Oedipus_Tex
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Posts
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Power Boost lasts for the duration of a power cast. On a toggle power this is about as long as Power Boost itself lasts (15 seconds) because it is constantly recasting itself. The only defense powers that benefit long term would be stuff like Force Field shields, Farsight, and Empathy's Fortitude power.
Power Boost also doesn't work on any power with enhance-able Resistance. (Force Field's shields do have resistance, but it's not enhance-able).
It's not all bad though. Firing your first shot into a crowd while Power Boosted is basically the equivalent of briefly armoring up before breaking an alpha, assuming you have defense powers to boost. And any -ToHit you do is increased for the duration of that effect. -
The numbers for any powerset are available in the game at any time by just typing in the name of each power in [brackets]. Putting the AT in front [like.this] lets you look at it on different ATs. This is why we know the presumptive numbers on powersets that haven't even been officially announced yet. :P
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I've done much worse.
I've responded to team calls on Virtue while I'm playing on Freedom. In one case holding up a group for 10 minutes while we tried to figure out why we couldn't see each other despite being in the same zone.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Local_Man
I agree about Dimension Shift . . . Every time I have tried an Intangibility power, I have hated it.
I always thought that Propel should be a narrow cone. Think about it logically. If a big object appears near the caster and then travels to hit a foe at a particular spot, wouldn't it hit other foes in its path along the way? And then that would justify its long cast time.
My only sort-of objection to making it a cone is if they also changed the IO sets it takes. From a power gaming perspective, single target attacks IO better than AoE ones, in general, because the ST can be used for either high ranged defense or high recharge, and AoE powers are mainly useful for only recharge. A few powers have gotten around this rule though--mainly Jolting Chain and Lightning Storm.
If they did make it an AoE though and left it taking single target, that means you could slot it with hold and a superior damage proc normally excluded from AoEs (the ranged AoE purple proc is a chance for knockback instead of damage). -
Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I would objectively assume the devs had gone insane. There are only so many ways to make something "look female" and most of them are not applicable to the Granite armor appearance. It basically leaves putting breasts on a rubble pile. Asking why Granite Armor wasn't made to look female is like asking why there are no female Fungoids.
I'm willing to bet that just giving it the female Walk would do it without changing the model.
It might even look less ridiculous than Eagle's Claw does. Anyway I bet with the right animation tooling some people would even start objecting to the huge size of the breasts and other aspects of the existing model, that currently don't cross their minds.
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Quote:
Or, something closer to home - do you remember how many times people have asked for a female version of Granite Armour? I'm sorry, let me say that again. Do you remember how many people have asked for a female version of AN AMORPHOUS PILE OF ROCK? Because I recall at least half a dozen instances of this. I never quite got what people's vision of a female version of igneous rock is, but I'm still blown away that such a notion even exists. It's a a walking collection of rock. It has no gender to begin with.
This raises a question for me. What would the reaction be if instead of making a 'female' version of Granite Armor, the male-ish version basically looked female to begin with, for everyone?
Anyway, in terms of size, I do mess with the height and bulk sliders quite a bit. One thing I also tend to do is to resize specific body parts to call emphasis too or away from various areas. The Joan of Arkansas character in my sig below actually has a maxed out chest, while the Attila the Honey character is set to around average. The reason I adjusted Joan upward was to give her a more recognizably female profile, since the armor is so obscuring, the end effect looking more like the armor is "oversized" rather than that she is bulging at the chest. The Attila character already has this attribute just in her style of dress, and she is intentionally dressed in a much more revealing manner. Neither character is especially bulky or close to the "high strength" female you are proposing, but individual parts are modified.
I also tend to play with boot sizes for emphasis on characters I want to look slightly silly. The enormous oversized boots make an already bulky character look bulkier, and a scrawny or short character look more cartoonish. I like using the PPD boots and that new set of boots that recently showed up for this. I often wish we had more oversized hands, collars, helmets, and so on.
