Some thoughts on Sentinels of the Multiverse

There’s a strip of Subnormality where the perspective character goes to a museum of things that could be imagined, but never actually happened. It’s fascinating, but she realizes no one would ever build such a thing. Even if they did, not enough people would buy tickets to keep it open. The museum can be imagined, but never actually happened, and she suddenly finds herself back on the street.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is that museum.

In the fictional publication history behind the Fanatic card, she went through years of comics without a clear origin story. In the real world, that only works for weird plot devices like The Phantom Stranger. With a star like Fanatic, some overambitious writer would have had a clever idea for her “true origin” that ended up debasing the character.

The Scholar is one of the oldest characters in the publication history, repeatedly returning as a mentor to other characters. He has a dad bod and wears board shorts. Fans would have revolted.

There are nods to failures within the history of the comics. Zhu Long was a racist caricature at first, and the card game shows a later “fixed” version. Unity was a kid-appeal character everyone hated, and her card is a later version people actually liked. But there is no Clone Saga, and there is no One More Day. There’s a continuous storyline that spans decades of comics and meets a fitting resolution without being abandoned or betraying itself, because these are the comics we wish we had, not the comics we actually have.

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I think people who’re somewhat logical, people who’re at about the average logic level, don’t understand people who think illogically. Like, I read about those people who send death threats to weather forecasters because the forecast says rain and they don’t want it to rain. Somewhat logical people can’t wrap their heads around this. “But weather forecasters don’t change the weather—“ Yes, you realize that because you think logically!

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I haven’t established much about how the aliens in Scrapyard Station communicate, because it’s such a broad question that it gives me decision paralysis. What kind of body language should I give a nonhuman? Do they speak with sound? Gestures? Other senses entirely? How would they struggle with human languages? It all seems like too much.

A few things I have pinned down:

Nomads live all over the place, so their languages are all over the place, too. Even Nomads can’t pronounce all Nomad languages, just as an English-speaking human may struggle with Hungarian. They use both gesture and vocal communication, but only the former is usable in hyperspace.

Scrappers are pretty good vocal mimics, but their consonants come off a little soft. Their native languages tend to sound like they’re speaking underwater.

Winnowers always sound like they have a mouthful of snot. It’s gross.

Riders breathe through their skin and don’t really have “lungs” per se. They can’t make a wide variety of sounds, but they can make a sound and then quickly repeat it. The same sound repeated a different number of times can mean very different things in their language.

Scholars can buzz their entire bodies to make intelligible speech sounds, but it’s a lot easier to use artificial voice synthesizers.

Stewards use their Maxwell’s Demon powers for their language, communicating in the transfer of heat through air or water. With other species, they have to rely on gesture language.

I have no idea what I’m doing for Builders. What speech quirks do you give a bipedal armadillo?

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One thing I really dislike about Hi-Fi Rush. Chai killing seemingly sapient robots, and occasionally other humans, is pretty dissonant with the overall tone, but the dissonance seems to be part of the joke. Like the game is going “This would be kinda fucked up if you took it seriously, but nothing in this game should be taken seriously, so we’ll discreetly but repeatedly gesture at how unfunny it is, because the gesture itself is funny.” And that’s entirely too far up its own ass. It reminds me of that “Undertale Prime” post, and it demonstrates why Undertale is a dozen times better than “Undertale Prime” would have been.

(Mind you, I still dislike Undertale, but that’s me talking. I dislike almost anything postmodern that isn’t Princess Tutu.)

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Inspired in this case by beleester, but responding to older posts as well. A recurring idea when discussing the NCR in Fallout: New Vegas is that it’s not really the old government, it’s a bunch of cosplayers pretending to be the old government. But isn’t that every democratically elected government? Joe Biden isn’t George Washington, he’s someone who loosely follows in the tradition of George Washington. The pretense of continuity is best left to countries where the king’s son becomes the next king.

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I think “please don’t lump me, a lesbian, in with those male gaze artists” is a risky take. It works for lesbians whose art would be unusual from a man, but I’ve also seen it from lesbians who draw basically the same stuff a male artist would. (Not naming names because they’d hate me for it, but I’m thinking of one of the futa Nearl artists as an example.) I think at some point, the latter are going to be accused of being men pretending to be women, and I’m afraid the former are going to join in the accusations instead of showing solidarity.

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I just realized that buff black scientist from Hi-Fi Rush is basically the same archetype as Winston the gorilla scientist from Overwatch. “Is Winston black-coded?” would have been a discourse atom bomb back when anyone cared about Overwatch.

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I’m not going to pick a fight with this person because they’re mourning their family, but the word “should” continues to be a wet fart. Westerners “should” care about dead Palestinians without live Palestinians having to jump through hoops for it. But if Westerners don’t care, any hoop-jumping that gets them to care is worth it. I mean, I’m queer, and a lot of us have practically become performing monkeys trying to get straight people to care about us.

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The idea of predators and prey unintentionally benefiting each other for selfish reasons is a lot like the idea of customers and corporations benefiting each other for selfish reasons.

People who come across this idea usually use it as an argument for why this model of economics is right. Personally, I think this is an argument for why this model of nature is wrong. Indirect benefit to other prey doesn’t matter to the prey who get eaten, and indirect benefit to wealthier customers doesn’t matter to poor people.

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Trying to come up with a good name for a character who has rubber/inflation powers. Basically, she’s balloon-themed.

Edit: went with Lune.