The Citizens of the Sun just having a civil war
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The relationship Christopher’s brother has with that song never ceases to amuse me. 
The lesson I am learning is don’t eat too many burgers, or your power will go out.
Let’s hear it for my favorite podcast about parlor quoits! XD
I love that Highbrow starts as Citizen.
Clearly, we need more Head Doctor episodes. Because that’s one of those characters I tend to forget exists, and I can’t remember if we’ve been given any info about them or the Parse incident they’re mentioning.
I love how into this Freedom Five pickup basketball game they get. 
So what’s Adam’s Citizen name, huh? Citizen Equal? Wine? Sommelier?
I’m so glad Christopher referenced Avatar.
“I feel like [Matthew] is the opposite of a redeemption arc.” Adam XD I kind of agree that I’d love to see a redeemed Citizen Dawn, but it’s just not right for her character. That’s what the Inversiverse is for!
Sandwich-conjuring Fanatic variant when?
Note that “deck quoits” can still be found being played on some cruise ships, with the rings made of rope to avoid damaging the decking (and other passengers). To the best of my knowledge this variant is only played casually owing the variations in available space and weather conditions making it impossible to establish fixed rules for professional league play.
Rope or light wooden rings are also widely used in garden quoits variants, at least one of which was commercially sold in the US as “Hoopla” during the 1950s. I’ve had the displeasure of playing it with my grandparents when I was a young child. Hoopla is an intensely boring game with zero possibility of causing bodily harm to your opponents, making horseshoes a clearly superior choice that also provides practical training in how to kill unwanted vermin that have gotten into one’s vegetable garden or chicken house. Learning to throw heavy things accurately so as to minimize collateral damage to crops or poultry is a good skill to have when you live on a farm.
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That just looks like a strange version of Horseshoes.
And I mentioned both these things in Discord, but I would like to see C&A’s reaction to Kubb (if someone wants to bring that up during the Editor’s note, I would find it very interesting), and all the talk of the Sentinels playing sports made me want a nice low-res sports game that included them, similar to Backyard Sports.
So, new character idea. Citizens Command and Control. They’re the ones that actually do all the work keeping things running, especially when Dawn isn’t available.
All well and good until Conquer comes along to displace Control.
I wonder what Citizens Rock and Jelly thought of the death of Citizen Roll in this issue.
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You forgot to mention Citizen Communications, who’s responsible for keeping the other two in touch with everyone else. Probably a telepath who uses hard-to-trace mental frequencies and psychic encoding.
Citizen Intelligence doesn’t mind not being mentioned but you know they’re out their carrying out their shady espionage work. With duplication and shapeshifting they could be their own network of agents and handlers.
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Yes, I was going to make that joke, too. Actually, I think it’s an interesting triumvirate, with Control and Conquer being the internal and external guys, and Command is the only one that can get the two to acknowledge that each other exists (Truth or Dare style).
Well, that was an exciting episode! RIP Highbrow (until your next appearance not that far in the future), your life as a Citizen was short but highly eventful.
When they were discussing villain redemption arcs, my thought was that Sentinels has fewer of those than Marvel, but is different in that more of its redemption arcs stick. The Big Two are full of redemption arcs that last five or ten years and then some contrived situation pushes the character back into villainy. Most X-Men villains, a solid half of Spider-Man’s rogue’s gallery, a decent percentage of Batman foes, a solid third of the Avengers it feels like. But most of them get shunted back to their original versions when someone who liked them as a villain comes along, and I don’t think we’ve seen much in the way of Sentinels backsliding aside from Mr. Jitters.
(Also surprised that Writhe didn’t come up as a scary hero to face as a minion! I would have put him at the top of the list.)
Looking forward to lots of quoit-based questions from the readers.
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That section made me think of the current storyline wrapping up in the Empowered webcomic (which is reprinting volume 10’s physical trade). The lead character’s boyfriend “Thugboy” is a non-powered human who specializes in infiltrating C-list supervillain minion groups and robbing them blind, re-selling all sorts of gadgets, costumes, etc. on ebay to creepy super-fans. His “employers” frequently wind up dead in the end, or at least badly regretting their life choices.
Also a former anti-cape terrorist, but that’s another story entirely and he doesn’t take those kinds of chances any more, sticking to the real bottom feeders of the villain community.
So Thugboy is an inversion of the “scary hero” concept. He’s a minion that supers would find fairly terrifying if they were actually smart enough to realize what he is before it’s too late to matter.
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The whole thing turns out to be a plot by Citizen Divide, who’s been trying to get rid of her partner and pick up Citizen Zero for years.
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The problem is there are a number of characters that work better as grumpy/antagonistic good guys than outright villainy. Magneto for a great example (especially the movies version). He’s interesting when the allegory for abuse and oppression is played up, but really boring when they put him in a “kill all baseline humans” mode. But the status quo is too important. Advantage of Adam and Christopher largely working across time periods, rather than building over decades.
But yes, the redemption arcs that stuck (Harpy, La Commodora) have been REALLY interesting. Frankly, I think that’s part of why so much future speculation has been about LC’s fate, because killing off a character just as she’s getting REALLY interesting just… stinks.
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Their big advantage is the same one most mangaka have - they don’t have an endless series of other creators messing with their continuity and their characters without their permission, in some cases posthumously. There’s very much an East/West divide in how the majority of comics are produced, and the Western approach has led to today’s constant rewrites and relaunches and corporately-dictated big crossover event disrupting the narrative on individual books on a regular basis. Many mangaka have enormous multi-year and even multi-decade story arcs plotted out to varying degrees, so they’re also doing something similar (but more linear) to C&A’s own continuity, with certain points and goals kind of set in stone but wiggle room for developments to slowly fill in between them.
There are exceptions, obviously. Many Western indie creators are allowed to keep control of their characters for at least their lifetime, and some few mangaka have established heirs (often originally part of a long-term team of assistants) to take over a title or continue using characters or settings in all-new stories. But overall, the largely two-person team approach of Sentinels is closer to manga than Western publishing when it comes to creative approach, although it probably draws more influence from fan prompts than most mangaka do.
And of course the RPG will let people establish their own radically divergent continuities over time if they use the setting. Be interesting to see how that evolves over time.
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There’s a reason I loved series like Lodoss and Battle Angel in college, not X-Men…
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talking about what heroes are scariest I can imagine a story where 2 thugs argue about K.N.I.F.E. because one saw the energy knives and efficient neutralizations of targets and the other saw the barroom brawler that dragged one of his buddies into the lady’s toilet for snu-snu.
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