The one female character I kind of threw in the towel on due to lack of parts that satisfied my original concept was one not in my sig called "Lotus Operandi." I envisioned her as an African American/black gumshoe with green hair who investigates crime by interviewing plants, who it turns out have all kinds of different personalities. I wanted to do a traditional 1930s or 40s trenchcoated (male) detective look over a somewhat more feminine base layer. I haven't been satisfied with the results mostly because the trench coat that is available to females is hard to work with for this purpose, and because the brown coat I envisioned next to her brown skin blended together too much. I ended up with a more traditional sort of super hero costume for her for now. The baron coat might work well for her if females ever get it, because its bulk and ability to wrap would probably create good contrast with the figure underneath. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good.
I cite for my proof Jersey Shore.
It is my distinct hope that one day we will have "so bad it is good" MMOs like we do movies. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Judging from the trailer, this could be very much what I had in mind. Judging from the trailer, that's also exactly the kind of movie that terrifies me, because I just don't trust screenwriters to not go for the easy cheap-shots. But I'll take your word for it and see about tracking this thing down. Seems like a solid work.
Videodrome (1983) does NOT have a strong female lead, at least not exactly. The main female character actually violates some of the stated rules. However it covers a lot of the same themes we've been talking about. If you watch it, its helpful to try to view it as a period piece set very distinctly in its own timeframe.
A less sci-fi movie you may want to look for is also Network (1976). I was really bored with this one for the first thirty minutes or so but stuck with it. I'm glad I did.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) is one of my favorite movies ever. The lead is not technically female, it is not an "action" picture, but it is to some extent a fantasy, even if a fairly gritty one. It's largely ignored by the mainstream but beloved by the "substream" if such a stream can be said to exist.
In reference back to the costume editor, if the developers ever go back through classic 80s movies for examples to include in the costume editor, some of the effects from this movie would be perfect. [When I originally wrote this I was referring to Videodrome and not Hedwig, but if we could get Hedwig's hair that would be incredibly awesome too.]
[EDIT: Throwing in another for you, can't believe I didn't think of this before. The TV series Damages, at least season 1. It's not action-chick but its definitely about female characters moving the world.] -
Quote:This post contains a spoiler about a recent-ish horror film (The Descent) so if that is problematic you may want to bypass.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I know "stupid deaths" aren't really restricted to women, but they are very common victims of such just the same.
First of all Sam I want to let you know how much I enjoy reading your posts. We don't always see things eye to eye but I like how much energy you put into your characters. Passively observing other people's characters is a huge draw for me in this game. I think that you and I have almost polar-opposite design strategies for characters, but I respect where you are coming from with your designs and love seeing explanations of their backstories and how you came up with them.
Back on topic (sort of): character fates are notoriously fickle. Sometimes they are even a choose your own adventure based on your nationality. I think most of us understand what the term "Hollywood ending" implies.
The movie The Descent is about a group of female adventure junkies who decide to explore a cave. They end up encountering monsters who eat most of the cast. In less talented hands, this would be standard T&A material. The way it's done here is actually legitimately scary.
It's a given in horror movies that characters die, often in the stupid ways you describe. What is intriguing to me about The Descent is that depending on which country you saw it in, you got one of two possible endings:
-- In the US: In the final confrontation with the monsters, the 2 final girls fight them off. Then the protagonist, angry at girl #2, who may have been having an affair with her deceased husband and is possibly responsible for the deaths of one of their friends, stabs girl #2 in the leg and leaves her to die. She manages to scramble to safety, but as she is in her car driving away, sees an image of the friend she just stabbed.
-- Elsewhere: Everything above, but then it is revealed girl #1 is actually still in the cave, surrounded by monsters, but is oblivious and hallucinating, her "descent" into madness complete. She is presumably killed by the monsters.
I happen to like the non-US version better.
