Tales of the Parodyverse >> View Post
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Post By
CrazySugarFreakBoy!

Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
In Reply To
HH

Subj: What happens to Chaos:
Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 at 08:22:03 pm EDT (Viewed 572 times)
Reply Subj: More implications to come - and a big question inside.
Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 at 03:26:02 pm EDT (Viewed 5 times)

Previous Post


    Quote:
    The Anti-Life Equation was always one of the more fascinating aspects of Darkseid, so I'm glad to see an equivalent metatextual quest grafted onto Dark Thugos' character here.


I'd got it into my head that we'd already referenced all this. Maybe I imagined it.


    Quote:
    I suppose Dream is lucky that Thugos never heard about his little Buddy Baker moment during the Hellraisers arc ("I CAN SEE YOU!"), or else Thugos might be trying to recruit someone else to go to the Wonderwall (or he could send the Gallagher brothers).


I'm having fun setting up Dream's next set of cosmic problems and the Surfeit of Chaos. The first casualty appears in our current issue of Untold Tales.


    Quote:
    Nice nods to Kirby with the Bitches; will Lana take up with an escape artist? And I see that the Exu subplot that you mentioned is coming to fruition here.


If there's a Mr Miracle-type escape artist character to be introduced I think a poster should really adopt him. It's a great niche that is currently unfilled in the Parodyverse.


    Quote:
    Likewise, I enjoyed your entertainment industry-related expansions of Lovecraft's allegories, as well as the fact that we see the mathematics of maintaining reality in that realm.


What's the Parodyverse without pesudo-scientific and faux-Lovecraftian bafflegab?

And so the the question, since this gets a LOT more relevant next issue: What does happen when a champion of chaos elects not to step aside for his successor and die? Is it like the 10th Doctor's TARDIS-shattering eventual regeneration? Does the next champion somehow go sour - Dark Glitch? Do previous champions decide they want to come back too? Enquiring minds want to know.




From Pulp Fiction:

Lance: If you want the needle to pierce through to her heart, you gotta stab her hard. Then, once you do, push down on the plunger.

Vincent Vega: Then what happens?

Lance: I'm curious about that myself.

Vincent Vega: This ain't a fuckin' joke, man!


Part of the problem here, for both the characters and the writers, is that there's really no clear road map for what happens next.

To a certain extent, Dream was kind of doing what he was supposed to do, by breaking the rules of the game, at least as far as Chaos is concerned, so I don't see Chaos censuring him as such, but by the same token, the line of Agents of Chaos will continue to move on, with Glitch and her successors, because each Age is different, and each Age needs its own Spirit. What this means for Dream is, while Agents of Chaos have always been the Spirits of their respective Ages before, Dream has now transcended that, and is no longer the Spirit of ANY Age. As I think I once wrote him saying, "I wasn't even cool when it was cool to be uncool," and in a very real sense, just like the Doctor, he's become an Outsider even relative to a whole culture of Outsiders.

The closest thing to a precedent for this was back in the Silver Age, from 1959-69, when Carter Armstrong became the CrazySugarCosmicIconiclast! (imagine if Reed Richards had flown his rocket ship out solo, and instead of being bombarded with cosmic rays, had been handed Hal Jordan's Green Lantern Power Ring from a dying Abin Sur), and decided to start the CrazySugarCosmicIconoclastCollective! (pretty much the Green Lantern Corps, if Timothy Leary had founded it in the midst of his consciousness-expansion phase). Between the late '50s and the late '60s, Armstrong went from a strait-laced pipe-smoking professor to a wild-eyed head-tripping interplanetary commune-leader whose solution to the encroachment of oppressive Order was to recruit as many Iconoclasts as he could into his Collective. I've kept the history deliberately vague on what ultimately happened, in part because I'm not entirely sure myself, but there's a reason why there's no longer a Carter Armstrong or a CrazySugarCosmicIconoclastCollective!

Bottom line, especially in affairs of Chaos, there's no real hard-and-fast rule against there being more than one Agent of Chaos at a time - rather, it's simply never been done before (even Armstrong's Collective was made up of Iconoclasts who all fit into his own template, making them more extensions of himself than truly independent Agents of Chaos in their own right), because it's simply a BAD IDEA, for much the same reason that an entire Earth full of Masters SHOULD have been a bad idea (dammit, Russell). For fuck's sake, with Armstrong, it was even in THE DAMNED NAME - you can't make anything approaching a cohesive TEAM by COLLECTING ICONOCLASTS. So, no, it's not going to corrupt Glitch, but since Chaos is hardly hierarchical, past Agents of Chaos who are still around, and are still wishing they could get back into the game, might suddenly find themselves freer to do so, since Chaos ... well, no, it wouldn't fair about being FAIR, but it would see fit to extend more like equal freedoms to its Agents.

The bigger problem is that Dream not dying opens the door for Order to escalate a proportional response to the increased amount of Chaos in existence, some of it in ways we've already discussed via e-mail. It basically becomes an arms race of dickbaggery, with Order playing the part of the passive-aggressive asshole who responds to his roommate's loud music by turning up his own stereo. Order kinda has to be reactive in all this, but by creating a multiplicity of Agents of Chaos, between himself and Glitch AND Wendy, Dream has basically given Order license to respond in kind.



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