Indeed, I’m very aware of his origin, and often speculate idly about how it has affected his perspective (eg his very obvious fondness for Spanish-derived cultures, as with the “El Nate” gag and La Capitan as a character and the Telenovelaverse and so forth - much of which I share, by the way, despite my being as whitebread of an average American as you could ask for).
Moving right along…
Justifications #20
KNYFE is a character who very much reads to me as being similar to a number of superhero projects from my teens and twenties and so forth (the pre-Iron Man era when comic-book stories were still considered inherently silly), where they tried to take the general concept of superhuman powers and make it look more down-to-earth. The comic-booky illustrations Adam does depict KNYFE’s powers as bluish-green triangles that are very obviously part of the standard four-color aesthetic of the genre, but I envision KNYFE more as a TV-movie kind of character, where the blades she creates would be depicted as colorless distortion waves that are visible only by the way they bend the visible area behind them. I can’t cite any examples of a visual effect like this off the top of my head, but I’m pretty certain I’ve seen it a number of times, and it’s one of my favorite things to imagine. Since KNYFE’s name is based on the phrase “Kinetic Neutralizer”, which doesn’t inherently make all that much sense, I would posit that the “energy” lances that come out of her body are specifically kinetic energy, and thus should not really be doing “energy damage” in the same way as a raygun, since they inflict damage in basically the same way a physical blade would, minus the actual matter inside the “kinetic envelope” that physically moving the material blade creates. (This entire aesthetic of creating a more “believable” and mundane version of the character is similar to what was done with the TV movie version of Witchblade, where the original comic’s near-pornographic and organic-looking visualization of the titular artifact’s effect on Sarah Pezzini’s body was replaced by having the show’s Witchblade simply create medieval metallic armor which completely covered her body. I tended to approve of the shift, not because I don’t love me some extreme cheesecake, but because the serious nature of a lady-cop character is far better represented by the more realistic effect.)
I also like to think that KNYFE’s fixation on Citizen Dawn is specifically due to her having encountered, or at least read about in FILTER’s archives, a LOT of alternate reality versions of Dawn Cohen who are virtually ALL bad news. Dawn isn’t necessarily the absolute worst villain who is most deserving of KNYFE going out of her way to try and demolish her, so I feel like this sort of justification (haha) is required.
For the record, I can vividly imagine the Progeny-head scene, and I definitely see it as cool. I don’t really hold to the version Adam describes, which doesn’t sound cool to me, but I do imagine it being awesome. I’ll save most of my description thereof for when we reach the Progeny episode (I think he gets one), since it’s not about KNYFE at all, but this is just me weighing in that I definitely believe in the cool version.
Wait, when the swear-words did KNYFE get a jetpack? I’m pretty sure we never see that.
It would take a really skilled writer to do justice to KNYFE’s overall story, in particular the part where she intercepts coded transmissions that only the Paige Huntleys of the multiverse would know. I’m definitely not good enough to write it by myself, though I could probably make significant contributions to the process. I would do better at populating the Cult of OblivAeon with a bunch of weird aliens, since that’s kinda my jam; I’d want to work with someone who understands military and spycraft type subjects way better than I ever could, and have that person write most of the KNYFE side of the story while I mostly handled the aliens she’s killing, as well as the multiversal implications of her timeline being largely destroyed by Progeny and the OblivAeon event.
I’m pretty sure this version of the future timeline is different from the one we end up getting in the Vertex Universe episode in the future, with PRISM and so forth. I’ll have to do a side by side comparison of the two later on.
Okay, that’s it for this episode (I think); from now on, no more Mr. KNYFE Guy.
The story of FILTER is a paradoxicaly interesting one to me, because it’s so boring and nebulous in a way that’s incredibly realistic to how I think the world actually works. One group of people founds a US-based institution with noble goals, then an ambitious government worker in the UK takes it over and starts using it to fuel his own pork-barrel contracts and line his pockets, and then that guy gets fired but manages to sneak his way back into control as the group reorganizes and disguises its true affiliations and eventually goes way off the grid, turning into essentially a for-profit prison complex that’s playing one nation against another (the nations in this case being universes, but I put it that way in order to preserve the metaphor for real-life things)…it’s all just the definition of shady, underhanded, not-obvious-in-their-evil stuff, which I find both compelling and demoralizing because of how much it resembles real life. The escapist aspect starts to come in when we move on to the technology for interdimensional travel which they gain access to and start abusing; the very awkward way that Christopher tries to detail exactly how this technology works could stand to have a lot of additional polishing and clarification added, and I feel like I’d be up to the effort of nailing all that down, though not right now.
Oh hey, plot twist - I’m going to have to do a two-parter here, when my attention is undivided. Turns out that there’s a contradiction between two consecutive episodes which I don’t believe anyone has pointed out before, so I’m going to have to track it down exactly, and then create a special Justification that isn’t for a single episode at all.
Just as a warm-up, for my own amusement, I’m going to list off the given information about all of the Steel Squad members. Since A&C don’t label their dimensions, I’m going to invent a three-digit code for every dimension we get any info about.
Jack Steel - from dimension JS1; originally a member of KNYFE’s squad.
Ash the Arsonator - from dimension A&C; a former Bunker opponent; originally a member of KNYFE’s squad.
Hans the Battle Medic - from an unknown dimension; recruited by Sgt. Steel
Rebecca the Bomb Specialist - from an unknown dimension; originally a member of KNYFE’s squad.
Chance the Espionagent - from a different dimension than the FILTER Spy; originally a member of KNYFE’s squad.
Donny the Field Inventor - from an unknown dimension; originally a member of KNYFE’s squad.
Beatrix the Infiltrationist - from an unknown dimension; originally a member of KNYFE’s squad
Jericho the Mega-Gunner - from dimension A&C; a former Bunker opponent; recruited by Sgt. Steel.
Kara the Sharpshooter - from an unknown dimension; recruited by Sgt. Steel.
Okay, that was just for fun; here’s the real work. Quoting exactly from the podcast episodes:
Episode 21 - KNYFE, quoted from 00:35:40
“She fought monsters, mostly, alien extra-terrestrial monsters, and she did work with Sgt. Steel on occasion, but not with any sort of regularity. He was just another agent, she mostly worked with her own team.”
Episode 22 - Sgt. Steel, quoted from 00:17:02
“So after the KNYFE story, or rather at the end of the KNYFE story, as we talked about last week, Sgt. Steel takes over her old squad, he was a member of her squad, and he gets promoted.”
Okay, that’s it. I thought there was more, something about the fate of Felix Stone, but apparently what I noticed was just this very obvious fumble between the two episodes. This obvious a contradiction has probably already been pointed out, so I guess this has kind of been a waste of my time most likely. But so it goes. Hopefully now I can at least move on to future episodes.
Well, I thought the numbering of Justifications would line up with that of the Episodes again, but the Naturalist episode turned out to be another one which I didn’t really have anything to say about; I liked it all, but there just wasn’t much to add. So the gap persists as we move forward to the episode about the character with one-and-a-half names.
Justifications #23
The subject of the Bloodsworn Coliseum is alluded to in this episode, and it’s very vague; I don’t know if A&C have ever definied exactly what the rules governing the place are, but they certainly haven’t spelled it out for our benefit. We’re told that at least a couple of times, the Coliseum has ended a species; the idea that it can occasionally, but not regularly, wipe out entire civilizations makes for a very baffling concept, which I’d really like to try and figure out concretely.
It’s really interesting to try and reconcile the idea that the Procytor civilization was incredibly orderly, harnessing the leylines to create this incredibly harmonious planet where everything just worked, and then the idea that Lifeline’s hero phase pretty much consists of nothing but going around fighting everything. It creates the impression that, much as Tempest was an extremely hot-headed Maerynian who became a diplomat because he was very calm and reasonable compared to anyone who isn’t a Maerynian, likewise perhaps Tarogath was an exceptionally chaotic and bellicose member of the very orderly and placid Procytor species.
Between this and the KNYFE episode, I really want to see a height chart for all Sentinels heroes, ranging from Tempest at less than 5 feet, with KNYFE a foot taller, then Haka a foot taller than her, and then Tarogath a foot taller than that (albeit that Haka is far wider).
Island Man environment deck now, plz kthx.
“Hey, you just tried to destroy our planet and kill us all!” “Not all of you; only most.” I for one would have been exactly on the same page as Lifeline, given the same information and available options.
Well, that wasn’t the best. I could almost have skipped this episode too. Oh well, onward and upward…
The hero section doesn’t explicitly mention Tarogath, sadly. Also I think it’d be a fun visual, if anybody has the art skill to draw it up. I do not, so let’s move on.