Unfortunately, this movie has a sequel. And the sequel essentially codifies the American ending as the "correct" one. Then it goes further and indicates that the girl #2 is also alive. This completely dispenses with and modifies everything we saw at the end of the original movie.
The reason this happened isn't really a decision for artistic sake, but a decision of related to the franchise. The story must go on. So the girls are alive again, and are Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers.
Spiderman, Batman and all those guys undergo similar sorts of decisions. It isn't just that they're designed with story arcs in mind, but they are designed to stretch franchise opportunities as long as possible. People don't build roller coasters named after Dorian Gray.
I'm not really sure what point I'm making or if I am making any point. But at least I do think interpretations of when a character "deserves" to die are different in different markets. -
I don't watch a lot of action or comic book movies. I would be tempted to say that the Underworld movies are examples of an action-chick although I mostly ignored that movie while it was playing, because I watched it years ago in at a goth bar in New Orleans and the attendees were more colorful than the vampires or werewolves. I did see Sin City in the theater and found it simultaneously intriguing and completely repellent.
I do think it's kind of funny that we are kind of saying, well, Jennifer Conelly was great in The House of Sand and Fog, but can she carry an Independence Day?
IMO one of the greatest crimes against cinema is that Peter Jackson is famous primarily for King Kong and The Snore of the Rings ( ) trilogy and not for his 1994, IMO masterpiece, Heavenly Creatures. That movie does feature strong female leads, as well as strong everything else, and is IMO something Jackson has yet to top (even if I have a lot of affection for Dead Alive.) It was also the breakout role for Kate Winslet, who is better known in popular culture for such fare as Titanic but occasionally gets back to her roots with stronger stuff.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Seriously, I'm interested to know - can you think of a movie that's not a romantic comedy where at least some of the viewers are intended to admire and want to be like one of the female leads? Or, even easier, can you think of one where that's true for ANY of the female characters irrespective of their roles? I know I keep introducing tangents into my tangents, but this actually does interest me.
I see what you are getting at with this question but the literal answer is yes, I can think of movies with strong female leads. We've already talked about the Twilight series. But females are the default lead characters in the horror genre and in period pieces, for reasons that are, humoursly enough, exact opposites of each other. The lead in high school movies is often female, especially in the sort of genre that produces movies like Heathers, Saved! and Mean Girls. Fairy tale movies almost invariably feature female leads (the Disney princess line, with their interchangeable princes who all have the same face). Then there are the types of movies in the Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes line up, thrillers like Diabolique, and even movies like The Stepford Wives which address this situation head on. By mentioning these things I'm not trying to detract from the idea that women don't have it rough, only point out the literal answer to the question.
The more nuanced answer to what I think you may be asking is that women rarely lead blockbuster movies. But this goes back to what I was saying about there being multiple channels of messages. Blockbuster movies are not something that is generally associated with good taste. They play a strange role in US society because at the same time they are mocked for their lowbrow content, they are held up as markets women and minorities need more representation in. To provide an outside example, there is a strong community of religious folks with some very un-nice things to say about my so-called "alternative lifestyle," but whether and how much actual influence they have over me is debatable. While in the US they've been more or less successful at keeping me from legally marrying my boyfriend they don't exert the kind of control over me that would make me completely powerless.
One of the objections earlier in this thread to the depictions of Sister P was that it was "obviously" drawn with men in mind. The other objection seems to be that she is being retooled into some kind of "stupid ****" (my words, paraphrasing). But images of scantily clad women are not consumed only by straight men. Who is it you find supporting "divas" like Madonna, Cher, Brittany Spears, Lady Gaga, and Christina Aguilera even during their most outcast moments? I think it's impossible to argue that these figures are not sexualized, but also hard to argue that their sexualization has an unambiguous fuel source. They are definitely not, in the circles in which they are idolized, characterized as "stupid sluts." -
So I made good on my promise to play Psi. I rolled Psi/Dark. And I love it.
