Just finished listening to C&A’s main episode about the “heroes are villains and villains are heroes” setting; I don’t know if they ever revisited this setting, but on the assumption that they didn’t, I thought I’d take a crack at fleshing out whatever characters they didn’t mention, and giving a few more speculative details about the ones that weren’t fully described.
Whew, this is quite the project! I think I’ve done enough for one day.
Heroes-Turned-Villains:
Legacy of Destruction - The Parsons family have been selfish, anti-patriotic louts holding back America’s development ever since 1775, when the Singular Entity known as Wellspring came to Earth, intent upon granting a boon of Progress to some leading figure who would grow to become the world’s greatest hero (it was loosely thinking of perhaps working on a progenitor of the Hayes family who would later move out west, becoming the most upstanding citizens in the corrupt mining town of Silver Gulch). Stumbling drunkenly upon the recently-arrived being, general-purpose loser Jehosephat Parsons utterly fouled up Wellspring’s efforts, absorbed much of the power it had planned to bestow upon someone far more worthy, and drove it to abandon the world in disgust; Jeho went on to sell out Paul Revere to the Loyalists and nearly torpedoed the entire Revolution, and after escaping justice for his treachery, he went on to found a lineage of sons named Paul in cruel mockery of his first (second, if Wellspring counts) ruined victim. Fast forward through eight other cads and bounders who have dragged America into pointless quagmire wars, and we get to “our” Paul, whose college philosophy courses made him the most nihilistic Legacy of Destruction ever. His battered and Stockholm-Syndrome wife Emily utterly fails at controlling his out-of-control narcissist daughter Paulina, who is well on her way to becoming the new LoD now that Aminia Twain has put Paul VIII away for good.
White Wraith - Gallivanting around the world and squandering the impressive fortunes of her ruthlessly efficient business-tycoon parents, Maia Montgomery was an emotionally unstable wild-child who utterly squandered her potential; what little remained of her inventive genius was destroyed after she blundered in and out of the Tomb of Anubis, where she spitefully rejected a mummy’s kindly offer of eternal happiness in Duat, and was cursed to wander the world forever as a spirit of rage. Returning to her childhood home of Rook City, she has stalked the night and preyed upon the innocent ever since, strangling folk with her animated bandages or simply whispering terrifying threats outside the windows of children at night.
Rampart - Not much to tell here; Tyler Vance and his CO General Armstrong are every stereotype of the brutal, sadistic Army thugs ever to come out of a Vietnam-era anti-war movie, and the Project Ironclad suits have been world-class weapons of mass destruction which have fueled profitable brushfire wars the world over for decades.
Terminal Velocity - Again, we pretty much know the story here; Dr. Meredith Stinson is an amoral genius whose desire to get away with her every twisted ambition led her to intentionally dousing herself in tachyon radiation. After nearly murdering her moralizing lab assistant Krystal (fortunately she didn’t stick around to ensure that her deathtrap worked properly, giving Ms. Lee a chance to escape and seek refuge in Mordengrad), T.V. has gone on to cut a swath of chaos across the world, constantly pushing the limits of what she can get away with (she’s particularly fond of robbing gourmet kitchens, eating thousands of dollars of the finest haute cuisine within seconds, and then routinely bragging to insecure heroines about how she never gains a pound).
Black Frost - Is virtually identical to the Absolute Zero of the main timeline, even to his suit design being almost the same…he’s just slightly more misanthropic, more bitter about his indenture to Terminal Velocity for the nigh-infinite cost of his suit, and generally incapable of growing as a character the way “our” Ryan did. He revels in the near-invincibility granted by his frozen, lifeless state, and is a lot less willing to intentionally heat himself up in order to create ice outside his suit, preferring instead to keep his Null-Point Calibration Unit perfectly tuned so that he remains optimally healthy.
Singularity - As described in C&A’s episode, this Devra Caspit is a crooked robotics expert who eventually creates the autonomous robot Negatron.
Haka - There was an immortal Maori warrior who ravaged his way across the world for centuries in the past, but he was long since erased from this timeline. (The real Haka is such a quintessentially good character that it’s not much fun to think about his evil version, so it’s convenient that the overarcing multiversal truth of Haka’s existence justifies the erasure of his version in this world.)
