Positron and Numina Are Now an Item?

From what I recall of the first COH novel, Monica was just a child when Stefan and Marcus left for war. Marcus promised to write her, and did so for years before they ever met as adults.

Which sort of makes it kind of creepy if you ask me....

As for Bella and Pablo ... Pia, Pablo's sister, is the one who told us that Pablo treated Bella like a second sister. Ghost Widow herself has never confirmed that she does anything more than "care" for Wrtech ... which can be a pretty complicated word sometimes.

For my thoughts on the Bella/Pablo relationship you can always just check out my Ghost Widow fanfiction "Atropa Belladonna".

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 think your missing the nature of Marcus and Stefan's relationship. They weren't friends who were as close as brothers, Stefan's father basically adopted Marcus when his parent passed away. The three were raised as siblings.

Talk about feeling the earth move...

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

I can relate.

In the stories I've planned... heck, even in the character backstories... I take pains to try to be canon-compatible. Its OK to add elements that don't appear to be part of Canon as long as they don't CONFLICT with the canon, but I prefer to tie in to provided lore wherever I can... if only slightly. I take a twisted pride in that, and I've had to retcon little things as issues reveal more details about the lore that conflict with these stories.

I'm breaking away from that a bit now.... mostly because I've had a story brewing for years (starting well before CoH) that in some ways feels RIGHT in CoH... as long as I pretend some elements don't exist, like arrest teleporters, medical teleporters. The story's been in limbo for ages as I stumbled over ways to explain away these elements (sabotage, service outages, etc) without having THAT become the focus of the story, instead of what I wanted to tell. All that extra explanation got in the way, so finally I just snapped and decided to "write like none of it exists."

Things are starting to flow together nicely now... but the glaring omission still bugs me & makes me wonder if I'd be better breaking away from CoH lore at all. All because I'd rather abandon all the lore that fits the story so well just to avoid breaking with the canon that doesnt.

Because they don't live in Arkansas?

Seriously though, I've obviously missed or forgotten some of the cannon. Is there a Wikki where I can go to fill in the pieces? I missed the Neni uplink fiasco entirely...

wiki.cohtitan.com, aka ParagonWiki.com - it is the closest thing to the canon bible that we as players have access to. A work in progress, contributed to by players as we go through the content.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

Make it so!

On the rare occasion that I've been inspired enough to set words to a fanfic idea, I always observe a primal rule - Game mechanics are not canon.

Ms. Liberty does not, in fact, spend day after day standing for hours in Atlas Square, nor does she need a robot/hologram/dimensional double/doppelganger/impersonator/evil twin to take over and stand there for her when she needs to hit the "head".

Azuria does not, in fact, lose crap out of the MAGI vault on a daily basis. The Clockwork King is not, in fact, arrested on a daily basis.

Resurrections are not a daily affair and healing is not a get out of jail free card unless either of those are good for the story. People do not have endurance bars, nor are "inspirations" actual objects that heroes apply to themselves.

Arrest teleporters do not exist. The medical teleporter network does not cover the entire planet - In fact, it doesn't cover the entire city and for that matter it can be ignored entirely if that's what's good for the story.

Etc..., etc..., etc...

Blatant GAME mechanics are not automatically STORY mechanics. You wouldn't write a story where heroes stand on the sidewalk and citizens walk up and shove them out into the street in front of passing cars, oblivious to their presence, other than to say "I heard that Chase Arcanum is cleaning up the streets!", right?

In any case, none of those magic deus ex machinas existed before 2004, so if you can set your story before the Rikti War, you solve all of the problems they cause.

And yes, sometimes you just have to deal with lore that either doesn't fit or that changes along the way. I have a Galaxy Girl story that I've been puttering with for years at this point. In asking Sean Fish for a few details during one of his "Hey, ask me lore questions!" phases, he answered my question about Dauntless' given name by mentioning that Robbie Prescott had an unrequited love for Kelly Graham that he never got to tell her about. (Yes, there IS a lot of that sort of thing in Paragon City, apparently. Perhaps Dr. Science should commission a psychological study of life in a City of Heroes...)

That little tidbit of unexpected info totally cocked up my picture of the relationship between Galaxy Girl and Dauntless and it completely changed the impact of very vital scene in the story. If Robbie was in love with Kelly, there was just no way for it to work the way I had imagined it or wanted it to work.

After putting it aside for a long time, I finally took a good long look at it and said "To smeg with it. It simply ain't so."

