Remove ads

With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)

Status
Not open for further replies.
Reader mode
Cornuthaum said:
Doctor Fate is a hero.

A harsh, uncompromising hero (but so is the Batman), who fights terrors and monsters most heroes cannot even begin to imagine (so do the Green Lanterns), who has been doing this for years and decades and centuries. He is the way he is because he is an emotionally neutered machine dedicated to order at the cost of niceness and because he has one of the worst, most thankless jobs in the galaxy (not that he needs to be thanked, Fate does what Fate does because he must do this. It is, after all, very metaphysical.)

He is, however, in utter opposition to the protagonist, which makes it easy to see him as just another soulless villain. But that's the tragedy of it, he's not. In a better world, Giovanni Zatara would be happy to work with Nabu to fight these things because, well, someone has to and it takes a mighty sorcerer to do so. But neither -16 nor ours are good worlds.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
My complaint regarding Nabu has always been... and likely will always be... not just what he does, but what he does not do.
Paul offered Nabu thirty Atlantean volunteers... and Nabu reacts as if that would work.

Nabu could have done that himself months ago. This isn't just theory anymore. I don't scorn him for Order, I scorn him for allowing his own sloth to harm good people.
I'm unhappy with Siskin's apparent death too... and Teekl's, in fact. Terror Thing contact has driven people to use lethal force before, and Nabu can use a lot of lethal force... an escape route would have helped, I think.
 
random_npc said:
... oh right. He thinks he's the good guy. Loonies like that make the worst bad guys because they will pursue their insane cause with selflessness and sacrifice.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." ~ C.S. Lewis.

Zealots convinced by the purity of their own cause are the worst kind of tyrants since they believe any doubt or hesitation on their own part is a test of their conviction and will only make them go through their action with even more fervent conviction.
 
GardenerBriareus said:
So OL basically just blew up London and killed a good number of his own allies through sheer concerted retardation.

If he leaves Earth immediately after this, he's not coming back, not without everyone immediately trying to put him down like a rabid dog.

I mean, he's obviously not going to leave, since Map will fucking murder him on the spot for doing this to his city, but still.

A malfunctioning beta fork with a sharpened lump of magic just cast the world into chaos, and OL apparently intends to run away with his tail between his legs rather than face what he's allowed to happen. Meanwhile, the Light will be merrily exploiting the situation to undermine the Justice League, so that by the time he bothers coming back, the Earth will be even more screwed.

I'm sure the survivors will appreciate how Paul abandoned them to go beg a race of malevolent alien sociopaths for more power.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
huh, we used to only get this type of 'there's no way out except disaster, the protagonist sucks!' assumption rant about Renegade. How times have changed.
 
aetherialDawn said:
That bastard. So he's... intending to kill at least John, Paul, Jade, and Adom - who he considers chaotic - but also Rob and Giovanni - who he considers orderly.
Or at least I assume Rob shows as orderly, given his training with the Ghost of Marrack Past.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Doesn't Grandpa Marrack exist in the summerland/otherworld, which is home of the dead and the fae? While the fae are known to keeping the (letter of) their word, they're also generally seen as chaotic as hell otherwise.

I suspect the lords of chaos see the fae as far more kin to them then the lords of order do.
 
vali said:
It's entirely possible that the explosion (assuming there is one) will be conceptual rather than conventional.

We're all assuming it's going to explode because all energy sources we are familiar with explode when released from confinement. But this is order magic being released; for all we know the explosion will fix all the windows, repair all the potholes, and do other orderly things. Of course, Nabu clearly believes that breaking the battery will kill them all, so bad things are going to happen. I just don't think a conventional explosion is as guarantied as you might think.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So a few hundred million quid worth of improvements, and if they're close enough to the City, fixing all those "errors" in large companies' accounting?
 
Mr Zoat said:
7th July
22:27 GMT
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not the ending I was expecting, but I like it. Now on to the fallout.

Important lesson for Paul here: People backed into a corner will act as if they have nothing to lose and thus may try anything.
That said I really doubt Nabu actually intends anyone to die from this. He hit the battery because it was the only hope he had of victory. And given what John and Paul just told him he has ample reason to believe that defeat would result in worse than death for him. It is a calculated risk rather than suicide.
Interestingly Paul reacts in a very similar way. When the stakes are high and his own strength insufficient he will happily start calling up beings he cannot put down in hopes of solving the problem then dealing with the demonic/inhuman summons later.

Aren't there quite a few people on Earth 16 wondering around without brains? Captain Atom for example. Do they suffer mental degradation?