The knock-up of Psionic Tornado paired with the Fear in Fearsome Stare leaves most enemies unable to react. Psi's huge range means I can truly hover blast, and the -Recharge in the attacks means enemies quickly run out of ways to respond (since most have only 1 or 2 ranged attacks). I'm fairly sure if it doesn't compete with Fire/ or Ice/Dark for damage but it definitely has a lot going for it in other ways. -
It was difficult for me to isolate a specific quote to reply to, so I'm going to try to respond to the gist of the conversation.
RE: The main message about the way men should look in society
IMO it is a bit too simple to say that men (or women) are "told" to look or behave a certain way. While there is a mainstream message about powerful men, that is just one of many available messages. I think that there are multiple channels that people are able to tune in to and that people change these channels depending on mood or environment.
While on the one hand there is an idealized male image as a rugged provider, there are other equally powerful images, such as man as immoral predator (any serial killer or gangster movie), man as incompetent loser (many comedies), and perhaps most prolifically man as too self absorbed and needing to get back in touch with his wife/kids/dreams/what really matters in life. To be recursive for a second, it could be argued that what we are doing in this thread is not combating commoditized images of men but reinforcing the commoditized version of men where men are fighting another form of commoditization. Hollywood protests its own images frequently.
In the 1950s and 60s, horror movies were defined by men always succeeding in protecting women. In modern horror, they are defined by men almost always failing and the woman surviving on her own. I'm not saying this means women are necessarily empowered by this shift, because what follows is usually 20 to 30 minutes of camera time devoted solely to the final girl being chased by her tormentor. What I am saying is that the message is murky, and it is murky precisely because straight men are not Neathanderthals completely unaware of or unsympathetic to criticism. The 1970s exploitation flick I Spit on Your Grave is a revenge picture about a woman enacting violent retribution on her rapists. But this is a movie primarily for men. What do men get out of this movie? According to some film critics, they get to not see themselves as the monsters women want revenge on. The fact that this movie features an extremely graphic and lengthy scene of sexual assault to set up of this dynamic complicates matters further.
The movie Showgirls is a true conundrum. It's a T&A movie that for 110 minutes forces the viewer to endure a stripper-ific vision of Las Vegas that is clearly aimed at a particular audience, then in the final 10 minutes tries to make up for it by preaching a message about how its important to find oneself. As it turns out, this movie is an enormous hit with the gay male community. It's not just because the movie is badly made, but because it is badly made in such a particular way.
RE: Is Sister Psyche too sexualized?
My take on this is that it's just one picture, and IMO one picture is not enough to de-rail a character. I also did not get "sex doll" from that image. I got "shocked/stunned with a little bit of sexiness thrown in." I don't think BAB looks ready to fight either and in fact even looks a little overwhelmed. In any case I don't really want to see either of these characters as strong. I want them to get out of the way so the real heroes (the players) can do what they failed to. It's too bad only one of them will die.
As for the picture of Sister P clinging to Manticore, I actually like this picture because it is only sensitive picture we have of any character in this game. It will make me feel a little more sympathic if she is the one who bites it. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
My point is that it's unfair to say that men don't face objectification and sexualisation and peer pressure and aren't held up to unnecessary standards of behaviour and appearance. The extent to which this happens is debatable, of course, but it happens on all levels of society. So much of male identity is still taboo and crossing over that taboo causes so many men to erupt in either towering rage or abject disgust. Because men aren't supposed to do "that" or be like "that." Why? Because they simply aren't. If you're a man, you're supposed to be a MAN and no-one really talks about what that should mean or if it should be such a stringent rule, but everyone is supposed to instinctively know about it. And if you don't conform, then you're not a man.
You make many good points. I just want to piggyback and add a few short responses.
