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  1. #16
    Uncanny Member Digifiend's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    The interesting thing about Power Girl in particular is that she got folded into the post-Crisis history as an Atlantean, and then got her “refugee from Earth 2” status restored by Infinite Crisis; but even then, she kept her post-Crisis memories right up until the Flashpoint reboot. She remembers being Superman's cousin; but she specifically remembers another Earth's Superman being her cousin. She is still a refugee from another world.
    She did actually get home to Earth-2 once. But it was a recreated version, and Power Girl had been recreated with it, leaving the Justice Society Infinity (a merger of JSA and Infinity Inc), to believe the one we know was an imposter.

    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    Second: what's that going to do to people? I have a feeling that therapists are going to be in high demand in the immediate future, as people struggle to come to terms with multiple sets of conflicting memories. And does that mean that secrets potentially revealed and then concealed are now out in the open again? E.g., everyone now remembers that Nightwing is Dick Grayson. Or is that memory somehow immune to the Lasso?
    Spyral fixed that for him. So no, nobody will remember Dick is Nightwing unless they're supposed to know (the Bat family, Justice League, and Titans).

    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    In the case of Wonder Woman, we have an entirely different issue restricting what kinds of stories we can tell about her — for now, at least: she's MIA. If you want to tell stories about her past, you still can. I'd even be okay with the “it all happened!” timeline including the four-generation timeline that was on the docket before everything went crazy last year, and telling stories about a Wonder Woman who was the first superhero and who helped found the Justice Society (as opposed to joining a bit later as their secretary). But contemporary stories of Wonder Woman? They're on hold until her return.
    She's still starring in her solo book though.
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  2. #17
    Incredible Member Hol's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    So after reading DM#7, I find myself wondering what this means going forward.

    First, the “new timeline” that they were planning appears to have been scrapped, in favor of of a setup where everyone remembers everything. As I interpret it, this is in effect an evolution of the Metaverse from Doomsday Clock: Superman first appeared in 1939, then the timeline was asked in 1957 and several times since then; and after Diana dipped her Lasso of Truth into the Cosmic Forge, everyone in the current iteration of the Metaverse regained memories from all of the prior iterations of the Metaverse.
    I'm assuming that this extension of memories only pertains to the primary Earth of the DCU: for instance, Superman didn't gain the memories of President Superman, because President Superman is not and never was from the Metaverse. Spinoff Earths may have acquired a similar unlocking of memories from previous iterations, if “previous iterations” are a thing outside of the Metaverse — which may well be the case, considering Convergence. But it's just as possible that each alternate world is its own thing, with just a single history. Again dipping into Doomsday Clock, you have the archival Earths (Earth 2, Earth 1985, Earth 52, and so on) which were spun off of the Metaverse when its timeline underwent overhauls; and even if Convergence is true and there are new iterations of each, is possible that the “archival Earth” thing happened when those worlds for updated to newer iterations.

    That said, I think it would be simpler to restrict the “everyone remembers everything” effect to the focal world of DC Comics.

    Second: what's that going to do to people? I have a feeling that therapists are going to be in high demand in the immediate future, as people struggle to come to terms with multiple sets of conflicting memories. And does that mean that secrets potentially revealed and then concealed are now out in the open again? E.g., everyone now remembers that Nightwing is Dick Grayson. Or is that memory somehow immune to the Lasso?

    Third, the Two Central Worlds, neither of which is Earth 0. One is called the Elseworld, and is described as the antithesis of the other. Nothing is known about the other. Speculation: the Elseworld is the new reality's version of the Cosmic Forge: it's kind of like the Metaverse in that it's spawning other worlds in the Multiverse; but it's spawning them all the time and in much more radical ways.

    As for the other one, it may well be that I'm wrong about Earth-0 being the Metaverse. Instead, Earth-0 may well be merely the latest Earth to be spun off of the Metaverse, with DM's resolution being the triggering event, and the actual Metaverse may be the other central world. The planned “new timeline” may actually still be a thing in this new reality, as the Metaverse's newest iteration. But unlike earlier iterations, it's not the focus of DC Comics.

