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With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

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I remember Power Ring Blue killed Emperor Rickard way back in his first appearance, though I'm not sure if how he did so was shown; was Rickard a villain/Made Man or on Wilson's side, and what were his abilities? I know Prez Rickard is good but I'm not fully sure.

I also wonder about the Director and how he differs from regular Niles Caulder; I imagine it's similar to this version of John Constantine (did Zorina consider marrying him?) in which they're not manipulative bastards but they're also actually villainous instead of being anti-heroic.

I don't recall a Word of Zoat on the matter but who is Medea in this setting? I imagine it would be a heroic Circe but I assume she'd have the same name in that case, since Circe and Medea are distinct characters in myth (not sure about comics canon).

Are the Guardians evil (their regular portrayal's moral ambiguity aside) and Qwardians good? And so on and so forth throughout the Galaxy/universe?
 
Bigking321 said:
Lol. Poor blue.

So does he have absolutely no say in the matter then?
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She can't rape him if his thing doesn't get up? He has a power ring, he can do what OL did and disable his libido. It is his last Hope after all. Though I don't think she'd actually demand immediate consumation of their marriage.
Seriously though, he could do what OL did with that one alien queen and try to find an alien overlord for her to marry (and ultimately fail). Though personally I think he's spending their honeymoon getting the blue lantern corps up and running. Can you say alien mafia?
 
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Bigking321 said:
Lol. Poor blue.

So does he have absolutely no say in the matter then?
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Of course, he does right now Don Giovanni is his bitch.
But Paul wouldn't stop him, cause he wants to keep him in power and not have his daughter murder him.

Ganurath said:
Zatana is going to have all sorts of thoughts once she understands how her counterpart arranged the marriage.
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Now if only regular Zatanna could pull off an equally criminal move
 
moralrelativity said:
holds
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Thank you, corrected.
DrThoth said:
I remember Power Ring Blue killed Emperor Rickard way back in his first appearance, though I'm not sure if how he did so was shown; was Rickard a villain/Made Man or on Wilson's side, and what were his abilities? I know Prez Rickard is good but I'm not fully sure.
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He's supernaturally persuasive. He joined the New Management, but only as a way to broadcast his powers worldwide.
Are the Guardians evil (their regular portrayal's moral ambiguity aside) and Qwardians good? And so on and so forth throughout the Galaxy/universe?
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The Guardians went mad with power and were killed by Krona, who killed himself shortly afterwards because he wasn't sure that he could trust himself either.
 
DrThoth said:
I remember Power Ring Blue killed Emperor Rickard way back in his first appearance, though I'm not sure if how he did so was shown; was Rickard a villain/Made Man or on Wilson's side, and what were his abilities? I know Prez Rickard is good but I'm not fully sure.

I also wonder about the Director and how he differs from regular Niles Caulder; I imagine it's similar to this version of John Constantine (did Zorina consider marrying him?) in which they're not manipulative bastards but they're also actually villainous instead of being anti-heroic.

I don't recall a Word of Zoat on the matter but who is Medea in this setting? I imagine it would be a heroic Circe but I assume she'd have the same name in that case, since Circe and Medea are distinct characters in myth (not sure about comics canon).

Are the Guardians evil (their regular portrayal's moral ambiguity aside) and Qwardians good? And so on and so forth throughout the Galaxy/universe?
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Fun fact: in the original myths, Circe is the aunt of both Medea and the minotaur. She (Circe) and her 3 sisters were children of Helios and Peres. Medea was also a priestess of Hecate. In the myths Medea sailed with Jason and the argonauts after Hera got Aphrodite to make her fall in love, at one time stopped on Circe's island, and eventually, in certain versions, killed her husband and daughters. She also healed Hercules from Hera's curse
 
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Was Don Giovanni using any truth/intention-detecting magic during this meeting, or relying on mundane methods of evaluating Power Ring Blue's character and motivations?

