If you don't like the writing...

As for the cheering and booing, there is another side. Sometimes the hero is so bad you'd rather cheer the villain.

Yep. Hence Samuel referring to "Face" and "Heel". In a show with a sympathetically played anti-villain and a not-so sympatheic anti-hero, where both seem to be equally evil, things get confusing. That's probably why there tends not to be that many nuances between "Hero" and "Villain". When it can be pulled off, however, it can be mind-blowing.

Not bad as in evil, bad as in bad.

The posts on page 8 of this thread made me nostagic for the summer of 2005, which was when - after a month or two of play - I first logged onto the forum to air the same sorts of thoughts about story and how story could be done better in CoH.

This may well be the first instance of a quote streak where I agree with everything I quote:

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Setting Sorceress Serene aside for now, I think that while the details of the question are obviously very complex, at its heart I think the answer to the question "what makes a good villain" is pretty simple. Its a villain we want to see more of.

Thank you for putting it so succinctly, Arcana, as this is more or less what I mean. This is really something I want our writers to embrace - that the antagonists they create for our heroes and the roles they create for our villains really should resemble someone we want to see more about. A villain whose scenes are painful to get through is not a good villain, no matter how evil, powerful or Villain Sue he may be. A good villain is one whose scenes I look forward to.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville But generally, all of these kinds of villains share one common trait. Either we think we know them, or we want to know them. Now, that doesn't mean actually knowing more about them is a good thing. Hannibal Lector is the classic example of a villain we *want* to know, but its not good for us *to* know. But until we knew more, we wanted to.

This is actually an entirely separate, but equally important issue - backstory. I'm one of the biggest proponents of solid backstory out there, but even I recognise that sometimes, it's best to left some things unsaid and unknown. Again I point to Darth Vader. When we didn't know his past, he was a cool, powerful bad guy. Now that we do, he seems that much less compelling because we know what a whiny brat he used to be. But even if you can pull off a villain's backstory perfectly, sometimes it's still better to simply not know. Dissecting a villain's past is kind of like pulling his pants down - it's harder to take him seriously once you've seen his pale ***.

A good villain, to me, thrives on a combination of intrigue and mystery. We want to know more about the villain, but we can't. Instead of being given direct answers, we're left to examine the villain's actions and try to judge for ourselves. Recluse shows up to fight Wade, but why does he do it? Because despite it all, the Statesman was his friend? Because he's angry someone beat him to the punch? Because he really is fighting for the greater good? To show up a demigod? We never really get an answer to that, and as far as I'm concerned, we're better off not knowing. That way, when Recluse goes back to his tower and claims "I did it because I wanted Wade's power!" he can save face as a villain and yet we can still suspect he has the heart of a hero underneath it all.

And yes, I consider Lord Recluse to be a good villain. One of the game's best, in fact. If only he had more to do in the story...

[QUOTE=Arcanaville;4329292]As you say, some villains appear irredeemably annoying. But nothing is really irredeemable, its just that it can seem that way because our first impression of them is a character we don't *want* to know any more about.[/quote

Nothing is truly irredeemable, but what stops villains like Serene from being redeemable, at least in my book, is that they're being mishandled in two very drastic ways. First of all, Seren's ENTIRE BODY OF WRITING paints her as an annoying *****, if you'll pardon my English. At no point is an attempt made to redeem her into a good villain, so if she is to be redeemed, whoever's writing it will have to start from scratch and do a LOOOT of work. Secondly, our writers don't seem interested in redeeming her at all. They just keep writing her as a cackling, bitter complete monster. Getting killed in First Ward should have been the perfect opportunity to give Serene more personality and make me want to know more about her. In fact, let's imagine how that might happen:

Let's say that Serene's anger and rage were focused around the death of her Cabal, and her plan was ultimately aimed at reviving the Ravenwing. That plan fails, she gets killed and the Furies let loose out of her control. Now as a spirit, she sees everything falling apart around her, the Furies are rampaging out of control and even desecrating the spirits of the Ravenwing Cabal. This is horrible! This is the exact opposite of what she wanted! Serene is desperate, so she forges an alliance with the Black Queen of the Black Knights. Serene's idea is to salvage her original plan for control of the Furies by freeing Lamashtu and controlling them through her, and in return for this, she offers to help the Black Queen gain control of the Black Knights by helping her kill Lorn.

