Dating and Immortality in COH

Going Rogue isn't out yet. When it does, that will get more attention than the devs desire, methinks.

I bet praetoria is primal earth's Arkansas. d;D

Has the Praetorian Statesman ever shown any signs of Aplastic anaemia and or Fanconi's disease?

That's a curious question to ask, and I must ask you to explain how it relates to what I said.

With respect to incest: if an immortal has children, and those children have children and so on, then if said immortal continues to have sexual relationships they will eventually run a high risk of having sex with one of their descendants. In and of itself, this is not particularly more incestuous than any two humans having sex - we're all distant genetic relatives, and in some small or isolated communities we may be significantly more closely related, and this is usually no great cause for concern. The real danger is that if the immortal continues to have children at a regular pace, their genes will eventually come to be overrepresented in the gene pool, much like Genghis Khan. While sex with a distant discendant may not be all that offputting, sex with someone who shares more than a quarter of your genes might be...

Well, technically maybe. But Statesman, immortal or not, hasn't lived all that much longer than actual people have lived yet. He's just physically better off being immortal. He hasn't even caught up with this woman yet.

The only problem Statesman has had to face that real people haven't already faced is the realization that his situation could last indefinitely longer. But he hasn't experienced anything other real human beings have. Real people have lived longer. Real people of his generation saw just as much death and loss in World War I (as he did).

Ignoring anything that immortality would do to his brain, being physically 30 forever means being physically in your sexual prime forever. He's going to be a testosterone-fueled male forever, which means while that doesn't dictate how he (or any other male) will necessarily behave, he'll always have the same physical attractions he had when he was 30. Somehow, I think even Statesman isn't so depressed that he's going to be a monk for eternity.


You know, now that I think about it, immortality for women is a much more interesting situation. So far as I know, there's nothing about male biology that couldn't be sustained indefinitely. But that's not true for women. Women are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, and hypothesizing them just growing back isn't a trivial exercise. We don't assume that immortal people can necessarily just grow back arms and legs: growing back eggs and follicles is kind of a similar thing.

The problem with that is that eggs themselves are an integral part of female biology. They are a critical component of the hormonal cycle. You pop an egg out, and that sets up the cascade of events that eventually lead to hormonal resets, periods, and triple fudge chocolate ice cream. Usually, most women have about a half million of them when they reach puberty, and lose about a thousand of them every period. So you have about 40 years of sexual maturity, maximum. If that process could be made biologically more efficient in theory, you could get to as much as 50,000 years of sexual prime, but really you're more likely to get a few hundred years at best.

Then what? I can only think of two possibilities here. One: immortal or not, youthful physically or not, you go into menopause. Two: the rest of your body somehow picks up the slack or doesn't need the estrogen from those eggs in the first place, and you keep humming along. In either case, we're speculating about women with significantly different hormonal biologies: women who go into menopause but don't physically suffer from that, or women who somehow dodge menopause by having hormones that override anything their ovaries might be doing.

Either way, the physical requirements of immortality might have a much different effect on women than men (unless its all just magic). Heck, if it turns out that immortal women are just hopped up on powerful levels of estrogen and testosterone all the time, then the question of who Statesman dates could be moot. It could be whichever immortal woman gets to him first.


What's my name, Statesman? Say my name, b*tch!

This could make for some interesting fanfic, anyway.


(Then again: the amount of estrogen and testosterone clearly flying around Paragon City even among the mortals sometimes makes me wonder how they even *notice* the effects of Superadyne.)

It's going to be interesting to see if the reactions to you saying this are going to be any different than the ones I got.

Don't be so sure!

(Granted, other publications doing similar experiments have reported mixed results, but well... the possibility may be there).

If you found out you were going to die in six months, would you break up with the person you were with and look for a terminal person to hook up with?


As to the cancer thing, immortals have to have a way to deal with genetic damage over time, or they'd just plain die.

Interesting comparison. It doesn't feel like the same thing to me, but I can't make a wholly rational argument as to why, although the fact that the difference between a finite small quantity and a finite large quantity is always less than the difference between any finite quantity and an infinite quantity does come into play. Perhaps that's not necessary, though - we are talking about emotional matters, and that includes irrational jealousy. Maybe there is a person who would be happy to settle down with an immortal for the rest of their lives. Such a person would have to be much more reconciled with their own insignificance in the face of the infinite than I am.

True.

I think part of this is that not only do you know that he'll find another partner after you're dead (assuming your female) but you also have to watch him strutting around as a smoking hot guy while you're constantly getting older and loosing your prime.

You know, I thought at first that Statesman had no idea that he was going to have a prolonged lifespan when he asked Maiden Justice to marry him, but Web of Arachnos made it pretty clear that the Three Sisters told him he would live longer than a normal man.

Have to admit I wonder if he told her that BEFORE or AFTER he asked her to marry him ...

It might almost be tempting to hook States up for a brief fling with my so-far-as-she-knows-she's-immortal gal around town, Andrea Blake. If he forgives her for publicly embarrassing him, that is...

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Considering the following some of the fictional immortal vampires get (oh so cute, oh so angsty *squee*), I very much doubt it'll be a problem.

There are certainly people who keep dumping their partners for younger versions. As Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed and Confused says, "I love high school girls. I get older and they stay the same age." So maybe someone would enjoy hooking up with someone who won't lose their looks as time goes by. Then there's the concept of the alpha and omega, dominant and submissive. A dominant personality might not want to cohabitate with an immortal, but someone who already considers themselves "less than" might not have any problem with it whatsoever.

