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An Imago of Rust and Crimson (Worm crossover)

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TechnoMage said:
I have only skimmed the arguments above but would like to add my two cents.

1 The entities are only aware of a finite number of universes, don't mean the multiverse is not infinite , when speaking of what is makes sense from a physics perspective, either a infinite amount of universes or just one.
a Finite amount of universes is possible, just not probable.

2 Any precog shard just needs to simulate between one and two hundred planets, hardly universe creation, still just as improbable as actual future sight though.

3 A simulation of our planet could get away with enough shortcuts to not need to be as big as a planet if the computational power is close to a 1-1 correspondence as far as matter simulated vs computer mass goes. Just one example is just enough accuracy in simulating the core of the earth to model surface manifestations.

4 Scanning alternate timelines to make predictions is the least physics breaking way to do so. And if alternate timelines exists then coils power is just to be aware of two at once and dropping one from awareness to latch onto another one. The powers are not for the capes benefit but the entities after all:)
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Actually there are a bunch of theories that predict a finite number of universes, or at least a finite number from the perspective of someone starting in ours, which is a same difference kind of scenario. So... yeah. A multiverse doesn't need to be infinite, or to 'split' all the time.
 
While making coffee it occurred to me.
Thinker powers tend to interfere with each other, and if they are based on computation that does make sense.

What if coil has poor mans precog, his shard copies the predictions from other shards and then just computes the difference that his actions bring, a much more tractable computational problem.

It even makes sense that if his power works like that then he would not have the normal thinker interference issues.
 
TechnoMage said:
2 Any precog shard just needs to simulate between one and two hundred planets, hardly universe creation, still just as improbable as actual future sight though.
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Why would future sight be improbable? The entities have actual time-travel in the form of Epoch and Phir-Se. In fact, given FTL and time-travel are the same thing, one could say Time-travel is central to the concept of the Entities. Genuinely don't get why people don't like that interpretation.
 
You know, I was thinking for a whole that ES had a point about the crazy of having Nazi's being so openly recruiting gang members in BB. Then we had this whole ferguson thing, and all the other racist stuff that has bed dropping up lately. Suddenly, nazi's running rampant in American streets don't feel quite so implausible as they did.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
You know, I was thinking for a whole that ES had a point about the crazy of having Nazi's being so openly recruiting gang members in BB. Then we had this whole ferguson thing, and all the other racist stuff that has bed dropping up lately. Suddenly, nazi's running rampant in American streets don't feel quite so implausible as they did.
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No, it's still implausible. They (referring to the Imago Patriot movement here; apply it to the real world as you wish) are nationalists, which means they puff themselves up big for being 'true Americans' (defined by them as a white, capitalist and Protestant), peer down their noses at everyone else who isn't and most importantly of all think they are the 'Good Guys' protecting their country by doing this. This would include the German, European, 'We Beat Them In World War II' Nazi Party who are oh-so-clearly the 'Bad Guys', as proved by every WWII movie ever.

Nazism is a subset of Fascism, not the same thing.
 
E88 is mainly as influential as it is because BB's branch is just a local city factor of an international movement as I understand it. They can pull in more resources from other cities at need, and mainly have their high impact capepower serve to reinforce the capabilities of their local skinheads. It's not actually that big a force in terms of raw manpower, but they have a lot of parahumans(who manifest disproportionately in the ranks of the dispossessed and dissatisfied) to employ, which magnifies the effect. They have a few one man army types who're content to reap the profits of street level crime.

Which mostly means the skinheads run rampant because if you do enough damage to them, E88 deploys capes. And if you do enough damage to E88 they start pulling in forces from other cities...or they could cut losses and move out. So the PRT is softballing them to avoid taking the risk of upsetting the pot maybe.
 
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Odysseus2099 said:
Why would future sight be improbable? The entities have actual time-travel in the form of Epoch and Phir-Se. In fact, given FTL and time-travel are the same thing, one could say Time-travel is central to the concept of the Entities. Genuinely don't get why people don't like that interpretation.
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Time travel is very problematic at best, impossible except in specific circumstances most likely.
All of the actual time travel in canon falls under closed time-like loops - one of the best behaved types of possible time travel scenarios.

Ftl and time travel can be part of the same mechanics, but they don't need to be, especially if you can keep your local speed under the speed of light while making the distance traveled a lot via whatever flavor of shenanigans you prefer/can manage.

Albecury drive would a an example, as well as using some kind of hyper/sub dimension, there is also the theoretical possibility of adjusting the speed of light itself upward, though I have only read one article that even suggests that possibility.

Looking at a split off timeline is the least complicated possible form of future sight and thus the most likely - Occam's razor.

