Anime and CoX

WHY DOES HE HAVE A BEARD?!?!?!

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

-
SUPPORT - IT'S NOT JUST A GROUPING OF ATs
-
More Than a Game
-

"Anime" is like "Live Action" - seeing one or two and writing off all live action films because of it would be silly. Same with anime.

Yes diehards in the wool like myself requires a Japanese production origin for something to be classified as anime or a Japanese artist/author to be called manga. I believe the word anime is a borrowed word from the French, since it's always rendered in Katakana in print.

As for others not making a distinction, true enough since Æon Flux is often classified as anime when it's entirely American in origin but art style is obviously very different than most western character designs. Heck there are a lot of people who believe Avatar: The Last Airbender is anime, again American in origin.

That's completely fine, but you could also think of them as the Japanese equivalent of George Lucas. In their early days (when others were footing the bill), there were a lot more checks and balances, which kept their work closer to cultural standards but had enough of their personal flair to set them apart. As their wallets grew, those external checks and balances subsided, and their stuff got kinda... weird.

Of course, unlike Lucas, they're not a one-trick pony, constantly remaking and undoing their original source of popularity. (Unless you count giant robot anime as a one-trick pony, anyway.)

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

So you just have a chip on your shoulder against Aquaman, then. 'Cause in JL and JLU he both takes himself seriously and isn't lame at all.

Toss in his appearances in Young Justice as well and it's entirely possible to make a good non-Superfriends Aquaman.

I'll admit to harboring a grudge against Aqua Man for the extreme lameness of years past, but giving him a gritty 1990s reboot (a decade late) didn't really help.

"He's got a hook for a hand now," says DC, "isn't that awesome?"
"Meh," says the reader base.
"O-okay... how about a magic shape-shifting water hand!?!"
"Are you friggin' kidding me...?" replies the rest of the world.




I still think the only way to make Aqua Man entertaining is to completely embrace how campy the character is as a concept. Admit the joke, embrace the joke, then turn it around and make it awesome.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Allow me to introduce you to a guy named "Superman"......

Last I checked, only in the most fringe story lines did he have the kind of power necessary to destroy a planet, and even then almost certainly not with a single attack.

Superman's general power level is also able to be approximated in the game. (It was effectively held by Statesman, the apex of super powered individuals within the CoX universe.)

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

That was Darkseid in the final episode of the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, yeah. And it wasn't that he was worried about causing collateral damage, it was that he knew that Darkseid could actually take one of his full-powered attacks without dying. (Like Batman, Supes doesn't kill.)

Note that his full power attack does not destroy any planets.



But Kryptonite isn't Superman's only weakness... just the most convenient one. He can be beaten with physical strength (Doomsday, other Kryptonians), and he has no real defense against magical attacks beyond his physical resilience, or any real psychic defenses at all.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Giving him a gritty reboot would be making him into a generic Liefeld character; the last Atlantean that wants to tear apart the surface world or something stupid like that.

What they actually did was make him more serious and respectable. Like they did with Batman, who was originally far more campy and lame than Aquaman ever was.

Honestly, that's pretty much how I see him. He's like an angry Captain Planet that really only cares about the water-covered portions of the Earth.

My own perception might be off base, but I still think he's pretty lame.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I expected that about 5 pages ago!

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

I never bought that, personally. Unless you want to go with video game logic of people getting shot with a rifle just losing hit points (or the DBZ logic of people being exploded losing "energy") rather than suffering internal and external injuries, you're just hamstringing your action. Look at the 90s Fox cartoon X-Men - you had a Wolverine who had these badass claws, which he never got to use because... Well, he'd draw blood and sever heads otherwise. So he mostly kicked people with his claws out.

As far as I'm concerned, if you create a story involving deadly weapons and cosmic powers, trying to come up with "creative" solutions to keep your characters from killing people is just hamstringing your narrative. Sure, if you make the story ABOUT that, you can pull it off, but really... How many stories about that do we really need?

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.

About the same number as the amount of stories of people murdering and maiming each other?

Death in writing is neither a positive or negative, it's simply a "thing". I'm not entirely sure what your point here is besides a call for more "gritty realism" or some such.

If that's the "point" you inferred from what I wrote, then you inferred wrong. I'm merely saying that if you don't want to involve killing in your story, it becomes more and more cumbersome to do so the more your story goes into territory where that's unavoidable. It's like making a war movie where no-one gets killed - you could, but you can pretty much only make one movie like this since THAT will be the point of the movie.

