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General DC Comics Discussion Thread

Elizio33 said:
@Deagonx @DarkDragonMedeus @ProfectusInfinity @Antvasima thoughts ?
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If the goal is to prepare a response for any "wasn't everything made canon several times" concerns, it's perfect. If I had to make suggestions only, here's how I might personally reword some things here and there.
Despite this, many efforts have been made to reconcile these various inconsistencies. For instance, Grant Morrison and Mark Waid created Hypertime in the '90s to explain multiple continuity errors away, but the concept has been used so inconsistently by writers over the years, it's devolved into a buzzword with no "official" in-universe definition. In another attempt, following the declining sales of the New 52, DC co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan Didio voted against constraining writers to strict continuity (i.e. New 52 continuity, Post-Crisis continuity, etc.) as they believed making everything canon would broaden the scope for potential stories. The issue surrounding these integrations however, is that different authors write independently of each other, often adding new concepts to the older works in general disregard of older writers' content. Though cases will arise where certain writers strive to preserve the integrity of older authors' works, irreconcilable disruptions in continuity are far more conventional for the DC Multiverse.

There have been other attempts to explain the disruptions, such as with Geoff Johns' Metaverse which aimed to rationalize the various changes taking place in the DC Multiverse. There was also Scott Snyder's attempt to undo the contradictions of the DCU with the end of Death Metal, which assembled and highlighted every DC storyline, transforming the multiverse into its own sort of Omniverse. However, even that effort was sullied within a literal year under the retcons of Dark Crisis.

All in all, the above circumstances have created the following irreconcilable difficulties:
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The goal was more to reinforce the already existing argument about why we decided to split the cosmologies, as I felt it put too much emphasis on the difference between cosmologies and scaling issues. The current argument on our DC Cosmology blog is a good one but doesn't even mention the ways DC tried to reconcile contradictions and continuity errors and why they didn't work so well, which opened the door to counter-arguments using statements from DC editors and writers or Hypertime. Or just attempt to reconcile the differences between cosmologies.
 
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Elizio33 said:
Here is my proposition ! Note that I'm not very good at writing well-written texts but I hope you like it and don't hesitate if I've made any mistakes. I hope I haven't made the explanation worse. 😕

The DC Multiverse is essentially a storytelling device that ties together numerous materials published over the past 80+ years. Throughout the years of publications that made up the DC Multiverse, the consistency of the verse has sparked much controversy. This is due to various changes, continuity errors, and different interpretations of them that have been written by various authors over the years.

Despite this, many efforts have been made to reconcile these various inconsistencies. In the '90s, Grant Morrison and Mark Waid created Hypertime to explain continuity errors, but it's sort of become a buzzword that writers haven't used consistently over the years, with no "official" in-universe definition. Following declining sales of the New 52, DC co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan Didio decided to vote against restricting writers to strict continuity (i.e. New 52 continuity, Post-Crisis continuity, etc.) and wanted to open up a wider playing field for potential stories by making everything canon. The problem we have been running into is that different writers often write independently of each other, adding new concepts to the older ones while ignoring or only somewhat acknowledging the works of the other writers. This is not always the case, as some writers pay considerable attention to the works of certain other authors, but even then there are some degrees of independence.

There have been other attempts to explain the changes, notably with the Metaverse with which Geoff Johns came to shed light on the various changes taking place in the DC Multiverse or Scott Snyder's attempt to undo the contradictions of the DCU with the end of Death Metal, which not only gave importance to every DC story, but the multiverse also became its own sort of Omniverse, but that was changed literally a year later with Dark Crisis which tampered with all of that.

Regardless, the above circumstances cause the following problems:

  • Chain-scaling issues: Several characters have derived their statistics from complicated chains of power scaling based on various distinct iterations of the cosmology that do not fit with each other, leading to ratings that do not fit with many of their storylines. For example, Perpetua of the Rebirth continuity does not fit DeMatteis' interpretation of the DCU as his vision is a different from Scott Snyder and Grant Morrison's throughout 21 despite some similarities.
  • Incongruent Ratings: For example, many of DC's cosmic entities are rated tier 1, even 1-A, even though these characters have never demonstrated a power level that high in any of their stories. Through scaling across different versions of the cosmology, they end up with a rating that is incongruent with their true power level as written.
  • Incompatibilities: Different authors have written incompatible versions of the cosmology regarding different dimensions and higher realms, in terms of how they are defined and fundamentally function. Sometimes, although this is not always the case, certain authors tend to contradict themselves. For example, Grant Morrison's previous stories described the Fifth Dimension as a higher mathematical dimension while in other stories he described it as an imagination. In James Tynion's stories the Great Darkness is the Dark Sphere of the Gods around the Dark Multiverse while in more recent stories by Joshua Williamson, the Great Darkness is a Primordial Darkness that predates even the Overvoid.
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To be clear, is this [the quoted spoiler] the "arguments" for why these reconciliations don't work, or are there going to be threads made to explain why exactly these reconciliations don't work with reasons debunking them bit-by-bit?
 
