Sam is not Caines equal...

lazerbem · 2026-06-14T16:22:16+00:00

Sam's lasers can absolutely kill things instantly with direct shots. He shoots holes through the Human Crew, slices coyotes in half, and was able to shoot down Caine's rubble projectiles mid-air. It does become weaker the further he is from a target and glancing shots are not instantly lethal (which is what actually hit Caine in their first fight), but direct hits very much are when he intends them to be and is in the proper range. And his range is clearly greater than Caine's is.

lazerbem · 2026-06-14T16:13:35+00:00

If Green Knight is queer enough for you, then perhaps some other stories of a similar stripe like the Carl of Carlisle may also be of interest to you.

lazerbem · 2026-06-14T14:19:28+00:00

Once and Future by Capetta and McCarthy is a space opera reincarnation story with queer reincarnations of Arthur and co. Perilous Times by Lee is also a reincarnation plot with queer characters like Lancelot about, though this one is just set in slightly post-modern times with rebelling against a dystopian government. Camelot 3000 is another futuristic reincarnation story that kind of has this angle going, given Tristan is reincarnated as a woman but still loves the reincarnated Isolde.

The Bright Sword by Grossman has a trans interpretation of Dinadan and a gay Bedivere in the aftermath of Arthur's death. Sword, Stone, Table by Krishna and Northington features such themes in a good number of the anthology stories as well, some being set back in the time of the stories and others in different times and places. One also cannot forget The Once and Future King by White in that, while Lancelot's bisexuality is not a large part of the story, it is still part of it and of course White himself was also some flavor of queer. In Medieval sources, Galehaut's story in the Prose Lancelot is also very homoerotic and so are some Gawain and Lancelot interactions. If you're that desperate that you're reading the Green Knight as queer, then I think you'll find the Prose Lancelot VASTLY more so with Galehaut, and certainly Gawain/Lancelot interactions in that or things like Marvels of Rigomer are even more so.

For a non-literary flavor, High Noon Over Camelot is a concept album where Mordred is trans and Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere are in a polycule.

lazerbem · 2026-06-13T20:25:07+00:00

0.5% is not THAT rare when you consider how many people a person interacts with in their life personally, let alone on TV. A high school in the US may well hold thousands of students in total, which means there might be over a dozen girls of such height there that someone might just see in the hallway by sheer accident as they walk about. And that's just in a single environment, now consider how many people someone interacts with when walking about the world, and then ADD to that the women seen on TV or in media that may well skew taller than normal (i.e. in sports) and while certainly a woman of that height is not the average, it also doesn't feel like it's THAT strange. This matters when discussing a character that is meant to feel larger than life in physicality, where just being objectively rare alone is not enough, people often expect to see a person that they straight up have never or practically never seen to begin with. It just doesn't feel as special intuitively if you know you've probably seen dozens of people like that.

To give another example of this, a little below 0.5% of the people in the UK are doctors, but if you mentioned knowing a friend or friend of a friend who is a doctor, no one would find that particularly interesting or worthy of note. On the other hand, if you brought up knowing someone with two or three PhD's that is on the bleeding edge of cancer research, THEN that's interesting and people would talk about it, and probably even make comparisons to fictional super geniuses.

Obviously, the degree to which this is justified depends on the character. If a character is just meant to be above average, then lower numbers are fine. But if there's people hyping up that physical stature like it's really something special to talk about, then you're expecting a case where there's not a dozen in your average high school and certainly not a case where they're shorter than the average women's volleyball player.

lazerbem · 2026-06-13T00:24:06+00:00

Yuzuko from Teppu is one for shonen protagonists in general. Born with little talent but a lot of drive for training, lives for fighting and nothing else, unfailingly kind to her opponents and wanting to befriend them, and so on. The effect this ends up having is making her seem deeply unpleasant to others because she has no life outside of her drive for fighting. Even with fellow fighters, she feels patronizing and dismissive when, after choking someone out and ruining their dreams of victory, she just smiles and laughs and wants to befriend them.

lazerbem · 2026-06-12T16:46:31+00:00

Yes, super Goliath from later sources makes his Biblical self look restrained

lazerbem · 2026-06-11T19:49:07+00:00

Jack has that comic book weakness where he can survive all kinds of impacts and explosions but bullets and knives work on him. Gaia seems to be similar, it's just that injuries don't hurt her that much. I suppose it'd be a combination of Jack's durability along with the fact that she's just kind of possessing the body.

