Why is Reichsman Reichsman?


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Originally Posted by Kheldarn View Post
Because M. Bison was already copyrighted by Capcom.
Of Course!


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Posted

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
je_saist. You're simply wrong.
No Durakken. You're wrong.

Plain and simple. Simply because Statesman and Reichsman both share the name and lineage of Marcus Cole does not mean, in any way, shape, or form that their formative years and experiences are in ANY way identical, outside of the knowledge that both happened to have found the Well of the Furies.

It could be as simple as brainwashing, or as complex as a bunch of hairs-breadth differences in experience that much the Reichsman Cole down a more malevolent and self-serving path. It could also be that the difference in experiences are a lot more than "hairs-breadth".

Indeed, this version of Cole could believe he's still doing his level best to help people. But, at this point, whole classes of people have been denied the basic acknowledgement of "humanity". As always, it's a lot easier to do monstrous things to people if you lie to yourself and deny they actually ARE people in the first place.



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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
"Born Marcus Cole, he began his transformation from a poverty born child to world hero after serving in the US Army during World War I. Instead of coming home in 1918 he headed east, bent on exploring the world now that he'd had a taste of it."

"Instead of coming home in 1918 he headed east, bent on exploring the world now that he'd had a taste of it. Where he went and what happened to him during that lost decade remains a secret to this day."

http://www.cityofheroes.com/game_inf...roduction.html

It says East or Far East


However they are looking for the fictional Greek island of Praxidae which would be south east of Germany in the Mediterranean... Maybe the clues for it led them further east and then back, either way they wouldn't have had to cross germany in that time and i doubt they would have.
That's Statesman's history, not Reichsman's.

Your "divergent reality" theory is assuming that all of those things happened exactly like that in every reality.

You are completely discarding the possibility that the divergence in YOUR OWN THEORY may have been prior to any of those things happening.

It is you who keeps saying that it's a divergent reality, yet you refuse to accept that the divergence happened anywhere else but where YOU say it did.

Reichsman is NOT Statesman, his life played out differently. Since his life played out differently he is the same person in genetics only. Like I said before, any number of things could have happened to cause the differences, and they could have happened before Cole was even born. Since we have been given very little information concerning Reichsman's early life, we can't assume it played out identically up to a certain point. If it DID play out identically he would be Statesman in every reality, and he is not.

Tyrant's history played out closer to Statesman's than Reichsman's did. His point of divergence seems to have been his decision to murder his best friend.

It seems far more likely that OUR Marcus Cole is the divergent one. Out of the 3 we have been shown, 2 of them are power hungry dictators, and ours is a patriotic hero. That tells me that out of all the realities in which Marcus Cole found the Well of Furies, more often than not he chooses to use the power selfishly. Most likely due to the fact that his life was not the same in every reality.

There is nothing that says he has to join the army in order to find the Well, he could have stumbled on it by accident while hiking.

There's nothing that says he even has to be American. In a multiverse with infinite possibilities it is entirely possible he was German, or French, or any other nationality. There's no guarantee America will even EXIST in any given reality.

I mean, do you really think Portal Corp has discovered and explored every reality that could possibly exist? That would be impossible in an infinite multiverse, which spins off new realities every time ANY living creature makes a decision. Every time you make a decision, new realities are created in which you did NOT make that decision.


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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

 

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
All Marcus Coles we've been introduced to have been mercenaries. By definition. Don't add conotation to the word.

Even if you don't accept the idea of divergent reality, which is stupid, you are forced to assume that most if not all of the history was exactly the same. Especially all major events and people, save for those stated be different and those proceding after that point.

If you want to say "it's fiction" stop. You have no more reason to post. You have nothing to add. Everyone gets that it is fiction and you can do anything in it. However, fiction that works on the princple "it's fiction so i can do whatever" is almost universally panned. Guess why.

And AGAIN I never said all Coles were inherently "good". They all Share the exact same environment for most of his life which would produce, the exact same person or close to.
Throughout this thread, you've bordered on insulting people. I think with this post you've achieved it. I find it offensive that you're telling me (and others) that if we are to post in a particular way, you forbid it. Why, because the content of the post may put into question the content of your post?

