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Eureka! Youāre a lifesaver. The post has been restored; I donāt know why much of the text is now highlighted in pink, and Iāll never be able to edit it again because there are about ten HTML tags in between every word of the highlighted section. But this is a small price to pay for not losing a page-length writeup that I spent most of an hour on.
Fun fact, just before getting back on here, I won the video game against OblivAeon for the first time. And thanks to you, Omegatron, Iāve not only defeated digital OblivAeon but also escaped digital Oblivion for my writing. Something poetic about that.
Turns out I didnāt have anything at all to say about the 16th podcast episode, which covers Absolute Zero; his story is so perfectly encapsulated that I canāt come up with anything to add. So the numbering of episodes and Justifications will no longer be lined up henceforth, which annoys me, but so it goes. I donāt have much to say about episode 17 either, for that matter; this post is mostly just a check-in.
Justifications #16
The only comment I have here is to kvetch a little about the fact that C&A briefly namechecked the Exordium series, stating that it was effectively a prequel to Vengeance, but didnāt say anything about what that word means or why they picked it. According to online dictionaries, itās basically a fancy academic term for the beginning of something, notably a treatise or passage of text, but that doesnāt give very much context for how the term is being used here. It doesnāt seem very in-character for Baron Blade to use a snooty ivory-tower academic term; were I the Sentinel Comics Publisher, I would have titled this series something like āPrelude to Vengeanceā or āA Gathering of Foesā or somesuch. The name Exordium is cryptic and kind of cool-sounding, but it seems out of place here. (I also have a lot to say about the nemeses themselves and how many of them arenāt adequately fleshed out, but thereās a different episode coming up for that.)
I got a good laugh out of the gag at the end where Adam tells you what to do with your negative reviews. This episode was fun, and I liked AZās a bunch, but I just donāt really have anything much to riff on with either of them.
Given Christopherās tendency to play with words, though, itās completely on-brand. 
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Have you met Baron Blade? Arrogant pretentiousness is 150% the sort of thing heād do.
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Arrogant, for sure, but pretentious? I think of that word as implying a pompous, puffed-up bag of hot air who has nothing but their reputation to depend on. Baron Blade, by contrast, actually IS as smart as he thinks he is, so I donāt think of him as needing to put on airs. Heās egotistical, but he doesnāt think enough of other people to care about having them stroke his ego by telling him how great he is - he already knows, and if they donāt, then theyāre blind incompetent fools and he doesnāt need to bother convincing them.
Anyway, on to new (old) content:
Justifications #17
It took me a while to find anything worthy of comment in this one; the episode is fun, but most of it speaks for itself (in a funny robot voice). Here are the few exceptions that I found on the third relisten or so.
āMr. Chomps, the one and only; there are three of you right now!ā While this was obviously a joke, itās not that absurd of one, given that Proletariat/s exist/s.
The ARG is obviously an Augmented Reality Game, not an Alternate Reality Game, because the code-speaking robot is named Augustus, not Alternus.
By far the most interesting part of the episode is the bit about Unityās dating. Weāre told she dated āseveral guys, a couple of girls, and at least one alienā; Iād like to think there are probably also several aliens in the guys-and-girls categories, and that the one which is specifically called out as an alien was some sort of weird genderless creature, which she found interesting in sort of the same way that she bonds with Omnitron-X in friendship, but without the āweāre such good friendsā aspect that keeps her from possibly developing proto-romantic leanings toward the robot. I donāt want this alien date to be an actual robot, but some sort of organic metal creature might work. In any event, Iād really like to see a comic or two which fully details this dating life of hers, showing no fewer than six relationships that she tries out across the three or so years that she ages in the decade and a half of comics she belongs in.
Thereās also the Biomancer section. I have a specific comment and a general one:
- In the scene where Mister Fixer bullies Biomancer into doing his thing for Unityās benefit, I imagine that his threat is specifically āIf I even think youāre up to any funny businessā¦you wonāt be laughing for long.ā
- The observation that Biomancer can sometimes act goofy, despite being incredibly evil (the opposite of Wager Master, who can do evil things but is basically goofy), combined with his not very intimidating costume, are an interesting suggestion about how Zosimos has been away from the society of normal humans for so long that heās totally lost touch with any sense for āappropriateā behavior. If he comes across as silly or comedic sometimes, itās just because of how inhuman his perspective is; I imagine he doesnāt bother trying to impress other people very often, because he just sees them as sources of flesh that would be better turned to his purposes.
