Ep 37 of The Letters Page! Discussion - Fanatic

Prepare your ears for the heavenly voices of Christopher and Adam, simply divine.

The choir can be heard here

Figure I’ll get this out of the way:

Like the episode, this is probably not a good thread to be in if you care about the nature of Fanatic’s powers and the spoilers behind their reveal. Spoilers or no, you’ve been warned.

 Might be worthwhile to just put spoiler in the thread title.  

Or we could do what we do and use spoiler tags so anyone can participate in this thread, rather than starting two separate threads every week.

[ color=white ]Delete the spaces next to the brackets and type your message here[ /color ]

Nope! No hidden message this time

 Then this thread doesn't have much point since if you listened to it you know this and if you skipped it there is no reason to visit this thread.  This is different than other weeks because a majority of the episode is considered a spoiler instead of just a few minutes discussing the future. 

Does any thread have a point?

I can see a couple of things in the opening spiel that can be discussed, sans spoilers territory.

Well once I listen to the episode and can comment further I will not be avoiding posting spoilers.  

The one where Christopher almost died. Or, well, revealed that he almost died earlier this week. Man, people would really get mad about Oblivaeon then. :V (I apologize for the tasteless joke.) Unrelated, I spent most of this episode singing the M.A.S.K. – err, sorry, S.H.M.A.S.K. – theme song with Lazer Ryderz-related lyrics. :B

I gotta say, the big reveal doesn't diminish her character at all. It's a cool twist, it's a cool state for things to be in, and most importantly, it lets Christopher and Adam, as storytellers, make a statement about the nature of faith in a non-religious context. It's not a subject I really have any experience with, but I think, by the end of the podcast, they made their point really clear. It makes me wish more people understood that concept in the real world.

#NotAllBloodMages

So, Plantverse vs. Animalverse Crossover Spectacular when? :V

I must humbly dissent with Christopher in that not all of us have faith in anything at all, even in a non-deity sense.

As such, it was kinda weird listening to this episode as a result because it inhabits a space that ends up being completely nonsensical to how I intrinsically think. (I won't say it's wrong to how I think because being different doesn't make something inherently wrong, but it definitely inhabits a space of "does not compute".)

I liked this episode and her motives make a lot more sense to me.  She reminds me of Justice and Anders from the Dragon Age series.  

I think C and A managed to somehow square the circle with the reveal about her origin. They left enough holes for someone to ignore the official story.

As for the idea of faith, I agree with Jeysie in that I don't consider myself to believe in anything, not even my own abilities. I don't think I lack self confidence but rather I have made an accurate assessment of my abilities. So I find the idea of a character like Helena very strange, a person who when shown the flaws in their logic who just then doubles down in their logic is anathema to me. 

edited to add I just remembered that my question was asked, that was sent Thursday after I had listened to the interlude so I guess it's never too late

Yeah, my stance is pretty much that reality exists independent of what I think is true or what I want to be true, so I should try as much as possible to ensure my notions of what I think is true are based on what is indeed actually true. I can never have faith in anything, because the mere fact that I'm resorting to faith to determine whether or not something is true makes me feel an intrinsic need to now go and check to make sure the thing actually really is true before I continue believing it is.

So my reaction to finding out an unpleasant truth would instead be something like "well OK I really hate that this is true, but that obviously doesn't make it stop being true, so I need to instead see if there's any way I can salvage something good out of it".

I mean like you, it's not even a self-confidence thing, it's just the way I'm wired. I remember being confused as a kid in church because while I actually rather liked going to church and Bible study and agreed with many of the ethical teachings (since we were more of the "love and charity and affirming life and being good to each other" type than the "fire and brimstone to sinners" type), I never once managed to understand the actual "talking with God/Jesus" part. It was kind of a "well OK I'm praying and listening but nothing is actually happening really so I don't really understand what people get out of this".

So characters, and people in general who do get something out of it and do have that faith approach to their perspective of truth, end up just eliciting a sort of "well OK you do you I guess" kind of reaction out of me if they're being benign in the way they go about it because I have no real frame of reference with which to relate to or understand it.

It’s possible that we are working from different definitions of faith, but I would categorize this as a belief. You have no evidence that the universe exists outside of your perception of it. Assuming that it continues to exist when you aren’t observing it is a belief, albeit a very rudimentary one.

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

I am by nature a skeptic, but I have too much evidence to not believe in my religion.  At some point I had to accept that not understanding was fine, but ignoring what was happening wasn't.

That evidence isn't transferable though, asking someone to believe something based on experiences they didn't have and I can't prove happenned would be ridiculous.

As for the Fanatic podcast, I loved it.  It wasn't so much the source of her powers being known was problematic for me, but the idea that her super powers were based on her faith (they aren't) and then removing the question of Faith from her (they didn't) that would have been the problem.

Growing up a conservative protestant and being drawn to philosophy and theology, I always had to deal with the "Faith is better when it is ignorant" crowd.  By that I mean the people who tell you to believe and not think about it, and certainly don't question it.  And yet Every faith has a rich history of people asking those questions and becoming better people for it.  Which is one reason I ended up Catholic, was because for all the churches I attended that wanted to "get back to the early church," not one of them wanted to actually read the writings of the early church and discuss the questions raised by them.

Anyway, Loved all of the episode, esp. the impact of Ra believing in her.  That would be one badass scene, I really want to watch that movie.  Also love that her personality was exactly what I expected it to be, and now I'm really looking forward to Apostate.

That's not belief, that's having a developed enough brain to understand the concept of object permanence.

Since you're not actually arguing that I really do have faith, you're instead trying to argue that I should have faith in solipsism as a philosophy. To which I should probably note that I don't "do" philosophy, either.

I think "No Particular Night or Morning" is a more relevant science fiction story to the specific concept you've raised.

Because I think Orson Scott Card's quote more just exemplifies that unsurprisingly people who have faith as an intrinsic part of their being have just as much of a hard time understanding people who don't, as I do the other way around. They have to reframe it as meaning those people have faith after all, because that's the only way they can compute it.

I mean, you don't have to be defensive. I'm not arguing against faith. Just pointing out that I don't have it, don't understand what it feels like to have it, don't understand what people feel when they say they talk or listen to God, don't understand how you can convince yourself to think something is true if you have no evidence that it is, etc.

I should note that this occasionally has its downsides, too. Like therapy for instance has always been a useless mess for me because virtually 100% of therapy revolves around trying to make you stop being depressed/anxious/etc. by making you believe feel-good things about yourself and the world even if they're not actually true (and maybe even especially if they're not actually true).

They keep saying that Citizen Dawn does radiant damage.

Where? She doesn't have any radiant damage in her deck. Her main card and Blinding Blast both do energy, not radiant.

Maybe they intended her to do so

One thing I find hilarious about this episode is how closely the concepts at work with The Host mirror the concepts of Spren from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive.

It is so wierd how often something I just read comes out of nowhere to connect to other parts of my life, but I love those moments of "OH, it's like that" that tend to come with them

Also, I love the incredibly strange nature of her existence. A mortal body with an immensely powerful spirit, her whole being is a fascinating series of questions and possible answers. Had some follow up questions I already submitted, mostly about the moment she was "created".

Actually, for me, it helps that she is explicitly not human at her core, that helps square some of the things we know about her and why she has never had a proper answer to the "what does she do in her downtime". She isn't human, she doesn't do downtime.

Finally, to dip my toe into the current discussion on Faith and belief, I think it becomes a matter semantics and splitting hairs after a certain point. Dig down deep enough into the most fundamental aspects of humanity and we end up calling things by a bunch of different names, shaped by our subjective experiences. For me, the idea of knowledge or certainty canceling out Faith is weird and I've never quite accepted it no matter how it is explained to me. But then there is the difference between Faith, Belief, Assumption, and Hypothesis. Very similiar things that can diverge wildly. It... it isn't really that important though to our day to day functioning or understanding.

Still Fanatic is an amazing character and I'm really interested to see how her story continues to develop in the RPG

Faith is trust in those things unseen.  It doesn't have to be about a God or anything like that.  You can have faith in your friends, in your job, etc.

Faith about God or similar ideas usually comes from experiences people have in relation to them.  Just like trust, it usually has to be earned and can be lost in a similar fashion.

Philosophy is, to me, like science.  But instead of studying the physical, it studies the ethical.  What happens when people act this way vs. that way?  In most religions I have found the way they say we should treat each other is what they try to emphasise, but what often gets emphasized instead is the way to believe about life.  Ifyou study most religions, you'll find that they have a core about treating others as you would like to be treated.  And to me, the rest can be kept or thrown out, depending on the reader's preference.