    Or perhaps the other central Earth was previously Earth-33, a.k.a., Earth Prime, a.k.a. us. Which means that it will never be visited by anyone in the comics, except through fourth-wall schticks like what Animal Man did back in the 90s. (The “new” Earth-33, by contrast, would be a reconstituted pre-Crisis Earth Prime, where Superboy Prime found himself at the end of the DM tie-in that he featured in.)

    Thoughts?
    The fact that I understand this completely tells me I have been reading DC comics way too long.

  3. #18
    Extraordinary Member Zero Hunter's Avatar
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    DC is a bigger mess now than it has ever been. I mean from top to bottom it is just a jumbled up confusing trainwreck. When everything happened and nothing matters whyvthe hell should I care anymore?

  4. #19
    duke's casettetape lemonpeace's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zero Hunter View Post
    DC is a bigger mess now than it has ever been. I mean from top to bottom it is just a jumbled up confusing trainwreck. When everything happened and nothing matters whyvthe hell should I care anymore?
    honestly, you probably shouldn't if you don't understand the new set-up and/or if you think that "everything happened" means nothing matters.
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  5. #20
    Astonishing Member Stanlos's Avatar
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    Honestly I thought the idea was there would be no broad far reaching continuity and each project would be a its own self contained story set wherever with whatever conditions. So you want to have the Joe Kelly era League but with the Hawkworld era Katar Hol and the New 52 Hal Jordan? Whatever! Your tale takes place in a verse with that permutation of the characters.

  6. #21
    Astonishing Member Dataweaver's Avatar
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    That certainly works in terms of the newly expanded Multiverse. In terms of Earth 0, not so much.
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  7. #22
    Obsessed & Compelled Bored at 3:00AM's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    That certainly works in terms of the newly expanded Multiverse. In terms of Earth 0, not so much.
    Why not?

    I'm a little surprised by the certainty that people have that this new set-up will automatically be bad when we haven't seen in put into practice yet. There will no doubt be bad to mediocre comics told with this set-up, but that was true in every prior permutation of continuity. The key difference now is that bad stories can be immediately ignored without the need to explain them away. They can just fade into the great giant sea of forgotten stories, allowing creators to move on to better stuff.

    It doesn't mean that stories can't use inter-connected continuity to build upon older stories or reference what's going on in other book, but they now don't need to do so. How is that a bad approach? That feels like the best of both worlds to me. It might not be, but it could be.

    Now, I have no idea if that's how it's actually going to work, and neither do you or anyone else. We won't actually know how this new status quo is going to work until we actually see comics using it, so all these dire predictions I'm reading on this forum seem a tad premature.

  8. #23
    Astonishing Member Dataweaver's Avatar
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    I'm also in favor of an infinite multiverse. And if the writer wants to tell a story independent of continuity, he can just set it on an unnamed, one-off world; no miss, no fuss. And if that story prices popular enough to warrant a sequel, then that would can be revisited. That's what I meant when I said that it works in terms of the newly expanded Multiverse.

    But if a story is set on Earth-0, that includes an implicit promise that it will abide by that meta-history. And that in turn means not mixing the different timelines. Not without explanation. The set of characters described in the post I was responding to never existed in the same timeline. So you can't just throw them all together without explaining how they got together from different timelines. Granted, that's easier to do now than it was when the status quo was that the previous iterations no longer exist. But it's still not as simple as just throwing them together willy-nilly.
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  9. #24
    Obsessed & Compelled Bored at 3:00AM's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    I'm also in favor of an infinite multiverse. And if the writer wants to tell a story independent of continuity, he can just set it on an unnamed, one-off world; no miss, no fuss. And if that story prices popular enough to warrant a sequel, then that would can be revisited. That's what I meant when I said that it works in terms of the newly expanded Multiverse.

    But if a story is set on Earth-0, that includes an implicit promise that it will abide by that meta-history. And that in turn means not mixing the different timelines. Not without explanation. The set of characters described in the post I was responding to never existed in the same timeline. So you can't just throw them all together without explaining how they got together from different timelines. Granted, that's easier to do now than it was when the status quo was that the previous iterations no longer exist. But it's still not as simple as just throwing them together willy-nilly.
    Again, why not?