And now to really go wild with speculation; I wasnāt going to go down this rabbit hole at first when I planned this post, but hereās an idea that just occurred to me, and Iām running with it. Rose Griggs, the Chaos Witch who accidentally caused Unity to gain her powers, is also indirectly responsible for Chokepoint, thatās my headcanon as of right now. Chokepointās power is never explained, and the way it works is bizarre enough that magic makes a better reason for it than any sort of scientific version. Scientifically, metal doesnāt have a voice that can call out to Choke even when sheās a baby, but doing that as a magical power is far easier to justify. And while the chronology doesnāt really line up, I like the idea that Griggs somehow becomes aware that she accidentally gave powers to a pregnant ladyās daughter, and then intentionally tried again by doing something similar to the woman who would end up being Chokeās mother, and that she plans to continue trying to master this accidental art of hers until she gets it right.
There, Iām not 100% sure thatās everything worth keying off, but itās plenty for right now; I donāt want to just sit here and listen to the same episode over and over. Time enough to come back to all this again in 2025, when the Vertex comic line comes out for real.
Justifications #18
The idea that the Electrum Age version of the Wraith was āharderā or āedgierā than her modern version is VERY interesting to contemplate, given that this would have been somewhere in the 50s, the height of the Comics Code and McCarthyism and similar issues, so itās really hard to picture how a character could be more edgy then than their modern incarnation.
Definitely very interested in the philosophical question of what art would be like if the consequences for creating bad art were more dire (or perhaps we should say more inescapable; as matters stand, a bad movie can definitely ruin someoneās career and cost them huge amounts of money, effectively destroying their life and forcing them to give up on the idea of a life in Hollywood, but itās all very nebulous and hard to pinpoint). Iām not currently up to having that conversation, but I do think itās worth discussing at some depth.
Since the Thorathians have been stated as Nazi analogues in the early comics, Iām very curious to know more about the Communist analogue aliens that kept the F5 busy during the Mad Bomber Blade event.
Because the Wraith is a Batman analogue, I find myself wanting to have actual DC Batman start dating a female US Army soldier who famously pilots a giant mecha-suit and eventually joins the Justice League.
Justifications #19
Thereās not much for me to say about the Dark Watch interlude, except that I totally got the Yoshi joke. Yes. I actually have seen that movie; I donāt even completely hate it. I think I was planning to riff off the subject of No-Feelings Setback, and also the discussion of Mister Fixer reckoning with this past versions, but at the moment I donāt know what I would do with those conversations. So letās move on.
Lots to say on this one; Chokepoint isnāt the best-designed hero from either a mechanics perspective or a story perspective (Iām pretty sure that 2011 C&A didnāt know what exactly they were doing about a Nemesis for Bunker and AZ), but sheās one of my favorites in the sense of not liking her, but being obsessed with how broken she is and having a primal need to fix her. Which is pretty appropriate to her powerset, so there you go.
Chokeās power is kind of inherently nonsense in the first place, although C&A do some decent work trying to, well, justify it. The version of her we see on the Armored Animus card is frankly stupid-looking (interestingly, it looks almost identical to the Misguided Fool created by Wager Master, although he was doing it on purpose to make it look dumb as a way of mocking the heroes, while she seems to simply not care about appearances, apart from dyeing her hair); sheād look far better wrapped in an M1 Abrams Tank as described in the backstory where she leaves Project Ironclad. (That name also seems to suggest that she may have been intentionally engineered by the Project, but I doubt that for several reasons, just as I doubt that WM had any role in her creation.)
In the Future section, we hear that Chokepoint is using whatās left of the Celestial Tribunal to try and blow up a star at the center of the galaxy, thereby wiping out all weakness. This is said in a way that seems to imply that it wipes out all life, but I interpreted it differently. Thereās an arc during Grant Morrisonās Doom Patrol where he turns The Chief (the groupās Professor X equivalent - one of the handful of famous superhero archetypes, also represented by DCās Oracle, Ando from the TV show āHeroesā, and numerous other āguy in the chairā types, with or without actual chairs) into the villain of a story arc, by having Chief reveal that he intentionally engineered all the disasters which turned the Doom Patrol members into the super-freaks they are. While I hated this arc for being character assassination, I also enjoyed the philosophy about how catastrophes force people to exceed their usual limitations in order to overcome them (a similar concept is the motivation for the villain in the movie āConstantineā). Iād like very much to write a version of Chokepoint who is less of an ax-crazy murderer and more of a well-intentioned extremist, whose use of Deadlineās former Zenith Gauge is ultimately a mission similar to Deadlineās own, where she hopes to kick-start evolution by stripping away all thatās unnecessary to survival and leaving only the most extraordinary people to be capable of rebuilding a destroyed civilization.
