So, I haven't listened to this yet, so let the flame wars begin, but I'm a little annoyed at that time stamp. That will be a doozy to plop onto my iphone to listen to (it's 182MB which is a lot for a podcast, especially when subscribed to others) and from the show notes (and previous schedule) it sounds like they just as easily could have done this as two episodes (or even 4 episodes?!??!???). Can we just...not do it this way again? I was looking forward to my Tuesday fix, but sadly I can't listen to this behemoth yet.
Side note? Am I the only one who would prefer that they slow down and savor these a bit more? I would have been okay with several Environment Letters Pages by this point. And I would rather have an episode for each of the Sentinels instead of a 3+ hour one for all of them. It really is okay if there are less questions to go through for a certain character by themselves (if that's a concern), as there is starting to be a trend of "Here's the bare skeleton of a story since we got A TON of questions about this one thing so we will wait until 30 minutes from now to share about this thing instead of sharing it where it logically makes sense" and that is equally odd to me. If this is their way of getting rid of interludes because less people listen to them, please find a different option.
Still love the Letters Page and will eventually listen to this one in chunks...but probably not before listening to upcoming, shorter ones. Thanks, folks.
I think that you're going to be in the minority regarding the episode length, there. While I don't anticipate any/many more episodes pushing this length in the future, I wouldn't be surprised if pretty much every episode from here on out pinged 1.5+ hours.
I do agree with you, regarding the Environment episodes. If there's a question of what to do instead of the "Interludes", perhaps those could fill the void (not the Void, natch). I, for one, would be particularly interested in seeing what the deal is with Atlantis after all this time, especially with us driving headlong into the Prime Wardens soon...
That…certainly changes my view of that character. I'd always viewed The Scholar as more of a mystic-type character, rather than one powered by cosmic sci-fi weirdness. Hmmm…
Scholar finds the shard and uses it to create his philosophers stone. To my knowledge, Scholar either costumes the shard in the process or discards it afterward, but after the creation of his philosopher stone, I do not beleive he still has the shard. But he needed that mystic-eque connection to ley lines to even find that shard in the first place, and the philosophers stone is more in line with that as well over cosmic stuff.
Also, they talk about Writhe as a villain in Tactics. I had speculated as much a long time ago. It's also more likely now than ever that we actually have card art showing this (take a look at Seer and the shadowy thing grabing him).
Man, I really hope they do something with the whole omegas thing. Like it's a cool way to explain it all, but their bios said "radiation from a local powerplant", and in a Silver Age-styled comic? That's enough.
That being said, easy power origins for anyone making RPG characters...
It was certainly a monster and took me all day to listen to, but I can see how it happened that way.
You cannot tell the story of any individual one of these characters without referencing the rest, and the plan to divide the Void Guard story out was wierd, because it takes almost none of the space for the episode and it would mean the entire future section would have to be in the next episode.
I defintely do not want to see 3 hr episodes being common, that's too intense, but I don't think we're going to see another set of circumstances like this very often.
As for more environment pages, I'm torn about that. I would like a few environment pages, but I'm constantly itching for more story and a week feels like such a long time to wait. I'm already waiting it to be Tuesday so we can get La Capitan, and then I want Fanatic, and Apostate, and Tempest and Scholar and… ect. I can't get enough so keeping the speed like it is works just fine for me, but I get why people might want to take a breather.
I'm with much0gust0 that I hope this is the last time we get an episode this long. I can understand why it happened, but still, it was almost too much.
I think 2 hours is my limit. I was OK with the length of the Argent and Akash episodes and don't want mega long episodes to become a common thing.
Partly because I have trouble processing aural information so if I want to really pay attention to something spoken versus using it as background noise I have to actually sit and concentrate only on paying attention to that... and spending too many hours of doing nothing but sitting and listening to something is hard even if you don't have ADD/focus issues as well (which I do).
Content-wise, personally I'd like them to go over all the characters and teams first and then do normal episodes about the environments, possibly combining any environments without a lot of backstory or where the backstory was already mostly explained in character episodes (like the Realm of Discord or the Nexus or Champion Studios).
I think interludes should be "metaludes", where they're just devoted to things like answering people's followup questions, giving corrections or clarifications, questions about the Sentinel Publishingverse, questions that span multiple characters, etc. Ironically the Live at GenCon Letters Page was a pretty good example of what I'd expect an interlude to contain in terms of question types and content.
Because of how inter-twined the characters are, I don’t think 4 episodes would have been even remotely do-able (heck, they felt that they couldn’t even easily split Sentinels/Void Guard properly).<o:p></o:p>
That being said, I think that what could have worked for this episode would be an artificial break somewhere around the 110(?)-minute mark. Basically, at that point in the episode they’ve covered the first 3 volumes, and answered the questions covering the Sentinels’ real origins. So this seems like a decent spot to have Trevor cut the episode and add in a “Tune in Thursday to The Southwest Sentinels/Void Guard Part 2, where we answer a lot more of your questions, have more reveals, and discuss the future of this superhero team!” Since this would have left a big chunk of info still to be covered, it might have helped drive Thursday listenership, while also breaking the episode up into 2 less overwhelming chunks. (Granted, this brings its own issues, but most of those would be solved by simply by listening to both episodes together).
So is Idealist an Omega? Just we know she is not, is she still lumped in together? When I said there are unanswered questions I meant, did the experiment force some dark force into her? Did her mother had telekinetic powers (or any)? Or was it a kind of latent ability that got triggered with the explosion? Also, she made a clone in her lab at home? HOW? (I love Comic books, doesn't need an answer but since they like to talk 10 min about fake pseudo-sciencecouOmegagh, I think they can answer this.)
After OblivAEon comes out they need to do a Void Gaurd recap once all the art comes out. They have some explaining to do.
SIde Note: does Thiago also go to the South West along with the Contract? Since Mainstay is protecting him from bullets.
Art: The Argent Adept giving help to the Visionary and the Idealist;
Flavor-Text: "Prepare yourselves. The worst is yet to come." - The Argent Adept, Freedom Five Annual #10
When does FFA#10 Happen again? Because it seems like hey crossed over early on. . . (This puts her before Unity, maybe around the Debie timeline.)
I like the longer episodes as I listen to them in my commute and since my commute is about an hour, this episode should cover 3 trips. I think listening to it all at once it might drag but split into hour chunks, I like it.
A question does come to my mind, but if this was covered in the episode and I just happened to miss it, pardon me. They talked about how Medico sort of came about as an idea from the forums, and then the rest of the Sentinels were created to form a single deck. Now, was this thread and disscussion before Infernal Relics came out? I ask because we see the Idealist(without her mask but still in costume) on one of AA's Melody cards.If the idea came around before IR then the image makes sense, but if it was afterwards then I've got to wonder if Idealist was a character in the Multiverse before the conception of thidea for the Southwest Sentinels...
Again, I may just be a terrible listener and that info just went in one ear and out the other. :)