A discussion on the true nature of the Nephilim

Maybe there is another source but who are the *rebels* ??rogue Black Lance officers or a planet member of the Confederation, if they are rogues, why don´t use the BL ????
Of course is bad if they are from Confed, BTW anyone in the Confed council or the Admiralty Knows above the rebellion or it is a secret stuff,Maybe Blair have the permission of his superiors.
by *Juicy* i mean that is better Adm. than Instructor (at least to me)
 
Well, the recon does sound like it’s designed to intimidate, so you’d want an intimidating fighter, and the scarier, the better if you preferred to try to avoid any bloodshed. Still, it’s not clear what “the next step” would be in this case. The all-important question is the nature of the rebellion, which we’re not told. We would likely judge the use of deadly force differently if we were talking about a labor strike versus a coup d’etat.
 
Since Blair was using the Black Lance im sure the rebellion is a Confederation world trying break ties with Confed, possibly joining the Border Worlds or the Landriech. Blair would probably have gained so much power he probably didnt have to care what the Assembly thought, nor have to many superiors that werent in his pocket.
 
Maybe he only haves the ships not the personnel !!!
So the BL was only the Fighters and the pilots are from confed.
 
I do assume that the rebellion was somewhat important enough to warrant using the Black Lance. Any military prescense could be intimidating enough for his purposes. The Black Lance isnt for show.
 
Originally posted by Ghost
Maybe he only haves the ships not the personnel !!!
So the BL was only the Fighters and the pilots are from confed.
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I dont think theres any reason to believe that. From the mood of the endgame scene and what it was trying to convey, its the personnel Blair is in charge of too.
 
Yes but maybe they aren´t civilians, maybe the landreich, rogues BL,other enemies or who knows !!
 
The point is, something is going wrong to the point where there are people rebelling for some reason, somewhere, and Bliar intends on using the Black Lance to smack it down.
 
Apart from our not knowing who the "enemy" is in this case, we also shouldn't assume too much about the "Black Lance". Maybe it's "old school" or maybe it's "new school". Again, we don't have enough information to judge it and so we should be careful about speculation.
 
And why would there be rouge Black Lances? Blair is seems to be allowing them to continue in their original form, as a specialized unit of the Confederation military. Plus there wouldnt be enough of them to be bothersome if they did rebel.
 
Originally posted by Nemesis
Apart from our not knowing who the "enemy" is in this case, we also shouldn't assume too much about the "Black Lance". Maybe it's "old school" or maybe it's "new school". Again, we don't have enough information to judge it and so we should be careful about speculation.
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This is true. I dont want to over extend myself here and look really foolish. But if Blair had reformed the Black Lance and made them into an honorable unit that they could show off to the rest of the Confederation with pride, i think they would have given us some indication.
 
WC is full of "blanks" that it would be great to fill in. In this case, though, I suppose you can argue there's a more artful intent at work. The moral of WCIV seems to be that the "roots" of tyranny are always present. At the end of the game, despite Tolwyn's fall, we are denied a simple happy ending by the presence of a second, ambiguous ending in which "Black Lance fighters" are still being used. We're not given enough information to know if that's bad or good (or even to what extent, beyond Blair's particular career, the two truly "overlap"), and so we are left to wonder, as we often wonder anyway about the "powers-that-be" in real life.
 
I think since the Black Lance werent a good thing in the first place, their continued existence couldnt be good either. Tolwyn used them to murder and commit genocide. The unit has that stigma attached to it forever now. If Blair was going to use the resources of the Black Lance, then he would have most likely changed the name and practices of the unit. They were Nazis in space. When you defeat them, you dont continue to use them and still call them Nazis if they arent being used to murder and commit genocide.
 
Originally posted by Nemesis
Apart from our not knowing who the "enemy" is in this case, we also shouldn't assume too much about the "Black Lance". Maybe it's "old school" or maybe it's "new school". Again, we don't have enough information to judge it and so we should be careful about speculation.
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It is impossible to base anything off that ending because we know that ending didn't happen, period. Just because the "Admiral Blair" ending isn't a total disaster doesn't make that in any way more valid than any of the losing endings. Secret Ops has an ambigious ending too, where we stop the invasion by destroying the gate and poisoning several systems, but that isn't the canon ending either. WC3 has an ending where Blair and Flinr end up together, but that doesn't have any canon value because the novel says otherwise. The WC4 novel makes it quite clear that Blair doesn't take over the Black Lance, but rather is charged helping shut it down. The Black Lance is gone, end of story.

Best, Raptor

[Edited by Raptor on 07-02-2001 at 04:10]
 
Originally posted by Raptor
The WC4 novel makes it quite clear that Blair doesn't take over the Black Lance, but rather is charged helping shut it down. The Black Lance is gone, end of story.
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Pointing to the end of the WCIV novel -- the one which states that there are elements of the project that will never be discovered -- really isn't much of an argument in this case. :)
 
It is impossible to base anything off that ending because we know that ending didn't happen, period.
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No, the only part of that ending that we know doesn’t happen is Blair’s becoming an admiral (with Hawk at his side). We can’t prove the rest is impossible. (Besides, you risk insulting any number of players who arrive at that ending quite honestly. That is, they make what they sincerely believe are the best choices in the course of the game, and win the game, yet “incline” Blair to become a line officer in the Navy.) So on the question of canon, I think we’re obliged to take the uncontradicted parts of that endgame seriously as a possibility.

