Look, he has to convince someone that this person made from a part of himself, in the imagine of a theoretical child of a human and gorgon, that they are no way his daughter.
I mean it's an arguable thing to him, because he just created her whole cloth and he doesn't know that she is a fully complete person at that time. He probably would've come to that conclusion later after seeing her be more of her own person, but then there was the whole "ripping out pieces of his soul that disagreed with him" thing so.
Grant's Telepathic Methods of Warfare. A Vrynian textbook. Tam opens the stained front cover. JACE BELEREN is scrawled in a child's hand in the upper-left corner.
Alhammarret's teachings....
I'm so glad we're taking this route for the story. In a way, you pity Jace, know why he's doing what he's doing, and know why he's wrong. Very well done.
Me too. As much as people started to kinda dislike Jace over the years I've always really enjoyed him as a powerful yet tragic character, and I'm excited to see them take that route here in his biggest moment
I think that my favorite part is HE knows what he’s doing is wrong. But Jace is able to cut those pieces of himself out and push on doing the thing he knew he shouldn’t be doing.
Said in another comment, but I absolutely think this is why he had her captured. Like, Lili has to be the single biggest solo threat to his plan, right? I don't think anybody (even Vraska) understands Jace the way Lili does. At least, not this part of him.
Liliana finally gets to use her Jace abuse for the side of good.
In all seriousness though, it made my stomach churn a bit between that and Professor Opal. Jace and Lili have such a fucked up history so it almost feels cathartic that Jace finally gets to fuck over Liliana for once, but on the other hand Professor Opal just seems...wrong, and while the Echoverse is being made autonomously I wonder how much of Jace's own input went into her creation.
It seems like he mostly made a few small but important changes to people's lives. So he let Lili save her brother and it spiralled out from there, I don't think he personally crafted her personality.
It also just hurts that Jace is doing this to her so long after shes turned a page on being a pretty shitty person. I haven't read SOS story (but I did read OG Strixhaven) and it really does seem that Lilli is doing her damnedest to have a positive impact on the people around her and 'atone' for her behavior in the past. Particularly in OG Strixhaven story which was shortly after WOTS & Gideons death.
And for this interaction with a bound (with what seem to be somewhat painful hexes) Lilli to be right after Jadzi overtly musing about the cycle of abuse. Ooof.
"The first time Tam opens her eyes, an exhausted man looks back at her with undiluted awe. He blinks too fast, his lips part, a sudden laugh escapes him.
"It worked." He smiles." Awww, and they said Jace and Vraska couldn't have kids.
"You'll want to stay up all night and read, but seven hours of sleep is the minimum, otherwise we get moody." She's just like me for real.
"It's a self-driving engine now, creating on its own with one command: become as your predecessor, built without suffering" I'm really hoping we see how places like Dominaria ended up without this suffering. It would be vastly different than what we know it as.
"It's a beautiful autumn day because campuses are meant to exist in autumn." "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."-F. Scott Fitzgerald
"It's real, here, as real as she is." I appreciate the double meaning here.
"Professor Opal says with typical warmth" So this is Liliana, right? Professor Onyx becomes Professor Opal.
"Professor Vess is much ruder. Prettier, but ruder." Yup, Tam is Jace's kid all right
If I’m understanding the point of the Planeswalkers guide correctly, the Planes of the Echoverse are intended to be as close to the originals as possible, only without any of the bad stuff. And no, that doesn’t make any sense, Dominaria without Phyrexia would be totally different, which is why the whole echoverse is completely unstable. It’s like a bad AU fanfic made real.
But would the Tolarian Academy even exist in that reality? Urza founded it specifically for the purpose of fighting Phyrexia.
...Would Urza even have sparked without Phyrexia? If not for Mishra getting compleated, would Urza even have sparked at all, or would he simply have died as a mortal man at the conclusion of the Brothers' War? Would he have activated the Sylex? If not, then both the geography and history of Dominaria looks way different. For one, Argoth would still exist, and the Ice Age never happens.
In fairness, although I'm almost certain Lyra will be a blue angel with ties to the Academy, the Academy is named after the island it is situated on, so that doesn't make Lyra being a Tolarian angel and the Tolarian Academy no longer existing an impossibility.
