Well recently on Twitter Christopher has said no on the OblivAeon Shard for Scholar x.com
Visionary and Vanessa Long was Born with it.
Picking up the relics of the old Egyptian "gods"doesn't their power source comes from objects.
The Void Guard also get there power boost form stones.
Wish we knew more about Fanatic. I still believe her power is of Believing in her self. Ultimate shonen power.
Oh she doesn't believe in herself, she believes the the God who believes in her
I really like the mystery of Fanatic, and I hope the mystery remains.
The beautiful thing of her character (and religion in general) is the balance of choosing to believe in something unprovable, with the acceptance that you could be wrong.
That struggle of Faith, when approached honestly, reveals ourselves and the world in really interesting ways, and when approached fearfully or self-centeredly leads us the wrong way, many times a very wrong way.
Seeing Fanatic go from blind aggressive faith, to doubt, to a kind of balance is a really cool character arc, and I hope that journey is a journey of faith, rather than a journey of finding out the answers.
Long way of saying I hope in the end the answer to her power source is not fully known.
I have the same feeling as phantaskippy, I admit. I feel like any answer we could get about Fanatic's origins would probably be one, disappointing, and two, just raise more thorny questions than it answers. It would remove an important axis of the character for her status to actually become concrete.
(Ironically I don't understand faith at all IRL and having faith runs pretty counter to how I think, but I appreciate the idea and uncertainty in a literary context.)
I am curious about Apostate, but that's because he's clearly not what he seems to be anyway, so the answer is less likely to be disappointing.
So they mentioned in the Void Guard cast that there were six known OblivAeon shards -- if the Void Guard have 4 and Captain Cosmic and Infinitor got their powers from the same one, then what's the sixth?
Do we know if possibly any villains have OblivAeon shards at their disposal?
This is a stretch but perhaps Progeny is some sort of animated shard
Galactra seems to have the same/similar powers as Cosmic, could be from a shard.
That's quite possible. Though I'd hazard a guess that if she did, it wouldn't count torwards the six on Earth.
If Galactra had a shard, wouldn’t she be more than a mini-nemesis?
Edit: scratch that, just remembered their comments about how crazy powerful Zhu Long is.
Hmm. I guess that's a question for the Captain Cosmic episode.
Generally a good list, however I’d put the Vanessa Longs into born with it or inherent - they will all always develop powers, so that’s innate to them to some degree.
I also think the entire Supernatural (other) list is superfluous with the following being able to go into the other lists as follows:
Anubis - magic innate or inherent
Apostate? - unknown
Bugbear - magical artifact
The Ennead - magical artifact partially/in same list as Anubis partially
Fanatic? - unknown
Ra - magical artifact partially/in same list as Anubis partially
The Scholar's, as was discussed earlier.
Really?
Huh. Does/can Guise know? Would Guise tell her?
If no to either, I think there's no problem with the audience/writers knowing, even if it's never explicitly revealed in the pages of the comics. I agree that Fanatic as a character is immeasurably more interesting when they can (endlessly?) explore the journey of faith almost everyone goes through, including times when faith is absent. However, I think that for comic book consistency reasons, having an established power source is fairly necessary, so that we don't get silly places where they get rando powers for the sake of solving one issue's problem, and then don't carry through that new power through subsequent issues.
TL;DR: Fanatic doesn't have to definitively know what her power source is to have a definite power source.
I also like the idea of Apostate bringing different explanations to Fanatic every time they meet, just trying everything they can to convince Fanatic of a truth they can then control and manipulate.
I think giving Fanatic a named power source is also very important, to avoid certain issues.
Her faith=her power, that is amazing and fine, but the question is why does her faith equal power. If we just allow that God has granted her power like she believes he did, then why don't other people of immense faith have power?
It becomes a mess and a philosphical discussion that g=can take away from the story instead of adding to it. If we find out that she came into contact with Element X, but that her faith still equals her power, then we have no problems. Her Faith and that journey is still maintained, while universe derailing questions of the nature of divinity and the selection of individuals to gain power are side-stepped.
The Pope, The Dalia Lama, and Aunt Gertrude who are all extremely religious and faithful people don't have the same power as Fanatic, not becuase God chose not to reward their faith, but because they were not exposed to Element X, which would allow their Faith to be directly translated into the power to create bursts of energy and throw cars.
Well… thats news to me! Definitely changes things…
For the same category of reason that there's a lot of very talented musicians in the world but not all of them are able to become a Virtuoso of the Void, presumably.
But honestly my problem with giving any sort of answer is that: If Fanatic's powers come from God that opens up a lot of cans of worms, but also if Fanatic's powers don't come from God that makes her look foolish and deluded (if not possibly kinda awful, considering she's done some questionably extreme things to "evildoers").
So as I put it in a Twitch chat once, there are some types of literary questions where the author just can't give any answer that could live up to the question.
The ‘Fanatic is deluded’ issue can be solved by addressing it in comics. If there is an issue where Fanatic has to face the fact that the source of her power isn’t what she thought it was, but ultimately decides that it is her faith in God that gives her the mental strength to use her power at its maximum potential and that God is working through this other power source then you can maintain Fanatic’s faith based powers while explaining them at the same time.
And my impression was that this is basically what the Redeemer Fanatic storyline is about.