Goddammit. Why did I decide it was okay to binge this over the past few days to catch up? Stopped at the Terror Thing arc and catch up right in the middle of this, now I am aching for Moar Nao like an addict. Didn't think I catch up this fast. 
With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)
- Thread starter Mr Zoat
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Jamie Roberts
Hávamál 127
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- she/her
I was referring to this. And, like I said, I took it as an implication, and the reason I bring it up again is that clearly that wasn't how you meant for me to take it. But quite literally the only reason I felt that my concerns were mollified after that time as because of the implication you didn't intend to make. And so, here we are again.
I'm going to be honest Zoat, you've spent some two and a half years, some thirteen percent of my entire life, building up this Nabu thing. Your entire story is set up to hing on it. And now that we're here... what? Literally everyone that isn't Paul or Constantine has spent three days doing nothing. Paul fills in M'gann and Kon on what he's been doing, and the only meaningful reaction is from Wolf. Paul checks in on Giovanni, and- oh look! -once more all new information on Nabu is negative information, because of course it is. I bet he spends his spare time kicking puppies and setting fire to orphanages. After all, canon doesn't explicitly say that he doesn't, right?
I'm peeved, in case you can't tell. It feels like you want to have your hard-man-making-hard-decisions-while-hard cake without having to deal with any of the backlash from that kind of behavior*. Now, I may be speaking prematurely; you may very well be planning to have some backlash happen. But the longer that it doesn't happen, the more that it feels like it won't.
When I recommend supervillain-esk behavior, an implicit part of that is ending up in conflict with non-supervillains. I recommend it anyway, because that's essentially how I behave IRL, I'm constantly in conflict with people who don't subscribe to my world-view, but I get on fine anyway. But Paul's taken up the behavior style with all of the consequences yet-to-appear. How am I to relate to that?
Paul decided that the best way to solve his problem was with violence, and he was right; all problems could be better solved with violence. He made a token effort to look like he had considered non-violence, but stacked the deck heavily in favor of making sure not-violence didn't really workout, something I do all the time. It helps to take some heat off later, once everything's concluded. It does not remove the heat entirely.
My problem is not, and has never been with Paul's behavior. My problem is with how its presented. He wants the advantages of solving his problems expediently like a supervillain, without the downsides of doing so, and that is purest Power Fantasy.
*I can't figure out how to work the words "and eat it too" into that sentence, but know that they are present in spirit.
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Why do people keep saying that Paul wanted to solve things with violence and even stacked the deck in his favor when that is complete bullshit? He was literally hoping that Nabu would just take the freaking Golem body when he first offered it. He made three different solutions to Nabu and According to WoZ Paul would have indeed have went through on his end of the deal and even would have given him a golem body if he had surrendered peacefully. Hell if things have escalated to violence it would have meant that it was highly likely one of his friends or allies would have died including Zatara. Things going to violence was absolutely the last thing Paul would have wanted because it wouldn't have gained him anything he couldn't have gotten peacefully and had a good chance of costing him quite a lot.
Seriously, the Paul bashing by saying he wanted this confrontation is as bad as the Nabu bashing.
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- Hampden Park
I'm not showing that he's wrong and I'm not showing that Nabu was. It is quite possible for different people to agree on the authenticity of the evidence and still disagree on the morality of the decision made. I am trying to present the situation as debatable, and not as one in which one side is definitely wrong.
Nabu wasn't incapable of negotiating (former hosts) and he wasn't generally a force for evil (Minions, Oceanus). If the SI had actually responded to his counter offer by saying 'fine, wait here' and had somehow come up with thirty Mister Zatara level magic users who were willing to take part, Nabu would have willingly made the exchange. The SI simply wasn't prepared to be that accommodating, and, legally? He didn't have to be.
Should he have been? Maybe? It would certainly have been worth looking into how many people in that category there were, just so that he'd have some idea of what Nabu was asking. Then again, Nabu had eight months to look into the matter himself, and he had far more reason to get on with it. It would also have been easier for him to do it than it would be for the SI.
