Episode 209 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Justice Comics #503

A story about the Blue Bomber I mean friendly iteration of the a rampaging robot.

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So would that be a Machinus ex Machina? I never really learned Latin. :B

Never really considered that there would have to be two different Omnitrons-X. I can’t remember if they’ve discussed this before, but it’s one of those small details I’m apt to forget.

I don’t get the “any Parsons” joke, I suspect that’s a Real Comics reference? c.c

Ah yes, as my friend likes to say, just because it happened doesn’t mean it’s possible. :3

The sheer disgust at “pages of word bubbles”. XD

Sudden ridiculous backstory for the Time-Crazed Prisoner is one of those things you just end up being here for without ever knowing it was going to happen, C&A included.

“Am I a person or am I a toaster? Those are the only two options.” Or you can be SCP-426 and be both!

Yaknow, in all seriousness, this question of the difference between thinking one can experience love and actually loving is something I have actually struggled with in regards to myself? I am no better than this robot, let Omnitron love! (Christopher really flexing the philosophical muscles here.)

Hope that cover shows up today! :B

Flexible robotic arms are generally referred to as “Waldoes”.

Cover art posted.

I was thinking of Muerto, but on further consideration he’s less person and more ghost.

There’s haunted bread in your neighborhood - who ya gonna call? Ghost Toaster!

This episode definitely made my day! And it was already pretty good to begin with!

I kind of want to point at this to C&A and say, “more of this, please!”

More of what, them reading your letters? Good luck, buddy…

Nah, that was just a pleasant surprise. They don’t owe me anything in terms of reading what I send in.

I just love hearing their over-the-top stories like this! Especially when they get as passionate and excited as they clearly were during this. And when they draw new connections to things never before explained! We’re living in exciting times for Sentinels Comics.

Interesting. I didn’t find this episode particularly engaging at all; while it was interesting that they had left the TCP as a blank this whole time and finally filled him in, I didn’t really love the result, and otherwise it felt very much like they were trying to figure out how to do more with a character that simply wasn’t allowed to do very much in the canon. Last week’s episode was light-years better IMO; this one was just “an episode” to me, not bad certainly, but nothing special either.

from this I see where they could go with Omnitron X variants-
First appearance- “I have come to Singularity to perform a heroic sacrifice”
Base- “A battle with free Radical left me in this timeline no longer moving towards Singularity”
“Pop In” - “I am moving back toward Singularity, but there is so much I could do before then. (I do not want to die)”
Omnitron-U- “Devra, I am your friend”

We have been told that Haunted Fanatic has an incap action that lets her reset as a different variant what if Omnitron X does that too?
First Appearance Omnitron X died in his 2nd comic and then we get the latter/earlier “real” character of Omnitron X

So the question of souls is back! And you know what, my opinion on the matter has changed since last time!
I still think that Omnitron-X is a person as soon as they appear in comics. Robot or not, their personhood is not in doubt. In the real world, or a world where the only fantastic element was robots, that would be enough for me to say that Omni-X has as much of a soul as I do.
However!
Thanks to our new Æternus-powered superhero and their story, we know that souls in the multiverse have a certain amount of metaphysical weight to them, and that they help one to connect with others emotionally. We also know that humans have them, and demons don’t. We don’t know where they come from or why.
On that basis, I’d say that Omnitron-X definitely does not have a soul at any point. They have an empathy chip which helps them to feel for other brings, but I don’t think that’s quite the same. On balance, I’d probably say Omnitron-U doesn’t either - but I do think it’s more fun if it does, either having one at its rebirth, or developing one over time somehow. Purely for the idea of a story in which magic stuff happens and Soul Power is important, everyone assumes Omni-U can’t help (because they know they don’t have one), and then in the pivotal moment it turns out they have one after all! And suddenly everyone is questioning everything they thought they knew about how souls work!

(Also I love the idea of Omni-X and Unity doing a Groundhog Day plot - it’s a great trope and they would be very fun with it. My only problem is, I don’t know what villain they’d be facing, who would somehow incite the time loop!)

Wager Master?

Better call Black Fist! He’s the resident expert on soul power!

