So February is coming, and with it, the revival of the Shipping episode of the Letters Page! Woo!
On that note, I wondered: what feelings do people actually have about relationships in the Sentinels-verse? Any that you particularly ship? (I personally am big on Setback/Expat and Fanatic/Ra, which I know are very mundane of me but whatever) Any canon couples you want to break up so that they can get together with someone more fun?
I think if people want romance to be a major factor, they should construct a game that revolves around it, rather than forcing it into a game whose rules do not support it.
Been around fandom for any work of fiction long? 
I’ve been thinking a lot about Soothsayer/Scholar ever since the episode about Soothsayer Carmichael and NightMist teaming up. There’s just something about the fussy one and the soother as a dynamic
Ooh, that’s actually very interesting! You know I hadn’t really thought about shipping Scholar with anyone - he’s got that kind of ‘walking the earth’ vibe that I guess doesn’t usually jibe with settling down - but him and Carmichael is a VERY fun dynamic!
Actually I was thinking about it more, and I realised that I don’t have any real ships for Captain Cosmic - which feels weird given how eminently shippable he is! I guess maybe Galactra, but that’s more of a ‘they would be entertainingly terrible together’ kind of ship haha!
If you guys are going to insist on shipping men with other men, then as a matter of principle I shall concoct a Sapphic ship for myself, despite my general disdain for the whole shipping topic.
Hm…
Okay, let’s say Commodora and Arataki. Each one of them probably thinks of the other as a young whippersnapper, since one was has lived in more distinct time periods, but the other has more consecutive years of life experience. Could be fun.
Or, if this is just about eye candy for myself, I’ll go the lipstick lesbian route and say that I find Harpy x barely-legal Idealist the most pleasing mental picture.
As a (soon to be) 64 year old and British, would anyone here be so kind as to explain what you mean by ‘shipping’ please? I assumed that this was something to do with sending out the new DE Kickstarter, but I was obviously wrong!
What I am asking is, does it refer to ‘pairing up’ because the characters work well together and compliment each others’ abilities’ which is interesting, or about some fantasy romantic affair, which is not so interesting.
It’s the fandom exercise of coming up with any romantic relationship between fictional characters you find interesting, for any reasoning you find interesting.
Fueled by it being the month of loooooove on the Letters Page next month, which has gifted us with a second official Shipping episode to talk about canon and fandom ships, and a couple romantic episodes (Tachyon/Dana and Wager Master/Madame Mittermeier).
I’m pretty basic in my tastes, I’m fine with the canon relationships. Mostly, I can’t come up with a good story to tell about anything that isn’t one of those.
Though there is always Chrono-Ranger and Guise… >.>
Thanks for the clarification guys. I am more interested in the ‘pairing up’ side for the sake of the game mechanics. It comes from being a boring mathematician, I’m afraid. 
Several of the flavor texts in the Enhanced Edition had me thinking that something was going on between The Wraith and Absolute Zero. It would have been nice to cut him a break. (I was not too excited about her and Bunker, probably because, let’s face it, he was not a very interesting character in the quotes we had available.)
Otherwise I was just happy to follow the canon stories.
I’m not personally interested in theorizing ships, myself, but am entertained by others doing so. 
I feel like a lot of this is due to his military background being such a large part of who he is. The folks writing him in the game don’t have the knowledge/experience to understand that. 
Just my theory, though… 
I didn’t mention them earlier, but my real Sentinel Comics OTP will always be KNYFE/Skyscraper I just think they have a great dynamic, and when I heard Christopher say that would be one sided early post OblivAeon it broke my heart for Portia but also I do love that type of content. As I’ve been starting to learn about Alpha I’ve also been getting very into Harpy/Alpha
Most of my shipping nonsense will be in my eventual letter regardless, but I will pause to say about the card text specifically that, you know. I used to ship Cosmic/Argent way back in the day. Then we had Argent’s character episode and after that I was like well, OK, that doesn’t work any more.
But then we saw the previews of DE and I saw Alacritous Subdominant and I was like “Christopher. Really with that flavor text? XD”
(In non-shipping thoughts, I appreciate that in DE the flavor text gives Bunker much more of a personality.)
Scholar is to Soothsayer as The Dude is to Walter. I’m not sure who’s Donny in this instance (AA doesn’t feel right to me), and I’m not really into shipping them. I’d read that book, though. The Scholar abides…
Seriously, though, maybe you should be interested in this because this is a pretty great pair-up. Especially with the romantic drama if Arataki finds out that La Commodora is the reason that she’s (a) a cool immortal hero and (b) was exiled.
My two big thoughts right now:
Greazer and Captain Cosmic. It starts with a hunt, but then it gets… groovy.