I got more of a Cole vibe from Fanatic than Anders/Justice.

I honestly don't have faith in things like those either. Though that specifically is less of an intrinsic inability and more general learned attitude from life experiences of "any time I've ever tried to trust in anything or anyone they've just invariably let me down".

And ethics are an entirely different ball of wax from faith or spirtuality. Sometimes related, sure, but not the same thing.

Like, my ethics are definitely influenced by my Catholic upbringing, but it's because those specific things continued to make logical sense in relation to my life experiences even after I gave up on trying to believe in God. (In turn there are some aspects I felt didn't make logical sense and so I dropped them in favor of more congruent ideas.)

Scholar does radiant damage (plus everybody with “choose the type” effects), but I think it notable that it’s on a card referencing “grace”.

Edit: and in environments, the vampire hunter and The True Form do too. While not Dawn, radiant still isn’t solely a Fanatic thing.

No, but Progeny and (from what I've heard) Oblivaeon do.

So I guess Oblivaeon is God. :V The multiverse ends in a JRPG!

The Death of Ra was already an amazing bit, but hearing about it again this week almost brought me to tears.

All the info about Fanatic's origin doesn't really change my picture of her, but it's definitely interesting with regard to Apostate, and I'm going to have to send in a few questions about him before next week!

In the 'oh this is totally like' corner, the first thing I thought of was Demon: The Fallen, where all the pcs have basically the same origin as Fanatic, except that their version involves actual literal Hell.

I was thinking DTC too but in that game the person remembers a lot about their host, like the English Angel of Death still loves her husband, and that gangster still loves his daughter. Fanatic has no connection to her previous life , she's like a changeling or ironically possession , where there is something new making the decision now

So, given the information from this episode, should we then consider Possession as a potential power source?  And, concurrent with that, what ramifications would possession have for the human/host body have in being possessed?

I LOVE that game. I didn't really connect the dots to it like you did, but I can see your reasoning.

It was interesting to hear about Fanatic's reaction to her sword being broken, and how it boiled down to "Aw man! Well, it IS just a sword made by humans… And hey, now it's an axe! I can use it to chop things!"

On a side-note, I think Adam and Christopher did a great job with that end explination, and it was a fantastic episode as always.

This made me smile. Because its true for so many JRPGs. Playing Breath of Fire now, I can't remember if the final boss is a god but the rest of the series you end up fighting a god or goddess of some kind.

I agree that they did a good job with her origin and the episode as a whole. They also did a great job not giving too much of future episodes away both for Apostate and the Prime Wardens.

Some of my questions that I don't believe were answered was does she have limits on her power? And what did Guise do to deserve being Final Dived, or maybe what didn't he do?

Where is my pre-show banter? They went straight to business. I feel a little off without them bantering for a bit.. . .

Also Fanatic is really cool. Now got to show my friend this episode so he can get into this.

I think we got the first "And then she died" that was both a lie and a truth.

I think so.  Based on revelations about her, Apostate, and Bugbear, I've revised the Power Sources post.

I actually just submitted a question for the Apostate/The Host episode to ask just this sort of question and how such possession would interact with a living host–i.e. is there a fight for dominance vs. symbiosis.

Finally got through it. I'm thoroughly enjoying these…

I love what they did with her and how her story progresses. Definitely an example of a highly-powered individual, so the stories have to be more personal to really have any stakes. 

I'm not going to get into the belief discussion here, though. I think that belief is a very personal thing, and we all have to process it however we have to process it, and doing so sufficiently in post form is nearly impossible. It's definitely something I enjoy discussing in person, however… 

(I think I was not the "Russell" that asked that final question, but I suppose I might have asked it back when they first put out the form. Doesn't sound like something I would ask, though…  )

I wonder how fanatic's situation differs from Ra ,was the first Ra a spirit of fire who thought he was the God of the Sun? If Fanatic dies does her sword turn into an artefact that turns the next wielded into an angel of the Lord ?

I got the impression that Ra knew exactly what he was: a being of substantial power who was not literally a "god" but deserved to be treated as one back in the old days.  Not sure about the Ennead, but he seems to know perfectly well that worshipping him isn't appropriate in the modern era.

That's a valid Host question, since we know a Host entity can be contained in a physical object (the Idolater's cross). Ask it for the Apostate episode!

I would hesitate to call Posession a power source based off of Fanatic and Apostate.

To begin with, they aren't possessed, by which I mean the main entity driving the body does not have a second personality they are subsuming. Both the girl who was named Helena and whatever corpse Apostate pulled up were just bags of meat at the time. Technically a possession in terms of "the spirit is possessing the body" but not possession in terms of a situation like Dark Visionary which is a little more classical in its presentation.

Secondly, the possession of the body is not the source of the power. They both have power due to their nature as spirits, and all of their powers flow from their existence as spirits. Apostate possesses a body more because that is a more convienent way to interact with Fanatic than because he needed to possess a body to wield his power, at least in my interpretation of events. Fanatic's power is not because she has a mortal body, but because she is a Spirit of the Host.

Now, Idolater and The Seer interct with Host spirits in very different ways, so it is possible that the possession of a mortal body, with a mortal soul, by a spirit of the Host could lend power, but it is not something we have seen and itwould be just as unique as Fanatic becoming "Stuck" in her body like she did, since generally these spirits possess someone to incite an emotion and then leave, they don't tend to linger long.

Consider then, the following definition of 'possession':

3. the state of being controlled by a demon or spirit.

"they prayed for protection against demonic possession"

• the state of being completely under the influence of an idea or emotion.

  "fear took possession of my soul"

Within this context, Fanatic's power comes entirely from the Host Spirit of Judgment overtaking her physical form, allowing that Host Spirit to manifest power on the physical plane.

Idolator, would work within the same context, though the form of "possession" comes from his imprisoned Host Spirit of Faith.  He's drawn a spirit here from The Host plane and utilizes its power which, in other forms, would be inaccessible.  His staff may be the thing that's possessed, instead of him, but he's wielding otherwise inaccessible power.

The thing is, there's not a person being possessed there. I believe Christopher and Adam said the spirit was entirely bound to the physical form, after pre-Helena died. So the power comes entirely from the spirit. Fanatic is its physical form.

Scholar also does some Radiant damage.

So, there's this great video out there of a meeting between Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama. Sagan asks (paraphrasing), "if there arose scientific evidence that reincarnation did not take place, what would your reaction be?"

The Dalai Lama's response was immediate: "Oh, then we would stop believing in reincarnation." His response was so sudden and so certain that Sagan looks visibly surprised.

Anyway - I find that exchange provides an interesting window on the faith vs evidence issue. The way I see it, faith can fill in the gaps. But our inductive determination of what reality is does not change, no matter what we believe. Unless we're Fanatic! ;)

The difference is that she isn't being controlled by a demon of spirit. She is a Spirit of Judgement. Trapped inside a flesh shell, mixed with it somehow, but that is like saying your soul is currently posessing your body. It could be "technically" true, but it does not fall under what we generally consder possession because possession is generally done by something that does not intrinsically own the bdy. Helena/Fanatic is the only owner of that body.

I agree that her having a physical body definetly informs the way she uses her power and the types of things she can do, but the source of that power is still her very nature as a spirit, not the fact that she is flesh and blood.

Man, I love the Dalai Lama.

It wasn't Sagan I saw talking to him, but he's been having scientists teach his monks about the universe even to this day, and going on record to state that the evidence they find of the universe takes precedence over the ancient religious writings in terms of "truth of reality" is just mind blowing to me. He's willing to synthesize science and religion, and so very, very few major religious leaders are willing to do that. He is truly a great man.

I think this is an issue where you have to agree to disagree, neither side has concrete proof one way or another, because it's a thing we have no experience of and cannot measure accurately.

Personally I'm on the this-is-not-possession-anymore-side, they are the person inside the body now... Hmmm, I guess the "best" test I can think of to answer this question is whether the spirit could be exorcised.

That's just the God of the Gaps fallacy, though.

The stance from Catholicism, at least, is more like "God created the world, and this is how He did it and what rules He gave it". Evolution is part of Catholic doctrine, for instance, because it's basically like "this is God's manual for how He created life".

There's also an element of, science teaches us how the world works, but religion teaches us what to do with it. Science can show you how to harness the energy of the atom, but it doesn't tell you if you should build power plants or build nuclear bombs. Religion (or ethics, for non-spiritual people) is what addresses that part.

