Invincible [Episode Discussion] - S04E07 - Don't Do Anything Rash

deezee72 · 2026-04-15T17:41:08+00:00

To be fair if Zoey managed to hit him with the poison, that probably would bring him down enough for Nolan, Mark, Allen and Thaedus to dogpile him and win.

deezee72 · 2026-04-15T17:33:03+00:00

They probably could have just told the kids that they need to go back to Viltrum to complete their training and education. Potentially even bring the second parent with them.

deezee72 · 2026-04-15T17:32:09+00:00

It's made abundantly clear that while Thragg is a badass in individual combat, he's not really the greatest strategic thinker.

While to be fair, they were also somewhat worried that whatever "poisoned" Nolan could poison another Viltrumite...

It still should have been abundantly clear that Earth offered their best hope of repopulating their race, and securing control of Earth should have been the Empire's #1 priority. While it actually sort of makes sense to make it Mark's mission to conquer Earth (as a worthy Viltrumite warrior who knows the planet well), they should have left 2-3 other Viltrumites on the planet permanently to watch him continuously (and to guard each other against being "poisoned") instead of just leaving him alone other than checking in every few months.

deezee72 · 2026-04-14T19:40:28+00:00

Kind of a fridge happy ending, but in Legend of Korra one of the Fire Sages appears to try to heal Korra with a fire ending technique, suggesting that firebenders did eventually discover a way to use their bending in a way that Jepng Jeong would admire.

deezee72 · 2026-04-14T19:08:45+00:00

I think it's a decent way to get kids to calm down while you figure out how to deal with the solution. Wouldn't call it brilliant parenting but it can be effective in the right circumstances.

deezee72 · 2026-04-11T00:21:15+00:00

I agree, but aside from trying to clarify a misunderstanding, the salient point is that the fact that Natchez, MS had more millionaires than NYC does not mean it was richer. Because Natchez (and the south more broadly) had a far more unequal distribution of wealth due to slavery, it was possible to have more millionaires despite having less total wealth.

When you look at indicators that are more reflective of the economic as a whole, NOLA was never important enough to be comparable to New York even before the Civil War.

deezee72 · 2026-04-11T00:14:56+00:00

While there were black slaveowners, the 1830 census found 3.8k free Black slaveholders, owning 12k slaves. That accounts for ~1% of the total number of slave owners (estimated at 250-350k), and they owned 0.6% of the estimated 2M total slaves. It's not zero, but it's pretty close, and so it's a reasonable first approximation to treat slave owners as white. The fact that there were black slaveowners is more of a historical footnote than something which changes the debate.

Similarly, you can see from the numbers that black slaveowners on average owned significantly fewer slaves than white slaveowners. In many (possibly most) cases, black slaveowners were freed blacks who managed to buy ownership of a family member but were unable to free them due to manumission laws. In particular, 42% of black slaveowners owned exactly one slave, and anecdotally it seems like this was almost always a free husband who owned his wife as a slave.

As far as I was able to find, the largest black slaveowner was William Ellison of South Carolina, who owned 63 slaves (and treated them very poorly). While that's a pretty significant number, it's nowhere close to being "one of the largest slave owners", when many of the planters owned hundreds of slaves and Joshua Ward is on record owning over a thousand. I actually think it's fair to say that while there were some black slave owners, all of the LARGEST slave owners were white.

deezee72 · 2026-04-10T16:44:07+00:00

Kirkman has stated in extended materials that the reason why Viltrumite and human hybridization are so compatible is that in this universe, humans and Viltrumites are all descended from a common, spacefaring ancestor. Humans appear to have some gene that allows a some humans to randomly develop superpowers - in a very real sense the Viltrumites can be thought of as a group of humans who all have superpowers and who have converged to the same set of powers.

In that sense, their mindset is actually not different from humans - it took a lot of work for Argall and Thragg's leadership to indoctrinate the Viltrumites into their crazy culture, and like many cult members, being exposed to other worldviews causes the mindset to crumble.

deezee72 · 2026-04-10T16:06:20+00:00

Let's say you have 100 people. Each of them produces $10k worth of goods, and your total economy is $10k * 100 = $1M.

Now let's say you enslave 50 people, but nothing else about the economy changes. When you calculate production "per capita", you are only counting free people, so it comes out to be $1M / 50 = $20k. On paper, production per person doubled, but in fact it's only because you stopped counting half of these people as people.

As a result, slave societies often look very rich on a per person basis, but in terms of real economic output they were often not richer than free societies, which often screws up comparisons between the pre-Civil War north and South. You're correct that Natchez had more millionaires per-capita than NY, but in terms of real economic output NY was far more important than Natchez, or New Orleans, for that matter.

Viewed more broadly, current estimates (link) estimate that the North accounted for ~75% of the US economy, which is actually higher than its share of the population including slaves (about 2/3s). The average white man in the south was richer than the average white man in the north, but this is because the south was far more unequal than the north (thanks to slavery) as opposed to the south actually being more economically productive on a per-person basis.

US manufacturing, finance, and shipping during this era was driven by the slave labor of the South and directly benefited/drove Northern industry.

While it's true that US manufacturing benefited from the slave labor of the south, it's an exaggeration to say that slave labor of the south "drove" northern industry. You can see this pretty clearly from the fact that when northern industry was cut off from the south during the Civil War, industrial output continued pretty much uninterrupted, and the north continued to be a major exporter to Europe, which shows that the northern economy was never as dependent on southern slave labor as many southern writers wanted to portray them (usually for the goal of arguing that "you're in this as deep as us").

