Editor’s Note #52

Revenge of the shipping episode

Upcoming Schedule:

  • Tuesday, March 1st: Episode 204: Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition!
  • Tuesday, March 8th: Episode 205: Creative Process: NightMist Supporting Cast
  • Tuesday, March 15th: Episode 206: Writers’ Room: Akash’Mecha
  • Tuesday, March 22nd: Editor’s Note #53
  • Tuesday, March 29th: Episode 207: Creative Process: Sky-Scraper Foes

Recording Schedule:

  • Friday, February 25th: Episode 204: Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition!
  • Friday, March 4th: Episode 205: Creative Process: NightMist Supporting Cast
  • Friday, March 11th: Episode 206: Writers’ Room: Akash’Mecha
  • Friday, March 18th: Editor’s Note #53
  • Friday, March 25th: Episode 207: Creative Process: Sky-Scraper Foes
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Oh boy, episodes about DE and Akash’Mecha? Dreams come true! :smiley:

It still kinda blows my mind that Trevor and Paul aren’t related, cuz like, they sound almost exactly alike? Is that just me?

Oh, the universe is ending? Thank goodness, I need a rest.

No lingering questions about Oblivaeon?? It’s not a real Letter’s Page.

Make him cry and then fix him, Lillian! XD

Oh, I forgot writing that letter. :smiley: Pleasant surprise.

I never made that connection between Unity and Setback before, but now I find I am suddenly really invested in them being good friends.

I like that the answer to “do any singular entities have children” is basically no, but if any do, it’s the Fervor.

Cross-franchise shipping? La Comodora and Echelon from the Cauldron. <.< There, I said it. Two cranky old ladies just palling around, getting drunk, going through time and schooling younger would-be heroes and probably even villains. I don’t even care if there’s romance, I just want them to be friends.

Okay, but after the super adorable image of Fright Train getting a stuffed conductor elephant and loving it, you cannot just tell me that Ermine is using him. D: My heart.

“Who’s the biggest hot mess in their dating life?” I immediately said “Captain Cosmic” out loud.

Other than the fact that it’s two super gross characters combining into an ever grosser pair, I can find no reason to deny Biomancer/Kronz. Like, even if the Gene-Doctor is all “humans are an inferior species”, Biomancer’s just like, “yes, but are you sure I am one?” And they make out or something, ugh, ew, no, stop.

Hippo having a crush on Arataki is like, my favorite thing in this episode now. Maybe that one will turn out better than Fright Train and Ermine. >:|

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I dunno, I think Lillian’s reaction to Apostate would be similar to her reaction in the video game to fighting the Matriarch. The “Oh Lillian, what did Poe ever do to you?” line. Less “I can fix him” and more “get me away from this poser.”

Setback and Unity would have been an interesting relationship, but recent bits showing that Setback’s actual age is about 5-10 years above what I thought (I had thought he and Expat, from most of the letters page discussions of them, were early-to-mid 20s… then the RPG had Kismet’s age as “Early 30s”), I think he’s definitely more a “cool big brother” type to her.

I have a strange perspective for cross-franchise ships. Probably from the crack crossovers I wrote in college. I can’t really think of any off the top of my head, but give me the franchise to work with and I’ll find a few interesting connections…

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Just had to pause in the middle of the episode and write this thing

EDIT - Okay, listened to more of the episode; it’s being another of my favorites, even though I don’t love the source material (ie I think most of the shipping is kinda dumb, but to borrow a phrase from the episode, “I love the way C&A love the shipping”, even though I don’t much love the shipping myself). I wrote a letter which was intended for this episode…sort of…and I’m very curious whether they’ll be brave enough to include it.

The reason I had to stop and comment again is that we’re in the letter about Atlanteans and Cavemen. I could say a lot of things here, but I obviously shouldn’t say those things, and that’s the point. Because what destroyed Atlantis? Xxxhul’ish. And what is Xxxhul’ish? The incarnation of forbidden knowledge. That includes forbidden carnal knowledge. In other words, my headcanon is that when the first writer of the first comic book to depict the downfall of Atlantis, with some stone tablet showing a tentacle beast rising from the deep, that writer’s original intention was literally that there would be Atlantean and Caveman, let’s just say “mingling”, and that THIS was what led to Atlantis’s downfall, that he intended Xxxhul’ish as no more than a metaphor (he was probably a little bit on the racist side, much as Lovecraft was, and similarly used horror monsters as metaphors for miscegenation and chaos and other things he was afraid of). All of which a later creative team threw out, instead treating Xxxhulish as a literal giant monster, much the way most readers of Lovecraft treat Cthulhu as a literal giant monster, when the point of the Cthulhu-type entities Lovecraft wrote about was for them to be metaphors. (Cthulhu himself was the most famous of the lot specifically because, of the major Mythos beings, he’s the only one that actually physically appears in the described action of one of Lovecraft’s stories. We meet the Son of Yog-Sothoth, but not Yog-Sothoth itself, and ditto for Shubby and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth and Hastur, so Cthulhu ended up being the “face” of Lovecraft’s universe, because he actually HAD a face described in the text and none of the others did. But even though HPL chose to make Cthulhu have a full onstage appearance, the point of the story isn’t “there’s a monster in the South Pacific, let’s go kill it”, but “there are monsters out there which you can’t even THINK about without being destroyed by the knowledge of them”; thusly, treating Cthulhu as if it’s just a kaiju is kind of missing the original literary point, and thus I’m arguing that Xxx’hulish is the same pattern happening here.)