Basically, if you give your character bladed claws or a gun, then NOT having him use those for what they're designed just makes the story awkward. And again, you can - Fox Kids did it with the X-Men, and it got very silly very fast. I can see Superman not wanting to kill since his powers aren't naturally destructive, sure. Not unless he wants to make them so. But I draw the line when a man with a gun only aims for limb shots or a man with fire powers only uses "healing fire" or sucks the oxygen out of the air or something.

If you want a hero to not kill, you need to take care to give him powers that aren't imminently lethal. If you DO give him lethal powers but have him only ever use "the blunt edge of the sword," then I'm not going to buy that.

I'm not advocating "gritty realism." I'm advocating less "I'm arresting them with shotgun blasts!" arguing.

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.

No not really, I've just simplified your very long post in a way that offends you.

Your definition of what territory is "unavoidable" hinges on your interpretation of things which are, ultimately, a stylistic choice.

You are arguing for more "Realism" in stories that contain certain things. That the consequences of actions performed conform to your ideas of what "Should" happen.

If a gun is in the story it's more "real" (read "gritty") and must be handled as such, according to your argument. Even though the very nature of filmed combat of even the most "grounded" kind is so completely removed from what actual combat is like: Quick, Simple, Dirty, Confusing, and Unfun to watch, That your argument is drawing the same completely arbitrary line you yourself tend to draw at the idea of "unpowered" characters. Basically, what you're saying is "That's unbelievable" Well, so is the very idea that we can even understand what is going on, because fights aren't like that.

I'm going to assume we're talking about purely the action and, not, you know, the entire story being about a character's fighting methodology. Because that is ridiculous.

I don't really see the "problem" here of creating unique applications of ideas.
Shooting a guy? okay, cool.
Shooting a wall, ricocheting off three light fixtures, and hitting his gun? stylistically cool.

Having characters engage in violent confrontation and not having them constantly being harmed in the way normal people are actually harmed doesn't seem to make the story "awkward" in your mindset. People are neither as Fragile nor as Durable as you seem to think they are. I know of just as many people who've survived gunshots to the head as have died from a tumble down the stairs.
You're sort of vastly underestimating super strength there. It's actually a pretty common method to inject drama and/or pathos into Superman stories to show how very hard he has to try not to murder pretty much everyone he touches accidentally.
It's Showa-era Kamen rider Cliche that the Rider of the day will angst about his uncontrollable freakish strength every few episodes, usually while he tries to hug a puppy or child and inevitably wounds it.
When exactly are you going to grasp that the things you personally feel are neither facts nor genre/medium defining concepts?

If people aren't killed with said powers within the narrative than they aren't imminently lethal within the confines of the narrative.

People can kill each other with their bare, unpowered hands. They can do it accidentally even. You can be knocked unconscious and fall on someone smaller than you a certain way and smother them to death.

you really are
This is pretty much exactly what it looks like.

It doesn't offend me, it's simply wrong. If anything, it should offend you because it's a straw man, but that's your own deal.

No, I'm not arguing for realism, else I wouldn't have brought up Superman. I'm arguing for believability. Those are not the same things. I can believe that a man can run faster than a speeding bullet and jump tall buildings in a single leap. I know that's impossible, but within the realm of super heroes, I can believe it. I can believe that a man whose key power is invulnerability can be shot with an 88 anti-tank howitzer and not suffer serious damage. I know it's not possible, but within the world of super heroes, I can believe it.

I can't believe that a man is shot in the chest with a shotgun and walks it off unless the story has a specific explanation for why this happens, and the more characters you come up with that have that specific explanation, the weaker it becomes. It's the same reason why hospital reclimators in City of Heroes make dramatic storytelling impossible and why the story ignores them so often. Because if the story didn't ignore them, then Sister Psyche would never have died from an arrow to the chest. She would have been teleported to the hospital and insta-healed.

"Real" and "gritty" are not the same thing, either. Most "gritty realism" games, movies and otherwise stories are hugely unreal. SSA1 in nearly its entirety is gritty, but it's in no way realistic because it deals with super heroes. "Realism" is a technical term while "grit" is a stylistic one. Realism is a question of technicalities and details, whereas grit is a broader storytelling concept. A "gritty" story is pretty much the opposite of a romantic one - it's a story where good doesn't win because it's doing the right thing, people die, hearts are broken and the plot bends over backwards for the sake of shocking plot twists and unpleasant plot developments.

