Atlas (Ul-ron) has lived on Earth all his aware life and he still gave his son the first name of Mo- in Argonian???! This can’t be the “Boy Named Sue” effect, he’s still around… He’s not know for cruelty (quite the opposite)…
Alright, I’m baffled…!?
Maybe “Mo-Ron” isn’t known outside of Ron and Atlas. After all, he just goes by “Ron” on Earth. If Lisa does know, Atlas may have convinced her it didn’t mean anything bad in Argosian and no else one on Earth would ever need know of it, so “no harm done”.
What I’m trying to figure out is, does MoonShadow’s last comment mean (a) he doesn’t know what “moron” means, (b) he can’t believe that’s Ron’s real name, or (c) his brain was a bit sluggish switching from the Argosian meaning to the English meaning (I’m assuming they’re really speaking Argosian here).
Moon Shadow was just surprised to learn that Ron’s Royal name is Mo-Ron. Tyler knows exactly what moron means, that its an insult and that Ron is embarressed by the name. In the first panel on the next page Ron begs Moon Shadow not to tell anyone back home his full name to avoid the embarrasment. This confuses Aluna, the Resistance member, so Moon Shadow has to say “It’s a bit complicated.” Tyler agrees, since he’s Ron’s friend and has always wanted to help him out.
Just to clairfy, despite his anger when he was sent to the principal’s office and during Career Day, Ron was never hostile towards Tyler. But he blames Moon Shadow for his parents’ divorce and many other things that clearly aren’t Moon Shadow’s fault. Before the divorce, Ron (along with Suzie and Ambriel) were Tyler’s best friends at PS238. Ron and Suzie were the ones to organize the write-in vote for Tyler for
“Class Defender of Liberty”, and they hung out at the K-Square together. But Ron didn’t meet Moon Shadow until the fight against Charles Brigman. Ron had never really hit anyone before, and he didn’t like it. The fighting between Lisa and Ul-Ron escalated, and when Ron decided to speak to someone about his problems he chose to speak to Moon Shadow, only for the Septos to show up. Then his parents divorced.
Ron associates the fights between his parents and their eventual divorce to those two incidents: hitting Charles and being caught by the Septos while he was sneaking out of the house to speak to Moon Shadow. But while Tyler is mature enough to know that Lisa and Ul-Ron’s divorce isn’t Ron’s fault (or his own), he feels bad that one of his friends feels bad.
tl;dr Tyler knows what the word means, he’s just surprised to hear that it’s Ron’s name. As Ron’s friend he’s been a bit worried, and this doesn’t exactly help.
I’ve always understood it as some sort of Argosian naming convention, like the IV in ‘James the IV’, and it just has an unfortunate meaning in English.
Yes, Ron’s royal Argosian name is Mo-Ron. Of course anyone who bought the PS238 Roleplaying game would have known that long before this issue was published.
It’s no coincidence that she found Ron and Moonshadow, since she’s the head of the Resistance and she has no doubt been keeping tabs on them ever since they arrived on Argos, via a network of spies working in the palace. In his arrogance, Dax-Ra can’t imagine that he has anything to fear from a non-powered Argosian.
You know, maybe Dax-Ra needs to meet the Revenant and get shown the power of someone even without powers.
Oh wait, the Revenant’s on the wrong planet.
Hang on, his sidekick/protégé/trainee (whatever Moonshadow is) – he’s on the planet. And there’s an (probably at least mostly) unpowered Resistance on the planet.
Anyone else hoping Dax-Ra gets beaten by someone without powers, just for the look on his face? It would be justice indeed.
Also, Mo-Ron is a hilarious name.
Well, Moon Shadow does have his cell phone with him. It just takes a few dozen minutes for text messages to cross interstallar distances using Herschel’s tech…
Aluna knows that Ron didn’t grow up on Argos. What she means is that she hopes he has higher intelligence and better values than the Royals who did. Like she said, she considers the Royals to be fools, albeit powerful ones. So while she knows Ron and his father grew up off-world, she doesn’t know about their upbringing. The ship that brought Ul-Ron to Earth was supposed to teach him Argosian history (from the Royal perspective no doubt) and Royal values, but that part of the ship wasn’t accessed by Ul-Ron. The US military discovered it when they were studying the ship. Instead, Ul-Ron was adopted by Mr. Peterson, at the urging of Tom Davison, and they never activated the ship’s memory archives. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tom, being based on The Doctor, told Mr. Peterson not to study the ship, and to teach Ul-Ron the value of humility and hard work. (Of course Mr. Peterson strikes me as someone who valued those concepts beforehand, which was why Tom made sure he was the one to adopt and raise Ul-Ron.)
