TrueGentleman

There's definitely nightmare fuel in NuWho, e.g. the Weeping Angels, the Silence, "Hey, who turned out the lights?", but those tend to rely more on shocks (though it's notable that those, like the Gangers, feature in two-parters). Consider the Daleks, which NuWho rarely does well*: They work better in an atmosphere of extended suspense, in which their implacable plotting mounts, e.g. Dalek Invasion of Earth, Genesis of the Daleks, rather than delivering shocks, e.g. Victory of the Daleks, Daleks in Manhattan.


* "Dalek" is the only first-rate episode featuring the old nemesis.

As the disclaimer goes, "your mileage may vary". There's also a difference between watching, say, Tom Baker during the Philip Hinchcliffe-produced years vs. Tom Baker during the Jonathan Nathan-Turner-produced years (to say nothing of Patrick Troughton or Sylvester McCoy).

I doubt that new Who, for all its pleasures, will ever be as frightening for children as it once was for the simple reason that the new format simply doesn't generate as much suspense as the old serial. When there were at least three guaranteed cliffhangers in a story that drew the viewers in for over a month, the opportunity to get worked up about the show was much greater.

At least the new scheduling evens out the show over the course of the year. Moffat is correct in saying that waiting for many months between series feels a lot longer to children.

This makes perfect sense to me: Doctor Who is best watched in winter, in the dark.

Jesters do oft prove prophets, as the bard says.

No, I'm talking about recruitment bonuses. If our pleasant and helpful in-game manners convinces an F2Per to become a VIP member, perhaps the devs could throw us a few Paragon Points? (Come to think of it, this might convince some VIPers to adopt pleasant and helpful in-game manners.)

Precisely. And I'm not sure how I feel about being expected to apply a positive kind of peer pressure to entice F2Pers into paying money to Paragon.

Honestly, if the upshot of the conversion to an F2P hybrid is turning VIPers into covert recruiters, could we get some updated benefits for promoting enrollment?

Reports from the game with hirsute-footed midgets are not sanguine from a veteran perspective.

Then why not split it the other way around and create new F2P servers where VIPers can go if they prefer more active/crowded playingfields? Some players love to start out from square one on an unexplored server, after all.

The mystery revealed!

Looks like the issue of trial accounts locking up names may be moot, and the question of how to attract returning players has just had the goalposts shifted a great distance...

But it remains to be seen how The Amazing Spider-Man's director, Marc Webb, best known for (500) Days of Summer and lots and lots of music videos, will do with a superhero action flick. He does cost less than Sam Raimi, though.

Oh, and in the wake of Green Lantern's not-so-stellar release, someone has leaked Robert ("TV Funhouse") Smigel's 2006 draft of a version that was intended as a Jack Black comedy vehicle. To preserve the dignity of these forums, I won't link to it here, but here's an interview with him about the whole misconceived affair.

Tobias Fünke: So what are your plans for this evening?
Bob Loblaw: I thought that maybe I would stay in and work on my law blog.
Tobias Fünke: Ah, yes. The "Bob Loblaw Law Blog". You, sir, are a mouthful.

Or if they'd been conceived of as series from the start and shot concurrently like Lord of the Rings and Superman/Superman II.

I completely forgot about it - that's not very auspicious. Similarly, its budget has supposedly been slashed to less than a third of Sam Raimi's last one.

Whereas I don't, although I'm confident it won't be a stinker like GL. My concern is that it was scared away from the logical 4th of July opening weekend by the latest misbegotten Transformers movie and will now have that and the final Harry Potter in theaters ahead of it. The studios have definitely taken note of the under-performance of superhero movies this summer, and if Cap can't justify its comparatively modest $140M budget, then its sequel could find itself being shot for a mere eight figures, the way Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance did (and Marvel Studios is already developing a reputation for being cheap).

The other problem is that its mid-summer opening risks audience fatigue for long underwear movies. The big-budget superhero movie, Vaughn said in the interview I linked earlier, has “been mined to death and in some cases the quality control is not what it’s supposed to be. [...] I think we’ve kind of crossed the Rubicon with superhero films. I think [the opportunity to do one], it’s only going to be there two or three more times. Then, the genre is going to be dead for a while because the audience has just been pummeled too much.”