    Just because the DCU operated by certain rules before does not mean those same rules apply now. Why impose all these walls and barriers between stories when you can just let creators pick and choose to form the best stories they can?

    I'd rather see how this works in the comics themselves before passing any judgements quite yet.

  10. #25
    Astonishing Member Dataweaver's Avatar
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    If you don't want walls and barriers, you've got an Infinite Frontier worth of alternate worlds to work with; as I said, you're free to make them up on the spot if you'd like. And if DC Comics' primary motivation here is to give their writers utterly unfettered freedom to tell whatever stories to want without any constraints, then I heartily recommend shifting the focus of stories from now on into nameless alternate Earths and away from Earth-0. That's what they're there for.

    But there's another side to the equation: what the readers want. DC has tried before with the “never mind continuity; we'll just write whatever we want.” That was the idea behind DCYou, and it bombed. Like it or not, the readers want more than just good stories. They also want some consistency, a shared universe. Continuity.

    Earth-0 exists to provide that. If it fails to do so, it will fail.
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  11. #26
    Obsessed & Compelled Bored at 3:00AM's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dataweaver View Post
    If you don't want walls and barriers, you've got an Infinite Frontier worth of alternate worlds to work with; as I said, you're free to make them up on the spot if you'd like. And if DC Comics' primary motivation here is to give their writers utterly unfettered freedom to tell whatever stories to want without any constraints, then I heartily recommend shifting the focus of stories from now on into nameless alternate Earths and away from Earth-0. That's what they're there for.

    But there's another side to the equation: what the readers want. DC has tried before with the “never mind continuity; we'll just write whatever we want.” That was the idea behind DCYou, and it bombed. Like it or not, the readers want more than just good stories. They also want some consistency, a shared universe. Continuity.

    Earth-0 exists to provide that. If it fails to do so, it will fail.
    And I would argue that DCYou failed because the stories weren't particularly good.

    There's nothing to say that there won't be some consistency, continuity or a shared universe moving forward. It's just that the rules once constraining creators about what they could or couldn't reference in regards to the past are now gone. That doesn't remove continuity, it simply re-contextualizes it in a way we haven't seen since Hypertime was introduced, then never implemented by anyone but Waid & Morrison. That may also happen with this new incarnation of DCU continuity, but it may not.

    Once again, we don't actually know how this is going to work, nor do the creators (all of whom seem confused about it). So, if we don't know yet, it is premature to make any assumptions about its failure.

    I also suspect that the shift of Earth-0 away from the center of the Multiverse is a pretty clear sign that it will be less and less the driving focus of the DCU.
    Last edited by Bored at 3:00AM; 01-12-2021 at 08:41 PM.

  12. #27
    Incredible Member blunt_eastwood's Avatar
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    This is the timeline I've been keeping to make sense of it all. I don't think Death Metal changed anything unless I misunderstood something.

    0. Stories before COIE - Multiple Earths exist
    1. Crisis on Infinite Earths - Multiple Earths are merged into one Earth called Earth-1
    1A. Zero Hour - No changes to Earth. Only slight changes to character histories are made
    2. Infinite Crisis - A multiverse is created with 52 Earths or the original multiverse is recreated but only with 52 Earths
    3. Flashpoint - The entire timeline is restarted with 52 Earths. Stories pick up 5 years in.
    3A. Convergence - The multiverse is amended to be more then 52 Earths??
    3B. Doomsday Clock - The Omniverse is created. I don't know what this is or means
    4. Death Metal - ?????

  13. #28
    Obsessed & Compelled Bored at 3:00AM's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    This is the timeline I've been keeping to make sense of it all. I don't think Death Metal changed anything unless I misunderstood something.

    0. Stories before COIE - Multiple Earths exist
    1. Crisis on Infinite Earths - Multiple Earths are merged into one Earth called Earth-1
    1A. Zero Hour - No changes to Earth. Only slight changes to character histories are made
    2. Infinite Crisis - A multiverse is created with 52 Earths or the original multiverse is recreated but only with 52 Earths
    3. Flashpoint - The entire timeline is restarted with 52 Earths. Stories pick up 5 years in.
    3A. Convergence - The multiverse is amended to be more then 52 Earths??
    3B. Doomsday Clock - The Omniverse is created. I don't know what this is or means
    4. Death Metal - ?????
    Convergence largely accomplished nothing except re-inserting the Pre-Flashpoint Superman, Lois & Jon into the DCU. Nothing else from that story stuck.

