SemiSaneAuthor
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- Location
- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
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- They/Them
*Blinks* No. There is a phrase you might of heard of, Kill two birds with one stone?
With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)
- Thread starter Mr Zoat
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Does an RKO out of nowhere.
Savage retorts by throwing Randy Orton at Grayven.
Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
- Location
- Baton Rouge
Yeah, based on what I've seen of him, if he was buried alive a few meters down, I don't think he could escape. He would survive, and someone might eventually dig him up, but there wouldn't be any sanity left after centuries of complete sensory deprivation. So just about anyone could end Savage for good given a shovel, a couple days, and some rope to keep him still during the digging time.
Savage's greatest strength is his immortality. His biggest mistake is explaining that fact to anyone who bother to listen, because then they'll know exactly what to do to keep him down for good. If he kept his head down and didn't blab about his supposed superiority, no one would ever bother with measures like throwing him into the sun, and he could try again when everyone forgot about him.
Do you think I'd have referenced Two Girls, One Cup if I were familiar with that phrase?
Because would, and did.
- Location
- Florida
This whole thing is bullshit and I hope Savage gets wrecked.
At first I was confused, because original!Paul called the Ophidian once before, but then I had the thought that this timeline might have greatly increased his tolerance for the concept of autocracy, and thus reduced Savage rule to a much lesser evil than alien invasion with a side of genocide.
Also, Savage's "now only the most primal magics will have any effect" seems to allude to the fact that the emotional spectrum works and is probably always gonna work, because its origin lies close enough to the start of the universe, iirc. So Ophidian merge does seem like a valid solution.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
I doubt any "help" he has received from The Time Trapper can ultimately help him, honestly. Pretty sure he's screwed no matter how this turns out.
dhasenan
always lowercase
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Savage and me.
- Location
- Ashtabula
Read over this again, just to make sure I got everything, I speed read sometimes. For reasons unknown to me I'm reminded that Bendis just redid Superman's origin (I've lost track of how many times this has been done) the entirety of which is so unbelievably stupid and unneeded it only serves to make me hate the comic industry all the more.
Yet here I am, a huge comic book fan for pretty much my entire life, and the only way I can get my comic fix, the only way I can read an actually good, interesting comic book hero is on a forum I had never heard of until TV tropes, written by a random Englishman with a day job.
This isn't a knock on Zoat, oh no. Instead, I feel like sitting the writers of the actual comics down while pointing at my screen going "See this? People who don't get paid are outshining you....EASILY."
I don't know if it's the same for anyone else, but nowadays? I dread what comic writers are going to do next, rather then look forward to.
Yet here I am, a huge comic book fan for pretty much my entire life, and the only way I can get my comic fix, the only way I can read an actually good, interesting comic book hero is on a forum I had never heard of until TV tropes, written by a random Englishman with a day job.
This isn't a knock on Zoat, oh no. Instead, I feel like sitting the writers of the actual comics down while pointing at my screen going "See this? People who don't get paid are outshining you....EASILY."
I don't know if it's the same for anyone else, but nowadays? I dread what comic writers are going to do next, rather then look forward to.
- Location
- Hampden Park
Thank you, corrected.
Mr Weisman has been very clear that he doesn't like this version of time travel. He's all about those closed time loops.
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- Location
- texas
I don't know, have you met a lot of folks from China that look like this-
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
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I don't know, have you met a lot of folks from China that look like this-
...wait, you mean the Chinese don't look like that to you? And here I thought everyone was just politely not commenting on it...
Sometimes this thread weirds me out. Dozens of criticisms of Vandal Savage for being stupid. Zero expressions of horror at his acts of mass murder and then individual murder of brave heroes in the violent and humiliating fashion, for no other reason than to feed his own ego. I mean, he admits that all of this is entirely unnecessary because he could have hid out and waited for time to reset itself. He just wants to enjoy himself killing these people before he loses the chance.
So let me break the pattern. Savage sucks because he's doing awful, evil things, not because he's doing them incompetently. He's a terrible man, and the fact that his plans aren't very good is very connected to that fact, not some kind of separate issue. Because evil makes you stupid. It makes evil people see the world as being made up of people just as petty and awful as they are and pushes them to unnecessary acts of cruelty and violence.
