Okay, so I had this long-ass comment sitting around since Episode 13 aired, but there wasn't really an appropriate place for me to put it since discussion was always limited to the episode posts for as long as Season 16 was still going on. But now that we're done, heck, especially since we're done, I think this is a good time to make a point about one of this season's biggest points of controversy in comparison to a source of inspiration that... a lot of people really liked. Hold onto your butts though, 'cause this post's a helluva long one.

With this season over it's confirmed that the Cosmic Powers aren't Gods anymore, so this should mean that they're totally forgiven in terms of the way they're executed, right? A fair amount of the fanbase seems to think so; just because they're no longer Gods in name, that excuses everything we've seen in the season up to this point because hey, we're used to AI, right? Some fans are easygoing like that. And while I'd love to say the same thing, believe me, I still don't want to hate Season 16 for no good reason, I can't agree with that mentality. Just because an attempt was made to ground the series back to its roots doesn't mean it necessarily accomplished everything it set out to do. Nicolosi seasons have a lot of “good in concept, botched execution” elements going for them, and this is no different. In theory this twist would work great. But in execution it's super-flawed. And with everything now pretty much set in stone as far as the Cosmic Powers' presentation goes, I'd like to delve into why that is.

But rather than talk about the Cosmic Powers exclusively, I'm gonna make a bit of a comparison post with the obvious referential material this season was going for. The other “gods that aren't actually gods but more sciency alien things” in modern sci-fi: The Norse Gods in Thor, specifically the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They share the exact same background of being regarded as deities by lesser cultures but actually having their roots grounded in science over magic, and that idea is great on paper for both franchises, but the way they go about them in RvB isn't the same. And while I wouldn't necessarily want them to just outright copy Marvel, I do think these differences are nearly just as much of a detriment to RvB's scope as if they just didn't bother with the AI twist at all. I'll also keep Marvel spoilers to a minimum, I don't think I delve too deep into MCU plot in this discussion so no worries there.

Marvel's Gods are a subversion that succeed in grounding out an otherworldly concept because unlike the Cosmic Powers in RvB, right off the gate the Marvel gods are exceptionally more limited. While the Cosmic Powers' origins are still inherently linked to an immortal otherworldly power (for the time being, until Chrovos is given more grounded origins just as the others were), the Norse Gods were simply a more advanced culture from a different dimension that are still very much mortal; more mortal than you might think. While they are more powerful beings than your average mortals they aren't invincible, and compared to other enhanced beings like, say, the Hulk or one of Iron Man's suits or robots or your run-of-the-mill alien, they're still on par with them in terms of combat and skill, and are no strangers to losing a fight. You could argue the Cosmic Powers being so overpowered has to do with the Reds and Blues still being a batch of dopey, dysfunctional losers, but even the Freelancers and every antagonist they've ever faced can't even compare to the sheer strength the Cosmic Powers have. They're just as overpowered as if the Reds and Blues fought God so they might as well still be fighting God. The AI twist does nothing but add a worthless caveat to their otherwise still very much godly presence. For all intents and purposes, they're basically invincible. No one can touch them, and we don't know of any way for our protagonists to reach that plateau besides the obvious "well maybe they can be God too". And introducing characters like that presents a huge disconnect that's really hard to shake off for future stories.

Which leads me into my next point... powers and technology. While the Cosmic Powers, being artificial intelligence programs, have all of their abilities inherently linked to their person, Marvel's Norse Gods keep most of their otherworldly abilities linked specifically with their weapons and locales. Sure some of their powers just come naturally, like Thor's lightning or Loki's shapeshifting (which even then seems to be limited to just turning into other humans, he can't alter his size or shape), but most of them have some kind of setback to keep them from being immediately broken, and it's always the really broken ones. Summoning portals that take you anywhere, bringing back the dead, seeing visions of the future, destroying an entire realm, time travel (not necessarily a Norse God thing but a Marvel thing nonetheless), changing the atomic properties of any given piece of matter (same thing), killing anyone in an instant (ditto), even something as mundane as flying, these are feats that require specific artifacts or that require you to be in a specific location, just to activate them. They're not abilities that anyone can do at anytime, villains included, and thus it keeps the characters from being either permanently overpowered or outclassed; Hela and Odin in particular are beings that yes, while most of their power comes from within, only increases to stupid proportions when they're specifically in their homeworld; again, some kind of consistent and reasonable limitation.

