Drama

On the dawning of the new century I believe I have finally gained the insight I sought.

The universe does not proceed in an orderly, clockwork fashion as the theories of Newton and Kant would have us believe. This clockwork universe is only a sort of default for mundane matters, but it does not rule the truly important events of the world.

Drama does.

—Acton Lord #0

A performance intended for the stage; alternatively, a narrative work focusing on strong conflicts, or on turbulent or tragic emotions.

Within the cosmology of the LNH, Drama is a fundamental force of the Looniverse (and possibly, all worlds in the Omnilooniverse).

According to The Stomper Files, Drama is a form of energy that sustains the world's illogical natural laws. Under this theory, the Looniverse and the Real World are in a client-server relationship; the Looniverse does not naturally produce the Drama that it needs, and the Real World produces more Drama than it can use, so that it flows from one to the other via the medium of the Writers. If the flow of drama was shut off, the world would quickly die; some have theorized that this was what happened to the universe that the Legion of Occult Heroes came from.

Net.heroes and net.villains are closely linked to drama, their lives regularly affected by dramatic events, whereas non-net.ahumans often have less of a link to the force. This can be good or bad; after Exclamation!Master! retired from net.villainy, he died in an undramatic fashion, but on the other hand, Atomic Rabbit suffered from severe Drama poisoning after the balance of Drama in the Tooniverse was disrupted.

Many characters deal with this force directly. Limp-Asparagus Lad has the ability to dampen, modulate, and sense Drama, while the various versions of Exclamation!Master! can increase it. The Interim Iconoclasts harvest Drama from unfinished stories. Trenchcoater magic involves harnessing the Drama underlying the Looniverse directly, and Bacchus seems to have some kind of elemental connection to Drama as the mythological founder of tragedy. And on Earth-20, the multigenerational Acton Lord dynasty is dedicated to mastering the power of Drama.

It is known that Drama, Comedy, and wReamEntropy are all part of the delicate cosmic balance; see also Looniversal Physics.