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'?
so apparently my city has a superhero. and a supervillain. who like, do activism. and. my mom. is dating the supervillain.
One night, you decide to put your phone under your pillow. When you wake up in the morning, your phone is replaced by cash totaling what you paid for your phone. Turns out the tooth fairy takes more than just teeth.
This is like those posts that talk about how humans have always been humans and have done dumb things since the beginning of time
I love this so much, I’m gonna start saying “nuts” we need to bring it back
What happened in Berlin was so scary to me. It rlly showed how far the right wing is willing to go.
People of color and ppl who aren't ethnically German(like me, I'm half turkish and half Kurdish) are scared to go outside.
And the media is definitely trying to cover this up, please educate yourself on what's happening in Europe- especially about what just happened in Germany.
Ppl rlly forget what happened just 80yrs ago.
And sure "lEfT wInG iS wOrSe tHaN rIghT wINg" literally shut the fuck up
I am fucking scared to go outside.
When the prophecy was given your first thought was to action you thought of ways to prevent it to remove the child to get rid of them. But then you looked at your a wife and you realized, you couldn’t no matter what you couldn’t break her heart like that. So you turned to the soothsayer, blind and deaf, yet knowing, seeing, and hearing and said.
“Thank you. You may go.”
Then you began preparing
you're far from the first king to receive the prophecy that your new born child would cause your death. Where your story diverges is when instead of tossing the kid to the wolves, you are driven to be a kind & nurturing father.
are either of these stories good? cause they sound really interesting
On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.
On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.
For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:
Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.
Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.
Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.
Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.
Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.
"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.
Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:
Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.
Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.
Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)
Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.
Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.
You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.
(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)
So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!
Buying a car
English added by me :)
just remembered this old clickhole video i used to be obsessed with
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