Posted a day early with some pictures
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Great music. The alchemists bit was fantastic. And I am certain this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Inversiverse Matthew.
But mostly and unsurprisingly I am just really excited hearing that Trial of Baron Blade is still on their list.
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Re: the question about the longest a fleshchild confronting its original has lasted, we clearly need a Proletariat (or other duplicator) fleshchild to take the record. How would most people even know that’s not just another “regular” copy? Even Proletatiat himself would probably get confused if there were enough of him out at once.
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Released a day early? Madness! Chaos in the streets!
These pictures are fantastic. 
C&A really know how to ham and cheese it up.
Oh my god, the opening remix!
Adam’s reaction to the tie.
We really, really need to get the soundtrack to this episode.
Revenant and Apostate? Okay, but which was which?
This question about Seraph… Oh my god… XD I love Mark.
Wow, Adam actually wanting to talk about a cover!
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My instant mental image was Tachyon in a side-scroller picking up a jillion coins.
Seriously strong 90s energy from all the music!
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For those who aren’t aware, the music was a mix of the Sentinels video game OST and the precious Lazer Ryderz music:
Also if anyone here who is a Contributor on the Patreon could either confirm or deny they got access to the audio files, that would be much appreciated - the description says Patreons would be able to access them but I don’t seem to be able to do so with my Collector tier account. 
At this moment I am not sure if this is due to being on the lower tier or because the episode was posted early and maybe there’s more stuff coming? Hopefully?
The episode got released a day early and we got told on discord to expect something today on Patreon. If it’s like 2018 then I suspect we will get audio files for music used but will know for sure later today regardless of what level of support you have.
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Patreon supporters should see a post now with audio files. https://www.patreon.com/posts/audio-files-from-87630954
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I was about to ask… Well, more reason for me to join, I guess… hmmmm…
I don’t think that ruse would last long, 'cause the real Proletariat would simply try to re-absorb the dupe and it wouldn’t work, tipping him off to something being fishy—unless the fake is somehow separated from the real Alexsandr.
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Y’know, Biomancer could make a whole bunch of identical Proletariat fleshchildren (assuming he can’t have them just duplicate his duplication) and use the mob to pretend to be the real deal in a different geographical location - possibly leading to a great deal of confusion and even Proletariat wondering if some of his copies have gained free will. The guy doesn’t seem to be super-stable at the best of times and his cognitive abilities take a dive when his powers are pushed too far (like in the one adventure with Fanatic) so the possibility of that happening might seem pretty plausible to him. “Did I forget one of me somehow?” Add in cunning fleshchildren programmed to claim they’re the originals and he’s the rogue duplicate and I could see him breaking down pretty badly. “If you were the original, you could absorb us, couldn’t you? But you can’t…” Cue screaming in Russian…
Seems like a very Biomancer thing to do as some part of cunning scheme that will inevitably fall apart completely…
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Ah yes, but it would only seem like it was falling apart, as that was also part of his plan all along…
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“Everything is going according to plan!”
“What plan?”
“Ah…I’ve forgotten, honestly. Let me check my notes.”
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I can’t believe A&C overlooked the obvious choices for their fill-ins at GTG/The Letters Page! Christopher’s new avatar as creator/storyteller is basically Grimm, who seems a better fit than Citizen Anvil anyway. (This is assuming we overlook the intended irony of Anvil/Christopher being the quiet one.)
The new laborer for the art mines is the Argent Artist, possibly consulting with Mr. Hideous (eye of the beholder and all that).
And yeah, Anthony Drake would be good to cover the music… Until you consider that (Diamond) Diva is objectively better in every way!
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Great episode overall!
I would expect an inversiverse story about Seraph’s boyfriend phase to actually be about “Millie”, the bad girl that he swears has a heart of gold but who turns out to actually be Inversiverse Harpy, OMG, What A Shock!! Can he redeem her? (No.)
Also (and this may be an outsider perspective and also I’m very aware that actually unpacking it would indeed need a whole creative process) I was sort of fascinated by how, when given a prompt about what differing canon backgrounds we might get for the Freedom Five, Unity, or Baron Blade, the answers were “maybe they have different personalities”, “it’s about her being an intern”, and “they gloss over it”. Those are all still basically just the comics canon, and I’m curious that they didn’t have any immediate thoughts about differences the way that most modern comics movies can get really weird.
The Freedom Five are all created at the same when Meredith’s Tachyon Emitter overloads and bombards them with cosmic rays! Unity is a brand-new intern at this funny place, Revocorp, working for Dr. Ray Manta on the new BENCHMARK program - is something suspicious going on behind the scenes, and who’s the lady with the eyepatch trying to shoot up the place? Baron Blade’s father is being forced to make weapons for the Russian mob, but gets gunned down by the American superhero Bunker, and Blade declares war on the mob and the heroes at the same time!
