Parallax - Blog Posts

parallax hal jordan and sailor earth kyle rayner

magical gurls

Kyle is a Parallax apologist.

And so is more than half of the universe.

That’s it.

Earth needs to get with the program before another planet decides to keep Hal and give him the love he deserves.

Kyle: so, with this thing, did you change sex or...?

Parallax Hal: what do you mean?

Kyle: are you a man or a woman?

Parallax Hal: I am an entity

Kyle: ok, but are you Miss or Mister?

Parallax Hal: I am Your Highness

Kyle: what's in your pants?!

Parallax Hal: POWER

I’m a bit curious on Hal’s personality in his depictions. From what I know is that early hal was headstrong, cocky, kind of a goofball, and detached (dissociating away his fear and averse to commitment). This seems to be the version of Hal that most people write.

But then there’s the whole Parallax thing, and the Spectre run. I don’t know much about it but it seems hal gets a lot more subdued and melancholy as the spectre. And then after that he comes back as flesh and bone.

So what is he like at the end of that?

Pre-Johns and pre-Parallax Hal tended to be more happy go lucky, stupid, and generally doe eyed hopeful "the system that fucked me over once definitely won't do it again!" type of man. He was also entitled at times. But this is mostly true up until around the time of Hard Traveling Heroes, which is when he starts to be heartbroken and melancholic, traits that persist until the climax of Emerald Twilight.

A lot of people say Emerald Twilight came from nowhere and I disagree. I think those people weren't paying attention, because all the signs were there. Hal had been steadily becoming more disillusioned and melancholic through the 70s and 80s until we get to the 90s, where that heartbreak gets amplified to the nth degree. Hal didn't go from stupid to mad with grief without a transition period in the middle. But a lot of people think once a run from x writer ends, it no longer counts for the next one, and so they say the tragedy came from nowhere.

At the very start of the 90s, Hal has a lot of suicidal ideation going on. The run itself begins with him more or less saying "There’s nowhere else to go" (paraphrasing) and throwing himself off a cliff. He waits until he's almost crashing head first into the ground to pull himself out of there using his ring. He's flirting with the thought of death.

He is also self sabotaging. He pulls back from everyone and turns himself into a homeless man who lives on the road because he's looking for a sense of self, a meaning to life he has lost. He becomes a seasonal worker because he needs something to do, but those jobs never last because the life he's trying to leave behind (in the shape of Guy Gardner) keeps metaphorically knocking on the door and dragging him back to Green Lantern.

Even when he comes back, he chooses to do solitary things. For example: exploring space to recruit more GLs, that keeps interactions to a minimum. It's all things that are brewing in a pressure cooker that blows up when Coast City is destroyed in front of Hal's eyes and the hero community drops the ball. Hard.

They all say well, it’s not MY city. They all say get over it. Clark goes and creates a monument using scraps of the very bomb that killed everyone and everything Hal knew all his life, and immediately after that Clark is in Metropolis enjoying the sun and saying aaaaah. what a nice day.

And Hal doesn't snap immediately. The tension is there, but at first he does try to keep it together until it becomes impossible. He tries to reconstruct Coast City, but there are limits to what the ring can do. The one thing he could depend on, his will power, is not enough. He is not enough. His grief and anger become so big that his mind just... fractures. He snaps. No one's listening and no one's helping, so he will take matters into his own hands and make. it. right.

This Hal is angry. This Hal has a heart with a hole that threatens to kill him at any moment but he endures because he cannot die until he does what needs to be done. This Hal refuses the help that comes too late, he has killed his friends, he has destroyed the corps, he has killed Sinestro. Kyle arrives like a lighthouse in the middle of the storm but for Hal it's too late because he has driven his ship into the cliff and is letting it sink with himself still in it.

He is mad at himself and mad at the world for failing Coast City and all the innocent lives lost. He almost becomes a god, and is perceived as a god by some due to the power he now possesses. There are moments when clarity hits him and the old wounded heartbroken Hal shows his face, and he is dying. His pain is so palpable. His anguish. The old Hal wants help. But Parallax Hal does not want to be saved.

Of course, the status quo changes with the events of Final Night. Hal sacrifices himself to save the Earth. He sees that only in death will his anger stop, and he sees that he's the only one who can do what no one else could do for Coast City. It's a no brainer. He sacrifices himself and burns himself to a crisp reigniting the sun. Hal doesn’t expect to come back. He doesn’t want to come back. This is HIS final night.

Unfortunately, The Spectre had other plans. His anger morphs into straight up depression because now he is alive enough to deal with the outcome of what he did as Parallax. He has to live with the tragedy of what he lost and the tragedy of what he did. Few people stand by his side and want to give him a chance. Very few people recognize there's good in him. Most want to see him dead and gone. He himself wants to be dead and gone. Helen, his niece, being there definitely helps him not lose it, not lose himself. She is his hope. She is the innocence he lost and he will never get back.

After all of this, he is more grounded, mature. Still melancholic. Still haunted by everything that happened. He is cocky, of course, and self assured, because at the end of the day those are the things he can cling to with some sort of safety net. But they're also things he uses to keep the raw wounds hidden.

