Lex Sedet In Vertice: A Supervillain in the DCU CK2 quest

[King crimson]

You've got to love the mixture of sweet and horrifying that is Cassandra in all versions of her character

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I'm a big fan of the mixture of sweet and horrifying that is comics-canon Cassandra where she's basically a eugenics program to create the perfect murderhobo that went rogue and decided to terrify the hell out of criminals in a bat themed gimp suit and who sees ways to kill everyone she ever meets. She's pretty great.

I also really like having child villains or child-like villains and Cassandra's quest incarnations often hits that sweet spot in my opinion. I have a blast writing her.

And you all laughed when I suggested Lex and Talia get hitched.

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In all fairness I had to kill off Ra's because I couldn't think of a way to make the relationship work while he was still alive and in the picture. I slanted the situation to be one towards it working.

It's feasible but certain conditions need to be met for it to work and this omake was written with me deliberately trying to set things up to have it work. I could probably have a Lex/Queen Bee or a Lex/Diana Prince or any number of relationships work out in an omake that's non-canon and I can actively alter circumstances in order to encourage the relationship to work and be functional and interesting.

Talia is good but I fear that the blatant indoctrination of Cassandra's friends is even worse for her

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Yeah things aren't perfect in this AU but I figured I'd leave room to expand on issues and problems later if I ever come back to it and for now I'd focus on the core appeal while hinting at some of the messed up stuff that might be happening.

Like the omake requested was specifically Lex/Talia so I was invested in showing how it might work out positively without constantly drowning the omake in things being terrible and awful and such.

 

[Gumiho]

Yeah, as cold blooded as it is, in-quest Talia doesnt bring enough advantages to the table, without us having to spend significant effort or hope the dice roles go that way.

 

[Sirrocco]

It was really interesting to me to see the ideological similarities between omakeverse Talia and Queen Bee, particularly with respect to the moral implications of power.

 

[Redhead222]

i did not laugh.
i think it might be one of the better pairing to be honest.
i`m not sure i see it happening anytime soon.
it sure be interesting on many levels if it happend.

 

[King crimson]

So I'm going to definitively close the vote at 10 or 12 am PST today. If you want to vote or offer an improvement to the plan currently being suggested now is the time to do so. The next mainline update should likely land sometime on Wednesday.

 

[King crimson]

So the vote is now closed. I'll get to work on the update but it will likely only land some time tomorrow. I encourage people to ask questions or comment on stuff if they have things they want to talk about or have me talk about in thread.

 

[King crimson]

So I've got a question I'd like to open up to people, what is your favorite DC comics character that has not appeared in quest? I'm kind of curious as to what the answer would be. For me I think it's either Larfleeze or Blue Beetle.

 

[Gumiho]

Snip.

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Snowflame.

 

[Ryddler777]

Gentleman Ghost, I quite like the aesthetics of it.

 

[Lord Ultimus]

Big Barda.

 

[Negation]

Icon aka Arnus of Terminus aka Augustus Freeman.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Gentleman Ghost, I quite like the aesthetics of it.

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Mildred Graves:

"Blew up his collection of nude artwork once."

 

[King crimson]

So bad news, I may need to go drive people to an airport soon which could disrupt my writing schedule. The next mainline update might not land today. That being said I'll make sure you guys get something today.

 

[King crimson]

So I promised something and I think this is something. It's less of a more traditional song and more a nursery rhyme/poetry but I think it's pretty neat. It's not one to one canon for the quest but I think it's fun and considering people haven't seen hide or hair of Gentleman Ghost I figured giving him a musical number would be entertaining and enjoyable. I tried to have it tell a brief story and touch on some of Gentleman Ghosts themes even if I simplified stuff a lot. Let me know what you guys think.

Gentleman Ghost Song
Old Jim Craddock was a highwayman,
A liar, a thief and a cad
All his life the folks he met
Swore that he was nothing but bad

He robbed the lanes
Gained fortune and fame
Till he was known throughout the land

And yet this dapper thief with flair
Who put on such aristocratic airs
Knew his reckoning was soon at hand

And so he left, across the sea
To live his life and get off Scott-free
In America, that great land of opportunity
Where no one knew his name.

"Old Jim Craddock's outrun the mob!"
The outlaw cheered as he continued to rob
Treating life as though it were a game

Well old Jim Craddock ran out of time
He made it far and found the end of the line
He might've shaken some pursuers loose
But old Jim Craddock couldn't outrun the noose
There'd be no bargain, quarter, or truce
As the gentleman thief met his end most vile

"You'll regret this" He would yell
"I'll haunt you all when I escape from Hell"
Was the sordid of which he'd tell
And yet he'd hang and all was well
At least for a little while.