As far as the Groundhog Day story, ¿Por qué no La Capitán? She’s pretty good at screwing up time. It’s definitely one I want to hear, even though the holiday falls on a Thursday next year (not recording or release day). Maybe the Discord folks will bring it back up.

I don’t think there even needs to be a villain. It could easily be Unity “fixing” Omnitron’s Chronal Doohickey, and repeats occur.

One thing I find very interesting about the Groundhog idea is that C&A couldn’t agree on which one remembers the loop, and my answer is that it’s most interesting if it’s one of them, THEN the other.

There’s an episode of Star Trek Voyager where the ship gets temporally messed up, and First Officer Chakotay is the only one who has a device that lets him pass from one of the time-displaced areas to another; he has one other such device that he can bestow on someone, and he picks the version of Captain Janeway from the past, so most of the episode is him telling her all about what’s been happening on the ship for the past seven years. She’s the one in command, yet he’s the one who has the experience and understanding to explain things to her; I really like that energy. If Chakotay had been taken out halfway through the episode, and Past-Janeway now had to recruit Past-Chakotay to complete the same mission that Future-Chakotay had set her on, which she is now the expert on and has to explain it to Past-Chakotay…that’s the kind of a story I’m envisioning here.

The only problem is that it makes the most sense from a technology standpoint to start with Unity in the loop, because she was repairing the chrono-module and it bathed her in chronotons, so she remembers the loop up until she finally installs it in O-X, whereupon it begins remembering the loop and she no longer does. But that inverts the Janeway/Chakotay dynamic, because Unity is clearly the “boss” of O-X; in order to have the same dynamic, it would have to be O-X who initially starts looping before transferring it to her, and in that case I don’t quite know how to technobabble the scenario.

What a fun episode. I was not expecting the Free Radical, and now I’m wondering if he’s around in the RPG era. Was he still in the Block when it went walkabout, and if so, did that restore his abilities?

I definitely did not remember that, and it completely threw me. Somehow, I thought that Omnitron-X’s self-destruct in Singularity was what destroyed its ability to move through time, and that the robot itself survived that event to become a regular.

That would be neat! It would take some work to make it both balanced and interesting, but it would be cool. Something where people get rid of Item or Golem cards in order to flip it to Omnitron-U?

I’d say the main reason Haunted Fanatic has an incap ability like that is because she’s got such low health and the reason she does is because she does more with various cards when at low health. While I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question, without knowing for sure how the Omnitron X deck works it may make sense to do.

Yeah, I definitely thought the Omnitron-X plot was similar to Visionary’s - come back in time to save the world, then staying here and maintaining the fight. This episode made it sound more like Chrono-Ranger, and I didn’t think Omni’s powers worked that way! I’ve sent in a question about it, so hopefully we’ll find out if this is a retcon, a mistake, or what.

Given how familiar this sounds, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was at least implied by the early OX lore, and they figured out exactly what happened later on.

I don’t remember if it was in the Omnitron episode or a later Editor’s Note or something, but I do remember them mentioning there was a difference between Visionary and Omni-X using time travel. Visionary does it once and then never again, while Omni-X uses small amounts of time manipulation regularly, which is why he has the card “Slip Through Time” in his deck but Visionary doesn’t have a similar card.

Or the DS9 episode where Miles gets jumped back and forth in time, and actually switches with a different instance with him because a method for controlling the jumps ends up poisoning him. (“Wait… if you’re me from the past… and you’re sick… how am I not sick?” both: “I hate temporal mechanics.”)

On the other hand, a double Groundhog Day loop like that one episode of Stargate SG-1, would be pretty cool.

My wife is Jewish, and this weekend Passover begins. The conversation about whether Omni is Jewish is a very interesting discussion, and mirrors the various discussions my mother-in-law and I (an Episcopalian preacher’s kid) have about various theological topics. Usually it’s about how various rituals and traditions came around and got started (look up what is considered Kosher for Passover between Ashkenazi and Sephardic sects).

Personally, I think Omni probably had a soul before Omni-U came about. If for no other reason than I think the battle in Onmi-4, the Omni-X’s sense of self is a key part of his/their survival. But it may be that Omni doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t see the point of the discussion until after. Like… that’s part of the “I am your friend” part. I like the line “you ARE a soul, you HAVE a body,” personally, and I think that it’s something that Omni developed.