Justifications #24
A nice unspoken subtext of this episode is the idea that Silver Gulch was a lawless town before Jim Brooks volunteered to keep order, and that it did not long survive his disappearance into a time portal. We never meet the parents of the Hayes family, but clearly at least one of them was both an influential figure in the town and entirely tolerant of the antics of Cyrus, Matthew and Tyler; before Jim, they were in the process of damaging the town and would probably have destroyed it, and after Jim disappeared, they somehow got out of lockup and started doing even more damage, probably being directly responsible for the boomtown’s eventual vanishing. I’m guessing that the 1883 environment with its time portal postdates Jim’s disappearance, though this is unclear; it could possibly predate his self-deputization instead, but that seems less likely.
CON Version 4…that’s an interesting detail I never caught before. Wonder what other Versions we have somewhere in the timestream…
A bit of a contradiction between the tale of CR’s first appearance, where he blasts Akash’Bhuta and then disappears, and the flavor text of the By Any Means bounty card, which shows Akash on it, in which CON tells him to “make some friends”. Perahaps this is a later encounter? But if so, it’s the only real hint we have of him ever going after the same target twice (other than Doc Tusser).
The technology described for how the bounties recharge his time-travel device strikes me as very handwavey and not entirely thought through, but I think I can Justify it. Here’s what I’m thinking. CON exists in the Final Wasteland, shielded somehow against changes in time, with a mission to prevent all consequences of the world’s destruction other than its own existence (since if you change the past thus that there is no Final Wasteland, then nobody would build CON, and thus you couldn’t change the past, etc.). The friction between the isolated bubble that contains CON and the surrounding reality is therefore a source of “temporal energy” which can be harvested and used to power the star, and whenever Jim destroys a Bounty target, history is rewrittening, widening the gap between current reality and CON’s dimension, and creating a new burst of this friction which CON harvests and immediately transmits to Jim.
Welp, I’m done, until someone travels back in time and changes something so that I have to come back and do this all over again. Sayonara, pardner…
The chronology here puzzles me a little; I thought the Chairman had been running crime in Rook City for most of the 20th century, so when exactly was Randy “Rotmouth” Burke operating as a drug kingpin in Rook City?
I’m very sick of the “schmandy schmar” joke that C&A kept using throughout the early days of the podcast; it almost died off at one point, and then the letters brought it back in. It was very startling to me when Trevor bleeped Christopher saying “Batman”. There can’t possibly be any legal consequences to them just MENTIONING another intellectual property, can there?
The story of Baron Blade stealing a piece of Akash’Thriya doesn’t seem to have ever appeared in the card game, although the immediately subsequent encounter with Plague Rat does. If anyone knows of a card reference to the BB theft and Natch’Thriya’s recovery of it, let me know, because I can’t think of one.
Loved the Metallica reference, especially how subtle it was. Not so fond of Christopher spazzing out and pretending to be a hair-metal rocker. (I thought he said “rock pizza”, I wonder if that’s a St. Louis joint.)
I for one wish they would have done an entire episode on Cyst, along with the other Spite Clones from Broken City. It’s not impossible we’ll see these Vertex characters again someday, but it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.
The discussion of one-sided nemesism (which word I invented independently before hearing the podcast) is one of the most interesting things in the entire card game to me. I’d love to see more nemesis icons throughout the game, and them having arrows leading to or from them, to allow for the one-sidedness described here. So for instance, with the symbols represented by {CR} and {SB}, Chrono-Ranger would have the icon {CR}>, while standalone Plague Rat would have >{CR}, VOTM Plague Rat would have {SB}>, and Setback would have >{SB}. (For two-sided relationships, such as Legacy and Baron Blade, you’d have a >{L}> icon on both of them.)
The fact that the four Revocorp Handlers have two copies each in the deck kind of undercuts the idea that they are distinct individuals. I always just kind of figured that they were stand-ins for a horde of faceless company mooks.
A double-header this time; I don’t have a lot of comments on either of these episodes, and they’re so closely intertwined that I might as well do them together.
Justifications #26
The random aliens of the week that fought Ra are interesting to picture; I find myself doubting that any of the three who A&C named here (Bloogo, Orbo and Immutus) were used this way, since two of them are huge and a third is generally non-aggressive. It seems more likely that Szreem and Frazzat and Gruum and Venox were the kinds of aliens that Ra would have gone up against in this fashion. It’d be interesting to specifically posit that one of them was NOT an endling at the time, that their species was wiped out during the time between Ra’s encounter with them and the first appearance of them in the Enclave. Szreem in particular feels like a species that might have showed up on Earth in multiples, having been warmongers who were exterminated in retaliation for their attacks on other races, and it was Ra ironically choosing to spare the leader of the attack on Earth which allowed him to become an Endling when the entire rest of his species was destroyed. I could do a lot more of this sort of theory-crafting around these guys; the Enclave is probably my favorite Environment, at least in creative terms, and I’m always happy to put more thought into it.
Apparently there’s something about Insula Primalis which attracts egomaniacal alpha-types with sun powers to go set up shop there. Ra had it as his home base for a while, and then Dawn took over. Now that it’s turned into Nexus Primalis, I wonder if some new Atum will show up there and start running the place for a while, or maybe it’ll just have a Void spirit of the Sun itself who crowns itself ruler of the other spirits.
The identity questions raised by the way A&C describe the Egyptian god-artifacts working are very interesting to contemplate. If you pick up an artifact that you’re compatible with, you gain the power and the memories of that god, and you retain your own memories and personality, but your personality is leaned a little bit more in the direction of how that god behaves. It’s almost like having the same mind but a different soul, or vice versa. It’s very interesting to consider, particularly in view of the Egyptian view of the multi-part self, which I’m borderline obsessed with. Depending on which source you believe, there are at least five parts to the self in Egyptian thought, possibly as many as ten, compared to the four or so that we usually think of. So the idea that you’re sort of the same person but sort of not really tracks, because some parts of your original “soul” remain while other “soul” parts are eclipsed to some degree by the newfound power. I may have to construct a full case study at some point to explore this in more depth.
Really mind-bending to think of the first Virtuoso of the Void predating the entire Egyptian pantheon. There was certainly a time when humans existed but music did not; Christopher says that there had to be a Virtuoso “from the very beginning”, but since Akash’Bhuta existed before humans did, I would assume that the Virtuoso only had to exist in order for civilization to rise. Akash probably suppressed humans for thousands of years, possibly even a full million, but once a Virtuoso managed to put her to sleep, humans were able to start creating a civilization in very short order.
Bastet is explicitly stated not to be here in this episode, but she does end up getting used for a Disparation later. So presumably she existed in the past of the canon timeline, creating an artifact which the canon timeline never found, but in that Inversiverse world, it was. Puzzling, given that the Inversiverse is supposed to exactly match our world except for the reversed morality.
Ra and Lifeline seem to have a similar character arc, where they’re both an “ancient child” who arrogantly tries to solve every problem single-handedly, and have to learn humility and mature a bit as a character after suffering defeats.
Calling Ammut a “source of foes” is interesting, given that this is the name of one of OblivAeon’s shield cards. Probably just a coincidence, but fun to consider.
Finally moving on to the Ennead episode; I didn’t expect to have that many comments on Ra. The Ennead were once named Roderick Ward, Charles Phillips, Jessica Douglas, Anna Rochester, Diane Lawson, Logan Brown, Steve Carr, Francis Lee, and Winona Ross. Most of these names have a very British Aristocrat kind of feeling about them, which makes me imagine the group of graverobbers as being a specifically British unit, possibly supplemented by a couple of mercenaries that don’t come from the same snooty background as the rest.
The dome that the Ennead uses to isolate Egypt from the rest of the world is an interesting commentary on the interconnectedness of the modern world; while I’d imagine that they made it permeable to water so that the Nile continues to flow through, it certainly stops things like airplane travel in and out of Cairo airport, and the economic impact would be staggering as Egypt loses access to all the goods that it has been importing and has to suddenly become self-sufficient. I’m curious whether the Ennead members made any attempt at actually ruling over the country inside their dome, attempting to be somewhat responsible even in their selfish evil way. Had Ra not found a way to bring the dome down, would the Ennead have ended up ruling nothing but a giantic graveyard after the country totally collapsed and everyone died of preventable diseases and starvation and so forth? Interesting to ponder.
(Not sure if I’m done, but I had better post in case I lose this.)
This one’s going to be a little different, because I don’t have any really direct responses to the content of the podcast itself; I’m just going to talk more generally about the character, based on a few thoughts which the podcast indirectly touched off.
First off, I feel like if I really sat down and thought hard about it, I could solve the unsolvable riddle of what exactly the Void is and how the multiverse works and so forth; Christopher said that if anyone can ever do that, he’s probably done something wrong, but I disagree. I’m someone who believes that magic systems should be very concretely thought out (not quite to the Clarke’s Law extent, since I oppose that trope, but also not using it as a plot coupon to allow you to do anything you feel like; there’s a very specific balance, I feel), and I have the sense that a fully fleshed-out and robust system for how Void Magic specifically works is something achievable, if I worked hard enough on it. (The fact that I’ve not read the Sentinels RPG, in which some more of these details are probably laid out, could be a limiting factor on my ability to do this.)
