#anyways also the omega timeline as the strength of community

[shameless-slit]

Obsessed with Nightmare being so much stronger than Dream in most portrayals, because it’s such a good metaphor for how negativity is much easier to fall into than positivity??

Like, one reason why the Nightmare + Killer VS Cross + Dream fight in Underverse 0.6 is one of my favorites is because it somehow becomes such a cool portrayal of mental health struggle. Cross succumbing to Night because of that deal he can’t get out of becomes an allegory for how negative thought patterns become inescapable loops. How easy, but ultimately harmful, it is to fall to negativity, especially when faced with intense trauma like Cross. And yes, it’s important to acknowledge and accept that negativity to be able to move forward, but that’s exactly what Night prevents cross to do.

And then the Faithfully scene, the conversation between Dream and Cross, shows us how hard it is to reclaim any positivity in that situation. And as much as it’s interesting to talk about toxic positivity through Dream’s character, I think this scene is an incredible character moment for him, to actually show how resilient and strong you have to be to still muster positivity, and inspire it in others in their darkest hours. It’s also a great example of not having to fight your battles alone, of managing to comfort someone without dismissing their struggles, etc… Like damn, I watched it when I was in a bad place mentally and Dream’s words genuinely helped me, I listened to the speech so many times I know it by heart now.

It’s a wonderful moment for both Cross and Dream, and also fits within the themes and allegory of the episode… And you’re telling me we got all that from four version of the same guy anime fighting each other???

[aftermathdb]

DEATH BATTLE Review: Cable vs. Booster Gold

So, for some reason, people were confused about this matchup? Like… C’mon. It was either this, or Cable vs. Trunks.

Cable′s Preview.

So, the convoluted story begins with Mister Sinister wanting to ship and breed the X-Men, specifically Scott Summers and Jean Grey.

And because of a lot of convolutedness, he had to use a clone of Jean to get the ultimate mutant that he wanted.

Enter Nathan Summers.

And because this is comic books, he had a rare disease, and had to be take to the future for a cure… Where there wasn’t one, because that world had been taken over by Apocalypse, another villain.

But through his training, a lot of experience, Nate was far more recognizable by one name: Cable.

The hosts go over his abilities that he has both in part of his heritage and the Techno-Organic Virus that he has. From all sorts of visions, to lasers, to being able to repair his metal arm at a whim.

And Cable’s also an Omega-Level Mutant, which means he’s super powerful.

And he’s been using these powers to keep himself together this whole time. Boomstick asks how he does it in his sleep, and… Yeah, I kinda want to ask that too.

And we go over his weapons and abilities.

I’m gonna level with you: Due to my new job at a grocery store, I can’t do the full Wiz and Boomstick segments due to time constraints. I’d love to quit, but at the time, there’s a pandemic, and I wouldn’t be able to find better work otherwise. Just know that this kinda just goes on to make a joke about how Nathan is basically Mutant Jesus. Really sorry that I can’t show more, and yeah… This is kinda how it’s gonna be from now on. Really sorry.

Anyways, after going over how Nate saw other timeline versions of himself, he decided to get rid of his Virus… By rewriting his DNA!

And the hosts go over his feats.

Like how he moved the earth, or ionized the entire atmosphere, or telepathically read everyone’s mind at once.

Booster Gold′s Preview.

There’s a lot to know about Booster Gold.

He’s an icon, a brand, and a Superhero.

However, if there’s anything that you should know about the guy…

It’s that he’s full of it.

In a nutshell, Michael Jon Carter was a football player in the 25th century, but he had to start doing dirty plays to make money to pay for a treatment that his mom needed, and was eventually kicked out.

As the hosts noted, he got a job at a museum that featured 20th century Superheroes, and became inspired to go back in time… And profit.

But instead of giving the name Goldstar, he accidentally gave the name Booster Gold.

And since he’s a huge dick, he got quite the reputation as being an asshole among the Superhero community

Even Superman wasn’t a fan. And that guy’s like one of the most positive people ever.

It wasn’t all bad. He had an actual friend in Ted Kord, the original Blue Beetle.

Onto the arsenal, Booster’s Power Suit basically makes him like Iron Man, but with time travel. He’s got enhanced strength, speed, and durability just as long as he’s got power running through the thing.

His shield won’t let anything pass, even bacteria, and it can even block from telepathic attacks.