That bit about how a character doesnāt have cards for whatever they always haveā¦clearly this philosophy postdates the creation of Bunker! (Low blow, I know, but kicking Bunker while heās down at the bottom of my character-power index is something of a passion of mine.)
Adam must have different dreams than I do, because I definitely read and hear and fully understand actual words in my dreams all the time. Also, I wouldnāt normally pick on someone for weird mispronunciations, but it really bothers me to hear Christopher saying āah-dahdjā instead of āadd-addājā for the word āadageā.
I thought there was some really interesting philosophy around the middle of the episode, where they take on the question of whatās really going on with CPās powers; I thought it was around the part where Christopher mentions the āadageā about hammers and nails (nobody tell Proletariat that one), but other than that and an analogy to car, I didnāt catch it this time through. Might have to do a follow-up on this one, this is one of my favorite podcast episodes, and I think it could use more unpacking.
Worth noting Christopher was born and spent his childhood in Venezuela. While he doesnāt have any overall accent now, I wouldnāt be surprised if it still affected his pronunciations in some ways.
(I say this mainly because Iāve also noticed Christopher having quirky pronunciations of some words at times.)
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Indeed, Iām 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 āEl Nateā 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 alongā¦
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 KNYFEās 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 canāt cite any examples of a visual effect like this off the top of my head, but Iām pretty certain Iāve seen it a number of times, and itās one of my favorite things to imagine. Since KNYFEās name is based on the phrase āKinetic Neutralizerā, which doesnāt inherently make all that much sense, I would posit that the āenergyā lances that come out of her body are specifically kinetic energy, and thus should not really be doing āenergy damageā 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 ākinetic envelopeā that physically moving the material blade creates. (This entire aesthetic of creating a more ābelievableā and mundane version of the character is similar to what was done with the TV movie version of Witchblade, where the original comicās near-pornographic and organic-looking visualization of the titular artifactās effect on Sarah Pezziniās body was replaced by having the showās Witchblade simply create medieval metallic armor which completely covered her body. I tended to approve of the shift, not because I donāt 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 KNYFEās fixation on Citizen Dawn is specifically due to her having encountered, or at least read about in FILTERās archives, a LOT of alternate reality versions of Dawn Cohen who are virtually ALL bad news. Dawn isnāt 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 donāt really hold to the version Adam describes, which doesnāt sound cool to me, but I do imagine it being awesome. Iāll save most of my description thereof for when we reach the Progeny episode (I think he gets one), since itās 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? Iām pretty sure we never see that.
It would take a really skilled writer to do justice to KNYFEās overall story, in particular the part where she intercepts coded transmissions that only the Paige Huntleys of the multiverse would know. Iām 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 thatās kinda my jam; Iād 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 sheās killing, as well as the multiversal implications of her timeline being largely destroyed by Progeny and the OblivAeon event.
Iām 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. Iāll have to do a side by side comparison of the two later on.
Okay, thatās it for this episode (I think); from now on, no more Mr. KNYFE Guy.
Justifications #21
The story of FILTER is a paradoxicaly interesting one to me, because itās so boring and nebulous in a way thatās 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 thatās 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)ā¦itās 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 Iād be up to the effort of nailing all that down, though not right now.
Oh hey, plot twist - Iām going to have to do a two-parter here, when my attention is undivided. Turns out that thereās a contradiction between two consecutive episodes which I donāt believe anyone has pointed out before, so Iām going to have to track it down exactly, and then create a special Justification that isnāt for a single episode at all.
Justifications #22 - Justify #21 Harder
Just as a warm-up, for my own amusement, Iām going to list off the given information about all of the Steel Squad members. Since A&C donāt label their dimensions, Iām going to invent a three-digit code for every dimension we get any info about.
- Jack Steel - from dimension JS1; originally a member of KNYFEās squad.
- Ash the Arsonator - from dimension A&C; a former Bunker opponent; originally a member of KNYFEās 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 KNYFEās squad.
- Chance the Espionagent - from a different dimension than the FILTER Spy; originally a member of KNYFEās squad.
- Donny the Field Inventor - from an unknown dimension; originally a member of KNYFEās squad.
- Beatrix the Infiltrationist - from an unknown dimension; originally a member of KNYFEās 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; hereās the real work. Quoting exactly from the podcast episodes:
Episode 21 - KNYFE, quoted from 00:35:40
āShe 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.ā
Episode 22 - Sgt. Steel, quoted from 00:17:02
āSo 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.ā
Okay, thatās 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 didnāt really have anything to say about; I liked it all, but there just wasnāt 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 itās very vague; I donāt know if A&C have ever definied exactly what the rules governing the place are, but they certainly havenāt spelled it out for our benefit. Weāre 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 Iād really like to try and figure out concretely.