I also just wanted to say that I really do enjoy the interview scenes in the story, be they tv show segments with Paragon and Renegade or a job interview with Mandated-Paul. They're pretty good writing that provide exposition and characterization in a well-integrated and always compelling way.
 
ForeverShogo said:
Why do people keep saying they hope Zatanna doesn't get ideas? The conditions that made the Zorina/Blue marriage happen don't exist in her own universe.
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Because she spent a considerably long time using the star sapphire and if this were an actual DC comic it would probably give her ideas.

No idea where Zoat is going with it though. Can't tell if he's gonna play it straight or subvert everyone's expectations.
 
EYYYY you can do things like this now because were in QQ YEEESS (more adult stuff not just smut I mean)
 
Buggy123 said:
Hmm, maybe. You can definitely create a convincing synthetic narrative, in the context of new footage/articles, interviews, other typical informative media, etc. But completely synthesizing events that didn't happen, including video/audio, is extremely difficult.
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Complete events, no. That's not really doable for someone with a typical PC. But a speech? There was a video of a reasonably convincing speech that never actually happened tied to the article on the tech news site I follow talking about this sort of program a couple years ago.
 
Its called deepfakes, and yes its gotten surprisingly easy to fake shit lately (what took days to make can now be done in hours), but its also noticeable, even more so if you have an AI handling image analysis to see if some tampering occurred.

In short Baul could fake the evidence he gave Paul, but its a whole lot of work and Paul AI would probably catch some of it at with point all the goodwill is burn.
 
King of Frost said:
Because she spent a considerably long time using the star sapphire and if this were an actual DC comic it would probably give her ideas.

No idea where Zoat is going with it though. Can't tell if he's gonna play it straight or subvert everyone's expectations.
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Paragon recently said that there wasn't metaphysical contamination due to using the Star Sapphire, which minimizes Zatanna's risk of going love-crazy barring powerful external influences like the dragon (though when brainwashed she did say the Sapphire talked to her- I'm not sure if this part was addressed, if it was just a mundane hallucination/imagining rather than mystic/emotional spectrum-based). I'm glad for that because it's more reasonable than every power-up the protagonists try to use being automatically a bad idea in order to preserve the status quo.
 
ForeverShogo said:
Why do people keep saying they hope Zatanna doesn't get ideas? The conditions that made the Zorina/Blue marriage happen don't exist in her own universe.
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From what we see so far, the marriage happened because Zorina went full-steam ahead and didn't take No for an answer. Assuming that there were discussions afterward to persuade him to enter into this more willingly, the most plausible explanation to me of why he would have acquiesced would be that Zorina made herself a useful partner to him in achieving whatever his goals are.

I'm dubious that this would cause Zatanna to get ideas about what to do going forward (since Paul shut her down pretty definitively)... well, unless/until him and Jade break up.

However, I would expect this would send her to darker "this could have been me, if only I were a stronger/bolder person" places.

She's almost certainly been playing through "What ifs" in the aftermath of the situation, and this is smacking her in the face with the idea that, no, it wasn't just a fantasy, there really was a way that a Zatanna could have ended up with Paul, she was just too weak/timid/something to manage it.
 
Buggy123 said:
With a teenager, that's not a "might". That is almost certainly what would happen. Especially since OL can't give the real reason, and Zatanna thinks that OL is also a (slightly older) teenager, and teenagers tend to be so desperate for intimacy that not being interested in the first place is relatively rare. OL was stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to let her down without also demolishing her self-esteem.
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Sure. I'm not saying there were any perfect options.

I mean, if you've read any advice column, there's any number of perennial issues that boil down to "I need to tell my friend this truth they don't want to hear. How can I do this in such a way that makes them face this truth, while simultaneously not affecting our relationship in the slightest?" That's how you make advice columnists laugh, since this isn't a thing that exists.

I don't know that putting a hard stop to this without hurting Zatanna (or their friendship) was an option. My issue with Paul is less that he didn't do some unknown perfect option, but more than he buried his head in the sand and didn't seem to grasp that choosing the soft option had consequences that weren't going to go away by ignoring them.

