“Oh, And If You’ve Been Possessed By A Sentient Alien Being, You’re Gonna Want To Go Across The

There's another Worm connection in No Man's Land with Poison Ivy. As the rest of Batman's rogues' gallery carve up Gotham, she ends staking out a derelict city park and caring for a bunch of kids who were orphaned or otherwise abandoned after the earthquake. Rather than rousting her out, Batman agrees to leave her alone for the time being, provided she uses her powers to generate produce for the rest of the surviving citizens to eat. While Ivy was less than pleased about having to go along with this, she still held up her end of the deal.

In his own discussion of Ivy's history on Twitter, Exalted_Speed has argued that No Man's Land is really where the interpretation of Ivy as an antihero (ahem) took root. The connection with Worm is obvious; however, Taylor's tenure as urban warlord feels like a more refined version of that concept. As noted in the thread, the attempts to turn Poison Ivy into an antihero often stumble on both the sheer amount of carnage she's caused over the years and on with her original characterization of "vicious plant-themed Catwoman" which is still a major element in her modern portrayals. By contrast, it's much easier to offer apologetics of Taylor's conduct on the Boardwalk, since she was explicitly written to fit the role that Pamela Isely was awkwardly retrofitted to play.

Got a Worm meta question for you. I'm starting on the early parts of Taylor's warlord era - I'm about to leap into Arc 13 - and the general concept of a ravaged American city being divided up by various supervillain groups is reminding me a lot of that Batman story arc No Man's Land from the late 1990s. Unfortunately my comics knowledge is rudimentary at best, and I haven't been able to any discussion comparing the two stories, so I was wondering if I could pick your brain on the subject. Was it just convergent evolution, or was Wildbow engaging with the Batman story in some way?

I myself have only read about half of No Man's Land- and several years ago to boot- so I've got limited ability to do a direct compare and contrast. No Man's Land is absolutely the sort of status-quo-shattering, history-book-making upset that, within Marvel and DC, nonetheless always inexplicably heals and loses salience until you can barely tell that it's still in continuity. Worm is heavily informed by Wildbow's irritation with that sort of thing, so I think it's totally reasonable to view the warlord era through the lens of "What if No Mans Land had no editorial escape hatch." Alternatively, I think it kind of makes sense to view it through the lens that it's working backwards from the premise of No Man's Land- In what kind of setting would it be plausible for the Federal Government to write off a sufficiently-damaged American City? In what context would the legal infrastructure have been established for that, in what context would that even fall within the Overton Window? What muddies my opinion on this is that the general concept of a ravaged, atmospherically-apocalyptic American city torn up by superpowered gang warfare is something that's kind of just been in the water in superhero comics since the mid-eighties at least, and it was a relatively common thing to see during the Dark Age- they were choice prey for all those overpouched musclemen with their poorly rendered firearms. I'd be surprised if Wildbow wasn't at least aware of No Man's Land, but it's definitely not the only cape book from the late 90s or early oughts where you could pick up that idea from. Ultimately this leaves me unsure if No Man's Land is the specific referent or if it's just part-and-parcel with trying to do an involved, thoughtful take on what cape comics were like at the time.

What happened? I haven’t been following the show, but I’m vaguely aware they did something with Spock in the latest episode.

Wtf, Strange New Worlds is making me hate Star Trek

Good to see this post making the rounds again. I forgot to include that link in my first response, so here it is again for good measure. It digs a bit more into the matter and makes a point that Kuvira may be more of an modernizing authoritarian than an out-and-out fascist. (A very fine point, yes, but an important one to keep in mind.) Come to think of it, I’ve been wondering for the longest time if Amon may have been the actual Nazi. Certainly when you look at Book 1 of Korra as a whole, it’s not hard to make a case that for all the talk of equality and the downtrodden nonbender, Amon’s ultimate goal was the elimination or expulsion of all benders from the United Republic, and his first act upon seizing control of Republic City was to round up the benders and strip them of their powers by force. While I don’t know the correct word to describe benders as a subset of all humans in the universe of Avatar, I don’t think anyone could disagree that Amon’s plan for all benders was essentially ethnic cleansing.

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

With 3 “a”s, even!

It’s Madiha Day!

This is very embarrassing, but I forgot to link the blog post that discussed Kuvira. It’s right here: https://futuristdolmen.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/kuvira-an-appraisal-of-the-woman-and-her-works/

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

You’re not an awful person, Madiha. You’re passionate about what you believe in and you stick to your principles, but you’re always willing to be open-minded, which is so hard to do in this day and age. That doesn’t sound like a bad person to me. I am probably the last person who should be an amateur counselor, but remember: those negative thoughts you have are not. true. They are years of insecurity and fear twisted by depression into a cudgel that give you a false view of reality and convince you that you deserve to be unhappy. Nothing they say is true.

We do not think that way about you.