Hellion - The equivalent of Fanatic, a spirit of Chaos incarnated upon the world to bring totally-metal destruction to anyone who crosses her path. I have nothing to add, even though she’s one of my favorite characters in the established canon of this universe. See her card in OblivAeon’s mission deck for basically everything we know.
The Tempestuous One - An amoral survivor of a people who genocided themselves in their hotheaded pursuit of galactic power, the blatantly supremacist Maerinyan who proudly calls himself M’kk Dal’Ton has been persistently thwarted in his conquering ambitions by Grand Adjudicator Voss of the Thorathian Protectorate. After Voss’s effort to bring Earth into his federation was rebuffed, Tempest chose to stay on the backwater planet and carve out his own private empire of Plavu’Col, keeping a handful of sycophant toadies (and one gene-binding survivor who is working to undermine his authority whenever he’s away) to rule over whenever he isn’t out wreaking havoc among the “inferior” Terrans.
The Viridian Virtuoso - A tremendously self-important and vainglorious individual whose entire music career exists solely for the sake of getting him groupies of both sexes, Anthony “Fat Tony” Drake (the nickname is ironic, he’s just as buff as our version) is the latest inheritor of the power which was stolen from the void by history’s greatest musical villains (Anpunku and Eydisiar and so forth). The noble Austrian conductor Franz Vogel nearly managed to bury this ancient cabal of wicked mages for all time, but after a century or two of blissful safety for the slumbering world-spirit Akash’Thriya, the greatest musical warlock ever has finally come into his power, and he pretty much wins every battle he fights because of how outrageously strong his magic is (few of his stories have actually been told in the pages of Disparation, simply because of how boring it is to watch a character who just always wins). The leader of the four-member Prime Ravagers team which have committed some of the most outrageous capers and atrocities of recent history, destroying all manner of ancient guardian-entities in order to harvest their power and squander it on selfish indulgences, Fat Tony has recently had to sacrifice some of his sources of power in order to escape retribution for his misdeeds (he broke the Bell of Xu Long to massacre an entire ship of Thorathian peacekeepers, and only years later did he briefly partner with the fallen savior Deadline in order to reforge this artifact), but he’s still an unholy interdimensional terror who seeks to orchestrate disaster on a global scale for the pettiest of reasons.
Captain Cosmos - A ruthlessly effective prosecutor for the Crown Court, barrister Hugh Lowsley and his simpering brother Nigel were both empowered by an Oblivion Shard which fell to earth one day, but Nigel flew off into the skies in a cloud of fluffy-bunny fantasies and didn’t come back for years, so Hugh took his newfound powers and went about savagely torturing everyone who he had ever failed to destroy in the courtroom. Determined to prove his brilliance and dominance at any cost, Hugh eventually tired of tormenting small fry on Earth and flew off in search of bigger conquests; it wasn’t long before his little brother reappeared and started getting underfoot, and the two have clashed consistently ever since. While far more effective when he has some minions or patsies that he can temporarily empower, Hugh’s arrogance and hypocrisy are difficult for others to tolerate very long; he speaks down to everyone and uses all manner of specious reasoning to justify whatever actions he decides upon, and has tied entire societies up in grotesque parodies of the English legal system simply as experiments to amuse himself, hoping to identify new tricks that he can use on the rare occasions he comes back to Earth and slums it as an ordinary barrister for a while.
Ra (later Horus) - An egomaniac, megalomaniac, pyromaniac, and pretty much everything else you can find in the DSM-V, the outrageously powerful sun god was once just a crooked archaeologist named Dr. Blake Washington, who plundered tombs for priceless national treasures and then sold them on the black market. But he hasn’t adopted that identity in decades, because ruling over an empire of melted glass in the desert better suits his vainglorious persona; while not particularly ambitious about actually doing anything beyond incinerating anyone impertinent enough to approach him, he’s one of the most vicious and destructive beings ever to walk the earth, and it has taken the combined efforts of the entire nine-person hero team known as the Ennead of Heliopolis to stop the handful of villainous plots he’s attempted now and again. Much of his general lassitude is due to a clever scheme perpetrated against him by the underworld’s protector-beast Ammut, who has used his arrogance against him in order to trick him into violating several mystically binding contracts, thus forcing him to spend years untangling himself from the consequences of his rash behavior.
