City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

How much retcon is too much

American_Knight

By American_Knight,
Posted on: 2011-05-20 22:00 in Comic and Hero-Villain Culture

 

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Originally Posted by Ironik View Post
How can you possibly use that as evidence that ST is fascist? I mean come on, the MAIN CHARACTER is Filipino and his love interest is Hispanic and his best friend is, too, while the two major mouthpiece/authority figures are a French-American and a Chinese dude.
You forgot the Fantastic Racism. The Terran Federation espouses that humanity is superior. The Bugs must be eradicated.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Ironik View Post
Yes. He's wrong. Clearly he needs a dictionary, because his definition of fascism bears no relation to reality.

He also makes specious side comments like "uniforms are not commonly worn by general government workers." Well, no, not in OUR world, but Heinlein's writing science fiction. It's no different from many other sci-fi tales from Star Trek to, well, name a random dozen. Plus, most jobs may not have uniforms the way soldiers, police, firefighters, EMS, park rangers, doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, restaurants, animal shelters, cable companies, yard maintenance companies... oh yeah, almost every job requires a uniform, and those who don't expressly define "acceptable dress." It's actually rare to find a job that doesn't have some sort of required outfit. Look at IBM when Heinlein was writing, for example.

But clothes don't make the political ideology. He makes a whole host of other selective and incorrect assumptions, sometimes even ignoring human behavior altogether.
Yeah. One of the ones sticking out for me is "Labor batallions." The author is basically pointing at the word "Batallion" and saying "See? Military!" when it doesn't necessarily need to mean that. They could just be a convenient way to label the groups, or (it's been a while since I've read it) it could have been set up, military and civil, along military lines with military labels.

And the line about "uniforms," yeah. Police wear uniforms. Fire fighters wear uniforms. (I believe both can get "awards" and "badges" to wear, as well.) Heck, Mcdonalds employees wear uniforms, and if we're under attack by the Mcdonalds Army...

Regardless, it doesn't disqualify the fact that calling the Starship Troopers movie "Starship Troopers" is like calling "Plan 9 from Outer Space" a documentary of Apollo 13.

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Originally Posted by Scythus View Post
That is not a free society. And earning the right to vote through service to the state is frankly morally repugnant and disgusting. The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
To you it is morally repugnant. To me it is prudent and effective. We do not live in a "free" society. We vote for which people we want to represent us and hope that they represent us in a fair manner. If there is a majority, then we have a democratic dictatorship. Effective voting on every issue requires clear knowledge of the issue by each voter instead of the cursory knowledge that most voters have. Why should some ignorant hillbilly vote for which scientific research to be funded when they don't have a clue about the potential rewards of it. Besides, the government in Starship Troopers appears to be more of a Direct Democracy than a Representative Democracy so it would be more accurate to consider all voters to have the same level of power as an elected official rather than regular citizens. Elected officials have to work to be elected so they earn the right to vote. Our vote only means something every four years while an elected official's vote means something every time a vote is called.

As far as your claim about the government exists to serve the people not itself, the more people involved in voting, the less power one individual can have. If people cared about how their government is run, then they could earn the right to vote provided that there is no repugnant restrictions like race, gender, or preference. I find self-entitlement to be far more repugnant than earning the right to vote. If people got more involved in the government and don't let someone else to do it, then votes would have more meaning.

Oh and IBTL or IBTD.

The first step in being sane is to admit that you are insane.

 

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Originally Posted by starphoenix View Post
As far as your claim about the government exists to serve the people not itself, the more people involved in voting, the less power one individual can have. If people cared about how their government is run, then they could earn the right to vote provided that there is no repugnant restrictions like race, gender, or preference. I find self-entitlement to be far more repugnant than earning the right to vote. If people got more involved in the government and don't let someone else to do it, then votes would have more meaning.

Oh and IBTL or IBTD.
You consider the freedom of voting a "self-entitlement?" That's frankly terrifying. It's a basic, unalienable right. The Constitution of the United States starts out "We the People" not "We the Government" or "We the State."

