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Reply Subj: It's a dead franchise by now. Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2010 at 09:34:12 am EDT (Viewed 856 times) | |||||||
Quote: Quote: Alcheman's got a different kind of experience, having even led a superhero team before. Ham Boy has the advantage of a full Juniors training. Citizen Z may not remember how she knows it but she's got years of experience too.Quote: Even so, that still means Liu Xi has the most direct experience of anyone. It's going to be scary for her when they start looking to her for leadership, since she's been trying to hide in the background for so long. The newbies will be looking to her with the question, "What would Hatman do?"Well, as I was writing this (and the five bits I haven't posted yet) I found myself naturally playing Liu Xi as the kind one. Quote: Quote: Vinnie's trying something that Xander never attempted, which is to be a working (acting) sorcerer supreme and a member of a superhero team. There may be a reason why the much more experience Xander never tried it.Quote: Not to mention acting as Sorcerer Supreme while overtly in love with someone.Vinnie's never been good at relationships. Quote: Quote: It's a story I intend to get to but I want to do a couple of LL adventures first. The one after this may well progress the Slithis subplot somewhat.Quote: Are you implying Vinnie's family would invite Slithis to dinner with Liu Xi just to annoy Vinnie?No, they'd probably want to set Slithis up with one of Vinnie's sisters (probably Golgotha, she's got a thing for necromancers; besides Threnody tends to scare men and Lucifera's a bit young, and has just started as a freshman at Paradopolis U.). So far none of the young De Soths have settled down and started breeding the next generation of evil sorcerers. Quote: Quote: I imaginbe with the Void Spectre Faite would pick her fight carefully. He's too powerful for casual provocation so she'd need to wait her moment and take what advantage she could find. Her main concern would probably be making sure that she didn't provide a trail back to the Parodyverse for him to use as a lifeline.Quote: Note that I said "annoy" - Faite's specialty is being subtle. She has eons of experience, and has learned over that time that the best way to destroy an enemy is to trip them up with their own faults. If it results in their own death that's a bonus.Quote: Generally she would just watch his plans and throw obstacles in the way that she knows would cause the plan to blow up in his face. For instance if the Void Spectre decided to try and punch through via a dimensional gateway built by Al B Harper at EEE, Faite would arrange for it to explode (it's not like that hasn't happened at EEE before, so they're prepared for it). And it would be the Void Spectre's own tendency not to see that coming which would doom his attempt.Again, my problem with using Faite or any all-powerful intervention type is that it kills drama. It's why Odin needs to enter the Odinsleep every ten minutes and why eventually lots of these uber-parent or amazing mega-prodigies have to either die (c.f. Marvel's Zeus & Odin, Dumbledore) or go off to another plance of existence or something. The point is that for every crisis or problem in the Parodyverse there's dozens of characters who could swoop in and fix it - but then there's no story; so we have to assume that there are unknowable cosmic reasons why they don't. Quote: That also means she's more likely to make changes that help out friends, because they will understand them and not attempt to reverse them.To me that reads "Faite's friends have a get-out-of-jail-free card and can't ever accomplish anything on their own without an all-powerful safety net". To put it another way: the Hooded Hood, being designed as an archvillain and therefore being more powerful and with wider-ranging abilities than the average heroic protagonist, theoretically has "do anything" powers. I try to be very careful to show that there are consequences to what he does and therefore limits to them. I restrain myself from having the Hood walk in to every situation and interfere just to show how cool he is - it's get old fast. I try to make sure that if the Hood's there it's for a solid storytelling reason, otherwise he just becomes a deus et machina and modern audiences require proper set-up and justification for such endings. Now when some major baddie (that I've set up with a plot) is going to do something that interferes with or threatenes the Hood's long range plans (that I've established) then I sometimes throw the Hood in there to twist the plot. It's sometimes fun to see one villain go up against another, and by virtue of his long history in the PV and his general established character the Hood is usually the one readers are cheering for. But even then I wouldn't want the Hood to take away the victory from the characters whose struggles we've been following, and I wouldn't want readers to feel the heroes were "safe" with the knowledge that he'll drop in and rescue them. That's one good thing about him being a villain - he's not nice. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I don't really want to write Faite or any other mega-power like the Chronicler or the Family of the Pointless against another mega-power like the Void Spectre. It basically gets down to a theoretical abilities pissing content. I'll just skirt round that stuff as usual and folks can fill in their own blanks as they please. | |||||||
