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General DC Comics Discussion Thread

Deagonx said:
Everyone is always capable of this. Both in and outside of a CRT. The only obstacle really is whether or not other people find that persuasive. If this were a meaningful CRT where a change to the wiki were on the line, I probably would compile the evidence, but I am not going to drop what I am doing to spend hours gathering scans any time anyone asks me to.
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0iPA1ig.png
 
Deagonx said:
Personally, I am not as sympathetic to this viewpoint. Or rather, I can only allow so much of it before I think we're painting a somewhat ridiculous caricature of the stories being told, where we must re-contextualize hundreds of stories by doing our best to explain away every seemingly physical event, with the end result being that our official stance is "never trust your eyes, this visuals of this primarily visual medium cannot be trusted!"

And in some cases, this approach completely doesn't work. For instance, there is a Supergirl comic where Supergirl manages to travel to Apokolips without a Boom Tube, and because of that she is physically smaller than the rest of the citizens. If we consider Apokolips an abstract non-physical space, this suddenly becomes borderline incoherent. It isn't unthinkable that Boom Tubes primarily change someone from being physical to abstract, but why would Supergirl appear physically small for teleporting there differently? Are we to assume then, that her method also changed her to an abstract form, but for some reason Boom Tubes also amplify the power or "abstract size" of one's form? And for some reason, Supergirls other method did not?

Please, goodness, no. In the context of that story it is abundantly clear that Boom Tubes make you physically bigger and Supergirl was small because she didn't use a Boom Tube and simply teleported instead. I can't imagine thinking the best solution to this problem is tons of mental acrobatics to make sense of this clear contradiction.
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I'm sure it sounds not good. And of course, I'm sure a lot of authors don't think about that and are completely unaware of any of those ideas. But at that point, it's more about the contradiction between different authors because they don't have the same understanding of the place.

But the idea that something like that can happen is the focus of many stories. One of the funny scenes from Marvel's The Ultimates 2 is Ego hiding behind a door to not enter the conflict only for Galactus to say something like "We are in an informational space, where combat is a metaphor, the door you are hiding, it doesn't exist". Not a concept exclusive to Marvel. In Chiaki J. Konaka's works about information space, he directly came up with using the term Metaphorize to describe turning "physical" in information space because it's not really physical, but rather a metaphor to make sense of a purely unreal place (Something he does in Alice in Cyberland, Serial Experiments Lain, and Digimon Tamers).

I do remember some old Grant Morrison scans talking about that and how you can't truly describe what happens in the abstract realms in terms of physical description because they exist beyond space-time, so everything is a simplification of what happens. I also recall some scans of some characters saying "It's not what it looks like, it's this complex pure idea of a thing and not the thing".

So, I think that at least some authors did at least mention once "Don't trust what you see, this is all a simplification of something that can't be truly described by physical means". However, I'm also sure there are just as many authors who have no idea of what any of this is and just made up stuff from their own interpretation without knowing the deeper meaning of what others said. Which is why we even have a cosmology division.
 
Armor by all means, feel free to right this wrong by undertaking that task yourself.
 
Deagonx said:
Everyone is always capable of this. Both in and outside of a CRT. The only obstacle really is whether or not other people find that persuasive. If this were a meaningful CRT where a change to the wiki were on the line, I probably would compile the evidence, but I am not going to drop what I am doing to spend hours gathering scans any time anyone asks me to.
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Are you from Quora or Comicvine?
 
Deagonx said:
Armor by all means, feel free to right this wrong by undertaking that task yourself.
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that wasn't meant to be an attack or anything i just wanted to reply with something stupid so i just browser the arkham sub and picked a post at random
 
Xearsay said:
However, after looking at Darkseids profile it seems the New Gods and their world are already accepted as platonic since we use the Batman statement for Darkseids AE type 1.
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If all you meant by "Platonic" was "Trueform Darkseid has incorporeality/abstract existence" then by all means. Even his appearance in the Orrery could've proven that. Actual platonism encompasses a lot more than that, but it's been proven that even TF Darkseid lacks those qualities which is why he does not have them.