The Visionary - An experimental subject of the sinister Project Cocoon (which, as a black ops project aimed at harnessing greater power for the utility of the nation, is pretty much in the middle of the morality spectrum regardless of which end you’re starting from), Vanessa Long’s mind was fundamentally broken in order to unleash its power, leaving her so delusional that she believes herself to be a traveler from a different universe entirely, and sees her “new” home as being a largely irrelevant other dimension which she’s perfectly in her rights to destroy. Only the presence of an ethical and compassionate splinter personality within herself holds her back from the most destructive actions she’s capable of, and when OblivAeon comes to destroy this reality along with all others, one of the first things he does is transform Vanessa into his Dark Mind scion, which is accomplished largely by obliterating the “Light Visionary” persona entirely.
Mister Fix-You-Good: H.R. “Slim” Walker isn’t exactly proud of his past as the ruthless drug kingpin Black Fist, but none of his discomfort is founded in ethics, only in preoccupation with whether he was given the respect he feels he deserves. He still runs his own little criminal empire out of an innocent-seeming auto repair shop, routinely having to discipline his cronies when they fail him - a pipe wrench here, a dropped engine block there, he has plenty of tools for improving employee morale. Other villains consider him a trustworthy source for assistance and advice, since he isn’t as egotistical or craven as most criminals (particularly in Overbrook City, where crime has barely even managed to gain a foothold).
Ex-Patriette: Of all the powered individuals who Citizen Dawn has fostered within her Sanctuary of the Sun, her worst failure was her own daughter who now lives under the name Amanda Cohen in order to please the loutish grandparents who Dawn tried to shelter her from. Dawn always tried to reassure young Amanda that she was welcome in the Sanctuary, even if she never manifested superhuman powers as it was generally assumed she would, but the paranoid and insecure girl never believed it, and her entirely imaginary construct of her mother’s disappointment and eventual abandonment of her drove Amanda to run away before she could be rejected. Now a contract killer for hire, who takes particularly delight in snuffing out the naturally powered before they can find a way of integrating themselves into the world, Amanda wears a purely cosmetic eyepatch and dual-wields her custom pistols, which are named in honor of a Jane Austen novel that she took great delight in hiding from her mother all throughout her childhood, (having baselessly assumed that Dawn would take the book away if she found it, since obviously she must be bigoted against anything written by a powerless human). Totally ignorant of the fact that she’s invented all of her own problems, Expat wages a one-woman world against a world which she’s convinced hates and fears her, and has cost the world more than one cancer cure by putting down people whose miraculous abilities could have changed the world for the better on a massive scale.
Big Risk - A narcissistic cad who haunts Overbrook City’s biggest casino, the inveterate gambler Pete Riske is convinced that he’s going to run the world one day as long as he keeps believing in himself, and no matter how often he loses a fortune on some obviously-doomed startup or other long-odds scheme to get rich quick, he never feels like a failure, because there’s always more money out there that he can steal to fund his next venture. It’s all insured anyway, so who cares if he’s plundering some old lady’s retirement account with a Ponzi scheme or the like? Let the bean-counters figure it all out, he’s got big plans to think about. Even his teenage ex-girlfriend’s attempts at teaching him some karmic justice with an “unluck hex” have done nothing to slow Pete’s consistent efforts at being the Next Big Thing. He’s read every “the Secret”-type book ever printed, attended all manner of motivational seminars put on by similarly-sleazy personalities (most famously including Mark Benedetto, who Pete doesn’t know is actually his most consistent foil on various crime capers, the armor-clad superhero Comeback), and generally just assumes that the Power of Positive Thinking is always going to make everything work out his way, believing this unquestionably no matter how much evidence to the contrary he encounters in his life.
