The ONE thing you want to know...

Well not to put too fine a point on this, but the problem with these stories is that Harry is basically a walking Godmode. He can never truly be harmed and even when he faces Voldemort (Sp?) you know he is going to win. At that point you basically just need to put your brain into park and wait for Mr. Invincible to do silly things and go on with his life.

I much prefer the magic from say, Excalibur, where it's drawn from the earth and can be turned against you. When an iconic figure like Merlin bites it you know someone means business. Of course Morgana got hers too, as did pretty much everyone, but that's a good ending. Of course, I may be severely jaded from playing/running far too many near-munchkin RPG games, which is likely why I'm still waiting for the Paranoia F2P. How much for an extra six-pack of clones? Only three dollars? Ok, time to moon Violet Sector.

It's Steve "Steel" Canyon, the hero that the zone was named after. You can tell by the aviator goggles.

I think that misses the point of the books. The books never portray Harry as especially heroic, and in fact the most heroic character in the series ends up being Snape. Harry is not there to win anything, his character's journey is to learn the lesson that Voldemort never does: that its not about what you can do, its about other people.

Harry is not invulnerable. Harry is not an indestructible horcrux. Harry could have been killed at any time. Just not by Voldemort himself. And even then Voldemort had options for killing Harry, its just that his own pride and blindness to other options prevented him from seeing them. Voldemort saw things in terms of power, but not in terms of sacrifice. Even so, Voldemort is powerful enough that even with the Elder Wand not fully under his control, he's able to kill Harry. The only reason Harry has a second chance to come back is because he's a partial horcrux: killing curses require powerful intent from the caster, and a part of Voldemort's soul obviously opposed the curse.

And Harry could have lost. He could have taken Voldemort's path, and sought a way to defeat Voldemort on his terms. He could have tried to seek out the horcruxes alone. Or, and of course this is the point, the people protecting him could have abandoned him to his fate. Particularly and especially Snape.

Harry is not the hero. He's the protagonist. Not everyone gets that.

Fixed.

Magic in the CoX universe works on a "Wizard ex Machina" principle. Whenever you can't be bothered to come up with a logical, well-plotted storyline that fits within the existing rules established for the setting, a wizard did it.

That's because we really don't have very strict rules for magic to obey in this game. But honestly, that's for the best. I'd rather have a loosely-governed magic system that I can write any character into than having to worry about creating ghost characters because "the dead cannot change" and mine aren't that one-dimensional.

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.

This.

That statement could be attributed to an unreliable narrator though. Either she's using it as an excuse, or she's generalizing based on her specific circumstances.

The problem isn't that magic doesn't have very strict rules, it's that magic has no rules at all. A nobody like Darrin Wade, who needs some random c-list villain's help just to steal some stuff from his former buddies, suddenly becomes a global threat because magic. A c-list hero like Desdemona suddenly becomes the most important person in Praetoria because magic. Whenever I see something like that the first question on my mind is "where did this super powerful magic come from, and why can't I do it?"

Or the person who wrote her dialog in i6 really, really like The Lexx. *sings Brunnen-G Battle Hymn* (*)

* very badly

You do not want to know.

She keeps them as her personal harem. Can you imagine living with that enunciation every day?

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's actually a good way of putting it. Magic doesn't have to have defined rules so long as plots that involve magic have at least some kind of limitation. When you can flip a loser into a super threat and have a super threat nullified completely, you have... Well, anime, essentially, but you have a story that's very hard to get involved in. It becomes a story driven by what's convenient to the narrative rather than by what makes sense, and when we keep getting blindsided by sudden and unexpected revelations of power, we start to not care terribly much.

To bring a story I HAAATE, this is more or less what happened to the Legend of Korra, the sequel show to the Last Airbender. There's really no specific definition in terms of exactly what a bender can do or how powerful he could be, but the narrative of the original made a pretty good effort to enforce a power hierarchy among the characters and yet still occasionally challenge it because... Well, sometimes you do well, sometimes you screw up. In sequel, everyone's as strong as the plot calls for them to be, leading to competent characters getting curb-stomped like losers and apparent b-listers pulling off ridiculous stunts, all because the plot said so. It also throws out what limitations the setting imposed on a lot of the powers so you get this mish-mash of "magic" where everyone can pull off anything with no warning or build-up. And it makes for a dull watch.

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.