If time travel and/or precog is possible then the idea of timelines as actual separate places is absurd, the world lines of particles would be fractals that interact with each other. Not saying its not so, just that the wizz guys will have problems with that, never mind everyone else.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
You know, I was thinking for a whole that ES had a point about the crazy of having Nazi's being so openly recruiting gang members in BB. Then we had this whole ferguson thing, and all the other racist stuff that has bed dropping up lately. Suddenly, nazi's running rampant in American streets don't feel quite so implausible as they did.
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Fascists. Not Nazis. The inability to tell the difference between the more general bastard child of modernism which springs from the nastier places in the human psyche and the specific manifestation which it displayed in Germany is one of the best tools fascism has - because it means people are blinded to the roots when they look for that specific flowering.

And that's why the true fascism in Imago is not the neonazi gangs made up largely of disaffected youths in a world of massive unemployment and poverty. No, the true face is the systematic racism among the police[1], a political culture where it's acceptable to blame all the social ills on immigrants and other out-groups [2], and all the other marks of the ur-fascism detailed by Umberto Eco (which was a constant reference source when working on the political set-up of Imago). That's why the toxic elements of the political culture look back to an idealised world of the seventies and eighties, and why life is a permanent warfare against "elements working against society".

Canon gives us the Empire-88, which are a bunch of Nazi-idolising neonazis who can be punched in the face and spring fundamentally from the fact that they have lots of parahumans. To rid Imago of fascists, you'd have to punch a lot of the population in the face. Because fascism isn't some nice, easily identifiable disease which makes people call themselves "Kaiser" and "Allfather". If only it was that easy. In Imago, American fascism comes draped in the Stars and Stripes, and protests loudly when they get called Nazis, accusing people of cheapening the word. Don't look for the dangers of the fascist in the pathetic neonazi parading around wearing a replica Iron Cross. Look for them in the protesters who try to picket interfaith marriages, look for them in the justifications of political leaders for disenfranchising (or refusing to grant the franchise to) groups which are unpopular with the mainstream, and look for them in the periodic waves of public opprobrium against anyone who dares criticise the military and their conduct in a 'time of war'.

[1] Who wouldn't treat a Japanese immigrant rally anywhere near as gently as they treated a Patriot Movement one.

[2] All the social ills not directly caused by giant monsters, that is. [3]

[3] Although some people claimed that the Simurgh's attack on San Francisco was God's judgement on a wicked city of sinners.
 
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Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
So Imago society is well on its way to becoming Columbia from BioShock: Infinite?
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No, it has analogies in real life.

A constant creeping paranoia because of a perceived existential threat that basically allows people to justify anything bad they do ("it's a war for survival!") plus some very problematic racial superiority overtones from having to justify the oppression of the poor (who are often minorities).

The Israeli right-wing are a preeeeeetty good place to start as an analogy.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
No, it has analogies in real life.

A constant creeping paranoia because of a perceived existential threat that basically allows people to justify anything bad they do ("it's a war for survival!") plus some very problematic racial superiority overtones from having to justify the oppression of the poor (who are often minorities).

The Israeli right-wing are a preeeeeetty good place to start as an analogy.
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I do understand that. I was looking for an easy reference point and that came to mind since I just finished a playthrough.
 
It happens a LOT IRL, and you definitely don't need superpowers to make that happen. Hating the Other is very easy to justify whenever faced with an indeterminate difficulty.
Unemployment, they are taking the jobs from true upstanding citizens.
Violence/Crime, they're asking for it/they are violent assholes/they are probably to blame without any evidence. Regardless of the case they need payback. So an eye for an eye(except of course, you'd be hurting the vulnerable ones rather than the violent ones, you like your skin in one piece).
Differring cultural/religious values causing moral decay.

Etc, etc, etc.
I think if you throw superpowers in this, the main change is a more rapid escalation, victims trigger and lash out, causing more triggers in turn, and then your city is a war zone.
 
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I've been wondering for a while why fascists in general - and Nazis specifically - would accept those with superpowers. It seems to me like they would go after paras just as hard as everyone else.
 
Stormseed said:
I've been wondering for a while why fascists in general - and Nazis specifically - would accept those with superpowers. It seems to me like they would go after paras just as hard as everyone else.
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Why are you assuming that "people with superpowers" are going to segregate and act like an ethnic minority, and define themselves as 'parahumans' rather than 'people with powers'? Canon Worm may have had a number of ordinary humans who mattered countable on both hands with fingers to spare, but I'm not under the same constraints.

