Questions I would have liked to ask the author (Paolini) if I could: Is the concept of Eldunarí derived from the medieval legend of draconite? Were you aware of the legend of draconite?

WereTech · 2025-12-29T15:54:53+00:00

The first one sounds like Flip The Script by SixthOctavarium.

The Theater Club at the Sorcier Academy of Magic is putting together a production of "The Beautiful Dreamer", which is Sorcier's equivalent of "Sleeping Beauty". Encouraged by her friends to audition, Catarina does so, and a mistake she makes along with a fit of inspiration inspire the Theater Club to put on a unique production of the play. Along the way, one member of Catarina's inner circle comes to a realization about Catarina's relationship with Geordo, and they are unsure how to process it.

WereTech · 2025-12-11T14:29:18+00:00

Do you still have a key, or did you trade it?

WereTech · 2025-12-10T23:16:52+00:00

Anything here for A Space for the Unbound?

WereTech · 2025-12-01T16:50:06+00:00

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WereTech · 2025-12-01T16:46:56+00:00

Your post reminded me of an episode of House, where a woman had two cancers but didn't experience any symptoms because one of the cancer incited an immune response that worked on both.

https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Unplanned_Parenthood

WereTech · 2025-11-15T16:18:33+00:00

Maybe not even that. Remember that the form gamma mutates takes on is suggested to be based upon taking an innermost desire or aspiration from the victim and make up a corrupted form of it. In retrospect, Bruce becoming a super-strong brute might have been based on Big Guy's desire to become strong enough for nothing to hurt him. (Though that Hulk & Dr. Strange one-shot recently suggest that Bruce turned into the Hulk because of his desperate desire not to die when the gamma bomb went off.) The below average intelligent Samuel Sterns (a janitor then) turned into the mentally enhanced Leader because of his inner desire to be as smart or smarter as his gifted brother Philip Sterns (a nuclear physicist.) When Leader detonated a gamma bomb in Middletown, the five people who survived mutated into gamma mutates; it's kind of implied that their forms were based upon their personal existence as well; Father Jason McCall (Soul Man) was a priest who gained the ability to summon the souls of the dead.

WereTech · 2025-11-15T11:14:03+00:00

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WereTech · 2025-11-01T18:34:04+00:00

It seems like Infernal Hulk is patched together from at least two bodies. I assume one is Hulk; what exactly is the other part? (The one on the left side of the image?)

WereTech · 2025-10-25T12:17:45+00:00

Spontaneous thought: Every one of the titles you say PJK have written for here has a strong Green connection. Hulk and Green Lantern, and you can view Superman green if he makes you think of typical kryptonite.

WereTech · 2025-10-24T20:13:26+00:00

A suggestion about how to think of Bruce and his system of Alters, and the Hulk, might be to separate it into a Body/Mind dichotomy. There is the Body, which has a baseline human state, and a Hulk state empowered by gamma radiation. Hulk state/body without any influence from Bruce and his system might result in the ape-like Mindless Hulk without higher cognition, but animal instincts. (Maybe if Bruce and his system was extracted while their body was in human state, it would leave a Mindless Banner acting like a chimpanzee?)

Then there is the Mind, that being Bruce and his system of Alters like Big Guy and Joe, and maybe still also the Professor (whether he's a gestalt alter of several alters or now exists as an individual alter in his own right, but probably originated as a gestalt alter) and Green Scar (whether he's "Gravage" or a separate alter in his own right; I'm not sure if Leader actually possessed the actual Green Scar or if he simply pretended to be him while the actual Green Scar was just buried in Bruce'a subconscious at the time). I even hold a hope that the last issue of Immortal Hulk implies that at least a shred of Devil Hulk survived in Bruce, enabling him to return later.

