Headscratchers / The Umbrella Academy

• If Alison didn't lose her powers, as implied by her kiss with Luther, why didn't she ever use them even once to stop the apocalypse suite? This is especially irritating since we never hear of any limit to her power. Is there any reason she couldn't have just said "I heard a rumor that Vanya feels very sorry for everything, and she's going to turn herself and the rest of the orchestra in to the proper authorities" and avoided the whole second half of the story?
  • And if she did lose her powers, how? And why does she never tell anyone? (Including the audience.)
  • Frankly, this brings up the question of what her power's limits are. She can break things, control people's actions and create beings out of nothingness with her power. But "The Past Ain't Through With You" implies that the things she says come true even when she isn't intentionally using her power, or saying "I heard..." So does *everything* she says come true? What happens if she says "I'm dying for a cup of coffee"? Why does she bother fighting crime when she could say "the world is a happy place with no major problems of any kind"?
    • For that matter, even if you assume there are limitations, like say, she has to have a specific scenario in mind (hence something abstract like "there are no problems in the world" doesn't work, and she can't change things she isn't aware of like stopping Vanya) why not at least rumor Spaceboy back into his human body at some point? One would wonder if maybe she can't outright lie, that is, can't use her power to change something she already knows for a fact, except that the first example of how her power works is her doing just that, even if "...But the Past Ain't Through With You" might not be strictly canon. Generally she does seem to use her power to make things happen rather than to change things after the fact, so it's possible that that is a limitation in some fashion. Not that detailed world building is really what one reads Umbrella Academy for.
    • Her powers only work if she prefaces a statement with, "I heard a rumor that..."
    • Actually it apparently can happen if she either tells it enough times or if it gets in her head enough I suppose as demonstrated by how she accidently made a clone of herself that went to the library to study every night since that was her excuse for sneaking out to she her boyfriend. I suppose it isn't too hard to believe "I heard a Rumor...." is just a trigger phrase/concentration mechanism that her "father" trained into her, so that she wasn't altering all reality whenever she has a thought.
    • Alternatively, who's to say the Rumor didn't create some or all of the Academy's previous adventures to rewrite history and make them famous?
  • The problem is that it wasn't until the last issue of The Apocalypse Suite that everyone understood that Vanya was, as Number Five put it, "the end of the world." Also, she does try to use her powers but Vanya proves to be very clever and severs her vocal chords before she can do anything to stop the Suite.
  • This troper would like very much to forget all of the apparent ship teasing centered around Rumor and Spaceboy. On something of a more related note; this troper wonders if writing statements that started with her power-phrase would have worked. Though now we'll never know for sure, thanks Temps Aeternalis giving Rumor her voice back...
  • I think that The Rumor's powers limits are somewhat ambiguous. When she lied about going to the library, there was ANOTHER Rumor that appeared at the library, and was killed, so she could manipulate reality and create out of nothing another of her. However, in the first issue, when she was little, she lied about giving for free some food and paintings, and Spaceboy told her that they must recover those paintings after the fight against the Eiffel Tower, so the lie didn't change completely reality, and so the paintings are not being given, but being stolen. Maybe her powers got stronger while she grows up?
  • Why would you say she DIDN'T warp reality when she claimed the museum was giving away their paintings? Whether it was an outright lie and people were just stealing them, or if she changed reality by saying it; the Academy would STILL need to recover the paintings to 'fix' the problem. I would also suggest that perhaps there needs to be some ounce of truth for the 'rumor' to become true. Both presidents she killed WERE assassinated, the scaffolding really COULD have been made shoddily but perhaps not as weak as she claimed until that moment, and Spaceboy probably has wanted to kiss her for that long; though at that time we weren't sure if her powers were working or not. This could explain why she added the offhanded mention of crepes being given out by the museum, because THAT is believable, while them giving away their paintings is not, but that sliver of genuinely possible truth was similar enough to balance out the lie. I also like the idea that she needs to truly believe it, and her phrase is just a mental trigger. Thus, frankly, she's seen too much and gotten far too cynical to truly believe the world COULD be a better place. Furthermore, that tendency has probably been supplanted in her subconscious since she was very little, considering what a bastard father Hargreeves is.