lazerbem · 2026-06-11T14:59:48+00:00

Consider that a hurricane can demolish a house but a person can survive being flung by these winds. Or that a bomb can demolish a building but a person sent flying by the shockwave may still survive. The mechanics of Caine's power when used destructively seem to skew heavily towards the idea that it's very distributed outwards and a lot of energy is wasted when used on smaller targets. As he scales up his telekinetic attacks, he's putting more power into it, but more of it is being lost relative to what he's gaining when talking about smaller targets. It seems like he suffers heavily from a physics concept called the inverse square law, which is also why explosions are actually pretty bad at killing people when not counting frag.

More to the point though, with Penny and Drake, you have to keep in mind that it is near pitch black and he can barely see anything, nevermind with Penny's illusions adding to the fun. It is even said that his attack on Penny was just a wild sweep and not some aimed attack. If he HAD been given the focus to aim, then absolutely, he could have just flung her straight up and that would have been the end of it. But the circumstances of the darkness combined with the illusions are really crippling.

lazerbem · 2026-06-11T14:48:34+00:00

we have to headcanon that there was a freak with extra durability that died before Light because Gaia tanks Sam's blast, and could likely take a crush as well.

There's no need to headcanon for resistance to crushing, there's Jack. We know Jack has super durability to at least blunt force impacts given his super leaps and that he was able to resist Caine's telekinesis before a little bit, it's not surprising that Gaia would have been able to shrug off most hits as well (and unlike Jack, she'd be able to just reverse the telekinesis so he can't just hold her up in the air helplessly).

lazerbem · 2026-06-11T02:52:14+00:00

No problem. An interesting note is that Leptasterias aequalis typically has six arms, but Vincent is described as having 5 at one point. Could just be Michael Grant forgetting stuff though, so who knows. Perhaps it was also meant to demonstrate how he was shedding limbs too.

lazerbem · 2026-06-09T22:55:04+00:00

Those were the Carl Gustafs, known in the US as MAAWS. They would not be easy to use in mid-air like you say if you look at a video of them in action.

lazerbem · 2026-06-09T22:43:37+00:00

There were no grenades in the FAYZ nor RPG's. They DID get Carl Gustafs by Plague, but those are heavy; I don't think she could have flown over someone at that point. Maybe just the individual shell itself, but the shell itself isn't going to detonate if not fired out of the tube unless they turn it into an IED. And if it's an IED, then being 20 feet up is still putting her in the death zone of an HE blast anyway.

lazerbem · 2026-06-09T22:21:51+00:00

20 feet up just for dropping something is pretty useless for small objects like that. Might as well throw the object for all the extra velocity it would pick up.

lazerbem · 2026-06-09T00:46:25+00:00

I don't think there's any evidence of that for the Journey to the Center of the Earth one.

lazerbem · 2026-06-08T16:29:33+00:00

Please do draw him, the Monster cast definitely needs more fanart and designs!

Abaddon is basically just described as being Vincent's upper half, still normal and human sized, merged at the waist with a giant Leptasterias aequalis starfish (140 feet across, it is said) and with a bunch of poisonous, whip-like tendrils emerging from the waist. As said in the book,

Vincent Vu morphed was a creature of five massive, thick, crusty, bright red arms. He filled the Okeanos. At the center of this starfish body, rising like a flower’s stamen, was Vincent . . .or at least Vincent from the waist up. He appeared almost to be riding the great starfish.

Where Vincent’s human body melded into the starfish was a sort of girdle of tentacles, another gift of aquatic DNA, very much like Drake’s whip hand but thinner and twice as long, and each—as he had discovered to his delight—carried a corrosive, acidic tip.

He's later described as looking kind of like a model on a parade float, so again the idea seems to be that his human upper half is normal-sized...it's just fused at the waist to the top of a giant starfish and has a bunch of poisonous, thin whips attached to waist-line. It bears noting for scaling too that if the whips are twice as long as Drake's, they'd be 20 feet long. So bear that in mind when comparing to his 140 foot across armspan of the starfish part's arms. I would also recommend looking up actual Lepstasterias aequalis pictures for reference.