The alien culture in Chorus had the same idea; yes, it had towers that offered a vast supply of weapons and could even wipe all life on a global scale, but they were just that. Towers. Which were built with very specific purposes in mind rather than just being “towers that can do anything they want”. And with stipulations set in place to keep them from being broken. They weren't living beings that could perform these tasks at will, they were places you needed to travel to and beyond that, were explicitly locked behind a specific set of keys just to even use them. That was fine because it had enough limitations to keep anyone involved from being too overpowered; and because anyone, even unsuspecting mortals, could potentially unlock these towers under the right circumstances, everyone is on an even playing field. Even the AI that were designed to guard these towers weren't overpowered beasts that could do any of these things themselves, they were just neutral observers that at their most involved, merely provided illusions that tested peoples' willpower so they could do all that stuff instead. The whole scenario was still grounded because it had a set of rules designed from the get-go to keep things grounded.

The Cosmic Forces have no such limitations; sure they can't alter the minds of others (however it still seems like Chrovos can, as he influenced Loco into building a time machine from wherever he's trapped in), but they can perform literally any other feat at the snap of a finger. They can create portals to anywhere, including other time periods, at anytime, they can smite people and destroy places on a whim provided other Deus Ex Machinas aren't interfering, they can summon wacky mythical creatures, they can turn into anything and they can grow to any size, they can do the same to others, and they can summon a vast array of rare alien artifacts seemingly out of thin air. And a lot of this simply isn't justified enough to be believable. Their “culture”, so to speak, doesn't exist the way the Norse Gods do because they're an army of robots created by another robot (?), so the lengths of their technology is never explored and never explained. We don't know where the swords came from so the first assumption is that they just made them out of nothing. We don't know how they grew Tucker to be the size of Atlas; Atlas's form is justified through holograms but how it works when changing the appearance of non-Gods is unknown since they don't explain the process. And how the fuck does time travel work? We still don't know; it's inconsistent as fuck, with paradoxes only working when the plot demands it, and when they tried to explain its rules all we got out of it was a PENIS JOKE, never mind how we're still in the dark as to how time travel is even possible.

Compare that to how other weapons and forms of transportation worked in Marvel, where they always tap into natural forces from the galaxy like stars and wormholes, and use those to power these aforementioned devices; everything is explained and again, has both limits and grounded origins rather than just “magic” (a word the Cosmic Forces use even after they're revealed to not be Gods). The sole exceptions are the magical MacGuffin Infinity Stones but again, at least those are still unique artifacts that anyone can use (and thusly, anyone can be stripped of) so long as they find them first. There's no one almighty guy that can just do whatever just because that's the way he's always been. Power like that is earned, and more often than not power like that isn't forever.

These Cosmic Forces seem like they're just plain capable of doing anything unless the plot demands they can't. Not enough effort was put into giving these Gods reasonable limits to their potential, nor was enough effort made into explaining how their current abilities work, and when they don't do either of those things, what's keeping them from actually being Gods besides just a formality? When you have people like that in RvB lore, everyone else who's involved in anything else both past and future can't measure up to these guys, they're literal genies that have the free will to end any story in an instant if they wanted to. Nobody in Marvel is that overpowered by default, and for good reason; because if they were, their movies would be two minutes long instead of two hours long.

I get what they were trying to go for here and I was hoping for this twist the instant Episode 2 aired, when Donut mentioned Gods and Kalirama showed up and wrecked shit on a completely new scale. But by the time they made the twist a reality, they shattered the laws of physics so drastically and so effortlessly up to that point that the twist felt ineffective and inconsequential. Because it's not what they are that's the problem, it's what they're capable of, and what they're capable of is still basically stuff God can do. If even. They tried grounding ideas that were already so far off the ground you could only see it with a telescope, and the worst part of it all is that nearly all of these overpowered abilities only exist to tell jokes, and not to move the story forward. There was no point in making Tucker the size of an island, there was no point in making them destroy anything they touch, there was no point in giving Grif (and co.) an energy sword, there was no point in greenscreening a giant live-action cyclops from another dimension or some shit, and time travel is still such a convoluted concept due to the lack of care put into its structure and rules that even that experience wasn't worth the trouble. It all exists to be silly or to make the stakes stupidly high for overly dramatic effect, and grounding that to the levels previous RvB seasons established takes finesse and detail that they clearly weren't prepared to execute because they were more focused on what could have been funny/cool in that particular moment over whether or not it made sense in the long-run. I'd go on but that goes beyond the “Gods” schtick and more into the problems the actual narrative has, which is a whole other can of worms.

TL;DR, Marvel's Gods (which Season 16 draws a lot of inspiration from), limits their abilities to be more situational (either through artifacts and locations rather than just being natural powers they can use at will) so that they're not constantly overpowered, and justifies how all of their abilities work and where their origins lie. The Shisno Paradox does the opposite, so even with its “they're actually AI” twist set in place, nothing about them in principle has changed. They're still overpowered, far above the leagues of any and all characters we've seen up to and likely beyond this point, and they can still do almost anything at will just like an actual god can, so the change in origin is meaningless. Combined with most of these problems only existing because of a need to tell jokes and not because they wanted to tell a story, the whole thing comes off as careless and disjointed.