This might be related to the idea of Omni working with magic-based troubles. Maybe in addition to being a library and having a lot of parallels with Soothsayer, it’s show that certain magic/psychic effects over a long time start to have more of an effect on Omni, to show that they start out as a machine, and eventually “grow” a soul.

Given that robotic technology is getting fairly advanced here in the real world, with AI experiments being done regularly, the question of whether a robot can be Jewish is not as ridiculously theoretical as it might initially seem. To avoid controversy, I’ll say no more than that.

I never thought it ridiculous… If nothing else, the ins and outs of what can be used/handled during Passover are… odd, and I imagine with increased automation in domestic applications, the question is very pertinent.

A story I’ve been told is that in the more Orthodox communities, the elevators are set to stop at every floor automatically on the Sabbath, so the “work” of pushing the buttons is not needed to get from floor to floor. Then I saw a number of discussions on whether a dragon’s fire is considered “cooking,” and apparently the answer depends on whether the dragon has to decide to breathe fire, or whether it’s an automatic thing…

Okay, the elevator thing makes a bit of sense, but the discussion of dragons is not exactly disproving my “ridiculous” point.

We’re on the “Lore” forum for a card game, having a chat about the metaphysics present in a non-existent superhero comic. “Ridiculous” might not be the stone we want to throw from this particular glass house.

I’m a fantasy writer that world-builds magic systems on an annual basis (NaNoWriMo!). I’ve debated things with my writing group like the strengths/weaknesses/limitations of magic tattoos, the ecology of kaiju in stasis so long they accrete rock and soil, and having a blood magic ritual that increases the range of a hyperdrive, unknown to the people that reverse engineered it thinking the ritual components were part of the system.

This is an old hat for me.

I fundamentally disagree. Humanity has been telling stories since the dawn of time; mythology is just as crucial to our psychological functioning as the love of our families, or our capacity to organize into nations. Making sure that our stories are quality ones is just as important as making sure that our food is both nutritious and flavorful.

I think it’s a bit much to be calling stories intended for the sole purpose of entertainment “mythology”. And there’s a fine line between critiquing stories and searching for flaws instead of enjoying content.

I think the difference is only one of degree. The ancients couldn’t exactly devote their time to anything as ephemeral as “entertainment”, since they needed to do hard physical labor basically non-stop just to stay alive, but in the few spare moments they had, they turned to things like religion to add meaning to their lives, and the tales that were told by old religions outlived the genuine religious belief, becoming stories told for entertainment, as the quality of life was improved by technology and there was more time for leisure in people’s lives. The last hundred or so years have seen a radical shift in the technological and social balance; entertainment is now plentiful, and we don’t think it’s super important, because we perceive scarce things as valuable and plentiful things as less so. But IMO this is a severe miscalculation. The value of some things is intrinsic, not entirely governed by the laws of supply and demand. Entertainment, mythology, religion - they’re all the same concept, something akin to what sociologists call “meaning-making”. And just because we have a lot of that sort of thing doesn’t mean that it isn’t still valuable, serious, and worth devoting a master level of craftsmanship to getting it just right.

This is subjective and easily misperceived. I search for flaws as part of enjoying content; if I didn’t enjoy the content, I’d ignore it entirely. You’ll never see me critiquing Pokemon or Rainbow Brite or professional sports; these aren’t worth my time to bother learning anything about. When I do take an interest in anything, inevitably I find fault with it, wanting to improve it by removing every flaw I perceive. To me, this is the ultimate possible act of benevolence; accepting a thing with all of its flaws is not a kindness to me, but rather proof of a lack of investment, an unwillingness to help the thing you love become the best version of itself. I don’t believe that tolerating any sort of shortcoming is ever a good thing; at best, it’s forgivable, due to a lack of time or other resources necessary to make a thing perfect, and settling for “good enough” quality. But I always think we deserve better than that, and should do everything that is possible, within the limits of our imperfect reality, to continue pursuing perfection, which I believe is indeed achievable, or near enough to make a meaningful effort to devote our lives to.