we have to do something about supergirl scaling above the presence..
vsbattles.com

Why is the Presence weaker than a literal middle schooler

The Presence is stated to be the ultimate being and creator god of all of DC Comics and Vertigo, which I assume also includes its spin-offs so then why is he put under the likes of Supergirl from Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade? Supergirl is also an entity that exists in DC Comics, albeit...
vsbattles.com vsbattles.com
 
@Deagonx since that thread was closed, I'll answer here.
Please attempt to explain where Pralaya and Mother Night exist in the cosmology in relation to the Overvoid, Perpetua, the Monitors, and other elements of the Crisis Cosmology, if we are meant to believe that they all share a singular cosmology.

Pralaya exists in Bleedspace as unbeing, transcending material plane and MN in Sphere of the gods. Why? Pralaya don't achieved something bigger than just transcending material plane (she personifies the world, which is simply primary to the material plane). Mother Night exists on the same
existential level of being as Endless and other gods in SOG.
 
Jolman1 said:
@Deagonx since that thread was closed, I'll answer here.
Please attempt to explain where Pralaya and Mother Night exist in the cosmology in relation to the Overvoid, Perpetua, the Monitors, and other elements of the Crisis Cosmology, if we are meant to believe that they all share a singular cosmology.

Pralaya exists in Bleedspace as unbeing, transcending material plane and MN in Sphere of the gods. Why? Pralaya don't achieved something bigger than just transcending material plane (she personifies the world, which is simply primary to the material plane). Mother Night exists on the same
existential level of being as Endless and other gods in SOG.
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The big issue here is that this is entirely headcanon. You will find no mention of the Bleedspace in any comic with Pralaya, you will find no mention of Pralaya in any comic with Bleedspace. There's also no reference to a "Sphere of the Gods" in comics with Mother Night.

We can decide -- as comic readers -- to attempt to unify these different cosmologies into some Frankenstein composite DC, but all of our solutions will ultimately be ad-hoc headcanon, which is why it's not likely to get rubber stamped on a website like ours.
 
NHTkenshin2 said:
To be clear, is this [the quoted spoiler] the "arguments" for why these reconciliations don't work, or are there going to be threads made to explain why exactly these reconciliations don't work with reasons debunking them bit-by-bit?
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They just don't actually address the issue at hand, and they were not designed for the kinds of issues we are dealing with in regards to being an indexing website. Saying "well both of these things are true despite being a contradiction because of the metaverse" doesn't really help us make a concrete decision about scaling when the decision we make is different depending on which one is actually true.
 
Deagonx said:
They just don't actually address the issue at hand, and they were not designed for the kinds of issues we are dealing with in regards to being an indexing website. Saying "well both of these things are true despite being a contradiction because of the metaverse" doesn't really help us make a concrete decision about scaling when the decision we make is different depending on which one is actually true.
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Are you guys going to explain why it does not?
 
A complete composite cosmology would only really be possible if current canons took precedence over older ones, so most of the works of Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey, J.M. DeMatteis, and several others would have to be abandoned altogether since most of them don't fit into current canon and some concepts or characters that were seemingly "exclusive" to certain authors' stories like Pralaya or Mother Night or Crisis/Connective Energy, should also be discarded.

Personally I think it's best to split them up because like @Deagonx said there are elements from the different stories that just don't match and trying to reconcile them using headcanon to patch the holes is not the best solution for us.
 
Its not really in the contradictions themselves, it's in the cosmology itself, it delves into the inner workings of DC as a narrative multiple times. Marvel for example has reconciled contradictions by simply acknowledging how some realms exist above stories as a whole, the House of Ideas obviously being a prominent example.

There are multiple different realms in DC that acknowledge DC as one narrative, that acknowledge contradictions, and are seen messing with narratives multiple times. Dax Novu for example witnessed the introduction of the Multiverse to DC Comics, the Monitors catalogue all DC stories, Mxyzptlk removing imagination reducing the comics to sketches, the Death Sun is the end of all stories. These are just examples off the top of my head.

