Episode 219 of the Letters Page: Creative Process: Scholar Villains

You have to be pretty despicable to hate him.

I’m going to start out with a “Holy Crap!” to Christopher’s story.

Also, the talk about Greatest Legacy and Boldest Legacy meeting makes me think it would be even better if Boldest and Newest (Felicia) met. Seems like she would be inspired by Boldest (especially from what I know of the Tactics/Vertex timeline).

What’s scarier: A story of real-life peril, or deepfake Christopher.ai?

Very glad Christopher and his friends and those other people did not die in a cave. D: Also very impressed with his ability to stay calm in a crisis.

I love that Adam had to concede to the idea of Christopher getting a peg leg, and I feel this sums up their friendship. What a couple of guys.

I’m glad he made the villainous cave joke, I was definitely thinking it. XD

Ooh, I hope this means we’ll get a DE Count Barzok deck as Scholar’s nemesis.

Maybe they could call him Mister Chomps… :V

Is Stuntman le livre choppéd to vous? V:

Again, I enjoy the joy they display at doing stupid things in the name of making comics.

Major points for the amount of nuance they poured into Waykeep.

“So many layers. I am so tired.” XD

“Oh, you thought the new addition was a baby?” Again, Christopher makes the jokes so I don’t have to.

Has anyone ever asked, like, what if Pauline had twins? Do they both get powers, or just the first one to actually be born? I legit don’t recall if this has come up before.

I seem to recall it coming up before but I’m not finding anything so far.

I think that comes down to the “magic genetics” bit. If I had to guess, I imagine part of the Legacy bit is inhibiting the probability of twins. Though it also seemed to be favoring male heirs, so maybe Felicia’s birth indicated something was changing about the Legacy line? Or not.

This actually plays into a theory that (at least) Jeysie and I have regarding how things will go down. Multiple Legacy lines with only partial powers passed to the members of a multiple birth. Thus increasing the number of people per generation that have powers, but simultaneously toning down the number of powers said individuals have.

I think this also plays into the transition from the “present” to the state in Galactic Strike Force where we have “Metahumans” instead of just “Humans”.

I feel like Waykeep is one of those villains that Scholar should eventually come to an uneasy truce with. Like, she’s not wrong; he’s playing around with power that could be devastating to the whole planet if he weren’t excruciatingly careful with it. The Waykeep spirit (and maybe that host body) has dealt with probably thousands of leyline manipulators in its many thousands of years, and Scholar might be the only one, or one of a tiny number, who are actually taking care of the system they’re accessing and treating it with respect. She might eventually trust that he means well and seems to know what he’s doing, but at the same time he’s still, as it were, doing open heart surgery with a backhoe.

That makes her a good setup for Deadline, too – the implication that leyline manipulation could theoretically raise mountains and boil seas, that Scholar is using the tiniest fraction of what he could do if he didn’t care about consequences, sets up for Deadline to show up and do just that. Like “Oh, this is what evil The Scholar looks like, and it’s an extinction event.”

Meanwhile, I’m wondering what happens in the RPG timeline when she comes after Guise, who if I’m remembering correctly, now has the Philosopher’s Stone inside him?

I’m sure it’ll be just fine………

I liked the circus origin, but if you ask me they really missed the opportunity with their first “_____ Man” character to tie it back to the beginning. Carl S. Badde is Cave-Man, the man that’s also an underground cave filling with water! Imagine the team up potential with Man-Grove!

“Domo arigato, you’re in my grotto!”

Okay, admittedly it’s a work in progress. I feel like the foundation is rock-solid, though. Hopefully it won’t collapse under its own weight.

Probably couldn’t use Cave Man due to Captain Cave Man

Taking me waaaay back there! You’re right, probably not. GEICO might have something to say, too. Shame though…

I feel like the right person to go through Scholar’s houseboat and reconstruct his life from what he left behind would be the Wraith. She notably trained with him, and she is a detective.

Maybe she sees the houseboat abandoned and washed up, and it feels weirdly familiar even though she can’t place it.

When they were discussing the third member of the circus and hit ‘trapeze artist’, I shot bolt-upright in my chair and silently yelled “THE AMAZING MABLE!”

But sadly, this did not turn into a situation in which one-third of a villainous trio went and joined La Capitan.

I think she’s from an earlier time period, though, isn’t she?

I had the same two thoughts. “It’s Mable! No, wait… she’s from MUCH earlier.”

I’m wondering how many of them actually remember Scholar. And what does that mean for them individually if this major nemesis just no longer exists, they have no memory of them, etc.

To be honest, I could not for the life of me remember what we have about Mable’s backstory.

I in fact wrote in with this question before I was done listening to the episode!

