Episode 224 of the Letters Page: Creative Process: The Harpy foes

Good luck with that whomever these folks are.

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Quick note on the Corrector. I’ve noticed over the years that the idea of criminal justice operates on a sliding scale with preventing crime on one end and punishing the perpetrators on the other. I’ll leave it up to y’all as to where the US legal system falls on that scale. But that sort of thing is also reflected in how superhero stories are told. Gone are the classic “crime fighters” that beat up “crooks” and hand them over to the police. Instead we have stuff like outside context issues, disaster relief, or countering schemes.

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“Avians and Arcanists” sounds like a bird-based knock-off D&D. :slight_smile:

I love Adam’s “I wish it were true” as the segue music plays.

So what they’re saying is we need to team up the Morrigan and Blood Countess so they can take the Harpy down, and also ship them. :V

Deer centaur? :smiley: New favorite character!

Lawyer episode! :smiley:

The fake comic history framing for everything Sentinels really does add a lot to the storytelling when they make characters like Moxie. God DAMN did it take them forever to reveal that name. XD

Definitely want to know what’s on the list of names. ;D

Okay, but did the Matriarch ever use auks or any similar bird?

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Is it just me, or did C&A recreate both the Batman villain Lock-Up and the magic system from Sanderson’s Warbreaker in their brainstorming?

Did the Cult of Gloom forget the card art where Harpy melts off their patron’s face/skull with a fire-hose stream of magic birds?

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So, the “Wings of Time” Disparation story finally gives us an explanation for the flavor text on the Final Wasteland’s Skunk Ape. There was a Matriarch that visited the Final Wasteland, just not our Matriarch. I feel like that’s been a long time coming.

Also, I’m having a hard time imagining the Corrector operating out of Rook City. The Organization’s presence gives him plenty of targets to go after, but if he becomes too successful they’re just going to off him. Maybe he’s just too fixated on the Harpy to care about the corruption around him?

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I could see it going a couple ways. First is he just avoids going into Rook City except to go after Harpy. The alternative is that the Chairman steers him toward who the Collector THINKS is the Organization, but is really competition.

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Not just you on the Lock-Up similarity, I was fully expecting them to come back from naming them and go “whoops, too close to another villain, our bad.”

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Not the first time they have a character similar to Marvel and DC properties. Are you forgetting the Wraith?

I was thinking The Corrector reminded me of Inspector Javert from Les Miserables, until he built his own prison. I’m wondering if, in the metaverse, he was originally inspired by Javert and became more connected to the American for-profit penal system when the problems with that moved more into the public eye.

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back to the Garfield thing- We talk about John being a cartoonist, but he works for an advertising agency not a weekly strip, right?
“Arbuckle the client needs a poster of Rhinos bowling by next week for their new promotion”
I seem to remember him and Odie’s owner talking about market related stuff

Wiki entries I’ve looked at never really specify beyond Cartoonist.

Judge Mental confirmed Harpy nemesis!

(Just kidding, but given her affinity for court-related villains, it seems like the logical next step.)

As far as legalized heroes work, I assume that the Freedom Five are considered some form of civilian disaster response team, with a handful of quasi-legal powers given to them as long as they accept government oversight of the use of their powers, and Bunker initially deployed as a military attaché. Wraith probably breaks a lot of those rules with how she investigates, but the others don’t.

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On this note, I went and checked out those Super Eyepatch Wolf videos Adam mentioned.

The computer buying one was eh, but the Garfield one is astounding. If you can handle super creepy imagery and existential despair, I’d recommend it. I knew a few of the things he talks about ahead of time, but not everything! :smiley:

My first thought when they started brainstorming the Corrector was definitely of Javert. And then my second was of Darkwarrior Duck (who is also a philosophical cousin of Iron Legacy). :wink:

Moxie, though … okay, I know Christopher in particular is a Stormlight Archive fan, but what her powers really reminded me of was Brent Weeks’ Black Prism. That series (which is complete! You can go read it all without waiting for anything) is like Game of Thrones with a Sandersonian magic system, entirely based on the idea that users can look at a color, fill themselves with its energy, and then produce a solid object out of the energy with properties defined by the color. But also, some really terrific characters who go through quite the journeys. It definitely was “the power of color! …but, okay, that’s super cool.”

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I am supremely happy this sentence exists. :smiley:

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I just dove into the Disney wiki, and boy howdy are there a lot of parallels between SotM and Darkwing Duck.

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I am happy to oblige!

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The Corrector is one of the most ripe-for-Justification characters that C&A have ever invented! He’s such a cool idea for a type of anti-villain that should exist in the same narrative space as anti-heroes like Expatriette (or that weird knockoff “The Punisher” made by the obscure publisher Timely Comics, prior to Sentinel Comics buying them out and burying all their crappy IPs…seriously, what kind of a company thinks that a flying android who’s always on fire should be their flagship superhero?). But he’s also so obviously an ill-thought-out idea that has huge amounts of logistical problems. That’s why you need a Justifier to help you work through all the details.