At the end, Serene sets the Black Queen up to be killed as the final key to opening the Eternal Prison. With Lamashtu now free, Serene offers her body as a physical vessel with which to open The Gate That Never Opens. Using Incarnate artefacts that Diabolique took from Tyrant and Serene took from her when she held Diabolque prisoner, she had already enchanted her body to act as a power syphon for the goddess' power, gambling on being able to control her that way. In the end, the gamble fails, but it is the gamble of a desperate person who has put it all on the line in one final attempt to recover from a terrible fate. She can then be written as a QUIET evil in Night Ward, and a hand from the shadows that barely anyone noticed - a person who has learned her lesson that revealing herself and starting a war in person is a bad idea. We'd have had character progression and a less irritating villain, and maybe, just maybe, a villain I'd want to see more of. But right now, I just hope I'll never see Sorceress Serene again.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville I do know that you are far more likely to hit the mark when you start by creating a real person, with real motivations, a real personality, and a real background. I've said before that I think much of the villain content is bad because I believe the writers don't believe in it. They don't really believe in villainy and they don't really respect villainy, so much of villain content is either pedantically bland or cartoonishly psychopathic.

I've been saying the same for years, and I completely agree. Much of villain content feels like it was written by someone who does dislikes villains from a moral standpoint and believes the only reason people play villains is because they enjoy the negative emotions associated with villainy. That's why nearly all of the original CoV content comes off like an objective moral lesson of "crime does not pay" and why all of the Rogue Isles are drawn up as this depressing place where everyone is miserable, everyone is rotten and everything is hopeless. This is the work of someone who asks the question: "What would a world where evil won look like?" and comes up with hell on Earth. This is the wrong question to ask and the wrong answer to give it.

The right question when writing villains is more along the lines of: "How can I make my villain players enjoy themselves without grossing them out?" The answer to this isn't as simple, but it is the question itself that matters - how can we make villains FUN? Because at the end of the day, if a game's not fun, it's not worth playing, and there's nothing to gain from making villain content aggressively demoralising. As I said before - intentionally unpleasant gameplay is still unpleasant, and that's not good for a game. At least not for this one. If a good villain antagonist is someone we want to see more of and learn more about, then a good player villain is one we want to play as more, and that's the meat of the argument when Dean McArturh or Bane Spider Ruben come up - these are pieces of content that inspire us to want to run them again and again, because they aren't so emotionally draining as, say, Peter Thermai.

Remember, a good villain is not made good by the monstrosity of his evil. He's made good by being a legitimately good character ASIDE from being evil.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville But I don't think Ledger was playing a man with no past. That's not a real person. I think he was playing a man who has deliberately destroyed his own past. And that's a real person.

To be fair, "a man with no past" isn't in itself an illegitimate concept. It can still be made to work with the right writing approach. Just as a random example, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic stars a protagonist with no past, and this is made the point of the entire game, resulting what I consider to be one of the coolest plots of all time. Now, granted, KOTOR's protagonist does have a past, but for the longest time, he works without one and is free to create his own personality. Yes, it is when that past comes back that the truly interesting question of "who are you, really?" comes up and the player is given the choice of going back or becoming someone else. Still, "no past" can be a decent plot of self-discovery if done right, both for a villain and for a hero.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Don't aim for [Raul Julia's M. Bison]. Unless the stars align perfectly and you have the ghost of Raul Julia helping you, you're probably going to miss, and miss badly: [Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze]

Agreed. A campy, loud, "Take over the world? Of course!" type villain is very hard to pull off in a legitimate, serious work just because this type of villain is so hard to take seriously and not chuckle at. Sometimes you CAN put over that megalomania as a real character trait and have that carry the villain, as in the case of Raul Julia's M. Bison, but it's a very fine line to walk and it takes A LOT of skill to pull off. It's all too easy to tumble over into either camp or parody, but when it works, it's glorious.

I still wouldn't shoot for this, however, because that's kind of cheating. It's creating an interesting villain, yes, but he's interesting less for his character than for his antic, which typically limits his use to pretty much just the work he initially shows up in, as it usually requires the whole work to be balanced just right for the villain to come over so well.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville On a personal note, I think all of the villains on my personal list of best villains of all time share one additional trait. With one relatively small change, they could have been the hero.