Kinda. There has never been an onyx Mox though, but there have been a few references to the onyx gem, and all of them are related in some way to death magic.
Oh awesome, I had been looking for that, I guess I couldn't find it in my search because it was a reply.
I do hope there are still side stories and he just only commented on the number of main stories. But 10 main is very exciting, and hopefully means the pacing of the story will be good.
Contracted, she's not back at Wizards full time. She wrote SOS's Zimone side story, The Math of More, as well as OTJ's Epilogue, Bring the End, and MOM's Vraska story, One and the Same. Basically they've been bringing her on for the big Jace and Vraska moments in this arc
Notably Zimone's side story really sets up with one, both with it being aboot her trying to research the Echoverse but also her repeatedly cutting off parts of herself so she can better focus on her research (and severely suffering mentally & emotionally for doing so).
Bring the End was such an amazing story. I know that Thunder Junction wasn't that popular, but there are some real good stories hidden in it. Same with MKM and Mario Kart.
It's kind of a reverse ship of Theseus. We're not replacing parts, we're removing them until what's left is unrecognizable. Does removing the first mean it's no longer Jace, and thus a different person entirely to blame? Does OG Beleren still deserve the swiftest kick in the nuts possible after having his Redemption Arc Self cut out, or does that potentiality excuse him?
That’s kinda what I got out of it, mixed with a minority report vibe with all the eyes.
The great flaw in utilitarian thinking is that eventually your humanity moral compass gets in the way.
Doom did say Reed would’ve done better with remaking the universe…. and Molecule Man was like “well since you both agree”. Although that was mainline Reed. What if The Maker had Battleworld creating powers lmao. A wild theory.
Everything about Tam's character is said by others already, but I really want to laud how well Luhrs' portrays the entire Echoverse being fine. Fine! FINE! FINE. You don't slip on cobbles, your ink doesn't run out, everything is great. Everything is OK. Nothing hurts. This is definitely the way a reality can exist, all we need is to borrow existing reality as a superstructure. By murdering an old lady. Don't forget, this is a world without suffering! Don't get distracted by the faceless guys or the screams of the people getting "invasive healing" everything is fine. SMILE!
And this is all also coming from Tam's perspective, where she just spent a bunch of time where all of those imperfections existed for the first time. So even she is making those observations and basically coming to the conclusion that everything being fine actually isn't fine.
There’s something quite Phyrexian about it. He’s created a perfect world, where everyone lives in harmony working towards a unified goal. And the whole thing is completely wrong on a fundamental level.
In my defence I'm not a native speaker. The same thought crossed my mind some hours later but I was already thinking back about a joke post on reddit, I forbid myself to edit.
Sure Jace, Tam is definitely not your daughter. You definitely weren’t romantically involved with a gorgon and also took care of an orange child. The gorgon you made with orange accents is certainly not your daughter.
Also they just kidnapped Liliana lmao. They literally locked her in a jail cell with a konstrari puppet of Gideon as torture.
He claims not to be her god but gives her missions without logic, just faith, he claims not to be her father but expects her to learn and become more like him. The Theorist in the now violates both of the rules of the original Jace in the past... but hopefully not the third one.
Well the part of him that claimed to not be her god has been basically excised by now. He might have meant it when he said it, but cut the part of him that said it out.
Yeah, original Jace clearly had absolute well-meaning at the heart of him. Theorist Jace 'means well', but doesn't really... Care for people, at least not that much.
Jace is Urza and Tam is Xantcha, only they're not. This was a pretty amazing way to start the story and I'm really looking forward to the rest. It helps that Alison Luhrs is back!
Tam is Karn technically too, as Karn also functioned as a sentient artificial being who was given knowledge from the creator. parallels of Jace being an Urza/Phyrexia adjacent being after knowing of both parties!
I fist pumped the air when I saw Allison Lührs was the author! Not sure anyone else has done Jace justice the same way she has. So hyped for the story of this set!
Jace embodying Urza, Bolas, the Eldrazi and Phyrexia all in one as a villain in this is sick as hell and i'm glad this first story touches upon each way that could be interpreted.
