Grrl Power #921 – Watergate-SG1
Before you go scrambling to google, “obstroculous” is a word Mrs. Slocombe of “Are You Being Served” made up. Based on context, it means “obstructive” or “being difficult” as in a person, not like a math problem. There is a word, “Obstropulous” meaning “noisy or rough, especially in resisting restraint or control,” and arguably, Mrs. Slocombe might have been saying that, but to me it’s funnier that she’s trying to sound fancy, but is doing it with a made-up word. Yes, yes. All words are made up. Like “matmass,” apparently. What we know for sure is that HenchWench watched “Are You Being Served” and is convinced Mrs. Slocombe said “obstroculous.”
The speed of sound in water is 3316 MPH or 5336 km/hr so it is almost 4.5 times faster than in air. The source I found that states this doesn’t take water pressure into account, and the speed of sound varies depending on altitude/barometric pressure, so I imagine the above figure is for a single additional atmosphere of pressure, which I think is like 37-ish feet. So yeah, Max is unhappy at the moment. It’s actually a little silly she’s going that fast underwater, and I debated changing this, but I ultimately decided to leave it in so you guys would have something extra to talk about. I suspect moving this quickly through water would have some additional effects, like vaporizing a massive amount of it in your wake or something. I’m not sure anyone knows what really would happen, as it would be insanely difficult to test it. Probably the only thing that has moved that quickly underwater is a meteor.
I came up with this page, imagining that the Hudson or East River or the Upper Bay, or wherever HenchWench portaled them to, are like 300 feet deep. Something that would be actually be pretty disorienting. Of course, getting zapped into any depth of water under about 15 feet at night would be pretty disorienting. Anyway, most of the rivers around New York are like 30-60 feet deep, which is really surprising to me. Parts of it are as deep as 160 feet, but really, a river is only as deep as its shallowest point if you’re trying to sail it.
I think that’s the Brooklyn Bridge Max is popping out by. The interwebs say the water around there is between 24′ and 108.’ So I guess HenchWench has done some underwater scouting for a good emergency bail spot?
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It is the cat that sells the last panel. LOL!!
hahahah didnt even notice that, perfect first comment.
Not even close. This is Page 3 of the comments for this page of the comic. These comment sections default to the latest page.
First one I saw! XD
Yes!! I loved that too! Now, if only she had a friend that has hydrokinesis or a carpet cleaner on speed dial.
That opens a whole spectrum of conversations that would be weird for anyone but her friends.
“Hey Sandra, how’s your night going? Listen, I need you to hire me to clean my carpet… No, trust me it’s not something I can put a towel on… Thanks so much, I’ll bring Chinese tomorrow and tell you all about it when I come to pick up my penny.”
I sincerely hope Hench Wench is killed soon. Executed, whatever. She’s already declared that she’d continue using her power in prison, and that she’s got at least one subcontract running to surprise them with more powers. She just really strikes me as too powerful to let live, and as Maxima said, their rogues will be incarcerated, in traction, or interred. I don’t want that to be empty bravado. I don’t want people getting away with this level of blatant deliberate antagonism.
Maybe.
Unlike Vehemence; HW was durable but didn’t have anything that could really threaten Max, even at 2v1 in her favor.
I hope not, and here is a better idea. Dave B waits till he has 5-10 heroes and 5-10 villains from paid cameos and then has them all engage in a battle royale. Just have all those heroes and villains form their own groups.
There’s one paid cameo upcoming eventually who’s power set falls into the good people bad power category.
How bad? Hmmm let me double ckeck
reminds me, once upon a time for a thought experiment I made a character called Co-bro. He had snake powers and worked around his snake theme. He was a super hero in a world where super heroes are common place, but snake themed characters were always villains so was fighting against that prejudice.
I sort of… can’t stand Hench Wench either at this point. :) It’s just something about when villains keep pulling powers out of their butt or where the powers make absolutely no sense (or both) that makes me think ‘okay I’m officially tired of this person.’ HW has crossed that line a few times now lol. Officially more annoying than Vehemence, so I guess that’s an accomplishment? :)
That being said – nice apartment and I like that she has a cat.
Kinda like what both Maxi and Sydney do?
Or the fact SmugD knows shit he shouldn’t?
Maxima and Sydney have established powers.
Maxima’s powers are actually very specific, and Sydney’s powers all seem to come within certain categories as well based on her skill tree. Her powers are not infinite in scope. We know even with the remaining unknown orb that it’ll be spaceship-related, and there has been foreshadowing about that orb as well, since the Squidward probe was getting a reading off of it even when Sydney WASNT HOLDING IT. The only other orb the squidward probe was getting reading from was when sydney was holding an orb.
And Deus has a LOT of foreshadowing about how his whole shtick is knowing things he shouldnt know, which will probably be explained MUCH later, but it’s been foreshadowed. Deus TRIES to make it look like a deus ex machinae’ but that’s the whole point with him. He’s intentionally trying to make it look like that. Even with his name. :)
That’s different than Hench Wench, who just suddenly says she has so-and-so power or can do such-and-such with absolutely no seeds planted in the reader’s mind in advance. It’s just making up powers on the spot, and saying ‘oh she has that power because she ALSO works for so-and-so a person who has such-and-such a power. Or ‘I can combine powers to do new things even though there’s no combination that could have actually DONE THAT. It’s just irritating because omnipotence is irritating. It’s even more irritating than Vehemence because at least with him, it became established that when he uses his powers it does start ‘burning his powersource down’ – even though by the end he was edging on being a reality manipulator.
Are we reading the same comic? Sydney does have established powers. Much as with numerous other characters, the extent is not. Given specific statements from multiple characters, not only is the scope of them infinite, it’s paralleled only by a select few that either spend all their time in a higher plane of existence or are utterly imperceptible by lesser beings.
While there has been foreshadowing, however explicit, throughout various scenes elucidating the various aspects of her power as things progressed, it actually required us reaching those points in the comic for such to become evident. One could have sat there before the initial press conference and made a vastly different analysis of Sydney and her powers, and they’d have been right, because that was indeed all we knew. Then. Anyone sticking to the same guns now would be egregiously at odds with the facts given various revelations.
Given that individuals with singular powers, such as Krona, or Xochitl, or For Whom The Death Tolls, have infinite scope, it’s actually rather idiotic to declare Sydney inferior to them and say her powers are lesser to them (or others).
A story evolves. Characters do not remain in stasis. The plot does not remain in stasis. The reader’s knowledge does not remain in stasis. This is basic common sense, so it’s surprising that someone who routinely presents themselves as being fairly educated and well-experienced in life so utterly disregards those rather basic facts of writing (and ironically, life itself).
Additionally, the fact is that is actually rather easy to come up with, as how you chose to phrase it, “combinations that could have actually done that.”, makes me think you’re reacting as a child throwing a tantrum does. Disliking characters is fine. Pretending they’re a waste of space because you don’t want to bother with the particulars is just lazy and disingenuous.
Acting as though there is absolutely no feasible manner by which unknown sorts of energy being arrayed in a certain manner to put someone to sleep or create material not being within the realm of possibility is being lazy, in a very bad faith argument sort of way.
Ironically, Hench Wench actually did foreshadow her capabilities. That she did not explicitly detail the full list of what comprised them is frankly as welcome as I find the notion repugnant that readers need to have absolutely every aspect of future characters foreshadowed, especially when it concerns things that are unrealistic as ‘introductions’ like #214 that’re prevalent in superhero or magical girl settings, or as unnecessary as Gandalf or Saruman telling us every single cantrip they possess would be. Mystery is a thing too. As is showing, and not telling.
A complete unknown, whose power relies on a specific condition… doubled down on said condition. If that if the limit of your critical thinking, that everything doesn’t trip your suspension of disbelief surprises me.
Omnipotence isn’t even in the same section of the library as that.
“Are we reading the same comic?”
I’m guessing so.
“Sydney does have established powers.”
Right. That’s what I said.
“Much as with numerous other characters, the extent is not.”
Extent of what? We’ve actually already seen that she DOES have limits, although those limits are largely based on how much she’s levelled up with her skill tree. For her to exceed those limits, something has to actually happen in comic to let her level up first. It doesnt just come out of nowhere, like it does with Hench Wench pulling powers out of nowhere narratively with not even the slightest idea that it would have even been possible.
“Given specific statements from multiple characters, not only is the scope of them infinite,”
Nothing about Maxima or Sydney’s power scope has been shown to be ‘infinite.’ In fact, it’s been shown quite a few times that they are both actually FINITE in their power scope, even if very high level to begin with. The only one who so far seems to have anything ‘infinite’ about them is Achilles, who is essentially ‘infinitely’ invulnerable, but he also has nothing else special about him which would make that story-breaking, since he can be tossed aside pretty easily.
“it’s paralleled only by a select few that either spend all their time in a higher plane of existence or are utterly imperceptible by lesser beings.”
No offense but I have no idea what you’re talking about here in relation to the comic. Please elaborate on that.
“While there has been foreshadowing, however explicit, throughout various scenes elucidating the various aspects of her power as things progressed, it actually required us reaching those points in the comic for such to become evident.”
I’m not sure what you’re arguing with me about then. You’re basically saying the same thing I said with slightly different words.
“One could have sat there before the initial press conference and made a vastly different analysis of Sydney and her powers, and they’d have been right, because that was indeed all we knew.”
Yes, beause we are being shown how Sydney, as the main protagonist, is learning to use her powers. It takes TIME for her to learn new powers, we learn how she GETS those new powers, and those new powers have at least something to do with her overall powerset. None of this is true with Hench Wench. She comes out of nowhere, she gains powers with absolutely no foreshadowing or narrative to explain it – just “Oh I also am hired by so and so” or “oh I can also use my powers in combination to do something that should not work with this combination of powers to begin with”
“Anyone sticking to the same guns now would be egregiously at odds with the facts given various revelations.”
I seriously don’t think you are understanding what my problem is with Hench Wench, because none of this has anything to do with my problem with her and why Sydney does not have the same problem. Sydney has a structure to her progression, Hench Wench does not. Unless you’re thinking Grrlpower is going to be the Hench Wench story. In which case the comic is going the route of the Walking Dead, which became The Negan Show and walked right off a cliff after season 6, when other characters started acting completely out of character around him (Eugene becoming Negan’s best friend after he murdered Abraham , Rick becoming pathetic, Maggie not killing him when he was in jail and could have easily done so… after he murdered Glenn in front of her, etc)
“A story evolves. Characters do not remain in stasis. The plot does not remain in stasis. The reader’s knowledge does not remain in stasis”
Again I don’t know how you’re thinking Hench Wench going to ‘instantly being able to have any power already’ is ‘evolution.’ In fact, everything else you’ve written SUPPORTS my viewpoint.
“Additionally, the fact is that is actually rather easy to come up with, as how you chose to phrase it, “combinations that could have actually done that.”, ”
What powers does Hench Wench have that, combined, could make her alter her physical state into a ghost state, while not leaving a flesh state behind vulnerable? None. There are no power combinations which allow that from the powers we see that she has. There’s no ‘messing with Concretia’s existing powerset’ which allows that either.
“makes me think you’re reacting as a child throwing a tantrum does.”
Well now you’re just being rude and using ad nauseum attacks. Everything I’ve critiques has been well explained – it’s not a ‘tantrum.’ Would it be nice for me to say that you seem to be acting like someone who wants to suck up to the author and ‘white knighting’ when someone makes a critique? No? Me either. That would not be a good argument to make. So maybe keep the personal attacks out of it? I like this forum because, with a few exceptions like Oberon, people usually don’t get into personal attacks that much.
“Pretending they’re a waste of space because you don’t want to bother with the particulars is just lazy and disingenuous.”
Well this sentence is just completely false, and you’re now making a strawman argument. I never said Hench Wench was a waste of space – I said I find her extremely annoying, and I’ve alluded that I think of her almost as a Villain Sue the more she pulls additional powers out of nowhere and conditions in the contract out of the aether.
Plus I most definitely HAVE bothered with the particulars. You might notice I’m REALLY verbose in my posts. Try again with another argument.
“Acting as though there is absolutely no feasible manner by which unknown sorts of energy being arrayed in a certain manner to put someone to sleep or create material not being within the realm of possibility is being lazy, in a very bad faith argument sort of way.”
I have read this paragraph 4 times and have no idea what you’re trying to say here, so I can’t really respond to it. Please explain, thanks. The only thing I got was you saying I was making a bad faith argument, but everything I’ve said has been based on legitimate reasons to not like Hench Wench – it’s not ‘bad faith.’
“Ironically, Hench Wench actually did foreshadow her capabilities.”
No, she did not. Because every following page, she does things which refute what she said the page before. She goes out of her way to say how she created an LLC agreement in order to get multiple powers at once… which means she’s going to use the law to make that contract, then each page presents a contract that literally makes no sense whatsoever. The story shows she can use certain powers better than the original user, because she’s more innovative in using them (as Sydney shows) then the page after it immediately undoes that cleverness by showing her able to do things which can NEVER be done by the original user, or done by someone who has a combination of the LLC members’ powers (turning into ghost form with no flesh left behind). Not to mention her not using that combination in the first place. Her nose is broken? Teeth broken? No problem, turn into a ghost then turn back – you’re healed. Even though a page earlier she lamented that she ‘would have to find someone with a power to fix her teeth and nose.’ Then the portal ability also comes out of nowhere. Oh she has another employment with someone that wasnt mentioned until now.’ Don’t worry about the apartment either – she probably also was hired by someone with super cleaning powers or something.
“I find the notion repugnant that readers need to have absolutely every aspect of future characters foreshadowed”
Why do people keep using strawman arguments? I didnt say you need to show every aspect of future characters. That’s not what foreshadowing is.