Moving on to AA himself…I’ve always had a sense that the closest Marvel/DC equivalent to the character as we see him here is the Scarlet Witch, because both of them have broadly defined but low-impact powers that generally just cause slight adjustments to the situation. With the exception of special incidents such as M-Day (and entirely ignoring the MCU version, who isn’t magical at all), Wanda generally doesn’t point at someone and disintegrate them down to their atoms with a burst of eldritch destruction; instead she just uses her “hex powers” to make them trip or something at a critical moment, allowing other heroes to capitalize on the opening and take them down. This neatly parallels Argent’s role as a support character, but what’s interesting is that the podcast describes the early 70s-premiere version of AA as being a very different character, who basically single-handedly wins every one of his encounters because his magical power is functionally limitless, making his comics not really the most interesting to read apart from the surface-level coolness of his magical effects. (This seems to parallel my vague understanding of early Doctor Strange comics; I’d be interested to hear from anyone who read those books back in the day, to see if the parallel is valid.)
Even after the Akash’Bhuta fight, when Anthony goes and makes some friends (to quote CON talking to Chrono-Ranger, which I already pointed out seemed odd since CR never really does that), the podcast describes how Drake is incredibly busy and never really takes a lot of time to hang out with other heroes and help them improve themselves, the way the Scholar will often do; for a character whose card-game deck is basically entirely support for other heroes, this doesn’t seem to match the character’s personality and the activities of his day-to-day life. The episode also tells us that Drake’s nigh-infinite capabilities of Void Magic are poorly modeled by the card game, and that his strategy for conflict resolution isn’t really about dealing damage to defeat opponents; I for one am very curious about whether one could invent a model using the card game’s rules, where you could play a full-power solo version of Argent going up against one or more villains. (I’ve done experiments in 1-hero play, and there are characters it works pretty well for as-is; Argent is pretty definitely not one of those, and it’s a fun puzzler to try and figure out what other cards you’d have to add to his deck in order to make it happen.)
A fair bit of the interesting-ness of this episode comes not only from Argent himself, but from the other Virtuosos. The comic-booky names assigned to them are pretty dumb, but otherwise they’re quite interesting characters, and it’s a basically endless well of speculation what other such mages might have existed and been lost to time. (Off the top of my head, we don’t have anyone whatsoever in the Roman era, nor anyone physically localized in Egypt; an Alexandrian scribe who taps out a rhythm upon a nearby stone column with his stylus might be someplace to start. This could crossover with some of Ra’s villains long after Ra himself went dormant.) An especially interesting member of this lineage is Xu Li Hua, who we see in a slightly altered form that doesn’t look all that stereotypically Chinese; she seems more like a Mongolian from her mode of dress, and that interfaces very interestingly with the fact that her Bell is such a gigantic and ornate piece of jade that it probably could only have been modeled on one belonging to an Emperor…perhaps her parents were traders who came to the capitol one time in their entire lives, and the girl peeped out between a couple of wagons and glimpsed some astonishingly priceless artifact as it was being carried from one pavillion to another, never meant for the eyes of such vulgar peasants as her, but so beautiful that its every detail was etched onto her memory, enabling her to precisely duplicate it when the time came for her to forge an instrument out of the Void.)
I might be able to come up with more to say on this one if I listened to the episode again, but I don’t have thousands of years to work on this project, so I’d better allow the sands of history to close over this completed work, and move on to the next phase of its existence.
So here’s a fresh-off-the-presses theory of mine: the site far underground where Akash’Bhuta sealed the Nexus of the Void until recently is the region now known as Magmaria. The Magmarians have only existed for a few thousand years; they were initially Void-spirit creatures which guarded the sealed Nexus, but they didn’t really have anything to guard it against, and eventually some of them became hostile to their fellows and to the Nexus itself, on a much smaller scale than Akash herself but for similar reasons. Ironically, these original predators eventually lost interest in their predations, especially after the first Virtuoso pulled the Nexus out of its intended prison. The more motivated and aggressive subspecies of these Nexus guardians eventually became the rather placid Magmarian civilization, while the original guardians never developed any other purpose besides fighting their renegades, and they survive today as Crystalloid Behemoths.
It’d be really interesting to see the first appearance of Akash’Bhuta in the Argent Adept book (Virtuoso of the Void #12), before the metaverse writers decided to make this one-off earth spirit opponent into the Big Bad which all the Virtuosos since the dawn of civilization have been battling. I’d imagine it’d be an extremely different presentation; instead of a mountain-sized monster with primordial limbs and the power to Entomb an entire party of heroes at once, she’d probably be something more akin to Man-Grove or Magman, depending on which mode she was in at the time, assuming the original version even had shifting modes (which it probably should, since she still has to pose a challenge for Drake by himself, and he’s a super OP character at this point in his history).
(Also, I wonder what the metaverse retro-justification is for the name Akash’Bhuta in her first appearance. That might well be unanswerable, though.)
In a later episode, we learn that the scion Voidsoul is one of the shadow parasites who survived the Hundred Million Years’ War; it’s interesting to think that if OblivAeon hadn’t recruited Voidsoul to be his Scion, it would probably have attacked the Nexus of the Void the moment it first appeared on the surface again, and the just-defeated Akash’Bhuta might not have been able to stop it. So the first Virtuoso of the Void might have been the last, if OblivAeon hadn’t scooped up one of the other existential threats to this entire reality and made it subservient to himself. (Then again, I may have the timeline entirely wrong on this.)
The idea that Akash’Thriya learns empathy during her time with the Naturalist doesn’t quite ring true for me; I think that she always had something that could be called empathy, but only across a timescale that’s utterly alien to humanity. Her malice for the human race isn’t so much “I want you all to die” so much as “you’re all going to die before I can blink, so why would I care about helping you live?”, IMO. So what Natch teachers her is an appreciation for the human perception of time; he persuades her to stop ignoring any event that takes less than a hundred years, and to actually change her perspective in response to new stimuli without having to go slumber for decades first.
Coincidentally, the Argent Adept, the Void Spirit form of Akash’Thriya, Progeny and Argentium are all silver-colored; Progeny also has a Gold form. Nobody appreciates the aesthetic qualities of Bronze or Copper, it seems…
According to C&A, Akash’Thriya cannot meld up and down through the earth, but we see her in several cards, most notably Cultivation, and she doesn’t really have legs, so…
Final comment, and this is about the now-deceased (possibly to rise again Cthulhu-style, but not anytime soon) Tactics line, in which Akash’Bhuta becomes Akash’Darsha. This is one of many cases where the character growth of the OblivAeon event and its SCRPG sequel is erased, sending several characters back to their more iconic original forms, but with a more extreme twist (Baron Blade is another example of this pattern). It’s extremely debatable whether this is a good or a bad thing; resetting the characters to more recognizable base forms makes some sense for an Ultimates-style reboot, which is kind of what the Vertex line is, but at the same time, it’s a bit of a creeping from the eternally static world of corporate big-business entertainment (notably including DC & Marvel comics) into the Sentinel Comics universe, which is normally a brand we see doing a somewhat better job of prioritizing quality stories over a profitable and eternally-unchanging product line. A sobering thought, and particularly relevant in Akash’s case, since she’s always been a villain who symbolized eternally unchanging cylicality, and whose turn to heroism was a case of her evolving to survive as the world changed around her.
(PS: Am I the only one who’d happily listen to a half-hour long podcast of C&A discussing their breakfast preferences?)
Okay, a TON of stuff on this episode. First and least significantly, I’m very disappointed in Christopher for saying that Visionary can “twist the minds” of people. We all know that she twists the ether and wrests the minds of people. That’s not a particularly clever observation, I just needed to get it off my chest before we move on.
Vanessa’s original timeline involved America eventually being pretty much ruined by the consequences of its unethical decisions in Project Cocoon; this story is very much in contradiction with the Writers’ Room which C&A later did set in Visionary’s timeline, in which the main cause of the world’s destruction is an evil Tachyon, but IMO the original version is better, and the evil Tachyon story is better treated as just a random Disparation. For my headcanon version of Visi’s actual origin world, I envision that while Citizen Dawn probably didn’t survive her childhood, her death unleashed a blast of destabilizing energy which has been echoing around the world ever since, and most of the individuals who became Citizens of the Sun in our world, most especially the brothers who we know as Citizen Truth and Citizen Dare, wound up as Project Cocoon targets instead, their powers partially triggered (and definitely unbalanced) by the phenomenon which the government only refers to by the codename “DC ##/##/##”, where those numbers are the date of her death). In particular, the fact that the Truth/Dare brothers wound up as a united force, their mutual irritation suppressed in view of a shared grudge against Project Cocoon and America in general, was ultimately the spearhead of the wedge which would undermine America and lead to its eventual destruction. The timeline would go on just fine without America, of course; it’s probably quite a nice place a couple decades later, and maybe someday the timelines will be re-shattered and we’ll get to look in on it again.
