Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Dangling Plot Threads I hope Levitz resolves by Legion #23

With Legion of Super-Heroes ending with issue #23, there are a number of dangling plot threads that need tied up by Paul Levitz. I know he won't get to many of them, here's the one's I wish he'd bring to completion:

1. Resolve the fates of Star Boy, Mon-El, Duplicate Damsel and Sun Boy.

2. Explain why Comet Queen attacked Brainiac 5 in LSH #11 and reveal who was behind it.

3. Bring the Legion Lost team home. I don't want to see Timber Wolf, Gates, Tellus, Tyroc, Dawnstar, Wildfire and Yera stuck in the 21st century when this series ends.

4. Explain who kidnapped Glorith and caused her to cause the time storm in LSH #15.

5. Does Lightning Lord really have a twin brother?

6. Who was the traitor within the Legion that Captain Adym told Yera about in Legion Lost #13.

7. Did Colossial Boy survive the technological crisis of LSH #17-23 as part of the Science Police?

8. Who are the other ECHO agents within the ranks of the Legion as mentioned in Legion Lost #13?

9. What ever happened to Quislet?

10. The dangling plot thread from the previous volume regarding the apparently-resurrected Karate kid.

Ooh, yeah, I forgot all about Mekt possibly having a twin of his own after all. I thought that was a neat twist, given how that facet of his birth has always been some form of motivation for his actions as Lightning Lord.

And yes, there needs to be some form of resolution for the Lost Legionnaires.

Wasn't it already shown that Saturn Queen brainwashed Comet Queen to attack Brainy?

Which is weird because CQ wasn't even a Legionnaire at the time...

Also, you would think it'd make the Legion want to check Ultra Boy and Brainy himself out as they were there too.

Remember that in the DCnU, Lightning Saga/Countdown/New Krypton didn't happen.

Well, Val still died at least once in current continuity, so his resurrection is still possible.

Well, I guess it doesn't matter since there's no way in hell Paul brings that particular plot point back in his close-out issues. It's a shame because that teaser in issue 6 or 7 of that volume really had me excited at the time.

11. What effect did the Emerald Eye really have on Shrinking Violet from Legion Annual #1? Going into this Fatal Five storyline, I thought Violet would be the new Emerald Empress.

Man, I hadn't realized there were so many danglers around.

12. Explain how Harmonia became immortal and why she decided to join the Legion - is there a hidden agenda here?

13. Explain how Captain Adym and the ECHO division of the Science Police from Legion Lost #13 can travel beck and forth to time from the 31st century to the 21st century, while Brainiac 5 contends in issue #2 that Flashpoint blocked the Legion's ability to reach that era.

14. Explain why the Legion gave up on the Legion Lost team as dead, even placing memorial statues of them in the hall of heroes as seen in Legion Lost #10 and LSH #16, while Cosmic Boy was still trying to search for them in LSH #8.

15. Follow up on what the Dominators did with Brainiac 5 and Dream Girl's DNA samples that they took from them in LSH #9-10. We know the Legion interrupted their plans in producing a clone army, but these tissue samples are still out there to make some bad ass clones down the road. This would have been a major future storyline.

16. Follow up on how Mordru escapes from the Black Witch's control, and Mordru's freedom effects Blok, since it was Mysa's powers that healed him in Adventure #507. Mysa still had Mordru's power in check in LSH #20 but we all know this wouldn't have lasted long. This is another major Legion saga that Levitz would have brought us if the title hasn't been cancelled.

I wonder if we'll ever get an explanation for Lu's power upgrade?

Duplicate Damsel was never explained? We don't know if she's unique or a mutant Carggite or what?

I think the idea was that all Carggites can duplicate infinitely, but they are naturally accustomed to 3 bodies, and wouldn't realize this potential until they're down to one body.

Oh, well that's interesting enough.

I do wonder where all the extra mass comes from though.

And can they use Lu as a replicator? I mean if clothes duplicate maybe they can just put something in her hand and say "20 more please".

