schmevil

"No, I don’t," Rodney said – although, well, he sort of did, except for the just part. "No, no, I.... He’s my friend, we – we like each other." He thought about that for a second, and it sounded...right. "We like each other," he said. John gave him a supremely skeptical look, and Rodney said, "What? Just because we don’t have that much in common at first glance doesn’t mean we – appearances can be deceiving, you know! It’s – we’re – look, it’s like Mr. Fantastic and the Thing, you wouldn’t necessarily know – but they’re really very close! They have years of history, they went to college together!"

"Okay, I know, but– Wait a minute, I thought I was Mr. Fantastic."

"No, no – what? Are you crazy? Reed Richards is a genius, he’s an inventor, he’s a master of alien technology, he’s a fucking physicist! No way in hell are you Mr. Fantastic!"

"Yeah, but...I’m the leader," John said, looking a little wounded.

Rodney relented and patted his shoulder, which changed John’s expression from wounded to don’t touch my shoulder. "The Human Torch can fly," Rodney said consolingly.

"Did not the Thing begin his career as an Air Force test pilot?" Teyla said. They both looked at her blankly. "I have researched your Fantastic Four," she said coolly, crossing her arms. "I see no reason I cannot be Mr. Fantastic, too."

"Oh, now, come on!" John said, throwing his hands up. "We can’t all be Mr. Fantastic!"

Satisfaction, by Hth and Caroline

So I've been avoiding

scans_daily. Apparently it's been declared Irondickery Week.

Yeah. So many winners in that comm.

Anywho. I’ve been reading mainstream comics again for about a year now. I gave them up yeeears ago because they just weren’t doing anything that interested me, but some of Marvel’s recent crossover events really grabbed my attention. In particular, Civil War, and everything it’s done to change the landscape of the shared Marvel universe, drew me in. One of the interesting things to come out of the Civil War arc has been a new social science developed by Reed Richards. ( relevent scans )

For those of you familiar with Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four films, a quick run-down. Reed is, according to Marvel editorial, the most intelligent and widely scientifically knowledgeable character in the Marvel Universe. He's a brilliant physicist, biologist, mathematician, engineer and surgeon. He's like Batman. But with more science and fewer bones. In Fantastic Four #542 however, Reed does something he's never done before: invents a whole new branch of science.

Psychohistory, according to Reed Richards, combines statistics, Marvel!mathematics, social science and history, in order to predict social trends an the scale of whole populations or countries. So he could have used psychohistory to predict declining birth rates in the first world, but not that Jane Doe decided to go childfree.

In the context of the story, psychohistory was introduced in part because the writers wanted a greater justification for his position during Marvel's Civil War event but more importantly, I think they wanted to take the character in a direction more in line with the Illuminati mini. With, I suppose, the idea of the Illuminati, who are sort of the lynchpins in Marvel's current drive to do something different with the genre.

Marvel’s Civil War was a fight between various heroes over the Superhuman Registration Act, which as the name suggests requires superhumans to register with the government. Reed took the position that the act was in the greater good and was in fact the best choice out of a million or so other options that he considered. It would, he argued, lead to the best possible outcome (in the heated circumstances which lead up to and continued during the war), for the largest number of people. How did he know this? Psychohistory of course.

( Read more... )

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no future

FTW!

Illuminati and psychohistory - primer

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