I'll say it again (and feel free to insult me by calling me stupid or something similar) - you cannot know any more than the rest of us that Reichsman comes from a divergent reality. Therefore, apart from what's been fed to us by Cryptic/NCSoft/etc, any assumptions anyone makes are just that - assumptions. Sure, this can lead to theories, but again that just means they're theories. Until proven erroneous, the theory stands. Trouble is, almost everyone has a theory (that's the problem with free will and such).

In your OP you asked this question 'What are your thoughts?' - people gave their thoughts and you gave yours. People challenged your theories and logic, and you challenged theirs, but it feels that (directly and indirectly) you have taken difference of opinion personally and posted comments that could be construed as insulting.

I suggest this thread be locked/deleted sooner rather than later as I question how constructive it really is.


 

Posted

"I still don't think that would be enough to cause him to be ok with the holocaust"

"or perhaps Cole saw what was happening and tried to stop the holocaust"

"in other words he said the holocaust was a good thing"

"For Reichsman to exist Cole would have to suddenly start hating Jews for no apparent (as of yet known) reason. I very much doubt that would happen as Cole was well traveled and likely accepting of cultures by that time and not to mention grew up in america and already viewed Germany as the enemy."


All the above lines are taken out of posts I think that there is a definite direction in these lines to suggest Cole / Reichsman was essentially good and was turned evil. I read this entire thread and I don't see any compelling reason to think the Cole we are talking about was ever good.

I would think that any event that changed the Cole would have been in his early childhood or before he was born perhaps his parents were bitter. I think that is easily to swallow than a hero being turned by the "evil doers".


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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
They all Share the exact same environment for most of his life which would produce, the exact same person or close to.
Bull****.

And I repeat BULL****.

While they share a couple of bullet point moments (in a roughly 100 year timeline) it does NOT mean their environments were "the same" or even CLOSE to it.

Again, as we're talking about very small pinpoints of similarity, there are vast tracts of time that could account for major divergences. Both before and after the salient event of the Well of the Furies.



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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
(snip)
So the earliest Cole and hitler could have met is 1930 because immediately after 1918 Cole took off to the far East where it has to be assumed that the Well of Furies is... And it took them till 1930 to find it, but they didn't come straight home because they didn't get back till 1931.

Between 1930 and 1933 it is likely Hitler was working on building the Nazi party which likely could have caught Cole's attention.

(snip)

I still don't think that would be enough to cause him to be ok with the holocaust, but then...

I think this is the only way to get by the Holocaust problem...

As a history teacher, I disagree with some of this. You assume that THIS Cole fought for the Allies in World War One. This is not suggested anywhere in Reichsman narrative. As a mercenary, he may have chosen to fight for the Central Powers, which may have led to his meeting the man who would be Fuhrer before 1930. And Hitler was building the party well before 1930, as the failed Munich Putsch indicates.
Cole, too, as a soldier in his own way, may have felt sympathy for the Germans, suffering under the Diktat of Versailles and its Article 231 (blaming Germany ENTIRELY for the war) which was imposed upon them by the vindictive allies.
You assume, too, that the Nazis imposed the Holocaust as soon as they came to power. This is not true. Even some Jews may have voted for the Nazis, who lessened their anti-Jewish rhetoric in favor of anti-Communist and 'strong Germany' rhetoric, at least until the end of the 1920's. The Nuremberg Laws were put into place in 1935, and in the world of this Marcus Cole, perhaps 'evacuation' of the Jews really did mean 'evacuation.' Not all Nazis favored the concentration camp model imposed by the SS just before Wannsee in 1942. The Holocaust as we think of it, with exterminations and death camps, does not really pick up steam until late 1941, though the Einsatzgruppen were active before then. Could Cole, as a mercenary, been active in the Einsatzgruppen, assuming he had internalized European and American anti-Semitism? THERE is a scary thought.
In our world, sterilization rather than evacuation was argued by many as a more humane, acceptable alternative (see, for example, Stuckart, Neumann, and Kritizinger, who argued against 'evacuation'). Perhaps that is what took place in Reichsman's world.
I would point out as well that anti-Semitism was not limited to Nazi Germany; much of Europe had no problem handing over their Jews to our own Nazis in this world, and even the United States felt it had too many Jews already (see, for example, the story of the SS St. Louis)