As to the Carggite question of upper limits in duplicating, it may not be an issue of the duplicating as much as the re-integrating.

Consider, once someone splits into two or three or more, those individuals each begin developing new memories/thoughts that are etched on the brain's neurons. The more duplicates, the harder the re-integration of multiple neural pathways. Probably, most people are advised to keep the number to two or three as they have (over the centuries) evolved to tolerate limited-number re-integration.

My theory, anyway.

As to the multiple and growing list of dangling plot threads and the very short time left to resolve them... It's seeming more like a continuity-wiping reboot (actually, the 4boot) may be coming!

I suppose they never really addressed the additional mass question even with regular Carggites?

It would be a cool factoid if integrated they were 3x heavier.

[Warning: Set makes up a bunch of stuff to rationalize super-power strangeness...]

Marvel gets around some mass-shifting wonkiness with their Pym particle technobabble, shifting mass to and from another dimension, but DC size- and shape-shifters never really seemed to get much of an explanation for their abilities.

Paul mentioned a year or so ago that Cham used some sort of mass-attracting power to call up the matter that he used to form his giant tentacle-monster forms, but it was a throwaway line, and not one that really explained anything. It's possible that he had intended that explanation to also explain where Carggites, Imskians and Colossal peeps get their mass-changing abilities.

Due to square-cube law, Colossal Boy, at ten times his normal height (say, sixty feet tall), should be a thousand times heavier and denser, and therefore require a thousand times his normal strength just to move (and bones, flesh, etc. a thousand times more durable to support that weight). He's not just 'getting bigger,' but replacing his body, every cell and organ, with something vastly tougher than human tissue.

Shrinking Violet just scoffs at physics and chemistry and biology, being able to shrink small enough to slip between molecules, and yet somehow still being able to breathe, when an atom of oxygen may be as big as her head, and hear sound, when the vibrating atoms of air conducting the sound would be slamming into her like a barrage of basketballs. Her brain, smaller than an individual neuron, and *vastly* smaller than an insect's tiny little instinct-programmed logic box of a brain, retains the capacity for language and memory and technical skills and an understanding of complicated stuff like the biochemistry of someone whose body she's infiltrating. Brainy probably can't even contain that amount of information, a lifetimes worth of experiences, in a 'brain' that is smaller than a single atom.

So far, in her few appearances, Duplicate Damsel/Girl seems to treat all of her duplicates as appendages, and not individuals. (Which is probably for the best. In a world as already full of fascinating characters as the Legionverse, giving Lu hundreds of different personalities would just result in her having *less* characterization, overall, I think.) Is she using some sort of gobbdigook 'quantum superposition' to manifest in different locations in space at the same time? Is she calling up quantum duplicates of herself, with no 'self' of their own? They don't appear to be 'people' in the sense of selves from alternate realities (since, if they were, many of them would be dressed differently, have their personalities, etc.). For Lu, and other multiplicative Carggites, I'd go with some sort of quantum thing. Different quarks bounce into and out of reality, temporarily becoming the underpinnings of our atomic structure, and then vanish again, retaining only some weird sort of 'memory' of their time as 'us.' The Carggites are somehow able to cause them to 'bounce back' and remain present, forming entire new bodies out of nothing but raw quarks (since, if they converted surrounding matter into their new bodies, they'd end up eating holes in surrounding matter to gain the 'building blocks' of their new bodies, and possibly kill anyone near them, tearing their bodies apart on an atomic level for 'raw materials,' which would be icky...). The 'death' of one of these selves would cause the particles to lose whatever quantum entangle-y 'je ne cest quois' that allows the Carggite to dial them up and spin them into new forms, causing them to lose the ability to call that 'self' up again. Plus, massive psychological trauma causes most Carggites to lose contact with the quarks currently making up their *real* bodies, leading to death. Lu, uniquely, survived her first 'death,' and then her second, and discovered how to forge her own connections, allowing her to conjure up *dozens* of selves, and not to risk dying if one of them is 'killed.'

