Annotated 38-2
If I were doing this today, I’d want Epic Games to be one of the companies circling in for the kill. And maybe Amazon or Google or both.
My general response to global defeatism is “Miss me with that shit,” but it’s not like I don’t understand the impulse, and it gives HR a noble way to couch his actions here. His alleged desire to save the world might be a little more convincing if he’d spent any time developing a way for anyone but Carol to follow him…or even for Carol to leave instructions behind that don’t sound like the ravings of a suicide cult to anyone else.
(Boy, if HR only knew how weird Jor-El was going to get in Superman comics after this installment came out.)
Things about to get even weirder between HR and Carol in three…two…
Oh man I need to know what happened with Jor-El. I don’t really read any comics but I just have to know in relation to this. lol
I’m in this boat as well. I’m barely familiar with much in comics beyond the basic stories/characters gleaned from decades of incidental contact. I’m much more familiar with the Bruce Timm versions of Batman and Superman where Brainiac was created on Krypton and intentionally downplayed the coming disaster in order to save itself from what it had already determined to be an unavoidable event. Though I can’t remember why Jor-El wasn’t able to save more than Kal-El in that one, either.
I only read the Wikipedia, and not that closely, but he’s apparently alive and part of some superpowerful group of some shit. Group which includes the person who destroyed Krypton. (Because yes, someone destroyed Krypton now, it didn’t just happen. At least, that’s what Wikipedia said.)
“Going to a new world where we can be GODS is the only sane response.”
Okaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy…..!
And which might or might not be still dependant on our sepia world. Nice plan…
@Jason
That put in a new spin, and not a good one, all these talks by Elon Musk and others to move to Mars before Earth is finally depleted. A move only those rich enough could afford.
@Velgar
Yes, the cuves for supporting one’s body while one is out being a PC or a god, and the servers supporting this other universe, are firmly anchored in Sepia world. The fate of Sepia world will be shared by the other universe(s).
Even if these universes exist outside and independently of Sepia world, and the servers just provide the mean to cross over, to connect all these universes, breaking that connection is unlikely to be healthy for the new gods.
Arkerra does in fact continue with no trouble at all once the game Kingdoms of Arkerra is shut down and irretrievable.
Of all the myriad practical and moral objections to HR’s scheme, I don’t think “you can’t possibly have known that something that didn’t happen wouldn’t happen, so it’s a bad thing that you never indicated being concerned about it” is a terribly good one.
HR clearly sees a link between the bodies in the tanks and the PC characters, otherwise he would have ended that experiment a long time ago.
He’s right about that link, too, as will become clear later in the story.
This means: The number of people who can “escape to Arkerra” (haha) is equal to the number of tubes which are installed in that basement, and connected to the game server.
It may be that e.g. Frigg, once she achieves her god-like status, does become independent of her tube-borne sepia body, could live on independently, but HR very clearly cannot.
That also proves that HR has no plans to “rescue” anyone to Arkerra except himself and Carol.
I believe that’s because the stuff he’s throwing around in the scene here is just plain bullshit to help Carol go along with his plan.
Perfectly understandable. Darkseid seeks the anti-life equation to remake the universe in his image. Thanos believes in drastic population control. It’s go big or go home time.
tbf, in the comics Thanos was just hot for skeleton tiddies
About Jor-El, yeah, entire generations of comic-book nerds have denounced that part of Superman’s origin story since its publication. How could a cataclysm of that magnitud just sneak up on an entire race of super scientists? On the other hand, only Jor-el saw it coming, albeit too late to be able to do much. If Jor-El is a loser for not saving his entire world, what does that make the entire Kriptonian race? At least Jor-El could save one person…
About Carol, it says a lot about her when her boss greets her in his undies, talking about leaving this filthy mortal world behind for a most awesome afterlife, and her only respond is “Godhood? For me? Gee, and I didn’t bought you anything”
Spoiler for Superman: Red Son…the story of Superman plays out as it classically has in the end.
A planet that has extremely smart scientists that still can’t escape a planet-wide catastrophe, despite it being easily predictable and avoidable? Gee, that sounds unrealistic!
(hint: The problem is not science, it’s the mass psychology of *all* inhabitants, and game theory)
Oh, the masses are definitely a factor.
We are a race of functional science illiterates that just shrug and take the word of a -very disproportionately- small scientist community (a handful of scientists that often work, not for the advancement of science, but for the bottom line that funds their research). Nowdays, the better part of mankind is disinterested in science at best, or completely sceptic of it in the worst cases. This is a world where Flat Earthers and GOOP are things that exist. We’re definitely not Kriptonians
Kryptonians were described as a race of scientists that lived in pristine cities full of crystal spires and flying cars. They were centuries ahead of us. I can’t imagine even a fringe part of Kryptonian society going all “Git yer g’dless science outta my Rao fearin’ house ‘n git back to Daxam ‘n leave us reel Kryp-tonians alone” I get that in a few versions of Superman’s backstory it was implied that Kryptonians fell because of their hubris, but my point is that they were a little too full of themselves, even if that was the case. In Richard Donner’s 1978 movie, the rulers of Krypton openly mocked Jor-El for warning them about the peril they were in, even though a real scientist wouldn’t have been so flippant about a possible end of the world scenario. And those Kryptonian rulers weren’t portrayed as a bunch of meat-headed military types, or a bunch of out-of-touch senile politicians. They were supposed to be intellectuals guided by cold logic, and yet apparently only Jor-El knew how to use their catastrophe monitoring equipment.
So, yeah, it does sound unrealistic
Is it just me, or do HR’s hands look REALLY BIG in this comic?