Executor_N0 said:
But at that point, it's more about the contradiction between different authors because they don't have the same understanding of the place.
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Yes, this is largely the case. It's not so much that I think there's no scans suggesting the Sphere is predominantly abstract, it's just that the many contradictions to that notion make it far more complicated a matter than some would be willing to admit to themselves. But as you say, this is something that the cosmology split was created to help alleviate to a degree.
 
Deagonx said:
Yes, this is largely the case. It's not so much that I think there's no scans suggesting the Sphere is predominantly abstract, it's just that the many contradictions to that notion make it far more complicated a matter than some would be willing to admit to themselves. But as you say, this is something that the cosmology split was created to help alleviate to a degree.
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And what are these contradictions?
 
I gave some examples above re: Libra gaining corporeal form in Apokolips, Supergirl being physically smaller in Apokolips when she travelled there without a boom tube.
 
Deagonx said:
I gave some examples above re: Libra gaining corporeal form in Apokolips, Supergirl being physically smaller in Apokolips when she travelled there without a boom tube.
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I have no idea why that would mean the Sphere of Gods isn't abstract. Physical beings entering the world does not contradict this.
 
Hypertornado099 said:
I have no idea why that would mean the Sphere of Gods isn't abstract. Physical beings entering the world does not contradict this.
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It's more the lack of explanation as to how a Physical being can interact with a metaphysical. Looking into the large picture, it's easy to solve this.

If Libra was becoming more spiritually aware and beyond what the physical body can affect, the fact that as he rose he became corporeal to the Sphere of Gods could just be the matter=spiritual equalization some emanationist philosophies apply.

That is to say, what is spiritual and transcendent is to the realm below that is physical from its own point of view, but that spiritual realm is physical to itself and what lies above, which that which lies above seeing the two realms below as physical.
V5rQwWS.png

So, it's possible to in fact use Libra's ascension to showcase it is an emanationist cosmology with the larger reality being transcendental to what lies below, while being physical and limited to what lies above. The only problem is the lack of an actual depiction of that being said in the work itself.
 
Executor_N0 said:
So, it's possible to in fact use Libra's ascension to showcase it is an emanationist cosmology with the larger reality being transcendental to what lies below, while being physical and limited to what lies above. The only problem is the lack of an actual depiction of that being said in the work itself.
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I'm confused, are you asking if DC works on increasingly more fundamental realms?
 
No, he's referring specifically to a cascading spiritual->physical relationship relative to all layers and the ones below them. As in, every realm can internally interact under a physical conception, but still be seen as spiritual by the realm below it, and still see the one above it as spiritual (which, itself, would behave physically relative to itself).
 
He probably just felt corporeal because he touched the ground tbh, there's an explicit statement of the Sphere of the Gods being outside corporeal reality by Darkseid in Justice League Odyssey, and metaphysical statements in guidebooks
 
Deagonx said:
No, he's referring specifically to a cascading spiritual->physical relationship relative to all layers and the ones below them. As in, every realm can internally interact under a physical conception, but still be seen as spiritual by the realm below it, and still see the one above it as spiritual (which, itself, would behave physically relative to itself).
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As in, each realm is more spiritual then the last, leading up to the most spiritual at the top?
 
NHTkenshin2 said:
As in, each realm is more spiritual then the last, leading up to the most spiritual at the top?
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No. Read Executor's explanation again:
If Libra was becoming more spiritually aware and beyond what the physical body can affect, the fact that as he rose he became corporeal to the Sphere of Gods could just be the matter=spiritual equalization some emanationist philosophies apply.

That is to say, what is spiritual and transcendent is to the realm below that is physical from its own point of view, but that spiritual realm is physical to itself and what lies above, which that which lies above seeing the two realms below as physical.
V5rQwWS.png

So, it's possible to in fact use Libra's ascension to showcase it is an emanationist cosmology with the larger reality being transcendental to what lies below, while being physical and limited to what lies above.
Click to expand...
The idea is that all realms see themselves as physical, the realms below them as physical, and the realms above them as spiritual.
 
JfqA6GO.jpeg
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eRqk47C.jpeg
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Can somebody remind me which of our wiki pages that those screencaptures are from please?

