Strong Female Protagonist II

[Traab]

Since the doctor said they don't need Tara in constant surgery anymore I guess whatever Max’s power did to her doesn't make the process work completely without cutting pieces out of her and didn't make her organs duplicate endlessly.

I also wouldnt be surprised if it makes surgery on feral even harder to pull off if her regeneration is even better now. Operating on her would involve an absurd amount of clamps and pins and other methods trying to hold her open while they cut into her because her wounds are closing as fast as you can move a scalpel through them. Depending on how much it has improved, I could see fighting her being like fighting the t-1000. Any holes you make close in an instant and she barely even notices because the damage is healed as fast as the pain receptors can even transmit something happened. Like, she would at most flinch taking a gunshot wound because its already healed by the time she realizes she was hit.

[Morquard]

Good point there, maybe it's now too much of a hassle to harvest her directly and it's easier to go with the other options. I think we'll learn soon enough now.

Another idea I just had would be that maybe her blood transfers some of her healing powers now, so instead of replacing the heart they just need an infusion of Feral's blood and the heart heals itself?

I mean Ali's ability of superstrenght transformed into flight, so her ability of self-healing could very well be boosted into general healing.

[Sapphire Guard]

Hmm, okay, while this is understandable on Allison's behalf, I don't think it should have been a snap decision. Messing with a power like regeneration can go wrong in so many ways, this should have been the product of long weeks of study and conferences with feral, who likely understands her power better than anyone else. Does Max have that much control over his power ups? There could easily be some other complication here. Don't screw with stuff you don't understand, Allison.

Possible prediction 1: Max's comment about Feral 'getting something' out of her donations actually turns out to be somewhat true, and Feral goes to pieces because Allison has negated the way she had of improving the world. (unlikely, I think)

[Traab]

Hmm, okay, while this is understandable on Allison's behalf, I don't think it should have been a snap decision. Messing with a power like regeneration can go wrong in so many ways, this should have been the product of long weeks of study and conferences with feral, who likely understands her power better than anyone else. Does Max have that much control over his power ups? There could easily be some other complication here. Don't screw with stuff you don't understand, Allison.

Possible prediction 1: Max's comment about Feral 'getting something' out of her donations actually turns out to be somewhat true, and Feral goes to pieces because Allison has negated the way she had of improving the world. (unlikely, I think)

Its not like she isnt already aware of people whose powers are getting stronger which sucks for them. Cleaver's body is slowly murdering him because of his powers. For all she knew, goosing ferals abilities could have turned her into a walking pile of cancer as her body regenerates uncontrollably.

[Vinyadan]

Who knows, maybe she's tearing up out of pain.

[Shogo]

Or maybe, plot twist, she's actually extremely upset right now.

No matter how painful it might have been, her perpetual donor scheme is probably something she felt would give her life some kind of meaning and purpose. Now that she doesn't have to do that stuff anymore, she's going to flip out at Al for taking that away from her.

And then we'll find out it was never about helping people and Max was right in the end. Just to twist that knife in a little deeper.

[SlyGuyMcFly]

Or maybe, plot twist, she's actually extremely upset right now.

No matter how painful it might have been, her perpetual donor scheme is probably something she felt would give her life some kind of meaning and purpose. Now that she doesn't have to do that stuff anymore, she's going to flip out at Al for taking that away from her.

Oh haha. If she flips out because Allison did stuff to her without her consent I am going to laugh so hard. And then I'll break out my favourite Bender gif and laugh even harder.

[Dragonus45]

Or maybe, plot twist, she's actually extremely upset right now.

No matter how painful it might have been, her perpetual donor scheme is probably something she felt would give her life some kind of meaning and purpose. Now that she doesn't have to do that stuff anymore, she's going to flip out at Al for taking that away from her.

And then we'll find out it was never about helping people and Max was right in the end. Just to twist that knife in a little deeper.

Honestly I don't see how those are mutually exclusive. She can be doing a good thing because it gives her meaning and also be doing it to help people.

[Lethologica]

I think y'all are really overstating how important it was to Feral to be tortured for the rest of her life.