Post Johns? Yeah like more than half of this is lost because Hal’s the greatest hero ever and he can do no wrong. He is headstrong, overconfident, cocky, and ultimately good, but he is missing like half of his soul.

so ive been reading the kyle rayner run

Which star is the closest to us ?

I don't mean The Sun or Proxima Centauri, which are the closest stars, I mean in the image above, which star is the closest ?

Of course, I left out the names and the constellations on purpose, because when you look up in the night sky, unless you've got Stellarium (or similar) as an app on your phone, you're not going to see names and the lines which our ancestors made up for story telling.

Maybe it's the brightest one in the middle ? But then, how do you know if that's a massive star far away, or a smaller one really close ?

Thankfully, our orbit around the Sun is going to help us.

Parallax allows us to see which stars are closer and further based on how much they move between 6 months. This works great for the closer stars, but not so much the more distant ones and especially not the other galaxies, however there are other methods for finding which of them are closer, but for now, we're only interested in the closest stars, so simple maths and observations over a period of time can assist us.

Have you ever wondered what our Sun would look like in the night sky of another planet orbiting another star ? Truth is, when you look at those stars in that image above, almost all of them, the answer would be "You couldn't see it, it's not bright enough!"

Truth is, most of the stars we see in our night sky are larger and brighter than ours, at 32.5 light years our Star would be magnitude 4.83, just inside our naked eye ability.

The red square represents the upper image, zoomed out to better reflect what you could see with your naked eye. The tiny dot that the yellow arrow is pointed to, is the same brightness our Sun would be in the night sky of a planet 32.5 light years away.

Why 32.5 ? Well, the brightness of stars in the sky are ranked by Magnitude, the lower the number, the brighter, in fact, each integer is 2.5 times brighter than the one above it. What we see with our eyes we call Apparent Magnitude, but given some fun maths, we can take each star, pull it 10 parsecs (32.5 light years) from us, and imagine how bright it would be, this is known as the Absolute Magnitude.

Getting back to our original question, which was the closest, you'll already begin to understand the brightest stars are not necessarily the closest, using parallax we can really find out, and as some of you may have guessed already, it's the one you couldn't see with your naked eye.

Just 5.96 light years from us, but at apparent Mag 9.51 quite invisible to the naked eye. While the brightest Cebalrai was 81 light years, still close in terms of our Milky Way, but when you next look up, and see a sky full of stars, remember, you're only seeing the bright ones, there's thousands of times more quite close by, you simply cannot see.

you ever just.

crack au where hal has to babysit the cosmic parasite that’s obsessed with him, it’s awful and everyone is very tired

Big Bad Setting Starter

Both factions have FTL, energy shielding, large scale directed energy weapons and control several star systems, but the majority of their infantry is void of shielding and uses kinetic weapons, most frequently a common bullet loading rifle.

The Cazanans have the largest usage of energy weapons in their standard issue Blaster Rifle, a low yield 'snub' rifle with a high fire rate and accuracy. Many of the kinetic rifles out damage it however. Infantry shielding is used almost exclusively by specialist troops and those of a high rank such as field commanders.

The Dronoks field fewer but more powerful DEWs, such as a high power cannon wielded by the Hulk units. Hulks are a special type of infantry that could be classified as a vehicle. It is a very heavy set of power armor equipped with a shield down the left arm, a dual heavy plasma blaster on the right arm and dual retractable melee blades under the left arm shield and a small reactor on their back. Their armor makes them extremely resistant to small arms fire and their cannon is powerful enough for them to singlehandedly destroy light and some medium vehicles.

Cazanan starships equip a large array of energy weapons. Their primary capital ship, the M160, is wedge shaped with overlapping lines of fire meaning that if they line a ship up in front of them, all of their heavy cannons can strike it at once. The M160 has hangars on either side as well as a vehicle bay, allowing it to carry LRVs and tanks to a planet and deploy them via dropship to the surface alongside infantry. The T177 is a frigate housing a very large flight deck, primarily fighters and bombers with a few transports for the few marines it may house. The T177 also carries two particle cannons, the most powerful single weapon in the Cazanan fleet. The cannons are retractable on the underside of the ship, used for damage dealing against large ships and ground bombardment. Other Cazanan ships are not currently made.

Dronok starships use a lot of Magnetic Acceleration Cannons and railguns with a few directed energy weapons. Their P13 Battleship is a long, sleek ship that has four forward facing heavy MACs which put a hurt on shields and rend hulls apart. It has one large hangar bay which goes through the width of the ship. There are many smaller cannons and railguns down the sides of the ship. The predecessor to the P13, the P8, is essentially a huge MAC with a ship built around it. The P8's main cannon is a larger caliber than the P13's quad cannons despite the ship being half the size. The P8 lacks any sort of flight deck, but houses a large array of weapons and heavy armor capable of taking a massive amount of damage without shields.

There are also the Fronzoks (Fox people), who live in much smaller communities but control almost all the systems surrounding the Cazanan-Dronok war. They as a whole avoid the conflict, intervening only when they or their interests are threatened.

The Cazanan and Dronok's view of the galaxy is extremely narrow minded. They only acknowledge each other and the Fronzoks and only think of their immediate region of space. There are explorers who do venture off into the uncharted, frequently stopping by Fronzok worlds for supplies or advice before venturing into the unknown.