Ser Pentrose

Humans are simply too social for Solaria to be a viable future, IMHO. 

Too many people are always trying to be at the top.  This is nothing new.  That's just the normal human instinct to establish a pecking order combined with wanting the the most toys. 

OTOH, Have you seen what happens to a group when nobody wants to lead?  It ain't pretty.  I don't remember if it's a Larry Niven observation on writer's collaborations or one of Niven's Laws for Writers.  "Someone has to be the dictator". 

A Republic is a way to have the dictators and get rid of them when needed.  Naturally the dictators will try to wire the system to keep that from happening, which is where but the US, Europe and related states are right now.  Democracies and Republics work best when the powerful are subject to being removed from power.

That's a comforting thought, but I don't personally think so. 
Any significant technological imbalance would have brought out the arrogance in europeans that 1000 years of cross-continent aggression bred into them.
If the Americas had proven impossible to invade and conquer given 15th and 16th century technology, only then would the people there earn the respect of europeans.

EGS really needs these kinds of wow moments.
I hope the next comic is just as wow: Pandora appears in evil little form screeching "HOW DARE YOU???" And then there's a big immortal fight.
I doubt it will happen. But I know I would enjoy it.

How so?  "Grok" comes from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, not Trek.

Speak for yourself!  If we don't want peers then why do we tend to gather in groups with people who are good at and enjoy the same things we do?  Why would someone smart go out of their way to join Mensa to find others equally smart and to be in a Gathering where they are completely ordinary, instead of just joining a more conventional group where they could always be the smartest person in the room?  Why would so many people have fought so hard, suffered and sacrificed and died, in order to free slaves and end Jim Crow, even though every Freedom Ride bus was half-filled with people who were white and thus would only lose relative status by your theory?  Why would we have expressions like "A rising tide lifts all boats" and have the concept that society is not a Zero Sum Game?
I'm glad I live in my world and not the one you describe, which would be a very depressing place.

I actually think EGS is more middle ground with maybe a bit of a lean towards hard magic. Dan has developed magic in the EGS world to have no known limits to what someone can do with it, except of course time travel. This may seem like Soft Magic at first, expecially when you get the whole Will of Magic involved, but Will of Magic would also imply Hard Magic in that the Will has set up rules for how the system works, how people can learn and use it, the whole spells that fit the personality bit, and the fact that it all can change at any moment. There's also the fact the the way it's structured is much like science considering Tedd's role in the comic, as Nanase said, the laws of physics are more like polite suggestions, there may be flexibility to most spells but I've argued with people in these forums over how flexible and there have been many occasions where some spell theories just seem too overpowered to me, Soft Magic would be like  "Sure that can happen." while Hard Magic would say "Only someone who's spent years using that spell might be able to do it." the middle ground would be "If the Will of Magic happens to favour it.

The whole Will of Magic could be seen as giving a false sense of Soft Magic as well with the fact that if doesn't want to be mainstream, keeping the number of people who can use magic limited maintains that sense of fantasy to those that get a brief glimpse of it, while those in the know treat it like a science.
 

Assuming you knew *how* they fit together...
It's trial and error combined with the fact that some pieces explode when they touch.

 
Yeah. Afterwards there is the fun of picking up the pieces only to find that they don't fit together anymore.

It also didn't hurt that he brought along an invisible army of billions of very lethal soldiers. Also known as a number of very virulent diseases that Europeans had resistance to but the local population had no defences against. The resulting epidemics wiped out unbelievable numbers of people and had an extremely demoralising effect on the Aztecs. It got so bad that they prepared their most powerful ritual in order to appease their gods. This involved the sacrifice living a year pampered as a prince and then to be publicly given to the Gods. (I believe this was referred to as 'The Ritual of the Smoking Mirror', referring to the God Tezcatlipoca.)
The sacrifice victim fell sick shortly before the ritual. When they hauled him out to be sacrificed, he quite literally fell over dead on the way to the altar. To call the resulting effect on the populace 'screaming panic' would not even BEGIN to cover it.

