Cosmic_Herald

Originally Posted by Chyll

Impie or Pub?

Originally Posted by Chyll

Soonish... November?

All my characters are on Shadowlands, unfortunately.

Originally Posted by Melancton

To answer your first question, that is actually a feasible reason... it simply has to be inferred. The Devs are utterly silent in the writing on that issue.

The problematic issue for me is the sudden, summary nature of it. Statesman vows to Wade that he is going to make sure he rots in prison for the death of his daughter, then walks into the Obvious Trap (tm) (for an inferred reason not explicitly given) and then is caught in the force beams. He realizes he is having his power stolen and is getting killed.

So he decides to die at the prompting of his deceased wife, flops a couple of times and is dead. If you blink, you miss it.

SuperOz has set out some excellent reasons earlier in the thread as to why this seems utterly out of character, and I added a few myself. It is also a dramatic shift in attitude on Statesman's part in the space of a few seconds, from "I'm taking you in" to "I'm going to just give up and die."

Your explanation is fine. It could work, had it been given, and it would be satisfactory overall if the Devs had laid some groundwork for it. But that did not happen. As it stands, we have to infer that a Ritual will presumably not work because Statesman does not want to return, period. Why that may be so also has to be inferred. And that is greatly problematic.

Originally Posted by BrandX

It's not a retcon.

She was 14/15 years old when CoH came out, and they aged her every year since. It's another of those wonky CoH Timeline...there's mission timeline and there's real time line.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

This is a cop-out and you know it. "They're just human" is such a broad excuse it can be applied to any and all situations. Why did Manticore stick his own arrow up his nose and pierce his own brain? He's only human. How was he supposed to know you're not supposed to pick your nose with arrows? Why did Sister Psyche walk out naked into the street yesterday? She's only human. She just forgot to put on clothes in the morning. How could statesman forget to breath and die? Oh, he's only human. It's more interesting when he has flaws.

Humans are not idiots. Humans whose entire profession revolves around meta-human affairs, whose very survival depends on understanding and dealing with other meta-humans, are DEFINITELY not idiots. If that's how Manticore operates, he should never have been allowed into the Phalanx to begin with. If that's how capable Sister Psyche is, she should never have lived to be as old as she is. Again, you don't get to be the premier hero in your field by making rookie mistakes. And, no, just being human doesn't excuse it. Professional soldiers are just human, but they don't continuously make terrible decisions over and over again. If they did, they wouldn't have made it out of boot camp. And if they somehow did, they wouldn't have lived long enough to be the best of the best in their field.

I expect the Freedom Phalanx to be competent, as is expected of their position. You can weave a story as to how they were completely unprepared in every way imaginable and how they did exactly the wrong thing in every instance where a choice was relevant, and I'm sure you can make it stick. But that doesn't make it a GOOD story.

All you've been doing so far is defending how the story makes sense, and it can make sense. But that doesn't make it a good story. You've gone on to explain how the Freedom Phalanx can make mistakes. But that doesn't make them competent. You've explained how the various members may have issues, but that doesn't make them any less horrible as people. Because everything they touch fails, every decision they make is wrong and everything they attempt just makes things worse, to the point where I'm the only one seemingly capable of doing anything at all.

Fine, put me over, I don't disagree with it, but all this does is utterly BURY the Freedom Phalanx to the point that not only are they irrelevant and ineffectual, but they're an embarrassment to the super hero community at large. Such is their sudden ineptitude, in fact, that it's almost as if an invisible hand is twisting the plot so that they always fail... Which is exactly what's happening, but I'm not supposed to notice that.

*edit*
I should point out that the core story is not bad, even if I might have slipped into sweeping generalisation and said so a couple of times. The idea behind it is solid. It's just executed in such a way that it simply murders any interest I might have had in any of the characters involved. So far, the only members of the Phalanx (and, yeah, that apparently includes BABs again) that I actually care about are the ones who haven't taken part in the story, if only because they've embarrassed themselves less than their peers.

*edit*
And another thing! There are many ways to "humanise" otherwise super-powered people, and many of them don't involve having them screw up like rookies. I mentioned this many times before, specifically in my Tender Moments thread, but it's worth bringing up here again - making characters appear more human is best achieved by giving us a glimpse at their lives when they are not engaged in whatever they have become an icon of. If we want to give super heroes depth and humanity, this is best achieved by exploring their lives outside of super hero work.

The SSAs don't do that in the slightest. It's work, work and more work, because these people apparently have no private lives that aren't part of their work. Giving them flaws doesn't make them more human. It makes them just as one-dimentional as before, only now they're unreasonably crap heroes where before they were unreasonably perfect heroes. It's like turning Samus Aran into a winmpy, insecure, ineffectual klutz in an effort to give her character, which just serves to make people hate her and the people who wrote dialogue for her, too.

Originally Posted by Dark_Respite

Desire is never a problem... I could make videos as the day is long and be perfectly happy.

The problem is time.

Allow me to show you the current project roster. Some of these have been on the roster for over THREE YEARS because they keep getting shelved thanks to stuff like issue releases and whatnot. (Oh yeah, I should add the I-22 trailer to that... brb.)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite