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

Or... It was a lesson on being too trusting, not having fallback plans, not having protocols for any number of mind control or subversion techniques. Not to mention, he literally says they're doing it again next week where this specific tactic will not happen.

Not a single person in the scene thought it was a waste or just him being petty, even the ones who hold a grudge.

 

Making the point that a properly equipped shapeshifter or one compromised League member could potentially get them all killed is definitely a way to get the League to step up their game, and is such a big point that it's easily worth wasting a entire training exercise on it.

Should be "about our".

 

I mean, maybe if Paul wouldn't refer to her like she's the woman on the side in his and Jade's romantic relationship and actually referred to himself as a worshiper of her she'd be less confused and uncertain?

 

That was a riot.

 

anybody remember where the marvel paul interlude is? google search is not helping

 

If Paul was the kind of person who would treat deities with reverence I doubt she would be nearly as interested in him.

 

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.c...oung-justice-si-thread-twelve.25032/page-2507

 

Thank you, corrected.

What's her portfolio again?

 

some of the plants?

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

Of course it's obvious, but that doesn't mean it's not effective. I would seriously hope he's going to pull a game of Paranoia next time -- if he can sow discord (hail Eris!) among the League so they're hesitant to work together, then he can divide and conquer to keep them from dedicating the necessary resources to stop him.

 

Paul will wake up with Eris using him as a cuddle pillow again. I mean what could he do ? Tell a greek deity not to try and coop a feel from one of their worshipers ? That's what they do.

 

I never really understood why someone like the SI who is all about careful rational choices and optimizations would choose to pick Eris as a patron goddess.

Technically he doesn't even need a patron goddess; you can just worship the pantheon. Though i suppose he was afraid his "faith" wouldn't be enough to count and he needed an explicit pact with someone. But why Eris?

 

Think of chaos in the sense of chaos theory. A whole lot of maths.

 

He wasn't expecting to have any actual contact with her. He only picked her as a declaration of purpose to the Amazons.

 

It sort of gets back to

In the original depictions of Eris, there is a sharp distinction between two kinds of strife and discord. Eris's form of discord is not the toxic kind that we see so much of these days, of people trying to tear down those they don't like. It's more like competitiveness and ambition: you see someone who is successful and want to be like that, so you are encouraged to work harder to compete. Eris's portfolio is the struggle to advance, to build, to outdo the people around you and rise above; she is literally the spirit of competition.

In one sense Paul and Eris have found an ideal way to relate to one another. Between Eris's aggressive flirting and Paul's deliberate ambiguity over whether or not he is willing to take her as a girlfriend or mistress on the side, they are both expressing Eris's own portfolio. It just strikes me as a particularly dangerous dynamic to have when Jade and Paul's relationship is already being strained by extended periods away from one another and Jade's own (justified!) concerns that she is simply not anywhere near Paul's power level and as such is both a potential hostage to Paul's enemies and being patronized as sort of a pet who has sex with her owner. That dynamic could so easily spill over into the unhealthy kind of strife that it seems strange to me that Paul is willing to live so dangerously with what is supposed to be an important relationship to him.

 

Did he forget that his best friend is an amazonian prince and that he is the student of the goddess of truth?

 

Truly the most dangerous of weapons

 

Did you forget that this is the same guy who walked through a coke-and-guns deal between gangsters and didn't notice!

He's come a long way since then, but not that far.

 

But even Diana doesn't have frequent contact with her deities. Kon has had far less face time with Helios than the SI has, and most Amazons don't even have that. He knew it was possible, he didn't think it was likely.

 

Except the whole thing only worked because they knew he was not a shapeshifter knew he was not mind controlled, and it was an exercise that they were cooperating with.

So basically the only thing they learned from this is that in the future if Paul suggests a training exercise, cheat.

 

sweet. thanks. were there more than one?

 

This?

 

You know, Paul could have been impersonated and mind controlled at literally any time before or during the war games.

And he just got them all killed.

But that doesn't matter because it means Paul is in the wrong!

 

I like it. I hope you write more. what is a power ring equivalent ability in marvel I wonder?

 

Doctor Spectrum's power prism.

 

I think you don’t understand what happened. He didn’t tell them all to show up somewhere to start the exercise and nuked them when they showed up. He approached each of them individually and recruited them to play the part of a patsy who had been mind controlled or replaced by a shapeshifter or an evil clone. Each of them went along with it because none of them are truly and completely immune to every method of compromising them, but each one believed that they were the only compromised one. The point wasn’t that they trusted him and so went along with it - it was that they as an organisation don’t have any method of noticing that their teammates are compromised. None of them were caught out at any point, because they don’t have screening for mind control or identity checking or any other way to reliably detect whether something is wrong. And having more people compromised should have made it harder for none of them to have been caught out given that they couldn’t coordinate - but despite that none of them seem to have realised that any of the others were compromised until after the exercise was ended. That’s not just a problem with methods of securing themselves - it means that if something like that happens, they won’t even realise there’s anything wrong until the compromised member actually attacks them.

They’ve learned that they don’t have any good way to detect compromised members, and that they can all be taken out simultaneously specifically due to that lack. That’s a seriously good thing for them to know, given threats like the Starros are still around and given Light clones impersonated multiple people close to the League (Red Arrow, the Guardian) for a long time. This should lead to them having defences against this, like checking each other’s identities on a regular basis or going through frequent screening protocols to catch things like hidden psychic instructions or brainwashing.

 

This makes sense, but as far as I remember (and I could be mistaken), Paragon never expressed that he thought it would be unlikely in the story, either in his internal monologue or in conversation with another character or Eris herself. If I could suggest adding a line or two to the next update, assuming it's not something different- since she participated in this exercise (which was nice to see, and I hope we get more of Eris being relevant in the world, either with Paragon or other characters), he could talk about his initial surprise with a curious Leaguer after the debrief.

 

I expect that it is because Paul is unscryable. His patron can't do the usual keep a eye on him from afar.