Warm the cockles of your heart with today's Ra-centric episode of The Letters Page.
I haven't listened yet, but I know I'm gonna skip the spoilers for the RPG.
Would you guy mind terribly not going into any of those spoilers here? I want to still be able to contribute to the conversation without accidentally stumbling along a mine. :)
BOOM!
[ color=white ] [ /color ] is a spoiler tag that I usually use to hide things.
THIAGO (extra text so you can’t tell the name by the length of the spoiler) IS TACTICS RA CONFIRMED!!!
Edit: changed it so it was clear it’s not an RPG spoiler.
I thought we'd known for a while that that was the case for Tactics. Pretty sure it was confirmed in an art stream, at least.
Also, it was pretty awesome how Adam confirmed the theory that Christopher and Adam are Butt Mortals.
We knew who tactics Ra was, it was in the Wiki.
Also time Paradox. They said the ennead and a antagonist force only once (but for a while).
NightMist fights ennead after Vengance.
RA beats Ennead before vengance.
What has La Capitan done?
I think it's pretty cool how in the world of Sentinels comics Ra and the Ennead are pretty much some of the worlds first supers, and they had so much power that their 'essence' can be carried on throughout time itself.
I'm disappointed they didn't read my question, but they answered it in like the first few minutes anyway, so I'm good. I'd asked whether he's permanently Ra after taking up the staff, or if he reverts to Blake Washington at times.
I've been singing this tune since Tactics was first released. I'll take one internet cookie please. /endsmug
But yeah, this was confirmed a while ago in the art streams. It's not news, but it was certainly worth bringing up in the podcast in case people forgot.
So, if the only Egyptian gods walking around in the Multiverse timeline are Anubis, Ra, and the Ennead...
who is Ammit?
An Egyptian goddess 
Ammit isn't consistently considered a god/goddess. In Sentinels she's more like a mythological monster. Not that the "gods" are really gods, but she doesn't have the same supernatural origin they do.
1 Like
She appears on the card “Judgment of Anubis,” I believe.
She's also in one of the decks from Villains of the Multiverse.
Bugbear's, specifically.
Ammit, I thought, was usually a creature or servant of Anubis whos job was specifically to help the weighing of the heart/feather to determine status in the afterlife. I don't think it was considered a god/goddess, at least not in that common understanding of the term since there were no worshipers specific to Ammit, at least not to my knowledge.
Ammit is credited as being a goddess in various literature I've seen. Maybe not a heavily worshipped one but still referenced as one.
We need to all that Egyptologist who wrote in!
This episode, more than all the rest, made me interested in a legit comic version of the story. All that talk of how he actually became a bearded wonder was astonishingly in-depth. Like, wow! What an arc! Just make me a graphic novel of that, and I'll be fine. Ra is much more rich with story than I had ever thought he would be.
1 Like
Listening through the podcast again from the beginning, and it was only episodes 25-29 which prompted new thoughts that I felt were worthy of expressing on this mostly-abandoned forum; I don’t know if anyone will care, but I’m writing for my own benefit more than anything else, and if someone else gets anything out of it, then hey, bonus!
First off, while this observation might be better saved for the episode where they discuss the Tomb of Anubis, I’m irked by the vagueness they use when speaking of the “underworld” that Anubis guards; I invariably think of that nightmare world of Egypt monsters as being named Duat, and I don’t know why that’s not canonically what C&A call it either.
The absence of Aten from their discussion of the sun-god cults is conspicuous.
In trying to picture the 11 gods attack on Oblivaeon, I have trouble figuring out how it worked for Ra to survive for “seven seconds” after the others were insta-disintegrated, and even more confused about where Fanatic was that she wasn’t joining the attack, so that she was close enough to reach Ra before he expired, but wasn’t close enough to be disintegrated too. This latter part is best explained by her being flying around rescuing innocents at the time, so she didn’t have time to react until after it was too late to try and rescue Ra from his suicide charge; as to why the charge wasn’t focused primarily on Ra, I’m just going to guess that he was at the leading edge of the wedge, and the blast sort of targeted the center of their group, being more focused on the center and the back, with slightly less destructive force at its front edge. I also don’t quite accept the way that Ra and Anubis persuaded the Ennead to join them; I feel like it’s more a situation of them near-animalistically falling in behind Setting Sun Ra, because he’s proved his absolute dominance over not only all of them at once but even Anubis as well - to borrow a card from Legacy’s deck, he’s proved that he can Lead From The Front, and the Ennead are never choosing to go to their deaths and prevent OblivAeon from killing things other than themselves, they’re just falling in line automatically because Ra has demonstrated the kind of total ascendancy that he had already begun to lose back when the Ennead first displaced him.
That’s my main thing about Ra as he actually exists, however I love the imagery of some alternate universe in which Ra and Citizen Dawn are a couple. My best theory on the “different people to envision that scenario” is that this is a universe where a female Blake Washington has the Dawn Cohen power and backstory, while still being an Egyptologist, and the actual Don Cohen is not that into Egypt but somehow gets a hold of the Staff of Ra (maybe it never got entombed in this history, and it turns up in a black market or something where Don just buys it or something). So Don Cohen becomes Ra, Blake becomes “Citizen Light” or something, and they are brought together in one of three possible ways. One, Don is considering resuming his throne as king of Egypt, and Blake goes there to seek him out because of her interest in ancient Egypt, and she tries to become his consort. Two, instead of her seeking him out, he seeks her out, after Citizen Light has begun to gather Citizens of the Sun, and Don-Ra initially sees them as upstarts to defeat, but when the Citizens defend their leader, he decides that she is a worthy god-queen, so he tries to create his new kingdom alongside her. Three, Blake and her light powers go flying off into the north and finds Insula Primalis, where Don-Ra is hanging out and battling dinosaurs, and they become a nation of two instead of the Citizens of the Sun or the Ennead ever happening. I’m not sure any of these three versions are quite right, but I felt like the pairing should happen, and that swapping both their genders and their powersets is the way to make it work.
The joke about cats being from space actually makes more sense than C&A probably know, since they don’t seem to be super into the Cthulhu Mythos, and a deep cut from Howard Lovecraft’s writing is the Cats from Saturn, eternal enemies of Earth’s cats.
I also think C&A have different opinions about the word Magister than I do, but probably shouldn’t elaborate on that, nor on my very clear mental vision of the…relationship?..dynamic between Fanatic and Ra.
Lastly, this has nothing to do with this particular episode whatsoever (my comment is essentially a Ra sandwich, in the sense that a tuna sandwich has tuna in the middle with bread on either side). I could say this on any episode whatsoever, but why wait. If you haven’t ever listened to the Christopher and Adam song at x2 playback speed, you’re missing out. Lol.
2 Likes