In my world, my story, it just wasn't that way. Being canon is great and all, but here's the thing - As soon as you start putting words into the mouth of a signature character, you're already off the reservation. There's no point in getting bogged down in splitting hairs over what just how far off you're allowed to go. You might as well just write the story that you want to read and to smeg with the fact that it isn't something modular with respect to game mechanics and literal game lore.

Getting back to your non-signature character story - it's no different with game mechanics. Details are subservient to plot. If a mediport network messes with your drama then go ahead and write as if it doesn't exist. Don't make a big deal about questioning it. Just go with it.

When the movie "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" was being cast, the top choice for Malcolm's daughter (as you know if you saw the film) was a black girl. In the special features, they talk about how the writers went round and about on how to explain a black girl with a white father. (It was a bigger deal then than it is now.) Finally, someone asked "WHY do we have to explain it at all ?" So, they didn't explain it. They just cast her and didn't worry about it and it worked.

If you don't like what a mediporter does to your story, then just don't have a mediporter. If people demand answers afterward, then you can deal with that or not. If YOU really need to feel comfortable knowing that those details are out of the way, then set the story in any other city on earth than Paragon City. Problem solved. Story > game mechanics.

But game lore is important to story mechanics - ignoring character relationships is a big no-no - the characters as they eixist in the game or any other official material is the only accurate version of those charcters.

Yeah, I'd normally feel that way-- heck, the way battles play out would be very different in my writing, too. Unfortunately, the game has whole story arcs, not game mechanics, that establish these as "real" elements in this virtual world... and even out-of-game content makes use of them (like heroes using the mediporters).

The thing with the particular story I'm thinking of is that it uses none of the CoH characters... or even some of my in-game characters. Heck, much of the idea and inspiration predates CoH. The game here has inspired it further, and elements of the backstory DO mesh nicely with it and help flesh out the story world a bit.

Still, most of it is superficial... I could probably port the whole thing to a wholly unique universe with minimal effort. Heck, the idea and the characters were first inspired by a PnP hero game world run by a friend in the early 90's. (The city was coincidentally also named "Paragon," but it was in New Jersey-- about where "Atlantic City" is in our world, IIRC. It also had a global organization that would often recruit local heroes called "the Vanguard Syndicate" but the similarities about end there.)

So, you're saying that Samuraiko SHOULD 86 her story?

I'm not saying you're wrong about accuracy. Only that a fanfic involving a signature character is unavoidably inaccurate. You can hand-wave almost anything if you really, really, really want to do it. The question is not whether you should or should not. The question is whether you should let the hand-waving take over the plot and undermine the story as a result.

To take the Galaxy Girl story I mentioned as an example - I finally concluded that the best way to handle the conflict that Sean's news created was to decide that the REASON Robbie's crush went unrequited was that Kelly's feelings for him were maternal and not romantic. Hand's waved. Problem solved. Get on with the story.

No way should she 86 the story. It's fanfiction! Nothing wrong with writing fanfiction.

It wasn't canon to begin with. Did it have anyone who actually saw it as canon or just a fun story?

My internet search finally managed to dig up this little cartoon from several years ago:



It really needs to be better known

No. There were people who've said it SHOULD be. (I was not one of them.)

That is fricking awesome. I adore Liz's chibi art (she's done three of my characters that way, and I love them).

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

Yeah... I love Red X too.

Edit: Oh, it's showing now. Cute.

I can understand that *still hopes for Gambit and Jubilee hookup to become canon*

And now we need a joke for a Fusion/Fusionette pairing. Something about being face down on the floor together?

Fusionette: "Errrr... what happened?"
Fusion: "I don't know... was that you who Nova'd?"
Fusionette: "I thought it was you."
Fusion: "No, the Energy Torrent was me."
Fusionette: "Oh is THAT what that was?"
Fusion: "Yeah... um, sorry about your wall."

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

Just a question of biology and social norms. Isn't the biological relationship between a Grand Father and Grand Daughter on a par with the genetic simularities (commonalities) between Cousins? And aren't cousins allowed to marry?

Depends on the state and religion. In the US, 30 states do prohibit it, or allow it only in certain circumstances. Catholics discourage it and generally prohibit it, though they do allow for a dispensation in certain circumstances. (This stance has varied over the years, though). Protestant faiths (generally) do permit it, though it may be socially shunned.

Second and greater, not first in most places.

Fourth cousins marry all the time (although, in most cases, they don't know they are fourth cousins). Given the likelyhood of marrying withing a couple blocks of one's home neighborhood (urban setting), size of most towns (rural), etc and et al.