El Goonish Shive

I thought that Voltaire was more wanting to be an Evil Overlord, and that changing the rules of magic was his preferred way of doing it.

The point about Tara is good; I should be more precise and say the first indication that anyone from the main EGS verse could take him on. Though I suppose it's worth asking if it would be Final Death or just a forced reset (which is still death for the personality of Voltaire, of course; though there's a pretty reasonable chance that the reborn person with Voltaire's memories would be pretty jerky).

Voltaire indeed seems to have Evil Overlord ambitions. His lofty-sounding address to other immortals notwithstanding, I doubt his scheming is for their collective benefit, not even in a We Can Rule Together sense. He may or may not have already foreseen the potential for conflict should others of his kind decide they want to Take Over the World, or a sizeable chunk of it, too.

Just you wait. It'll turn out he's doing it for completely wholesome reasons and then he'll get a redemption arc a few years later.

I'm still waiting for Damien's redemption arc... oh wait, he's dead. Too late.

Voltaire wants to change immortal law to allow him a more direct hand in mortal affairs. "Guide and empower" does not an Evil Overlord make.

Changing the laws of magic so that everyone is too busy re-learning how to cast spells to threaten him as he rises to power was just the secondary plan.

Oh, you totally could become an Evil Overlord with just "guide and empower" as your suite of abilities. That said, one, you'd have to be more of a Man Behind the Man, and that doesn't seem Voltaire's style. Two, even if it were, you have to know how to actually do it, and given his periodic grabbing of the Villain Ball, I'm not sure Voltaire could even if he wanted to. Three... honestly, for all his scheming, Voltaire seems... well, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and even without the Villain Ball moments, I don't think he's got the skillset for it.

Man, I forgot that Diane and Lucy are dating already. The NP just reminded me. Though for a second I thought Diane meant that it would be easy to find someone to like her newfound curves, not buy the artifact.

And yeah, I don't think Voltaire is sharp enough to be an overlord within the original guidelines. I figure him knowing this was the reason he tried to change magic in the first place. And that this was also part of why he decided to reject the befriending Tedd plan.

Edited by DatLonerGirl on Mar 26th 2019 at 6:22:47 AM

Stepping back to Lovecraftian's comments... oh God, I can totally see Shive doing a Voltaire redemption arc (probably involving a reset first, but still).

EDIT: Meanwhile, possibly the most sensible thing Shive has ever written.

Edited by 32_Footsteps on Mar 27th 2019 at 12:57:55 PM

I'm not saying and will never say 100%, because I have been wrong on this comic's direction before, but based on my model of the author mind and what we have seen of that guy so far, I'm 99% confident that Voltaire will join Damien, Sirleck and Not-Tengu in the club of irredeemable vile villains of egs. I don't think he has what it takes to get his redemption arc.

EDIT: ok, given that "true" reset is pretty much Death of Character, I'm not excluding post-reset status shuffle. But not with the current Voltaire.

Edited by jaff on Mar 27th 2019 at 1:20:32 AM

Same status as Damien, Not-Tengu and Sirleck, meaning a mostly anticlimatic end and then being completely forgotten from there onwards?

Also, do keep in mind that for the longest while Pandora seemed like the worst ultimate evil in EGS. She tortured Magus, tried manipulating Mr. Verres into committing murder, intentionally created a massive magical reservoir that has been causing problems for an entire city, and was largely responsible for causing Magic to change out of boredom (initially, at least). She was also said to have driven werewolves to extinction as a means of revenge.

Then the comic took a hard turn and she became "sympathetic super grandma" and had a tragic death.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Mar 27th 2019 at 6:30:32 AM

I actually do expect Voltaire to turn around. Mainly because his primary reason for villainy was because he wanted magic's system to change and that ship's sailed. His master plan's been foiled and he's still here.

So his options are either

• F*ck off out of the story and never show up again, which Shive is unlikely to do.
• Come up with a new, even more sinister master plan for a return evil appearance, which Shive is unlikely to do.
• Stick around and gain more personality traits, and then suddenly become really sympathetic because Shive decided he likes the character and wants him to have a happy ending.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 27th 2019 at 4:11:48 AM

Yes, pretty much.

