I love Tachyon, she talks fast, she is scatterbrained and brilliant. She is funny and light hearted and lives her life with a childlike joy. I really dig that.
Team Leader Tachyon scares me, because that Tachyon has seen the world turn dark, and has failed to stop it. That Tachyon is serious and driven and focused.
I don't even know how to process that character change. I'm not a huge fan of the Iron Legacy timeline, simply because of what it has done to heroes like Tachyon.
Also Tempest.
He? lost everything, and yet we see him pictured as kind of cool and aloof and all about elements. Then you look at Shackles, this is no Kal-El, this alien has vengeance in his heart. He would be scary to see unleash on enemies, esp. given his crazy power level.
Unity is terrifying if I think about her too much. All that power in the mind of an introverted child, who makes raptors as playmates and creates metal dolls to mock her human acquaintances in their own voice (see Swift Bot). Just think how dark SHE could go in the face of an IL-esque level of world-shattering. She'd be like Omnitron and Spite and a bit of Matriarch all rolled into one - an emotionally disturbed teenager with an army of destruction at her command, and the ability to bend reality itself to suit her whims (see Brainstorm). Nightmare fuel, is what that is.
I've always seen Unity as a bit crazy, on the verge of going very dark at any point, but a giddy dark. Kinda like Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2. She creates cute little toys that are very very deadly and finds glee in their effectiveness.
I asked Christopher what he sounded like once, and he mentioned that his voice was like a soft-spoken Johnny Cash. Its not always a voice that you trust... but its one that you listen too. And sometimes thats all it takes.
One night (or day), things aren't going well and you find yourself alone. You meet a man in a red mask who offers to help, to lead you home and keep you safe. After all, he says, there are villains out there. He's a hero- you've heard about them on the news, but this is the first time you've seen one in person. That voice makes you feel safe...and he's kind and theres something about him that seems trustworthy.
Maybe you decline, and thank him. Until you realize (far, far too late) that he's following you.
Maybe you make it home, as he helps you carry your things and he talks to you about the city. Until he comes back, later.
Maybe he sees something and whisks you to the rooftops- telling you that he's got to keep you safe. Until you find yourself dangling off a rooftop.
Maybe you are simply never seen again.
Thats why Spite is scary. Because even in a world of superheroes, the bad guys don't always come out and say it.
That is a cool and creepy description, Braith, but somehow, I cannot really picture this guy passive-aggressively stalking victims.
(Also, y'all have some dark outlooks on Sentinels if you see a wisecracking teen hero and immediately think "incipient mental collapse".)
What do I find creepy? A pan-dimensional police state that views heroes and villains alike as the enemy. F.I.L.T.E.R. is much, much more threatening than Iron Legacy in my book. Also, a bunch of psycho pirates (heh - no, not him) being able to better navigate the timestream than any of the beings with powers specifically meant for that.
But most of all: the anthropomorphic personification of the Earth is a goddess of destruction which perpetually tries to destroy humankind. That is some deep existential horror, right there.
Yeah, Unity is either hiding a special forces level of ruthless focus, crazy or is headed for a crisis the first time those Raptor Bots really finish off a villain. They have Metal spikes in their mouths.
I've enjoyed that angle in our forum campaign, and she sure is happy getting to fight Omnitron now.
I love that angle on Spite. He's a serisl killer, so he isn't quite the drug dealer gone mad that I had originally pictured him as.
Maybe he uses the drugs to try to up his prey level, he goes after the sidekick, then wants to take out the real thing.
Spite was a serial killer long before he took any drugs. They just gave hima new addiction and allowed him to go after more targets.
This is just my opinion, but I'm not really sure there is anything "passive aggressive" about my interpretation. We've seen (in Good samaritan and the Little Girl) that Spite doesn't kill straightaway- and the fact that he's holding the Little Girl's hand was what led me to think in the first place that that part of his thing is getting people to trust him. Stabbing himself in the neck with drugs, lab raids, and uncontrollable experimentation are definitely one facet of him. But I strongly suspect that the horrific betrayal is another.