That article is from a site that is explicitly anti-religion, though. Wikipedia gives a more nuanced view of [url= God of the gaps - Wikipedia]God of the Gaps[/url], including the view of the theologicians who originated the phrase. I quite like Bonhoeffer's quote:

It's not a matter of nuance, though, "God of the Gaps" is flat out based on a lack of understanding how science and knowledge work.

Ironically I think your phrasing gets into the crux of the matter. You reject a source based on it being "anti-religion" because you are instead in favor of a statement about reality that is "nuanced" and "fair" to religion. When it's actually perfectly possible that the truth of reality could end up being anti-religion, because reality has no obligation to care about how well it matches any of our ideologies or what we want or don't want to be true. Reality is what it is whether you want it to be that way or not. Your choice is instead about what you want to do with that reality.

Fanatic's episode actually kind of gets into that, even. Instead of accepting what ironically were Apostate's truths and then making a choice to still find ways to do good with them, she blocks them out in favor of having faith in lies.

I wonder how Fanatic would react if it had been a benevolent Spirit that didn't insert lies into those truths instead of one of deceit.  Would that put her where the RPG timeline is heading much earlier?

TBH, I feel like on a purely literary level, "personification of judgment stuck in a mortal body tries to figure out what is the best way to translate the core of their being into mortal society and ethics systems" would be way more interesting to me than "character goes around figuring out what they want to believe is true and then how to really, really believe it's true in face of any and all possible contrary evidence".

Especially since we already have the Celestial Tribunal to showcase what "pure" judgment with no consideration of mortal society actually looks like, as a potential contrast.

I came away feeling the first statement you made is what Fanatic is.   That translation came in a form of their faith and not a set of programming like the Tribunal.   Redeemer Fanatic also makes more sense to me because she comes out being blind and Justice is supposed to be blind.   So despite seeming like she is ignoring what was said she is personifying Justice even more.  

Except the framing of the story isn't "Fanatic is struggling with squaring the core of who she is with the system of ethics she's developed" it's "how strongly can Fanatic blind herself to the truth of who she is in favor of still believing she's an angel".

As someone whose core revolves around facts, logic, and honesty rather than faith, the former to me is interesting: Since something being true doesn't automatically make it morally good or morally congruent, how do we deal with that possible dissonance as people? But the latter doesn't add anything interesting to me regards an exploration of ethics or human nature.

We will just have to disagree there as I didn't come away from the episode feeling that way.  

Except Apostate isn't telling her the facts. Apostate wasn't trying to convince her that the were both spirits of the host who exist as personified versions of emotions or concepts.

Apostate is using the fact that she doesn't know the truth to try & shape her perception of reality to his own ends. Apostate isn't presenting objective facts to her to help her know who she really is. He is presenting half of the facts to try and abuse the gaps in her knowlege for his advantage.

From my interpritation she isn't blinding herself to the truth of who she is. Becuase the Facts of who she is are that she has a calling to judge, punish the wicked and protect the innocent. Weather she is an angel or a spirit is irrelevant to that calling she feels from her core, which is a fact. The context that she recieves from worldly religions shape her perception as experience does to anyone. However, it does not clip her wings(sorry) in terms of making up her own mind. She feels that her role in judgement must be more active, so she leaves the convent and fights for what she believes. While what form she takes might have changed had that initial Christian context not been there, i doubt she would've been unrecognizable as the same "person".

Yeah, but she doesn't even try to find out the other half of the facts and incorporate that new knowledge into herself, she just goes lalalalalala and does her best to reconvince herself of her original beliefs.

It just pattern-matches too strongly to many bitter fights and other problems I've had in real life with people who stuck their fingers in their ears and clung to false narratives rather than deal with reality, for me to find the matter anything but headshake-worthy at best.

This is why Fanatic disturbs me. I have had arguments with moon landing conspiracy theorists where I offer to bring them to my workplace and bounce a laser off the laser reflectors we left there to prove we went,  the offer is never accepted , and the person will something like , "I believe that they didn't go, let's agree to disagree", and I'm like "No, I can prove they went" but they walk away

I had a best friend/roommate who once abandoned me while I was broke and unemployed after a layoff because he refused to believe I was actually sending out resume after resume each week to no avail versus believing a narrative where I was lazy and not trying hard enough to find work and especially not trying hard enough to find full-time work. Among other strange narratives he had built up about me over the years.

I have a mother where it's an ongoing thing my entire life where she will get very very weird and contradictory-to-reality ideas about how things work, want things done according to those weird ways, refuse to listen to me trying to explain how things actually work and therefore what is and isn't actually possible (since often what she wants done is frustratingly difficult or even flat out impossible), and hurl verbal abuse at me about how stupid/useless/lazy/worthless a daughter I am because I can't just do things the way she believes they should work.

And that's just personal issues with individuals I've dealt with, let alone community or wide-society issues I've dealt with.

Shaking my head at Fanatic's obstinance is the most benign reaction I can summon up, as a result.

Something I want to point out is that although we do now have an explanation for Fanatic's powers beyond 'miracle,' that doesn't necessarily rule out divine intervention or design in the process. We've got this reason now, that she was a spirit from The Host - hey great, cool. But even in the world of Sentinel Comics, with its superheroes and aliens and what-have-you else, there are still religious people of all kinds, and nothing we've seen has in any way proven their faith wrong or unfounded. That puts Fanatic's abilities more or less in the same place as avowed 'miracles' from the real world, as incredibly unusual or improbably occurances that nevertheless are somehow consistent with physical reality.

Obviously, the rules of physical reality are a little different in a comic-book world where people can fly even without wings, but the point stands. Even if her original source of information hadn't been someone obviously evil and deceptive, it would probably have still troubled her, and she probably would still have gotten past it, because being this angelic figure is a big part of who she is as a person.

@Jeysie, @padcurtin

In this case though, Fanatic has no way of "investigating" Apostate's claims.  There are no philosophical or scientific arguments that she can read up on, and she can't excatly ask The Host.  So far as we know, the only person with any actual knowledge about the Host that Fanatic is able to interact with is Apostate, and like any good deceiver the few truths he's sharing are mostly half-true at best a nestled in with a whole bunch of lies.  Having no alternative source of information to turn to, nothing else against which to weigh her beliefs, Fanatic has few real options...

She could choose to beleive everything Apostate is saying.  But the core of her being and her own experience tell her that Apostate is being deceitful, that on the whole his words represent a lie, and so this hardly seems like an honest option.  Choosing this option would be to blind herself to, herself, and choose blind faith in Apostate instead.

Or, she could admit that there is some truth buried in Apostate's words, but with no actual way to seperate the truth from the lies, how is she to know?  The result would be to question her very self and to know nothing for the rest of her life.  This option wouldn't result in blind faith, but it would have rendered Fanatic blind.

Finally, she could stick to what the core of her being, her experience, and her faith have taught her, and choose to blind herself to everything Apostate is saying, viewing it (correctly, actually) as a distraction preventing her from achieving her true purpose.

This isn't a case of "there's evidence for this thing but I'm going to choose to ignore it".  This wasn't a case of Fanantic picking the facts she like best.  Faced with competing and (thanks to Apostate's deceitful presentation) mutally-exclusive facts and no "logical" way to weigh them against one another, she made the best choice she could.

@dprcooke:

I guess I just felt irritated at people in this thread not accepting that no, I really don't feel faith in anything, and I also have strong reasons why I feel more comfortable engaging with other people (or characters) who focus on facts and logic and truth instead of faith.

I have no issue accepting that!

To obtain knowledge about the state, history, and governing mechanisms of the universe, there is really no substitute for scientific inquiry. One of the incredibly powerful things about science is its stress on repeatability - anyone with the necessary equipment can investigate the same question, produce data with the same properties, and infer the same result (with much time in peer review, reaching a consensus, of course), which totally throws to heck the whole idea of relativism. It's not logical, nor does it really stand up to any kind of argument, to say "let's agree to disagree on this Moon landing thing." Moreover, saying that would countermand the whole way that every human learns about the world when we are young - trial and error, investigation, curiosity, and the resulting induction.

Unless you're Fanatic, and you can just change the world by believing it should be a different way.

Ironically Fanatic would therefore be pretty powerful if she should realize what she's doing!

And going back to the moon landing thing, yeah, I always feel bewildered when I state a fact of some sort and someone says "I disagree" or "we'll have to agree to disagree" and it's like, I kinda really hate to break this to you, but, you can't disagree with a fact.

