Ep 39 of the Letters Page featuring chill dude The Scholar

No lies this time just go here http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/episode-39-the-scholar

That's just like, your opinion man.

I’m only about 45 minutes in, but they were wrong.

How backstory isn’t merely sad. It’s TERRIFYING.

Just got through it.

Wow, there's a lot of stuff there. Not necessarily story revelations (though there are some) but a lot of filling in gaps.

Dude.  Not cool, dude.  Very un-Dude.

But, in all seriousness...poor dude. :(

Meh.

A chance to try something else with all the life experiences you've already gained? Losing your place is the world is bad, but I'd take that over death.

I have to say, this was incredibly sad.

Not in the way of crying or depression, just a very melancholy tale of a man who lost everything, and continued doing what he had always done while the world went on without him.

Does anyone else though feel like that bit about Alaska is important? That feels important to me. Cause, wasn't Dawn also born in Alaska?

Edit: Canada, right, still "The Far North" and Churchill, Manitoba on the opposite end of that section of land.

I still would prefer Christopher and Adam do an overview where they go over what they feel are major plot points and then go to questions.  The episode seems so disjointed due to that. 

They said this episode was going to be happy! D: THEY LIED! They were all, "An episode where a hero dies! We'll say it's happy! NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!"

I mean, come on, they never lie. :V

#NothingCanStopTheSchmude

#LetChristopherParty

Sad as it was, I feel like they were pretty thorough with this one, and now I'm super-excited for Guise's episode. I mean, it all comes down to the question of, Scholar made this excellent heroic sacrifice (better than dying in a hospital of a brain tumor or running until all your bones break <.<), but what Guise worth the sacrifice?

The Scholar seemed to think so.

I still would prefer Christopher and Adam do an overview where they go over what they feel are major plot points and then go to questions. The episode seems so disjointed due to that.

Not to worry! This will not be the standard format going forward. Just trying out something different because of the questions we got and the (un)naturally disjointed nature of The Scholar's story.

Thanks.  I still enjoy listening but the story overview is the part I like the most.  Questions fill in gaps is how I see it.  

I don’t need to follow that link to know that it goes to the Dover Boys clip.

I’LL STEAL IT! NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!

The more they tell us stuff about Biomancer in the Letters Page eps, the more I end up really, really, really wanting a Biomancer LP episode. I'M JUST SAYING, GENTLEMEN.

Ahem.

As for Scholar's backstory being sad/horrifying, I think it honestly depends on what sort of life you've led and thus are looking at it from. If you're someone whose life is one of infamy or misery or ostracization or mistakes or so on, you'd obviously relish the idea of getting to start over with a clean slate. But if you're like Scholar and you actually were pretty darn happy with the life you had built up, you're going to feel a lot more miserable about the whole matter.

Plus it's gotta be seriously crazy-inducing when it first happens, going around frantically trying to get everyone you know to actually remember you and not being able to accomplish it.

In general, yeah, this was kind of a sad episode, for a character who didn't deserve sadness. Poor Scholar. :( Really it seems like every mortal person except Argent who has any encounter with the Void comes out of it severely worse for wear in the end.

P.S. I admit I laughed quite a bit at the whole "I'm going to go lay in my backyard in the grass in the dark and just wait for it to end" exchange at the start of the ep because I am a terrible human being with a really morbid sense of humor I'm sorry.

I'm going to second that call for the Biomancer episode, and add in a call for a Zhu Long ep.

These two are major villainous players that are (presumably) still existant in a post-OblivAeon Sentinels scenario.  They may not have any particularly large storylines, a la Blade, Dawn, or Voss, but their hands seem to be in everything...and I want to hear the whole story!

I would be surprised if there wasn't a Biomancer episode. Zhu Long would be a good candidate for an extra one, though!

More like because it was hilarious! Christopher and Adam have a 'good cop, bad cop' thing going on, except it's more like "bad cop, worse cop", and it's hard to say who's who at any given time. ;D

@PlatinumWarlock: Yeah, not only is Biomancer delightfully creepy to hear about in his own right, but it increasingly seems like he's had his creepy fingers in pretty much everything in the timespan that mortals in the Sentinelsverse would care about on top of it. It makes me incredibly curious.