The most interesting single line in the episode is where Christopher very quickly says that OblivAeon is the reason why Vanessa realizes she can do the time-travel thing, even if only once and with disastrous consequences to her health and sanity. Now, Christopher might well have meant that only to mean that OblivAeon shattered the timelines, and Vanessa’s ability to reality-hop was possible because of that shattering…but I think there’s more to it than that. Consider that one of the more effective Scions of OblivAeon was Dark Mind, that if not for Faultless undoing the damage Dark Mind inflicted on Dark Watch, Expatriette would probably never have recruited Citizen Dawn to join the battle against Aeon Master and Voidsoul, and a callously unconcerned version of Setback would have gone around causing disasters and probably amounted to an accidental Scion in and of himself, in addition to wrecking heroes’ efforts to deal with other Scions. Consider also that Vanessa Long getting powers is one of the main Fixed Points we learn about which are central to OblivAeon’s plan to collapse all realities. I think there’s a good chance that OblivAeon looked at all of the Vanessa Longs, saw the incredible potential within her (having probably considered Dawn Cohen in a similar light and ultimately rejected her as not quite big enough of a deal, in part because Visionary specifically would end up beating her), and realized that she was the critical block he could remove from the metaphorical Jenga tower of the multiverse, in order to set into motion the virtually-inevitable collapse of the entire structure. Thus, with a single action, he not only shattered the timelines, but very deliberately broke them in such a way that a single “crack” ripped out from her mind, lethally wounding another Vanessa Long and causing her to become the Dark Passenger, and incepted the idea of stepping through the freshly-shattered realities into Visionary’s mind. (The highly improbable circumstance of an alternate-universe version intruding into your mind has actually happened in one other instance, that of Aminia Twain becoming Miss Information, and I’m somewhat inclined to credit OblivAeon with that one as well, but probably not as deliberately; to extend the analogy, she was probably the consequence of that same “crack” radiating out from the crucial intersection point with Dark Vanessa and fractally repeating the same “shape” enough times that, across an infinitely large multiverse, it would eventually break one other person’s mind in the same exact way.)
We get a lot more pieces of the FILTER story here, and while I still don’t feel like I understand everything that’s happened, I think we’ve gotten close enough that I can put together a partial timeline.
Original sixties-ish FILTER is a bit of a jerk to Tempest, but mostly only cares about protecting Earth from alien monsters.
Most of the Seventies passes without much change in FILTER’s priorities.
Warlord Voss invades, and FILTER remains largely good.
Gloomweaver event unleashes Dark Visionary, who murders scientists and blames FILTER for it.
KNYFE begins as a character, with FILTER already starting to be jerks to human heroes.
KNYFE sees the Progeny situation go down in her original universe, and notices that Tempest is a hero during that event (though he dies).
Due to substantial conflict with heroes from “our” timeline, FILTER ignores KNYFE’s warnings about Progeny, saying that this timeline has “brought it on itself”.
KNYFE has a conversation with “our” Tempest and goes AWOL from FILTER as a result.
Felix Stone is influenced by Voidsoul and continues to ignore further warnings about the approach of Progeny and later its master, officially cementing FILTER’s status as minor bad guys.
Most of that story isn’t about Visi, but she does play a critical role at its turning point.
With very few exceptions, the tales told in this episode are the only real indications we’ve ever had that it’s possible for Visi to mess with other layers of reality besides the physical plane; we know she could step through timelines, although it’s unclear whether she could have done that if not for OblivAeon shattering them, but apart from the card “Twist the Ether” (which I still think should perhaps have been reflavored to make it a mental effect, since it’s basically the only indication that she has any power over anything other than people’s minds), there has been no reason to think she’s capable of messing with other dimensions. In this episode we learn that the Realm of Discord’s ability to destroy her Decoy Protection is a completely intentional choice by the creators, though the reasons they give still don’t make a great deal of sense IMO; more importantly, though, we learn that the only reason Dark Visionary was ever purged was because the imprisoned Visionary’s psychic scream was heard by the Argent Adept, and that only happened because Dark Visi’s torment of Citizen Hammer somehow involved traveling into the Void, when there is otherwise no reason why Visi should even know that the Void exists. So with this episode, the creators appear to have somewhat-unnecessarily positioned Visionary as a mistress of multiple realities and dimensions and so forth, on top of her having some of the greatest power imaginable within any one reality. I’m really not sure why they did this, or if it is justifiable (no pun on my name intended) for her to have this extreme level of importance compared to all other characters.
“When we were young, fresh-faced idealists”…hm, I always thought of you more as Mainstays. (Hey, gimme a break; I’ve been writing about reality-warping insanity for two solid days here; I deserve a cheap pun every once in a while.)
(Now this is interesting…apparently my edit history only shows the edits I did today, not my original version of the post from yesterday, before I added the FILTER stuff.)
Welp, I think that’ll do it for this extra-long, extra-timey-wimey Justification. I might be able to dig up more topics of discussion here, but I think my idle hours are better spent rewatching “The Raytrix”. It is my second-favorite movie of all time, after all.
I originally planned to skip this one, since I didn’t think I had much to say about it, but in the course of not getting around to doing another Justification for a full week, I ended up listening to this episode again just to re-center myself during my trip through the archive (and also because there isn’t a new episode up for today). And I did end up finding some deep cuts that are worth talking about, which also gives me Justification for making a few comments that aren’t otherwise worth devoting a post to. So here we go.
The story of Revocorp and Mark Bennedetto are awesome, but I don’t have anything to add; likewise, I don’t have much of a comment about the Benchmark part. It’s interesting to look at the idea of this new hero showing up and being a painfully obvious Marty Stu fanfiction-self-insert-style character, who’s good at everything and everyone in-universe likes him, but the audience hates him. The full story of the character as described in the episode, including his future in the SCRPG where he gives up on being a hero, is a really neat arc for a character who was born super-privileged, coasted through life with oblivious self-assurance, and then suddenly had an experience that actually forced him to learn and grow as a person, leading him to actually walk away from the heroism that he initially thought was his destiny being fulfilled. He started out not deserving the admiration that he just assumed everyone felt toward him (which he actually could obtain in-person through his personal charisma, but it didn’t extend to the readers, at least not often enough to matter), and over the course of growing to become worthy of true heroism, he decided that wasn’t what he wanted after all, that he could do a better job of giving back to the community by following a different path. It’s definitely an interesting character study, and very nicely encapulated by a very small portion of the huge Sentinel Comics universe.
Love the “HUD Display” gag. That’s one of the funniest bits they’ve ever done IMO.
I find myself wondering whether Benchmark was invented after the other heroes of SOTM, in large part because of the introduction of Kismet as a character. We know from the podcast that the creation of Setback and Revenant as characters for the game wasn’t initially planned, even though the characters in an early form go back forever; while C&A planned on turning their childhood friend Pete into an unluck-based superhero forever, Adam drew the picture for Expatriette’s Shock Rounds without fully having conceptualized the black-and-yellow-suited hero with the 1-die symbol as being that same character. (As a creative myself, I know how these things work; you can have all the pieces of an idea swirling around separately in the back of your mind, little pieces of them emerging into your work here and there, until one day everything clicks and the fully realized idea surfaces out of the mire as though it had always held that form. So I have no reason to doubt C&A’s assertions that these seemingly-linked events were actually more of a convergent coincidence.) Thusly, it isn’t exactly accurate to say that the “original” plan for SOTM involved a Setback hero deck and a Revenant villain deck, and that when Kismet was created as part of a fan contest, that “displaced” Revenant into being a mini-nemesis, but also introduced a conceptual space for a new hero who could sort of be a nemesis to Revenant, with that space eventually being filled by Benchmark (I just mistyped that name as Bencharm, and now I wish the character had been named Ben all along, because that seems perfect). Despite the fact that all that isn’t so, however, I kind of have it as my headcanon now, to the point that I’m saddened Benchmark doesn’t have a unique nemesis symbol and Revenant doesn’t have a deck. We certainly could stand to have a couple more villains besides the existing 24 (not counting OblivAeon or the various permutations of Vengeance/VOTM), and quite frankly we didn’t really need a 37th hero; the oddness of that number has always annoyed me, and I very much wonder whether 2010 Christopher & Adam had any concept whatsoever that Benchmark would ever exist, whereas nearly all of the other characters they had, up to and including OblivAeon, were at least loosely planned from day 1 (the main other exception being Dr. Medico, of course).