You can, mind you, disprove a fact and show it's not actually a fact, but that's not the same concept as disagreeing with it (and the sort of people who say they disagree with a fact rarely ever actually do that disproving anyway).

The way I look at it is, even if Fanatic knew the truth was the truth, that she was a spirit from this realm inhabiting the otherwise-dead body of a little Peruvian girl...

... there's nothing at all stopping Fanatic from concluding that this happened because God willed it. Who's to say that spirits from the Host aren't as much under a God's purview as human spirits?

“faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.”

I just figured I should put this here to clarify what faith is.

Of the things I like about this quote for discussing faith is that it talks specifically about knowledge and that faith isn’t without it, but rather is a belief in something that is true but you don’t necessarily have the means to make a repeatable experiment to prove it. In order for faith to really have power, it must be in something that is true otherwise it remains a simple belief. Fanatic believes she is an angel. She has faith that she has the power to smite transgressors. There’s a distinct difference, and the lines definitely blur for her since her beliefs inherently change what is true around her.
As to her character, I actually felt the discussion on the podcast was refreshing and I am much happier understanding her power source than not. She’s way cooler because of it and I would love to make a Sentinels RPG character who is also a member of The Host.

But if something is true, why not just go find proof that it's true?  And if you can't find that proof, then why not just acknowledge you're merely assuming the thing is true for the sake of getting things done?

It's the idea of knowing for sure without proof that doesn't compute for me. I have to know something is true because it actually is true. Nor do I feel whatever sensations you're supposed to feel any time I try praying or the like; I just feel like I'm, you know, sitting there talking to nothing.

I don't really understand a number of related concepts, either. One big one is how most people can deal with cognitive dissonance by smoothing over in their minds the areas where various ideas and experiences contradict each other or otherwise don't quite properly match up. While I mostly walk around going "but this doesn't make any sense!" in miserable annoyance to just about everything, since it feels like the more I know and learn the more none of it fits together (especially where people are involved).

I actually have no problems with the source of Fanatic's power; it's the framing around that power that I find disappointing. Usually when I listen to the character stuff on the podcast it's with a "wow I could never come up with something that cool myself" reaction, but this time around I feel like "there's more interesting ways this could have been done".

I wonder how much the label of "Angel" and "God" interfere with this discussion and with Fanatic's views. Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

Fanatic believes she is an Angel of God sent to the world to pass judgement on it, and cleanse it from evil.

What she actually is is a Spirit of Judgement whose job is to pass judgement on the world and (assuming that Judgement and Justice are naturally in sync and devoted to the betterment of the world) cleanse from evil. This spirit ended up in a mortal body on Earth.

Frankly. the difference is pretty minor. What is an Angel of the Lord, in the vein that Fanatic believes herself to be, if not a Spirit of Judgement? She is on the planet Earth, though whether she was sent by some even greater being or if was an accident is impossible to know. And even if it was an "Accident" if Fate and Destiny can be things which occur, then is an accident not still the work of "God"?

If you throw aside all the trappings, The Bible, the Church, the symbology... is Fanatic really wrong in how she views herself? Yes, her "natural" environment and previous state of existence did not include Catholocism or Christianity, but that does not mean that using that lens to describe herself invalidates her Truth?

I don't think it does. I may quibble over her use of terms, insist that defining spirits by the church teachings is innacurate or insufficient, but I can't really tell her she is completely wrong, she's just using a different framework to describe essentially the same thing. And that makes her story closer to that "How do I fit what I beleive and what I experience with the world and use it to protect people and make the world a better place"

For me at least.

Basically:

If we go with the concept of Fanatic being a being of judgement, I'd rather an exploration where she openly embraces that and considers herself how mortal ideas like mercy and proportionality and rehabilitation might factor in rather than the "I'm on a mission from God so my decisions are always right" sort of attitude she tends to exhibit even after her Redeemer version. Take it from a religious-based thing to more of an exploration of ethics in general.

If we go with the concept of Fanatic being a Catholic character, I'd rather something a little bit closer to a D&D paladin that's actually being played properly, where her powers revolve more around how well she embodies being a Catholic including the ideas of protecting people and charity and affirming life. Essentially take a cue from Haka and show how a given cultural identity would shape a hero and how they go about heroing.

I would like to add that she doesn't know that she is a Host. Nobody does (except Apostate who is a liar).  In fact, few know what the host is. The Idolator is using one, but to him it is dark magic that bound the spirit. The Seeker Soul his soul to the  Devil(Domination) which is unclear if he knows about the host or Domination was just a powerful force.

Fanatic also changes so she does listen to other. May not process it in a healthy way but she listens. The beauty of this is that Spirit believes itself to be a human with the power form god. The spirit is trying to be human and learning that things do not work that way.

It sounds like, in the RPG timeline, she's more openly accepting the whole "being a spirit of the Host" thing? Or at least, on the path toward doing so.

It'd be a good move if that's the case.

Honestly associating religion with zealous judgment and the idea of having faith in lies over the truth is kinda problematic since those are two issues currently being struggled with in the real world to the detriment of a lot of people. Hence my suggestion that we either give a more secular angle to the judgment matter or we focus instead on the beneficial and heroic aspects of Christianity. Either one would help ameliorate the problematic areas.

I think this is what Christopher and Adam indicated in their answer to Jean-Marc’s question. Fanatic is divisive: some people like her and some don’t!

Honestly, I think it’s kind of cool that they created a character like that; it gives their publishing universe more completeness.

Well, for me, it's because the way she's handled means she both embodies the negative aspects of religion as a heroic character and without the narrative doing much to address it as of yet, which isn't true of any other Sentinels hero I can think of. You generally either get heroes like Legacy who embody just the heroic aspects of a heritage that has mixed aspects, or you get characters like Expat where they have an arc of expressly addressing their anti-heroic aspects and getting past them.

The fact that they even have a parallel storyline in the Celestial Tribunal where unthinking judgment is explicitly set up as antagonistic/villainous just makes the handling of Fanatic feel even more out of place.

See, I don't think she is supposed to have or even represent "unthinking judgement"

The one and only time we see her or hear about her denying the truth (sort of) is in the context of denying the truth about herself (Sort of) which was being presented by Apostate, the literal incarnation of Deception. In fact, because we know Apostate is Deception I can guarentee he lied about some of what he was telling Fanatic, the only reason he includes any Truth at all is because it is a more effective lie if some of it is true. That way she has to question how much of what he said is true.

And, let's dig into the situation a bit. We've got an entity of lies, summoning demons and causing havoc. He's told her enough truth to make it possible that everything he is saying is truth. And so, she is left with three potential options. Deny that he is telling the truth, believe everything he says, or try and seperate truth from lie.

The third one sounds like the best, but who would she turn to to help figure out what is true and what is not. We can say the Host, but it isn't like Apostate is going to tell her how to contact them, and he might not have even explained what the Host truly is. We know he would not have told her she is a spirit of Judgement, because he wants her working for him to take over the world. It doesn't help that cause to admit they are opposed when he wants her to believe they are allies. Also, doubt cripples her powers, so even if she wanted to figure something out she is too weak, and finally, Apostate doesn't just let her run away and he stands there waiting for her, he's busy wrecking the world, which means she can't really go on a long quest for the Truth, there won't be a world or a people left to protect if she does.

So, she has to decide, on her own, is Apostate truly her ally and creator, or is he a liar and her enemy. Has he told her the complete truth or has he only told her enough of the truth to confound her.

She spends three days struggling with this. Three days of meditation and prayer and trying to figure out the best path, while Apostate sets about harming innocents and trying to destroy the world.

Her eventual decision isn't a perfect answer, nor do I think is it supposed to be. It's supposed to be a little desperate, she takes a leap of faith. She resolves to trust that she is a force for good in the world and that Apostate is a force for evil, and that he did not create her and that instead it is her duty to defeat him. She recognizes that this is "Blind Faith" but for her, there aren't many other options. She has to stop him before more lives are lost.

And, I'm sure that this question of her origins doesn't end their. Prime Wardens Fanatic's bio mentions she is looking to understand her place in the world. She hasn't forgotten or ignored everything he said. She may be seeking answers up until Oblivaeon or beyond, but she does not have the luxury of doubting that her mission is a just one, or that her purpose is to protect the innocent from evil. She is blind in that respect, because not believing in that core means that she must assume those she saved were instead meant to die, that instead of doing good and spreading light she is instead allowing or even empowering evil in the world.

I know this isn't everyone's headspace, that perhaps her actions still seem too extreme or not thought out enough, but I can see this being the way she approaches everything.