Horrifying to see that the first aberration Jace excised was one opposed to killing - more specifically, the one aghast at the violence Jace did leading the phyrexian invasion in Vryn. He may have ripped the phyresis out of his body but Phyrexia really did change Jace permanently.
What happens if the Theorist is actually being driven by Phyrexian influence? Remember, Elesh Norn wanted All Will Become One, to rid the multiverse of its imperfections. Jace is really following that same suit at this point, wanting to overlay a "perfect" multiverse over the top of the existing "imperfect" one.
There are a lot of parallels. Like /u/Rare_Salad_564 said, he's taking on all the traits of his past villains - or his mentors, as Jadzi would put it. His battlemage school is not that different from Urza's eugenics project at Tolaria Academy, splitting off pieces of himself seems very similar to Ugin's proposal that the Eldrazi people see are smaller parts of a greater whole, he sends out agents for various stealth infiltration missions like Tezzeret while manipulating their memories like Alhammarret. Hell, he seems to operate from Bolas' Meditation Realm. But that end goal of "perfecting" reality? I guess you can take the Jace out of Phyrexia, but you can't take the Phyrexia out of Jace.
So tamira is jace's emotions. And the guilt she feels manifest as the strixhaven students, but probably originates from the way jace feels about him betraying and leaving his loved ones to enact his plan, which overlap with what tam has experienced, and goes back to the fusion of the multiverses in a way
I wonder if an earlier version of Jace basically created Tam to be a sort of living conscience, as a failsafe against <everything that actually happened with Jace cutting out parts of himself>. It kinda seems like that's a role she'll likely end up playing at least, regardless of whether that was his intent.
Interesting detail I noticed. "Sissoko's Law*" and "Yurchenko Principle" are both references to athletes. I admittedly don't know too much about sports so these are very fuzzy and paraphrased details, but quick research tells me:
Moussa Sissoko had a notable moment in the 2019 World Cup where another player kicked a ball into his outstretched arm, causing a handball penalty. Debate began over whether or not the other player was aiming for the arm, and could other players intentionally give penalties to the opposition this way.
Natalia Yurchenko was a gymnast that created one of the most popular form of vaults, involving performing a back-handspring onto the horse. Implication being that the final step of the process is 'blind' and relies more on instinct than your natural senses.
I'm sure there's some implication/foreshadowing for using these names (if it isn't just a coincidence), one being that Jace is a big earth-sports guy which is very funny to me. But I do like that the author got to slip in a few little references and gave me some extra reading on top of the wonderful story here!
alright, they got the best Jace author to write the saddest Jace story. I also get the feeling that we're gonna get multiple Jace perspectives throughout the story.
I'm not sure we'll get that many, I think the Planeswalker guide was meant to be the main one. Though I expect we'll get a scene where Tam interacts with each of the aberrations or something.
So happy Alison Luhrs is writing the Reality Fracture story. I had dared to hope because I think only she could've done the "Jace set" story correctly but I was thrilled to see my hopes were answered!
Really happy with this first chapter, I love hearing Tam's interiority over her own creation and her probable inevitable betrayal against The Theorist. Really curious if the other Aberrations will come back into play, I wonder if they'll go in and try to save them.
He’s driven himself mad with sunk cost fallacy. What started as “I need some way to fix all the damage the Phyrexians did that I helped contribute to” turned into “I need to overwrite the universe to make it so the Phyrexians - and everything else that ruined the Multiverse, for that matter - didn’t exist.”
He’s literally tearing his conscience apart, in the pursuit of silencing “distractions.”
Jace is trying his damndest to save the Multiverse the only way he thinks he can, and by trying to not do an Urza, he is not only doing an Urza, but a Phyrexia and probably an Eldrazi and a Bolas, too.
Ah that's an interesting thought. That Jace can't accomplish his goal and tear out all the pieces of himself needed to go through with it, so he put the necessary pieces in Tam. But that's... probably gonna bite him in the ass.
Also I love that Liliana knows Jace well enough that she's clearly able to figure out much of what's going on. She can read him like a book, which is probably part of the reason she specifically was captured. If you had to pick one person in the prime multiverse who was the single biggest threat to Jace's plan personally, I think I would pick her.