And now we get to the part I actually wanted to talk about. The “quick” question from William asks “Is Benchmark actually a person with a heroic outlook, or is he very much lined up with Revocorp’s profit-first viewpoint?” C&A point out in the episode that Revocorp actually isn’t the most profit-focused of companies; partly to contrast with that and partly because it matches my vision of the character, I would argue that Randall “Benchmark” Bunker probably is one of the more profit-focused heroes, not in the sense of charging people to be rescued, but more in terms of the idea that if his heroic career had been longer and he’d been sufficiently famous, rather than clearly just a corporation jumping on the bandwagon of existing heroes (and with him probably having various contracts in place with Revocorp limiting his ability to go off and do his own thing), I definitely envision him eventually becoming the type of superhero who would sell his image to companies which he thinks are deserving of an endorsement, not necessarily picking the highest bidder, but definitely thinking of the money as being a just reward for his overall awesomeness. He doesn’t strike me as the “charity is the soul of virtue” type, but more along the lines of, if he were a religious guy at all, he’d be the type who thinks “God doesn’t want good people to have to live in poverty; my doing selfless work should eventually open doors for me and allow me to seize the brass ring”. After all, his life up until now has led him to believe that if you work hard and make friends and generally do all the right things, stuff is going to go your way; he’s a strong, smart, likeable guy, and he’s become a chess champion and a famous boxer and all these other things, so I fully believe that he would consider himself worthy of being paid for his time whenever he, like, goes and gives a graduation speech at a college or something. Whereas the more “pure” heroic types like Legay or Fanatic would offer to give that speech for free…well, Fanatic probably wouldn’t spend her time on such an activity at all, but Legacy would happily do it, and he might be able to talk Fanatic into doing it as well, and in both cases they’d do it simply for the sake of shaping the hearts and minds of the next generation. Benchmark would believe that part too, but he’d still think that if the school asked him to speak and then refused to pay them, that they were being chintzy at best, and more likely he’d feel outright cheated and wronged by them at least a little bit. (Exactly how legitimate those feelings are is one of those questions that doesn’t have an easy answer; most of the heroes we know and love are inclined toward the Legacy end of that spectrum, but then not everybody has the advantages of being as rich as Maia Montgomery, or having in-born superpowers, or having the full backing of the U.S. Military, or any of the other rather privileged positions that most of the heroes come from. Even though Randall is kind of well-to-do himself by virtue of just being born lucky, he strikes me as being more inclined toward the point of view of people who have bills to pay and don’t give their time away for free, because they don’t have the luxury of sitting on the kind of high horse that Wraith and Legacy were born upon.)
The other subject which eventually occurred to me because of this episode isn’t Benchmark, it’s Supply and Demand Benchmark, since those are different people even though they’re the same person. (Just today I noticed for the first time that they have their color schemes reversed, with a pale blue suit and vivid red energy versus a pale red, aka pink, suit with vivid blue energy. Why exactly S&D BM has one arm unsleeved is anyone’s guess, but otherwise the two versions are a pretty neat mirror of each other, with the blue Benchmark having a red visor and the red Benchmark having a blue skullcap. I’m sure most people caught all this long ago, but I have still never played S&D Benchmark at all, so I never really paid much attention to his card, and I only ever saw Benchmark’s deck a month or two ago, so I’m still only semi-familiar with the finer details of even the default version.) My commentary on this other universe and the characters within it comes from two distinct standpoints, as I shall further explain.
First, I must point out the fairly unusual and circuitous route by which I came to this information in the first place. I’ve been quite poor in real life for many years, and while I could afford to buy most of Sentinels of the Multiverse, my cash supply ran out at around the time OblivAeon came out, and I didn’t own it until a couple of years later. But during this interregnum, a friend of mine did make a gift to me of the Complete Foil Hero Collection, a vanity product which I could never have afforded to purchase on my own, since it offers no additional functional utility over what I already had. I had printouts of all the variant character cards from off of the Internet (which >G has always officially permitted people to do), so having the actual cards, let alone alternate-art foil versions of them, was a purely superficial indulgence that I wouldn’t have paid for, not even if I had far more money than I do. But because of my generous friend, I did have the little black cube containing 100-plus foily character cards, and while I was looking through them, I got my first glimpse at hero character cards whose decks I wouldn’t see for 2-5 years thereafter. After I finished goggling at Akash’Thriya with her 50 HP (which I would later learn doesn’t go anywhere near as far as you might hope), one of the other first things I looked at was Benchmark, because unlike the other OblivAeon villain-heroes (counting the Ambuscade mini-expansion, and also counting Benchmark since he was the other mini-expansion), this wasn’t a pre-existing character that we knew anything about. We had only heard occasional references to “the standard by which all heroes are measured”, and that was a bizarrely ominous phrase; combine that with a power that was literally a straight upgrade of Bunker’s seldom-used Initialize innate, when Bunker is an armored hero heavily influenced by Iron Man (specifically by the Mark 1 Iron Man suit from the 2008 movie) and Benchmark is also an armored hero (who resembles Iron Man even more closely, on the superficial level of just looking at his character card)…well, obviously, I was left with more questions than answers. So that’s where I was in terms of Benchmark, and the fact that there was also this other version of Benchmark…quite frankly, I didn’t give it a second glance. Even when I later learned about him being from an alternate universe, that didn’t really mean anything to me; oh, how time has changed that.
So my old viewpoint on S&D BM wasn’t much, but today we know far more about the character, the universe that he’s from, and the universe that he isn’t from, which is the one we all know and love. Our glimpse into that reality is basically just looking at five of the supervillains he has to contend with, pictured on the incapacitated sides of his two versions, and notably, because of my experience of being given the Foil Collection when I couldn’t afford to buy the decks, I only knew the “premium” or “alternate” versions of these cards. Since I don’t habitually peek at the back side of a hero character card before they actually get incapacitated in the course of a game (that habit is largely defunct, thanks to a later episode of this podcast going through every incap art systematically, although I still don’t go so far as to think about incap abilities when putting together a team of heroes for a game), I don’t think I ever saw the four alternate villains visible on the Anniversary Foil version’s incap side, but I definitely didn’t know about the mysterious figure on the standard version of S&D BM’s incap, which is still unknown as of this podcast episode, but will later be revealed to be Count Barzakh, and still later be fully fleshed out into a truly terrifying villain, whose absence (for the most part) from the canon timeline seems quite a shame, given what an epic-level threat he is.
But with all that preamble out of the way, we can now look at both the original cipher of S&D Benchmark and the version that we currently know about. And there’s quite a rich vein to dig into, which I’m only going to scratch the surface of. This is one of those ideas that a writer (no offense, Christopher) just kind of tosses off without really thinking about it, such as the often-lamented cliche of a science fiction story set “hundreds of thousands of million years” into the past or future, or distances in space being ill considered (eg the example in the Alien movie franchise, I forget which specific film, where someone says that a ship has traveled “two hundred million miles” or somesuch, to emphasize how far from home they are, when in actual astronomy that distance doesn’t even get you out of the solar system). Likewise, being the only superhero in the world is one of those ideas that you can’t quite properly wrap your mind around and do justice to, but the idea that there’s an entire corporation dedicated to supporting him does at least lend some credence to the idea. I do find myself wondering how that version of Revocorp makes enough money to keep itself operational, but still, we can safely assume that their main business is just crunching all the information necessary to promptly inform Benchmark of whatever crisis is currently happening somewhere in the world - literally the entire world, so I sure hope they have some sort of ultrasonic transport or maybe a teleportation device or something, and he doesn’t just have to fly there under his own power.
There’s a lot more that could be said on that subject, but some other matters are making pressing demands on my time, so I’ll just have to leave that whole subject as a preamble to further discussion. I sure hope we eventually get some.
For some reason, possibly the mind-splintering derpiness of Anthony’s music, I kept gaining and then losing my conception of what I wanted to talk about with reference to this episode. This is my final attempt, and if I don’t at least produce some vague concept of what the thing I’ve wanted to talk about ever since my first listen, I’ll officially give up, and probably not even post this. But as I write this, I hope I’ll be able to recover at least one little scrap of the topics I have in mind. I feel like a survivor of one of the SCP foundation’s frequent apocalypses, retaining memory of a timeline that’s been erased; let’s see if I can manage to tell my story before the amnestics finally kick back in.
No favorite villains or heroes, eh C&A? How about you at least pick a favorite Environment?
I’m glad that C&A don’t seem to do the thing which the Marvel corporation occasionally does, and DC too I think, where the company itself exists within its own fictional universe, and the comics it publishes there are supposed to be fictionalizations of the heroes’ actual adventures. This gives an excuse for the comic company’s writers to insert themselves into the universe, and I’m glad that C&A limited their self-insert impulses to creating Citizens Hammer & Anvil, who only resemble them in physical appearance and not any other way. It’s much better that way IMO.
