Episode 279 of the Letters Page: Writers’: Cosmic Tales Vol 2 #533

It’s all in the cards.

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Ahh, the sweet sound of the guys regretting their previous actions.

Oh look, it’s everyone’s favorite comic trope: space inflation!

They’re right, the Roulette just got way cooler.

I am pleased with myself for figuring out which suit each guard would be. But the Suits as their name? That’s genius.

Oh man, I can’t believe Greazer’s dead. D:

They did NOT name a villain Gaslight! XD Next they’re gonna say she’s a girlboss.

Hmm, this begs the question of what the metaverse non-human reader numbers are like. I’ll bet they’re quite different than here!

Ooh, she packed her Fashion Anti-Gaslighting gas!

You know, getting to hear her in action here, Fashion is a really weird hero.

Whaaat, it’s Greazer?? Oh my goooosh! Is he a space zombie?!?!?!

Good job not answering that question, it’s perfect. XD

Not a rollicking adventure perhaps, but a very satisfying ending.

2027? c_c Wow. I also love Adam’s optimism.

Oh yes, origin of Crossword, absolutely, please! I hope his name is Ward Crossley.

I am super enjoying their giggly delight at these dumb gimmick letters. XD Context!

Excuse me, FLANDO MALTRIZIAN? C_C He listens to the Letters Page???

This Legacy/Baron Blade letter is amazing.

I also do not hate Argent Adept and Visionary. >_>;

That was a lot of fun!

I can totally see Argent Adept and Visionary having some thing of “look, if they think we’re together, they’ll stop trying to set us up” or the like.

Surprised Harpy and the Edge Twins didn’t get a ship.

Also, Christopher mentioned Gloomweaver just about ten seconds after I was thinking the same.

As noted by WalkingTarget on Discord they seem to have forgot in episode 115 they gave Crossword the name Michael Crosse. Mentioned even more recently with this update for Freedom Five board game https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcanewonders/freedom-five-a-sentinels-comics-board-game/posts/3020048

Having an ace character forced into getting a beard because of shipping is really not okay.

No, it’s not. That’s kind of been the point.

So, Roulette environment confirmed for the Cosmic box? With a Zhu Long-esque mini boss for Cardshark, who throws ongoing into player areas that “trap them in a card”?

I need to listen to episode 115 again. I almost never re-listen to an episode, but man is that one packed with characters who keep coming up again but we otherwise know nothing about. I was thinking “Wordsworth” for Crossword’s first name.

I can’t be the only one bothered by a space casino having the Earth card suits, can I? Heck, even on Earth they weren’t the ‘universal’ pattern they are now until the 18th century. A roulette wheel, I kind of understand, it’s a simple enough game (although red as the non-black color is a bit of a coincidence). But the French symbols? Especially hearts; we only have that symbol called that for weird, unclear, historical reasons.

I’m not bothered by it. It’s even a thing that has been shown in actual comics for a space casino. This is a 2016 cover

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It’s comics, and comics are often absurd. Those “historical” reasons are weird and unclear because all the suits originally came from outer space in the first place and the true story was hopelessly garbled after all the xeno-telepathy and memory erasure and and whatnot was over with. The space casino doesn’t have Terran card suits. Terra has alien card suits - at least in Sentinel Comics.

Latin letters, even? Come on. Please tell me Silver Surfer (or the human-looking lady on the right) taught the aliens how to play Earth Poker.

Came from Space Rome way back when, obviously.

I would not mind that…

Sound a little like Menagerie from The Cauldron who puts the heroes in Enclosures in what’s basically a space zoo.

It was so sweet of those letters to try to reason through which ships were the most popular based off of who shares a book and who is married and who is canon when the reality is we live in a world where the Dr. Suessian character the Onceler was shipped with himself. The only logic one can apply is that anything can happen. It’s not a matter of if the on-paper folks have any chemistry, it’s what the subtext pulled out of an otherwise meaningless piece of dialogue can build into a memeable fervor.

Which, to that end, the most popular non-canon ships would obviously be Blake Washington Jr and Ra, The Prime Wardens as a polyamorous relationship, and Visionary and Dark Visionary. Facts are facts, folks.

