No alternate Recluses?

Wait, what? Where does it say they're nature spirits? Moreover, how can they have evolved past the need for worship if the Rikti killed all of their gods by killing all of their worshippers? I believe that's said either in Angus McQueen's arc or one of the Midnighter arcs.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I want to take every opportunity I get to agree with Venture, as that doesn't seem to happen often. But here, I agree completely. The "box" storyline is just BAD, and I try to pretend it doesn't exist.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

There are too many canonical instances of superhuman activity during historical periods when "the box" was supposedly closed. Cimerora would be one honking huge example.

Web of Arachnos was written several years ago, long before those pages on the signature characters were put up. They appear to have been (very poorly) written by someone who just smashed in everything from the books and comics which was really a bad idea. According to one of the editors the books were written while the game's backstory was being developed, which is why there are so many continuity gaffes in them. They should have been relegated to the dustbin of apocrypha instead of having some ham-handed effort made to wedge them in.

Right, I misread that. Thought it said they evolved "beyond the need" when it said they "evolved to need." My bad.

Still... That's kind of a lame explanation for gods, to be honest.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan (literally Beat-to-death Angel Dokuro-chan) is a gag series (well, gag OVA, not even a full series), so it's not supposed to be coherent or sensible. It is presumably supposed to be funny, although humour is subjective. Then again, it was successful enough to spawn a few extra episodes.

Basically, like a lot of other storytelling media, it's not easy to generalize past the basics (anime has to be mostly, if not entirely, animated, for instance). For some series, be it for humour or Artistic purposes, things aren't supposed to make sense, and they consistently fail to make sense.

For most others, they try to tell a story in a more conventional way, and how much sense it makes is... well, you could compare Star Trek to Smallville to Lost to Heroes to Babylon Five to Chuck to whatever in terms of plot coherency, and it would be as useful as generalizing anime. (Possibly more useful, since the listed shows are mostly in the same genre of speculative fiction.)

As with most works of fiction, the most the creators can do is to come up with ways, however desperate or patchwork, to explain new developments consistently and coherently with old ones, as soon as they think about it. The deeply-thought-out list of traits and limitations of a given fictional system seldom survive contact with the audience, in much the same way it is assumed that the developers will never find every exploit at the same rate as the players.

Or they could just go "don't think too closely about it", which is more or less giving up in exasperation, because they don't think it matters that much.

So far.

I assume that we haven't seen any alternate Recluses because there haven't been any stories which needed to feature an alternate Recluse. A meta-reason of narrative convention and convenience, rather than something deeper. You could say that each server shard is a different reality (or set thereof), after all.

... Azuria is an authoritative source of information.

I find it amazing you accept "what a character" said from a non-authorative character in a book you said has points that contradict, but then won't accept what is in canon and also from a much higher source of canon.

Good point.

I think that's kind of how they tried to sell the Origin of Powers arc when they introduced it, deliberately having the different faction contacts tell contradicting stories... Only the stories are so poor the only one I could tell contradicted was the Magic one, and only because it's a rehash of the Oranbegan storyline and the Scroll of Tielekku information. The rest are just... Weak? Even if we ignore the fact that they trod all over people's concepts, they're just not well written.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Please understand that I'm not trying to be ugly here, but I'm just not sure what you're saying with this one, at least in relation to my quote at the top. That we shouldn't generalise anime? I guess, since it's a wide-spanning media, but there ARE a few key points you CAN generalise on.

I don't know why that is, but American cartoons have always struck me as reactionary to whatever the latest greatest thing is at the time. A rare few crop up every now and then to revolutionise the medium, such as the Simpsons, but by and large what you get is... Well, more of what you're already getting, but cheaper and of worse quality. Maybe I'm biassed in that I get most of my cartoons from the Cartoon Network and the Disney channel, as that's all my provider gives me, but from the stuff I see there, I'm not impressed. And even before, when there were actually GOOD shows on the air, I still wasn't impressed.

By contrast, anime - at least the anime I've seen and liked - doesn't tend to follow in the footsteps of trend and hype. Sure, when you get right down to it a lot of anime shows recycle each other, but at the end of the day, anime by and large is a LOT more daring with the subject matters it involves and the way in which it involves it. Maybe times have changed, but something like a little girl wielding a giant scythe and fighting an Edward Scissorhands version of Jack the Ripper in wire-fu style would have been laughed off the set of most Western cartoons, or if actually done, would have been TERRIBLE. Yet anime pulls it off. I don't know why that is, but I dare say it's because anime writers are more willing to take goofy ideas more seriously and run with them, whereas Western shows either won't do them or will parody them.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I've bolded the part I was trying to say.

It's actually more to do with how anime gets produced... or rather, how anime gets approved for production. There's a lower barrier for approval, especially if there's a pre-existing work that has proven to be popular enough (and I don't mean so popular that everyone knows about it, although it helps, but merely popular enough to be considered). This is why we hear a lot about some anime having a source manga or light novel or whatnot.

And from what I can tell, anime seasons are usually decided by quarters (cours), rather than needing to go on and on and on until cancelled. This lets them try (however successfully) to tell the story within the space of 13 episodes, or 26, or some other multiple of 13 (or 12 or 14). Exceptions are the really short one-offs, or the long-runners.

