Expat, Setback, and Shardborn

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
#1

So, the topic of this writing prompt came up: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/s/mYyUWH7UNv

And someone brought up Citizen Dawn and Expat. Which logically led to someone saying that of course Setback’s kids would have superpowers even without inheritance, because his luck would just end up giving them powers somehow.

Which brought me to the idea of the Dawn of the Shardborne adventure. I mean, as far as we know they don’t have kids. But heck, with Setback’s luck, some weird lone shard dust just hangs out in the atmosphere for years before coming down into Expat and Setback’s kid.

Because obviously.

Which someone noted that Expat’s reaction would be “And somehow she still keeps getting involved in our lives!”

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#2

I question whether fathering a child with powers would be considered lucky or unlucky for/by Setback, especially if the mother was Expatriette (which seems to be the assumption) with the specter of Dawn in the background. Moreover, having his luck influence a pregnancy (or preventing one) feels extremely squicky to me, suggesting that both the mother’s bodily autonomy and desires are being overridden by his blessing/curse. That’s nasty on a fundamental level.

Also, regardless of whether a pregnancy (with a powered child at the end or not) is good or bad luck for Setback, since he gets hit with both types of fortune unpredictably you’d expect a “whoopsie” pregnancy to result sooner or later. He’s bound to have a lucky/unlucky failure of whatever birth control measures he and his partner are using, and there are only a few of ways to reach 0% chance of accidental pregnancy without abstaining completely. Even the surgical options have been known to fail, as one of my old friends can testify after his vasectomy reversed itself in his 50s.

Since AFAIK that hasn’t ever happened to Setback, he’s either sexually inactive, sterile, extremely cautious about what sex acts he gets involved in, or his two-faced luck doesn’t extend to messing with pregnancies at all - which ultimately involve at least three people, more if the result is a multiple birth with twins, etc. Hardly seems fair that his luck and Kismet’ half-accidental curse could mess with two other people, one not even born yet.

I’m going to headcanon it as his power just plain not influencing the odds or outcome of any pregnancy. He might still wind up with a kid, and that kid might still have powers, but it none of that will be a factor of his luck powers. The other option has some gross implications, and one Teela Brown in all of fiction is more than enough.

YMMV of course, but on this one I don’t care what Christopher and Adam might have to say about it.

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#3

Rich, I honestly cannot make heads or tails of your comment.

For one, the OP didn’t read to me as being about Setback’s powers preventing/causing pregnancy, versus just the idea of the shard dust affecting any kids they did eventually have for whatever reason. So I have no idea why you’re going on about that in the first place.

Along those lines, unless you’re getting IVF treatments, the mother has no real say in what genes from her and her partner that her kids end up with (and neither does the father, for that matter), because that’s not how biology works. So I don’t know why you’d think having Setback’s powers influence what powers the kid ends up with is any weirder or more problematic than his genes in general influencing that.

Finally, birth control failures tend to either be based in biology, or are a failure in not taking/administering them properly. I struggle to come up with that many ways they could go wrong that wouldn’t be immediately obvious and so you’d just not have sex until they were addressed. So there isn’t anything I can think of to read into that either way.

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#4

If you don’t understand why the idea of effectively-magical luck powers influencing both the odds of pregnancy and potential outcomes for the offspring is really disturbing, I can’t help you with that. Even the shard dust concept still implies hereditary effects of the father’s powers, which could lead to some ugly places - but the plain fact of the matter is that Setback’s luck has been portrayed as affecting every part of his life, and that should include pregnancies as much as it does wacky superhero hijinks. That wouldn’t get addressed in the non-existent comics about the character any more than Superman’s potential reproductive issues are, but that didn’t stop Man of Steel, Women of Kleenex from taking a satirical look at them.

If you want to see why “super-luck” and human reproduction are disturbing bedfellows, go read up on Teela Brown from Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels. The implications of her origin, possible psionic luck powers, and ultimate fate have been discussed at length by fans over the years, and for good reason. It’ll at least give you something to think about.