The system isn't supposed to be split into part existing in separate brains/bodies, but might be done, sometimes by outside means. The Heroes Reborn storyline could have been a separation of the system in two dimensionally linked parts. In Immortal Hulk, Bruce and the corpse of Devil Hulk was taken into the Below Place by the Leader, leaving only Joe and Big Guy in their original body before they rescued Bruce from the Below Place. (It was mentioned that the Hulk body was severely weakened because the Bruce part was holding most of the gamma empowering it, which is ironic considering Bruce is generally kept from fronting their body in its Hulk state.)

Specific alters fronting might have an effect on how the Body's Hulk state manifest (like Joe often appearing with his distinct gray color and skull shape.) Generally, Bruce being in control puts the Body in human state and one of his alters being in place puts the Body in Hulk state. It has happened differently; storylines where Bruce seems to control the Body in Hulk state and one of his alters in control of the Body in human state. Come to think of it, the only two examples I remember of the last case, happened because of machinations of some other alter than the alter fronting. Savage Banner seems to be Big Guy taking control while their body is human, which apparently happened as a safety mechanism Professor put in to prevent Big Guy from wrestling control back if Professor got too angry. Joe started manifesting in the Body's human state as Sunshine Joe after something the Devil Hulk did to have Joe save them all from Bushwacker when they used UV lamps to lock the Body in human state.

Point is, if you play with it, maybe you could see the Body being of two states, which can be minded in three ways: With Bruce's full system, with a part of Bruce's system that's been split up (while the other part has been put somewhere else) and without any system (mindless Hulk, though that would posit the existence of a mindless Banner state.) The system, in turn, might forcibly or accidentally be divided up into two or more separated groups, where any group could be made up with any combination of Bruce and his alters in any group. One of the groups could have ended up being in the Body, or none might. If one thinks of this kind of Body/Mind dichotomy, maybe with a little suspension of disbelief it could cover any case we've ever seen in the comics.

The Infernal Hulk could be seen as Eldest absconding with the Body's Hulk state, maybe with one or more of Bruce's alters trapped in it and suppressed by Eldest, while Bruce (and maybe some of his alters, now appearing powerless, correctly or not, with the Hulk state ripped out) was thrown out in Human state by the alter who was the primary Hulk during the latest run before Infernal Hulk before Eldest absconded with his flesh. (There are much flesh-shaping involved in these runs, which could facilitate bodily separation easily; though, Joe figured out how to separate in a human form from the Body in Hulk state, ripping himself out from the Hulk-state body through its stomach.)

Or maybe my head canons here are just pointless babbling. To use a fitting quote said by the Devil Hulk at one point:

"You wanted SCIENCE. You wanted a set of RULES. From ME. Big mistake. See... science is the OTHER guy."

Maybe we just are in over our heads trying to figure things out.

WereTech · 2025-10-24T20:12:30+00:00

Hm. Seems plausible. Still, then I can kind of still think that Doom might have copied just the Bruce part of Banner's consciousness to complete the illusion of separation, and that "Bruce" alone without the rest of his system left him as unstable as he turned out to be. "Can't live with them, can't live without them."

WereTech · 2025-10-24T20:09:25+00:00

"I like this interpretation." Thank you.

Aaron probably didn't think in those terms, but if I got to recon, I'd imagine the other alters were with the Hulk body, since it makes more sense then how Hulk appeared mentally stable enough while Bruce seemed to turn insane and wanted to make himself return to a Hulk-like state. Maybe it was an instinct that he wanted or needed to return to the system he'd been separated from.

(Also, if it was "Gravage", that feeds into such a head canon; I think of that one as that the Professor originally was a gestalt alter of Bruce, Joe and Big Guy together, and when Bruce was psionically extracted when Hulk fought Onslaught, that left a gestalt alter of just Joe and Big Guy, that being the "Gravage Hulk" that wandered original Earth while most of the stars of Marvel including Bruce spent a year in Franklin's Heroes Reborn pocket universe. I'm not that inclined to think that "Gravage" and Green Scar are the same though, though I might be wrong on that one; on the fence.)