Obvious issue the first: making your own prison, so that you can lock up criminals who you think deserve more punishment, is not really a single-person operation. Nothing about this person suggests they’re capable of having a team working with them, but you can’t have a prison with one guard who’s also the warden who also feeds the prisoners and keeps the electricity on and makes sure there’s hot water in the showers (for reasons of sanitation, not prisoner comfort). In part this lack of resources would play into how brutal he is, combined with the need to maintain secrecy; he can’t afford to keep dozens of criminals locked up for their whole lives, so he has to take the approach of trying to brutalize them with torture and dehumanization, until they’re clearly so traumatized that they’ll spend the rest of their life never daring to disobey his last orders, even when they’re clearly beyond his reach and have access to the normal law enforcement system to be able to report him. Thusly, his captives don’t stay for any longer than necessary to break their wills, because he needs his facility to be a revolving door, with only one cell and only one captive to think about at a time; he would lament the need to be this way, wishing that he could expand his operation and bring in more crooks to teach them what real justice means, but he simply isn’t capable of that. (All this is entirely ignoring the issue of money; I assume he has to have Maia Montgomery levels of wealth-without-need-to-work, in order for this operation he runs to be even vaguely possible. The main reason he’s a Harpy foe and not a Wraith foe is probably simply geographic; he’s as far away from Rook City as makes sense while still being American.)

I paused the episode to write this post around the time they mentioned the idea of Brianna Hawke out-legalesing him, which probably doesn’t work super well for this version of the character I’m envisioning; he’s not a computer from an original Star Trek episode, you can’t make him catch fire and melt down just by making him contradict his own operating system. But I do like the idea that he tries to stay in legal compliance as much as possible, given the fact that he’s inherently breaking legal statues against vigilantism and brutality, because he wants to minimize how hypocritical he’s being and how guilty he feels at the end of a day of whipping his captives. So I’m going to also say that he’s an obsessively knowledgeable legal expert, probably an actual lawyer himself (this would give him the level of money we’re talking about, if he won some very high-profile cases and then made savvy investments and stock trades to turn his first billion into ten more billions which each became ten more billions, until he could afford to do literally nothing else with his time than this anti-villain thing), and that in addition to keeping the lights and the water and the heating and so forth operational in his facility, he also has a computer (or an entire bank of Mega-Computers, to parallel the Wraith again) that’s NOT in his facility, but that he spends almost all his time when he’s “not on shift” there instead sitting at this bank of computers, obsessively reviewing and memorizing every legal statute that’s on the books in the area near him. This plus the facility itself so thoroughly monopolizes his time that he probably goes days without sleep, making him even more irrational and thus even more vicious in his punishments, a cycle that eventually thwarts the near-perfect precautions he’s taken to ensure that this scheme of his doesn’t fall apart, and that’s how he’s eventually discovered and taken down by Brianna Hawke and perhaps one Freedom Five member (I would specifically not use Wraith here, even though anyone with superpowers tends to overshadow the non-powered lawyer in this scene; maybe it can be Bunker showing up with no suit, or Absolute Zero when he’s feeling particularly glum about his lot in life, because the other members are simply busy fighting three Vengeance villains or something). When Brianna does the out-lawyering thing at him, then, his reaction would not be “ERROR ERROR MUST ARREST MYSELF”, but rather “Don’t you think I know that!? I desperately WISH I could do this in more perfect compliance with the law, but I’m just one man, trying to do the job that society as a whole has turned over to a bunch of corporate contractors because nobody cares about real justice any more! You shouldn’t arrest me, you should give me all that government money your costumed clown-show gets! If I had an entire Tower and all your support staff and everything, I wouldn’t have to beat and terrorize my captives and violate the Geneva convention; I could do this RIGHT, and I wouldn’t waste my time on the hijinx you all get up to which result in more criminals going loose on the streets!”

Naturally this argument doesn’t convince Briana or the FF member, and Corrector (I don’t like that name, and in my vision he wouldn’t use it, it’d be a label that newspapers slapped on him, which he hates) does still end up going to actual prison for his actions, getting all his assets seized and frozen, so that even once he eventually does get out, he isn’t capable of going right back to what he was doing. But to make that Star Trek Computer story eventually happen after all, his second story arc could involve him finding some fallen chunk of the Celestial Tribunal after it blows up in earth orbit or something, and he figures out how to reprogram the robots so they’re no longer obedient to their original programming; instead, he sets them to work building him a new Corrections Facility and then operating it “properly”, perhaps with the aid of a few contacts who used to work at The Block and are interested in seeing the concept made to work again. This time, he’s done a good enough job that mundane methods aren’t capable of stopping him, and the only way he’s able to be shut down again is indeed by using insanely specific legal minutia to paradox the computer core into destroying itself, shutting down all the robots and leaving Corrector unable to continue doing his thing. In this case I’d probably rule that he escapes, and the heroes spend several years worrying about how he’s going to come back with another supervillain scheme to rebuild Omnitron or something, but ironically in this case he actually does give up villainy after having failed the second time, accepting that he’s simply not capable of doing what he hoped to do.

Yeah, once again, I really like this character.

(By the way, to briefly talk about the preceding character, I see The Gaoler as clearly being Morrigan’s version of what Hela in Thor Ragnarok did with The Executioner.)

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