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The Old Hack

Story Friday April 21, 2017

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Yee-hah, that thar's a rum tum humdinger of a theory ol' Justin just thunk up! Kinda ironic that it actually strengthened Susan's belief Diane must be her sister. Half-sister. Whatever.

I have a theory or three (of course.) 

My favorite-est theory is that in panel four of Wednesday's comic Justin realized that Diane does look exactly like the blond-haired Susan he saw on the first night he met Susan, ten months before, and came up with the rum tum humdinger right then precisely to strengthen Susan's belief that Diane is her sister. It makes Justin look not only compassionate and insightful but pretty darned smart.

My second theory is also based on panel four, and it doesn't rule out my first theory. It's that Justin realized that outing Diane as a find-em-fleece-em-forget-em gold digger seems kind of like that other outing.

My third theory is that if Dan makes the rum tum humdinger into canon we're all going to throw rocks at him, or at least call him for bullshitting us as badly as The Lucas does in continuing to insist Leia was always going to be Luke's sister.

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16 minutes ago, mlooney said:

BtVS must not exist in the EGS world.  Buffy looks nothing like the other known slayers.

Nonsense! Every world has a BtVS, even the ones with no TV. In the Moperverse version, Buffy looks like Susan. 

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18 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Nonsense! Every world has a BtVS, even the ones with no TV. In the Moperverse version, Buffy looks like Susan. 

I accept this a canon.

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Justin's theory makes sense because appearance base on affinity is in the same league as affinity based on name.

In the case of name base affinity we have magic going "that name is soo perfect, I just gotta give them this" but appearance based on affinity might be more "the people with this affinity needs to be able to stand out". That alone wouldn't make 2 people with the same identity look like twins, just similar enough to make people think they might be related.

Magic might have taken things further with Susan and Diane though because of the whole being born 20 minutes apart, being in the same general area, etc. Maybe Magic wanted Susan and Diane to meet one day and become a vampire fighting duo. It seems like a cruel thing to make people think that they're twins or half-sisters, but considering whats happening, if it turns out that Susan and Diane aren't related at all and it was just a big coincidence or magic had set up the whole thing, I don't see Susan or Diane parting ways never to see each other again. I'd point out the fact that Susan and Nanase didn't originally get along very well, I don't think it'd be any worse if Susan were to learn of Diane's past dating habits and getting to know what Diane's like now shouldn't be hard. If anything, now that Susan is aware of Diane, even if it turns out that everyone was wrong about them being related, I'm certain Nanase and Ellen would invite Diane to more group activities or assist in spooky stuff along with Susan.

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On 4/19/2017 at 5:53 PM, Stature said:

I also see that the fairies are not really moving.

Still not moving. They just really hover in place and look at Justin.

Not even Justin could strongly disprove the theory. So why fight it and just ask the man? 

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Scotty: Penetrating analysis, as usual. But Dan is a giant d__k if he makes it canon that Susan and Diane aren't sisters after ten years of leading us to believe that they are.

Have you noticed that name affinities kind of don't fit very well with magic wanting to keep itself mostly secret? Just sayin'. Of course, inconsistency is part of magic's basic nature, in that magic isn't consistent with natural law as most people understand it. If the world is a game, magic must be a rules lawyer.

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6 minutes ago, Stature said:

They just really hover in place and look at Justin.

Of course they do. They are expressing Susan's overwhelming desire for Justin; without them, Susan would be frozen in place, so overcome she couldn't move or speak or think.

Or maybe Dan cloned them because drawing fairies is a lot of work and they aren't the focus of this sequence. I'm sure if Dan cut back to one comic per week we wouldn't have a single cloned image.

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11 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Scotty: Penetrating analysis, as usual. But Dan is a giant d__k if he makes it canon that Susan and Diane aren't sisters after ten years of leading us to believe that they are.

Have you noticed that name affinities kind of don't fit very well with magic wanting to keep itself mostly secret? Just sayin'. Of course, inconsistency is part of magic's basic nature, in that magic isn't consistent with natural law as most people understand it. If the world is a game, magic must be a rules lawyer.

Magic has, at least, two conflicting major objectives. It wants to be secret and mysterious and it wants to be used dramatically. So it has to balance those two objectives. It's also a massive troll, so it'll also do something if it thinks it's funny.

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48 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Have you noticed that name affinities kind of don't fit very well with magic wanting to keep itself mostly secret? 

Not really, you still need some source/spark to start your access to Magic, Name affinities just shape how your path will go if you ever get that start. I would assume that only a small % of name affinities actually get spells. 