#5

Correct, I don’t understand why it’s disturbing, because in the former case there’s not really any ability for it to meaningfully influence that (Setback’s powers affect probability; they don’t produce miracles, and the ways birth control can fail are not probability-based), and in the latter case that’s already literally how biology actually works.

Because, again, that’s literally how biology already actually works is that fathers get to potentially pass along their genetic contributions as much as the mother does, and there’s no real logical reason why powers should be exempt from that–especially in a case where one parent has powers and the other doesn’t.

I think that you’ve derailed and ruined someone’s attempt at a lighthearted fun thought experiment with making up things out of thin air to be offended by that has zero logical connection whatsoever to either Sentinels lore, how biology actually works, or the OP’s comment.

How about you apologize and back off, we get the mods to delete all of this derail or something, and then we let people give the OP the actual fun lighthearted discussion that is what they intended?

#6

Agreed. I imagine Expatriette has multiple things going to be careful, because she doesn’t see kids as a thing for her, or doesn’t want to be sidelined. But the various ways things work is not “luck.” And she probably has access to stuff that isn’t necessarily real-world stuff.

You brought up a good point in your other response about probability. I wonder if Amanda would trust various medical practitioners enough to do IVF, because she wants that level of control. Depending on when this is addressed, I can see a bunch of subtle or not-so-subtle things that can be worked into any such storylines.

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#7

Yeah, I think basically people see the whole “[x] birth control method is 90% effective” or so on and get the wrong reading of it.

As it’s not really “roll a d100 and 90% of the time you roll over the ‘not getting pregnant’ DC”, it’s more like 10% of the time “the condom broke”, “your body didn’t handle the hormones correctly”, “you forgot to take the pills consistently” type deal, where the percentage is really “this is how many times people using this method got pregnant for any possible reason for failure”.

And for most of these, when they happen IRL and people don’t realize until they’re pregnant, it’s due to unawareness that certain symptoms or drug combos can = birth control failure, not luck. And with how attentive to detail Expat is in general, she’s more likely to have over-researched/planned precisely because of how much a trouble an unexpected kid would be for her.

So while there’s various failure points that could happen, there’s not many where Expat would be unaware they happened to the point of not getting to take a Plan B or similar equivalent. The only one I could really think of is when you get pregnant after a tubal ligation, and even that is more likely to produce an ectopic pregnancy than an actual pregnancy (aka the actual worst luck scenario for that one).

Phew.

And yeah, as for the whole “not getting powers” part of the equation, I feel Setback having powers while she doesn’t is a way bigger factor than Setback’s luck. I would expect there to be a higher chance of the kid getting powers even if Setback had just the serum powers with no luck component (not to mention the question of whether Expat herself has latent power genes of some sort).

And I admit I just don’t see how that takes away Expat’s desires or agency, because mothers don’t get priority or choice about genes in RL anyway unless they go the IVF route.

As for Teela, admittedly going off what details the related fandom wiki put in their summary about her, she’s more analogous to Wellspring’s meddling to me regards what could be viewed as problematic, not anything to do with Setback.

#8

As a note, I don’t expect the luck to affect pregnancy, hence why I considered that if the shardborn origin had any impact at all, it would have to be due to a single random piece of shard dust hanging in the atmosphere so long until such time as Expat and Setback decide to have kids (if ever).

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#9

If I’ve “derailed” (not your phrasing, of course) this for you I apologize to you.

I’m checking out rather than continue yet another pointless disagreement.

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#10

In that case, looping back to the OP more directly:

I could see a case of Expat and Setback’s kid getting Shardborne powers maybe leading to a future sort of “reverse Citizen Dawn” plot where they eventually cause a sort of Shardborne Civil War.

Maybe even an “accidental leader” thing where they didn’t even actually want to replace Dawn, they just wanted to convince Shardborne to not follow her and oops the newly convinced people pick the “kid” (probably really more like young adult if it’s gotten to that point) as their Shardborne leader instead.