Episode #181 - Writers’ Room: Disparation Vol. 2 #119 (Freedom Five 1776!)

Let’s get patriotic! waves old skool Betsy Ross flag

I am really down with this team. I actually like how difficult it was for them to get to the end of the path they’d laid for themselves, and how stoked they were when they got there.

Major kudos to Elias Swift for getting C&A to talk about Kamen Rider on the air.

The “clockwork sun” bit was top tier. XD

Oh, excellent! Doctor B asked a question that’s been burning on my mind for months now. The DEI, eh? I’ve got a plot for the RPG now!

The lack of cover only makes me more excited for it.

I mean… the Unity/Bunker is only SLIGHTLY less crazy awesome than the actual French people that came over to fight. I mean, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier had a long family history of trouble making and badass-ness.

Also, plate armor totally works. It was developed in response to bullets, so having one that has some special metallurgy that keeps it bullet-proof even after the 1500s isn’t much of a stretch for super-hero physics.

I like how they did the 1776, overall. I can see an alternate universe based on that in the same groove as Marvel 1602.

Alex Ross-style Sentinels art would be AWESOME.

It certainly would, OddballPaladin.

I’m disappointed to realize that even the brand-new episodes can’t have comments placed on them. I was previously assuming that the “adding comments is not available” text was related to them being too far in the past.

EDIT: I can’t believe they invented a Bunker-equivalent character who totes a cannon around, and didn’t think to call it “L’Omni-Cannon”.

Justifier: Can’t have comments placed on the Libsyn page, you mean?

Probably because it’s much easier for them to funnel comments to places they already have established communities and moderators.

I’m a bit surprised that C&A didn’t notice that they’d successfully referenced seven members of the Freedom Five (plus Unity) in their Freedom Four!

First, obviously, Legacy. They discussed the Tachyon elements in Meredith Montgomery, making her both Tachyon and the Wraith. And L’Unité was both Bunker and Unity in a new, fancy cannon.

But Icebear is also two different people. He’s got the cold powers and standoffish attitude of Absolute Zero, but he’s also a member of an Indigenous nation who was abandoned by his people after they thought he died, and now he’s a loner who travels with others temporarily but has no people to call his own while being a big bear of a guy. He’s Absolute Zero and Haka, bringing in another founding Freedom Five member!

If only there’d been a way to fit the Shrieker in there…

Well the Tachyon element of Meredith Montgomery was basically just her name; I think it was the right call not to try and do a speedster in the past, since that’s inherently a very modern-feeling power (speed of transit is one of the things, akin to computing power, that has just steadily gone up and up and up since the relevant technologies first appeared). And the Haka connection for Ice Bear is a stretch, but I agree that it’s a cool stretch.

Adam finished up the cover! https://twitter.com/GtGAdam/status/1413240463432339457

Very nice! The circle of stars replacing the O was a nice touch. No hint of the ice on Tataki Maasq, but he does look almost identical to Haka apart from the Ta Moko, so I’m guessing that the allusion someone drew earlier was intentional, or else Adam read it and decided to lean into it. L’unite looks properly ridiculous, and it’s good that the art doesn’t focus on him too much. Overall quite a good painting.

He has the ice bear claws (edit: and also little ice patches on his arms and face). More apparent if you open the image in its own tab and expand it to its raw big size.

Totally didn’t even see the Wraith until I did this. Then again, that’s kind of the character’s schtick.

Yeah, I love how relatively inconspicuous she is.

Now, has anyone noticed that no one is actually propelling the boat?

There’s probably a little outboard trolling motor off-panel going buddabuddabudda.

(Don’t think about it too hard.)

Aside: Now that I look even closer, Ice Bear actually has little ice crust spots all over his exposed arms.

That’s a great cover. A funny thing about doing Washington crossing the Delaware is that that historical event took place right about at the fictional location of Rook City.

Source? I earlier posited in one of my Justifications (the one about Lilian Corvus, which was nearly destroyed, and can easily be spotted because all of its text is highlighted in pink for some reason) that RC had to be somewhere in the American Southwest, because how else could there be vultures nearby. But I’m neither a geographer nor an ornithologist, so feel free to correct me on this one.

FWIW Rook City is in Pennsylvania and Megalopolis is in Connecticut.

Connecticut I knew from a podcast episode, but I’ve not heard any explicit statement on RC.

It was initially said by Adam to someone at a PAX Unplugged event then confirmed on air in later podcast episodes.

In Publisher’s Note #3 for instance:

• A recent conversation about the location of Megalopolis brought to mind the fact that the location of Rook City has been discussed, but not in the podcast; the rumor mill placed it in Pennsylvania - given its industrial background and other similarities, is it a fictional stand-in for Pittsburgh? Christopher’s response is to just show us the Google Maps overlay they’d put together for it. We have permission to share screenshots, so here is my quick and dirty collection of images. Rather than being a Pittsburgh stand-in, it’s right on the border with New Jersey (with some locations technically being in NJ) on the Delaware River near the real-life locations of Levittown, PA and Trenton, NJ. Similar maps exist for both Megalopolis and Mordengrad, but we don’t see them today. [A later question asks what software was used to generate the map - it’s just done within Google Maps.]

Hm, this is what I get for skipping the Publishers’ Notes. So, no addressing of the vultures thing?

She’s a girl with magical control over all birds.

Yup, that’s it right there! Washington crossed the Delaware to fight the Battle of Trenton.

Also, there are turkey vultures in the Northeast.

True, but with the exception of one card in the Harpy’s deck, which is much later in her career after she explicitly starts learning Nightmist-style magic, all of what we see from her Matriarch phase gives no indication that she’s gating birds in from miles away; the power of the Mask seems only to send out a psychic call to all birds which are within flying distance to come fry to the wearer’s location. This is admittedly not made clear at all, but in general my policy is to assume that a superpower/paranormal-phenomenon/etc. doesn’t exist unless it’s explicitly demonstrated to. When all we see is a bunch of birds gathering around the Matriarch, my assumption is that they were already close by.

Okay, I didn’t know that. Is the one shown in the card actually a turkey vulture?

My policy is that unless a given unusual discrepancy makes a plot become completely unworkable or it would add something particularly interesting to either the plot or a character to explain the discrepancy, I’m highly likely to apply the MST3K Mantra than worry about it.

It would be really funny if the whole reason Voss was in Champion Studios at the beginning of OblivAeon is that the Oracle of Discord showed him that the secret of Earths tremendously powerful mages and superheroes was the stories of heroism and fantasy that we tell ourselves. So the Oracle essentially shows him a movie, which is about the power of movies, and so he makes his secret base in a movie studio, but does nothing having to do with movies while he’s there.

(This is the wrong topic, I wanted Episode 119, but I think the comment works for a Disparation issue in general.)

PS: I’m also The Dogged Ted Doggett. Two weeks in a row! I must have been on cloud 9 that summer.