How would you rank the villain-turned-heroes on a scale of heroism?

General GTG Sentinel Comics Lore
1

in other words, to what extent is each of these “heroes” actually a hero? ranked from least to most heroic, i would probably list them as follows

 

1. Luminary: Baron Blade took on the mantle of Luminary and teamed up with the heroes purely out of self preservation. i believe C&A had said at one point, though i’m sure my wording isn’t spot on, that he was willing to help save the earth because it’s where he kept his stuff. if not for Oblivaeon, i’m sure he’d have just kept on villaining, even if his experience with the positive energy field managed to just barely mellow him out

 

2. Stuntman: Ansel only took on the role of a hero because of Oblivaeon, but he’s still not quite as bad as Luninary because at least in the case of Stuntman, it could be said he had previously eased off on the villainy. granted, Stuntman wasn’t exactly a hero before, but at least he wasn’t much of a villain. he was more of just an idle, aimless jerkwad

 

3. Lifeline: i feel bad about putting him so low because unlike all the others, Taragoth truly wanted to help people, even during his time as a villain. but it still took Oblivaeon for Taragoth to realize that he actually needed to communicate with people and work alongside them for him to help them. most of what he’s done wrong can be attributed to ignorance rather than malice, but that doesn’t make him any less of a villain in my opinion

 

4. La Comadora: La Comadora had been doing various acts of good for quite a while before the Oblivaeon event, even though a significant chunk of them were just cleaning up after herself. whatever the case, she had been a force for good for some time, but it wasn’t until Oblivaeon attacked that she became a “hero” in the typical Sentinel Comics definition, teaming up with good dudes and fighting bad dudes

 

5. Akash’Thriya: Like with all the heroes higher up on this list, Akash’s motivation to become a hero came quite some time before he attack. by the time Oblivaeon came around, she had already spent a decent amount of time fighting alongside The Naturalist against threats to nature. but that’s what keeps her from being a full-fledged hero, her scope is much more limited than others. she has no desire to team up with most heroes or fight most villains, though at least she’s not bent on chaos and destruction anymore

 

6. Harpy: Harpy is a genuine hero. her run as the Matriarch was certainly destructive, but it was only a one-off event, and it didn’t take long before her two weird moms Tachyon and Nightmist were able to help her on the path towards heroism. she would try and fail to join the Freedom Five, before becoming a full-fledged member of Darkwatch. i think it’d b fair to say that throughout the publication history of Sentinels Comics, Lillian has spent more time as a hero than as a villain, even if she is haunted by the what she had done

 

(side note: i only listed the Oblivaeon heroes, so i didn’t include Omnitron X or i guess Writhe or whoever else)

1 Like
2

I’d agree on this list but I think La Comodora / Lifeline are a bit interchangeable.  Neither really become a hero until the OblivAeon threat is fully made apparent to them. 

3

Luminary is dead last, of course.  I don't see anyone arguing that.

I'd actually place Akash'Thriya next.  She does heroic things, but they're all based on her own personal priorities.  She's compelled to protect the Earth, and the universe by extention, by her very nature.  She has no interest in protecting people specifically or humanity in general.  She's essentially amoral by human standards, and thus not "heroic."

Stuntman is probably next, indeed.  He's acting heroically because he can't think of anything better to do, and it's kind of fun.  There's a reason he goes bad again in the Tactics timeline and morally ambiguious in the RPG timeline.  But he knew what he was risking when he took on Borr, even though he regretted it later, and that counts substantially in his favor.

The Harpy is definitely a hero, but it's not so much of an effort for her.  It's just kind of where her life led her.  In becoming a hero, she found friends, a mentor, and a purpose in life.  There's no sense of sacrifice from her, and I get the impression that she still has that invincible feeling that comes with youth.  With Nightmist out of her life, I could see her becoming a villain again in either timeline, under the right circumstances.

Lifeline has a similar problem as Akash'Thriya: he's acting for the good of the universe but is willing to make sacrifices to do it.  The difference is that his position is understandable to humans.  I think a lot of people can imagine that if they were in his position and asked to sacrifice, say, Vognild Prime in order to save all the rest of reality, they'd do it.  When he sets aside his own M.O. so that he can work with the humans on their terms, I can't see that as anything less than the actions of a true hero.

La Comodora is not just a hero, she's one of the most important heroes of the multiverse.  She sees the grand scale of OblivAeon's attack for what it is and devotes all her efforts to countering it, but she'd been on the path to becoming a hero before that.  She sent Chrono-Ranger to stop her younger self from dealing so much damage to causality.  She found new homes for all her crew, despite having a strong incentive to keep them with her.  She worked tirelessly to not just empower herself, but to help other heroes become more powerful or even to become heroes in the first place.  And of course she makes a sacrifice which, for her, is possibly more costly than death.

4

Well Luminary is less a hero than a villain fighting for a good cause.

 

I would put Akash slightly above him : It's not moral or the protection of humanity that motive her. She has to protect the Earth, but his humanity would diseapear without harming the world , well, not her problem.