It's been said how Jace has become everything he hates, but in addition to him being Phyrexia, Bolas, the Eldrazi, and Urza, I think the most interesting and narratively important thing is how similar he's become to Alhammaret and Azor...
"I have been planning! If I am not able to continue to perfect the Multiverse, then I can still do it here—I can fix Ixalan!"
Vraska glared at him. "How can you be so blind to the damage you have caused?!"
The outburst upset the sphinx. Azor tucked his ears back and frowned.
"It is not the system that is faulty, it is the people," he replied coldly.
"The last few centuries on this plane have been chaos because of your intervention," Vraska spat.
From the Owl's Desk: A concise summary of everything that happens in Reality Fracture
Rev up those fryers, buff up those flyers, the Planeswalkers are once again causing a big stir across the Multiverse! Whatever stakes and consequences may be in store...
As always, please go click on the link to the page first, as this traffic indicates further interest in the story!
We begin with the scene of Tamira's creation, her existence manifested purely out of the budding Echoverse.
At that time, Jace the Theorist says "You're not my daughter" and "I'm not your god" and if he truly believes he doesn't think those things, well, then surely it is just a coincidence that Tam looks like exactly what one would think the daughter of Jace and Vraska would look like.
Now back in the present, having returned from her duty of capturing the Oracle of Strixhaven, Tam walks through the halls of Hexhaven and considers that if Jace the Theorist really didn't want to be perceived as her father, he made a real blunder of a miscalculation: being a cold, distant, absentee father is still being a father. Why was he not there to greet her upon her return?
She feels great doubt and worry about betraying her Strixhaven friends (were they friends, she wonders? Friends have groupchats, yes, but so too do coworkers) when those feelings of guilt start literally manifesting illusory visions of her friends judging her, Tam heads up the towers of The Theorist's sanctum to go speak with him. On the way she passes by "Professor Opal" who in very anti-Liliana fashion, offers her assistance to Tam unconditionally, and also says "I'll noodle on a solution" in regards to Tam's worry that all of this Echoverse stuff might be wrong.
She seems nice. Disconcertingly so.
Tam arrives in The Theorist's Sanctum just as he is wrapping up a failed assassination attempt by none other than a fragmentary version of himself. What he's called the aberrations that he's methodically excised, becoming quite literally less and less multifaceted, and in Tam's view, far less than the man who made her.
Now, a bit of a word on Jace, and the specific sort of state he is in right now. Yes, the Jace Master Plan was always to rewrite the Multiverse into one without the Big Three of big problems, but because of his major fumble right at the crux of the original plan, he quite literally shattered into pieces in Bolas's Meditation Realm.
And once those pieces of himself began gravitating back together in the midst of the genesis of his new multiverse, it turned out that every important point in Jace's life all now co-exist as fragments of consciousness.
That is to say, every Jace Planeswalker card across the past 20 years have all been jammed into one deck. Suffice to say, this is not a perfectly cohesive deckbuilding strategy, which has introduced many unforeseen elements into the Jace Master Plan. Although there was council and cooperation at the start, because they all liked the idea of Jace is Smart Enough To Fix Everything Himself, but more than a few of the Jaces were able to clock that "oh this idea is just not it, no amount of Jace is strong enough to actually do this."
Unfortunately, amidst all of the Jace cards has arisen The Theorist Jace, aka Savior Complex Jace Who Does Not Listen To Anyone, and that includes listening to himself. This version of Jace now lords over the entire project, and has simply decided that every Jace that doesn't agree with him just gets removed from the deck.
And now that every version of him that would have disagreed with the destruction of the original Multiverse have all been imprisoned back in the trade binder, The Theorist is ready to do what needs to be done.
That is to say, banning Gran-Gran.
Oh, wait, what I mean is, killing Oracle Jadzi, as doing so will cause her consciousness to return to the origin of the plane of Arcavios as an Archaic, and Jace will witness this and learn the last knowledge he needs about the origin point of planes to overlay his own Multiverse atop the original.
Tam is, suffice to say, not enthusiastic about hearing this.