That all depends on what sort of stress you are putting the brain under.

If Edward's Paranormal Division was really on top of everything, they would be using Uryuom tech to produce a new line of undergarments based on the worker suits and pushing them through every form of media to make them insanely popular  That way, whenever a human gets transformed magically, they will not lose or destroy all their clothes in the process.

Don't never need to cut it
'cause it stopped by itself!
Or someone is covering up which is a much simpler explanation. Of course, simple isn't simple all that often in EGS.

Don't make me post the video. Assume it's a quote from a 60's rock song...

Nonsense. Billions of women manage just fine without one.

For Example
So this means that the government has converted The Mall into an ultra maximum security prison for the worst offenders in the country.  They are dropped in and never allowed to leave.  Now Rhoda must rescue Catalina and lead her out of The Mall while the inmates are actively trying to kill those two and the guards may not realize that those two are not actually inmates.  And they need to do all this before the bomb in the collar of Rhoda's spiffy new jacket explodes.

That seems pretty likely really.  Edward has a real point about poor acoustics and background noise.  Between that and nobody likely to be standing real close to a fight between a superhero and a monster, and neither Elliot or Dunkel being exactly common names.  I wouldn't be too startled if the press were currently all camped out in front of the house of somebody names Leah Duncan, because her Facebook page shows her with pink hair.
 

 
If Susan could get her karaoke score up to something reasonable, she could be saving the hammers for when she forms a Peter, Paul, and Mary tribute band.
 

It generally wouldn't.  People expect a lot more from genetic testing than it can deliver.  Places offering to find your relatives from mitochondrial or Y-chromosome samples are exaggerating a lot, or outright scams.
Mitochondrial DNA doesn't change that fast.  If you aren't a mutant (and you probably aren't) you have the same mitochondria as any other children of your mother (and the children of those of them that are girls).  Likewise your mother likely wasn't a mutant either, so you have the same mitochondria as your maternal grandmother and female line aunts, first cousins and first cousins removed descended from her.  Repeat for your grandmother and more distant cousins back to whoever was the last mutant.  In a matrilocal culture it wouldn't be too astonishing if most of the woman in the village to had the same mitochondrial DNA.
 

Nope. And on that thought, Ashley and Elliot are both dorks, so it would have been the will of Magic to get them together, it wasn't just a coincidence that Elliot just had to morph at the time that Ashley went to talk to him about Susan.

I just realized (while reading today's comics, but it fits this one more): What would Pandora with her dislike of name-based affinities say about namesakes?
(explanation for people doing the mistake of not reading whole comics)

I think Max is in charge of training hunters.
http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1368
http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1376

Uh, that's exactly what Tom Sewell said, though.
All I was saying is that those two bolded statements are a bit limiting. I don't care how popular something is, we shouldn't limit things to purely what's popular. To say it again, that would be "unnecessarily limiting".

You aren't a parent are you?  The estimated birth date the doctor gives you is the midpoint of a two week range, and there's probably a 25% chance the birth will be outside that window.  Being born on the same day doesn't guarantee you were conceived in the same *month* let alone the same day.
 

Wait: New theory: The "Other Woman With Susan's Face" is ADRIAN's alternate from other dimension.
That explains both mentioned foreshadowings. Also, as an elf she has enough experience with modifying hospital records: she obviously wouldn't want to appear on either Diane's or Susan's records.
(Note: It was obviously Pandora's alternate who found a way to break the "elves can't have children" rule. Adrian wanted to fight ; his alternate wanted to have children.)

 
Not necessarily.  Perhaps Edward is someone's twin sister who had been forcibly transformed into a male at a very young age.  What Tedd thinks of as disapproval from dad with regards to gender bending is actually jealousy drawn from Edward's earliest memories of being a girl.
Wild theories can be a beautiful thing.