Captain_Photon

Man, I don't know. I just... this multichromatic Lantern Corps thing, I'm just not on board with it. And what is MODOK doing there? He doesn't even belong to the same comics company.*

*sarcasm

I'd like to see some of the newer missions revised so that there's an option for my characters to be other than dumb as rocks, please.

CAUTION: Spoilers for one of the early Praetorian arcs, unlikely though it is that anyone reading the Suggestions board is going to be unfamiliar with those.


Here is an example: The mission where Cleopatra sends you into the Underground to deal with... something, I forget what the excuse is, and you find yourself in a giant subway-station-type room. Which is utterly and completely empty except for a mysterious glowy crate at the far end.

Now, in this example, I already suspect that something hinky is going on with this contact, and the theme of the character I'm playing is that she's a former police detective who's been grabbed by Powers Division because it's come to the attention of the bureaucracy that she has superpowers. She has "Detective" in her name. She is not exactly the Rhino.

At moments like this, I would like for there to be some way for the not utterly stupid character to recognize that this is obviously the hell a trap, GTFO without springing it, and report to Cleopatra's office on her own initiative to Sort Some Stuff Out. Cue the cutscene and Moral Choice as before. Fewer XP traded for less of a sense that I've just been compelled to be an imbecile.

Task Forces do that. When the leader calls in the last mission, the TF automatically disbands. Since the SSAs accomplish their level-locking trick by using the TF mechanism, well, that's what you get.

When Iron Man came out, I was on hand at my local (well, as local as these things get in the wooded neverland where I live, anyway) first-run theater for the Thursday-midnight show, 'cause I'd been waiting for an Iron Man movie since about 1980 at that point and it seemed like the decent thing to do.

What I hadn't been counting on was that the theater would make an occasion of it. They had a Local Television Personality emceeing a little floor show for about 15 minutes before the film started, and part of the proceeding was a little trivia contest giveaway featuring some tie-in toys donated by the local mall's K-B (remember them?). I sort of sat over in the corner observing, feeling a bit like a sociologist watching some bush tribe that's never seen television before.

The thing I remember most clearly about it, besides the fact that it was all kind of stilted and twee in the way that "gin up some enthusiasm in the stadium" exercises always are, was that one of the toy-giveaway trivia questions was "What is Russian for 'Iron Man'?" Now, as it happens, my "local" theater is also the nearest first-run theater to the University of Maine campus, so it gets a fairly international crowd for a movie theater in the middle of nowhere, and there was a Russian kid in the audience. So he blurted out the Russian for "Iron Man"...

... and the emcee, reading from a card and clearly having no familiarity with the material at all, told him he was wrong.

"I'm Russian," he quite reasonably objected. "I think I know what a simple phrase like that is in my own language."

But no, the emcee insisted, that was not right. According to his card, the Russian for "Iron Man" was supposed to be...

... have you guessed it yet?

... "Crimson Dynamo".

I have at no other time felt such a powerful cross-current of emotions - equal and opposite riptides of the terrible urge:

1) to be That Guy who explains that the Crimson Dynamo is another character, and while he might arguably have been intended as the Soviet answer to Iron Man, he sure as hell wasn't supposed to be Iron Man, and anyway "Crimson Dynamo" isn't even a Russian phrase so how in the hell is it supposed to be Russian "for" anything; and

2) to just go home and forget the whole thing because it was just too embarrassing to even sit there and witness this sideshow.

Fortunately, I stuck it out for another five minutes or so, the theater staff eventually gave up trying to be entertaining and just showed the frickin' movie, and all was forgiven, but...

That's the kind of thing that happens when regular people try to get down with the comics 'hood. It's the superhero fandom equivalent of the Segway scene from the "White & Nerdy" video. It's partly mortifying and partly just sad.