Sounded suspiciously like a Lantern Oath from Nabu. Several explanations suggest themselves but I feel the 'oath' is something fundamental that the Guardians tapped into rather than them coming up with the idea.

Andoriol said:
They just want the current person he's using free and he's come to the conclusion that he needs to die to 'stop' them. I get that it's turned into an idealistic order v chaos thing for him now but still, shitty of him.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
o_O John just said he is actively working to obliterate Nabu's mind. And Paul just implied that that he intends to have someone rip out and subjugate Nabu's soul.

aetherialDawn said:
I scorn him for allowing his own sloth to harm good people.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
While this is legitimate, the same flaw can be attributed to pretty much everyone involved. Any League member could have gone out looking for volunteers. Several have the wealth and or authority to hire/order people to take a turn as Dr Fate, Hero Of Earth. Paul certainly could have gotten some mages or mage-wannabes together. KF swore an oath to find Nabu a host but did nothing. And any of them could have done so back before Nabu got fed up of being stuck on a shelf and only picked up after everything had already gone south.

Nabu is to be blamed for his sloth in regards to finding a more willing host. Most of the cast are also to be blamed for their sloth on this matter.
 
Lubaf said:
Guys, have you considered Nabu smashing the battery was what OL and Constantine wanted?

Don't ask me what phase two of the plan was, but this feels like a Constantine plan, and those generally rely on conmanship, and the first rule of conmanship is you never show your hand unless you have some way of taking advantage of them taking advantage.

Thanks
Luc "Xanatos" French
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well Constantine perhaps, Paul had the yellow text of fear seeing Nabu go for the battery. But it would hardly be the first time Constantine set up a trap without informing his allies for various reasons.
 
Rift120 said:
Well Constantine perhaps, Paul had the yellow text of fear seeing Nabu go for the battery. But it would hardly be the first time Constantine set up a trap without informing his allies for various reasons. no reason at all.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
FTFY

oi, Zoat! Congratulations, you made me hate Nabu even more than before with this update, didn't think that was possible. Kudos, mate.
 
Angelform said:
Sounded suspiciously like a Lantern Oath from Nabu. Several explanations suggest themselves but I feel the 'oath' is something fundamental that the Guardians tapped into rather than them coming up with the idea.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
IIRC, the oath doesn't actually have any power in itself. It's purpose is as a mnemonic to help focus the Lantern on the appropriate emotion, and also a timing tool to give the rings time to actually get a full charge.
 
Riyshn said:
IIRC, the oath doesn't actually have any power in itself. It's purpose is as a mnemonic to help focus the Lantern on the appropriate emotion, and also a timing tool to give the rings time to actually get a full charge.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Generally yes.

There have been exceptions. In Legend of the Green Flame, trying to recharge off of Alan's lantern without the proper oath results in the lantern killing you and sending you to Hell, but that's more about Alan's lantern being the home of an eldritch abomination that is less friendly than the Ophidian.

But since YJ went with the boring version of Alan's origin, not much of a possibility here.

Although an alt.Paul who does get a magic lantern possessed by the Starheart is something I'd be interested in seeing in an omake, but maybe that's just me.
 
So I imagine the first thing Giovanni will do after getting rid of the helmet is ... get a haircut! Can you imagine it - eight months worth of hair growth under a helmet?
 
PostwarGryphon said:
This would be the perfect time for him to appear. Indeed, as Paul pointed out before, Nabu's actions have indirectly resulted in a net-negative for the cause of Order, and in fact has driven more people to the side of Chaos than Chaos itself probably has managed to do in a long time.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
All it takes for evil chaos to win is for good order to do nothing.

Prosecutor-0 said:
So I imagine the first thing Giovanni will do after getting rid of the helmet is ... get a haircut! Can you imagine it - eight months worth of hair growth under a helmet?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It would be flawless and magnificent -- the power of Order applied directly to the forehead would prevent all snags, tangles, and curling!
 
TheBlackLight said:
No Nabu life is not Order. Life is Chaos. Death is Order.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Life most certainly is Order. A living thing is a hierarchy of order: a body, built on a blueprint of organs, built on a blueprint of tissues, built on a blueprint of cells, built on a blueprint of intracellular structures, built on a blueprint encoded at the molecular level in DNA. Life is the pursuit of homeostasis, the battle against entropy.

Death is the end of that battle, when reason can no longer persist, when the organization of the body no longer holds, when the structures of the self fail to remain distinct from the not-self.

Chaos is an essential nutrient to life, as it will fail to develop and grow and thrive without it, but it is not the essence of life.
 
Reader mode
35,016 more messages…
Status
Not open for further replies.
Remove ads
Back
Top