It would be interesting to see Fashion and Visionary bond over being two folks who are in a world that is tantalizingly close to what they’ve been used to, but is throwing them curveballs regularly.
The exception that proves the rule, Friv. One card hardly makes a game mechanic. If you wanted the game to actually be ABOUT relationships, you’d need to do something along the lines of the Disciplines mechanic in “Vampire: the Eternal Struggle”, where a relationship requires you to pick a character who has an icon representing some kind of interest or personality trait, and then play an “incident” or “experience” card or something where you meet another character who has that same icon.
I didn’t even think of the Rudder in the Timestream thing when I picked those two, by the way. I just brainstormed female characters off the top of my head, and the first one I picked was Commodora, since she’s one of my favorite characters to play (not the top ten, just above the median). And then instead of just automatically sticking her with some chick who I think is hot, I tried to think of someone who wasn’t so immediately obvious, and picked Arataki as the first such obscurity that occurred to me. Considering their personalities came later, and yes they do make an interesting match even apart from the lore connection, but that isn’t WHY I put them together.
I’m just gonna take your two choices and switch them into hetero couples, kthx. Greazer lives in the 50s and Visionary lives in the 90s, so putting them together is fun. Meanwhile, Fashion is a very latter-day trendy character whose superhero career is entirely secondary to her personal interests; that nicely mirrors Captain Cosmic, who is significantly one of the older characters in the setting, and whose secret identity as a barrister barely comes up (at least in EE).
(PS these are all space characters, and two of them have the Lazer Ryders connection; I wonder if anybody has ever homebrewed components for that game representing Greazer and Fashion, who are later additions to the same universe. They don’t fit into the extreme 80s-ness of the other game, so probably not, I’m just bringing the idea up here for the sake of doing so.)
…you do realize this is about relationships in the fictional comics upon which these are based? Nothing about this episode has anything to do with game mechanics, this is simply filling in lore details.
I don’t like having the lore off by itself and unrelated to the game mechanics. I want the two to reflect each other as closely as humanly possible. Sentinels is actually really good about this most of the time, just not in this particular instance.
As an example of the kind of thing that I get hung up on, in the year 2000 Magic the Gathering published a set of cards called “Invasion”, where the game world of Dominaria was invaded wholesale by a massive army of evil mechanical demons called Phyrexians. There were novels published to tell the story of this invasion, and one of my favorite incidents from that novel trilogy was a battle in which the Phyrexians tried to attack an enchanted forest, and the nature-goddess defended against them by transforming an entire legion of Phyrexian monstrosities into bodies of living wood, converting them into nature elementals who would fight on her behalf against the un-transformed Phyrexians. As amazingly cool as this scene was, nothing within the card game could simulate it, nor can it even today. It wasn’t until 2018 that they printed a card that REFERENCED this incident, just in the flavor text, and I got an immense kick out of them finally acknowledging that novel chapter, but it still isn’t actually integrated into the game, just given a cosmetic easter egg.
I want the player to actually be able to re-enact that battle exactly the way it happened in the book, to the point that could tell exactly which cards represented the spells being cast in the battle. It’s not impossible, given how many thousands upon thousands of cards exist in the game, and how incredibly specific their game effects can be; the reason they didn’t do it is because not enough people cared to bother, but it is absolutely possible in theory. And since I live entirely in the realm of the “in theory”, I would like them to do it. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting, I just say it would be nice.
To be perfectly honest, that was just meant as a lighthearted joke, which I would not have made if you hadn’t already engaged with the thread on its terms after your initial comment. It wasn’t meant as anything else, and I’m sorry that you seem to have taken it as a slight.
If you want a serious answer: Sentinel Comics is not just the card game any more, and arguably it was never just the card game. What made it succeed, and made it sing, was that it was portrayed as a snapshot of a much larger and more expansive world, a world that is now reflected in Sentinels of the Multiverse, Sentinel Tactics, the Sentinel Comics RPG, the Sentinels of Freedom video game, and the Letters Page podcast.
With so many outputs, many of which directly involve narrative, the notion of whether romance is part of the game mechanics is going to be pretty heavily involved in what output you’re looking at. Recovery scenes in the RPG are going to be based on romance, the Letters Page stories will often involve romance, plot lines in the video game will touch on romance and romantic partners will appear and have appeared in the Definitive Edition. So yes, romance is a part of things.
