Topic on User talk:DocColress

Hey, sorry to bother you, but while this isn't gonna be a super common thing anymore, I've got a potential CM I want to run by you.

So a couple of years back when I asked your opinion on the Punisher 2099/Spider-Man 2009 villain Kron Stone and got him written up, I also bought up the Spider-Man Noir incarnation of Norman Osborn. I didn't have a whole lot of information about the guy available so I never got around to really proposing him, but now that I've read both Spider-Man Noir series', I think good old Stormin' Normin' is worth looking at.

So in case you aren't familiar with it, Spider-Man Noir is an Elseworlds-style reimagining of Spider-Man as a gritty noir/pulp hero fighting corruption in Great Depression-era New York City. Like any good noir city, NYC is a hellhole of corruption, with the poor forced to live in awful conditions, slum lords and mobsters have scores of people in their pocket and are free to do as they wish (to a degree), and the cops are more than happpy to keep a blind eye to the corruption. One of the biggest guys keeping this veil of corruption over the city is, of course, Norman Osborn.

Known as The Goblin for reasons that become clearer later in the story, Norman is something of a free-lancing mobster, who does a lot of dirty work for his friends in high places: when rich and influential men want people rubbed out without drawing bad attention to themselves, Norman is the guy they go to. Backed up by an inner circle of carnies and former freak-show residents (Reimaginings of The Vulture, Kraven the Hunter, Chameleon, and The Enforcers), Norman has been responsible for countless deaths of innocents who pose a threat to New York's elite, one of which being Peter Parker's Uncle Ben, who along with Aunt May are a pair of social revolutionaries who are champions of the poor and downtrodden. Norman had the guy beaten and tortured by his enforcers, and had the Vulture eat him alive. We also know that he's behind twelve murders (that can factually be traced to him), and there's a sequence where he has an apartment building set on fire as a favor for its greedy insurance money-hungry landlord, which only killed one little girl, but put tons of people at risk for burning to death.

So after Fancy Dan, Montana, and Ox try to violently "persuade" Aunt May to stop rabble-rousing and almost brutalize Peter, he decides to properly take action against Osborn and his cronies. In an incident that involves the Enforcers messing with a weird spider idol that Osborn had shipped over and Peter has a trippy run-in with an ancient spider-god, he receives his spider powers and uses them to shut down Goblin-run establishments: mob hideouts, drug dens, whore houses...

This leads to Norman deciding that he's got to identify the spider and cover his tracks, starting by him having an associate named Ben Urich (The story's narrator and a friend of Peter's: he trades potential blackmail info for heroin) assassinated, and tries to go after anyone Ben was friendly with. This leads to him kidnapping speakeasy owner Felicia Hardy (whose establishment is called The Black Cat, ha ha) and good old J. Jonah Jameson, then sending the Vulture after Peter and Aunt May in order to rub them out. What results is a dead Vulture, Spider-Man saving JJ and Felicia from being fed alive to a tiger and the swarm of killer spiders respectively, and him having an alleyway throwdown with Osborn, who is revealed to be wearing a rubber mask that conceals a horrible skin condition that made Norman all green and scaly (hence his Goblin moniker). Here we find out that Norman grew up in a freak show, and he rants about how he's using his power as an underworld player to gain respect for himself. He gives Peter the option of killing him or dying at his hands, and when Peter refuses to kill him Norman attacks, only to be killed by a killer spider-possessed Kraven. And with his death, pretty much all of New York's corruption comes tumbling down. At least until CM's Doc Ock and Crime Master show up for the sequel series.

Anyway, he was bought up on TV Tropes but rejected due to his freak show upbringing being too valid of a Freudian Excuse. Where do you stand on it, I wonder? Because to be fair, it definitely sounded bad: freak shows were not... exactly humanitarian, with Norman growling about how kids would throw rocks at him and call him names. The Vulture was also a part of that same freak show, and he was treated so bad that he went from a normal if creepy guy to a cannibalistic psycho. He also refuses to be sent to jail due to "not wanting to be put in a cage again."