Misty Night - Faye Diamond’s grandfather started out in the Cult of Gloom but was too damn good at what he did, eventually being driven out by direct orders of Gloomweaver himself. And, having a deep-seated need to prostrate himself before a greater entity in search of power, Joe Diamond went in search of other nameless entities who he could venerate, who might bestow upon him the secret to various arcane formulae which Man Was Not Meant To Know. Exactly how Joe’s story ends remains unclear, but at some point he had a son, who had a daughter, and Faye disobeyed all of her father’s warnings to stay away from dark magic, eventually succumbing to a curse that shattered whatever sanity she once had. She now collects every dread artifact she can find and hoards them within her Overbrook City mansion, plotting to unleash all manner of havoc one day (see the Podcast episode “Nightmist’s Little Black Book” for more details on what horrific outcome the canon Nightmist has tried to avoid, and which this one is simply biding her time before doing deliberately).
The Matriarch: As described in the podcast episode, this version of Lilian Corvus started out as the heroic Harpy (briefly having gone by Pinion early in her career and then abandoned it in favor of a more “edgy” name, signaling her eventual slide into morbidity and viciousness). Her sister Terminal Velocity eventually persuaded her that pursuing good ideals in a naturally evil world was pointless, and she eventually fell from grace, ultimately replacing the doomed Misty Night as the magical authority of the loose confederation of villains known ironically as Light Watch, which works to rule Overbrook City from the shadows.
Chrono-Ranger: Sheriff Jim Brooks was the one-man army which ruled Silver Gulch with an iron fist, until he was eventually betrayed and ousted by his deputy, “old man” Pratt (who once slammed a man’s hand in a cell door, but didn’t do it “just 'cause”, he had a very specific and totally evil reason). With a bullet wound in his arm slowly succumbing to gangrene, the ex-sheriff stumbled into the desert, wandering so blindly that it took him hours to realize that he’d left the American West and entered some sort of bleakly tranquil other-world, populated by shy but friendly “fearsome critters” out of American folklore. Eventually he was scooped up by the robotic patrol drones of the Discordant Disharmony Entity (aka “Disco”), a vicious multi-mind entity which was sealed away in a bunker by the last generation of human survivors, and has been gradually burrowing its way out ever since, determined to rule the world even if nothing but ashes remains of it. Disco performed emergency surgery on Jim’s arm and eventually had to amputate it (naturally there was no anaesthetic, although that didn’t bother Jim too much since it was little different from what the most benevolent of doctors in his era could have done), replacing it with an array of cybernetic devices that would make him a useful minion. With temporal technology that its jailors had specifically tried to keep it from having, Disco sent Jim back into the history of this particular timeline (whose peculiarities include the ability to edit its own past without spawning any alternate dimensions, for reasons that would take lifetimes to explain - Eternal Haka could do it, but we don’t have him here, so that’s that). His mission - seek out specific Targets and terminate them by any means necessary. If he fails in his mission, he won’t be able to return…
Negatron - see Singularity above.
Villains-Turned-Heroes (solo decks)
Luminary - The not only morality-swapped but gender-swapped (this is oddly common among the VTH’s but not the HTV’s) equivalent of Baron Blade, Princess Ivana Ramonat is described extensively in the podcast episode.
Citizen Dawn - The naturally powerful Dawn Cohen always had great potential for both good and evil within her; in the canon timeline, she fully embraced her arrogant self-superiority and became a callous mass-murderer, but in this world her personality is nearly the same, with just a tiny dash of extra compassion and empathy that made all the difference. She has created a pocket paradise on the dangerous island of Primalia, domesticating its dinosaurs with the aid of her first and most supportive ally, Citizen Spring (who she has no idea at all is planning to betray her). Here, she raises the banner of her own socialist utopia and offers shelter to any naturally-powered individual whom the world hates and fears, whether they were born with powers like Spring and the other Seasons, was experimented on by Project Cocoon like the quarreling brothers Truth and Dare, or even gave themselves powers intentionally, as with the poet coven who are now Blood, Sweat, and Tears. (I could go on infinitely, since Dawn and her Citizens are one of my favorite things in the entire card game, and a heroic version of them perfectly appeals to my sensibilities. But we’ll save all that for another article.)
Omnitron - As described in the podcast, the Omnitron Defense System starts out as a nonsentient network of robotic protectors created by Luminary, and is later messed with by Singularity to create various other versions. Most of these ultimately revert to their benevolent programming regardless of how Devra alters them (causing her to swear “Oh sparks!” in disgust every time her bot-tastic plans for world domination fall apart on her), but eventually she succeeds in creating the ultimate malevolent robot Negatron, who systematically dismantles all of the world’s surviving Omnitron systems before it is finally stopped.
