Why does the Clear exist when the Red revolves around all animal life? SuperFan95 (talk) 19:25, August 18, 2020 (UTC)
- From a meta perspective, probably because Mark Millar saw fit to include a Parliament of Waves in his 1995 Swamp Thing storyline and his aesthetics did not really allow for it to explicitly connect to the Red (which was probably not even named at the time) nor to the Parliament of Limbs, which only arose as a defined concept much later, in 2012.
How that works from an in-universe perspective has not been established yet, far as I know (I may be wrong), but could be a good thing to establish at some point in some story. I can see several possibilities.
- The Red can indeed be a superset of The Clear, only perceived differently by sea creatures. That converges nicely to the loose DC theology based on The Presence, which is vaguely henotheistic, pantheistic and/or panentheistic depending on the specific needs of the story. That includes the possibility that The Red is exactly the same as The Clear, but presents itself in different forms according to the environment. That could perhaps also mean that the Parliaments of Limbs and Waves are ultimately one and the same, even if they look and act entirely different - different aspects shaped to the benefit of their listeners according to the situation. We have seen Animal Man interact with dolphins back in Animal Man Vol 1 15, which strongly implied that the then-unnamed Red reached those dolphins. Yet when Porm talks with Aquaman she does not seem to necessarily even know or remember that there are terrestrian animals that would not be connected to the Clear. Perhaps attunement to and expression of either The Red or The Clear are skills that turn out to be rare even among the creatures that they protect.
- An alternative is that The Red and The Clear are entirely different and have separate domains. There may or may not be some sort of boundary and even dominance struggle involving, for instance, amphibians and cetaceans, and perhaps even migration of members between the Parliaments of Waves and Limbs. The Red can simply have a bit of a chauvinistic streak and present itself as representative of "all animal life (that really matters)" out of simple lack of humility or even ability to remind people of the existance of the Clear. Or it may assume, correctly or otherwise, that the people it speaks to may be too disturbed for anyone's good if you dump the existence of the Clear into their heads all of a sudden.
- Or the Red and the Clear may coexist in sea life and not necessarily even notice each other. Individual entities may be better or exclusively aware of and attuned to both, either or none on a case-by-case basis. It is not like there is any obvious reason for them to be aware of each other.
LuisDantas (talk) 21:22, August 18, 2020 (UTC)