Well, in Darrin Wade's case, while he was a completely mundane human, he had access to a ridiculous list of resources that allowed him to carry out his plan. It wasn't HIS magic that made him a threat, it was the magic of all the artifacts he had access to.

In Desdemona's case, she becomes important because she happened to be at the right place at the right time. You could replace Darrin Wade and Desdemona with anyone else and the outcome wouldn't change. Both are relatively low on the power hierarchy and got VERY lucky.


As for specific question I want to know:

How is it that UN somehow recognizes the Rogue Isles as a sovereign nation and yet after numerous invasion attempts the US just hasn't declared open war?

They're just attacking Rhode Island and... it's Rhode Island.

Well, they could invade the RI, but it's cheaper to let Statesman send 8 superpowered heroes to invade instead. It also gives them deniability.

And herein lies the problem. In order for a character in a story to have a meaningful character arc, something about that character must prove central or at least crucial to the outcome of that arc. Even in stories where an everyman falls over backwards into super powers (see: Spider-Man), how the story progresses from there must still be shaped, at least in large part, by how the everyman's personality influences the super being that results from this. When you create a story in which you can swap the characters around in their roles and not change terribly much about it, you've essentially made a bad story because you're both not utilising the characters to their potential and you're actually not making a very involved story.

I've always maintained that a good story is a puzzle that clicks into place, with each character and each event representing a separate piece. In essence, this puzzle gets put together as the story progresses, it gets arranged in large chunks throughout its run time, until you finally start seeing how the major pieces fit together towards the end. A good climax will show you how easily things could have gone otherwise and how important people's onscreen actions and reactions were to the eventual outcome. You want people invested in what's going on thus you want actions to be meaningful, and they can't be meaningful when you can role-swap characters around and not change that much.

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's a little more complex than that. The Rogue Isles aren't officially under Arachnos' rule, each governor has at least some degree of independence (Dr. Aeon, Marshall Blitz, Johnny Sonata, etc). While Arachnos' presence is strongly felt pretty much everywhere in the Isles, it's probably seen as a terrorist organization rather than a state, and the UN security council could be hanging on to that excuse to avoid overextending Primal Earth's forces - already stretched thin trying to contain the Rikti. That said, Longbow (NATO) are openly fighting Arachnos in the Rogue Isles, so it can't be said that the US and their allies are doing nothing. Just not as much as we'd like.

Longbow is not NATO. NATO is NATO. Longbow is a private mercenary army that may be getting some oversight from some part of NATO. The description claims that they get materials from them but we don't really know how deep the connection is or if there's much of a connection at all. I have a difficult time believing that the rest of the world sees the Rogue Isles as a threat to world security that requires an international military response.

Longbow is nothing but Ms. Liberty's private enforcers, which is why they operate on US soil as well as internationally in the Rogue Isles. They are NOT some international super hero squad fighting for the safety of all people of all nationalities, and their priorities have nothing to do with anything related to the UN or NATO.

I sometimes wonder if Longbow is secretly a project concocted by Recluse himself, to give the Isles an opponent to fight instead of challenging the status quo. It could make for an interesting story if Ms. Lib was faced with the reality that she had been manipulated into forming Longbow and that her uncle had pulled the strings all down the line to make it happen.

Speaking of Longbow, they are one of the most egregious examples of poor super group writing. They're an American force invading a sovereign nation? Wave your hands and say "NATO" and now it's okay. They're sabotaging the UN's forces in the RWZ? That's just good old-fashioned rivalry. They're policing Paragon City and pre-emptively attacking and 'arresting' people who aren't doing anything illegal while talking smack about them? That's just good Heroism.

Meanwhile, we're supposed to be cheering for them as the good guys.

Mad Magazine once did a parody of "A Clockwork Orange". In the film, the protagonist Alex is "rehabilitated" and once back in society he encounters his old Droogs (gang buddies) who are now police officers. They beat the tar out of him and leave him in the dirt. The Mad version of this scene involves Alex talking to his former underlings and the one fellow telling him "Yeah, they tried to rehabilitate us, but they couldn't so they made us policemen instead." After which they beat the stuffing out of him.

That's how I see Longbow most of the time. The sole exception is the Sefu Tendaji story, but the ironic thing is that Tendaji's story works BECAUSE he's a sharp contrast to every other Longbow operative that we run across blueside.