Thursday, July 21, 2011

Still Talkin' Bout Tasky

OK, so two more thoughts I had in relation to Taskmaster - Unthinkable. Don't look at me like that. I didn't plan it, these didn't occur to me until today.

1) Taskmaster's learned so many things that exist in what he calls his implicit memory that he's lost most of his explicit memories. Can he learn so many things that he starts losing some of the implicit memories? Similar to Mimic from Exiles (and maybe the Mimic in the Marvel Universe, too, I'm just more familiar with the Exiles one). He could only copy the abilities of so many (I think 5 or 6) mutants at a time. If he wanted to add someone else's powers (say optic blasts), he had to lose some other person's copied abilities (teleportation or bone claws, or whatever). So Taskmaster learns some new skill, playing a 1987 DG-20 electric guitar, for example, and forgets some flying kick he stole from Shang-Chi. I suppose that's what his memory palace is for, creating sensory inputs that trigger those skills, but it seems like it'd be easy for him to forget what the particular stimulus he needs for a skill was.

2) If Taskmaster had remembered everything about himself sooner, how would Nick Fury have handled that? Would Taskmaster have been as effective knowing the truth about himself, or would he have wanted to do things differently? It'd still be possible for him to pass himself off as the same old Taskmaster. He told Mercedes he's a master of 'intimate sounding, utterly superficial chit-chat', so he can probably continue to talk in a way that seems normal to whoever he interacts with, even if his mindset is completely different. I think Tasky might decide he wanted to do things differently, to make up for a past mistake, but I worry Fury would try and put him in a situation where he'd forget himself and revert to the Taskmaster we're used to seeing.

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