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Maybe I’m engaging in unintentional shipping, but I had it in my head that Parse & Benchmark, and Headlong & Rockstar were canon couples.

And I’m glad someone shipped Omnitron and Guise (separately). Those were about the only two I was thinking of from the Shipping episode who weren’t really mentioned.

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A houseboat is not a ‘ship’ you fools!

(and I’m glad my giant edit above didn’t scare you off, Thunderbird.)

Okay, I was polite there for a bit, now I have to go back to being the guy everybody hates. I’m REALLY mad about Adam thinking that Gimli and Legolas must be shtupping or something. This is a huge example of the trend for modern audiences to interpret everything through the lens of the way our society does things today, without taking them into historical context. The gay people of today want to say that there were a bunch of closeted gays everywhere all throughout the past, and sure maybe there were some, but not every “bromance” in history was a gay couple having to pretend they weren’t having sex. It is actually possible for two people, regardless of gender, to JUST be friends. When Legolas says he will show Gimli the beauty of the forest, and Gimli says he will show Legolas the beauty of the caves, those aren’t crude metaphors, they are literally saying exactly what they said. The two of them are going to travel around and look at cool stuff together; there is absolutely zero implied homosexuality, or sexuality of any kind, in that interaction. Please, for the love of god, Internet, cease this insanity.

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I believe that C&A said in previous episode(s) that, although Rockstar and Headlong aren’t yet a thing, it’s inevitable that they eventually will be.

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Alright, we’re back to the fun. Two comments.

#1 Anybody who ever read Ghastly’s Ghastly Comic (if you didn’t, then don’t, it’s majorly 18+ and I don’t think it’s even online anymore, this is just a nod to anyone in the know), the “space bartender” described in the KNYFE part of the episode? It’s Hammer. Just paint him blue or whatever and literally use the same character. It’s almost 1-to-1 with the strip where Chibi Sue tried to pick him up, even though she’s the exact opposite sort of character as KNYFE. But Hammer would work perfectly. I’m quite sad that most people won’t (or legally can’t) get this reference, as it’s SUCH a perfect expy situation.

#2 Going back to the question of what the Citizens of the Sun do for a date, my brain absolutely lit up with a hypothetical scenario for the latter-day Sentinels universe; I don’t plan to play the RPG, but anyone who does, you are highly encouraged to pick up this football I’m about to throw, and run with it as far as you like. We already know that Citizen Dawn tried and failed to have a child who would carry on her powers, and presumably she encourages (if not flat-out orders) the other Citizens to also reproduce their gifts, in case there might stop being new powered people out in the world that she can recruit. So, while a few powered children might be born this way, what would happen the first, or second or third or fourth, time a Citizen other than Dawn gives birth to a child who grows up and proves to be totally normal? Since there isn’t a unifying aspect to all of these powered people, as there is with the X-Gene in Marvel’s universe, there’s some hope for people who are born without powers to eventually gain them artificially somehow (Revocorp will likely do a brisk business with this group). But more to the point, the first time some other woman on the island replicates Dawn’s failure (that is totally Citizen Pain’s fault and not any reflection on her, if anyone asks, but secretly she knows the truth even if she’ll never admit it)…I’m VERY curious how that situation would play out.

They shot down Parse and Benchmark in the last Shipping Editor’s Note. He’s too “over the top” for her.

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Hey, I got first letter of the episode! Nice! I guess it didn’t get a lot of answers (beyond the fact that people apparently got very cross about Unity/Benchmark, haha), but it was still very cool.

On the topic of Wager Master being an in-universe shipper: I really like the idea that he’s sometimes a voice for the readership, whether or not the writer in question agrees with them! Obviously he shows up to throw Bunker and Wraith together, and that one becomes canon, but I can easily imagine a Wager Master Valentine’s Day issue where he’s buzzing around, making unlikely couples infatuated and just generally causing chaos, just to give a teasing writer a chance to thumb their nose at people who have the wrong ships.

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TAKEWALKER STOP READING MY MIND!!!

Nerd! congrats on your version of a question getting read instead of mine.

Some thoughts I had had about High Brow x Adhesivist was the story idea they had where a heist crew was sitting around and someone asks “What is glue globe Glen over here bringing to the plan” and suddenly High Brow realizes she had gotten the Hippo, Heartbreaker, Skeleton Key and… Glen. Why is she thinking about him so informally… oh no. Also, the idea that having a boyfriend would make her such a better foil for Parse. The cold, emotionless human computer and a hyper intelligent woman with emotions and the wants and needs of a person.

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suffer :slight_smile:

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IIRC, Setback and Expatriette are two characters who have aged quite a bit faster than the Sentinel Comics average. Expatriette was a teenager when she was introduced in the 80s, and Setback was probably about 19-20 when he got his powers and became a Freedom Five supporting character (he left high school, college lost his application, worked three jobs in pretty quick succession that are each described as lasting not very long, and then he became a RevoCorp test subject.)

So when Setback was introduced, he and Unity were probably only a couple of years apart in age. But he and Expatriette have been aging fairly steadily, getting a good ten years in over the course of Sentinel Comics, whereas Unity went from late teens to early twenties, so he’s got five years on her now.

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I mean… comparing Legacy and Wraith…

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