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

God, this whole thread is so so weird now that I'm missing half the conversation.

And yet I'm happier.

Anyway, glad Paul is getting some unbiased opinions. Maybe he could be a tourist with Zatanna for a week in deep space before heading home and just not dealing with this shit.

 

That’s boring tho... there has to be some resolution

 

Should this just be "Staff of", or should there be something after the "of"?

Edit: Hm, I guess it might be referencing how the staff of love is now the staff of nada.

 

Well that's going to raise a few feathers.

 

Man the as tacky as the cycle of hatred is it really is something to keep in mind.

 

Oh dear.

Can't say I don't understand Enigma though. Hard not to want revenge after that.

 

Staff of... what? Methinks you're missing a word there.

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

Uh, also missing something here?

Wow, the Kents were not nice people. No wonder Ultraman was an asshole.

Nice of you to think of that now...

Any number of useful devices, certainly.

Relatively recent, then.

I'm guessing a considerable amount.

Like perhaps, her becoming a hero in another universe

Riddle me this...

Yep, Wilson's Crusade mentality is still in full effect.

"Ultraman burned off half my face, then murdered my wife, my son and my daughter.

Where does the cycle of revenge end? Hopefully not with a giant moon tree and a fistfight on a nuclear scale...

Nope. Diplomacy check failed. At least it wasn't a critical fail. That would trigger a boss fight.

Seriously, this is looking worse and worse. The end of Kingdom Come is starting to look nicer than the probable battles ahead.

 

Wow, I gotta say, this is turning into a beautiful catastrophe. I'm excited to see how far this goes.

 

Then

 

It’s the Staff of ... because it doesn’t have the Star Saphire any longer. It’s the “staff of .... “

 

I wonder if the situation with Sai is that the Syndicate isn't the only side in this conflict with a "Join or Die" policy, and some who would otherwise be heroes had to join the Syndicate to get a measure of protection from the government.

 

Why do I feel that the final end of this is the death of everyone on both sides, Zatanna being traumatized, and Paul explaining that this was ultimately what they wanted.

 

... Paul really should have stopped him when he said 'You' while referring to the syndicate, and pointed out that they're actually forigners.
There's really nothing to be gained by allowing people to think that you're a member of a criminal cartel.

Also, Quizmaster is right, the syndicate need to die, and this mindless assuption that killing them all HAS to involve massive casualties seems like a lack of foresight.

Locate their backup plans and failsafes (fail-deadlies?) and then ambush them and wipe them out while another team takes care of their bombs and plagues and curses, or whatever else they have buried away.
Get the whole Zatara family together for a big celebration and drop a sound-baffle around them as they succumb to drugged food or something.

Taking people down without allowing them to cause mass-casualties is what being a superhero is all about. The idea that it's totally inevitable seems like something that batman would scoff at.

What, are they relying on tanks and missiles because they don't have any heavy-hitters who can go toe-to-toe with powerhouses Olypia or something?

 

That'd be pretty great, to be honest.


... Well, not the Zatanna getting traumatized. That'd suck for her. But it's not every day you get to see a civilization of mutual hatred and violence dissolve into a orgy of unbridled mayhem, ultimately leaving behind a pile of blissfully peaceful ruins.

 

You know what he should do you should probably just suggest to The Syndicate that they should all just use their travel to other universes technology to travel to some other Universe where there are no superheroes or even where there is and rhey are unknown and then just you know don't do the same big stuff again and then block off that Universe from their method of travel so that they can't be followed. Cuz it doesn't look like there's going to end any other way then full War.

 

Thank you, corrected.

Actually, with The Professor, Mister Richter and The Future dead, the Wanted universe might actually have room for them.

 

I'm not sure there are universes like that. They don't have the whole infinite-quantum-parallel-worlds thing; DC universes appear to be basically handcrafted and there are around a few dozen total I think.

Of course, this depends on when you count them. The entire multiverse has been broken and glued back together several times now, and each new version is more confusing than the last.

 

That's just dumping them on another society that has no way to resist them. That's just turning more innocent people into victims.

