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Post By
HH

In Reply To
Anime Jason 
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Member Since: Sun Sep 12, 2004
Posts: 2,834
Subj: I'm sure he'd be pleased to hear you say so.
Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 at 04:42:37 pm EST (Viewed 1 times)
Reply Subj: They are, but it has nothing to do with the Hood this time.
Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2016 at 12:36:51 pm EST (Viewed 688 times)



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      Which is a long-winded way of saying that I wanted to take the time to define some new character interactions we hadn't seen before, such as Liu Xi/Sallym and to push some others in new ways, such as Mumph/Baroness.



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    I'm not against that at all. My reaction was more of "Oh, that actually works. I didn't think of it."


Pleased to hear it. Any time there's a character bit where the audience says that is a win.


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      I think you're already established her as a force for balance. Indeed, when Dark Thugos offered her a spot in the New Pantheon she turned him down partly because of that. Otherwise by now she might have been Goddess of Force.



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    A really uncooperative one, at that.


The process as previously described involves strong-willed infividuals travelling the near-impossible journey to the Wonderwall and a tiny percentage of them returning. The ones who come back have been "magnified", with step magnitude power-ups. The rest are absorbed into the wall.

Thugos offered Lara the opportunity - temptation - to abandon her current role and her relationship with Faite and to try such a transformation. He knew that a changed Lara might see things his way. if she didn't, then she'd be unfamiliar enough with her new power levels to be dogpiled by other New Pantheon recruits and culled for parts. Lara elected not to play the game.

I suspect behind the scenes that must have been where Faite and Thugos' powers interacted, preventing any scenario where Lara was eliminated (Faite's change) or where Lara could warn or aid the Legion (New Pantheon's change), effectively benching the problem until one side or the other had an improved position.

Of course, with all that focus on Lara/Faite, it might be suspected that nobody was looking what was happening at the other end of the Parodyverse. It's almost as if Lara was a diversion .



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      The bigger the retcon the more power it takes and the harder it is to sustain. [Nu-Hood] might erase Lara but he couldn't rewrite her as Goddess of Force.



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    True, but Lara does have one retcon-related weakness that no one else has: She had to discover this universe at some point. If things change so she never did, it makes her disappear. Additionally, things could change so she went back home earlier than she normally would have.


Her appearance is one nexus point, but one that the original Hood may well have defended in the same way that he insulated Vizh and Hatty. He made sure that Lara played a key role in the downfall of the Parody Master and the Carnifex. If the nu-Hood chopped her out of ever being in the Parodyverse then he would have to deal with those threats instead.

Winkelweald's villainous power set really gives him an unfair advantage over all the heroes - a feature of an archvillain, of course. If he wanted Lara eliminated he would make a much smaller retcon at one of her critical battles, a choice she would need to make to save somebody else that would result in some kind of unsuspected heart condition. He'd make it irrepairable after the fact to prevent Faite from fixing it at a later present and undetectable until the time of massive coronary that instantly kills. So he wouldn't retcon Lara away, he'd just retcon some life-ending event that would eliminate her from future interference.

Except that the original Hooded Hood never does that. He thinks it's sloppy and wasteful of resources. If Lara, or Hatty, or Vizh or whoever, is dead, they can no longer be used. If his enemies are dead then they can't hear him gloat over their utter downfall and defeat.

This is important narratively, in the same way that its important in Avengers comics that time-travelling Kang the Conqueror doesn't go back in time and kill the team as children because he sees it as dishonourable.

Of course the other narrative convention protects the Hood likewise. Lara doesn't arrange for an inescapable meteor strike on him in the same way that Superman doesn't fly past Luthor at high speed and just rip his head off. There are in-story moral reasons to justify out-of-story storytelling reasons.



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    Faite is sort of a joke of mine, in a way, because she has a really useful power - the ability to change things as they are *right now*, as opposed to in the past or future - but she also feels a separation from events going on, and gets involved as little as possible.


That's how pretty much all can-do-nearly-anything powers have to be played. Its an especial problem in a shared fictional universe where different writers have different characters with can-do-anything powers.

For example, off the top of my head, poster-associated can-do-anything types include:

Carrington, the (original) Shaper of Worlds
The Chronicler of Stories
The Void Spectre (associated with poster Grim Reaper)
Eggo (associated with Amazing Guy)
The Omni-Soul (possibly also one of AG's; I forget)
The Celestians
Pierson's Porter (sometimes; he was an early poster)
The rhino-thing whose name I can't remember
The Fairly-Great Old Ones (when they wake up)
Faite

I'm sure there are more.

During the early days when the PV was transitioning from a silly set of funny stories to a more ongoing framework for continuity-based stories I remember laying a lot of groundwork about how the various uber-powers interacted. I was the one who introduced the idea of the Triumverate of main cosmic office holders, who defined the Void Spectre as an outsider, and who generally and obsessively tidied things up to the point I felt I could sustain a logical plot. I was also the one who most often supplied reasons why characters of posters who had gone were no longer active and sometimes gave them conclusions (e.g. Magnetic Techbird, Grim Reaper, Hollywood V, Troia, Ziles, Pegasus et al.). At the time it seemed important to me to have an idea of how the Parodyverse's powers and principlaities interacted. In fact it got me some interesting stories./font>


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    That's also how she makes herself scarce. Changes things so right now, she's not there. If the nu-Hood tries to retcon her, she knows it's coming because it's happening *right now*. But because she can change the right now, she's not there when he tries. Must be frustrating for a retcon-er, because he knows she has a past and should be there, but she's not.


There are a good deal of Parodyverse entities whom the original Hooded Hood found trying, starting with CrazySugarfreakBoy!


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    Lara learned about her power at age 13 or so, and she's been gradually honing it since. She joined a super-team at 16-ish or so, and then quit them two years later (actually a few times during then, but came back). So by the time she reached the PV, she'd been using her power almost all the time for nearly 10 years.


I recall you wrote some stories mapping out her early years but I don't think you concluded them.

We so need links pages to the exploits of our various characters.



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    I also think Lara has a better shotgun.



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    Figuring out how to use it was just learning. She does have a much larger power reserve, though, because she draws it from all around her.


What is she drawing in, exactly? Electromagnetic potential? If so are there side effects on her nearby environment?






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