I suspect this is retro-causality, but the “mess up” that was references with regard to Tachyon is more easily explained later in the podcast, when they establish that Sentinel Comics’ fictional universe is technologically about 20 years ahead of our own. So the tachyon was probably a theoretical physics concept in the 60s when Dr. Meredith Stinson first got her superpowers from a particle accelerator, even if the real world scientists didn’t come up with the idea that those particles existed until the 80s or so.
“The Nature of Divinity” - I think I had something to say about this one, but I don’t want to get entangled with anything related to Fanatic, since that’s a whole separate issue. Although Christopher says that the Egyptian gods aren’t really gods, they’re just powerful entities, I would argue that their ability to “die” and leave behind an artifact, symbolically tied to the deity, which can transform compatible humans into a being which is partially the human but mostly the deity, but also partially the human’s conception of the deity - look man, I think that’s more than 10% of the way toward deserving the title of godhood. Someone like OblivAeon is clearly not a god, just a very powerful immortal alien, but I would argue that Ra and Anubis are definitely at least somewhat godlike, because so many of the aspects of how they operate are clearly more than just “powerful being from another dimension”, or even “powerful being from another dimension which is directly entangled with human belief systems”. They’re not all the way toward being what I would argue qualifies as a “true god”, but they’re at least as close as Gloomweaver and probably more so, and Gloomweaver is worshipped as if he was a god, not at all without justification. So even though C&A have said that no other pantheons in their universe are at all real, just the Egyptian ones, and those aren’t real in a theological sense, just as Fanatic isn’t 100% a servant of a Lord who is real in a theological sense, I would like to postulate that somewhere in the Sentinels universe, there probably exists at least one entity which is more of a “true god” than Ra or Gloomweaver or OblivAeon, or maybe even the Lord as Fanatic conceives of same. Let’s say that Gloomweaver is a 10% god, Ra is a 20% god, Anubis is a 30% god, and Fanatic’s externalization of her own power source is a 40% God; I think we could afford to see a being which is 50% of the way toward deserving to be called “a god” or “a God” or even “God”, while still not invalidating anyone’s real-world religious beliefs.
Whew, okay, that’s a pretty heady topic, and definitely one of the things I planned on discussing about this podcast ep, so I think that’s justification enough to publish at least one draft of this post before continuing.
Okay, so to resume. The Citizen Dawn vs. Void power question reminds me that I have a not-fully-complete sense of what exactly the source of Dawn’s power is, at least in my own headcanon. I think I mentioned before that I’ve got my own ideas of what Dawn ought to be all about, to the point that I think the timing of when she gains powers ought to be different than in the canonical story. I don’t know if the SCRPG or the Definitive Edition will ever answer the true source of Dawn’s power, but I do think there are enough puzzle pieces that a pretty good idea can be put together eventually, not just about where Dawn’s power comes from, but also what exactly the Void is and how it works.
I’ll also put off most of my discussion of OblivAeon and the two timelines and so forth, but to briefly touch on what is mentioned here, the normal nature of the multiverse is that every universe is isolated from all others by impenetrable barriers, and that the “Shattering of the Timelines” done by OblivAeon is not the reasons alternate timelines exist, but only the reason they are capable of coming in contact with each other. I think there’s further discussion possible about the Fixed Points and how the universes antimatter each other, but I’ll avoid that for now since it’s still not a complete thought.
Probably the single best pull quote from the episode begins at around 0h52m, where Christopher and Adam talk about the question of comics as an art form. I definitely wish that little clip was a standalone YouTube video that I could just link to when the subject comes up in online discussions. (YT does have a recently-premiered “clips” feature which can kind of do this sort of thing, but it’s not particularly effective in terms of the way it works.)
On the question of a cinematic universe, my thought is that the live action movies which “did fine” were probably the equivalents of the Tobey McGuire Spider-Man movies and the initial X-Men films, with a little bit of the Ang Lee Hulk film and a little bit of Batman Begins and the Dark Knight, but definitely never having an Iron Man movie.
I’m interested in picturing the crappy initial Ennead story, where the nine evil gods are probably just basically palette-shifts of Ra who all just look like random people and all have identical powers. Moving on to the crappy Fanatic story, I can’t hear the sotto voce references to who the bad writer is meant to correspond to, but I’m guessing it’s meant to be Todd MacFarlane, and I’m very curious what the real-world equivalent to the actual comic is.
Okay, probably the big subject that I was keying off of was the “because comics” question, which actually isn’t about that phrase at all, but that’s a good way of identifying the topic. The rewinding point which makes the SCRPG timeline happen is caused by Setback activating Chrono-Ranger’s time travel device, allowing a portion of RC to be un-destroyed. Given that Chrono-Ranger has time powers, he has technology from La Capitan who also has time powers, and Setback has luck powers that are powered by probability, which is probably a variant of time power, and OblivAeon’s death-beams are probably also an energy that’s a variant of time power, some kind of entropic blast that’s related to the energy that creates the timeline barriers that LC and CR and basically nobody else (except Visionary that one time) are capable of messing with. So the unwinding is probably something that’s only possible because the confluence of those specific energy types; OblivAeon blasts RC with “probability of destruction 100%”, and then Setback’s curse kicks in and causes that power to bend around him, turning into “probability of destruction 99%”, which renders Setback temporarily invincible against that particular attack. Thusly, the division between the two timelines is basically determined by whether Setback notices CR’s time-star flashing in the ruined remnants of his corpse; in one timeline, Pete gets distracted by something else and doesn’t manage to trigger Jim’s resurrection, and part of RC along with it.
Okay, I think that might finally be it. But I’ve been wrong before, so let’s keep going through the episodes and see if anything else comes up.
Well, there’s the topic of Constructs & Manifestations vs. Concepts vs. Distortions (and I’m still bitter about the non-answer about why Decoy Projection dies in the Realm of Discord). This mostly ends up being about Idealist, and I don’t think there’s ever a really concrete explanation of how her powers work, so I might as well look at it here. We know what Captain Cosmic is all about, because he’s a very transparent expy of the Green Lantern; he creates hard-light constructs which are effectively equivalent to Star Trek holograms, with CC himself as a power source, and no “holodeck” required; it’s pretty concrete as far as comic-book science goes. Infinitor is the same deal, except that the Manifestations have more individual agency and thus function as creatures rather than objects (some of CC’s creations are duplicates of a hero, but they don’t do anything that the hero wouldn’t do, whereas the Manifestations clearly have their own minds, to the point that they are sometimes hostile to Infinitor himself when he’s trying to act as a hero). And we get a very thorough explanation of Visi’s one Projection, so that just leaves Idealist, and the concept of what exactly a Concept or Fragment is. Gameplay-wise, they’re Ongoings and One-Shots respectively, but that doesn’t tell us much. It’s possible that they’re a form of shaped telekinesis, akin to the Decoy Projection but without the telepathic element, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory answer. The real question is why they take the complex shapes they do; the simplest object she ever makes is a fist, and even then she’s usually tempted to throw in a POW sound effect. So why does she imagine a cloud of Flying Stabby Knives that look like actual knives, instead of just a bunch of molecule-wide lines that would be far more efficient at cutting and stabbing things because of their smaller surface area? When she has to wipe out an Ongoing or Environment card, why does she specifically make a giant cat head to beam the thing with its eyes? I get that she’s supposed to be this very imaginative little girl, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around why her powers work the way they do, and only sometimes, instead of being a constant reality warp akin to what we see from The Dreamer (who should probably have been mentioned in this discussion but wasn’t).
The other point, and I’m pretty sure this is the last thing from the GenCon live that I had a half-comment on (the fact that they’re not complete thoughts is why I took so long to finally put them down; I was hoping to do better, but clearly I couldn’t)…Miss Information’s reality-warping powers. I think it’s fairly clear that she’s not meant to be another example of Dark Visionary exactly; we have two individuals who vacated their physical bodies, passed through the shattered timelines, and ended up in the bodies of their counterparts, one of whom was traveling between realities right after the timelines were shattered, and another where the timing didn’t line up and the “evil spirit” had to travel to its counterpart body the hard way. The explanation here pretty much amounts to “because comics” whether C&A want to admit it or not, but here’s my attempt at Justifying it. The chemicals that were dumped on Miss Info would have granted some degree of power to Aminia Twain if she had still been the loyal secretary of the Freedom Five (there’s an RPG character concept for some alternate universe), and they would have granted some degree of power to any other woman (or man) who was being possessed by the “evil spirit” of the vengeance-obsessed Aminia from that other reality. The reality powers of Miss Info - which by the way would have been astonishingly powerful and worthy of a full villain deck, instead of the second-weakest of the mini-villain decks, if not for the fact that she’s out of her mind and often actively self-sabotages - those powers are a sort of “triforce” which perfectly combines the latent potential of Aminia Twain’s genes, Aminia Twain’s mind, and the energies of the shattered timelines. Because the “evil spirit” only came to our universe, rather than some sort of afterlife, as a result of the timelines shattering, it has an inherent connection to the idea of reality being pliable, which further reinforces and is reinforced by the mental disturbance of this alternate Aminia, as she imagines scenarios where the heroes could have saved her life, and has no other reality at the time so those imaginings become real to her, until she suddenly falls into a real universe again and is temporarily restored to a measure of sanity. But that dormant hallucinatory madness is reawakened by the same chemicals which gave powers to Fright Train, chemicals derived very roundaboutly from Legacy’s genome, and thus ultimately derived from Wellspring’s influence on old Joseph Parsons. The idea that random chemicals can give you superpowers is scientifically nonsense, but Wellspring’s existence goes a long way to justifying how it can work; ultimately, while Tachyon is an example of the “because comics” school of thought with regard to “radiation accidents”, Miss Information is actually much better Justified than that, even if it takes some puzzling-out to realize this.