I'm sorry, but I dislike your political view terribly.

 

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Originally Posted by Scythus View Post
You consider the freedom of voting a "self-entitlement?" That's frankly terrifying. It's a basic, unalienable right. The Constitution of the United States starts out "We the People" not "We the Government" or "We the State."

I'm sorry, but I dislike your political view terribly.
Our ancestors earned the right to vote. It is something we have to fight for all the time. The belief that they deserve something without willing to fight for it is whats wrong. There are numerous countries where the right to vote is not a basic, unalienable right and the only reason it is not is because those countries have not decided to fight for it. Fortunately, there have been many of those countries that have decided to fight for it this year. Unfortunately, those countries' government have always acted in their best interests rather than the peoples.

For your information, I am not a citizen of the United States. There is a lot of things in the United States that I am appalled by. One of them is the false superiority they display to other countries. Another is the amount of self-entitlement that exists. One of my philosophies is that if you are not willing to work for or defend something when it comes under attack, then it is not that important to a person. The most important things are things that you are willing to work for or defend so if someone is not willing to work for the right to vote or to defend it, then it is not that important.

The first step in being sane is to admit that you are insane.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Scythus View Post
You consider the freedom of voting a "self-entitlement?" That's frankly terrifying. It's a basic, unalienable right. The Constitution of the United States starts out "We the People" not "We the Government" or "We the State."
And when they created that, "We the people" who could vote were white male landowners. Poor? Ignore them. Women? Pfft. And black, hispanic or native american? Nope.

 

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...
Democracy isn't the the opposition of fascism nor socialism. Fascism and Socialism are opposites. It's more of a political philosophy than a system. Democracy is mob rule and disgusting. Americans do not live in a democracy. Americans are supposed to live in a Socialistic Republic, but live in a government that has slowly been turning into, or has been since creation, a Fascistic Democratically empowered Oligarchy.


As far as the actual topic... I don't view most movies as being good representation of characters from their original format. They are more representative of what the public thinks of those characters and is reinforced by the simplified movie versions. I don't expect faithful translations because movies have never done so. They more seem to write a story and find a character that fits the archtype of the characters they already written, skin it in the costumes and names of those characters, and throw in a small amount of detail the mass public knows and you get what hollywood puts out.

 

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Back to the retcon thing, I don't even look at movies as retcons. They're just a different interpretation of the source.

 

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Originally Posted by ObiWan View Post
Back to the retcon thing, I don't even look at movies as retcons. They're just a different interpretation of the source.
Even when the source itself was a movie?

Watch Star Wars Epp 4-6, and Darth Vader is impressive and scary. Then, watch 1-3 and tell me if you can take him seriously any more.

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Originally Posted by starphoenix View Post
Fascist, authoritarian drivel.
You may hate freedom, that's fine. I don't.

Mind you; however, I don't support America playing world cop. That's something that needs to change and one reason I liked the Starship Troopers movie's anti-war stance as our world cop status has us usually bombing countries that I could care less about.

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Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill View Post
And when they created that, "We the people" who could vote were white male landowners. Poor? Ignore them. Women? Pfft. And black, hispanic or native american? Nope.
How true is that anymore? Or in its text? There never really was verbiage in the Constitution that said "people" only applied to that small demographic. It was the ignorance of the time that limited the ability to vote, now there isn't a limit. Everyone can vote now, and frankly not enough take advantage of that fact in my opinion.

 

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Originally Posted by Rabid_M View Post
Even when the source itself was a movie?

Watch Star Wars Epp 4-6, and Darth Vader is impressive and scary. Then, watch 1-3 and tell me if you can take him seriously any more.
He's still an 8-foot magical mechanical samurai who dresses in all black and kills people over the phone. Still scary, even if he was an emo teen.

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Heinlein wrote the book during the Korean War, so you can expect a strong "serve your government" and "destroy the hivemind(commies)" vibe.