No, the only name that works is Su-Ron; the Royal names for the House of Ron that we’ve seen all have two letters followed by a dash and “Ron”: Ja-Ron, Ul-Ron, Mo-Ron. Ay-Ron would be okay, but Eye-Ron would break with the House’s tradition.
By contrast, the House of Ra’s spelling conventions seem to be three letters followed by a Dash then “Ra”, eg. Dax-Ra. Commoners, whether of Royal blood, or not, do not have a House appelation; eg. Forak, Aluna.
Remember Aaron is gently poking fun at Superman, aka Kal-El, son of Jor-El of Beis El, er, the House of G-d, no, wait, The House of El. (Sorry, my Kryptonian language chip was getting cross-wired with some of my Earth languages.) Male Kryptonian names don’t have to be three letters long, though many are (e.g. Jor-El, General Zod, Non). So you could have a Kryptonian named Falaf-El. 🙂
Not only are there non-powered humanoids on Argos, they are the majority of the population. The Royals have established an apartheid system, where the “Softlings” are little more than slaves, and all political power is held by the Royal Houses.
Not surprisingly there is a Resistance Movement, of which Aluna, the woman hiding Ron and Moon Shadow, is a member (possibly the leader, or a high ranking member.)
I thought about not revealing Aluna’s name, which is not revealed until next issue, but then I realized that it was going to be impossible to refer to her in anyway without calling her “Old Lady with Staff” or something like that for the next month. If you look back to the last few pages, I have not mentioned anything about the super-powered Royals vs. non-powered non-Royals until the last two pages, by which point it was being revealed in the comic, nor have I mentioned Aluna at all by name until she appeared in the comic.
I feel that revealing Aluna’s name isn’t a major spoiler, nor is mentioning she has a role in the Resistance. There is a lot more about her that are SPOILERS, and I’m not mentioning them. By contrast, the Singularity, whose existence is a major plot point, and which I kept secret about for weeks, I always redacted its name because someone might deduce its true nature. By last Wednesday the Singularity’s name was mentioned by the Argosian P.O.W., so I started referring to it by name.
@Rock: I am really sorry about the spoilers. I’ve been a big PS238 fan since 2004, bought as many issues as I could in individual issue format (which was not easy, most comic stores didn’t order the book, even when I specifically asked my FLCS to do so) and I own all nine TPBs and the RPG. I will endeavor to keep my comments free of spoilers from now on. Honest. I’m a big fan and I’m not interested in ruining the ending, but I sometimes slip up in my exuberance.
The attitude of the superpowered Argosians toward “softlings’ reminds me of Tyler’s parents.
That whole “people without powers have no business trying to solve the world’s problems” arrogance.
It’s entirely possible that the origins of the current regime on Argos is a result of a group of superpowered Argosians trying to help society by going to the logical extreme of ruling society. For all their flaws, Ultima and Soveriegn are not bad people. (They’re awful parents, but they are heroes who save lives and protect the weak.) The Earth Defense League’s goal is to protect normal people from supervillains, alien/interdimensional invaders, natural disasters and crime. But it is a natural temptation for a superpowered individual to decide to emulate the Squadron Supreme and conquer the world in order to wipe out crime, hunger, war, poverty and disease. (The Squadron were the first to try this; The Authority are a bunch of murderous wannabes who aren’t hit to dry clean Hyperion’s cape. 🙂 ) In fact, that was how the Imps and Cherubs sent by the beings of Chaos and Order were manipulating the adult heroes into doing their bidding. The Cherubs were listing all the things they were unable to do while restrained by the laws of normal society; the Imps then suggested breaking those laws in order to have the freedom to act, with the Cherubs then attempting to close the deal by listing all the good things they could do by imposing a different type of Order on society once the old one was overthrown by all the Chaos the superheroes would create. Luckily Malphast was able to nip that in the bud! “Meh.” 🙂
From Dax-Ra’s comments up to this point we can ascertain that Argosian superpowers originally appeared like they did on Earth: spontaneously, randomly and with no explanation why. The difference is that the Argosians decided to use science to weed out undesirable superpowers, until there were only two types: F.I.S.S.’s and Super-Intelligence. The super-intelligent were no doubt the ones to figure out the way to control for specific powers using eugenics, and they may have also figured out how to keep whole parts of the population from getting powers. During this period the super-powered Argosians probably set up the current status quo, with the final act being the elimination of all the super-intelligent Argosians by the F.I.S.S.’s, leaving them the rulers of Argos.