Also, I dunno, I find a certain morbid hilarity in how Biomancer just accidentally created a powerful hero by being really careless about where he tosses his failed experiments, and then getting really pissed off and envious that Scholar actually fixed that failed experiment. It's like some kind of really bizarre laser guided karma.

@TakeWalker: It was the whole "...I meant for the party to end" but Christopher had actually been totally willing to just roll with the dark interpretation anyway that made me giggle. And yeah, they both have pretty dark senses of humor which I 100% approve of.

Two things I found strange this episode :

1) C & A calling the university the scholar went to old , being founded in the nineteenth century makes a university young really

2) The Scholar selling tinctures , which are alcoholic extracts , wouldn't he as a science minded pharmacist use more advanced techniques to distinguish himself from snake oil salesmen

Not all tinctures are necessarily heavily alcoholic and considering the timeframe I don’t believe it would be that uncommon to sell tinctures.   Lastly, they just really like saying tinctures.  

Your probably right about the timeframe  - I don't know enough about the history of pharmacology to know what exactly they used.

Tincture is a fun word to say though it's quite an old timey word even though it has a definite meaning in modern day chemistry

I went to a high school in the US that has existed in some form since 1850, so yeah, I admit that something still existing since the 1830s is still impressive but not that unusual for me.

Also I forgot to give props for another episode giving us Adam's lovely old timey radio announcer voice.

Towards point one, I know people in Europe and other such places may be used to things that are 600 or more years old, but personally, I find a school that was operating 200 years ago and is still in operation within the same field, fairly impressive for America.

We tend to reuse old buildings after we've built newer ones, so we don't have a lot of places still doing the same thing they did a century or two ago.

Something I found strange, the focus on the expedition to Alaska. That seems notable to me, so I asked a question about potential "power source for oddness" in that direction.

Also… there's no way Joseph King is a descendant of Charles is there? I mean, that would be a bit too odd, right?

Is it just me or does biomancer seam to be a dark foil to the scholar?  Both seam to be characters who do most of their work subtlely and avoid the lime-light.

I'm just glad Scholar didn't run into a bunch of malformed mistakes of misused magic while getting the stone. Guess Biomancer just dumps them in different places.

@kitmehsu: Also Scholar learns all the information he can because it lets him help people better, while Biomancer learns stuff for his own selfish purposes.

I do like that Scholar's arguably the most heroic hero so far, in that he's so focused on helping people that he even tries to rehabilitate the bad guys.

@Princess Cool: Could be that not all of Biomancer's flawed prototypes warp leylines. Dude's probably got lots of weird stuff he's dabbled in.

To be fair, if one character was going to have an overview that short, it would be The Scholar.

I do agree with Powerhound though that I generally prefer episodes that give you a strong overview of the character and then use the Q&A section to flesh out details from the overview, rather than having an overview with key sections of the character arc missing because someone asks a cool question. Something more like the earlier episodes, rather than the latter, but there's  probably a balance somewhere between those two ideas.

On an unrelated note, as much as I love The Scholar and am very sad to see him gone from the future of Sentinel Comics, I really think the act of sacrificing himself in order to save Guise is sincerely one of my favorite moments from the game. The incap art from the foil pack of Scholar of the Infinite is probably my favorite art in the game right now.

I do find it funny  that this episode was almost entirely questions, yet almost entirely devoid of meta-plot.

That said, I'm guessing that the Guise episode will more than make up for that.

It'll definately be absolute chaos, I wrote my questions directed at Guise, because I assume they'll have someone playing Guise in the studio.

I had this really strong mental image of the just-created Scholar meeting his wife and trying to prove who he is with things only he could know -- "Do you remember the night I asked you to marry me?  I said--" and so on -- as she gets increasingly distressed until she pulls out a shotgun and tells him something along the lines of "I don't know how you're doing that, but you need to leave me and my family alone right now!"

Like, not so much that she even doesn't believe him, but the cognative dissonance gets worse the longer they're talking... she KNOWS her husband is dead, but her memories are all messy and distorted, and being forced to face that is incredibly uncomfortable, and ultimately it's easier to make the problem just go away than to figure out why it's happening.