The other option available to Nabu would have been to submit to arrest. The problem with that is Nabu wasn't prepared to submit to the authority of others. If he had, he'd have been chained up and the SI would have probably handed him over to the London police with a full explanation of the League's lies.
Not at all. Everyone was doing something, most of it just wasn't associated with this because it was a secret mission that actually stayed secret. The SI and company successfully prevented anyone who might have decided to intervene from finding out what had happened.
They just found out that a good friend of theirs killed one of their superiors and had lied about his plans for eight months. As of now, they're having a frantic discussion on what the heck they're supposed to do with this information. You don't see this because the SI isn't there.
Canonically, Wallace felt all the pain inflicted on his body when Nabu was in control. I've already established that exposure to lots of magic isn't too healthy and if you look at the Helmet of Fate there isn't room for the wearer to eat.
There won't be some kind of karmic backlash. The SI certainly won't ever come to believe that he was in the wrong. Various other people will react, as they did when the Renegade behaved iconoclastically, and there will be consequences to that.
Everyone always wants to solve their problems with no negative consequences. Power rings just make you better actually doing so.
On balance, he didn't want violence. But f Siskin hadn't been killed he'd have found the whole thing blooming satisfying.
So, if Nabu had both the reason and the ability to at least start looking for a successor or a different accommodation/deal with Zatarra the only reason he didn't must be that you as the author didn't want him to?
It's all well and good to say that the SI would accept a peaceful resolution, but both in and out of the story no-one ever thought it would actually happen because everything Nabu did is bad/wrong. This was wholly forced storytelling with just the end-goal in sight.
The reason he didn't go host shopping is because he had a perfectly good one right there. Why bother looking around when you don't need to?
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Again, Nabu still seemingly being in Zatara's body by season 5 implies that he never bothered looking into it in canon either so can't blame Zoat for that. Also no one is saying that everything Nabu did is bad, that is you exasgerating. Everyone working on taking on Nabu was pretty biased againt him and he did hijack someone's body with seemingly no intent on giving it back.
Hell, Zoat just said that if Paul had been willing to accomodate Nabu he would have agreed and things would have been resolved peacefully. So the SI definitely messed up there since there really wasn't a reason he couldn't have taken the time to do that while letting him stay on Zatara until then.
Emstar
The Shining One
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- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
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- She/They
Stop being hungup on Paragon. Renegade is going to ascend to true protaganist in our hearts if not in actuallity.
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Or maybe, and stay with me here, Nabu did here exactly what he apparently did in the show: not look for successors. Unless you can find something from Young Justice that suggests that he was, in fact, looking for other magic users willing to let him sit on their heads?
So much for the Staff preventing mental contamination.
Humm… In canon it was M'gann who went slightly off the deap end over the time-skip. Guess here it will be the soon-to-be love fanatic.
Apparently she never heard about what he did to Clay Face. Or what he did in the simulation.
Paul is by no means reluctant to pull out lethal force when legitimately fearful.
Yet I cannot recall any occasion, canon or in this story, where Aquaman has actually called in his army of mages to help.
Think you are forgetting someone there. Big guy, flying brick power set, turns into a ten year old when off the clock.
All it means is that for some reason he stayed with Zatarra. Either they reached an agreement or he's just puppeting, we don't know.
The latest information we have about Nabu is that in canon season 2 he's still on Zatarra. In WTR he had both a reason and ability to look for successors in the 8months after he took Zatarra but he simply didn't. Whether that was due to the rarity of powerful mages, unwillingness from other potential hosts or simply Zoat just not bothering with hinting at anything going on we don't know.
As I said previously, it increasingly seems that the members of the JL are put in stasis between appearances so they change as little as possible from stimuli that should and does reach them.
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Clayface eventually mostly recovered, and no once actually died in the simulation.
The attack on Poseidonis, and the fight with Oceanus. Mostly off-screen, but I think I mentioned it.
Oh. Yeah. Him.
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Or nothing changed, since months after he took Zatara's body Zatana tried to get Nabu off of him. If he is puppeting his body then Zoat is actually being accurate to his character.