Taking this estimate at face value, that leaves Captain America, The Avengers, and Dark Knight Rises to convince audiences that superheroes are worth it as summer blockbusters. Then there's the question of Zack "the Hack" Snyder's Superman in December...

Green Lantern is rumored to have cost the studio $200M, so Thor, having cost "only" $150, is in a somewhat better position (stronger opening weekend, less competition, better timing). Matthew Vaugan, director of X-Men: First Class (also doing better than Green Lantern, but not great), is calling this summer the beginning of the end of the big-budget superhero movie. Of course, we shall see how Captain America does in July, then the Avengers and Dark Knight Rises next year.

(from their album Pencils Down)

Well, then, I stand corrected.

Well, hobbits do tend to have pastorally themed nicknames, so it would probably have gotten by. Their actual names have very different rules of construction, though, so Prof. T would have given a gamma for that. He was, after all, profoundly obsessed with the linguistic aspects of his fantasy world. The success of his books unfortunately has ensured that most would-be writers of high fantasy often become entangled in their attempts to devise their own ersatz high elvish and the like.

If you want to write the adventures of Carrotbeard the Barbarian, by all means go for it. The genre could use some envelope-pushing, and it's been a while since there was a top-notch fantasy protagonist* with a name like Grey Mouser. As I've said, it's all in the execution.

* Whoever derails this thread into a discussion of what constitutes a top-notch fantasy character wins the Internet.

In all seriousness, I do not believe this to be true. Creativity is a skill, not an innate talent, and numerous tools and exercises already exist to develop and promote it (and are only a Google search away on the web). The best ways to stifle it, however, are to establish arbitrary and unchallenged rules of what constitutes the "good", fixate on limited possibilities, and, worst of all, give up trying.

Flaming Carrot is wearing a giant carrot mask* - he's not an "animate carrot". He's a surreal character, but not that surreal.

* It contains a secret compartment where he keeps his nuclear-powered pogo stick.

I was quite explicit in stating a "typical" fantasy setting in order to rule out parodic ones (not an insignificant subgenre). In Bored of the Rings, the protagonist is named "Frito", and one of the armies is composed of animate vegetables. It's not widely considered a typical example of fantasy.

RPGs, where players can name their characters, are under discussion here, not third-person point-and-click adventure games in which all players control the specific protagonist, whose name is the author's choice, not theirs. Honestly, that would be relevant here only if this CoH required players to chose from pre-determined lists for their characters' names.

(The forum ban on mentioning other video games really crimps these discussions. We all know about a certain MMORPG adapted from the works of a famous Oxford don, so why can't we come out and say it?)

You scurrilous cad!

Now who's arguing semantics? Are you telling us with a straight face that you posted your paraphrase of the devs' position - including your own unique example of a name that was somehow acceptable in a fantasy game but not a superhero one - but in your heart of hearts you disagreed with it?

If you can provide a quote of precisely what the devs said, I'll address that. If you've accurately summarized their contention that superhero names are "a different animal", then let me state for the record, having furnished several counter-examples of all-but-unpronounceable names* from three prominent comics in three very different superheroic subgenres, that the devs are wrong.

* Ignoring the even more numerous examples of merely silly sounding ones.

Much as I appreciate the works of Sir Terry Pratchett, he writes parodies (excellent, witty, hilarious parodies) of fantasy, not typical fantasy. There's a reason why Professor Tolkien's books, with their stringent linguistic rules and high tone, have been adapted into video games but not his. And if I tried to play a character named after one from Bored of the Rings in one of them, I'd be breaking immersion (and would probably get generic'ed by a mod).

Were this a literary discussion in the common room at All Souls College, I might be moved to debate that this is because superhero comics, unlike the purer genres of science fiction and fantasy, are inherently aware of their absurd element and, at their best, incorporate it into their character (Superman has Mxyzptlk and Bizzaro, and Batman, the preeminently intimidating superhero, has an arch-nemesis who regularly laughs in his face). It's not, so I'm going to get back to levelling Codename Carrot-top, who blended in without comment on the Virtue server last night.

Quite so. I'm going to take a break and have fun levelling Codename Carrot-top.

Level 1 Traps/DP Defender LFT!

Even if there were a rule to superhero naming - and there is none - you mean exceptions, plural. Claiming that only certain names work for superheroes is as pointless as claiming "all of the good names are taken".

Also, Mr. Zsasz.