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This here is a really, really interesting observation to me because this isn’t even hypothetical, it is what superhero comics have evolved to be.
Since the metaverse is so similar to our own world, it means that this is a process that most likely would happen there as well - which then would have consequences for the RPG era at the very least. The transition from comic book to movie theater screen specifically is something that would have a huge effect. Reboots of character arcs seem to happen all the time (I think - this is with my very limited knowledge of RL superhero popular culture), so what does that mean for Sentinels?
I feel like there is a lot to talk about here.
Edited for actually including the quote. >_>
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Neither my wife nor I were really comics readers a few years ago. She got into it shortly after the first Wonder Woman movie came out. She picked up a bundle of 10 issues of WW to start, and we read them together. What was fascinating to us was that they were ALL Wonder Woman origin retellings. We’ve since learned that DC is apparently notorious for this, but didn’t know at the time. The differences between the versions were pretty striking. Sometimes she’s a god. Sometimes she’s Zeus’ daughter. Sometimes she’s the only child on the island; sometimes she’s in a crowd of them. Sometimes Ares is involved. Sometimes Steve Trevor is around right at the very start, and sometimes she doesn’t meet him till moving off Themiscyra.
It really made me wonder, like, every time there’s a new war, does Bunker release a new issue with Vance as a new recruit for that war? Do Sentinel Comics writers have an utter fascination with showing the Wraith get beat up and resolving to train? Whose origin is different absolutely every time it’s shown?
But every time, the answer is that Sentinel Comics weren’t created organically, they were planned out by people who knew the one true origin for everybody and don’t want/need to revisit that part of the story. They’ve said that the comics companies we know are around in the Metaverse, so just like we know DC for constantly revisiting origins, I figure this is just a thing SC is known for in the Metaverse: not retelling origins, or if they do, staying consistent.
Yeah, I think that is the core issue. Usually, you get these different backstories because a new creator wants to put their own spin on the character, taking the pieces that they consider iconic and playing around with everything else. C&A don’t have that, because they’re ultimately two people who already have an iconic story, and it’s the one that they told.
But they make such amazing Disparations for these characters that I guess I just assumed that when given that question, they’d explain a handful of things that were “iconic” for the characters in the Sentinels metaverse which they were already using in their alternative realities, and maybe give an example or two of things that aren’t.
In that respect, the history of Sentinel Comics bears a lot more similarities to manga than Western comics despite taking a traditionally Western approach to superheroes.
Western supers books are (at this point) defined by an endless churn of rewrites, re-imaginings, reboots and retcons inflicted upon readers by an endless succession of creative teams trying to put their own stamp on other peoples’ characters. Very few modern creators stay on a book for even a couple of years at this point, and the cycle has gotten noticeable shorter within my lifetime. And now, of course, there’s an editorial imperative to make comics mesh with movies, including making radical changes to existing characters solely so that any hypothetical crossover readers who came in through the films won’t be as confused. The tail isn’t just wagging the dog these days, the dog’s being trained to walk ass-backward.
Manga, by comparison, is usually the product of a single writer, sometimes supported by an art team, sometimes doing it all alone, and when there is a turnover on artists the replacements are trained to stick to the established style, not to innovate - something you rarely see in modern Western books outside of Archie Comics, and even they’ve loosed up a lot at this point. If the original creator of a series quits or dies, that’s usually the end of the series. Highly unlikely that anyone is going to be taking over One Piece if Oda is run over by truck-kun, whereas Batman will outlive any number of writers and artists, changing with each new creator. Many mangaka have at least an outline of their book’s entire story in mind before they even start, which just isn’t possible in Western books.
Similarly, Sentinels has an enormous amount of faux-history built, running into the “future” of the RPG, and that history has been created by two people with some inspiration from fans. If truck-kun flattened Christopher and Adam (or, arguably, either of them) I suspect that would be the end of the faux-publishing company they’ve built, although it might limp along with fan-created doujinshi much the same way some manga does.
Can’t honestly see an IRL gaming publisher insisting on continuing with the conceit when they could just use what they have already, or ditch it entirely and just sell the rules by themselves - perhaps with licensing for 3PP supplements, which would likely do wonders to signal boost the RPG engine itself. That can’t happen with things as they stand though - it’s C&A’s sandbox, and there doesn’t seem to be any interest in letting others apply the game engine to other settings.
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Fascinating.
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