In 1999, the speedster known as The Flash began fighting crime in Central City, Oregon, combining the inspiring presence and gentle demeanor of Superman with the facts-driven and logical mind of Batman.
Later that same year, Coast City, California would get its own hero in the Green Lantern, a cocky man who claimed to be an officer from an intergalactic peacekeeping force assigned to this sector of space.
2003 would see the appearance of the Green Arrow, a Robin Hood-like figure who would target and expose corrupt officials in Star City, Washington and surrounds.
Though not as notable as The Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the three Heroes of the West Coast would be instrumental and important in the Silver Age of Superheroes.
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ok so while my ds is getting sand poured into it at alarming rates I'm thinking about how jrpgs in specific have a really weird desync with How Important Death Is. like some address it better than others but it very frequently happens where if you take a step back youll go "am I wild or is everybody just like, Really down with murder in this game". and consequences for said murder, especially in a characterization sense but even just actual physical consequences, don't really happen? unless it's a vehicle for conflict but like. when it is a vehicle for conflict it feels weird because why are These Guys actually taking the fact we killed somebody in broad daylight seriously and coming after us for it while all the other npcs and even the main party took it like it was another saturday evening
see I Think where the issue lies is in the fact that everything is in its own little world when you're in a battle? like. when you fight an enemy and you get leather out of it it's seen as something the enemy Drops and not. their hide. when you defeat a character in a battle it does just feel like you Defeated them. unless there's dialogue afterwards that says otherwise you don't even mentally assume you killed em you just wounded them enough to make them flee or dissolve or whatever. and it's Weird to just. have that assumption there because for a lot of games it really isn't clear if you're killing them or defeating them !!
that last point is extra important when you have the specific brand of Skittish Hero / Noble Hero Who Doesn't Kill People / Rational Hero In Way Over Their Head or whatever where you really don't think they Would kill a guy just to get them out of the way. in that case it's REALLY weird because it's hardly brought up. even if it Is brought up that that guy Sure Did Die the mc doesn't tend to actually have a reaction ??? and I don't know why this is ???? like Any written reaction would be more interesting than nothing even if the guy doesn't have a full on crisis about taking another life having them go "oh shit, The Consequences" would be nice. really anything except (oh cool we can advance the plot now).
I will also mention that Some deaths do matter plot wise but very frequently what makes them matter is how much of it is linked to an in game battle I think. if your mc just finishes a fight and comes back to the overworld and the guy's Disappeared or Dissolved or whatever it means they don't matter. if the guy's still around after the fight it means it's more significant, especially if they're still alive but wounded or Really Shaken Up. because this clears up the indistinguishable line between if a battle is lethal or not and if a character decides to deal a finishing blow now it's Way more telling of their character. even though this is basically the same thing that happened in the (killed In A Battle) scenario. just with more dialogue. I will also mention that the person who deals the finishing blow is Rarely Ever that good hearted protagonist and often they'll even go :0 at somebody else committing a murder despite them instigating and helping murder quite a few people. just. In Battle. so it's less bad. I guess.
this is leaving out the fact that in party deaths are often a Major Major Blow because like. ok that's fair. that's A Guy You Knew that's understandable. anyway I don't really know where I'm going with this I just think it's interesting how in these types of games death can swap from not mattering at all to mattering a Lot and if u don't think about it too hard u don't even question it. I'll probably be putting some examples in the tags idk
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thinking abt bellum v hard. (fyi there are 1658 words under this cut)
there's not a lot of concrete stuff to think abt but there ideas. he's kind of already won by the time link shows up on the scene. he's not really actively antagonizing the world of the ocean king, he mostly just has the ghost ship to go around collecting prey for him while he has the yook and anouki turned against each other and seems to have infested the different temples and whatever with monsters to delay any opposition. is he the one who destroyed the cobble kingdom? they're meant to be supporters of the ocean king so i think we can guess that bellum is the one who tried to eradicate them.
maybe he was the one who... mind controlled? or otherwise meddled with the yook to keep them from checking out the ice temple and keeping the anouki occupied with dealing with them. (tbh theres some untapped potential in the relationship between the yook and anouki) he doesn't really do anything to the gorons but maybe he doesn't see them as a worthwhile threat since they see the crimsonine as more of an artifact and not something they should really do anything with, and link has to pass a test to even be allowed to go to the temple. the cobble kingdom is already destroyed, and it can be assumed that he mightve mimicked their engineering based on eox being the hostile boss of the last temple and turning into sand, suggesting a relationship to bellum, and maybe that he's trying to hide the fact that he's the one fucking with everyone. i'm not even sure if characters (besides the main group) even know that bellum exists until link's quest is more known.
taking a note from the manga, where bellum says something along the lines of feelings of love and friendship creating more worthwhile life force for him, so taking that into account with stuff in the game suggests that he maybe doesnt make his presence well-known to avoid something like a mass panic or a persistent fear in people, which could downplay positive emotions that makes their life forces more worth taking to him along with other worthwhile forces maybe being ones connected to divine power (like his taking of tetra and seeming desperation to keep her specifically, since she's most likely a descendant of hylia's mortal form), so he likely is very hands-off with how he's affected the world in order to preserve the value of his prey, somehow. idk why he turns people into statues maybe its a preservation method. maybe hes saving tetra for some reason or maybe trying to bait link in as well. maybe he wants to grab link, too, but failed to catch him the first time and resorted to allowing him to go down the path of dismantling bellum's work all so that bellum can try and capture him himself.