Okay, I think I’ve earned another break.
I was wrong, not done with the episode yet. Zhu Long! There are at least two times that Zhu Long gets brought up in this panel or its sequel, I’m pretty sure about that, and I just hit the first one. Zhu Long is more than powerful enough to be a primary villain in the game, he just never has a major plot revolve around him. This makes sense, because he’s astonishingly ancient (older than Akash’Bhuta if I remember correctly, and definitely older than the man who would become Gloomweaver), and thus has ever reason to be patient; he could define the “age of the superheroes” as starting when Haka was born, and it would still be a fleeting moment in history by his standards, so he has little reason to stick his neck out doing anything that’s going to bring the entire Prime Wardens or whoever down upon him, when he can just keep doing his minor machinations quietly in the background over the course of centuries, and preserve his powerbase in an isolated corner of the world that nobody else will bother with. So all that makes perfect sense, but it leads to an amazing question which I don’t think we’ve ever gotten an answer for: what exactly did Baron Blade say or do in order to convince Zhu Long to leave his temple and take part in the Vengeance event? Presumably giving him Mister Fixer was part of the bargain, but Zhu Long already had plans for that anyway, so there has to have been more going on. We know the specifics of ZL’s bargain with the Chairman, but Baron Blade doesn’t strike me as the type to respond well to an arrangement like that. While he’s more mentally unbalanced than Chairman Pike, he’s also kind of more human in a way, and the ghoulish bargain Zhu Long struck with Pike doesn’t seem like something Blade would ever agree to, not unless it was much more specifically aimed at either securing Mordengrad’s future or destroying Legacy (which is ultimately what Vengeance was about, but Zhu Long’s participation wasn’t exactly the linchpin of the plan which would guarantee Legacy’s destruction). Definitely a fun thing to ponder.
Ansel G. Moreau’s question about rip-off characters is answered by C&A, but not fully addressed; I don’t expect that C&A will ever fully detail the other publishers of the Sentinel Comics world and which characters they produced, but I think we can speculate usefully by way of comparison with real-world examples. Probably the most famous example is the Fawcett Comics line, which started out as a competitor with DC and was rolled into it later; Captain Atom was very transparently a variation on Superman, Blue Beetle loosely resembled Batman, and so forth. It’s fairly likely that Sentinel Comics had a similar situation, but made less of an effort to integrate these somewhat redundant characters into their canon. I could however imagine that someone like Setback might have initially started out as a crappy knock-off of Legacy, and been re-engineered to have the backstory where he directly derives his super-strength from Legacy via Baron Blade’s experiments, plus a whole luck-curse business that was invented by the SC writers. Likewise, the fact that we have two “archmage” characters, the Argent Adept who was pretty definitely a SC creation, and Nightmist who never quite fully fit into the same universe, may well indicate that the adventures of Joe Diamond might have once originated in a different publisher, one more focused on gritty noir and transparently Cthulhu-based monsters, which was later retrofitted into the backstory of Nightmist, explaining why she always kind of has one foot outside the SC universe and into a different genre, which was a-bit-awkwardly stapled onto the existing setting using the Cult of Gloom as a bridge. I could probably come up with a few other such examples, but two is enough for now. I don’t say this to malign any of those characters - Nightmist is one of my five or ten favorite heroes, after all - but simply to exploit this opportunity to imagine the meta-setting in greater depth.
As to the interlude which follows GenCon, there are a lot of comments I could come up with, but all of them are either one sentence long (eg “why didn’t we ever get that blooper reel episode, Trevor?”) or will need to become their own thread. I may create those threads later and then link them here, but otherwise I don’t have anything to say on the interlude, other than to briefly mention that their “a teleporter wouldn’t really work” line is proven hilariously untrue by Vanish, the first of the Cauldron heroes (which absolutely should be canon). Apart from that, I’m gonna say this gigantic post is finally done.
I normally don’t plan to stir up any postmodern “problematic” hornet’s nests, but in this case, I really have to say something: how would it be “cultural appropriation” for Christopher to perform a Haka (the quality of the performance notwithstanding), but it was not “cultural appropriation” for Christopher and Adam to design Haka as a character? This seems like a ridiculous assertion on Christopher’s part, and I’m curious whether even one person actually comes from a traditional culture of some sort, analogous to the Maori in terms of how much they’ve struggled with the effects of colonialism, and is actually seriously offended by the idea of a white guy (with substantial Latino heritage and upbringing) practicing a Maori chant if he felt like doing so.
That controversy and potential unpleasantness aside (and again, I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to touch the subject, because I dread the thought of doing so myself), my main observation about Haka is that I flat-out do not believe C&A when they say where Haka’s powers come from. I can believe that it’s something similar to what’s described, but the fact that we have Eternal Haka out there, combined with the timing of the timelines being shattered…no possible version of time-travel logic can explain how Haka could absorb lifeforce from all his alternate selves until only one other existed, and has had this power for over 700 years before the timelines were ever shattered, without all of those alternates having been retroactively wiped out 700 years ago. It’s akin to the time-travel error in the last episode of Star Trek Voyager, where the show contradicts its own pre-established (even in the same episode) rules of time travel, so there’s no possible way that it can work out. I can link to a YouTube video explaining this subject if anyone is interested in hearing about the Star Trek example; otherwise, just take my word for it that it doesn’t make sense, and I say the Haka powersource doesn’t make sense either.
The line in the podcast which really unlocks my headcanon for Haka is where the effect of his Hakas are discussed, and I have to quote Christopher’s line exactly: “The Hakas are not in any way magical, but they are powerful”. In the Dungeons and Dragons game, specifically its 3rd Edition sourcebook “Expanded Psionics Handbook” (which is my single favorite D&D book overall), they posit that Psionics are a form of magic, but IMO that’s more a matter of simplifying the rules than anything else, and it very specifically contradicts the canon of the Dark Sun setting, which is one of the main codifying sources of knowledge about psionics. In that setting, magic is inherently a corrupting force which destroys the environment, and so psionics is cultivate specifically as an alternative to be used against magic; the XPH does detail how a DM can optionally declare that psionics and magic are not “transparent” and thus equivalent, and this is the option I invoke for my own setting, which is not remotely Dark Sun-esque in any other way, but does tend to follow similar logic on this point.
Thusly, I would posit that the original source of Haka’s powers is much simpler: he’s an intuitive psionic user, specifically what the XPH refers to as a Psychic Warrior (or possibly an Egoist, who are the most PW-like of the actual Psions, but they tend to do a lot of shapeshifting and healing-with-a-touch and other such “psiony” things, so PW fits a lot better). The PW is a monastic-like class whose abilities are usually considered to emerge from strict personal discipline, but it’s not at all unreasonable to posit that someone could be born with latent psionic talent, awakening it through stress at some point in life, in your standard X-Men fashion. So this is what I posit is the true origin of Haka’s abilities; he unconsciously activates his psionic abilities by performing Hakas and similar Maori rituals, and when he would otherwise die, his unconscious mind activates ultra-powerful psionic powers he has no conscious access to, in order to heal himself through biofeedback until his body is restored enough that his conscious mind can reassert control, whereupon it locks those powers away again until the next emergency. The one big flaw I admit with this theory is that it doesn’t really explain why his Ta Moko disappeared; perhaps that really was the work of the gods his tribe worshipped, because they foresaw the path that it would put him upon. That’s no less implausible than C&A’s original explanation anyhow. (I’m still fine with saying that the other individual did what they did, and it had the effect of making Aata and Arataki both invincible as long as either one was alive, while exterminating Eternal Haka and the other alternates. But that couldn’t have been where the powers came from in the first place, not even by OblivAeon’s timey-wimey logic; more sensibly, it was a power boost akin to Naturalist unlocking a fourth animal form, which gave both Hakas what they needed to complete the battle, in exchange for a tragic sacrifice that would impoverish the many other worlds they were saving.)