On Earth in the PS238-verse, there are enough normal people that fear something similar that when they discovered President Alfred Cranston was a telepath who manipulated his way into the Oval Office they decided to launch a coup. One of the goals of PS238 is to give a firm moral grounding to young metaprodigies so they grow up to use their powers responsibly (note how often Ms. Kyle devotes class to ethics). The staff at PS238 are attempting to mold the next “Union of Justice” not the next “Masters of Evil” or “Squadron Supreme”, and they seem to be doing a good job, IMO.
I had the thought that Argos could be a look at what Earth could become if more extreme versions of Ultima and Sovereign became dominant. A superpowered elite lording it over a vast unpowered underclass, “for their protection”, of course.
People like Forak are even the equivalent of the FISS on Earth – super, but not “super enough”, so they’re treated like second-class citizens by the dominant superhumans.
Ron’s heart hasn’t been poisoned yet, at least not by the Headmaster and his Praetorian Academy goonsquad. Ron’s a good kid, he’s just been having a tough time. His father wasn’t that different he was that age.
Ron’s only eight or nine years old, and in case you’ve forgotten he used to have a ton of neuroses such as a fear of heights and recurring dreams of getting sucked into a jet turbine ala Syndrome. He was always terrified that his mother would get upset with him for some imagined slight. He was quiet, gentle and played the clarinet. Then he got into a fight with a bully, his parents’ marriage (which unbeknownst to him was not the happiest in the world) fell apart, began to act out in school and then he was tricked by a supervillain into joining a military academy designed to fulfill the Headmaster’s nefarious schemes.
His parents are divorced; he was cut off from his mother thanks to Praetorian mind control, the Praetorians took away his clarinet, formerly his main source of comfort and he’s lost his superpowers thanks to Dax-Ra’s scheming. Cut the kid some slack. He’s not a supervillain. Victor Von Fogg is a supervillain. Lady Alexandria Von Fogg is a supervillain. Charles Brigman (aka “Greyhound”) is a supervillain. Zodon used to be a supervillain, but he hasn’t done anything “evil” since he was thawed out from his several thousand year nap. Ron Peterson is a hero who’s had a tough time.
Unlike Tyler, Ron doesn’t have a mentor to give him guidance anymore. Ms. Kyle and Coach Rockslide used to play that role for Ron before he transferred to Praetorian Academy. He is too young to realize that children are not to blame if their parents divorce, or need to go to couples counseling. The best thing for Ron would have been for his family to go to a superpowered family therapist (someone with empathy powers or a telepath), but the friction between Atlas and Lisa had been building up for too long. These are problems that can’t be solved in 22 pages, not even by Moon Shadow. 🙁
Ladies and gentlemen the wisdom of the universe…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9er_c0yGpCw
Incidentally the third panel would make better sense in a thought ballon. She isn’t safe yet.
Except the next panel shows that she’s aware Ron has heard her and hopes she didn’t give offense.
Atlas (Ul-ron) has lived on Earth all his aware life and he still gave his son the first name of Mo- in Argonian???! This can’t be the “Boy Named Sue” effect, he’s still around… He’s not know for cruelty (quite the opposite)…
Alright, I’m baffled…!?
Think it’s just Rule of Funny.
It was probably implanted in his brain, although how he managed to convince Lisa is the real mystery.