First, what Alison did didn't negate Feral's contribution, it just made it so Feral didn't have to torture herself to contribute. She still made the contribution--perhaps Alison even improved the contribution--and now Feral has a chance to make other contributions.

Second, we're no strangers to Feral's motives. If someone feels like making a case based on chapter 3, they can try, but as far as I can tell, what we saw there was someone whose primary motive is not some kind of self-aggrandizing notion of personal fulfillment. Just because we've encountered Max more recently doesn't mean we should give his value system any more weight in our understanding of Feral.

Third, it's not like we need that kind of character assassination to generate conflict in this story, for Pete's sake.

[Vinyadan]

I guess we would have the two varieties of imposition: forcing Max to do something and forcing something on Feral, in both cases ignoring consent.

[Dragonus45]

Third, it's not like we need that kind of character assassination to generate conflict in this story, for Pete's sake.

I do agree with you for the most part, but its not like this series is above random character assassination.

[Kantaki]

mean Ali's ability of superstrenght transformed into flight, so her ability of self-healing could very well be boosted into general healing.

Wasn't that because she always had telekinetic powers? All that changed was her range/scale, letting her fly and make stuff float.

But yeah, following that logic Tara could have gained the ability to let others regenerate by being near them/touching them from the boost of her „heal”-power.
I'm sure there are no problems that could arise from that...

[Traab]

Wasn't that because she always had telekinetic powers? All that changed was her range/scale, letting her fly and make stuff float.

But yeah, following that logic Tara could have gained the ability to let others regenerate by being near them/touching them from the boost of her „heal”-power.
I'm sure there are no problems that could arise from that...

Hell, rent out a stadium once a week and ship in everyone sick to form a line, and walk up to her to be healed. Way more impact than organ donation and would work for that too! "Boom! You no longer need your lungs replaced!" Or she could travel the world healing people instead and get to see all sorts of exotic locations.

[Fjolnir]

If she's mad it's because she genuinely sees the act of surgical torture as penance for her multiple murders.

[Deliverance]

Repeat after me, "authors have no sense of scale".

[The Patterner]

Repeat after me, "authors have no sense of scale".

I actually did a little math on this (slow work day), the number of people waiting for kidneys in USA is about 100,000. Every year roughly 17,000 kidneys becomes available, of those 11,000 are from accidents. Add to this that the transplant list grows with about 3,000 a month and we have some solid numbers to count on.

If the regeneration speed is the same for hearts and kidneys, Feral will be able to provide 28,800 pairs a year. Meaning 57,600 donations, if we go by a person only needing one kidney. Add to that the 11,000 from accidents since that number most likely would not change and round of sligthly to get 68,000 kidneys.

The yearly increase is 36,000, so yeah. This would help the US a lot and in the long run slightly help the rest of the world. Buuut, there is about 300 million people is the US and about 7 billion in the world.

So I'll repeat after you.

Authors have no sence of scale...

[AmberVael]

If the regeneration speed is the same for hearts and kidneys, Feral will be able to provide 28,800 pairs a year. Meaning 57,600 donations, if we go by a person only needing one kidney. Add to that the 11,000 from accidents since that number most likely would not change and round of sligthly to get 68,000 kidneys.

I think your math is a little off here.

Feral can regenerate an organ 8 times in a minute. (The doctor technically said 8-10 in a little over a minute, but for simplicity we'll take the lowest estimate and say 1 minute).
She can generate 480 organs an hour (8 organs x 60 minutes).
She can generate 19,200 organs in 40 hours (480 organs an hour x 40 hours). This would be the amount they're saying they can keep up with in one month.
She can generate 230,400 organs in twelve months. (19,200 organs in a month x 12 months). This would be her yearly amount.


My question is "how on earth can they keep up with that rate of regeneration." Especially if they want to harvest more than one organ type.

[Maryring]

So Feral now regenerates 1440 times as fast as before.

How are they even able to operate on her? Back when she only regenerated organs at a rate of 10 per day, she had to undergo a very specific procedure with special machinery because she regenerated so fast. If it was that difficult to maintain surgery back then, how are they able to do that now?