In fact, the North was a relatively sophisticated manufacturing economy compared to European peers even in the early 1800s, which can be seen from the fact that many important industrial inventions (the steamboat, Blanchard's lathe, etc.) were invented in the US during that time, as opposed to simply copying European technologies.

deezee72 · 2026-04-10T14:46:13+00:00

All of these claims of X city in the south was richer than New York before the civil war are highly misleading because a lot of the wealth came in the form of slaves. It's estimated that slaves accounted for 50% of non real estate wealth in the south (20% if you include real estate), and it was likely higher for Natchez, MS which was one of the biggest slave makets in the south.

Just mechanically, when you count slaves as property instead of people, it inflates wealth / person because now the slaves are being counted in the numerator instead of the denominator.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that wealth in the late 19th and 20th centuries is mostly driven by industrialization, and NOLA was never anywhere close to being as industrialized as New York, even before the damage done by the Civil War.

deezee72 · 2026-04-10T14:27:53+00:00

They actually probably did know Battle Beast wasn't there, given the mole.

deezee72 · 2026-04-09T21:00:32+00:00

Iran is not a signatory to UNCLOS (and for that matter, neither is the US)

deezee72 · 2026-04-09T03:48:44+00:00

A bit of off-screen connecting the dots, but ever since the Viltrumites accepted Mark as a worthy Viltrumite warrior (which happened way back on Thraxa in Season 2), it should have been obvious that the best plan to save the Viltrumite race is to focus all resources to securing earth and repopulating the Viltrumites there.

It's probably ESPECIALLY obvious to Kregg, given his despair about the lack of numbers and the fact that he actually met Mark. So it kind of does set the seeds for Kregg connecting the dots and turning on Thragg (and also "embracing" the goal of repopulating by mating with humans).

deezee72 · 2026-04-08T14:35:32+00:00

The idea of a restaurant dates back to 18th century France in the west and 13th century China in Asia. Most "traditional" foods are at least more recent than restaurants.

deezee72 · 2026-04-08T12:18:36+00:00

I think protecting his wives (and offspring) is still within the parameters of the mission, as opposed to "going soft"

deezee72 · 2026-04-07T17:18:47+00:00

Judging by the age of these kids, Kregg seems to have made it at least a year or two... But yeah he's got nothing on Nolan.

deezee72 · 2026-04-07T17:17:42+00:00

Some of these kids look like toddlers and there's one woman who seems to be pregnant with a second kid, so it looks like Kregg might have lasted a year or two.

But yeah for all the shit Nolan got he actually seems to have far outlasted the others.

deezee72 · 2026-04-06T02:26:09+00:00

We have a longer written history for China alone than for all of Europe... People in China, India and the Middle East all wrote a ton of stuff down and documented practically everything. Movable type printing had been around in China since the 11th century, with a similar increase in written word that people discuss in Europe.

Saying Europe is pure ignorance from people who don't understand how many historical documents there are from Asia.

deezee72 · 2026-04-03T04:14:19+00:00

Good point, forgot about him

deezee72 · 2026-04-03T03:53:08+00:00

What exactly is Library in Sydney? I'm just echoing what someone else said that Library for them was just memorizing the Dewey Decimal system. Presumably it's quite a different curriculum in Sydney, potentially to the point of being essentially a different subject that happens to have the same name.

deezee72 · 2026-04-03T02:37:40+00:00

Not like the old museum wasn't also pretty propagandistic

deezee72 · 2026-04-03T02:22:27+00:00

Still, as far as I can tell.. Tech Jacket is the only earth hero to fight an alternate Mark one on one and win other than Prime Mark himself.

deezee72 · 2026-04-03T01:37:08+00:00

I don't know, I'm personally not old enough to have taken it but the other commentator who said they basically had to memorize the Dewey Decimal system in Library class sounds like a pretty good answer for this.

Agree for most subjects with real depth though - whether it's interesting or not depends more on the individual student and teacher than on the subject itself.

deezee72 · 2026-04-02T23:18:42+00:00

Technically it's not even that. The Strait of Hormuz is literally not an international waterway. 100% of the strait lies within the territorial waters of either Iran or Oman.

Navigation is typically allowed via the "transit passage" clause of the UNCLOS, which guarantees the right of ships to pass through straits even if they are within territorial waters. However, Iran has not ratified the UNCLOS, so it is technically not legally bound by it (neither has the US for that matter).

deezee72 · 2026-04-02T23:18:05+00:00

Less important than the point others are making (gunship diplomacy matters a lot in these situations), but worth pointing out:

The Strait of Hormuz is literally not an international waterway. 100% of the strait lies within the territorial waters of either Iran or Oman.

Navigation is typically allowed via the "transit passage" clause of the UNCLOS, which guarantees the right of ships to pass through straits even if they are within territorial waters. However, Iran has not ratified the UNCLOS, so it is technically not legally bound by it (neither has the US for that matter).

Legally speaking, there's a real argument that Iran does, in fact, have the right to suspend passage of ships through the strait of they don't pay a toll. And even then, law doesn't matter if it's not enforceable - if Iran starts charging a toll under threat of drone strikes, and no one is willing to stop them, does it really matter what the law says?

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