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Durakken should get a shovel:

je_saist. You're simply wrong. People are who they are because of their pasts and the world is created from their past. As already said, it is near impossible to have anything near what the world is like if it doesn't follow the same path up until a divergence point. In this case Sometime after Cole becomes an incarnate.
You're wrong from the beginning because you make the assumption that alternate/parallel dimensions must be the result of some divergence point. Ain't necessarily so. In fact, that's the way Marvel Comics do it in What If? and Exiles, but all their dimensions aren't so. DC, on the other hand, virtually ignores the concept and things simply develop differently in different dimensions. The reason is "because they did".

I highly suspect that what we're looking at here is not What If? but rather the old-school Earth 1/Earth 2 thing from DC. They're simply different. No divergence point needed or given.

In fact, given all the discrepancies mentioned in this thread, I'd be almost assured of it.


Dec out.

 

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Durakken says one and only one:

je_saist, I already explained why one must assume that the history is exactly the same up until that point. If you disagree wit that provide an argument against that instead of just saying "NU HUH!!!!"
Your explanation is nice sounding nonsense. The universe is not a pool table. The world never hinges on one and only one event. There are hundreds...thousands of influences on even the most meaningless events. Sure, sometimes you can change one thing and it makes big changes. Most of the time you could make hundreds of changes and nothing would change.

It would certainly have been possible for there to be a Nazi Germany without Hitler. Do you think he did it by himself? What it needs is someone "Hitler-LIKE" but it doesn't have to be him. To be honest, guys like Goebbels had a whole lot more to do with shaping the Nazis than Hitler himself.


Dec out.

 

Posted

Old Gray, as I keep saying, unless other wise stated it is automatic that you assume that the same course of events happened up until the point of divergence. So if it is not implied and stated then the events happened exactly as they did for Primal Earth...

Now i haven't looked at and compared the 2 descripts, but rather read, processed, read... When you do that some things are lost so I'm willing to say that my previous idea on how and where the divergence occured may be wrong, so let's look at the descripts and see...

Statesman - "During the war, he had been exposed to Mustard Gas and become ill. He knew that he would prematurely die if he did not find the Well. Friends from his unit joined him in his search including Marcus's best friend, Stefan Richter. They became mercenaries trying to help Marcus find more information on where the Well of the Furies was and how to unlock its power"

Reichsman - "This Marcus Cole, from an alternate dimension, was a rogue and a mercenary who was exposed to mustard gas during World War I. In search of a cure for the effects of the gas, Marcus discovered the Well of the Furies."

Statesman implies that Cole enlisted with the military, got close with his units during the War and then been exposed to the Mustard Gas. After the war he became a merc with his unit to find the Well.

Reichsman says that Cole was a rogue and a mercanery and then got exposed to Mustard Gas. And also no mention of Stefan, but he still goes and looks for the Well.

So it seems the divergence happened before 1918... and if he's a Rogue it might imply that he never got over his parents death and that he was moved to Austria earlier as the only reason he's over there as Statesman Cole us cuz he's in the military and I don't think you could leave the country to go be a merc then, especially if you're a rogue at that time in history...

Also I never said they started the holocaust as soon as Nazis took over. I said given history that Marcus Cole wouldn't allow that to happen unless there was something else we didn't know in his background...


 

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
"Born Marcus Cole, he began his transformation from a poverty born child to world hero after serving in the US Army during World War I. Instead of coming home in 1918 he headed east, bent on exploring the world now that he'd had a taste of it."

"Instead of coming home in 1918 he headed east, bent on exploring the world now that he'd had a taste of it. Where he went and what happened to him during that lost decade remains a secret to this day."

http://www.cityofheroes.com/game_inf...roduction.html

It says East or Far East


However they are looking for the fictional Greek island of Praxidae which would be south east of Germany in the Mediterranean... Maybe the clues for it led them further east and then back, either way they wouldn't have had to cross germany in that time and i doubt they would have.
I see where you got Far East -- it says so on the official timeline. However, there are two things I think you're conflating, "east" and "Far East," and somehow combining them into the search for the Well.