I don't think that either sexualization or objectification are necessarily bad things. On the one hand, they can be used to dismiss people, but on the other hand, it's just sex. To some extent it is unclear to me whether discussions about female avatars being "too sexy" is actually an issue with gender power balance or just an objection to sexuality intruding into the game at all. If the answer to the question isn't "make men sexier," then to some extent IMO it is the latter case. Some people do view sexualized people as having less inherit value and dismiss them, but this is not an automatic truth. Sexualization is not an automatic shortcut to devaluation unless sexuality is viewed as dirty. I would even say to some extent that too much concern about it risks recategorizing women into madonna/harlot archetypes.
In the case of men, for most of this discussion we've been lumping all men into one large category. But here's a question: How many Hollywood movies are there starring Asian men who are marketed for their sex appeal? I can think of none (but maybe I'm just out of touch). Asian men are almost never sexualized in Western media. According to some of what has been posited in this thread, that should be empowering. IMO the opposite is true. It's the fact that they are NOT sexualized that is problematic. -
Bonfire can be hit or miss. My usual rule on a team is you're placing it underneath enemies instead of away from them it's being used wrong. The most frustrating uses I've seen of Bonfire have been on BAF trials where people put it right under the spawn point for the incoming robots, dispersing a tightly packed group all over the area.
Solo, Bonfire is a really nice power with many uses. One of the best I've found if you're of fire farming bent is to find a map with a choke point and have all the enemies chase you there, then throw down a Bonfire so they are unable to stand up. Works better for Dominators and Blasters because they don't need Containment. -
[EDIT: Clarity]
Well, what intrigues me about Twilight and other similar supernatural TV shows and movies is the clear pattern from which they are taking their cues, which is gothic romance novels. Buffy in the Buffy-verse, Bella in Twilight, and Sookie in TrueBlood all share the similar problem of being irresistibly attractive to gorgeous men traveling under a curse. Some people would say these shows are products of women trapped in a patriarchal role because they spend so much time worried about the protagonist's relationship to men, but IMO if women themselves aren't allowed to decide what they enjoy then the goal isn't liberation so much as demonizing personal choice with regard to tradition.
Anyway, in these sorts of discussions sometimes I think that the issue being debated is not so much patriarchy as it is puritanism. In the United States, at least, there is a history of nervous attitudes about sexual imagery in general, accompanied by an equally prevalent history of commoditizing goods. IMO in American public consciousness sexuality is a cycle of pleasure and guilt. When Janet Jackson flashed her breasts on national TV the main objections weren't from feminists outraged that she had been sexualized, but that unsuspecting people were exposed to a potentially pleasurable but guilt inducing image. Moreover, it is an image that some number of people might have found appealing in a different setting. -
I love Corruptor Psi Blast for many of the reasons you mentioned.
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Quote:Originally Posted by BrandX
Didn't they comment on that with National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon?
Probably. While he's now better known for his meltdowns, Mel Gibson more or less made a career of being T&A without the T.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
Um, yeah. They're advertisers. They're supposed to try to make you feel insecure so you'll buy their crap. In real life, men who go to too much effort to make themselves attractive are disparaged as effeminate, unless of course said effort includes working out or buying visibly expensive clothes. Then it becomes about showing your friends how strong you are, not how sexy you are, and how much money you can spend, not how well you dress.
I disagree. Underwear ads, as an example, most definitely market the sexual attractiveness of men. Moreover, they do it for an audience that is presumably made up mostly of straight men. I am a man who is attracted to men and there is no possible way that image can be misinterpreted as an attempt to merely characterize the model as "strong." I assume one of two things: 1) advertisers assume women are buying underwear for men, or 2) straight men are enticed by the idea of looking as sexy as the image, or at least being associated with other men who are conventionally attractive.
For an example of explicit marketing of men for women, the Twilight movies are a standout example. They're basically movies about improbable abs and, every now and then, supernatural creatures. Twilight is a basically an outgrowth of gothic romance novels, a genre so replete with the sexualization of men I don't really feel it necessary to expand on it. I'm also not sure if Mel Gibson in the 1980s was so much an actor as a he was a stunt backside. -
[We seem to have turned from a discussion about art design in general to one about the clothing editor specifically, so the post below attempts to address my take on that.]