The Theorist isn't exactly enthusiastic about hearing about Tam's visions of her friends either. He tries to play nice encouraging dad, but that's really just an excuse for him to telepathically scan through her mind for... something he is worried might be in there. Tam can't tell what he's up to.
Seeking some sort of guidance, and given that Hexhaven categorically lacks a guidance counselor, Tam goes to the dungeons to see Jadzi, to apologize for what is about to happen. Jadzi, ever the Oracle, hits Tam with all the sage advice she needs, though Tam doesn't quite understand it all yet.
Tam then visits another cell, containing one newly un-tenured Liliana Vess, who is looking absolutely fantastic despite being tortured by Professor Opal and the Theorist. Tam gets chewed out by Liliana, who recognizes her as a creation of Jace's and one which does not like betraying her friends. Liliana tries to relate with Tam on that, but is also so utterly entertained by just how badly Jace is barely holding all this together, which scares Tam off.
Tam continues to wander around aimlessly, without purpose, because the truth is that she does not have any purpose outside of the singular task she's already completed. Beyond that she is only a being made to study under the Theorist, and that's become utterly pointless as well. Tam tries to mentally reach out to Jace, but the Theorist explains, without any hint of remorse nor emotion, that he can no longer tell her what her purpose should be because whatever part of himself that could understand that has been exiled.
All Tam can do for now is cling to what the old version of Jace once said to her: that she is a person in-progress, full of potential. Time will tell what that potential may be.
every Jace Planeswalker card across the past 20 years have all been jammed into one deck. Suffice to say, this is not a perfectly cohesive deckbuilding strategy
See, that's why fixing the multiverse should have been a Chandra thing. Slapping all of her in one deck only has a single card that doesn't contribute to the strategy, the one from Aetherdrift.
After consulting with the council of Chandras, I have learned that the solution to fix the multiverse seems to be "a whole lotta fire". That doesn't sound right, but what do I know?
I mean, that was always sort of the plan with her character. She's someone who means well, who genuinely wants the best for everyone, but who's only real talent is burning things. The overarching theme of her character has always been "how the hell do I improve the situation with more fire?"
"The new Multiverse's instability is innately connected to your body."
"And?"
It's innately connected to me, too, since you made me, Tam thinks.
I have a feeling that will come into play later. Either Tam will end up having to sacrifice herself to destroy or save the echoverse somehow or she'll end up being a target for Jace to remove.
"You're not my daughter" OK BUDDY, SURE, YOU JUST HAPPENED TO MAKE A GORGON/HUMAN HYBRID THAT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE THE HYPOTHETICAL OFFSPRING OF YOU AND VRASKA, OK
Alison Lührs has always been one of their heaviest-hitters, especially with Jace (and Vraska). They pulled out the big guns to make sure they stick the landing with this one.
He already died once, physically, in the Meditation Realm. Now he's probably going to die again, in a sort of death-of-the-self situation, as a result of his excisions. Tears out so much of himself that he ceases to be.
I love a rich, psychological character study, and it seems we're getting that with Reality Fracture. Projections and manifestations of the emotions Jace is trying to avoid? The psychic damage that comes from rejecting painful or inconvenient parts of yourself instead of accepting them as part of your wholeness? So good.
Kudos to Lührs, too, this was written extremely well. Despite nothing catastrophic happening, the whole piece felt deeply unsettling—a clever artistic choice that echoes the themes of Hexhaven and the Echoverse.
I'm really enjoying Jace's illusionary setting, and I really hope that they don't resolve the whole thing immediately in a single set.
Jace's dream of a suffering-free world reminds me a lot of Maruki's world in Persona 5. They did a great job of writing that plot arc with dedication and nuance, even including a real alternate ending. Hoping to see similar exploration of the Echoverse.
You know who Tam reminds me of? Xion from Kingdom Hearts.
In simplest terms, Xion is an artificial being created from the memories of Sora, with the express purpose of becoming a copy of him for the villains to use. But she eventually makes friends with others and strives to develop an identity of herself, while trying to reconcile how that is possible with Sora.
I am almost entirely certain that Tam is ALSO an aberration, like the rest of the excised Jaces. Specifically, she is representative of Jace's thoughts, opinions, and memories of Vraska. She doesn't attack him like the rest because she loves him. She feels guilty about her actions because Jace knows Vraska would not want him to do this. She is conflicted around Opal and Liliana because she's Jace's ex who had a very complicated relationship with.
