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you know it's kind of wild that Marvel a. supposedly has given up the rights to the Big Hero 6 to Disney proper, and b. during their push for more Asian heroes a few years back, didn't introduce a single new Japanese superhero (although it should be noted, a good chunk of those came from Chinese and Korean game developers)

so the result is that the Philippines, South Korea, and China all have more active superheroes than Japan in comics canon right now

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it's crazy that Sony Pictures Animation can just shadow-drop an incredible movie onto streaming with little fanfare like this. and then four years later, do it again.

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Never done thinking about The Rashomon Job. Because ok, I think that, on balance, we can assume Eliot and Sophie spent a not insignificant amount of time at that museum gala flirting aggressively with each other (Nate's careful excision of this from his reconstructed version notwithstanding).

We also know that Sophie clearly did not remember/recognise Eliot until he pantomimed his behaviour and accent that night. This tracks for Sophie; she's not a faces person. She notices actions, tones, accents, and above all she notices physical signifiers of social relationships (class, professional, personal etc.). She can be pretty confident, from her own grifting experience, that that's all most other people notice too.

Eliot, on the other hand, is absolutely a faces person. It's something of a recurring bit. There's at least one occasion where he IDs a guy he saw for three seconds. He's a hypervigilant observer with a detailed and well-trained memory ("it's a very distinctive..."). That's part of what gives him an edge (and also must make the occasions where he briefly becomes famous deeply stressful).

(The bit in the opening episode of Redemption S3, were they walk into a party and Sophie notices the decor and dress and Eliot notices all the armed and dangerous security is such a good example of their respective ways of seeing the world.)

Taking all this into consideration, I think we can fairly happily imagine the following: that Eliot Spencer walked into a theatre in LA with an alcohol-soaked insurance investigator, an annoying hacker, and a disconcertingly odd super-thief, and was absolutely baffled to find someone he recognised from that deeply frustrating attempt to steal the dagger of Aqu'abi doing the world's worst Lady Macbeth.

And then she clearly hasn't recognised him, and he's not going to bring it up, because it's just a one time job, and also there's her whole thing with Nate happening right in front of his salad. And then eventually it becomes "wait, this is gold", and he's just sitting on this reveal until that night in the bar.

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I love you albums. I love you songs connected by similar themes. I love you listening to songs in a specific order picked by the artist. I love you reoccurring motifs throughout the same album. I love you album covers. I love you albums with extended editions. I love you songs that reference each other.

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I'm the #1 time travel fix-it fan like yess send that blorbo back in time to save the future but destroy the world they knew in the process!!! let them give everyone a happy ending while they have to deal with leaving their versions of those people behind

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...did you just give your occult friend your blood for a blood magic ritual?

I know I’ve already got an ask in the queue, so just getting this one in before I forget…

What’s up with the change in Doctor Fate’s helmet? All of a sudden he’s wearing a half helmet and socking bad guys like some regular flying brick instead of doing fancy magic, and then just as suddenly, he’s back to the full helmet and ankh effects.

Point of order if having more than one ask in the queue at any one time was against the rules I could have @krinsbez shot at dawn by now.

Anyway.

(An image of Kent Nelson wearing his "half helmet" in a war time propaganda comic circa 1941)

To explain it we need to understand the main "tools" that Dr. Fate uses to conduct his work. Like many mages, Kent Nelson does not hold a purely academic level of arcane knowledge. Arcana of that nature is esoteric and hard to conduct bare handed, there's a reason most wizards in history used tools like wands or orbs. In Nelson's case he wielded.

The Cloak of Destiny: Chiefly a protective garment, able to shield the wearer from earthly and magical attacks

The Amulet of Anubis: A multifaceted item that can enhance a magician's strength, produce a small list of basic spells by itself and even store items, people or souls within it.

And, most importantly.

The Helmet of Fate: Containing the soul and mind of the ancient wizard Nabu, empowered by the occult and cosmic spirits known as the Lords of Order. Wearing the Helm not only allows the wielder to communicate with Nabu for advice and guidance it also grants access to the power he had in life as well as the power of the Lords of Order.