Edit: yay 2000th message
 
NHTkenshin2 said:
There are multiple different realms in DC that acknowledge DC as one narrative, that acknowledge contradictions, and are seen messing with narratives multiple times. Dax Novu for example witnessed the introduction of the Multiverse to DC Comics, the Monitors catalogue all DC stories, Mxyzptlk removing imagination reducing the comics to sketches, the Death Sun is the end of all stories. These are just examples off the top of my head.
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Okay. So how does this help us determine the indexing, precisely, in the instance of two contradicting pieces of information where the indexing is different depending on which is true?
 
NHTkenshin2 said:
In the case of the death sun for example, both are. Because the story and all of its inconsistencies end up in it nonetheless.
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That isn't really a helpful or substantive response to the issue at hand.

I'll phrase it differently. If one scan says "There are 14 spatial dimensions" and another says "There are 27" which should be treated as true, assuming that both sources of information are unquestionably in a position to know whether or not that's correct? If a character is to be indexed because they scale to this, should they be treated as scaling to 14 spatial dimensions or 27? Should we split both pieces of information into keys? Do we just assume one of them is incorrect?
 
ProfectusInfinity said:
Even if the cosmology were composited, you couldn’t up and accept it without evidence of these one-off higher dimensions being qualitatively superior.
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Of course, but for the purposes of the hypothetical I am just trying to explore this notion that we can somehow resolve all of these consistencies by saying it's all true at the same time.
 
Deagonx said:
That isn't really a helpful or substantive response to the issue at hand.

I'll phrase it differently. If one scan says "There are 14 spatial dimensions" and another says "There are 27" which should be treated as true, assuming that both sources of information are unquestionably in a position to know whether or not that's correct? If a character is to be indexed because they scale to this, should they be treated as scaling to 14 spatial dimensions or 27? Should we split both pieces of information into keys? Do we just assume one of them is incorrect?
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If the narrative of a verse places itself above the chronological order of events, then something sitting beyond that narrative scales above both statements nonetheless. More importantly, being the end of all stories would imply an end to stories where both statements are true.
 
Elizio33 said:
A complete composite cosmology would only really be possible if current canons took precedence over older ones, so most of the works of Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey, J.M. DeMatteis, and several others would have to be abandoned altogether since most of them don't fit into current canon and some concepts or characters that were seemingly "exclusive" to certain authors' stories like Pralaya or Mother Night or Crisis/Connective Energy, should also be discarded.

Personally I think it's best to split them up because like @Deagonx said there are elements from the different stories that just don't match and trying to reconcile them using headcanon to patch the holes is not the best solution for us.
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Strongly agreed.
 
Frankly, this argument doesn't really work anyways. The narrative isn't cut off when statements that contradict each order exist, it's doesn't become separate narratives, both of the statements are written on the narrative eitherway, it contains them both as text.
 
NHTkenshin2 said:
If the narrative of a verse places itself above the chronological order of events, then something sitting beyond that narrative scales above both statements nonetheless. More importantly, being the end of all stories would imply an end to stories where both statements are true.
Click to expand...
Okay, see, do you not feel like we're running directly into a wall here?

It's not sufficient to retreat to a platitude like "well ultimately it's all true." I'm telling you there's a character who scales to both statements, but these statements contradict eachother. I am not saying this character scales above both due to being "beyond the narrative."

So, how do we resolve this? That is a framework that would need to be created to even consider treating every scan in DC as equally true.

NHTkenshin2 said:
The narrative isn't cut off when statements that contradict each order exist, it's doesn't become separate narratives, both of the statements are written on the narrative eitherway, it contains them both as text.
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That's very nifty for the narrative and people who scale beyond it, but that does not help us resolve the issues for people who are within the narrative scaling to multiple contradictory statements.
 
Deagonx said:
It's not sufficient to retreat to a platitude like "well ultimately it's all true." I'm telling you there's a character who scales to both statements, but these statements contradict eachother. I am not saying this character scales above both due to being "beyond the narrative."
Click to expand...
Here is the thing, I am not critiquing the split or saying that it should not be used for the reasons I provided, it should still be used in such a case all the same.

Deagonx said:
That's very nifty for the narrative and people who scale beyond it, but that does not help us resolve the issues for people who are within the narrative scaling to multiple contradictory statements.
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Indeed it does not.
 
Also just to add, that example Deagon gave isn’t even what’s happening. Most dimensional statements in DC don’t even give a definitive answer of how many dimensions there actually are and whichever character makes the statement usually addresses these dimensions as only the one’s they know of. Some characters will even clarify that there are more dimensions layered beyond what they know.
 