From episode 96

Mable Griffin, The Amazing Mable, Acrobat: When is she from? The early 1900s, when circuses are really popular. She was part of a specific traveling troupe that was all black women acrobats (The Amazing Aerial Angels - the members of the troupe all had alliterative names and she was the Marvelous Mable in the show). They would go from circus to circus as they were a more independent act that would get hired on for a show here and there as the prejudices of the day prevented them from getting a permanent job/meant that they didn’t want to be locked into unfair conditions. One time they had a job at some weird carnival with a ridiculously long name. The other members would go off somewhere (backstage, out of the tent for whatever reason, etc.) and disappear until she was the only one left. When she goes to look for them she finds that the whole carnival is now empty. She thinks she hears something in a tent and goes in only to now find herself lost in time - luckily, there’s somebody we know that kind of hangs out there and picked her up. So, she’s kind of got a secondary mission of her own to find the rest of her troupe. She takes the name “The Amazing Mable” in remembrance of the group as a whole.

Wow, Christopher. Amazing story. I am impressed and glad you were able to help all those people.

Two things appear to have gone missing: this episode, and the forum thread for the following episode, Editor’s Note #57. The latter simply doesn’t exist; perhaps nobody thought to create one, and maybe that’s just as well, as the thing I was motivated to comment on there was mostly just a pet peeve I was going to complain about; y’all can live without, I’m sure. But it does seem as though all you July People really enjoyed this episode, and I’d like to know why it now either returns a 404 error or simply refuses to play.

It does seem like for some reason you need to choose Download This Episode if you listen via the Libsyn page, but otherwise the episode is there.

And the reason there seems to be no Editor’s Note #57 thread is because the title was misnumbered: Editor’s Note #56

Whoops. That’s been corrected

The download gives me a 404.

Heh, I admit I had noticed at the time, but didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem important and I didn’t want to look pedantic. Welp.

I genuinely have no idea what’s going on, then. If I hit the play button on the episode’s page, that does nothing, but clicking on Download This Episode does. I can also play it through my podcast app and on Spotify.

Do they upload on YouTube or anything like that? Maybe there’s another location someone could link me to.

Nope, it’s just Libsyn and other major podcast apps

Well whatever Justy’s issue in '22 was fine, the episode works fine in 2026.

I’ve never been in a cave, and I really want to be in one at some point in my life. (Or not; if I die and become a ghost and am not region-locked to the area I died in, I’m definitely going to haunt a cave. Hopefully ghosts have dark vision with a sufficient range that I can see the walls and ceiling without needing a light source. Until then I’ll just replay Dear Esther chapter 3, that’s unquestionably the best cave experience I’ve ever had.)

Anywho, on to the episode. This story about golden Age Scholar, predating even the Wraith and maybe Legacy too, I really want to see a Definitive Edition deck for him. Obviously in those days he’s not gonna be a fat dude in a bathrobe, so I’m picturing some sort of lightly noirish “looks like Sydney Greenstreet, sounds like Peter Lorre” kind of person who gets sucked into suspense thriller situations without really trying to.

Andolin is a pangolin…how did I never get that

Some “all about the money” villains…you mean, someone who’s a villain FOR PROFIT!?

There actually is a “below the hollow earth” concept in the H.P. Lovecraft Mythos…there’s blue-littten Kn-Yan, which has a very Agharta/Shaver Mystery kind of concept with mostly normal humans in it, and below that is red-litten Yoth, which has reptilian and mammalian monsters in it, and below that is black lightless N’Kai, where amorphous alien horrors dwell.

Not a huge fan of how they got to Waykeep as a character, especially since I can’t hear the name Leybeast without channeling Jerry Seinfeld and going “It’s a female body part?..” But since we have this spirit that can body jump when killed, I’m like “well this is how you take a relatively neutral force of nature that wants to stop what the Scholar is doing, and turn it into a nihilistic villain that wants to kill the Scholar out of revenge.” (It’s a very different revenge from BB, since “you killed my father” is quite thoroughly not the same experience from “you killed ME.”) In fact, I’d go even further; IMO the way they got us to the Scholar of the Infinite was a very unsatisfying “yada yada” bit of the story, similar to things like Haka’s origin, where we deserve to know more about why he’s fading out of reality than just “his awareness is pulled into too many directions”. So I would patch that hole by saying that Waykeep succeeds in killing the Scholar (another way in which the Baron is different). After failing several times to destroy his power or himself, Waykeep fibally essentially cursed or poisoned John, with an effect that would gradually unweave him from reality in a way that he couldn’t counter, since trying to reverse it would only accelerate it. She told him that his remaining time should be spent saying goodbyes or making amends or whatnot, but instead he continued heroing until he was a minute or three from poofing out, and spent that last minute saving Guise. Who should then meet Waykeep later on and seek revenge on her.