Let me give you an example from another fictional series – Star Wars
Do you know (one of the reasons) why The Last Jedi was just godawful? Because the Force was being used to do powers that had NEVER been even alluded to before. Teleportation across the universe of objects. Instantaneous healing. Hologram projections across the universe. Learning advanced Sith powers like lightning without EVER training even a little for it or realizing it was possible. Surviving the vacuum of space and Mary Poppins’ing back to a ship that is travelling fast enough that a chasing First Order ship can’t catch it.
It’s just an ass-pull after ass-pull of powers. That’s what Hench Wench also does. Not even the slightest idea that it could happen. It’s a continual stream of literal deus ex machinaes without any idea that there was something pre-planned (at least Deus’s entire point is that he has plans within plans).
Hench Wench really stands out in that it doesnt feel like she had any planning of her character when she was made beyond the very rudimentary basics, and every time one gets written into a corner with her, just pull another power to use to get her out of trouble. If it’s just once then okay, but this has now happened multiple times in a VERY short amount of strips since her introduction. It’s annoying. Not sure why you’re so offended that I find it annoying.
Guesticules finds Deus annoying, but I don’t hate G for it or say G is making a tantrum. Heck, I like Guesticules. I’m good natured when talking to G about how one day, G will see the eternal light that is our Lord and Savior Deus, Paragon of Humanity and Blessing to Us All. All praise Deus, amen.
“Gandalf or Saruman telling us every single cantrip they possess would be.”
Foreshadowing is Gandalf being able to summon the eagles.
Ass-pulling is Gandalf suddenly showing that he has the ability to teleport, or revealing that he’s actually from the future and time travels forward then back again, with a bazooka which he uses against his enemies.
One had some foreshadowing that he can do that. The other is just ‘I’m not sure how to get Galdalf out of this mess, so invent a new power on the fly because nothing else will work from what’s been presented, and we havent seem him studying any ideas on how to get out of messes in the future.
Like… if Dabbler suddenly comes up with a new invention that can be used non-lethally to attack an enemy, I’m okay with that. She is an established inventor, and was actively looking for less lethal ways to take down enemies earlier (ie, the Tickle Gun) after the Vehemence fight.
“Mystery is a thing too. As is showing, and not telling.”
This isnt mystery. This is inconsistency.
And then Glorn the alien bounty hunter appeared, and he was more powerful than everyone including Maxima, and just hadnt helped his fellow aliens until now because he was busy capturing Vehemence from super-supermax which he now has in his ship because he’s also able to nullify super powers. And with a wave of his hand, he teleported all his fellow bounty hunters back onto the ship, along withe Vehemence, and said “Puny humans! I shall be back for you! Prepare yourself!” and then he was off. Also he broke Hench Wench’s neck because he did not like her awesome dress, because he knew where she lived, since he’s also a telepath.
If that was added, would you find that mystery? Did that ‘show, not tell’ that the aliens might be able to do something that they had now shown they could do beforehand? Even though only a few pages ago, the lizard guy said they were outmatched here and would try again MAYBE with orbital attacks and war mechs? After all, there are more than just the aliens that were captured.
No. That would be an awful deus ex machinae. An ‘ass pull’ from the aliens. They’d be pulling a Hench Wench.
“A complete unknown, whose power relies on a specific condition… doubled down on said condition.”
Again, I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Except that you seem to be trying to excuse a character being able to do literally anything with almost no reasoning behind it narrative-wise. It’s very difficult for the suspension of disbelief to be maintained when stuff like that happens. It’s even harder when it happens over and over and over again in a VERY short period of time, like with Hench Wench’s powers as needed.
“Omnipotence isn’t even in the same section of the library as that.”
Omnipotence in the sense that she can have any power needed without the story needing to show ANYTHING towards that progression at all. Not even a hint.
“Extent of what? We’ve actually already seen that she DOES have limits, although those limits are largely based on how much she’s levelled up with her skill tree. For her to exceed those limits, something has to actually happen in comic to let her level up first. It doesnt just come out of nowhere, like it does with Hench Wench pulling powers out of nowhere narratively with not even the slightest idea that it would have even been possible.”
The extent of her powers? Sydney’s limitations are entirely dependent on how many ‘points’ have been expended, yes, but that is entirely different from it’s ultimate capabilities, and therefore assigning scope by current knowledge is ignorant. If the assumption that they are indeed a spaceship analogue, that she cannot yet achieve escape velocity from a planet should be evidence enough for that fact that her scope is only partially what it can be.
Yes, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. The thing you don’t seem to understand, or at least be capable of acknowledging, is that just as with Sydney learning entirely new aspects of her powers without adding new points because of having never utilized the orb’s abilities in the manner necessary to encounter said factor (finding out the bubble is airtight), is narratively identical to a character we know absolutely nothing about having a backstory… and not telling us about all of it right away.
The slightest idea it would have even been possible? It’s not a novel power for the genre, although applying it to employment is a tact I’ve not seen taken before, but no more different than environmental biome or any of the other more popular avenues. As I stated later, finding more than one employer? That’s called thinking ahead. As Vale and Dues themselves say that if Harem is being a double agent for them, it’s just as possible she’s being a triple agent, so it’s not even an alien thought to the comic itself. Your inability to think laterally is showing.
“The only one who so far seems to have anything ‘infinite’ about them is Achilles, who is essentially ‘infinitely’ invulnerable, but he also has nothing else special about him which would make that story-breaking, since he can be tossed aside pretty easily.”
My bad, I assumed we were operating under the conventional societal logic similarly employed with common usage of the word ‘perfect’, despite it being just as nigh-on an impossibility as infinitude is. By your logic, Achilles’s defenses are not inviolate, and therefore not infinite in scope, because someone’s power or magic might ignore the manner in which it defends against all thus-far seen damage. As we saw of Sydney’s potential with Krona’s aid, it is so far from what she currently is that by the time she reaches it, she may make Xuriel look like a quadriplegic infant.
“No offense but I have no idea what you’re talking about here in relation to the comic. Please elaborate on that.”
The Nth. Logically, they’re either as powerful or more powerful than the orbs, as their creators, and given Cora’s comments that scant evidence of their existence exists, they’re either no longer on the same planes of existence any other known type of being is, such as with the Ascended from the Stargate franchises, or they are, but they’re simply unable to be perceived by those not in their league.
“I’m not sure what you’re arguing with me about then. You’re basically saying the same thing I said with slightly different words.”
What I was arguing about, is the intent. Since I’m saying something vastly different to you, keeping close attention on logical connections between sentences and paragraphs discussing the same elements is vital. In essence, not all foreshadowing happened at the same time. As your argument relies on treating things as though they do, keeping that in mind in the future should be beneficial for you if you decide to be less myopic towards concepts you arbitrarily decide are unlike everything else, even when they’re not, seems prudent advice to offer.
“She comes out of nowhere, she gains powers with absolutely no foreshadowing or narrative to explain it – just “Oh I also am hired by so and so” or “oh I can also use my powers in combination to do something that should not work with this combination of powers to begin with”
She came out out of the same “nowhere” every character does, narratively. This is relevant to my later comment on mystery: As a very poignant example, we don’t know if the shot Maxima laid out the fel carrier with is her 100% strongest. We don’t know just how many cantrips Xuriel has, or how strong they can be if she’s sitting at super-derived-orgy levels of tantric energy. We didn’t know every member of Archon Sydney would come across until she came across them (which ties back into my earlier comment on foreshadowing you thought was the same as what you were saying). Sure, a few were hinted at. Not all of them, and certainly not the D&D character sheet type expose your general argument implies we need about the characters you decide to arbitrarily stop thinking when looking at.
Hench Wench’s power is rather simple. As seems to be consistent, you honestly don’t seem to give a damn about what that entails, and treat mere raw exposure as though you’re being transported from one author’s work to a different author’s work every time she uses a part of it, directly in contradiction to how you treat most every other actor in this play.
“Again I don’t know how you’re thinking Hench Wench going to ‘instantly being able to have any power already’ is ‘evolution.’ In fact, everything else you’ve written SUPPORTS my viewpoint.”
Wow, talk about blatant misrepresentation and an abhorrent understanding of language.
Principally: That isn’t her power, and certainly isn’t what I presented it as. Given that even when viewing only say, every page since she was fired, as opposed to every page she’s in since her introduction, our knowledge of her has advanced, so the only way my statements would support your viewpoint is if it’s directly antithetical to what you argue.
“What powers does Hench Wench have that, combined, could make her alter her physical state into a ghost state, while not leaving a flesh state behind vulnerable? None. There are no power combinations which allow that from the powers we see that she has. There’s no ‘messing with Concretia’s existing powerset’ which allows that either.”
This is pretty much the perfect example of how you absolutely refuse to bother with the particulars. Especially since they’re both rather egregious examples of how you seem to hyperfocus on one single element and ignore everything else.
It’s far too many comments to try and sort through given the number of pages since she appeared and the comments over each one, but I’m pretty sure at some point I saw Dave say that her power only works as a supervillain, in reply to someone wondering what she’d be able to do if she were instead working under Archon. Even if that isn’t the case, that by now anybody is pretending she only has one single power from one single individual is, frankly, the height of hilarity – and absurdity.
“Would it be nice for me to say that you seem to be acting like someone who wants to suck up to the author and ‘white knighting’ when someone makes a critique?”
Since the majority of my statements tie moreso into the elements of writing and the facts of the story itself, it wouldn’t be “nice” to make up complete lies, no. However, applying nonsensical (in that it is completely contradicted by you not reacting to numerous other characters in the exact same manner) standards to some things very much sounds like what an adult version of when a child throws a tantrum. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
“Plus I most definitely HAVE bothered with the particulars. You might notice I’m REALLY verbose in my posts. Try again with another argument.”
Don’t mistake verbosity for veracity. As someone who is frequently lambasted for excessive loquaciousness, believe me, I can tell the difference between when someone is making an effort to communicate something in extensive detail, and when someone is merely communicating a whole lot of nothing.
As the above few selected quotes and their replies demonstrate, no, you honestly don’t have very much at all to do with the particulars of Hench Wench whatsoever in this discussion, and I’ve seen similar in your dealings with others.
“I have read this paragraph 4 times and have no idea what you’re trying to say here, so I can’t really respond to it. Please explain, thanks. The only thing I got was you saying I was making a bad faith argument, but everything I’ve said has been based on legitimate reasons to not like Hench Wench – it’s not ‘bad faith.’”
It’s rather simple, provided you’ve paid attention to the small details. Observe any instance of those such as Gwen or Dabbler using their gifts. Similarly, any virtually identical presentation in other media, such as magical girl, some types of fantasy, or other various genres. Energy/magic/etc, visibly shaped in a particular way depending upon effect, and voila!
The comment on your laziness being bad faith is that you pretend things simply aren’t possible (for no reason whatsoever) or have no explanation for why they’re happening, even when the character literally states exactly why in the plainest of language.
Which coincidentally, has nothing to do with whether or not one winds up liking or disliking a character. Plenty of works have characters that I absolutely loathe – sometimes for their personality, sometimes for symbology behind their existence, etc. Pretty much not a single one ever has to do with whether or not I found their abilities to be logically consistent with the rest of the story, because that frankly doesn’t matter. That impacts the work as a whole, not an individual character.
” I didnt say you need to show every aspect of future characters. That’s not what foreshadowing is. ”
You’re acting as though it is. This goes back to your complaints against Vehemence, too.
That’s exactly what foreshadowing is – when it comes to the extent observed directly in your complaints against her.
She announces that her power gives her the powers of those who employ her. If you want to know every single individual power, that’s a hell of a lot of details to be revealed. Pick a side of the fence and stay there.
“Do you know (one of the reasons) why The Last Jedi was just godawful?”
Funny, I’ve seen some of those uses before The Phantom Menace was showing, much less by the time The Last Jedi came out. And I didn’t even play all the games or read all the books.
Ordinarily, I’m not one to ascribe to the philosophy of ‘All canon content weighs equally’, to include that of alternate mediums and the like, but when I see people getting into comics because of tv or movies (to use one of your prior examples, TWD, or say, The Boys or the MCU) and wanting to see what differs, I lean back on it slightly. Particularly considering that even elementary school kids run around using tablets and smartphones, so it’s not like you can’t wikiwalk (which I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t given how popular a site like TvTropes is, even if all the various wikias are slightly different), when we’re talking about a franchise as expansive as Game of Thrones or Star Wars or whatever.
Hell, half the reason I bothered with certain games like the Star Wars MMO or the like was because of the SW books I’d read. Otherwise, I’d have been inclined to treat it like the prequels: Avoid like it was yersinia pestes.
“Foreshadowing is Gandalf being able to summon the eagles.
Ass-pulling is Gandalf suddenly showing that he has the ability to teleport, or revealing that he’s actually from the future and time travels forward then back again, with a bazooka which he uses against his enemies.”
In the movies, he passes a message to them via a butterfly. Not a baby eagle.
By your standards, the movie ass-pulled his escape, and by extension of that, the rescue of Sam and Frodo.
Now, the books cover Radagast talking to Gandalf at the conclusion of Elrond’s Council and the latter asking that he contact his friends in the form of the beasts and birds, and that they send messages to Orthanc, which the Eagles come to directly and no moth is needed for his rescue. It’s purely for dramatic purposes to explain things to people utterly ignorant of content that is other.
Arguably, those in charge of the 3rd Star Wars trilogy’s writing were sitting on their hands as often as they were sticking them in their ears. Not because something wasn’t explained.
“Like… if Dabbler suddenly comes up with a new invention that can be used non-lethally to attack an enemy, I’m okay with that. She is an established inventor, and was actively looking for less lethal ways to take down enemies earlier (ie, the Tickle Gun) after the Vehemence fight.”
Like say, Hench Wench saying her power gives her the abilities of those she’s employed by. Whether that be one group or two.
“Again, I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Except that you seem to be trying to excuse a character being able to do literally anything with almost no reasoning behind it narrative-wise. It’s very difficult for the suspension of disbelief to be maintained when stuff like that happens. It’s even harder when it happens over and over and over again in a VERY short period of time, like with Hench Wench’s powers as needed.”
