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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Tom Sewell
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Days Won
23
Everything posted by Tom Sewell
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That little girl who enhanced the dragon and the rather-dim boy grew up to become the King of Xanth and had three daughters named Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm. Rhythm managed to summon a stork before getting a husband and so the aforementioned little girl has a granddaughter named Cadence.
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I'd like to re-iterate that my Arthur theory is that Arthur might be an elf, not an Immortal. The way Dan seems to have set up elf-hood is that elves don't age beyond their early twenties, but they don't reset, either. That would mean that Arthur could be older than most immortals who would have reset themselves (or been reset) one or more times since the last time Magic changed. Dan has established that magic power can be stored (Tedd's gauntlet, Susan's hair) but I don't think he's made it clear that wands can store power. They could be powered by using ambient magic, and that could depend on mass or surface area, more of one or the other means being able to draw more of the ambient magic power, like being able to pump more water through a larger diameter pipe, or more current through a heavier-gauge wire. Or they could use the power of the person using the wand or staff. Edward seemed to have plenty of power for another shot after he downed Abraham with a very powerful blast. Or they could use either power source. Or some might be enchanted with a sort of magical battery to either give them the ability to store magical energy, or to increase their natural ability to store magic. Or it just might be possible that Dan hasn't worked out details like this, and doesn't really think it's necessary to do so. Because, magic.
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I just wanted to know which book or two Don Edwards was referring to, or whether he was citing EGS itself.
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Your link leads right back here. Is that really what you wanted?
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Well, here's one argument in favor of a smaller change: The more magic changes, the harder it will be to predict how those changes will work out, which means it will be harder to guess whether the changes will turn out to be a horrible mistake.
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They've forgotten and repressed a lot from what we've seen. However, the Emissary was very quick to back down when Pandora asked him about his chances. Apparently the Will of Magic didn't empower its emissary enough to stand up to that particular Immortal, perhaps because it could not. Voltaire could be an exception here. If Voltaire knew a Change was coming, it's reasonable to think he might know about the Will of Magic which would bring about that change. And if Voltaire does know about the WoM, he doesn't seem to be afraid of it. It's all unproven theory, of course. I'm just bringing up a few things that might help support my notions.
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Which it will, theoretically, if Immortals retain their ability to empower. And if the Will of Magic is only the Will of Human magic, it/he/she/them can't do anything to Immortals. Perhaps the WoM was empowered by the Immortals to keep humans from becoming powerful enough to challenge them.
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" So long as every seer knows why it has changed, it will be secret enough." So, Arthur, why is magic about to change? Do you really know? And if you do, how do you know? Magic has just gotten to the Change point because two Immortals have been working to expose it. One of them has just reset, but the other one hasn't as far as we know. If they weren't limited, all those other immortals aren't, either. To prevent something like this from happening again, Magic would have to change the rules for Immortals. Does the WoM have jursidiction over Immortals? Hmmm. Someone else would like to change the rules for Immortals. Maybe someone who will show up in the last panel of Friday's comic?
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Dan hasn't said it isn't a possibility. That doesn't prove my theory, but it doesn't disprove it either. I'm thinking maybe the reason Arthur hates Raven is that Raven has an Immortal parent who cares for him and Arthur doesn't. Also, the "greater good" attitude about accepting a few lives lost kind of fits with a lonely ancient who sees humans as short-lived creatures anyway. Pandora herself in one of her nastier moods told her son he was a fool to risk his life for people who were going to die anyway. About the only thing in canon that would support my theory is that the flamethrowing horde that provoked the last Change is the only really epic abuse of magic by humans we know about. How much work would it be for Dan to create another comparable incident? And how could it have been covered up? We don't even know how the historical memory of the horde was lost. And Arthur doesn't just say he knows what can result when magic falls into irresponsible hands, he says he's seen it, which implies that he's witnessed it. Contrast that with how he vetoed sending agents to deal with the bulldog dragon. If he's not a complete villain and/or lying, what he's seen has to be much worse than one Tercel-sized dragon.
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He'd certainly be aware that he can see how magic works, teach magic to others, and make wands, staffs, etc. And while he was aware that a Change was likely soon and that the revelation of magic was likely to bring it on, he didn't necessarily need to be aware that the Will of Magic has special purposes for Seers before the WoM spoke.
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I'm thinking Arthur is old enough to remember the last time magic changed. That is, he's really an elf, an even older elf than Adrian Raven.
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Considering that Edward said "they've started wars just for fun", some of them don't struggle very much with morality. Also, this crisis wasn't really caused by humans but by a couple of Immortals, Pandora and Voltaire. As far as we know, the Will of Magic doesn't affect them at all. And Uryuoms and Uryuom-hybrids? Dan's gone to a lot of trouble to say that their magic isn't the same as human magic. So the Will of Magic from what we've been told so far is just the Will for Humans magic. Noticed something about that limitation? Aberrations by definition have given up humanity, so they shouldn't be governed by the WoM at all. So, why does the WoM exist at all? Story-wise, it's there to make our heroes and villains more exceptional. As Syndrome said, when everyone is super, no one will be. The "Magic is dangerous and needs to be controlled" seems like a good argument, but all the magical capabilities shown by human-scale beings don't even measure to the scale of today's mundane weapons--or for that matter, bows and arrows. That unarmored horde of flame-throwing idiots wouldn't have done very well at Agincourt or Carrhae. The problem that Magic had with them was that they put on too much of a show.