Anime does follow its own trends and hype. Some of them have been labelled as "genre conventions", some of them as "tropes", some of them as "cliches"... certain trends dominate over a period of time, a little like how reality TV dominated for a time or National Idol-type shows or game shows or such. In anime, it used to be mecha, and then lots of mecha shows appeared until Evangelion, upon which deconstructions and reconstructions abounded. Or under-one-roof harem comedies, possibly stemming from Maison Ikkoku. Or random slice-of-life, made popular in the West by Azumanga Daioh. Or the moe style, which is an interesting spinoff from certain shoujo styles... it goes on.

In each anime, though, there may be some strange detail that seems out of place, which helps differentiate it from everything else: Kimagure Orange Road would have been a love triangle story, except that the male lead has, for some reason, ESPer powers. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya would have been a standard school days iyashi-kei (one of the spinoff manga was even going in this direction until recently), except that the titular character warps reality (and the main male lead narrates in first-person in the light novels).

This is probably why there seems to be greater variety: there are a lot more anime due to production methods, and US companies have been aggressively marketing many of them for some time, possibly because they're different. (Or more likely, fans have been aggressively promoting them.)

No in-universe character is "an authoritative source of information". Characters can be mistaken about things they believe. They can lie. They can be Nemesis Automatons. It is an ooooolllllddddd GMing trick to only give the players information about the world through NPCs precisely so that any or all of it can be contradicted later if desired.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Do you mean the claim that the box is thousands of years old? If that is false then the entire point in contention is false.

Basically, what I'm saying is that it seems much more common to have much weirder and much less regulated content in anime than it is in Western cartoons. Western cartoons very much CAN have weird and wonderful concepts, but outside of revolutionary shows or bid-budget productions (like the original Ben 10), you're highly unlikely to see that. You just end up seeing more crap like American Dragon and Camp Lazlo, which while somewhat weird, fall on the FAR side of good.

That's not to say anime is inherently good. In fact, from what I've seen, a very large portion of it is utter garbage. But the scope and breadth of concepts it presents still means a much better chance of finding something truly astounding, and that one real gem can mask the disappointment with much of the rest.

I actually use to say the same about Western television... Until I saw shows like Oban sidelined and basically dropped off the air because they were a French-Japanese collaboration (I assume) in favour of crap like A.T.O.M. which is not only insultingly stupid but barely actually has a plot. But it has people prancing around and throwing hadoukens in it...

Sometimes the Disney channel feels like it's sabotaging itself. Seriously, who watches Hanna Montana?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That is just an idiotic thing to say. Especially considering how the devs act in character and out of character randomly so you never know where the information is coming from.

Also Azuria IS an authoritative source. She "may" have her own agenda. That's true. Do you think I'm not taking that into account when I say that she is an authoritative source?

Has that ever worked?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It does when I'm talking to people who actually understand the sentence.

Nice

No...she can't be. Maybe as far as our characters are concerned, she's studied the nature of things to the limits of her capabilities, but she could still be wrong. (and that's just what Venture went on to explain) That's like saying that Stephen Hawking *knows* the nature of the universe. He can work things out as best as possible, but he could still be wrong. He's on the same side of the screen as us, as it were. But we're on the other side of the screen as far as the game goes. We can ask the creators. We have the lore section of this website. We essentially have access to the Teacher's Edition of the text. That's an authoritative source.

No what i said is like saying Stephen Hawking is an authoritative source concerning astrophysics.

You are arguing that because we didn't get it from a dev it's not 100% even though the friggin devs says what they say isn't what is 100% but rather that the game itself takes precedence and not only the game but the site, both take precedence over anything a dev says.

That means If a Dev says something that is contradictory to what Azuria is saying in the game or on the site the DEV is wrong.

Yes, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to keep continuity hounds off-balance.

Evidently not.

You're new around here, I guess.

Once upon a time, Maria Jenkins' in-game bio said she was Maiden Justice, the female hero who worked alongside Statesman at the beginning of his career. Manticore started posting about Maiden Justice being Monica Richter, Ms. Liberty's grandmother and Statesman's wife, people pointed out the contradiction...and look what changed.

N.B. that this wasn't even a statement made by a character -- it was an out-of-character piece of narration, "Word of God" if you will. It still got thrown under the bus. The official explanation was that the bio was mistaken, but you really have to be pretty simple to think it wasn't a retcon. (Proof here being the Unfortunate Implications that resulted in the Praetorian version of the story. Someone wasn't thinking things all the way through.) If such a narrative statement is subject to revision then it's hard to say that statements made by characters would somehow carry more force, when logically they are even more provisional.

Protip: the GM (or "devs" when they go pro) is never wrong. Even when he is. The guy behind the screen has the first, last and only word about what is or is not true about his creation. Fictional reality is subject to change without notice.

You should be used to it by now.

/shakes fist

I can't read anymore of your posts. I'm getting angry at an internet forum, and that's just not good for my health.

Has anyone ever told you you're a pest? Or do you get it enough that you've learned to ignore it?

The way you shoot down other peoples' posts is just. . . . aye. Wow.

Tell you what? Go work some more on that ADST and Vanguard or CityofLore or whatever thing you wanted to work on. You can make sure the lore is 100% correct with no flaws or errors, and then all of us lore-ignorant peasants can amass at your site and praise you for your stupendous efforts in correcting us.

Go ahead, go do it.

Right now. Go.