#734 Real Life Insight

Seems even our captor seems to "sorta" get what Omega Energy is. ...Not that this helps explain it for the idiots in the audience (like me).

I was thinking JD would take a pass for a Halloween themed comic.

Instead, it looks like he's waiting until the end of the week for that...

I'll take a stab and say Omega Energy is based around death.

Something that our captor doesn't acknowledge but I can't understand why quite yet.

Omega Energy = the end of childhood.

When you become a teenager, you get all angsty, and you stop playing with your old toys.

See also: Toy Story 3, the song "Puff the Magic Dragon"

I agree with this. If JD is connecting Alex getting teased with Omega Energy, as if there is some connection there, then it seems to be that loss of childhood innocence, which all the NES characters represent. Though a loss of something is a privation, while Omega Energy seems to be something positive.

Has anyone tossed out the idea that at the point where his memories stopped... Ryan died and this is some sort of echo? A spirit, or just a manifestation of Alex's guilt?

The thought that Ryan is dead has been thrown out before and has some good backing. Notably the conversation about Dubya, which lead to Alex narrowing Ryan's last real-world memories to a time frame of some significance that we don't know about. Something big happened during that time, something Alex connects to Ryan's situation.

Just what Ryan actually *is* is less clear. Alex at seemed to leap at any conclusion that meant Ryan was a fake (such as claiming he was a "Vincent"), but seems to have given that up since. This suggests he really believed there was no way this could be the real one until Ryan started quoting genuine real-world knowledge - real-world knowledge that meshes with Alex's expectations of what Ryan would actually know.

Whether Ryan is an echo, a shadow, a spirit, or even just a living being whose body was never found again on the other side, he has the correct memories of Ryan (correct, just not complete) and Alex apparently believed he was dead. This is Videoland, however, and Occam's Razor couldn't cut warm butter here. All that can be said for sure is that the answer will be interesting.

@Calemyr: Only thing with your "Dubya" bit is that Ryan didn't say just which Bush he thought was president. He well and truly could have been referring to the elder George Bush, in which case he could have easily died (or simply been brought to Videoland and had something happen to him) as far back as 1992.

Omega Energy: I think it might be pure Sorrow. Sometimes people have died from simply giving up the will to live. Then again, it could be Entropy, something a video game universe wouldn't necessarily be subject to, as they don't have the same physical laws ours does. In fact, when I examine that thought further, I get a little chill, because it's kind of scary to imagine all that violence that game characters are capable of, without entropy present to really govern and mitigate some of that violence.

If it's Entropy, that might explain why the Touched go the way they go: they're breaking down, for the first time ever. Minds and bodies are no longer unchanging and "safe", so that's why they go insane like they do. They just can't handle what's happening, as they weren't given the emotional equipment to do so.

Actually, he pretty much says exactly that it is elder bush. He has no idea who dubya is. His last memories of the real world were during the election season after bush's terms, during the short period where... ross perot, was it? dropped out of the race.

It was a very specific period of time where his memories of the presidential election stopped, after Perot dropped out but before he re-entered the race. Alex seemed to know of something that happened involving Ryan right around that point in time, but refused to say what. It was frustrating.

I like the theory about Ryan having died. This comic... seems to back it up, if only tangentally.

I also have to disagree with omega energy being pure sorrow. The sovereign is a reaction to the introduction of omega energy to videoland, not a manifestation of it.

Omega energy could be your soul. Humans have souls and they live and they die and with the soul they have the ability to understand the consequences of their own actions. If a video game character was given a soul they would suddenly realize how many people they had killed in the name of the video game, life and death would become more then just lives and game over and this would cause them to give in to the madness of it all. If they extracted Kevin's soul and put it upon the characters this could be an explanation of what this all is.

Omega energy isn't what the sovereign does (edit: to make sprites go angstyemo).

Omega energy is the stuff that makes people go purple-pixelly and then vanish. The two are NOT the same thing.

I know this has probably been covered in previous threads, but what are the chances that Ryan has been exposed to "The Desert"? If the desert can make people forget their names, forgetting the name of an important concept doesn't sound like too much of a stretch. It could also explain the other memory related discrepancies between meatspace!Ryan and antagonist!Ryan.

I should mention that any theory saying that Ryan died before '96 is completely false. I can't remember the comic, but Alex has very clear memories with Ryan in '96. I think it was mentioned around the same time as the Perot discussion.

Also, I can't remember if this was in the Crazy Theory Emporium thread or in the Where Are They Now? thread, but it's been mentioned that the apparent cut-off in Ryan(?)'s memories coincides with the date on Schrodinger's collar. What this means is uncertain, but a coincidence seems...unlikely, to put it delicately. That is, it ain't happening.

This post has been edited by aturtledoesbite on Nov 1 2011, 12:27 AM

When the purple wave hit Nexus from Roll, people became angsty. Alex says that Omega energy makes people go angsty in this comic as well as die: http://www.captainsnes.com/2011/10/19/730-assumption-undone/

This is accurate. Schrodinger came the same year, in the same season, where Ryan's memories begin to end. Schrodinger is said to have come to Videoland in the comic arc where the Pretty Little Girl (or whatever) and Kain first begin their battle with Schrodinger.

When the purple wave hit Nexus from Roll, people became angsty. Alex says that Omega energy makes people go angsty in this comic as well as die: http://www.captainsnes.com/2011/10/19/730-assumption-undone/

Mordain's point is that sorrow is a reaction to Omega Energy. Sorrow is NOT Omega Energy.

If it was there would be no need to hash it out like the comic is doing.

I think it's been pretty well made clear that Omega energy is a form of death. But I think it can manifest itself in more ways than just causing sprites to disintegrate. That is, sprites can be Touched by mortality instead of simply being killed outright. Imagine what it would be like for something that never had any knowledge of death to suddenly come face to face with...not just the fact that it could die, but the certainty that it would. I think describing how they might feel as sorrow would be a severe understatement. It might even be a protection mechanism to keep them from dwelling on the fact that they will die.

And that might be part of the reason why the Sovereign - Despair - went all nihilistic after killing the Shadow King - Deception. Maybe she realized that even killing the Shadow King wouldn't fix Videoland, and all of the sorrow and despair caused by their fighting would still be around afterward. Sounds like that was when the Sovereign went to stage 2, assuming that applies to her.

As for Ryan, it's pretty obvious that he knows about death, but has no personal knowledge of it (thus why he has this vague idea of what it is but can't spell it out). And he might be young enough not to be aware of his own mortality yet (which doesn't necessarily mean he's a little kid; people can and do last into their twenties without becoming 'aware' of death in a personal way).

This, right here. This is a good part of why I'm thinking "Entropy" for Omega Energy. Especially with Proto saying "Is there some other way to actually kill people where you're from?" As if all those various swords, energy weapons, guns, explosives, and all the rest, had no power over this universe's inhabitants, other than wounding. The only way I can really see that being possible, is that this place was a universe that was born without Entropy (and probably a few other important physical laws, to boot.)

That might even be why Lana didn't want Kevin to use it, in it's "new" form as an energy source, to directly and deliberately kill Mother Brain*. I may be wrong, but I'm thinking it's pretty likely that Kevin, the Champion of the Princess, doing what he did, started to re-write some of the fundamental laws of Videoland. And this, coupled with the iteration of the SNES, is part of where we get the Great Change. Kevin inadvertently introduced Videoland to the act of murder.

*I've worded it this way because MB didn't know A. what Death is, and B. that shoving Duke into that hole would have that effect. She wasn't going for a deliberate course of action that she knew would end with a life gone forever, the way Kevin seems to have done.

Here it is!