Again: Sorry that I can’t make these longer. I think I might have to go back to the older ways of doing this of only featuring the background, powers/arsenal, and end line while also trying to get screenshots of the important info and maybe some Wiz/Boomstick segments. Trust me, I’d love to quit the grocery job and do something like video edit, but I don’t have the time, nor do I have the ability to go out and do interviews.

Anyways, Booster can not only hang out with other timeline versions of himself, but he’s also got an impressive field of feats to pull off too.

And after a while, Booster became an actual hero, and learned humility so that meant that he couldn’t really publicize it.

Still though, he’s the main character in the greatest story never told, and he’ll be protecting the timestream while doing what he does best:

Showboating.

The Battle Itself.

Luis and Zack lead on animation, Cable will be voiced by Dave J. Dixon and Booster Gold will be voiced by Ricco Fajardo. , Days of Booster Past by Brandon Yates, and audio led by Chris Kokkinos.

So, the battle starts off with Booster showboating in front of a crowd, when Cable shows up. Because Booster is Booster, he assumes that Cable’s there to steal his spotlight.

Cable responds… Like most people would if they saw Booster, and when Booster challenges him, Cable shows off that gritty 90s attitude.

Cable takes an early lead, hitting Booster with all sorts of attacks until Booster turns on his shield and starts his counter.

We get a bit of a back and forth, and I know that I don’t have a lot of screenshots, but please bare with me.

This little “ZA WARULDO” segment doesn’t really phase Cable too much, and he surmounts a counter attack.

(Let’s do the time warp again!)

We get a little attack cycle through and it just shows that Booster is tanking everything that Cable is throwing at him without much effort.

So Cable counters by using his time-travel prep time to take Booster Back to the Past where he has a trap set for him.

Booster’s shield doesn’t break, so, yeah.

And Booster calls in backup.

This goes on for a bit until Cable tries to use his telepathy to force Booster to turn off his shields.

Finishing blow in

5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Booster gave the shield to Cable.

Verdict + Explanation.

So, at first, Boomstick is exasperated that some tool like Booster was able to take down a badass like Cable.

Once again, it’s similar to Sasuke vs. Hiei, where one of the fighters has one advantage, but the other has perfect counters to everything that the other could trow at them. In this case, Cable had the better training and experience, but Booster had everything else.

For starters, while Cable could move planets, Booster’s shields were the big thing keeping him in the game. And they were the big thing letting him stay ahead of it too, credit where it’s due, it was only reallyone thing keeping Cable from winning, and if it weren’t for that, he would have won.

So yeah, Cable could move planets, but Booster’s shields could block planets being destroyed sub-atomically. And since apparently everyone in the DC universe can tap into the Speed Force, Booster was holding speed as well. Telepathy wasn’t going to do much since Booster’s shields could stop that, and Cable had no real ways to bypass it.

Since Booster’s weapons were also using the same power as his shields, that meant that he had some big power on his side.

And we also get a neat little Aesop at the end, where the goofiness and siliness of one character, and the seriousness and grit of the other only really matters in the context of their respective universes, but in a DEATH BATTLE, that means comparing them directly, which means a total goofball that you’ve never heard of, like Booster Gold, can defeat a serious and gritty guy like Cable.

Overall impression.

If anything, it took me spending a few hours at work to really ruminate about this fight and what it means. The animation and music are really great, and the lesson at the end is very meaningful.

Despite that, I gotta say that I’m getting really tired of DC characters that aren’t the Flash or Flash-Adjacent being able to tap into the Speed Force like Booster or Green Lantern. It kinda ruins what makes the Flash special. That’s more of a criticism of DC than it is this episode, so I’ll stop.

Overall, there wasn’t really much to write home about. Like I said, it was either this, or Cable vs. Trunks, and there’s a lot to unpack in regards to power scaling for that bout.

7.5/10

Next Time…

Y’know, when I saw Obi-Wan in the season preview, I had a short list of characters that he could fight, and this guy was probably number 1.

So, I guess we’re going to find out if a knight is better than a ninja, huh?

Is there a fight that you want me to review? - Send an ask/request, and I’ll look into it!

Do you want to read my fanfic based around DEATH BATTLE itself? click here!

Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you next time for…

Knight vs. Ninja.