I don't recall where I read it, but someone (John Byrne, maybe?) once mentioned that you can't have a character wake up yesterday and say, "Welp, I'm immortal now." It doesn't work from a story perspective. They have to have become immortal hundreds of years earlier. Which is why, I think, all the really resonate stories about immortals take place either over a period of hundreds of years (Highlander) or after they've already been around for that length of time (Interview with the Vampire).


That's a really interesting idea. The "born with a limited number of eggs" thing as pertains to immortal women.... You may have come with an original notion, here. I've certainly never come across the idea in literature or film. For a true science fiction version of immortality, specifically extreme life extension, tailored doses of hormones might become much more important for women as time goes by. I would think that an error would happen sooner or later, like the "odds of getting cancer approach 1" given a sufficiently long life. That would flip the current ratio of long-lived women to men around... unless menopause really doesn't have terribly deleterious effects once you get past a certain danger zone.

Since more women than men live to be quite elderly -- in the 90 to 120 range -- I wonder if at some point outside of a specific window during "the change" it no longer matters that a woman has her eggs or access to the hormones produced during her fertile years. Women tend to live longer than men because they engage in fewer risky behaviors, but when all of that is normalized (as occurs in certain populations such as monks and nuns living identical healthy lifestyles), the women still dominate the supercentenarian set (age 110 and above). That would seem to indicate that hormones play less of a role after a while. Either that, or said women were vital longer, entering menopause later than normal.

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Technically-speaking, but it also depends on the definition of "immortal" that you're working with at any one time. Statesman seems to fall more into the "immortal because his body is indestructible"-line of thought. If the cells no longer die/reproduce (due to whatever MacGuffin you're working with--in his case, the power of Zeus), the statistical probability of cancer appearing disappears along with the biological imperative for it to develop.

Granted, we don't really have an existing example of biology showing indestructible and immortal traits (although there are examples that get extremely close to their respective targets on either side, moreso the latter, however), so we're kind of left with wild speculation. I mean, how exactly do you describe the intricate biology of a living thing that survives the physical effects of a nuclear explosion (see 1976 on the history page)? There's resistance to radiation and heat and pressure...but the silliness of the sheer forces involved in that type of explosion paint the discussion in an interesting light.

Well, you have to think about it. If someone claimed to you that they're immortal, how would they prove it?

The whole notion of immortality as a character trait is that by itself, it has no value. While it can help designate the way a character can initially be seen, it doesn't go much beyond that--it's an alternative form of describing a person's age. Its value is summed up by its ability to act as a framing device for the character's other traits.

The truly interesting immortal characters, in my opinion, are the ones that have lived for significantly longer than the "normal" immortal (assuming they're written well--of course, that assumption should be expected). I'm not talking the random Viking vampire that shows up in fiction, I mean one that participated in the sack of Babylon-kind of old--or even older. It's generally fairly rare that characters that old are written well, though, so it's probably a good thing characters of that type rarely show up as is.

On one hand, it can certainly be interesting to have a character who's seen thousands of years of human history go by. On the other ... an immortal that age will have long since reconciled himself to living in a world of human mayflies and will have resolved all the issues that's facing Statesman. They'll have long since learned how to cope with having a mortal lover age and die on them ...

(Notice how most of the immortals in popular fiction CANNOT have children, though? That was one of the things that intrigued me about New Amsterdam-- the immortal character DID have children throughout his long life ...)

I think writing a character who has seen thousands of years of human history in a way that both conveys their ancient age and yet also makes them seem human takes some skill. A person who has seen the glory of Rome also saw the endless brutalities it did. They experienced the Dark Ages as well as the Enlightenment. They saw the promising birth of the United States and its cruel treatment of African Americans and American Indians.

Heck, imagine how many times someone like that has gone from societies with working plumbing to chamber pots.

I think comparatively "young" immortals don't necessarily work well in comics simply because time is already compressed there. The Marvel Universe has lasted for almost fifty years, but Johnny Storm and Peter Parker are barely into their 20s. You're not going to see time pass there, so the more interesting story elements that you might do with a "young" immortal aren't going to show up. No one is going to get married, have children, watch their children grow up, age, die... it just doesn't work in the media as we normally see it.

I dunno. The immortal character I think I've enjoyed most is Amaranth, from Tales of MU, an immortal nymph... who was born seventeen years ago.

That's kind of the same boat Statesman is in, no?

I found the one in Poul Anderson's "The Boat of a Million Years" that was pretty decently done (especially in the ancient sequences...nice vision of a world long gone). It's worth a read, although not "OMG FANTASTIC!!!one1".

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i know, right? Despite knowing that i've been not capitalizing it on the forums and in game for six years as a sort of identifying affectation.

Although it's actually the love of money that's described as evil in the source material, not money itself. So, i guess it's evil to love women then? If so i say "FIE!" upon your antiquated morality.

The best example of the latter that comes to mind is lobsters.

i think the approach Decorum has to immortality in The Milk of Paradise and the effects on mindset seems one of the more plausible solutions.

Still, full immortality is one those impossible to actually show concepts, much like infinity. In fact you'd have to follow an immortal around for an infinite amount of time to be certain that they are immortal. Immortality in comics is generally of the 'continue living until a big enough hammer crushes you' variety. Comic book immortals can generally be killed, but it takes serious effort to do it; just waiting around for them to drop dead on their own isn't enough.