But it's pretty much the only thing I can see being mitigating for Noir!Osborn: He doesn't have any legitimately good traits (His relationship with his fellow carnies/enforcers is business-like with him acting snappish and outright threatening to them at times. He DOES try to have Felicia killed for killing Chameleon, but it's presented as a "You killed MY guy" moment as opposed to "You killed my buddy!" For what it's worth, the guy doesn't seem eaten up at all about Fancy Dan having been eaten by spiders and keeps said spiders as pets), and while he isn't a serial-killing Nazi like Noir!Ock or a Nazi bedfellow like Noir!Crime Master, he's still a powerful and influential criminal responsible for an untold amount of corruption and suffering so he's definitely heinous enough.

So where do you stand? Are his freak show origins juuuuust sympathetic enough to keep him from counting? Or do we have yet another purely evil Green Goblin on our hands?

On the fence about him. I don't think his backstory really holds any bearing on his present day actions and character, but I'm unsure if he's not eclipsed by Ock and Crime Master in heinousness. He sounds just bad enough to be a borderline case of the trope at least.

Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, it can definitely be hard to measure up to a legitimate Nazi and his mass-murdering psycho "buddy". :^Y

Anyway, moving on to something else: have you been keeping up with the newest Season of Samurai Jack? Because the book has closed on two characters who I definitely feel are keepers. If you've been watching, you'll probably know who I'm referring to. If not, I'll explain. :p

I know one is the High Priestess of the Aku cult, but who's the other one?

The Dominator, the villain of the last half of episode 5: a rather nice, pleasant man who launched an attack on a village and killed most of its inhabitants (bad but not overly so since SCARAMOUCHE(!) did that in the first episode), kidnapped a LOT of children from that village, and uses them as both a power source that he slowly drains the life out of, and brainwashed child soldiers in a process that is shown to be very painful as shown by how they acted after they were freed from them. The guy also brutally tortures Ashi through electricity to, so that's extra scumbag points.

I'm rewatching the older seasons juuuuuuust to make sure neither are out-heinoused by other villains (Aside from Aku, but it's hard to be worse than a guy who has conquered entire planets and has been allowed to terrorize innocents for thousands of years), but so far I think they're both bad enough to count: the High Priestess's horrifying abuse of her own children and the fact that she had (I think) all of her own followers slaughtered at their hands for training purposes make her stand out enough for me. Ditto for the Dominator and his child-focused atrocities.

Oh yeah, those two seem like they might be valid keeps - the High Priestess moreso since she's not just a one episode character (we're apparently going to be hearing from her one more time in the series finale and I shudder to think what the context for that might be).

Aku has done the most widespread evil deeds and has even gotten to kill characters on-screen (poor Scottsman) but not only is his moral agency questionable and he gets Played for Laughs often, but he's actually semi-sympathetic this season with how he's had his own midlife crisis Not So Different from Jack's internal crisis, so he's still easily a non-example. These two, on the other hand, have agency entirely of their own choosing, are played dead seriously, and do horrible things that stand out from what regularly comes up on this show, all with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Well, the finale has aired (and was probably one of the more depressing and demoralizing finales I've seen, IMO. Overall I liked the season just fine though) and the dust has settled. Are you cool with me penning up writeups for the High Priestess and the Dominator?

(And yeah, I never figured that Aku would count. I actually wondered if he'd stand a chance given this season's darker tone, but after seeing him hold a goofy therapy session with himself... yeah. Plus, you know, there's the whole "made of 100% pure concentrated evil who is unable to do anything good" thing.  :^y)

Go for it! (And yeah, I liked the season and the series finale, but that whole Jashi romance and wedding scene were so needless.)

(Aku, to the very end, was just way too oddly likable despite the awful things he did, and there was no conceivable way he could choose to break from his evil path given what he was. The Dominator and especially the High Priestess are more despicable because they were fully human and chose to do things to children that were so depraved I don't think even Aku himself would approve of them, given his standards of not harming little children.)