Also, why would the Sphere of the Gods being an abstract realm of ideas automatically give it a higher tier than currently, and what is its current tier and suggested new tier?

DC Comics is extremely inconsistent in any case, so it would definitely not be unusual for the realms of its gods to be portrayed as conceptual in some stories and physical in others.
 
Antvasima said:
Can somebody remind me which of our wiki pages that those screencaptures are from please?
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The first is from Darkseid Pre-Flashpoint, the second is from our cosmology page.

Antvasima said:
Also, why would the Sphere of the Gods being an abstract realm of ideas automatically give it a higher tier than currently, and what is its current tier and suggested new tier?
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I'm not sure anyone has explicitly mentioned giving it a higher tier in this thread. Currently we do not treat the Sphere as having qualitative superiority, which is good.
 
Okay, but if we already accepted it as being officially established as conceptual during our official DC Comics revision, we probably shouldn't let the inconsistencies in other stories where Apokolips and New Genesis were portrayed as purely physical places affect that.

It can easily be reconciled by stating that the physical versions of Apokolips and New Genesis that have generally appeared within DC Comics stories are just material representations/Platonian cave wall shadows of their true selves.
 
Antvasima said:
It can easily be reconciled by stating that the physical versions of Apokolips and New Genesis that have generally appeared within DC Comics stories are just material representations/Platonian cave wall shadows of their true selves.
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There are some cases where this is not a fully functional reconciliation, which is my issue. I'm fine with it staying in the Cosmology page. I am just pointing out that the reality is more complicated than simply "Batman said it was, discussion over" which is how some people seem to treat it.
 
TiltedFN said:
Why don't we scale Platonism to 1-A again? Especially like concepts of space and time.
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vsbattles.com

A possible downgrade of 1-A Platonic concepts (Staff only)

I was just looking after a forum discussion about plutonic concepts transcending reality and all possible existing concepts, but frankly, that sounds kinda like an illogical impossibility. For something to be beyond reality, it would have to be both beyond all created concepts within a verse, so...
vsbattles.com vsbattles.com

As for why transcending the concepts of space-time isn’t 1-A, a concept is defined as an abstract essence that defines a part of reality. Hence, the concepts of space-time scale to the dimensions shown to exist as you can’t really extrapolate that to speculative dimensions.
 
Does Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade qualify under our notability standards for DC Comics? It has only six issues and was published within half a year in 2009.
 
Serious question: how reliably do you think we've tiered the cosmology split? As it stands, I find the cosmology page's formatting substandard for such a prominent verse, and we don't have profiles for a bunch of the characters there. I've also seen a bunch of people claim some parts of the cosmology should still be 1-A, which I've never quite understood. Marvel and DC's cosmic profiles were all unreliable and clunky before the recent overhauls; I've managed to properly make sense of Marvel now while DC's only improvement is that we scrubbed off the egregiously unjustified tiers.
 
IdiosyncraticLawyer said:
Serious question: how reliably do you think we've tiered the cosmology split? As it stands, I find the cosmology page's formatting substandard for such a prominent verse, and we don't have profiles for a bunch of the characters there. I've also seen a bunch of people claim some parts of the cosmology should still be 1-A, which I've never quite understood. Marvel and DC's cosmic profiles were all unreliable and clunky before the recent overhauls; I've managed to properly make sense of Marvel now while DC's only improvement is that we scrubbed off the egregiously unjustified tiers.
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They’re probably just as or if not more unreliable than they were before. The tiers don’t make any sense, the profiles for the cosmic characters weren’t made any better, and the cosmologies for Morrison/Snyder and Dematteis should definitely scale higher.
 
IdiosyncraticLawyer said:
Serious question: how reliably do you think we've tiered the cosmology split? As it stands, I find the cosmology page's formatting substandard for such a prominent verse, and we don't have profiles for a bunch of the characters there. I've also seen a bunch of people claim some parts of the cosmology should still be 1-A, which I've never quite understood. Marvel and DC's cosmic profiles were all unreliable and clunky before the recent overhauls; I've managed to properly make sense of Marvel now while DC's only improvement is that we scrubbed off the egregiously unjustified tiers.
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Not good because insufficient research was done
 
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