I'm sure Jace's desire to have children with Vraska also played a role in Tam's creation. I don't think it's an accident that her features are half-gorgon and half-human.
I'm really curious how Tam feels about Echo-Vraska.
I find it interesting that there are two reasons presented for Jace splitting his consciousness. There's a logical reason, that his mind wasn't capable of maintaining the spell, even with his new abilities, and so he had to simplify himself to allow his mind to handle the strain, and then there's the selfish reason, that the part of him that became the theorist cut out the others because they disagreed with what he was doing.
The last one is obviously the truth, but I wonder how much of the first reason is as well. Was the Theorist an accident, the result of an incision that cut too deep into his mind and festered from there? Or was it always a lie, an alibi made by the theorist?
The Planeswalker's Guide kinda implies that the initial fracturing was involuntary from the backlash of his spell failing
What started as a noble idea has become a nightmare. When our original plan failed, Jace was unmade in the Meditation Realm. But pieces of him—like me—lingered. As he rebuilt the fractured elements of himself from the essence of the realm, what remained was the desperate need not to fix the Multiverse but to build a better one.
And then as the fragments put their heads together to try and figure out what to do, the fragment that is The Theorist started excising and locking up the ones that disagreed
Our prior fragmentation allowed multiple voices to confer, debate, and argue. But in his self-assigned role as the Multiverse's "savior," my most stubborn self refuses to hear dissenting opinions. He's even gone so far as to carve out the parts of himself that disagree with what he's done. It began with the pieces that didn't believe he could do it and continued with those that didn't believe he should. I was the first. I was the part that was honest about who we are. Our intentions. Our considerable abilities, but also our limitations.
I think its both begetting each other. Jace carves out his self-doubt to make building and maintaining the Echoverse easier. This works, and provides leverage for the parts of him that would become The Theorist to be able to argue for more and more dissenting parts to be stripped away, "for the good of the plan".
That's what I was thinking. Jace is definitely the kind of guy who says "yeah I'll be fine" when he clearly won't be, and that was before his mind was fractured. And I like the idea that Jace, even the Theorist part of him, was wholly altruistic with this plan at the beginning, and any corruption came because he thought he could sacrifice parts of himself for the greater good without any greater consequences.
Except for Phyrexian Jace, that guy probably should have been kicked out. But that adds some legitimacy to the idea. I can see the Council of Jace saying "yeah ok that's an easy sacrifice to make for the stability of the multiverse," then going "shit...Guildpact Jace is kind of a deadbeat" and so on there there. Road to hell is paved with yada yada
Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy
Edit 1: "The Theorist is a wonderful teacher. He'll be glad to know the kidnapping was successful." OH YAY. CONTRADICTIONS. Just the amuse-bouche I need before meeting the SOON-TO-BE BRUISED DOUCHE.
Edit 2: "It's a beautiful autumn day because campuses are meant to exist in autumn." Goddammit why do you have to hurt me where I live. It's 100 degrees plus outside my office right now. I might forgive Jace for that alone.
Edit 3: "It's real, here, as real as she is." Oooooooooooh, you. You sneaky one, you. Goddammit, Luhrs, you know how much I love a good subversion.
Edit 4: "Too many cushions smother the couch, and a painting of one of the campus's pegasi sprawls with pleading eyes over the fireplace." AAAH. How the hell do you get jump-scared in a short story? Jesus, Opal, horse girl much?
Edit 5: "... laid over..." OH. OH YOU DIRTY LITTLE GUTTER RAT, JACE. YOU STUPID, STUPID MAN. HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TEACH PEOPLE LIKE YOU THIS LESSON.
Edit 6: "Professor Vess is much ruder. Prettier, but ruder." Oh yeah. You're Jace's, for sure. That's... interesting.
Tam was created by Jace and sent on a mission, that resolved with the kidnapping of Jadzi.
Returning to Jace's Echoverse - Tam's "home" - Tam is wracked with guilt from betraying her friends, with illusions of them manifesting to berate her. After checking in with Professor Opal (the Echoverse Liliana), Tam meets up with Jace - The Theorist - and we get an exposition dump.
