At first glance, having a thousand faces to choose from sounds like a pretty sweet deal. You could wear a new face every day for nearly three years! I have only two faces: the nerdy one I usually wear, and the goofy one I only show to people I’m very comfortable around. No wonder people think I’m boring.
But not so fast! “Creature with a thousand faces” is easy to state, but once you start thinking about the logistics, it gets a lot more complicated. How is Latho even keeping track of all the faces it has at its disposal? A notebook? How would they be organized in there – alphabetically probably wouldn’t be very helpful. When operating in a technically more advanced society, I guess Latho could keep a gallery with pictures of its different faces on a smartphone…but finding a specific one would still be a drag.
But administrating that vast choice would only be part of the solution, anyway. The harder part begins when you have to choose the right face for some given setting. In that regard, less might really have been more – if Latho had, like, 20 faces it might not have the perfect face for any setting, but probably at least a usable one for almost any. And picking the best one would be so much quicker and easier.
With a thousand options, the chances of having the perfect face for any given setting increase dramatically – but the chances of finding it might be pretty minute.
To illustrate that, I thought I’d do a lowlight reel of some of Latho’s less successful attempts. Panel three, for example, shows what can happen if you label a face in your notebook with something generic like “Egyptian Pharaoh” without adding “according to the wild imagination of a Japanese mangaka who skipped doing any research”.
Nicola Tesla was an obvious choice, based on speculation that he was part of HPL’s inspiration for the Nyarlathotep character.
And as for the mushrooms…well, let’s just say that “fungoid monster” can be interpreted in at least two vastly divergent ways: A Lovecraft one and a Pokémon one.
A final note on how they managed to decipher something that had been defined as indecipherable: they simply were very determined. In this flashback sequence, the Queen and her twins are no longer villains, but heroes instead – so here they can get away by doing the impossible simply by being super-determined about it.
More on Thursday.