I used to feel the same way, myself, and did my best to try and "justify" why my heroes were evil... And I can't really deny that this does make for a very compelling villain. But at the same time, I've been moving away from this of late, and designing villains who really don't work very well as heroes. Praxis, for instance, is completely irredeemable and spells absolutely certain doom for all life everywhere, yet I still find her compelling as a villain. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but a lot of it has to do with the audacity of the design. Yes, Praxis is a Villain Sue, I admit that, but she's one in potential only and her actions in-game are rarely like that. But it's that kind of audacious potential that I really enjoy.

You said earlier how it's a good idea for writers to consider what they would do if they were evil, and I think this is what contributes to my feelings here. Maybe I'm just not as morally pure of a person, but I really can have fun with a true villain with no real redeemable qualities, so long as that villain feels glamorous and powerful. I can, occasionally, put morality aside and just have fun being a megalomaniacal, self-serving tyrant or a ruthless, cheeky trickster, so long as the evil those portray is in some way constructive towards a goal, rather than destructive towards malice. This is where my notion of "destructive evil vs. creative evil" comes from. Sometimes, evil itself can be fun (and harmlessly so) if it can be made to embody many of the same traits that make us naturally inclined to want to be good.

Having a goal, solving problems, creating great things and wielding enormous power are not, in and of themselves, evil, but they are the stock and trade of most good villains. These are things we enjoy for their own merits and, whether we like to admit it or not, villains are the ones who most often get to play with these cool toys. Heroes are hampered by consequences and morality and laws and common sense, but villains are the ones who can just ignore all that and have fun. THAT, to me, is where player villains should be heading.

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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.

Thank you Samuel Tow and Arcanaville. Your writing on this subject is what is truly heroic. I wade through the campy crappy writing in game, which varies widely. Sometimes you get cool, but the other end of the spectrum is a bad concept, poorly executed, and completely unedited. I ignore most of this because I like to level and smash. But writing like you two are doing (and some other posters in this thread as well) really brings home the fact that City players can be some of the best gamers to hang with in the world. My channelmates on Virtue, and places like the boards are what really make the game feel like community to me. Thank you for elevating the discussion.

Makes me think of "The man with no name" characters. Is that a valid archetype? Eastwood played one and that movie a year or so ago, "Drive" had one. There are other examples. Eastwood's is derivative of Akira Kurasawa's Yojimbo after all.

To me, an anti-hero is little more than a sympathetic villain who's more often seen doing good, albeit reluctantly, and usually only said to have done evil. Basically, it's the character who's a villain but is still popular enough to where writers try to blur the lines so they can tell hero stories with him.

It stands to reason that an anti-villain would be the reverse - a character who's really a hero by design, but is still filling in the role of villain. Like the anti-hero, the anti-villain is a character cast against his type - a villain doing villain things, but in a way that constantly makes him feel like with just a little push, he could become a hero proper.

Personally, though, I tend to disregard "hero" and "villain" labels entirely. The reason I constantly bring up the "face vs. heel" duality is because it skips a few layers of fluff story and gets down to the real matter at hand - is your character one the audience is supposed to cheer or one the audience is supposed to boo? If you want to build a face, it really doesn't matter whether that face is a hero, a villain or an anti-thingy. That's a question for personal characterisation, and personal characterisation is entirely independent from the broader dynamic of intra-story morality.

It's actually quite liberating once you realise this. Once you realise that all that really matters is if you want a character to be cheered or booed, and then you can characterise him in any way you want past that, it opens up your fictional world to a much more interesting, much more complex morality. Typically, a character's alignment isn't a simple question of "hero, villain or in-between," because morality is nothing more than an extension of the larger personality of the character. In fact, I wouldn't bother with alignment at all, at least not as a separate character trait, for the simple fact that moral action are bought from a character's personality, not a grid of character alignments. A hero might choose to kill not because "he's chaotic good" but, much more specifically, because he believes villains deserve to be treated as they treated their victims.

Basically what I'm saying is the only meta-story aspect that really matters is whether you're making a face or a heel, because that informs presentation. Anything past that is just artistic license. If anything, I wish more writers took more artistic license with their characters, instead of relying on other people's character archetypes and morality tropes. It makes for a more organic story. Questions directed at a character should only be answerable within the context that particular, not by drawing on a much more faceless generalisation.

Is Dexter an anti-villain? I don't know. I've never watched the series. Never found the basic concept all that engaging.

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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.

Here's something else I want to touch on: reusing named characters, and to illustrate, I'll use the example of SSA2.2 that went Live recently. I won't give any real spoilers for the plot, but to mention that three people show up in it working together - Ghost Widow, Arbiter Sands and Nocturne the Night Widos (who I swear I thought was Veluta Lunata the first time I saw her). I want to look at how reusing named characters can contribute to a story and how it can damage it.