[The Patterner]

I think your math is a little off here.

Feral can regenerate an organ 8 times in a minute. (The doctor technically said 8-10 in a little over a minute, but for simplicity we'll take the lowest estimate and say 1 minute).
She can generate 480 organs an hour (8 organs x 60 minutes).
She can generate 19,200 organs in 40 hours (480 organs an hour x 40 hours). This would be the amount they're saying they can keep up with in one month.
She can generate 230,400 organs in twelve months. (19,200 organs in a month x 12 months). This would be her yearly amount.


My question is "how on earth can they keep up with that rate of regeneration." Especially if they want to harvest more than one organ type.

I read it as she can regenerate one organ in about 1 minute, looking back at the phrasing you might just be right

However sticking to kidneys (easy to find solid numbers) that would mean she removes the waiting line completly in less then six months.

Especially considering you did'nt take the 2 kidneys into account. So she regenerates 8 hearts per minute, but 16 kidneys...

So it's not 230,400, it's 460,800. Or is it something that I have missed?

[Vinyadan]

Maybe the doc thinks the world and the US are synonymous?

Another problem is that organ recovery surgery takes between 4 and 6 hours. I don't know how long it takes to recover each organ, but I assume that there cannot be more than a certain number of people operating Feral at the same time. I mean, organ harvesting isn't like picking grapes, I believe, there's all the other organs and tissues around, and there are strict sterility conditions that need to be enforced. So I don't think that they could get more than 1 heart per hour, 30 minutes top, since they also need to go after kidneys, lungs, tongue, face, liver, stomach, marrow and so on.

I personally read "now you are doing that" as "now you are regenerating your heart" rather than "now you are regenerating your heart 8-10 times".

[sum1won]

On a realism note, re feral, I was curious and punched the numbers:

The highest transplant rates are:

1.) Kidney
2.) Liver
3.) Heart
4.) Lung

Kidney was around 16000/year. Divided by 2 (2 kidneys), and set daily, and that's 22 operations/day for kidneys.

Livers are 6000/year, so around 16 operations/day.

Heart is around 2200/year, so around 6 operations/day.

As for blood, one unit contains about two liters. The entire world uses about 40 million liters of blood annually. Divide by 20 (% of population that is the us) and that is 2 million for the us, or about 5000 liters per day. Feral can contribute "liters upon liters per day", so that's the one area she won't make much of a dent.

Feral can donate her heart "8-10 times per day", and everything else far more often, with kidneys and liver "30 times per day".

Basically, feral not only would put a dent in US organ demands, she'd obliterate it entirely. Blood, perhaps not.

Of course, the issue isn't really paying for the heart. It's paying for the operation.

So assuming surgical speed (probably can't) can keep up, organ shortages were just solved worldwide.

[The Patterner]

Maybe the doc thinks the world and the US are synonymous?


I personally read "now you are doing that" as "now you are regenerating your heart" rather than "now you are regenerating your heart 8-10 times".

If you are not an american you get kind of used to that...

The thing is that if it's one per minute, then it solves americas problems, but not the worlds. If it's 8-10 per minute I think that mights just be enough for the entire world (altough not many times over).

Still, I would have prefered the healing blood explanation that I saw being thrown around

EDIT:

On a realism note, re feral, I was curious and punched the numbers:

The highest transplant rates are:

1.) Kidney
2.) Liver
3.) Heart
4.) Lung

Kidney was around 16000/year. Divided by 2 (2 kidneys), and set daily, and that's 22 operations/day for kidneys.

Yeah but these numbers seems off, you have gone by the number of surgeries not the number of people waiting for an organ.

There is 3,000 people added each month, that's 36,000 new per year.

Unless this page lies of course:
https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom...antation-Stats

[The Patterner]

Double post

[Deliverance]

I think your math is a little off here.

Feral can regenerate an organ 8 times in a minute. (The doctor technically said 8-10 in a little over a minute, but for simplicity we'll take the lowest estimate and say 1 minute).

I would have to disagree.

The doctor doesn't say "now we can harvest your heart 8-10 times in a minute".

