#moss man

yeah so what if bigfoot was real & he was god?

this is new. he was never a god before, he just had super OP nature powers. he wasn’t from Preternia, either. just a guy who could control plants. the apotheosis of Moss Man over here.

or an alien from the planet Florania, where his people were hunted by dinosaurs (the uk comics did their own shit). another canon on the cutting room floor in favor of just Making Shit Up, which would not annoy me so much if it weren’t their professed mission

morgan was an alias she used in the DC comics to fuck a former guard into stealing a gem for her (for skeletor), but that wasn’t until a few years after this so i’m not 100% sure where morgan came from and i don’t care enough to find out. she also let the giant green gorilla loose from stasis. crazy few months for her

okay. so. wun-dar is a fandom inside reference/joke. he’s named that because of wonder bread. please read this delightful and informative article on the battle ram blog if you want to learn more! maybe don’t watch the ‘SOLVED’ video because it’s scott’s and it just rehashes everything adam’s said + shows a grainy ass picture of a letter.

yes i’m picking favorites but hear me out: adam does research and cites his sources & scott is a plagiarizing dipshit who makes shit up.

but i digress! this bio is boring. #tundaria mention ig. only other mention of a “he-man” other than our boy. the end <3

i was actually first introduced to optikk via this shortpacked! comic several years before i got into SPOP and summarily MOTU so like. this was some of the first shit i knew about he-man. zowie!

i think the blinking thing is p stupid bc it’s not like he has eyelids but perhaps it’s communicated via pupil contractions or some shit. sci fi hand wavy stuff. what’s real stupid is “spyeye eyeball”. more like ay-ay-ayball am i right

idk i can’t really take optikk seriously. i look at him and just see a Buzz circa 1999. this man is a Fleye, get him back to Neopia

Image from poeghostal

Bios are all transcribed and searchable here

uuurgghghhhh the kerning… why did they insist on the sideways-rolling scroll if they were just going to fuck it up every single time?

Tytus and Megator were going to be part of the Powers of Grayskull line, an expansion of MOTU slated for 1987, but that was the year sales tanked because corporate greed led to oversaturation of tertiary characters nobody cared about. incidentally also got POP killed, so I have some sympathy for the POG line.

they were at least released in europe though. we can envy them that.

also incidentally, this bio has (at least) three wrenches in the timeline–when Grayskull was built, when the Towers were built, and when Tytus died.

Image from poeghostal

Bios are all transcribed and searchable here

Okay. So, I don’t like this one. Some things are old established lore–Randor had a brother named Keldor in the 80s minicomics, who was heavily implied to be Skeletor. And the 200X cartoon had blue people, yes. But those people were not called Gar.

Gar was a fan term, a clipping of Anwat Gar (the city Sy-Klone was defending), itself almost certainly derived from the Earth temple complex, Angkor Wat. If you rearranged it to put the ‘temple’ in the middle of the 'city’ and then followed the cartoon’s Creative Spelling (e.g. the cat people live in Felis Qadi) tendencies… and honestly like, probably didn’t know what a dependent vowel even was? You could get Anwat Gar. But I digress.

200X!Keldor was not explicitly confirmed to be Randor’s brother, even in behind the scenes stuff. Classics was the next piece of canon. It solidified the name 'Gar’, which is fuuuuucking stuuuupid. It also made the Gar an oppressed racial class, which is somehow stuuuuuupiderrrrrrr. 95% of the blue people are evil. This is like making the Sith (species) oppressed without establishing the Sith.

It’s fucking bananas. And then you get into him wanting to “unite Eternia” by becoming planetary dictator. The leaps in logic that requires, both Watsonian and Doylist, are absurd.

this was also the first (original–skeletor’s was reprinted after they secured the trademark) bio to use the name Demo-Man. scott alleged that it had been a working name for skeletor, despite it actually being D-Man/De-Man (the initial name pitches were all like that–He-Man, Wing-Man, D-Man, Wo-Man, Sea Man, and so on)(can you believe they didn’t stick with Sea Man?). go read the battle ram blog’s article on that whole catastrophe if you want actual facts and not just my off-the-cuff huffing and puffing.