Firstly, the most immediately negative aspect of reusing named characters should be obvious from the above list - they end up mischaracterised. Characters who appear in a mission or arc tend to appear in very specific circumstances in which they make sense, but when trying to reuse those characters in further story arcs, it's not always possible to "match" them to the situation. Our trio above is a wondrous example. From Faultline, we know that Sands and Nocturne hate each other. Nocturne tried to have Sands killed and Sands sold her out to the heroes. These are not people who would do well working together. Furthermore, Sands is an Arbiter, and thus the highest ranking branch Arachnos has to offer, higher than even Recluse's lieutenants, themselves. He should not be working under Ghost Widow as he should, technically, be her superior in the same way Arbiter Daos is. Arbiters are the military police of Arachnos and thus have authority greater than that of any other branch.

Now, that's not to say reusing characters is always bad. Faultline and Fusionette showing up all over the place in the Rikti War Zone makes sense - they're Vanguard agents, and pretty dang good ones, I believe. But they have a very strong reason to be there, and it's in-character for both to have joined Vanguard. Sands and Nocturne have no reason to show up in SSA2.2 aside from Arachnos show up and these two are named Arachnos agents. This leads to the second big problem of reusing named characters for no reason: It makes the world seem very small.

One of the cornerstone problems of writing in general is to give the sense of a large world with relatively little writing. Tolkein built his by essentially devoting his life to ironing out every last detail of Middle Earth, and while this is very admirable, it's not sustainable for a commercial business. Writers who do this as a job, therefore, need to create a large-feeling world by implying size through a very small viewport, which is the small body of content they have the time of day to create. Having the same characters keep showing up repeatedly for no reason other than coincidence makes the world feel much smaller, because it starts raising uncomfortable questions: ARE Sands and Nocturne the only capable people in Arachnos? See, the two of them are believable in Faultline because... Recluse needed to send someone, and it happened to be Sands, while Nocturne just took advantage. Having characters appears one is not a coincidence - someone had to. Having them reappear, however, raises the question "Why them?" and that's not easy to answer. Specifically, what's not easy to answer is "Why not someone else?"

The truth of the matter is that, in many cases, it's better to come up with a new named character pulled out of whole cloth and use it just for that one mission, than it is to reuse an existing one. Basically, unless there's something about the character himself that is tied to the place where he appears, it's generally a good idea to not use that character in the first place. About the most immersion-breaking thing a writer can do when picking who to use is to pick one that feels like he was random-selected. Do you remember the old Street Fighter games? You'd select the question mark, and then the game would randomly tab through the roster and pick one? That's how this feels. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-Sands! That works, he's looked for artefacts before. I know that's not how the process went, I don't mean to insult, but that's still what it ended up resembling, because there's literally no reason to pick the people who got picked.

Again, I don't mean to say that reusing named characters is never a good idea. Far from it. Take Akharist, the Circle defector, for instance. Akharist has two arcs devoted just to himself, but he does make cameos in other arcs, as well, such as Johnny Sonata's search for his soul and I believe one of Mu'Drakhan's arcs. However, here's the difference - Akharist makes sense to be in these arcs because he's a Circle of Thorns arcanist of immense knowledge, an expert in demonic negotiations and a powerful wizard. Yes, it's possible another wizard could have been invented to help decipher Johnny's contract, but Akharist made perfect sense AND linked the stories together. This is an example of a plotline in which a returning character slots perfectly, which is what makes his cameo so spot on. This brings us to one of the reasons why reusing characters is a good thing: It ties the world together.

When creating an open-world sandbox game, you end up writing many standalone elements that happen in the same persistent world, but all too often they seem disconnected and the world, as a result, feels disjointed. Drawing connections between the stories helps pull the world together and make it feel like a consistent whole. That's what Akharist does - his involvement brings one story closer to another because both share elements crucial to the story. And this is exactly what Sands and Nocturne fail to do. Unlike Akharist, there's really nothing about the mission they show up in that's at all specific to them. In Faultline, Sands was selected because of his leadership skills - he was bold, aggressive and smart enough to find unorthodox interpretations of complex problems. Nocturne showed up there because she's conniving, opportunistic and, frankly, fiercely disloyal to Arachnos.

