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Post by redsycorax on Jan 17, 2022 3:16:33 GMT
Okay, so right now I'm listening to the very poignant Queen song "Who Wants to Live Forever?", which raises some interesting questions about the psychology of immortality. It also happens to be the soundtrack to the eighties movie Highlander, which is about a Scottish highland guy who discovers that he can't die in the sixteenth century and the downside of that- which is that he has to watch his wife steadily ageing until she eventually dies, and has to deal with the fact that he's going to have to go through this over and over again when he forms relationships with mortal people he loves. Or the BBC series Torchwood and the immortal Captain Jack Harkness and the women and men he's loved and lost. So, how does that fit DC? For argument's sake, let's leave out Amazons, vampires, gods and goddesses, demons, the Endless and other metaphysical entities. Well, simply, there are immortals in the DC multiverse. Adeline Kane (Jericho's mother) comes to mind and could be used quite constructively given that she may still be alive on 5earths Earth-One. I'm focusing on her instead of the more obvious ones like R'as al-Ghul (although how would he react to losing Talia?) or Vandal Savage (who must have gone through that particular ordeal repeatedly, given he's probably the oldest immortal on Earth-Two), Farley Fairfax (Gotham, Earth-One), and Zazzala, the alien bee queen and JLA adversary who became immortal after drinking the elixir of immortality in 1968. The problem is, some immortals regard their condition as a curse, particularly if it means they will outlive their partners or children as a result. Which is why Adeline asked to die in the New Earth continuity. I don't think that this would necessarily be restricted to women who become immortal. I'm a dad and married and I'd find the prospect horrific too. Zazzala is an alien absolute ruler, although that may still mean that she faces similar long-term existential issues. And I see that the current DC New Earth continuity has Rose Forrest of Earth-One's Rose and the Thorn multiple personality Metropolis vigilantedom as an immortal. Interesting... So here's the deal. I'm going to have Adeline Kane live into the thirty first century and introduce her into a Legion of Super Heroes 3021 story. How would living for a millennium have changed her? I think I might introduce some of the other DC Earth-One immortals into that scenario too and see what happens. So- references, in case anyone wants to explore the issues raised in this thread... Zazzala: dc.fandom.com/wiki/Justice_League_of_America_Vol_1_60Adeline Kane: dc.fandom.com/wiki/Adeline_Kane_(New_Earth)Farley Fairfax: dc.fandom.com/wiki/Farley_Fairfax_(Earth-One)Vandal Savage: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandal_SavageRas al-Ghul: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%27s_al_Ghul
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Post by johnreiter902 on Jan 17, 2022 14:54:03 GMT
It takes a person of unique psychology to handle being immortal. My observation of many different immortals in fiction is that you have to be able to do one of three things in order to stay sane.
1) Be a sociopath to begin with. This is the case with Vandal Savage, and a lot of immortal villains in literature. Vandal Savage feels no need for a relationship outside of himself. The though of everyone he knows dying again and again only gives him a pleasant sense of power (and occasionally annoyance, when he has to loose a useful tool).
2) Live eternally in the moment. Atticus O'Sullivan from the Iron Druid Chronicles is a good example of this, and so is the Doctor from Doctor Who. You fully enjoy and love the company of your friends, and part amicably before you have time to see them grow old, immediately making new friends and new loves, and investing yourself in them while the old ones live immortal in your memories. A darker example of this is Walter Jameson from the Twilight Zone, who keeps falling in love, marrying, and then abandoning his wife when she is too old and his love for her fades.
3) Avoid close attachments. Most immortal heroes, like Lady Me and the Immortal Man, try to do this, with varying success. They keep an emotional wall between them and the rest of the world, liking people fondly, but never becoming close friends, and never falling in love. This is easier for an introvert, but still hard. You run the risk of slipping into sociopathy, and thinking of humans as pets instead of people. Also, by emotionally isolating yourself from the world around you, you run the risk of becoming a living artifact of your birth civilization, increasingly out of touch with the world as it changes around you. Many of the villains in Highlander suffered from this.
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 17, 2022 18:04:07 GMT
Is Adeline Kane an immortal in the Post-Crisis DCU? I would've assumed Slade Wilson (Deathstroke the Terminator) would be immortal thanks to his ability to regenerate after being wounded, but what's the rationale for Adeline being immortal as well?