[friskheart000]

I’ll Try to Be Good: Solving the Alpha Enigma

Hello Internet! Welcome to Webcomic Theory (Is that too much of a ripoff? Probably), where we sift through the dark depths of Tumblr to over-analyze fan-made and original content alike. Today’s topic? Ask Frisk and Flowey, also known as I’ll Try to be Good (@illtrytobegood) by Lovely Lady Artist. It’s a fancomic that takes place after the True Pacifist ending of a video game called Undertale, and though it started off as a simple fluff ask blog, it’s now been revealed that there’s something more to this story than its apperant plot of Flowey adjusting to life on the Surface. If you haven’t read AFAF yet I highly recommend doing so, both because we’ll be covering some MAJOR spoilery topics, and just because it’s a great series. With that out of the way, grab your echo flowers and open up the ask box, because today we aim to get to the bottom of I’ll Try to Be Good.

The focus of today’s theory is figuring out what we can about the Alpha Timeline, specifically what we see in LLA’s alternate blog, @unknown-20xx. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this strange side comic, Unknown 20xx follows a group of askers left in the remnants of the Alpha Timeline, from which AFAF’s Sans and Flowey originate from. They were separated from it and brought into the AFAF timeline, which we’ll call the Beta timeline, after Flowey blew up the Core and performed a Reset. Due to the magic of an asker, they are currently (at the time of me writing this) back in the Alpha timeline again, in a time before everything went downhill, as we see in Unknown 20xx. That blog shows the timeline in a state of ruin, with only 13 of over a thousand monsters still alive. Time seems to be frozen for everything but the survivors, and magic cannot be regenerated. The entire latter half of the Underground is more or less destroyed. 

So what happened? What point in time are we seeing through this side blog? My theory is that it occurs after Sans and Flowey make it back to the Beta timeline, whenever their time in Alpha ends. This would make sense with Papyrus saying that everything started going downhill right after the two left, and we know it couldn’t be after they first wind up in the Beta timeline because in that same conversation, Papyrus shows familiarity with the askers, beings he was clearly unaware of when this event began, and mentions that Flowey talked with them, with us, frequently. Flowey only started communicating with the askers a few weeks after he came to the Surface, when Frisk invited us. There would be no way for him to communicate with us beforehand, securing this place in the timeline to be after Sans and Flowey leave and things start going bad. 

“But FriskHeart!” I hear you say. “Unknown said that they had just gotten back from terrorizing Flowey in his nightmares while they were walking through an empty Snowdin! And Papyrus’ letter got delivered to Sans before they even arrived there!” The answer is simpler than you give it credit for. It’s just time travel. The Unknown went into the past, which was the present for us askers, to torment Flowey, and we sent a letter into the past, which, again, was our present. We’re seeing two different timelines at two different periods of time. This fact is going to be extremely helpful for figuring out what’s going to happen in AFAF, but first we need to understand things here, so let’s move on.

Okay, so we know this blog’s basic place in the timeline. It occurs after this event ends and our heroes (?) return to Beta. This would explain in part why Unknown said that what we were seeing was the consequences of our actions. We had nothing to do with the Alpha Timeline until now, when we pulled this stunt to bring Sans and Flowey back. Let’s move on to the next major enigma: the messages in the Echo Flowers.

While walking through Waterfall with Unknown we hear a string of messages in the Echo Flowers as we go. The earlier messages say things like “Chara, where are you? Chara?” and “I know. You’d never hurt me Chara... I trust you.” As the askers walked farther, the messages grew more unsettling. “Where are we going?” “Chara, I’m scared... I don’t know if it’s a good idea to-” The voices end with “Chara, what are you doing...?” “Chara, s-stop!” “Chara, p-please, don’t you re-” “It’s me, As-” before being cut off with a scream. There’s only one message left, from a different speaker, who seems to be crying. “Asriel, why won’t you try to defend yourself from me?”