Xearsay said:
Also just to add, that example Deagon gave isn’t even what’s happening. Most dimensional statements in DC don’t even give a definitive answer of how many dimensions there actually are and whichever character makes the statement usually addresses these dimensions as only the one’s they know of.
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Many of them certainly do.

"Collapsed back into the unquantifiable eleven dimensions from which all things in the universe were exploded"
"Picture existence in all fourteen of its dimensions, not just three"
"The multiverse exists in four dimensions."

Or we could point to the fact that 5-D Imps used to be geometrically 5-D and say that anyone below Mxy needs to scale below that. Or we could say Mxy scales to the whole multiverse and thus even more dimensions than that. Pick your poison. You can find a way to justify almost anything if you open the discussion to include every DC story that has ever been written. How about "each Multiverse has it's own Source?" You could justify that too.

By my estimation, much of the opposition to the cosmology split comes from the way it prevents a select few characters from benefitting from scans they have no connection to, without regard for why it was problematic in the first place. All of the potential issues are just handwaved, said to be wrong, meaningless, irrelevant, et cetera. For obvious reasons, that isn't going to go anywhere.
 
Mxyzptlk has a lot of stuff, I was reading some of it earlier this week, the guy and that entire Fifth Dimension are just a cosmology split cheat code.
 
Deagonx said:
The big issue here is that this is entirely headcanon. You will find no mention of the Bleedspace in any comic with Pralaya, you will find no mention of Pralaya in any comic with Bleedspace. There's also no reference to a "Sphere of the Gods" in comics with Mother Night.
Click to expand...


Failure to specify does not invalidate things. The gods were not previously specified as conceptual entities, but later chronology confirms that they always were. Expanding history and chronology should in no way negate previous achievements. Cosmological hierarchies are identical to characters' inconsistent achievements when they show or are stated to have less than in their past appearances, or as Wiki has calculated. To make a composite cosmology, characters must scale to their shown or stated position in their hierarchy. The Endless have never been stated to be superior to all Dc, so this does not contradict their hierarchical position in the world of the gods. Yahweh was never stated to be superior to all Dc, only the physical multiverses, within his hierarchical position.
The true absolute must be revealed depending on more recent indications from the comics, and confirmation of new chronological sequences. If earlier Yahweh and some being above him could still be considered an absolute, then later chronologies indicated that the absolute is Overvoid, etc. The Source previously occupied a not very high hierarchical position in the multiverse, but later chronology again indicated that it is the top 1 level in the cosmological hierarchy, which may logically contradict past appearances, but according to one’s personal desire, canonicity should not be ignored.
Universes such as Scp are also expanding in cosmology, but this does not prevent one from turning a blind eye to contradictions (even though they will start telling me fairy tales again that there are no contradictions, this is all canonical, and in general one author explained everything for everyone, which means it is taken into account)
 
I don't recall Mxy or the Fifth Dimension ever being mentioned in any of the Vertigo or DeMatteis comics.
 
I don't recall them being referenced in a Vertigo series, but they're definitely parts of JMD's, as he wrote Adventures of Superman #582/#583, which were parts of the Emperor Joker arc, and, as such feature Mxy and Emperor Joker. I'd also figure we'd treat the rest of the arc as part of JMD's cosmology, as, despite not being written by him, they tie-in, similar to how we count Starlin's DOTNG for the Final Crisis cosmology.
 
Deagonx said:
The big issue here is that this is entirely headcanon. You will find no mention of the Bleedspace in any comic with Pralaya, you will find no mention of Pralaya in any comic with Bleedspace. There's also no reference to a "Sphere of the Gods" in comics with Mother Night.

We can decide -- as comic readers -- to attempt to unify these different cosmologies into some Frankenstein composite DC, but all of our solutions will ultimately be ad-hoc headcanon, which is why it's not likely to get rubber stamped on a website like ours.
Click to expand...
Bleedspace is present in John's comics. Secondly, I start from the scale and concept of the character, so that MT exists in the SOG is more than obvious.
 
vsbattles.com

Major Doctor Fate revisions

Finally found the time to do this and do it correctly. Just a couple of things. First and foremost: All the stuff mentioned for "Eric and Linda Strauss" is actually just Kent Nelson. The characters were created in the late 80s and all the feats provided that measures them was long before the...
vsbattles.com vsbattles.com
 
Question, are we gonna merge The Presence, The Source and Overvoid profile? seen this topic a while ago on this thread, but its never done
 
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