Neither of those people's reasons for being in Faultline are relevant to them showing up in SSA2.2, where they appear as, essentially, goons. In fact, considering Ghost Widow was involved, a much more applicable support crew for her would have consisted of Wretch, her constant companion and bodyguard, and Veluta Lunata, the woman so loyal to Ghost Widow she murdered her lover on her behest and bound his psyche to herself as a spirit. These are characters for whom a cameo would have specifically made sense and for whom it might have actually served as character development. Which brings us to another reason why reusing existing characters can be good: It can deliver character development quickly and with little effort by using context to tell a story the writer doesn't need to.

Having a character show up in someone else's story is a powerful tool for the development of that character, just by means of implication. For instance, having Melvin Langley show up in Operation: World Wide Red as a hardcore operative working under Crimson is awesome. When last we saw him in Missing Melvin and the Mysterious Malta Group (alliteration, ho!) he was a poor CIA clerk that got caught in over his head, and last we saw of him was rescuing the inexperienced bumbling man, with him swearing to help fight the Malta Group. I, for one, didn't believe he had it in him, yet here he is some levels later performing quite an impressive feat of intelligence gathering. It makes sense for the story, it ties it to another story and it progresses Melvin's character at the same time.

None of this is the case for either Sands or Nocturne, which is why their appearance stands out so much. In fact, not only is this not a case of character progression, it's a case of character regression. Sands goes from an enterprising leader and rising star among the arbiters with the ambition and skill to possibly rival even Daos into just a grunt for Ghost Widow. Nocturne, in turn, goes from a cunning, conniving manipulator willing and able to use anyone for her own ends, into - again - a grunt for ghost widow. This appearance reduces these two people from protagonist in their own right and characters with depth and personality into palette-swap goons, and that's a really bad way to use them. It's bad for the story and it's bad for the characters.

What I'd take from all of this is the following: If you're going to reuse an existing character, ask yourself whether that character has anything to gain from being in the story and whether the story has anything to gain from having that character in it. If the answer to either question is "no," then just make up a new character that makes sense and take the time to give that new character some personality. You never know - a future writer might see it fit to use that throwaway character of yours in his own story.

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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 agree with your assessment, Sam, but I'll say this for Arbiter Sands (not so much for Nocturne): Sometimes you just pick a character to evoke an emotional response from the player.

Arbiter Sands is one of those characters who is guaranteed to evoke a reaction from any player who encountered him during the Faultline Saga. My reaction to Nocturne was pretty much "Who is this?" whereas my reaction to going around the next corner was "Hey, it's Arbiter Sands! This should be good!"

There's a class of villain who is less an opponent than he is a foil; the kind of villain that respects your abilities and you end up respecting his abilities in turn so that you become a kind of peers. You see this kind of relationship a lot in spy stories, where the antagonist and protagonist exist in a world where negotiation is as much a survival trait as weapon expertise, so they learn to talk first and shoot second. Sands is the sort of villain who would say "Must we engage in this pointless brawling yet again?" and my hero might well decide to sit down with a pitcher of beer or a bottle of wine and "battle" with him verbally instead of physically. He's the embodiment of the concept that "just because we are enemies, it doesn't mean that we can't be gentlemen about it."

I think that the mission writer was shooting for an emotional reaction based on that perception of Sands rather than considering whether casting him in that role made a lot of sense from a story perspective.

I can't really say the same for Nocturne but you'll notice that SSA2.2 is a bit of a "Faultline Saga" reunion. The only primary character missing is Jim Temblor and he gets a mention even if he doesn't put in a personal appearance. This gimmick alone might account for the choices about which NPC's made guest-starring appearances.

In other words, your points are completely valid but your points ignore the influence of considerations that affect the story but are technically outside the realm of the story itself (like "Hey, wouldn't it be cute if we had a Faultline Family Reunion?").

In fact, with Doc Delilah being an archaeologist, I'll be unsurprised to see her make an appearance in the next chapter as well. With Arachnos involvement, Agent G would be easy to insert and turn the whole thing into one big grand Faultline extravaganza.

I actually hope SSA2 gets centered on Faultline. It's a cool zone, and I honestly hope they finish rebuilding.

And to bring this discussion down from the arts of writing to the work making missions, I have recently realized one of the things that I dislike about the writing in this game. And it has nothing to do with the stories themselves. It is the process.

When new powersets are deployed to beta server, the developers consider them about 2/3rds or 4/5ths done. Some of the inputs come from feedback, some from bug reports and some from metrics and datamining. But everyone expects the powers to be changed, sometimes significantly, before they can be released.