Maybe “Mo-Ron” isn’t known outside of Ron and Atlas. After all, he just goes by “Ron” on Earth. If Lisa does know, Atlas may have convinced her it didn’t mean anything bad in Argosian and no else one on Earth would ever need know of it, so “no harm done”.
What I’m trying to figure out is, does MoonShadow’s last comment mean (a) he doesn’t know what “moron” means, (b) he can’t believe that’s Ron’s real name, or (c) his brain was a bit sluggish switching from the Argosian meaning to the English meaning (I’m assuming they’re really speaking Argosian here).
Moon Shadow was just surprised to learn that Ron’s Royal name is Mo-Ron. Tyler knows exactly what moron means, that its an insult and that Ron is embarressed by the name. In the first panel on the next page Ron begs Moon Shadow not to tell anyone back home his full name to avoid the embarrasment. This confuses Aluna, the Resistance member, so Moon Shadow has to say “It’s a bit complicated.” Tyler agrees, since he’s Ron’s friend and has always wanted to help him out.
Just to clairfy, despite his anger when he was sent to the principal’s office and during Career Day, Ron was never hostile towards Tyler. But he blames Moon Shadow for his parents’ divorce and many other things that clearly aren’t Moon Shadow’s fault. Before the divorce, Ron (along with Suzie and Ambriel) were Tyler’s best friends at PS238. Ron and Suzie were the ones to organize the write-in vote for Tyler for
“Class Defender of Liberty”, and they hung out at the K-Square together. But Ron didn’t meet Moon Shadow until the fight against Charles Brigman. Ron had never really hit anyone before, and he didn’t like it. The fighting between Lisa and Ul-Ron escalated, and when Ron decided to speak to someone about his problems he chose to speak to Moon Shadow, only for the Septos to show up. Then his parents divorced.
Ron associates the fights between his parents and their eventual divorce to those two incidents: hitting Charles and being caught by the Septos while he was sneaking out of the house to speak to Moon Shadow. But while Tyler is mature enough to know that Lisa and Ul-Ron’s divorce isn’t Ron’s fault (or his own), he feels bad that one of his friends feels bad.
tl;dr Tyler knows what the word means, he’s just surprised to hear that it’s Ron’s name. As Ron’s friend he’s been a bit worried, and this doesn’t exactly help.
I’ve always understood it as some sort of Argosian naming convention, like the IV in ‘James the IV’, and it just has an unfortunate meaning in English.
Like being named Saline IV
Yes, Ron’s royal Argosian name is Mo-Ron. Of course anyone who bought the PS238 Roleplaying game would have known that long before this issue was published.
It’s no coincidence that she found Ron and Moonshadow, since she’s the head of the Resistance and she has no doubt been keeping tabs on them ever since they arrived on Argos, via a network of spies working in the palace. In his arrogance, Dax-Ra can’t imagine that he has anything to fear from a non-powered Argosian.
You know, maybe Dax-Ra needs to meet the Revenant and get shown the power of someone even without powers.
Oh wait, the Revenant’s on the wrong planet.
Hang on, his sidekick/protégé/trainee (whatever Moonshadow is) – he’s on the planet. And there’s an (probably at least mostly) unpowered Resistance on the planet.
Anyone else hoping Dax-Ra gets beaten by someone without powers, just for the look on his face? It would be justice indeed.
Also, Mo-Ron is a hilarious name.
Well, Moon Shadow does have his cell phone with him. It just takes a few dozen minutes for text messages to cross interstallar distances using Herschel’s tech…
Moon Shadow: (thinking)”Must Not Laugh”. “MUST NOT LAUGH!!” , . . .
If they’ve been privy to everything that goes on in the palace, then they ought to know that Ron wasn’t brought up there.
Aluna knows that Ron didn’t grow up on Argos. What she means is that she hopes he has higher intelligence and better values than the Royals who did. Like she said, she considers the Royals to be fools, albeit powerful ones. So while she knows Ron and his father grew up off-world, she doesn’t know about their upbringing. The ship that brought Ul-Ron to Earth was supposed to teach him Argosian history (from the Royal perspective no doubt) and Royal values, but that part of the ship wasn’t accessed by Ul-Ron. The US military discovered it when they were studying the ship. Instead, Ul-Ron was adopted by Mr. Peterson, at the urging of Tom Davison, and they never activated the ship’s memory archives. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tom, being based on The Doctor, told Mr. Peterson not to study the ship, and to teach Ul-Ron the value of humility and hard work. (Of course Mr. Peterson strikes me as someone who valued those concepts beforehand, which was why Tom made sure he was the one to adopt and raise Ul-Ron.)