And, yeah, the "concealing what he considers his true age to be" thing does make it more complicated.

I don't believe this was intentional in the slightest, but Paul's situation makes for a very easy allegory that I find more than a little humorous, given his in-story expressed opinion on the subject.

A core part of Paul's identity is that he believes the real him is a different age than the biological age that everyone perceives.

He's afraid to come clean about what he considers his true age identity, because he believes that some people will feel betrayed by him having hidden it from them for so long, and he doesn't want to mess up his relationships.

(And, there's a level on which they might not be wrong for feeling that way, either, since I would think there's some consent issues implicated here, if for example, a teenager might have no problem consenting to lying in bed not-fully-clothed while another teenager massages them to relax them in the evening before sleep, but might not consent to a 30-year-old man doing that to them.)

His age identity affects what kind of relationships he has with others, which leads him to perform actions that any objective observer would misinterpret (like the above massage), because he's perceiving the situation as though he were really the age he identifies as, whereas other people are expecting him to relate to others as the age they perceive.

His reluctance to share a core part of his identity means that who he is and isn't attracted to doesn't always make complete sense to others. This leaves him with the conundrum that, well, it's really none of their business why he feels the way he does, just that he does... but it'd still be easier if they had all the facts and could understand why he feels that way.

There's presumably a part of him that recognizes that, if he were to come clean, some number of his friends would be of the belief (just like X number of posters here) that his belief in his age identity is bullshit, and that he's an idiot for letting it rule his life like that. Their belief doesn't change the fact that he feels that his "true" age identity is important.

It presumably doesn't make it easier that the society he's in seems to think that apparent biological age is the only thing that matters. Kon is 1 and M'gann is 48? Doesn't matter. They both look like they're 16, so they should both be in high school and it's completely okay for them to date each other.

... so, yeah, I find Paul as essentially a transage protagonist amusing, and I'm curious to see whether the masquerade is going to fall apart in Blue Paul's world, and how Zatanna would handle it if it did.
 
Mquz said:
He doesn't like tea?:eek: How can he call himself British?
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Probably has not found the right kind of tea. There are like a thousand different blends.

I am partial to black tea Earl Grey. Or just regular black when drank with a bit of milk.

I like coffee but it makes me angry if I drink it too much.

Next thing you know Paul will be dissing fish and chips.
 
Vaermina said:
The only difference is that Zorina is evil...
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Eh.....no. Can you honestly say that you could see Zatanna throwing herself at OL the way Zorina did with Blue Paul the first time we saw them? Climbing into his lap and demanding his "attention" like Zorina did would be horrifically out of character for Zatanna. Even mind controlled into fixating on her desire for him to the exclusion of all else she didn't try an approach quite that aggressive. And that difference can't really be explained away as just Zorina being an evil Zatanna. They are VERY different people.

Maxx Crowley said:
Anyway, I think it'd be hilarious if OL just went "Yeah....nah." And just up and ported himself and Zatanna back home. Seriously, the lack of kidnapping villains being told to go fuck themselves and deal with their own shit is sad.
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Assuming he can. I mean, I know he CAN - as in "it's within his power" - but does he know how yet or is it something he's going to have to take some time to figure out? If he needs time the best way to get that time is to play along for the time being.

Bigking321 said:
Lol. Poor blue.

So does he have absolutely no say in the matter then?
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Oh he COULD say no. But then he'd have a fight on his hands. One that he very probably couldn't win.
 
I..... well that went to a dark and "Medieval" place.

I mean, few people liked arranged marriages. They were just accepted as part of the life of the Nobility. Even the great King Solomon in the Bible had 600 (though, Song of Songs and a few verses in Proverbs said he and his first wife were truly in love.)

Hopefully, BL Paul will escape the crazy 16 girl (technically legal, depending on your location, a list that grows smaller every election cycle).
 
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