I kind of wonder if he didn't offer Brave Thiago a chance to fight evil with him, side by side....
I do have a pretty grim worldview, but it's not so much that I think Unity is likely to have a breakdown (if only because we know, canonically at least in the main timeline, that she dies before having a chance to break down). Just that in the event that it DID happen, I think it'd be spectacular in its fearsomeness.
What do I find creepy? A pan-dimensional police state that views heroes and villains alike as the enemy. F.I.L.T.E.R. is much, much more threatening than Iron Legacy in my book.
With you on this one. Maybe we'll get a villain deck for the psycho new leader of FILTER at some point - a sort of Sentinels take on Bolivar Trask or Grandon Creed, who comes in and takes a moderately nasty organization and kicks it up to 11.
But most of all: the anthropomorphic personification of the Earth is a goddess of destruction which perpetually tries to destroy humankind. That is some deep existential horror, right there.
Oh yeah, definitely agree there. And I could believe it was Truth in Television Gaming pretty easily…if such things as nature spirits do/did really exist, I figure they might have some of the same attitudes we hear in her quotes.
Plague Rat is the one who was originally a drug dealer actually. Spite is just a convict who got used as (ironically) a lab rat for Pike Industries, and happened to roll "jackpot" on the save-or-die.
Fanatic unnerves me a bit, but it is probably mostly undeserved. She's just... very driven. and blows things up with magic.
Other than that... Visionary defintely. I have a long-standing belief "don't trust psychics" Any one with the power to bend people to their will seems almost inevitably to misuse that power.
I mentioned to Foote the other day that the Swiftbot quote "I am uptight about science and hate explosions in the lab." is an excellent homage to the origin story of The Silver Age Flash (Barry Allen).
Fanatic scares me quite a bit. She...would not like me at all. Sure, she's a good guy, but she wouldn't mind introducing this atheist to Absolution the hard way.
Out of the villains, Spite is the worst. Plague Rat is just an animal, you can't blame him entirely for what he's become. Baron's crazy but incompetant. Matriarch is small time. The Chairman I can understand, he's out for himself, you might even be able to make a deal with him. Iron Legacy is driven but has some sense of honor (twisted as it might be). Voss is doing his duty. The Ennead are beyond human morality.
Spite LIKES what he does. He embraces his foulness and wants for one thing and one thing only...your degredation and pain.
Also, as someone who frequently suffers from night terrors and similar sleep disturbances, The Dreamer scares me as well. I know what I can do while sleeping, and I'm not a child with psychokinetic abilities.
I don't get this from her, I don't think she cares about other's faith, her quest to destroy evil seems very personal and not based on conversion at all. Now if you get labelled as evil through a misunderstanding or mistaken identity she'd be scary, she doesn't seem likely to verify her target before smiting.
Essentially true, but debatably mis-stated. Christopher has implied that she's tapped into a HUGE source of power, so while she herself is peanuts, she might be packing some very heavy artillery that forces her to be taken somewhat seriously. She's definitely an example of the various tropes whereby a cartoon black hat is usually their own worst enemy, so I agree she's not scary, I'm just not thinking "small time" is quite the way to put it.
Voss is doing his duty.
False. Voss staged a one-man coup against his own government; he's a conqueror, plain and simple. By the standards of other Thorathians (apart from Vyktor and Tamar et al, who are his own hand-picked cronies), he's a war criminal at best; he was exiled for his initial crimes, because they couldn't stand to kill him due to his noble blood, and his thanks was to take the whole place over.
I'm not disagreeing with Spite as being scarier than Voss, just being clear that Voss is definitely no mere soldier. He's basically Space Hitler, and Hitler really is far less frightening than, say, Jeffrey Dahmer…but racked up a much more impressive body count, even if it was in more underwhelming ways.