As for Violet, I can pretend she isn't actually biologically or chemically 'shrinking' in mass or volume, but is actually warping spacetime around herself to *appear* smaller (and effectively occupy less space, as she is basically becoming further away from *everything* at the same time, contracting her interface with the universe, like a living singularity with her own spacetime warping 'event horizon'). If the 'bottle world of Imsk' actually tightly orbits a black hole, dancing across the edge of the singularity like a bead of water skating across the iron of a hot skillet, that property might extend to the rest of her people (and their planet), having survived on the brink of annihilation thanks to the technology they stole from Brainiac when they escaped from his collection of bottle cities.

Of them all, Chameleon Boy is close to the worst offender. Without any of the Colossal Boy / Shrinking Violet / Duplicate Damsel explanations, he can expand his mass or function at microscopic sizes or even (rarely) replicate many other Legionnaires powers, having turned into a phantom, made himself transparent and even generated electricity in the past.

Waid worked pretty hard on toning down the powers of Element Lad in the Threeboot, but few Legionnaires pull such shenanigans as Chameleon Boy, who, with a single super-power, can upstage a half-dozen of his teammates at the one single thing they bring to the team. Quite a leg up for someone whose power used to be 'super-disguise.'

On at least one occasion in the Silver Age Lu was shown to triplicate her strength without actually triplicating.

Thanks Set and EDE, I love asking questions on LW.

Ray Palmer had the white dwarf star material which probably served a similar plot purpose as pym particles.

I always thought the triple-sun of Cargg caused them all to have three selves, and I'm okay with the mass merging with a set limit, but it stretches the willing suspension of disbelief (though it only matters when I'm in a certain mood ) to have infinite duplicates without explaining were they 'come' from.

But hey, there's worse problems with the Legion's writing than that.

Bear in mind that 99% of what I say isn't any sort of canon, just my fanwanking possible explanations...



If Carggites draw mass from the triple suns, in a manner similar to how Star Boy (at least for a time) 'drew mass from the stars to make people heavy,' then it's not any more unlikely that Lu could develop the ability to draw more mass from Cargg's triple sun to create dozens of selves. Stars are pretty big, and the mass in a even a whole lotta Lu's is a tiny drop in that bucket.

Still, we have no idea if that's the case. Proximity to the Carggite suns doesn't seem to have any real bearing on Carggites ability to triplicate (just as proximity to 'the stars' doesn't really seem to have affected Thom's ability to make stuff super-heavy, back when that was the explanation for his power).

I was thinking the other way around, they have the mass of three bodies, and something about the triple sun allows them to merge. This would make the most sense of the idea that Lu could lose one. And then two. But not that she could then form so many.

Lots of interesting possibilities have been given for Vi, Lu, Cham and Gim!

I figured we were going to get the deux ex machina of all mass-related power explanations when Brainy realized that Glorith displaces energy through time. Mass displacement through time... which could have been connected to the Iron Curtain of Time, or some inability to travel to the future.

It all ties back to the cellular trim ray and the super-fatass ray, in the end. All that mass isn't being created or destroyed, it's just being moved around!

You know... given the fact that any world in which super-powers exist is going to be one in which the laws of nature work much different than they do in the real world, it's really never bothered me that various powers might violate the conservation of mass.

Considering how much I love to use the pseudo-science to come up with story ideas (like Imsk skating on the surface of a black hole, or the light and heat shunted away by Shadow Lass and Polar Boy going somewhere and being used for something...), it doesn't 'bother' me so much that the discrepancies exist, as that the writers don't see them as fantastic opportunities to explore for new storytelling.

Much like Kurt Busiek seeing a canonical discrepancy, this sort of stuff screams opportunity to me, perhaps a result of growing up with the idea of 'No-Prizes' for explaining things, instead of just (accurately) labeling them mistakes or oversights and forgetting about them.

Much like the difference between porn and sex, it's more fun to fill the hole than just to see the hole.

Or, some other metaphor that isn't so terrible.

In seeing all this discussion about dangling plot threads from Levitz' run, it makes me wish all the more there were actual good plots too.