If Ron had a sibling would their name be…
Armst-ron?
Beest-ron?
Eye-ron?
Dadoo-ron?
Su-ron?
And for eveil twins/clones/robots, Sau-ron?
No, the only name that works is Su-Ron; the Royal names for the House of Ron that we’ve seen all have two letters followed by a dash and “Ron”: Ja-Ron, Ul-Ron, Mo-Ron. Ay-Ron would be okay, but Eye-Ron would break with the House’s tradition.
By contrast, the House of Ra’s spelling conventions seem to be three letters followed by a Dash then “Ra”, eg. Dax-Ra. Commoners, whether of Royal blood, or not, do not have a House appelation; eg. Forak, Aluna.
Remember Aaron is gently poking fun at Superman, aka Kal-El, son of Jor-El of Beis El, er, the House of G-d, no, wait, The House of El. (Sorry, my Kryptonian language chip was getting cross-wired with some of my Earth languages.) Male Kryptonian names don’t have to be three letters long, though many are (e.g. Jor-El, General Zod, Non). So you could have a Kryptonian named Falaf-El. 🙂
So… there are non-empowered people on Argos. A sizeable population, from the sound of it. That is… interesting. It offers possibilities.
Of course there are non-powered people on Argos. What’s the point of being a lord unless you have someone to lord it over?
Not only are there non-powered humanoids on Argos, they are the majority of the population. The Royals have established an apartheid system, where the “Softlings” are little more than slaves, and all political power is held by the Royal Houses.
Not surprisingly there is a Resistance Movement, of which Aluna, the woman hiding Ron and Moon Shadow, is a member (possibly the leader, or a high ranking member.)
Ieor613… SPOILERS.
Enough is enough.
I thought about not revealing Aluna’s name, which is not revealed until next issue, but then I realized that it was going to be impossible to refer to her in anyway without calling her “Old Lady with Staff” or something like that for the next month. If you look back to the last few pages, I have not mentioned anything about the super-powered Royals vs. non-powered non-Royals until the last two pages, by which point it was being revealed in the comic, nor have I mentioned Aluna at all by name until she appeared in the comic.
I feel that revealing Aluna’s name isn’t a major spoiler, nor is mentioning she has a role in the Resistance. There is a lot more about her that are SPOILERS, and I’m not mentioning them. By contrast, the Singularity, whose existence is a major plot point, and which I kept secret about for weeks, I always redacted its name because someone might deduce its true nature. By last Wednesday the Singularity’s name was mentioned by the Argosian P.O.W., so I started referring to it by name.
leor613, you obviously know everything that’s going to happen for a good long while ahead.
DON’T TELL US ABOUT IT.
Please, for pity’s sakes, bite your metaphorical tongue and let the shoe drop in its own time?
@Rock: I am really sorry about the spoilers. I’ve been a big PS238 fan since 2004, bought as many issues as I could in individual issue format (which was not easy, most comic stores didn’t order the book, even when I specifically asked my FLCS to do so) and I own all nine TPBs and the RPG. I will endeavor to keep my comments free of spoilers from now on. Honest. I’m a big fan and I’m not interested in ruining the ending, but I sometimes slip up in my exuberance.
The attitude of the superpowered Argosians toward “softlings’ reminds me of Tyler’s parents.
That whole “people without powers have no business trying to solve the world’s problems” arrogance.