You mean they'll actually have Guise in the studio. :V

I'm also looking forward to the Wager Master episode, because Christopher is going to keep doing that voice. :D

He might do it a bit but even he sounds annoyed with himself for doing that voice. 

@Escher: Yeah, that's the part of the situation that was horrifying for me, because I can just imagine how much it would drive both sides of the matter crazy and hurt them. After that it kinda goes to just being really sad. It's gotta be like being a ghost except you're actually still living.

@TakeWaker: Now you got me trying to remember how many "character voices" we've heard from C&A. We've got Adam's old-timey radio announcer voice which I still would make a pretty good Grandpa Legacy. We have Christopher doing Wager Master now and then, and now Argent from the Boards Alive podcast.

@Powerhound: Thing is, Wager Master is supposed to be annoying, so that's all right...

Wager Master may be annoying but unless they plan a whole episode with Adam in his old timey radio voice then the Wager Master episode should not consist of Christopher doing his Wager Master voice.  

Am I the only one expecting them to record an entire episode, then have Guise record all of their dialog as them?

Guise doing Adam's voice doing the Old-Timey radio voice. 

I would definitely be down for an episode consisting mostly of Adam’s old timey radio voice. In fact, I had been thinking just before this episode that it had been too long since we had heard it, so I was very pleased!

Are you folks able to tell the difference between Adam's old-timey radio voice and mine? We both did them in The Scholar's episode. Personally, I prefer Adam's. He nails it.

I can.  I think both are good but Adam’s is better.  

I think you should talk to Alex Hirsch and have him play Wager Master. In my headcanon, he and Bill Cipher are the same entity.

Wager Master has like 12 voices at this point. I imagine he can change it at will and does so for the sake of a gag or bit.

He still comments how he is annoyed doing those voices each time.  I fully expect he’ll do more of those voices but I sincerely doubt Christopher will keep it up all episode long.  

That's why it's great

I do wonder why they didn’t do any RP questions this time–no Cult of Gloom, no Fleshchildren, no Animalverse. I’m sure they got some (I wrote one myself). Was it because none of them had good questions or because they wanted to keep this episode more grounded? Or are they shifting away from all that as a matter of policy?

I suspect that it was simply that they liked other questions better.  It is possible that they avoided them due to the already disjointed nature of this episode, but I doubt that they want to shift away permanently.  They've expressed delight at our antics before, and I think that we've been finding a happy medium since the peak a few weeks back that started to generate backlash.

And there were role-played characters in there - just not any of the really big names.

Actually, I just realized they never finished the story of Scholar in that Caribbean dictatorship with Apostate. :B I guess he defused the nuke situation after Appy left, but what about the problems that were already there?

Well there doesn't appear to have been a nuclear war in the world of Sentinel comics, so I presume things worked out.

And yeah, I'm a little surprised there wasn't anything from the Biomancer fleshchildren at the least, given the nemesis status.

Keep a paper towel tube in the recording room so the next time either of you do the old-timey radio voice you can talk through it. Then the illusion will be complete.

I was drinking tea when I read this. You  almost owed me a new keyboard.

(But yes.)

I'm SUPER looking forward to the Guise episode now.

After the several sad ones we've had, I need a fun episode.

It seems like it should be more humorous but I’m questioning how happy it ends after Scholar sacrifices himself.  

This is gonna be the darkest one yet. I just know it.

If I can go to Adam's party, (which I can't, but just for fun,) can any of you pick me up at the >Games warehouse? I'll be inside it, pocketing a copy of Oblivaeon (don't worry, I'll leave $50, I just didn't have money when the kickstarter happened), and I could really use a ride to wherever the party is. PM me now with what you look like, and what time you'll be there, because you won't be able to find me. Why? Because I've found I'm too stealthy for anyone to see with this new Guy Wraith costume I made. Thanks in advance!

I was about to say the same thing.

Also, I wonder if Guise feels frustrated as a hero. Like he really tries, but he can't seem to make the impact he wants to

"The difference between America and England is, the English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time."

Is it..

can it be..

can has Guise tiem yet?