synthozoic

The movie is full of all kinds of magic realism but one only has to watch the huge cop car chase at the end of the movie to see that it completely departs from reality as much as the most fantastic superhero flick. And besides Jake and Elwood beat down a lot of Nazi's just like Capt. America and they are fighting for a good cause! And come on! Cab Calloway!

Personally I think business suits are a lot more flattering yet also modest to a person than spandex. Think of the bleeding cool in 6 String Samurai or James Bond?!

Additionally, let's remember that the modern business suit and tuxedos (Worn by G Men and Women everywhere.) trace their satorial lineage all the way back to the officer uniforms of Napoleon's army and the British Regency period.

Anyway, I'm taking us way off the subject. I'll quit this line of thought here.

I have thought of at least four counterexamples to that: Reservoir Dogs, The Blues Brothers, The Matrix and the first MIB. Granted they aren't superhero movies but at least the last is based on a comic book and the last three definitely have a superhero like feel to them. People fighting in business suits can be quite cool!

Point taken.

Sounds sort of like Falling Down. but played for laughs I guess. Alas if only the real world's problems where so easily solved.

And yet here we all are blathering about it. What does that say about us? It's notable that you cite the whole Starfire debacle. That's a prime example of the problem. The Starfire embarrassment also points out that superhero comics really aren't just for young children anymore--at least that's pretty clear how they're being marketed now.

Anyway, I know this is something that will never going to be solved here. Personally I think there is a problem and I'm a little tired of the apologists who say there isn't.

There is the veteran's award pack, the bank mission pack, the 30 day pack you can buy in the store, the rocket boots costume piece, and probably one or two more that I'm not even aware of. Nearly all of these can be purchased in the store.

This game has no shortage of jet packs. But I suppose we could re-intrepret this as an air tank or air recycler which all cosmonauts need, right?

I really don't want to make an issue out of it. I'm sure whatever the devs give us will be fine!

Excellent citation! And I agree with Amber completely. It's simple I think, superhero comics would be less alienating to women readers if more of women supers in them dressed like this.

But as a silly aside, I just avoid this whole issue in the game by mostly building robots and weird looking aliens.

I agree this needs to be built. And although these may be famous last words, I really doubt such an experiment is going to end the world. It will probably tell us a lot about the fine structure of the vacuum on the quantum scale though.

I know it's a thought experiment and an exercise in daydreaming but I guess I'm wondering why they'd even tell you at all? If their evidence is that certain and they are time travelers, why not just just kill you secretively and never let you know? Just one day you don't wake up and it looks like a stroke or heart failure or whatever. Why would they tell you this, if they are gonna kill you anyway? And if they are time travelers, I really doubt you could fight them off or escape them. Any escape plan you make they already know--assuming there is no nonsense about free will.

But of course if there is no free will, that means the time travelers can't change their present no matter what they do. All their actions in the past (your present.) only work to ensure the causal chains that bring about their present that they already know--no paradoxes can form that way. Time travel is possible but only in the form of ontological loops, like 12 Monkeys or the first Terminator movie.

But if there is free will and we can change the past and future, that still leaves open the question why they'd bother to tell you. Just kill the loser and bring about a better present (Or future.)!

See, I guess I'm just a very boring guy and just can't buy into stuff like free will (Although I do admit we definitely have the illusion of such and as social animals it is necessary to function as if the illusion is real.). However I can suspend disbelief over time travel stories where attempts to change the past only switch you to a universe where that past is just the way you'd like it. That way global causality (above the causal chains of any specific universe.) is preserved and no paradoxes form.

And I'll agree with that!

And the really good writing has it so the villain is right for all the wrong reasons. For example, he may have some crazy scheme to limit the population of the Earth. The scheme itself might be horrific and clearly evil but, at the same, the reader, if the writing is done well enough, will be forced to admit that family planning is a good idea and brings many benefits too.

And so on. The play between heroes and villains in superhero comics can be a vehicle for exploring a lot of deep stuff.

I would agree that's probably the way it usually goes but it doesn't have to be. There are stories were the bad guys cooperate quite well and are mostly open with each other at least on specific tasks--Star Wars' Empire for example. Maybe the Sith themselves somehow build their strength through some insane Darwinian struggle of continuous backstabbing with each generation but the rest of the Empire is the very model of cooperation and efficiency in the pursuit of goals.

In collaborative fiction or table-top roleplaying games this requires the players and GM, if there is one, to work out key points and lay down rules that can't be violated before starting a plot thread or campaign story arc.

The metagame is, "We as players and GM are agreeing beforehand that the villain characters are not going to be backstab each other and everyone is going to mostly cooperate until certain plot events happen." It is possible to play evil parties in D&D but everyone has to be mature and restrict themselves from free-for-alls for the sake of a larger story. Once a strong leader whips them into shape the orcs usually don't fight among themselves as they go out slaughtering merrily.

Again this underscores my point above about players and GM all agreeing on cooperation and driving cooperatively toward specific plot events, whereup the characters become NPCs and all the back stabbing and chaos that follows is handled by the GM alone.

Here at the CoH boards, I notice that most of the threads don't really have a formal GM that controls the metagame and occasionally disallows stuff from derailing his plot. As such most villain threads here derail because there is no one who says, "No, I'm not letting this degenerate into backstabbing. I'm bashing you down with the plot hammer and we are moving forward. If you all think there is a conflict that needs to be worked out, let's discuss this in metagame and then write it out in actual play."

