hello-apes-of-the-world

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Do the clowns enjoy doing these tricks?

Did you know? Clowns can inflate their noses up to a diameter of 30 cm. This is known as "honking".

While this behaviour is often seen when it feels threatened, a trained clown may also honk for entertainment. Releasing the contained air in a burst creates their iconic sound.

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Have a present thing throughout the rest of the comic being small panels showcasing various bug perspectives/her sense with bugs, then the water hits and it’s just her water obscured view with nothing else

Imagining a nice segment of the comic adaptation of the Leviathan fight as seen entirely through Taylor's water obscured lenses as carnage ensues

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You’re right and I agree with you but I wanted to try and justify it so this is a quick and not super thought out explanation, it could be him being with Dragon and chasing the Nine are meant to be him at his peak while the Leviathan fight is his lowest point

it’s been pointed out how him being in Brockton was the worst possible option for him, stuck in a dead end position with enemies he’s not really suited to deal with, no one he’s really close to, all his shit with Dauntless and dealing with the recent ABB crisis and everything else, all just emphasizing his worst traits, the Leviathan fight is the bottom of a years long spiral with it being his seeming salvation, getting him respect and removing problems only for it to go wrong

meanwhile him hunting the S9 with Dragon is both him out of that situation but also putting his traits and abilities that got him to that point to full use, he finally has someone he’s close too, he’s making real progress using his abilities (both hunting the S9 and helping Dragon) he’s doing something that will earn him respect and glory but tempered by having Dragon there to reign him in and an actual focus on finishing the job

admittedly him and Dragon are still weirdly similar it is to his supposed trigger event but still this is all just random surface thoughts and probably wrong jut thought i’d try to justify it

i do feel like colins arc is a little weird. i don't have anything against transhumanism as a concept, past finding a lot of transhumanists as People really annoying, but I find it odd that mannequin comes to colin, goes "you and I are the same, and you should do the same thing I did and become less human", and then Colin does, and the story kind of treats it as a value neutral choice. in isolation, i would totally find replacing your body with robot parts to be value neutral, but we're not operating in isolation, we're working with a scenario where the bad guy told colin to do this thing, he does it, and it doesn't... mean anything. in fact, his identity as defiant is meant to be a better version of him, a humbler one, compared to colin as armsmaster. it's just very odd narratively -- it makes me wonder if wildbow is quietly a die-hard transhumanist and didn't want to introduce dissonance by condemning a transhumanist action even in a context where the narrative positions it as part of a corruption arc, or if he had enough transhumanist followers that he didn't want to tick off by doing that (im leaning towards the latter but i dont know when exactly yud recommended worm to his devotees within the storys publishing history)

in addition and separately to that, its super fucking weird that the PRT says that they can't account for colin because he escaped and there's this sense that he's gonna Do something and/or possibly leave the city without knowing about the s9s condition that no candidates can leave the city, only for him to.... literally never at any given point show up during the s9 arcs after his arc 11 interlude

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hey really cool theory, to build on it using a point from I think @artbyblastweave edit: sorry it was @estavionpira

Etienne is always in control, his original plan with Valentina is for the two of them to rule, afterwards it’s for him to be one of the people who “really” matter, when Heavy gets shot Etienne is in a very convenient king maker position, and so on,

Now it’s not clear if Etienne does this on purpose or if it’s just a happy accident that he keeps being in power but if your idea is right and the Queen really would’ve succeeded, then maybe Etienne realized and wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to not disrupt his own power

Of course that does kinda make the whole thing a little boring if it was just “Etienne is a power hungry dickhead” but still thought its interesting

There is something about this page...

I think we're going to find out that the "Queen" did not 'choose' to enter a bad trip, and that she was pushed towards it through some type of manipulation.

The first panel looks like she received some type of relay, especially if you take into consideration the little splotch of white against the ink black backdrop, right along where the eye meets temple. It looks almost like a bloodstain. Did she get shot with a psychic bullet that gave her an invisible lobotomy? That caused her to have a personality shift in the following third panel?

My first instinct is to lay the blame at Etienne's feet. We know he has mental powers, she looks to be suffering some kind of psychic damage, and he was suspiciously... absent... in this issue. He appears in three panels, only speaks in two. What he says is that "if they have the chance (to kill her) they should, because she's an unknown variable".

I think that this "Queen" could have achieved her goal. I think she could have made Heaven on Earth. And Etienne gamed the risks out in his head and calculated that there was a slight chance she could go nuclear down the line and cause the end of the world, so he sets her off early and - while the entire continent of Europe is lost - it's an acceptable loss compared to the entire planet they would have lost had she been allowed to continue her mission and, somewhere along the line, she goes berserk.

We already know he is the type of person to kill one victim instead of four when faced with the trolley problem. An acceptable sacrifice.

HOWEVER

I also have this nagging suspicion about the "Queen's" origins, and it has something to do with this panel -

"...I was asleep through the whole thing."

ASLEEP?!?!

If Masumi was in Japan the same time Isabella was, then we know that the "Queen's" shift happened in the day. She blocked out the sun with her display of power. Not to say that Masumi has an average sleeping schedule, but on its face the excuse just makes no sense. If the "Queen" really was tearing reality apart, I don't see how the resolution of this conflict would take longer than a few minutes, maybe a few hours at best (unless we see something involving the Pyramid slowing the "Queen" in the next issue).

So what if Masumi was in a different kind of 'sleep'?

