As a disclaimer of sorts, I should firstly point out that the following post is a very general answer to most of the objections and uncertainties people have with the idea of the Overvoid and The Writer being a thing, and not specifically an answer to Kep's post, as well as to clarify some other things which I believe are misconceptions. I do this so I don't get shot at all sides by "I never said that" and similar stuff. Anyways...
It should be noted that the notion that Perpetua's Multiverse is "The Flaw" as described by the Book of Infinite Pages, and that it was the reason behind the Overvoid being pissed off is... well, flawed, and undermines many essential aspects of the Creation Myth of the Monitors which we use for the Monitor-Mind's profile in the first place.
Firstly, it should be noted that Perpetua was just one of a race of divine entities called the Super Celestials,
and was actually sent by higher beings (The Judges of the Source, most specifically) in order to create new systems of life within a Greater Omniverse, containing many other Multiverses much like the Mainstream DC World which we all know, and for this purpose she created Mobius, Mar Novu and Alpheus as her children, which would latter be known as the Anti-Monitor, the Monitor and the World-Forger respectively.
Meanwhile, in the Creation Myth told by the Book of Infinite Pages, as shown in both Final Crisis and Multiversity,
in the beginning there was only a vast, unconscious expanse of nothingness without definitio identified solely as "Perfection", which was immaculate and pristine, bereft of any form of existence. It was then that this expanse of nothingness gained some semblance of conscience and awareness, as it noticed the existence of something other than itself, namely "The Flaw" that is DC Comics itself. Perfection is then shocked by its discovery, and defines a relationship of difference and opposition between itself and the Flaw, naming itself Monitor-Mind, before sending a probe in order to analyze the Flaw.
Now, it is true that both stories involve higher forces being upset with the creation of a Multiverse in their expanse, but those two stories are extremely distinct when you really get down to it, and split in crucial points:
Namely,
it is shown that Mar Novu saw the malice in Perpetua's intentions,
and in turn contacted the Judges of the Source through a machine created by him,
who then sent a Raptor in order to defeat and imprison Perpetua by creating the Source Wall, separating Perpetua's Creation from the Greater Omniverse that resided in the Overvoid.
On the other hand, in the Tale of the Monitor-Mind, the Overvoid became pissed off not because of malicious actions of any particular entity, but because it started to perceive the existence of something apart from itself, of material and quality, and thus gained the "desire" to return all of it to its nothingness, though since it is just unmanifest nothingness bereft of definition, this ends up manifested as a living concept, Mandrakk
This is directly stated by Grant Morrison himself in Supergods, and he also establishes in the same sentence that the metafictional aspect of the story is very much literal, with Mandrakk / Dax Novu being an extension of the Monitor-Mind, the conscious aspect of it that desires to terminate The Flaw entirely by corrupting the narrative itself, wiping the Multiverse clean of all stories:
| The "final crisis," as I saw it for a paper universe like DC's, would be the terminal war between is and isn't, between the story and the blank page. What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying. |
Given this aspect of The Monitor's Creation Myth,
which is also stated to be the most primal of all by Superma, who was directly holding the Book of Infinite Pages at the time, it is really unlikely that this story is the same thing as Perpetua's. These two are completely different narratives that are only tangentially related to each other, and even then only in the most remote sense.
This brings me to another point: Namely, I say that it makes no sense for any lesser being to have existed within the Overvoid in order to have created the Multiverse, as the entity itself only gained a name or anything resembling awareness
after it discovered the Flaw and manifested a concept in the form of Dax Novu in order to contain and analyze it. Before that, there was no relation between it and anything else, as nothing existed in any form whatsoever.
Furthermore, by a process of elimination, there is absolutely no entity who could have existed in such a state without evoking the attention of Perfection in the first place. The Monitors were only created after the Overvoid materialized Dax Novu into being, for instance, and Grant Morrison considers The Presence, The Source and The Monitor-Mind to be all one and the same, as the Overvoid is the state of nondual dissolution in which all narrative contradictions are broken down into unity and in also intended to be DC's "God" in the most general sense regardless of contradictions, so the former two are also out of the equation. That's also the reason Morrison refers to the Overvoid as "God, or Kirby's Source", btw.
And like I said before, the Overvoid was upset because the quality of material was inserted upon it, not because a physical Multiverse was created by a lower entity. In all likelihood, the Flaw represents DC Comics itself, as Morrison describes it as the Inkblot from which -all- possibility springs, and where all stories reside and are created from.
So, yeah, the Flaw couldn't have been created by the Overvoid (and by extension not by The Presence or the Source, at least in the context of Grant Morrison's works), nor by the Judges of the Source, and most certainly not by the Super Celestials.
Rather, it shoud logically have come from something above, and given the fact that Grant himself compares the Flaw's formation to somebody having drawn the story into the blank page of the comicbook, it is absolutely no stretch to say that the Writer was the one who created it, especially given all of the context clues, and how Superman Beyond was literally all about Morrison revisiting concepts he introduced in his run of Animal Man, such as the Comicbook Limbo where all Stories end and people "run out of Multiverse". Heck, the story itself has the Thought Robot feeling the presence of the Reader and describes it as
"something immense beyond understanding".