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 17, 2022 21:54:30 GMT
According to the DC database blurb, this happened: " After receiving a blood transfusion from her ex-husband Slade, Adeline became unable to die from physical trauma or aging as long as her brain was intact but could be killed if her entire body was destroyed." Okay, apparently this happened in Deathstroke Annual 3 (1994-5), so she therefore became an immortal in the Post-Crisis universe. Although, in pre-Crisis canon, Slade isn't totally beyond redemption and clearly still has feelings for his estranged ex-wife and children, so if you wanted it to do so, it might happen in 5Earths continuity. It'd be interesting to have a female immortal around apart from the usual metaphysical beings. How might Adeline handle her immortality differently from her male counterparts, for instance? Incidentally, Addie also assumed the identity of Vigilante for a while- is that post spoken for on Earth-One?: www.titanstower.com/adeline-kane-wilson/She's an interesting character and could benefit from going this route.
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Post by dave on Jan 18, 2022 3:54:21 GMT
I wrote about several immortal character in my Earth I Else Worlds series and their differing types of immortality. Arion, the Phantom Stranger, The Immortal Man, Shazam, Black Adam, Nabu, Felix Faust, Vandal Savage, as well as others.
I intend to get back to those tales once I have finished reading the fifty 1 year of pre-crisis available online.
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Post by DocQuantum on Jan 18, 2022 7:26:55 GMT
DC has a lot of female immortals: Morgaine le Fey, her alleged daughter Morgana, Gudra the Valkyrie, Queen Hippolyta, and the entire tribe of Amazons who live on Paradise Island. There are also the Greek goddesses, the original Titans, and assorted others like Circe. Getting out of Wonder Woman territory, there's Eve, the horror host who most often looks like an old crone but sometimes masquerades as a beautiful young woman, and who is currently a teacher on Grim Island.
One of the youngest immortals is Deborah Dancer, a young woman who at the end of the original "I...Vampire" series gains not only immortality but all the powers of a vampire without any of the liabilities. I've always thought she could be a great lead character as a vampire slayer/action-hero, but it's a genre I haven't yet delved into.
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Post by johnreiter902 on Jan 18, 2022 13:04:45 GMT
It's easier for people, like vampires and gods, who live in a community of immortals, and so never have to be alone
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Post by redsycorax on Jan 18, 2022 21:21:41 GMT
Okay, I did omit vampires, Amazons. other metaphysical entities and deities for a reason and John is absolutely right- they live in a community of immortal beings and will never have to be alone as a consequence as he just said. It must be more different for those immortals who don't start off with that context and embedded within that community. It could well be one reason Vandal Savage went off the rails in the first place- originally, he did care about his mortal loved ones but then he had to watch as they aged, became ill and ultimately died, added to which there probably was superstition and individual persecution related to the fact that he never grew any older and never perished. He may have experienced this repeatedly, eventually concluding that baseline mortal humans weren't worth it and that he should exploit his advantage over them and cease to form close relationships with his 'inferiors'. One of the problems with Vandal Savage and Ras al-Ghul is that they're persistently depicted in the present day, which means that we never have a chance to see (a) how Vandal Savage became calloused to human suffering in the first place; (b) how Ras will react if his daughter Talia isn't immortal and she ends up dying in the course of one of their future conflicts with the Batman before he can get her to a Lazarus Pit- or what if the Lazarus Pit doesn't work on her? Hence my idea about Adeline Kane- it'd be useful to have someone who isn't alienated completely from baseline mortal humanity and who can act as a useful foil to the more alienated and distanced self-interested criminal immortals in the DC universe.
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Post by johnreiter902 on Jan 19, 2022 12:03:53 GMT
Okay, I did omit vampires, Amazons. other metaphysical entities and deities for a reason and John is absolutely right- they live in a community of immortal beings and will never have to be alone as a consequence as he just said. It must be more different for those immortals who don't start off with that context and embedded within that community. It could well be one reason Vandal Savage went off the rails in the first place- originally, he did care about his mortal loved ones but then he had to watch as they aged, became ill and ultimately died, added to which there probably was superstition and individual persecution related to the fact that he never grew any older and never perished. He may have experienced this repeatedly, eventually concluding that baseline mortal humans weren't worth it and that he should exploit his advantage over them and cease to form close relationships with his 'inferiors'. One of the problems with Vandal Savage and Ras al-Ghul is that they're persistently depicted in the present day, which means that we never have a chance to see (a) how Vandal Savage became calloused to human suffering in the first place; (b) how Ras will react if his daughter Talia isn't immortal and she ends up dying in the course of one of their future conflicts with the Batman before he can get her to a Lazarus Pit- or what if the Lazarus Pit doesn't work on her? Hence my idea about Adeline Kane- it'd be useful to have someone who isn't alienated completely from baseline mortal humanity and who can act as a useful foil to the more alienated and distanced self-interested criminal immortals in the DC universe. Good point; I just went over my chronology of Vandal Savage. If you ignore all the issues published post-crisis, he doesn't really do anything clearly evil and tyrannical until the 26th century BC, when he was Pharaoh Khufu. By that point he was already over 30,000 years old, who can imagine how much he had changed?