Of course players will have to be mature and agree to this beforehand for it all to work. Their villain characters are mostly free but there are barriers of behavior they can't cross.

This can happen to the good guys too actually. Good is not always unified and cooperative. Suppose they have factions that have different visions of what is best for society or how to solve a problem? Suppose the situation is desperate enough they they make mistakes and cut corners and throw compromise to the wind?

History is full of nations, political groups and so on who all viewed themselves as the good guys. They believed that what they did to stop other supposely "good guys" (Who they often relabeled as 'bad guys.") was justified because "god was on their side," or "We fight to bring about the worker's paradise," or "Capitalism is a good thing. We need to fight to protect it." Each one of those groups really believed they were fighting for a better world.

And not all bad guys are just egotists. Sometimes, and this is the most scary thing of all, they would be good guys if history had just happened differently. The winners write history and get to spin things and engage in historical revisionism all the time.

Evil guys can be good guys that just get a little too obsessed and uncompromising. Some may cheer Rorschach's utterly manichean and uncompromising attitude in the face of a meaningless and cruel universe but, we all remember that he was psychotic, right? It wasn't really ego there. He just felt that the universe meaningless and, as such, it was necessary to impose some kind of justice on it, by any means necessary. Logic isn't ego but it can take you to completely insane positions.

It's not only ego, or at least not the definition of ego that I'm using. That's the scary thing; "going too far" for a good cause is something that lurks in each and every one of us. If recent history is any guide, that's the lesson to be learned.

Now we could depart from all that depressing but nuanced and realistic stuff and go into fiction where evil is very simplistic and moustachioed and good never separates into factions and always cooperates but, to bring this back into game terms again, that's exactly the same thing as all the players agreeing before hand to not factionalize and not backstab each other.

The only difference it seems to me is that one, evil, is overt and the other, good, is subconscious.

But actally, now that I read through your whole comment. I think you already understand this:

Right, for villain threads to work, someone has to be in charge and everyone has to keep things moving forward and avoid degeneration into chaos.

And I too can find all the unrelenting, gritty darkness tedious. Which is one of the implications of what I said earlier: unbounded grimness can be so draining that it becomes silly, cliche and boring. But I think it's possible to have both. You can have Superman's MLK to Batman's Malcolm X. It's probably very hard but I think you can contrive situations where Billy Batson is in the same world as Rorschach.

Or maybe not.

But all this is a little beside the point:

As Devious said, I'm really making it too complicated. What I really should focus on is the villainous plot-line I dreamed up some months ago. Fitting this into existing threads is just going to be problematic and, to keep it even simpler, I'll just start the thread as a solo story, and if interest develops, maybe I'll turn it into an actual RP thread. This idea of mine has gelling in my mind for a few months now.

Heh, heh! I'll just pretend I only wrote that to make you write the word "codswallop." Which is a really great word! It just bounces off the tongue and soft pallet in such a way as to suggest to your amygdala that you're saying something much, much worse.

Codswallop. Codswallop.

Anyway, not to worry, there is nothing golden or girlish on my side of the monitor. I was just expressing a sentiment that I sometimes agree with and sometimes disagree with. It's all nuanced.

I'm pretty much in agreement. I've always been one of those "Ozymandias was right." Watchmen fans. Sometimes the heroes become monsters. It's a much finer line that a lot of people think. And sympathy for the Devil is far older than Milton.

Besides it makes for much more interesting story if we keep your points in mind.

My only parting is that I don't know if the above conceits are really all that unique to the US. There are products of Usan culture that show a much more subtle view of good and evil and all the shades and permutations between them. You only have to read authors like Melville, Poe, Bierce or Twain.

Anyway, I'll keep your points in mind.

I couldn't do that. And I've never bought the argument that suppressing technology makes the world safer. Nor does making technology secret make the world safer because, if the Cold War taught us anything at all, military secrets are the most fleeting of all.

Assuming humans made the suit in the first place, they could easily just build more so my destroying one suit would accomplish nothing. If the suit was only mildly more advanced than Earthly technology then:

1. It will be rather easy to reverse engineer.
2. Soon many countries will possess that technology anyway.

In either case destroying the suit only briefly holds back the inevitable.

I think this becomes one of the central messages in later issues of Iron Man. At first Tony is the only one who has the suit but eventually the Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man showed the world that the Soviets had suits, SHIELD got suits, cops got suits and on and on. Pretty soon nearly every minor villain Stark faced had some variation on his designs or suits that they developed independently.

So instead, if anything, I want to study the suit closely and share that knowledge with world. Pretty much I'd go the Reed Richards route.

If no-one steps forward to claim patents, fine, I'd claim them. But I'd share it with the world because all the technology behind that suit could have all kinds of applications in many areas besides the suit itself. Who knows how it could revolutionize medical technology or transportation or building design or something even more unexpected. Would it be right to prevent the world from knowing these things?

I agree that nuclear weapons on utterly horrible, but that genie has long since left the bottle and, I think, relinquishing that knowledge is unrealistic.

Definitely number 3. The suit is such an enormous technological leap forward that understanding how it works and widely implementing those technologies in many devices would revolutionize society. That would be my way of helping the world--and that's heroic, isn't it?

I also say this because the suit doesn't really give me any powers I'd like to have, like superhuman intelligence.