...How? He literally had the same exact sources as he did as canon Nabu. And what do you mean reason? Seems like you are just reaching.
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It seems more likely to me that John will to get a visit from a big, golden dragon than he might get straight answers from a shut-in wizard, and a former hero who became a mad Lord of Chaos.
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- Wishing I was somewhere much colder, I asssume.
So it just hit me. Grayvy-OL was essentially ostracized from the League for a very long time for killing Klarion.
OL just killed Klarion, and then he killed a member of the Justice League. OL is closer to the League than Gravy-OL was/is, but that's a much more significant event.
He also empowered John Constantine to be one of the most powerful beings in this universe.
Let me state that again. John Constantine, who excelled at being clever as all fuck and using great power he either took or borrowed from much more powerful beings, is now one of those kinds of beings. With seemingly no loss to how clever he is. The denizens of hell, if they even know it's happened yet, must be having a massive "Oh crap." moment.
OL just killed Klarion, and then he killed a member of the Justice League. OL is closer to the League than Gravy-OL was/is, but that's a much more significant event.
He also empowered John Constantine to be one of the most powerful beings in this universe.
Let me state that again. John Constantine, who excelled at being clever as all fuck and using great power he either took or borrowed from much more powerful beings, is now one of those kinds of beings. With seemingly no loss to how clever he is. The denizens of hell, if they even know it's happened yet, must be having a massive "Oh crap." moment.
zhuull
SB still lying to protect Racists what else is new
Shush you! You need to get on the Zatanator train.
As soon as Zatanna makes friends with the Predator we can add him to the Entity pyramid riding through space on Ion's head!
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Why not, exactly? You explicitly promised and delivered karmic backlash on Renegade, so why does Paragon not get the same?
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For one people were bitching about how Grayven was needlessly a dick to everyone and never considered the consequences of his action and people were waiting for his action to blow up in his face, Another is that Nabu literally stole someone's body after using his daughter(who happened to be his friend) as a hostage with no seeming intent on ever giving it back. Paul then went through great effort to be able to legally take action against said body snatcher while also being willing to negotiate with him to settle thing peacefully.
Don't really see why there has to be some karmic backlash considering that Paul was kind of in the right here.
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It wasn't a karmic backlash, it was the practical downside of the risks he took. I'm not Steve Ditko. I'm not using this story to espouse a particular moral philosophy which always results in the characters getting what they want while their enemies always fail. If a character takes a risk, sometimes it will blow up in their face. If they keep taking risks, eventually one will.
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It's my personal headcanon that Zatara and Nabu eventually reach an agreement that allows Zatara to live part of each day, if not half of each day, without the helmet on by the time season 2 comes around.
Sure, there's no evidence to say otherwise, but I like that better than the implications of a body slave.
Sure, there's no evidence to say otherwise, but I like that better than the implications of a body slave.
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I don't think that you mean 'otherwise' here.
With his tattoos, he's invisible to Rama Kushna
The golem was never a realistic solution. Paul doesn't understand Nabu, nor wants to, and never made a serious attempt at communicating with him (or doing so through a third-party, so that the palpable hatred didn't throw off the conversation).
Which is: Doctor Fate isn't Nabu riding a meat puppet, which can be replaced with a metal puppet as needed. Paul's hatred of Nabu blinded him to any other possibility other than Nabu being an evil possessing spirit.
Just the fact that we're calling him 'Doctor Fate' instead of 'Nabu' is a pretty big clue that the situation isn't that simple. It's not like Nabu has a secret identity he needs to hide; Klarion doesn't call himself 'Doctor Chaos'. Fate uses 'we' to refer to himself and refers to Nabu as a separate person; a few short weeks after Zatara put on the helm, Fate was instinctively protective of Zatanna.
Even if Nabu is in control, it seems obvious to me that Fate is--at least--unconsciously influenced by his host's thoughts. (I believe that, in this story, all of that was just play-acting combined with blocking of Wonder Woman's ability to detect lies, because of course it was.)
