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The DC Comics Cosmology Revision Project - Part 2

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Antvasima

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Hello.

The second phase of our DC Comics revision project will determine where and how the cosmology of the verse in question is divided. Our current blog provides four cosmologies, Vertigo, DeMatteis, Morrison, and Snyder/Tynion, with a 'Williamson Cosmology' being tentatively outlined. These five were selected based on each having a distinct approach to the core concepts of DC, and having a certain level of internal consistency with those approaches.

This thread is for assessing the division into these five cosmologies, and reaching a community consensus on the matter. However, this thread is not for tiering these cosmologies, as the tiers cannot be decided until the cosmologies themselves are agreed upon. Once a consensus is reached on where we draw the dividing lines, another discussion will be had for tiering.

Moreover, due to practical limitations for this discussion, it is advised that a level of restraint be applied in debating the specific qualities or details of a specific cosmology. In other words, a specific objection about how "the Dreaming" is described in the blog under the "Vertigo" cosmology is better left to a later discussion. It is best that we avoid encumbering this discussion with the fine details of each cosmology, and focus foremost on which cosmologies DC will be divided into.

With that said, here is the link to our current cosmology blog, and the matter is now open for discussion.

https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Antvasima/DC_Comics_Cosmology_Revision_Project

As before, participation in this thread will be limited to staff, project members, and regular members who are knowledgeable about the verse, if they contact a member of our staff for permission. The discussion will be strictly moderated, so any comments that are off-topic or toxic will be removed, and those who repeatedly post them will be barred from further participation, in order to focus on productive discussion.
 
Project members:

@Deagonx @Eficiente @Elizio33 @Firestorm808 @LuciferDC099 @Pain_to12 @Planck69 @Sandman31

Staff members:

@AKM sama @DontTalkDT @DarkDragonMedeus @SomebodyData @Celestial_Pegasus @Wokistan @Andytrenom @Ultima_Reality @Mr._Bambu @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @ByAsura @Sir_Ovens @Damage3245 @Starter_Pack @Abstractions @LordGriffin1000 @Colonel_Krukov @SamanPatou @GyroNutz @Shadowbokunohero @Crazylatin77 @Jvando @Zaratthustra @Just_a_Random_Butler @ElixirBlue @Tllmbrg @Nehz_XZX @Dereck03 @Agnaa @JustSomeWeirdo @Theglassman12 @Crabwhale @Eficiente @DarkGrath @Moritzva @Firestorm808 @DemonGodMitchAubin @Everything12 @Duedate8898 @Planck69 @KingTempest @Armorchompy @CrimsonStarFallen @UchihaSlayer96 @Hop_Hoppington-Hoppenhiemer @Maverick_Zero_X @LordTracer @Emirp sumitpo @EliminatorVenom @Executor_N0 @Spinosaurus75DinosaurFan @Therefir @DMUA @Jasonsith @Migue79 @Psychomaster35 @CloverDragon03 @KLOL506 @Dark-Carioca @AbaddonTheDisappointment @Aguywhodoesthings

Your input help would be very appreciated here in case you are interested.
 
Thank you to everybody who are willing to help out here.

If any members who are knowledgeable about DC Comics want to contribute here, please send a message to one of our staff members with a brief explanation regarding what you want to say.
 
Are no knowledgeable members really interested in commenting here?

Should we let them post here without requests as long as they have something important to say, @Deagonx , or would that cause too much of a risk?
 
Antvasima said:
Are no knowledgeable members really interested in commenting here?

Should we let them post here without requests as long as they have something important to say, @Deagonx , or would that cause too much of a risk?
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I genuinely only know of a single point of contention which is Ultima's, so I think it's just a matter of waiting for him to be done with his school stuff.
 
@Xearsay

Do you or any other knowledgeable DC Comics supporters have any objections here?
 
Okay. Never mind then.
 
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Deagonx said:
Well, no, you didn't express that and your response didn't fit the question. But if you have no objections then that's fine. We will wait for Ultima to have time to express his thoughts.
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My comment might have not came off that way but I did clarify my intent directly after. However if you want to be weird and start a petty argument over how I said something, go ahead.
 
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Xearsay said:
However if you want to be a weirdo and start a petty argument over how I said something, go ahead.
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If you can't handle participating without flinging insults around then you won't be allowed to participate in the revisions. This is not the place for toxic comments.
 
Deagonx said:
If you can't handle participating without flinging insults around then you won't be allowed to participate in the revisions. This is not the place for toxic comments.
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You’re the one derailing the thread into some pointless argument over how I said something. Maybe you should learn how to not be so passive aggressive.
 
man-ray-facepalm.gif


Alrighty then, more insults. If you've got that out of your system, then:

Deagonx said:
We will wait for Ultima to have time to express his thoughts.
Click to expand...
 
Isn't Ultima supposed to post something here first?

We have waited for quite a long while though.
 
Okay. Thank you for helping out.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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.”
Click to expand...

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.
 
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Ultima_Reality said:
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,
Click to expand...
I will say, I generally agree that Morrison's works with Final Crisis and Multiversity can reliably be combined with what we're calling the Snyder/Tynion cosmology with little to no problems. The only problem is that the vast majority of what Grant wrote in the 90s does not fit with any of that and there is the risk of people trying to mash it together for overblown scaling. This is even becoming a problem with a specific Morrison cosmology, actually.

I do think the better solution would be to combine the "Final Crisis-centered cosmology" including Grants post 2000s work, and leaving his older stuff which did not persist within continuity as a separate thing that is not unified under a single cosmology (because he so clearly did not maintain a prolonged coherent notion of any of the concepts he wrote).

Ultima_Reality said:
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
Click to expand...
I do disagree with this, I don't think the ideal way to reconcile those two stories is to place one above the other. Morrison clearly intended for them to be a direct creation of the Overvoid, but in Snyders they are clearly fragments of Mar Novu. (Actually Tynion wrote that)

Ultima_Reality said:
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.
Click to expand...
I think the problem is that none of that is really in the comics about Overvoid itself, just the interviews, and how Overvoid has been portrayed has changed over time. I think Overvoid can be scaled definitely to Snyder and Morrison, and that should be sufficient without necessarily saying it's above Gaiman who never included it. Morrison also said the Overvoid included Marvel, but I wouldn't scale that either.
 
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Deagonx makes sense to me above as usual.
 
Regular members should preferably only post here if they have something very important to say, especially if they are inexperienced.
 
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