If she were employed by enough groups, she would be able to do literally anything. That’s not difficult at all to believe unless you’re willfully refusing to accept that B comes after A.
Which is almost exactly what I outlined. Her power depends on being employed. By thinking ahead, she got herself employed by a second group in case the first fired her, so that she might still have a manner with which to escape. Given that any character I play in an RPG I attempt to do the exact same when it comes to my build, favoring defense over offense even if it comes down to a war of attrition via the death by a thousand cuts, it’s literally what I, and I think anybody else, would do if they had her power. At which point, I would be fine if they disliked her because of her personality. Pretending her powers makes no sense: Again, that’s disingenuous.
The same can be said of prior scenes, such as when Maxima shifted to full defense or full speed depending on which would be more prudent. The only people that wouldn’t do something similar in those circumstances, are in my opinion, those not intelligent enough to survive any circumstances that require fighting atavistic instincts. And even some of those folks seem to understand that such a choice is prudent, even if they’d be hiding under the table.
“The extent of her powers? Sydney’s limitations are entirely dependent on how many ‘points’ have been expended, yes, but that is entirely different from it’s ultimate capabilities, and therefore assigning scope by current knowledge is ignorant.”
Sydney’s powers are limited in scope, level, and knowledge. And VERY thoroughly foreshadowed.
“If the assumption that they are indeed a spaceship analogue,”
Which was explicitly theorized and makes COMPLETE sense
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-542-ncc-scoville/
“that she cannot yet achieve escape velocity from a planet should be evidence enough for that fact that her scope is only partially what it can be.”
… okay my turn to ask… what comic have YOU been reading? She has already shown that her flight has no effective ceiling. TWICE.
First time – Maxima makes the assumption that Sydney apparently has no flight ceiling:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-418-high-level-talks/
Second time – actually DOING THAT.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-653-fly-me-to-the-moon-eventually/
Because Sydney’s flight does not rely on thrust at all. Her flight is based on localized gravity (hence her hair when flying upside-down) and anti-gravity.
“Yes, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere.”
Hench Wench DOES pull powers out of nowhere. And legal clauses out of nowhere. And new employers with additional powers out of nowhere. Which causes readers like you to need to, for some reason, white knight and bend backwards to explain something which does not have any logical sense in-universe even, even based on HW’s own statements about her powers.
“The thing you don’t seem to understand, or at least be capable of acknowledging, is that just as with Sydney learning entirely new aspects of her powers without adding new points because of having never utilized the orb’s abilities in the manner necessary to encounter said factor (finding out the bubble is airtight), is narratively identical to a character we know absolutely nothing about having a backstory… and not telling us about all of it right away.”
Do you not understand what I mean when I say Sydney’s powers have foreshadowing and buildup to them, while Hench Wench’s do not? That Sydney’s powers are learned over a significant period of time, and we’re learning along with her as readers, while Hench Wench just gains powers all at once to get her out of her pickles?
“The slightest idea it would have even been possible? It’s not a novel power for the genre, although applying it to employment is a tact I’ve not seen taken before,”
It actually IS A novel power for the genre. Applying it to employment is the entire basis of her power. Then pulling new employers out of nowhere to get her out of a narrative corner that she’s gotten painted into, even after the scene had a relatively satisfying conclusion. Not once. But twice.
“but no more different than environmental biome or any of the other more popular avenues.”
I again have no idea what you’re talking about when saying stuff like environemntal biomes or ‘any of the more popular avenues.’
“As I stated later, finding more than one employer? That’s called thinking ahead.”
No it’s called an ass-pull when you don’t give any idea that she did that. Hench Wench’s entire motivation for what she’s doing makes absolutely no sense. She doesnt seem to actually ‘think ahead’ or she’d be thinking ‘hrm, a lot of villains are NEVER going to hire me because i’ve already shown I will betray them at the drop of a hat for absolutely no reason.
“As Vale and Dues themselves say that if Harem is being a double agent for them, it’s just as possible she’s being a triple agent, so it’s not even an alien thought to the comic itself.”
Deus IS strategic in his planning. He doesnt seem to do anything spontaneously, and that’s been rigorously shown in almost every scene he’s in. Hench Wench, on the other hand, seems wildly impulsive… until she needs to get out of a narrative pickle from her awful decisions… so pulls another power out, either from combining powers in a way that makes no sense, adding clauses which not only make no sense, but are simply not legal and would never have gotten past the filing stage with a clerk, or spontaneously stating she has more employers in the next county over who happen to have a power that she can use to get herself out of a mess.
It’s poor writing to do that. Like I’ve said elsewhere, it’s like if I really like the alien bounty hunters, so I spontaneously say ‘oh they thought ahead and brought Gorn the Master Hunter with them, who’s stronger than Maxima and has a nullification power that works on even supers, and by the way he wasnt here to capture Maxima because he scouted ahead to capture Vehemence and also killed Hench Wench in her apartment where he wa waiting for her because he’s awesome and can read minds, because that is definitely his power, and then he teleported his alien buddies away because oh yeah didn’t I mention he also has a personal long distance teleportation device on him?
“Your inability to think laterally is showing.”
Your ability to stay within a consistent narrative framework is showing. Read in my other posts what I mean by that. For example, with what I said about the problem with the Star Wars sequels (specifically with Rey Palpatine).
“My bad, I assumed we were operating under the conventional societal logic similarly employed with common usage of the word ‘perfect’, despite it being just as nigh-on an impossibility as infinitude is.”
Again I’ve read this several times and it’s almost a word salad. What? An… impossibility as infinitude is’? Employing the conventional societal logic similarly employed with the common usage of the word perfect’? What are you even SAYING?
“By your logic, Achilles’s defenses are not inviolate, and therefore not infinite in scope, because someone’s power or magic might ignore the manner in which it defends against all thus-far seen damage.”
… you’re concentrating on using complex words to the point that it’s like you swallowed a thesaurus. But I’m going to try to translate what you just said, then respond to that.
You’re saying ‘by my logic, Achilles powers are not… inviolate… safe from injury? Wait um… okay seriously you need to rewrite some of your sentences and use words that make more sense in context.
You’re saying… that by my logic, Achilles powers make him safe from injury, so are not infinite in scope?” What? NO. that’s Not what I said at all
Look, i’ll put it simply.
Achilles is truly and utterly invulnerable to any physical force used against him to injure him. But ONLY for being injured. He can be buried. He can be thrown around. He can be locked up. He can be grabbed and held in place. He can be handcuffed. He can be tied up. He can be put in a straight jacket. He can be forced by anyone who is significantly stronger than him. But he won’t get injured in the process.
This has been very clearly spelled out in advance, then shown MANY times in many different fights and examples, and also described by various characters about how ‘Achilles is probably buried under a ton of rocks… AGAIN.’ I have no idea what you’re talking about, though.
“As we saw of Sydney’s potential with Krona’s aid, it is so far from what she currently is that by the time she reaches it, she may make Xuriel look like a quadriplegic infant.”
Literally no idea what your argument is at this point. You’re just proving my point that other characters who are very powerful, like Krona, are being introduced with her powers SLOWLY…showing that she’s learning HOW to use them in new ways, showing that she’s experimenting with them in ways that are foreshadowed or at least hinted at AS WE ARE READING IT.
Whereas Hench Wench just pulls stuff out of nowhere narratively, like combining powers in ways that shouldnt work to do new things that have almost nothing to do with the power combination, adding legal clauses that make no sense, suddenly having additional employers, etc.
“The Nth. Logically, they’re either as powerful or more powerful than the orbs, as their creators, and given Cora’s comments that scant evidence of their existence exists, they’re either no longer on the same planes of existence any other known type of being is, such as with the Ascended from the Stargate franchises, or they are, but they’re simply unable to be perceived by those not in their league.”
Where did you get ANY of this from in Cora’s brief mention of Nth technology? The whole point of Cora mentioning Nth level tech is to give another little breadcrumb of info about Sydney’s orbs. That’s all. It’s part of that character-building stuff that I’m so fond of and you’re so dismissive of.
“Wow, talk about blatant misrepresentation and an abhorrent understanding of language.”
Translation – calling me a liar.
“Principally: That isn’t her power, and certainly isn’t what I presented it as. Given that even when viewing only say, every page since she was fired, as opposed to every page she’s in since her introduction, our knowledge of her has advanced, so the only way my statements would support your viewpoint is if it’s directly antithetical to what you argue.”
Oh god, seriously… Somno… using big words does not always make you sound intelligent or eloquent. Sometimes it just makes you sound like you’re using big words to try to sound smart when what you’re saying is word salad. :/ It’s really difficult to parse what you’re saying in every other paragraph.
This paragraph again makes very little sense, which makes it hard to respond to.
I’m going to roughly translate what you’re saying in this paragraph to ‘Hench Wench’s powers ARE being shown and built up with each strip she’s in.’
To which I will respond, no, they are not. In fact, each strip she’s in seems to contradict the previous strip she’s in which is why she keeps going from being beaten to not being beaten to being beaten to not being beaten. Because she keeps pulling more stuff out of nowhere. Stuff that you’re arguing happened ‘offscreen because she’s like… super prepared, except when she isnt.
“Since the majority of my statements tie moreso into the elements of writing and the facts of the story itself, it wouldn’t be “nice” to make up complete lies, no.”
Please write more clearly, I’m begging you now. Or explain at least what you’re referencing from what I posted.
“However, applying nonsensical (in that it is completely contradicted by you not reacting to numerous other characters in the exact same manner) standards”
I’ve literally shown, multiple times, with examples and even links to other parts of the webcomic, that what Hench Wench is doing is not like what any of the other characters have done, except maybe Vehemence, who was ALSO getting into Villain Sue territory. Where he started making up powers like ka-pants and ‘immovability from ground’ and stuff that really had very little to do with him ‘getting stronger or healing damage or offensive attacks.’ Hench Wench has managed to compress all that made Vehemence annoying into days instead of a year. And DaveB apparently DID have a plan for Vehemence’s resolution. He didnt have a plan for Hench Wench’s resolution. He even admitted that.
“to some things very much sounds like what an adult version of when a child throws a tantrum. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.”
You know, when I say you’re making an ad hominem attack, that’s not an invitation for you to try to out-Latin me. Ad nauseum is a very common term in debate. People know what it means. But you’re using stuff like QED in ways that does not even fit. You’re just using personal attacks because you think that gets a rise out me or something. :) Then using a word salad thesaurus when you could just speak in plain English that doesnt require people to hunt in a dictionary for every other word you write and figure out of that makes sense in your sentence structure.
“Don’t mistake verbosity for veracity.”
Translation – just because you write a lot doesnt mean you’re right. That’s what you’re saying.
My response – no, but the fact that I use links from other parts of this comic to back up my claims does make me right. Or at the very least when I make an opinion on something being poor storytelling, I have a reason for saying it beyond it ‘being a tantrum.’
“As someone who is frequently lambasted for excessive loquaciousness,”
Translation – people often tell me that I’m using big words unnecessarily to try to sound smart
Yes, you do.
“believe me, I can tell the difference between when someone is making an effort to communicate something in extensive detail, and when someone is merely communicating a whole lot of nothing.”
Clearly you can’t. And so much of what you’ve written here DOES say nothing. And oh god I’m only like 1/4th through your post.
“As the above few selected quotes and their replies demonstrate, no, you honestly don’t have very much at all to do with the particulars of Hench Wench whatsoever in this discussion, and I’ve seen similar in your dealings with others.”
Examples? You’re doing what Oberon does right now. You’re making a declaration for declaration’s sake without backing it up. Even with sprinkling in the personal attacks.
“It’s rather simple, provided you’ve paid attention to the small details.”
It would be even simpler if you used normal words that don’t require me (and others who maybe read your post) having to parse out each word you write into something more understandable to read.
“Observe any instance of those such as Gwen or Dabbler using their gifts. Similarly, any virtually identical presentation in other media, such as magical girl, some types of fantasy, or other various genres. Energy/magic/etc, visibly shaped in a particular way depending upon effect, and voila!”
Dabbler literally had an entire lesson plan on how different types of magic works, in universe. While wearing a sexy teacher cosplay.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-813-metaphysics-101/
“The comment on your laziness being bad faith is that you pretend things simply aren’t possible (for no reason whatsoever) or have no explanation for why they’re happening, even when the character literally states exactly why in the plainest of language.”
I literally keep pointing out WHY things are not possible based on the in-universe examples being given. Then people, like you, either make declarations for declaration’s sake, or try to give out-of-universe reasons to ‘fix’ what HW is doing to try to make it make sense, like Rhuen. But Rhuen at least speaks in a way that’s easy to understand, and Rhuen is not making outright declarations – he/she is just trying to ‘fill in the gaps.’ It’s something readers sometimes do when a story has plot holes or a character lacks consistency, because people like stories they’re reading to make sense, and characters to have some sort of consistent framework. Chalk it up to humans liking pattern recognition, I guess.
I seriously don’t mean this as an insult, but I don’t think you read most of what you’re responding to in my posts, and are trying to cover up that by using big words that don’t always make sense in context, or using big words to cover up that you’re just making declarations, not fact-based arguments.
“Which coincidentally, has nothing to do with whether or not one winds up liking or disliking a character. Plenty of works have characters that I absolutely loathe – sometimes for their personality, sometimes for symbology behind their existence, etc. Pretty much not a single one ever has to do with whether or not I found their abilities to be logically consistent with the rest of the story, because that frankly doesn’t matter. That impacts the work as a whole, not an individual character.”
Condense that all into one sentence so I can respond to it k?
