Huh. This thread is a bit barren. Honestly expected more discussion to have taken place.
Alright, so:
I'm fine with the basic premise of splitting up irreconcilable elements so that they don't scale to each other, but something that's been bothering me is arbitrarily dividing the Final Crisis-centered cosmology into "Morrison" and "Snyder." Despite the fact that the latter's works are basically a direct continuation of the former's, and any inconsistencies that exist between them are no longer than inconsistencies present between works that, in the blog, are already accepted as forming one cosmology.
For instance, in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the Silver City is stated to have predated the universe altogether and to not be a part of the created order of things at all. Meanwhile, in Mike Carey's Lucifer, it's revealed to have been built after the universe's creation, and devised by Lilith, in fact. In Gaiman's Books of Magic, the maintenance of creation is split over seven Archangels (Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Saraquael, Raphael and Raguel) each responsible for some aspect of reality, while in Carey's writings, only Lucifer, Michael and Gabriel have any such importance.
I could probably go on, but the point is: Those are inconsistencies as big as anything used to justify a split between Snyder and Morrison, and yet we're fine with letting the works of both authors form a single cosmology, instead of creating a "Gaiman Cosmology" and a "Carey Cosmology." I believe this is made even clearer when we consider that the relationship between Morrison and Snyder's works is very much the same as what went on between Gaiman and Carey's works.
Moreover, the bulk of the things used to split them apart arguably are not even inconsistencies per se. I refer to this:
- In Morrison's stories, the Monitors are thoughts of Monitor-Mind The Overvoid while in Snyder's stories they are splinters of Mar Novu.
- In Morrison's stories, the Monitor Sphere is the thoughts of the Overvoid while in Snyder's stories it was made from the Multiverse's current structure.
Treating either of these as inconsistencies is missing the point by a pretty wide margin because it's treating the origin of the Monitors from the Overvoid as if the latter just spawned the former into existence and then let them do their own thing from there and onwards, which is not really what happened. As we are told in Final Crisis, the Monitors were originally creatures that were
numberless and faceless, without narratives,
beginnings or endings. It was not until they came in contact with the stories squirming around in the multiverse that they acquired all of these things: Beginnings. Endings. Backstories. Time. Narratives. And so on.
So, in my view, it is perfectly possible for Morrison's origin for the Monitors and Snyder's to co-exist. The latter is their origin story, certainly, but the former is the origin story
for that origin story,
which is also clear from how the Monitor-Mind is described as having given birth to the history of the Monitor race. Their birth from it wasn't really a linear thing, it was a simultaneous creation of their entire past, present and future. And the same goes for the Monitor Sphere.
So, yeah, I see no reason to split Morrison and Snyder apart at all. In cases where the latter contradicts the former, we just grant precedence to newer material, as is usually done. Retcons can exist just fine, after all.
Speaking of retcons, though, the following part is the more controversial one, but I'll try to pitch in the idea, regardless:
As said before, I completely agree that certain elements of the cosmology are, by and large, irreconcilable with each other, and as such should be placed in their own little vacuums, where they don't scale to anything else, nor anything else to them. But I do believe that certain things can be deemed as exceptions to that general rule, namely the topmost parts of the cosmology. This being something I say due to the statements by Grant Morrison that are accepted and used in the blog:
Here, for instance, we are explicitly told that, because of the Monitor-Mind's non-dualistic nature, it encompasses and resolves within itself "all contradictions."
This isn't exactly anything new, either. He explored the same idea in another interview with Newsarama (And directly linked it to something that happens in an actual comic, that being Lex Luthor's breakdown at the end of All-Star Superman)
As I’ve said before, the solid world is just the part of heaven we’re privileged to touch and play with. You don’t need a priest or a holy man to talk to “god” on your behalf: just close your eyes and say hello. “God” is no more, no less, than the sum total of all matter, all energy, all consciousness, as experienced or conceptualized from a timeless perspective where everything ever seems to present all at once. “God” is in everything, all the time and can be found there by looking carefully. The entire universe, including the scary, evil bits, is a thought “God” is thinking, right now.
As far as I can figure it out from my own reading and my own experience of how the spiritual world works, Jesus was, as they say, way cool: a man who achieved a state of consciousness, which nowadays would get him a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (in the days of the Emperor Tiberius, he was crucified for his ideas, today he’d be laughed at, mocked or medicated).
This “holistic” mode of consciousness (which Luthor experiences briefly at the end of All Star Superman) announces itself as a heartbreaking connection, a oneness, with everything that exists…but you don’t have to be Superman to know what that feeling is like. There are a ton of meditation techniques which can take you to this place. I don’t see it as anything supernatural or religious, in fact, I think it’s nothing more than a developmental level of human consciousness, like the ability to see perspective – which children of 4 cannot do but children of 6 can.
Everyone who’s familiar with this upgrade will tell you the same thing: it feels as if “alien” or “angelic” voices – far more intelligent, coherent and kindly than the voices you normally hear in your head – are explaining the structure of time and space and your place in it. This identification with a timeless supermind containing and resolving within itself all possible thoughts and contradictions, is what many people, unsurprisingly, mistake for an encounter with “God.” However, given that this totality must logically include and resolve all possible thoughts and concepts, it can also be interpreted as an actual encounter with God, so I’m not here to give anyone a hard time over interpretation.
And in yet another interview, he mentioned the same thing:
The Multiverse map places Earth in the middle, but the other structures (including both Heaven and Limbo) “get more and more archetypal the further out you get into the void, and the void is also the white page where things are drawn,” says Morrison. “It's kind of like in Buddhism where there's this pure consciousness that underlies everything, and you can call it god, you can call it the void. It contains everything—all good, all evil, all contradiction, all possibility. Just like the page of a comic. The first mark on the page could become anything. The mark is all possibility.”
So I find it fairly strange that, despite this concept explicitly containing and subsuming all contradictions within itself, it is being segregated like any other part of the cosmology because of... contradictions. This aspect of the Monitor-Mind is added to, although not dependent on, I might add, by much of the metafiction that Grant Morrison introduced back in his Animal Man days as well. He, after all,
very directly talked about how the fictional world is ultimately a universe created by committee . The horde of authors that write for DC is acknowledged, and as a natural extension of this, as are the inconsistencies that come to be as a result of that: The Monitor-Mind is the blank page of the comicbook, and it can accommodate for whatever stories the writers like, regardless of contradictions.
Therefore, I really see no issue in allowing the Overvoid (And only it) to receive scaling from all the different cosmologies. Seems like a no-brainer to me, and something that ultimately doesn't conflict with the essence of the cosmology split proposal, especially with the added emphasis on how all of those different cosmologies are really just rough lines drawn in the sand, instead of anything objective and unbreakable.