It’s entirely possible that the origins of the current regime on Argos is a result of a group of superpowered Argosians trying to help society by going to the logical extreme of ruling society. For all their flaws, Ultima and Soveriegn are not bad people. (They’re awful parents, but they are heroes who save lives and protect the weak.) The Earth Defense League’s goal is to protect normal people from supervillains, alien/interdimensional invaders, natural disasters and crime. But it is a natural temptation for a superpowered individual to decide to emulate the Squadron Supreme and conquer the world in order to wipe out crime, hunger, war, poverty and disease. (The Squadron were the first to try this; The Authority are a bunch of murderous wannabes who aren’t hit to dry clean Hyperion’s cape. 🙂 ) In fact, that was how the Imps and Cherubs sent by the beings of Chaos and Order were manipulating the adult heroes into doing their bidding. The Cherubs were listing all the things they were unable to do while restrained by the laws of normal society; the Imps then suggested breaking those laws in order to have the freedom to act, with the Cherubs then attempting to close the deal by listing all the good things they could do by imposing a different type of Order on society once the old one was overthrown by all the Chaos the superheroes would create. Luckily Malphast was able to nip that in the bud! “Meh.” 🙂
From Dax-Ra’s comments up to this point we can ascertain that Argosian superpowers originally appeared like they did on Earth: spontaneously, randomly and with no explanation why. The difference is that the Argosians decided to use science to weed out undesirable superpowers, until there were only two types: F.I.S.S.’s and Super-Intelligence. The super-intelligent were no doubt the ones to figure out the way to control for specific powers using eugenics, and they may have also figured out how to keep whole parts of the population from getting powers. During this period the super-powered Argosians probably set up the current status quo, with the final act being the elimination of all the super-intelligent Argosians by the F.I.S.S.’s, leaving them the rulers of Argos.
On Earth in the PS238-verse, there are enough normal people that fear something similar that when they discovered President Alfred Cranston was a telepath who manipulated his way into the Oval Office they decided to launch a coup. One of the goals of PS238 is to give a firm moral grounding to young metaprodigies so they grow up to use their powers responsibly (note how often Ms. Kyle devotes class to ethics). The staff at PS238 are attempting to mold the next “Union of Justice” not the next “Masters of Evil” or “Squadron Supreme”, and they seem to be doing a good job, IMO.
I had the thought that Argos could be a look at what Earth could become if more extreme versions of Ultima and Sovereign became dominant. A superpowered elite lording it over a vast unpowered underclass, “for their protection”, of course.
People like Forak are even the equivalent of the FISS on Earth – super, but not “super enough”, so they’re treated like second-class citizens by the dominant superhumans.
Wow. Ron didn’t look a thing like himself when he did his cameo on the old Freakazoid cartoon… Bad camera work?
probably cgi or contractual obligations
Poor, poor woman. No palaces, but his heart has been /so/ stupidity-poisoned already.
Ron’s heart hasn’t been poisoned yet, at least not by the Headmaster and his Praetorian Academy goonsquad. Ron’s a good kid, he’s just been having a tough time. His father wasn’t that different he was that age.
Ron’s only eight or nine years old, and in case you’ve forgotten he used to have a ton of neuroses such as a fear of heights and recurring dreams of getting sucked into a jet turbine ala Syndrome. He was always terrified that his mother would get upset with him for some imagined slight. He was quiet, gentle and played the clarinet. Then he got into a fight with a bully, his parents’ marriage (which unbeknownst to him was not the happiest in the world) fell apart, began to act out in school and then he was tricked by a supervillain into joining a military academy designed to fulfill the Headmaster’s nefarious schemes.
His parents are divorced; he was cut off from his mother thanks to Praetorian mind control, the Praetorians took away his clarinet, formerly his main source of comfort and he’s lost his superpowers thanks to Dax-Ra’s scheming. Cut the kid some slack. He’s not a supervillain. Victor Von Fogg is a supervillain. Lady Alexandria Von Fogg is a supervillain. Charles Brigman (aka “Greyhound”) is a supervillain. Zodon used to be a supervillain, but he hasn’t done anything “evil” since he was thawed out from his several thousand year nap. Ron Peterson is a hero who’s had a tough time.
Unlike Tyler, Ron doesn’t have a mentor to give him guidance anymore. Ms. Kyle and Coach Rockslide used to play that role for Ron before he transferred to Praetorian Academy. He is too young to realize that children are not to blame if their parents divorce, or need to go to couples counseling. The best thing for Ron would have been for his family to go to a superpowered family therapist (someone with empathy powers or a telepath), but the friction between Atlas and Lisa had been building up for too long. These are problems that can’t be solved in 22 pages, not even by Moon Shadow. 🙁