I -think- what you’re saying it ‘I don’t necessarily like Hench Wench, but I think her powers make narrative sense.’ Is that what you’re saying? Because if it is, then I just would respond that I don’t think they make narrative sense because they do something different than what she even described them to do (with the power combinations, for example), and she does continually keep pulling things out of nowhere. First with the contract. ‘Can’t fire me unless you have 2/3rds of members! Got 2/3rd members? Can’t fire me unless the LLC manager signs off on it? Oh you don’t know who the LLC manager is? I am! MUHAHAHA. I have to fire myself for it to work, even though I’m an employee, not an owner! Because that… totally makes sense.’ (It does not make any sense, btw). Then ‘oh you nullfied the LLC, which I completely had no way to know you’d be able to do because I’m supremely overconfident! Well… I have another employer who lets me open portals! Oh wait you’re super-fast and were able to grab me before the portal could close? Okay I’m opening a portal around both of us to water 100 feet deep because I guess I happened to go deep water diving earlier, and I know that will disorient you long enough to let go of me! Oh and I know you’ll also just give me a dirty look instead of just grabbing me AGAIN because your superspeed won’t for some reason be used against me a second time!’
See… It. Makes. No. Sense.
“You’re acting as though it is. This goes back to your complaints against Vehemence, too.”
No I haven’t acted like it does. I’ve been pretty specific about the problems of lack of foreshadowing or even a hint of any of this super-prep HW has done to foreshadow what she’s been doing the last several pages. The only thing we’ve seen at all was the flashback of her signing the LLC agreement and making the evil laugh… with only two LLC members there – Brut and Flygirl – no one else there to sign it.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-916-bad-faith/
“That’s exactly what foreshadowing is – when it comes to the extent observed directly in your complaints against her.”
No it isn’t. In fact, what was foreshadowed was something that goes against what actually happened (Brut and Flygirl being the only ones there to sign with her). I mean even Concretia wasn’t there to sign. It’s like saying Rey’s powers were foreshadowed by her…. seeing how the Force was used a few seconds before she uses the Force. The only thing that was given any history with Rey was why she’d be good at technology. Because she has years of being a scavenger. Doesn’t explain why she’s a better pilot than Chewbacca. Or why she can speak wookie…. when she’s lived her entire life on a desert planet. Or why she can do jedi mind tricks when she had no idea it even existed before 30 seconds prior to seeing it done. The same is true with HW. She can do something because of a single throwaway line she says… before she does the thing that she has no narrative reason to be able to do.
“If you want to know every single individual power, that’s a hell of a lot of details to be revealed. Pick a side of the fence and stay there.”
No, I’d like there to be at least SOME detail showing there was more than just Brut and Flygirl there though! There’s NOTHING except a throwaway line of ‘oh I have another employer as well, which I’m going to mention on the same panel that I’m going to use the power. It’s not an all or nothing choice. It can just be at least an actual hint of what’s to come so it doesnt constantly feel like the ass-pulls that it is.
“Funny, I’ve seen some of those uses before The Phantom Menace was showing, much less by the time The Last Jedi came out. And I didn’t even play all the games or read all the books.”
No you haven’t. Because the Force powers i mentioned NEVER happened before The Last Jedi. Because Rian Johnson is clueless about the universe in which he was writing a script. Show me where there was a power to heal others with the Force. Show me where there was the power to survive the hard vacuum of space with the Force, then Mary Poppins your way back onto a ship travelling at incredibly fast speed (at least compared to Leia just floating out in space). It was bad writing. Rian forgot that the ship was supposed to be moving still. He forgot things in his own script, from what he had written earlier in the script.
Show me where anyone had any clue to use hyperspace jumps to destroy other ships. You can’t. In fact in the original trilogy Han Solo specifically says you CANT do that which is why hyperspace requires precise calculations or you’ll kill YOURSELF. Not that you can use it as a weapon. Because if you could use it as a weapon why not just use it on the Deathstar instead of the suicide run they made. All those bothans dying for nothing?
Why does Rey not just levitate herself and all her friends out of the quicksand, when it was shown she can not only do that, but laughably easier earlier in the same movie? Because Rian Johnson doesnt pay attention to what he writes and has no concept of consistent rules in-universe. It’s just ‘powers as the plot demands.’
And you can’t even try to find some obscure reference in the expanded universe, because Disney de-canonized most of the expanded universe.
“Otherwise, I’d have been inclined to treat it like the prequels: Avoid like it was yersinia pestes.”
I have no idea what that means and had to google. AGAIN… to figure out what the heck you were saying. Why not just say ‘Avoid it like the plague’? Seriously. It’s not making you sound smarter to use obscure terms and words, or overcomplicate words where simpler ones will work just fine.
PS – the prequels wind up making a bit more sense because they fill in the plot holes with the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons, which are established in universe as being between the first and second movies, and second and third movies.
The sequels, on the other hand, make no sense at all from any narrative standpoint (especially 8 and 9, although there are plenty of problems with 7 as well – such as ‘how did the First Order get so insanely powerful within approximately 20 years or less, after the Empire’s complete and utter defeat because of how the Emperor manipulated things to intentionally collapse it after his death).
“Like say, Hench Wench saying her power gives her the abilities of those she’s employed by. Whether that be one group or two.”
That. Is. Not. Foreshadowing. Your first sentence was just a generic description of her powerset. And your second sentence was never even stated at all. You made it up. In fact, the foreshadowing would be that she CANT be employed by multiple people at the same time AND make it work for her powers (yes I know people can have more than one job, but the foreshadowing actually suggested her POWERS won’t work for more than one job, hence the need for the LLC creation), because why would she have needed to make the LLC in the first place? She went out of her way to say she had the LLC made JUST so she could have all of their powers.
“If she were employed by enough groups, she would be able to do literally anything. That’s not difficult at all to believe unless you’re willfully refusing to accept that B comes after A.”
And for all you know, based on your not caring if there’s any sort of foreshadowing beyond ‘she gets power from being employed by as many different supervillains as she wants, with or without them being in an LLC’, Hench Wench COULD have like 600 powers or so because she’s employed by 600 supervillains. That’s just insane and broken, as far as a narrative building device goes. But based on YOUR reasoning, completely fine and a darned good character.
“Given that any character I play in an RPG I attempt to do the exact same when it comes to my build, favoring defense over offense even if it comes down to a war of attrition via the death by a thousand cuts, it’s literally what I, and I think anybody else, would do if they had her power. ”
If you create your RPG characters by trying to make sure they’re inherently broken and you can just claim powers after powers, I’m not sure who would ever WANT to rp with your characters. It sounds really annoying for anyone who’d be RPing with you, and completely not fun for a DM, because you’re outright saying you try to make sure your RPG characters can break the game.
“it’s literally what I, and I think anybody else, would do if they had her power.”
If everyone thought like you, every Flash comic would be two panels long on one page since, if you were him you’d just … steal everyone’s speed and then put all the criminals behind bars before they had a chance to blink even once. Not a great story. The adventures of God-Man.
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/GodManVsThePurpleBeetle_3147.png
“Pretending her powers makes no sense: Again, that’s disingenuous.”
No, it’s because her powers literally do make no sense. The rules on them keep changing when roadblocks get thrown up in HW’s path every single page. The rules on firing her. The rules on what powers she can use. Even in contrast to her own statements about how she was doing this by ‘combinng powers’ without there being a combination that could do that. Then what powers she can access changes, despite her not having used that power as soon as Brut was trying to fire her. It’s not like she was going to get paid at that point anymore.
Nothing disingenuous about it.
“The same can be said of prior scenes, such as when Maxima shifted to full defense or full speed depending on which would be more prudent. ”
I’m thinking maybe you don’t usually read what DaveB writes underneath. DaveB explained that Maxima generally keeps her power levels at a default of a certain level of strength, armor, and speed as the golden triangle of powers, and can shift that as the need arises. Like putting everything into armor to survive Vehemence. Or putting everything into speed when in the stasis field. Or putting everything into plasma blast when trying to get through the Fel shield. Which was the first time she ever maximized THAT… according to HER. In the comic. She ‘always wanted to try that.’ See last panel.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-767-maxima-effort/
The implication is she had never done it before because there had never been a need to maximize her plasma blast before, given how even a small plasma blast was able to do a lot of damage. See second panel.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-161-cooldown/
“The only people that wouldn’t do something similar in those circumstances, are in my opinion, those not intelligent enough to survive any circumstances that require fighting atavistic instincts.”
Oh for crying out loud Somno, just say ‘primitive instincts.’ Plus that entire sentence doesn’t make sense in reference to the first sentence, and seems to have been an excuse to use the word atavistic instead of primitive in a sentence.
“And even some of those folks seem to understand that such a choice is prudent, even if they’d be hiding under the table.”
Again no idea what you’re trying to say here :/
I don’t know how you can say “absolutely no seeds planted” when we’ve been discussing for weeks that an intelligent version of HW would ABSOLUTELY have a backup contract like that for escaping. In fact, in retrospect, it explains or excuses her stupidity in continuing to fight (rather than running, powers intact) when her “bosses” wanted her to stand down. She was having a great time, and didn’t plan to be caught even if she lost.
That being said, we only have ZERO or ONE more movement of this, given the audience’s patience level. Either no one finds her, or someone suddenly finds her and stuns her so that there is no additional back-and-forth.
“I don’t know how you can say “absolutely no seeds planted” when we’ve been discussing for weeks that an intelligent version of HW would ABSOLUTELY have a backup contract like that for escaping.”
No seeds planted IN THE STORY we’re reading. When we, the readers, are coming up with ways for a villain to do something if they were smarter, that’s not ‘seeds planted’ in the story. That’s us engaging in fanfic ideas and basic nerd arguments (like who would win in a fight between Superman One Million and Rune King Thor).
” In fact, in retrospect, it explains or excuses her stupidity in continuing to fight (rather than running, powers intact) when her “bosses” wanted her to stand down.”
I honestly don’t think so. I think DaveB didnt really have a resolution for this fight. Because he literally said he did not have a resolution to this fight a few pages ago. And then he wanted her to escape, so she escaped. It’s just not satisfying at all to me how this is being resolved via a tush-pull.
“That being said, we only have ZERO or ONE more movement of this, given the audience’s patience level. ”
Nah not really. At first I really liked the idea of a villain who could be beaten by a lawyer. :) Then it became obvious that her powers were not ACTUALLY based on the law, because more and more things were added that made no legal sense. Then it turned out yes, she CAN be beaten by a lawyer, and was. Then she made that win meaningless by having another employment as backup. Then that was made meaningless by Maxima being able to catch her before she could get out of there because Maxima is super fast. Then THAT Became meaningless becaus apparently Maxima might be super-fast but if she’s in water she’s not fast enough anymore because she’s distracted, but still not distracted enough to give her a dirty look BEFORE Hench Wench escapes.
Do you not see why I’d find this incredibly unsatisfying or annoying? :)
“Either no one finds her, or someone suddenly finds her and stuns her so that there is no additional back-and-forth.”
Also no. I loved the Sciona story arc. And Sciona was able to escape death or defeat multple times, including at the very end. Because maxima had much bigger problems at the time, and the reason for her letting her just walk off on a dead world was understandable. And even when Sciona returns, it’s ENTIRELY understandable and in keeping with her, her abilities, and her people’s tech.
Sciona is a brilliantly written villain. Hench Wench… not so much. But only because stuff kept getting added over a very short period of time which kept refuting what was already done the page before, while Sciona’s arc was consistent and made sense.
Heck, even Vehemence’s arc made sense, and I’m not a big Vehemence fan (more because it took a year than because of the character himself, but there were some stuff with Vehemence’s getting powers out of nowehre that I didnt like as well, like his ‘I’m unmovable’ power or ‘ka-pants’ spontaneous matter creation). But they were fewer and farther between so I could adjust to it easier when reading how the story progressed.
Look, I love this comic. A lot. I think DaveB is a gifted writer and an even better artist. But I have the occasional critique. This is one of them.
Max has had the same powerset from the beginning. It’s very strong, but when her limit is reached (Vehemence, stasis beam) she struggles, instead of revealing new powers to help her.
Sydney hasn’t, as far as I can remember, never pulled a power out of her butt to deal with a problem. The air bubble was just flavorful power-testing, the teleportation even happened unopportunely when she suddenly found herself physically in Sciona’s lair, and her flight upgrades were not only foreshadowed, but planned and earned.
Deus can be plenty annoying at times, but he takes a different role in the narrative. He is neither a hero with challenges to rise to nor an antagonist to overcome, which are the things that would be ruined by too much ass-pulling.
Max has clearly been utilizing her powers in the field for years, quite likely more than a decade. She’s found their limits.
Sydney just got her’s recently, was quite furtive about testing them until she joined Archon, and obviously some of them have unlock conditions. A decade from now, comic time, (Some time in 2060 our time!) she’ll have reached the end of her powers, too. We’re just watching that happen, instead of seeing the end result.
Agreed. Also, Sydney handled the parking lot battle and the kaiju without relying new powers manifesting (until afterward).
So you hate Henchwoman for being exactly what the two main characters are? :p
No. Because the two main characters do NOT do that. There’s a difference between having powers within a certain powerset and having ANY power because of your powerset. Even Death Toll didnt have ANY power because of his powerset – he had any power at a time, which means too many multiple powers used against him could not be countered. Varia, who can also potentially have any power, has to actually TOUCH the person she’s copying, which would be some foreshadowing of which powers she might get.
That’s not the case with Hench Wench. Its just, if she’s written into a corner, say she has so-and-so power because she is working for yet another person who was never mentioned before and she can use that power in ways that seems to make no sense unless she also has ADDITIONAL other powers to protect her from suddenly being submerged around 100 feet down. Which makes me think ‘oh there’s probably yet another employer out there who can also breathe underwater or can withstand getting the bends’ (which happens at depths of 30 feet or lower far as I remember).
It’s just annoying the more that gets stacked one on top of the other powerwise, because there’s no clue beforehand about what she might be able to do (aside from ANYTHING SHE WANTS), while Sydney and Maxima’s powers are not.
If Sydney suddenly found her unknown orb had the power to, say, create simple matter. I’d think ‘replicator’ – okay I was prepared for that. If she had the power to instantly translate any language, I’d say ‘universal translator’ – that makes sense, plus we already know the tech exists among aliens as well, and would be something useful for a starship. If she suddenly was able to learn to open a small pocket dimension, I’d think ‘okay, brig or storage space, that makes sense’ because they already discussed that possibility in the comic.
