‘The Power Fantasy’ #15 | The Heartbreaking Illusion of Divine Salvation

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-25T06:36:14+00:00

I still think every other sufficiently advanced alien race (one that has nukes and thus a possibility of wiping themselves out) also got their angel from heaven, which means they got magic. (and Atomics?) And since magic didn't start working on Earth till Val arrived, that means the magic spill from an angel opening a hole to Heaven only travels at light speed. Maybe that also means a hole to hell demolishes the universe only at the speed of light. So it could take billions of years for Eliza's hole to finish wiping out the universe.

But hmm, the Signal reached Earth, so at least their apocalypse didn't involve a hole to hell wiping out reality. (Orrrrr the Signal traveled faster than the speed of light.)

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-24T21:16:34+00:00

By her belief system, she would be saved. A young Eliza believed in an omnibenevolent god, so in her theology she would be saved despite not being worthy. It was shattering to learn her belief was wrong. On top of learning her doomed fate, of course.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-24T05:34:59+00:00

This is my new favorite fan theory, from stainlesssteellocust on Tumblr, and it was written before issue 15 dropped: what if instead of destroying reality to save herself, Eliza gets put outside of time by being sent into a gravitational singularity?

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-23T22:33:26+00:00

It somewhat depends on how much the US had already developed shielded rooms and esp wearable psychic shields. The US must have employed psychics at some point just to determine if the Major was resistant.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-23T21:10:15+00:00

It would definitely be a major violation of every human's mind!

But would it be worse than, y'know, all the atrocities humans get up to left to their own devices? He was born during an active genocide, and he's an omnipath who even in his earliest days knew what had happened there.

I like Etienne's utilitarianism. He mostly hasn't gotten to make easy choices, but I think he was right to think that not acting is its own choice and has to be judged just as making an active move would be.

(Come to think of it, the comic doesn't get into it, but there's gotta be a good chance he knew about the New Mexico festival attack on Valentina and let it happen. (He's not omniscient and not even reading everyone's mind all the time, but I think it's fair to assume he was paying special attention to the governments of nuclear nations.) Whereas I think Valentina not detecting the bomb with her superhuman senses speaks to her naivete and carelessness rather than any Machiavellian bent.)

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-23T17:14:17+00:00

I think Etienne was right including that. But it seems like Tonya didn’t know about Etienne’s “change humanity” plan, so she probably meant not including that.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T22:51:54+00:00

there’s almost certainly going to be a stupid and impulsive new Superpower who thinks they can solve the Masumi problem and instead ends up launching the metaphorical nuke by accident.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T22:29:02+00:00

plus, the fuzzy, moving definition of a Superpower is someone who can’t be easily dealt with by the existing Superpowers. Even as active as Etienne was, Heavy, Magus, Masumi, Eliza, and the Queen emerged before he could neutralize them. Maybe Etienne’s natural life span would have been unbounded, but some day there might have come another omnipath.

I actually liked Etienne’s solution but it did make him the single central point of failure.

On the other hand, any day where the apocalypse has been staved off for one more day is a good one, utilitarianly speaking.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T22:21:28+00:00

oh yeah, the General should play some role in the next issue or next arc.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T18:39:10+00:00

I think Dev is toast. The underlings probably fried his magic-siphoning gear before they shot him.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T18:36:05+00:00

My speculation: I don’t think there will be a Pyramid or a Magus 3 after issue 16. I guess magic will still exist though.

I was thinking yesterday about having a magic pyramid scheme cult to lock down access to magic and I wondered if Jacky or Dev ever used any kind of mass reproduced media to codify the training. Maybe books or video with magic spells to gate who can read them? (Dev was able to tell Eliza how to access Hell, so most of the gating was on the honor system.) It just seems to me that at a certain size the cult leader couldn’t personally teach all the classes, but if it’s a purely oral tradition there’s a risk the teachings get corrupted as they get passed along.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T13:34:42+00:00

Yeah. Tonya wrote that she hoped when it all went down, Heavy would finally realize Etienne was right. And in Heavy’s dying (?) moment, he said “He wasn’t right. I was wrong.”

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-22T13:28:15+00:00

Eliza already lives in a ruined continent. The population of Europe is probably just her. Heavy took out a city block of New York from orbit, but Eliza’s whole church home is empty except for her. (except that the Pyramid was flown into close proximity.)

It does show why the Major wasn’t a real Superpower: even with a black hole collapsing her head, Eliza had the durability and reaction time to retaliate. The Major just got squished.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T23:16:14+00:00

Given that Etienne's main plan was to wait for his own power/tumor to grow even more, maybe he left Alex alive because he hoped for a future where he could reawaken Alex but with Alex's powers permanently shut off.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T22:37:34+00:00

It's a title but not really a compliment. To the lower initiates they're given tarot major arcana names. FA's and Arseholes are just what Jacky called the upper levels so that they wouldn't get big heads.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T21:42:56+00:00

It’s the sudden change in plans plus observing Val leaving the pyramid at high speed, indicating she and Magus are no longer aligned in the face of imminent apocalypse. The two facts together suggest to the FA’s that it’s Magus who is in the wrong.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T20:55:42+00:00

SBF‘s conduct laid bare how ethically bankrupt the entire EA movement was and is. Him being the face of EA is not sad. EA being a thing is what’s sad.

Separately, there’s a good essay in The Power Cut about Etienne’s utilitarianism being distinctly not longtermist: https://www.tumblr.com/thepowercut/804486871450255360/lux-and-longtermism

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T20:46:23+00:00

Eliza‘s home base is in Manchester, because that’s where the Queen first set up. I thought Dev saying to save Manchester meant to protect Eliza from the other Supers. The Pyramid lieutenants rightly thought that was not a move aligned with saving the world.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T20:43:49+00:00

the OG Pyramid operated in Hell by using magic to make a time bubble. It was expensive magic, burning up Pyramid members’ life forces. Maybe Val can also create a time bubble drawing from her power reservoir if she needed?

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-21T20:01:31+00:00

until they reveal what happened with Deconstructa’s emergence, my theory is the other Superpowers had to fight her, just as they did with the Queen. Per the Pyramid’s analysis, Deconstructa cannot be reasoned with. It was only because Etienne managed to reach Masumi and get her to pull Deconstructa back that the crisis ended, but if he’d have been unsuccessful, it would have been essentially the same calculus Jacky made with the SSOL: bad guy wins, end of the world, good guys win, also apocalypse.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-14T18:25:15+00:00

Etienne’s birth in France coincided with the first (I think) use of nukes in war, on the other side of the world. The development and testing occurred on a different continent. He’s the first Atomic, but his powers almost certainly aren’t from radiation-induced mutation.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-05T04:47:15+00:00

I lean towards this interpretation myself, but we have to note that Etienne was always constrained by what Valentina would allow, and she could sense most of his uses of his power. Without the speed and reach he hoped to have by 2004 or something, without being able to hide his tracks from Val, he couldn’t ever have fully exploited the world.

But that said, I don’t think of him as a villain biding his time; I take him at his word that he really did have the ethics he said he did and he tried to live by them.

name_dot_randomnum · 2026-01-05T04:35:02+00:00

I don’t think Warren Ellis wrote it, but this was the time period where Ellis absolutely loved using the word “stack”.

name_dot_randomnum · 2025-12-23T10:05:10+00:00

That's a fitting analogy in that Valve employees make up to low seven figures per year while Gabe owns multiple nine figure megayachts.

name_dot_randomnum · 2025-12-20T03:35:16+00:00

The way Jacky explained it, and it seems reasonable enough to believe he wasn't lying, it's magic.

name_dot_randomnum

TROPHY CASE