The problem lies with that 3rd item. The Helmet of Nabu cannot be overstated in its importance. In the magical community (thank you Gwen, as always <3...not sure why you needed me to prick my finger on a cactus fruit for this research but you were helpful as always), the Helmet is considered THE most powerful artifact that currently exists in human hands. To bear the helm makes one not just AN Arch Magus but THE Arch Magus, responsible for the protection of all mankind from the threats beyond this realm, the holder of the mantle of Dr. Fate.

The problem is that the helmet's 'inhabitant' and its 'suppliers' do not always have humanity's true best interest at heart and certainly not always the interests of the helmet's wearer.

Nabu is...well he's a sorcerer from the mid Bronze Age. His understanding of justice and protection is that he, as a man who "understands" such things should impose his rules and protection upon those beneath him. It's not really a problem if he's stopping someone from getting crushed by a dragon's toenail but one can imagine it causes personality clashes when more contentions moral or political topics are in play.

And the Lords of Order are, as I have been warned, not Lords of JUSTICE, not Lords of LIGHT. They are Lords of ORDER. And any one of you that has read a slightly complex fantasy story can pick out the issues in that. When the forces of Chaos are mostly made up of demons and imps trying to cause death and suffering for the sake of returning the world to an era of barbarous bloodletting opposing them is almost always the right call but the Lords of Order are not above trying to impose their vision of "Order" upon the human race at large.

Kent Nelson was NOT a millennia old Arch Mage, but he was a man of unshakable responsibility and unbroken moral principle. When Nabu and the Lords of Order began to push him, attempting to manipulate him, attempting to overtake his actions or his will through their mystical might. he did the only thing that was available to him...he took the helmet off.

For the majority of the war, in fact, Nelson wore the helmet as little as possible. Wearing a "regular" half helmet (we have some of them here at the Perisphere, they're adequately machined but not exactly antiques, depending on which helmet it is you can see the seams rather clearly). And getting by with the powers granted to him by the Cloak, the Amulet and what mystical knowledge her could apply in the heat of battle. He could fly, he could increase his own strength, he could shoot beams from the amulet. For 99% of problems it was perfectly workable, if all he had ever had was the cloak and the amulet no one would have questioned Dr. Fate as a hero of his era.

Some situations did indeed call for wearing the Helm, when a more intensive form of mystical power was required but because of Nelson's reluctance and resistance to Nabu's influence over time their relationship became more and more strained, and Nabu's attempt to assert his will when Nelson donned the helmet became more and more forceful, increasing Nelson's reluctance to wear the Helm.

When the Keane Act disbanded the Justice Society, one can only imagine that Nelson was all too ready to place the helm upon its stand and lock it away in the dark for a few decades.

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Solar system objects (sun, moon, and planets) move along an imaginary line in the sky called the ecliptic, which travels through the 12 traditional Western zodiac constellations.

Constellations are a way to divide distant stars based on how we observe them from Earth, and are unmoving relative to one another (as opposed to the objects in our solar system, which are far closer to us). There are 88 constellations recognized by the International Astronomical Union, but objects in our solar system don't belong to any of them.

Chat am I stupid? I'm trying to look up what constellation the Sun is in, but it seems like that's the wrong question to ask in the first place??? Cause literally every other star belongs to a constellation but not the Sun apparently???????

And looking at those maps with like the nearest stars, one can see where that Star is located within that constellation, but nowhere is the Sun to be seen??? (Despite everything else being labelled)

Am I completely misunderstanding this and taking it from the wrong angle? Is a constellation a way to group Everything in the Universe or is it just what stars are visible from Earth (but then again the Sun is also a star and extremely visible on Earth so...)

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I should add, I saw it happen in real time: the takeover of what had previously been the aisle next to the cash registers at Walmart dedicated to baseball cards and Yu-Gi-Oh, slowly consumed by their cousins, the blind-bag plastic trinkets. Nowadays you’d be lucky to find sports cards there at all.

It sucks that kids barely play with toys anymore. That's valuable creative play, hand-eye coordination, and fine motor skills that aren't getting developed. Plus toys are just neat

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Blame LEGO for that one. They jump-started the blind-bag trend with their collectible minifigures, it was a hit, and everyone else jumped on it.