If Sydney suddenly was able to duplicate herself like Harem can… I’d have more trouble with that because, while she can create a fake hologram of herself (holodeck, makes sense), those holograms are not additional physical Sydneys, and wouldnt make much sense from a ‘starship-based power.’ At the very least, Sydney’s powers are foreshadowed so we have at least some idea of what they might be, enough that we can make guesses at it.
Hate to break it to you but with all the “level ups” Sydney gets shes guaranteed to get completely random abilities-heck her “life support” orb is already creating a tailor made mix of matter that she can breathe,That could easily in another level up or three become a straight up matter replicator capable of constructing a star ship in 3 seconds.Until she caps out of “level ups” Im considering Halos powerset to be unlimited.
And even if you dont agree with my assessment the comments sections no1 Sydney related hobby is making predictions on how shell become able to use all the orbs at once or what new powers she gets.Still i suppose Maxima counts as having a limited powerset though her powerlevel is so ludicrous the only reasons any fights last longer than 1 page is shes actively trying not to kill/gruesomely cripple whoever shes dealing with-I mean do you honestly think she couldnt explode henchwench like a blood balloon if she wanted to?
“Hate to break it to you but with all the “level ups” Sydney gets”
Sydney’s level ups have been:
1) consistent in that they’re all starship-based
2) done slowly, where we see HOW she earns those level ups
3) further based on what the orbs are used for. The only orb we don’t yet know about is the brown one, and even there they’ve made at least theories. IN COMIC theories, not just us readers making what if hypotheses.
4) limited. Halo’s powers, even if powerful, are still shown to have limits. If Sydney suddenly got the power to summon puppies, that would make no sense. If Sydney suddenly got 20 pips added out of nowhere, that would make no sense. Not to mention, we’ve already seen examples which strain what Halo can do. Her shield was almost breached by the Squidwards. Her lighthook has a weight limit. Her speed, even at full 5 pips, is not instantaneous, although it is Mach 16, plus is still going to be limited at least partially by her ability to perceive things (although there’s probably a side power which does heighten her reflexes as well, since she was able to dodge the bombings of the Squidwards pretty deftly).
5) achieved over a longer period of time, with explanation of how she got those power ups. Whereas with Hench Wench, you just can say ‘oh she’s also hired by ‘This-Power Man/Woman’ if you write yourself into a corner with her.
The life support orb was very obviously thought up in advance by DaveB, btw. The entire pool scene was a setup in order to show the life support power being discovered and used. That’s good writing for a reveal.
“I mean do you honestly think she couldnt explode henchwench like a blood balloon if she wanted to?”
Yes but she’s not a psychopath, so did not. This was also discussed. By Cora and Ray Cosmos, aka Deus’s cosmic littlte brother from another mother.
Even after escaping multiple times from Maxima, Sciona never bore the full brunt of Maxima’s anger. Maxima still stayed restrained. And was actually annoyed with Dabbler for going beyond that level of restraint when she blew off Sciona’s leg.
The only time Maxima was at the ‘okay you’re an irredeemable villain and there’s no chance to stop you except to kill you’ was with Vehemence. And even there, it was only a ‘last resort’ if Vehemence did not accept the surrender and succumb to Dabbler’s sleep spell. Even when Maxima blew Vehemence’s arm off, she wanted him to surrender and she would have gotten him medical attention.
Maxima has the ‘Superman’ problem. She’s so powerful that you can NOT make a regular story around her with a typical hero’s journey going up against adversity in the form of a typical ‘MCU style boss villain who’s basically the same powerset as the hero but bigger.’ Instead, she has to be combatted where she’s weak. And physically, she’s anything but weak. That’s why Superman’s greatest villains, whether they’re powerful like Darkseid, or merely human like Lex Luthor, are villains who fight him with strategy, tactics, and intelligence.
Except for Doomsday. But Doomsday was a money market grab because writers didnt know what to do with Superman beyond ‘kill him with a Kryptonian Hulk.’ Also Doomsday is the exception to the rule with Superman, since he has no mind beyond ‘kill’ (at least until much later on, after which point he has a sense of survival and never wins a fight against Superman again).
“That could easily in another level up or three become a straight up matter replicator capable of constructing a star ship in 3 seconds.”
Actually I’d consider that ‘pulling a Hench Wench’ to construct a starship. But to construct, say, a simple meal, that would be normal matter replicator technology from Star Trek and I’d have less problems with it, since it was foreshadowed as something that she might be able to do with the remaining orb.
From what we’ve seen so far, each of the orbs have a basic sphere of influence.
Fly Orb – Flight, speed, and aetherium gateways
Comm Orb – Communications, hologram scouting, teleportation (which is still sort of tied to the idea of being comminications – in person communications), and truesight (still in the area of communications in that an illusion might not always work against a sophisticated enough camera or communication device).
PPO – weapons. Just beam weapons right now. So far only one type of weapon, but if there were other types of elemental attacks from it, I would not be surprised.
Lighthook – manipulation of objects via tentacle, enhanced strength of the tentacle. If there was also the ability to have tractor beam or some sort in this orb, I would not be surprised at it. It would still make sense.
Life Support Orb – Creation of gases and atmosphere. Probably can do more, like how on Star Trek TNG, the life support can be used to also create knockout gas. Since it’s creating gas, it might also be capable of creating other matter. Like a matter replicator. Like making food or other stuff that you’d find from a star trek replicator. You need food and water to stay alive on a ship, after all.
Shield Orb – so far just a shield. Although if she ever learned how to shield someone ELSE, without shielding herself, I would not be surprised. It’s still a shield. If she learned to alter the opaqueness, I wouldnt be surprised. It’s still a shield (plus would have been HEAVILY foreshadowed).
Brown Orb – no idea. But it will likely have something to do with a spaceship ability, and she hasnt been pulling it out of her butt to get out of a problem that wasnt specifically written for her to get out of by using the brown orb (ie, how the life support orb powers were discovered in a completely understandable way).
The center circle – seems to get her more in tune with the orbs and what they can do. Basically an instruction manual. OR…. storage of pips for later use (less likely since Sydney started making more guesses about the orbs that turned out to be accurate after using that pip in the center circle).
In any case, there’s also the matter of timing. Hench Wench has done all of what she’s doing one after the other, in a very short period of time. Sydney’s been learning. Slowly.
It’s why Luke Skywalker’s journey was interesting to watch as he goes from a whiny teenager who wanted to go to Tashi Station to pick up power converters, to being the hero of the Republic and a Jedi Knight. He had a heroic arc, over a LONG period of time and training.
It’s why Rey Palpatine (she’s not a Skywalker dangit, and give Po back his droid, Rey! Give it back BB-8 is his not yours!) was not as interesting to watch because she went from being a good, kind, brave, great fighter who knew everything about technology to… being a good, kind, brave, great fighter who knew everything about technology AND the Force. Without any training unless you call the day that she spent with Luke ‘training.’ Remember, the original trilogy took place over years. Even the prequel took place over even more years than the original trilogy (plus had the Clone Wars and Rebels to fill in a lot of the gaps). The sequel took place over days. It was all so compressed that it hurt the story’s logical consistency, not to mention Rey didnt have an arc. She had a … horizontal line. If Finn had been the Jedi, and Rey was the ‘Han Solo’ (which I honestly think was the original idea and was alluded to a few times in the first sequel that there was something ‘special’ about the originally fearful Finn), that would have been an arc (for both Finn and Rey).
The airb may not even be creating gases out of nothing, just doing electrolysis to extracting it from the surroundings. Really wondering what else it has in its skill slots.
Also, 100% on the same page with you on Rey’s storyline, including her stealing Po’s [strike]dog[/strike] droid – her first movie was fantastic and then she faded away to a plot device. Finn Skywalker would’ve been a better twist than the Palpatine resurrection and his terrible engineering / strategic choices. Nearly as interesting a theory as the Darth Jar Jar proposal, which would’ve been hilariously awful but still better.
“The airb may not even be creating gases out of nothing, just doing electrolysis to extracting it from the surroundings. Really wondering what else it has in its skill slots.”
Possible. I’m just giving an idea on what would allow her to have the maximum amount of REASONABLE powers based on the orb while staying consistent to what’s been built in the story and not making it so overpowering that there would be no heroic arc anymore.
Your theory works too though. A bunch of theories could work. My main point was Sydney’s powers are not tush-pulls (I know I keep going back and forth between being foul mouthed and clean mouthed, sorry:)) like HW’s later powers are.
“her first movie was fantastic”
I wouldnt say it was ‘fantastic’ but it at least had promise, which Rian Johnson just threw out and killed every single plot thread from. There were problems in the first movie as well – mainly with how easily Rey would learn new force powers from nowhere with no training and only the barest realization those powers exist. Perfect people make for annoying protagonists. Flawed people make for good protagonists. Another reason that I like Sydney. She’s flawed on many levels but WANTS to do good. It makes her incredibly endearing, pretty adorable, and not someone I want to just punch in the face. :)
PS …. I want to punch Hench Wench in the face. :) Fictionally, of course.
“Finn Skywalker would’ve been a better twist ”
Finn as a jedi would have been AWESOME. He would have had to actually overcome the fear that was instilled in him from what he had constantly seen as a member of the First Order. He clearly had a strong will to be able to resist the brainwashing since almost birth to know right from wrong. He clearly had bravery DESPITE his fear when he fought against Kylo Ren, despite Kylo being FAR superior to him in using a lightsaber, not to mention a powerful force user. And it would have made Kylo Ren seem like an actual threat. Kylo Ren doesnt seem like a threat to Rey when she beats him each and every time they fight, regardless of the massive difference in training between the two of them.
” the Palpatine resurrection and his terrible engineering / strategic choices”
I’m pretty sure the Palpatine resurrection was not in any original plan :). I heard the actor who played the Emperor had NO idea that he’d be called for the third movie at all. Completely out of the blue. Probably because JJ was scrambling to figure an ending for the trilogy after Rian pretty much cut all the plot threads.
“Nearly as interesting a theory as the Darth Jar Jar proposal, which would’ve been hilariously awful but still better.”
Oh Jar Jar is totally a sith lord! Using his clumsiness as cover for his awesome battle powers, Darth Binks is the drunken fighter Jackie Chan of the Star Wars universe I tell you! :) He was Palpatine’s ally in giving Palpatine complete powers over the Senate! :) No one suspected! so insidious :) :) :)
(I’ve been watching a lot of Generation Tech on Youtube in case it’s not obvious)
As far as the bends go;
1) There was a significant amount of light present, that means they were close to the surface. But since it was night, I’m calling that artistic license.
2) You can actually SEE the surface in panels 3 and 4, so they’re probably not deeper than 10 meters or so.
3) It takes TIME to set up the bends. It’s not even possible to do it on the basis of one breath, you’d suffocate to death before enough nitrogen would dissolve in your tissues, I’m not even sure your lungs hold enough volume for it to happen even if that wasn’t an issue.
The bends happen to people who are breathing regular air at elevated pressure for a significant period of time. It NEVER happens to free divers.
I’ve already been told my idea about bends is inaccurate by Luis and he was pretty convincing :) I’m a lawyer with a fixation on comic books and video games and science in general (since I had to be to pass the patent bar), not a diver :)
So I agree with you about my Bends argument not being a good one, and I’m completely dropping that argument, although I’m still surprised she didnt suffer any effects from the spontaneous pressure differential, even if not ‘The Bends.’
It was predicted long ago her over confidence in the fight was likely because she had a back up escape power. Power stacking has been explained to you before. Heck the mere act of being more powerful can cause one to use copied powers to greater degrees than the original, see Kirby and Rimaru Tempest as examples, granted they both have power cannibalism but it’s comparable . They also demonstrate the idea that combining skills and powers can lead to unexpected results that make sense when you think out the mechanics of the abilities and add a larger pool of strength to draw from. Honestly Henchwench has been less broken than the average power copier who is stronger than the original.
“It was predicted long ago her over confidence in the fight was likely because she had a back up escape power.”
That’s more us trying to fanfic a reason than there being an in-universe reason. It’s fun to do as readers, but it shouldnt be substituted for what the actual story is. Because even DaveB admitted a few strips ago that he had no idea how to resolve this thing with Hench Wench.
“Heck the mere act of being more powerful can cause one to use copied powers to greater degrees than the original”
But that’s not how she described it. She described it as ‘combining powers.’ What she did did NOT combine powers. I still have no idea whatsoever what combination of powers would let her transform herself to a ghost WITHOUT leaving behind her meat puppet, or at least having both a meat puppet AND a ghost (which itself makes very little sense to me, but Concretia does allude to the possibility that another super in the LLC can let her split consciousness…. although Halo then immediately afterwards squashes that idea by showing how Hench Wench could have done it as well, at least with her concrete self and her ghost or physical self.
But there’s nothing I can see to explain how any combination of splitting consciousness, flight, invulnerability, and concrete control/ghost form with your body left behind can let you remove being physical
ALTOGETHER, completely. See my ‘Glorn the Alien Bounty Hunter’ response in another post. :)
“They also demonstrate the idea that combining skills and powers can lead to unexpected results that make sense when you think out the mechanics of the abilities and add a larger pool of strength to draw from. ”
How? How would, say, flight + strength + concrete control allow a new power of… I don’t know, I’ll use this because it’s almost as ridiculous as becoming a ghost without still having a body left behind …. the ability to control other people’s bodies. Might as well have Hench Wench say ‘I just realized, I can go beyond just controlling CONCRETE with my ghost self, I can control ANYTHING with my ghost self… even YOU! Then flies into Maxima and take over her body.
Then people would probably try to argue ‘Maxima is gold and Hench Wenchcan control gold’ (ignoring that Maxima isnt actually the physical property of gold, because she’s now more powerful than what Concretia can do anyway).