And, think about how her fighting style fits with all this. She is reckless only in terms of her own health and safety.  She will bring herself to the brink of death to protect civilians from threats, and generally the threats she fights are evili wizards, spirits, undead, demons, alien monsters. The moral questions she gets faced with in those sorts of fights are not the type of "what is the place of faith in a modern society" but more the "are you any less of a monster than I am?" type of questions. And that is a struggle for Fanatic because she knows she is not human. I'll bet, mostly because of Idolater, that another big question for her is "do I expose this evil and disrupt the community or do I allow this evil to continue and the community to continue in this relatively positive manner". These kinds of decisions are difficult and important, and I feel like she gets into a lot of stuff.

TL;DR She does question, it is just a matter of what answers she comes up with for those questions.

Only because the heroes take steps to keep her deliberately aimed at those types of threats, not because she's learned how to moderate herself when dealing with lesser evils.

I feel like Jean-Marc's question and Christopher's answer was aimed primarily at her status as a religious character, when I have no particular problems with a heavily religious character per se; I just dislike that Fanatic is a negative example of religion of the sort that causes real harm in real life when people behave that way, and only escapes being that bad in Sentinels because everyone aims her at "acceptable targets" and not because her flaws are ever really addressed by the narrative.

And even that might not be so remarkable if Sentinels didn't have an express pattern of making sure its heroes are genuinely heroic via addressing their anti-heroic traits at one point or another.

I mean, I think you're not correct that her goal is to save the innnocent from evil; her goal is to judge and smite what she sees as evil, with her secondary goal being merely to avoid causing collateral damage to innocent people rather than specifically saving innocent people.

And it's not as if there's any particular shortage of heroes in the Sentinelsverse who are versed in magic or mentoring.

Hence why I made the two suggestions I would have rather seen: Either go with the idea of being a "spirit of judgment" just divorced from the problematic religious connotations, or go with the idea of being a religious character who plays up the more heroic and benign aspects of religion (especially since ironically that's not very hard to pull off with a Catholic character specifically).

I associate her with Crusaders rather than any modern Christians epesically since her equipment was created from Templar gear who were crusaders.  I also find it unlikely outside of seeing an Angelic figure that most of those in universe knew much or cared about her religion. 

I wonder if she willed that armour and sword into being in the first place, made it unconsciously too big for her when she found it.  That would explain why the cross is too big and why there was Templar armour in Peru in the first place ( A country that to my knowledge had no contact with Europeans until 200 yrs after the Templars were disbanded) Fanatic probably wanted to find armour so she did.

A being with that kind of power is  going to be extremely hard to convince that she is wrong,. Considering herself an angel, she probably thinks she's above reproach in everything she does and she cannot make a mistake. If you think about it ,we're lucky Fanatic thinks she's an angel, how much more powerful would she be if she thought she was the avatar of the Incan god of justice/judgement ?

I think it is less that the other heroes "aim" her at more appropriate targets and more that she seeks (and because the writers want her to she finds) greater evils to fight.

Fanatic's stated goal is to protect humanity, that holds true for her no matter what else we may say. And so, she looks for threats that are big. She doesn't bother looking for bank robbers, sure she'll get involved if she sees one (and then is promptly stymied by the other heroes when her reaction is more extreme than they find acceptable) but she's in town looking for the source of the demons popping up and causing havoc, so she'll let the lesser evil continue and focus on the threat to the entire city.

And yeah, the writers tended to not have her address this tendency of hers to pass harsh judgement for more minor offenses, but that puts her squarley in anti-hero zones which isn't a bad thing. Especially since she isn't built for dealing with the kind of minor threats that require a lighter hand or turning people into the police. She can wreck landscapes having her deal with the mob is kind of a waste.

And, I don;t think she feels she is above reproach or unable to make a mistake. If that were true Apostate couldn't instill her with doubt and make her insecure about her place in the world.

She's made mistakes, she knows she has, and people have suffered because of it or the fight has gotten worse because of it. She isn't a character who never questions her place in the world, but she is a character who changes slowly. She's questioned herself and her mission a few times we know of and probably more that we don't know of, but in the end she chose her faith and her role as a guardian of humanity against the forces of darkness every time.

At least, this is my take on things

What I meant by my distinction between "protecting humanity" and "just making sure she doesn't do collateral damage" was, to give an example: If it was a choice between staying behind to protect people from some threat not caused by the heroes or evildoers and pursuing after an evildoer, what would the hero choose?

Someone like Legacy would stay to protect the people no question. Haka would likely be initially tempted to chase after but then stay. But I think Fanatic would simply take off after the evildoer without hesitation.

Which is my point, really. She never really learns to moderate herself, just to go after threats where she wouldn't need to moderate.

It is an unusual thing for Sentinels, though. Sentinels tends more towards a White and Grey Morality sort of setting to borrow TV Tropes terms, where the heroes are definitely heroic and the grey comes instead from the villains sometimes having redeeming qualities. Fanatic being an anti-hero in a way that's never really addressed sticks out like a sore thumb as a result.

Plus sticking a very Protestant-like emphasis on faith in a Catholic character when Catholicism has more of an emphasis on "good is what you do, not what you are", still feels weird to me.

(I'm now reminded of Avacyn from Magic: the Gathering, who has a way way way darker version of some of Fanatic's arc. "An angel is made of goodness… but is goodness made of an angel's acts?")

Indeed there are anti-heroic characters, but their anti-heroism is always actually addressed over the course of the narratives to make them more strictly heroic (even KNYFE does, since her questioning the morality of killing an alien who's clearly both sapient and not evil is what makes her go rogue agent in the first place), and Christopher often stops to emphasize in their podcast how in Sentinels their heroes are really heroes.  Also Visionary and Writhe were called out as being actively possessed somehow when they started being evil. The Crimson Conductor is another situation where a hero being actually definitely evil is still attributed to some kind of possession or corrupting influence.

Hence, you know, the " in a way that's never really addressed " part of my post regards Fanatic.

So you don’t consider Visionary while under her own control lobotomizing Citizen Dawn questionable?   Also, what about KNYFE impaling Choke and leaving her for dead?   The Ra early outings just taking out monsters or other freaks is never fully explained as to why that was Heroic.  

Visionary lobotomized Bugbear while under Dark Vis's control, not Citizen Dawn.

Also, what part of "it's eventually addressed" was not sufficiently clear enough for you? I've stated over and over again that my argument is that the narrative specifically addresses what awful things various previously anti-heroic characters have done and it's the fact that that doesn't happen with Fanatic that sticks out, so you attempting a "gotcha" at me by ignoring that deliberate context to pretend I'm instead acting like there's no heroic characters who've ever done anything at all bad is really irritating.

You have had a persistent tendency ever since I first started posting here and on Reddit to do that in general via ignoring what I carefully said to attempt some sort of "gotcha" at me that I actually already addressed in what you ignored, and I find it frustrating and disingenous every single time you do it. Stop doing it.

(And I don't want any complaints about my tone. I have a right to ask someone who's regularly debating me in bad faith to stop doing so.)

We don't even have to go that far. There are plenty of places in the bible that are pretty aweful. There are several examples of Angels destroying whole cities. Sodom and Gamora were "Scoured from the Earth" by fire and brimstone. Every first born son of egypt. 

" He sent upon them His burning anger, Fury and indignation and trouble, A band of destroying angels." Psalms 78:49

That's why we can't just focus on her as a "spirit of judgement" because like any child, her upbringing and early life context has changed her. Those bible passages which refer to judging angels as Wrathful, refer to them slaughtering the enemies of God. There are Tons of them. There is a reason that every Angelic Messenger and every New Testament Angel begins its communication with "Be Not Afraid." That's because up until that point, in the scriptures, Angels had given people very ready and poingiant reasons to be afraid when one shows up.
 

It's alo very possible that the opposite is true. I put forward the possibilty that her Chatholocism could make her more unyielding. What about the other way, What if we do get one of the magic users left over (of which there aren't many) who discovers how the Host works & realizes what Fanatic is. They convince her she is a Spirit of Judgement and the spirit remembering what it was abandons all human concepts like "Mercy" or "Forgiveness" or "Moderation" because there are other Host spirits for that stuff and what she does is judge things. 

That's why we can't just take one  part or the other and debate it. the Whole that she is at the moment has changed her. She isn't the same spirit, she is, indellibly marked if you will…

Sorry, i thought the Revelations pun was funny.