Grand Adjudicator Voss - The peaceful Thorathian Empire has been briefly overthrown by various malefactors over the centuries; Rainek Kel’Voss was the second son of the latest such despot, who held power for a while but was eventually deposed, thanks in large part to Rainek’s efforts to aid the rebels from within the dictator’s own palace. As a reward, he was not only elevated to the position of highest authority within the long-established rightful power structure of Dok’Thorath and the Protectorate of allied systems that it rules over, but was given unprecedented authority to mobilize the state’s resources, including the controversial Gene-Binding program. While “our” Warlord Voss subjugated entire planets and turned the entire surviving population into Gene-Bound soldiers, Adjudicator Voss has only a small handful of Gene-Bound, who started out as the worst scum of the galaxy and were systematically deprogrammed of all their malevolence, building them back up into a crack strikeforce of elite guardians under the direct authority of the Adjudicator himself. With the aid of his subordinates, the heroically gung-ho Tamar and the deviously clever (but secretly romantic) Viktor, Voss sought to bring order and lasting peace to the entire galaxy, but encountered a nearly unthinkable degree of resistance on the planet Earth, whose people seem uniquely stubborn about retaining the freedom to embrace their most negative personality aspects.
Stuntman - As described several times by Adam and Christopher, this universe’s version of Ansel G. Moreau is a straight-up hero whose movie career has only been boosted by his consistent battles against the famous villains mentioned above. Only during the OblivAeon crisis does this tireless hero briefly fall to the dark side after having his beautiful face horribly maimed (at least that’s his vision of it), causing him to lapse into a fugue state where he acts out his famous movie role of The Hunter, and stalks his fellow heroes until being swiftly put down.
Mayor Pike: The reverse Chairman, as mentioned in the episode, with his right-hand woman on the police force, Inspector Sophia DeLeon (occasionally nicknamed “Modus Operandi”).
The Harpy: As mentioned above, Lilian Corvus has both heroic and villainous phases in this universe as well, just in the opposite order from the canon timeline.
Peacemaker: The somewhat bizarre variation on Spite, detailed extensively in the podcast. Not sure why The Wraith and her nemesis changed so much, when most of the other canonical characters of this universe are pretty nearly straight-up mirrors of their normal version (excluding hero-Fright Train and hero-Ermine). I’m tempted to do some work on him eventually (including fleshing out hero versions of the Exemplar clones from the MistStorm future; it’ll be fun trying to come up with a heroic version of Cyst), but I’ll work on less-established characters for a while first.
Caged Rat: Not actually a rat at all, but a superhero in a lab coat with lots of devices and syringes and trained rats who do his bidding (he thought about going by the moniker of Lab Rat, but felt it was too obvious, and instead went with a reference to his favorite song by the vintage band Soul Asylum), Randy “Minty Fresh” Burke didn’t exactly live a charmed life, but he always had an aptitude for pharmacology and a fondness for animals. Working briefly as a sewer maintenance engineer in between contracts at various biochem labs around Overbrook City and even occasionally out to Megalopolis, Randy saw that there were cracks in the squeaky-clean facade of his hometown, and set out to clean up the streets as best he could manage, using science and biotechnology as his weapons against the relatively small but persistent criminal element known loosely as “the Disorganization”.
Miss Deeds - As the podcast mentions, Aminia Twain was a trusted henchling of the Fearsome Five for years, but was secretly working against them the whole time and eventually orchestrated the final downfall of Legacy of Destruction. No doubt his daughter will have words for Miss Deeds whenever she starts her own criminal career…
Heroes-Turned-Villains (Mini-Decks)
Luminary - This would be the same character as the one mentioned above, just a different version of her to represent a different problem-solving approach that she adopts later in her career.
Express - The podcast describes this gender-swapped but basically similar heroic version of Fright Train.