She says: "You are regenerating so quickly, that we are barely able to keep up. You were regenerating your heart 8-10 times a day at the outset of the procedure, now you're doing that in a little over a minute".

So what is the "that", which Feral is now doing in a little over a minute?

Grammatically it can either refer to "regenerating your heart" or "regenerating your heart 8-10 times a day"; it cannot refer to "regenerating your heart 8-10 times". So this gives us the two possible interpretations:

a) Feral is now regenerating her heart in a little over a minute, or

This one gives her at most 24*60 = 1440 heart regenerations in a day.

b) Feral is now regenerating her heart 8-10 times a day in a little over a minute.

This one gives her 8-10 heart regenerations in a day, but the heart regenerates really quickly when it does and for some reason doesn't allow more frequent harvesting

Since a) is consistent with with how Feral's anomaly has been presented and b) isn't, let's go with a)

[Deliverance]

I actually did a little math on this (slow work day), the number of people waiting for kidneys in USA is about 100,000. Every year roughly 17,000 kidneys becomes available, of those 11,000 are from accidents. Add to this that the transplant list grows with about 3,000 a month and we have some solid numbers to count on.

So did I.

I started out looking up world numbers and began writing a tongue in cheek post about the bizarre math in today's comic, then remembered that the author and probably a large portion of the reader base were Americans and might have problems extrapolating t a world scale. So I looked up the US numbers too, did a few extrapolations of my own for jokes and giggles, and posted it in the comic's comments.

The funniest extrapolation is actually asking yourself "what is the world need?" and seeing if you can find any numbers that might even hint at the magnitude of the issue if we are looking in terms of medical need (which is surely how Alison and Feral would view the problem) rather than need based on who can afford it and what governments are willing to pay for.

Extrapolating from US numbers (on the basis of the audience, and that the US is a highly developed country where most people will either receive a transplant or get on a waiting list and die or get too sick before they receive a transplant, rather than not even make it onto a waiting list in the first place, and ignoring the large variety of factors that makes it a shaky estimate) I thus extrapolated a need for ~418,000 kidneys per year assuming one was willing to accept a 2.3 million backlog with 186k people on the waiting list dying per year, something that Feral's 57,600 kidneys/year from a leisurely 40h/month shedule harvesting both kidneys simultaneously at maximum speed comes nowhere near matching.

Even putting her under the knife 24/7 without logistics issues would take decades to catch up with the backlog (in practice, they'd die of other reasons) and equilibrium was reached... and unfortunately even that approach wouldn't work given current population growth predictions. Feral would never, ever, catch up even if the doctors performed the hypothetical mentioned as covering the world's needs many times over

Now to see if my SFP post clears the censor. It should.

EDIT: The real question is whether I've kept the Ks, Ms, and Bs straight in my post on SFP. I expect egg all over my face if I've accidentally turned a million into a billion as I did here.

[Vinyadan]

I was taking a look at the new cast page.

Literal hothead who is completely sure he’s a superhero, despite leaving a trail of destruction, scorch marks, and offense in his wake.

Guess who this is? But this description suggests something of a funny guy. If this the was the concept, it was a good one, although the actual character had no reason to exist.

Used to be in the Guardians, using her light bending powers to fight supervillains; lately she’s struck out on her own and has been fighting a different kind of evil.

And guess who this is! I was somewhat taken aback by this description. I would have gone with "Ali's old superhero friend turned into villain, she has been on a murder and kidnapping spree in what she considers her personal crusade". I guess this is how she sees herself? Or an attempt to incentive a morally ambiguous reading of her actions?

I remember Ali's reactions to Moonshadow's actions and words striking me as nonsensical. I especially could not understand why she let her go. But, given how Ali has been acting lately, it is possible that she simply thought Moonshadow was at least partially right.

EDIT: Rereading the descriptions, these two have an interesting parallelism. They probably could be swapped.

[The Patterner]

So did I.

I started out looking up world numbers and began writing a tongue in cheek post about the bizarre math in today's comic, then remembered that the author and probably a large portion of the reader base were Americans and might have problems extrapolating t a world scale. So I looked up the US numbers too, did a few extrapolations of my own for jokes and giggles, and posted it in the comic's comments.