 

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Originally Posted by Scythus View Post
You forgot the Fantastic Racism. The Terran Federation espouses that humanity is superior. The Bugs must be eradicated.
Did you even read the book? The Bugs attacked first. That's survival, not racism.

and besides, it is actually species-ism, not racism. Yeah, your little link talks about "hiding" racism as speciesism. Sorry, but I don't agree when you're talking about survival. To call the book Starship Troopers racist is ignorant considering the many different human race groups of the good guys. Even more so if you have read Heinlein's other works. Aliens could be good guys or bad guys. Humans were just as often the bad guys.

As to the original topic -- the movies exist separately from the comics. It is a different medium with a different audience. The producers/directors/writers/actors/editors for a film will view what makes a good movie different than the editors/writers/artists view what will make a good comic book. While the comic fans certainly "start the buzz" for a comic book movie, ultimately, what really matters is whether it is an entertaining (and not necessarily good) movie and not whether it is accurate to the source material.

Have you seen "The Running Man?" Ever read the story? Not even close, other than the basic premise of taking a convict and putting him on TV in a game show for his life. Still, the film was a mostly enjoyable film.

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Bugs vs. Humans is the same thing as Federation vs. Klingons, or any of the numerous wars that have resulted due to resources. Two diametrically opposed species meet together and need the same type of worlds for colonization. Wars usually don't start with one massive battle or tons of destruction. It is usually minor skirmishes that eventually turn into a war.

The first step in being sane is to admit that you are insane.

 

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Originally Posted by Local_Man View Post
Did you even read the book? The Bugs attacked first. That's survival, not racism.

and besides, it is actually species-ism, not racism. Yeah, your little link talks about "hiding" racism as speciesism. Sorry, but I don't agree when you're talking about survival. To call the book Starship Troopers racist is ignorant considering the many different human race groups of the good guys. Even more so if you have read Heinlein's other works. Aliens could be good guys or bad guys. Humans were just as often the bad guys.
Hear that whizzing sound over your head? That's the point passing you over.

 

Posted

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Originally Posted by Rabid_M View Post
Even when the source itself was a movie?

Watch Star Wars Epp 4-6, and Darth Vader is impressive and scary. Then, watch 1-3 and tell me if you can take him seriously any more.
What? Eps 1-3 weren't Vader. They were Anakin. 4-6 was a different person, as different as teenagers and old guys usually are. When Luke took Vader's helmet off, I was deeply disappointed at the sight. That guy looked like a couch potato dad. If I were more articulate, I'd say something about how Obiwan was right, Vader was more machine than Anakin.

Oh, and thank you for all the interesting articles. I disagreed with almost ALL of them! That guy writing about military and government service especially, displayed an almost complete ignorance of actual government services. And the military attitude toward them.

It is interesting that it's the hippies who mostly don't get the movie Starship Troopers. I suspect its because they resist the ideas so strongly, they can't relax and laugh at it. (And the nerds with nerd-rage, of course.) No one with militaristic beliefs actually takes it seriously. The love story was pretty irritating, though.

The article by that man, Perich, was superb, though. Very interesting. And although I knew the line--"I'd buy that for a dollar"--was stolen, I didn't realize it was an attempt to emulate the society of The Marching Morons in Robocop. I read that story from my cherished copy of Asimov's 100 Greatest Short SciFi stories...everything in that book is wondrous...

Now I have my own nerd-rage because neither Robocop nor Idiocracy went all the way that Marching Morons did and commit (genocide? intellectocide?) mass murder on the population. That's the way it was in the book!

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Originally Posted by starphoenix View Post
For your information, I am not a citizen of the United States. There is a lot of things in the United States that I am appalled by. One of them is the false superiority they display to other countries. Another is the amount of self-entitlement that exists. One of my philosophies is that if you are not willing to work for or defend something when it comes under attack, then it is not that important to a person. The most important things are things that you are willing to work for or defend so if someone is not willing to work for the right to vote or to defend it, then it is not that important.
Ouch, dude. Talk about painting with a broad brush. Let me know where you live and I'm sure I could come up with just as many harsh generalities, fyi.