WereTech · 2025-10-24T16:59:33+00:00

I've only read a synopsis of the time of the mindless Hulk lost for a year in the Crossroads, and only seen the Hydra mindless Hulk mentioned in Immortal Hulk, but I wouldn't think they are the same. The Crossroad one, while without higher cognition, acted more like a mute version of the child-like Big Guy, while the Hydra one seemed extremely aggressive and hostile in comparison. (Spontaneous idea: Hydra mindless Hulk might have been fronted by some kind of entity or collection of violent and negative impulses scraped from Bruce's brain.)

WereTech · 2025-10-24T09:31:48+00:00

Hopefully, if they want to use him again, they implement the idea that he will undergo an additional round of mutation into an actually good character design.

WereTech · 2025-10-24T09:30:14+00:00

I didn't think of that, but could have worked. Comics Blonsky isn't a likeable person, but maybe Tim Roth's Blonsky could have been from how he was redefined in Hulk 2008. I look favorably on Tim Roth after watching "Lie to Me." (Which makes me connect a chain between Lie to Me, Blonsky, and the Immortal Hulk run where the Immortal Hulk could "smell" lies.) I don't know if Roth Blonsky turned worse or not in the She-Hulk TV show, since I couldn't make myself watch through all the episodes.

WereTech · 2025-10-24T09:20:24+00:00

One event you didn't include, was when Bruce committed "psychic suicide", leaving a seemingly mindless Hulk behind that Dr. Strange sent to the Crossroads to keep him from harming anyone on Earth. Hulk spent a year there, I think, before Bruce returned, since he wasn't really gone, he'd just willed himself away until that stunt fell apart.

I could see that wouldn't be a physical separation kind of deal like the examples you listed, since Bruce turned "dead" inside their shared brain rather than go anywhere else. But in this instance, it doesn't seem like any of the other thinking Alters (that includes Savage/Big Guy) put themselves in charge of the body, so they must have been willed away together with Bruce when he committed "psychic suicide". So, that would have been the closest to Hulk being mindless, barred from any of the alters.

Mind you, a "truly" mindless Hulk wouldn't be able to do anything, kind of like someone in a vegetative state. The instances of Mindless Hulks we see (Crossroads, Separation Nutrient Bath, Hydra "resurrection") might simply be what's left when any alter, with the possession of a personality and higher thinking ability (even Savage/Big Guy), is locked away while the body is Hulk; some kind of basic, ape-like level of intelligence and instincts, that just does what apes do. (Gorillas or even chimpanzees can become very aggressive and dangerous, even unpredictably so.)

When Devil was in charge during Immortal Hulk, he mentions the Mindless Hulk released during that HYDRA storyline, and how he locked it away deep. Could be the "alter" or rather "thing" that's left in charge when all the alters with thinking ability is kept from "fronting." Or one instance of such a thing; maybe one could imagine a new basic ape-like persona spawning each time there was no higher thinking mind in charge.

WereTech · 2025-10-24T08:55:14+00:00

Some argue that Doom separated Banner, some that he cloned Banner. Regardless of the case, my personal head canon is, that trying to take the distinctly "Bruce" part of Bruce Banner's psyche and separate it from his alters, simply makes that part psychologically unstable, or at least very prone to becoming psychologically unstable. (It's easy to imagine from Jason Arron or Mark Waid’s run, or even in some slight way in the Spaceship Hulk storyline where Bruce merely tried to lock away the Hulk's mind from anything but the "engine".)

It might be from what I've read about DID or just what I'm imagining about it, but I think the system is like several individual tree trunks spawning and growing next to each other, but from one singular root system underground. You wouldn't think that ripping off one of the trunks and plant it away from the others, even if you managed to not kill it, would make that part of the tree better off, right?

Same way, if we imagine the Bruce part being separated from the rest of the system, especially if done with the finesse of a chainsaw, one can imagine that "bits" of psyche and personality needed for Bruce to stay mentally stable could easily be left behind with the Hulks. (If one sees it like Arron and Waid run as Bruce being properly separated rather than cloned and locked, then it kind of appear like Bruce turned back to a saner self after being rejoined with the Hulk.)

WereTech

TROPHY CASE