After WWI, "east" would've been anywhere on the other side of the English Channel, because England is almost certainly where Cole was taken after the mustard gas incident. I don't recall where the novel said he was exposed to the chemical, but it was probably somewhere in France or Belgium, in what was then known as the Western Front. So France, Italy, Greece... these are all east from Cole's starting point after WWI.

The official timeline says "1918 - Marcus Cole, who becomes Statesman, travels the Far East." The only way he would be strong enough to do that is if he had already opened Pandora's Box. I also think the reason that it says that is because the Pandora's Box notion occurred to the Devs after they wrote the timeline. Statesman's original backstory said he'd gotten his abilities because "he'd mastered his inner will." That really sounds a lot like typical comic book shorthand for "learned amazing techniques from wise teachers of the Orient." It's been used by many characters from The Shadow to Iron Fist to recent versions of Batman, to name a few. Now, of course, the "mastered his inner will" line is being waved aside as Cole prevaricating.

Normally that leads to slight incongruities when trying to retcon a new spin on an original story -- the most famous recent example being Obi Wan Kenobi's lame offering of "What I told you was true... from a certain point of view." -- but in this case, it actually supports the notion that Cole is, at heart, a bad guy who somehow managed to beat the odds on Primal Earth and become a good guy, where all his other incarnations turned out evil.


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Originally Posted by Decorum View Post
You're wrong from the beginning because you make the assumption that alternate/parallel dimensions must be the result of some divergence point. Ain't necessarily so. In fact, that's the way Marvel Comics do it in What If? and Exiles, but all their dimensions aren't so. DC, on the other hand, virtually ignores the concept and things simply develop differently in different dimensions. The reason is "because they did".

I highly suspect that what we're looking at here is not What If? but rather the old-school Earth 1/Earth 2 thing from DC. They're simply different. No divergence point needed or given.

In fact, given all the discrepancies mentioned in this thread, I'd be almost assured of it.
first, why would you add "says one and only one:" That makes no sense...

Secondly, I don't care where the divergence is. It may have happened 2000 years ago like in the case of the Rikti or if it was yesterday at midnight. It doesn't matter. When you're looking at a history you look at the Prime history and any point before the point that is altered it is the same as the prime history. I'm not talking about a branched system. Universes that happen completely separate and and never interact if you were to look at them and find they are relatively close to each other then their history will be nearly if not completely exact. Because of this the assumption is always that they are unless other wise stated...and when it is stated you move the divergence point back.

It has nothing to do with a branching system. Just chance and probability.


 

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Originally Posted by Ironik View Post
I see where you got Far East -- it says so on the official timeline. However, there are two things I think you're conflating, "east" and "Far East," and somehow combining them into the search for the Well.

After WWI, "east" would've been anywhere on the other side of the English Channel, because England is almost certainly where Cole was taken after the mustard gas incident. I don't recall where the novel said he was exposed to the chemical, but it was probably somewhere in France or Belgium, in what was then known as the Western Front. So France, Italy, Greece... these are all east from Cole's starting point after WWI.

The official timeline says "1918 - Marcus Cole, who becomes Statesman, travels the Far East." The only way he would be strong enough to do that is if he had already opened Pandora's Box. I also think the reason that it says that is because the Pandora's Box notion occurred to the Devs after they wrote the timeline. Statesman's original backstory said he'd gotten his abilities because "he'd mastered his inner will." That really sounds a lot like typical comic book shorthand for "learned amazing techniques from wise teachers of the Orient." It's been used by many characters from The Shadow to Iron Fist to recent versions of Batman, to name a few. Now, of course, the "mastered his inner will" line is being waved aside as Cole prevaricating.

Normally that leads to slight incongruities when trying to retcon a new spin on an original story -- the most famous recent example being Obi Wan Kenobi's lame offering of "What I told you was true... from a certain point of view." -- but in this case, it actually supports the notion that Cole is, at heart, a bad guy who somehow managed to beat the odds on Primal Earth and become a good guy, where all his other incarnations turned out evil.
Praetorian history is somewhat funny in that aspect... a quick gleaning appears to put the divergence point in 1823 when Paragon City was instead named Shroud city... and this had no effect at all on the world until Cole randomly killed Stefan at the Well of the Furies... which had no effect known... until MacArthur launched a nuke at Korea and then everything starts going in another direction...