• Why is there a picture of Number Five on the milk carton at the end? Is Luther drinking twenty year old milk?
  • It may be that the Temps Aeternalis (the gas-masked guys who attack Number 5 at the diner) put out that photo to search for him. More is learned about them in the second storyline, Dallas.
  • Rule of Funny was my guess.
• Why couldn't Seance take off his own shoes when captured by Hazel and Cha Cha? Only his torso and wrists are bound. His legs are free, he doesn't seem to be paralyzed, and he certainly knows how to remove shoes with feet, right?
• Why didn't Kraken just destroy Vanya's bow when he had the chance? Ironic, because the other brother does literally Just Shoot Her.
  • I think he was hoping that a good old fashioned "I know you're still in there" speech would bring her down from her power trip. Keep in mind, Kraken is probably the only sibling who actually loves her.
• Why didn't Vanya get arrested to put in the nuthouse like the other musicians?
  • A conversation in Dallas implies that the police commissioner protects the Hargreeve family, which may also include pulling strings so Vanya is under the Umbrella Academy's care rather than in a prison.
• For that matter, why did the other musicians want to destroy the world?
  • Just because? Maybe they all had miserable lives and wanted to see the world destroyed like the Delilah organization from Count Cain?
  • The Conductor even states that they're a collective of insane people. They probably don't even really play instruments.
  • They probably do, it seemed like The Conductor spent quite a bit of time to find psychos who DID play instruments. He was VERY concerned with his piece being art, and he was willing to kill if it didn't sound perfect. Considering the nature of art, I think its safe to assume their Apocalypse Suite wouldn't work unless the music was genuine. Just because they're insane doesn't mean they're incompetent or unartistic.
• If Hargreeves is so smart, why did he think it was a good idea to not name, but rank seven kids with super powers by their usefulness?
  • Keep in mind he is 1. An alien 2. A straight logic thinker 3. An utter bastard. He wasn't ranking seven children, he was ranking seven objects to be used to further his own goals.
  • Are we completely certain he's ranking them? After all, in Apocalypse Suite the babies are numbered and he couldn't possibly know Rumor's power would be useful before she could use her vocal cords.
  • Remember this apparent "Smart guy" thought the best way to deal with the apocalyptically powerful Vanya, was to simply ignore and suppress her, rather than try and teach her to control her powers. along with basically messing up the rest almost as badly, although being an alien he may have a case of Blue-and-Orange Morality when dealing with humans.
• Okay, so, if The Rumor kills JFK by saying that "The back of your head is about to explode", isn't someone going to notice there's no entry wound?
  • What would it matter? Where the bullet came from in real life is still in debate.
• Is it just me, or is the entirety of Dallas pretty much set to "Static Age" by The Misfits? I guess technically that's Wild Mass Guessing, but still.
  • I'm pretty sure Gerard Way is a Misfits fan, so you might be right about that one.
• For someone who organized the Umbrella Academy to save the world, it's a little unusual that Reginald was himself indirectly responsible for every doomsday scenario to date. His mistreatment of Vanya and suppression of her powers was what caused her to become the White Violin and play the Apocalypse Suite, in Dallas the earth was destroyed by nuclear missiles he had coerced JFK into giving him, and even the Hotel Oblivion event was caused by his decision to put every supervillain, space parasite, and Doctor Manhattan the Academy ever defeated together in one place. Even in the Netflix series, if he hadn't killed himself, his journal never would have fallen into the wrong hands.
• Why didn't Reginald cull Vanya? Her powers couldn't have been useful to him sealed, and if she'd gone off the medication earlier, or Alison had told her the truth, she could've endangered his whole project. Was it just the sunk cost fallacy?
  • He was too proud to take the easy way out. Acknowledging he couldn't control her would've meant acknowledging he had failed. That he was scared, to any degree, of a little girl.

• Are Kraken's powers ever mentioned In-universe?

I know his breath-holding power from Wikipedia.

---