And the follow-up is: it’s fine not to like an aspect of a thing, but if that’s the case, you shouldn’t take part. I had assumed that since you got involved with a couple of pairings you were taking part, but it now feels rather like you’re trying to define how other people are allowed to have fun. I wasn’t being sarcastic - La Commodora and Arataki are a good pairing, for the reasons you mentioned. I added an extra wrinkle with the goal of spurring discussion. I don’t know why you’re so insistent on not taking the compliment, but honestly this has happened just about every time that we’ve interacted, so I’m just going to apologize and stop engaging with you from now on.
Nope, I had no such perception.
Oh. Well NOW I’m slighted.
Yeah, I feel like “Not every media property and/or aspect of a media property is going to be aimed at your tastes specifically and that fact alone doesn’t make those things automatically bad” is something I wish a lot of fans in a lot of fandoms would be willing to work with more often.
I did find the idea that we were “forcing” romance into Sentinel Comics a bit odd because C&A already put it there themselves. Some of us just find it entertaining to then discuss those particular aspects they put there. If it’s not someone’s cup of tea that’s totally fine, but, let other folks have their fun.
Where did I say anything even remotely contradicting that? I don’t even get why Friv said the line that you quoted. I expressed ambivalence toward the activity while also participating that; in what universe does that equate to me issuing some sort of papal bull which declares the action as heresy?
Again, I didn’t say you were forcing romance into SC. What you are doing is forcing romance into relationships between characters whose current romance is non-romantic, and thus destroying that existing relationship in the version of the characters as they exist within your mind, in favor of the way you prefer it. That’s not a cardinal sin that’s always unacceptable; I reinterpret characters myself quite a bit (see my Justifications thread, and in particular my take on Citizen Dawn as expressed there and elsewhere). But there’s a difference between extrapolating lore and contradicting it, and there’s a difference between having your own version of the character and trying to persuade the creators to change it in favor of your version. The Letters Page has shown a LOT of evidence of the latter happening, and I’m often okay with it, but in some cases I think it’s questionable. Maybe the community ought to respect the integrity of the original creators’ vision a little more, and help them better expand on their expression of that vision, without steering the process as much as y’all do.
You can have your own fun with your own toys. When you borrow someone else’s GI Joe doll and then put it into your Barbie Dream House, or when you borrow a Barbie and make her fight GI Joe, the owner of that original toy might very well see what you’re doing as proof that they shouldn’t have cooperated with you.
I legitimately don’t understand why so many members of this community seem to have such an ingrained hostility toward me, a positive determination to interpret everything I say in the most negative light imaginable. Everything I say should be read as neutrally as possible; I’m never trying to start arguments or anything like that, and I don’t get the fact that everybody thinks I am. It’s like I walk around saying “puppies are cute” and everyone immediately goes “why do you hate kittens, you kitten-hater?” (Or maybe it’s more like I say “this puppy isn’t cute”, but that difference shouldn’t matter; the statements are logically equivalent, each one is just an opinion, and expressing it doesn’t amount to condemning alternative viewpoints.) It’s bizarre; I feel like I should get Nightmist to check whether I’m cursed.
You know what, we know that KNYFE/Greazer is canon, so I feel like Cosmic/Greazer could really work. I think the difference there is that KNYFE feels sort of…I don’t know, more morally flexible? the sort of character one might expect to hang out with villains. Cosmic on the other hand isn’t really that, so there could be a lot of tension between the two of them, even as things start to get flirtier.
It’s a cool dynamic!
Unless of course either of them is a strict heterosexual. I know it’s very popular among today’s people to assume that everyone is either gay or bi, and no such animal as a straight person exists. But I think if you can assume some person might be “heteroflexible” or somesuch, despite having never given the slightest hint, then you should also be able to assume that another equally undefined person might NOT be willing to participate in a same-sex relationship, no matter who asks or how nicely.
Here’s the deal.
There’s already been two Shipping episodes, a full one and an Editor’s Note followup.
In the follow-up, they explicitly asked us to “play with their toys” and tell them our non-canon ships.
They’ve read plenty of other letters in other episodes that involved talking about shipping.
And they’re having a third Shipping episode, just straight up fiat not even voting for it, it’s just automatically in the schedule, because they specifically think it’s amusing listening to us want to talk about this sort of thing.
So people are reacting negatively because we started a thread to have fun chatting about something C&A explicitly invited us to do and chat about, and you’re lecturing us over it.
I strongly recommend pausing and listening to Episode 77, Editor’s Note 21, and the schedule portion of Publisher’s Note 11 to hear C&A’s thoughts directly, and then coming back to the topic.
I’ll note specifically in Editor’s Note 21 when a letter said “Canon means nothing to me” and Christopher said in a cheerful voice, “Good, good, that’s correct when you’re shipping”.