Because old Jim Craddock was a man with grudge
When he he set his mind he wouldn't budge
He'd now condemn all those who'd judge
People like him to draw their last breath.

Beware the Gentleman Ghost my friends
That fiendish phantom whos vengeance doesn't end
For if he finds you then he'll send
You straight to your death.

 

[King crimson]

For people wondering why Gentleman Ghost got the song and none of the others did it's because he just leant himself to it.

Of the four characters I personally like Big Barda the most but her transition of going from Female Fury and enforcer of a despotic regime of Darkseid, to a genuinely great hero thanks to the power of love between her and Mr. Miracle is something that I think is genuinely hard to nail and I personally do not feel like I'm capable of writing love songs that work well.

Icon's also tricky because a lot of his theming centers around race to some degree and what it means to belong to a place and he didn't have a backstory or motivation I felt I could easily boil down without fundamentally reducing him in some way.

Snowflame was briefly considered but I only got about three lines or so in ("SNOWFLAME!, Runs on Cocaine! SNOWFLAME! white dust nectar in the brain!) before I decided to stick with Gentleman Ghost and exploring his backstory through a nursery rhyme as opposed to trying to contain Snowflame's literal super-crackhead energy in musical form.

Edit: For people interested in a fun fact, I intend to write Snowflame like how Frank Miller writes Batman at his worst, random words are capitalized for no apparent reason though in the case of characterizing Snowflame, this is to show him just randomly screaming at certain points due to being unable to contain himself as opposed to anything deep or meaningful. For example his dialogue might look something like this: "I am SNOWFLAME! Every cell of my BEING burns with white-hot ECSTASY. Cocaine is my GOD-- and I am the human INSTRUMENT of its will!"

 

[Simon_Jester]

Edit: For people interested in a fun fact, I intend to write Snowflame like how Frank Miller writes Batman at his worst, random words are capitalized for no apparent reason though in the case of characterizing Snowflame, this is to show him just randomly screaming at certain points due to being unable to contain himself as opposed to anything deep or meaningful. For example his dialogue might look something like this: "I am SNOWFLAME! Every cell of my BEING burns with white-hot ECSTASY. Cocaine is my GOD-- and I am the human INSTRUMENT of its will!"

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...It honestly never crossed my mind that he would behave any other way.

 

[King crimson]

So status update, mainline update comes today, Last Days of Krypton Part 7 is coming soon and I've got various sidestories and omakes are in the works.

I've got two apocryphal posts to make based on writing elements which I think would be interesting to discuss, one on how to recognize and write a bad character (bad as in the character is actively harmful to the story it is in) which naturally dovetails at least a little bit in how not to do it and one on how I personally feel as though I tend to write mainline updates in a quest a lot more obviously and with less nuance or unspoken details or implications than I like to try and include in my more freestyle writing and the shift in priorities for show versus tell when writing for slightly different purposes. What are people more interested in?

Edit #2: stuff's fighting me more delays have occurred sorry for the inconvenience.

 

[Kir the Wizard]

So I've got a question I'd like to open up to people, what is your favorite DC comics character that has not appeared in quest? I'm kind of curious as to what the answer would be. For me I think it's either Larfleeze or Blue Beetle.

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Not counting my own short story, definitely Eobard Thawne / Professor Zoom, but I generally like all the various incarnations of the Reverse-Flash

 

[King crimson]

Hello. King crimson here steadily chugging away at stuff. I ended up hating what I was writing so I rewrote entire sections of the old version. I'm about 2K words into the update and kind of struggling to get it out (my focus has been split hard lately between participating in another quest, Arcane taking up brainspace/focus and just generally looking for work). As such I missed getting the update out this week. It is coming though, that much I promise I just want the final product to be one I actually like and am happy with so I'm taking some extra time.

Edit: Participating in another quest has actually been interesting since a lot of what I'm doing is proof of concept in selling plans to threads using what I've gleaned from how stuff works here. I've been able to learn a lot of tactics for selling plans to people and so it's interesting to see and learn and potentially reapply back into this quest.

 

[King crimson]

Hello. Figured people would like a status report. I've gotten really bad writers block on the update. It is coming along (now at 3K words give or take) and I should have it ready to go by the weekend. Sorry for all the delays.

Edit: I'm going to try and get something up today for you guys but it won't be the mainline update most likely.