As for Pandora, that's my main data point; while she has been replacing Lord Tedd as the ultimate background antagonist (Oh, yes, Lord Tedd and General Shade Tails: two other potential candidates for the club membership, albeit the jury is still out on these two), she wasn't just an evil vile villain: she was a being of eldritch power and alien mind, but had deep down understandable motivations (vengeance, boredom, desire to help her child...), but twisted just enough to make her unpredictable and very dangerous. And for those reasons, I found her the most interesting antagonist of egs.

Voltaire isn't complex. As I said once before, he is basically a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain. He's petty, vindictive, he spend half his time looking unbearably smug and the other half raging at the universe, he set up convoluted plans for motivations that pretty much boils down to "take over the world", and he walk around with a white suit, a fedora and a goatee. Since his "begone" moment, I am not sure there is a single drawn picture of him that wouldn't make a 8-years old say: "hey look, a Villain".

And that is kind of logical, given that he is pretty much the substrate of Pandora's redemption. Pandora became Pure Good, and he emerged as Pure Evil.

Now, to be fair there is one thing he has been given since his emergence, and that was the semblance of a motive: e.g. his frustration borne from the constraints of immortal laws. But given that it was delivered in what was pretty much a villain monologue, I'm not expecting much on that front.

Edited by jaff on Mar 27th 2019 at 3:26:38 AM

@Tobias Drake:option 2.

Because he has already set up his more sinister plan: using Pandora disaster of a reset to incite the other immortals to change the laws and "Become Demigods again". He made a little speech about it a while ago, remember?

Edited by jaff on Mar 27th 2019 at 3:25:23 AM

NP NanaseCraft 68

Yeah, yeah, we get it.

This is Ashley done right! Please Dan have Circe come to the main universe and replace Ashley!

...holy shit, yeah, Ashley Circe isn't being completely overbearing, pure and adored. She's still not incredibly interesting, but this is an improvement nonetheless.

She doesn't drive me to distraction, that's all it takes to be an improvement in my eyes.

Edited by DatLonerGirl on Mar 27th 2019 at 7:53:14 AM

It might just be that MU Ashley simply hasn't interacted with the "right" people to make her more interesting.

Even during that time period, Pandora was literally the only reason Ellen wasn't killed by Abraham. The idea that she was ever meant to be read as being more evil than Damien has to completely ignore that fact.

(It's clear that Shive consider Damien a mistake, and doesn't want to have that sort of villain in his comic ever again; if you read his commentaries from that time period he mentions severely toning down Vlad, for example.)

Not necessarily. Yes, Pandora did save Ellen indirectly by guiding Nanase to save Ellen, but it wasn't clear at the time that she did so because Ellen is one of Tedd's friends. It was very easy to read that move back when it happened as Pandora wanting to save a useful tool. Later developments did make it more seem like Pandora saved Ellen for more altruistic reasons, yes. But based solely on what had happened thus far in the comic, it was just as easy to conclude that Pandora was guarding her chess pieces rather than anything else.

Didn't Pandora explicitly say she did it because he hurt her son so f*ck him?

After he was defeated, she then tried to influence Edward Verres to murder him in cold blood. Because he hurt her son so f*ck him.

Even Evil Has Loved Ones, and retributive violence against people who've harmed those loves ones can be a motive for a temporary Enemy Mine. That was pretty much Pandora's depiction initially. She's a bad, bad, bad person who loves her son in a kind of sick and twisted way and will do terrible, terrible things out of a misguided belief that he'll be better off for it. Even when he's practically begging her not to.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 28th 2019 at 8:21:42 AM

I mean the issue is that this is a lo/no death story. Even Voltaire has avoided trying to kill Tedd. I do think Pandora was shades more sympathetic in a weirdly specific yandere-ish way, but in general most long term Powerful characters are written to not want to kill the characters, at least not immediately.

Comic QA8-9

Learning.

"So every religion is wrong!"

...sorry, it was just my first thought.

note: do not trust twitter. he lies.