Fista

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

As to the general comment about sexualizing women in comic books, are women oversexualized? Of course they are. Just like they are in movies, television commercials, and also most of the advertisements in women's magazines whose primary audience is overwhelmingly women. In my opinion, women are exposed to far more oversexualized depictions of women than men are, most of it promoted by or created by other women, and in a far more deleterious fashion. Comic books are a pale reflection of that issue. Comic books don't create the bulk of body image problems for young girls. Comic books aren't the source of most eating disorders in women. Comic books aren't teaching girls what is acceptable - and I don't even think they are teaching boys that either. Comic books are escapist fantasy: the real problem is the exact same fiction presented as reality in mainstream media. We know comic books are fake. But those same female depictions could have been traced right out of the pages of Glamour magazine, except people think that's actually reality.

Originally Posted by Zemblanity

There are countless examples of decisions being made in Paragon City, both local and federal, strictly to benefit criminal organizations and profiteers instead of serving the best interests of its people. Unlike in Praetoria, however, no one has a gun to our leaders' heads, it's just plain old corruption at its best. Authority abuse to prevent impending destruction? Regrettable, but I can accept it to a point. Authority abuse for profit? Much less acceptable.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

The devs have said that he's alive and in our hands.

Originally Posted by Mr_Grey

That's the myth told after the people's minds were addled by Enriche.

The Destroyers, however, remember being there to help Marauder when "he alone, stood by Cole."

And goodness knows how many meta humans were killed by "friendly fire" (read: secret execution) before, during and after the war, all rolled into the combat in order to secure Emperor Cole's vision of a perfect world or to satisfy the egos of the people he brought into his circles of power.

The truth of the Hamidon Wars cannot be trusted because it's all a veil of history rather than the fact of it. Finally, it all boils down to one man's decision to die slowly and afraid in the gilded cage he built for himself and the people around him rather than stand and fight.

Originally Posted by JohnP_NA

Ran it 5-6 times last night on Victory. We only failed once, the final time when we were going for The Really Hard Way and the timer ran out on Tyrant. We got the Master badge from the other runs and slotted up our Hybrids.

We were all +3.

Originally Posted by Tenzhi

To hear some tell it, DC stories are about the motivations of gods and aliens, which is why people (and apparently some writers) can't relate to (or create good stories with) their characters. And that's the context I'm going along with.



I don't really see the point, but if I had to go into it briefly, there is a particular category of manga/anime that I consider a guilty pleasure called "slice of life". Many of the sorts of mundane day to day life problems that go on in those stories are exactly the sort of thing that I tend to dislike elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Tenzhi

You're still shootin' wide. Boring, or 'mundane' if you prefer, human motivations are generally not my cup of tea (there is at least one area of exception, but for the purposes of this discussion such is moot), but good stories centred on them are certainly possible in any medium with good writing. I wasn't really saying anything about them one way or the other. What I was saying, essentially, is that good writers don't necessarily need those to be a focus, nor do they need to inject those motivations where they don't necessarily belong.

The problem I often see with the handling of DC characters, is that writers overcompensate and become focused on these petty concerns and it either serves to make the stories dull, or provides such an overwhelming dull contrast to the superheroic bits that the fantastic becomes the absurd.

Originally Posted by White Hot Flash

Lucas and his team invented techniques for filming, sound, and visuals that had never been done. You'd have to watch movies from Pre-Star Wars to understand how different the entire movie experience was. The mind-blowing was not simply from a lightsaber.

Star Wars was probably the most uniquely visceral movie of its time.


The Avengers ratchets up the wow factor when you consider that there really hasn't been an ensemble movie that lived up to the hype and gave each of the main players enough screen time. The X-Men movies were mostly about Wolverine, Jean Grey, and Professor X, while the rest of the team feasted on the scraps. It may not be the quantum leap in technology or visuals that Star Wars was, but there's still plenty of iconic moments and visuals to make it stand out from every superhero movie that came before, for sure, including the previous Marvel Avengers solo movies.

Originally Posted by Tenzhi

Yes, those sorts of boring human motivations. Not that I ever said a good story *couldn't* be made of them, nor did I malign writers who were constrained to such areas.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

That was also a key factor - although it was also one of the big problems Lucas had in getting it made - it seemed like it was such a totally left field idea for a movie at the point in time.



Again, a lot of that is down to the unique visuals - the Avengers doesn't give us anything visually new - it just gives us familar visuals in an awesome way - we've seen superheroes doing superheroic things in modern day environments plenty of times before.
For example, the Avengers is not actually that different from Daredevil - it's just better than it in every possible way.

Originally Posted by Tenzhi

So, you're saying that DC characters are harder to write for for writers who have trouble grasping characters that lack boring human motivations some or all of the time?