Also, considering when we last saw Pandora, there might be more going on in those cases then just their name ;)

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23 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Have you noticed that name affinities kind of don't fit very well with magic wanting to keep itself mostly secret? Just sayin'. Of course, inconsistency is part of magic's basic nature, in that magic isn't consistent with natural law as most people understand it. If the world is a game, magic must be a rules lawyer.

Dan had said that it's not guaranteed that a combination of names would given an affinity, for one example, he stated that " Magic wouldn't dignify "Maximus Power" with any sort of affinity. It's about a theme, not power." so it's possible that out of all the people with name combinations that make you think they could have an affinity for something, only a fraction actually do. Magic having a flair for the dramatic and such there are probably name combinations that it considers "too obvious" or "uncreative", Catalina Bobcat was probably in that sweet spot, or maybe Magic just likes cats.

As for Magic wanting to keep itself mostly secret, randomly seeding people with name based affinities doesn't itself increase the chances of being public, but having 100 people with a name based affinity does increase the chance of 1 of them developing magic and Magic would have been content with that. If that one person suddenly realized their magic was themed after their name and started looking for others with names that suggest possible affinities and teaching them how to use magic, that might be more of an issue.

27 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Magic has, at least, two conflicting major objectives. It wants to be secret and mysterious and it wants to be used dramatically. So it has to balance those two objectives. It's also a massive troll, so it'll also do something if it thinks it's funny.

In some cases, being a troll might even help keep the balance. If there is some inconsistency, it might keep people from pining down how magic works and making it public. What Pandora has been doing though, has been giving more consistency, not talking about the cases of public uses of magic, but by marking a number of people, the concentration of magic users in Moperville increased, people who didn't believe magic was real now has proof, some might want to keep it a secret because they fear what people might think of them, but there might be a few that are like "this is soo cool, everyone needs to know" and after Arthur J Arthur announced on TV that magic was real, all it would take is for one of those people marked by Pandora to figure out that being marked isn't the only way to get magic and tell everyone about it.

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I am guessing Dan is using these comics to express all the different ways he considered for having Susan and Diane be related, or unrelated, over the years before he reveals the actual story* at the end of the Sister III arc.

*until the next ret-con.

1 hour ago, Stature said:

Still not moving. They just really hover in place and look at Justin.

 

49 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Of course they do. They are expressing Susan's overwhelming desire for Justin; without them, Susan would be frozen in place, so overcome she couldn't move or speak or think.

Susan's fairies are serving her as court jesters.  Reacting with exaggerated emotions to everything so that she, like a dignified monarch, can maintain the veneer of detached stoicism.

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10 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:
10 hours ago, mlooney said:

BtVS must not exist in the EGS world.  Buffy looks nothing like the other known slayers.

Nonsense! Every world has a BtVS, even the ones with no TV. In the Moperverse version, Buffy looks like Susan. 

Buffy as Susan? Seriously? She looks like Diane.

8 hours ago, Drasvin said:
8 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Have you noticed that name affinities kind of don't fit very well with magic wanting to keep itself mostly secret? Just sayin'. Of course, inconsistency is part of magic's basic nature, in that magic isn't consistent with natural law as most people understand it. If the world is a game, magic must be a rules lawyer.

Magic has, at least, two conflicting major objectives. It wants to be secret and mysterious and it wants to be used dramatically. So it has to balance those two objectives. It's also a massive troll, so it'll also do something if it thinks it's funny.

Well actually secrecy and mystery DO raise drama. The "flair for dramatic" is just conflicting by itself - you need to hit precise spot for maximal drama.

7 hours ago, Scotty said:

If that one person suddenly realized their magic was themed after their name and started looking for others with names that suggest possible affinities and teaching them how to use magic, that might be more of an issue.

Note that as we can see on Greg's case, ANYONE who starts teaching magic to others may be issue.

7 hours ago, Sjmcc13 said:

Not really, you still need some source/spark to start your access to Magic, Name affinities just shape how your path will go if you ever get that start.

Exactly. It is little easier for people with name based affinities to get magic by being marked by immortal, but that's not way to make magic public - I mean, Pandora was TRYING to mark as many people as possible and didn't marked that many. Probably. Unless Dan is hiding few thousand marked people ...

7 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

I am guessing Dan is using these comics to express all the different ways he considered for having Susan and Diane be related, or unrelated, over the years before he reveals the actual story* at the end of the Sister III arc.

It would certainly be good idea. Still waiting for characters to speak about the alternate universe hypothesis. (Note that dewitchery diamond was already mentioned, although it wasn't taken seriously.) ... wait. Elliot already mentioned "mirror universe Susan".

7 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:
8 hours ago, Stature said:

Still not moving. They just really hover in place and look at Justin.

Susan's fairies are serving her as court jesters.  Reacting with exaggerated emotions to everything so that she, like a dignified monarch, can maintain the veneer of detached stoicism.

IMHO they do bad job on the last three pages. But yes, I'm not surprised Dan doesn't want to spend so much time on them.

2 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

I think we've all been missing the real point of this whole conversation: How can Justin honestly believe he is a distraction machine? He didn't even summon the enormous d__k.

Isn't he still on vacation?

Also, I think he gave up on that distracting for now.

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2 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Note that as we can see on Greg's case, ANYONE who starts teaching magic to others may be issue.

Yeah Greg certain does fit what I was saying, though it'd be interesting if he doesn't count because everyone involved originally assumed it was just the style of martial arts and not magic? Of course Greg's since learned that it's more than that so he reluctantly decided to stop training new students in that style, though you could say that the ASMA Dojo was self regulating, yeah it worked for Nanase, Elliot and Justin, but there was a lack of other students and the one other student we know of had thought Greg was a fraud so maybe there wasn't much danger of Greg teaching large numbers of people. But at the same time Nanase on many occasions and Justin on at least one, weren't very discreet about showing their abilities.

I also think that until Pandora showed up on TV, Moperville was fairly self contained in terms of how residents reacted to strange occurrences, and Magic was probably content to leave it that way because the residents didn't question it which I'm sure Edward played a role in making sure they didn't. Then Moperville became a tourist destination for people wanting to find out more.

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1 hour ago, Scotty said:

though you could say that the ASMA Dojo was self regulating, yeah it worked for Nanase, Elliot and Justin, but there was a lack of other students and the one other student we know of had thought Greg was a fraud so maybe there wasn't much danger of Greg teaching large numbers of people.

Well sure, but that was because Greg is total failure at marketing. Even with zero idea about how well would the training work, someone whose favourite anime is more mainstream and get idea how to use it for marketing (and choose better place for the gym) could get hundred people first year. Now, from those hundred, let's assume still only one Nanase (people with that strong talent are rare), but 33 people like Elliot and 33 people like Justin ... I'm sure DGB would be planing intervention.

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4 hours ago, mlooney said:

Well angst plus vision quest, a rather powerful combo in many esoteric traditions.

And if Greg had binge-watched Battle Angel Alita, he'd be a beautiful and extremely deadly Martian cyborg catgirl assassin, and crying about how James Cameron reneged on his promise for a Battle Angel movie after years and years of leading us all on.

Sadly, I'm not a Martian cyborg catgirl assassin.

Yet.

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43 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

And if Greg had binge-watched Battle Angel Alita....

Heh.  My roommate in college one year was an anime fan, and instead of putting pictures of ourselves on our dorm room door, her side had a picture of Alita, and mine had the female protagonist from Crying Freeman.  Which matched what we looked like surprisingly well.  :-)

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4 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Heh.  My roommate in college one year was an anime fan, and instead of putting pictures of ourselves on our dorm room door, her side had a picture of Alita, and mine had the female protagonist from Crying Freeman.  Which matched what we looked like surprisingly well.  :-)

Since Alita is from the future, maybe there's a reason Alita looks like your roommate...

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6 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Heh.  My roommate in college one year was an anime fan, and instead of putting pictures of ourselves on our dorm room door, her side had a picture of Alita, and mine had the female protagonist from Crying Freeman.  Which matched what we looked like surprisingly well.  :-)

::googles:: Ahh that does bear a strong resemblance to your previous forum avatar.

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16 hours ago, mlooney said:
18 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Here's a theory that actually has a canon reference to support it: Greg had an angst-induced awakening a few years ago.

I had always assumed that to be the case.

Well angst plus vision quest, a rather powerful combo in many esoteric traditions.

I didn't though it was ANGST-induced. But yes, it's obviously description of awakening.

7 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:
11 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Heh.  My roommate in college one year was an anime fan, and instead of putting pictures of ourselves on our dorm room door, her side had a picture of Alita, and mine had the female protagonist from Crying Freeman.  Which matched what we looked like surprisingly well.  :-)

Since Alita is from the future, maybe there's a reason Alita looks like your roommate...

Well considering Alita lost memory ...

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

I didn't though it was ANGST-induced. But yes, it's obviously description of awakening.

Well, he had just lost a girlfriend so it is not an entire impossibility.

Hrm. If I had lost someone dear to me and binge-watched something, I wonder what it would be. Possibly Fringe. That might give me a decent chance of becoming a mad scientist like Walter. How about you guys?

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