I'm very pleased to learn that Haka is a G&S fan.
Also, to whomever is doing the Biomancer clones - lots of kudos for adding another Latin animal name pun while impersonating me. Your limerick was excellent too.
I'm very pleased to learn that Haka is a G&S fan.
Also, to whomever is doing the Biomancer clones - lots of kudos for adding another Latin animal name pun while impersonating me. Your limerick was excellent too.
That was actually my thought too. Something about the "powerful enough to see the need and reach across timelines and parallel reality" aspect–and there was a notion, I think, that the source retroactively made Haka have existed. That is, reached back in time from the future and caused the collapse of what I have to assume are really screwyideas about worldstates and parallel timelines and probabilities and I should probably read Anathem again.
See, I don't think "the name of the person you have redacted" is responsible for all this. We know what he/her/it does during the OBlivaeon fight and I believe they are confirmed "no longer existing" after they do it, so I just don't see the opportunity and it also does not fit the theme or style of that character to do something like create Haka.
They have the oomph to pull it off, but I don't think they have the desire, time, or propensity to go mucking things up and causing what I assume is a large cosmic mess when you pull back far enough to see such things as what has happened to Haka metaphysically.
Haka isn't the way things are supposed to be, which is a big red flag in my mind.
I'm not going to lie, I got misty-eyed listening to this episode, particularly the parts about loss. All the feels.
On the topic of the Role Play and meta stuff:
You know, people might think it's hard to hear, that it takes up too much time or whatever. Let me tell you, it is hard to PARTICIPATE. Basically, if you want to, you have to listen to an episode and you have less than 3 days to send in a message if you want to RP. And you gotta make it a good question not to waste everyone's time. If you don't wait until AFTER the episode is out, you may get facts wrong or be incorrect with the details of where the "story" is. Or, you can wait and only send a message every second week, but then if you have real question, you kinda have to skip them.
All this to say, a question I sent for the Slaughterhouse Six mentioned the "animalverse" version of Christopher and Adam and they are not the same as what was mentioned in this episode. Oops...
Ooh, sorry, Leo. :C
Maybe it's an alternate Animalverse. I mean, who's to say there's only one?
I'm sure there are multiple animalverses. I've sent in some early RP questions as well and am just waiting to see if someone contradicts them in the meta-lore before they come out--or possibly in the same episode.
No need. It wasn't really a complaint against you, more pointing out how much work it takes sometimes. I'm sure they'll mention it or come up with their own explanation for things. Animal Biomancer clones perhaps? ![]()
On a related note, I've been wanting to make a post somewhere to collect the animal and biomancer names of all the Sentinels characters and question askers and suggest new ones. I need to have Omnitron-Pi submit a post as "Omnitron-Lie". And possibly "Omniprawn-Pi".
I tend to send in questions closeish to the deadlines anyway if only to ensure that what I want to ask didn't already get answered or invalidated somehow in a podcast in the interim (or if something in a podcast makes me think up new things to also ask).
I loved this episode. Haka is wonderful!
After the KNYFE episode, I just had a feeling that the image of her and Haka in a tavern somewhere fit in perfectly with what I knew of both their characters. Both of them are on the happier side for heroes and both enjoy battle. So I posited a throwaway question…
Christopher and Adam supplied what might be my favorite answer on this podcast.
Haka’s the best.
So, my other question: if you search YouTube for “haka,” it is really easy to find examples of the dance we Sentinels know as the Haka of Battle, including with translations. (Check out the flavor text when this gets to the “It is death! It is life!” bit: https://youtu.be/BI851yJUQQw) But I haven’t figured out what the translation of the other Haka cards are. Does anyone know?
Anyone else wonder how there's a XTREME Prime Wardens Haka, given what we just learned?
