Anime and CoX

You're always my favorite dance partner, after all. You'll learn to tango eventually, Sam. It would help if you actually listened to the music.

haha, no.

The rules of what guns can and cannot do within reality are different from those of fiction. Said rules are clearly documented. If you are arguing that guns and swords should operate less upon the rules that fiction has established over the course of history, and more towards what you believe(often wrongly, but let's ignore that for a second) they should do, based upon a desire for these things to be treated in a way that fosters more "believability", you are arguing in favor of more "realism". If you are arguing that these things be treated with more "gravitas", that the consequences of such things should be handled more severely, for the sake of the style of the narrative, you are asking for an overall darkening of the tone, AKA "Grittiness" The fact that you are arguing for both simultaneously is you arguing for more "Gritty Realness"

okay.
It happens because it's a superhero story. Or an action movie. Or even just a work of fiction and works of fiction do this all the time. Tropes are not bad, Sam.

You're using a very odd use of the phrase "dramatic storytelling" if you think characters not dying makes it impossible

Okay? unrelated entirely.


Hypothetically, yes. In practice, no. Life tends to be a lot crappier and less stylized than fiction. Any attempt to ground something in reality will deal with the realistic ramifications of the actions people take. Which can get depressing, I.e. "gritty"

Yup. This is mostly out of a desire to cater to a specific audience or evoke a specific response via stylistic means.

they tend to overlap due to life being kinda gritty. Particularly in any story dealing with physical conflict.
This is kind of a grey(hah) area. For instance, is a story that explores the consequences of a Hero's murder of a "bad guy" on others that serves to make said character seem less "clean" "Gritty" for it's darkness and moral ambiguity, or "real" for it's accurate handling of the consequences of murder and the after effects of death, as well as the complicated nature of conflict?
You're going to need to come back to some common ground for me, there.
I could, and probably will, google it, but you need to actually talk about what you're using as an example if you're going to use it as an example.

It works perfectly well within the established confines of the genre. The fact that you want to talk about super heroes while ignoring the ones you don't personally like is pretty arbitrary indeed.



All of them are armed with potentially lethal weapons, is my point. The only thing you want is for certain things to have a certain stylistic storytelling element(death and dismemberment) automatically assigned to them.

If a super power is some how inherently less dangerous than a gun, it isn't very "super" at all, now is it?

You could always want to kill monsters as efficiently or cheaply as possible and be willing to be more careful when dealing with people. Really, you're hamstringing the idea that every single human being(or other thing) in a Setting has access to the same exact resources, skills, intentions e.t.c. when you make this argument.

Soooo, every character, then?

Kay.

We don't suffer them, our fictional avatars do, within a world that has different standards(dictated by the genre) than our own.

I'll stop doing it when you come up with a good reason why your opinion matters. Or is accurate. Or is based in a logical progression instead of just "how I feel" At the end, you're saying "I just don't like it" and that's fine so long as you realize that. That's not based in something you ca accurately defend in any way. We're both wrong. You just like to tell people what they can and cannot do.

There's also the thing where you choose to ignore wide swathes of precedent and pretty much just do not seem to like or know much about superheroes at all but feel the need to discuss them.

Here it comes..

That is what you are supposed to do.

Does not matter in the slightest.
Okay, this is going in a circle. The point here is. Your argument looks like. Sounds like. And Seems to be in every way, shape and form, the exact same argument of "That's not what would really happen, this needs more murder" You're a 90's comic writer defending.. well... 90's comics. You fail the duck test, Sam.


Or exist in this game, by your logic.
I can queue up a melee attack and have it animate and "kill" an enemy even as they are miles away from the actual end of my sword.

The Visuals of the powers are to be interpreted at the whims of the players, as the game cannot, and should not, explicitly dictate what they are "doing" as that would be far too limiting. For one thing, it would have to decide on a particular cause and effect. Muscles tensing as you heft your titan weapon, for instance. Even if your character has no physical body. You say your character is actually a haunted axe? Nope. Human, See/hear the muscles?

If the game went so far as to give a Mortal Kombat style x-ray of each attack going through the flesh of each enemy you'd have a point. If attacks had to physically hit or miss like true action games and fighting games, instead of characters shooting numbers at each other, those numbers rolling dice at each other, and then animations playing, you'd have a point. But it doesn't, and they don't, and pretty much every character you've ever made benefits in terms of creative freedom from it.

The rules of what guns can and cannot do are bent the minute they enter most fictional universes as what they actually do tends to not be very entertaining to watch or read or do. Further, they often exceed or fail to match up to the average person's expectations of what they should do.

No one is bending the rules. You're ignoring them.
The rules are not bent until the narrative explicitly says so. Usually via the exact same means of explaining it. "This is being done because of super powers" until that point, everything functions within the realm of possibility and/or "Normality" of the narrative. Jump on top of a two story building from the ground? That's what people can do in this world. It's only "special" if the narrative says so.

Hole of what, exactly?

Why?(the point being there can only be one or two of such people, I'm assuming)
Are there many stories that have people being directly visibly shot in the head that don't also have those people dying without some type of powers?. Pretty sure when guns are used in non-lethal ways in fiction they tend to have non-lethal effects.
That is pretty much the most unremarkable aspect of both of those characters.
Not even in the slightest. Not even in the very best adaptations where they don't share the world with hundreds of other super-heroes.

The fact that your characters are or are not very traditionally "heroic" has nothing to do with this. Please stop bringing your emotional baggage with other people about tangentially related topics into discussions.

