Tales of the Parodyverse >> View Post
·
Post By
HH

In Reply To
Anime Jason 
Owner

Location: Here
Member Since: Sun Sep 12, 2004
Posts: 2,834
Subj: Proud of his hubris
Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2016 at 08:37:54 am EST (Viewed 1 times)
Reply Subj: It really is!
Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2016 at 06:07:54 pm EST (Viewed 413 times)



    Quote:


      Quote:
      Did you ever estabish why Lara has chosen to migrate to the Parodyverse rather than stay at home?



    Quote:
    Boredom, and a desire to see something new. Since then, she's made friends, and has to balance living in two places. Except back home, she has kind of isolated herself to hide from being a minor celebrity, so she has very few close friends there now.


That explains somewhat why she shuns the spotlight in the PV.


    Quote:
    Eventually, either here or in novel form, I'll get to stories of what she does at home.


Jolly good.


    Quote:


      Quote:
      The Hood feels the need to fix things. His tragic flaw is that he believes only he can do it.



    Quote:
    Now that's someone who really needs to talk to Faite. He could probably benefit from her hundreds of years of experience learning the futility of trying to fix mistakes of the past.


It's his basic limitation, the thing that makes him a villain rather than a hero. He genuinely believes that his actions are justified because of all the injustice that only he can address. Someone has to make the tough calls, and clearly the powers that be who sustain the current system (cosmic powers, not just earthly ones) are not doing their job. People suffer and die and things don't make sense. From his perspective, only he has the insight and ability to make things work.

And yes, that makes him mad. Like most archvillains, if only he could overcome one fatal flaw he'd be a great hero. But he never will.

As for Faite, like all other major beings with the power to improve things who elect (for what are probably very good reasons) not to, the Hood ultimately holds her culpable of neglect. It's like the atheist railing that if God existed he should fix poverty and end suffering.

The Hood even has something of a point, since we've established in stories that the Parodyverse was an artificial creation of the mysterious metatextual "Creators" who made it a place for their silly stories and narrative investigations. The Wonderwall is a metaphor for the barrier between the universe of stories and the world the creators inhabit. The Hood blames the Creators for the suffering in the Parodyverse in the same way as we might blame a pet owner for mistreating a dog they bought. His long-term goal is to fix the Parodyverse by escaping it and destroying the Creators.

And like all madness, there's internal logic as well as fallacy. The PV was created for its creators' amusement. Those creators do abuse the being in there, consistently endangering and tormenting them with plot twists, and then lose interest and abandon them to their misery. From the point of view of characters in a story, the author is their worst enemy.

The Wonderwall is really only relevant as a barrier, then, when trying to transit from a story-based multiverse into a "real" physics-driven one that doesn't sustain magic and superheroes etc. Lara and Keiko and many other characters can transit to the PV from their similarly fictional (if less improbable) worlds without ever worrying about that barrier. But Visionary can't cross over to call upon Adam Diller and the Hood can't appear to murder me - yet.



    Quote:


      Quote:
      So we're talking about electromagnetic absortion and projection over a grand scale.



    Quote:
    Something like that. It makes it very hard for anyone to take her power away entirely, unless they send her someplace with no energy *and* get her to drain what she already has stored.



    Quote:
    Why did I do it that way? Because it's more complicated and interesting to see enemies forced to try and cripple her emotionally than simply take her power away each time. An enemy can only take Hatman's hats away so many times before it starts to look like a crutch.


What's the mechanism by which she processes and stores the power? Is it some biological process or some kind of weirder quantum thing? She's somehow drawing energy across distance and storing it, but where? You mentioned a kind of sub-space that might be like a storage bank for her.


    Quote:
    One of Lara's friends back home taught her how to fight without using her powers. Not because she anticipated Lara losing her power, but because she believed it would focus her better. And it worked, because now Lara depends on her power less and on her brain more.


That's always smart. One of the storylines I never got round to doing, but might if I ever do more Untold Tales after the current plotline, includes a plot where one day all superpowers vanish from the Parodyverse. Someone has suspended the law of nature that exists there but not in our world that enables magic and weird science to work. It's suddenly a world without superpowers, without wacky SF devices, a universe without cosmic entities.

But that wouln't mean there were no bad guys who might take advantage of the shift in power. In a world where suddenly there's no super-team to stop your war or terrorism the advantage goes to those who excel at corporate aggression and military force. And of course it becomes open season on the now-unpowered former heroes.



    Quote:


      Quote:

        Quote:
        The one feature she hasn't quite mastered yet is siphoning directly from the universe and releasing massive amounts of energy. She has pulled that off once or twice, but doesn't know how to do it consciously.

      Quote:

        Quote:
        That's a bit like Superman's new trick.



    Quote:
    I don't read Superman anymore. Also, while Lara hasn't mastered it, she also isn't really trying to. She's acutely aware of the danger of it. She believes her powers are in balance with the universe, and if she abuses that by siphoning all the incoming energy through herself, it could cause damage she couldn't even imagine.


I'm not following Superman myself, but I'm given to understand that he has learned how to burn off his stored solar energy in one massive burst, leaving him de-powered for around twenty-four hours afterwards.






Posted with Mozilla Firefox 43.0 on Windows XP
On Topic™ © 2003-2024 Powermad Software
Copyright © 2003-2024 by Powermad Software