Bible Black in all its incarnations is a "gritty" story, but it's nothing at all like a "real" one, for a variety of reasons.

It's not arbitrary at all. You simply choose to label it as such. I don't want to assume why that is - whether you have such character or what - but you can't play an "unpowered" character in this game's higher levels unless you do a radical mental reimagining of what's actually taking place on the screen. I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying you have to take significant liberties with the material you're working with.

Yes, I am. There's nothing wrong with a character who refuses to kill. It's actually quite admirable, though it can get tedious if the story keeps bringing the problem up. However, characters who refuse to kill don't tend to arm themselves with lethal weapons, and it's those that do which I don't buy. It's a sci-fi magical fantasy world of super heroes. If you don't want to kill people, you don't arm yourself with knives, guns and grenades. You pick a sonic rifle or sleep gas or something else that's more appropriate.

What I take issue with is a character who wields a lethal weapon for the sole purpose of wounding and never going for a kill shot. That's just taking a square peg and hammering it into a round hole.

When I talk about what's unbelievable for people to survive, I tend to go for the extreme, such as close-range shotgun blasts to the chest, high-explosive rockets to the face, sustained heavy machine gun fire, being dropped off a 40-storey building and such. You don't tend to walk away from those unless you have some kind of meta-human power which protects you. To some extent, body armour can stop low-velocity shotgun pellets, I agree, but look at the crap our characters go through. The Kronos Titan, for instance, can hit you with a barrage of high-explosive, incendiary missiles as big as you are, and those things tend to fly super-sonic.

I know people are tough, but they are not indestructible, and the end game REALLY raises the stakes of what we suffer.

When are you going to grasp that "it's just your opinion" is not an argument that works on me? I mean, I take no issue with trying it on me. Go ahead. But it's not going to work.

And unless the narrative has an explanation for it, I don't buy it. It's like Will Smith's power in Wild Wild West to survive increasingly ridiculous falls, on Indiana Jones' power to survive a mid-air plane ditch in a rubber dingy or a nuclear explosion in a fridge. I don't buy these for a dollar, but the movies they show up in are so out-of-step with reality I pretty much don't try to question them. But it doesn't mean I don't stop to tell myself that... This really shouldn't work like that.

People can kill each other with their bare, unpowered hands. They can do it accidentally even. You can be knocked unconscious and fall on someone smaller than you a certain way and smother them to death.

No, I'm really not. Care to carry on this thoughtful argument line?

Then you'd do well to check your reading glasses. I don't question how any of my characters "arrest" people with a rifle or a sword, because I don't give a rifle or a sword to a character who wouldn't use them for their intended purpose. If I had qualms about doing so, I wouldn't give them a rifle or a sword. How do you "arrest" someone by impaling him through the chest with a sharp length of bone? Well... You don't. You just impaled him through the chest. Either he's now dead since you pierced his heart, or the magic of hospital reclimators teleported him away and healed his wounds with fairy dust and crushed unicorn horns.

What I'm saying is that this argument doesn't need to exist unless you're deliberately bending the rules of what guns, swords and fire do. And if you're bending the rules, the onus is on YOU to explain it. And you can really only use the same explanation a couple of times before it starts dragging the whole fictional universe it's part of down a hole. You can have one person in the world armed with a magic no-kill gun. You can probably have another who's sort of linked to the first. But once you make guns with bullets that blow large holes in people without killing them, I start to not buy it.

Superman's no-killing policy is just fine. Batman's no-killing policy is also just fine. The two of them put together are about enough, however, since that aspect of their characters, slightly unbelievable though it may be, is a big part of what makes the two unique. They're non-killers in a world full of killers. That's a powerful statement. Creating a whole world full of non-killers, however, to the point where people claim any character who actually kills isn't a hero (and I've had that said to me on these very forums) just lose any impact that decision might have had. It's hard to buy and it really serves no purpose.

Ruronic Kenshin hitting people with the dull side of the blade, I can buy. It's his thing. The whole Samurai class hitting people with the dull of the blade, however, would make me question why their swords are even sharp to begin with.

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.