It sucks that kids barely play with toys anymore. That's valuable creative play, hand-eye coordination, and fine motor skills that aren't getting developed. Plus toys are just neat

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every generation has a - hang on post cancelled I wanna talk about this autocomplete suggestion

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sorry i was researching the author of a victorian book about raising children and now i'm fascinated by her. clear my schedule we're talking about lydia maria child.

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New Krypton, anyone?

At this point, why do you think people keep falling for Lex Luthor's whole thing?

Like, i argued with my dad last week because he swore that Mr Luthor had changed and that now he was a better man and i'm like "it's thr 6th time we have this conversation".

Simple, same reason people fall for any hate cult

Because its easy, because it tells them what they already want to hear, and because it invites them to not think.

(A popular campaign poster for Lex Luthor)

Lex Luthor is the kind of person that people are told to look up to. He "built a business with his own hands" (ignoring the fact that he 100% inherited LexCorp as already one of the most profitable tech companies on the planet) he "provides jobs" (his union busting efforts are LEGENDARY) he's a "true American" (most of his wealth is sheltered outside the US for tax purposes). He's the American success story as defined to a child by a society that wants that to be children's first impression of the country they live in. The industrialist, the business owner, the self made man.

And many people, one can hope most people, eventually grow out of that idea. They go on to higher education or through the circumstances of life educate themselves. They find that the world is more complicated than they thought, that a lot of the ideals they were taught in simplistic forms as children are indeed much more multifaceted than they believed. That their American Patriotism must be tempered with an understanding of America's imperfect history, the economic prosperity is often build on the backs of those whose voices are unheard, and that the idea of what and who "an American" is has been fed to them from specific angles both purposefully and unknowingly. Most people find at least some small way to break that cycle, to move it forward so at least their children have something NEW to rebel against.

Lex Luthor doesn't do that. And he appeals to people who, when confronted with the idea that life is not as simple as it was taught to them in the 6th grade clap their hands over their ears and scream until the people trying to educate them are silences in their own minds. Lex Luthor is a genius, he's self made, he's a real American. And that allows his supporters to clap their hands together and put their critical thinking skills back up on that dusty shelf.

Because if they flinch, if they recognize the truth. Not only that Lex Luthor is an arrogant fraud, propped up on the backs of idiots he's throw by the dozens into a volcano without looking down to grow back 2 inches of his long deceased hairline but ALSO that people like Superman. The alien, exotic, the 'illegal' and the 'radical' are not only correct in their accusations but also correct in their EXPECTATIONS.

Then that means they have to CHANGE. It means they have to take the blinders off, treat others with kindness as a baseline, offer assistance to those in need without them having to prove "worth". It means they have to pull their heads up, take a breath of cold, fresh air and realize the kind of person they've BEEN this whole time.

And some people would rather forgive Luthor 100 times, than have to follow Superman for an hour.

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Green Arrow and Hawkman, however…

No, what do you mean a bleeding-heart liberal who can’t keep his opinions to himself and a neoconservative space cop who thinks the solution to any problem involves medieval weaponry don’t get along well?

is there any actual evidence of the animosity between the Bats and the Arrows that people online like to claim exists? Or is it just people creating drama?

Like, institutional animosity between the two groups? No that's not a thing.

The "Batman Family" and the "Arrow Family" are two large pillars within the American superhero space. Made up of heroes who have some personal tie to either Batman or Green Arrow. Sidekicks, partners, lovers, friends, former enemies, the whole 9 yards. Both groups consist of at LEAST a dozen people, if not closer to two and they are the main heroic anchors for two large metropolitan areas Gotham City in New Jersey and Star City in Washington State.

If there was some kind of familial feud going on between the two groups, we would ALL feel it as that rivalry caused a mass clashing of gears within the American hero community and the League in specific. People would end up dead if the two groups couldn't work together, that's WHY institutional rivalry in the superhero community is so rare. The largest example I can think of is the animosity between the Justice League of China and the traditional Chinese heroes in the Great Ten but even in that very prominent case the two groups will always put aside their differences to work together in cause of saving lives.

There is no rivalry between the Batfamily and the Arrow Family...

Between the two MEN how-fucking-ever.