 

Next : Lifeline : He wants to do good, but he is not a team player and follow his ideas, even the stupidest one (I will kill almost all of you so you don't die !) : He is doing his own vision of 'good'. He got a little better as a hero, but he is still flawed that way.

 

Next : Stuntman. He knows the difference between right or wrong and is sincere in his desire to do good and avenge Chamions Studio. He has selfish motive but in the end he turn them to show the better of him.

 

Harpy and Commodora are real heroes for me. It's a draw. Both had a very bad start but redeemed themselves.

Well as a tie breaker, I'll put Harpy second and Commodora first : Commodora was way worse than Harpy and so made more effort to be what she is/were/will be/would will been (I'm not sure with all this time travelling stuff ...)

5

I wonder if Akash'Flora adds anything to the hero equation. Her actions after a certain point suggest that she's basically accepted the idea that humans and their weird little cities are also a part of the Earth and thus also worth looking after and helping.

6

I would rank them as follows from most heroic to least

1) Harpy - Her initial villainy was caused by the relic . Once she could make a choice she chose heroism. She also paid her debt to society and wants to help

2) La Commodora - She also seems genuinely reformed and has become a big good of sorts. She also made the ultimate sacrifice and trapped herself outside time to stop OA .She loses some points because her initial heroic actions were cleansed by up her own mess.

3) Lifeline - gets points for regretting his villainous actions as he did them. But somehow he is more of a jerk as a hero which loses him points. He leaves in the tactics universe which is the worse mark against him.

4) Stuntman - Selfish motives for his heroism , plus a return to villainy in the tactics universe.In the rpg verse he's helping people so that's a plus.

5) Akash'Thryia - Sociopathic anti hero at first, plus a return to villainy the tactics universe. Akash'Flora seems like a neutral source of power than a heroic figure

6) Luminary - Shortest time as a hero  plus a major villain in both timelines

7

Akash'Thriya turns over a new leaf with Akash'Flora.

8

Does Akash’Flora make like a tree and leave Villainy?

9

That pun hurts, Christopher.

10

You log on to write that ?

 

Please, stop those stupid puns and leaf us alone.

 

 

11

The more I think about it I’m not too high on La Comodora being as reformed and see her only being slightly better than Luminary.   OblivAeon seems like her white whale and she is going to use any means she can to take it down.   Sure she makes a huge sacrifice herself but she also destroyed a timeline, albeit a very dark one, to further things.   She made the two Hakas without their consent or concern for how they were impacted and they aren’t even aware it happened.   She recruited Chrono Ranger to clean up the mess she created and then left him essentially stranded.   She provides Fanatic with a dark sword from another timeline and we don’t know what the full implications of that are.  Overall, I still lump her in with Lifeline.  The more I think about it I’d order it this way from least to most reformed:

1. Luminary

2/3. La Comodora and Lifeline

4. Stuntman

5. Akash’Thirya

6. Harpy

12

Good point--her motivations are much like Lifeline's in that she's willing to make sacrifices, even major ones, for the greater good.  But every time C&A talk about her (as La Comodora), they emphasize her trying to do the right thing.  She gives Fanatic the black sword with great trepidation, and was completely open about there being potential baggage that came with it.  If she hadn't created the Hakas, they'd never have become heroes at all, and they're hardly the "I hate being immortal and want to find a way to die" types; she clearly did them a favor.  She destroyed the Iron Legacy timeline only after examining it carefully, realizing it was literally the worst, and making a judgement call.  She has to look at the grand scale of things because of her unique position and outlook, and that means making some very tough and very destructive decisions.  With great power etc. etc.

Plus, as I said, she started down the path to heroism even before setting her sights on OblivAeon.  I have no doubt that she'd remain heroic if she were ever rescued from her current predicament, or that she'd have become a hero of some sort if she'd never learned OblivAeon was coming.

13

Out the villains turned heroes I only see Akash’Thriya and Harpy becoming a hero without OblivAeon.  I don't believe La Comodora would have been heard from much at all once she dealt with her earlier self if OblivAeon hadn’t become a threat.  At which point I’d just consider her a neutral character.  I think Lifeline once Jansa took him would’ve been in a similar spot if OblivAeon was not a threat.  With Stuntman we know at least he would have given up on Villainy and at worst would have become an action hero in movies again without OblivAeon.  So he would have been a neutral character as well.  Also for La Comodora, we don’t know many timelines she has destroyed as destroying the Iron Legacy timeline gives the impression this isn’t the first time and overall that is part of OblivAeon’s goal to destroy timelines.   Regardless, I think the gap between Luminary and the rest of the villains turned heroes is a large one.   La Comodora certainly has turned over a new leaf like Lifeline but the motives for doing so I still don’t think were done for heroic reasons to start with.  At least from what we’ve heard and what I’ve seen that’s my view of her.  

14

La Comodora seemed pretty reformed to me. (Well, “reformed” is not quite the right word, more that she grew into working for the greater good with the perspective of agree and experience.) I mean, there’s a whole ongoing series that’s her and Chrono-Ranger hopping through time fixing problems.

What? He got to the root of the matter.