    Doomsday Clock established the Metaverse, which revealed that the Main DCU Earth has been the same since 1938, which is continually revising itself and creating new Earths which back-up the prior incarnations of Superman's Earths, starting with Earth-2 and then Earth-1985. This re-contextualized the nature of the DCU in a significant way.

    Death Metal has established that the Omniverse is a collection of infinite Multiverses, which doesn't mean anything because infinite is already infinite. The big change here is that the characters are now aware of all their prior continuity, but no one knows how this will actually be used or what it will mean for future stories.

    It could be great or it could suck. Or it could be something in between. We'll find out in the next few months.

  14. #29
    Astonishing Member Dataweaver's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    This is the timeline I've been keeping to make sense of it all. I don't think Death Metal changed anything unless I misunderstood something.
    The biggest change that Death Metal made was that now, everyone remembers the changes.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    0. Stories before COIE - Multiple Earths exist
    There's a stage before this: before the Multiverse, there was just one Earth. This was the Golden Age DCU. The transition from the Golden Age to the Multiverse want accompanied by a massive, worldwide Crisis event; but it was every bit as reality-altering as the Crisis on Infinite Earths was, and completely redefined the DCU.

    Also, there was a shift in the DCU around 1969, when the New Gods entered the picture. It also wasn't an official Crisis, and its effects were more on par with Zero Hour than with CoIE; but, for example, this transition was the first time that the notion of a “floating timeline” was introduced. One of the more significant continuity changes that took place was that Bateman and Bat-Girl (who had been staples of the Batman titles for the better part of a decade) just up and vanished.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    1. Crisis on Infinite Earths - Multiple Earths are merged into one Earth called Earth-1
    It wasn't called Earth-1; it was just called Earth. Because it was the only one. The closest things you got to alternate Earths in its wake were a few Elseworlds tales and Armageddon 2001.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    1A. Zero Hour - No changes to Earth. Only slight changes to character histories are made
    The Legion of Superheroes might disagree with you.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    2. Infinite Crisis - A multiverse is created with 52 Earths or the original multiverse is recreated but only with 52 Earths
    Pretty much; and it designated the main Earth as New Earth.

    By the way: if you're including Zero Hour, you should probably also include Final Crisis. It folded the Milestone heroes and the “Red Circle” heroes (i.e., Archie Comics' original superheroes) into Earth-0. It's also the source of the Earth-0 designation. The changes didn't stick; but they were indeed there.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    3. Flashpoint - The entire timeline is restarted with 52 Earths. Stories pick up 5 years in.
    Yes. And they attempted to fold Wildstorm into the DCU as well. As with the Milestone and Red Circle efforts, this one ultimately bombed. They also redesignated Earth-0 as Prime Earth.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    3A. Convergence - The multiverse is amended to be more then 52 Earths??
    Nope. All they did was to retroactively say that the original Multiverse survived the Crisis, and that 52 of those Earths evolved into the 52 Earths of the post-IC Orrery of Worlds.

    The more notable change actually took place a year later, with the launch of DCU Rebirth. This was followed a year later but Superman Reborn, and finally by Doomsday Clock, which I'll get to shortly. I personally view Convergence→Rebirth→Superman Reborn→Doomsday Clock as a single thing, albeit spread over the better part of five years.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    3B. Doomsday Clock - The Omniverse is created. I don't know what this is or means
    Doomsday Clock did not create the Innovative; it revealed the Metaverse: that is, it introduced into the setting itself the idea that the main Earth's timeline has been changing, and that the previous iterations of the timeline continue to exist even after the change. It also ended with another timeline revision that brought back the Justice Society and the Legion of Superheroes; in my own head-canon, this is when DC's “G1–G4” timeline kicked in.

