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beccaelizabethThe thing with Nick Necro is most of the issues have him be a bit boring about John stealing Zatanna
but then that one issue
has him torturing John by putting cigarettes out on his chest
while the comic shows us this is how BOTH of them power up their magic, by pain and sacrifice,
and it's a plan to let John escape
into a trap.
you cannot flatten that out into simple even in the Hate direction
I mean sure with anyone else the torture is a red flag
but they introduce John getting himself beat up and stabbed to use in his magic
so from a perspective that messed up you kind of have to put the burns on a sliding scale?
And then!
Nick explains he's been in Hell
and the thing that makes it Hell is
nothing is personal.
It's an eternity of suffering
but it's not about you.
Your suffering doesn't matter.
And he explains this while
making it
Very Personal Indeed.
He's messed up and lost and apparently tries to sacrifice John to Hell again but if he's as competent as John remembers him that last bit where Nick gets killed might be deliberate?
He did a bunch of scrying and saw an ending where John died and an ending where Nick died, and we actually got both, so maybe Nick didn't see enough.
You can without bending the canon out of shape whatsoever
suggest that Nick
got himself sacrificed
to save John
even if it was by making sure John hates him.
The dropping him into hell means something different if it's paid in full in advance by sacrifice.
The scrying stuff changes Nick's whole motivation
because now he's up there with Xanadu seeing dark futures and fixed points
and doing messed up stuff to try and fix it.
And in the earlier issues when he asks John and Zatanna to rule beside him
and they say that ship sailed a long time ago
well how long has it been?
They wound their fates together until the end of the world
and the page calls that six years ago
but Nick was dead for some of them
so how does time in Hell work
and is six years a long time anyway?
Also how young is this John? Sliding timeline messes.
Even the torturing them to 'death' repeatedly
(did I mention messed up and twisted red flag parade?)
reads very differently after the bit about teaching them
to pay the price of magic up front
with pain.
I mean there is no bigger way they could pay for their magic if that's the baseline theory Nick is working from
so sure he could be doing it to power the machine
but he could also plausibly be doing it for them.
But then there's the way John would be hearing it, trying to make sense of it. Nick insists they were all three in love, so then he mentioned the sacrifice of a blood brother or a lover, I hear him saying John is his lover. But if John is hearing the gloat, the bad guy speech, he's hearing what Nick is going to do next, which is when John gets the flying knife spell out and kills Nick. But we already saw him do that exact spell when Nick was teaching him the pain and the escape, so it's predictable to us. So why not to Nick?
Either he's dumb enough you have to wonder what John saw in him or
it's complicated.
There is so much more story in it if it's complicated.
He is so messed up and that one issue changes the meaning on ALL of it.
Lovely stuff
that might make me buy more comics
if I just ignore how little I liked, oh, about 3/4 of the other stuff I read.
I want to keep this particular messed up dynamic and run into another canon with it.
but then that one issue
has him torturing John by putting cigarettes out on his chest
while the comic shows us this is how BOTH of them power up their magic, by pain and sacrifice,
and it's a plan to let John escape
into a trap.
you cannot flatten that out into simple even in the Hate direction
I mean sure with anyone else the torture is a red flag
but they introduce John getting himself beat up and stabbed to use in his magic
so from a perspective that messed up you kind of have to put the burns on a sliding scale?
And then!
Nick explains he's been in Hell
and the thing that makes it Hell is
nothing is personal.
It's an eternity of suffering
but it's not about you.
Your suffering doesn't matter.
And he explains this while
making it
Very Personal Indeed.
He's messed up and lost and apparently tries to sacrifice John to Hell again but if he's as competent as John remembers him that last bit where Nick gets killed might be deliberate?
He did a bunch of scrying and saw an ending where John died and an ending where Nick died, and we actually got both, so maybe Nick didn't see enough.
You can without bending the canon out of shape whatsoever
suggest that Nick
got himself sacrificed
to save John
even if it was by making sure John hates him.
The dropping him into hell means something different if it's paid in full in advance by sacrifice.
The scrying stuff changes Nick's whole motivation
because now he's up there with Xanadu seeing dark futures and fixed points
and doing messed up stuff to try and fix it.
And in the earlier issues when he asks John and Zatanna to rule beside him
and they say that ship sailed a long time ago
well how long has it been?
They wound their fates together until the end of the world
and the page calls that six years ago
but Nick was dead for some of them
so how does time in Hell work
and is six years a long time anyway?
Also how young is this John? Sliding timeline messes.
Even the torturing them to 'death' repeatedly
(did I mention messed up and twisted red flag parade?)
reads very differently after the bit about teaching them
to pay the price of magic up front
with pain.
I mean there is no bigger way they could pay for their magic if that's the baseline theory Nick is working from
so sure he could be doing it to power the machine
but he could also plausibly be doing it for them.
But then there's the way John would be hearing it, trying to make sense of it. Nick insists they were all three in love, so then he mentioned the sacrifice of a blood brother or a lover, I hear him saying John is his lover. But if John is hearing the gloat, the bad guy speech, he's hearing what Nick is going to do next, which is when John gets the flying knife spell out and kills Nick. But we already saw him do that exact spell when Nick was teaching him the pain and the escape, so it's predictable to us. So why not to Nick?
Either he's dumb enough you have to wonder what John saw in him or
it's complicated.
There is so much more story in it if it's complicated.
He is so messed up and that one issue changes the meaning on ALL of it.
Lovely stuff
that might make me buy more comics
if I just ignore how little I liked, oh, about 3/4 of the other stuff I read.
I want to keep this particular messed up dynamic and run into another canon with it.