Paranatural

To keep friendly relations open leaders would have to meet if only to symbolically transfer the trust of one leader to their successor. You could say Boss Leader just wipes their memories but that kinda thing doesn't feel right from a cooperation standpoint.

I'm just kinda pointing out that a spirit forming its own army of spectrals would be incredibly problematic and in its earliest days other organizations ought to have seen through it. Unless Sandman started the first organization.

I just don't like secrets among the secret-keepers, it makes people and organizations appear too incompetent, which is a bad thing when they're the bulwarks against spectrals around the world becoming insane possessed crazy people.

It's possible that the Paranatural Activity Consortium or whatever it's called IS the only game in town, and Guerra is a splintered mini-faction that might have only happened posthumously (in which case a meeting with Boss Leader would be impossible since ghosts can't sleep) and Spender and Zarei are ostensibly members but have some side gigs.

...Really one of the flimsier aspects of the worldbuilding is that it doesn't exactly feel like spectrals are a recent phenomenon. Like it's been more or less explicitly stated that Grandpa Guerra was the one who pioneered the weaponization of a spectral's aura, but if there have been spectrals as long as there have been people, how could he be the first to crack something so fundamental?

As for your point about it making the secret-keepers seem incompetent, I kind of agree, but I think that we might be underestimating just how insidious Sandman's power over dreams can be in terms of diverting suspicion. On the other hand, Boss Leader clearly wasn't prepared for Catnine to call her out like this which seems a bit odd. Like I can't imagine Isaac is the first time she's been put in a position to kill a malevolent spirit possessing a human, and yet she didn't already know about the smell. ...I guess maybe Catnine's sensory abilities are more potent than anything Boss Leader has encountered before, since he also seems to be a top tier spirit even if he got totally punked by Lucifer.

...I'm getting a vague idea that there's actually only one Wight and it experienced a mental/physical schism and is currently at odds with each other.

Could work, but I kind of hope that's not the case.

>I guess maybe Catnine's sensory abilities are more potent than anything Boss Leader has encountered before
See, you've really nailed the problem here. There's a reason why lawyers are used to write policies because it's their job to make sure there's no problems. Lawyers don't ask questions they don't already know the answer to. And Boss Leader really should be a lawyer, she shouldn't walk into a situation and not own it completely. And it makes it altogether worse now that we know she's eons old and walks into situations half-cocked.

The powerful spirits of this world like Lucifer, Forge, Catnine, and Boss Leader should be operating on an entirely different level of knowledge in the story, they should practically be omniscient because their actions (until the revelation of Boss Leader being one) have been decisive and swift - they don't fuck around or hesitate. And because they're all-knowing you have two choices: the plot revolves around them OR the plot revolves around the spectrals. And we really really cannot let the plot revolve around them because their goals will be eldritch in nature. The plot has to revolve around the spectrals and their struggle to maintain the peace and in order to have that struggle matter, Boss Leader has to be a fucking mortal.

Like, this whole time without explanation we have to wonder why the spirits even give a shit. And we can simply excuse their cooperation with humans simply because they are capable of feeling love and sympathy unlike their wild violent kin in the majority and their servitude is a product of that ability to care. The (good) spirits really should have no goal other than the wish to see humans flourish and in order to divorce themselves from any sense of self-interest besides the humans they cannot themselves be involved in some fucking conspiracy of their own.

I'm not sure I'm following your points exactly.

I think being a Wight, Boss Leader might stand head and shoulders the other primordial spirits to the point where you can't really measure her by their standards, also I'd even object to Lucifer being said to be of a similar ilk to Forge and Catnine, since he seems far more capable of multiple levels of subterfuge while those two got caught completely flatfooted by someone changing the game.

And if anything we've been shown throughout the comic that Boss Leader isn't exactly omniwhatever even within her domain, because she either can't or won't just make Spender and Zarei trust her (or take what they know directly out of their heads) she can't even completely erase Zarei's memory. So I don't know, I feel like the combination of her not being the main character and having a very limited ability to effect change in Mayview makes her non-human status acceptable.

And I agree that we DO have to wonder why the spirits, or this spirit in particular, actually gives a shit and I'm really interested in finding out and if it ties to the overwhelming emotion that turned her into a Wight in the first place. Though in that sense, not a lot has changed? Since even in the cover story it kind of seemed like the Sandman was the one keeping things going and it chose Boss Leaders as representatives more than anything else.

So Boss Leader was protecting her own ass instead of her organization's, and Isaac stuck his neck out for King Catnine despite having very little reason to do so, though that doesn't seem like it inspired Catnine to suck less, considering he tried to kill Spender just a couple chapters ago.

Imagine recommending this to someone
>oh dude you should read paranatural, it's so good!
>what is it? oh well uh it's this comic and then it's this comic with no backgrounds and then it's this comic with noticeably worse art and then it's a txt file with some drawings in them

Kind of a dick move from Boss Leader to be fair.

It's quite likely that other Wights have done what Boss Leader/Sandman has done. We know that at least one entity that is presumably a Wight is "a broken god" and its fragments can communicate just like normal people.

The problem is that it doesn't seem like most Wights are like Sandman where they're willing to play nice for the sake of others. In general, they just seem to be abominations. Sandman could have justified forming the Consortium simply due to the fact that it's the only one of its kind that spectrals have found that isn't intrinsically hostile to everything around and as a Wight, they have no means of destroying it either.

I don't think Boss Leader's true nature is known to any but those she trusts extensively, above and beyond the rest. And with her power over dreams, she can always remove the memories of people who find out too much. I think her big reason for being so secretive is because knowledge of Wights in general seems to be dangerous or lead to people recklessly pursuing them and getting fucked.

>and Isaac stuck his neck out for King Catnine despite having very little reason to do so,
Isaac sticking by Catnine has been a thing for a while now, despite not really having any reason to do so. It's similar to how Max didn't want Boss Leader to destroy Scrapdragon despite it being a Grudge and FAR more dangerous to his health and sanity than a normal spirit.

Yeah, Boss Leader isn't omniscient. She's about as good at playing the game as Lucifer (probably even better since outside of this conversation, I don't think there's a single person in the Consortium who is aware that she's not a person, let alone that she's a Wight), but even she can get taken off-guard or have her plans disrupted by unexpected interference from the likes of Spender and Zarei. And for all her power, totally erasing memories doesn't seem to be a thing she can do, at least not safely.

She was also dismissive of the monster problem in Mayview and of the organization that hunts them, despite the fact that we know that at least two of them, the Witch and Davy, are in extremely high positions of power within the town and that there's a goddamn werewolf running around. So either she's playing a long-con or she is just genuinely so self-assured in the Consortium's (and her own) power that she plainly refuses to see the issues beyond spirits that are cropping up.

>And I agree that we DO have to wonder why the spirits, or this spirit in particular, actually gives a shit and I'm really interested in finding out and if it ties to the overwhelming emotion that turned her into a Wight in the first place. Though in that sense, not a lot has changed? Since even in the cover story it kind of seemed like the Sandman was the one keeping things going and it chose Boss Leaders as representatives more than anything else.
The fact that Sandman still communicates in Wight-wail instead of like a person kind of implies that there's some degree of divide between it and its Boss Leader avatars.