Lancer Ass Coding

Minecraft should completely rework villages. They're not hominids anymore, they're animate bipedal constructs made from clay or bronze wandering the ancient overgrown ruins of their former farming hamlets. The villagers are gardening robots, still tilling their fields after untold centuries of disrepair.

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'?

Saw these right next to each other and I don’t know how to feel

there’s something else that’s really interesting about Scion that’s revealed in this chapter though

and that is that Scions an asshole

now that feels obvious with him blowing up Britain but specifically because of how Jack convinces Scion to start killing he tells him to do what his ancestors did which for Entities is the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do

the whole point of Entities is to stop entropy since they realized the old way of just fighting an consuming was going to cause them to die out and yet Scion decides to revert to the old ways and kill everything and there by ruining the Simulation and stopping any progress on the entropy problem which is the exact opposite of what Entities want to do

this means to other Entities specifically Scions a huge self important asshole

Very confused by sting interlude 3; don’t really get what happened

Artificer school would have loved you

Most people ask me: “How the fuck did you graduate from Wizard School?”

I didn’t. I got kicked out 2 weeks in for permanently petrifying a classroom with an arcane machine I made.

When you learned of the god of war, you thought he’d be tall and muscular and angry. When you were about to meet him, you braced yourself for the worst.

You weren’t quite expecting the short, scrawny, shy kid you ended up getting instead.

I just realized that Jon has tone of scars on his neck Michael, bugs, daisy, Melanie, Julia montauk

or read Twig

every post attempting to find 'plural' subtext in ward is just another grim reminder of how few wildbow fans have read pact

You could also tie in two other common tropes with the whole “Superman-esq is trying to contain all these guys” which is the whole no kill rule everyone follows and how villains constantly break out

Basically the Superman knock off purposely enforced the no kill and purposely tries to make containment not a priority so that way there’s always villains to keep the hero’s distracted so they can’t start enacting facist coups or whatever but it’s a ticking clock of hero’s getting fed up and just putting people down and villainy getting less popular until there aren’t enough villains to keep this system going and it all comes crashing down

sorry for random addition just an idea that popped into my head based around this

A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.

Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?

Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.

this exact idea is really well done and mentioned in the short stories “The Road Not Taken.” and even more so in “Herbrig-Haro” both by Garry turtle dove they’re both really good check them out you can find them online and they’re pretty quick read

Faster-than-light space travel as a concept is fun to me because everything we’ve observed in the stars is how the universe was a long-ass time ago, so in a sci-fi setting where FTL tech was just invented, there could be all sorts of crazy developments that could be found by traveling through hyperspace or whatever. Try to visit a star system, whoops it isn’t there anymore. Try to go close-ish to a nebula, whoops there’s a bunch more stars here now and this trip is more dangerous than we estimated. Or better yet, a planet with intelligent life on it, the light caused by which won’t reach earth by normal means for about another million years. Thought you’d be going to an ocean planet, turns out it’s got small continents and terrestrial life now. Huge amounts of space travel would be based in predicting what the star systems you see will probably be like in such and such many years, and hoping you predicted correctly when you finally make the jump. Actually, with an FTL engine, one could theoretically take advantage of the speed of light to travel a certain number of light years away from our solar system and study it from afar, as a way of observing the history of our planetary system from before humankind even existed! How wild is that?