I think if you look at things without being blinded by Nabu hatred, it's fairly obvious that the host is more than just a mount. All of the other Lords of Chaos/Order we've seen have been just themselves in a physical body; if that's what Nabu wanted, he could have done that from the beginning. The fact that he's chosen a path that requires a human partner indicates fairly strongly to me that that's what he wants.
The interaction between Nabu and Kent in canon reads clearly to me as two old friends (with massive emotional wounds) rather than "former master/former slave". Canon WoG is that Nabu is looking for high magical potential in his hosts, and left it open to interpretation whether the host's moral alignment mattered. A golem had neither.
This isn't to argue that Nabu was in the right with what he did. I'm sure I'll have to ignore a bunch of "This is still wrong!" posts which are completely missing the point. This is simply about the idea that the golem was a solution to all of Nabu's needs.
The analogy is that, basically, Nabu just came out of a horrible relationship in which he was literally imprisoned for decades. He feels betrayed by that and by someone who swore to help him and didn't, ends up grabbing the first person he can, and declares that the person he grabbed is going to be in a relationship with him and can never leave him... and Paul keeps trying to offer him more and more technologically advanced dildos as a replacement, which would be hilariously (and insultingly) missing the point.
First, nobody was talking about forcing Zatanna to do anything. You have to make sure she's OK with it, but at the end of the day she is a minor and she does need a legal guardian. As a 14-year old, it's not actually her decision, and it shouldn't be.
Making her choose between her home and friends, or all other social contact... that's putting enormous weight on a child while she's already grieving. That's why Bruce should have told her everything and then said that Giovanni asked him to look after her if anything happened to him.
Second... It's in Mr Zatara's will that batman becomes her legal guardian if he dies.
Now, under Nabu he wasn't actually dead, merely "indefinitely indisposed" so it's a grey area whether the will should come into effect. If it did, then Batman (or maybe Bruce Wayne) would become her legal guardian. So no, it's not kidnapping.
Sidenote: It was set up in this manner because her only other family is a bunch of people in italy who she barely knows and can't communicate with.
He's made three or four serious attempts, actually. Nabu shut him down every time. Ranging from shouting at him, to ignoring him, to outright teleporting away to avoid talking to him.
Kent Nelson, the man who wore him on and off for decades, says otherwise.
There you go, direct quote from the episode where Kent directly compares being used by Nabu to being worn like a piece of clothing.
Plus, We've seen what wearing the helmet looks like from the inside. There's a reason Paul keeps describing it as "being trapped in a blank void" and that reason is "Because that's literally what it's like."
Nabu has all the control and Wally is trapped in a White Room. Nabu can show him what's going on, but he doesn't have to, and Wallace's only input is the ability to talk to Nabu.
There is no melding of personalities or blending of intentions between Ghost and Host to create Doctor Fate.
We've seen what a merged personality looks like, because Paulphidian had one, and they kept hanging around Paul's friends and trying to help.
"Doctor Fate" never approached Zatanna at all. Only even attempting the "Your dad wants to talk to you" thing after being ambushed. Months after the kidnapping itself.
It's very very clear that Giovanni Zatara had absolutely no say in anything Nabu did.
Direct quote, since you only linked to it.
So basically, his answer (as WoG usually is) was completely worthless and consisted only of "I'll leave it to your interpretation" and "spoilers, no comment"
Not sure why you're trying to use that as evidence of anything.
As for the golem, it was specifically designed for him to wear it, and when Nabu responded by saying he needs a living host that can cast magic, Paul countered by claiming that the golem was "thuamatically active" (that means he should have been able to cast though it.)
The question about morality is moot, since the golem would be completely neutral and mindless, allowing Fate to impose his alignment on it at will.
If there was a real problem with this setup, Nabu could have just told Paul what it is. He has already proven to be able to do things that Nabu considers impossible, and he clearly has motivation to get nabu a new body.
It could have been his ticket to real, working immortal body for Nabu. Permanently removing any threat of being stuck on a shelf ever again.
Nabu wouldn't even finish hearing Paul out.
When you refuse to do things the easy way, you leave only the hard way. Aint got nobody to blame but yourself.
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