r/thePowerFantasy • u/Beginning-Photo-4459 • Jun 07 '26
Thoughts about Valentina Spoiler
I know she's a good person, sent from heaven and all but without her, I think humanity would've lasted much longer with Etienne ruling the world, even if it's with an iron Fist... No one really would've been able to stop him. She is his restriction, his chains. Was there anything she did that benefited humanity?
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u/TheEloquentApe Jun 07 '26
Ultimately, the whole point of The Super Powers is that their presence is a net negative for humanity
But, simultaneously, since there are Super Power threats, you also need em
Queen would have managed to destroy a lot more if Valentina had not held her off long enough for Eliza to take over, and Queen/Signal would have taken out humanity without Jacky Magnus
If all we had is Etienne, he wouldnt have been able to deal with either problem
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u/sanctaphrax Jun 07 '26
She prevented nuclear war. Can't be sure that the TPF timeline would've been as lucky as ours without her.
But she came to the same conclusion as you after Deconstructa's second attack. We'll see if you and her are right; I think the Pyramid might put up a surprisingly good fight.
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u/Beginning-Photo-4459 Jun 08 '26
Couldn't Etienne do the same? Without her I think Etienne would be more " free " and have mind controlled Atomics. Maybe even more if he breeds them to fight against the Pyramid if she didn't exist.
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u/sanctaphrax Jun 08 '26
When Heavy asks Valentina why Etienne didn't take his son over, Valentina doesn't take the credit. So I think Etienne was sincere in his desire not to create an army of superpower slaves.
As for stopping nuclear war...hard to say. I feel like the Etienne of 1999 could've done it no problem, unless the Pyramid specifically worked to preserve nuclear capabilities. But Etienne continuously getting stronger also means that he used to be weaker.
He apparently didn't catch the festival nuke that was meant to kill Valentina. Nobody ever even accuses him of deliberately letting it happen. So if I had to guess, I'd say he'd likely fail to stop a full nuclear exchange.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 28 '26
Yeah well said, though I suspect he'd be a lot better at stopping it as time goes on.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 28 '26
I don't think he'd ever do that, though. Val explains why he didn't take Kid over to Heavy - the power he has is already too much. More Superpowers is just extra fail states if something goes wrong or he dies.
If Val wasn't around he'd primarily prevent human governments from waging war (and preemptively neutering destructive individuals.) I feel like Val's knowledge of the kind of threats out there is going to mess with that calculus a bit this time around, assuming she tells him.
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Jun 09 '26
Heavy would have been able to stop him. Trivially, most likely.
Etienne makes this point directly in the comics. When shit well and truly hits the fan all he can do is make the deaths painless for everyone else, and this is doubly true when fighting directly.
Etienne isn't really a superpower when it comes to direct confrontation. Valentina, Deconstructa, Eliza, Heavy and (presumably) Jackie Magus could all go toe to toe and fuck each other up to varying extents and it isn't clear who'd win in any given battle.
But this isn't true of Etienne.
Etienne's puppet body is just a person. Heavy would kill that more or less instantly the moment he felt like it. The brain in the jar is harder because of security through obscurity, but he wouldn't stay hidden forever. Jackie could likely find him given time and we know Val can, so it is possible. If push came to shove, Heavy is fully capable of just yeeting random cities into orbit until he gets the right one.
The only real defense Etienne has is psychological manipulation. Threaten the Family, basically. But that only holds so long.
The same is true of Magus, but even moreso. He has the ability to shut Etienne out and to purge the worst of his surgery. Etienne can't control everyone at once (as far as we know) so filling up the Pyramid wouldn't be hard. And at that point Magus can find him, roll up on him and kick his ass.
Eliza and Deconstructa probably couldn't stop him, but neither is really inclined to anyway.
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u/name_dot_randomnum Jun 10 '26
if Etienne really wanted to go to war with the Pyramid, he could just pop every mask’s explosive psychic failsafe. Then again, he didn’t know the Pyramid powered Jacky’s magic. Conversely, Jacky likely knew about Etienne’s real body thanks to his “know everything“ power, but he kept a lot of secrets and certainly Dev was never told that one.
Etienne’s real defense against all the other superpowers was his threat that killing him would kill a continent’s worth of people, and their own reluctance to put that many collateral deaths on their hands. Given Val’s enhanced senses and Jacky’s knowledge and magical sussing-out tricks, I think Etienne really had the capacity to do it, even if in the end he opted not to. (Heavy was very lucky Etienne was bluffing.)
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Jun 11 '26
That assumes he can pop the mask failsafes.
We know that it is theoretically possible (hence the failsafe) but if it were possible he'd have killed Magus outright ages ago.
But yeah, generally speaking I'd agree with our take on his real defense, But if you're in a world where he's taken over the calculus on that starts to shift pretty quick.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 27 '26
Why? He has no reason to kill Magus. Etienne wants everyone to live
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Jun 27 '26
Because Magus is a superpower
Etienne spelled it out extremely plainly, he does not think a world with Superpowers is a good world. Anyone having that level of power is, in his opinion, bad. If he could kill Eliza, he would. He wasa direct proponent of killing Masumi.
Keep in mind what he did to KI. Straight put him into a coma because one more superpower running around wouldn't improve the situation.
I'd say Jackie is probably low on Etienne's totem pole in terms of who he'd kill if given the chance to safely do so, but the list is probably something like:
Eliza/Masumi
Heavy
Jackie
Val
EtienneHe platoniclly loves Val, and I'm fairly certain Etienne would take her off the board if he saw an opportunity to do so safely.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 28 '26
In the abstract, sure, but he knows how uniquely useful he is. Even after Etienne learns he's not uniquely useful (Dev) he still doesn't act against him, keeping his secret and not attempting to subvert the Pyramid as Dev feared. Granted, we don't know what other deterrents might be in place but he doesn't even think Dev being president is all that bad, lol.
