I think there’s a high chance of them showing up on various cards, but a low chance of them showing up as their own deck. Would be pretty neat, though. Maybe we should flood the Patreon with questions about them to try and express interest. ;p
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Well if they aren’t a deck, they definitely should be.
Listened to the episode once and had a lot of comments I wanted to make, and then listened a second time and couldn’t find any of the prompts that I wanted to respond to. So her goes with attempt three:
I think the word that Adam was groping for to describe Christopher is “hyperactive”. “Manic” also works, but is a little less on-the-dot as an antonym for “tired”.
As to the question of whether people are constantly giving birth in both realms all the time, I feel like there probably aren’t so many humans in AEternus at any one time that there would be a lot of pregnant women there, let alone women that are just about to give birth. So I’m not sure that the extra bit about a spell destroying the spawning demon was necessary.
Since they eventually decided that the spawn-demon was in Japan when it died, that demon may have been in the form of an Oni or Yokai of some sort, but because it’s actually a shapeshifter, it adopts whatever form is present in the local culture, the better to integrate itself into the folktale schemas of the area. So, at the same moment, an Indian woman was carried off to “Naraka” (AEternus), and a shapeshifting AEternal that was marauding in Japan as a Yokai created a spawn which it failed to bring back to AEturnus with it. The younger shapeshifter adopts the form of a Japanese baby girl, and the two grow up as seemingly near-identical twins (eventually becoming less identical, when the spawnling notices that the parents are weirded out by having a strange baby, which they found in the bushes or whatever, look too much like the one which the mother gave birth to). Meanwhile, the son of the pregnant Indian lady grows up in “Naraka” as the servant of a self-proclaimed “Lord of the Asuras” or whatever.
The “odd” and “unusual” word that C&A were looking into at around the 24-minute mark, the word they wanted was “eerie”. This story of demons and torment isn’t a horror story, it’s a “weird fiction” tale, designed not to scare the audience but rather to unsettle them slightly. AEturnus feeds upon torment because torment is an energy of conflict and change; it is fundamentally contrary to any form of comfort or stability, but it doesn’t always manifest as the ultimate agony of sustained torture; that’s the torment-energy equivalent of a hydroelectric dam, and sometimes all you need is a car battery, or even just a couple of D-cells. So sometimes the “torment” is just a mild degree of unhappiness, which might manifest as soap-opera drama rather than absolute horrible suffering. AEturnus at its worst can indeed be a place of complete monstrosity, but it is also empowered to a small degree by basically any discomfort that any person ever experiences, at least if there’s a “demon” nearby to harvest that emotional energy before it can dissipate.
Without getting too much into stuff that shouldn’t be discussed here, some of the writers of this story would have presented them as like separated-at-birth siblings, and others like a destined romance…and some as BOTH. But this is definitely one of those X-Files kinds of cases, where the will-they-won’t-they dynamic between them is crucial to the way the characters play off each other, and even ignoring the sorta-step-sibling angle, it would ruin that tension between them if they ever actually became a couple. They need to have a very intimate yet professional connection, enabling them to deal with all of the situations they get themselves into during an adventuring career.
Before they came up with the “fear stare” idea, everything they’d previously said indicated that the demon girl was basically a Doppelganger, who not only shapeshifts but also reads people’s minds, enabling her to appear as exactly what other people expect her to be. (Also, I’m very curious as to what Christopher thought he was saying when he mentioned “doing a Baphomet thing”. Don’t look that word up if you’re below 18 or at work.)
I’m very much picturing Darkstryfe as an Elric-type character, who would be built as a Warlock/Hexblade in D&D terms. He’d be incredibly over-the-top and a massive edgelord, while Akare tries to pretend she’s a totally normal Japanese teenager (I really want her to live in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, just for Demon City reasons). I totally agree with Adam that the dynamic between these two is flat-out amazing, that Darkstryfe feels human aversion to murder but also believes intellectually that it’s totally okay, whereas Akare’s nonhuman origin has effectively made her a sociopath, who could murder a hundred people and never feel the slightest discomfort, but knows intellectually that human society condemns murder as wrong and has all sorts of reasons for it, so she adheres to that moral principle despite feeling no attachment to it.
I totally disagree that a sword exists solely as a killing war weapon; if you’re going to say that a spear is useful for hunting and a knife is useful for craft purposes, then a sword is in that same wheelhouse. If any weapon exists solely for combat, it’d be something like a flail or a halberd, which is totally impractical except for its use in specific battlefield maneuvers that are specific to the armor and weapons that your opponents are expected to have.