The funniest extrapolation is actually asking yourself "what is the world need?" and seeing if you can find any numbers that might even hint at the magnitude of the issue if we are looking in terms of medical need (which is surely how Alison and Feral would view the problem) rather than need based on who can afford it and what governments are willing to pay for.

Extrapolating from US numbers (on the basis of the audience, and that the US is a highly developed country where most people will either receive a transplant or get on a waiting list and die or get too sick before they receive a transplant, rather than not even make it onto a waiting list in the first place, and ignoring the large variety of factors that makes it a shaky estimate) I thus extrapolated a need for ~418,000 kidneys per year assuming one was willing to accept a 2.3 billion backlog with 186 million people on the waiting list dying per year, something that Feral's 57,600 kidneys/year from a leisurely 40h/month shedule harvesting both kidneys simultaneously at maximum speed comes nowhere near matching.

Even putting her under the knife 24/7 without logistics issues would take decades to catch up with the backlog (in practice, they'd die of other reasons) and equilibrium was reached... and unfortunately even that approach wouldn't work given current population growth predictions. Feral would never, ever, catch up even if the doctors performed the hypothetical mentioned as covering the world's needs many times over

Now to see if my SFP post clears the censor. It should.

That's some impressive math there

And I now realise that the biggest problem is not the number of organs available, it's the logistical nightmare to keep it all working

[Deliverance]

And I now realise that the biggest problem is not the number of organs available, it's the logistical nightmare to keep it all working

Absolutely; It is a logistical nightmare, first the issue on what to do on the spot and then distribution and storage.

But it is something that is eminently solvable, if there's a will and funding, and the one thing that is certain is that the 40h/720h (30day month) operating schedule due to logistical reasons for the hospital clinics operations is ridiculously low. Something that inefficient is just begging for optimization, and given the value of the product in question getting that funded should be no problem.

[danelsan]

So, no organs duplicating outside her body, no regeneration-juice-for-blood, no healing people at a distance or anything. Just increased regeneration rate.

On the one hand, the augmentation power goes back into making sense. On the other, I'd really like to know how the hell the surgeons are gonna be able to deal with that. They already had a lot of trouble before, and she is now 144 to 180 times faster.

We just get a deus ex medici instead of a deus ex "Maxna"

Also, yeah. No sense of scale. It is a common malady among comic book authors, it seems, though it usually manifests in having no idea how much a given weight that a character can lift actually represents in reality.

[Traab]

For those talking about how long it takes to operate, remember this is fast healing feral. They could go temple of doom on her and probably have a viable heart for transplant. They have absolutely no need to be gentle, so long as the organ is intact the faster they can remove it the better. Because feral will recover just fine. So no need to do things like clamp vessels one by one and slowly clear a path doing as little damage as possible on the way to the organ of choice, just core a hole through her body and get moving. Keep her peeled open and rip out the organ every 15 seconds or so until you get the number you can transport, then move on to the next organ.

Operate on her while she is immobilized and upright and you can go in through the back AND the front and have two teams removing different organs at the same time. The guy operating on the back is doing a speed removal of both kidneys while his team is holding her cavity open. Or for a less grotesque mental image, they carve a path to say, her heart. They then put a hollow tube into her boy that surrounds the heart. This keeps the path to her heart from healing shut. They wait for the organ to regrow, rotate the scalpel all around it to cut it loose (or whatever it takes to disconnect the heart from her body) hand it off then wait a few seconds for it to regrow.

The real issue is being able to get those removed organs where they need to go. If she is serious about staying under the knife as much as possible, they would have to build a town sized hospital around her. Bring in hundreds of surgeons, thousands of assorted other medical personnel, build entire blocks full of nothing but surgical suites and recovery areas. Probably build a town for all the medical personnel to live in, a hotel complex for patients families and those waiting their turn, a small airport to constantly shuttle in patients from around the world and back. The only real chokepoint is implanting the new organs into people and waiting for them to recover enough to be sent home. By the time they finish giving one person their new kidney, feral has already donated enough organs for another thousand or so patients.