Personally I think it's a little too easy to write off this discussion either by saying it's completely irrelevant or by just saying "it's like this because we live in a patriarchal society." IMO feminism is not a debate about clothes. I think taking on the costume editor as a black and white example of patriarchal oppression leaves something to be desired both because IMO there is a lot more going on, and at the same time because at the end of the day we may be talking about the sexual liberation of robots and plant people.
I am a fairly concrete thinker, so I will include a few image examples from my own costume experiences. The images are hyperlinks if you want to get a closer look.
Behold for example, the shocking image of a completely naked male character, the tantalizing Richter Snail, whose detachable shell is used as a shield. This character uses "Huge" body frame, with a huge chest, short legs, small height, and low muscle mass:
And meet RGBee, the character who is dressed more or less like a Chippendale. A Chippendale who shoots rainbows.:
Pinball Blizzard is the first human of the bunch. Does he become "fetished" just by being human?
Is Snow Watt showing too much leg? Is "she" even a "she" at all? If I suggested that "she" was "born male" what would that even imply?
Anyway in the end what I want are more options in general. I think the debate on costume options runs of the risk of being taken too literally. Even if the editor had a social agenda (I'm not convinced it does) there are many ways to subvert it. -
Quote:Originally Posted by warden_de_dios
If you bought something you didn't want fill out a petition. The worst they can do is say sorry no refunds.
I'll think about it. It's only like $5 so it wasn't so much about the money as it was confusion and trying to figure out whether the store glitched. If I claimed the wrong item on the wrong character that is my fault and not theirs.
Thanks for the replies, they were helpful. I tried the /mypurchases method and see 2 "Experienced" purchases, so I guess that's all the store registered. Going forward it would still be nice to be able to see where my points went. -
And... I am an idiot. I will leave the post above because the design consideration still applies and I could have verified this more quickly had I been able to see my purchases, but yeah I am an idiot.
I bought a bunch of "XP Boosters" and not "Enhancement Boosters" because I can't read. So at least that part of the mystery is solved. Unfortunately I also claimed it on my level 50 character so that is either 450 or 675 points thrown away--I am not sure how to know many were spent.
My fault on buying the wrong thing, but it would still be nice to know what I spent. It looks like I only got 10 uses of the power and not 15, assuming the "Experienced" power is the one in question. What made it confusing is I also had 2 Enhancement Boosters hanging out in my Salvage, for reasons I don't really know (vet awards?)
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This is a choose your own adventure sort of post: if there is a way to view your point spending history please let me know what it is. If not, proceed to next page.
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Not really sure where to put this. It seems like both a technical issue and design issue, but it's the design issue I want to address.
Earlier tonight I decided to add some enhancement boosters to one of my characters. I bought (I think) 3 sets of them. In the first purchase I bought a package of 5. Then I redid my build, realized I needed 2 more, went back to the store and to buy a bulk package of 2 sets of 5 more. I needed more points to do that, because I was down to around 100 something. So I spent $15, to add 1320 more points.
Somehow right now I only have 2 sets of enhancement boosters.
Now, I realize this is a tech issue to some degree, but what really surprised me about this is I can't figure out where to see my point spending history. I checked my email but all it contains is a record of the $15 purchase. I don't remember exactly how many points I started with. I just know I have 1045 right now.
I went to my email and there is nothing showing how the points were spent. So I looked at the help page and it says this:
Quote:Ok, except this item is purchable multiple times...Originally Posted by Paragon MarketView Previously Purchased Items
No, there isn't currently a feature to view all of the items you have purchased on the NCSoftStore and Paragon Market. However, in Paragon Market the buy button will not appear next to items you already own.
So right now I assume 1 of 2 things happened: 1) I purchased this item and didn't receive it or 2) only part of the order was processed for some reason.