I think we need more detail about the host spirits and how the Host veiw the world, are they embodyments of emotions which gives them a direct human tie to how those are viewed? Or are the spirits more alien. Do they have human like motivations or given the lack of need for any kind of similar self preservation instinct do they have entirely different reasons for her actions. Also if they are mutable how do the determine their personality and shape, are the destinct with their own wants or desires, or are the mutable like fade spirits from Dragon Age, reflecting what the observer expects to find.

That's why i love this character so much. Even with a big shell like the Host reveal there is so much to unpack. And we didn't even get into the little nuanced parts of her character like we did with Haka. 

You might review the Citizen Dawn episode again.  As to the rest of your post you do similar to me.  At this point I’m done on this conversation because it’s going nowhere.  

No, you're not going to try this tactic.  I'm tired of people giving me a hard time whenever I make a reasonable request to be debated with respectfully.   Chaosmancer and others have been able to disagree with me without ignoring what I said; I want you to do the same.

Deadly deadly Alpacas are watching this thread.

Mods, can someone step in here?  

We're hashing it out in PM; please return to your regularly scheduled angelic debates.

Couple of layers to that pun there. Nice!

One thing I wanted to ask but forgot to (have a tendency to do that) with the relation of the Host to Fanatic is...does the nature of the Host make Fanatic immortal?

Like, if Fanatic's physical form were to die, could the Host possess another body and resume where he/she left off (albeit maybe in a different form, possibly without the memories of the past incarnation of her possession). Or, would the Spirit of Vengeance/Justice simply cease to be?

The Host gives me a real Eldrazzi vibe for some reason, where it's more of a being beyond our physical realm/comprehension but can still interact in our realm by taking over physical objects. (Imagine like a hand going into a fishbowl. The fish can see the hand in their bowl, sure, but can't necessarily comprehend that there's an arm that reaches back to the bigger part, let alone the bigger part.)

Hopefully Tuesday will give us more insight.

I doubt Fanatic just let Apostate go after their confrontation so it might make sense that he took over other bodies so that he came back to threaten heroes later on.

There's no doubt in my mind that Apostate can do it, He can turn any body he has to look the way it wants, but Apostate knows he is a Host member, what happens to the spirit inside Fanatic when it rejoins the host?

Maybe I’m starting to read too closely into it, but I’m starting to believe The Host is probably one of the entities Christopher was alluding to when he mentioned other beings as powerful as OblivAeon.

Especially if it’s in it’s nature to possess beings on a lower realm than its own and play around with them like toys.

I get a bit more of a 'Space Phantom with more power' vibe from the Host than gods, but I guess we just have to wait till Apostate's episode to learn more.

[quote="Jeysie"]

Which is my point, really. She never really learns to moderate herself, just to go after threats where she wouldn't need to moderate.

[/quote]

But maybe that's the best that Fanatic is able to do?  And that itself is evidence of growth and change?

To use a very different example: Alcoholics (in the vast majority of cases at least) don't learn to moderate their consumption of alcohol, they stop consuming alcohol all together.  Middle ground or gradual improvement isn't a possibility.  Fanatic is a spirit of judgement, that is what she both is and does.  It's highly possible that there's nothing she can do to change that.  After all, if Judgement could change to Mercy, then The Host would only need to be one spirit and not many.

So what does she do?  She directs herself at threats where she doesn't need to moderate.  Being aware of a shortcoming that she can [seemingly] do nothing to address, she does the only thing she can and directs herself to situations where that shortcoming isn't a problem.

Yes, this isn't the same degree of character growth and change that we see in the other heroes of the multiverse, but with Fanatic we get someone who for all her immense power is unable to change who she is.  That she manages to harness that power and even her basic character flaw as a force for good is inspiring.

Won't worry, I sent in almost that exact question for Apostate right after I finished listening to Fanatic's episode, so hopefully they'll read it this week.

After years of going from extreme to extreme, Fanatic finally found some moderation, and her allies in the Prime Wardens had no small part in helping the avenging angel center herself. Now, she stands more resolute than ever - not for vengeance or for zealotry, but for the defense of the innocent and the advancement of the greater good.

The last hero to join the ranks of the Prime Wardens, Fanatic had been witnessed most recently fighting a dark-winged Deceiver. As a result, the Avenging Angel had donned more protective armor and a face-plate that obscured her vision. So, when Fanatic joined the fray against Akash'Bhuta wearing armor that allowed greater mobility and freedom of movement, half her face-plate torn off, and a her sword a jagged shard, the other heroes were as taken aback as they were pleased to see her.

Her faith stronger than ever, Fanatic as a member of the Prime Wardens is a resolute opponent of evil in its many forms. She fought against demons and deceivers, and takes the fight to the Court of Blood against blood mages and vampires. The hero called Fanatic does not fully know her role in this world, but she knows one thing: she is Justice.

(Copy and paste from the Wiki)

This is why I say I really enjoy Fanatic's journey of faith.

Fanatic starts out with untested Faith, faith that is ignorant and strong.  That faith is shaken by Apostate, who wishes her to join him in conquering the world.  She retreats, meditates and comes back, blinding herself to his words and their implications.  She will not abandon her role because her faith is shaken.

I don't see that as her blocking out the questions and relying on purposefully ignorant faith, because she doesn't stop there.  She questions, she mellows, she sees her allies doing good differently from how she does it and allows that to give her more options.

The one thing she doesn't budge on is her mission to stop evil, to bring justice.

One of the reasons I love PW Fanatic so much is because of the theme behind it.  Her faith has grown up a lot.  She can admit she doesn't know, and she may be wrong, she can adapt to new truth she runs into, and yet she does not waver in her resolve to bring justice.

That is a fantastic journey of faith, and she comes out in a good place.

I know many who grew up Christian, many who stopped identifying as Christian, many who changed branches, some who reject all faith, and others who found a different one.

The only ones who disappoint me are the ones who gave up on the cause of doing what is right.  Which includes people on every path I listed.

To branch into dangerous theological territory here, Jesus was pretty clear in Matthew 25, those who help others are the ones in the right.  Guessing the right faith gets you nowhere if that is all you have.

"Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes," is essentially the message of the Bible, and most faiths.  People just keep finding it really hard to do the first part.  I honestly don't care what it takes for you to find your way to being excellent to your fellow human beings, whatever it is it is leading you to truth, so follow it.

Admittedly I feel like faith can get in the way of letting you be excellent to your fellow human beings, as it forces you to choose between basing actions on what you believe to be true and your religious dogma, versus working with what actually is true and what actually will really help people.

Like as much as my Catholic upbringing still informs a lot of my ethics, there's also other areas of Catholic teaching I think cause more harm than they grant help so I dropped them.

I think I disagree with your conclusion. She actively works to minimize damage that could harm innocent bystanders. I can't imagine her, for example, leaving a civilian behind in a burning building to chase after a cultist. She would be murdering that person and she would not let that stand. She judges actions, and if her actions led to the direct death of an innocent person she would find herself in need of judgement.

Now, if she was working with a partner, then she would take off without hesitation because she can really on that other person to help them. Legacy would organize, either doing it himself or calling out directions to someone else. Fanatic would take action, forcing others to adapt to her.

I will agree with you that most of the heroes have an arc that moderates them eventually. I think there are two things that make the perception of her slightly different.

One, she has a lot farther to move than quite a few of the other heroes. AZ for example doesn't want to be a hero, but he's just a guy that life's kicked around a lot. His accepting of the heroic mantle is a much shorter journey than a spirit of judgement working on mercy.

The second is that she has moderated a little bit, and that you keep talking about her reaching a place of moderation "Eventually". Her story isn't done yet. The moment with Ra declaring his faith in her is a massive moment for her, which led directly into Oblivaeon. The RPG is her time to process those events, she's been looking for her place in the world, how does she fit in the grander scheme of things, she knows what her mission is, but things aren't working out perfectly. She;s still moving forward, it is just a very slow process for her. She doesn't change easily or quickly

This all seems like an awful lot of assumptions to go on from what very little we heard about the RPG timeline. :P

I'm really not going to budge on wishing we had instead seen a more moderate religious figure from the get-go if we were going to have one. It'd actually be kinda fun to have a D&D Paladin like figure or Guardian Angel type in Sentinels, I think.

Instead Fanatic is a character I just find totally orthogonal to my ability to relate to at best and highly problematic at worst.

That's completely fair, and yeah, I'm coloring in a lot of blank space.

I apologize if I came off as a bit curt.

Since, I agree with you completely that Fanatic's storyline follows logically from her axioms. The problem is that I don't know if I like the axioms themselves, and where she might end up I don't know if it fits the sorts of axioms I would have preferred to see.