Itās 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 Lifelineās 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 isnāt 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.
āHey, you just tried to destroy our planet and kill us all!ā āNot all of you; only most.ā I for one would have been exactly on the same page as Lifeline, given the same information and available options.
Well, that wasnāt the best. I could almost have skipped this episode too. Oh well, onward and upwardā¦
Also here: Height Compairisons - #11 by Jeysie and here Height Compairisons - #16 by jesse_garcia_87
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The hero section doesnāt explicitly mention Tarogath, sadly. Also I think itād be a fun visual, if anybody has the art skill to draw it up. I do not, so letās 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 boomtownās eventual vanishing. Iām guessing that the 1883 environment with its time portal postdates Jimās disappearance, though this is unclear; it could possibly predate his self-deputization instead, but that seems less likely.
CON Version 4ā¦thatās an interesting detail I never caught before. Wonder what other Versions we have somewhere in the timestreamā¦
A bit of a contradiction between the tale of CRās first appearance, where he blasts AkashāBhuta 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 āmake some friendsā. Perahaps this is a later encounter? But if so, itās 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. Hereās what Iām thinking. CON exists in the Final Wasteland, shielded somehow against changes in time, with a mission to prevent all consequences of the worldās 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 couldnāt change the past, etc.). The friction between the isolated bubble that contains CON and the surrounding reality is therefore a source of ātemporal energyā 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 CONās dimension, and creating a new burst of this friction which CON harvests and immediately transmits to Jim.
Welp, Iām done, until someone travels back in time and changes something so that I have to come back and do this all over again. Sayonara, pardnerā¦
Thatās why I also included the second list link, which is the villains; Deadlineās in there.
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Justifications #25
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 āRotmouthā Burke operating as a drug kingpin in Rook City?
Iām very sick of the āschmandy schmarā 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 āBatmanā. There canāt possibly be any legal consequences to them just MENTIONING another intellectual property, can there?
The story of Baron Blade stealing a piece of AkashāThriya doesnāt 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 NatchāThriyaās recovery of it, let me know, because I canāt 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 ārock pizzaā, I wonder if thatās 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. Itās not impossible weāll 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. Iād 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, youād 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.
Welp, thatās that for this episode.
A double-header this time; I donāt have a lot of comments on either of these episodes, and theyāre 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. Itād 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 Raās 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 Iām always happy to put more thought into it.
Apparently thereās 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 itās turned into Nexus Primalis, I wonder if some new Atum will show up there and start running the place for a while, or maybe itāll 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 youāre 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. Itās almost like having the same mind but a different soul, or vice versa. Itās very interesting to consider, particularly in view of the Egyptian view of the multi-part self, which Iām 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 youāre sort of the same person but sort of not really tracks, because some parts of your original āsoulā remain while other āsoulā 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 āfrom the very beginningā, but since AkashāBhuta 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 theyāre both an āancient childā 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 āsource of foesā is interesting, given that this is the name of one of OblivAeonās shield cards. Probably just a coincidence, but fun to consider.
Finally moving on to the Ennead episode; I didnāt 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 donāt 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 Iād 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. Iām 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 Iām done, but I had better post in case I lose this.)
Justifications #27
This oneās going to be a little different, because I donāt have any really direct responses to the content of the podcast itself; Iām 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, heās probably done something wrong, but I disagree. Iām someone who believes that magic systems should be very concretely thought out (not quite to the Clarkeās 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; thereās 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 Iāve 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 himselfā¦Iāve 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 isnāt magical at all), Wanda generally doesnāt point at someone and disintegrate them down to their atoms with a burst of eldritch destruction; instead she just uses her āhex powersā 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 Argentās role as a support character, but whatās 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; Iād be interested to hear from anyone who read those books back in the day, to see if the parallel is valid.)
Even after the AkashāBhuta 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 doesnāt seem to match the characterās personality and the activities of his day-to-day life. The episode also tells us that Drakeās nigh-infinite capabilities of Void Magic are poorly modeled by the card game, and that his strategy for conflict resolution isnāt really about dealing damage to defeat opponents; I for one am very curious about whether one could invent a model using the card gameās rules, where you could play a full-power solo version of Argent going up against one or more villains. (Iāve 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 itās a fun puzzler to try and figure out what other cards youād 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 theyāre quite interesting characters, and itās 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 donāt 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 Raās 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 doesnāt 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 Emperorā¦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 donāt have thousands of years to work on this project, so Iād better allow the sands of history to close over this completed work, and move on to the next phase of its existence.