So it seems that Stefan Richter and the name Paragon City is the reason Cole turned out as Statesman...who would have thought.


 

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
All Marcus Coles we've been introduced to have been mercenaries. By definition. Don't add conotation to the word.

Even if you don't accept the idea of divergent reality, which is stupid, you are forced to assume that most if not all of the history was exactly the same. Especially all major events and people, save for those stated be different and those proceding after that point.

If you want to say "it's fiction" stop. You have no more reason to post. You have nothing to add. Everyone gets that it is fiction and you can do anything in it. However, fiction that works on the princple "it's fiction so i can do whatever" is almost universally panned. Guess why.

And AGAIN I never said all Coles were inherently "good". They all Share the exact same environment for most of his life which would produce, the exact same person or close to.
I'm fine with that.

But like I said, it's clear that Statesman is the aberration, based on the evidence we have. All other versions of Cole that we know about are evil.

"Mercenary" to me does connote a certain, shall we say, "moral flexibility" that allows someone to kill and steal fro money without considering the consequences in regard to Right and Wrong. I think Statesman was headed down the road to being just like Lord Recluse or Tyrant or Reichsman but something persuaded him to be good rather than bad on Primal Earth.


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Posted

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
Old Gray, as I keep saying, unless other wise stated it is automatic that you assume
Maybe for YOU it is.

But, as people have been telling you from the get-go here, it is NOT necessarily automatic for anyone else.



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Posted

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
Old Gray, as I keep saying, unless other wise stated it is automatic that you assume that the same course of events happened up until the point of divergence. So if it is not implied and stated then the events happened exactly as they did for Primal Earth...

Now i haven't looked at and compared the 2 descripts, but rather read, processed, read... When you do that some things are lost so I'm willing to say that my previous idea on how and where the divergence occured may be wrong, so let's look at the descripts and see...

Statesman - "During the war, he had been exposed to Mustard Gas and become ill. He knew that he would prematurely die if he did not find the Well. Friends from his unit joined him in his search including Marcus's best friend, Stefan Richter. They became mercenaries trying to help Marcus find more information on where the Well of the Furies was and how to unlock its power"

Reichsman - "This Marcus Cole, from an alternate dimension, was a rogue and a mercenary who was exposed to mustard gas during World War I. In search of a cure for the effects of the gas, Marcus discovered the Well of the Furies."

Statesman implies that Cole enlisted with the military, got close with his units during the War and then been exposed to the Mustard Gas. After the war he became a merc with his unit to find the Well.

Reichsman says that Cole was a rogue and a mercanery and then got exposed to Mustard Gas. And also no mention of Stefan, but he still goes and looks for the Well.

So it seems the divergence happened before 1918... and if he's a Rogue it might imply that he never got over his parents death and that he was moved to Austria earlier as the only reason he's over there as Statesman Cole us cuz he's in the military and I don't think you could leave the country to go be a merc then, especially if you're a rogue at that time in history...

Also I never said they started the holocaust as soon as Nazis took over. I said given history that Marcus Cole wouldn't allow that to happen unless there was something else we didn't know in his background...
I think you need to define what you mean by 'the Holocaust' because you are simply assuming that in the Reichsman timeline, it occured as it did here. Even here, the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, what we think of as 'the Holocaust', was not determined until after World War Two had started. Many Germans, shoot, many Europeans and an uncomfortable number of Americans thought the Nuremberg Laws and the isolation of Jews were perfectly acceptable and even necessary. It does NOT mean that they wanted the Jews dead. Who is to say that 6 death camps ever existed in the alternate timeline? The Germans did not exactly advertise what they were doing, either, and intentionally misled both Germans and the conquered populations. For God's sake, they made Jewish prisoners send home postcards saying what a great time they were having, just before they sent them to the gas chambers. But that is in THIS universe. Again, perhaps the sterilization route was taken. Perhaps Reinhard Heydrich was killed sooner, and never organized Wannsee. Perhaps Adolf Eichmann never existed to carry out Heydrich's grand vision. We just do not know.
And perhaps Reichs Cole saw in Germany, a country of culture, a country with a glorious military history, a country full of pride that had been pointlessly humiliated and deserved his support. Perhaps he saw America as abandoning its promise to Germany to negotiate a just peace, and abandoned his birth place for his new home.
And can I just say that as a Pole, it is not easy to write nice things about early and mid 20th century Germany. :-/