 

[King crimson]

So some fun facts for people that are in my head canon but most likely will not be explored or touched on much in quest.

• Chemo despite not talking much is actually most fluent in French and "thinks in French" (I don't know French and I don't want to inconvenience readers too much so his internal thoughts are written in English). He can speak English but he mostly just cheats and uses a universal translator when possible.
• Metallo is South African and lived there during the period of time in which Apartheid was instated
• David Cain has a distinctive Texan accent
• Whisper A'Daire was literally cold blooded and derived her more impressive abilities through exposure to sunlight.
• Wotan, despite presenting himself as male and resurrecting himself in a male body, was actually born female and only shifted with time
• Bruce Wayne received training from Henri Ducard, Kirigi, Sergei Alexandrov, Harvey Harris, Ted Grant, Giovanni Zatara (Zatanna's father) and Willie Doggett prior to becoming Batman.
• Bane can fluently speak Spanish, Portuguese and English
• Atlantean as a language is arguably an off-shoot of Greek. Each of the kingdoms of Atlantis have their own distinct accents save for the Trench (who have devolved to the point language isn't really used)
• The names of the Five Inversions are Atrocitus, Qull, Roixeaume, Kultonious and Worz
• Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) has a cousin who shares his name
• Macho Gato is from Santa Prisca
• Carol Ferris got her degree from the fictional university of UCCC also known as UC3 or University of California Coast City. Like every other UC the school colors are blue and gold.
• Gotham's basketball team, the Gotham Gators, is notoriously awful and tends to do very poorly overall. It's done so poorly at times that people have accused the team of being a way for mobsters to launder money though nothing was ever proven.
• Thomas Wayne saved Carmine Falcone's life by performing surgery on him when he was shot.
• Mr. Mxyzptlk sounds like Gilbert Gottfried
• Kordax's more monstrous appearance (resembling someone from Tritonis) is the result of his mother, the queen of Atlantis, sleeping with someone who was not the king. The queen avoided accusations of cheating by claiming Kordax had "been cursed" which would in turn lead to Kordax's cruel behavior and in turn lead to the stereotypical "curse of Kordax" being ascribed to blonde individuals that affects Atlantis to this day
• Edward Nygma is left handed
• Hellgrammite's species hatches out of an egg. The newly born creatures then all promptly devour each other until only the strongest one remains and then over the course of a week or so they mature into an adult. His species does not form familial groups.
• Victor Fries' sister-in-law works as a secretary at the GCPD

 

[Negation]

Wait. When Ms Crock left, did we lose the Ravager Suit?

 

[King crimson]

Wait. When Ms Crock left, did we lose the Ravager Suit?

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No, not at all. Katherine had on an Equalizer suit and Jade had no exo-suit. The Ravager suit has remained in reserve at LexCorp (Rose didn't take it either even though she'd be "Ms. Wilson" and not "Ms. Crock") thus far. You still have it and can make use of it if you want to even though it'd be suboptimal to have a non-Rose unit use the suit.

 

[Marcrawsky]

Kordax's more monstrous appearance (resembling someone from Tritonis) is the result of his mother, the queen of Atlantis, sleeping with someone who was not the king. The queen avoided accusations of cheating by claiming Kordax had "been cursed" which would in turn lead to Kordax's cruel behavior and in turn lead to the stereotypical "curse of Kordax" being ascribed to blonde individuals that affects Atlantis to this day

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We could actually prove that with a DNA test to check for any undersee diseases while having our magic people search for the "curse"

 

[King crimson]

We could actually prove that with a DNA test to check for any undersee diseases while having our magic people search for the "curse"

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Not really. Kordax is long dead (at least a century has passed since he died) so at best all you could prove is that some blonde individual nowadays is not cursed as Kordax's body was not preserved and there's no clear place to take his DNA from. Furthermore at this point the "Curse of Kordax" is a very long held stereotype that's integrated its way into Atlantean culture.

It's almost sort of comparable to how Shakespeare made Richard III into a hunchback and tied that into him being evil which in turn lead to the creation of individuals like Igor from Frankenstein whos hunchbackedness reinforces their evil. You can potentially prove that Richard III wasn't a hunchback but you can't undo the cultural impact the stereotype has had. Proving Kordax wasn't actually cursed is actually significantly harder to prove (the records on him are a lot less clear and a good number of the ones that are contemporary aren't accurate) and the stereotype is a lot more strongly reinforced (the Pygmalion effect managed to reinforce it a good number of times in Atlantean history) so a DNA test alone is nowhere near enough to prove things one way or another.