(Also, you don't understand fascism and its appeals if you say that sort of thing. Especially when, I note, superhero comics and narratives frequently have quite notable fascist themes - and no, I'm not talking about the antagonists here)
 
Stormseed said:
I've been wondering for a while why fascists in general - and Nazis specifically - would accept those with superpowers. It seems to me like they would go after paras just as hard as everyone else.
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What could Goebbels' propaganda machine have possibly loved more than a tall square-jawed blond blue-eyed ubermensch who in a fit of National Socialist ardour took to the skies and started smashing the VVS's planes apart with his bare hands?
 
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Hmmm, how to fight it then. Probably the same way that gay marriage and civil rights became accepted. Protest and put faces to the stereotype. Show the unfairness, show the accepted violence, and just keep protesting. Hell, Lung would be a genius if he paid for the college of the best and brightest in his neighborhood. A large amount of well educated lawyers, reporters, and Japanese actors in mainstream television would have a big effect within a decade.

Still how does Taylor fit in? I think the best thing she can do as a hero is to play investigative reporter for Brockton Bay. Finding secrets that others would prefer buried and brining them out into the light of day. Showing/Proving corruption, hypocrisy, and just being a whistleblower that others can't send to jail. So her next steps should be getting a better camera, a audio recorder, practicing her stranger abilities, becoming a lock picker, and figuring out a way to discreetly spill secrets to others.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Why are you assuming that "people with superpowers" are going to segregate and act like an ethnic minority, and define themselves as 'parahumans' rather than 'people with powers'? Canon Worm may have had a number of ordinary humans who mattered countable on both hands with fingers to spare, but I'm not under the same constraints.
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I was referring to 'ordinary' people.

EarthScorpion said:
(Also, you don't understand fascism and its appeals if you say that sort of thing.
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I think I'll mark that down as a good thing.
 
EarthScorpion said:
(Also, you don't understand fascism and its appeals if you say that sort of thing. Especially when, I note, superhero comics and narratives frequently have quite notable fascist themes - and no, I'm not talking about the antagonists here)
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Yeah, the basic idea that you can effect positive social change by punching evildoers is fundamental to fascism and superhero comics. It's a childish idea, and its simplicity appeals to the child within many normal humans.

And obviously there are situations where "punch the evildoer" really is the best positive action. But not many in the modern world.

The other really major point of correspondence between superhero tropes and fascism is the idea of a world-threatening enemy against whom extreme tactics, and sacrifices, are justified.

To me, that's the major horror of fascism: it leverages something fundamentally heroic in humanity, the self-sacrifice instinct which would push someone into heroism, and twists that heroic instinct into narrow-minded destruction, for the short-term benefit of whatever oligarchy is profiting from the sacrifices of the many and the subjugation of the Others.
 
Stormseed said:
I was referring to 'ordinary' people.
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Then you weren't paying any attention to what I wrote. My response was to your remark of " It seems to me like they would go after paras just as hard as everyone else.". Which indicates that you were thinking of parahumans as a collective group.

But they're not. They don't even have the same ties as homosexuals (who are the closest comparison minority-wise, because "random" people among the general population are attracted to their own sex rather than being a religion or ethnicity), because while homosexual people are incentivised to hang out - among other reasons - so they can get laid, there's nothing forcing parahumans to band together. [1]

So why will your common or garden undereducated underemployed unthinking racist who's never really questioned their beliefs and who wants a good strong authoritarian hand to smash those Jap gangs and send them all back to where they came from - why are they going to put the wicked villain Lung, who's a criminal and a thug and a murderer, in the same category as Alexandria, that super-strong super tough flying symbol of American justice who fights to defend the States from the Endbringers? She's exactly the same kind of strong brave figure fighting the monsters which make everyone helpless and wreck cities that he wants. A great man (well, woman), if you will.

Stormseed said:
I think I'll mark that down as a good thing.
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Then that's a problem. Because assuming that a childish depiction of the Nazis is the be-all and end-all of fascism and looking at none of the deeper causes leaves people blind to the real world forms it takes. It has people espousing fascistic viewpoints being mortally offended because "they're not a Nazi".

Among other things, the Imago thread on SB had someone unironically agreeing with my blatantly fascist recitation of the goals of the Patriotic Movement, saying they "probably had a point". Which produced this response from @Revlid.

[1] Beyond authorial fiat, hurr hurr hurr. The status quo in canon Worm assumes parahuman criminals never ever defect when playing the Prisoner's Dilemma, which... doesn't match what real criminals do at all.
 
Well, an exception might lie with Case 53s who could count as an exotic ethnic group or the like. But they literally have no history or cultural ties aside from looking like freak shows.
 
veekie said:
Well, an exception might lie with Case 53s who could count as an exotic ethnic group or the like. But they literally have no history or cultural ties aside from looking like freak shows.
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This reminds me of something that was bothering me. Why did Cauldron brand Case 53's with their logo? Did they want to constantly remind them of who was responsible for their current problems?
 
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