Back to the topic at hand, I would say that the new movie or approach to the source material has to reflect the main themes and ideas of the original. I'd quibble if the LOTR movies did this entirely, but they're close enough that I'm okay with them (same thing for the Potter movies). The better comic book movies do this as well.

It gets kind of tricky, because would you call The Thirteenth Warrior or the book it was based on a retcon, or an homage to Beowulf? There, you're still going for some kind of feel of the original, but not as much.

Heck, I would still say that Ten Things I Hate About You is one of the better "Shakespeare" movies I've seen (and teen comedies, for that matter), even though it's more of an homage to Taming of the Shrew than a Shakespeare movie. Rotten Tomatoes called it one, though.

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What's considered retcon Vs reinterpretation?

For instance their is a movie called Bride and Prejudice which is a Bollywood inspired version of Pride and Prejudice. What about Pride, Prejudice and Zomibies? Ran and King Lear? How about the gender bending in the 2010 movie version of The Tempest?

In the case of the Starship Troopers movie the only points they took out of the original novel are humans and bugs are at war and government service is required to vote. The second point was warped into a pro Nazi metaphor right down to the propaganda.

The main problem here is what do you do with a vast body of "history" written by numerous authors set in a collective universe while keeping it open for new readers. Also you have practical problems of taking such a body of work and translating it to live action on the screen. Face it, spandex only works well on Superman and maybe Wonder Women. It looks kind of dumb, to the general public, on everyone else.

As for the new X-men movie, on one hand they want to show how the split developed between Xavier and Magneto, how their people worked together once. Now I agree, de-aging Mystique and age swap Havoc and Cyclops is odd. In the second case I guess the team still needed a blaster and the studio wants to save the Scott/Jean love story for another movie. What is also strange is the Americanization of Moira and Banshee. I guess that saves us from poorly done Scottish and Irish accents since most Americans can't tell them apart.

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Starship Troopers is a greatly entertaining B movie. That is all.

Too much retcon? Statesman. That his retcon paved the way for all the annoying threads on incarnates and trials stuffed into every freaking forum makes it worse.

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Too much retcon: midichlorians.

@Demobot

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Originally Posted by Demobot View Post
Too much retcon: midichlorians.
Heh.

Thing is, if Lucas wanted something to "count" as a field-measure of Force strength, he could still have used them - just changed the explanation slightly. (OK, and gotten rid of the "Oh, and midichlorians are your father, lu... er, Anakin." "Nooooooo!")

 

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Originally Posted by Starflier View Post
Starship Troopers is a greatly entertaining B movie. That is all.

Too much retcon? Statesman. That his retcon paved the way for all the annoying threads on incarnates and trials stuffed into every freaking forum makes it worse.
Am I the only one who finds Statesman and every iteration of him utterly boring? And I don't buy him as the Superman figure he so often seems to be portrayed as.

My pet peeve is people who refuse to acknowledge it when I tell them my character has unlimited power. If I rp attack them they are of course disintegrated beyond the ability of any hospital or magic to restore. Yet despite this they refuse to delete their characters and still keep playing them as if nothing happened. ~Mandu, 07-16-2010

 

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Originally Posted by Ironik View Post
Back on topic: I honestly don't care about what details they've jiggered around in X-Men: First Class. It looks like they're getting the characters and their conflict and the overall point of the book right.

As opposed to Green Lantern, where they seem to be fundamentally changing Hal Jordan's personality. Ryan Reynolds is a superb actor, but how many of you have seen his serious roles? I'd wager it would be me and maybe one other person.
You misspelled sub par.

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Posted

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Originally Posted by Starflier View Post
Too much retcon? Statesman. That his retcon paved the way for all the annoying threads on incarnates and trials stuffed into every freaking forum makes it worse.
So you did the logical thing and stuffed it into this thread too I see...

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