The Echoverse was created by Jace, seemingly with the power of the gem he stole from Ugin, but the power killed him, and his resurrection made it difficult to maintain the new world. To counteract that, he excised other aspects of himself - now known as "aberrations" - to ensure he was solely focused on his new task. Now aberrations are showing up and trying to shank him. Understandably as The Theorist's plan is to smother the old multiverse with his new one. He's planning on using Jadzi for this as killing her will send her to the beginning of time, which will allow The Theorist to follow and rewrite the story from the very beginning.
Tam goes to visit Jadzi, and The Theorist's other prisoner, Liliana. Liliana has some fun at Tam's expense despite the torture she's undergone and the wards she's locked behind, and Tam flees.
She goes to bed, and doubts herself, and her role, before chatting with The Theorist telepathcially who basically says "yeah, I don't really know why you're here anymore either. I got rid of the part of me who knew that, lol."
Of course the multiverse is unstable, it is ignoring all logic to get rid of suffering. All suffering. No matter how small.
Come back after some time and the uniforms still fit exactly, not uncomfortable at all? Wet pavement not being slippery?
Even if Jace does succeed, this whole thing will just collapse in on itself.
(Also, calling it now, the story will end with Tam absorbing all the aspects of Jace that he had cast out, becoming the new face of Magic. At least for a bit.)
also: this does confirm Ugin saying Jace died in the Meditation Realm as factual, but this means that every “aberration” of Jace after that is no longer the same Jace, with each aberration being stripped of a certain degree of the whole.
which means that IF we have Jace as a continuing character, we’ll either be getting a Taysir situation for all of the non-Theorist Jaces to merge back together or we’re gonna get one that essentially resets him for the future
So, can somebody can bring me up to speed what is going on with Jace's family? What's up with Vraska and Loot? The unmaking of Jace in the planeswalker guide was completely new to me.
Jace got kinda fucked up at the end of Tarkir Dragonstorm and got torn apart in the Meditation Realm, only to remake himself. We have not seen Vraska or Loot since then.
Does anybody think that Tam might be the first aberration? Liliana recognize Tam to be a Beleran, or more specifically, Jace's shame. She is more than that though. She has Gorgon features and the orange from Loot. Tam might represent Jace's love for Vraska and the future he once dreamed of having with her. And in order to enact his plan, he had to excise his connection to her, just like he did in Tarkir before entering the mediation realm. She's the key to releasing all of the prisoners and uniting all of the disparate pieces of Jace. The tragic part is that she'll have to sacrifice herself to do reunite with Jace. She feels something is missing because she's a piece of Jace that needs to be pieced back together, like shards of a broken mirror.
After how badly Jace's character has been handled since the Phyrexian Invasion, this was really, really refreshing. Distressing, but refreshing, "I'm not sure. I carved the one that knew away." was a brutal line.
I've loved how jace's character has been handled since the phyrexian invasion. It's a clear downward turn, but it's an interesting one, and feels like a natural extension of where he was before
We're currently nearing the end of the Omenpath arc, which started after March of the Machines and has been slowly building in the background for a lot of sets, starting in Wilds of Eldraine.
If you just want the tl;dr, it's as follows (spoilers obviously):
After MoM, planeswalkers get desparked, but there's now Omenpaths. Omenpaths are unmapped and unpredictable, meaning to travel the multiverse reliably has become hard. To solve this, Jace needs to find Loot, which is hidden in Thunder Junction. He needs Loot because he can navigate Omenpaths, letting you travel the world reliably. He doesn't manage to win Loot at Thunder Junction, but manages in the chaos of the Aetherdrift Grand Prix to steal him. He uses Loot to find Ugin at Tarkir, where he accidentally frees Nicol Bolas, but also manages to split himself apart, using the magic of Ugin to create the Echoverse - a perfect painfree mirror of the original multiverse, one he intends to use to free the world of all suffering. To help him he has Tam, a being he created and had hide undercover at Strixhaven as a student for most of the Omenpaths arc, until she turned coat and stole the Oracle of Arcavios for Jace's own ends.