I like that these are two Asian characters with unusual skin tones for their area; Darkstryfe would probably be genetically Dravidian, while Akare’s appearance would be well within the Japanese average, but intentionally leaning toward light skin, since this is viewed as more attractive by the cultural mainstream over there. The fact that AEternus was almost certainly designed by American Christian-raised writers to be literally the Judeo-Christian Hell, and yet it fits so perfectly with these two Asiatic cultures. I definitely think these are two of the best characters C&A have ever made, right up there with Naturalist and Kaargra Warfang and Void Guard Mainstay and Greazer Clutch (and possibly Morrigan and some of the other Fey, though I can’t be sure on those until we see more of them).
They never answered when the readers learn that AEternus itself is alive. I can certainly picture a lot of very appropriate entities which the Dread Will of AEternus could appear as, such as the Black Man of witch folklore (who may or may not be a Mask of Nyarlathotep, and Nyarlathotep itself could be equated to AEternus), or the main character of the song “Red Right Hand”, with its extreme Southern Gothic vibes (probably also applicable to the Dark Tower novels, but I’m not familiar with those).
The big difference between Torment and Gloom is what I said earlier about Torment being a dynamic force; Gloom is relatively static. If you cut yourself and you’re feeling pain from the wound, you’re being Torment by that wound; when the cut heals and leaves just a spot on your skin where some of the nerves are dead and you don’t have much feeling anymore, that’s Gloom instead. If you never felt any pain at all, then you’d definitely be experiencing a degree of Gloom; even if you could still feel pleasure, you’d probably still be in Gloom’s thrall, because any time you weren’t feeling pleasure, it would feel like a nagging absence and you’d be depressed about it. In time, even the pleasure wouldn’t do much for you anymore. Ultimately, Gloomweaver has more in common with The Graey than he does with AEternus.
I share Adam’s disgust and frustration (disgustration?) with April Fool’s Day, assuming that he isn’t fooling about disliking it. (We can be fairly sure that he’s kind of into Christopher’s terrible puns, or they wouldn’t keep doing the bit where the latest terrible joke makes Adam quit the podcast. But at the same time, “stupid lying day” sounded like genuine annoyance on his part, and if so, then I’m definitely 100% with him on that. I’ve hated April Fools with a passion at least since 2004 or so, when I was working on a project on the (now long-vanished) Magic the Gathering forums. It actually got me hired as a freelance writer for the game for a couple of years, but I didn’t know that would end up happening; back then it was just something that I did to make my time passed, and I was intensely frustrated on April Fool’s Day, when the forum was rendered unusable for an entire day, just for a stupid joke. I’ve always hated the general concept of pranks, since they’re usually not 100% consensual, and a day devoted specifically to pranks is really a day that makes me want to lock myself in a small room and wait for it to be over, having no interaction with the outside world until this insanity has passed.
One more small disappointment: if they got a letter from a user calling themself Dr. Fate, they should have done the Nabu voice.
If OblivAeon got his way, I feel like it wouldn’t so much be “no universe exists”, and more like “an entire universe of absolutely nothing is now everything which exists”. So Wager Master’s “backup copy” would probably have come into existence therein, after OblivAeon looked around at the universe of nothing and went, “welp, a job well done” and then effectively switched himself off. So after that, Wags would be the only entity which existed, and could recreate a universe in his own image, but given that his entire personality is “hey you, caper for my amusement”, I don’t think he’d be very satisfied with being the only being in existence. If he could entertain himself adequately with his own clones, then he’d have no need to go to the bother of bugging our heroes; he needs beings other than himself to exist, in order to be able to enjoy annoying those beings. I for one could be perfectly happy as the only being that existed in a universe of nothing, so long as I had the power to create objects that I could amuse myself with…but I’m not Wager Master, and in fact he’s pretty much the exact opposite of me in almost every way. So it absolutely makes sense that he would want to help the heroes thwart OblivAeon; his backup copy might not even have been meant for OblivAeon winning, but rather OblivAeon noticing that he meddled and destroying him for it.
And my favorite reveal from the kickstarter was the Fey Court; they were absolutely the most interesting thing to me, since they’re so different from any other villain we have.
Whew, what an episode!
People always forget the hyphen, and that just – it bothers me…
I have no idea why they would even put the hyphen in there; it makes as much sense as calling your green car “my green-car”. Fey is an adjective and a noun; the Fey Court is a court of feys, or it is a court which is fey. Neither of these requires a hyphen to properly denote it.
