As a general rule I restrict how many "character x who has been on the sidelines of the story actually fixes things for the main protagonists" events I include. It can work really well if the twist has been properly telegraphed and surprises the reader, but each time it happenes it gets harder to pull it again.

The very worst offender ever (in my biased opinion), was Brian Bendis in his first Avengers story, Avengers Diasassembled, a plotline so bad it broke me of a lifetime's habit of collecting the series. In that the Avengers are attacked by one of their own, the Scarlet Witch, who murders a number of team-mates including her former husband. The rest, about thirty of them, stand and watch in dismat as their mansion burns; not one of them tries to put it out. Fortunately, the whole team is rescued in issue four by the sudden appearance of then-non-member Doctor Strange, who waves his hands and solves the problem for them. This isn so utterly anticlimactic and such appalling plotting that it would make even for bad fan fiction.

So, burned by that, I try not to repeat Bendis' mistakes by doing the "previously unsuspected character robs the heroes of their victory" plot, and I limit the only-sometimes-cool "character x quietly flanks everyone and saves the day" for rare occasions.

This is especially important when one's archvillain character could probably walk in at the end of every storyline and solve things if one was being careless.




She;s probably emotially too young for the current team, then. That's why they're now the contradictory Senior Junior programme. They're college-aged so they discuss sex and they probably swear and drink. Most of them have active love lives. If, say, Samantha Featherstone (15), or Magweed and Griffin (13) were there they would be more restrained, like babysitters. 18-year old Kerry is pretty fond of her niece Mags but there are some things she wouldn't talk about with her and some situations she wouldn't drag her into that she would never hesitate to do with FA.

Fortunately, having a Senior Junior team now leaves the way open for the Junior Junior team, the next generation!




Yuki is probably one of the more alien women to Vespiir. Caph doesn't really use robotics or even mechanised prosthetics, so that's strange to Vespiir. Machine-using, mission-oriented Yuki is really a typical leman, whom pleasure slaves generally both fear and patronise. Masters sometimes use lemans to discipline pleasure slaves but otherwise pleasure slaves see them as being crude jumped-up domestics.

We saw a bit of this with the leman Kriije, who had a lot of resentment over not being born high enough to become a pleasure slave (her father was a serf, not a master) and who clawed her way to the top of the leman league but hit a glass ceiling.

Vespiir would never look down on a leman, especially one like Yuki, but it does create yet another division. Yuki is Not Like Her, pretty much like Liu Xi is like her.




Just going somewhere without her immediate clan-sisters would be a big step.




Who's Picard, then?