Episode 205 of the Letters Page: Creative Process: NightMist Supporting Cast

Could be quite the varied group as she is a character that’s been around a while

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Brigitte the pixie sounds like one of the more clearly defined Chaotic Good characters I’ve heard of lately. (Or, to use my own “west southwest” type of terminology, she’s “Chaotic Chaotic Good”. D&D players may recognize the Outer Plane of Ysgard, which is a different manifestation of the same alignment.) I’m not a fan of the name, but she’s a pixie, she may have intentionally picked one that would annoy people slightly and get a rise out of them.

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Everyday Kickstarter updates are NOT too much if you ask me, I feel dry on weekends now. XD

“And then he dies!” Fantastic. :slight_smile:

Cucumber-eating groundskeeper Kappa gives me life. :smiley:

I feel like it’d be cool if Virgil was originally meant as some kind of test hero in one of the old magic comics, and didn’t take off, but he was brought back to be a love interest by some writer who thought he was neat.

No, but Nightmist and Lydia is totally a good ship. <.<

“Pfft” is how Oblivaeon describes what happened to the Telenovelaverse. >.>

Adam, don’t eat the podcast listeners.

I’m glad someone asked about the singular entities cover. I still say the one all the way on the left is the giraffe. :V

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Most of the rest of the episode slides off my brain without much engagement; the Kappa bit got me to go read up on Wikipedia, but I didn’t particularly love Faye’s version, and the Virgil Miller character is neat, but pretty self-contained. But there was one section of the episode that absolutely lit my imagination on fire, and that section was two words: “child detective”.

One of the very few pop-culture works I’ve ever enjoyed watching which has no “speculative fiction” elements (no fantasy, no science fiction, no horror, and an absolute minimum of “movie magic” level suspension of disbelief, regarding things like a gun that never runs out of bullets), as almost everything I enjoy does, is the TV show “Veronica Mars”. I also grew up occasionally reading The Hardy Boys and a little bit of Nancy Drew, not really distinguishing the two very much, back when I was very young. So crossing Drew and Mars in my head, I can put together a very compelling vision of the stories you’d tell about a “teen-aged” Faye Diamond, who sleuths her way in and out of dangerous but mundane situations, under the watchful eye of her grandfather (or, in a modern revisionist version of the story, just make Joe her father and write the intervening non-investigator Diamond out). She never sees any of the eldritch horrors lurking in the shadows, since Joe ensures that she’s protected from that, but he allows her to endanger herself by confronting normal criminals and the like, hoping that she’ll both learn valuable survival skills and get her thrill-seeking out of her system.

So yeah, my top twelve or so sub-genres of storytelling are all SF of various types (counting “superhero” as one genre which is 99% SF, if you include the “movie magic” stuff that Punisher-type characters almost always have). But “mystery” is the 13th of these genres, and I really love the idea of a pre-Nightmist Faye having some “girl detective” comics in the 50s or the like, with Joe standing in for the Comics Code itself and protecting her from exposure to any “seduction of the innocent” elements. A few easter eggs from recently-banned Cult of Gloom comics, where a cultist that was named in those old books shows up as a random seemingly-normal mook in one of the post-Code tales, would make for great connective tissue.

So yeah, that’s this entire episode for me, pretty much. Two words = a whole new comic line that I want to read obsessively.

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Locke the Werewolf Hunter turned Werewolf. Wonder if we’ll hear soon if he has any part to play in Alpha’s story or the Apex event. They cut off his story pretty abruptly. I sure hope he hasn’t been “Locke”-ed in Nightmist’s basement for 20 years, even if it’s voluntary.

I disagree with them stating that Virgil Miller isn’t a hero. He’s not a main character or part of a team, but he has powers and fights evil for altruistic reasons. It’s ok to show or imply there are more heroes out there beyond the scope of the stories told. Heck, I think they mentioned in the OblivAeon episode that Stuntman and Naturalist fight alongside a bunch of unknown/minor European heroes when OA attacks Stuntman’s home town in France.

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Locke/Alpha for next shipping episode.

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Geeze, we have one male werewolf and one female werewolf in the entire world who aren’t evil like most werewolves, and you’re immediately wanting to pair 'em off…kinda lycanthropist of you there dude.

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So the pixie, Brigitte, is interesting to me! I like her concept, as a sort of magical refugee who makes herself a part of Faye’s life - definitely without perfect skill or knowledge, but lots of enthusiasm!
But given some of the stuff they mentioned about her role in stories, and when she was created…I feel like she’d be Sentinel Comics’ Scrappy Doo, is what I’m saying.

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I’m just cackling because Adam’s trying to do the Obi-wan accent and the longer he tries, the more he’s just transforming into Ringo Starr as we listen.

“I haven’t gone by Ringo since, oh, before you were born, love.”

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I was thinking of the episode of Samurai Jack (like 3 or 4) where he meets some fish people, and they sound like Alec Guiness, Ringo Star, and Sean Connery… and the close captions tell you who they are impersonating

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I think he just ended up with Wakko Warner.

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Not gonna lie, this mostly feels like an introduction to the targets we’ll be seeing in a Diamond Manor environment… I also wonder if Mister Fixer’s garage will make an appearance in the Rook City deck.

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I was thinking Orko from Masters of the Universe - willing to help, but likely to cause more problems.

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First off, neat episode. I quite like these weird supporting cast members.

Regarding Wager Master and those confused about why he follows the rules: I have a pretty good idea. It’s that Chaos is paradoxical; it can’t exist without Order (a fact that isn’t true in the opposite direction; Order can exist without Chaos just fine.)

If you have a pattern, and you introduce a random element, that’s chaos. But the more random elements you introduce, the less of a pattern there is. Eventually, new random elements are just part of the static, at which point your chaos is just another form of order, and to make things change you would need to create new patterns.

Wager Master works that way. If he could just do whatever, on every whim, there wouldn’t be any rules, and the chaos that he introduced would be indistinguishable from the background radiation of the world. By having fairly strict rules, he both creates an avenue that encourages people to engage with his weirdness, and ensures that he can’t get so weird that it loops around to normal again.

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Just finished listening and I am very curious about the implications of a world where people catch, trade, and battle scientific disciplines like Pokemon.

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Is that how Banner got his 7 PhDs?

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I cringe every time a writer tries to indicate someone’s intelligence by the number of Ph.D.s they have! 1 means you’re perseverant. More than one means you’re a glutton for punishment.

I also really enjoyed that characterization of scientific conferences. It’s pretty excellent.

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Even more so, it’s a complete misunderstanding of what a PhD means.

A PhD isn’t a smarty-pants badge and having more than one doesn’t show you to be smarter. A PhD shows that you have completed the minimum training necessary to be a researcher. The PhD path isn’t really about acquiring deep knowledge of the subject (though that will happen to some extent); rather it’s about gaining the skills to perform and publish research. Once you know how to perform research, you don’t need to learn it again, unless you’re moving to a very distant field for some reason, say, computers to music or from biology to mathematics – but most universities would be very leery of that move, like why are you unhappy with the degree you got already? Graduate programs don’t like having their time wasted by people who aren’t actually going to use it.

In general, getting multiple PhDs would be like trying to become the best plumber ever by going to trade school over and over. It just doesn’t work that way.

Like, it would probably make sense for Bruce Banner to have a double-doctorate in particle physics and biology. Those are not closely related fields and would have pretty different requirements. But you wouldn’t then add an additional doctorate in nuclear physics; you’d just do post-doctorate work in nuclear physics based on your closely related particle/high energy expertise.

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According to Thor Ragnarok, Banner actually has seven PhD’s. Although none of them are in piloting alien spaceships.