Okay, that’s a short Justification, but I think it’s sufficient. Most of what the crew said about Haka doesn’t require comment IMO, just those two points (one minor and questionable, the other one comfortably fiction-based and central to the character). Really, I’m just trying to get out of my rut and get back into the swing of doing these, so that I can get them completed in some reasonable time frame and move on to other projects.
This episode sure didn’t keep its “longest ever” record for long.
The cardboard cutout goofiness probably only literally happened once; my assumption whenever I’m playing against “Ambuscade” in a Villains game and this card comes out, it represents some kind of misdirection tactic or another, but it looks different every time depending on what Environment you’re in, what other Villains are present, and in general what’s going on in this fight. I love the idea of, for example, the heroes are in the Tomb of Anubis fighting Ambuscade and Miss Information et al, and when the cutout shows up, it’s actually the heroes discovering a life-sized Egyptian-style painting of Ambuscade, and instantly uncritically accepting that Ambuscade has transformed himself into a hieroglyphic to try and hide from them, so they start disassembling the wall before they suddenly figure out that Missy’s powers made them accept a nonsensical premise as being reasonable. If Miss Info wasn’t there, the cutout might instead represent Ambuscade leaving his mask on a statue or something, so that the heroes would turn a corner, see the statue at the end of a shadowy hall, and snap off a quick shot at him before realizing their mistake. And if it was in Megalopolis or Rook City instead, then the cutout might represent the heroes mistaking a civilian who coincidentally looks like Ansel Moreau as being Ambuscade with his costume off, or even some crook who Ansel paid to impersonate him for an hour so he could get away.
The part about his energy powers fading makes me think that his first appearance might have been Challenge Mode, with the traps shuffling in and constantly accumulating; even though this wasn’t anywhere near being a thing when he first came out as the original mini-expansion villain, I feel like Ambuscade is one of those villains who somehow came out of playtesting (assuming 2011 C&A even playtested stuff) feeling much more potent and relevant than he has since been proven to be. Like Gloomweaver and Chokepoint and debatably Spite, Ambuscade almost never gets a win normally, and so his challenge mode is outrageous; thusly, it seems like it should retroactively explain his energy powers when they were brand new and at their peak, and that by the time they fade and you fight him on Mars, they’re down to the base deck again and he’s kind of pathetic.
As an alternative challenge mode, I’m a huge fan of the idea of having Ambuscade win if even one hero is incapacitated (similar to how Greazer drives away if he gets his bounty, but even more extreme). It doesn’t line up with the character as presented, but it could work as an alternate game mode. This mechanic was only ever used in Wager Master’s deck, which I found to be a tremendous waste, given how many other things are going on in that match (I don’t hate Wags as much as I used to, having seen him occasionally output an actually satisfying game; he just has a high probability of randomly aborting the game before it gets anywhere…it’s still more fun than fighting Spite). Moving it to Ambuscade instead seems both flavorful and a mutual benefit.
I remembered from my first viewing of the Visionary episode that it ended with the Lazer Ryders theme song, but I forgot that this episode also had a custom piece of music in place of the usual Progeny ending. It’s really cool, and I’m assuming it’s Ambuscade’s victory music, which I may have to wait a very long time to hear, since I always (well, almost) play with the intention of winning, and with my reverse-chronological rollout, Ambuscade will be the last villain I premiere, probably only fighting him a couple of times before financial and time constraints will probably force me to discontinue playing the app. At least I know Jean-Marc puts much of his music up on YouTube, so I’ll probably listen there.
Another pretty short one; my future looks bleak, so I may well never have time to finish this series, and am going to try not to linger perfectionistically over future episodes as I have done in the past (listening through six or so times to try and ensure that I get whatever point I half-noticed during my distracted initial listen). I hope at least someone is reading these giant walls of text that I put so much effort into; I do them for my own benefit and would even if I knew for a fact nobody ever read them, but I rather would like it if they did.
Man, the forum’s been quiet for the past several days. Usually there’s a little casual chit-chat between podcast and weekly app game drops, both of which happen on Tuesdays most of the time; I don’t think I’ve heard a peep out of anyone on this forum since like last Thursday. But I finally got around to resuming the Letters Page, so here we go again.
Justifications #34
With the knowledge that Ambuscade isn’t Ambuscade, much of the Slaughterhouse Six VOTM deck makes more sense; the various Snares and distractions we see are closer to matching Glamour’s MO instead of Ansel’s. But one card doesn’t make sense within this frame: Too Many Guns. If Ambuscade is just a robot or something which Glamour disguises with her suggestion voice so that you think it’s Ambuscade, then why is it so heavily armed? It seems out of place with the rest of the team’s more trap-focused methodology (except Fred I guess, he’s pretty straightforward), that the fake Ambuscade is just running around shooting grenades and lasers and bullets while also kicking whoever he’s caught in a Snare.
A thing that’s worth mentioning here is that when I originally bought VOTM after it came out (ah, I miss having money), the first game that I played with Ambuscade’s deck, we didn’t know to not kill him first, and so the discovery that you have to fight the rest of the Six was a mind-blowing reveal for me and my oldest friend (we frequently couldn’t find a third, so I would just play two heroes at once while also doing most of the tracking for the villains, letting my friend concentrate on just enjoying his one deck while I get all my control-freak tendencies out). Since then, I’ve taken it for granted in my tabletop games that anytime you kill Ambuscade, even if he’s the last villain left alive, his incapacitated ability kicks in and you’re not allowed to end the game until after you kill off the surviving Six members (which can be quite a challenge if Glamour is one of these, although at the time I assumed that the deck never played cards, so it wasn’t that difficult to pick the last couple targets off, unless you were very close to death). Imagine my surprise when, upon playing the app game, I discovered that killing the final character card ends the game immediately, even in this scenario. I find this fact somewhat disappointing, as it seems like it’d be more fun to always have to finish off the Six (unless they were discarded by Ermine or something). Combined with the shortage of weak villains in VOTM/Vengeance, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where Ambuscade would ever NOT be the last villain left alive, assuming the heroes didn’t just lose. So now, I find myself with an additional couple of “challenge mode” levers that I can fiddle with in order to play this deck - for an easy game, you can kill the other villains end then end the game by acing Ambuscade without worrying about the Six, while for a hard game, the Six not only continue the game past the loss of all character cards, but play additional cards from Ambuscade’s deck the whole time, potentially raising the other four back to life if you take too long getting Glamour killed.
Would really love to see some of these Glamour stories sometime, particularly the one where Tachyon’s wife is falsely perceived as having murdered and mimicked Melissa Morris, the makeshift matriculation of the missing Madame Margery Mittermaier. (I also find myself speculating on Margery herself; her dates back to the Golden Age, her surname sounds Yiddish, and the Festival seems like it would include the trope of the “gypsy fortune-teller”, with Mittermaier very possibly dressing and acting within that role despite not being Romani, or maybe she actually is. Either way, just as Magneto became one of the greatest supervillains of the 1960s and forward because of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Third Reich, I imagine that Margery also fell victim to the National Socialist regime in some fashion, which only made her a worse villain than she had already been, rather than rendering her in any way sympathetic. Indeed, the description of the Carnival’s purgatorial nature makes me suspect that Margery’s blatantly magical powers literally come from the Devil, or at least from an entity that has historically been regarded as the Devil and helped to inform those myths; either way, Margery is a witch in the literal sense, and either she is immortal or she had an ancestor who was burned at the stake, so her or her family have been “at war with the world” ever since, making her an unrepentant villain whose persecution by the Nazis is just another phase in her lifelong state of conflict with the innocent and the guilty alike.)
Gonna have to take a break here at about the 45-minute mark; lack of sleep is catching up to me and I’m not up to finishing the other half of this lengthy podcast (or Justification). I am interested to notice that either Omnitron-PI is written by the same person as the Cult of Gloom, or else deliberately did a riff on their catchphrase in his own presentational style (I feel like there’s a word for that, but I can’t figure out how to reverse-dictionary Google it any better than that). That sort of thing is fun, though it also impedes the clarity of the question-asking process; it’d be nice if the two were a little better separated, but Adam is pretty good at translating the madness into something resembling sense. Kinda the opposite of what I do, really. Anyway, g’night for now.
Yeah, it’s like we’re kind of in a lull now. I know I’ve created the last couple Weekly One-Shot threads because I’m usually pretty quick to jump on it when it shows up 7:00pm Central on Monday for me. This is basically the only game I’m currently playing with any regularity. I expect the boards will have an influx of activity once Definitive Edition finally arrives.
Well, that sounds perfectly dreadful! I can’t stand Glamour with her multiple redirections per turn. It’s like you either have to use start phase damage or have a damaging power to be able to get past that. Guess I haven’t yet tried a game with her in MMFFCC, but I can only imagine the horror of Glamour in the mirror maze!