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Posted

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Originally Posted by Durakken View Post
first, why would you add "says one and only one:" That makes no sense...

Secondly, I don't care where the divergence is. It may have happened 2000 years ago like in the case of the Rikti or if it was yesterday at midnight. It doesn't matter. When you're looking at a history you look at the Prime history and any point before the point that is altered it is the same as the prime history. I'm not talking about a branched system. Universes that happen completely separate and and never interact if you were to look at them and find they are relatively close to each other then their history will be nearly if not completely exact. Because of this the assumption is always that they are unless other wise stated...and when it is stated you move the divergence point back.

It has nothing to do with a branching system. Just chance and probability.
While there's no official evidence supporting divergent realities, that's as palatable an explanation as any for the differences between the various incarnations we see when traveling to parallel Earths. It may have been something small or something large that led to the differences we see "today" such as the Rikti Earth being so completely different (large change) or Praetorian Earth being somewhat different (small change).

As I say, I'm fine with divergent realities, and arguing whether that's the mechanism or not is immaterial until something is added to the game (which is canon uber alles, even to Dev pronouncements, per Manticore's canon thread) that explicitly states how it all works.

As Robert Frost said,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


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Posted

Raphael says that this is now the new dumbest thread ever.


They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

 

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Originally Posted by Old_Gray View Post
I think you need to define what you mean by 'the Holocaust' because you are simply assuming that in the Reichsman timeline, it occured as it did here. Even here, the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, what we think of as 'the Holocaust', was not determined until after World War Two had started. Many Germans, shoot, many Europeans and an uncomfortable number of Americans thought the Nuremberg Laws and the isolation of Jews were perfectly acceptable and even necessary. It does NOT mean that they wanted the Jews dead. Who is to say that 6 death camps ever existed in the alternate timeline? The Germans did not exactly advertise what they were doing, either, and intentionally misled both Germans and the conquered populations. For God's sake, they made Jewish prisoners send home postcards saying what a great time they were having, just before they sent them to the gas chambers. But that is in THIS universe. Again, perhaps the sterilization route was taken. Perhaps Reinhard Heydrich was killed sooner, and never organized Wannsee. Perhaps Adolf Eichmann never existed to carry out Heydrich's grand vision. We just do not know.
And perhaps Reichs Cole saw in Germany, a country of culture, a country with a glorious military history, a country full of pride that had been pointlessly humiliated and deserved his support. Perhaps he saw America as abandoning its promise to Germany to negotiate a just peace, and abandoned his birth place for his new home.
And can I just say that as a Pole, it is not easy to write nice things about early and mid 20th century Germany. :-/
How is it that you completely missed everything I said? 1 little iota had to do with the Holocaust in that post tangentially. The whole point of that post was to show why and where I was wrong about my idea about where the divergence took place.

The other Coles, presented as they are, wouldn't never be ok with the Holocaust. If they found out it was happening they'd stop it. This is because they as far as been told have virtually the same past. My reading of Reichsman description led me to think he did to, but rereading has shown it hasn't and one who didn't...who was more corrupted and disaffected as Reaichsman Cole seems to have been might given the proper coaxing.


 

Posted

Durakken, I think you need to take a step back and take a deep breath. You do seem to be taking this personally.

As a long-time reader of both science fiction and comic books, there have been parallel universe stories which are based on divergent reality and those which are different just because they are different. In this case, there's no evidence that either assumption is correct, so arguing that CoH's alternate universes HAVE to be the result of divergent reality is unsupported.