    Quote Originally Posted by blunt_eastwood View Post
    4. Death Metal - ?????
    In the same way that there's a throughline from Convergence to Doomsday Clock, Death Metal is actually the culmination of a story started in Dark Nights: Metal. Its conclusion unlocked the Metaverse, making the histories of the previous iterations of the main Earth's history known to everyone. But its biggest change was to restructure the Multiverse, removing the 52-Earth cap and altering the center of the Multiverse from Earth-0 to a pair of diametrically opposed worlds, one of which is being called the Elseworld. It's too soon to know exactly what that means at this point.
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  15. #30
    Astonishing Member Dataweaver's Avatar
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    The meta-history of the main Earth, as I understand it:

    0. Golden Age Earth. A single Earth, where Superman debuted in 1938. Definitely includes everything published by DC Comics back then; but it might also include Golden Age stories from rival companies. Lasted until roughly 1957.

    1. Silver Age Earth 1. Introduced the Infinite Earths, including an Earth 2 that served as a direct continuation of the Golden Age Earth. The exact trigger of the change is given in DDC as Barry Allen tapping into the Speed Force; in CoIE, the birth of the Infinite Earths was credited to Krona (of the Guardians of the Universe) breaking a taboo and peering into the Dawn of Time.

    1a. The Bronze Age Earth 1. As I mentioned in my last post, this took place around 1969–1970, and was arguably triggered by the arrival of the New Gods.

    2. The post-Crisis Earth. In retrospect, the Crisis was actually the culmination of changes in the DCU that began as early as 1980. I'd say that the first signs of the changes actually took place on Earth 2, when All-Star Squadron was launched and retconned Earth 2 from being just about the JSA to being a “clutter-Earth” populated by Golden Age heroes from numerous companies that DC had subsequently acquired. Earth 1 also underwent some changes, though they weren't so much timeline retcons as changes in tone and direction: after roughly a decade of having Green Arrow co-host his title, Green Lantern went back to being about just the Green Lantern stories and concepts; the New Teen Titans debuted; the DC Explosion have us new heroes like Firestorm, only to be followed by the DC Implosion. The Justice League switched from its classic lineup to the Detroit based team of troubled youngsters. And so on. And then the Crisis hit. Worlds lived, worlds died; and nothing has ever been the same. While there was officially only one Earth in the wake of the Crisis, this was also when Watchmen was published. As well, this was when we started getting Elseworlds tales, like Gotham By Gaslight.

    2a. The post-Zero Hour Earth. In the same way that I consider the CoIE era to actually have started a few years before the Crisis, I consider the starting point for Zero Hour to actually have been the Death of Superman. In addition to some minor and not-so-minor timeline changes, I consider the biggest contribution of this era to be the introduction of the notion of Hypertime.

    3. New Earth. Here too, there was a lead-up to Infinite Crisis, beginning in 2003 with Titans/Young Justice: Graduation Day and the Superman 10¢ Adventure (IIRC), the latter bearing the distinction of kicking off what came to be known as the Futuresmiths storyline in the Superman titles, culminating in Superman #200 where his backstory was retconned to align with Superman: Birthright. Graduation Day also featured an incursion from the future, and it is that event which I take as the beginning of the Infinite Crisis era of the DCU. Infinite Crisis saw the birth of a new Multiverse, which Final Crisis eventually clarified as an Orrery of Worlds, with Earth-0 at its heart.

    4. Prime Earth. Triggered by the Flashpoint, this was easily the most abrupt and sweeping of the changes to the meta-history of the DCU.

    4a. DCU Rebirth. This era also began about a year before Rebirth itself was launched, with Multiversity and Convergence. As I said before, I see it as continuing through Superman Reborn and culminating with Doomsday Clock, which ultimately revealed the Metaverse and the concept of the archival Earths. As I said before, it also revised the timeline to bring back the JSA and the LoSH (as well as the Kents).

    4b. Dark Nights. A sort of “competing narrative” with Doomsday Clock. The first installment introduced the Dark Multiverse; the last installment destroyed everything before resetting it and setting the stage for…

    5. The Infinite Frontier. All we know about it so far is that limitations have been removed (such as what continuities people remember, and how many alternate Earths there are), and that they're setting up something for a pair of centers of the expanded Multiverse, one of which is called the Elseworld.

    Everything else is speculation.
    Last edited by Dataweaver; 01-13-2021 at 08:38 PM.
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