#s sentinels of the multiverse

golemintern:

So today, the guys spoke about everybody’s favorite hero who is inspired and informed by Van Hohenheim, The Dude and Uncle Iroh:

The Scholar.

And here’s the things that stick out to me.

1) The scholar’s alchemical power stems from his connection to the Philosopher’s Stone, but he wasn’t an alchemist before. He was a pharmacist, back in the 1800s. The Philosopher’s Stone was made at a confluence of leylines, which is also how “Omegas” in the Southwest Sentinels books were made.

2) After finding his source of power, he returned to find his wife and children missing, and when he found them again, they had no memory of his existence.

3) In the card art for “Get out of the way” he’s not trying to burn the Blade Battalion soldiers. He’s using his power to cut off a malfunctioning engine from a mobile defense platform. The Battalion goons just happen to be in the way.

4) The philosopher’s stone itself is a creation of the Biomancer, who is a much older, much more malevolent force than most other evils in the multiverse, save Akash’Bhuta and Gloomweaver.

5) His connection to Guise is one where this joke character is falling into a more serious role, and needs proper guidance.

6) He changes his form, and the form of things he touches by willing his wishes through the stone. There’s no need for transmutation circles or complex rituals.

7) When he tricked the Wager Master into leaving Earth, the terms of the arrangement were “You get to bring this Philosopher’s Stone with you into space, and you never come back.” The Scholar never said that he got to keep the Stone, just that he could bring it with him into space.

This episode just made me want a Letters Page episode for Biomancer even more than I already really wanted one. I wonder how many more of his creepy eldritch magical science inventions have screwed up our poor heroes’ lives at some point.

(I should make a post about Biomancer; creepy mad scientists are totally my thing.)

As for Scholar himself, I like how he’s always been totally focused on helping people and “mentoring the mentorless”, to the point where he even cared about protecting the Dreamer more than fighting her projections and how he thought maybe helping Apostate might be better than trying to fight him (I mean it didn’t work obvs but it wasn’t a bad thought). He’s really one of the most truly heroic of all the heroes.

He totally didn’t deserve the stone erasing his previous life or the stupid Hermetic ruining his stone and then the eventual end result literally erasing him. The Void seems to continue to be bad news for everyone except the Argent Adept.

So my half-joke that in the Sentinels fandom that the fangirls are gay for NIghtmist and the fanboys are gay for Argent Adept just got 5000% more funny/interesting after finding out that the alt-universe-Virtuoso who looks like Nightmist on “Quando? Ahora!” is actually “Angela Drake”.

So what I’ve picked up from my stay in the Sentinels of the Multiverse fandom is that the fangirls are all gay for Arataki or Nightmist and the fanboys are all gay for Argent Adept and I feel like there’s probably a sociological study lurking in here somewhere.

agirlnameded:

Anthony “I played the recorder in second grade one time flutes are basically the same thing right” Drake

I found it particularly hilarious because…

On the GTG forums there was a thread where everyone was listing quirky instrument ideas for the Virtuosos, and I was basically like “I want a Virtuoso who plays the recorder, because as a singer, in middle school I was always required to play that in music class and man anyone who can play that thing well deserves to be a Chosen One”.

And then later Anthony’s Letters Page ep comes up and Christopher’s like “Yeah Anthony was a singer, so he eventually went with the pipes for his Virtuoso instrument because he remembered his time in middle school playing the recorder in music class” and I was just a kind of half-amused, half-squeeing “ahahahahahaha”.

P.S. Bonus: MigrantP actually linked in that thread to someone in real life who’s ridiculously good at the recorder.

So the more and more we hear on the podcast about how Christopher and Adam lovingly created their own fictional history of comics in addition to their own giant comics story, the more I feel weirdly fascinated that they somehow successfully anticipated the whole SW arc BEFORE it happened.

Like in 2011 we get SotM as a game with an already developed arc that involves a weird cosmic being that wants to destroy everything by collapsing the realities, a group of superpowerful beings who are aiding that destruction, heroes who sometimes think they have to do the same thing to save reality, a character who wants to steal that cosmic being’s power for themself, and as part of the whole mix a random nobody who accidentally becomes a chosen one who has reality-warping powers by channeling a strange universal cosmic force. In the end the force is defeated but as a result the multiverse essentially reboots into only a couple major timelines.

Then in 2012 we get… pretty much the same overall thing out of Marvel. Including that chosen one character. (You just can’t tell me that the Starbrand and the Superflow don’t feel similar in basic concept to the Virtuosos and the Void.)

The specific details involved obviously vary quite a bit to put it mildly, but the situation of two writers completely independently coming up with similar-feeling arcs at close to the same time has always bemused and amused me greatly. (As well as the coincidence that I ended up liking that “chosen one” character best in both stories, albeit for obviously very dissimilar reasons.)

agirlnameded:

• reading letters from you
  
• let ‘em read them atcha
• (let ‘em read them atcha)
• (oooooooo)
• (Christpher and Adam)

I dunno, I think we can actually be all thorough about this:

• Bad puns
  
• Joking how every character dies
  
• Realizing that oops this time they have to make it clear the character really did die for reals
  
• Coming up with Nightmare Fuel that would make Lovecraft and Stephen King approve
  
• Sinking all your ships
  
• Coming up with entirely new canon ships that are somehow even weirder than the ones that were sunk
  
• Turning canon mortal enemies into later canon adorable best friends
  
• Making defeating villains in beatnik poetry sessions somehow be totally awesome
  
• Constantly comparing dangerous cosmic forces to breakfast foods
  
• Taking historical figures rumored to be creepy people with mystical powers and turning them into actually being creepy people with mystical powers
  
• Making Apostate legitimately hilarious
  
• Having one of the canon timelines make Ultimate Marvel look bright and cheery in comparison
  
• Saying blood so many times in one episode that it stops sounding like a word