You deserve to be happy. You will be happy. Whenever those thoughts start to roll in, remember that they are do not reflect reality and they are lying to you. Hold on to that. (This is really weird for me to write, but it tears me up to see you burdened with so much and know there’s almost nothing I can do about it.)

im really afraid im just a like, completely awful person but just utterly deluded in my own goodness that i dont see why everyone hates me

if you relate to having an idea for a story for 4 to 8 years with almost zero progress towards actually writing it down, clap your hands

Esther, speaking as a big ol’ Star Trek fan, your friends were right. Season 1 was rough. A lot of the time it comes off as an attempt to make a 1960s-era Trek show in the 1980s, and it does not work at. all. Production was also a nightmare, to the point where the TNG writers’ room gained the reputation as one of the worst places a writer in Hollywood could work at. There’s a documentary called Chaos on the Bridge that discusses some of what went on, but it has its own biases and axes to grind. Still, Season 1 TNG did give us this incredible moment. (cw: more gore than you’d ever expect to see on an episode of Star Trek) If you ever want to give the show another shot, I’d recommend just watching any episode whose summary sounds cool. TNG was made with an eye to syndication, so the writers were discouraged from any heavy serialization. Anyway, great podcast, and I hope Madiha has recovered from finally seeing the Super Best Friends stumble their way into one of the worst (in all senses of the word) endings for Detroit: Become Human.

Transmediacrity Episode 23: You Deserve To Be A Space Kid

I'm not down with the catholic church; I just want to dress this way.

Please do not listen to this episode on full blast volume earbuds, there’s A Thing.

Topics include: Heart to heart about being depressed all the time; Madiha reads HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; 2017, a year of closure for Betterman; the story of GGG vs Betterman; a brief, confused summary of GaoGaiGar; combining the tones of GaoGaiGar and Betterman; Linker Gel Dyalisis; THE POWER; Esther is back into Shin Megami Tensei Apocalypse; masters of reusing assets; god’s toilet; sexy nun; it all sounds like a doom level; SMT Mobile, why the fuck would I play that; did you get the dick chariot; CAN’T ESCAPE FROM CROSSING FATE; BACK IN to Honkai Impact; but first the masocore gacha hell of Bang Dream!; 29:00 warning for volume; this is like hell; NOT EVEN A FREE ROLL; thank you Honkai Impact; Sakura Samsara, the open world content; Theresa, the old small nun; Mihoyo storytelling; FGO is a demon monster gacha game; PUT HONKAI ON STEAM MIHOYO; honkai impact is warframe for lesbians; warframe anxiety; impossible to progress; FUCK DAVID CAGE. Send us timestamped suggestions for the Transmediacrity podcast sampler for newbies!!!

Outro theme is “Ashura-Kai Authorized Shop” from the Shin Megami Tensei IV OST.

Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.

SUPPORT US ON PATREON! Or donate directly to Madiha for hosting costs.

Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!

Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)

You can find us at:

Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War. Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.

TNG still had a fair number of godlike energy-based or “sufficiently advanced” beings outside of Q. Off the top of my head there’s the extradimensional god of the Edo, Nagilum, Kevin Uxbridge, and “Isabella”. Beyond TNG, I do think you’re right; there really weren’t any in DS9 outside of the Prophets, and VOY and ENT avoided the trope entirely. There are other ways the consolidation of the Trek universe under TNG changed the types of stories that were told. There was a recurring trope in TOS of fellow captains who suffered some sort of horrible tragedy and ended up going off the reservation in some way, and the only time that plot comes up in TNG is with Benjamin Maxwell and the Cardassians. @abigailnussbaum also made the point in her old TNG critique that as the show went on, the planets-of-the-week Picard and co. visited were increasingly worlds that had preexisting relations with the Federation rather than being new discoveries. While this didn’t really change the types of stories that were being told, it had the effect of making TNG more about maintaining the Federation than exploring strange new worlds.

One of Star Trek: The Next Generation's missions was to give coherence to a world originally developed as a frame for the one-off episodes – completely disconnected SF stories using the same stock cast and setting – of the original series.

There's an abortive first season plot about corruption in Starfleet that's dropped once it's established Starfleet isn't interesting enough to bear more weight than as a plot device telling the Enterprise where to go this week.

Something underappreciated as a success though is that the original series had scads of godlike but trickstery or inhuman beings because individual writers (the Trek franchises were famously full of episodes by published SF writers and continued to take freelance episode pitches well after this had been widely abandoned in TV) kept finding the notion of the Enterprise dealing with one a solid premise.

And in TNG we instead get Q, this type condensed into a single recurring character, introduced in the pilot, getting 6 episodes to himself and then blessing the finale, going on to appear in other Trek shows across multiple galactic quadrants (also, basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, as the John de Lancie-voiced season 2 big bad Discord)

Unfortunately for Lord Regent Burrows, the right man in the wrong place can make all the diff-er-ence in the world.

There was nothing personal in this. Goodbye, Corvo.