15

I feel kind of cheered that I was right about Akash'Flora, at least, excuse for a pun or not. :3

Since there's just something sort of satisfying about the matter since she finally sort of figured out that her and Argent and Naturalist actually have fairly congruent goals, it was just the small fact that she was trying to kill them/everyone else that was the issue.

16

I'm happy Akash'Thriya managed to blossom into her new role as a hero. I wonder where the first seeds crept in? Does it stem from when the Naturalist saved her from Professor Pollution's attack? Or did she want to act more heroic earlier, but couldn't think of how to do so, and thus decided to stay-men on her course?

 

Still... when she finally did become a hero, I hope she wasn't stigmatised.

17

I mean, people are people… Someone wood probably hold her past against her. Fortunately, she’s not the type to bough to pressure.

18

I'm just glad to see a budding new hero join the ranks.

19

Looking at the wiki summary of Maria Helena's Letters page episode, I found the following section:

  • Going back to her experience of events, after the FF fight she realizes that this isn't the right direction for her to be going either. She starts finding homes for the crew in different localities and spends some time alone as a solitary pirate-queen of time, thinking about her experiences and what she's learned from other versions of herself.
  • This brings us to her encounter with Jansa Vi Dero as part of the Cosmic Contest story (which we'll be told about at length as its own episode, but probably not until 2018 at this point). She's not really a villain or hero at this point, although she's pretty well solidified her mastery of time.
  • Here's where she starts transitioning into her La Comodora iteration. We met her briefly in the Chrono-Ranger/Young La Capitan story, but the majority of her story is outside of the "canonical" timeline - instead taking place in the pages of Disparation, a book that's been around since after the Iron Legacy event (people really responded to it) and is all about alternate-reality stories. Sometimes there will be a story spanning several issues, sometimes there's a bunch of one-off stories, but they're all these disconnected realities often with a simple "what if..." conceit - take a known scenario and change one aspect of it and see how that alters how that reality's history played out. This title fleshes out a lot of the actual Multiverse that the main books can't really address. A lot of the OblivAeon Mission Rewards are payoffs of earlier Disparation stories, but the events in the book don't have any bearing on the events of the canonical timeline until the OblivAeon story itself (which is why no art or flavor text on cards published up to now mentions it). The timeline image in the show notes includes green lines around the main timeline - those represent the stories in Disparation that she's part of.
  • However, this is the book where the character of La Comodora is developed - in her early reckless appearances when she swapped stories and equipment with alternate reality versions of herself, she was creating the same kind of connections to those other realities as she was establishing with other localities in her own timeline when she looted them, allowing her to not only travel to other times, but to these other realities. So, we see her showing up occasionally in Disparation, progressively growing older until she catches up to the older appearance as we saw her interact with Chrono-Ranger. Only superfans are really even reading this title and even then, there's a question of whether they'd catch on that this is happening with this character (or if they do, if this is "canonical" for her).
  • What she's trying to do here is to sail past the edge of time. When she was young, she had boundless access to time - there was no limit to how far forward or back she could go. Now, when she's older, she finds that there's a block - some point where the timestream she's sailing on will drop off into nothing (this is teased all the way back to it being on the back of her villain deck's cards - representing both the initial vortex she fell through, but also this "end of time" problem). Every reality she goes to winds up terminating in this blackness.
  • This is, of course, OblivAeon. When she determines the source of this as being related to this event, she returns to the main timeline as La Comodora to help fight OblivAeon. She also does some preliminary running around in the past to fix some stuff, such as:
    • She destroys the Iron Legacy timeline.
    • Saves Tachyon from the Rat Plague (Tachyon think's it's due to her sped up metabolism, but it's La Comodora running her backwards in time and separating the plague from her).
    • Does a lot of simple observation of events in time, weighing if she should interfere in, say, the downfall of Pike Industries starting in 1923 and the subsequent corruption in the city (she decides that changing that would have too many knock-on effects on the timeline).
  • During this period, she's acting without a crew and (apparently) independently from the ship. The trick she's figured out that's used to great effect, though, is that she'll open portals to specific parts of the ship for whatever the situation requires (say, opening one for a cannon to fire through). She's also got help. In an alternate reality, she dealt with an alternate version of Chrono-Ranger. This reality ended poorly, but she's managed to bring that reality's version of CON with her - incorporated into the ship's load-out, is the Concordant HELM (the Concordant Harmonious Eternity Link Matrix) which she calls Concorda and bears a resemblance to an Omnitron eye incorporated into a ship's wheel. Concorda lets her interface with the ship more directly than she was able to previously - she's moving from her connection to the ship being more of an art to a science. With all of this she's also got a good chunk of the seas of time mapped out for the purposes of navigation - she still can't just jump to specific localities on a whim, but it's much more reliable now.

From this it sounds to me that Maria Helena started to mature from a non-villanous person before she discovered the Edge of Time and the coming of OblivAeon.  She didn't fully become heroic until she was faced with the threat of OblivAeon, but it seems to me like she was heading in that direction and OblivAeon only sped up the process.

20

That is an accurate assessment. She was not "scared straight" by the impending end of everything.