1/10. Managed not to misspell anything, as long as we don’t count Demo-Man. I kind of hate it.

Image from poeghostal

Bios are all transcribed and searchable here

it’s our giiiiiiiiiirl

okay so this is the introduction of the Power of the Universe (usually Powers, plural)(aka the Wave of Creation)(aka the Aura of the Gods) and the Wisdom of the Elders of Eternia (usually known as the Council of Elders but we’ll give them a pass this time bc this isn’t Eternia).

Whereas He-Man’s bio says he can use the Sword to “channel the energy of the Elders” which like, alright, famously energetic, the elderly–She-Ra has this “combined” shit. Later in the line this combination was specifically deemed the Power of Grayskull, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

perhaps i have been primed by the numerous he-fans Being Weird at me to expect misogyny in these, but it does kind of smack of that 90s brand of Girl Power where it’s like. “boys are strong but that’s okay because girls are smart and have healing powers” like okay she’s ALSO the strongest woman in the universe, tyvm.

and here we see the seeds of Hordak’s “escape” to eternia. aren’t you glad that we’re spending a solid third of the first POP bio talking about he-man anyway?

Image from poeghostal

Bios are all transcribed and searchable here

okay we’re on less annoying ground today, but it’s a little confusing. count marzo was a filmation character, originally an evil nobleman who would like, trick children & give you amnesia & shit. he was thousands of years old and basically a fairy tale trope.

the MYP cartoon dark and grittied it up, had him being imprisoned by the Council of Elders in the form of an old man. his evil magical powers were contained in an amulet. Miro (adora and adam’s grandpa) banished him to the dark hemisphere. marzo tricked Mekaneck into getting the amulet for him and that was like, a whole thing.

this is… not that. fifth degree wizard? evil mystics? okay, sure. aspirations of dictatorship, standard fare for responding to systemic injustice in this continuity. banished miro into another dimension. okay. and now it’s randor and keldor trapping him instead of the council. what happened to combining the canons or whatever?

and why does he just have a regular ass last name? the very first Actual Surname to feature and it’s to give the generically beige bad guy something arabic. noted 🤔

Image from poeghostal

Bios are all transcribed and searchable here

most of this is new lore. in the MYP cartoon we established that he was from Subternia and had betrayed the other Caligars somehow, but these are first details.

Don’t mind it. Would have been nice to have some of the other canons incorporated when that’s the ostensible point but I recognize that Reptile Man from the Dragonsland of Warania, inhabitant of the Demon Zone, and Subternian native are difficult to reconcile unless you’re like, a lizard military brat. And making them brothers does explain why Ceratus hates him so much, even if that isn’t expressed in the bios.

Yeah, mostly fine. Don’t love the name but I’m reasonably sure I can pronounce it so good work imo.

Image from poeghostal

Bios are all transcribed and searchable here

so uh. i should explain.

it was an SDCC exclusive.

Yeah, Carnivus–a 200X original. Most of this is just what happened in the show, except his name.

Fervelius… isn’t anything? It reminds me of like… okay, when I was 12 I made an OC named Vereu Jurat bc my school’s planner had like, quotes and occasionally greco-roman roots in it.

and i was like yeah haha, Truth+Good! a beautiful name for a baby girl. but Vereu does not read at ALL because i didn’t like… know what I was doing? I cut out half of Verus and just slapped Eu (which is Greek and almost always a prefix) on the bleeding stump of it, which in concert with a regular ass noun leaves a suggestion of the French véreux, ‘maggoty’. A worm-eaten certificate on an affidavit is poignant in its own way, but absolutely not what baby clare was going for.

the closest I can approximate to Fervelius is fervello, 'restless brat’, with the Latinizing suffix to indicate it’s totally a real word. some other derivative of ferveo, 'boil’? i just can’t tell.

bio’s fine. it fucks with the timeline of the cartoon but that’s not really a problem for bio reviews.

Image from poeghostal