No need to apoligize, you didn't come off as curt (to my perception) at all.

Everyone has those stories or literary elements or beliefs that just don't quite jive with them. And sometimes being open to interpretation like this vague form of storytelling doesn't help.

There is a webcomic I've been reading called Daughter of the Lillies that had a big reveal sometime back, the author is very religious and the comic revolves around the reemergence of "totally not god from the bible" into the world and the main character is the chosen messiah of this god.

I'd enjoyed the webcomic immensley up until that point, but that reveal made me leery. They've handled the story very well since then and I'm confident now that I'll continue to enjoy it, but in that moment I saw a possibility for this to become the kind of religious story I cringe at. I have no problem with religious characters, but I would never go to the "Christian literature" section of a bookstore, because the kinds of stories they write just tend to rub me the wrong way.

All of that being a long way to reiterate, we all have our hang ups.

Now I'm reminded of the time I found out as an adult that the Chronicles of Narnia were intended as a Christian allegory (yes I realize in retrospect I am really clueless for not picking up on this as a kid, but I totally didn't).

Granted, it didn't really diminish my appreciation of the story that terribly much since it didn't change the story that terribly much, but it did go a long way towards finally explaining why I related to Edmund even though I knew he was a jerkass.

Well, in Edmunds defense there aren't any people who are "good guys" in CS Lewis's books without a fair number of redeeming qualities.

Edmund always struck me as a guy with a good heart and a bad attitude. Which is understandable, every once in a while everyone becomes convinced that their family sucks(because sometimes they do), doesn't make them bad people.

I know now, but as a kid you want to think you're a good person, so identifying with someone who's not always a good person is harder to wrap your head around when you're that age.

But it makes sense that someone who's inherently agnostic identified with the character in a Christian allegory written to be the atheist/skeptic even if I didn't consciously realize that's what I was doing at the time.

From the perspective of Christian allegory, I never felt like Edmund was supposed to specifically atheist/skeptic, but more so "just like us".  He (along with Lucy, I find) is the most "human" of the Pevensie children, because he's flawed.  Who cannot relate to having "once" done something mean to a friend/family member, even knowing it was wrong?  Especially if you had siblings growing up! lol.  (On a funny side note, every time The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe comes into greater attention, sales of turkish delight increase.  Apparently everyone wants to know what this treat is that's so good you would betray your siblings for it.)

And while we're deviating from Fanatic to discuss my favorite book series of all time, I cannot recommend the book Planet Narnia enough.  The allegory and symbollism is the Narnia books goes a lot deeper than simply "Aslan represents Jesus", with Lewis having each book communicate/feel like/demonstrate the principles of each one of the 7 planetary influences from Christian medieval theology/astrology.  It is an absolutely fascinating read.  As a word of warning though, the book is also the author's PHD thesis, so it's not exactly light reading.

All those poor, poor people…

Well, it seems like Edmund is meant to be the "Judas" figure, which definitely falls along those lines in a more sympathetic reading of his role.

It also kind of runs along the line of thinking: Even if God does exist, is He someone that is worthy of our worship? That's an angle that doesn't crop up in the debate often.

Also, as a kid who had hyperactivity and so my parents were advised to keep me from chocolate and sugar, I'm pretty sure I could empathize with betraying your siblings for basically any candy at all. :P

Really good Turkish delight is worth it, but also not easy to find.

Edmund was the Judas figure, or more appropriately, a Paul figure, going from the one that almost crushed everything good to probably the most influential human character in the series.

Susan was the skeptic.  

Edmund was C S Lewis himself abandoning Christianity only to return to it, strangely enough this makes Peter J R R Tolkien ,steadfast in his faith

Makes even more sense why I liked Edmund, then.

I'm forever feeling a tug between "I miss being Catholic" and "But I still don't believe in God".

I'm Irish, and I consider Catholicism to be part of my nature, even though I don't believe in God, I'm still a Catholic a very Irish paradox

I'm part Portuguese and part Irish, so I know that feel.

So it's this weird thing where my mom is totally OK with my being bisexual, but she complains now and then about my never making my Confirmation. #priorities

In the Apostate episode, Christopher explained that when they say Fanatic is the spirit of judgement, they don’t mean the word judgement in the sense of determining a person’s worth or good/evilness. They mean it to be a considered decision based on reason, what we have in mind when we say things like “judgement call.” This has me thinking differently about Fanatic as a character - and thinking that the environment she was raised in has a much bigger contribution to her character than maybe we’ve been thinking. It also suggests that she should be much more logical and rational than we’ve been giving her credit for.

Nothing says a judgement call can’t be rash.   Look at the event that created her a judgement to chase down something despite an oncoming vehicle.   I still overall have a better view of Fanatic between these two episodes than I did before.  

Yeah, being super religious isn't conducive to being rational or thought out, and that sort of logical character would likely come out closer to Parse in depiction. (Just instead of seeing flaws in things, the analysis would be more about coming to the correct decision/conclusion.)

FWIW, I got the impression from the [Apostate] episode that the spirit of judgement was inhabiting that girl to prevent her from running into traffic after a ball, but that the spirit just arrived a little too late.

No the spirit was in her body before the accident which killed the little girl.  This is the note WalkingTarget has from it

>

• Fanatic exists because the young girl died why Judgement was occupying her body, why was Judgement in that 6 year-old's body right then? The "judgement" involved at the moment was tied to an indecision that the girl had been facing about running into the street for whatever reason (Christopher's example is running to get a ball, but I can't tell if that's meant to be the canonical event), and Judgement was her making the decision.

This leaves me with the impression Judgement was there already as part of her decision to run onto the street. 

I agree that the Apostate episode cleared up somethings. Like, why she doesn't believe him about the Host. With the larger context of him telling a different story every single time, and the fact that he started with "I killed God and made you in my image" it's pretty understandable that she's going to dismiss his lies and his truths.

And it seems the only reason the Readers of Sentinel Comics know the Truth is because of the interaction between the Scholar and Apostate, and the discussion and events of that encounter could only work in the context of The Host being the truth. And, since I'm sure Fanatic and the Scholar  rarely sit down and chat, and even more rarely would that involve discussing Apostate, Fanatic has never gotten that outside confirmation that one of the ridiculous lies Apostate has spread is acutally truth.

You know, I realized today: Maybe we actually have seen Hellion?

Check out Voidsoul's art here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gtgames/sentinels-of-the-multiverse-oblivaeon/posts/1930705

I'd kinda assumed Voidsoul was warping Fanatic somehow, but what if that's Hellion?

I don't think so.

Think of how different Seraph and Apostate look in terms of clothes and equipment.

Hellion is a spirit of Chaos, I doubt she would look almost exactly like Fanatic in the same armor and with very similiar wings. Pretty sure our first impressions of Voidsoul attacking Fanatic are more accurate.

Sorry if this has already been talked about...things got hectic in here and I skipped most of the conversation ;P

If Fanatic's faith essentially causes things to happen, why is the Idolator bad? She firmly believes that he is good and she wants to follow his teachings. Wouldn't her powers shift his alignment to be good? Even when she finds out he's bad, she denies it at first...how is this different from her growing wings, for instance, haha?

He has pretty much become a vampire to a degree.  Instead of siphoning blood he is siphoning faith from people to extend his life.   Unlike Fanatic he was aware of what he was doing and subjugated a spirit of the Host into his staff to accomplish this.    Sounds like she spent a decent amount of time with him  and was convinced of having bad judgment about once he revealed more about himself.   At least from Fanatic’s persepctive he wasn’t redeemable and certainly after what she did he was overt about his bad intentions.   Overall, that sounds like a good follow up question as to why she found he couldn’t be saved.  

There are limits to power, and I would not be surprised that Fanatic's power of belief is limited to herself and the inanimate world around her.

Altering the very nature of the person or mind of the person you are dealing with is far more power than Fanatic as any right to have, especially since, as a Spirit of Judgement, altering people  to fit within the laws is outside of her realm and make no sense. You can't judge anyone if all you do is literally force them to change into something which fits with the ideals and laws you uphold.

Plus that would make her insanely evil.

As to why Idolater is irredeemable.

There is the obvious in the selfishness and willingness to use evil magic, but I think there is another side we don't see. First off, we don't know what tips Fanatic off, her and the Idolater are friends for a time after all, but also nothing good ever comes from extracting thngs from other people.