Seriously, explain how she would NOT be able to do something like that, in story, based on how she can pull new powers out of nowhere from combinations that do not merit the new power? Heck, it would even be something that you’ve seen in DC comics with ghost characters, like Deadman. But it would just be an ‘out of the blue’ additional power for Hench Wench based on little reasoning. As little reasoning as the ‘turning into a ghost only’ power or the ‘Oh I also was hired by someone who makes portals but I didnt use that before when I was clearly not able to beat you and didnt want to surrender but also did not want to obey my boss so I’m going to burn my bridges with future employers’ tact she was taking.
“Honestly Henchwench has been less broken than the average power copier who is stronger than the original.”
In what way is Henchwench less broken? If anything she’s more broken because you don’t need to see her do anything to GET those powers. She doesn’t need to touch something and maintain physical contact, like Varia. She doesn’t need to be getting attacked to use her powers, like Death Toll (who also has an additional limitation of only being able to use any one power at a time, not EVERY power, so enough different attacks at the same time and he can’t keep up with the counters).
She doesnt need to even be at least in the vicinity of another person, like Marvel’s Synch. She just needs to say, storywise, that she was hired by someone who had the power to get her out of whatever mess she happened to put herself in. It’s not satisfying as someone who you actually see plan things out or at least someone that you can see does think in long term planning ways.
And again, we know that is NOT Hench Wench, because despite making the LLC agreement (which I remind you, is legally nonsense on paper), DaveB himself did say he hadnt thought of a way to resolve this in advance.
Concretia has an astral projection.
Astral Projection + enhanced strength/durability= add strength to other abilities.
Thus Concretia using a larger form of geokinesis than we saw, and also being able to keep her body awake and moving while also using the ghost *asleep = tired, implied lack of strength to keep both going at same time”
the pull body into astral form is an advanced astral technique, something Concretia may be able to do some day with enough training and increasing her endurance. Henchwench got a bonus from Brut’s power to pull off advanced feats…
also we did just learn she did have a portal/teleport capsule power in back up so combine that with the ghost form can also add up to yanking her physical form into another dimension as well.
new revelations cast light on surprises from before. That is not bad storytelling.
“the pull body into astral form is an advanced astral technique, something Concretia may be able to do some day with enough training and increasing her endurance. Henchwench got a bonus from Brut’s power to pull off advanced feats…”
1) In what way is ‘turning your body into just an astral form’ an advanced form of ‘astral form’ The point of an astral form is it separates you from your physical form.
2) Your explanation runs counter to what HENCH WENCH HERSELF DESCRIBES IT AS IN THE COMIC. Hench Wench specifically says it’s using a combination of different powers to do this. If you have to come up with brand new ways that run counter to what is stated in the comic…. that is not good. It’s you making excuses for a poorly thought out power that makes no sense in universe, based on that own universe’s character’s rules and statements.
3) No idea how a portal + astral projection lets you change the physical body INTO an astral projection, removing the body from existing at all. Sorry, no. I’m not seeing it. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not consistent with the story. It’s not consistent with the powers. It feels like an a**-pull because it is, no matter how much one might want to bend over backwards to try to justify it.
Unreliable narrator is still a factor here,
also it is still combining powers if one just adds to the strength of another.
and portals move the body through another dimension, and astral projection is a projection of your astral self (also her astral projection is advanced as it has properties of an elemental spirit and can even form golem bodies and manipulate matter around it.
all she is doing is then moving her physical self into the same plane as the projection, inside the projection and becoming one with it.
this makes even more sense if the portal encapsulates and then teleports as it appears to do, as her ghost form has encapsulated her physical form and ascended it.
Yes this may be out of no where, but its explainable.
and to be honest I think you are taking her circumventing the lawyer solution too personally. that is how your tone is coming across. Less critical thinking and more emotion.
As an addition on the story aspect. It is important to remember Henchwench is a guest character
At some point they had to bow out of the story. If I am understanding the role correctly that it. The focus needs to move off of her and to the real threat. Can’t have that if she sticks around and is questioned and what not. And killing off a guest character would be kind of bad form. So while not the best solution, they are now removed from the story going forward, an off hand comment of local authorities and lawyers or whatever handling the rest as she is tracked down would be enough. It’s time for Maxima and crew to focus on what is important…like berating Dabbler for trying to invoke the Warf effect when she was built up in the comic to be a demon sorceress that fought Maxima to a standstill yet went down like a punk in this fight.
“Unreliable narrator is still a factor here,”
So which is it. Is Hench Wench a brilliant user of superpowers or does she not know what the heck she’s talking about? This is a problem, since the character is not being written particularly well the longer this goes on, and is requiring readers like you to try to thread the needle to come up with excuses for her actions to make any narrative sense… which they don’t the longer it progresses.
“and portals move the body through another dimension, and astral projection is a projection of your astral self (also her astral projection is advanced as it has properties of an elemental spirit and can even form golem bodies and manipulate matter around it.”
I’m sorry but that made no sense, and was not how either Concretia’s powers have been explained to work or HW’s powers have been explained to work, even by HW herself. Sure. Unreliable narrator. Which means the ONE thing to explain her powers is now gone, and it’s actually ‘whatever can be done to let her do anything.’ That is NOT satisfying, and does not make narrative sense.
“Yes this may be out of no where, but its explainable.”
Explainable by you. But not explainable by the story or the fictional universe’s own setup. Seriously – when a plothole or problem in a character has to have excuses made from the readers, without ANYTHING in the comic to point to as a set-up for it…. that’s not actually fixing the plothole/character. See my diatribe about Rey from the Star Wars sequels and why Rey was a pretty bad character, and got worse the more they added onto her to make her ‘awesome’ (when stopped being awesome when she knew more about the Millenium Falcon than the guy who had owned her for 30 years, and got worse as she spontaneously popped new skills and powers in a matter of a few DAYS in which the entire trilogy sequel was set in), while Finn as a Jedi could have LEGITIMATELY been awesome because the setup was there for it, while still having Rey be the ‘Han Solo’ of the team (since her setup was knowing technology, which was based on her years of being a scavenger).
“and to be honest I think you are taking her circumventing the lawyer solution too personally. that is how your tone is coming across. Less critical thinking and more emotion.”
No, I’m taking it as being bad storytelling, which stands out mainly because normally the storytelling is excellent, and this has jumped the shark, even when there were completely good setups in place. Please don’t take my being descriptive in my arguments as it being emotion and not logic. I use logic when making arguments. I don’t take the circumventing the lawyer solution as some sort of personal slight as a lawyer. I take it as it being no longer enjoyable to read the ongoing adventures of Hench Wench. Sort of the same way I stopped liking The Walking Dead when it became ‘The Negan Show Starring Negan – Everybody Loves Negan, even Eugene and Maggie who should both Despise Negan and Kill him The Mutiple Times They Could.’
I take it as ‘okay you had a great ending and…. just kept going on past the ending. Why.’
“It is important to remember Henchwench is a guest character”
That… actually makes it even worse. Why would you want to have a guest character become someone who half the fanbase winds up hating. And not a good ‘I hate her but she’s awesome’ hate. But instead a ‘I hate her because she’s incredibly annoying, her powers contradict themselves, including contradicting what she herself says, and it keeps jumping the shark’ hate.
Would you really want a guest character to be thought of THAT way? Was the spiderlady hunter thought of that way? Not that I recall. She was… actually pretty cool. And she got the better of several supers simultaneously but the world did not alter for her successes.
“At some point they had to bow out of the story. If I am understanding the role correctly that it. The focus needs to move off of her and to the real threat.”
And yet this narrative has made that sort of impossible. It’s impossible to just casually forget about her now since she got away AND did so while making everyone else look like utter chumps in the process. And not even because of her own well-designed character. Because of deus ex machina after deus ex machina. Even after the narrative was relatively saved in a satisfying way. Just to make sure the resolution would NOT be satisfying instead.
“an off hand comment of local authorities and lawyers or whatever handling the rest as she is tracked down would be enough.”
Poochie died on the way back to his planet.
https://i.imgur.com/h24DDn0.jpg?fb
HW’s power is simple and easily defined.
She’s exploiting the heck out of it.
Yes, she’s annoying precisely because she’s exploiting the heck out of it, just as any good gamer would.
It doesn’t make her a bad character; it makes her a very interesting challenge.
It’s simple. But not easily defined. She can basically have any power without the readers having any idea of it happening in an understandable way that doesnt blow the suspension of disbelief by saying ‘oh I’m also hired by so-and-so.’ and ‘Oh I can combine powers to make new powers that have nothing to do with the combination of the orignial powers I combined.’ or ‘I can base this on a contract that doesnt make any sense at all, and even if you allow that to not matter, the others who signed it didnt bother to read it.’
“It doesn’t make her a bad character; it makes her a very interesting challenge”
Maybe if it happened over a longer period of time. But not when each page with her contradicts what happened on the previous page. Then it just gets annoying. Right now the main way to beat her is to just straight up kill her, like Cora and Ray Cosmos suggested when they were talking with each other.
I honestly can’t see how she even adds to the story, she’s not even an endearing kind of annoying.
The sad thing is she probably could have been but this has just dragged on and on and gotten more and more ridiculous with each new thing she pulls in such a short period of time.
It’s somehow too long and too compressed simultaneously, and equally annoying in its compressed state of the powers and contractual clauses that she introduces, and annoying in how it just goes on and on and on without a resolution, each page completely doing a 180 on the previous page, which is quite the feat for a character to accomplish in being annoying. :) She’s no longer the endearing annoying that she originally could have been. :) Even if it ended with Hench Wench awkwardly smiling about asking if anyone needed a paralegal for a job, that could have been a good end.
So the apartment of former gal is equipped with a cat tower. And a cat. Finally something to like about her.
I wonder if she’s figured out yet how to get her cat to sign a contract to hire her so that she can have cat powers.
her name is on a legal contract, all they have to do is file an order making it impossible for her to be employed in the country. If her powers applied to illegal employment then the llc could have fired her and the cancelling of the contract would not have stripped her.
She is bound to contract so just nullify her ability to enter a contract and her powers are fucked.
Actually, I believe that her power is directly tied to her ’employment’. The contracts mostly seem to be a way to keep people from firing her at an inconvenient time.
That all presumes that her powers are bound to the american legal system, rather than her setting it up that way for ease. The only reason Arianna was able to depower her was because she tied the llc to the american legal system. If it was a much more convoluted contract that described the employment structure it was setting up instead of relying on the ready made format provided by the american legal system, then it would be insulated from such legal shenanigens.
I’m honestly convinced that the only reason she set it up that way is because it causes people to try to find a loophole in the contract rather than taking more… explosive measures.
Jonesie sells this whole page for me. Did his opera music get interrupted by the boom?
I knew it was Hunt for Red October, but I couldn’t remeber the sonar operators nickname.
He’s just pissed because it drowned out the one section that was flawed in the piece he was lisening to.
He’s going to be pissed due to the extreme sonic event moving up the schedule on his PMS… He’s going to have to do his Weekly’s, Monthly’s, Quarterly’s and Yearly’s all at once to get things back in calibration/function. And that is IF the event didn’t trash his transducers beyond recalibration.
I was wondering if anyone would comment on that reference. Glad I’m not the only one. This makes me happy.
What’s up with HW’s face in panel 2? It looks like she has a snout or something.
I believe its a Grinch grin
This comic switches between a couple of different visual styles, much like manga, but occasionally within the same panel, which can be a little disconcerting. Just go with the emotions of the scene: HW’s Grinchface is super snotty, Max’s high-realism is super annoyed.
Well now time to see if cameras, FBI database, and super speed can allow the angry golden woman to find her before she escapes from her apartment.
I’m surprised that Max let her go. I would have thought, if anything, her grip would have gotten tighter.
It should have. To the point that Hench Wench no longer had a neck. Or head.
I believe the phrase is “popped like a pimple”
The head doesn’t pop, and be surprised how much you can crush a neck without severing the head, even hanging limply like a sling and rock from a complete crushed neck, that tissue that makes up the neck is surprising strong even when compressed. You’ll have to usually twist and tear, cut the main muscles and esophagus at least to get the weight of the head to pull the skin off, or hold the body down and yank the head off, probably still get some organs mainly the throat and torn lung bits and surprisingly the spinal nerves torn free dragged by the brain stem. If you want to pop a head you need to grab the skull, back of the skull or temples and crush it. Fair warning the sound of a skull being crushed is so horrific to humans that nature documentaries will muffle the sound or dub over it for broadcast.
My guess is the “Disorientation +5” triggered Max’s learned reflex of “Humans are easily broken, disengage until I’m in control of myself again”.
It’s better to lose HW temporarily than to behead her. Max is a pro.
I feel like HW will end up working for Arianna as a probationary paralegal. Knowing Arianna HW will probably find the job sufficiently evil.
Well “because Science” explored that possibility with aquaman Supersonic speed under water… basically it would require a absurde shitload of energy to achieve such speed.
If your interested in the number and all the “logic” there the link to the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL0F_F1k7kw
Finish the video. The power requirements are not so absurd it he would be supercavitating. Just like Maxima does.
I was really hoping that HW would either go to super-supermax prison or be abducted by the alien mercs so we never had to see her in the comic again. Oh well. At least the last few panels were funny to help alleviate the annoyance I feel towards the character. :)
Now you know how some of feel every time SmugD shows his ugly butt (oh wait, that’s his face)
No, Deus (praise be his name, amen) has a whole shtick of TRYING to look like he does Deus ex machinaes. I mean its even his name. And there’s a lot of foreshadowing that there’s some yet-to-be-explained reason he knows as much as he knows. Beyond that he just has a lot of money. I get a lot of David Xanatos vibes off of Deus. And David Xanatos’s secret was that he got information from a future version of himself, including how to start his own fortune.