Okay, that’s a lot to take in. The first speaker is clearly Asriel, who’s being led off by the final speaker, Chara, who seems to kill him for some reason? Oooookay then. That’s...odd. So what exactly is going on here? Well, there’s not much we can go off of right now, but we do have some clues that could point us in the right direction. First, it’s important to mention that this is NOT a recounting of when Chara and Asriel first died. Flowey has confirmed that in the Alpha Timeline things basically went he same way as before up to a point, meaning that the buttercup incident still happened, and Asriel died in the throne room, not in Waterfall. Also, the chances of the Echo Flowers retaining those voices for so long seems pretty unlikely. But if it’s not that first time when they died, when is it? The only place in the timeline that would make sense would be some time while Sans and Flowey are in Alpha, but that couldn’t be possible...right? And yet, there’s nowhere else for it to fit. If it had taken place before, then Flowey wouldn’t have been waiting for Chara to wake up, because they already would have, and it couldn’t take place after because he wouldn’t be there. He’d be back in Beta. So...it would seem like it has to take place some time before Sans and Flowey return to the Beta timeline.

So what does that mean for the story? A LOT. If this is true, that means that Chara would have to return in some form (most likely in a ghost form or something similar, as we see that their grave is undisturbed) and be made to try and kill their brother, even though they don’t seem to want to. This would also mean that Flowey would likely...become Asriel again?! There’s no way! Right? And yet, that would be the only thing to make sense. The Echo Flowers clearly repeat Asriel’s voice, not Flowey’s, and while Flowey can change his voice and has before, he doesn’t seem to find the need to to so in front of Chara. In the M!A event “Another Omegaful Life”, one of the askers brings back Chara and Flowey retains his typical yellow text for the most part. He’s actually used his Asriel voice with SANS more than he has Chara. How exactly he would turn back is hard to say, as he’s only been able to do so one time during the M!A “A Soul For Flowey”, when an asker gave him their soul. This is not a great source for what it would take to help him become Asriel again as we have no idea how powerful an asker soul is compared to a monster or human soul, and the event was mainly powered by the strength of M!A anyway. However, if the Echo Flowers are at all reliable, him turning back via sciencey stuff, M!A, or something else seems to be the most logical option. And all of this may very well occur when he and Sans are in the Alpha Timeline, as they are right now.

It’s also important to try and answer the question of whether or not Asriel actually died. The final page with his voice in the Echo Flowers is tagged as “death mention”, yet Chara says “Why DON’T you try to defend yourself from me?” The use of the word don’t instead of didn’t, as well as the the fact that Sans and Flowey will make it back to Beta alive (hopefully), suggests that Chara didn’t kill Asriel. “But what about Unknown saying that Asriel was ‘sleeping’?” I hear you protest. Yes, that could mean that he died, but it could also have to do with Flowey currently sleeping at the time, over in the Beta timeline, and be purposefully meant to mislead us. It does have a darker implication to it, but that isn’t necessarily enough to be considered proof.

After Sans and Flowey return to Beta, things get pretty self-explanatory. The Core, along with Hotland and New Home, get destroyed and all but about 13 monsters die. Thanks to the time-space shenanigans going on, the entire world save for the survivors remains frozen in time. Plants don’t grow and lost magic can’t be regenerated. Since the Echo Flowers are now frozen in time, they repeat the same messages over and over throughout the Underground. Papyrus becomes a scavenger for the survivors, Alphys tries to use her science knowledge to help in any way that she can, and Toriel nears falling down. The askers manage to heal her before taken out by two figures, who seem to be...Sans and Flowey? Okay, what’s going on there?

First off, we can confirm that these two are NOT the Sans and Flowey we’ve come to know and tolerate. This Sans has an eye injury and a different outfit, and the Flowey has red eyes. The Flowey we know (who I’ll refer to as Alpha Flowey) has never had those bright red eyes, especially when paired with the smiling expression. This alternate Flowey bears a much closer resemblance to the smiling red-eyed flower Alpha Flowey saw when he was having a panic attack while having tea with Toriel and Papyrus. The have the same smile and red eyes. Beyond that, the two are tagged at the bottom of the post as Beta Sans and Beta Flowey.

It’s hard to say exactly who these two are, but my best guess is that they’re the Sans and Flowey from the Beta timeline, the ones replaced by Alpha Sans and Flowey. The Alpha pair seems to believe that the Beta pair just ceased to exist and they took their place, but they’ve been wrong before. And with the name similarities, it would definitely fit.

Now we only have one major question remaining, one I’m not sure of myself. Who is Unknown? Are they the personification of “the anomaly”? Or are they something else entirely? I’m eager to hear any fellow theorists’ thoughts on the subject as we figure out what to do next. 

In the meantime, remember, that’s just a theory! A Webcomic Theory! And I really need to change this thing’s name!