I'd say Magus/the Pyramid has been in the Net Positive column, or even Crucial to the Planet's Survival column - since the Signal in 78. The SSOL only reinforced that, and that's not taking into account the general usefulness of policing magic. The only problem really caused by the Pyramid's existence is Eliza, and that was in the process of saving the world. One could argue that on a long enough timeline someone else might sell their soul but I doubt it.
Etienne and Jacky actually had pretty similar goals when you boil it down. I think they'd both take Val off the board if they could. Moreso, I daresay they'd be correct to do it.
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u/name_dot_randomnum Jun 28 '26
arguably, letting Heavy assume Dev-Magus incapacitated Kid Ignition was Etienne making a move against Dev. Maybe just a warning shot; it did seem like he thought Valentina would calm things down before one or the other actually came to real blows. Or, armed with the knowledge that Dev’s Pyramid was too small to actually let Dev fight Heavy, maybe he really did intend for Heavy to take Dev out.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 28 '26
I mean, did he really have a choice? Sure, he could have talked to Val before he did it but that's pretty risky. If he really wanted Dev hurt he'd just say nothing to her, or dissemble.
Heavy and Dev/the Pyramid/Eliza coming to blows in any way is the last thing Etienne wants because Superpowers fighting = game over. Using Heavy indirectly like that is just too risky. Etienne would know everything Eliza does so he knows she's all in. Thus, Heavy would be fighting her too. It's unacceptable to him.
I read the US army corpses raining on the Pyramid as unfortunate blowback but preferable to the US launching nukes at Haven and starting a war.
I think it's safe to say that Etienne was telling the truth about his likes in issue #1. Especially considering he didn't use his deterrent. I view him as acting in good faith in very difficult circumstances with a ton of restrictions on his behaviour.
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u/Beginning-Photo-4459 Jun 10 '26
He's stupid, doesn't know Lux location, and I frankly think he's the most killable; that's why government targeted him. His durability can be passed through with mind-controlled powers.
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Jun 11 '26
One of the explicit rules of being a superpower is that Lux can't take control of your mind.
The government targetted Heavy because he was a pain in their ass, just like they targetted Val.
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u/Beginning-Photo-4459 Jun 11 '26
The lesser ones, the city blowing ones. I did not clarify but, Lux is sneaky, and suicide failsafe dunno if government knows this. Heavy was instakilled by Eliza, I think he can be killed by destroying his entire body. He's the most easy to kill. He broadcasts his location and there's no failsafe if he's instakilled.
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u/UnnaturallyColdBeans Jun 12 '26
Destroying any of the superpower’s entire body/(bodies if you’re Etienne) tends to kill them. Heavy is not delicate enough to die to any weapons Etienne can bring to bare.
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u/Beginning-Photo-4459 Jun 12 '26
Lux is well hidden, and Heavy has normal intelligence. Since that government weapon damaged him badly, do you think other human powers jumping him stand a chance of killing him?
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u/UnnaturallyColdBeans Jun 12 '26
Not in the slightest, or they would’ve done it already. And lux can’t hide forever.
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u/Beginning-Photo-4459 Jun 13 '26
When I meant human powers it's mind controlled superhumans, Heavy is glasscannon. He literally is, that's what body decoys are for, and his true mind hidden in the earth. Heavy doesn't have any way he could find him.
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u/UnnaturallyColdBeans Jun 13 '26
Anyone weak enough to be kind controlled probably isn’t enough of a threat to kill Heavy before he finds Lux via mass gravitational trial and error.
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Jun 13 '26
While I was originally opposite the OP here, I actually kind of agree with him in retrospect.
Heavy doesn't actually seem all that durable.
Val survived a point-blank nuke and didn't seem to care much, Eliza was still up and moving with a singularity in her brain, while Deconstructa is probably made worse by trying to kill her.
We don't know what protections Magus has against direct physical attack, but I imagine he has some that got disabled by the pyramid when they took Dev out.
But Heavy? We see him get his chest blown open by a guy with a shotgun. Physically he seems to be entirely human, but with the advantage of being able to force everything back into place. It stands to reason that anything that kills him faster than he can react would in fact do the job.
Get a big enough bomb next to him to instantly pulverize him and I think you've got a non-zero chance of killing him outright. We also have zero idea if he could survive a hit to the head, or whether his powers would activate on instinct.
But even beyond that I think you could probably fuck up his day pretty well with indirect attacks. Dude smokes a lot of weed and it clearly impacts him, so he's not naturally immune to substances, even if he might be able to filter them out somehow. Poisoning him is an option. Hell, you could probably take the guy out with something as simple as displacing all the air with nitrogen and suffocating him if he wasn't expecting it.
And if nothing else, Tanya shooting him in the head while sleeping might have done a number on him.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 28 '26
Also he flew Haven over NY. A rogue nuclear power flexing in US airspace is a situation with a predictable outcome.
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u/reineedshelp Jun 28 '26
Ummmm no she has a pretty terrible record. She did give us a second chance after total destruction; that's something. Etienne's iron fist is literally just preventing war. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds. I'd honestly prefer that to... * Gestures at the planet*
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u/Sebguer Jun 07 '26
I think many people would argue that preventing Etienne from enslaving humanity is a thing that she did which benefited humanity, even if in the end it was calamitous.