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Depends on whether he knew he was a Seer and what Seers do after a Change. Since he knew the Change was imminent, it's not a stretch that he does know. And what that means for him is that he'd be much more important after a Change: Seers are how magic starts being workable again, and as one of the few, he should have a lot of say about who gets to use magic again. Of course, he is really old, so he isn't likely to have a long post-Change career.
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Did your romantic interest leave with your bank account, credit cards, and your car?
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Wild abandon for Brits. Check out a series on YouTube called Very British Problems before it goes away.
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That's a pretty good theory. Larry Niven built a whole fantasy universe around it, centered around the novel The Magic Goes Away. And it ties in with the excessive magic in Moperville caused by Pandora's dam. But... how much magic is there? Is it a permanently limited resource, or renewable? Let's compare it to regular energy resources. Fossil fuels aren't renewable on a human time scale or even a historical one; we will eventually have to depend on other energy sources. But we seem to have enough for a century or three, ignoring those pesky climate-changing effects. Solar power is renewable as long as Earth lasts (the sun will vaporize Earth before it finally shuts down billions of years from now), but it does have limits. You can't really run a car on solar cells, and the sun doesn't shine for us at night. The solar economy seems feasible now, but it also seems to require a considerable change in lifestyle. So, Magic rationing? Well, along with magic rationing, probably Magic taxes. Revenue Agents will not only be looking for stills in the backwoods but secret enchantment factories. Or maybe unregulated sex-change castings...
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Nah, I wouldn't think you've stopped. How can you resist Teutonic weenie dogs?
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At that point, Arthur says that "Police have guns of their own." No police officer is shown in that incident; police only arrived after the previous incident at Salty Crackers, the Mall Cops didn't do anything except call in "Code Spooky" at the Mall last Saturday, and the neither of the two guns shown in EGS has been in the hands of cops. After that, Arthur turns his back on Cranium and adds "Do not worry, Miss Cranium. The occasional casualty will not disrupt our long term objectives. Arthur doesn't reveal he wants the Change to come until years later in our time. Don't call me "Sweetikins." And don't call me "Shirley," either. Before we go any further, do you really believe Dan will make magic change so much he wrecks the powers of all the characters he has so lovingly built up?
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The only way we can find out if Arthur was right is if Magic doesn't follow his logic, doesn't make a severe change, and disaster results. Then we all go into the Vault for a few centuries and... Oh, that's right. Fallout. Or The Morrow Project, which Fallout ripped off. Or Gamma World, which The Morrow Project ripped off. Or... Story logic isn't the same as real logic. The object of story logic is to make for a good story that holds audience attention. And after that remark about a few casualties not interfering with the greater purpose, Arthur doesn't fit the story logic definition of a good guy or "right".
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Arthur's rejection of magic for everyone comes across rather like "If I can't really use magic, they shouldn't either." He would have had a long lifetime to self-justify his attitude, outliving many or most of this bosses. Magic's rejection of magic for everyone comes across as "I just don't like it that way." It ties in with the flair for the dramatic: What becomes ordinary can't be dramatic. The argument that too much magic is too dangerous--which Magic hasn't made once yet--doesn't hold compared to the technological and ecological terrors of modern reality. The most fundamental argument against too much magic is that it could damage reality too much to recover, another argument that hasn't been made. But that's the only argument that stands up compared to the prospects of non-magical menaces like global thermonuclear war or pollution-triggered climate change leading to worldwide famine.
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If the outcome really depends on logic, then we may have the Captain Kirk solution: Destroy the judge with a logical paradox. It's really ironic that in every episode of the Original Series the CKS was used, it was Kirk who used it, not Spock. However, I'm having difficulty in maintaining interest in this part of the story. Unless Dan wants to blow up EGS completely as in such disastrous "improvements" as the revised versions of the Original Trilogy, or denizens of the Aisle of Shame as Highlander II, Magic is not going for a severe change. The only features of interest for me are the relationship between Van and Tedd and finding out whether Arthur is simply wrong, deluded, or downright evil.
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Leifeld is a Bureaucrat, a character class known more for skill in blame avoidance than in anything else. And Tedd's dad already exposed Arthur's agenda in front of Tedd, if Tedd thinks about it.
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I vote for I.O.U. It's conveniently located next to any universe, and it isn't owned by Disney. Yet.
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Three more comics and Goonmanji 2 will take the title of "longest running NP arc" away from Escape From the Mall. I intended to quote Pharoah Rutin Tutin here, but quotes don't seem to be working for me right now. Anyway, I was late for poodle skirts in the real world. By the time noticed girls they were all wearing Capri pants. However, I was around for the very first version of what became Happy Days, an unsold pilot that ran as a segment on Love American Style in 1972.
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complicated Story Friday January 26, 2018
Tom Sewell replied to Pharaoh RutinTutin's topic in Comic Discussion
Actually it was Elliot who pointed that out to Tedd, but that really doesn't affect your arguments.