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Post by redsycorax on Jul 24, 2023 2:56:12 GMT
I'm continuing the ongoing adventures of Adeline Kane in the Infinite Earths thread, picking up the story after the death of almost the last member of the original Legion of Super Heroes, Dawnstar, some time in the thirty third century (although her husband Wildfire is immortal due to the fact he's a sentient humanoid configuration of antienergy) . I have some ideas about what I'm going to do next, which is have her present at all of the future events that are recorded past the thirty third century. Along the way, we'll meet R'as al-Ghul, Rose Forrest, Vandal Savage, Zazzala and her other fellow DC universe immortals... and find out what happened when she finally met her long-estranged husband Slade Wilson again.
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Post by lawrenceliberty on Jul 24, 2023 18:25:28 GMT
I wonder if Madam Xanadu is immortal in Pre-crisis continuity? I guess we really don't know since so little if anything of her background was ever revealed in pre-Crisis tales.
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Post by redsycorax on Aug 2, 2023 5:35:32 GMT
Okay, so I've reached the end of my Sweet Adeline Part II story arc, with the terminus point in the future at about CE 852,000 +- (the Justice Legion future), the most distant known point in Earth-One's future history. The most distant point in the whole 5 Earths universes is Zoltan, a future tyrant from CE 1,000,000 who gets sent downtime to twentieth century Earth-S, assembling a transtemporal army before the Marvel Family defeat him. I can only recall one future event after that- the Silver Age Flash travels to one billion AD, at which point the Sun has expanded into a red giant and goes nova. That future Earth is deserted, so humanity is either extinct or left Earth before the sun began to expand into a red giant, about five hundred million years beforehand. The same applies to the distant DC past. Other than pre-submersion Atlantis (BCE 11,000), the most distant point in the DC past is the 38th Century BCE.
It'd be interesting to have a similar Vandal Savage immortality story arc that incorporates most of the significant DC past (pre-1930s) timeline events into a coherent whole. How did Vandal Savage lose his humanity? When? Why? One observation- after the Legion of Super Heroes in the 30-31st Century, there's not a major temporal nexus again until Green Lantern's Pol Manning interlude in the 58th Century and then the Ironwolf events. Other than that, there are several time travelling 20-21st Century superheroes (and Jimmy Olsen...) in evidence. I've got Adeline providing logistical support for events previously recorded that unfold, but they tend to be short duration events that end when the 20-21st Century heroes end up back in their datum time.
One question that occurs to me- the Legion of Super Heroes virtually never travelled into their own future due to the Time Trapper's Iron Curtain of Time, but no such barrier blocked the Flash, Justice League, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or Jimmy Olsen from travelling further than the 30th Century, so what happened there? The Legion virtually never went uptime. Again, why?
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Post by johnreiter902 on Aug 2, 2023 13:10:08 GMT
One question that occurs to me- the Legion of Super Heroes virtually never travelled into their own future due to the Time Trapper's Iron Curtain of Time, but no such barrier blocked the Flash, Justice League, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or Jimmy Olsen from travelling further than the 30th Century, so what happened there? The Legion virtually never went uptime. Again, why? My own personal head-cannon is that most people (including the heroes) don't like to travel into the distant future because of the extreme culture-shock. Once you get more than a thousand years into the future, the world will seem so alien, and you will seem so out of place, that you won't want to stay long.
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Post by redsycorax on Aug 2, 2023 23:31:12 GMT
Apart from Superboy, Supergirl and their longstanding relationship with the Legion of Super-Heroes, and Mon-El seemed to acclimatise quite well to the thirtieth century after Brainiac 5 perfected the anti-lead serum. This suggests that thirtieth century Earth may have been on a technological and social par with twentieth century Krypton and Daxam. And the Silver Age Flash resettled with Iris into her thirtieth century after discovering she was alive. There does seem to be reverse evidence too- Dream Girl doesn't like the fact that Thom (Star Boy) has no effective medication to treat his schizophrenia, which is medically manageable in the thirtieth century. Although Karate Kid didn't seem to have any similar problems fitting into twentieth century life as he underwent Voxv's tests to win the hand of Projectra in marriage.
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Post by redsycorax on Aug 3, 2023 3:52:22 GMT
And I've found that Silver Age Flash story! In "Fatal Fingers of the Flash", Barry travels to one billion AD, at which point the Sun is about to nova. The Earth is a barren, deserted lifeless wasteland. Barry finds several pools of liquid metal. As the Sun goes nova, he takes photographs and then relaxes his vibrations, returning to the present- but finds that contact with the liquid metal has caused him to inadvertently erode anything he touches. Source: "Fatal Fingers of the Flash" Flash 146 (August 1964): dc.fandom.com/wiki/The_Flash_Vol_1_146
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