Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The Proty-Garth plot

Maybe it's a telepath thing?

A few thoughts:

1. It's not the writer's job to respect past writers. It's the writer's job to tell entertaining stories. So the only real standard is does it work or does it not. In my opinion this story worked - it made sense in the history of the characters, and it added complexity and depth to all involved.

2. The kids have no reason to be upset with Proty/Garth. He's not impersonating their father - he IS their father. Their father happens to be the form of Garth and the sentience of Proty.

3. Similarly, this IS the Garth that Imra fell in love with. Most of the heroics of Lightning Lad as we knew him weren't Garth - it was Proty/Garth.

4. As I recall, part of the revelation was that there was some ambiguity about whose memories and feelings were whose in Proty/Garth, so in all liklihood there's some element of fusion there.

The revelation isn't so much that Proty impersonated Garth. It's more that what you thought was Garth for a long time was really Proty/Garth.

Hi Joe! Here are my responses in order...
1. That line about respecting past writers is debateable. I happen to be flexible on that issue, so I agree that it depends on whether or not the story works. Proty as Garth provided big shock value that never had consequences because of the move on to Zero Hour. We are left with all kinds of issues to reconcile:

a. Can we live with the fact that the person we thought was Garth was actually Proty? I can't stand that. I'd be furious with Proty.

b. What would Imra's reaction be? I love you anyway? Omigod, NO! Oh, I already knew. Really? Weird! We have to guess what she would have thought. It pretty much discredits her as a telepath...unless she knew. See? I think that kind of writing is flaky.

c. Ayla comes across as a doormat. I don't buy her reaction. Especially adding in the twin aspect.

d. What would everyone else think? Cham? Cos? Mekt? Brande?


2. You never know with kids. Maybe one of the boys would freak out and the other one would beat him up? Maybe they'd all be fine, maybe they'd all be repulsed. The thing is, the kids never knew that the sentience of Proty was their father, they thought it was all Garth, body and soul. Being asked to accept such a fundamental change is a lot. Kids are pretty good at adapting, though. Again, we'll never know.

3. Imra fell in love with Proty's personality in Garth's body, but she didn't know it was Proty's personality, she thought it was an altered Garth. There is a big difference. Would she have fallen in love with him if she knew?

4.I don't recall that ambiguity. Maybe there's some fusion, but it doesn't alter the fact that Proty never revealed that he was in there.

I don't see much difference in the two points of your closing statement. Proty lied about being in there, to everyone. Naturally, those closest to Garth are most intensely affected. We only saw Ayla's reaction, and I, as stated, don't agree with the way the writers depicted that.

This issue has been debated forever, and although I have my strong opinions about it, I don't mean to discredit others'. I seem to get into it whenever this topic comes up.

Hey Dean.


We'll certainly all have our own responses. I can certainly live with it. I'm more interested in the things he does than who he is.

But I do think she knew, and I think she was okay with it at whatever level she needed to be. we're all capable of choosing to not know or acknowledge things - Imra too.

What I always love about Imra is her conflicted state. There's her ethics vs her practicality, and in this case her ability to know vs her desire not to.

I disagree - I bought it whole heartedly. She WANTED her brother to be alive. She was willing to accept a lot to that end.

Good questions.

Again, whatever NAME he's called, he's still the only dad they've ever had. He's not impersonating their father - he IS their father. It's like finding out your father has been using an alias - technically he's someone else but in every practical way he's not.

But yes, there's no way of knowing what the reaction of the kids would be because every individual will have their own reaction.

We might compare it to kids finding out their dad is gay and his marriage to their mother was a sham of sorts. Some kids would be more upset than others, some would accept it more than others.

Again, this is just a matter of names. The Impossible Man said in the Fantastic Four that his people didn't bother with names because they knew who they were. So Imra thought he was Garth and in fact he was someone else -- but did she fall in love with his name or his personality?

Sure, he lied. But people lie. They lie about being gay, about their ancestry, about their education, about their feelings, and on and on. What we had here was a Legion take on this.

[Again, this is just a matter of names. The Impossible Man said in the Fantastic Four that his people didn't bother with names because they knew who they were. So Imra thought he was Garth and in fact he was someone else -- but did she fall in love with his name or his personality?]

To move away my Cosmic Boy/Saturn Girl proness. If I found out my wife lied about her name, past, and was in fact not someone I knew when I was a teenager. I'd consider us not married and I wouldn't want my kids to know her.

Proty is a liar and there relationship is false. You don't forgive liars. In many ways, they are lower than murderers because you don't know them or their intentions.

There's no two ways about this unless he THOUGHT he was Garth...which would be a cool plot.