Dumping them on an uninhabited world might work, but I expect the syndicate to implode and kill each-other before too long, because building a sustainable society is hard work. Lots of people would starve, because without people to take things from, they don't have any way to gain anything.

 

I'm normally one for rooting the problem out at it's source, but the sheer scale of what they're talking about doing is honestly more monstrous than anything the Syndicate ever actually accomplished.

Conservatively, if Zatanna's right, you're looking at one hundred and fifty million people dead and the destruction of virtually all infrastructure and support on a national level.

That's putting aside the near-complete economic collapse the US will suffer, the international depression from the loss of one of the world's major trading powers, and...

...yeah, while the Syndicate definitely aren't good people, a government and its actors need to be pragmatic and realistic enough to know how far is too far.

These people are not making sane or rational decisions if what we've been shown is accurate.

 

Yes. It also weakens his rhetoric. A disinterested (“disinterested” as in “unlikely to have a personal stake in the matter”) concerned outside party has a much easier time convincing the people involved in a conflict of the reasonableness of their argument.

 

what if there are 52 universes? I'll see myself out

 

I'm not sure these people can actually be convinced; I'd wager they don't want to preserve the country or protect people, yada yada, they have a personal vendetta against the Syndicate. They want them dead, consequences be damned. One hundred fifty million corpses is merely a small price to pay for that.

It just so happens that people almost always create arguments for actions, rather than actions from arguments. Far fewer people realize this, so from a third-person perspective things can seem a bit confusing and counterintuitive.

 

There are indeed 52...in the standard multiverse.

IIRC, DC cosmology has multiple Multiverses, so you functionally have inifinite ones..

 

Thanks to hypertime, each universe in a multiverse has infinite universes branching off of it too.

 

... and Enigma et al would believe him, why? For that matter, would they even care, given that Paul is advocating for going soft on people that Enigma (at least, probably the other two as well, but it's hard to say) wants very seriously dead, at nearly any cost?

 

Exactly.
A neutral third party clearly doesn't have an agenda either way, they're just trying to do the thing that seems best for the random civilians that have to live in this verse, where-as the people on both sides have their own biases and yearning for revenge.

 

Well, they know that people from another universe exist, since a forign justice-league is the only reason they overthrew The Management in the first place, and Orange Power Rings don't seem to exist in this universe/on this earth. (larfleeze might have one, but nobody on earth knows who he is)
Also, he's with a Zatara who seems similar to but not exactly like the one they already know.

Seems pretty believable to me, but they'd obviously want to verify that.

I'm the same way, which is why I have to question the rest of it.

Sure, Zatanna mentioned that killing the syndicate would end up killing half the country, but A: Where did that number come from? And B, why is that a hard number?
Did they see something in the syndicate base that we didn't get to see?

Surely the casualty numbers depend entirely on how they go about it, with military intervention having massive casualties and something like a superhero strike-force attacking the villains in an isolated area would naturally have less.

They don't want to fight the syndicate like two armies fighting a war, they want to strike at them like assassins, going right for the heads and/or the most dangerous weapons in their arsenal first, taking those off the table and then mopping up the least dangerous members afterwards.

Attacking, for example, the Zatara crime family in the streets would lead to massive casualties as a while clan of reality warpers start tearing the city apart.
On the other hand, if they manage to find them all in one place and took them out with sleeping gas and sound-baffles to prevent them from speaking, then the casualty-rate should drop to near-zero.

 

Perhaps, but judging by their behavior and Enigma's responses, I still don't think that they'd care, or at least that they'd make much distinction between 'member of the Syndicate' and 'powered non-Syndicate-member who is trying to negotiate on behalf of the Syndicate.'

 

I agree that the number is probably not accurate, but what I find more disturbing than the number used is the reaction the heroes have to the stated possibility that half the nation could be killed as a direct result of their prolonged conflict with the villains.

For me, it's less about an exact accounting for the possible casualties and more the fact that Enigma and the rest just casually accept and brush that potentiality off. It speaks of either a blithe surety that it won't get that far or, more likely given the context of the conversation as a whole, an acceptance that even the deaths of one hundred and fifty million people are worth their goal.

In either instance, that is a really bad thing.