I’ll also note that C&A have said on numerous occasions that they in general actively enjoy us playing with their toys. They love hearing that we’re writing fanfic, drawing fanart, coming up with fan decks, the crazy things we do in our RPG games, and so on. They don’t always directly engage with it because of legal issues, but they love that we do it.
And the Letters Page as well is collaborative. We send them topic suggestions, yes, but they do not actually put up for voting everything we send in, not by a long shot. They put up for voting from the options the things they personally want to talk about. So if they’re discussing anything on the podcast, you can know that it’s because they wanted to discuss it.
This is true of letters as well, they choose what to read and what not to read. Even letters from the live recordings this is true of. There have been times when we typed letters at them during a recording and they just typed us a response in the server rather than reading it on the air, either with an answer or explaining they can’t answer it for whatever reason. That’s cool.
Sorry for the long discourse here, I just felt like maybe it would be good to explain this in general just to get us all on the same page.
@The_Justifier, it sounds like folks want to have a conversation that you aren’t interested in having. Would you be willing to let them have that conversation and enjoy themselves in it?
Okay I adore this. Massive Brokeback Mountain “it’s because of you I’m like this” energy
Personally I wanna hear more about great friendships in the multiverse. Tachyon och Absolute Zero being a great example!
Yeah I brought up in a discussion elsewhere that I appreciate AZ and Tachyon are a rare set of opposite gender besties in fiction who are in fact just besties, and I honestly have about as many “BroTPs” as I do romantic ships.
My personal fave BroTP other than AZ & Tachyon is Sky-Sky and Tempest. They actually have a lot in common as two aliens with tragic pasts who are trying to fit in on Earth and appreciate Earth pop culture. Just, you know.
It’s the enemies to besties track for me.
A random thought that popped into my head a few days ago that I can’t shake is a Wraith/Black Fist fling. It’s of a time when Henry and Maia are of compatible ages both keeping the streets of Rook City as clean as they can but neither is likely to settle down with anyone long term. Idk I’m just thinking there’s some potential there
Yes, platonic shipping is also great. I remember how delighted I was at the idea of Expatriette and Legacy just kind of hanging out and being informal cousins. I kind of wish we’d seen more of that after the off-hand mention of it once.
Hmm… who would my favourite BroTP be? I would have liked to see Writhe and Visionary get close to each other. Maybe she could have pulled him off of his course towards whatever the heck he’s turning into. Alternately, now that she’s on Earth, I’d love for Idealist to declare that she’s going to get Fashion up to date with all the latest cool culture.
Alternatively, Fashion becomes the Cool Aunt™️ who takes Idealist out for fun Girl Time™️.
This idea of “friendshipping” is very pleasing to me.
“Och”?
I assumed English is their second language and they intended “and”.
“Och” is Swedish for “and.” @JoeSteeloak is Swedish, if I recall correctly.
Haha, indeed. The problem with having to switch between two different keyboards all the time is that the auto correct fails whenever I forget to switch. Swedish and English share most letters and more than a few grammar rules thankfully.
And then Mr. Fixer shows up in the comics, Wraith eventually figures out it’s him, and starts questioning her understanding of the passage of time. XD
Listen she starts in Paul’s age bracket and by the end of the multiverse she’s in Felicia’s as people age around her that’s just how it goes for her.
Meanwhile, on the BroTP front, a conversation today with one of my good friends reminded me that Unity & Omnitron is right up there with with Tachyon and AZ for me. But speaking of Unity I’ll admit to never having wrapped my head around her and Benchmark. Like, their brands of cheesy don’t necessarily line up in my mind, but Benchmark is also one of the characters I have the shallowest grasp on still in terms of personality, so i can definitely still be convinced.
But also, I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this yet, but Road Warriors really just lives in my shipper brain rent free. Like, yes, we know that Ansel is a terrible selfish lover, but I believe in Jackson’s ability to find a way to work with that, especially for his favorite movie star. Is it any more than just a hookup in my mind? No, never. Do I think about it on a regular basis? More than I wish it did.
Meanwhile I’m extrapolating on my Fashion/Idealist “Cool Aunt” idea, and realized that Miranda has a “Cool Uncle” in Mainstay, thus leading to clashing personalities between Fashion and Mainstay simmering for a long term “Beauty VS Beast” that could become “Beauty AND Beast”…
I actually know how they can explain Maia’s weird aging in a way that almost completely makes sense, and could lead to future story potential. You know, if anyone is interested in hearing how a Justifier might go about fixing that little plot hole and Justifying the existing lore…
I’d have them say the Chairman dosed her with a diluted form of his syrum because he was entertained by having such a worthy adversary to mess with or something comicky / stupid like that… 
But my apologies – that’s off topic… 