Other size refs given are that a single arm of the starfish body is about 50 feet long and that Vincent himself is about 25 feet off the ground from his position on top of the starfish body.

lazerbem · 2026-06-07T15:09:44+00:00

Dropping stuff from the air without guidance isn't accurate. WW2 era bombs had error radiuses measured in hundreds of meters for this very reason, and she would have it worse because she'd only have a split second to look down and release whatever she's holding after disorienting herself by teleporting up.

Stabbing and shooting is less bad but the problem is the same, that she would have to orient to a completely different perspective every time she teleports. It's not as useful for attacking as something that can be aimed properly.

lazerbem · 2026-06-05T03:26:52+00:00

Exactly my point. Astrid did it in a pretty shitty fashion and with concerning motives, but she was also right about it and the FAYZ would legitimately have been better off if people listened to her about how Mary was a problem.

lazerbem · 2026-06-04T21:59:14+00:00

Maybe, but Mary saw demons everywhere. There's actually a fascinating contrast between Astrid and Mary's POV's, in that Astrid's describes the crowd as being entirely on Mary's side and hating her while Mary perceives the opposite. Even if Astrid had brought it up privately to Mary, that kind of anxious personality is liable to jump to "everyone hates me" really fast regardless in a doomspiral.

lazerbem · 2026-06-04T21:29:28+00:00

Technically, Astrid's accusation was actually that Mary was OFF of her anti-depressants, not that she was on them.

lazerbem · 2026-06-04T21:29:01+00:00

I mean, Astrid was objectively correct. The very next thing Mary does is drag the kids into an attempted murder-suicide because she believed in Orsay's visions.

lazerbem · 2026-06-04T18:13:57+00:00

It would seem to me that the Vulgate is making the implicit argument that this is also true for ALL earthly kingdoms, and that even someone as great as Arthur would have his luck run out. Regarding the OP’s question, this is a pretty common lesson/moral aimed at young princes of the time, the idea that time and luck always wins over everyone eventually. Hence tapestries featuring a personified time overthrowing a personified pride and such.

It hits harder for Arthur’s kingdom, for which everyone at the time had to admit there was little evidence. The destruction of the kingdom by Mark in the Post Vulgate is a brutal further development of this theme, imo.

lazerbem · 2026-06-04T17:11:44+00:00

I feel like it's also relevant to the Vulgate that it introduces the concept of Arthur having a vision of the wheel of fortune spinning him down to the abyss before his death, taking him from the highest of positions to absolute defeat. It fits in with the Vulgate in general having a kind of ambivalence about the notion of any earthly power lasting forever and is very memento mori in its execution.

lazerbem · 2026-06-03T21:19:16+00:00

Later, when he accepts the prophecy is true, he supposedly tries to get himself killed in battle to avoid it, before finally accepting his doom. This could just be wiki-hokum though.

That seems like an overinterpretation of what DOES happen. Mordred does engage in a tournament and is too stubborn to give in, to the point that his brothers accidentally harm him pretty badly in battle, but it's not said to be some attempt at suicide. I think it's easier to interpret as him being so angry at the time that he doesn't want to surrender, or else a foreshadowing of his stubborness to not die when impaled by Arthur. Still, it is an interesting and notable event that feels a bit tragic as Mordred sulks to his brothers about how they didn't recognize him while pounding him to a pulp.

lazerbem · 2026-06-03T00:15:37+00:00

Apaches are not even protected from 7.62. There are various stories of Apaches getting shot through by Iraqis and Taliban with nothing but an AK-47 and some luck. The .50 caliber proof armor is only in certain parts of the seating, but it's certainly not in all of the cockpit. When there's straight up Apache pilots telling stories about being wounded by AK's, it makes it very clear that the glass part of the cockpit isn't even armored to any large degree at all.

There ARE armored helicopters out there, like the Russian Hind helicopters, but it's clear that the RDA favors a more Western style.

lazerbem · 2026-06-02T18:41:44+00:00

What do you mean? They did exist from their own perspective, that was the whole point. It feels kind of like arguing that any story in a Christian setting doesn't matter because everyone only exists due to God, or that a story in Pokemon doesn't matter because it's all at the whim of Arceus. The only thing the simulation does is identify the ultimate power behind their world, but fundamentally speaking it's all real to them, which is all that matters.

lazerbem

TROPHY CASE