We know that when Masumi feels intense despair, a kaiju rises up to destroy things. This has happened before. However, in her appearances she hasn't really had great leaps of emotion in any other direction, like intense anger or intense happiness.

What if she can manifest different creatures based on how she's feeling, and this "Queen" was actually a 'kaiju' representation of her ecstasy? Or what if this was her original power, and something happened that made it flip and only be activated by despair? Did someone interfere? Etienne?

I want to draw some attention to a panel from a previous issue that was about Masumi, at her gallery debut. Look at her eyes.

Familiar, right?

Even the backgrounds are similar.

And thinking about how the Power Fantasy is a pastiche of super heroes but especially X-Men, mutants, and their dynamics. Etienne is Professor X, Heavy is Magneto, etc.

I, at first, assumed Valentina was the Jean Grey. The Omega with godlike powers, much like the Phoenix.

However, the Phoenix has had a storied history throughout the Marvel Universe, as a bringer of life and of destruction.

So what if Masumi was the Jean Grey of Power Fantasy? And the evolution of her power is that ANY intense feeling causes some type of psychic creature to appear?

And she was 'asleep' throughout the Second Summer of Love because she was channeling the "Queen" in Manchester? And something happened to her which then affected the "Queen", turning her into a threat? What if this was Etienne's doing?

This is all conjecture, but conjecture is all I have right now while trying to fill in the missing gaps of 'The Second Summer of Love' that have yet to be provided using the clues available to me.

We know Val was there, and she was not just an acolyte of the "Queen" but also in love with her. Heavy was busy with his kid but he showed his support of this growing movement for love, sex, and drugs. Magus wanted her gone, but he also sacrificed a LOT of his own people to stop her and it hit him HARD he wanted her out before she became a threat. Eliza sold her soul to take the "Queen" down.

That just leaves Etienne and Masumi. What were they really doing during the 'Second Summer of Love'?

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Just finished The Power Fantasy #7 and it’s a really good look on both Eliza and the Second Summer of Love, and I’m so glad they didn’t just have the Summer be a cop out “the queen was just evil and everyone was too dumb to notice”

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just remembered this old clickhole video i used to be obsessed with

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does this count for another one?

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Chai tea bag + lil but of brown sugar + apple cider packet + 16 oz. mug of hot but not quite boiling water

it will not Fix You but like. maybe. maybe.

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woke up today and realized that tumblr entirely killed fuck ya life bing bong so here ya go again

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Daughter of fantasy villains decides to rebel against her parents by actually going through with her arranged marriage to a local golden retriever of a prince instead of running off with some local villain-to-be or conquering said golden retriever’s kingdom and ruling it solo like her parents expect her to. Plus, sue her, she’s into the clean-cut earnest look.

At the same time, local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane, he would never have guessed a spiderweb pattern could look so fetching on a ball gown…?

Meanwhile, two pairs of parents in a tizzy because they both expected their offspring to whole-heartedly reject this union and give them an excuse to conquer their goody-two-shoes/evil neighbours, they’re not supposed to actually like each other-!

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Most normal Path

normal day in tf2 casual

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I remember a Astro City comic that also dealt with regular people having access to super tech stuff but being Astro City it explicitly addressed how this stuff wouldn’t get out and would stay in the hands of Superheroes and Supervillians

Now one thing I find really stylistically interesting about Batman Beyond, is that a lot of the mechanisms by which the supervillians do their thing come part-and-parcel with the cyberpunk setting, rather than being an aberration resulting purely from the superheroic genre elements. This is the future of a quote-unquote "present-day" DCU, meaning that they've superficially addressed the question of why all the cutting-edge supertech used in the cape scene never seems to see mass adoption by the civilian sector- forty years later, it has. This means that It's never hard to grok where any given villain is getting the resources necessary to execute their gimmick; these people are flashy by our standards, but they live in a world where everyone has access to flying cars and antigravity drones. Half these people are doing the cyberpunk equivalent of going killdozer with repurposed industrial equipment, or kludging together something with off-the-shelf stuff from radio shack, or mounting a machine gun on a technical truck, and literally in the middle of typing this sentence I started the episode where there's mass-market off-the-shelf animal gene-splicing that would have been a whole-ass individualized origin story in the time of Batman: The Animated Series. Even one-off mutants like Inque and Blight are well-understood within the context of the setting, to the extent of Inque being able to make a knockoff of herself on the go.

This is dystopic. Beyond the genre-typical surface-level megacorp domination of society it's dystopic. On the meta-level it's the same dynamic as Superman: The Animated Series, where the reason there's a sudden uptick in weird costumed crime concurrent with the protagonist's debut is purely Doylistic- the hero needs punching bags. But within the logic of the setting, there's nothing special about Willy Watt's decision to go full Carrie using a hijacked construction robot besides the fact that he had somewhat easier access to the thing than the average school-shooter. Spellbinder being able to put together functional illusion-and-mind-control tech on a high-school counselor's salary- when his entire complaint is that he isn't being paid enough- implies that the main barrier to anyone else pulling the same brainwashing stunt is that nobody else thought to. Shriek's sound suit might be more a more roundabout demolition tool than dynamite, but it's still powerful enough to bring down buildings and he created it as a fly-by-night contractor. The consumer tech base is evolved to the point that regardless of when Batman shows up, shit like this should literally never not be happening- they're past an inflection point. I remember Syndrome from The Incredibles having some kind of line about this