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Posted on 08/05/2004 5:47:31 PM PDT by HairOfTheDog
Eleventh Thread: Wedding Edition: The Hobbit Hole XI - No One Admitted Except on Wedding Business!
New verse:
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Upon the hearth the fire is red, |
Still round the corner there may wait |
Home is behind, the world ahead, |
I've never played the Marvel Super-Heroes RPG, but I do seem to recall reading that it went through an updating sometime recently...
Nothing? I've read very little of hers, but "The Left Hand of Darkness" is classic (wacky classic).
The "Wizard of Earthsea" trilogy, as originally written, is a young-adult fantasy with some deeper themes. Pretty much it's about a boy who becomes a wizard and spends half the first book chasing his evil shadow around the world until he learns its true name. It's got a weird narrative style that keeps it from being kiddy-lit; it's almost mythological sometimes.
Um, does that make any sense at all?
I guess I haven't learned to properly suspend my disbelief. One superhero in the world, I can buy. But having tons of them running around is just weird.
"Arrakis... Dune... Desert Planet..."
"I *will* kill you!"
etc... (shudder)
"Pretty much it's about a boy who becomes a wizard and spends half the first book chasing his evil shadow around the world until he learns its true name."
Huh, that sounds kinda cool. I will try to read that soon. How do you like her adult stuff?
One superhero implies many superheroes... and you can't have superheroes without supervillains!
Um, I've only read "The Left Hand of Darkness" and that was really, really weird, so I can't say. Basically the people there are sometimes male and sometimes female but mostly neuter.
"Cool! Glad to have the answer... Marvel history is convoluted, to say the least."
I could follow it okay until Jim Shooter (grrr!) got ahold of it. . .
The original Marvel RPG was pretty fun. Any fantasy fight you'd ever thought of you could do! New York looked like Godzilla had just been through it by the time you got done, though :)
I guess I just don't get superhero stories. I think I prefer stories where the hero is fairly normal, maybe with some uncommonly good skills at something, but wins against enemies anyway. Superman, for instance, always seemed like cheating.
Maybe it would help if, instead of looking at them as SF or Fantasy stories, you looked at them as Mythological stories.
The larger-than-life, mythical aspect of superhero stories is what I like best about them.
"Um, does that make any sense at all?"
That particular storyline was kind of an offshoot of the regular Marvel timeline where the writers invented an alternate universe to get in some friendly jabs at DC. DC had previously invented a second Earth in order to explain away some plot discontinuities, so Marvel was kind of spoofing that as an inside joke.
As for having tons of superheroes, yes, you have to properly learn to suspend disbelief--no moreso than for anime, though. Marvel Earth has its own alternate history and science. Really, though, there aren't that many superheroes, just a lot of supervillains. You have to take into account that in order to keep a monthly series going for years, you have to come up with a new supervillain every few months or so. After 30 or 40 years, that's a lot!
Heh, more than just one Earth... there were an infinite number!
Good. One Earth or infinite Earths, but only on Star Trek can you get away with only two Earths.
Is there an Evil Superman with a goatee running around somewhere?
I was actually just thinking today that Superman is a good case study in what can go wrong with a superhero series. Superman didn't start off as powerful as he became. He got more powerful as the series went along, and he's been toned back down more recently to make him more interesting. Initially he was basically a souped-up version of John Carter of Mars. His powers derived from being on a planet with lower gravity, so he was exceptionally strong, but his "flight" was actually leaping and was limited in range, and he didn't have the full range of powers (x-ray vision, heat vision, etc.) and invulnerability he eventually developed. If you look at a cover gallery of early Superman stories, he gets more and more powerful over the first 100-200 issues or so, until he became practically invincible. At that point he got less interesting. Different versions of Kryptonite and other twists were introduced to offset this, but it still made it challenging for the writers. This trend started to reverse in the 1980s as DC tried to compete with "X-Men" and revamped several strips accordingly. The revamped "Dark Knight" Batman was able to beat Superman using a high-tech battlesuit. Since then Superman has been revised as well. Supes is still pretty powerful, but the "rules" governing his powers have been fleshed out to make him more manageable. "Smallville" does a great job with keeping the character in bounds.
I didn't like how he disrupted Marvel's continuity with "Secret Wars". Other stuff he did was okay.
Hey, guess what?
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