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While the two should never have been in a true romance there is another story complication… She has a little sister. The sister might have been interested in the edgy bad boy hanging out with her sister. He might have allowed his mixed up “what are you doing step bro?” feelings for his soul bonded partner to refocus on someone that looks a lot like her.
Hypothetical deck I think would look something like EE Harpy.
Not card, double sided soul tokens that could be flipped to show how “human” each of the pair are.
Low humanity for her is demon body war form
High humanity for her is doppelgänger infiltrator possibly healing as she feels compassion
Low humanity for him is forbidden magics attacks
High humanity for him would be regret and penance probably card draw and damage blocking
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My biggest guess is legal reasons. And to allow for people to point out that there is a hyphen. Fey court can be any ol’ court of fey in any story. The Fey-Court is Sentinel Comic’s very own fey court, with characters owned by Sentinel Comics.
I would be quite surprised if they removed tokens for two decks, just to add them to a new one.
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Finished listening. This whole episode was on point. Loving these heroes.
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I think you mean “en point”. 
The problem there is that as written, drawing on the soul and drawing on Aeternus isn’t actually contradictory; one person could be drawing on both. If I wanted to do it quickly and easily, I’d have four total cards, like the Sentinels, but the four are Darkstrife, Painstake, The Soul, and The Power.
Darkstrife and Painstake are normal hero cards. Darkstrife’s inherent Power says “Flip the Power” and Painstake’s inherent Power says “Flip the Soul”. The Power and The Soul also have powers written on them, based on who has it at the moment. Then you have cards that do extra effects if someone has The Power, or extra effects if someone has The Soul.
For variants, you could mess with how things flip - maybe there’s a variant where Darkstrife flips The Power and The Soul, and Painstake flips one, uses its power, and then flips it back. Or a variant where Darkstrife does something big and then puts one of the cards under his card, and Painstake returns a hidden card to play with either side showing.
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Well, if any hero is going to have a card called The Power, it should be The Babe. (What babe?)
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So less extra character cards and more like indestructible ongoings?
Actually… what if “soul” and “power” cards are more like Tempest’s “weather” cards? And then they have powers like destroying or burying a soul card for one effect, or them having persistent support effects (like… a soul card that has a minor HP regen, or a power card that deals 1 damage to the non-hero target with the lowest health).
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Coming back around to pure lore, I think this episode crystallized a thing that I hadn’t thought of too much directly, which is one of the ways in which Sentinel Comics is the least like the modern comics industry.
Old-school comics had a lot of anthologies: things like “Detective Comics”, or “Weird Fantasy”, or “Journey into Mystery”. They often had more than one story per issue, or served as a place for recurring adventures of minor characters.
These anthology comics started fading in the 60s, and were pretty much all gone by the early 80s; there were a few “semi-anthologies” that were “The Main Superhero And A Rotating Cast Of Minor Superheroes”, like the Defenders reboot, but in general the system was over. If Marvel or DC wanted to introduce a new hero, they’d either do it as a guest in another hero’s book, or they’d just launch a 6 or 12 issue limited run and see how it did.
This occurred to me because in the world of Sentinel Comics, the anthology comic never went away. “Tome of the Bizarre” and “Cosmic Tales” never transformed into a specific character’s story, even if various characters took them over for short blocks of time. If Darkstrife and Painstake were Marvel characters, they wouldn’t have popped up in Tome of the Bizarre. They either would have been introduced in a story like Nightmist or Fanatic, and then given their own backstory, or the editors would have planned a full arc for them from minute one.
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Just wanted to note the name as provided by Christopher is Darkstrife with an i not Darkstryfe with a y.
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Geez and here I thought he was a 90s edgelord. Lame! 
(For some reason the system automatically removed my quote, but I was able to put it back in. Weird.)
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Thanks! Fixed it in my post.
When they first described the demon-powers bursting out of the hero, the main image that came to my mind was Mogget from Sabriel.
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You mean it’s not DarXtryffe? I feel like this is a typo :V
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Gotta leave something to the imagination for the 
XTREMIVERSE
version!
Anyway, I feel like we’re not discussing the most important part here. Who do we ship them with? 
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I mean, as the episode was in progress, I was already shipping them with each other. I’m glad C&A tackled that point in the process. I’d definitely be one of the fans going “one soul, two bodies, they are already bound to each other. It’s not incest, they aren’t related. It’s just a really complicated masturbation.”
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I think it’d be a safe bet to say Akari would end up with a nice, shy Japanese boy. Or at the very least, there would be someone with a crush on her that she would be oblivious to.
I’m really glad C&A addressed their connection in the episode; sibling dynamics don’t show up enough in media, but it can be done really well and makes for much more interesting interactions.
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