Whereas for written content, such as arcs and TFs. When they are put into beta, the developer attitude seems to be that they are done and only need to be checked for bugs. The quality or "balance" is not being checked or changed. As I recall, the cases where writing was changed (as opposed to fixed) during beta only happened after huge threadnaughts full of complaints. And SSA1 was not beta tested at all.

So if Paragon do not want to hire an editor, let the players be your editors. Communicate your intent, read the feedback and act on it, when appropriate.

Something occurs to me, and it ties back into recent problems in writing that people have expressed, and that's the writing of people who are supposed to be friends or at least supposed to be close. Simply put, the characters who are supposed to be this don't act like it. And to keep this discussion grounded in the game, let's look at an example - the Freedom Phalanx, that poster child of "what's wring with the writing."

Now, I myself am a fan of SSA2.1, which is the latest arc to feature the Phalanx heavily, yet even there the Freedom Phalanx don't act like friends who have been together for years and saved each other's lives repeatedly. However, it's SSA1 in pretty much its entirety that is the biggest culprit here, with the way the various Phalanx members interact with each other. I believe I called them "incompetent, horrible people" at one point, but "horrible" is the key word here. I don't know how it is in the novels, but in SSA1, the various Phalanx members are complete jerks to each other, and this doesn't make sense to me.

Now, my problem may be that I'm biassed, but I consider friendship to mean something more than just cooperation. Friends aren't simply people who do favours for each other. A friend is someone you can trust, someone you can depend on, someone you would do things you normally don't want to for. A friend is the person you turn to for support in your darkest hours, not the person who CAUSES your darkest hour. A friend is someone who will understand you and support you when you fail, someone you can simply... Talk to. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just a clingy person who gets attached to people too easily and is too lenient of friends' failings, but I still don't think that friends should be jerks to each other just as standard practice. Not if it's played straight.

The Freedom Phalanx, thus, really don't come off as friends. What they come off, if I have to be honest, is contestants in Survivor or Big Brother or some other such low-brow show that thrives on pitting people against each other for the sake of petty drama. They act without a feeling of any real closeness, of any real... Bond. It never feels to me like one of them would offer comfort to another who is grieving, it never feels like one would abandon pride and dignity for the sake of another. At no point does it feel like these people will stand up for each other when the chips are down. Even Manticore and Psyche fail to sell me on this, because while the angsty drama and the "NOOO!!!" are all there, the actual quiet affection simply isn't present.

It's been said before that SSA1 is all payoff and no setup, and no - it wasn't me who said it first. This contributes to the story really not having any quiet, introspective moments in which we can observe the bonds of friendship we are told exist between these characters. Instead, we're simply told they exist and are then shown these bonds breaking, and that just doesn't work. This, to me, is what's missing from the game. A long time ago, I asked about what "tender" moments this game has, and the list we came up with was depressingly short. To me, this undermines the drama, undermines the friendship and outright sinks the story that was meant to be told about the freedom phalanx. Because when we're allowed to see the tenderness, care, understanding and friendship between two characters, then we have a reason to care when those bonds are tested. But the story never stops to examine this. We chase the plot with great speed, leaving no time for establishing the setting.

There is a "thing" in contemporary writing that I really don't like. There is this notion that a story involving functioning adults who get along is somehow boring and not exciting. If there isn't internal conflict within the group of heroes, if most of the problems don't stem from the heroes acting like jackasses, then the story would have solved itself immediately. After all, if Manticore were not an idiot, much of SSA1 wouldn't have happened. But this, to me, is just backwards writing where the ends are determined and the only possible way to get them is to make the heroes incompetent and jerkish.

I like scenes of people getting along. I like scenes where the going gets tough and the heroes band together. I like scenes of a character opening up to another and reaching out. I enjoy stories of functioning, emotionally mature adults acting like functioning, emotionally mature adults, and it's entirely possible for these stories to have plots which test these bonds and this maturity nevertheless. Because that is the only way for me to care, and that is the only way to make it feel real.

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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.

While I generally agree, I am compelled to offer the counterexample of TNG season 1, which showed that a group of perfect people from a (supposedly) perfect society who all get along all the time and have no interpersonal drama at all, by Word of God, are about as exciting to watch as drying paint. Beige paint.

(It didn't help that they often came across as so smug and patronizing toward other "less enlightened" societies that one wanted to push their faces in.)