As others have pointed out, even in comics there are both Divergent Reality stories and Different Reality stories standing side-by-side. Both DC and Marvel have them, and lately Dark Horse and Image have played around with it. So Reichsman, Tyrant, Rikti could be either Div-R or Diff-R or *both* at the same time.

As others have pointed out, just because *you* assume this is a case of Div-R doesn't mean everyone does. Personally, I prefer Div-R over Diff-R because it opens up interesting meditations on what small events lead to large changes ("The Sound of Thunder" by Bradbury), but I also enjoy Diff-R tales because they open up discussions on how a similar person would react given different circumstances ("Red Son" by Millar in DC, the Marvel Noir and Marvel 1602 stories by various over at Marvel).


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Posted

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Durakken wonders:

first, why would you add "says one and only one:" That makes no sense...
...method of looking at this.

Quote:
Secondly, I don't care where the divergence is. It may have happened 2000 years ago like in the case of the Rikti or if it was yesterday at midnight. It doesn't matter. When you're looking at a history you look at the Prime history and any point before the point that is altered it is the same as the prime history. I'm not talking about a branched system. Universes that happen completely separate and and never interact if you were to look at them and find they are relatively close to each other then their history will be nearly if not completely exact. Because of this the assumption is always that they are unless other wise stated...and when it is stated you move the divergence point back.

It has nothing to do with a branching system. Just chance and probability.
These are fictional systems following comic books super-heroes. Your way of looking at it is not the only way. In a multiversal system, your choices are infinite. The way you're looking at it is the Marvel way. Precedent is there for non-divergent dimensions that are very similar without there being some kind of divergence point or points (as I mentioned, the DC way).

I take issue with "nearly but not completely exact". That's nothing but something out of your own head. "Close, with a lot of details changed" is more like it, and even that doesn't HAVE to be.

In short, you're trying to force your own rules inappropriately on something fictional in order to fit your own questions/theory. Hammering the proverbial square peg into the inevitable round hole, as it were.


Dec out.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Decorum View Post
...method of looking at this.



These are fictional systems following comic books super-heroes. Your way of looking at it is not the only way. In a multiversal system, your choices are infinite. The way you're looking at it is the Marvel way. Precedent is there for non-divergent dimensions that are very similar without there being some kind of divergence point or points (as I mentioned, the DC way).

I take issue with "nearly but not completely exact". That's nothing but something out of your own head. "Close, with a lot of details changed" is more like it, and even that doesn't HAVE to be.

In short, you're trying to force your own rules inappropriately on something fictional in order to fit your own questions/theory. Hammering the proverbial square peg into the inevitable round hole, as it were.
Decorum is right about your assumptions Durakken. Your assertions are simply just YOUR assertions. So they are no more true than anyone else's.

That said, however, I will point out that both Marvel and DC use both Divergent Reality stories and Different Reality stories when building parallel universes. Sometimes, as in the Marvel book Exiles, at the same time.


The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Decorum View Post
...method of looking at this.



These are fictional systems following comic books super-heroes. Your way of looking at it is not the only way. In a multiversal system, your choices are infinite. The way you're looking at it is the Marvel way. Precedent is there for non-divergent dimensions that are very similar without there being some kind of divergence point or points (as I mentioned, the DC way).

I take issue with "nearly but not completely exact". That's nothing but something out of your own head. "Close, with a lot of details changed" is more like it, and even that doesn't HAVE to be.

In short, you're trying to force your own rules inappropriately on something fictional in order to fit your own questions/theory. Hammering the proverbial square peg into the inevitable round hole, as it were.
These are not my rules. This what we automatically assume with any work of fiction that takes place on any thing we have foreknowledge of. It's basic human knowledge and psychology.

And again, all you are saying is "it fiction they can do anything" and again while that is true, when authors do that it more often than not results in being universally considered a bad thing. That is because we make those automatic assumptions.


 

Posted

Calling someone or their thoughts stupid will rarely win you an argument or supporters.

Just saying.

Onto the original question.

I've always just taken this story as, "Well in this universe Statesman sided with the Germans."

Alrighty.

No why or how. Just where do I go to beat the jerk up?


@Mental Maden @Maden Mental
"....you are now tackle free for life."-ShoNuff