Speaking from experience, I think this is a perfect analogy. My father came to terms with his homosexuality when my brothers and I were in our 20s. My parents had been married 29 years, and their divorce was amicable, since they still cared for each other, but they wanted different things. Actually, I guess they didn't!

My two younger brothers and I were thrown for a loop, as none of us really had any indication that Dad was gay while we were growing up. My mother always knew it, as she discovered it early on in their marriage, before they even had kids, but dad thought he could keep his feelings/thoughts in check, and they both decided they still wanted to be married.

As my brothers and I came to terms with the fact that dad was gay, we realized he was still our dad despite the fact that he had always lied about who he was (especially to himself
), and this had always been his reality, we just didn't know about it. And it is sort of silly to be upset at him, because if he hadn't tried to live a "normal" life, my brothers and I wouldn't even be here to complain about it... ). He is still our father and loves us.

Now, we were all adults at this point in our lives, so it wasn't as shocking as if we had been kids. We all still interact with him a decade later, spending time at the holidays and vacations, etc. (none of us live in close proximity to each other anymore...) but on different levels. My brothers basically ignore the fact that he's gay, almost as if they are stil in some denial.

So I think this point is dead on. And on some levels, Proty may not even have realized how much of himself was "Garth" and how much was "Proty".

"You don't forgive liars" is a pretty harsh and sweeping statement IMO. As someone else said, we all lie about something some time. My grandmother used to lie about her age. Is that unforgiveable? It could be said that those of us who are gay were living a lie while we were in the closet, but I dont' know of anyone who was born "out". Was it unforgiveable that I pretended to be straight when I was a teenager? I dont' think so.

The problems I have with the story are that (a) Imra is shown to be watching Garth and the Proteans with a worried look on her face. What are her thoughts? If she already knows Garth is Proty, this shouldn't be a big shock to her and she shouldn't look worried. If she doesn't know, is she going to use her telepaty to find out? Maybe she knows it's Proty but she's afraid he's going to leave her to rejoin his own people? Later, she's shown half awake, blithely telling Garth she loves him, which seems to contradict her earlier, disturbed portrayal.

(b) Ayla overHEARS the Proteans' secret telepathic meeting, which they're having in the middle of the night to make sure no one else is around to observe it. If two or more telepaths are speaking TELEPATHICALLY, a nontelepath like Ayla shouldn't be able to hear anything. Earlier, Imra, who is a telepath also observes the meeting, but doesn't overhear anything, though she is inside a closed window.

I don't think the "dad is gay" analogy works, because even if he was in a marriage that he didn't belong in, it was still him. I think a better analogy would be if a step dad always claimed that he was the child's birth father. It'd be complicated, but the child might just be fine with it, or he might be very upset and start focusing on who is his real dad.

I differentiate lies from stretching of the truth and untruths under duress. Proty deliberately stole someone else's identity and basically took all that person's relations.

A better example of adoption is if a person took a man's license, had plastic surgery, and then had kids under that name.

I think it works perfectly as far as the children are concerned. Because while the kids don't know their father used to inhabit a different body under a different name, it's still him. It's not like Garth and Imra got married, had kids, and then Garth died and was replaced by Proty. Garth/Proty *is* their birth father.

It's a bigger effect than some may think. My brother I found out was the child of another man than my father when I was 14 years old. Until then, he WAS my brother.

While it certainly didn't change my opinion of him, my brother's reactions and mine were colored a great deal.

He was angry, hate filled, and disgusted by it along with the fact that mom kept her previous marriage from him. He hated the man he found out was his biological birth father and his relationship with our father suffered.

You're assuming a lot from relatively little information. Namely, that Protty was even aware at the start. More likely he came in confused with a jumble of memories and the only thing clear being that Garth Ranzz stared back at him from the mirror.

It could have been months before he had it sorted out in his head what happened. By then, he'd been Garth for some time and couldn't face disappointing everyone.

(Though why I'm still defending it, I don't know.)

I personally was under the impression that the Proty as Garth thing was not the manipulative actions of a master deceptor, but an effort to ease the pain of people he loved. Also, I always thought that Proty had taken an "impression" of Garth's personality and memories, creating more of a "Groty" or "Prarth" amalgam rather than one sentient being masquerading as another.

That's a good point, Armsfalloffboy. Mon-El was revived by Eltro Gand in the same way that Proty revived Garth, but it was later revealed that part of Eltro's personality survived along with Mon-El's.

Actually, I'm surprised people don't find the Mon-El/Eltro Gand revelation to be distasteful as well.

Basically, it was a way of trying to shoehorn both Superboy and Mon-El into the revised continuity, by making the personality classically associated with "Mon-El" (the moody loner) into Eltro, and turning Mon-El proper into a Superboy figure.