(An image of Batman and Green Arrow taken from the team's final press conference at their original Mount Justice headquarters)

Batman and Green Arrow are an unstoppable team when they work together. The most potent human specimens on the League and perhaps in the world. When it comes to physical ability, technological acuity and investigative technique they rank among the best human beings alive and perhaps beyond. In battle the two of them cut a swath throw villains 10 times their size and 15 times their power.

They just, by all accounts, DO NOT get along.

If there's a personal or historical basis for that, I obviously don't know it. It has been several years since Green Arrow was ultimately revealed as former Star City billionaire Oliver Queen but the Batman's identity of course remains in shadows for the time being and its neither my desire nor my place to speculate as to the relationship between the two men behind closed doors.

Their colleagues, when commenting upon it, put it down to a simple clash of personality. Queen is, famously, boisterous, opinionated and truly incapable of shutting his mouth for any extended length of time. The Batman, by all accounts, is the opposite. Stern, emotionless, withdrawn. Any disagreement between the two men would naturally escalate due to the differences in their styles of communication.

Even if they're not on the same bowling team, their rivalry is a personal grating. They're not going to be throwing down in the middle of a case and the most we get to see of it is a dirty glance thrown across a press conference, the last embers of a private argument that has undoubtedly already burned itself out.

If there is juicier drama here, a historian is the wrong person to ask.

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I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

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The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

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It's by the It's Jeff! team, I don't think it's supposed to be anything other than a cutesy 5-page backup story.

This event having Captain America/Wonder Woman and not Storm/Wonder Woman is genuinely an insane fumble. Like thats the easiest slam dunk ever what???

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I seem to remember Congorilla saying something to that effect when he resigned from the Justice League. That he wanted to bring more spotlight to native African heroes on the global stage, and when that JLA disbanded, he was going to do just that.

What do you think about the superman theory?

I didn't believe it but then Pozhar and Killer Frost came out to talk about it and i'm having my doubts.

This is gonna be a long one. This fucking "theory" has been sitting on my back for close to 6 years now so buckle your seatbelts and just to make sure you read to the end I stuck some REALLY juicy drama down there.

I think the so called "Superman Theory" is one part repackaging unsurprising information everybody knew, one part conspiracy theories ACTING upon said publically available information in the worst possible way and one part both previous answers being amplified by bad faith political actors for the sake of their own ends. In short, I think its bunk.

The "Superman Theory" in its broadest form is a conspiracy theory positing that the overbalance of active metahumans in the United States was created by the United States government and military in and attempt to cover super soldier research, creating a new weapon in geopolitical strategy that the United States could keep a larger control of by pretending it was a natural phenomenon.

Let me debunk this part by part:

(A partial map of "claimed" superhero teams in the immediate aftermath of the theory's political ripples. Most of these teams never actually operated and many of their members are thought to be entirely fictional. In fact many of the LEADERS of said teams do not work directly for their governments and have disavowed these "teams" outright)

1. No one was ever under any impression the government WASNT trying to manufacture superhumans.

We've all seen it, outfits like the DEO or Argus or Task Force X working on myriad ways to trying to create superhuman operatives that would be loyal to a government chain of command. Some of the "revelations" exposed by the "Superman Theory" are farcical in their idea that this is somehow not old news. Saying that Captain Atom was the creature of a military experiment isn't a shocking twist because it WAS a shocking twist more than a decade ago when it was actually uncovered.

The idea that many other superhumans such as Metamorpho or Gotham's Man-Bat were pushed into existence by clandestine military funding isn't pulling the blanket off of anything because that is how the military industrial complex in the United States has ALWAYS worked. The government pays for scientists to test stuff, and then they test stuff! The fact that these tests were not morally or ethically sound is a big shakeup if you happen to have never heard of the US Military or Government before.

2. The idea that any government can manufacture controlled metagene responses isn't just insane, its dangerous

There's a lot of bad science out there about "the metagene" as if its a specific thing only certain people have. That's not how it works at all.

EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING ALIVE HAS A "METAGENE".

Because what we call a "metagene" is really a poorly understood system of genes and DNA clusters that activate when a human being is placed under impossible stress. If there is some kind of terrible happenstance. And your body can adapt to that particular happenstance in order to keep you alive, then congratulations you're a metahuman. It's not a single light switch that goes on and off its a shorthand term for the human body's amazing and poorly understood ability to adapt to life threatening injury via the manifestation of superhuman traits.