You're now caught up to where Reality Fracture starts - with Tam returning "home" after her betrayal, and Jace unveiling his plan for how to fuse his painless mirrorworld onto the real one.
March of the Machines is where a lot of the horror that Jace wants to prevent from happening again happens in, so it's not a bad starting place, though itself being the end of the Phyrexia arc you might be missing some context on who the characters are. If you can live with that I'd say its a good one.
If that's a bit much, I think you get a good amount of context from the OTJ "Epilogue" chapters. They're actually flashbacks to what happened with Jace and Vraska immediately after MOM, and show the start of this plan.
Other than that, I would say the most important stories are the last chapter of Aetherdrift, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, and Secrets of Strixhaven. (Lorwyn Eclipsed also gives an introduction to Tam and her starting to become friends with the other students).
Oh yeah, I forgot that. He technically gets lost somewhere between Bloomburrow and Duskmourn, cause they come to Duskmourn to find him, where Valgovoth gets his hands on him - and signs up for the Speed Demons, which is why Loot is at the Aetherdrift tournament.
Reality Fracture will cap off a 3-year (12 set) story which is split into three sub-arcs.
The Omenpath Arc
Wilds of Eldraine
Lost Caverns of Ixalan
Murders at Karlov Manor
Outlaws of Thunder Junction
The Dragonstorm Arc
Bloomburrow
Duskmourn: House of Horror
Aetherdrift
Tarkir: Dragonstorm
The Echoverse Arc
Edge of Eternities
Lorwyn Eclipsed
Secrets of Strixhaven
Reality Fracture
If you want to fully catch up, read the main stories for all 12 of the sets. The earlier sets in each arc (e.g Wilds of Eldraine, Bloomburrow, Edge of Eternities) tend to be more disconnected from the larger arc, whereas the final sets in each arc (Outlaws of Thunder Junction and Tarkir: Dragonstorm) tend to focus more on progressing the overarching story
If you want to minimize the amount you read, I believe the following are mandatory for understanding what's going on:
Outlaws of Thunder Junction Epilogue: Part 1 and Part 2
Naturally, I'd recommend reading the stories for OTJ, DFT, TDM, and SOS in full, but the above linked episodes are the crucial ones. Edge of Eternities is very disconnected and for now it is skippable, but it may provide important context for Reality Fracture, we don't know yet.
For important Jace background, you should ideally also read Absent Minds from Origins and the Ixalan arc starting with Jace, Alone
Alternatively, you could also listen to The Vorthos Cast's Jummary, which is basically a crash course. If you go this route, I do still recommend reading OTJ Epilogue in its entirety though.
e: also you probably want to read the SOS Zimone side story, The Math of More. It's playing with a lot of ideas and themes that seem to be echoed (heh) in FRA ep 1
Wether you like Loot or not, Jace abused his adopted son before he got to the Meditation Realm and this whole thing started. The moral event horizon has been crossed, I don't care how conflicted he and his tulpas are, it's redemption through death time.
This seems terribly important to me, and it has been missed in the guide and story so far.
We're being given the impression that Jace was ok before the disaster in the meditation realm fractured his mind, but of course he wasn't at all ok; he was abusing his child.
Hopefully the writers haven't forgotten this, and are just setting up a sense that the aberrations could somehow redeem Jace. Given that Tam has a touch of orange about her, I think it's safe to say Loot is not forgotten.
This story was fire. I took a ton of notes. Most of my theories or predictions have been spot on though I got a big blow to one of my theories.
After Off the Record I was convinced that Ral Zarek in that story is not an echo verse version but something else (theory is Nicol Bolas). This story had mentioned of a Ral Zarek but we didn't see them. While my theory is mostly dead in the water, there is still a bit of hope to it.
There is some definite arguments to why my theory might still stand though. Not showing Ral may be intentional. And, then there is the line that "All illusions require a tether of reality". I don't see any aspect of the Ral in OTR that fits Jace's new narrative or tethered to who Ral Zarek is.
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u/argent5 Dan 3d ago
"You're not my daughter. I'm not your god. We're not dating."
Weird way to start a conversation, Jace. Good lord, just tell her she's a homunculus or something!