The real world is full of non-killers. Many of them even engage in direct physical conflict with each other on a regular basis.
In fact, not killing people is a pretty basic thing that everyone is more or less accepted and expected to do naturally.
Killing people is generally more the unique, impaction decision than not.
Ruroni Kenshin isn't really a good comparison simply because his sword actually has the blade on the wrong side, hence he's essentially using a tool that looks like a weapon as a weapon.

He's using a claw hammer, hammer side down.

You didn't bring it up, though so that's not really your fault.

So your problem is with suspension of disbelief, which does involve the line between what you'll accept as real enough and not. You're just not trusting that a guy can be so improbably lucky that every piece of the shell misses vital organs for every shot. Or that bladed weaponry can move clean through a body and only hurt as much as a fist.

I've sort of always tried to express this to you, Sam. Not trying to be argumentative but just saying.

Entertainment is entertainment and we should never try to limit ourselves to what type of entertainment we 'prefer' because tastes change over time. I remember when I used to watch and love WWF wrestling back in elementary/junior high. In highschool, WWE seemed like utter crap because of how fake it was. Now, I can watch WWE with my nephews and actually enjoy it if only to say to myself "wtf, Undertaker is still out there with his old-***, bustin foos? Awesome".

If I were to give you some homework, I'd tell you to finish A future lost and then for your next posted story, make it as crazy, campy and/or ridiculous as you can stand. For the fun of it

If that were the case, they'd have waited until much closer to B&S's release before cancelling the game.

On the other hand, they announced the cancellation the week after Guild Wars 2 was released...

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

Ow. x.o

On a side note, my character was heavily inspired by anime, and in my totally unbiased opinion - she turned out fine.

@Kyuu

That's not anime. Not even close, as a point of fact. While the connotation of anime as "Japanese animation" hasn't been true for ages when a large number of nations started producing works in that style, Korean animation really never fit the "anime" mould very well. That doesn't make it better or worse, it just makes it as much anime as the JLA or Teen Titans Cartoons.

Also, I seem to have missed a few comments from way back when:

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.

You're arguing for going out of my comfort zone, and that simply isn't going to happen. Tastes change, but my understanding of those tastes has only gotten stronger over the years. I can tell, at a glance, whether I'll like something or hate it and be pretty much on the money 99% of the time.

Consider the Avatar: The Legend of Korra. From the very first episode I saw, something bugged me about it. I didn't like the show, but I LOOOVED The Last Airbender cartoon, so I kept watching. That was a mistake, and has earned the Legend of Korra the place as the worst god damn cartoon I've ever seen in my life and the only one that has caused me to get off my *** and punch inanimate objects. Ever. No piece of entertainment has ever actually made me punch things. Made me want to, sure - we all have those, but we're usually smarter than that. This one caused me to hurt my arm.

And the real fun of it is I KNEW it would be crap from the very intro sequence. I suspected, but I couldn't believe the creators of such great cartoons could produce anything bad. I refused to trust my judgement, and I paid the price. I walked around sick to my stomach and with a pounding headache for three whole days after finishing the season. And I know you think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Ask anyone who knows me in person and they'll tell you what state that left me in. My mother thought I was ill.

I'm not going to go out of my comfort zone for more than an idle look again. Why would I?

No. "Believability" is what makes me enjoy the stories I tell, and that enjoyment is what gives me the strength to like them. I don't mind starting with a ridiculous goofy basis, such as my Slime Girl. But if I can't spin that into a serious story, then I have no interest in writing it. That's like saying "Finish what you're doing, then pull all of your fingernails out of your fingers with rusty pliers." Sure, I have a pair of rusty pliers and my fingernails are quite long at the moment so it should be pretty easy. But I'm not going to do it because I don't want to go through that kind of pain.

I take my entertainment seriously because if I can't take it seriously, then it's not entertaining.

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.

Indeed.

As for taking entertainment seriously, that's what those executive jobs in the entertainment industry is for. If I like a form of entertainment, I'll enjoy it for it. If I don't, I don't. I think that's the difference between enjoying and critiquing. One you're ending up expressing an event you probably barely tolerated and force yourself to re-experience despite your distaste...unless you're getting paid or getting recognition, critiquing is probably bad for your overall health.

It IS bad for my own health. I found that out first-hand. And I have only myself to blame. I knew it was bad from the very beginning, but I was convinced my impressions were wrong and I should give the show a chance. Actually, no - I blame the creators. They are... Or were better than this. I watched this thing purely on my faith in them, even though I KNEW it wasn't going to turn out go. That's up until mid way. After that, I watched because I could not believe the train wreck I was seeing, hoping against all hope that SOMETHING would happen to pay off for all of this. It didn't.

Yes, it was stupid. I know that NOW. And it's why I'm not going to give more than a courtesy glance at stuff that looks like I won't like it unless I have DAMN good reason to. I would never have given Star Trek a glance were it not for finding out I didn't have to play one of the established races, and it turns out it's an awesome game. So I'd have missed that, sure. But then, I that lesson learned also saved me from the Jagged Alliance remake. I still spent more time than I should have with this game, just purely based on the hype people were giving the original, but I quit while I was ahead and before the game wasted my time or pissed me off.

The trouble is, I can't help critiquing what I'm seeing. I fancy myself a writer, so I'm always looking for new ideas. What this means is I can't just go "I like this!" If I like it, I want to use it. To use it, I need to know exactly what it is that works and why it works. If I hate it, I want to avoid it, so I need to know what fails and why it sucks. I lost my taste for idle idle entertainment years ago, unfortunately.

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.