And I honestly did like Hench Wench’s concept at first, but it just kept getting more and more annoying the more that things were added on with her. First with the LLC that made no sense legally in at least four areas, then with the combining of powers into new power that could not be explained by any combination of those powers, then the teleportation, then the being able to easily deal with an instantaneous change from dry land to 100 feet down in water with the pressure and lack of oxygen, which even Maxima was disoriented from – prepared or not, it’s going to be disorienting and for someone with no other powers, probably damaging). The only problem I didnt mind with hench wench was that she was able to both fight WHILE using her stone construct against Maxima… and that’s only because it was already established (and Sydney pointed it out to Concretia) that she could control concrete even when NOT in the concrete form.
And I admit that part of my annoyance with her is the whole ‘laws that make no sense’ thing. Probably in the same way that someone who knows how guns work would not like if a handgun was shooting 80 rounds without reloading and no reason for it. The brain just goes ‘no, no, no’ and you struggle with the suspension of disbelief if you know how it works, while if you don’t, you might just think ‘cool gun’ :)
So yeah HW is annoying to me :) Only because of the problematic add-ons, not because of the character herself. :)
No, do not get to say what does or does not annoy other readers about another douchier character
You know why no one has been able to combine powers like Henchie has? Because no one has had the two different powers together at the same time before!!!
“No, do not get to say what does or does not annoy other readers about another douchier character”
1) I thought you realized by now that I only say the stuff about Deus because it’s an ongoing joke between us, since I love Deus and you hate him.
2) I genuinely do not think Deus is ‘douchey’ – and is a MUCH better character than Hench Wench in every conceivable way… plus not actually a villain even though he tries to play the tropes of one. Since he hasnt actually ever done anything ‘villainous.’ Which I’ve mentioned elsewhere MANY times, in exquisite detail.
3) I’m not trying to prevent you from saying that Deus annoys you. I know Deus annoys you. You make that plainly obvious every time you mention him. I’m just disputing the reasons you give for WHY he’s annoying that you are trying to present. i’m allowed to do that as well, because it is different than the reason I love the character. But I actually give reasons for why Deus is awesome. Detailed reasons, with in-universe explanations on why he is not a villain, why his future plans are foreshadowed constantly, etc. Plus he gives off a very intentionally David Xanatos vibe, and I thought David Xanatos was an amazingly well written character.
“You know why no one has been able to combine powers like Henchie has? Because no one has had the two different powers together at the same time before!!!”
Sorry but that reasoning does not make sense. I’m not comparing it to other people’s powers elsewhere in the comic. I’m comparing it to simple logic. How do the powers presented – superstrength, invulnerability, flight, portal creation, splitting into ghost AND flesh form, and concrete control allow you to turn into a ghost AND remove the physical body from existence at the same time? What possible combination would allow that?
No combination allows that. I’m basing it on the in-universe logic making no sense here.
Oh I forgot to mention, All praise Deus, amen.
I think one of the reasons DaveB gave Henchie an escape sequence was to demonstrate that she had several other backup powers to tap, even after losing the LLC (which we don’t know the full extent of). That gives her almost as much of a license on powers as Varia, since her associates could have any power.
Super strength and resistance appear to be nigh standard issue in the Grrlverse, and flight is pretty common as well it seems. Concretia accounts for the earth-bending and ghost powers, portals we’ve seen a couple times in Sciona and Opal (?). We’ve also seen multi-presence in Harem, which covers the advanced simultaneous control of both phantom and body (and potentially even a golem). Really the only unique power she showed was dismissing her physical body, but we’ve seen phasing too (the shadow weapons guy from the restaurant) so even that’s not completely new.
HW is definitely OP and I agree it’s time for her to exit stage left, but a gestalt-powered super bringing just 1 semi-unique power to a fight isn’t a stretch at all to me.
“That gives her almost as much of a license on powers as Varia, since her associates could have any power.”
At least Varia actually has to touch the person to get the powers. That’s a limitation you can see in the comic itself.
With HW… well the only way she can be out of it is entirely offscreen or something …. well pretty much this:) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tvAjX5ACPo
“HW is definitely OP and I agree it’s time for her to exit stage left, but a gestalt-powered super bringing just 1 semi-unique power to a fight isn’t a stretch at all to me.”
Except her powers didnt even make sense based on her own description of her powers. As a result everything about her feels forced the longer the ‘fight’ went on and wasnt resolved in some satisfying way. The irritating thing it managed to GET a satisfying resolution (despite all the problems already presented)…. then shot right past that resolution into a non-resolution. For no understandable reason from a storytelling perspective. It’s like you’re in a boxing match and you knock out the other boxer. So you win right? But you then start kicking the downed boxer while unconscious and get thrown out and loser the match for unsportsmanlike conduct, even though you technically won. I dunno if boxing matches actually have a disqualification for unsportsmanlike conduct but I’m using it for the analogy.
I’m not a sporty sport.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-542-ncc-scoville/
freon makes your fridge cold inside, but the tubes on the back of the fridge are hot. how does making the outside of the fridge hot make the inside cold? Does everyone know how it happens? I think the idea of combining powers in different ways than the original owners of the powers think of really isn’t too far-fetched, plus HW’s powerset seem to allow her sort of a shortcut no-manual-needed access to the powers as well, so she seems to have more information about them than the original owners.
“freon makes your fridge cold inside, but the tubes on the back of the fridge are hot”
The refrigerator heat exhaust is that vent under your fridge where the warm air is coming from. This is the end of a short duct from the coils which are cold inside the fridge and hot outside the fridge. This configuration is also why you might notice excess heat coming from the back of your fridge as well.
Now that I’ve explained how fridges work…. what does that have to do with my critique of HW?
“Does everyone know how it happens?”
Anyone with google would know, yes. Again what does this have to do with HW?
” I think the idea of combining powers in different ways than the original owners of the powers think of really isn’t too far-fetched”
It really is. Because ‘combining’ powers should generally have something to do with the component powers ‘combining’ to form a new power that utilizes parts of the component’s existing powers. Not make a power that is impossible for ONE component, and there’s no other component involved. There was no ‘combining’ of powers as HW had been describing it. What other power did she combine with Concretia’s power?
Why do people do this? If there’s a plothole or a character that makes no sense, just accept that it’s a problem and make a critique of it. Don’t try bending over backwards to figure a way to make it work which can NOT be found within the confines of the story being presented as is. If it was going to work in the story, your reasoning on how it would should come from…. the story. Because you can’t solve an in-universe problem with out-of-universe answers, unless those out-of-universe answers have been incorporated in-universe. It’s the difference between good storytelling and bad Mary Sue level fanfic.
Okay so… I’m a lawyer so I’m going to try to present this with a law analogy.
If I’m a DA and trying to prosecute a defendant for a crime, I have to use the evidence that actually exists. I can’t start making up stuff that MIGHT be possible, despite there being absolutely nothing in the case that even remotely shows it would be possible.
Defendant and victim were in a locked room together. Victim was then found dead by a gunshot wound. I’m claiming the Defendant killed the victim, who was shot with a gun. But they could not find any gun. They did find a knife on the defendant’s person. I can’t then argue ‘oh well it’s possible that the knife was originally a gun and they just melted down the gun and reforged it into a knife in order to hide the evidence. Because that would be just…. dumb. It would have nothing to do with any evidence at hand that I can use. I’d just be making up stories in order to try to fit a square peg into a round hole.
“freon makes your fridge cold inside, but the tubes on the back of the fridge are hot. how does making the outside of the fridge hot make the inside cold? Does everyone know how it happens? – hypnobubbles
It’s one of the standard illustrations of the Ideal Gas Law and thermodynamic cycles in high-school science. I think we covered it when we were about 14 or 15, is probably a more translatable comparison than referring to a particular year-numbering system. Of course, how many people remember what they learned in high school is not the same as how many learned it in the first place!
In order to cool the inside of the fridge (i.e. take heat energy out of the air), that energy needs to go somewhere – it can’t be created or destroyed. The circulating system is designed so that the coolant gas expands in the pipes inside the fridge, absorbing energy as it does so. It is then pumped round to the radiator pipes on the outside where it condenses, releasing the absorbed energy and heating them up in the process.
I’ll say this for this particular individual, it’s never a bonus when the good guys win in every way, every time. If they can never be taken down permanently and they will always triumph, I’d be bored of it. Hench Wench, while being a multi-tool of crazy power types in one crazy lady, keeps the heroes of the story from being far too successful. We have yet to see any real hard loss yet, just momentary inconveniences.
I would call their venture to the Alari homeworld a loss. They had to run away from there, and they left Sydney behind. Sydney managed to stay alive, and took some of the enemy down, but she didn’t actually defeat the invaders.
Actually, there were quite a few reports of development of underwater missiles (not torpedoes) that bubbled air ahead of them to reduce the water density and allow high speed weapon travel. Not a joke. Was reported in many magazines in the ’90s and ’00s (Popular Science and Popular Mechanics come to mind).
and really all it takes to power through water that fast is power. considering how fast the speed of sound is through water…damn!
Gotta say, Henchwench has no idea how lucky she is right now. Maxima letting go of her throat when disoriented was one possible outcome, but another probably very likely outcome would have been accidental decapitation.
Maxima has likely put serious effort into training her surprise reflexes. Remember the flashback to the time she first learned she could shoot energy blasts? The “paper bag incident”? And she was the one who advised Sydney to train HER surprise reflex away from “punch people” and toward “grab Shield Orb”.
Interestingly enough, you can move at sonic speed in water, but not much more – water’s very low compressibility makes it more difficult to move in it than if, say, in air if air was as heavy as water, because you need to push a lot of water in front of you instead of shoving it to the sides easily like you do with air. If water was entirely incompressible then sound waves wouldn’t travel through it at all, by the way.
The important thing here is that there is a law that states you cannot make fluids go faster than the speed of sound in those same fluids.
(This law normally applies to “in tubes only”, since the cockpit of a supersonic aeroplane has air moving faster than the speed of sound in air, duh, but since you’re pushing water straight in your direction for a little while, you have a small section of water that works as if it were in a tube… with a lot of weird border effects so it stops soon but still has effects for a moment)
Water begins to break down at higher speeds, releasing the gases it contains, reordering itself, making bubbles of void and gas, which limits the amount of water that passes, and this is why speed of sound is the fastest you can get.
So you’re creating pockets of void (which is common in fast-moving water, this is how you can break water bottles by hand please let this link work) which will collapse on you, and lots of bubbles which will come out to the surface.
Oh, and you’re using an awful lot of energy. This heats up quite a lot. This might expand your bubbles.
And what of the underwater life? They just got heated up a bit but that could be alright, maybe? The underwater sonic boom is of much more concern. All the water that moves at sonic speed and yourself generate a lot of energy in that sonic boom, much more than Maxima would on her own in air. AND, in water explosions and waves strike organisms more directly (if a grenade falls in the pool and one falls next to the pool, LEAVE THE POOL, your internal organs which are a lot more compressible than water and a lot less than air will thank you). The fishies might get squishies.
MOST of your organs are just as uncompressible as water, because they ARE mostly water. Thing is, most people like their lungs, and THOSE are compressible very well. If a grenade falls in the pool and you are in it, you will PROBABLY also get some other damage, but you will be dead because your lungs will change to one bleeding wound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4DnuQOtA8E
Very late reply but your organs are mostly water, true, but with LOTS of holes full of air and cell membranes that can’t be stretched too much. Lungs get squished, but so do many other things that just aren’t made to bend yet CAN bend. Why the cells inside your lungs proper are very much full of water as well, that’s most of what’s inside any cell ever always. It’s not much the composition but the structure that matters – things that aren’t meant to collapse can collapse and then buh-bye
So. It occurs to me, one way to completely neutralize Hench Wench, would be the old school, outlawry.
Rather than the pop culture idea of ‘outlaw’ just being a famous criminal, ‘outlaw’ was a status inflicted as punishment. Those declared Outlaw had the protection of the law withdrawn from them.
No contracts she enters would be valid.
This, however, would be the nuclear option. There are several constitutional issues that would have to be resolved.
A more elegant solution would be to have her declared a Ward of the State, preventing her from entering into a contract on her own behalf without the approval of a government lawyer.
…..
*brain goes into massive overdrive, external cooling mechanisms will be required*
Verbal agreements such as implied by her prison fantasy last page imply she doesn’t need a paper contract or legal employment only that both apply to affect her qualifications for working for someone.
The main problem is that she doesnt actually need a contract for her powers to work. She just used the LLC Agreement to be able to have several powers simultaneously.
Hopefully Maxima maximizes her super hearing and kicks hench wench up her cooter.
Okay, Wait, wait, wait. Are HenchWench’s portals one-way? Because if they’re two-way, the pressure at anything more than about fifty feet would have blasted her back out of the portal in a GEYSER of Manahattan sewage.
I got the impression it works like a capsule hyper jump. Forms a dimensional pocket around her and things near her then teleports that package to the new location and let’s them out.
Sort of like when a Terminator goes back in time, right? But through space instead of through time.
I suppose.
I had a mental image of those teleporters in some sci-fi that surround you with a pod and then shoot you through hyperspace. Only the pod looks its self to be in hyper space already and just scoops her up or she jumps into as we saw the interior last page when she tried to jump in.
Normally, I would have said it was like the Stargate. Especially with the tagline of ‘Watergate SG-1’
Except that doesn’t make sense here.
In Stargate SG-1, when they opened a portal to a water planet (the episode was Watergate, Season 4, Episode 7) where the receiving stargate was underwater, it did NOT flood the Stargate room, but WAS keeping the portal open because it’s a one-direction only portal. But while that explains why water wasn’t pouring out to the New York street, it wouldn’t explain why a constant stream of water wasn’t coming out of the other outgoing portal into the apartment.
So the whole ‘Terminator ‘pocket of teleportation’ idea seems to work in this scenario instead.
Then I remembered that the portals in Stargate can actually go both ways.
But THEN I remembered that Carter said in Watergate:
“My research indicates that the gate actually has the ability to use density, molecular structure, and the force being exerted on the event horizon, to determine whether something’s actually trying to pass through.”