There are no lies spoken here.

Unlike the podcast, right?

Alright, I have been convinced that Legacy/Baron Blade is the top bracket for metaverse ships. I had initially dropped it a few places because of Legacy being married, but on reflection, Paul and Emily’s relationship is very comfortable, which does not lend it to blocking off shipping in the way that a very popular canon ship would.

Also I’m slapping my forehead at not thinking of Nightmist / Mr. Fixer.

The Adhesivist/Highbrow conversation tripped me up for a minute, because I could have sworn that C&A explicitly said that he had a crush on her for a while, but looking it up I think I was misremembering and that idea was actually in a fan letter.

Surely the more appropriate phrase would be “…he was stuck on her…” wouldn’t it?

Someone must have done that joke in the episode, right?

They did say that Adhesivist might have revaluated his interests after seeing Guise.
“I had not thought about that before but now that I am getting a closer look…”

There was a joke about him telling Brianna that something about him “sticks with you”, with the follow-up joke being that she didn’t know he was the Adhesivist yet so he had to add “hang on to that, it’ll make sense later”.

Yeah, I realized once they started reading other letters that my interpretation, which was “out of all time, which relationships did readers most suspect might actually be real or probable in canon,” was not the definition of “shipping” that other people inferred, including C&A. That’s why I omitted gay relationships for non-gay characters, because as much as Legacy + Baron Blade is titillating, no readers would seriously suspect it would ever happen. Certainly, the list of what ships people would like to talk about in 2016, as a snapshot of both character development and the fandom, would be a very different list.

I could have sworn the Vantage/Rival relationship was more “will they” than “won’t they.”

I’ve been slowly plotting a letter for the eventual third shipping episode for a while now, and one of the things I was definitely going to put in it was an affectionately amused observation that the RL fandom is almost an unrealistic model for the Metaverse sometimes, because we are way too sane and reasonable on matters like this compared to what an actual fandom for a mass market property would be like.

The relationship between Karr’Dcharque and the Roulette is a interesting inverse of Kris Barron and Revocorp.

Nevie Sticks

Since Fashion is the intersection of 1950s clothes horse and sci-fi adventurer, I think she should have like a sexy skintight (modesty padded) spacesuit that’s colored to become invisible while not exposed to vacuum, so that when she’s in atmosphere she can have clothes, but if she’s spaced, she instantly has a spacesuit on under her clothes and a bubble helmet pops out around her head.

The character they introduce here under the name Gaslight is a common example of the word being misused. It isn’t any form of hypnotic suggestion, it’s specifically trying to convince a person that they are insane.

I’ve been unsatisfied this whole time with the name Fashion, but only now have I figured out a name I like better: Fashioneer, with a stylized E that looks like either one E or two depending on how you read it, I dunno how that would look eexactly.

Letters on meat? They must be from Biomancer. (I miss the Biomancer letters and their war with the Cult of Gloom.)

Crossword can be named Wordsworth Crosslyn.

Degenerate is a walking advertisement for Early Parse having the right idea about how to solve problems. You can’t lock her up, you can’t bring her to trial, the only reasonable way for the legal system to bring her to justice is to authorize a special one-time “kill on sight”, bounty.

That letter is DEFINITELY not from #1 Gluen.

I want to believe that Brianna spends the entire day being super intimidating and serious, but in the meet cute with Glenn he’s so dorky and disarming that she just laughs through her nose and cracks up so hard that an entire week of work stress just melts away instantly. That’s the only way I can see her giving him a chance to win her over the rest of the way.

Did Adam actually miss the line “slow paste”, or did he intentionally blow through it without giving him the dignity of a response?

The bad lawyer who tries to use Brianna’s husband against her in the courtroom? It’s Judge Mental during a short time when he ostensibly has no powers and is back to being a practicing “barrister” but stuck in America because of his former Southwest Sentinels activities.

Very briefly going down a mental rabbit hole about the origin of the imprisoning cards. Some ancient alien society had a caste system informing the suits, and anyone who broke the radically different rules of their own particular caste would be put on cards to keep them in stasis. Only if you broke the rules outside your caste might you be executed or exiled or tortured or whatever.