In the Handelabra Steam today, we had two guests: Christopher and Peter. During the chat, grysqrl asked a question that many of us have asked previously, but this time Christopher answered it!
It's generally believed that the Legacy powers are passed on to the firstborn, but we didn't know if this is because each Paul Parsons only had one child or if they had several children but only the first had powers. This issue was raised. The answer: "Some of the Paul Parsons had younger siblings, but none of them had any powers."
When Silverleaf queried how the genetics "know" the firstborn is first, Christopher answered: "Magic genetics. NOT ACTUALLY MAGIC."
Just thought I should share that with everyone who wasn't in the stream, as it's a detail I've been curious about for ages. :)
If only it was passed down by the mother it wouldn’t need to be “magic” to know who was first born… Unfortunately, that’s clearly not the case.
Ahh, matriarchal lines just make everything so much easier. Is it too late to gender swap Legacy?
How does the DNA distinguish between ova, exactly? I mean the woman has all the eggs she'll ever have when she is born, and each one just gets some final preparations done just before release (usually singly once a month from puberty). AFAIK, the egg "chosen" is random, and the vast majority of them will pass out of the body unfertilised.
So either all the ova are Legacy ova (otherwise you risk losing that special one through periods before the conception, or getting a non-Legacy one for the first birth) or they all are (in which case any subsequent children would also be Legacies). There would have to be something else going on.
It's estimated that about 1/4 of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion (i.e. miscarriage), many without the woman even knowing she's pregnant. That's also a significant risk for our little Legacy foetus assuming there can be only one. And there are other risks during pregnancy. So it doesn't make sense for the Legacy genetics to be "assigned" or "activated" at conception, because not all conceptions result in birth. And that wouldn't explain the "first conception only" status either, because what's to stop Baby Legacy's new little sister getting exactly the same?
I suppose there could be something about the birth process itself that triggers the latent power potential that all Legacy offspring would have to have in order for this whole thing to work, like the baby's blood mixing with the mother's (which doesn't happen during pregnancy unless something's gone horribly wrong, but does happen at birth). That blood mixing could leave the mother with, I dunno, a special anti-Legacy factor or something which suppresses Legacy powers in subsequent offspring. That's a bit of a stretch, but plausible I guess. My question here though is: why?
I think I'd just prefer that powers attributed to "Science!" which then have to be further qualified by "MAGIC Science!" when they don't make any sense according to our knowledge of how things like genetics actually work just be attributed to Magic in the first place.
It’s certainly possible that there could be different influences within the womb that could change with birth order. There’s theories such as the fraternal birth order effect which suggest there are differences within the womb that could influence such things.
This could also work for a male within the idea of a purely monogamous coupling that has never paired up with anyone else previously, which considering the ever so wholesome American dream image of Legacy I could see as believable. Which also gives me an amusing idea of an alternative lothario Legacy leaving little super powered babies about the place.
Sure it’s all walking a very fine line of implausible, but that’s what fiction does. Suspension of disbelief is about finding an internally consistent logical basis within the setting more than lining it up to hard facts from our reality.
Yep. This is totally one of the reasons why I don't care for comics.
Handwaving away scientific inaccuracies/implausibilities bugs the hell out of me. Just call it magic in the first place and stop pretending it's science, damn it.
I do recall a previous conversation on the whole "only the first-born gets the Legacy powers" thing and I remember it ended up with an increasingly silly series of what-ifs, wherein we theorised what might happen if a Legacy had twins or something - would the first twin get the powers, or would they both? What if there were more than twins? What if they were octuplets or something? Well I suppose they would be...nonuplets or whatever the word is, given the recent themes leading up to the Oblivaeon reveal, but anyway... :D