So let me break the pattern. Savage sucks because he's doing awful, evil things, not because he's doing them incompetently. He's a terrible man, and the fact that his plans aren't very good is very connected to that fact, not some kind of separate issue. Because evil makes you stupid. It makes evil people see the world as being made up of people just as petty and awful as they are and pushes them to unnecessary acts of cruelty and violence.
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Empiricist2
Let's play doctor!
- Location
- Baton Rouge
I love how Savage is thousands of years old, has seen empires rise and fall, and the failure of countless dictators. Yet he thinks that murdering his way through the world's idols and protectors is a good idea for acquiring power. He said that 90 years is almost meaningless to him, so why can't he gain power by showing everyone what an effective leader he is? Most people don't haven't 90 years total in order to gain power, yet some rise very high. Becoming the ruler of the Earth through unstoppable power is an implicit admission that he can't gain stable power through other means in an advanced society. And it's not like anyone would actually want to follow him when he sets off multiple nukes in inhabited areas and kills the planet's idols and protectors. So not only will he gain power through force of arms, the only way he will be able to keep it is through the same methods.
Oh, and it's not like the guardians are figureheads or anything. Presumably they actually do things as well, such as disaster relief, stopping existential threats, and generally keeping order. Is Savage going to do all those things personally, in addition to acting as the ruler of the planet? I highly doubt that the big G Guardians are going to take losing two Lanterns to such a maniac laying down. Nor are Hinnon and Dox going to allow someone able to rewrite time so casually to mess up all their plans.
Given the fractal failures in planning that Savage is making here, I'm still of the opinion my cat would do better.
Oh, and it's not like the guardians are figureheads or anything. Presumably they actually do things as well, such as disaster relief, stopping existential threats, and generally keeping order. Is Savage going to do all those things personally, in addition to acting as the ruler of the planet? I highly doubt that the big G Guardians are going to take losing two Lanterns to such a maniac laying down. Nor are Hinnon and Dox going to allow someone able to rewrite time so casually to mess up all their plans.
Given the fractal failures in planning that Savage is making here, I'm still of the opinion my cat would do better.
You don't get it. This world isn't even going to exist. Savage knows that time is going to snap back, and he thinks he has some bullshit that will allow him to come out on top of the new reality.
All these people he's killing would shortly have stopped existing anyway. Savage isn't killing them to gain power. He's killing for fun, knowing that there's no other point to it, knowing that everything except the pleasure he feels at these acts of murder will shortly be swept away by the tide of history rewriting itself again.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
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Because we expect Savage to do petty, evil, cruel things. That's what he does, it's in his name for heaven's sakes. But we don't expect him to be stupid about it. The man's lived through basically all of humanity's recorded history and still hasn't learned that behavior like this is counterproductive to his own goals? It's pure idiocy. So the genocide goes without comment because nobody expected him to do any different, while playing king-of-the-hill with metahumans for no particular reason besides the pleasure of the kill stands out as something that Savage should know better than to do by now.
I don't know why you assume that vast experience should lead to absolutely no moral growth but considerable intellectual growth, rather than the other way around.
Isn't the real tragedy that he hasn't learned to stop valuing all the evil shit in life and pursue positive ends that would actually make himself and others happy? Who cares whether he's smart or stupid about it. What he should know better than is to do evil in the first place. If he can't learn that very obvious lesson, why would he be able to learn any other lesson?
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
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Because it's not in-character for Savage, and because immortality often leads to distancing oneself from humanity in these types of stories. Why get attached? They're like mayflies to you. And the more distant you've grown, the easier it is to justify an atrocity that gets you something you want because you stopped caring about individual humans centuries ago. Plus, he hails from the age of cavemen, where morality wasn't even remotely a concern, and while by volume he lived more years in societies where morality meant something, his formative years were spent with survival as the only concern.