the spirits he does manage to capture and left alive and instead just sealed away within their temples, which i believe is because spirits and gods and whatever in loz can't really die unless they explicitly permanently become mortal (hylia) and can only really be sealed away temporarily in some form, mostly due to a lot of them being a sort of representation of some part of the world (i like to imagine that demise is the god or whatever who created monsters, he's the father of monsters and opposes hylia due to the way her favored creatures [hylians ig] attack and kill monsters and he wants the world to be habitable and safe only for his creations)
it's probably safe to say that the ghost ship (like. the whole thing) was created by bellum, and in some form is perhaps some kind of living being, hence why bellum is capable of effectively possessing it the way he does, since it's an extension of himself like the boss monsters, it just maybe takes parts from some existing ships, or maybe it's not alive and bellum is capable of creating large structures like that he is compatible with.
bellum himself turns to sand when he is defeated, as well as most of the other boss monsters, but the cubus sisters (who certainly have a relationship with bellum due to having the same eyes and being connected to the ghost ship) do not turn into sand, which makes me think that bellum didn't actually create them; maybe they're corpses or something being remotely puppeted by bellum.
bellum is clearly made up of the sand of hours, a crystallization of life force, and oshus is said to have used those sands to create the phantom hourglass, and the sands are also mentioned to have been created from the force gems connected back to oshus himself, so bellum was probably created from those force gems and therefore those sands of hours at some point somehow (i enjoy the idea that oshus was the one who created bellum; with oshus being our main source of info on bellum, i think it'd be interesting if he was the one who originally made bellum but obscures this fact by just talking about how he 'appeared' and whatnot).
bellum seems to have a weird sort of... inverted? perverted? ability to create life (perhaps a sort of parallel to the one we can assume the ocean king has if we assume that he created the three spirits as well as bellum maybe) but only in a hivemind or derivative sort of way, only able to create things that follow simple commands and when he possesses something else he takes it over. (i like to take him in a more biological or physiological way rather than magical, when he is removed so is the control, but there might be little remnants, but his influence is gone. i take bellumbeck aftereffects to be terrible sickness rather than others going with the idea of taking on some bellum-like traits or residual controls. the things bellum creates can only follow simple rules unless he is directly in control therefore he can use it as he wishes, but if he takes control of something he did not create, it's a bit more of a battle, he has to contend with that other being's subconscious or whatnot and has no effect unless he is physically connected. his control is more limited and ends up incorporating some of the hosts' subconscious desires with some guiding from bellum himself to achieve a favorable outcome.)
with the world of the ocean king being a sort of parallel/separate world to link n tetra's great sea, it's interesting that the ghost ship can be physically present outside the world in which it was created. definitely there can be contact between different worlds in loz (like hyrule and the dark world/lorule in alttp/albw and a little bit with termina if you take that as a literal place and a little bit with koholint and then the twili realm and whatever i'm missing) but it's interesting to see bellum as a villain capable of (in some way) contact and interact within other worlds and drag inhabitants of those other worlds into his own (oshus can send people out of his world, so i assume he can also bring them in, maybe that's how link gets in despite falling off of the ghost ship, unless somehow the ghost ship is still within the world of the ocean king but is also present in the great sea but the area around it is a fragment of whatever part of the world of the ocean king its in superimposed over the great sea... idk) so it's interesting that bellum could bc considered a villain able to tamper with or at least interact with world boundaries to let things in and out, maybe it's something that he is only capable of with whatever power he's attained by the start of the game.
whatever relationship he may have to oshus and the other spirits is not at all a part of the game, but at the same time we don't learn a whole lot about them anyways. there's also stuff with the chief of the golden frogs as another ally of oshus, but i imagine bellum didn't bother with him because he has no relation to the spirits' locations and the pure metals, and zuaz was left alone perhaps because his location is secret, while astrid and kayo were maybe found due to living on a more populated island (more prey for bellum to go after, more people to know about astrid and kayo). a lot of the monsters in the dungeons were probably already there, while the bosses were specifically made to protect what was hidden there, or maybe the bosses came first and their presences attracted other monsters.
i think bellum created the two monsters you fight overseas on the spot; they existed specifically to try and kill link because at those two times (link going to get the final spirit and link going to get the first pure metal) bellum suddenly panics and decides to try and eliminate link at the cost of the loss of a possible worthwhile piece of prey. bellum was probably also the one to begin the rumor of the ghost ship; i imagine he can take a sort of human form the same way oshus can, and spent a bit of time after defeating oshus and creating the ghost ship integrating him within some pirate crew and using them to grow and spread the rumor of the ghost ship, eventaully leading them towards it and taking them has his first victims (and along the way taking the time to foster good relationships with them in the hopes that their positive emotions and feelings would make them more worthwhile prey, back to the manga snippet idea of feelings of friendship and love [and probably positive emotions in general] being another form of better life force).
bellum's cool
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