I do, as a matter of fact. They gutted Mon-El, who was (or at least had the potential to be) one of the most singular personalities in the Legion. Only maybe Cary Bates and Paul Levitz played up the fact that 1,000 years in isolation might have a donwside. It stinks that the change was made prior to the "Valor" retcon. It means that strictly speaking it applies at least to the post-Crisis Mon-El as well as Valor.

matlock:

It wasn't really. It was originated in LSH (TMK series) # 4 as a way to bring back Mon-El so the Valor retcon could be launched, and then it was used in the post-Valor-retcon continuity to undo Valor's death at the hands of Glorith in the intended analog to the Time Trapper conspiracy story, also resulting in making Valor (post-retcon) the ultra-heroic Superboy-type figure that the retcon required him to be.

I think I always saw Mon'El as actually as heroic as Superboy, just in a slightly more quiet way than Superboy ever was. I never really saw him as that kriffed up in the head...wehteher via Saturn Girl tampering or whatever reason.

I personally have also always wondered what it would have been like if they'd just switched over Superboy's adventures to Captain Marvel, Supergirl's to Mary Marvel, and actually made the whole plagarism accusations WORK for them.

It still shoehorned the idea that Eltro's inability to cope with Mon-El's memories were the cause of Mon-El's bouts of depression into the pre-Valor retcon continuity, just without the Valor history added on. I believe the text page for that issue actually played up Mon-El's problems via a tell-all Kitty Kelley type biography to reinforce how poorly Eltro was equipped to be Mon-El.

Back to the Garth/Proty story: I still find it all very far fetched and apropos of nothing. I can buy any explanation you want to throw at me why no one wanted to recognize the fact that Garth wasn't Garth anymore. Imra was blinded to by love, or Ayla wanted her brother back or Cham didn't notice Garth was eating out of Proty's dish. Whatever. I was more disturbed by the relatively lazy way TMK just threw it out there with no preamble whatsoever. I mean, teasing it out a little would've given it some plausability. Show "Garth" change the channel when a Discovery Channel program about proties came on. Anything.

I do find it terribly amusing that TMK seemed to find a "reanimation" machine too implausible, but a psyche transfer machine was a-ok. Of course, it still managed to reanimate Garth's dead, lifeless, heart-not-beating corpse anyway, but why pick nits?

Oh, and kudos to you Charles, for wringing a relatively interesting discussion about a topic I didn't think had many more miles on it.

I enjoyed this mainly as it made for a nice twist, didn't retcon anything and suddenly added a lot of depth to the characters concerned.

The personality of Proty/Garth didn't seem much different from Garth without this revelation. I was familiar with Garth as a retired founder. I first read him in action when he was having a breakdown as leader.

Perhaps his breakdown was also due in some part to the split entity?

For me Garth stands out as a much more distinct personality as Livewire and TMG played to that by showing the differences between the SW6 version and the original. Even reading back, all of the Adventure Legionnaires took a while to develop distinct personalities.

There are plenty of things I don't particularly care much about in Legion continuity, but few things that I actively dislike and deny.

As someone who (occasionally) writes Legion fanfic, Proty-as-Garth messes too much with storylines I want to use with Garth, which would involve his relationship with Ayla and Mekt. A potentially powerful scene with Mekt and Ayla and Garth all fighting becomes some sort of theatre of the absurd, because one of them is a blob pretending to be their brother, rendering all the emotional beats farcical and surreal.

Eh. Don't like it.

Could some residual Proty-essence have transmigrated over to Garth during the resurrection? Might he be changed by that, or even 'recognized as Protean' by other Proteans? Might even his children be affected in some way by this? Sure.

But Proty-as-Garth doesn't work for me.

I'd have to reread to be sure, but I had the feeling it was a Proty/ Garth mix in there. Garth's body, Proty's mind, but with access to Garth memories. So that Proty mind would be affected to some degree by Garth's past?

It would have been a little awkward to have fake-amnesiac Proty/Garth wandering around Garth's life constantly making faux pas while learning the role.

I just thought the Legion got Garth back, changed by the experience, but not alien as such.

That kind of entity is what I thought we had, rather than Proty using Garth-corpse as a flesh puppet. That's the way I remember it anyway, without peeking back.

Looking at Validus, could the changed form actually be down to the Proty elements of Garridan? It's really a Proty/Garth/Imra result?

Validus does seem to have a knack for being anywhere from nine feet tall to twenty or thirty feet tall, depending on whose drawing him and whether it's a group shot (in which he merely towers over his teammates) or an action scene (in which he shoots up to building sized).

Some protean shapeshifting might explain his otherwise inconsistent size-changes.

For relevance