So yes, I expect no moral growth over the millennia from a man who clearly wasn't all that altruistic in the first place since he never bothered to refute being called "Savage". But when morality and connections with humans stop mattering... well, you've got to fill the hours somehow, and there isn't much left besides intellectual pursuits and reckless self-indulgence. Even Savage can only wantonly rape, plunder, and kill for so long without getting bored eventually. Plus, since Savage explicitly wants to rule the world, learning as much as possible about, say, strategy and tactics can only help with that.
Why? You seem to act like altruism is something that humans should naturally gravitate to, when freed from the tyranny of aging and death, but it honestly strikes me as far more likely that if a random human got Savage's abilities, they would just go do whatever they've always wanted but were too scared of retribution to actually do, because they know they can't be meaningfully punished for it as long as they keep their immortality under wraps. Even if the average human is as likely as you think to be benevolent if given these abilities, Savage isn't in the middle of the morality bell curve. No, he's basically Hitler on that scale. Give Hitler immortality and I guarantee he will never bother to even consider whether his personal moral system is inherently wrong; he will simply kill, and lie, and steal, in the pursuit of a world that is exactly the way he wants it to be, never mind the trillions of innocents he squashed under his boot.
Basically, unlike some of the other supervillains in DC (Captain Cold, Harley Quinn, and the like), there is no realistic hope of Savage ever being benevolent. The closest he's ever gotten was "whoops, I killed the world. Didn't mean to. Let's restore it, not because I regret having killed all those people, but because all I can rule over as things stand is the mutant cockroaches." Consequently, since "evil" is the only setting Savage will ever be on, barring alternate versions such as the Crime Syndicate version, his atrocities aren't as surprising as his lack of basic pattern recognition (monologuing at superheroes -> superheroes stop my plan -> this is bad, don't do that again). It's not worse than most other evil geniuses, but it particularly stands out in Savage since by all rights, he ought to have been studying strategy for as long as it's existed.
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- texas
Well he did come even closer to being non villainous.
In Star Trek/Legion of superheroes, Savage was made the same person as Flint.
The difference between Savage and Flint, one a monster and the other a great mind, according to the series?
Flint is the version that came to the conclusion that tomorrow can be a better day than today.
Basically, Savage doesn't have hope. Savage, despite his enhanced intellect, never evolved his thinking. He still sees life as nature, red in tooth and claw. The idea that life can be better than that? That people can be better than that? That societies can be better than that? Alien to him.
Hestia&theCourt
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Huh. I learned something new today. Nonetheless, given that Savage still refers to himself as Savage at the moment and is still going full-blown megalomaniac, as of the current story arc, he's not reaching that conclusion for a long time. (Not to mention that probably falls under "alternate versions of Savage" since it was a crossover.)
At first he was defending himself with a chunk of time from pre-Atlantean empire days, long before Persia or Egypt cultures (or their magics) developed. Snow man drew on an older, power and could still affect him.
Now he's using a chunk of time that's older than the dinosaurs. Meaning he's pretty much immune to anything humans have developed.
Of course, the Light Entities and the Guardians all predate Sol's formation let alone Earth's.
- Location
- texas
Since the emotional spectrum isn't magic, an anti-magic defense wasn't going to be too effective to begin with.
However, someone magical in this very storyline also has origins that predate the origin of Earth.
Nabu.
He's not human, he's Cilian. And the Cilians, like the Maltusians, claim to be the oldest sapient race in the universe.
Nabu's magical tradition is about 10 billion years old, give or take.
Doesn't that vary some depending on the continuity? are you sure that applies to YJ Nabu? Granted it'll be quite handy if it does.
- Location
- texas
Zoat changed his origin by making him a Cilian who turned into a Lord of Order, when in the comics it's the reverse- The Lords created the Cilians to have thumbs about 10 billion years ago in the comics. Mordru also got a Cilian body. In the comics Nabu's style of magic would be more along the lines of 14.5 billion years old, because apparently it went something like "Let there be light. Now while I'm on a roll, let there be order and chaos too."
From the comments Greg made about Klarion, YJ Nabu is probably not a person but merely a personification of Order, the opposite of Zoat's approach, but that's neither here nor there.
While Zoat hasn't mentioned the Cilians being peers of the Guardians of the Universe, Nabu was an ancient astronaut, which as a trope, really implies an older more sophisticated culture.
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