I think since the Black Lance werent a good thing in the first place, their continued existence couldnt be good either.
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Yes, we could and would easily think so. (Black Lance is Black Lance is Black Lance, right? Or something like that.) But this creates a paradox in the context of the one endgame.

If we choose to argue that the Black Lance in the endgame is “most probably” the same evil thing, then we only increase the improbability that Blair would have anything to do with it. I mean, by the same logic, Blair is Blair is Blair, right? In particular, the Blair of both endgames was previously the Blair who confronted Tolwyn with heartfelt, moral outrage in the climax of WCIV. So in trying to make sense of Blair being in charge of the “evil” Black Lance, we can’t simply say “oh, he must be evil now” and leave it at that. On the contrary, we’re obligated to do some heavy lifting and provide a truly convincing explanation for his presumed “fall from grace”. (Good luck.)

Still, I can think of a different sort of explanation that does avoid the paradox in large part. (But I bet some won’t like it.:)) Blair doesn’t have to be “evil” or inhumane in the way that Tolwyn was, only controlled in the way that Tolwyn wasn’t by the Belisarius Group (or whomever). But if it is some third person or group within Confed who is ultimately responsible for the Black Lance’s survival in the one endgame, then we have no good basis for arguing that this person or group isn’t present and active “in the background” of the other endgame too. (Good luck again.)

[Edited by Nemesis on 07-03-2001 at 01:39]
 
Originally posted by Nemesis

No, the only part of that ending that we know doesn’t happen is Blair’s becoming an admiral (with Hawk at his side). We can’t prove the rest is impossible. (Besides, you risk insulting any number of players who arrive at that ending quite honestly. That is, they make what they sincerely believe are the best choices in the course of the game, and win the game, yet “incline” Blair to become a line officer in the Navy.) So on the question of canon, I think we’re obliged to take the uncontradicted parts of that endgame seriously as a possibility.
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By that logic, we're obliged to take the uncontradicted parts of *every* scene of *every* path of *every* Wing Commander game seriously, as a possibilty, as there would be players who arrived at that scene by honest choices. We can all create a melange of the scenes and paths we favour as a serious possibility. And if we do that, then the WC universe fractures into a dozen or more differant continuities, which would be ridiculous. While there might be many paths players can take through the game, there is only *one* canon path. The scene is an alternate ending that is not the canon ending chosen by the WC creators, and that is that.

Best, Raptor

[Edited by Raptor on 07-03-2001 at 03:14]
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By that logic, we're obliged to take the uncontradicted parts of *every* scene of *every* path of *every* Wing Commander game seriously, as a possibilty . . .
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Yes, that follows, and that’s fine. It’s a nice description of what we do in the Zone all the time as we debate what we know and what we don’t know about the WC universe.

. . . as there would be players who arrived at that scene by honest choices.
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No, you’re confusing my parenthetic comment with my main point. (Probably my fault.) I’m definitely not trying to tie how a player plays the game to what then can become canon. My side comment was simply to say that if you or I were to play WCIV for the first time, made what we had every reason to believe were valid mission choices, won the game by bringing Tolwyn down and exposing the Black Lance, only then to see Blair as an admiral in control of “Black Lance fighters” . . . well, the apparent implication of that for us (both as players and as Blair) is . . . oh, NOT a happy one.

But if it’s possible that we weren’t the cause of the Black Lance surviving . . . such as that, among other possibilities, the Black Lance continues in the other endgame too . . . well, we can still hold our heads high.

As I said, it was a side comment, and so not meant to be part of the main point.

[T]hen the WC universe fractures into a dozen or more differant continuities, which would be ridiculous.
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No, that doesn’t follow. We’re still talking about only one continuity. We’re just trying to figure out what does or will make it up, and so we ponder what the possibilities are. (Kind of like life generally.)

The scene is an alternate ending that is not the canon ending chosen by the WC creators, and that is that.
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No, to the best of our knowledge, only part of the one endgame can’t be canon.

You seem to treat the two endgames as somehow mutually exclusive with absolutely no overlap. But they do overlap. Isn’t Tolwyn’s downfall part of both? (For that matter, isn’t the Confederation in both?) And if Tolwyn falls in both, why can’t the Black Lance survive in both? It’s . . . a possibility.
 
I treat them as mutually exclusive because the picture they paint of Blair is mutually exclusive. In one endgame, he is flying, doing what he loves best, serving with the Border Worlders he fought with in the game. In other other, he's a brooding figure who commands the Black Lance he fought in the game. The two scenes show the kinds of man Blair could have become depending on the choices he made. They are *alternate* paths, and so are mutually exclusive. You can't remove the rest of the scenario and then insist that one fact in it is a credible possibility, any more than a reporter can print a story that is generally contradicted by the facts, and insist one assertion in it is a credible possibility just because there's nothing to contradict it.

You say that just because both endgames events are set against the same universal background, the existence of the Lance is a possibility. I could equally say that it is possible that Blair carried on a secret affair with Flint that no-one ever knew about(despite the fact that her fighter was shot down over Kilrah and the canon says Blair eneded up with Rachel) based on the scene where Blair ends up with Flint. After all, don't both feature the downfall of the Kilrathi? Isn't Confed around in both?

Best, Raptor
 
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