Longbow .. Friend? Foe? or whatever

Longbow are stupid, arrogant, and stubborn children with guns. They're pretty reckless and will judge things right away.
"Vanguard is accepting Arachnos help? This must be a secret plot by Arachnos to stab us in the back!"

This is gonna be fun.... no joke.

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Originally Posted by khorak_EU That you think brainwashing or medical study of captives doesn't reduce them to the same level as simply using a flamethrower, marks you as being intensely morally disturbed.

So, everyone who writes for Marvel is "intensely morally disturbed"? Because the Marvel U has been throwing villains in the Vault or Ravencroft, and using them as guinea-pigs for decades now. Have you ever even READ a Marvel or DC comic?! Much less a lot of what goes on in this game right here! Praetorian arcs must induce atrial fibrillation in you. Don't run the MoM trial by the way!! Intensely morally disturbed people wrote that.

Also, don't read Marvel's recent "Carnage: Family Feud" TPB because you just might have an aneurysm at what is done to Carnage in the name of science. Carnage is not at ALL a nice guy, but that's why I love him... and what is done to him is in no way right and backfires horribly on his tormentors. One example of DOZENS over the years.

I don't remember posting that I thought brainwashing was a peachy-keen thing to do to anyone. It would probably beat being roasted alive, though.

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I'm not at all joking. It's people like you who worry me. A flamethrower is evil, but brainwashing, an act which adds obscene violation on top of what is ultimately personality death regardless, is fine, is what should be done instead of the flamethrower. That's not right. That's not right at all. I'll take the flamethrower rather than personality death leading to programmed servitude in battle until I die thanks. Pretty sure all those Germans who got cleaned out of bunkers on D-Day would have agreed too.

I invoke Godwin's Law right here and now.

[snip]

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You're reminding me of the people who argued entirely seriously that heroic Zombies masterminds are totally ok. Not people who figured that the zombie was a construct of pure magic or something, or some sort of summoned ghost or spirit that didn't claim an existing physical body, they thought it was perfectly fine for heroes to be reanimating the bodies of anyone to use as expendable cannon fodder in the name of heroism. The relativism is disturbing, where obviously wretched acts are kinda ok because they're not visceral enough for you to give a damn (like brainwashing), or you just don't care what other people think (like raising them and their friends and their family from the dead as disposable toxin spewing horrors).

What if the zombies were terrible criminals in life, and being controlled after death by someone out to do good is part of the price of their eternal redemption?

But in answer to the above, you need to get out more. We are discussing comic books and games, not real-life acts. People summoning zombies can't happen in real life. Which is kind of a shame.... and would be morally wrong, but moving on:

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Basic fact of the matter is that in CoX you can take a battleaxe to a Hellions face and the guy is tough enough, if you pull your punch so to speak if you also happen to be superstrong, to take it and just be subdued. Heroes hack, slash, burn, freeze, blast and irradiate their foes with what turns out to be a completely acceptable degree of non-lethality. To take that context and toss it away when defining the use of a flamethrower doesn't make sense in the slightest. It's like complaining that using a WMD is universally the act of a bad guy, just as Reed Richards is shooting Galactus in the face with one to stop him eating the planet. And Galactus won't even actually be very hurt by it.

There is a grain of truth to the above, but I still hate Longbow and I still think they are douches. They're even douches when you show up to rescue them, like that Dietrich person in some RWZ arc somewhere! I always let her die first, whereas the force-field guy is a little politer, so I let him tag along.

Moral of the story: stop setting my character on fire, tyvm! And take a deep breath, this is a game, these are comic books, we are here to have fun and the fact that I dislike my level 20 being flamethrowered for merely appearing in a mission does NOT mean I would have been wearing swastikas in WW2. Sheesh.

I'd personally say ignore Venture.

While I will admit the story writing as of late has been fairly meh (dropping to 'pretty crappy' levels at times in my opinion with the SSAs), Venture hates all the lore and writing in this game with the very passion of his black little heart.

Hell the Dean McArthur arcs that actually got quite a bit of praise for being well written he was all like "it's not Shakespeare therefore it is terrible!", that is the mentality he has, if the writing isn't up to his amazingly high standard, it is not worth the time.

So yeah ignore what he says most of the time there Angel of Retribution, just continue the conversation anyway, hell slap him on ignore if you feel so inclined.

Nice post,

as far as this case goes though Venture's reply would have been the same to anyone regardless of how long they've been here.

Can we get back to the facts as presented in game regardless of how good they are now?

So NE of Bermuda. about 50 miles long, parts of it filter into the US coast line, the others belong to Recluse.

Thank you everyone for posting (and though I'd hate to use it on anyone, I didn't notice there was an ignore function - I'll remember that!), and I'll still be here - one frustrating conversation can't begin to outweigh the months of fun before that, and I really appreciate all the replies and encouragement.

To help get things back on topic, Longbow's attitude kinda does make realistic sense to me. They started as Ms. Liberty's idealistic, if legally dubious, "Peace Corps with guns" and went in with the same gung-ho attitude and inexperience. To that extent, I don't think their actions are inherently bad, they just take the implicit comic book question of "what right does one private citizen have to go out, break into a bad guy's warehouse and capture everyone there?" and extends it to a bigger, organizational level, where the question becomes that much more noticeable.

But then they started dying in battle, getting tangled up in quagmire situations like the Rogue Isles and watching major villains like Recluse keep getting away scot-free and, as time passed, the ones who survived, succeeded and so became the experienced leaders of Longbow also became hardened and embittered by their lack of progress, giving them a very myopic "us versus the world" mindset. And so after that initial "we're gonna save the world" enthusiasm wore off, we start seeing things like the tip missions, where this or that rogue, vengeful Longbow unit decides it wants to kill a suspect rather than apprehend them.

None of this reflects very well on Megan, though. I'm not sure if it'd be better to have her character darken to reflect the change in Longbow, or if she needs to hand off Longbow altogether since her idealism and its increasingly vigilante methods have drifted so far apart. As it is, she kinda seems like a public figurehead who really doesn't have much interest in what's going on with them, and I don't think that's what the story's really aiming for (at least, I hope not - I like Ms. Liberty!).

But about the flamethrowers, I'd always thought that was harsh too (and the NPC desc makes it sound even worse), but a few other people made a good point: heroes can have fire powers too and, whatever rationales can be applied for a single fire-blaster hero fighting bad guys without killing them (they can control the temperature to incapacitate rather than kill, they're careful about where they aim, the flames are some special chemical or energy effect that doesn't cause permanent damage and so on), we could guess that Longbow's flamethrower tech can work the same way.