' is an actual thing, but I can somewhat see them coming across as a mix of a cult and the dregs of the 'net.
Jack is the leader and a spree killer and a troll and an utterly pathetic human being, but incapable of being taken down by the powers used by everyone
Ok, you've described Jack Slash as what does, but not
who he is. Actions, rather than motivations, you know? I'd see Jack Slash as more a take on comic book villains like The Joker: Utterly psychotic yet theatrical killers who never die, but escape the heroes to keep on killing, almost like they have some dark entity working to keep them alive. In fact, that's the comic book villain I'd say is the closest to Jack Slash, and that last part is quite literally part of his power. Now as for motivation, Jack Slash is an incredibly shallow individual. He's still that kid who crawled out of the basement Daddy and Mommie locked him in and kept telling him through a radio that 'the world is at war and its people are nasty and evil'. If I was to do him too much credit and attach a philosophy to him, I'd say he's a Nihilist. But Jack Slash really has two things at his core: 1. He enjoys breaking people's minds and morals, and generally doing things because he can. 2. He does what he loves to stave off boredom.
Bonesaw is a metaphor for a very specific kind of child abuse victim that joins in the abuse because she wants to be a good person inside her group
Shatterbird is the rich person with no friends who only has their art to feel good about and so they go into more and more extreme actions in order to feel like they are still being a good artist (Think a Slaaneshi cultist)
I'd say you have the two's motivations mixed up here. Bonesaw's the 'artist', as Jack taught her to be, and Shatterbird's the one trying to divorce herself from the person she was before she was force-fed her vial and killed an entire city.
The Siberian is an actual G.I.R.L. character (this is one of the ways those rare men that actually do that sort of thing behave: they make a female projection of themselves that they make as inviolate as they can)
This one I can't see at all. What we learned of Manton was that he lost his daughter when she took a vial and became Custodian, hence why the Siberian projection looks like his daughter. He was one of the 'first truly dangerous villains', so after that initial attack on the Cauldron bunch, Hero, Alexandria, Legend, and Eidolon, I chalk up the Slaughterhouse Nine membership to Jack's Social-shard-powers.
Crawler is an internet tough guy with a power that makes him actually have action that can back up his words
I always thought he was more of a sado-masochist. His entire motivation is 'hurt me more, hurt you more'.
Mannequin is an engineer that has had their knowledge proven utterly useless in maintaining a family and has now turned to destructive spiteful nihilism;
The first half of that I think you're stretching, and the last part seems half-and-half to me. The Simurgh killing his family he was totally unable to stop, but who
can stop the Simurgh from doing what she sets her mind to? Nobody! So when he becomes Mannequin and seeks to ruin Tinkers by showing that all it takes to fail is one bad day, I guess you could call that nihilism. But I feel that OOC it's an impossible standard to hold characters to.
Burnscar is a violent abuse victim that is aware that they are perpetuating the cycle of violence that hurt them but are unable/unwilling to fully commit to being a better person
That seems egregiously off-base to me, given what's established in-story. We know Capes have a conflict libido, we know shards will kick back when they feel their hosts are not using their powers to the shards' satisfaction, and we know that Burnscar's power takes away more of her emotions and humanity the more fire she's around. So it's really a case of her power makes it
impossible for her to be a good person on her own, she has no effective choice in the matter.
We've seen this kind of vicious cycle with capes like Damsel of Distress, Panacea, and even Leet: Damsel's passenger makes it almost impossible for her to live normally, or even
eat without per powers going out of control because she doesn't do the hammy villain enough, Panacea sticks to healing over anything else, and Leet's so cautious about what gear he makes that his passenger ups the failure chance anyway.
Cherish is a female domestic abuse victim that has gone fully cynical and chooses to believe that she will be able to manipulate anyone if she just uses her charm on them.
And is actually incredibly easy to see what she's doing, and manipulate in turn, exactly.
Bonesaw rejects her previous identity within the group as soon as she is older and has talked with people outside the group and realized how much of a monster she was, but Wildbow had to go and write her as staying with the Nine until Jack is beaten. This doesn't happen in real life: as soon as they are aware of how horrible they are people like Riley start to distance themselves from their identity within the group and they start building a new identity for themselves that is independent from their past actions.
Actually, she seems to have stuck around in part because she's terrified of Jack, and he's still one of the few people she had any affections for.
Like, you know, lots of abused spouses and children willingly go back even if they realize its wrong. Because it's all they had.
Going off of what veekie said, Riley is vey terrified of Jack, and is the only person either of them really had a connection to. It's why she kept modifying her appearance to appear the same little girl Jack remembered.
I'm also highly skeptical when people start slinging around 'real people do X' without any evidence or citations. That, to me, comes across as saying 'this isn't how I think people act so I'm right' or 'this is how I've seen people in my life act, so this must be the way everybody acts'. It's not remotely valid! Combined with Stockholm Syndrome being a pretty big deal, as demonstrated above, and I just can't take your claims of 'they're not acting like real people' seriously.
That is why Jack's defeat and his making Scion have a cosmic temper tantrum feels so much like an author's preference than a well written piece of storytelling. People like Jack in real life are either shot by the police, kill themselves when there is no way out or they reach a point where they are left destitute by their own actions and nobody is interested in helping them out of the hole they dug themselves into.
Well, think about the Scion manipulation in terms of the Jack Slash mentality I proposed above: Jack Slash breaks things for fun. He set up the S9000 'partially to find out just how he was supposedly going to end the world, because he
really liked the sound of that. When Scion talks to him, he's stuck in a Grey Boy loop for all eternity. He's now forced to become
bored until the heat-death of the universe. And the golden idiot asks him how to find meaning in life. It's not only Jack killing himself, but from a theatrical perspective, it's him
murdering the entire world! What else was in-character for Jack in those circumstances, but to tell Scion to destroy everything?