What does extracting someone's Faith do to them? Is he even extracting their Faith, or is he using their faith to extract life energy? Whatever the ansers are, it was not a benign system, those people he was feeding off of were getting harmed in the proccess, guarenteed, and using you position in the church to harm innocents with dark magic for the sole purpose of extending your life? Yeah, not going just goig to get a talking to for something like that, plus she felt betrayed by him, because he seemed like a good man who was doing God's work and succeeding, only to find out he was as bad as they come.

Yeah, her "faith makes things happen" power doesn't appear to be an "anything goes, she can warp all reality" thing. The only things we've seen her doing stem from herself -- she can affect herself, or create effects starting from herself and pouring out. She can't seem to just will the world around her to change to how she sees fit.

I disagree with that, I think she willed her sword and armour into existence , which means she can affect stuff outside her body at least a little.

Manipulating inanimate matter is on a different level and scale to changing a person's nature and the effect he's having on reality.

You are 100% right , just because she can turn metal into a sword doesn't mean she can affect minds , don't know why I never saw that before

I don't think she willed them into existence.

She found armor and a sword in the catacombs, this is not that unusual considering that there were lots of suits of armor and swords from the Conquistadors and other groups.

She may have altered them to appear as Templar artifacts before she "found them", and she defintely later altered their power and their appearance later, but I think she has to start from some base and then alter that base. I don't think she can just will matter into existence, though she can remake matter to a degree, and that is entirely accidental as well, otherwise she would use it a lot more often, such as recreating Absolution after it shattered, which she does not do.

There's also the fact that Fanatic inadvertently put a limiter on herself mentaly, so she may be even more powerful and have more abilities than she realizes.

Unconsciously changing conquistadors era armour and sword into Templars era armour and sword is still an ability to affect stuff outside herself . I agree that this is done unknowingly by Fanatic. She can't repair Absolution because she saw it break and thinks it's a relic.

Fanatic is limited by what she thinks her powers are, If she thought she was more powerful she would be

I think Fanatic’s power most involve some conscious expenditure of effort, rather than just whatever she believes becoming true. Think about if she ever played a shell game…

Tachyon, practicing: “Guess which cup the ball is under!”

Fanatic: “I followed it the entire time. I know it’s under this one.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know it.”

“Well, I think you’re in for a bit of a - HEY!”

This phenomenon could mean that any time Helena is tricked into believing something, or mistakenly believes something, it manifests as true. My theory is that she has to really fully internalize a belief for her powers to kick in. This is a reason why her vehicle for invoking her power is all couched in prayer and meditation.

I think Fanatics subconscious mind has power, more than her conscious mind. She subconsciously grew wings , reshaped her armour and etched writing into her sword (Although perhaps some of this was done in a fugue state)

Her subconscious also limits her power , she can't do what she thinks is outside an angels remit .

I agree that prayer is important for her, while she empties her mind, it allows her subconscious to work

She doesn't do what she doesn't believe she can do.

That doesn't mean she can't.  Imagine one of us has the ability to fly if we reach terminal velocity.  The likelihood of us ever finding out we have that power is ridiculously low, because not many are going to go do things to reach that speed, nor are we going to try to fly once we get there.  We don't even try, because we don't believe we can.

Fanatic believes she is an angel (or something like it), and her use of her powers fits that belief.  She doesn't do things that she doesn't believe she can, probably because she doesn't think to try.  Maybe she can teleport, or change bodies, or cheat at cards, but those things aren't things she tries to do, because they don't fit what she believes she can do.

Essentially, as I understand it, inside her head she has a Fanatic box that contains her purpose and powers.  Her faith has been tested, resulting in using the powers she knows she has differently, her purpose and methods seem to have alterred slightly, but the powers she hasn't gone outside the box, she isn't testing what she can do, she's acting as if she has a certain set of powers, she might push those powers farther and find she can do those things more powerfully,, but she isn't trying to go outside the box and do things she doesn't believe she can.

And, I'd like to add to Phantaskippy's point by pointing out that we have other characters we know of who this applies to.

Paul Parsons the whatever, who fought in the Civil War thought he did not gain any new powers, because his power was subtle (comparitively) and didn't activate until he got shot with a cannon. He didn't know he could survive that, so he never tried to use that ability, but later Parsons knew and could rely on it.

Also, Fanatic does sometimes do something towards the opposite. There are many times she's doing something very different from what she thinks she's doing, because the effect is so similiar.

Actually, the more I think on it, the more I feel like Fanatic's stories are written as if she was correct about her origins, but the Host story exists for the arger multiverse to make sense of her and her abilities. At least, at an editorial level.

Didn't C and A outright say that the host stuff was added in later by different writers to give her a rogues gallery and integrate her more smoothly into the larger universe ? Therefore her early comics are written as if she is right

It's in the Apostate episode starting around 28:37. They did come up with the Host explanation very quickly, though, but we don't know exactly how early that was and we don't know if this was actually different writers than her creators (all of the pronouns and other specific wording imply a group effort, though, so non-creators' input seems likely to me).

Aight, so in Editor's Notes #11, we learned that Fanatic cannot change other people with her powers of belief, which is why her belief that the Idolator is a good person does not make him so. She can only affect herself and physical objects. But that still leaves me wondering if somebody tricks Fanatic, if her powers cause the world to become as she's been tricked into believing. I mean, suppose, oh, Baron Blade goes and builds a bunch of really convincing Baron Blade-Bots. If Fanatic encounters one, and thinks it really is Baron Blade, will that bot start to act more like Blade? I mean, it won't turn into him, but it might become more devious and conniving and Legacy-hating.

From their phrasing I suspect that Fanatic can only alter objects that she considers to be hers.

They're pretty clear on the limitations of her powers -- she affects herself almost exclusiely, and the only other things she alters are things like her armor and sword, which she is constant contact with.

So I think any question along the lines of, "If she thinks person is X, will they be more X?" is going to be a no.

I’m not thinking of her changing a person, that was clearly ruled out. But the other conditions we know of could still be worked around to trick her in some way.

If that was the case then Apostate would have her as an underling in their initial confrontation.

I think you're still misunderstanding -- her powers don't "cause the world to become." They don't cause the world to do anything. They cause herself (and objects that are effectively extensions of herself) to be and do things.

I thought I heard C&A say that Fanatic’s powers affect “herself” and “physical objects in contact with her.” Also definitely key to her abilities is that she has to actually believe in the transformed state of things - so I 100% agree that she doesn’t transform into one of Apostate’s minions, because she doesn’t really believe she is one.

We also know that she doesn’t require extended contract with things she transforms, and they don’t have to be things that belong to her. What she does in Consecrated Ground is get herself to believe that the graveyard is holy and Apostate won’t be able to draw on the corpses any more, and so it becomes that way. But she doesn’t OWN the graveyard, and she wasn’t there for a long time.

It's not that she just believed the graveyard was supposed to be holy, therefore it was holy. It's that she believed  she  was capable of consecrating something, and doing it. That wasn't her power changing the world around her as she believed it to be; it was that she generated power in herself, then directed that power outwardly in a conscious and deliberate act.

It's like any of her attacks – the Idolator doesn't have a cross scarred into his face because Fanatic just believed he was supposed to; he has a scar because she generated cross-shaped power in herself and projected it at him. Apostate doesn't have a big scar because she believed he's supposed to be that way; he has a big scar because she sworded the crap out of him.

So it's not an example of the world spontaneously changing to fit what she believes; it's an example of her deliberately exercising her power through herself to create change.

So I guess what I'm saying is...

Would a Blade Bot start acting more Baron Bladey just because Fanatic believed it was the real thing? No.

But if Fanatic for whatever reason thought that she had the power to put, I dunno, some holy spirit into the 'bot with the intent of giving it life? She might be able to do that.

The discussion of what type of encounters are inappropriate for Fanatic makes me really want to read a fully written out story of Fanatic trying to take down the Organization in Rook City. The hopeless slog of trying to put down infinite criminals and never making a difference, as stated in the Dark Watch, Fixer, and Chairman episodes (any or all of these), it’s like the exact polar opposite of Helena’s vibe. These are all humans, they’re making bad life choices in a situation without really good ones, and her desire to just kill bad guys would really threaten her own soul and virtues…it could be super cool if written properly.

On a lighter note, the definitive answer of “there is or is not a God in SC” would be great to touch on in a quantum physics inspired battle between Fanatic and Antimox, titled “Superposition”.

Episode 252, June 2023 if you haven’t gotten there yet. About as complete a Fanatic v. Organization story we’re gonna get.

Definitely haven’t gotten there, not even close. The newest episode I listened to, not counting the recent exception, probably wasn’t even in 23, since that’s when my house burned down, and I quit Sentinels completely for over two years.