Sorry, I should probably have stated that more precisely. There is a fine line between critiquing stories and searching for flaws to the point of being obnoxious. If stories are meant to entertain and bring joy, and people are voicing their enjoyment and pleasure from those stories, it is unnecessary and rude to tell them they are wrong in enjoying those things . Especially because enjoyment of content is subjective, and your opinion of “perfection” might be quite different from that of the target audience.

I listen to the podcasts, and stories about comic books in general, because I want them to be ridiculous. And I listen to this podcast in particular because I like hearing how Christopher and Adam tell stories. If I wanted to listen to stories told a different way, I would listen to a different podcast.

Well to the best of my recollection, I never actually said that being ridiculous was bad; if you actively enjoy it, then more power to you.

The earliest mythology and religion were attempts at explaining the world, more akin to science than entertainment.

Of course, we’re discussing the intersections of mythology, religion, science, and entertainment on a thread for a podcast episode about a comic book about a time-traveling robot published by a comic book company that doesn’t exist, well, I feel like there’s some irony here.

For those who are interested, I think that the whole “dragon fire” argument is important to contextualize within Jewish cultural practice, too.

It’s really important to remember that ‘religion’ isn’t a monolith. Critically, Judaism doesn’t have a central religious authority that dictates whether doctrine is accurate or not. That role is taken up by rabbis. All of them. Some are more respected than others, some have arguments that are more long-lasting, but 'rabbis argue about the interpretation and implementation of religious law, how it interacts with weird edge cases, and what that means for your culture and community.

These critical arguments are a big part of what’s kept Judaism alive and intact through a really long period in which they had no central location, authority, or easy way to keep in contact. People could meet up occasionally and discuss their interpretations of law. The idea that there’s a single right answer, something that you can strip away all the falsehood from and just have and no one can argue with you about it any more - that’s anathema. That’s declaring yourself a divine authority. Someone else is always going to come along with a new perspective and new ideas and they’ll add your arguments to the pile, and when they do you need to listen and be thoughtful instead of yelling that you are the authority and you’re trying to fix their mistakes.

There is a very famous story in which a group of rabbis are arguing about whether a new oven is kosher, and one of them disagrees with the others and calls God in to back him up, and God does back him up, and the other rabbis essentially tell God to piss off because this is a terrestrial matter and God explicitly left those in their hands (or, in one version, they say, “Okay, so it’s four against two, God’s still outvoted.”) So God does leave the decision to them, and he’s very proud that they were willing to make the argument against him because they are his children, and children grow up.

Debates about meaningless things have meaning. They teach us that disagreement is allowed, that there’s a framework for conversation, and that we can connect with and listen to each other.

This was an amusing discussion to read through a week late. Happy Passover, everybody, a holiday in which part of the ritual observance is literally discussion over the meanings of various symbols and aspects of the story!

I am catching up on the podcast and, in this episode, Christopher dropped a comment about Justice Comics #500 (?) having an “awful” foil cover for a story “The Death of Emily Parsons.” Wait, Emily dies?

In my opinion (I’m trying to be less of an absolutist than I historically was), Temporal Tantrum is not a good name. Temporal Insanity would be better, but if you didn’t want to give the time-crazed aspect away too soon, you could hunt more obliquely at it with Schism. Or, to drop the word Temporal in favor of plain language, do the name Stitch In Time or a variation thereon.

Free Radical could be me, since I’m a bit of a lunatic and obsessed with the concept of time. I imagine him as like a militant version of Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse Five, where instead of just lecturing about how there’s no tragedy because the past is never gone, he aims to prevent all tragedies by erasing time as a concept, so that everyone can time travel as easily as they can walk. Screw having a future, that’s too predictable! We should just exist whenever we want, and always have existed then, unless we decide to always exist somewhen else! See, I told you he was me, or at least I know how to write him.

Honorable mention to the homebrew villain Anomalos, Conqueror of Time from Artifact Comics. He’s too different from Free Radical to act as a proxy of any sort for him, but he likewise scratches the itch for a time-themed villain that the Shattered Timelines ones didn’t really (LC gets the closest, but even in VOTM she’s more pirate than time traveler).

The discussion of philosophy and thought makes me realize that Visionary should trivially be able to detect whether a flesh child actually thinks. But I don’t think there are any stories that include both Visionary and Biomancer. Perhaps he avoids her much as he avoided the Scholar.