I'm not angry because I know we are still very early in the conversion over to the new model. I just want to say that if I'm unable to tell where my points are going and where I've spent them in past I will be very reluctant to use this feature in the future. I'm also not really sure whether to submit a bug report or flag someone down because I'm not even sure if I was actually overcharged or not. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Blue_Mourning
EDIT: I guess my bigger point is this: I don't think objectification is bad. Were I a woman (or a gay man) I would certainly appreciate Brad Pitt without his shirt in Troy. I certainly enjoyed watching Claudine Auger in Thunderball (and Monica Bellucci in everything and anything). Objectification is bad though when that's all there is. I think that that is Sam's bigger point - sexual objectification of women in character creator options tends to overwhelm many other options for women. I would argue though that the same is true for the male models, we just don't necessarily see it as readily because male sexualization is, for one reason or another, not considered a bad thing.
I think you make a good point about male sexualization in the costume editor. While I do think the female models have more street-walker style clothing available, the nature of that clothing is more "sexually daring" than it is explicit. You can strip a male character down so that he exposes nearly all of his flesh. What I find interesting is that the female is considered more sexualized when it is given "teasing" types of clothes. Perhaps it is an issue of volume.
To answer the supposition about whether seeing Brad Pitt shirtless in a movie is a pleasure for gay men, I will just say this; one unspoken advantage of being straight is that you will never be a thirteen year old boy watching TV with your dad when a men's underwear commercial comes on. What I mean by this is that even if I enjoyed seeing half naked male characters I'm not sure I'd want to do it in this environment. I'm not sure whether that is an individual feeling or something generally true of other gay (and female) players. I do know I wouldn't feel comfortable cat-calling at a picture of Maelstrom the way posters sometimes do Desdemona. So there is a fair possibility that sometimes the reason some characters are sexualized and others aren't is that the implicit audience wouldn't be receptive; whether this is because they just aren't interested or whether it would be too stressful/embaressing to engage the image in a public setting is an outside question I can't answer.
I also seem to differ in opinion from many other posters on the issue of Sister Psyche. I actually like her more recent portrayals better than the originals. Not because I am sexist (I hope) but because I find her more relatable than the other characters, male or female. If she would just lose the stripper outfit (doesn't Frederick's of Hollywood sell lycra that isn't lime green?) and have a couple of more moments to show her unique strengths she'd be spot on. IMO the issue isn't sexism really so much as that there isn't a lot of personality smoothing between poles, because we aren't shown these characters very often. The fact that the character even has concerns outside of just "being heroic" IMO makes her more dynamic than the rest of the group. The character I actually find completely off-putting is Statesman, who while not sexual comes across to me like a bludgeon of not-sexuality. It was the justaposition of Statesman's canon image with the Statesman-Faultine shipping/hook up that made that thread so funny.
It's time for me to head to work, but just to conclude I'll add that there was one instance that stands out to me as a time I was uncomfortable with the sexualization of a character, and it was thankfully ret-conned: the characterization of the Dominatrix character. It just seemed like a frat joke taken way too far. Paragon City is a place without context in a lot of ways; a mythical American city with no racial districts, no tangible crisis of education and youth violence, nobody protesting the opening and closing of housing projects or community centers. The villains we fight materialize out of thin air without making a commentary on what must have created them. These things are too objectionable to include; but making over the icon of Atlas Park into a dominatrix was greenlit, and against the lack of realistic setting really jarred me. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Madadh
While I agree in general, I don't find it helpful to lobby for a set based on what it is possible to do when incarnated out. For 1, that's a fair amount of playtime when it's irrelevant. For 2, almost everything is capable of everything when fully incarnated out.
Sorry, I'm not "lobbying," I'm stating a fact. Psi Blast has longer range blasts than other sets. It starts at 100ft. Other sets are not capable of reaching the same range, even when incarnated, in part because many of them have only a 40ft base range on their Tier 3 attacks. And I think plenty of people would disagree that considerations of what a set will look like at the incarnate stage is completely irrelevant.