Flashbulb - The podcast also describes this much looser variant on Ermine, who not only turns into a guy but also gains an innate superpower that Cassandra Lilia never had, and gets a pretty radically different personality besides. I’m not sure why C&A went this route; a heroic version of a cat-burglar character would certainly need some alteration, but this was a rather strange route for them to go. The podcast also details Blank, an almost entirely cosmetic variation on Equity (who isn’t 100% evil in the canon game, having an odd code of “balance” which limits his assassination activities, and thus his heroic version is probably also somewhat compromised; if nothing else, he manages to be even creepier than his evil version despite looking arguably stupider).
TechDisrupt - Krystal Lee used to have a fawning admiration for the brilliant but amoral scientist Meredith Stinson, but as the latter became less of an irascible genius and more of an outright villain, her increasingly nervous lab assistant started working up the courage to confront her, until the fateful day when Terminal Velocity was born. Krystal’s worldview was pretty thoroughly shattered that day, and instead of the faithful Girl Friday to Meredith that she’d hoped to become, she realized instead that she had a responsibility to put this speedy supervillainess down once and for all, hopefully then putting some of the genius inventions she’d locked up in her lab into the public domain so that they could be useful at last. Having fled to the famously benevolent nation of Mordengrad after her brush with death (getting in wasn’t easy, since everyone wants to live there and it must thus have a very strict policy of isolationism, with only very rare exceptions - think Wakanda before the Black Panther movie, though not quite as hardcore about maintaining their secrecy), Krystal worked directly with Luminary to create an artificial “speed suit” which would allow her to confront T.V. on a reasonably level playing field, though the prospect was still frightening to consider, given that Meredith’s powers were innate and she was brilliant enough to find the weak points in any gear that might be used to match her abilities. Indeed, when the confrontation finally came, T.V. handily outclassed Krystal and started dismantling her equipment, leading to a desperate situation in which Krystal finally had to sacrifice herself in a uniquely horrible fashion in order to finally defeat her former employer.
Proletariat - Always an ideological zealot whose noble intentions could easily be directed towards destructive aims, Aleksander Tsarev hardly needs to change at all in an inverted universe like this. Being sort of neutral, he effectively acts as an anchor point while the Soviet Union and its successor states change around him. While “our” Proletariat believes blindly in a noble-sounding goal which he refuses to recognize is nothng but Stalinist propaganda designed to keep the rabble in line, this version is cynically aware of how imperfect the Marxist “worker’s paradise” was, that leaders from Lenin to Yeltsin were all various shades of gray that exploited public perception of their morality to great effect. Yet even if the world isn’t as simple as people like to believe, Aleks does what he can to try and make it live up to its own stated ideals, even if those were lies to begin with. Ultimately he acts much the same way as the canon version, using violence to accomplish goals which he believes are correct, but often his allies have to manipulate him and work around his ideological blind spots in order to get him where he needs to go…he’s definitely one of those heroes, like KNYFE or Setback or certain versions of Unity, who is often as much of a hindrance that his team works around as an asset which they can rely on. (Simply for the sake of visual distinctiveness, let’s assume that this version of Proletariat has the Oblivion Shard which empowered him embedded in his chest, forming a vaguely star-shaped scar around its own jagged protrusions which his insignia is designed around. Alternatively we could consider another gender-flip on this version, but I personally don’t feel it works all that well; a female character with duplication powers has interesting possibilities, but I would probably find it was crossing the streams to try and combine that with everything Proletariat stands for.)
Note: For now I won’t create OblivAeon Scions, since Oblivion himself remains evil regardless of universes, and thus he either overrides the inversion and forces formerly-heroic characters like Empyreon and Borr to become evil because he says so, or creates entirely new scions out of characters that we probably haven’t even seen in the canon timeline. Either version is unsatisfactory, so I’m just leaving that whole thing alone at the moment.