Soooo then I thought maybe HW’s portals operate like that.
But no, that wouldnt make sense either, because then no water would have gone into HW’s home – just Hench Wench.
I was thinking more about the pressure rupturing her eardrums, but you bring up a good point.
It appears that rather than passing through the portal, the portal is moving around her (and whatever nearby she chooses, like Max), so that explains the water falling in her apartment and not blasting out of the portal in the first place. If the portal was simply a rift in space-time connecting two points, she and max would have both been launched out into her apartment.
Good lord, just kill her already. She has resisted arrest a dozen times this point.
…And you feel she deserves to die for that? Bloodthirsty are we?
Nah, it’s more the attempt to murder government officers that would be a rationale if she was killed. In case you forgot.
This is where she tries to murder Heatwave:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-891-enter-the-wench-not-that-way-pervs/
This is where she tries to murder Amorphous:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-893-ima-punch-you-so-hard/
I’m not going to bother mentioning this one below, since Achilles is publicly known to be invulnerable. So this could just be her trying to bury Achilles under a bunch of rock.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-895-fine-print-bitches/
yeah Pander has a point here, she went past the point where lethal force would be authorized awhile ago.
that said, she is still a patreon paid cameo is some reason to set her aside and not just kill her off was to be expected.
You know what would be REALLY funny?
What if her ‘ultimate employers’ are those Xenovarchy extraterrestrial council people who wanted to see how far Arc (and Max) would go?
What better way to ‘test’ people than with a clearly insane (and insanely overpowered!) super?
Are extra terrestrials going to care about human lives or property damage? Probably not. But their tech and testing someone who demonstrated the ability to take out a Fel battle carrier pretty much single-handed are different.
Hench Wench is nuts, no question. But is there method under the madness?
Other ways to nullify Hench Wenches power…
-keep her intoxicated
-hypnotize (or otherwise mind control) her
Being under the influence of either invalidates a contract. Then again, if you could mind control her you could just give her the “don’t enter into any deals” mind whammy
She doesn’t need a contract, she only did that to form the L.L.C. so she could have multiple employers at the same time
Decapitation immediately might also slow her down.
Man, people sure do get boodlthirsty in the comments for a fun super hero romp comic where death* is and should be rare.
Hench Wench is cool and funny, and hasn’t gone for lethal attacks against anyone, she’s a fun villain, leave her alone.
*Important character deaths. Redshirts and Minions, as usual, don’t count.
Yeah, and it makes one wonder how the patreon feels with comments like that
It’s nice.
We’re all nice.
Wonder if she knew Achilles was indestructable when she crushed him with a stone pillar? Or that stretchy boy was stretchy when she went for the brain stem that put his head inside out. Yeah. She went for fatalities against legal authorities.
Their powers were demonstrated on TV for a national audience, so it’s likely HW did know about those two. Of course that doesn’t let her off the hook for assaulting them.
OTOH there is her piledriver attack on Heatwave, who doesn’t seem to have any special defense against that kind of physical attack. That one could have been lethal.
Some of the comments seem awfully casual about suggesting HW should die for being annoying though.
Internet = Anonymity = Heartlessness in many cases.
I am a civilian, not a cop or a soldier. I am also (obviously) not a superhero) That said, I have been in positions where people threatened me with lethal force. It is hard NOT to react to such with equal measures.
Here, we are free to comment. To armchair quarterback. To analyze and nitpick. To make comments that would get eyebrows raised at the VERY least in real life.
That said? Hench Wench is a high level threat. She is a danger to everyone around her while she has her fun. I have known people who acted like her in real life and they were damned scary. All of them are now in jail, 3 for murder. Sociopath or psychopath, the result is the same. A high body count until they are stopped.
My QUESTION is this then: Is Hench Wench acting on her own or was/is she being compelled like Concretia was? Same group, different power sets. She is nuts, no question, but so was George S Patton. His crazy was almost entirely an act. How much of hers is?
Considering she kept fighting even when they tried to fire her, she seems to have been a very willing participant in supervillainy.
“Hench Wench is cool and funny, and hasn’t gone for lethal attacks against anyone, she’s a fun villain, leave her alone.”
She almost murdered Heatwave. And tried to murder Amorphous.
She failed with Heatwave because Amorphous grabbed her right in the nick of time.
She failed with Amorphous because she had no idea that instead of punching a hole through his head, his head would temporarily turn inside-out.
Just occurred to me that Max’s boots, presumably the same make that didn’t survive her co-zorching with Hiro, should be completely disintegrated by the cavitation she’s creating. It’s a visually beautiful phenomenon to study, but the regular kind eats through solid steel and she’s well into the supercavitation range. The trailing bubbles would protect the clothes on her torso, but seem to start collapsing around her knees so the boots are getting quite the beating.
Also occurs to me that the energy cone in front of Max’s ascent appears to be filled with air, perhaps seeded by the large bubbles in panels 3 & 4 and sustained by some combination of flight aura and and suction in its wake. If so, the sonic boom is happening in the trailing air pocket / bubbles, not the water itself as I (and many others) have been assuming, and Max’s speed is only gaseous Mach 1 and not liquid Mach 1. This would justify the noise (which would indeed be very unusual) and comparatively low-energy exit.
You seem to have missed the part where Max’s powers were discussed, and that she creates a micro force-field around her body that protects her clothes, for example when she is flying at supersonic speeds in air.
That force-field isn’t perfect, again, when Maxi’s clothes got zorched-off and again during this encounter (first she lost her clothes to a booby-bomb,and then had her replacement top ripped)
Oh-ho-ho! She had ported into the waters surrounding NYC? Yeah, she just TRASHED that apartment and the apartment below her! Sewage, chemicals, possibly even salt water in the mix if this was far enough into the bay. Dozens of gallons of stinking, festering, biohazard. its gonna stiiiiink after a day or two! >:D
“Possibly even salt water.”
*dies laughing*
Having been stationed in the area onboard a ship… at times it can be difficult to officially classify the sea water around NYC as salt water… Sometimes it was iffy to bring into the evaporators to make fresh water.
“Do you have a visual?” “…Sir, it’s the Hudson. Nothing is visible.”.
Well, since we’re talking about thinks that are not actually water, and only technically flowing:
THE RIVER ANKH
The Ankh is a river serpenting through the Sto Plains, reaching the Circle Sea by the town of Ankh-Morpork. By then, it can only be called a river because it moves faster than the banks. You can’t drown in the Ankh, but it is really easy to suffocate.
Paradoxically, Morporkians are very proud of it. They say “A water that has been filtered by so many kidneys can only be very pure indeed” or “A water so full of life can’t be bad for health”. Fishes are known to dwell in the Ankh, but they can’t be easily observed, because they tend to explode in clear water. Few of them are eaten, due to the “terrible gastric trouble” that would otherwise occur.
It has been said that the Ankh is the only river in the multiverse where cops can draw a chalk outline when a corpse is found.
A certain member of the The Watch likes to spend his time guarding the Brass Bridge (lined by 8 hippos) that arches over this water. Why? because he likes to be one step ahead. You never know when thieves are going to get it in their minds to steal a brass bridge, and he’ll be there, waiting for them.
There is a legend in Ankh-Morpork of an ancient drum in the palace that will bang itself if ever an enemy fleet is seen sailing up the Ankh, although the legend has died out in recent centuries, partly because it’s the Age of Reason and also because no enemy fleet could sail up the Ankh without a gang of men with shovels going in front.
Heh, had forgotten about the Ankh, it’s been a while. Need to finish my current stack of books so I can start on re-reading the entire Discworld set.
Wonder what a non compete clause would do to Hench Wenches abilities
That portal should have created a massive whirlpool as the pressure of the surrounding water should have flooded her entire apartment (submerge EVERYTHING) within moments due to water pressure.
one way could be for Dabbler to french kiss HW too into submission
Obstreperous.
Just did a quick scan of all the comments so far…
Am I the first one to point out the typo for “CAVITATON” in the comic?
I guess I’m not as nice as max. I’d just hold onto henches neck tighter to the point her eyes started to bug out a little. That or come panel 4 mantis shrimp that smug face. either wench is f^cked as archon has her face and a desire to arrest her (not to mention she called herself a paralegal so they probably can narrow the search area for her through her cert)
As for who finds her she better hope it’s a arcligh team, or arcdark black bag squad with fast acting tranqs, and not max. As I would have wench on the or dead side of bringing her in, alive or dead since she has proven not only a threat but also an extremely resourceful escape/flight hazard, and if it’s my judgement call says we bring in her remains for conformation, any legal work to negate any and all contracts she may have incase its a super duplicate, and cremation.
Good thing you are not a cop or military then, or your all sign would be “Body Bagger”
True, but to me its more that wench has proven more a threat as she has attempted to escape arrest multiple times and during the press event max made it clear super-criminals will have the choice of incarceration or incineration. how many times would you allow a super-criminal to attempt to flee before you bag em and tag em instead of allowing them to keep going? if she had surrendered after the whole spirit form bs she attempted to pull I’d be happy to have her incarcerated heck a bit of rehab and a few psyche evaluations maybe put her on some kind of retainer as her power could be quite useful (though her personality is dubious and morality questionable) maybe on an arkdark team
according to what i’ve read, as long as her personal shield is able to overcome the underwater speed of sound, then the cavitation formed makes it like basically flying in air instead of water from that point on, and then she can accelerate past the air speed of sound, and it become basically an underwater “air sonic boom” so there is nothing really wrong about this page
(tho, personally i would put some glow at the bottom, from the light emitted during the cavitation collapsing behind her)
I was thinking the same thing. Not that comics physics has to be accurate, but Dave does a fairly good job of keeping things semi-realistic outside the powers.
I just don’t believe Max’s reaction to the teleport is to let go of HW. I’ve done a little bit of self defense training and the thing your taught is to lock down your fingers, wrist and elbow when someone is struggling from your hold. With Max’s strength the involuntary reflex she would have developed is more likely to break HW neck than just letting go. That just seems like an arbitrary decision so she can get away and be used again. Where as, startling someone with super-strength who already has a firm hold of your neck, just seems like a quick path to injury or death.
Henchwench actually made a fadeaway signoff work – right after Maxima told her it wouldn’t. Bonus points. Also bonus pain cos Maxima is so going to smack the smile off her face with a bitchslap of epic proportions as soon as possible.
From a screenwriting standpoint there’s a bit of jank where it looks like Max is looking at HW’s departing head with that glare in panel five, which…we literally just confirmed she could apprehend someone in that situation. It’s been ONE PAGE since that. And part of the joke was that by trying to flourish on the way out she tipped her hand and Max caught her…
And she tips her hand again in panel 1 here, but Max doesn’t respond, even though it’s exactly the same mistake.
It ends up making Max look less competent, which isn’t a great feeling for the audience. And overturning the depowering and capture of the last 2 pages is also just…
While her smug face makes her a solid rage target, I think the writing itself is what has caused HW to wear out her welcome. The arc for this scene has just gotten disjointed.
the vacuum created behind her as she accelerated would cause a massive cavitation bubble, while the water she compresses before her would heat up, but it would not boil because of the overpressure once she broke the surface however there would be a massive explosion as superheated water flashed to steam and cavitation shockwaves started to catch up. All in all, a really horrible day for you to be a fish in that area.
Unless Henchwench disguised her appearance with another borrowed power she’ll be identified and captured within a few days at most.
You’d be amazed what we can do with just the ordinary goods from Sally’s beauty supply.
Superman has done pretty well by just putting on some glasses and slouching a bit. :)
the people of his universe are so stupid they could (and have been) fooled by a balloon shaped like Superman while he was dressed as Clark Kent.
Or maybe they all PRETEND to not know he’s doing a secret identity because the last thing you want is a dejected Superman (by your friends) or a Superman who no longer has any reason to have a day job (by your enemies).
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/0c/1d/2c0c1d6203dcd42612ff9eb7b326e802.jpg
I <3 this ♥
Well, ZLRP you too, Henchwench.
How large would be the radius of ecosystem destruction of an underwater sonic boom?
Why is HW not bleeding from the ears after changing pressure twice so abruptly?
Why was it unthinkable to evade Maxima’s speed with a portal, but she was unable to evade the portal herself?
Is that Dark Helmet’s Grandma in that picture in the background?
I got a Granny Goodness vibe
Close, Danny DeVito
Someone starts to teleport/portal/whatnot, and you are holding onto their neck- YOU SQUEEZE.
If they keep trying, do it harder.
They will learn, or they will discover that this is a very, very short enforcement loop.
Or, depending on the speed and aperture characteristics of their specific portal mechanics, you could just lose your arm.
Also an option. You just have to bet you can squeeze faster than they can portal.
Are you feeling lucky?
Okay, I’m going to point out something to those who say Max should’ve squeezed instead of released.
Rules. Of. Engagement. Max didn’t have a kill order, and it’s possible to secure Henchy without resorting to immediate lethal force later.
also, given this IS Max, does anyone really think she didn’t slip a tracer or tracker on Henchy? I mean, it’s potentially possible, but Max is an established super with training. Once Henchy was no longer a threat in public, slipping a bug on her would be quick and easy (assuming there’s one available). The best time to foil the bankrobbers isn’t at the bank unless you can decisively end the incident immediately. Otherwise, it’s better to follow them to their lair and get them while their guard is down.
same principle in effect here. Arianna’s probably got Henchy’s name along with a nice list of known associates that can be legally traced and investigated.
Henchy’s power requires a paper trail, and by extension, implicates others with that paper trail. Bringing her in, it’s a small feather, but that’s small compared to being able to bring in the whole ostrich.
+1. Not only is tracking them to the lair safer for the general public, and the officers who get time to plan a response, it potentially leads you to collaborators and bagging more perps, preventing future incidents. In HW’s case, as you point out, there are clearly ties to more evil-doers out perpetratin’ evil. I’d like to see a tracking device here, and even think it’s reasonable given how dumb Dabbler felt after losing Sciona to over-thinking her portal in the Vault.