There is a separate thread that got started because of that https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/haka-letters-page-confusion-10701
Back on September 10th, I listened to the Haka episode, and I came up with a response that I didn’t post here at the time. I debated when exactly to post it, but ultimately the decision is made by my concern that I will forget, and I wanted to put this out there, even though it was contradicted almost immediately. So here goes the original post, warts and all, with a short comment afterwards about what I got wrong.
I find myself disagreeing with the explanation of how Haka works that C&A in fiscal year 2018 came up with (which I think I have the right to do, because they admitted themselves that it was a kind of an unsatisfactory explanation, it was just what they chose to go with when they needed to go with something). Time travel concepts and theories about human lifeforce and the soul and so forth, these are things I think I have an intuitive grasp on, and what my understanding of these topics tells me about “the what and the how” of this unkillable eternal person, it doesn’t fit with the explanation given here. It also contradicts the mere existence of things like Eternal Haka in a way that C&A18 kinda just handwaved without really properly handling; I was originally going to post on the ChronoRanger episode with some of these thoughts, but Haka (along with Visionary since then, so expect me to post on that too) expands on some of that while still leaving other things that I can say about other characters like La Capitana Della Commodora. (I don’t know the Spanish for “or”, sorry; I think Della is Italian anyway, but it sounds close enough.). Note that I have five or more years of pandemic-era podcasts to catch up on, so maybe some of this stuff has been discussed and maybe solved, but for now I’m just going to riff on what I know about and do the best I can, making sense of an inherently nonsensical fictional subject (that is probably better just accepted as “because comics” contradicting itself and who cares you dumb nerd, but that’s not how I work), so here goes.
So here’s my controversial stance: I don’t think Haka is actually a superhuman. I think he’s like Batman or Benchmark or Hawkeye, an exceptional example of human physical perfection that is then taken beyond human limits through technology. Only in this case, the technology in question isn’t an armor suit he wears, it’s the temporal technology of LC’s time ship, which interfaces with the flow of lifeforce through the human soul (and IMO that’s also a kind of technology but that gets into some very strange ideas of mine which are better set aside for now, in part because I may turn them into a book at some point and should avoid endangering my own IP). Haka is as strong as a human being becomes if he lives for six hundred years; he isn’t stronger than that, he doesn’t have the kind of super-strength that Legacy and Setback and Vengeance Blade all have, where their muscles exert more force than should be physically possible for those muscles. Haka is enormous because he has engaged in normal strength training and muscle growth, but his connection to the bottomless well of lifeforce from infinite other potential Hakas just constantly repairs his body from exercise that would permanently disable any normal person.
In terms of the Champions roleplaying game, which is a point buy system, I would give Haka the drawback of “normal human physical limitations”, which gives you twenty extra build points in exchange for doubling the cost of any attribute increases beyond the normal human maximum. Batman and Hawkeye would be built with that same restriction, but then might spend like ten of their twenty points to go into “Olympic athlete” level slight superhumanity. But Haka has been earning experience points for six hundred years! So he’s spent hundreds of points raising Strength at double cost, to represent the idea that he’s still not superhuman, he’s just humanity taken beyond the usual external limit imposed by old age or violent death or debilitating disease or starvation or any of that. He’s more human than human, yet he’s still ultimately a normal man, expressed to a usually impossible extent, because of him effectively being a fixed point in time, not in the same way as Vanessa Long, but similarly so.
So yeah, Word of God says I’m wrong, that Haka is indeed superhumanly strong and more so than Legacy (until he becomes Iron), but I still like my vision of a totally human Haka. The idea that he is just muscular hypertrophy to a normally impossible extent, and that immortality is his only paranatural quality, just seem more correct for a character based on the actual Maori culture (or any other real tribal society from any point in human spacetime). Legacy is a different thing, both because America as a nation is very different from the Maori as a people, and because the later revealed Wellspring endowment of Legacy is a very different powersource than temporally siphoning multiple universes of Hakas into just two individuals and thereby making them something with magical superpowers of muscles that break physics.