Episode 185 of the Letters Page: Creative Process: Expatriette Foes

Technically Setback was a foe at one point.

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I love Adam’s ability to just whip out the “Bye” the same way he says it every week, no matter the circumstance. :slight_smile:

Lowlife has one of the most interesting power sets I’ve ever seen. :open_mouth: That’s totally new!

Man, I do love Creative Process, they always come up with cool, weird character. :smiley:

Adam with the hot Turbo Teen reference! I wonder how many people remember that…

I really hope the Burning Stickman takes up that cockamamie backstory. :smiley:

As for the ethical problem at the end, my take is that, if it’s a case of “The bomb has been rigged to explode if you step over that line” or “This monster will eat those people’s souls if you approach within 20 feet of it”, then you do hold some culpability in what happens because it’s been pre-programmed. (Though of course the programmer shares the bulk of the blame.) You find another way to save everyone.

But if it’s just someone hold a knife to someone else? They’re making the conscious decision in that moment to end that person’s life. It doesn’t matter how many threats they make, maybe they’re hoping the bluff is enough to keep you at bay and they can’t actually follow through on it. If the circumstance allows you to back off and come back another time to save the person, then yeah, you should totally do that, but if it’s an in-the-moment, do-or-die kind of thing? You do it, and it’s not on you.

I have actually been thinking about this dilemma a lot lately, can you tell. :B

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When Adam said he was going to go live in the wilds Christopher said “thank goodness for Storn” That would be Storn A Cook
StornArt - Illustrator, Art, Fantasy
I mainly know him from Hero Games Champions book but he has done many game books in the past (including SCRPG, but he could not remember any specific art when I asked him on FB)

I swear, y’all can’t get out of the silver age even when you try. Like I completely buy a 90s antihero-turned-villain whose codename is Bloodletter, and taking a 90s character and updating them with new name-appropriate powers and a less edgelord schtick is certainly valid for the mid-2000s or 2010s… but then like she coincidentally has a new schtick for which her old codename just happens to be a pun? That’s so silver age of you.

Christopher is unabashedly a Silver Age writer in his core, it’s part of his charm.

I am reminded of the very first Xtremeverse episode with the Prime Wardens, where Christopher was giving Xtreme Captain Cosmic very Silver Agey dialogue and Adam was like “It’s the extreme 90s, tho” and suggested more fitting dialogue.

Christopher just can’t turn off that part of his brain.

As for the episode itself, I was surprised how Horror Story Tropes this whole episode was. Even when we got into the questions about Expat and the Charles siblings it was still super horror-y.

I don’t disapprove, I just admit I wasn’t expecting an Expat story to be so horror-y, heh.

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Yup. As the old CoH fandom put it: We’re heroes, it’s what we do.

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My guesses on Grace’s hero name!
If it’s one word starting with I and she can stop time, then it’s gotta be like Interlude, Intermission, Interval, Interrupt, something like that.

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My thought was “Isolation”.

(I still hate “Quiet Time” as a name for Owen.)

Interlude as a callback to the early days of The Letters Page. I like it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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They may have said it as a throwaway line and made themselves crack up, but I really want a Writer’s Room for Bloody Sunday Times. Expat and Wraith team up to take on Crossword and Blood-Letter?! Yes, please! And can we get at least a single panel with a background drawing of Legacy working a crossword puzzle as an Easter Egg of America’s Cleverest Legacy? :nerd_face::memo:

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The shtick they described for Blood-Letter doesn’t really make sense; it’s clearly an idea that hasn’t been thought through. It wouldn’t be worth the effort of making it work either; if this character existed, they’d be the Sentinel Comics equivalent of Polka-Dot Man or Arms Fall Off Lad, a character who is universally agreed to be terrible and an embarrassment to the company. Generally, though, C&A tend not to do that, so I think they should just abandon the letter shtick for this character. Maybe have Guise or Unity make a crack when they first hear the name, about how it must be this thing, and then spending like 4 panels visualizing it before they realize it’s stupid even by their standards.

I agree! The culpability is totally on the person holding the knife/with their finger on the button, and not on the hero making the choice set by the villain. The thing that distinguishes those situations from the trolley problem is that deals with an out-of-control machine. The outcome is mechanized, with no decision in the loop except the hero’s. A villain trying to argue, “oh, you’re making me do this thing by violating the absurd rule I set” not only set up the situation in the first place but retains the choice to follow through or not, regardless of the hero action. (Sometimes illustrated by having them kill the civilians anyways, even when the hero satisfies their criteria.)

Sure, the hero shouldn’t egg on the villain or antagonize them, but as long as they don’t do those things, I don’t think anyone could say the fault lies with anybody but the villain.

This sounds like something Sentinel Comics definitely would have explored with Wager Master, and I bet that “we’re not going to play your game” was the solution! :laughing:

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