No one knows what stimuli will activate a specific person's metagene, no one CAN know how that metagene will manifest once activated and putting in place systems to "test" or "activate" a metagene is going to end up with 9 parts corpses to 1 part terrified people running on fight or flight adrenaline except now they can shoot lava from their hands.

3. The international superhero community is not "unbalanced" in America's favor

All I really have to do here is gesture broadly at the existence of the Global Guardians, the Great Ten or the Rocket Reds. The rest of the world is not lacking for superheroes. Every large nation has a team and every small nation has a member on a large multinational team. The idea that American superheroes are especially numerous, powerful or prominent has more to do with the way that American superheroes monopolize media attention than it does anything to do with raw data.

As for the numbers of actual METAHUMANS that each nation has, rather than active superheroes. That is an impossible comparison to make. No one has even the broadest guess as to the number of active metahumans in the world in general, let alone in each nation. And that's just metahumans.

4. Metahuman and superhero are not synonyms.

Superman is not a metahuman. Wonder Woman is not a metahuman. Green Lantern is not a metahuman. BATMAN IS NOT A METAHUMAN.

The idea that a larger metahuman population would equate to a larger population of active superheroes just doesn't amount to anything when you look at who superheroes are and how they work. Superheroes draw their ranks from every kind of extranormal being imaginable from aliens to wizards and regular people in spandex animal costumes. Most metahumans are people living with a mutation, more akin to a rare disability than a superhero. Superheroes exist for a laundry list of very individual moral and societal factors that have little to nothing to do with the mere existence of their abilities.

5. Superheroes can't be an arms race because superheroes aren't soldiers.

America is not going to send the Justice League into downtown Beijing to level the place because the Justice League doesn't work for the American government. Any successful superhero organization has found that the only way for it to successfully conduct its work is to be independent of political oversight. The first age of heroes in the United States ended in a single court case when the Justice Society declared outright that it had no interest in following the political whims of Washington.

That's why so many of these new "national teams" announced in the aftermath of the Superman Theory (and the brawl it lead to on the White House lawn because we're at the point where some people are listening to Black fucking Atom for diplomatic cues) ended up being so much smoke and vapor.

So many of these teams were announced on live TV with heavy fanfare only to amount to nothing.

The Seraph is not leading a team of black ops superhumans for the Mossad because The Seraph already works for the Global Guardians and has been kinda busy for the last 600 days acting as one of the core mediators for a political clusterfuck of epic proportions in the Gaza Strip. Russia's "People's Heroes" consisted of large swaths of Russian heroes being impersonated by stunt doubles because most of Russia's superhero population is in open revolt against the Putin administration and has been since the 2nd Chechen war. China's "Great Twenty" proposal has run into the brick wall that is the DEEP factional animosity between China's traditional hero team the Great Ten and its more recent Justice League China. China's Super-Man and the Great Ten's August General in Iron can't even be in the same room and the two groups' communications have been in a deep freeze for nearly a year.

The UK's "Knights Inc" proposal caused a flare up in post-Brexit tensions when they attempted to include Irish national hero Jack O'Lantern in the team's roster without his permission leading to a truly history defining rant by the Irish hero on the emerald isle's iconic Late Late Show backed up by his Global Guardians teammate Godiva.

Conclusion

The Superman Theory isn't just an idiotic conspiracy theory playing off ignorance at the superhuman community's global scope it is also a dangerous political crowbar being used by bad faith actors in an attempt to stoke nationalist divisions in said superhero communities. It is fanning flames of distrust that could actually get people killed if teams from a certain region are the closest at hand to respond to violence or disaster in a neighboring nation. There was a tense period where Vietnam nearly denied the Great Ten entry into the country's airspace where hundreds of thousands were at risk of catastrophic typhoon flooding.

Superheroes are not national assets and there are dozens, hundreds, THOUSANDS or reasons as to why. But the insidious part is that until now the superhero community has sidestepped national division in favor of a close knit circle of trust that has allowed them to respond to as many disasters as possible with the maximum effective force.

And we should be VERY suspiscious of ANYONE attempting to disrupt that balance.