Miscellaneous (mini-nemeses and Environment targets, mentioned here only if they don’t come up above)
The Enclave of the Endlings - as described in the podcast, this version of Jansa ViDero is a far more malevolent one, still not pure evil but so inhumanly amoral that she sees nothing wrong with exterminating an already-doomed species before offering the last survivor a choice between immortality as a pseudo-prisoner and dying along with the rest of their race. (C&A portrayed her as outright villainous, which contradicts the premise of inversion since the canon Jansa isn’t very heroic; I’m trying to dial that back a bit without outright reversing anything they said. They didn’t specify that she only goes after races that are already past the tipping point of being able to repopulate, but I think this is a reasonable extrapolation.) The Endlings themselves are mostly too weird to answer to human moral standards, although we can assume that Slamara is one of the more malevolent ones and Orbo one of the most friendly and helpful (Immutus we can be certain is exactly the same, at least as far as our perception can tell). Phrentat probably doesn’t exist in this Enclave at all, since Voss didn’t exterminate the Piunites to create horrific Psi-Weavers, but we do have a version of Venox, as the Mubbloxians were already a dying race when either version of Voss got to them (hence why there’s only one Gene-Bound Bionaut, instead of two copies like most others). It’s not clear whether the canon Venox is malevolent, or simply ignorant of the danger it poses to everything around it; perhaps it’s shy and tries to avoid others who can’t survive proximity to itself, or perhaps it lacks the capacity to understand why everything is dying around it. Regardless of which version of these is true in the canon timeline, the opposite one works here. The last Endling worthy of mention here is Tarogath, who has his own article (two of them actually) elsewhere in this list, which I have yet to write; I’ll have to put some serious thought into this version of Jansa before I know exactly how she ends up allowing the last Procytor to become first Lifeline and then Deadline.
Heartbreaker - The canon episode does a near-perfect job of handling this mirror version of Tony Taurus (though, as of this episode, it still hasn’t really properly explained how the canon one turned so damned evil; the explanation of this one turning good is far more satisfying). The only thing I’m tempted to contradict is their decision to keep his name, and come up with a rather flimsy explanation of why he gets called that; I might rather have called him Thrillseeker or something.
They do revisit the Inversiverse in later episodes and flesh out some more characters, including Dark Watch. The Wiki has a page that contains some details about everyone who’s been mentioned so far.
I’ve read that page; it doesn’t contain much information beyond what’s in the original episode. About the only characters it mentions which I haven’t incorporated into my writeups above are Scholar, Biomancer and Parse. I’ve been pretty careful to avoid contradicting C&A, though there are places where I disagree with their version enough to massage it a little (see my discussion of Jansa for about the most of that which I’ve done); the rest is mostly just extrapolation.
Fair enough. If you want to avoid contradiction though, you might want to wait until you’ve caught up on the Podcast. (Or at least the Inverse Dark Watch and Prime Wardens episodes.) You can do whatever you want of course. Just a suggestion.
Ha ha! XD
Wait, are you implying that the Argent Adept is incredibly weak and loses every fight?
No, quite the opposite; the Argent Adept episode talks about how, when the character premiered in comics in the 70s, he tended to be incredibly overpowered and would just always win every engagement, and Akash’Bhuta and the Prime Wardens came along later to try and correct that. So this villainous version of the Adept is in that same stage even still; Akash’Thriya was a bit of a challenge for him and he needed the Prime Ravagers to put her back in the ground, but he wouldn’t have grown and become a more sympathetic character, so I’m assuming he’s still the equivalent of that D&D player who overclocks his wizard character and then tries to solo every dungeon.
Okay, so listening to the Prime Wardens episode, I’m wondering whether I should continue working on this project. I hate leaving anything unfinished, but it’s already a separate Disparation from the original Inversiverse, where the Fearsome Five are the same but Tempest and Voss are totally different. Anyone care about my finishing this thing?
As a weird hybrid of attempting to work around C&A’s canon, while also blatantly contradicting it in places, I have very mixed feelings about resuming work on the Inverse Justiverse (particularly given that there isn’t really a regular Justiverse; my Justifications expand a little on the canon but have not really contradicted it yet).
But I am struck today by an impression of how cool it is that the very aspects of the canon which are least well explained, also provide the most opportunity for me to come up with explanations that work for both versions of the universe.
(For example, the fact that we know very little about the canonical Virtuoso named Xu, and almost nothing of the origins of Zhu Long, gives me the freedom to imagine a new character named “Xu Long”, and any details I invent while further detailing Xu Long can then also be regarded as canon-compliant placeholder lore for either or both of Zhu Long and Xu.)
I continue to await any encouragement that I should work on this project any further, as opposed to the myriad of other projects I could devote my time and creativity to.